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Scot Trek: To boldly come...
The Book of Scotlands -- my first book -- has been, up until now, vaporware. It's existed, publicly, as a series of proposals, promises, premises, outlines, excerpts and readings. Not only is the book a series of descriptions of Scotlands which do not actually exist, but it hasn't, itself, existed either. Until now.

I'm delighted to announce that The Book of Scotlands -- did I mention it was my first book? -- is now available for immediate delivery via Amazon.de. The other Amazons will get it in a few weeks (stock is being shipped to the US by sea). Meanwhile, people out there are actually reading the tome, and some are already tweeting their impressions. Press reviews are imminent, and on August 15th I'll be doing dramatised readings from the book at ProQM in Berlin. Here's an extract from the book, the bit where Stanley Baxter tells Scotland to stop masturbating -- with impressive results!

* Scotland 689

It's a little-known fact that Alfred Kinsey came to Scotland shortly after publishing "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female". He came with his friend Alan Lomax, the ethno-musicologist. It was partly a holiday, but the pair also wanted to pursue their interests; Lomax wanted to make recordings of sea shanties, Kinsey to compile data on Scottish masturbation.

And so, over three weeks during the hot summer of 1954, the two Americans travelled the length and breadth of Scotland. They listened to old sailors singing what they remembered of sea songs, and harvested data on masturbation. Sometimes no sooner had an old man put down his fiddle after playing for Lomax's Revox than he was being quizzed by Kinsey on his jerk-off technique. The pike-faced old musicians were assured that, although all credit would be given them for the music, none would be attributed for the sex survey.

Lomax managed to record some wonderful ballads, but what Kinsey discovered shocked him profoundly. Scots were masturbating far too much; on average, 6.7 times per day. By his calculations the nation, at this rate of sexual squandor, wouldn't last far beyond 1978. Something had to be done.

Kinsey and Lomax formed a delegation and made an urgent visit to the Scottish government. Lomax handed over priceless folk recordings, then Kinsey rose to speak.

"Gentlemen," he said, "after an extensive random survey of Scottish sexual habits, mostly focused on fiddlers, I have made a disturbing finding. The Scots are masturbating too much. Birth and productivity rates are sure to nosedive over the next decades. At this rate, there won't be a single Scot left by the year 2000."

The Scottish leaders took Kinsey seriously; after all, he had recently appeared on the cover of Time magazine, surrounded by birds, flowers and bees.

"What do you suggest we do?" they asked.

Kinsey outlined an extensive promotional campaign with the slogan "Stop masturbating!" Only this direct approach, in his view, could bring the nation to its senses, and save it from sinking to its knees.

After the meeting, Kinsey and Lomax were given bowls of Scottish onion soup and glasses of Scottish mead before being driven to Turnhouse Airport and put aboard a Caravelle jet bound for New York. They sat in first class, smoking briarwood pipes and gazing down at the Atlantic through the gaily-curtained floor-to-ceiling windows (later deemed a serious design flaw).

The Scottish government decided to act on Kinsey's advice. They launched a major publicity campaign advising the Scottish people to "Stop masturbating!" The ads were shown in cinemas before and after every film (this was still the age of almost universal cinema-going). They featured a crowd of old sea-dog fiddlers sawing away at violins. The musicians were interrupted by Stanley Baxter, who strode into the centre of the circle, pushed the men aside, screwed up his rough-hewn Glasgow face and said, directly into the camera: "Stop masturbating!"

The campaign was a great success. Masturbation went quickly out of fashion in Scotland, and the results didn't take long to make themselves felt. Work productivity rates soared along with the birthrate, and the nation's GDP skyrocketed. Before long there was enough excess income for the Scottish prime minister, Margaret Muir, to promise, in a famous 1961 speech, that Scotland would, before decade's end, put a man on the moon.

In 1969 the entire world watched on live television as that promise was fulfilled. I remember the scene well. I was lying in an air-conditioned room in the French city of Montpelier, masturbating.

American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
... there is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behaviour must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be in flicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this - and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've commited - and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing....

Current Mood: thoughtful

in spite of everything // e. e. cummings

in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neating each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds

-before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were

summer
It's been a while. I dread summer, I have been barely creating, hardly written a word. Dutch summer has unbearable hot and humid days, especially here, in the east near Germany. I know there must be much worse places to live but I'd be happy to just skip on the summer.

This is a photographic collage I am working on. I have never been keen on manipulating photos in photoshop, I rather use paper, photo-copies and scissors but photoshop allows me to do/alter things that are impossible to do manually.

i'm a ship's doctor, not a genetic scientist!
i have to admire a b-grade fantasy sci-fi horror spoof movie that has a literary epigraph.

to the looking-glass world it was alice that said
"i've a sceptre in hand, i've a crown on my head.
let the looking-glass creatures, whatever they be
come dine with the red queen, the white queen and me!"

then fill up the glasses as quick as you can,
and sprinkle the table with buttons and bran:
put cats in the coffee, and mice in the tea--
and welcome queen alice with thirty-times-three!

"o looking-glass creatures," quoth alice, "draw near!
'tis an honour to see me, a favour to hear:
'tis a privilege high to have dinner and tea
along with the red queen, the white queen, and me!"

then fill up the glasses with treacle and ink,
or anything else that is pleasant to drink:
mix sand with the cider, and wool with the wine--
and welcome queen alice with ninety-times-nine!

yes, before there was scary movie, there was waxwork ii: lost in time.

it also made me realize there should be a list somewhere of all the movie sequels that pick up immediately after the ending of the prior movie (or nearly so), and especially the subset of movies that were released years apart (unlike, say, kill bill i & ii).

Current Music: are you lonesome tonight?do you miss me tonight?are you sorry we drifted apart?

Super In The City by Daphne Uviller
"She wandered through the aisles of stationary stores the way some women hunted shoe stores: longingly, lovingly, and always leaving with something she didn't need but couldn't live without."

poor turtle smiling in the summer sun
thursday ci

hearts remote, yet not asunder;
distance, and no space was seen
'twixt the turtle and his queen:
but in them it were a wonder.

now, how did ice do this?

well, i was many a year before i found out that, and i dare say i never should have found it out for myself.

there were things she couldn't go into--injunctions, impressions she had received.

"natives cooking in the foreground, fellows standing about smoking, and a whole pile of tinned stores dumped down in one corner, exactly as they would be, don't you know! Oh, i think the Committee made a very good choice indeed, a very good choice."

"this is my fight," said the woodman, "so get behind me and i will meet them as they come."

lily drew away with a movement of quick disdain: it was easier to endure his insolence than his commiseration.

used to look at the stars and dream
'round the world / same stars were seen

Current Music: they say true love only comes once in a lifetime

Ends Are a Kind of Beginning
I am only a troubled guest
on the dark earth

~Goethe (paraphrased)
---------------------------

Tomorrow afternoon I leave for San Diego to help Mom with some house clearing. I would bring sage, but she eschews such things.

I don't know how this will go physically. The temps have been in the 100's and Mom doesn't have air conditioning. She doesn't live near the beach, for those of you who think ALL of San Diego is beach! But I will be taking a couple of trips to the beach, if my friend Michael will take me in his new Mini Cooper. Point is, I've been VERY sedentary for a long while now with only spurts of exercising and I'm starting to feel it. I hope that this venture will invigorate me as opposed to felling me! I also worry about my mom as she IS in her 70's now. Jesus. My mom is 70.

I want to be the yoga-doing, strength-training 90 year old one day. I know I need to simply begin. Again. Why is it so hard for me. Grrr.

End: Dad's life
Beginning: Clearing the house

End: Too much couch potato
Beginning: Exercising

End: My depression
Beginning: ...No answer as yet

Moon, Or, Sam Leaves the Factory
Go thy great way!
The Stars thou meetst
Are even as Thyself -
For what are Stars but Asterisks
To point a human Life?
1638, Emily Dickinson

So you will likely have heard v. good things about Moon, and you will have heard rightly. Deftly plotted script (mostly), dreamy wonderful score that reminds me of Mogwai, restrained use of special effects (as a friend said, "I could watch those combines spit out rock forever!").

In the hall of Sams

( It gets spoilery beyond here, yo. )

Current Mood: I can has more life?
Current Music: Mogwai: Tracy

Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
And thus when you met someone who listened, someone content to do nothing but, so overwhelming was the difference, you had the startling and quite lonely epiphany that everyone else, every person you'd encountered since the day you were born who'd supposedly listened, had really not been listening to you at all. They'd been subtly checking out their own reflection in the glass bureau a little to the west of your head, thinking what they had to do later that evening, or deciding that next, as soon as you shut up, they were going to tell that classic story about their bout of Bangladeshi beachside dysentery, thereby showcasing how worldly, how wild (not to mention how utterly enviable) a human being they were.

560: The Nature of Things
“The Nature of Things”
Annabelle Bok

It is the nature of things

To fall sideways between the slanting shadows of
Dark and light
Scrabbling there for a grip on the
Everyday quarrel between the open and the
Closed, where doors are neither locked nor open but
Broken, or ajar, or blown up, or closed but untried, and their keys
Lost, buried, nonexistent, wrong -

It is the nature of things

To lie weary and shaken on a pillow that's wet with
Your fears
When hours ago it was victory you claimed, and the
Cheering figures beside you said their
Congratulations, and swore they would give of their
Everything, to do what you did, and the sunshine of favour was
Bright in your eyes and you
Smiled through the rainbows in front of your eyes -

It is the nature of things,
And well we would do to remember.

a request...

this is my favorite quote of all time:

Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,--'Wait and hope'.

Dumas~ Count of Monte Cristo.

i was wondering if anyone wanted to help me out with a gift for my boyfriend and i wanted to give him a bracelet with a quote on it about always in my thoughts/heart, you're never alone. hell, a kick ass love quote would work. the quote sites don't have anything but the cliche` sayings.

so does anyone have any favorite quotes about that (admittedly) vague subject? anything please? pretty please?

I did see the quote from cumming's poem, which i thought was cool.

Current Mood: pensive

There's something I love about the end of this dialogue: it's so perfect and yet so close to slapstick (maybe cos the words stop working). I feel like it could be the transcript from when Beckett guest-starred on The Muppet Show.

B- The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.

D- But that is a violently extreme and personal point of view, of no help to us in the matter of Tal Coat.

B-

D- Perhaps that is enough for today.

From Three Dialogues. with Georges Duthuit. I. Tal Coat

high fidelity. as usual.
we sing a hymn, pray, there's a brief and unsatisfactory address from the vicar, some stuff from his book, and another hymn, and then there's this sudden, heart-stopping clanking of machinery and the coffin disappears slowly through the floor. and as it does so, there's a howl from in front of us, a terrible, terrible noise that i don't want to hear: i can only just tell that it's laura's voice, but i know that it is, and at that moment i want to go to her and offer to become a different person, to remove all trace of what is me, as long as she will let me look after her and try to make her feel better.
- high fidelity by nick hornby.

this breaks my heart every time i read it.

PHALANGE WAGNER FRACASSANT!
The day is ticking away too slowly and the sentences I keep beginning keep dissipating before they finish. I take breaks and read other, related things, thinking I might become somehow more focused thereby, but my mind still runs to ANYTHING-BUT-L'EVE-FUTURE. Can my dissertation be just four chapters?

This painting fascinates me, though I think I like it best in the form in which I originally encountered it, earlier this afternoon, as described in a review of Stephan Jonsson's A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions:

"Whence the interest of the middle essay which enlists the sprawling phantasmagoria of Ensor's Christ's Entrance into Brussels in 1889 for an investigation into the shifting relations in the fin-de-siècle between madness, Messianism and mass politics.

( Whacky would be the appropriate adjective hm? )

Current Mood: metonymic

She suggested that the fragility of my body was the only thing keeping her from "the abyss". I thought this was funny; her personality is one that lends itself to hyperbole more than dependence.

No, I corrected her, my body is the only thing keeping me from the abyss; she was at least one step removed.

The amount I think about death seems to multiply in proportion to my perception of unnecessary or unearned happiness, or as being the destination or receptacle for good luck. The feeling, which is both intuitive and childish, is that with every idyllic scenario that unfolds I am accruing a sort of negative balance of bad luck, which will inevitably manifest itself in the form of a car accident, freak cancer, asteroid impact, etc.

And the most difficult thing to imagine about having children is the feeling that this debt might be transferred onto another person, one who is on one hand more valuable than oneself, and on the other impossible to control. Could anything be worse?

extremely loud and incredibly close - jonathan safran foer
To my unborn child: I haven’t always been silent, I used to talk and talk and talk and talk, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, the silence overtook me like a cancer, it was one of my first meals in America, I tried to tell the waiter, “The way you just handed me that knife, that reminds me of -” but I couldn’t finish the sentence, her name wouldn’t come, I tried again, it wouldn’t come, she was locked inside me, how strange, I thought, how frustrating, how pathetic, how sad, I took a pen from my pocket and wrote “Anna” on my napkin, it happened again only two days later, and then again the following day, she was the only thing I wanted to talk about, it kept happening, when I didn’t have a pen, I’d write Anna in the air - backward and right to left - so that the person I was speaking with could see, and when I was on the phone I’d dial the numbers -2, 6, 6, 2 - so that the person could hear what I couldn’t, myself, say. “And” was the next word I lost, probably because it was so close to her name, what a simple word to say, what a profound word to lose, I had to say “ampersand,” which sounded ridiculous, but there it is, “I’d like a coffee ampersand something sweet,” nobody would choose to be like that. “Want” was a word I lost early on, which is not to say that I stopped wanting things -I wanted things more - I just stopped being able to express the want, so instead I said “desire”, “I desire two rolls,” I would tell the baker, but that wasn’t quite right, the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river. I lost “come” one afternoon with the dogs in the park, I lost “fine” as the barber turned me towards the mirror, I lost “shame” - the verb and the noun in the same moment, it was a shame. I lost “carry”, I lost the things I carried - “daybook,” “pencil,” “pocket change,” “wallet” - I even lost “loss.” After a time, I had only a handful of words left, if someone did something nice for me, I would tell him, “The thing that comes before ‘you’re welcome,’” if I was hungry, I’d point at my stomach and say, “I am the opposite of full,” I’d lost “yes,” but I still had “no,” so if someone asked me, “Are you Thomas?” I would answer, “Not no,” but then I lost “no,” I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasn’t made life wonderful, it’s made life possible, when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify “book” by peeling open my clapped hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more and more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent. I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. “I” was the last word I was able to speak out aloud, which is a terrible thing, but there it is, I would walk round the neighbourhood saying “I I I I.” “You want a cup of coffee, Thomas?” “I.” “And maybe something sweet?” “I.” “How’s about this weather?” “I.” “You look upset. Is anything wrong?” I wanted to say, “Of course,” I wanted to ask, “Is anything right?” I wanted to pull the thread, unravel the scarf of my silence and start again from the beginning, but instead I said, “I.” I know I’m not alone in this disease, you hear the old people in the street and some of them are moaning, “Ay yay yay,” but some of them are clinging to their last word, “I,” they’re saying, because they’re desperate, it’s not a complaint it’s a prayer, and then I lost “I” and my silence was complete.

Coilhouse #3, now on sale

Coilhouse, which I believe I've mentioned here before, has a new issue for sale. And I've got an essay in it, on the strange and compelling Russian pulps of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.

Current Mood: busy

johann wolfgang von goethe, everyday
"one ought, everyday, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable words"

-- johann wolfgang von goethe

Current Music: Alela Diane - To Be Still | Powered by Last.fm

leo tolstoy, beauty
"What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness."

-- Leo Tolstoy

Current Music: Alela Diane - White As Diamonds | Powered by Last.fm

Kansas prosecutor refuses to prosecute girl's rape, then shows pictures of it around
Frank Campbell, the prosecutor, refused to prosecute the rape of a seventeen-year-old girl but did show the pictures of the assault to the families of the perpetrators and the witnesses. His excuse? There was alcohol involved.

For years, Phil Kline was the State AG and he used his position to relentlessly harass and hound Dr. George Tiller, using underage rape victims as an excuse for his panty-sniffing. Now we have this guy.

The girl and her family are suing. Seriously I'm just aghast. The perps took pictures of the rape in progress, which should have made prosecuting the rape a slam dunk, but instead the prosecutor re-violated the victim for God only knows what reason. He got six months punishment for something or other, but he should be disbarred and criminally prosecuted.

The girl and her family are suing. I hope they bankrupt the shitheel and somehow he goes to jail.

I really don't understand why women don't just rise up one day and revolt.

For further shits and giggles, once again the issue of "But what aobut the men?!" has arise on Jezebel, with the usual whining about what if men didn't want to have kids and did use BC? Pretty big what ifs, and they're always there, giving men the benefit of a doubt they haven't earned. The standard form of this debate always takes the form of people assuming the poor guy is innocent, the women is careless, and ignores reality, in which men lie, change their minds, lie some more, want biology to change to their benefit, and want to re-assert the ability to abandon women and kids like so many used condoms.

MTV has a show on about teenage mothers that illustrates this. Older men prey on younger girls, then abandon them. Teenage fathers beg girls to have babies, then change their mind too late. In real life, this is waht men do. Men want to turn every situation to their benefit, and whine that it's unfair when they don't get their way. Fact is, shit happens. Deal with it or be responsible. I've seen plenty of proof that men lie, sabotage BC, change their minds, lie some, and abandon women. Being responsible does not mean---as so many assholes have tried to twist it---that men can't have sex. In fact, they can't have plenty of sex, as long as they avoid PIV sex, or use BC all the time, or talk to their partners, or have a vasectomy, or exclusively date sterile women. Even so, there's always the risk of pregnancy. Sucks, but it's part of being a grownup. Guys want to have it all their way; condom-free PIV sex, no conversations about what if, and then being able to dump everytihng on women because OMG they didn't want to be a father. Try oral or anal sex, dudes. Hell, you might even consider being on the receiving end of some anal yourselves. Instead it's all about the vaginal penetration and condom-free ejaculation. If a guy walks drives a rattletrap car without seat belts after drinking and he runs a red light and gets smashed, it's really unfair for him to blame the woman who was abiding by the laws (of nature) and had the misfortune to run into him.

Men want to act recklessly and then skip off and once again leave women cleaning up their messes. Nope. This is just an argument for re-instating the good old days--if you were a man, that is---when men could skip off and leave women and children in poverty. I've heard cases where men lined up all their work buddies to testify that the wife they were divorcing was a whore, leaving her with nothing. What I want to know, is why do we never consider that men lie? It's always the assumption that women do all the lying. At the very least, the reality is that men have way more to gain by it, and are given the benefit of the doubt way too often. Let them prove their case. I bet most of them can't.

And no thanks, I'm not interested in yet another round of 'my best friend's nephew's girlfriend oopsed him.' Yeah, I'm sure the girl admitted it. Uh huh. When guys have every reason to lie, and society believes them, they have to prove it to me. Until then, tit for tat. They wanted equality? Let's let them walk a few miles in womens' high heels for a change.

(3/5) Continuing the favorite quotes from this bok. :)
♥ Well, I've seen all the photos a million times like everyone else, but they just don't capture the way it felt to be there - the sunlight and the redness of the blood: that's always cropped out of magazines, and this bugs me because when you crop the photo, you tell a lie.

♥ Oh, God, it's religion all over again; it's my father's corrosive bile percolating through my soil and tickling my taproot. Be as pious as you want, people are slime, or, as my father might say, we're all slime in the eyes of God. It's the same thing. And even if you decided to fight the evil, to attain goodness or religious ecstasy, not much really changes. You're still stuck being you, and you was pretty much decided long before you started asking these questions.

♥ But most of all I remember making sure that I got my injection every day right on time, at noon and midnight. After I got it, I had a five-minute window when I didn't have to think about Cheryl, alive, dying or dead.

I'm drunk.

♥ The conventional wisdom is true as regards faces: by mid-adulthood, what's inside you becomes what people see on the outside. Car thieves look like car thieves, cheats look like cheats, and calm, reflective people look calm and reflective. So be careful. My face is like yours, but I ended up turning it into the face of failure.

♥ I fidgeted with his water decanter, which seemed to be made of pink pencil eraser material. Why does everything in a hospital have to be not just ugly, but evocative of quick, premature and painful death?

~~Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland.

Current Mood: cheerful

Re-peat/Re-model
I'm trying to repeat myself more than I have been. Though at one point this sounded to me like the exact opposite of what I should be doing — you gotta stay fresh, you gotta change it up, you make like the proverbial rollin' stone and gather no moss — it's become important with a shift in my thinking about the very nature of blogs and the broader class of work to which they belong. Before, I thought of blogs as ever-expanding books, snowballing accretions of discrete mini-articles. If a piece was posted, it was posted; anyone wanting to read what I have to say on a subject can dig up the relevant entry, so why post about anything I've posted about before? Over the last year or so, I've come to see blogs in a different way: they're not magic anthologies; they're places, and as such should be constructed with an eye toward what's interesting to inhabit, rather than what's interesting to consume, digest and excrete (intellectually speaking).

There are a stack of other serviceable metaphors I could whip out here — materials, symphonies, textiles — but after traveling back in time to 1996 and studying its grandiose articles on cyberspace, I find that terms of place seem to be most useful. If a blog is a place, what's its visual design? The paint and furniture and architecture, I suppose. (It probably comes as no surprise that I hew to minimalism, and hard, in all those elements in real life.) Who are the readers and commenters? Obviously, they're the locals; the hangers-out. (The metaphor also admits tourists and passers-through.) But what are the posts themselves? Trickier, but this is the meat of it: the posts are the very essence of the place, the driving energy — the "ineffable ancient mystical qi," if you like — that remains when you pull the humans and the physical infrastructure from the equation.

A blog whose posts drop off is like a place that somehow loses its underlying appeal. We've all seen how rapidly, and often inexplicably, hangouts fall into disuse and disrepute; it's almost as rapid and inexplicable as the tubes' staggeringly high rate of blog abandonment. So a blogger's job isn't particularly different from a place manager's: keep the subtle shifts rolling to attract interest, but don't flail around to such a degree that you alienate the clientele. Do indeed keep it fresh, change it up and gather no moss, but do it organically and iteratively.

And yes, there are those words again. I fear a developing dependency on them, but aren't they appropriate in this case? My

Pick a new topic
Post about the topic
Pick a new topic

blogging mindset has become a

Pick a previous topic
Post about the topic from a new angle or extend it in a new way
Pick a topic from the now-slightly-expanded roster of previous topics

blogging mindset. Where I used to step from subject to subject to subject, a wake of intellectual descruction behind me, I now find myself visiting and revisiting ideas, mutating my treatment of them a bit each time and following the most promising branches of the tree. What could be more biological way to go about it? Reader Dan Owen also put it in a way I liked:

I love the deeply self-reflective approach you both take, even though you're working in very different fields, and I love the thinking-out-loud structure, which tends to be more circular than linear. You open the subjects you write about, rather than narrow them down to a point.

"Circular" instead of "linear." Choice.

This links up with thoughts I've been thinking about cultural projects more generally, and how circularity in creation might just lead to more effective stuff than does linearity. Many of my favorite filmmakers — a Wes Anderson, say, or a Sang-soo Hong — and even some writers — your David Sedarises, your Haruki Murakamis, (to an extent) your Alexander Therouxs ("Therouxes"?) — hold the superficial qualities of their work constant, continually doubling back to the "same" sort of material in order to explore it in different second- and higher-order ways. This draws the criticism of always "[verb]ing the same [noun]," but who ever made something incredible listening attentively to that sort of nonsense?

My first non-Roman alphabet spam!

без фанатизма

I wonder why it took so long.

Also, this residue of the Russian language, most of which I barely knew and now have largely forgotten, allows for such a ghostly perception. I'm trying to remember if it's like that brief stage in childhood, when. although you can sound out words, their meanings remain quite opaque. As if something were being witheld so that what you're doing is not quite reading, is too mechanical to really qualify as reading.

I suppose it is like that. It just seems different because I'm different.

без фанатизма, indeed.

e.e. cummings, i carry your heart with me
"here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)"

-- e.e. cummings, i carry your heart with me.

Current Music: The Shins - One by One All Day | Powered by Last.fm