Soooooo....what shall I write about today? Hmmm, let's review the last coupla days shall we?
On Tuesday I get a letter from the University of Hawaii...it takes me an hour to open it because it takes me that long to screw up the courage to open the damn thing..even then my heart was beating like a noh drum! For good reason as it turned out that the Philosophy Department accepted me but didn't give me any money so they can't enroll me and in the end it's the same as being rejected or not even having applied in the first place. So sorry, please try again next year....
gomen gomen !
On Wednesday I get an email from the organisers of a Social Theory conference that I had dashed off a hasty abstract to...and yes, they accepted my paper..so if all goes well right after graduation I fly to Redington Beach to kick some theory butt! Pure niceness..
The mail giveth, and the mail taketh away
I almost forgot! I got my seriously bootlegged copy of
Snake in the Eagle's Shadow on Monday. Joy! Joy!
Still to come,
Drunken Master and
Snake in the Monkey's Shadow !
The Larry's are set to take a mini-tour of the bowels of New York state, I can hardly contain my enthusiasm....here's hoping I make it through the weekend..
Ugh, I think that knowing about Graduate schoool is worse than not knowing..hehehe...
Oh dear, Oh dear..please don't confuse what I have been writing recently with the babblings of self-pity..dear reader, anything but that!
"To have and not have one's emotions, one's for and against, at will, to condescend to have them for a few hours; to
seatoneself on them as horses, often as on asses-for one has to know how to employ their stupidity as well as their fire..." (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil).
Or maybe this will sound familiar to you:
"A philosopher: a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes. dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if from without, as if from above and below, as by
hiskind of events and thunderclaps...a fateful man around whom snarling, quarrelling, discord and uncanniness is always going on"
Or maybe not! Hehehe....
And by the way, it took me two days to get the comments working on this page so use 'em gawdammit!! Argh!!
You, no not you, you! You want so badly to know why I don't like you, why I can't stand the sight of you, why I dont want to be with you. You want to know that badly?
Well, here it is. All I see when I look at you is the reflection of my own bitter self-loathing, I see you and all I see is all that I hate about myself: my weakness, my loneliness, my wasted years and you ask me to embrace all that and smile, to wrap my arms around it and kiss it tenderly, to rest my head against its foul shoulder.
How dare you, how dare you make me face myself like this?
:EDIT: Well 'che...it seemed like a great post at the time!
So you want to know why I wrote those poems? I think more to the point you want to know who they were for...
Hmmm, you want me to name names? I don't know if I want to, or even think that it's necessary. The experience will remain the same: briefly heady and tingly and the bitterly disappointing but strengthening. I guess the reason that I posted was to remind myself of that time when the only outlet I had was to write poetry.
I haven't written anything new since I was in Denmark. Just for fun I tried to write again, to see whether I could recapture those moments when I felt that if I didn't write the poems down my head and heart would explode....
So in the end, who did I write those poems for? For myself...
Poetry today!
Now that
what we had has curdled
sour and lumpen
keeping us apart
I ask myself
time and again
gazing up into midnight skies
why
I broke my promise
never to do this
again.
You want more?
Music
is best appreciated in the dark
of a hushed theatre
and the squeaky
shiftings of uneasy arses
in plush seats
It is then
you notice
the curved line of your
lover's face
and their peculiar
br-ea-thi-ing
distracting you
from the enchantment
of bark and hoof but
there is another magic here
older and more lethal,
decadent!
And so you take the sorcerer's hand
and recline
ensorceled
and replete.
I'm seriously considering going to the
Ultra Music Festival, I wonder if brutha-man will put me up for the weekend....getting there is the tricky bit. Any ideas folks?
Oh I slept so well last night....who was that knocking on my door as I drifted away into la-la land?
My term paper topic was approved, that makes me feel better... What's driving me nuts is the waiting around to hear back from graduate schools..i'm going insane!
I'm afraid that I am going to disappoint you about last night...It's a shame but you looked so happy and curious, with your eyes shining in that wide-eyed-curious-happy-excited way you have about you. What's to tell? After you left the room, we sat and talked about all kinds of stuff. You know how he is when he lets his mind and imagination run free, but last night I was surprised, we talked about God and free will, the Antichrist, oranges, Armageddon, woolly mammoths and by the time he fell asleep on my shoulder it was 5 am. No time for any funny business. Maybe next time :-D
Of course that leaves me wondering, what to make of it all...I do that all the time, I'm sure you have noticed but I can't help myself! I like to know exactly what is going on, and what things mean, and how they relate and how (sadly) I can take control...So I'll leave it at that and try to take my own advice...hehehe...
Awwww...isn't it cute to find little poems written about you?
You looked at me
Soft, long
Kept your eyes on me
So strong
We connected intimately
I stared at you
No reply
I glanced at you
Declined
I filled you with my thoughts
Denied
You talked to me, showed me I could
Trust
In
You
I do trust you
I need you
I feel all that you are
Your sumptuous eyes
Give me butterflies
You incline me
To
Places I can't see
But only feel
Don't look away
Let our eyes be connected
Always.
Too bad I don't ever want to see him again.
And no, woman, this is not what you were harassing me about at dinner! :-p
Here's something that came up in class: why do insults in your mother tongue sting worse than insults in any other language? In Swahili saying "nyanyako" to someone is just asking for a fight, in english it would translate to "Yo mama" which doesn't strike me as quite so effective...I wonder why that is?
Something very interesting happened last night, but I am not quite sure what to make of it.(Yes, it does involve a boi, hehehe) More on this later...
Speaking of favours..get off your arse and buy me
this for graduation!
Speaking of favours..get off your arse and buy me
Interesting discussion on NPR today about "absolute terror". Sounds a little like Neon Genesis Evangelion to me. I've been thinking about that series lately, there are a lot of fascinating themes embedded in it. One episode that stands out is
"The beast that shouted 'I' in the heart of the world." This is a must see people...a must see...
Not only because it is finely scripted and drawn, but also because of the compelling and realistic emotional tension between the main characters and the mystical, mythical supratext of angels, life and death, love, fatherhood and the end of the world. It's a thinkpiece if there ever was one...do yourselves a favour and watch it!
I had this great post all planned out until I watched 12 monkeys and got distracted...then I turned on VH1 and saw that android Michael Jackson and his spawn on TV and....ugh, the results were not pretty.
Yeah, so I must have a sign on my forehead that says, "Give me your desperate fat, pimply masses waiting to breathe greasy onion breath down your neck and I shall leave you grease stains on your duvet"
Bleargh! I give up....i'm signing up to be a
eunuch
Does anyone else like 'Legend of Drunken Master' as much as I do?
Wow.
It's amazing to think that in a small town like Canton, as rural and isolated as it is, that 3-400 people can show up in -24 C weather to protest for peace. Perhaps there is hope yet that war can be avoided, or at the very least that come election time next year, we can have a little regime change of our own.
Give peace a chance!
Now here's a disturbing thought.
We like to think that no matter how complicated situations get, or no matter how many viewpoints or life circumstances we take account for, that somehow and in someway we can decide what is good or bad, and find out who or what is good or evil. We stand against war in Iraq or for it on the basis that persons, choices or actions can be absolutely evil or absolutely good.
Postmodernism and deconstruction tries to open up the spaces between extreme positions and binaries and to show that there is always room for "freeplay" and possibility, and that through this opening up of dialogue something good or productive or better will arise.
I like to think that that is possible and even desirable, but here is the disturbing thought. What if there really is no certainty in the world? No absolute moral code, no stable cross-cultural assurance of 'good' behaviour? It is beginning to seem that contingency or slippage or uncertainty is somehow fundamental to human existence...we can never be absolute about Saddam's "evil" or our own "good" because such positions themselves are based on a losing fight against the wobbly structure of certainties we have thrown up against the chaos that lies beyond.
What I think I am grappling with is the suspicion that one cannot say anything
certain about the world at all.
::Edit:: Perhaps what I really meant to say was that no matter what, we cannot escape the text...
Derrida was right..we are always and already slipping through the spaces between what we mean to say and what can be read...
On a lighter note, can I say how much my appreciation of Beethoven was improved by tonight's performance by the
Ciompi quartet. I usually shy away from performances of canonical artists: Mozart and his ilk, but this was quite lovely. Not quite on the level of
Brahms' German Requiem but then how much can you expect from a quartet seriously...
I can't wait for Opera support for Blogger, if that browser were a
man oh the things that we would do together...mmm...
Sometimes I fail to understand women. Case in point, my friend A. She comes up to me and says "I don't think you like me anymore, you never talk to me" Thing is, I don't want to tell her that I can't stand her when she gets all maudlin and full of whiny self pity. Which is often. I can't stand to be around that, or hear that, or see that.. gah! I have issues around emotion, I just dont feel comfortable with raw emotion, it makes me feel strange, sort of exposed. I don't know what to say or do and it just feels awkward for me, like standing wet and naked in the middle of Times Square with a case of severe amnesia...
It's hard to tell other people exactly what you think of them
I need some backbone
It is decided... the entire purpose of gay.com is to frustrate me with the potential of utter sexual freedom..bah...roll on May, roll on...
Look out..free rolling train of thought here.
::: A Public Service Announcement:::
Dear Parents: Should you decide to have children, please make sure they are not separated by a gap of more than 5 years. This will spare the younger ones from the annoyance of being treated like 6 year olds by their older siblings.
Thank you ever so much
Scratch that...great suffering leads to great ennui...roll on May, roll on...
Is genius the necessary result of overcoming great suffering?
Interesting...so Nietzsche was homosexual..hmmm, the list of philosophers that I know were gay grows: Foucault, Wittgenstein and now Nietzsche.. this is illustrious company I am joining!
I just watched " Rules Of Attraction" perhaps one of the strangest movies I have seen since "Donnie Darko" but just like Darko, Rules defies the standard Hollywood formula to deliver a thinkpiece almost on the par with French existentialist cinema. The screeplay was written by the same man who co-wrote Pulp Fiction and the cinematography is just gorgeous. That's what really ties this story together, however i use story in a very loose sense of the word. There is no traditional plot to speak of in this movie only a grand circular movement loosely held together as an exposition on the sheer absurdity of human existence; its pains, beauty, love, hate, jealousy, disenchantment and sheer ugliness are thrown up on the screen in a riveting yet very disturbing manner.. The suicide scene stands out in particular as an example of how the movie forces the audience to face pure human pain and anguish without mediation or qualification.
Powerful, existential and loaded with the most beautiful cast of actors you will find anywhere. Ian Somerdahl anyone?
Grrrrrrroooowwllll
Musings on Columbia
Death is the end of all meanings. I have been reading news articles and online postings about this tragedy and again and again, the deaths of those 7 astronauts is being portrayed as a kind of martydrom. A sacrifice in the name of science. That's utter bullshit.
Nietzsche very aptly points out that there is no meaning to phenomena, there are only interpretations. Whatever meaning or intentionality that those seven crew members gace to their mission ended when the shuttle broke up at 200,000 feet. Once the individual existences for which that mission had immediate meaning ended, their futural project ended as well. All we are left with are the comforting fictions that their deaths had purpose, significance or meaning.
Death is the most absurd of life events, it is inescapable, it is final and it defies our understanding. To claim that the deaths of those astronauts was
for anything like science or space makes a mockery of their short existence on this earth.
My head is just one tangle of thoughts these days... I have been taking this great social theory class with one of my favourite professors, but it is such a
mindfuck! I have a very good idea now why nobody really wants to touch Foucault or Derrida or Lacan or even Wittgenstein in traditional philosophy classes because they undermine everything that is basic about the philosophical project
The categories of identity, substance, Being, personal identity all begin to lose their ontological character under the sociological microscope. I am even beginning to doubt whether communication (like what I am trying to do now) is even possible in the sense of communicating internal dialogues or thought processes from one person to another. How is it that my words come to mean something? How is it that we come to say what we mean?
Beginning with Wittgenstein, he attacks the very idea that words have stable referrents: "chair" does not necessarily have its referrent in the physical assemblage that we call chair, its meaning as such is a temporary signification given to it within a certain closed system of meanings or what he calls a language game. Derrida further fucks with language by pointing out that even the sounds we pronounce when we say "chair" are themselves only incidentally connected with the sign "chair". I mean....this is radical stuff! So much philosophy is predicated on the assumption of a stable field of meanings and significations that can be clarified, manipulated and studied so as to extract an essential, present meaning from philosophical discourse.
All the above means that we are at best groping around within a mush of signifiers and signifieds and arbitrarily assigning stable values or meanings to words and concepts that are in constant flux..what does that say for personal identity? What does that mean (and there's that word again) for statements that begin " I think..." or "I say..."?
Argh!
How is it that a single day can spark so many memories? I found the emails from you that I had saved...God knows why I saved them, but two and a half years on they are still on my computer. We don't talk as often as we should, and I still wonder why I broke up with you..
I found a part of you today,
just when I least expected it.
Late for class
hopping on one foot
juggling socks and curses
and suddenly there it was
on my pillow
and i paused
remembering
the soft breeze of joy
that heralds your presence
the incandescent flame of your hair
a tender embrace
sweet kiss
shared laughter shared confidences.
How then can I say
all the things you mean to me
when a hair from your head
reduces all my eloquence
to these poor words?
I wrote that poem for you, after our first night together....How did I know that would be our last?
Ah, the tang of regrets....
je ne regrette rien
Y'know, normally I wouldn't post IM conversations but this one just stands out, don't you think?
Jon Jon: No, this is nasty:
divvilish: i do not wanna hear about no douche
Jon Jon: I was stocking tampons...
Jon Jon: nasty enough...
divvilish: here it comes
Jon Jon: and this guy and his wife were perusing the douche... which seems to be very popular among black ladies, for some reason, and she asked him "What scent should I get?" him- looks at me... and asks:
Jon Jon: Do y'all sell fried chicken flava'ed?
Jon Jon: Me- Pardon, je ne parle pas anglais. Excuse-moi. *run*
divvilish: oh holy homo....if i had eaten dinner i woulda barfed
Huh...well let me tell you folks, theorygasms aint all they're cracked up to be. They made us watch a movie,
But I'm A Cheerleader. The verdict? A pile of tasteless, steaming crap.
What do I have to look forward to for the rest of the evening? Student Judiciary Board! I have to make myself all pretty and clean smelling and then be forced to listen to endless whining about our Stasi-like campus security officers...bleargh..I may as well gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon.
So why do I go?
They pay me.
$200.
I feel like such a whore
Oakenfold in the morning, a hot date with
Foucault in the afternoon..my life rocks! Theorygasm anyone?
Oh, I almost forgot...in honour of the Japan party on my dorm floor this afternoon, a guide to making your own
sake!
Ah good times you guys, good times..Nothing beats going out with the girls, shooting some pool, shakin yo' azz and staggering home 5 hours later in 3 inches of fresh snow...Well I suppose gettin a cum facial from Orlando Bloom wouldn't hurt either...hehehe
I think I should be typing this to the sound of trumpets...The last time I started a weblog I ended up having to come out to my nosey brother and having to explain certain..umm..
incriminating photographs. Let that be a lesson to ya!
So, a couple of ground rules blah blah blah..I'm 22, about to graduate with a BA in Philosophy and I live in upstate New York. Oh yes, there is life north of Syracuse..just barely..I can't wait to graduate and leave this strange place. I have visions of living in a
cardboard box and being run over with a Land Rover
Ahem
I digress
Hehehe..who let this monkey loose on my computer?
