some other words

these are some other words that i've seen lately and that i like:

isochrony, galilean, length, chronometer, clepsydra, timepiece, experimental truth

as a metaphor

"huygens invented a mechanical device called the escapement, which gives the balance wheel a small kick as it goes through equilibrium, but is not in contact with it at other times."

ivar ekeland, the best of all possible worlds

no things considered

i said some things once. some things about the picture below. i forgot that i said them, and then i remembered.

Outside, there aren’t any trees. There are a lot of buildings that I pretend are trees. Since there are some birds, it’s not that hard. At the end of each hallway, on each floor, there is a window. That’s where I am now. It’s very grimy, the window. Below the window are two stairs and a small amount of concrete I use as a seat. I go to each window on each floor and sit on the piece of concrete. I think about how this place isn’t safe. I still don’t want to leave. I love it here. The place and I are interchangeable. The place takes over and I tell all of the people I can’t leave. I tell them this is where I live and this is my life. They don’t mention it to me that they don’t believe me but I can tell.

this was one time. there were other things then, too.

contemporary poetry

dana gioia: "the debasement of poetic language; the prolixity of the lyric; the bankruptcy of the confessional mode; the inability to establish a meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative and the denial of a musical texture in the contemporary poem." from, "notes on the new formalism"

lisa sewell: "innovative, materialist poetic practices have been absorbed by both the lyric mainstream and the multicultural poetries of identity politics: writers on either side of the ostensible divide employ interruption, parataxis, narrative discontinuity, and alinearity to produce fragmentation and disjunction." from, american poets in the 21rst century.

cole swensen: "considering the traits associated with 'conventional' work, such as coherence, linearity, formal clarity, narrative, firm closure, symbolic resonance, and stable voice, and those generally assumed of 'experimental' work, such as non-linearity, juxtaposition, rupture, fragmentation, immanence, multiple perspective, open form, and resistance to closure, hybrid poets access a wealth of tools, each one of which can change dramatically depending on how it is combined with others and the particular role it plays in the composition." from, american hybrid

dear baudrillard,

it seems like this. to me, it seems like this.

what you mean is that presence (simulacra) absorbs absence (simulation).

"'whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms' (littre). therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the 'true' and the 'false,' the 'real' and the imaginary.'"

i also think you think of the phases of an image:

1. it is the reflection of a profound reality; -> 2. it masks and denatures a profound reality; -> 3. it masks the absence of a profound reality; -> 4. it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.

i think in 3, you might mean it makes aware the absence by masking it. and in 4, you must mean that representation is represented, or at least the idea of representation is represented.

it'll all work out

agent cooper is the kind of man.

a man comes, humming. a man comes, humming his chess moves. he has games from his history. there is something classic. he might use half of the time and end up with twelve. people will die.

windham earl comes. other chess board. some privileges.

check please, says everyone seeing the tournament.

my pattern is something like that. all of our bodies keep having it.

i had disappeared. i was told about the owl. they told me to sing something beautiful at a picnic. i'll have these shoulder pads. i'll have them while no one knows me. we'll have our cemetery pieces, our suggestions. technically. ed is serious. ed is having a big deal.

"she'll start to see reality again when her mind begins to feel safe."

"i think i've gone blind in my left eye."

"it's an inner thing, you know."

dale says it's a damn fine time to start.

i'll make everything feel like trees on your ceiling, dale. i'll make you take everything away.

"ecology is not a luxury science."

thank you. my gold curtains. my wool jacket. our clapping. our clapping. clapping.

the gains are our best part.

life exactly.

tea

my mouth tastes like tea. lipton tea. for two days, my mouth has tasted like lipton tea, or more like how a mouth tastes after it has lipton tea. i don't drink tea. i used to drink hot tea, and sometimes i would drink cold tea, but for the most part, i don't like or drink tea regularly.

the fact that my mouth tastes like tea makes me think my body has too much of something. too much of whatever it is that tea has in it. i feel like my body has too much of that, and too much of other things. i've had a cold place in my chest for four days. sometimes it feels so cold in my chest that i know i'm dying. the cold leaves after it comes, but i still know about it. i remember it, and when i feel it again i remember how scary it was feeling it before.

so i think i must be dying. someone tonight said they couldn't talk about the brain, and i don't think i can either. it must house dying. all the time it makes me worry. all the time i'm trying to forget it.

snow day

today is a snow day. it was, however, a snow day before there was snow. i intend to make use of this snow day by reading fanny howe, who says, "depression in the sea," watching twin peaks, making a salad with spinach, tomato, cucumber, red onion, avocado, sunflowers seeds, raisins, red pepper, and balsamic vinaigrette, writing about the snow, looking up information about a current archaeological dig in peru, filling out some forms, and thinking about the snow.

two quotes about postmodernism

"the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. that is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like . . . 'which world is this? what is to be done in it? which of my selves is to do it?' other typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of teh literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects, for instance: what is a world? what kinds of worlds are there, how are they constructed, and how do they differ?"

--brian mchale, postmodernist fiction.

"by crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials . . .it is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. it is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes."

--jean baudrillard, simulacra and simulation

beckett

today, i woke up and ate an apple. is this the kind of thing you usually put in a blog? now i'm going to read some notes on contemporary drama. i got beckett's letters in the mail, an entire book of them, from 1929-1940. i have it in my notes that vivian mercier says, about godot, "it's a play in which noting happens, twice." probably my favorite characters ever are vladimir, estragon, and don quixote de la mancha. in general, i like characters and make them always be in my stories.

maggie, this is my blog now.

i had forgotten all about this.

i guess i made it so i could talk about northern exposure.

instead of talking about northern exposure, i will talk about the sky.

i like it and want it to be real, and sometimes this is how i feel:

Maybe I can wait. Maybe there’s a world, and I can wait for it. I think there’s possibility. Or maybe I shouldn’t. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. If we can tell, how do we tell if we can tell? I can look at things and see them. I can know about them, or at least I think I can know about them. I can know about things the way I know about the sky. Someone looked up and I believed them. I guess there’s a sky. There’s a woman and she sees it and she says, that’s the sky. So it must be. I think it all must be sky. I used to take photographs of the sky. I used to take them at 8:05. I was trying so hard to understand what it was. I put all of my pictures together and made it into a slideshow. I watched it every day. I watched it and thought about what it meant that I watched it. I didn’t feel pain. I just looked at the pictures and reminded myself about what the sky was. I would add a picture and watch the new show about the sky, and I told my mind, that’s the sky. That’s it. It has to be.