I have to concentrate as if playing Whack a Groundhog before sending a few words about the weather into the world. If someone responds to them in any but the most rudimentary way, it feels like a series of physical slaps arriving.
It’s an outrageously beautiful thing: this making the queerness of expression and thought queer again.
:::: Traveling to Utopia performs its thematics through a troubled interface with its reader/viewer, suggesting the new flesh (in this case the female abdomen, site of bio-reproduction) has become impregnated with media (the site of semiotic reproduction) that knows more about us than we do about [[ourselves]] — a realization that conjures the uncanny image of Max Renn’s head disappearing erotically into the TV set in Videodrome.
:::: I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
Claimed John Cage.
:::: What would it feel like, think like, to imagine without categories?
While possible to become conscious of feeling and thinking through ideology, it is impossible to feel and think beyond it.
:::: Camping at 14,000 feet in Bhutan. Temperature near zero. Our sleeping bags worn and dicey.
My body kept yanking me back from the brim of sleep with oxygen gasps — those massive reflexive inhalations your brain initiates when it no longer believes you’re serious about getting the air into your lungs you should be getting into them.
:::: The average American makes 36.07 % more money than the average German and consumes two times more oil.
He or she also uses 87.69 % more electricity, births 68.45 % more babies, risks a 55.44 % greater chance of dying in infancy, spends 93.91 % more money on health care, works 33.71 % extra hours each year, is 13.41 % more likely to be unemployed, perceives a 66.67 % larger class divide, and is six times more likely to have HIV/AIDS.
She or he will check out 1.17 years sooner.
:::: At the very moment the book is dematerializing, it is becoming more embodied than ever, the book celebrating the fetishization of the book’s bookishness: design, layout, texture, smell, borderlands.
:::: A wooden doll with a miniature novel inserted into a slot in its tummy.
:::: A text printed on a slice of bread tucked into a plastic baggie.
:::: The outhouse at our Kentucky cabin: redwood and tidy with the remains of an indoor-outdoor carpet on the floor and bucket of lime and plastic dove-colored cup in the corner.
I sat with the door open in summer for the breeze and in winter for the view of naked pines and cedars sloping down before me to fall away off a limestone cliff into thousands of acres of uninhabited forest.
It’s absurd to read a book in there, think of any politics save democracy, perched as you are above the most egalitarian system in the world.
:::: Heather Weston’s Borges and I.
The raised black text offset on black paper bringing forth a subtext, a reverse erasure, by deploying raised letters: the textural allusion to Braille, Borges’s creeping blindness.
You want to carry it with you everywhere you go.
:::: By 2007, five of the top 10 bestsellers in Japan were cell phone novels.
:::: Flurries falling upward outside the bedroom window.
:::: Think of it as a dance, someone advised me in regards to crossing the crazy streets of Hanoi, where there are few stop signs, traffic lights, crosswalks, lanes to speak of, and so crowds constantly swarm into the mess of cars, trucks, motorcycles, buses, taxis, bicycles, tuk-tuks.
The idea is not to meet the eyes of drivers or other pedestrians.
The idea is to keep moving forward.
An outrageous act of faith, all Easter bunnies and hope.
:::: Guy Debord: Human circulation considered as something to be consumed — tourism — is a by-product of the circulation of commodities; basically, tourism is the chance to go and see what has been made trite.
:::: I wanted to like this book very much. But I found it quite boring and odd. It is frustrating, repetitive, and does not offer much in the way of style and language.
Commented one Amazon reviewer about David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress.
:::: Fails to entertain, fails to enlighten, fails to engage. Time to move on to something more rewarding.
Wrote another.
:::: What book were they reading again?
:::: Jen Bervin’s The Desert, wherein she sews across 130 pages of John Van Dyke’s 1901 prose celebration of American wilderness, leaving a new poem in her wake.
:::: In a German restaurant, it turns out, you have to pay for the tap water.
:::: The runs strike me down in the Nairobi airport.
Everything is just fine, then an ominous gurgle leans into my awareness. Five minutes later, I’m trotting at the speed of angst into the men’s restroom.
Done, I realize there isn’t any toilet paper in the dispenser. That’s when a cute little boy — seven, eight — materializes in the doorless opening of my stall. Between his palms, a fresh roll. He’s all white teeth and faux innocence.
I reach into the lightweight trekking pants around my ankles and fish out a dollar, which I dutifully pay him. He tears off exactly one sheet and passes it to me. I look at him. He looks at me. His smile doesn’t flinch.
I fish out another dollar.
He tears off another sheet.
Und so weiter.
:::: One day O. sets out to write a fiction in the form of a Table of Contents.
His first line:
Introduction: Rapunzeclass="underline" Her hair, her pain, the black hood over her head. . pg. xi
:::: Borges and I: a critifictional meditation on the pronoun as a hoax foisted upon us by the culture’s language. How the rules of grammar have been repeatedly misunderstood by philosophy and fiction as a metaphysics.
:::: You attend the House of World Cultures to see Ralf Hoyer’s Mid-Size Robo Soccer Music. The building was America’s contribution to the INTERBAU exhibition in Berlin in 1957. Hugh Stubbins, Gropius’s assistant at Harvard before the war, designed the place as a symbol of freedom. Its distinctive feature: a curved roof that connotes both a sculpture by Henry Moore and a bird’s spread wings.
The roof collapsed in 1980, killing one and injuring dozens.
The natives refer to it as The Pregnant Oyster.
Hoyer’s piece takes place on a small soccer field laid out on artificial grass around which people sit. The players are robots reminiscent of R2D2. When the human referee blows his whistle, they go for the ball. Sometimes they make impressive goals. Sometimes they lose track of what they’re doing and begin wandering the field aimlessly, little speakers atop their heads pointed at the sky.
:::: Hoyer has transformed those robots into musical instruments. They generate eerie sonar-like howlings defined by their movement, position, and distance.
They become a mobile sound installation, an exercise in swarm aesthetics.
:::: In a German restaurant, you don’t leave a tip on the table.
You never eat with your hands.
When finished, you lay your fork and knife side-by-side pointed to the center of the plate with the handles on the lower right rim in the five o’clock position.