Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Make a Kind of Story of Kinked Plot

You like the iPad? L asked at a Tuesday edition of Thursday Night Pints. Yeah, I said, I like it a lot, though this morning I bought two new Moleskines, including an excellent giant hardback quadrille I'd never seen before. Good, said D, does this mean you're tired of blogging, you're gonna start writing again? Tired of blogging? asked K. What does that have to do with buying new tablets? When he's tired of blogging he buys new tablets even if he doesn't need them, said L,  - pen's too, D said - and writes in them more than usual. Yes, true, I said, but I really did need new tablets, I said, I can go to the car and show you the two full ones. Something pissed him off, said D, over in blogworld or whatever he calls it. L said, someone must have ignored or disrespected him. D said, yeah, or someone turned asshole and wrecked the club's tree fort in a hissy fit, he hates that too. I'm sitting right here, I said. What happened that pissed you off, asked K. Nothing, I said, I'm not pissed off. I bet, said L, you posted a link to a blog and the blogger looked to see who was sending the boinks - pings, hissed K - and he looked at your blog for a second and dismissed you as insignificant. Yes I have bitched about that before, I said, I'm still small that way, but no, that's not it, I needed new tablets. D asked, can you see yourself blogging a year from now? I can't imagine a year from now, I said, without new tablets. That's hardly worth a pint, said K, getting up to buy a round.





  • Sen and the folly of austerity
  • Obamasshole: Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals. Security goals? Political goals, asshat. And yes, I know they're the same to the fucker.
  • Same article: Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss. 
  • Motherfucking Democrats.
  • Snapshots of Washington's essence.
  • How Ron Paul with change the Republican Party. Beinart has been consistently wrong about everything, but it's still an interesting hypothetical.
  • Libertarian or rapper? Take the quiz
  • Dembot apologists.
  • He's more delusional than you, pal.
  • 2011's most memorable?
  • For the Love of D_g.  
  • Things you might have missed.
  • Huh? And so, to conclude concerning the beginning of the question, there is in some sense a “return to the things themselves” because there is a return to the idea that it is really the things themselves which appear. There is this kind of idea in Logics of Worlds and this is why it is so difficult, in fact: that if the things themselves are pure multiplicities, if it is really a pure multiplicity which appears and nothing else, then it is being which appears. And so, there is not the Kantian distinction between the thing-in-itself, which we cannot know, in fact, and the organization of a thing which is a transcendental nature. In my region, the transcendental is the transcendental of the thing and we can absolutely know the thing as thing — by mathematics, precisely by the mathematics of multiplicity. But to know the thing not only as thing, a being-qua-being, but as being as appearing in the world, we can also know something of that. But we must only assume that there is something other than pure multiplicity in its mathematical composition, there is something which is like an indexation, like a mark, of the multiplicity which is the thing that the multiplicity appears to be within a determinate world. So it is almost a thing-itself but with the transformation of the notion of “thing.” That is the point. There's another club of 1% I don't qualify for.
  • Worthy list. I tried Ice Trilogy four months ago and intensely disliked it after initially liking the first 2/3rds of the first, it was visceral, weirdly, never experienced anything like that reaction. I was in the reading slump, which had nothing to do with anything other than I'm going to try it again soon now that I'm out of the slump to be fair to both the book and, more selfishly, me.
  • The few of you regulars who read in the wee hours of EST, do you like the headers I leave for you?
  • Cristiano Ronaldo consults diving expert
  • How ghosts affect relationships.
  • Expect lots of His Name is Alive in the days to come, cause it's been a couple of years since I was listening, and holyfuck.
  • Doom and Gloom from the Tomb.
  • Three excellent WFMU djs 2011 lists, with sound.
  • Yes, I know he was born 61 years ago today. Songs this afternoon.
  • Drive By.
  • Aether.
  • The Royal Family.
  • I learned about The Necks this past year while not listening to KEXP. Easy snark, it's still a good station, their flagship djs pissed me off and reminded me to listen to WFMU. I'm grateful. Have part one of a The Necks song, then a poem, then part two:





ROYAL

Joshua Clover

They moved across the screen like a computer simulation.
They moved across the screen like complex models & we learned
                                      to call this a nature show.
Animals but set in gray shades for video capture with a lighter area for
     the face.
Almost white they moved across the screen like a compressed
     meditation.
But the song was never familiar.
Because this was the only room this was the only room where we
     undressed—:
                                      that was the plot.
They moved across the screen across the room but it was not happening
     to us.
The image burning in.
Coated with hair & then a lighter area for the face meaning exposed
     skin.
We have learned to wear the architecture despite the sky’s numerous
     advances.
All these things—the speed & the music & the room—happened but
     not enough.
We undressed in the room we could not take off where I handcuffed
     you to the story.
This is the work of the brain—itself a bloody spring or electric wire
                                      wrapped in ripe gray gauze—
                                      you like it.
(2 lobes resembling the holy tablets delivered into the veldt’s dry
     speed—the Laws
                                      prefigured in the neutral network’s burning thicket.)
They moved across the screen howling but the sound turned down.
This happened over & over again—the blue light leaking into the
     room like sand.
Burning into the brain in a finery of filamental fire.
The Laws which do not unravel into noise & make a kind of story of
     kinked plot
                                      which can’t be straightened like a motel wire
                                      hanger looped around your wrists.
The loop like a computer simulation—the thought of the thought—
                                      the image burning in now.
We began to understand what they were—:
                                      the Thou & the shalt & the not



10 comments:

  1. It's more likely that a President Gore would have been impeached** for allowing 9/11 to occur on his watch than for Congress to approve an AUMF against Iraq, imho. I don't think a President Gore would have sought war with Iraq, either.

    It took all the PNAC folks that Bush put in office (starting with Cheney) to ignore warnings about bin Laden because they wanted to war with Iraq as early as January, 2011, and then to follow through by using 9-11 as a pretext.

    As for Obama, on the other hand, I could easily see him taking us into a war with Iran.

    ** With the 'more in sorrow than in anger' approval of the NYT and the WaPo.
    ~

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  2. The Necks absolutely fucking rule. I spend weeks lost in Necksville.

    You need Silverwater, Mosquito, Townsville, all of it.

    Also, re: your Thursday crew, among others, I honestly don't get what's so confusing to people about blogging.

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  3. You (and your pint-buddies) should know that I have a hand-made iPad cover that looks just like a Moleskine. I'm a heretic.

    The Beinart link gets a page not found which is probably just as well. I still haven't seen the core problem with the GOP and Paul mentioned. By anybody.

    When you refer to "the headers," what do you mean?

    And what does it mean about me that I got a perfect score in the rappers/libertarians quiz?

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  4. Beinart link fixed. Apologies.

    The TNPers were just clowning me out of love, though D does think the time I put into blogging I should spend writing the novel that I'm not writing.

    Along about nine at night I post a photo or something behind the blog name, then take it down in the morning. I deserve to be clowned.

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  5. Why do you take it down? *boggle*

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  6. Also. Blog and novel writing are completely different animals. And blogging keeps one writing. (Reminds me of parents who don't want their kids reading crap and teach them that reading sucks in the process. Wrongheaded.) Sasha said so.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Blogging and novel-writing (and failure of either)? I'm listening.

    I'm new to The Necks. Must explore. &, of course, not write while doing so.

    re TNP: as if you weren't lapping up the sardonicry.

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  8. +100 for the header.

    Jim, you say failure like it's a bad thing. You publish a book, then it's non-stop functions set up by your agent, hookers, blow, then drinking yourself to death while working on novel #2.

    Re: Badiou. I hate math.

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  9. @RG: We can all dream, can't we?

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