05.07.2015

So I’m sick for the second time in two weeks, only this time it’s been serious enough to miss work and fall way behind on my writing and reading schedule. It’s all been in my head until this week. Even when I caught that nasty stomach flu in mid-April, I was still able to fill in my remaining free time with make-up reading/writing time. But now. Fuck. I think I’m done writing for BTLG for now, sans the immaturity, it just isn’t worth it. Why would I work for a couple more concerned with forming an onanistic ouroboros, teasing one another with fading flickering images of one another’s future-perfect selves before simply stepping up and admitting “we will, or we won’t” pay me.

But yeah, last time I just cut into my sleeping hours, brought some of my writing material with me and worked through things on the 2 or the N Train, one sentence at a time, if necessary. Never thought I’d become so pragmatic, especially for something I’m doing pro bono. But so no, no more I say! I do not work without cash or networking. What am I, twenty? No way, yeesh, what’s wrong with me. All that happens there is I put way too much work into something I am internally conflicted about, so the work will just reflect this (to me, if no one else), and then it’s impossible to convince these kids to do something to improve motivation, because the former works are then their favorite post hoc reason not to pay or network me (even if it’s of a literary level of its own qua the rest of their project).

So. I was supposed to have a thesis finished for my Sadean experience in the contemporary//pop world thesis like a week ago, and I’m still only about halfway there. I need to reread Gass’ piece and finish my research. I should be able to have a topic by Saturday night, and a thesis by Sunday. That’s that. Fuck titles.

I’ve had so many writing projects since Xmas! It’s insane. I complete like half of what I begin. The ones still floating around are…hm, let’s see: there’s the one about what specifically bodies gain access to through argument, incorporating Deleuze’s BwO, micro-fascist (µF) forces, and how they interact within concrete experience, without succumbing to the frailties of nominalism. If this even makes sense. Nominalism is such a stranger boundary to set, since it can go both ways, excluding either universals, terms or predicates or abstract objects, but not necessarily all of the above. So I guess this is a good thing, though, right? Just pick some relatively inclusive metaphysical conditions, ones compatible with the sort of objectivity found in Logic of Sense, and build a fucking narrative. Probably out of that Out-With narrative essay that was much more of a maniacal narrative than an essay. Now it’s all coming back to me, ah, behold; New York, the shock and the glory…

Let’s see, what else. Ah, the Future Anterior piece. Right, that was never accepted by TNI; no response (and no surprise coming from that plutocratic syndicate, ivy league whutt). But so there must be something else I can use that concept for beyond analyzing a movie from like eight years ago. I mean, it’s, like, around you all of the time, man. Trauma. The pervading temptation to indulge the impending sense of inevitable squalor and psychological ruin. New York. Just last week I ditched work early to check up on another protest gathering at Union Square. I haven’t had a single thing to do with the movement since like January. I think. It’s been too long. But so many different groups have joined since then. Every Union I could think of, legalization organizations, anti-NRA groups, NRA groups, anti-censor groups, etc. Hell, I thought I saw a couple pushing for the 9/11 truth. I guess the hoi polloi of political praxis has thrown in for front-page exposure at this point. But hell, man. What started in Baltimore spread so quickly across the rest of the country. It doesn’t speak too well of me to consider how quickly I forgot about this serious movement as soon as my own health came under question. I mean, it wasn’t forgotten, but I just kind of assume it will be there when I get back into the city life, once I recover. So many things we take for granted, I remember thinking last week, so easily spun into revolution could we be, I remember secretly wishing. Would have blown to have caught that torque at full-illness’ pique.

But so writings. Body, sans bodies (speaking earnestly here, the sheer irony of writing this one in preterite fashion wrt my seven-month-long situ is laudible in its own right). Then there’s FiFA, which can be so easily related to anything in this NYC-situ. Take your pick, Chuck. Then, hm, ah, yes, I did kick a redux of She Returns into being the week before last, in the days before my last sick days. BTLG probably won’t put it up, and definitely won’t pay, so why bother with them. Re-edit the falling action post-bus-allegory, sans theory, mit prose, ja? Und dann, ich denke…naja, there’s nothing to fear from the Marquis de Sade. Indeed. Except this major sickness I’m pushing through, sans words to any living human. Maybe if I’m better by Saturday I’ll hit up the library. Narrow that topic down, and write a few practice ¶s.

Now, readings. If the state to which I’ve recently discovered I last left my writing projects in is best described with the adjective disorderly, then my readings are pushing the use-mention dilemma for Deleuze’s Chaosmos. Yeah, it’s a neologism. Well it used to be. Get over it.

Let’s just have a list of things I’ve been reading over the past year. At least the ones I’ve not yet finished. Gaddis’ Recognitions, Lacan’s Écrits (although it is true what they say: one does not simply read Lacan), Borges’ Ficciones, Tabucchi’s Time Ages in a Hurry (short, but deep, so deep I can’t bear to read it unless my mind’s in minesweeper-mode), Deleuze & Guattari’s Capitalism & Schizophrenia (both parts; AΘ and 1K Plateaus), Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory (both of which, I’m sure, I will not finish until I finish D & G’s books, or, at most, roughly the same time). More recently, I’ve picked up growing interest in Wittenberg’s Time Travel and Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, the former of which I’m halfway through, and the latter of which I could probably spend an entire graduate school term ensconcing myself with. I’ve noticed how uncomfortably comfortable I’ve become with ending sentences in prepositions. I’m going to blame this on the homesickness not sated by my four months home last year. I still feel like a damned nomad. Wouldn’t be a big deal if I had the means to cop total alienation. It’s been a long time alone in this body.

I have also noticed how much of this city and my vocabulary fade away when I’m in this boxed-up room, where there’s no sunlight, and no friendly voices, and little to no wifi. It feels like a time machine, in a bad way. A broken vanity mirror on the door. A Chinese charm at top trying its hardest to bless me with wealth and good health, already (it would add). Several lists of old-new vocab, writing prompts and self-written synopses, note cards espousing themselves (in their own words) individually; as ARGUMENTS, collectively; a GENE POOL. A self-portrait of oneself drawing a self-portrait of oneself with a short anaphora about being a white girl in white shirt in black skirt in black light, etc, that I obviously did not draw. Taped to the wall are a few light philosophical reflections on tragedy; deception, persuasion, the spectator and the New School for Social Research. Marcionism & my first abandoned novel. That novel is the biggest long-shot of all, save the secret metaphysics I wrote and burned in the months between 2010 and 2011. So long ago…I do so miss Sophia.

Beyond this schtuff, I s’pose I’ll just resubmit some of my film reviews and essays I’d prepped for the pro bono zine to the better ones who would but they could, like i said, sans plutocracy. Here’s hoping.

Finally. Maybe I should get sick more often. I needed this break to catch up with life. Nah.

Bring it on, assholes.

-b

03.02.2015

I was just accepted for a position on the first floor of The Strand. I think. I was very distracted by an acute case of depression, which I had been doing my best to disguise with sanguine continence. But the calling manager, who overheard my jumping for joy (and giggling with glee) changed his voice’s tone as he explained to me that I would have Tuesdays and Thursdays off. He sounded a little annoyed, much to my chagrin. Then he told me to come in next Thursday (the twelfth), which implied an obvious contradiction.

Now I have this reality-encompassing fear that a) I’m going to walk in on Thursday to the first floor information desk, and the manager will refuse me with a laugh, saying “a job for you at Strand? …hahaha, there is nothing here for you, you pathetic philistine failure!”, or b) that my overzealous exuberance at getting the gig prevented me from hearing a first offer I halfway may have heard him start to say as I failed to contain my excitement about an initial position on a higher floor (or better-standing strand of Strand’s crew) which my ill-timed jouissance convinced him (the calling manager) to renege, and amend, downwards.

I hope I’m just paranoid, but then I also kind of hope I’m not, for my sanity’s sake. Which brings me to the core of my current pathos–I have been feeling increasingly trapped by the rock of my extremelly limiting (veritably castrating) lack of funds and the hard place of both having become so hopelessly mired in psychoanalytic and antipsychoanalytic conceptual theory that my F.A. essay is practically capsizing from sheer incoherence, and the perfidious tease E’s turning out to be, and the vituperative self-loathing automatically ensuing at both having allowed myself to be so easily swayed and the plain, ineluctable fact that I haven’t even kissed a woman in over three months, coupled with the suspicion that this proverbial desert of the real will go on for quite some time, quite some time…

Firstly, I do not need to buy any more books. I do not need any more books. I should not buy any more books. I will not buy any more books. Secondly, I cannot join any more movements, clubs, organizations, charities, institutions, et al, etc. I have stupidly become involved with SMIN again, and an overwhelmingly foolhardy and onerous weight of biopolitical activism is on my shoulders. If I follow through on my commitments to canvass, recruit, train, “activate,” and compose the lion’s share of the 04.14.2015 “NYC shut-down’s” outreach program, there is no possibility of changing or overcoming or ultimately acheiving the desiderata mentioned on the last page.

Tack on top of that (yes, by the gods there’s more) my consenting to join a Mr. W.D. in the development of a re-launch of a (hard) scifi radio show. D’s an aged and rugged patron of the kind of boyish scientistic ogling of the sort of all-consuming impetus to get Humankind to the stars that sees its unconscious telos as being at once manifest destiny, genetic injunction and first cause. He’s nerdy, but incorrigably innocent, or so it seems thus far. He is resolute in his conviction that we should already be on the Moon, mining Helium 3 (what is that?), returning it to the International Space Station (ISS) to fuel not the Earth’s economy, but more, exclusively more vessels into not only interplanetary, but interstellar space, purely out of capitalist fervor, or (at best) piggy-backing capitalism’s (hopefully…or perhaps not) inevitable expansion into space. One thing he is objectively correct about is that we as a species do not have long to dwell on this planet, indeed likely will not survive the 21st century, if our effect on Earth’s ecology continues to carry on.

So. To start, I need to find a way to state my F.A. thesis as simply as possible, adding clarity to its concept in little steps, as all these others and Others pull me in, move on, or stubbornly rest as unreliable constants, at this specific juncture. [And, uh, whatever is to become of Sonder Q?]

02.13.2015

Today my bag was stolen from 96th St in the upper west side. I suppose these things happen. Its contents were a tin water canister, a notebook, a scarf from Cambodia, French sunglasses, a bottle of ibuprofen, a book of poetry, a pencil I’ve owned since 2001, and my journal, which contained fragments of manuscripts, essays, personal thoughts, speculation and poetry. I sincerely hope whoever decided to take it performs a gestalt of reason on these contents, and concludes that he or she just stole from someone who was out to do something spectacular, but it’s almost certainly already in a garbage container by now, because there was no money in it.

I am trying to think of something profound to write in eulogy to these items, with my last modest spurt of energy, but it isn’t coming.

A part of me feels relieved, as my manual writings were becoming more theory and itinerant plans than actual passionate writing. Only half of the journal’s contents really seized their respective days. The rest were notes on others’ thoughts, and the depressive motions of a man in bad faith of a futile relationship. Maybe it’s for the best to forget my first few months in NYC. No record of beginnings really make a difference, because in retrospect, it’s during the middle and the end that the most profound recognitions occur, when the old habits break down and deconstruct, when one transforms and realizes he or she has already become an other, that the story actually comes to life.

But really, there was much to be unpacked that I wrote down … ideas i consented to forgetting because i wrote them down. Fuck. I’m going to have to re-research so many things. I feel so empty without it. My work and its media are obsessed with stoicism and buddhism right now, and it’s been getting on my nerves; as if I haven’t already practiced this. I don’t want to play mind games and trick myself into feeling better about the state of things. I want to go, go, go, move on and higher, and stop doubting how I feel. Of course no one needs to feel any different than they already do. I’m (ironically) a radical individualist. One can choose to remedy any set of emotions if they are an obstruction to extending a genus of ethical conduct, a flow of desire,  but one should never be forced to assuage one’s present body. However, you’ll suffer that,  regardless.

But moving on is all one can do in this situation. Damn. I’m so unattached to everything and everyone. Oh well, moving on …

I can’t stand only writing at night, when my mind’s spent and my imagination is asleep. Everything in this post feels so quotidian and uninspired, and that isn’t me. (PROGRAM …) This isn’t what it’s like to be around me. I can’t wait for this next job. Which one of the two awaiting me I cannot say.  that is up to the economy.

I suppose this blog will be my journal of the more profound kind, in the meantime. But I miss pen and paper. At least the screen lights itself, but still. Text is so fucking democratized and minimal on these flat dull screens. There’s no character, no mistakes turned semiotic tricks to play off as coy slips.

A few notes:

reactionary→i am so very tired of people of ordinary craft and creativity using SNS sites to document their self-sabotage. (I made it! I did it! I’ve achieved jouissance! it exists only for me,  and pretty soon it’s coming to destroy you,  too!)  … there should really be a public announcement illustrating the phatic nature of remediating gestalt-recognitions. It should begin with a soundless definition,  and conclude with examples of online socialites of ordinary craft being cross-examined by homeless geniuses (again, soundlessly), to reveal how irritatingly much desire the viewer discharges in he/r adoration of them.

spontaneity→time. work. sign. lit. revolution. open relationships. negative capability. indifference to public dissent/assent. art, genesis, concept. reading//writing. thought, thought thought. sleep.

some deriding circles running-on around prose form and audience(s) i.e. two questions i’d like to see on the GRE

in order for short fiction to serve its function as not only a thoroughly concrete phenomenology of the real, but also an experimental journey into both signs present and as-of-yet unsignified, unentered or otherwise not-yet-triggered, and then also signs so far not even present in mainstream media, alternative indie or otherwise not yet within the scope of public discourse w/r/t mundane consciousness, the characters involved must embody already existent political standpoints, complete with old and new ideologies, each with their own individually signified utopias (i.e. the unspoken lack, the frame, the incompleteness in their theorems; the rub).

q1: T/F? Elucidate.

From here, with an a priori noncomplimentary ideological difference-in-corpus, the story, through narrative twists and vocalized synthesis (i.e. dialogue), must convey some interesting critique of what is, what’s said should be, and what-could-but-so-far-probably-isn’t-but-might-very-easily-be-via-a-modicum-of-thought, could strike the reader to interpret ways, going beyond what picayune options I may privately intend (à la mort d’auteur), but so interpret ways to bridge the growing mise en abyme all indie writers find themselves starting in contra the inevitable post-punk jump aboard the hashtag(ged) locomotive bound both for the liberal elitism found in the physical confines of manhattan and brooklyn and yes also in the virtually enclosed ivory tower of academia (now on Linkedin?!), and the neoconservative mainstream that kept them from pursuing the very same kind of sincerity-laden auteur-sentiments that got them in front of the proverbial-perfunctory typewriter in the first place. goddammit.

q2: is the last word rhetorical?