wanna know a secret? well too fuckin bad, cuz I guard mine like they’re the rim and I’m Bill Walton (November 5). admittedly, I don’t really know much about basketball. I am attempting to follow this season, and my Lakers barely squeaked by the 1-and-6 Rockets the other night. I do not understand the Lakers’ offensive strategy. what does Russell Westbrook (November 12) add to the team? again, stupid person talking, but I don’t think his passing game is really making or breaking anything for them. it’s like he’s not even on the same team as everyone else.
y’all ever very obviously fudge part of a task you’ve been assigned, most of which hums along satisfactorily, but when time comes for the assigner to sign off on your submission, they call you out on the part you’re fudging and make you do it again, so you shuffle it around and send it back promptly but get left watching your email until the assigner finally accepts the very last of the work you need to do to be free? another way of putting this, how do I stop obsessively staring at my email? I feel like I’m being held hostage by my graduate advisor. I’m so fucking close to being rid of this bullshit.
once I am rid of this bullshit, I will, after a brief respite, be diving headfirst into my stagnant art projects. there’s nothing to be said here of the Big Thing I’m working on other than that I have shed all self-defeating hesitation on the matter. this novel is getting written by me one way or the other. other than writing, which I’m stuck doing no matter how much I vacillate on the value of fiction or the novel’s loss of stature in the culture, I’ve been playing the guitar more. I wouldn’t say that I can play the guitar quite yet, but I know how to play the guitar, if that distinction makes sense. I also plan to acquire a MIDI controller keyboard to make music on my laptop with. let me repeat: I barely know the guitar, but I intend to make music in the near future. so stay tuned on how that turns out. JPEGMAFIA, whose bday comes in just short of the Scorpio side of October (the 22nd), and his newest album put that fire under my ass. Adam advised me to keep a journal about my music making attempts, so maybe some of that will appear here at some point. he asked if I felt like I needed to express something that’s better suited to music than to fiction. Sontag argues that modern (ie contemporary) art tends to deal more in the interplay of constituent material, rather than it being an expression something specific through media, and I find it very easy to revel in the possibilities of music making, much easier than I do with language. but like I said, I’m cursed to write, so by altering course I’m not seeking the appropriate avenue to express something specific so much as widening my range of options for aesthetic play. and music is the most mysterious and explicitly occultist of the art forms, since it’s through creating tiny vibrations on the air that emotions aren’t just suggested, but foisted on the audience, as a magical spell. artful writing is also a kind of spell, but it’s easier to get hung up on Ideas with language-based arts, so I’m hoping that by pursuing music I can get some relief from my neurosis.
elsewhere, in an essay titlted “The Pornographic Imagination,” Sontag makes the point that it isn’t clear whether human sexuality ought to be understood as healthy and positive, something I spend a lot of time thinking about, since I’m preoccupied with sex. Colin Wilson, in his seminal work The Occult, argues that sexuality as we understand it now is a result of the sublimation of primitive erotic instincts into the social field created by urbanization millennia ago. he also argues that sexuality is one of the more stubborn primitive impulses, one our progressive domestication has not succeeded in muting. I don’t totally agree with Wilson’s argument, but I’m having a blast reading the book.
Today’s Google Doodle honors Charles K. Kao (November 4), who initiated the fiber optic revolution that allowed the internet to flourish into the Leviathan it is today. What’s more Scorpionic than a cryptic, all-powerful network of interstitial connection, the slow insinuation of which went largely unnoticed until it was too late?
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