Category: Uncategorized

with the present COVID surge, the library where I work, under direction from the county, isn’t allowing patrons into the building. people can pick up requests for books and movies still, but otherwise our services are all but ceased. consequently, there isn’t much to do during the day, especially after months of similar restrictions last year gave us time to do maintenance and upkeep tasks usually impeded by the need to provide customer service.

personally I’m grateful for the respite, even if things weren’t exactly bustling before. I’m stealing time to read, watch Ableton tutorials, listen to music, write. what a strange blessing to have a place to go to with a cubicle that doesn’t demand I spend all day doing something soul crushing, like sell things or actuary work, or something mind numbing, like coding. plus, at my immediate disposal is a fairly extensive library catalogue. if I want to be an ~intellectual~ and an artist, but I am loath to sell the labor and products of those activities, I couldn’t ask for a better source of income.

my comrades at this library and I, we aren’t very close. tbh I don’t get the sense that they’re very close with one another either. I transferred here from the busy downtown branch almost a year ago now, and everyone else has been here for years. but the contrast between my previous branch’s environment and this one’s is stark, in no small part because that branch is literally on Main Street, downtown, lots of foot traffic from locals and tourists in town to shop the vintage stores and amble by the beach. here we’re tucked away, way off the freeway, nestled among the suburbs surrounding the Navy base just down the street. plus, during my time at the downtown branch, I made a very good friend, a fellow artist whose perspective I’ve come to deeply appreciate, and now I only see him occasionally.

but so anyway, during the day, I don’t really talk to my comrades. they don’t really talk to each other. one guy, he has a reputation for talking people’s ear off, going on and on about his energy investments, international soccer, stock market history, but lately he’s been conspicuously reticent. seems to have lost some weight too. when I use a computer after him, there are entries in the search history like “depression at night,” “insomnia and melatonin,” “music to help relax.”

everyone seems to keep themselves busy throughout the day, but what everyone else does, I couldn’t say. they likely couldn’t guess what I’m doing either, which is fine with me. but maybe it shouldn’t be.

it’s a lovely january morning, after what felt like weeks of storm and gloom. every extra minute of daylight is as a gift from the gods, an assurance of approaching spring.

yet it remains winter.

eventually I’ll finish writing up a rundown of my 2021 reading list. this year I’m starting off with a reread of Nightwood, and this morning I opened Oswald Spengler’s seminal The Decline of the West, with the intention of alternating chapters between it and The Dawn of Everything, the new David Graeber book (with David Wengrow). the fourth Hermetic principle listed in the Kybalion of the Three Initiates, the principle of polarity, states that everything is dual, so why not study world history from both angles: conservative pessimism and anarchic irreverence.

making steady progress on music production. churning out scratch takes of drum patterns and basslines mostly. I have a lot to learn still. soon I’ll write some verses to rap over the beats I really like. I want songs that get a crowd going, rafter rattlers, singalong anthems, mosh breakdowns, deep-as-hell grooves, that sort of thing. music for hot girls to dance to. maybe some drone and noise experiments. something new, but familiar. art pop, essentially.

tomorrow the library closes to the public again, out of a much too late, and therefor too little, abundance of COVID caution. hard not to feel like there’s a concerted effort to shrink my social sphere at just the time when I need opportunities for exogamy, of both the spiritual and the physical variety. but prolly for the best, being forced into slow, deliberate change, instead of my usual incidental flailing.

writing is slow but consistent. I feel like I’m in a collect/excrete phase, jotting ideas as they come and leaving them to be sorted through later. with the start of the next month, in all its inevitability, an adjustment will be called for, with greater focus, and tighter control.

missed the new moon, so if I’m your go-to astrologer…why?

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote a book I haven’t read all of, about the literary DNA of Dostoevsky. I know about this because I read the Wikipedia page for Menippean satire, a genre of writing I’m interested both in reading and producing. instead of working from whoever’s paraphrase is offered there, I decided to read the five pages of Bakhtin’s book about the genre and craft my own paraphrases below, as guideposts.

1. in the Menippea, the comical and humorous are central affects, especially when contrasted with the genre’s forebear, the Socratic dialogue.
2. Menippean narratives demonstrate “extraordinary freedom of plot and philosophical invention.” there is little concern for historical or memoiristic accuracy, nor is there respect for received myths and legends. realism is not the genre’s purview.
3. as such, the fantastic and outlandish operate in the Mennipea out of devotion to philosophical interrogation: extreme, even unbelievable, situations are created so that ideas may be stretched to their limit. the fantastical plot does not embody any truth but instead provides the background against which the truth is tested. in such adventure stories or religio-mystical narratives, it is not a human character that is the locus of conflict and tension, but an idea.
4. the fantastical elements intermingle with a “slum naturalism.” the idea is tested not only in supernatural extremes, but in those worldly contexts that are abject, poverty-stricken, perverse or depraved: “in brothels, in the dens of thieves, in taverns, marketplaces, prisons, in the erotic orgies of secret cults.”
5. the Menippea raises ultimate philosophical questions. it is as though every situation the narrative enters into poses in miniature ethical and practical choices of fundamental importance, as though all scenarios and characters represent alternate approaches to these ultimate questions.
6. a three-planed structure of the world provides wider range for addressing these ultimate questions; Menippean satire deals in the heavenly, earthly, and, especially, the netherworldly. action is often depicted at the boundaries between these spheres, as when a man argues his soul’s case at the gates of heaven, for example.
7. the experimentation and fantasticality of the genre extends to nontraditional narrative points of view: observation is made from a great height, as if looking down from Olympus, or it rapidly shifts between disparate perspectives, further broadening the scope of the work.
8. Menippean satire attempts to give voice to abnormal, extreme psychological states, “insanity of all sorts…, split personality, unrestrained daydreaming, unusual dreams, passions bordering on madness, suicides, and so forth.” the role these play is in introducing alternate ways of being; another life, a disjunct from the Self, a multiplicity in the place of the singular Ego. indeed, the Menippea seeks to destroy the unity of a person through dialogic interrogation, often to comic effect—even if simultaneously tragic, as in Dostoevsky’s use of doubles.
9. equally characteristic as psychological disturbance are violations of etiquette and eccentricities. taboos are broken, inappropriate speeches given, scandals enacted. these play the same role insanity plays for the individual, but on a societal scale, that is, in suggesting alternate modes of being, by undermining the power of convention to determine behavior. utterances that profane the sacred, cut through pretense, or defy decency, are common.
10. juxtaposition of extremes is a favored technique of the Menippean satirist: oxymorons, abrupt shifts, pairings of unlike things, the king as slave, the noble whore.
11. an imagined social utopia is generally present, “in the form of dreams or journeys to unknown lands.”
12. Menippean satires allow for formal promiscuity, with elements of other genres (“novellas, letters, oratorical speeches, symposia”) dispersed throughout, in varying degrees of parody.
13. this formal promiscuity is evidence of the Menippea’s interest in establishing “a new relationship to the word as the material of literature,” descended from the work’s thoroughly dialogic nature.
14. of primary interest to the Menippean narrative are issues contemporary with the work’s production. Menippean satires are in this way “journalistic,” by making reference to pop cultural, historical, and political events; by mapping the emergence of social developments; by depicting new directions for mundane existence.

Bakhtin notes that the genre “was formed in an epoch when national legend was already in decay, amid the destruction of those ethical norms that constituted the ancient idea of ‘seemliness’.”

Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama—only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall (in love) would already be too negative. Yet it is precisely such negativity that constitutes love: “Love is not a possibility, is not due to our initiative, is without reason; it invades and wounds us.” [Levinas] Achievement society—which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project—has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

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?

my brother is applying to be a cop. he’s already a deputy with a semi-major city’s sheriff’s department, but he wants a transfer to somewhere more suburban. my dad was formerly an FBI agent. you can listen to him here, guesting on the relentless picnic. he sucks. full disclosure, I worked for the campus PD in college. it was the best paying student job. but no thank you, never again. I lucked out that an Oedipus complex trained me to be distrustful of the police state.

unfortunately, I also better understand cop psychology than most people who put ACAB in their Twitter bios. empathizing with viewpoints I disagree with comes so easily to me because my entire psychological development is a struggle to parse through the cryptofascist background noise of my upbringing. speaking of Oedipus, I would love to hear what Freud has to say about how I was affected when my dad left me, 7 months old, for Quantico, to return as an American Gestapo agent. I have suspicions.

anyway, I’m supposed to fill out a character reference questionnaire for my brother’s new department. he’s fine, much smarter than most cops. I just don’t understand how he could want to be a cop, and not in the abstract, from my political or moral objection to policing. like, he was never someone to enjoy wielding power over others. he often threw a fit when he felt like we were asking him to make a decision that affected everyone. but he doesn’t know anything else to do. he’s lazy, he didn’t enjoy school. most of his life was devoted to playing baseball, so when that didn’t work out career-wise, where was he supposed to go? I mean my answer would be “not be a cop,” but what does my opinion matter.

and that’s just it, my opinion does not matter. not to the police department asking me for a reference, not to my brother, not to my dad, not to this fucked world where everything seems awful and doomed and I can see it so clearly and it does not matter. I have tried to push back against their blinkered worldview. during the protests last summer I threatened to stop visiting if my dad didn’t take down his “thin blue line flag.” wrote a whole letter explaining my position and why it never feels like I can be heard. they did not take down their fascist memorabilia, and I have visited them since.

my thinking is I shouldn’t be so plain spoken about this, and instead use it all as the basis for fiction, which I fear will be weakened if I pull the veil back and let you see what goes into it. but I also think it’s valuable for me to be honest and forthright about this. then, when I get accused of being a plant, an op, a spook, or otherwise complicit, at least no one can ask why I hid this stuff. while we’re at it, what my dad does now, ie provide “security consultation” for very wealthy people, is even more evil, and by association probably sullies me worse, even though I refuse his offers for work. all these moral dilemmas are brought into focus by my mere existence, and I have no idea how to deal with any of them.

part of me wants to sandbag this reference questionnaire, somehow be a minor wrench in the oppressive machine recruiting my brother. but the questions just make me sad. “How often do you have contact with the candidate?” rarely. I miss my brother always, he was the only person I really had when my parents divorced. even though we have very little, next-to-nothing in common, he and I have no problem spending time together. enjoyable time. but I barely hear from him, in part because I harbor resentment over how I was always a satellite for my dad’s and brother’s interests, following around the baseball team my brother played on and my dad coached. but that childish indignation on my part seems to have created the space that made it possible for my brother to drift into law enforcement without any input from me.

when you’re a coward, everything’s always too little, too late.

somehow I lived til 2021 without having seen Jennifer’s Body (dir. Kusama, 2009). the movie deserves its cult status and does not deserve such a low score on rotten tomatoes. or maybe it does, but only if we lived in a world where real Movies got made, not advertisements for merchandise. I’d give anything for someone to make a zero-fucks campfest as bonkers as Jennifer’s Body in 2021.

I mean, ultimately it’s nowhere near a perfect movie. I can’t even say for sure if it’s a Good movie. not sure if it’s really my business saying if it’s Good or Bad anyway, but that’s an aesthetic discussion I’m not getting into now, not exactly. Jennifer’s Body is definitely a Fun movie, and it’s got grit and texture and takes silly risks and let’s itself be overrun with ideas. so few movies do that nowadays. and far be it from me to criticize a movie that burns Chris Pratt up in a fire explicitly symbolic of the World Trade Center attacks.

where it loses me is in the last 1/3, when Diablo Cody has to explain the mechanism of evil and tie it all up, and the film’s logic becomes too convenient. this hinges on easy “occult” cliches that offer very corny justification for Needy’s escape and revenge. when she goes into her school library searching for answers and finds an extensive “occult” section, me, being the pedantic librarian I am, I was like “yr school library would not have those books.” (later, Needy’s boyfriend “hangs the lampshade” on this when he asks her “our library has an occult section?”) but like, fine, like, the movie obviously relishes the absurdity of teen films and splatter flicks. the end just gets a little too Diablo Cody, and wobbles.

speaking of the occult (hoped for a more artful segue, but fuck you this is my blog), I started reading The Occult: A History, by Colin Wilson. truth be told, I’m ambivalent about the occult. And to maintain my ambivalence, or to prevent it from being too easy to determine what I “actually” think, I sometimes struggle with how much I should write publicly what I feel about my preoccupations. I don’t have simple explanations for my perverse fascinations, or for my idiosyncratic convictions. like, in The Occult, Wilson writes about faculties often termed paranormal or supernatural as being nothing of the sort, and that we all have some measure of perception that is subconscious, instinctual, not explainable by narrow conceptions of “logic.” this seems obviously true to me, based on my own experiences with premonition, intuition, and nonverbal communication. from this epistemological basis, though, one could easily follow lines of thought and feeling that would not only seem insane, they would feel insane. when one attempts to communicate felt truths from that alienated point of view, with all the conviction of someone asserting that 2 and 2 is 4, a mismatch of contexts gives the impression of psychosis. if you’ve ever read the writings of schizophrenics or any of those books that get labeled “conspiracy theory” on the back, you know what I mean. I have a stack of these books, plus books on shit like ESP, astral projection, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, etc., that I intend to read once my school work is done. whether it’s all true, or if I’ll go crazy, or if those are two sides of the same coin, we’re going to find out.

were it to have not been so horror-lore exposition-y, Jennifer’s Body obviously would have been a different movie, so my criticism feels a little meaningless. I most value art that commits to its premise, which hell fuckin yeah that movie commits.

Alright let’s go clap, clap, clapclapclap Boris Yeltsin clap, clap, clapclapclap hippie burnout clap, clap, clapclapclap Stanley Kubrick clap, clap, clapclapclap Sour Diesel clap, clap, clapclapclap paranoia clap, clap, clapclapclap COINTELPRO clap, clap, clapclapclap Marxist discourse clap, clap, clapclapclap Leon Trotsky clap, clap, clapclapclap Frida Kahlo clap, clap, clapclapclap artist’s artist clap, clap, clapclapclap foamtop surfboard clap, clap, clapclapclap hot young singles clap, clap, clapclapclap hiked-up g-string clap, clap, clapclapclap “What’s that mouth do?” clap, clap, clapclapclap HR meeting clap, clap, clapclapclap antifascist clap, clap, clapclapclap Ku Klux Klansmen clap, clap, clapclapclap vaccine skeptic clap, clap, clapclapclap right-wing nutjob clap, clap, clapclapclap Donald Rumsfeld clap, clap, clapclapclap Don DeLillo clap, clap, clapclapclap “Go on Cum Town” clap, clap, clapclapclap unpaid intern clap, clap, clapclapclap bloody knuckles clap, clap, clapclapclap pin-up tattoo clap, clap, clapclapclap phat ass white girl clap, clap, clapclapclap West Coast shithead clap, clap, clapclap Samuel Beckett clap clap, clap, clapclapclap BDSM clap, clap, clapclapclap active shooter clap, clap, clapclapclap anti-Semite clap, clap, clapclapclap Thomas Pynchon clap, clap, clapclapclap schoolgirl fetish clap, clap, clapclapclap Jeffrey Epstein clap, clap, clapclapclap middle finger clap, clap, clapclapclap Alfred Hitchcock clap, clap, clapclapclap meth addiction clap, clap, clapclapclap new nonfiction clap, clap, clapclapclap algorithm clap, clap, clapclapclap 3D printing clap, clap, clapclapclap neural network clap, clap, clapclapclap mean Latinas clap, clap, clapclapclap marijuana clap, clap, clapclapclap tig ol’ bitties clap, clap, clapclapclap cumstain, sorry clap, clap, clapclapclap Hunter Biden clap, clap, clapclapclap Ella Emhoff clap, clap, clapclapclap Sirhan Sirhan clap, clap, clapclapclap kickflip faceplant clap, clap, clapclapclap lubricated clap, clap, clapclapclap hardcore porno clap, clap, clapclapclap anal prolapse clap, clap, clapclapclap unerotic clap, clap, clapclapclap bean burrito clap, clap, clapclapclap cocaine traffic clap, clap, clapclapclap Franklin Credit clap, clap, clapclapclap John Krasinski clap, clap, clapclapclap futures market clap, clap, clapclapclap kratom OD clap, clap, clapclapclap revelation clap, clap, clapclapclap DMT trip clap, clap, clapclapclap transcendental clap, clap, clapclapclap Bodhisattva clap, clap, clapclapclap Tender Buttons clap, clap, clapclapclap broken promise clap, clap, clapclapclap lover’s quarrel clap, clap, clapclapclap “What an asshole” clap, clap, clapclapclap LMAO

sometimes I think myself into a place where all preconfigured systematic knowledge, from scientific rationalism to dogmatic theology and everything between, seems as though to only obscure the infinite variability of pata/metaphoric mythopoesis. so like, maybe the idea that the universe is however many billions of years “old,” maybe that’s only a metaphor and all thinking consequential to premises so ignorant of their own abstraction will never overcome its blindspots. it’s all stories, is what I think I’m saying.

which isn’t to suggest that metaphor is “bad” or that clear literary thinking ought to focus, Iowa-workshop-style, on Things and Senses. I do not write “concrete/literal” alt-lit blah blah blah, because we still can’t be sure we’re not the butterfly in the dream.