Nietzsche for the sake of Nietzsche

Every time I try just writing for the sake of having words, it doesn’t turn out very well. Or maybe it does… because eventually I do get there and something valuable comes from the exercise… but I also manage to bullshit like crazy and I don’t think anyone really benefits from that.
I also use way more ellipses when I’m freewriting. So that’s weird.

So foreals… I’ve been reading more Nietzsche lately, revisiting some of the tidbits I read when I was traveling in France. Brings back good memories. When you’re traveling I think you develop a tendency to want to generalize about people in the world. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism– like, you just want to find any similarities you can in the world so you feel more comfortable and at ease. But that can be really dangerous, in my opinion, because it can close you off to learning about differences in the world and they [beautiful, necessary] ways people vary. If you’re too busy looking for similarities, what is that going to do to your ability to appreciate differences?

When I was abroad I definitely tried to make some broad generalizations about people, for better or for worse. But even at the time, when I was writing those things, I would know on some level that they were hollow observations and one could easily refute anything I was saying. After all, I had only been to the United States and Western Europe, which is but a tiny fraction of the diversity out there. And I was 19. What the hell did I know?

So I compromised by reading people like Nietzsche, who seems to relish making generalizations and grand overtures about human nature. You could expect that from someone who wrote a book called “Human, All Too Human.” Nietzsche filled the void for generalizations about humans, but was also a little over-the-top, so I could read Nietzsche and still keep a conscience about me. That is, I could read what he was writing and think, “aw, well, that can’t be totally true. What about ______?” That seemed more healthy than just buying into all he said about the world and humanity, and more healthy than writing those things myself.

Heartwarming as Hell

The most recent podcast of This American Life is about breakups of all kinds. So Ira Glass includes an interview from 1987, when a 9 year old girl was interviewed about her parents’ divorce. It’s very sweet, and for me it put words in the mouths of many of the kids of divorce. I am so lucky to have no experience in this field.

This is the transcript of the interview with the little girl: http://sites.google.com/site/profenglishprofenglish/unit2

It’s really cute, but it’s also extremely heartbreaking– especially the part where she says she talked to her counselor at school. Apparently, the counselor told her that out of the 400 kids at school, about 300 were going through (or had gone through) divorces. And that was 20 years ago! So, so sad.

You can listen to the different parts here:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/339/break-up

Writing prompt exercise with Haley

Remember how I did those 4 poems that were continuations of lines from Sylvia Plath poems with my bff Haley?

Well just in case you were wondering, Haley published hers as well.

Progress and Promises

This past quarter was difficult for me. I worked harder for longer than I had since probably freshman year of high school. But now that it’s over, I am rededicating myself to this blog, and specifically channeling it towards music. You should know that I will probably only talk about stuff I love, in the interest of being positive and all. So if you’re looking for a lot of indie-bashing, I regret to inform you that I will not deliver.

I talk about eMusic a lot. Most (if not all) of the music I discuss will be available there. I swear I’m not employed by them!

Starting today, a few friends and I are embarking on a #blogblitz !! (See https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23blogblitz for more information). It will last the whole month.

Here’s more info, plus the rules: http://www.facebook.com/pages/blogblitz/243301429015226?ref=ts

And here are links to the other bloggers (a few others may be joining in, and you’re welcome, too. Just contact us via the Facebook page):

Brian: http://brianfullerton.posterous.com
Darren: http://thenwsportsfan.blogspot.com
Seth: http://www.sethvincent.com
Jesse: http://paperdollmegan.tumblr.com
Sam: http://biancacasablanca.posterous.com
Carrie: http://carrierenee.tumblr.com/

 

 

 

Continuation of “Soul Symphony”

Find the original “Soul Symphony” post here.

My ears
are fuzzy,
They hear sounds that
aren’t real.

They make a symphony out of a train whistle.

When I’m half asleep.

Somehow, that is me:
my body,
a compilation of  things I know are real and some
imagined.
Things I know are beautiful,
and some that are so piercing that they
wake me up at night.

I wake up to turn a train whistle into a symphony.
I have the power to transform beautiful noise.

But if my alarm goes off….

I am dead to the world.

.

“That fantasy of godlike power only refuses the ways we are constituted, invariably and from the start, by what is before us and outside of us” (Butler).

I have the power to transform beautiful noise. That is, I have the power to transform noise into beauty. That is, I have the responsibility to transform noise into beauty.

This really loud train whistle wakes you up in the middle of the night. Now, everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance. But this isn’t in the distance; it’s right in your fucking back yard. And it’s not even loud enough to actually wake you up, so it just rouses you a little from sleep. That’s the worst, because you can’t make the decision whether to actually wake up, and you can’t go back to sleep, so you just remain in that god-forsaken limbo. You have this body without procedures, so you just can’t know what to do.

Awesome-zine

It’s the first day of a new month. Do you know what that means? It means brand new magazines. BRAND NEW MAGAZINES! I don’t subscribe to any, since I move around so much, so I have to grab them when they hit the newsstands. Last month I got Filter, Poets & Writers, Rolling Stone, and a few others.

Atonin Artaud said,

There aren’t enough magazines, or if you will, all existing magazines are useless. We are appearing because we believe we are responding to something. We are real. This excuses us from being necessary. There should be as many magazines as there are valid states of mind. The amount of printed matter would then be reduced to very little, but this little would five the abstract and total of what should be though, or what is worth publishing.

All magazines are slaves to a way of thinking and as a result they despise thought. They all have the serious defect of being edited by several people. Thus they imagine that they are reflecting a state of opinion, when they are really only a grab bag. For there is no such thing as a state of opinion, there are various opinions which are more or less worthy of being expressed. But humanity is incurable. No one will ever present people from being sure of their own thought and suspicious of someone else’s; if someone who has a valid point of view wants to give it an audience, he has no choice but to start a magazine. We have a point of view that is worth expressing. Circumstances external to the fact of thinking correctly of incorrectly prevent existing magazines for accepting this point of view in its absolute nakedness. There are no free magazines; all magazines have what amounts to a creed. Thus we are choosing the only means of being ourselves and of being ourselves totally.

We will appear when we have something to say. When we think that we have an interesting view on a false way of thinking, or when an aesthetic or moral phenomenon seems to lend itself to discussion. This magazine will therefore be a personal magazine, interesting in that it will be the creation of a single individual, but we will welcome as guests those artists and writers whose work seems to accord with out state of mine, to illustrate it, or to relate to it in some way.

I absolutely adore that quote. I used parts of it when I did a magazine project for a class last year, and if I ever start a magazine it will be the creed by which I live and write and create. I don’t think that “all existing magazines are useless”– far from it. Many are superficial and unnecessary, but many uphold Artaud’s principles and are pretty collaborative and genius.

Personally, I think magazines are just the best representation of creativity in the world. The full-color glossies are the best (is “full-color glossy” the best phrase in the English language?!) but I’d take a black and white, crappily stapled zine, too.

42.

If I haven’t already told you, or if you hadn’t figured it out: I don’t read a lot. I would like to, and I really do enjoy books… but my attention span is so flighty, and my standards are pretty high I guess, because nothing seems to captivate me. Usually nothing does capture my mind unless it’s Harry Potter (no, seriously), and it’s been like that since the books first came out. I used to read all the time– I was one of “those” kids. I never minded when my parents made me spend the evening in my room, or when my gift for Christmas was secondhand books. But when the Harry Potter books came out, I started reading them over and over again and disregarding all other literature in the world. I have hazy memories of the books I was assigned in high school– Snow Falling on Cedars, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Moby Dick, Atlas Shrugged, Pride and Prejudice, various others– but mostly what I remember are the midnight book release parties at bookstores, loading up on Gobstoppers and my brand new hardback, and holing myself up in my room for hours. In fact, the only downside to the Harry Potter books for me was that they only took me about 6 to 12 hours to read (less when I was reading them for the 18th time, of course).

Yes, I realize now that all this is quite lamentable. It’s like only listening to one band for years and years: Even if that one band is the Beatles, one’s senses need to experience new and different sounds. Avid music listener that I am, I’m appalled at people who don’t branch out of their musical comfort zones. I’m sure that avid readers have the same feeling about people like me, who read minimally, and only read Harry Potter at that.

So that’s why I’m glad are different for me now. I’ve been reading.

This summer, I burned my way (quite figuratively!) through several enlightening books, including The Catcher in the Rye, which quickly became one of my favorite books of all time, Siddhartha, which I did not enjoy as much as I thought I would, and a few others. I even made some notable progress in Thus Spake Zarathustra. I was so grateful for the time I was able to spend reading this summer, because it reminded me that though I am slow as a lame turtle when it comes to reading, I thoroughly enjoy it when I have the time to sink my teeth into something.

I finished The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this week and cannot tell you how much I enjoyed it. It was different than anything I’d read before, but it also combined elements of my favorite books. It had the surreal, fantastical fictional element that makes me love Harry Potter so much (ok, ok, they’re completely different ball parks, but they both keep my attention, which is what counts). THHGTTG also had the witty, remarkably pertinent quality that I loved about Catcher in the Rye. Everyone knows that a good comedian’s tactic is to touch on things that everyone experiences but never comments on and turn them into humor, like awkward moments waiting in line or sneezing. Well, a great author does the same thing, but (sometimes) without the element of humor. If you’ve ever read Catcher in the Rye, you know what I’m talking about. The narrator is amazing at getting to the heart of everyday things we don’t realize are (or should be) abnormal– like going to the movies, or prostitution. His ability to remove himself from the story enables us to see the story almost from the perspective of third person omniscient as well as first person.

THHGTTG is like that, but on a larger scale. Instead of commenting on a few days during a seventeen year old boy’s winter in New York City in the 1950s (1940s?), its perspective is of all mankind, all universe-kind, in the future. Because of this, we may think Douglas Adams makes silly, 1984-esque predictions about life. In my opinion, Adams is actually making incredibly real, timely observations. I think he offers an astute critique of life on Earth today as well as ironic, humorous, chillingly real analyses about human behavior that will always apply.

Adams uses an obscene amount of variations of the phrase “entirely coincidental” throughout the book, enough to convince us that nothing is coincidental. I love this sort of mind game with the author. I’m not sure if he meant to make such intelligent observations about people in general, or if he just meant to tell a story, but since the book insists that coincidence exists, I wonder if perhaps the author’s observations exist only in my reading of the book…

Most of all, I love that this book makes me think (perhaps too hard). I wish I could talk about it with people, but I know this is just the way things work– I never read books like this in high school (though they were assigned) when I had the opportunity to discuss them, but now that I am reading them, no one else can talk about them because they are all engrossed in program work. Nevertheless, I plan to just keep reading. I haven’t decided on my next book yet, but I’m thinking it will probably be the sequel to THHGTTG.

I will leave you with a few of my favorite quotes from THHGTTG:

“I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
“Why not?”
“Because… because… I think it might be because if I knew I wouldn’t be able to look for them.”

“Zaphod couldn’t sleep. He also wished he knew what it was that he wouldn’t let himself think about. For as long as he could remember he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there. Most of the time he was able to put this thought aside and not worry about it, but it had been reawakened. … Somehow it seemed to conform to a pattern that he couldn’t see.”

“He had turned unfathomability into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

“Last night I was worrying about this again. About the fact that part of my mind just didn’t seem to work properly. Then it occurred to me that the way it seemed was that someone else was using my mind to have good ideas with, without telling me about it. I put the two ideas together and decided that maybe that somebody had locked off part of my mind for that purpose, which was why I couldn’t use it.”

“How many roads must a man walk down? Forty-two.”

It’s because they’re English.

I wrote a paper in French! It’s really short, and it’s about a play/playwright of whom you’ve probably never heard, but I’m posting it anyway.

This is about the element of the absurd in Eugene Ionesco’s “La cancatrice chauve.”

At the end, there’s a sort of “blague” (in French, that’s like an inside joke) about the English, because at the beginning of the play the characters make a huge deal about being English. They’re French, obviously.

—-

Depuis que je suis au Paris et vois <<La cancatrice chauve>> en scène, je me demande, qiu dit les mensonges, et qui dit la vérité ? Par exemple, qui sonne à la porte quand Mme Smith a ouvert la porte trois fois ? Est-ce que c’est le pompier, ou est-ce que c’est personne ? Si l’histoire marche logicalement, Mme Smith ou le pompier doit mentir. C’est impossible (ou c’est absurd) pour l’histoire marcher sans des mensonges. Tous les vérités ne marchent pas ensembles.

Il y a trop des situations possibles, et on doit analyser chaque situation comme une problème des mathématiques.

Les constantes sont :

Mme Smith ouvre la porte trois fois,

Le pompier se présente le quatrième fois.

Les variables sont :

Mme Smith dit qu’il n’y était personne à la porte les prémières trois fois,

Le pompier dit qu’il était près de la porte pour trois quarts d’heure,

Il dit qu’il n’avez vu personne,

Il dit qu’il n’a pas sonné.

 

Si Mme Smith dit la vérité et, en actualité, elle n’a vu personne, c’est certain que le pompier a dit au moins qu’un mensonge : il n’était près de la porte depuis trois quarts d’heure, OU il a vu quelqu’un, OU il a sonné à la porte. Si Mme Smith ment, si elle a vu quelqu’un, le pompier aussie doit dire au moins qu’un mensonge.

Si les deux ne mentent pas, l’histoire ne march pas logicalement. L’absurd est difficile pour moi, parce que je veux que les histoires sont sensibles. Quand je dois faire les maths et élaborer beaucoup des situations possibles afin de le comprendre, ça me rend fou ! Mais enfin je crois que les personnages sont fous, pas moi. Ils sont anglais, non ?

 

Guided to the Galaxy

I started reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tonight, for the first time… wait for it… ever. Shocked? Appalled? Yeah, well, I was too. I mean, I was shocked and appalled at how much I liked it. I’ve never been interested in science fiction writing of any kind (though, I did develop a very strong love for A Wrinkle in Time when I read that, when I was 9), and I never even saw the movie, or wanted to see it.

It all started when I was using StumbleUpon (the modern day Guide, really, if you don’t count Wikipedia…) and landed on this anecdote written by the same author, Douglas Adams. It was about how he got a cup of coffee, a newspaper, and a bag of cookies at a train station and sat down at a table next to a guy to enjoy it all. Suddenly, the other guy at the table opens the package of cookies and eats one. Adams talks about how, since he was English, he couldn’t very well say anything to the man, because it just wasn’t proper form. This wasn’t L.A., you couldn’t just start yelling and smashing shit, so he just ate one of the cookies himself and went on reading the paper.

Well, there is a punchline, I promise. Click here to see it.

So anyway, I fell in love with that writing. Upon closer inspection I noticed that the author was the same as Guide, so I went to GoogleBooks and got the pads of my cold fingers on a copy of it. I was surprised. I guess I assumed that science fiction writing would be dull, punctuated by capitalized words no one knew and descriptions of violent aliens. Or in the case of this book, I pictured an actual bulleted handbook, useful for hypothetical space travel. Can you say “neerrrrdddyyyyyy”?! I was also slightly put off by the introduction, because I really don’t like it when books talk about themselves (thing Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traaveler), so when the narrator spoke of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy being the best book ever written, I was peeved.

So I got over 50 pages knocked out in an hour, which for my slow pace is incredibly rare, and I’m actually pretty excited to go back for more. I still can’t understand the appeal of all those proper nouns, and I have to roll my eyes at the description of some of the aliens, but I’ve fallen in love with Ford Prefect, and I think that right now, he just might be the perfect non-humanoid for me.