Love this. Burroughs and his cats.

sorry in advance.

November does good/bad things for me. Something shifts and my perspective is re-oriented. Consistently over the past five years my motivation to do school completely diminishes at this time. I have zero motivation to read philosophy or wrestle with issues in papers right now. And I don't really care about it either. Bad timing, though. Keeping things in perspective is good. Sometimes I realize that regardless of what I do to fuck up my life, even if I went on hiatus for a month or so, nothing would be ruined in the slightest, any damage due to dismissed papers, missed classes, forgotten phone calls can be undone pretty quickly. Recognizing the great insignificance of my life and problems is very liberating.
New lovers are so fun, everything dims except that. Just when I think I'm getting too jaded about people I meet someone who is easy to get along with, comfortable as fuck, and generally on my wavelength. So fucking refreshing. My inability to concentrate is probably a result of good vibe endorphins that make me feel like dancing or fucking at all times. I pretty much want sex all the time but the dancing is a new development. Its more like a pent up physical energy that usually expresses itself in one of those two outlets.
I really like this photographer, found via Garance. His site is here. His photos incite wanderlust and that wonderful feeling in the pit of my stomach in response to beautiful things found on screens, through headphones, behind windows or in my hands. I really like the latest post at Ani Smith's blog, I really like Ani Smith in general, I really like this photo of Alain Delon, I really like the new the Big Pink album. Here is a poem at read some words that I wrote a long time ago, I like it, although I think it is very simple, which is not necessarily a bad thing but I feel self-conscious.

I really really want to live in that house. Serious. When I was a kid I used to write super long stories and epic naive love stories about people living in abandoned houses on misty cliffs against water. I like reading those stories, I nod in agreement and approval of my former self. I drew portraits of the characters to go along with the narrative, and, later, I drew floorplans and detailed interiors of the houses I described. There are certain themes and images that still hit me in the same ways. Which makes me feel a sense of continuity of self, a uniformity- recognizing similarities between my 10-year-old self and now. I wonder why certain images stick with certain people. As in, what is the root of that influence, the tugging that happens when different people see different images with a particular vibe. I wonder if its connected to dreams at all. I wonder if its genetic . If I asked my sister, 'do you feel this way when you look at this' I wonder if she would understand at all. I know she wouldn't.

I love love love the texture and the colours in this photograph. Sometimes I save photos to my computer not because of content or composition but just because of the colour combinations.

Halloween nostalgia.

These are my favourite Halloween pictures. The first is classic and pretty much tells you everything you need to know about me and my brother. My brother is currently politically-conservative quasi-religious and in the army. I'm the crazy one consistently in disarray. Of course for the yearly Halloween parade I was wearing a skin-coloured top underneath my flashy purple shells. I can still - I kid you not - recite the lyrics from every song in the Little Mermaid. The second is epic on all levels. Strangely, my sister dressed like a princess that year (highly uncharacteristic of her, she was a menace). My brother is a fighter pilot. I am...so awesome. Pretty much every other year I dressed up as Princess Leia; unfortunately, I couldn't find any pictures.

xo

So I'm back in suburbia again. It is raining really hard, permanently overcast, chilly and damp, but the entire back yard is covered in bright yellow leaves and the ivy against the butter-coloured brick has turned golden orange. I would rather spend this weekend drinking beer with my brother than in Toronto watching half-clothed drunk people do stupid things that make them feel interesting and 'alt.' I'm going to hand out candy to rich suburban kids. Any excuse to indulge in nostalgia is taken. I'm not in a very good place mentally. I feel like something is rotting in my chest (and no, not my lungs, thanks) and like my brain is floating around in my skull, untethered. Such is anxiety. Most of my anxiety stems from changes that have to happen in the next month. The antipation of realizing this and the fear of having to make such changes happen. Anticipatory anxiety results in heavy and paralyzing inertia, which is why I've been sleeping 16 hours a day and loading up on carbs and tea. Fear is paralyzing and the paradox is that if I just moved, if I just got shit done, I'd feel a lot less anxious. I need someone to push me out of this space, I don't feel very strong. Then again, my moods change so often and in such extreme directions, I may feel amazing tomorrow.
On the agenda for today - -
blueberries and pineapple cashew chicken
Kant, metaphysics of morals
some Parfit essays
hot chocolate and home-made carrot cake
musical accompianment by Girls Real Estate Flaming Lips Zola Jesus
Silence of the Lambs @ 9
bubble bath with Brothers K.
good things :)

Some shaky first drafts.

grimy first moves, bones drawn to bone
friction against skin shedding itself

cocoon bodies pushed out of their private darkness,
corrupting forms too material for
sighs that sway up into the overhead light
singed on bulbs like moths crowded in the dusty glass
lacking legs and single wings:
torn up asymmetrical shadows of sounds and failing bodies.

Artificial flame draws me into that rain-soaked space
between a rock and a hard place.
steady suction lubricated fingers slippery and
unsuccessful
mouth moves like an angry epileptic body open against
ambiguous mattress-stains and smoke-smell pillows
eyes roll back into skin pockets
flushed milky white, sheathed in moisture.
dirty flecks of yesterday's mascara
float like insects in the corners of your
sealed eyes.

tequila-skin and another man's sweat
darken your profile

thick full lips stained october-cloud-purple
sloppy wine mouth stains chin blood red
mop your face playfully, too self-conscious
the glass delicate and water-stained:
I'm fingering the stem and licking my lips.

shrink-wrapped body contained to
save energy, keep the freshness in and
tongue pieces fluorescent
like that space behind your ear,
each touch a more intense
invitation to infection

strange strong hands have a pulse
that echoes in organs, I can see the outline of your body
and its place in a sprawling soupy city
impervious to rain

---

The final act is an awkward look-away
dress rehearsal for the big
anti climax, poorly lit. And I can barely hear your voice on the phone.
the amputation swift, one fell swoop before the crash and
no one hears the tree fall in the forest, either.

Each lover a bandage placed over the scar left from the last
scab ripped off with the wrapping,
negligence sting-proof tingling wound that grows,
self-contained

Wiping your semen from my browned belly,
eyes sway with guilt like you've stabbed, not loved.
"you can't leave like that, sudden"
removal a shock too loud
the lid of a sealed jar popped open with force
a seal peeled off a closed envelope,
my contents exposed for consumption.
cover me.
panic pulls shame out of me
(but i need love, i need this)

before retreat you stuck it out,
Appease-her
curled back between swollen breasts
now wet with fluids that
smear and suck into belly buttons,
into the curved skin boat
of upper thigh.

you are hard and seamless
you never leak when held up to light.
turn me upside down,
test my contours.
taste me, I am leaking quietly.

Oh and 2 things.
I got rid of comments, it makes me feel less self-conscious about writing whatever I want. I still want to talk to you if you have anything to say, so email me.
I like the way my skin smells when I wake up after a night in a club. Perfume mixed with my skin, my pheromones, other peoples pheromones (and by that I mean sweat) tequila, the city. Gross, I know, but I feel really great in my body after a night out meeting and talking and dancing.

Antichrist

Here’s another essay on film that no one will read.
This will spoil the movie if you haven’t seen it and want to in the future. Some things are best left as surprises.

Antichrist is a very powerful movie. Trier is trying to tackle and critique issues of misogyny and gynocide but he does so in a way that is…misogynistic. This puts me on edge and I’m not sure if these tensions can be reconciled - but that’s part of the strange beauty and insanity of the film. On one hand, Trier is criticizing the ways that women have been historically and ideologically damaged by patriarchy, particularly through male conceptualizations of women over time. Ironically though, the female character is portrayed as each and every one of these archetypes of femininity – she is pure corporeal body, catalyst for sin, irrational, instinctual, primal, hysterical – and Trier chooses to enforce these constructed visions of Woman rather than develop an alternative vision of femininity that could in some way, emancipate ‘Eve’ from this pigeon-holed male vision. She is active but only in a destructive way. Lier admits, yes, women have been wronged. But the response of this female character is to engage with her victimhood, to revel in it, to choose an active role only in a destructive capacity. And the act of self-mutilation is not an affirmation of powerful femininity – it is emancipatory, but its not emancipation from the cycle of victimization – it’s a sad acceptance (on the part of the character) that she is indeed only what ‘Man’ has told her she is, that she is indeed evil – and the act of self-mutilation is an attempt to free herself of femininity in all its forms, but particularly, that one component of femininity not capable of appropriation within phallocentric discourses – the woman as capable of pleasure, of choice. Strangely, she never castrates her husband, but she does castrate herself. This is a strange reversal that puts ‘Woman’ in an active role only so that she can deny any opportunity for active and autonomous femininity. It is also interesting that the mutilation does not prevent her fertility; she is still capable of sex and pregnancy and birth; only her capacity for orgasm, only her capacity for sexual pleasure is removed, by choice. So in this sense, without a clitoris, she better conforms to the idealized, stereotype of Woman as a vessel for male desire, without any opportunity for jouissance, except through the male phallus. The self-castration is a symbolic removal of that element of Woman that slides between pleasure-for-self and pleasure-for-Him (as an object for birth and male pleasure). In many ways, the film engages with these issues, but it does so in a way that consistently draws our attention back to the woman as the harbinger of evil.
At the beginning of her violent rage, she rushes into the room and accuses her husband of wanting to leave her, etc, and starts to fuck him. Again, the rage is a response to her need for the man – her violence is reactionary (regardless of whether or not it is founded in anything ‘real’) and reinforces the image of the woman as dependent on the man, not only in the obvious ways, but as a catalyst for her own activity and rage.
The film is obviously critical of psychiatry and therapy as a symbol of patriarchal ratiocination. Of course, the male is conceived as the ‘voice of reason’ who must teach (ie indoctrinate) his wife on how to control her body (in this sense, her physiological anxiety symptoms, her sexual desire and her violence, in that order). The result is that rather than becoming less of an animal, she becomes increasingly less [outwardly] rational by the conclusion of the film. The irony though is that if indeed Trier is trying to criticize psychiatry, by the conclusion we realize that *ta-da* she was nuts all along. Because of this, it is difficult to sustain that critique. Her psychosis wasn’t a result of the ‘manipulative’ and ‘repressive’ pressure of psychiatry, because she was crazy beforehand. The therapy is apparently one of many factors that brought her insanity into a more public space, but it wasn’t responsible for its onset. And by the conclusion, she’s not strong (?) enough to finish the job she started. She still needs him. He must destroy her, and he does, and this is acceptable because the crazy bitch must be put in her place. This is also a symbol of the ‘Man’ ‘killing’ the ‘feminine’ component of his identity in order to sustain that rational exterior. The dichotomy of male/female must be maintained. Trier never really plays with this. The boundaries are set up really quickly and each character never really passes out of their predetermined gender space.
There is a lot to say and write about the film, but one image in particular is insane – a two-part image. The first takes place when she runs out during sex and starts to masturbate under the tree (symbolically, the tree of knowledge, of course). She gets him to hit her and only then does she take him back inside her, etc. Pan out and we see (dead) female bodies entwined within the roots of the tree, surrounding them. This is insane on many levels:
1) ‘Eve’ invites and tempts ‘Adam’ into sin (the violence)
2) He can’t resist her ‘power’ which is purely sexual and tied to her body
3) She cannot achieve pleasure on her own, she requires the phallus for any degree of jouissance (which also probably relates to her self-mutilation later, the inadequacy of the autonomous female to achieve pleasure on her own except through the male)
4) Knowledge necessitates violence and destruction – the Fall is both a fall into knowledge and suffering, the two are intertwined and involve a dialectic explored in the passive/active interplay between the male and the female – he overpowers her because she wants and asks him to overpower her (ie. who is the active/passive agent in this situation, really?).
5) The ‘fall’ – this whole patriarchal, Christian discourse is founded on the sin and the suppression of the feminine (the bodies are the ‘sacrifices’ required to support and sustain this discourse, biblically and in relation to ‘gynocide’ of the 16th century, etc). The bodies of the women are entwined within the roots of the tree of knowledge to symbolize their role as the sacrifices necessary to sustain ‘maleness.’
The female character is sacrificed for the same purpose, later. I think the final image of the hoards of women entering the forest could symbolize a bunch of different things. They are the women ‘released’ from their position in the roots of the tree/as the foundation of Christian discourse/maleness. How this emancipation makes sense in the context of the films narrative, I’m not sure, although it might be related to the killing of the original ‘Eve’ figure as a means to emancipate all women from the ‘shit Eve started.’ This would be fucked up. The fact that the hoards of women walking in the forest are clothed and walking (aka not dead) also implies that they are women liberated from their ‘sin,’ from the flesh – they are covered and ‘imaginary’ women, suggesting that women can only ever really escape their essentially evil and destructive nature by retreating into Lacan’s imaginary realm again, as idealized concepts but not real, fleshy, active Subjects. Woman as Subject is problematic for Man.

But goddamn, Willem Defoe is super hot in this film.

Sartre admitted in 1939 that he never experienced the existential nausea he wrote about. I feel cheated by this a little. I never really enjoyed Sartre as a person. I've read too much of Simone deBeauvoir's autobiographical material to respect Sartre. A combination of Camus, Kant and fucking Schopenhauer has put me in a very strange head space. I hate hate hate my dreams. Even when they are pleasant enough visually they terrify me. I was floating in the ocean and it was sunny and beautiful and despite this I continued to experience waves of panic, feeling that something foreign and larger than me and dangerous was about to brush against my legs. That's only one part of the sequence that involved lots of people I don't really want to dream about, but I do all the time. Schopenhauer is a very bleak and sad man. Everything is utterly meaningless and absurd and despite that we still possess 'will to life' that results in the fabrication of a 'bubble of illusion' - a fabricated excuse to keep our body moving, to justify reproduction. The only metaphysically respectful form of suicide (according to Schopenhaur) is starving-yourself-to-death because it involves a slow process of waning 'will to life' - when your body shuts down you enter a state of depersonalization where its possible to step outside of your body and detach from its petty concern to remain alive. No wonder I'm feeling groundless and sad. Camus is the same:
"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood it in solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when under the familiar face of a woman, we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone."
This in particular bothers me a lot. The absurdity of seeing someone that I have touched in every way possible, that I spent hours in bed with - now as a stranger. I no longer know them and I never really did. "Knowing" people is familiarity and habituation; association. I want to shake people hard when I feel this way, scream at them, "what the fuck, this is a stupid game, I know you;" I want to sustain that illusion because it makes me feel less lonely. But instead I keep up the stupid vacuous exchange, I continue to let words spurt out of my mouth mechanically, mundane fucking shit. I can't even deal with it. The loss, but also the indifference. It's paralyzing. When I first read Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" (which you should read, by the way) I felt "fuck yeah, I get this" but then I felt, confused, that I can never really reach that state of indifference again. I feel irreparable sometimes, in certain areas. In my seminar yesterday my professor asked: "if, according to psychology, Schopenhauer's philosophizing is the result of a chemical imbalance or psychological disorder, does that devalue what he wrote?" I guess you could ask the same of most philosophers, who, for the most part, either killed themselves or went insane (except for dudes like Sartre who were apparently faking anyways). Of course I don't think so, I am still wary of 'diagnoses.' Maybe some psychiatrists (I doubt mine would, he's become aware of my sensitivity in this area and is generally a cool dude) would probably say, yes, everything you wrote over the past few weeks has been symptomatic of your various 'disorders.' How to reconcile my identity and creativity with this, I don't know. I'm supposed to ask myself a series of questions when I feel this fucked up. "Is anything really broken?" "if you are broken, do you need to pick up the pieces" "is it possible to relinquish the struggle" These questions make me feel nauseous and silly. They feel like stock psychology questions meant to manipulate a certain response out of me. But when it comes down to it: yes, I think most people are 'broken' and yes, I think most of us, including me, try to pick up the pieces, because who the fuck enjoys feeling untethered. Who the fuck wants to feel like damaged goods. As for relinquishing the struggle, I don't really know what the fuck that even means. I don't feel that I'm struggling, I just feel depressed. There is a word for this world-weariness in German that has an untranslatable connotation in English. Weltschmerz. World-pain. I think that this kind of angst probably sounds less trite in German. English words are so inadequate, they betray my meaning. I'm pretty good at life, though. There is no reason for me to feel waves of panic and literal nausea while sitting in groups of people talking about stupid shit. There is no reason for me to feel disgust at people's faces, people that I love or respect. I wish I could control these things. And when it comes down to it, I want to affirm life. I don't think everything is meaningless and absurd, or rather, I find it insanely liberating to feel untethered and disillusioned. According to Camus, thats when consciousness starts. I believe that. But I also believe that philosophy is really, really dangerous, and that its impossible not to swing between those extremes: elation and desperation in the face of absurdity. What I love about most of my professors is that they're all very good-natured, very chill and seemingly content people, despite having read so much depressing material. I admire this, and I want to be like this. I wish I could just snap my fingers and feel less terrified, less sad, less angry. My Dad always told me that happiness is something you can just choose. Simple, just give your problems to God, he used to say, completely serious. But that's not going to happen.

Serious.

Watched “A Serious Man,” really liked it. I got a really Dostoevsky-ish vibe from the whole film, maybe because of the absurdity, the religious confusion, the oscillation between moments of intensity verging on catastrophe (but not really getting there) and lament for the mundane fatigue that fills up the spaces between. Plus, quick reference to gambling, creepy dreams, the theme of doubles, etc. The title/content reminds me of Dostoevsky’s distinction between the ‘underground man’ and the ‘serious man’ (did I get that right?) in Notes from Underground. D. is in my brain.
Here is my humble and sloppily-written analysis of one amazing scene.
Larry awkwardly climbs up the roof of his suburban house to adjust the antenna. The camera looks down at his face from the sky as he adjusts one component, then another. As he moves the antenna we hear channel voices coming in and out of focus between bits of white noise. When he turns around he notices his neighbour sun-bathing nude in her yard. Her body is obscured by the fence due to his position. He moves down the roof in order to get a full view of her body. She holds out one hand to the table and moves it around, without moving or taking her sunglasses off, as though blindly looking for something. She finds her cigarette and moves it to her mouth.
The relationship between Larry and the visual image produced by his fidgeting with the antenna is indirect. He is literally disengaged from the image he is producing (albeit production mediated by technology). There are different levels of disengagement and alienation going on here, 1) the image itself 2) the technological medium/mediating tool. A lot of communication in the film is mediated by technology, contrasting the more religious/spiritual component. The television is inside the home, a symbol of security but also constraint. The nondescript suburban home generally symbolizes 1) stagnancy and complacency 2) libidinal sublimation and/or repression. Larry is still connected to his home; he has not escaped it, however, he is at this point outside of it, above it – still within the limits but not entirely contained. There is a lot of concern about this whole ‘transgressing the boundaries’ of home in the film – Larry is often preoccupied about the neighbour crossing the invisible property line separating their lawns. Significaaaaant.
So it is interesting that the sequence of events relating to the naked neighbour directly parallels this episode with the antenna. When he turns away from the antenna, the image of his neighbour becomes immediately visible, but the image of her body is also obscured by another symbol of domestic complacency and libidinal restraint – a white picket fence. This limited and restricted image is only accessible to him ‘outside’ the bounds of his home (ie. outside the standards of ‘normative social behaviour’). Nevertheless, he is alienated from the image of the naked female body and, by extension, alienated from his own desire – he cannot realize this desire within the psychological/material ‘home’ he has established. This is why he only realizes this desire for the neighbour in his dream. Many of Larry’s important relationships are mediated, suggesting that his desire is necessarily sublimated.
It’s also interesting that despite being entirely naked, the woman’s eyes are obscured by sunglasses and she literally gropes around indifferently for the cigarette, echoing Larry’s attempts to fix the antenna and his attempts to get a clearer image of the woman’s body. In both cases, he is attempting to access an alienated and fragmented image but he never really comes into direct relation with these images. Both Larry and the neighbour are ‘blind’ in a certain sense, which perhaps explains their weird connection. But both of their playing-around-with-phallic symbols results in different pleasures: Larry’s searching is desperate and alienated, whereas she is in direct relation to her desires and is capable of pleasure.
The score of the movie is really amazing too, like in all Coen brothers’ movies…in this case, it was so well-timed: the more melancholic score only starts up during these really significant scenes, like cues to pay attention. There’s lots of other sequences of images that I’d like to (and probably will, because I've decided to stay home on this fine Friday evening) write about.
1) all the images in the final Rabbi’s room (especially the painting of Abraham & Isaac)
2) the moment when Larry rummages through his brother Arthur’s crazy notebook (insert crazy music) and the brother being in trouble for 1) gambling and 2) sodomy
3) the dream sequences
4) the teacher struggling to open a locked door while the students stand outside watching a fucking tornado, and Larry’s son is trying to repay a debt to his fellow classmate – argh, so goooood.

Blackberry song.

Kurt Vile's new album makes me feel really good. I bought it yesterday along with the new A Place to Bury Strangers. If only I quit smoking I'd have more money to splurge on actual albums more often. I love being in Soundscapes and Rotate This (ie the best record stores in this city). They were playing this amazing soul album by some dude named Famous L. Renfroe called "Children." I don't know a lot about gospel/soul but the three tracks I heard were...um, fucking great. I want to learn more because music like that makes me so happy, my body just starts moving and I couldn't stop humming on the walk home. I don't think Kurt Vile's face matches up to his voice. He's still really young, his voice is not. It is really cold here today. I'm having a hard time getting out of bed in the mornings because of this fact. The past few days have been good. One of my favourite things to do is unlimited coffee and a smoked salmon bagel sandwich at Nirvana with my friend Shawn. That was yesterday and then I cuddled on his couch with his warm warm knit blankets and his kitten as he sifted through feminist ethics course packs to find me good articles for my proposal. He lent me Berger's small book of essays "Ways of Seeing." I'm going to finish it today, its super good and tiny but powerful. Today was coffee with my friend Julie, who is a dancer and absolutely sweet and beautiful. When I went out for a cigarette I met an interesting cyclist who does triathalons for a living. We talked about buying long johns for the winter. 2 old men wearing non-ironic fedoras approached me later and we discussed mittens and windy days. Everyone is preparing for the widespread seasonal depression that sets in right about now. People are friendly but nervous about it. October is full of simple pleasures.