My feet are soaked because my umbrella doesn't cover the open toes and my hands are bloody because I was clumsy today. My professor looks like he belongs on a motorcycle with some sexy young man. He sneaks drags from a cigarette hanging limp between long, dark fingers. Guittari studied with Lacan and would have turned 79 today if he didn't die 17 years ago in France. The slim frame of your shoulders stops my desire in its tracks when you turn to me with those vacant screened eyes. There are boys hidden in closets during the 18th century watching older lovers act out infant role-play and offer their breasts to men for nourishment before Freud sucked on his first cigar. Fassbinder cries and his lover curls into him, two men cradled on the ground, squirming like wrestlers or the severed ends of one worm seeking blind comfort, stranded in puddles far away from earth. Imagine the difficulty and the desperation of a worm curled in the gutter 3 meters from grass. "No one lives the story we all repeat to one another." This is how I live.

Three single-scoop ice cream cones in 24 hours

A man with no shirt sits on the curb watching construction workers dig up the road and yells "have another baby" and smiles at a woman holding pamphlets, blocking the sidewalk and she smiles back at him, very warm, very sincere. A man is sitting cross-legged on the ground and paints ugly pictures on cardboard and he has a sign next to him that reads "homeless please give change for art supplies." A man in the subway tunnel sings "mama take this badge off of me, I can't use it anymore, its getting dark too dark for me to see" and I feel sad and desperate and run to catch the train. The man who dresses like Santa Claus and stands in front of the Ossington liquor store doesn't ask for money anymore. We buy wafflecakes in Chinatown and almond red bean cakes in Koreatown. We stroll along warm streets and eat ice cream on the beach and strawberries on the streetcar and we throw the leafy parts out the windows to hit passing cars and I roll around on my blanket with my feet on hot sand and read Faulkner but the sun gives me vertigo. My bare legs are flushed red and the sky darkens and stuck at the red light a group of old men in a cafe smile and wave at us with their beers and Sandy says "they look like they were in a band together and the one in the back with the crazy hair was the drummer" and the sky starts to bleed rain and the streets are soaked and my skin is wet and moist and we run home from the beach to eat samosas and comfort hungry cats.

"My only thought is a complicated simplicity. Complicate your life as much as you please, it has got to simplify." -Gertrude Stein

This is my tentative reading list for my summer direct readings course on sexuality, gender and queer theory. It kind of makes me feel on the verge of orgasm.

-Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vols. 1-3 (Vintage)
-Haraway, Donna. Selections from Modest-witness @ Second-millennium. FemaleMan-Meets-OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge).
-Irigaray, Luce. Key Writings (Continuum) and The Irigaray Reader (Blackwell), which include selections from To Speak is Never Neutral; An Ethics of Sexual Difference, This Sex Which Is Not One, and Speculum of the Other Woman.
-Lacan, Jacques. Selections from On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Book XX: Encore 1972-1973 (Norton).
-Parisi, Luciana. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-Technology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum)
-Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision (Verso)
-Short, Sue. Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity (Palgrave Macmillan)

Add some Judith Butler in there for good measure. Not sure what texts yet.
I am leaving the internet for a while. Maybe, hopefully. It is making me more anxious than I need right now. Not that any one cares. But that is okay with me. I am 74% happy.

xo

Today is the first t-shirt day.

My birthday is on Sunday. My roommate told me to choose whatever random shit I wanted to do. So we are going on a thrift store journey and scouring kensington market for random vintage shit and then having a star trek marathon and drinking whiskey and eating cake and possibly bowling. These are the kind of things I like to do. I will probably wear a dress tomorrow. We were supposed to go camping but due to various circumstances the reservation was postponed for a few weeks from now.
I am really happy right now.
I really really like Kurt Vile & the Violators new EP. It is called "Hunchback EP." You can find it at ill-formed. I seriously suggest you listen to it. I always cry stupidly when the song Losing It comes on. Really fucking beautiful and stuff.
I am reading a lot of Marcuse and Baudrillard. I have fallen in love with Marcuse.

Poem, yo:

skin exposed already
makes me flinch and I
lower my open mouth
onto thick cold scoops
of chocolate soft-serve
and lick the cone
so it softens with my mouth's moisture
and you looking at me
touching your hard cock in the park
under shorts
while I lie in the sun
flicking ants off exposed limbs
scratching mosquito bites

I am going to take a long bath now. All these photos are from flickr people but I am irresponsible and forgot to record exactly who took what. If you know, or whatever, let moi know. But they are not mine.

I am a useless human being, come to bed with me.

he/she dreams of floating down Wittgenstein's river
inundated by language
holding out one arm
to steady the body
slow the movement
touch the bottom.
but the riverbed is vulnerable,
nowadays.

he/she sticks one finger into the sediment
“perhaps we are not so

secure
(as we'd like to believe)”
he/she shouts

and the current moves the body
and the water is not so clear
as he/she first believed
when she/he first stepped in,
feeling cold at first
then warming
with familiarity
and the ease of it

not knowing who to communicate with;
he/she communicates
{with}
everything
or nothing

---

the Subject is penetrated,
the information man
smacks heads against the wall
inserts codes like stitches
that play across our brains:
we refuse to speak except on screens

Benjamin is displeased
now the oral tradition is usurped
there is nothing to communicate
information has triumphed over experience
(for) now
and there is no past to preserve.

The gods and the goddesses
were murdered by machines
that took their faces and learned
to smile while disciplining

paranoia fuels my fusion into Other
we are quietly balanced between
being and nothingness
and have learned to embrace this
playful, strenuous, dangerous dance
to smile on the edge of ledges
and look down
from a threshold
that refuses to stabilize

we must re-learn bodies
and the way they move
against other bodies
and the way language cradles
and sings us to sleep
or disciplines
and abandons;
we are the progeny of
dead dictators

this is recoupling:
go to the next line
resurrect it all over again


this is closure

First things first, gotta give some love to DJ Berndt and his poetry series Soon We Won't be Friends at Read Some Words. I really, really dig it. I'm too tired to come up with some absurd or funny blurb that kind of skirts the issue: I just like the poems. Read them (for all those who haven't already).

There are a lot of responsibilities I must attend to this week. And when the 'responsibilities' bear down on me, that's when I start taking lots of benzodiazepines and skip school more than usual and stay in bed for hours looking at my ceiling or the patterns that the paint makes on my walls and watch shitty reality tv about women having babies and have a difficult time having an orgasm and don't exercise or feel good about the future and take 4 hour naps in the afternoons and then binge drink on Friday to a point where I start weeping loudly and only further alienate the handful of people who still love me and give honest hugs. Let's hope I stop thinking about responsibilities. I have to rebuild friendships this week. I have to stop avoiding certain people. I have to stop being a bitch and try to be friendly to people I feel anger towards. I have to buy belated birthday lunches and look for a job. I have to write papers and meet profs and read a lot of Faulkner and Adorno. I have to write down poems that are circulating but won't settle. Smile, bitch.

I visited my family for 4 days and it was wonderful. I painted easter eggs and sang along to every song of the Sound of Music with my little sister and played baseball and went mountain biking and hiking and cooked delicious food with my mother and woke up early to drink coffee in the sun of the porch with my dad and offended religious women on Good Friday. Atypical activities encouraging feelings of nostalgia and peace. I felt safe with my family. I don't really feel safe in the city.

I'm not really feeling depressed or angsty, just unsettled and jaded. On the brink. y'know.

Memory.

When we walked into the apartment there were faces everywhere, plastered against walls, smoking weed on couches, touching your arm, infiltrating bathrooms, inundated with drink. You became manic and we walked out into the rain to get drugs and to be away from the faces of people you didn't want to see. We walked through muddy construction sights and across fields. I waited outside in a piss-coloured foyer while you met your dealer. He was a thin, tall man wearing huge black pants with unfortunate facial hair. We bought lemons at the grocery store and ate slices with salt, spitting the seeds on the ground. We took refuge in a warm room full of books and good records and you snorted as much powder as you could find, crushing random pills on dictionaries. We listened to Captain Beefheart and you acted out Waiting for Godot, wearing cups and books as hats and eating whole carrots. You performed an I Ching ceremony and we all sat in a circle and thought secret thoughts and you lit a match and let it burn and arranged the sticks and found answers. We walked back to the hostile place with the faces. You started talking about the meaninglessness of all existence. I tried to explain why nihlism is a false philosophical position. I wanted to throw one of your guitars off the balcony and watch it shatter 20 floors down. I imagined what would happen if the guitar hit someone and their head cracked open. I remember standing wet in the rain in the middle of a muddy field, watching you laugh meters away, my shoes filling with water.

John Cayley:

I.
II.
Robert Barry:
III.
Penkiln Burn (thank you, Ryan):
IV.

Sina Queyras,
excerpt from "Murmurings, Movements or Fringe Manifesto:"
B: Writing is not a commodity
A: (Unless published).
B: Original is not a commodity
A: (Unless patented).
B: Writing is thinking made visible
A: (Unless it isn't).
B: Original is what you haven't seen
A: (What hasn't been reproduced).
B: Writing is a disordered hum
A: (What is disordered is useless to the market).
B: Original is singing
A: (Recognizable).
B: Writing is always forward
A: ().
B: Original is what you don't recognize
A: (What you don't recognize isn't there).
B: Writing is the space between this
A: (Original is overrated)
B: And this
A: (Is anomaly)
B: Space
A: (Who needs this?)
B: Is only in relation to stopping whereas
Language
A: (Only what is functioning)
B: Persists and
Original is ornery
A: (Of no value on its own).

---

I'm going camping in a few weekends for my birthday. I'm excited.

The girl who lives below me is making lots of noise again. Sometimes I can't tell whether he's beating her or fucking her. Sometimes the neighbours above me and the neighbours below me are having sex at the same time, and the knocking and the screaming occur in unison.

Oh wait, they're definitely fucking.

Who's afraid of Gertrude Stein.

Ryan Manning interviewed me. I like interviews. I like being asked random questions and filling out questionnaires and doing quizzes. Ask me anything and I will answer you. And I will probably not lie. The past week has been fucking rough. I never want to pick up Das Kapital again. For at least two weeks, I mean.

Hegel > Marx > Rousseau > Hobbes > Kant > Mill > Locke >...
No.
Hegel doesn't really count as political philosophy.
-

"My best friends
don't even pass this way again
i think i must have insulted them

i don't want you to cry
i'm just saying goodbye
i don't want you to come
and i don't know why

i never did understand
the words coming out of a man
giving answers to questions
that i didn't ask

count to ten and then i'm just a tool again
you were never no great pretender

i can't go on like this
with a clenched fist
nicotine is even in my dreams"

-Kurt Vile
is amazing
because
a) he is playing gigs with US Girls and Ducktails
b) my best friends (don't even pass this) (song above) (is one of my favourite songs ever) (but I toss around the words 'favourite' and 'hate' too much) ( my opinion means nothing)
c) his lyrics are simple but wonderful

I had horrible dreams last night and now all I want is to smoke endless cigarettes and lie curled up in bed and feel lonely and uncomfortable. I think it is true that when one part of my life starts to go really well the other slides into fucked-up territory. So this is where I am at. My personal relationships seem fucked up. Or, my dreams tell me so. But I am doing very well in school. I am focused on school work. I feel very isolated today.
Yesterday was one of those days where you go out for a cigarette and it looks sunny so you're feeling pretty dapper about it but then once you get outside you realize the wind is a mother fucker and you keep changing positions, looking for different pillars or new areas of the building that may protect you from the gusts but everywhere you go the wind just gets more intense and the cold nestles into your body, under your skin. Quite possibly a metaphor for my present emotional state.
I am happy that today is rainy and dark.