Hot magic.

After dancing for a considerable amount of time around my apartment listening to Of Montreal and frightening the shit out of my cats, I have settled down to gush about the beauty that is my life right now and enjoy my fifth cigarette of the day. The temperature is 34 degrees downtown and everything is very sticky and lucid, everyone is moving slower but in happy directions. I spent an hour in a local hardware store in Little Italy explaining what I needed to a charming Italian man who spoke very little English. I like hearing people speak different languages. Everyone who came into the store spoke Italian to the man and his voice was beautiful and fluid and rough around the edges. I'm actually looking forward to next year now that I possibly have a great roommate set up. I am looking forward to camping this weekend with the marvelous boyfriend. Playing poker and strategic board games, guitar on the beach while the sun comes up, lots and lots of sex and much literature and maybe skinny dipping in Georgian Bay if I can get away with it.

I have nothing much to say but lots of joy about it. I'm going to go read feminist literature in a cold bath.

(Oh and aren't these men possibly the coolest-looking people you have ever seen? Maybe? 1 and 2. Fuck I need to get my body to Florence. Men and women are no longer built like they used to be).

"Just to look at her is god."

Every little bit of our bodies (We are only bodies v. 2)

Michael Hessel-Mial is an interesting person who did a remix of some of my poems. I really dig what he did, I think its quite marvelous, and I love the concept of poetry re-mixes.
The remix is here.
His blog is here.

*he is also the author of "i am rainbow," a poetry series of exceptional quality at PBP. I love "...poem" it made me feel very sad and alive, much like I feel while reading Lacan.

x

King Khan and BBQ Show, HEALTH, the Dead Science, No Age, Little Girls, Priya Thomas, Cold Cave, Crystal Antlers are the bands I saw live this weekend for NXNE. One thing I love and hate about this city is the sheer amount of life and activity that makes it impossible for me to justify sitting at home watching science fiction movies or reading philosophy. I generally feel obligated to be a young person, to live some sort of life that will look or sound good when I'm recounting my youth to children 30 years from now. Sometimes youth is oppressive, but sometimes my feeling obligated to go out and be a part of things works in my favour and *surprise* I feel a part of something lovely. When it comes to music, I love being in it and arguing with new people about the different forms of nostalgia produced by the music of Girl Talk vs. Boards of Canada (fuck, is that even a question? People are stupid).

Despite having read 700+ pages of Foucault in the past few weeks, digging into the Lacan makes me yearn to be back in the middle of Foucault's exhaustive but straightforward account of the history of ancient Greek sexuality. Right in the thick of volume 2 when life was more simple and the big O Other and little o and the jouissance and the mirror stage and the love and the One are not combatting concepts in my brain. If anyone wants to help guide me through Lacan's seminar on feminine sexuality (book XX) please, yes.

Careless and disorganized.

Caverns with cheap ‘happy new year’ signs pinned to brick and soggy piss-coloured walls, newspapers cover boundaries but their text is dripping blending into light and leftover cocaine on a cluttered table. Glitter pills fill your mouth your lips are all ripped up and colourful. My body is dripping, I expect to melt into the boy in front of me or drip into the girl’s beer glass, maybe she will drink me up and smell me too, our organs will fall out of our wet bodies and mix together onto the floor like balls of hot wax that we smother and slip on, my heels are ground down and I fall into that lady’s body smelling at least four people and the indelicate beer sweat. When the noise and the orgasm is over (all of us touching each other and electric bodies shuddering and the brassy click of pain in my ear drums) we reassemble ourselves and bring the parts back together; we no longer exist as one mass but autonomous bodies again, we shuffle out looking elated but uncomfortable, post-friendly-stranger-fuck yeaaah move it into the street someone else will have picked up my lungs accidentally and I will have grabbed the heart of a boy, crowd surfing and propelled onto the stage. In the rush to compose ourselves we snatch the wrong parts and no longer know who we are or what animals become us. I want to rub a guitar between my legs while I suck on that mans fingers. People are shrugging me back into the crowd of fluids and wetness and bodies shaking like we’re all scared epileptic children on the edge of death. We are young beautiful and mindless for a moment like that moment just before you cum. Buildings are just boxes holding people together. Bodies are buildings, words are buildings or something. I’m not sure you know what I mean. I am very much in love

Image by Richard Dadd

One of my philosophy seminars is called "Topics in Contemporary Philosophy." This is a vague title. The course deals with social constructivism, relativism, and deliberation, plus the political effects of these issues. The professor is a tall, broad English man who says things like "we English are real toppers" (whatever that means) and "imagine if I came to class naked one day. This would be a transgression of unspoken social rules. Imagine if I came to class wearing a ladies dress. You would probably think I was gender-fucking but I could probably get away with it." I like him, his sardonic jokes and straight delivery, the way he pauses to think about things said. He also makes snide jokes about first year undergrads and most people laugh heartily in a self-righteous and pretentious manner, poking each other in the ribs, sharing the secret of our obvious superiority. Fuuuuck.

Good things have been happening today. I feel pleased with life. I am thinking about social constructivism and Wittgenstein.

Most people associate social/moral constructivism with increased freedom. If nothing is objectively or universally true, then we are free to construct our own realities, engage in whatever language game we choose, play within discourses. Social constructivism is linked to relativism in that it seems to be a justification for relativism. "If this way of seeing the world is contingent on a particular socio-historical context, I am justified in believing that all knowledge is relative." But I disagree. The fact that "reality" is socially constructed limits us. According to Wittgenstein, language games that we unconsciously partake in are a "form of life." Language games are not free discourses, they create limits and structures within which discourse is possible (and only within this structure). Form implies limits, and language creates limits. So the games propagated by language or institutions are manipulated and in flux, yes, but this does not mean we are not constrained within the game as players who have learned rules and have a stake in maintaining them. We are either feeding into already-existing sources of power that are invested in enforcing the already-existing system, or we subvert this system in order to establish or support new sources or forms of power. We create systems in order to delineate 'us' from 'them;' to control what it means to be 'human,' even. And these games, like the multi-faceted, layered city Wittgenstein describes, do not allow us the freedom (and tyranny) of relativism. Why and how did language develop the way it did? Think of the infinite possibilities and alternatives that could have developed and think of the various forms of power that have manipulated the way that we speak, communicate, and thus, live in the world. I'm reminded of that kid in White Noise who is mute but cries all the time. Crying is the closest we have to a universal language, really, in terms of sound. There is a girl crying outside my window, big, weepy sobs. A man is trying to talk to her and she doesn't want to go with him. He sounds intimidating. She sounds desperate, animal.

I feel fairly terrified about life right now and the large looming presence of "FUTURE." On one hand, I want to look forward to what's coming up. On the other hand, there are complications and hurdles to be crossed before good things can happen. When I start to think about everything in one mass lump sum I feel extreme panic. In retrospect, the shit that I've been through recently seems like it should have felt a lot harder to deal with than it actually felt at the time. Or maybe, PAST as whole lump sum is equally difficult to make sense of and perceive "objectively" as FUTURE. The shittiest things that happen to me occur very much out of the blue, so that I can't even worry about them beforehand (shame). Life tends to work out eventually, in strange forms, as it does for most people. Keep on keeping on. I'm still terrified, however. The only way I make sense of shit and ease my panic is to spout off cliches and trite interior monologues about taking 'one day at a time.'

I would like people to recommend me some e-books or chapbooks that they like. I want to inundate myself with poetry this weekend.

This weekend, the small press convention is happening at the Toronto Reference Library. I want to go but feel that I will spend a lot of money on books and my reading list is already at 40+ over the next few months. I need to learn more and be more involved in Canadian literature, and not just the [mostly] dry canon of CanLit. I am now a junior editor for a lit/art journal based at my university. I get to read poetry and judge people. The more shitty poetry I read the more I appreciate all you great bloggers out there, mixing shit up, being all innovative. Keep it up, y'all make the world a more interesting place.

The mans hands:
bones wrapped in brown parchment paper
fingers sliding between the pages of a newspaper and the
crack
of paper separating and opening up
words.
The intricate geography of bodies
illuminated
like archaeological digs;
these artifacts must be carefully withdrawn and
dusted off.
Some things cannot be
excavated
and remain rooted in soil.
To know your face
is to know a country
always at war.

I'm just kind of clicking on things
pulling hair out of drains
evading people who live in the internet and
creating order with braces
punched in the faces of models

clawing at animals
repelling objects
taking things inside of me
feeling vulnerable and shit

maybe I should be more social
maybe I should take more pictures of "social activities" that I partake in so that I can post the pictures on a public networking site and feel really interesting and loved, like I do "interesting things" and am "living life to the fullest" and have lots of "meaningful relationships"
maybe I should take more candid polaroid shots of myself so that I look like one of those effortlessly creative people who go to interesting parties
maybe I should write a long list of writers whose blogs I like reading and post them on the side of my blog, even though they are the same writers listed on everyone's blog
maybe I should show people that I like the same poets they do or something, that I appreciate the "hip" writers of my generation and have credibility
maybe I should learn how to "network" with people
maybe I should actually submit some poetry somewhere, I have never tried to publish anything
maybe I should be less intense and critical of things so that I do not intimidate and alienate people
maybe I should pretend to give a shit about your photos and your twitter account and smile and be all cute and stuff

Fail.

I am disturbed and frustrated and angered by many things and tend to explode outwards in a messy fashion, all over the streets, radiating hostility and anger and confusion like that one person who sees the iceberg hit the ship and tries to warn the passengers before anyone knows they're going to die. I have a desperate desire to touch people and pull them away and organize bodies and tell people how I feel under streetlights at 1 in the morning; people who are drunk and happy. But my glassy eyes do not penetrate those skins, never, and I want to let them be. I want to give them their smug happiness. I have those moments too, and I do not want to be penetrated, I do not want eyes to hurt me at night.

I'm watching the Blair Witch Project. I really like this movie, I feel a lot happier when I am watching horror movies. There are 30 minutes left and they just ran out of cigarettes and the girl is hyperventilating. People will die soon. I think I like horror movies because of their inevitability. The viewer is a prophet or a god watching things unfold without the responsibility of warning people.