scooters, vacation, fall

I feel incredibly guilty and sad today. And disappointed in myself, I guess. For not having any Marxist pep this morning and doodling horrific looking bodies instead of watching Santiago Alvarez films in my Brechtian cinema class. For being someone I would be afraid to be with. For having little motivation to write about Deleuze and modified bodies, and little confidence. I wish I wasn't so scattered and sad all the time.
Of course, I write here pretty much only when I get into these moods, so I am in no way trying to say that my life is bad or that I have any reason to mope. Everyone has certain thresholds that they come up against. When I get here there is nothing left to do but scale down my self-created wall of shame and pool up at the bottom until the feelings pass. Wait it out wait it out wait it out.
I've been meaning to write this quote here for a while. Blake Butler told me to read Zeroville so I did, and it is amazing. And each section functions like a vignette, usually unrelated and readable in its own right.

'In America you have this idea that anything about sex is acceptable only if it absolutely is not, under any circumstances, sexy. The Americans are too romantic to make such a film. They are in love with shame.'
'The French are romantic.'
Maria dismisses this with the flick of her fingers.
'Quelle mythe! No one ever said in a French film, 'We'll always have Paris.' Can you imagine Bogart fucking Bergman with a cube of butter on the Champs-Elysees as the Nazis march in? The pornographer? He is concerned with what the characters do, while the artist, the artist is concerned with what the characters are. The man does not pay me for the sex, he pays me to leave afterward. For the lack of consequences.'
'He pays you to leave?'
'This is what Brando thinks will save him in Dernier Tango...sex without consequences.'
'You are paid to leave?'
'This is what destroys him, because there is no sex without consequence.'
'Perhaps last Tango in Paris isn't just about sex.'
'Cheri,' she laughs, 'sex is never just about sex.'

Images:
3. Georges Rousse
2. Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus
1. Room O (I think) by Yves G. Noir

how do I feel?

Just like that.

Here's a little eye candy to take away from the heaviness/cynicism that has been my blog lately.
These are some of the ones that really struck me, but Kander has a tons of amazing work.
Krisatomic/BOOOOOOOM/Nadav Kander
In other news, I found out that I am getting a big scholarship from the government via sshrc. I feel honoured and happy.
I am reading Baudrillard's The Ecstasy of Communication, Bataille's Literature and Evil, and Perdido Street Station by China Meiville. All of which singularly and combined make for some fucked-up, evil dreams. I really need to record them more quickly than I do.
Any recommendations for great science fiction novels, other than the usuals of Gibson, Philip K.Dick, etc.? I'm house-sitting for my Mom and step-dad next weekend in their spacious home with a pool and a garden and a full fridge, and I'm half terrified of feeling isolated but mostly excited to have the house to myself. I'm planning a little spiritual/intellectual retreat. There is much to be done.

Elizabeth Weinberg's photography makes me want to be away and in the country, in clean lake water, free to go topless, free enough to make eye contact with people.

I didn't enjoy An Education but I relate.

When I first came here I was not wide-eyed but extremely porous and everything was radically beautiful and depoliticized and every step outside was a breath of fresh air and a slap in the face. Every street corner was the first line of a poem I couldn't finish. And each new man was an entry-point into understanding the streets. You're fucking him but you're thinking of the city and it gets you off fast. And I was like a jittery wet kid just learning to masturbate, my body stuck at the front at concerts, vibrating against the speaker. My eyes permanently damp and closed really tight so as not to breathe and each song got me close to climax that released itself like a swell, not a bang. Becoming an adult is learning how powerful people are and the terror of desiring bodies all clenched and holding themselves in. And I learned about the obligation of being an object and I learned that men coerce and pull. Romance is not a well framed sepia toned print with soundtrack and a clear foreground, romance is abandonment on an empty street in chinatown at four AM so drunk the city looks like sticky wet paint. Learning romance is realizing the cruelty I am capable of showing myself.

"It is the possession of a role which provides the impetus to go out in the world, to act at all. The more numerous roles, the greater the number of excursions" - Susan Sontag from The Benefactor

ph: them-thangs.com

I'm feeling really exhausted, of everything. It's hard to put things in perspective because, obviously, I've done nothing but write papers the last 3 weeks and I have one left and my brain is sore. And I'm not taking care of myself, my body is falling apart. I haven't left my boyfriend's apartment since Tuesday. I need to go out and breath and buy some fruit and make a smoothie and stop being on the internet. I am so tired of being inundated with information but its like I compulsively seek it out when I need my brain to stop thinking about misrecognition and fracturing and Kushner's fault lines of creation. Doesn't anybody get sick of shit, the parade of fucking naked girls online, the fucking disaffected irony of things, the constant updates, the endless google reader-wheel, the making-of-plans, the mutual masturbation of facebook? I want to be out in-the-world but I don't want it to be full of people. I'm really sick of blogging too, I feel like this is a waste of time, but - I compulsively do it anyways. Habits die hard.
ps. I put on comment moderation because of all the spam. Its really irritating to me.

Photo sources
1 + 5 unknown
2 sacha heron
3 baubauhaus
4 a journey around my skull

Sometimes I feel very tired of accumulation, of life as layered surfaces that can stifle or comfort. Living is moving between layers of fabric, some thick like wool or glass and others so thin you can pull them up and away from you like dried skin off a scab. Recently I've been feeling like I'm moving through textured surfaces and constantly pulling back layers to get a better view. I want to be sun-drenched. I want thunderstorms. I feel happy but overwhelmed so I want to stay indoors and be in bed with my cats all day. That's all I have to say for now. I feel very private.

photo source.

If you see her, say hello.

All from baubauhaus.com
Phew. Sometimes I need Jeff Buckley to tuck me in. Live at Sin-e soothes my soul.

Bored Dylan.

Nietzsche tattoo.

Man on man.

I knew that my choice to go out and be drunk yesterday night would backfire on me today. I'm almost done a 3000 word paper due tomorrow morning. I started it on Friday. Its been very tedious. I am sitting at my boyfriend's desk surrounded by recording equipment. He has an electronic drum kit and a really old school synthesizer. His apartment is above a goodwill store and we always rummage through the stuff people drop off at night. Last time we went he bought a light-bright box for 2 bucks. In the other room, Godfather 2 is playing at a subdued volume. Someone just had a baby. There are people yelling outside and breaking things. I find that a lot of people talk about masturbation on their blogs, as though this is the new measure of authenticity. Cool, I guess. It is Valentine's day and I only gave one blow job. He's at work right now so we're postponing the sex and smokes fest until tomorrow.

Sorry for boring you. This blog is my friend first and foremost and I need a neutral space right now.

All pictures were stolen from this person's tumblr.

oh, Pessoa.

Down the steps of my dreams and my weariness, descend from your unreality, descend and be my substitute for the world.

One longed, in order to truly feel life, to be a patient convalescing from an illness.

I created various personalities within myself. I create them constantly. Every dream, as soon as it is dreamed, is immediately embodied by another person who dreams it instead of me. In order to create, I destroyed myself; I have externalized so much of my inner life that even inside I now exist only externally. I am the living stage across which various actors pass acting out different plays...

I did not act the part. It acted me. I was merely the gestures, never the actor.

Civilization consists in giving an appropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities.

Leaning on the bridge, I wait for the truth to pass so that I can regain my null and fictitious, intelligent and natural self...to know nothing about oneself is to live. To know a little about oneself is to think. To know oneself precipitately is suddenly to grasp Leibniz's notion of the dominant monad...a sudden light scorches and consumes everything. It strips us naked even of our selves.




[feeling isolated, angry, anxious deep into the
pit of my stomach self-deprecating and intellectually exhausted.
Reading Pessoa is like stepping into already-familiar words.
I want to sit in a pool of water near a beach, one of those little pockets that becomes stale and lukewarm, watch people swim and feel water droplets slowly evaporate off my skin under white-blind sunlight, experience the chill of close-to-summer-sunset breezes, feel at home in my body again
why are people so inpenetrable and why do I turn away so quickly?]


All text is from Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. All photos belong to Miranda Lehman and can be found at ghostinthewoods.com

I feel ridiculous, my head has been swimming and murky for the past week. I want to have electric-shock-underwater-half-asleep-when-you-crawl-into-bed-with-me-early-in-the-morning sex after I (exhausted and half naked) curl up and doze off to the sound of you and your stoned friends murmuring delightful things in your well designed living room painted neutral colours. You and your chocolate stout. You and your extremely long fingers. I'm nervous to see/talk to my Dad and his wife for the first time in a while. I am afraid. I feel afraid around my family because I know that nothing I say would even crack a hole in their shrink-wrapped shell minds incubated in religious juices. Religion works so well, it sucks up everything like a vaccuum, all doubt condemned, everything soaked up and churned out and half-digested. Syrupy faith. You can't reason with faith, which makes it very powerful and stupid. I am so absent from everything except my body. It keeps producing things and moving along streets and I'm watching it with a stupid fucking grin, feeling like a brain-in-vat staring dumb faced at my own flesh that is unwilling - incapable - of not moving. I'm tricking everyone! No one knows that I am so incredibly removed from myself and others. Sometimes when we fuck I look down at my body moving and I am impressed. I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay. Write, write, repair. Know your language, know your neighbours. I want writing just for me. I want hard copies of everything. I am afraid of losing or wanting to lose because that's easier. I want paper cuts and ink stains and callouses on the inside of the ring finger on my right hand. I want you to suck the blood from my paper cuts and read me the 'Grand Inquisitor' when I'm leaned against the wall and you are deep in and the street-lamp-light filtered through blinds cuts up your hard, angular body. Condemn me. I feel close to you and only you.

*I forgot to credit these:
the first is Francis Bacon, the second is an unknown source re-posted from another blog (and I don't remember, I'm sorry).

Sources of inspiration this week.

Jonathan Zawada

All night dreaming of a body
space weighs on differently from mine
We are making love in the street
the traffic flows off from us
pouring back like a sheet
the asphalt stirs with tenderness
there is no dismay
we move together like underwater plants

Over and over, starting to wake
I dive back to discover you
still whispering, touch me, we go on
streaming through the slow
citylight forest ocean
stirring our body hair

But this is the saying of a dream
on waking
I wish there were somewhere
actual we could stand
handing the power-glasses back and forth
looking at the earth, the wildwood
where the split began

from "Waking in the Dark" by Adrienne Rich

Sanne Sannes

I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.
My guide in these matters is your self,
Firm, oblique, accepting everything with the same
Wraith of a smile, and as time speeds up so that it is soon
Much later, I can know only the straight way out,
The distance between us.

from "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" by John Ashbery

...more typewriters...Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Will Self.

I'm really tired and cranky. We're reading Moby-Dick for my Literature & Philosophy course. I thought it was going to be one of those books that are excruciatingly painful to get through, but its actually been a really fun read. It reminds me of being a kid and reading adventure novels 10 hours straight in my backyard during the summer.

I now have two jobs, plus my poetry editing job which will kick back into the forefront around January. Plus end-of-semester papers and 4 grad school applications to pump out. I want this month to be over and I want a day to write and drink tea and lounge around with my cats. I also want to stop whining, because my life is pretty damn good.