Best Phrase from a JoP Paper 2

"there is a privileged carving of nature at its joints"

Best Phrase from a JoP Paper

"jumps of a puppet"

Homespun Diagnostics

Q: If someone else were suddenly inside your head, what would he or she notice first? How would s/he describe it?

Winter tips from THE EFF BEE

1) Moisturize! Don't forget your feet!

2) Stop envying your pets! Sleep as much as you want!

3) Don't be proud! Wear tights and/or long underwear!

4) Got the shopping itch? Go to the library instead!

5) "Spa-treated" Dole raisins are worth it! White Rose is crap!

6) Need bucks? Reduce your cell phone plan!

7) There is no reason to use luggage without wheels!

8) Feeling gray? Find a botanical garden!

9) Washing clothes by hand is surprisingly cheap and easy!

10) Per Fred Nietzsche, "If something is falling, give it a shove."

Great PSA

"You've got to hug and kiss your kids. Words aren't enough.

"Call 311 or visit nyc.gov/NYCDADS"

Paging Dorothy Parker

One man's mistress is another man's whore.

Remake Remodel

Taking the blog back like our country! Wild Style at Film Forum!

Heteronormativity grew slightly less tedious in Connecticut.

RE: thesis -- Crunch Time for Cronzo.

Fragments from the vaults:

We are making delicate little party decorations
We are planning a lunch three years in the future
We know what we would do if we were someone else

*

Love came in to ruin me,
And I said no problem.
She disappeared into my skin.

*

The little girl
She
Looks older in the picture
You can tell

Little girl
I am coming for you
I am here
I am loving you back in time

I am loving you forward in time
In that bardo with the ancestors
The candle in that secret room before dawn
In the mountain stream

The little girl
She
Not an ounce of self-pity
Saw something you have not.

Slide the rice paper door
Over massacres of the old country
Massacres of the new country
Ghosts in the garden

My lover is me approaching
With her esses lisped
Her cat-yellow eyes
Her curls in distress

Ideas after 2 a.m.

That the first issue of Spin I bought had Ani DiFranco, Thom Yorke, and Missy Elliott on the cover.

That I would like to exactly reverse the celebration of plastic party divas and the disdain for music that women enjoy singing along to together.

That being in school makes me think I'm living in a dorm. The overhead lights don't seem to be my responsibility.

That time is not just tight, it's mechanical.

That the tree outside my window is encased in ice. One image burns up the untrue.

I might as well be a thousand years old.

Trucker hat

Wes Anderson deliberately tries to make cult films. It isn't a surprise that prefabricated cult films have come into existence, but we should still take notice. I doubt that he knew what he was doing when he made "Rushmore" -- which filmed the combined fantasy boyhoods of himself and the Wilson brothers as though they were Godard films. However, with the film's success, he believed he had discovered his style. What he had in fact discovered was his audience. This explains the estranged, polite distance he keeps from his characters in the later films -- he does not explore them; he accessorizes them. It also indicates why each of the most recent three films are organized around collectives -- stand-ins for the audience -- that face casually meaningless trials to awesome pop soundtracks. If post-suburban white kids do anything other than recognize a simplified reflection of themselves in Anderson's protagonists, they are seeing too much, or not enough.

Swan/s

There's an album by Mazzy Star from 1996 called Among My Swan. I like to pretend that I'm the only person who has ever heard this album, or that I'm the only person to whom it remains important, or that I'm the only such person who has no interest in shoe-gazer music.

The second track, "Flowers in December," was playing in Chipotle Grill today. Something about burritos and 90s alternative, a demographic. Is salsa made of tomatoes and cilantro, or a sense of belonging?

So I guess it's been since April. In the intervening months, I fell in love, got work visas for 314 people, switched roommates twice, had five lovely friends get married, became the Board President of a (very small) non-profit organization, saw the Chair of my graduate program replaced by another dude, was ravaged by bedbugs (in Florida!), endured flirtation from men with names such as Chuluunbaatar, Zagd-Ochir, and Zinametyr, attended the Clay Buchholz no-hitter at Fenway, and got a library card. This was mostly really good.

I feel bad for leaving you readers in the lurch for so long. For periods of time I find the prospect of accounting for myself really daunting. But I'm glad that people are running around, wondering how each other are, having birthdays. I mean, you are ALL having birthdays. May they all be happy.

Fall is starting, which means that the air is abruptly delicious, and the sky is clear as a bell. Lots of black squirrels in the park. Didn't it feel like a long summer? Last night we lay in bed and listened to Leadbelly. Paul Chan is down in New Orleans producing Waiting for Godot with the Classical Theatre of Harlem. Worth a trip?

EPluribusUnum, or Women's History Month

I'll tell you all about my messiah complex later on, but for now want to talk about now, and bring to your attention some services that came to my attention this afternoon. This week, Flavorpill, which you should just go-Ogle, is promoting a free party at Webster Hall by two "activity-enabling orgs," MyOpenBar and HeyLetsGo. Were we not in haste to go get some reading done, we would think about the inefficiency of spaces between words. Both of these are social networking services. They collect people by collecting email addresses. They are party-minded objective spirit, which I have been given to understand is a fancy pseudonym for social institutions. Oh wait, we had the thought while we were writing: losing the spaces between the words is a way to draw attention to the objectivity of the service, to articulate what they do. EPluribusUnum, as it were.

Also, there is GoodReads, where you can post what you're reading, what you were reading, what you want to read. Why not? Claire, I imagine, will never forcibly collect those syllabi from the rest of us, anyway.

As these media show no sign of slowing their reciprocal proliferation and consolidation, one can merely hope that the soft, Mac-white anaesthesis that they radiate is not, as the ice-pick Modernists have feared, malignant. As objectivity draws itself together with all the inevitability of a dying star, let us aspire to actually *using* it, to reaching into the instantaneous transference of information and grasping inside that magnificently-organized storm an equally human hand.

By which I mean, nothing more than my class of seven women continuing the conversation about art criticism when my male teacher ran out of the room with a nosebleed, and nothing less than recreating our political system online, if that's what it fucking takes. Speaking of which, ladies, do me a fave and talk about HISTORY with one another. Whatever strand you want -- music, hairdos, marriage, education, weapons, politics, philosophy, philanthropy, philadelphia, the rocky mountains, judaism, elephants -- just talk about it.

From the vaults: men of ancient times

"The understanding of the men of ancient times went a long way. How far did it go? To the point where some of them believed that things have never existed — so far, to the end, where nothing can be added. Those at the next stage thought that things existed but recognized no boundaries among them. Those at the next stage thought there were boundaries but recognized no right and wrong. Because right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured, and because the Way was injured, love became complete. But do such things as completion and injury really exist, or do they not?"

_Chuang Tzu, Discussion on Making All Things Equal

Ceci n'est pas une blague

I was born to have a messiah complex.

Smartest ever

This guy.

I'm not kidding. Check out the full-size pic.

Mistake

When cloven-hoof Prince Turnip in the garden...

Poem, from the vaults

Refrain: I go down to the river, but I don’t get there

Where the guy with the beard plays his radio

We wish our rocking chairs were visible

We don’t have no lovers nor ice cream

The pigeons look like ink brushes

And the sunset their watercolor

I just put it together

It falls apart a little

The cars driving upstream below

Re: my corkwoo

Oh Gigi Bevil, what *is* a corkwoo?

out an elderly type with a white beard and a monocle entered.
Training and programming, dear boy. Before this present assignment I
this planet, some inhabited, but they have no contact with this one.
Ive been meaning to ask. Whats a tachyon?
saints who had accomplished so much good.
from active duty; with talent in such short supply I had had the
Then why wasnt I going to sleep? Instead of lying there tensely
It was waking up that was difficult. Some hours had slipped by female.
was the gentlemen-at some physical cost I must add-who polished off

A few thoughts for the year of the double agent: Regina Spektor's songs beg to be arranged for a capella groups. I'll travel eight hours to look at a lake and not feel lonely. I need to appreciate visual art more like I appreciate music than like I appreciate literature. Eyeballs!!

Pope Caitlin the DAMN FIRST

Who else is bored by that last post? Yeah. Anyway, now you know how I write after a few glasses of wine.

Air travel to Tallahassee was pleasant this season. Met a Williamsburg-residing art enthusiast on the leg down to Orlando; made nice with several little kids on the return. One sister said she liked my Unicorn in Captivity tote bag, so I told her about the Cloisters. Her brother had already found an affinity for the Middle Ages via a battle ax included in a McD's Happy Meal. A Columbia sweatshirt-wearing preschooler danced and waved at me singing "Jingle bells jingle bells" for about an hour, filmed occasionally by his father, drawing close and then giggling away behind a row of chairs. Waiting for luggage at JFK, a precocious gal and I discovered that our mothers had both tied ribbons onto our suitcases.

Coasting over a fluffy sea of anecdotes, I took some notes during "My Super Ex-Girlfriend." You know who's in that? Luke Wilson, Rainn Wilson, Uma Thurman, "Cameron Diaz" from Lost in Translation, and a very butch Eddie Izzard, who sneaks in a Switzerland joke. NB, the shortest distance between two plot points of this action-manhattan-romcom happens to include hurling a great white shark through the window of a highrise. Those New York chicks don't know their own strength.

Spent the late wee hours of the birthday drinking wine with Rat P. and friend, listening to my old rival and love get excited about Nabokov and French film theory, as well as his stories about a friend who served on special forces in Afghanistan, undergoing training getting held underwater until he passed out, mailing home spare funds in an Xbox or some shit. On the 23rd, one of the two young women at the party who had survived brain tumors (what) didn't recognize me at first. Out on the patio, I fraternized with culture workers: an old best friend who hosts dance parties in Sarasota and a casting agency assistant in LA who still insists that clicking ballpoint pens open and shut on my arm passes for flirting.

Christmas Eve I cleaned out my bedroom closet. It had been my closet since I was 9, so there were some pretty good finds. Still best ever yearbook signature, from the vaguely predatory dude who now goes by Golden Bull on MySpace: "I'm glad I'm signing this instead of Jeremy, who could never appreciate the gravity of the situation." The naked reclining fairy tucked away in a notebook. Lots and lots of poems, like the one about listening to Mazzy Star in the driveway. About ten years worth of movie ticket stubs, stashed inside a L'eggs egg. Some diplomas. Notes, letters, and postcards from as early as sixth grade and as late as the semester abroad in Japan; scripts for summer camp performances of abridged Shakespeare; physics homework; my first two diaries, one of which bears the distinction of beginning mid-sentence...All hand-written and photographic evidence of more people than I regularly conceive of having passed through the muscle of my affection. What a blessed, desirous, dizzy-headed gal have I been, all the while inside a sufficiently rational gourd. Who knew? My phone rang while I paused outside the car; I put the last box down on the asphalt. Five and a half inches of rain flooded down and something invisible yet still rain-like flooded up.

I saw some important ladies for lunch on the 26th, a date with real emotional heft, and a feeling I wasn't quite familiar with as we greeted each other, something smack between fear and love...exaltation? They are these sublimely strong women, probably the bedrock of goodness that kept me from really getting fucked up by that punk senior year. Like, I want one of them to be pope. Pope Caitlin the DAMN FIRST. I should probably tell her that. She started asking hard questions of her faith on a volunteer year with the Jesuits in Birmingham.

Dad didn't come along to the airport, so I listened to him encourage me to keep studying Buddhism over my brother's speakerphone. As we pulled out of the garage, Dad all smiling and worried I might sleep too late or watch too much YouTube, I teared up. Alex and Mom were teasing each other about something in the front seat, and family felt complicated. I love all of them but almost never at the same time. What's the deal with that?

Back in the city, albeit briefly, I lunched with Yuko at a v. traditional noodle house, lots of "gomenasai"s all around. We practiced the social kiss outside Starbucks, and she kept running her cheek into mine too hard. She had many interesting things to communicate, from her views on bisexuals to feeling the soul of her father go to heaven to who's on her team in our class.

Heading into 07, I’m looking forward to working on the following resolutions: (1) cultivating a scholarly New Yorker writing style, (2) staying on top of my work, and (3) not worrying. Heterogames have been green-lighted clear through spring.

Preface/Afterword

For those of you who didn't spend the day talking about Kiki Smith and Ideological State Apparatuses, you might find the next post, er, sad. Don't be alarmed! Writerly people eat sadness for breakfast! Also bagels.

We merely ask, rhetorically, whether such nonsense is of interest.

Meet Reality, My Praying Mantis

In honor of potential new readers, some diaristic nonsense which I blame on beer and the A train running local.

The steady destruction of fantasy. Why isn't there a profession for me? That's probably the best question I can ask tonight...We have eyes, fingers, a tingling below. The rest blurs. Our economical selves cry at the first hint of uselessness. Time passes. We know we'll die. The professionals have earned their bread making our lives less plausible...You'll never read this! The very movement of my pen eclipses your name! Love is not what is beautiful, but the Beloved! The closest I will soon to have to home is L.E., because my parents are moving, because they have aged, because I abandoned Caitlin and Diane, because Sean abandoned me, because I will be someone who dates, while the stone of philosophy falls blindly through the crepe of my heart and because, for the mistake I believe I once made, I will lie myself a solution, abstract and round, to match my mind and the world, where I misrecognize my father's smell in Richard's Aesthetics class, and my mind turns back to sand, the boy, his hairless chest, my brother's skin before I had perfected subjectivity.