This might not last long but

http://ohsweethoney.tumblr.com/

figure I might as well give it a try...

Due to their cracker-like nature...

they shouldn't have melted. Wheat Thins, no mas. Bummer.

Whether or Not to Look

Something just happened and almost all of my last post got deleted. Mysteries of the internet, I guess. Whatever.

Today on the subway I watched while a woman sent a text message that said "I just saw the Latin version of you...it was bananas..." I know I shouldn't have been looking but I totally was and rather than deny it I'm going to cement it by writing it on the internet. There is something so strange about being able to use your phone on the subway. Like the time before everyone had cellphones when you just couldn't get in touch with people all the time, knowing that someone will be sonically out of commission for the length of their subway ride is becoming a thing of the past. For someone as chronically late as I am this can be a godsend, when I can send a text at 59th street telling whichever poor unwitting person I was supposed to meet ten minutes ago that I am still half an hour away, but it is also a strange and unsettling change. The train used to be one of those places you could put on your headphones and be totally alone in the middle of the city, Walter Benjamin style. He said that the rise of the metropolis would cause the individual to hide away rather than to open up and embrace it, because the crush and chaos and closeness would simply be too much for us all. Now I find myself unconsciously touching my phone through my bag all through the ride, wondering if a pocket of service will cause a text or a call to suddenly erupt into the car.

The first time it happened I was getting on the L train on First Avenue a couple years ago. I stepped through the doors into that strange saturday night commute crush to Bedford Avenue and my phone started to ring. I looked down, probably said a little "what?!" under my breath and picked it up. Nothing. I "hello"-ed into the phone for a minute and then was whisked under the water where I knew there could no longer be anyone on the line.

As someone who likes to walk through the city wrapped in my cuccoon of music and that alone-in-the-crowd feeling, this sudden entry of my personal life into that which I live underground is still disconcerting. Sometimes I just want to be silent, and listen to the metal of the tracks as the train moves.

[Speaking of being disruptive on the train to Williamsburg, this was almost two years ago. Can you believe it?! Bodyskillz reunion anyone?]

Spring Fever

I've stopped correcting people when they suggest that Scout is a puppy in the park. This morning a woman shuffling down the bridle path in those orthopedic sneakers with a jumpy-looking Yorkie looked at Scout and then at her own dog and said "look, puppy feet." As I walked away from her I could hear her saying it over and over to her little companion--"puppy feet, puppy feet." That's when I decided to stop correcting people.

[Between the Blinds]

Reading over my notes on Derrida's Archive Fever for ideas, for anything really, that could help me with my paper on Brian's photos, I saw that I had quoted Derrida as claiming that Freud felt that he had an "unconditional right to secrecy." I don't remember reading this, or writing it down, even. My notes from that day, April 30th, 2008, are written in red pen and smudged by what I'm going to assume is rain because I've never been much for effusive crying over the pages of my notebooks. I went on to write about Levinas, whose "il aura oblige" represents the ability of multiplicity of meaning to unmake language. It means, "he will have obligated," a clunky and hardly meaningful statement at first. However, when looked at further, at least according to Derrida, it is the very phrase that allows for multiple meanings to exist simultaneously, thus eroding the existence of any meaning at all. To this he says, "the edges of a phrase belong to the night."

I think this recession of meaning into some metaphorical horizon may not be wholly different from Freud's demand for secrecy. Without a little bit of ambiguity there is no way to tell that anything is actually happening. The lack creates the dynamics that force things to keep moving. This is why the modernists claim to be able to change or destroy the fundamentals of language by making it indecipherable--by pushing words, perhaps the most ordinary of all ordinary things, into some ungrockable ether, they take on infinite meaning, rather than remaining relegated to the place of representation of reality or experience.

So much tension comes from trying to fight against the meaning that lies at the edges of the phrase. I think there is some discomfort in that idea no matter how meaningless the statement. "Il aura oblige" aside, anytime we say anything there is the possibility that even we don't understand what it means, and the fact that we have no control over the interpretive possibilities makes this fact all the more frightening. They have a name for this too, the 'future anterior' or the past of the future. It all comes down to time, it seems. Time and possibility and movement. The receeding edges of the phrase prove it is active, that something is happening. But the fact that something is happening would imply that it has also already happened. Thus this 'future anterior' business; the fact that everything is already always happening. You can never actually see the horizon, because it's always in front of you, but you are also always reaching it, making the distance where it was before.

This makes me remember the very distinct feeling of coming upon Jackson Pollock's Number One on it's white wall at MoMA. When people talk about it they often use the words 'speed' and 'space' and mention how emotional the painting is. There is no sign value to anything in the piece, no possible way to read it, and yet it is read as emotional. Meaning and language are two completely different things, is what I'm trying to get at. When I look at Number One it makes me nervous and then makes me want to wrap myself in it. It means a lot to me.

I've been listening to this song on repeat for the last two days. It means a lot to me too.

Debbie's a Freak

Shelly and I just ate a really enormous loaf of bread. Seriously, it was the length of my torso. I don't really know why we did it we just did and that's okay. While demolishing this incredibly large bread-sword, Shelly introduced me to Debbie Nailer. Debbie Nailer is a teller at Bank of America in Atlanta and is dating Shelly's gay father, Hank. Debbie and Hank didn't meet on the internet. When Hank first signed up on J-Date he was matched with Shelly's mother, his very recently ex-ed wife. Debbie and Hank met at a club called Johnnie's Hideaway, which is apparently some kind of disco for people over 50. Debbie drives a powder blue convertable VW Bug and always keeps a flower in the built-in dashboard flower holder. She always makes jello and some kind of pizza involving cheddar cheese melted onto a store-bought pizza crust. Debbie buys picture frames and hangs them on her wall with the display photos still in them, flowers and kittens and other people's children. She goes on cruises, and already has her seat booked for the 2012 voyage of the 6000 passenger Royal Carribean ship. Hank calls Debbie's apartment "Club Deb."

Shelly's mother has a man with six cats living in her basement. She met her boyfriend on the internet.

Right now Shelly is on a three way call with her insurance guy, Sheldon, and her mechanic, Rick, talking about the repairs being done on her Chrysler mini-van, which was stolen and then returned to her a month later. Whoever stole it left a blond wig and green neglige on the back seat, which is disgusting.

I shouldn't have eaten that loaf of bread.

Heavenly Tedious

Last night Bilal and I decided to go to Williamsburg against our better judgment, to go to Enid's and see our friends. Everyone there was mean and pretty and so an hour or so later we found ourselves walking down Bedford avenue dodging towering girls in shiny leggings and giggling. I was on the phone, giggling, when two vaguely thick boys ran across the street and knocked out a street light with their bare hands. Or at least it seemed that way. We went to the Levee and mercifully found a seat at the front bar, with a view of the girls with what B calls "those stupid rope headband things" and the creeps who love them.

The evening progressed with the mutual realization that the Levee is the closest either B or I have come to being at a frat party (besides that one time I went to Isla Vista, but, that never REALLY happened), and that part of why we both like it is the fact that 3/4 of the people there are either hideous or so drunk any semblance of aesthetic appeal is erased from their being. It's comforting. When everyone is too pretty and too mean there's nothing left to say, and you just stand around eyeing one another like dogs, there's no space.

I think music is kind of the same way. They talk about it in Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, how the best music is imperfect and unfinished. Not that its missing something, I don't think that's it. You don't have to be missing melody or anything like that, just like it's often the most "perfect" looking people who are the hardest to look at, just like models look like aliens. When I try and think of an example all I can think of is The Smiths, because when I listen to them I just don't get it. I feel the same way about The Talking Heads, just don't get it. The lyrics are a little twisted but you want to be all the way in them, or at least I do. Example:

I listen to this song on the subway all the time. The epic movie score violins really push it over the edge. You can't take it too seriously but it tries to make you, and therein lies the genius of it. You know you're being fooled but you let it happen anyway, because if you were totally aware all the time, if you never let yourself get duped you would never do anything fun. You would never find something new or fall for someone or whatever happens when you do something really stupid because you just have to do it, you feel me? Music in general is kind of like that, though. There's really no reason it should mean as much as it does to people, why it should be able to make everything better or worse. There's no reason that a song should be the one thing that can make you cry when you really just can't cry anymore, or why an album should be able to save your life, besides this unending need that people have to be tricked, to make everything a little better for a little while. This is totally obvious, but I think it begs the question, even though we all know that it isn't real, that it's fleeting and emotional, why does it happen? Meaning of life I guess, sunday morning questions. Don't bother answering, I just have to ask to preserve the vision of not completely giving in to the fantasy.

Last night Bilal told me he has a piece of one of Morrissey's t-shirts in a box in his bedroom. I laughed at him for it but really it made perfect sense and I loved it. If we could all be so lucky.