Notes from the Overground

I. And there's this thing about the young and the addled, who ask, "Is there a god and what does he think of me?" - treading sidewalks and ghosting over storefronts, what choice is there? - tramping from hotspot to hotspot, places we are allowed to stop and always looking to turn more places into places we can stop, click the clip lights of our bikes and take off our shoes -  we all just want everywhere to be home, so we can doff our PJs anytime.

So, my angels, and here's that ignoble lining - we'd all take the deal now. Lord love us, but somehow the self got severed from the self sometime after the war (or maybe earlier; we've got our best scientists on it, I promise), which means mustering a lot of imaginative force, which means a lot of tired people, which means a lot of bed-worshipping people, which means people who want to put on their PJs, which means people who would take the deal. In the annals of ignobility, the entire generation takes the deal because if others will happily purchase you in your unadulterated form, maybe you can get some peace, you know?

(Positive side effects of fame include using your imaginative powers for everything except living.)
(Or at least, evidence to the contrary, say the Phoenix fam, gets assiduously ignored.)

II. What the fuck is art for if you want to destroy culture?

III. The question remains, who am I doing this for? The question sometimes becomes, why would anyone do this for free? At worst the question is, WHAT IS THIS? And sometimes, there is a horrible tumbling of, how can we pretend to narrativize that which resists narrative so completely, structure the unstructured, enforce logic on the illogical and the vast, maybe we got a few things right but what if our basic assumptions are wrong spinning us out into some sort of weird collective delusion, there are no names for the nameless, action doesn't even mean the same thing it meant three thousand years ago, but really who am i to say because we move so goddamn slow as a whole, what if stories have to change to catch up with the way we think of the self now which has almost nothing to do with what we do, what of Mac Wellman's recidivist, what of quoting scripture for my purpose, what of evil, i can't even begin to imagine a new form, i'll die if i have reinvent the wheel tomorrow, i'm not ready, i'm not ready, when will i ever be ready, amen.

Ya know?

IV. Notes on tone from N+1: "Women’s websites like the Hairpin created unity among their readers by cultivating the sense of membership in an inner circle, where women displayed their intimacy and cemented their belonging by speaking to one another like high school best friends. The Hairpin’s voice, filled with chatty camaraderie, was sometimes cloying and sometimes engaging when it gave me style tips and book recommendations (“I know I made you all go out and get your Villette tramp stamps like my first day here”); but in articles that took on larger topics, that voice read as distracting, condescending, or even anxious at the prospect of alienating readers."

V.  Off to London tonight, don't really know what to do there. Turns out tickets to the Olympics are real complicated to get. Turns out the Olympics are a moral shitfest.

VI.

shrewd

how much

do you take your own advice?

and speaking of looping around,

"In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent. Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hronir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer.

"Until recently, the Hronir were the accidental products of distraction and forgetfulness. It seems unbelievable that their methodical production dates back scarcely a hundred years, but this is what the Eleventh Volume tells us. The first efforts were unsuccessful. However, the modus operandi merits description.

"The director of one of the state prisons told his inmates that there were certain tombs in an ancient river bed and promised freedom to whoever might make an important discovery. During the months preceding the excavation the inmates were shown photographs of what they were to find. This first effort proved that expectation and anxiety can be inhibitory; a week's work with pick and shovel did not mange to unearth anything in the way of a hron except a rusty wheel of a period posterior to the experiment.

"But this was kept in secret and the process was repeated later in four schools. In three of them failure was almost complete; in a fourth (whose director died accidentally during the first excavations) the students unearthed - or produced - a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three clay urns and the moldy and mutilated torso of a king whose chest bore an inscription which it has not yet been possible to decipher.

"Thus was discovered the unreliability of witnesses who knew of the experimental nature of the search...Mass investigations produce contradictory objects; now individual and almost improvised jobs are preferred. The methodical fabrication of hronir (says the Eleventh Volume) has performed prodigious services for archaeologists. It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future.

"Curiously, the hronir of second and third degree - the hronir derived from another hron, those derived from the hron of a hron - exaggerate the aberrations of the initial one; those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second; in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical: the hron of the twelfth degree begins to fall off in quality. Stranger and more pure than any hron is, at times, the ur: the object produced through suggestion, educed by hope. The great golden mask I have mentioned is an illustrious example."

- from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Borges