alienation poem

i feel like i alienate myself more when i try to not be alienated

its like i am allowing my repressed desires to become fears which in turn i desire which in turn i repress and the dialectic/cycle/whatever goes on

i need to take a break from blogging and the internet in general

random but simple post about art

sol lewitt



first found out about him when i visited the dia:beacon museum, which is located a bit upstate from nyc


at that museum they have a drawing installation he did back in the early 70s i think



this is a wall drawing he did, i think. it is not at dia:beacon and is actually much different from the art he has a dia:beacon. it is more colorful and chaotic than.

i think this drawing was used as the background for the cover of an edition of a rimbaud book i have. dont think there is too obvious a connection between rimbaud and lewitt. rimbaud was decadent/symbolist and proto-surrealist and he died when he was really young and stopped writing even earlier than that. sol lewitt was a minimalist/conceptualist and had a much more typical lifespan.

he was really into Minimalism, which is something i am going to talk about a lot in this post, maybe

here is something he did which is similar to the dia:beacon drawing installation:



i think it is kind of cool the way in which he describes in such mundane/menial detail the way in which he conceptualizes his drawing. i feel like there is somewhat interesting level of irony to this approach, although i would not concede that irony is anything special or important, although maybe it is.















niki schur-narula

this picture you see above is the cover of his first album, which is fairly accessible throughout various ways on your computer/internet. google, myspace, my sidebar, etc.....

he is my best friend, probably, and is a musician/composer/sound artist/installation artist/printmaker/whatever

i found out about him through myspace during the summer before i came to college

he is mostly a performace artist and also an anti-performance artist

dont think he really cares about qualifying or classifying art at all, which is a pretty artistic posture i guess

here is a link to a page with some of his music on it, although i would say his music now is more mature than this:

http://eadersdigest.com/projecks/niki/NIKI.html

here is a picture of me he took the other day with his iphone:




he also wrote this poem/advertisement and published it on his facebook:

fuzz
bass heavy sounds

golf carts
mopeds

he is linked on my sidebar, of course















bruce nauman


he is another cool minimalist/conceptualist who is featured at dia:beacon. the image above is a still photo of a video installation he has there that is very cool.

this is his best work:
Body Pressure

Press as much of the front surface of
your body (palms in or out, left or right cheek)
against the wall as possible.

Press very hard and concentrate.

Form an image of yourself (suppose you
had just stepped forward) on the
opposite side of the wall pressing
back against the wall very hard.

Press very hard and concentrate on the image pressing very hard.

(the image of pressing very hard)

press your front surface and back surface
toward each other and begin to ignore or
block the thickness of the wall. (remove
the wall)

Think how various parts of your body
press against the wall; which parts
touch and which do not.

Consider the parts of your back which
press against the wall; press hard and
feel how the front and back of your
body press together.

Concentrate on the tension in the muscles,
pain where bones meet, fleshy deformations that occur under pressure; consider
body hair, perspiration, odors (smells).
This may become a very erotic exercise.

Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure, 1974,










this is my favorite painting by salvador dali:





i like dali because he does not seem to be too ideological about being a surrealist but he embodies the positive aspects of surrealism at the same time






this is my favorite painting by andy warhol:





i like it be because it is simple and complex at the same time

it came before he became popular with his Pop Art movement and everything


this is a sample photo of a piece by andy warhol that is at the dia:beacon museum, it is from after his Pop Art heyday in the 1960s





this is the greatest band ever (the velvet underground). andy warhol was their manager and made them famous/notorious
john cale was a member of the band and also a somewhat prominent figure in the avant-garde art music movements of the time, including experiments in minimalism and drones and whatnot. he studied under john cage and lamonte young. he also produced records by iggy pop and nico and others after he left the velvets. i dont want to put any art up by him. you should wikipedia him and google him.



elvia p-w

is also listed on my sidebar. she is a friend. she is okay. she is very good at literature but also mainly a big time small time artist. she likes to make attempts at starting art collectives. here is a cool clip from her website thing:






and here is a neat little prose poem she wrote:

I bought a stopwatch. I time exactly how long I wait to cross the same street every morning when I leave the house and every evening when I come home. At the end of the week I return to the crosswalk and wait for the cumulative amount of time that I have spent waiting that week. I wait, but I do not cross the street. I go home.






link to the one and only CHELSEA MARTIN, an experimental writer/artist





richard serra:
the postmodern something

me and my friends whom i went to dia:beacon loved this a lot. one of the girls who is very knowledgable about art agreed with me that it felt like tripping on acid or shrooms or something kind of:













ummmmmmm, what else do i want to talk about. nothing that i can think of right now.

i might do a "part 2" of this post at a later date.

what is existentialism?

existentialism

what is it?

existentialism has both very broad and abstract as well as close and narrow meanings to me

it is broad to me because it encompasses a lot of different types of thoughts

and abstract because in order to understand it you have to think of it as a vague but concrete philiosophy

it is close to me because it is the philosophical school of thought with which i am most familiar a

and it is narrow to me because i consider my own views towards existence to be the defining interpretation of existentialism

because theyre mine

i think this last part is in the spirit of existentialism

first of all, existentialism was a historically based cultural movement in france lasting from as early as 1942-43 and would continue to be popular there well into the 1950s

(somewhat) it was a reaction to breton's surrealism and was reacted to by structuralism

it was cultural for the french, and perhaps for some other corners of western society as it became known outside of france

but for most people in today's world existentialism is known mostly as a philosophical and literary school of thought

today the foundational figures of existentialism are considered kierkegaard, dostoevsky, nietzsche, kafka, and heidegger

but when existentialism was a "french cultural movement" its most well-known members were probably considered sartre, camus, de beauvoir, merleau-ponty and maybe a few others

in general, a philosophy course on existentialism will probably teach dostoevsky's notes from underground, then excerpts from nietzsche and kierkegaard, then maybe some shorter works by kafka such as "before the law", then heidegger though possibly only briefly, maybe karl jaspers but probably not, then sartre in fairly large depth, then possibly camus or de beauvoir

when i think of things that have helped me gain knowledge of existentialism they range from reading all these authors to watching bruce lee movies to remembering when i used to run everyday to thinking about philosophy or lit that has no connection at all to existentialism

i combine all of those things and all the things in between and that helps me understand existentialism

my philosophy on life is not existentialist but it is existential and it focuses on existence

for me, existentialism is secularist

for me, it is metaphysical-ontological

for me it is pragmatic

it is hemingway and kerouac

it is the pacifist settler of the american frontier

it might also be "the man with no name" aka "clint eastwood"

it is anti-religious

it is pro-spiritual

it is sartre

it is camus

it is not camus

it is death

the thought of death

the ignorance of death

the randomness of death

the randomness of everything

it is christian, but not really

it is jewish, but not really

it is buddhist, but not really

it is confuciust, but not really

it is transcendentalist, kind of

it is hamlet and william blake and sherlock holmes (mixed with oscar wilde) and george orwell (mixed with james joyce) and wittgenstein (mixed with joe strummer)

i dont what i am saying

this post is stupid and vague and it sucks

i will post a better post soon

Fruit flies were fluttering around Drake as he sat in his chair staring at his computer screen. The flies were visible against the backdrop of his screen saver, which was showing the cosmos. The garbage in the trash can next to his desk reached several feet above the brim of the can. He had worked out a system of delicately placing his garbage on the pile so as to never have to empty the can. The trash consisted of banana peels, orange peels, crumbled-up wrappers, disposable microwave dinner containers, sales receipts, and scraps of paper. Next to the trash can stood half a dozen forty ounce beer bottles in neat line. Sometimes when wind blew in from the door or window a wrapper or paper scrap would fall. But in general, his pile of trash was a reliably solid structure.


Drake could hear his mother and her boyfriend Ted having sex in the adjacent room. Her loud and excited gasps carried through the wall into his room. During these times he usually would put on his headphones and listen to music. But tonight he felt too lazy to walk across the room and pick up the ear plugs off the floor. He lit a cigarette and hit the "delete" button on his computer. The screen saver disappeared to reveal The Sound of Music paused in the middle of dance scene. He had been watching it an hour before but now he could not remember what in the hell had made him want to watch that stupid movie. He stared at the still picture of Julie Andrews dancing some douchebag for a several minutes until the screen saver returned and then he lit a cigarette.


It was ten past eleven. He rubbed his eyes and put his hand down his pants to scratch his balls. He got up and left his room. In the hallway the sounds of his mother fucking were much more coherent. He walked down the stairs and out the front door and got into his car. He drove around the neighborhood for about a half-hour until he came upon an open bar and grille. He went in and sat down at the bar and ordered a half-pound cheese burger, cheese fries, and a jack and coke.


"Do you always eat that much?" asked the waitress, "Because you are a skinny kid."

"Uber-fast metabolism," said Drake. This made her laugh.

Drake forced a slight laugh and stared at the two television screens above him to his left. He could sense the waitress waiting for more of a response from him but he had already decided to passively resist interaction with her and so after twenty or thirty seconds she walked away. On one of the televisions there was a football game and on the other one there was a James Bond movie with Pierce Brosnon. He didn't remember any of the Bond movies with Brosnon but he had played the video game for each movie hundreds of times. He couldn't remember though because he was too disinterested.

A fairly-good looking brown-haired woman sat down in a seat near him. He smiled. She made a slight upward movement with both her lips and eyebrows. Drake looked away and then looked back.

"Have we met?" Drake asked.

"No," she said. He had figured they had not met but was not sure. Regardless, he figured it was a good indirect way to ask her her name.

"Oh, sorry," he said.

"Oh, it's okay," she said,"My name's Margo."

"I'm Drake. Nice shoes, by the way."

"Thanks," she said.

He nodded his head for no reason and then took a long sip from his drink. He yawned and noticed a wave of exhaustion come over him but at the same time he felt as if he were wired on uppers or something. He wondered why he wasn't in college. He finished his drink and order a beer. He leaned on his elbow and stared at the television and then the woman named Margo said something to the bartender about a trunk in her house that she couldn't move. He slid his eyes from the television and stared at her for a second.

"What did you say?" he asked.

"I was saying how I need someone to help me move a big trunk that used to belong to my grandmother."

"Oh? Where do you live?"

"Well, I live a little down the street about a mile or so," she said.

"Oh, well I was gonna head home after I finish these fries and this drink," said Drake, "But if you need help moving it I can stop at your place on my way and move it."

"Really? Thanks, that'd be great, I guess."

Drake finished his drink and fries and paid his bill. He and Margo walked out of the bar and he told her he would follow her in his car. When they arrived at her house he got out of his car and put out his cigarette with his show and followed her from the driveway across the lawn up the front steps.

"So there isn't a Mr. Margo...I don't know your last name, come to think of it?" said Drake.

"No, and the name is Jamison" she said as she gave him a questioning look while slightly laughing.

"Ah, ok. That makes sense then," he said.

"Why do you ask?" she said.

She opened the front door and they walked in. She closed the door and he noticed that she was standing close to him in the dark.

"Oh, just the moving your trunk..." He mumbled.

He noticed she hadn't moved in the past minute or so, not even to turn on a lightswitch. He put his arm around her waist and she placed her arm on his back and he felt his dick move. They began kissing and taking their clothes off and then they moved onto a couch. They fucked a couple times and then they laid on the couch and stared at the pitch dark ceiling. Then she led him upstairs and they fell asleep on her bed.

In the morning when he awoke he noticed a large trunk lying in the corner of the room. He shook her to wake her up.

"Is that the trunk?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said.

He got up and walked over to it and she did the same. They carried it downstairs and placed in a corner of the living room. He put on his shoes, kissed her on the cheek, and walked out the door and into his car. Driving home, he began thinking of excuses to tell his mother about where he had been that night.

thoughts on prose fiction

vocabulary:

if a writer is writing for themselves, then they should use whatever language they want

the same goes for if they are targeting a very specific group

but most writers want maximum exposure, they want people to know they have thoughts

in "what is lit", sartre refers to how a writer should not have the goal of 1000 or 2000 people reading his work, but rather that everyone in the world would read his work

i dont agree with a lot of what sartre says in that book, but that idea really strikes me

if a writer uses an overly advanced and large vocabulary, then he is alienating many from his writing in an elitist fashion

to write words that the average person couldnt understand creates the illusion that the writer holds some greater knowledge that the average person could not comprehend

this is not to say that some people arent more intelligent than others

what i am saying is that through using reasonable and popular language, say the vocabulary of say an 11th or 12th grader, then the writer is allowing for the democratization of literature

some will still be proven to have more intellect than others, but if most people can at least comprehend the language then it removes any appearance of there being something deeper behind a word that one does not know

obviously, a coding theory professor will not be able to use a high school vocabulary, or other such cases, but the work of a coding theory professor is not the type of work that one would hope the entire world would read

i am fine with writers using whatever language they want, but it just seems that often they use language that is more rare in use just to add makeup to their work, while all the while there was a much more common word that would have worked just as well to express the said idea


grammar/structure:

in general, i have gradually moved from favoring the sprawling type of stream of thought writing towards being in favor of more concise and minimal style of writing

the minimalism that can be found in the work of hemingway or camus or bukowski consists in short sentences, which are usually only one clause and or several independent clauses connected with a conjunction (usually "and")

rather than each sentence containing multiple variations on a idea, each sentence instead is relatively singular in terms of ideas, and stands in variation to the next sentence

it is often as if each sentence shoots out of a womb, each infant containing different features

the problem i find with a more sprawling and streaming style of writing is that it is if the overall ideas of the piece are constantly in the process of becoming the work without having a grounding for that work, while a more terse and concise style of writing is better at balancing the work's process of becoming that work with the grounding of that work

another aspect of so-called minimalistic writing that i find positive is that some things are left unsaid, there is often an absence

but this absence does not imply that the work is concealing something from the reader; on the contrary, it is an admission of the fact that no matter how descriptive and detailed the nature of a written account, there will always be something missing for the reader

in this way, such a style of writing empowers the reader's imagination, which is once again a move towards the democratization of literature


genre, or lack thereof:

in the world of serious writers, the word "genre" is usually used in a derogatory manner

some well-known genres are sci-fi, fantasy, horror, war, romance, mystery, detective, etc

i dont know how i feel about this

i personally prefer to deal in mostly realistic writing that keeps in mind the absurd condition of reality

i always like that miranda july quote about tao lin dealing with subjects other writers overlook such as boredom and laziness and depression

i kind of like the writing of zachary german, it is radically realistic, dealing with boredom and routine in an extreme fashion, and he does not create characters who are overtly introverted

but after a while, you can only read so much of tao lin or zach german without wondering if you would be much more productive actually just going out and doing ordinary things like their characters do

luckily, lin provides humor in the form of hapless characters or random devices (ex: talking animals), and german provides humor as well in the form of the almost self-mocking attitude that the characters take towards the base and cyclical lives they lead

actually those last points might have been bullshit

this whole thing might be bullshit

i generally dont read genre fiction, although i do have fond memories of lord of the rings and harry potter

what i can conclude based on reasonable evidence is that as time is progressing the difference between genre literature and "serious" literature is eroding, as part of the larger erosion of the dichotomy between so-called high and low cultures

this is in some ways yet another aspect of the democratization of literature

when one really reflects on genre, they realize it is sprinkled all through the canon

hemingway wrote war and romance stories

kafka and poe and burroughs often indulged in fantasy, sci-fi, horror, or mysteries

fuck, even shakespeare's plays are usually categorized according to their genre

so in the end, if you have an interesting creative idea i think you should use it

but i try not to have creative ideas just to be creative, the meaning of those ideas is more important

i think i am making no sense


themes:

i guess i have kind of been talking about this for a while

i usually like works that have philosophical or psychological explorations scattered and buried within the work


characters:

the same goes for characters in regards to the last point

i also am uncertain of my position towards the neccessity for sufficient character development in order for a story to be successful

sometimes people dont change, and hence their development is actually defined through a lack thereof

but it is always entertaining to watch characters who struggle with identity and anxiety and existential uncertainty


thats it folks

dont know why i wrote all this