Letters of Note, “Correspondence deserving of a wider audience”; example: So it goes (Kurt Vonnegut Jr writes to Sr on the occasion of surviving the firebombing of Dresden).
One day it’ll be a choice. I don’t like it. I mean, the flexibility is nice to have — especially for something traumatic that you just want to get rid of; war, rape etc etc. But part of your job in existence is to be witness and to work through your pain and evolve yourself. And I can see this being used nefariously — and not just in a paranoid Phillip K. Dick dystopian future kind of way, either.
I had (or have? I dunno. We’re still “friends” on facebook) a friend who called me up. Let us call her Agnes. She had broken up with the love of her life because shit happened and anyway, time heals wounds etc etc and several years and a marriage later she gets an email from him out of the blue “i fucked up, you were great, if you’re still angry I don’t blame you but i just wanted to tell you i know you were great” etc. Long story short, they got back together (and are still,) and as far as I know are deliriously happy together. Which is all well and good — forgiveness is a nice thing, after all, and happiness is a bitch to find, so you gotta work for it. Except about two months into their newfound love she calls me out of the blue saying “hey how do you permanently delete files from a Mac?”. I tell her and hang up and then go “Wait. She doesn’t have a Mac.” But I know my friend, and on a hunch (I’m usually really good at these) I call back and tell her off for deleting his pictures of his ex from his computer. Quite frankly, I feel a bit used and dirty and I am Seriously Unhappy about this, so perhaps I am less than nice. She gets mad, tells me he’s backing up the pictures later (…but she’s deleting them now…? just distraction BS…) and anyway I don’t know the situation. I tell her that it’s hardly fair for her to decide what memories he gets to keep, because they’re his memories, after all. She gets mad and repeats that I do not know the circumstances, and I say she’s right, mea culpa, if I’m wrong, please forgive me. She says nevermind and it’s ok, don’t worry about it and since then we haven’t spoken. Which leads me to believe that I was right. But enough about that.
So now think of someone demanding this of you, literally of your memories. Or doing it against your will. Note that one of the reasons given for not freeing some of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners is not “they’re dangerous terrorists and we can’t let them go” but rather “they’re totally innocent but they know too much about our information extraction (viz, torture) methods to be let go”.
Here, have some sonic yoof “Nevermind (what was it anyway)”:
xkcd’s strip today brings up house of leaves by mark z danielewski. which is a genius book. nightmare-causing, take your breath away reading, for real. some of the writing is not as poetic as say harlan ellison’s “speculative fiction” but it’s certainly more claustrophobically horrifying. i finished this book at the bar, the day before my last conversation with the woman i thought was the love of my life. still is? i don’t know. i stopped thinking about it. she’s still the love of my life, but now in the past tense I guess. It’s just one of those things where you associate something with what was happening — e.g. Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works II” 2nd disc is to me an incredibly erotic piece of music, just because of associations — and House of Leaves is just a picture of a raw gaping wound. It doesn’t hurt, but it reminds me that there was a tender part exposed and hurting.
So but what do you do? How do you just drop it? No one I know who’s gone through hellfire and brimstone can adequately explain. And it’s such a personal, subjective thing. If there’s a universal that I have found in this, it’s that people tend to pull back, reserve more of themselves and give less away. And that’s so horrible, so very sad. But I see it time and again in my friends, and I see it in myself. The nerve numbed, you learn that you don’t know what’s normal anymore, so you learn to not trust yourself to keep from getting hurt.Â
Sterling and I ate sushi, a while ago, and we talked about it, again. Except this time she was sober because of the pregnancy, so this time she remembered it I think. And it boils down to: I know it’s not all my fault. But I feel like it is. I blame myself, even though I know it’s not like that. The bitch of it is, I am sure she blames me too. Which is galling, especially considering the condescending attitude she gave me when last we spoke. Really, that’s how I keep my anger going.
So yeah, this started as “look! comic link to awesome book!” and is now about me me me me. Well it’s my blog so fuck you if you don’t like it. Get yr own.
Enjoy this amazing and very entertaining speech by Malcom Gladwell on the lessons of happiness, self-knowlege and hidden desires inherent we can learn from spaghetti sauce:
I’ve had a copy of Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart’s “Take Me To God” for about 5 years. Picked it up used, 5 bucks or so. I listen to it maybe once a year, which on average is kinda high actually. It’s like techno world music that your reggae dub DJ friend mixed for you. Here’s a song from the album:
Anyway, I saw a used copy again and picked it up for a friend and in the process also picked up a used copy of Jah Wobble’s 30 Hz collection and it is indescribably good. How he does that with his fingers is beyond me. Listening to his basslines makes me want to play the bass forever and forget about the guitar. And you gotta give props to a man who quit the music business out of disdain and keeps dropping out of successful bands when they start sucking.
Vignettes: my favorite part of dogs is that they cannot help showing your their emotions — if a dog is happy or excited, the tail will wag, no problem. A confused dog will be quizzical, a scared dog will be scared, a happy dog will wag his tail. it’s so honest, it’s fucking gorgeous.
I have a headache, so this entry will be refreshingly content-full and thought-free.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Tricky recently:
“Karmacoma”, Massive Attack featuring Tricky:
Tricky’s version of the song:
Christiansands, live:
Let me backtrack, I’ve been listening to JWZ’s mixtapes a lot recently and one of the songs on one of the mixes (13 i think? coulda been 20) was “Bad Dream” from Pre-millenium Tension. So it reminded me of how awesome Tricky’s music is and I had to …acquire… “Ruff Guide” to sort out in the car. But it was missing some stuff I felt it needed (e.g., his covers of “Lovecats”, “Dear God” and “Something In The Way”). So I wound up digging out my old CDs anyway and reburning a new comp.
I still have a headache from last night, going to finish watching Sweeney Todd and maybe a nap.
Hey, remember Silence of the Lambs? Great Movie, huh? Remember when Clarice tries to bribe Hannibal Lecter by promising him a reassignment to Plum Island, home to Animal Disease Studies? Hey, guess what’s in the news!? http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080411/ap_on_go_ot/animal_disease_1
I have been listening to JWZ’s mixtapes pretty exclusively for the last week or so. They are made of 100% pure awesome. http://www.dnalounge.com/webcast/mixtapes/ They are in fact, how I found that “let’s dance to joy division” song. In the admittedly unlikely case that you were wondering who JWZ is, if you’re using Mozilla/Firefox, he’s responsible for that. http://www.jwz.org/
I may have, once or twice, mentioned how awesome I think Phillip K. Dick’s short stories are. Have I mentioned that he was fucking crazy? http://www.philipkdickfans.com/weirdo.htm
I love old world maps, especially old world maps of the old world. Wait, that came out wrong. Anyway, here’s a cool site all about strange maps: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/
“willie the pimp” from Zappa’s “Hot Rats” album, which I first bought in DC when I lived there with my dad. I loved the feeling of walking down the streets with the cherry blossoms still gleaming white and the heat coming down hard. Awesome guitar solo and Captain Beefheart singing. HOT BEEF! HOT RATS! WOO-WOO-WOOT!
minotaur having a breakdown in a public bathroom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TssuSYrxVI very creepy and yet full of pathos. Also, hey, Einsturzende Neubaten that has melody, instead of dudes hitting shopping carts with rebar.
Here is a picture of a tiger feeding piglets. I am attaching it specifically for Silvia, because I said I would. I don’t remember why, but well, there it is.
You may have seen it already, but god, it just hurts to watch someone be this stupid in public: “Well I believe that US Americans can’t, um, do that, find America on a map, because, I believe, some people don’t have maps, and, our education, like South Africa – and countries in Asia – we should help them. South Africa and those Asian countries, we should help educate them.” — Miss Teen USA 2007, South Carolina http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQdhMSEqhfg
