Borne On The Bier With White And Bristly Beard

Today was a pleasure in that I got to leave the house an hour later. The book I brought with me was a compilation of poems gathered from “the Foundations of the English Spirit” to poems written in our own time. As you know, you being me, I am deeply interested in the 19th century, its literature, philosophy, and history. The Romantics will play a main role in my thesis and therefor I am spending my time in between train rides acquainting myself with more writers I may be overlooking, where I stumbled apon a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning which made me think about Maria and our 4 year anniversary that we will celebrate this Saturday.

Sonnets from the Portuguese

If thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say,
“I love her for her smile-her look-her way
Of speaking gently-for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day”-
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee-and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry-
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.


I love how her “look” is between her smile and way. To think that anything can change from one day to the next, as it has over the past four years, it becomes more the idea that holds us together if we continue to give it life like love, something shared outside of the physical, that has been our best preserve.

All who increase their understanding by careful thought, even a little, enjoy a pleasure denied to those who live on scraps of borrowed opinions

The time is 18:00 here in Freiburg Germany, 12pm in Brooklyn New York, and 9am in Gig Harbor Washington. It has been decided, after 17 months of no internet, to return to my blog and give family and friends a simple retreat into a world not too far away, no matter what time it is. It would be sort of silly to rack my brain over all that has transpired and try to fill in such long periods of absence with the presence of mere words. I guess whatever presence of myself that you, my valued reader, may feel must be earned on my part through genuine reflection, honest observations, and a conscious effort to met you half way. This “I” is new. This blog is relatively old, circa 2008. I hope you will come to find that perspectives have changed, sensibilities refined, prejudices purified and defiled. My past horizons will inevitably merge through my future blogs and a bit of where I was will mingle with where I plan to be, still these are just words, lets take a deep breath together.

Can you feel the breath of Fall already laying down outside? In Pumpkins, singed purple gold, dwindling green, hazel eyes, shivering leaves, and the sound of a blue plastic tarp being dragged across the yard. The sun was setting so I went for a run before it would become too dark. Did you notice?

I want to also set a few guidelines for myself before I go any further. I will try to channel my more abstract and theoretical compulsions through this blogs ultra-violent brother, which you are welcome to take a gander at. I will try to keep mere Blathering fenced at the margins and mighty Point at the center of my discourse…but there are so many points (of view, of fact) that are up to, on, or beside that I may as well let it all go and simply write. Tomorrow is the return to old routine with a new twist. By 6:20am I will be on the tram, by 6:50 the train, and by 7:40 hopefully sitting at my oval table “teaching” business English. My life will fall back on track, literally, after nearly a whole month in vacation mode traveling with my Mom as if on a cloud high above the iron horse I now must ride four days of the week. After returning from my morning class I make the daily omelet, read the morning paper, and make it back to the station for afternoon appointments. The twist is that I am now in position to write my masters thesis, so every movement or thought not spent cradling its development could be regarded as gross negligence, punishable by death-wielding baton shaped question-marks. So the plan: turn a 50 minute train ride into a structured part of my research time. A train to Siemens and back, well thats two hours of Byron. Shoot I could have a lesson on Don Juan retold using the target language of mergers and acquisitions. I could give a tour-guide exploration of the landscapes of capitalism as told through the narrative style of George Elliot or the ridged rules of a Pope or Johnson regarding grammar and syntax. Or better yet, just become a damn teacher of English and be done with this silly teaching of English as a Second Language. All in good time. Need to save up for the move to Berlin once my baby has been delivered to Professor Fludernik. Some give birth to babies, some to books. Some make love to the Mind and some to the Body and some don’t prescribe to such dualism. None the less some generation is at work and I intend to be its author. Damn back to work. Got to sleep. Good Night. Schlaf gut.

September 25th, 2012

Well very little sleep was had, I tossed and squirmed all night because after believing myself to be finished with last nights blog I came to find that my blog was simply no longer available. This came as a shock. Four years of writing, some moments better than others, and I had always believed that they would be there for posterity’s sake. The following few hours were spent vainly trying to find some point of contact, someone who could help, some authority who could bring my blog back into existence. Only impersonal links to “general” problems. The story is this: At some point Google purchased the blogging host I was using and turned it into what is now known as “Blogger” and introduced some new and exciting changes, including spam bots powered through algorithms to find and disconnect blogs that are deemed offensive. Some blogs however are regrettably lumped into the category of “false positives,” including my blog. As I work to regain access to my own blog I am struck by how little control I actually have over my own information and by what criteria these “spam” bots are using to determine what is and isn’t “offensive.” What effects does this have on the status of art for example if it must be filtered through some algorithm that determines its acceptability? Some art is meant to shock people out of their automatonic lives, make things new, grapple the unnoticed. How can something shock and still maintain its acceptability within these new terms? My blog was never shocking, but I sure wish it was in a way that would cause it to be removed.

'Confabulation' - To Fabricate Imaginary Experiences as Compensation for Loss of Memory. My Last Journal Entry. Happy 28th!

Taken from my last journal entry, Tuesday May 16th, 2011

I think the reason I avoid this journal is in part from this girl who explained to me that it should be faced right side up (which it now is) so that the tassel falls from top to bottom, I hadn’t ever thought that a point worth considering. Today has been a great day, an important day I would say.

A great many things have taken place, some of which made it into my journal used as space filler for this one, because I can’t seem to write in you! Lets say from now on you just get the filtered bullshit and maybe you can give me some synthesis once in a while, for I am tired of giving. Funny things happened its true, things that caused reflection, events that brought back my times buying underwear from African street merchants in Napoli, times which have taken a seat to my consciousness. All well kept in another text, a book you will only know now through what I let slip. You my friend are the last survivor with me chuckling after a late party before we part ways.

Today was important because I put my two tasks to work. My recent interest in narrative I am sure plays little if any part, maybe as a paratext through outside materials you will never know anything about, because I won’t mention their name. As I was saying, today was an important day. I finally got beyond the insufferable reports from David Copperfield’s wedding but I still can’t get beyond his current indiscretions, benevolence, and inability to disentangle himself from his social sediments. Basically I can’t stand his knickknack of a wife. But hey, at the moment he is only 21, and that’s when it all begins in my book… By the way, I am in deep trouble. I have been swapping between a fully charged Cosco bag of trail mix and a near potato sack of dark Chocolate Açai for the past page now and if the past is supposed to reflect the future, I will take my breakfast with a burning regret. Even without the aid of beef jerky. Thanks mom. Basically today seemed to top other days. I found those I sought, and spoke about space I found to give form to time, cause ‘it’ happened. So it goes.

The first element we agreed on was that ‘it’ could not be communicated, at least through our current system of forms or language that already ‘means’ something. All presuppositions and therefore all orders are banished. Us as a group, in a circle, shared a special position together of space and time and enjoyed each other’s company. Attention being paid to discourse, to the ‘words’ allowed, as language is a form of public transportation at a tax of its paved roads and maps, and we wanted the forms of our conveyance to be free of direction and result. All we agreed on was that one had ones body and its movement, that’s all that we could be sure of back then. We meditated over how to give what we had form, to define it, to make it last, to express outside ourselves what we knew already within.
Today has been a good day. I can’t stand post-modern thought; it seeks fragmentation and clamors for identity, full of perspectives without any plan for action. It’s like a child with a ball and a cup tied to a string, its only entertainment; a toy not to be marveled at but remembered as an effective gizmo that taught coordination while we were still growing up. Now it’s Nintendo. Now I am digressing in thought. We agreed that Plato began and Hegel completed Western Metaphysics, basically the world of thought we were thrown into and forced to make doo with. We are currently very interested in Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, we made a large pot of ginger tea and decided that today was a good day

If I were a new historicist I would explain all my current subjective developments and socio/ cultural constructs that have shaped how I view and interpret whatever it is I am speaking of. But that is for my past 7 journals to support, you on the other hand will attest for nothing before now written. We were watching Scanner Darkly projected outside an apartment wall. This was after the brief encounter with a section of American students, t’was their last farewell, adieu, au revoir, adios, bon voyage, aufwedersehen before their sober return. Their semester had just ended. They were drunk and bedazzled, full of sound and sentimentality, we crashed their party, and we smoked American Spirits.

‘Is it rational to be immoral?’ that’s a question posed by my professor that stemmed from a simple question of ‘what is good,’ from which we will submit an outline next week. In my opinion, depending on a reason justified by a given community for some desired result, it is not only true, but in the same context its opposite can be true as well: that it can be immoral to be rational. I will then allude to the American treatment of the Japanese during WWII and get a feather in my cap for not mentioning the Holocaust. OHHH discourse, ohh language, oh you blasted bottle of invertible time! Today was a good day.

.
End

A Stifling Status Quo

Actually went out for the first time in weeks rescued from my avalanche of books by a pocket of time and now I can feel the strangle
hold this system has on me and what little of myself that is left, this system of dry emulation and categorization and comparison
that seeks not to innovate but to inundate with qualifications and create space not with substance but with that which defines
its function, a wallflower who gawks and justifies its lack of participation with the dance of life with highfalutin lectures
that call attention to nothing more than words that can only wish to be real. My soul is being sucked moment
by moment so soft and faint I hardly realize it is not my own incompetence but my everlasting prowess
which cannot squeeze and shaped passive by these smothering forces that I seek as a naive convert
seeks absolution through that which only takes and deceives My achievement is a dream,
my room all too well furnished, I blather and stumble my age thickens and coarse
with its leathery carelessness, not I, this is not how it is to be,
no dead arid arrangement can bring me see otherwise
as I ignore and I break and defy and escape
these chains around nothing I laugh
as I feel to be alive is no reason
but with structure no feeling
though once it was said
to have been
what now
isn't.
Fuck Form
and what it stands for
and all its discrimination
to point and regard for a base of a tyrant
all things made select and come taken if proven
yet forms themselves form nothing and thats why I'm gone.

A joke and tears below 600 words...

Inside a coffee shop located on the corner of some busy four-way street stood Charlie, waiting for his latte. The three teenagers behind the little counter moved in every direction, knocking metal on plastic, pulling brass knobs, releasing steam, pouring this, sprinkling that, a wild flurry of bodies performing a synchronized beverage dance while everyone else waiting in line appeared frozen and de-caffeinated. The carefully metered aroma of coffee and soft contemporary jazz music that swirled around Charlie as he remained upright and waiting reminded him of what purgatory might be like, some vague location between standing in line and reclining above cushions. His mind wondered around the earth tone colors and coffee bean mosaics that coated the walls and soon Charlie found himself searching for a quite place to sit and think, a place near one of the windows hopefully…oh too late, well luckily there was a place in the center of the room flanked with sofa’s and there he made himself at home, working himself between two cushions he set his coffee down and slowly stretched his legs out on top of a little community of neighboring pillows. Ahh. He closed his eyes.

Soon a little boy with silver spectacles shaped round carefully balanced his hot chocolate with both hands as he took up residence right next to Charlie. The boy tried to take sips of his chocolate the best he could since he had a patch over his left eye behind his glasses, the doctor said it would have to be there for two more weeks. He had a lazy eye. It was just the two on the sofa and the both began sipping their drinks, each conscious of the other, there was an unnatural silence about the room. Then the boy suddenly turned to Charlie and asked, “Want to hear a joke I heard?” Charlie felt obliged to humor the child so he agreed.

“Ok,” said the boy, “say knock-knock.”

Charlie considered what was asked of him for a moment then said, “knock-knock?”

“Who’s there?” the boy answered swiftly. Charlie wasn’t sure what to do, something wasn’t right he thought.

“Who’s there?” the boy repeated slowly.

“I don’t know?” Charlie said as he crinkled his forehead in confusion.

“Well lets try again,” said the boy, “say knock-knock.”

“Knock-knock,” Charlie mumbled and straightaway felt ridiculous.

The boy with what looked to be a little smile repeated those words, “whose there?”

“I don’t know who’s there!” Charlie exclaimed.

“Who’s there?”

“Nobody! Nobody!” Charlie was trembling as he spoke the words that seemed out of his control and immediately Charlie broke down in front of his young inquisitor, shielding his tears with his great big hands. Who’s there now he thought to himself? This little boy brought out the strangest emotions, he saw his own son who grew up long ago, who one day, just like his wife, wasn’t there. Such great distances of time and loss caught him off guard, he felt ashamed and childish.

“It’s OK grandpa, it’s just a joke. I don’t get it either,” said the little boy.

He pulled himself together taking a long sip from his latte. He managed something that resembled a smile.

“It’s a good one Charlie,” the old man said at last, “I haven’t heard it that way before.”

A delightful parley of power relations played to Curb your Enthusiasm or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Run the Gauntlet

For all who missed the demonstration yesterday in Freiburg, here is the gist of it though much didn't make it on tape.




Up Next:

Wikipedia and Wikileaks in relations to trust, authority, and funding...

Happy Birthday Kale

Chocolate Calendars and Tram Rides

Well, I now have two incredible places to study, one with my own personal window in-between two book shelves where nobody seems to go, American intellectual history, and where I currently am, in the Klasische Philology Raum comfortably lived with ancient books, small and cozy, with a great big window that covers the entire wall on the 3rd floor that in fact overlooks the very building from where I spend the other half of my time while not in class. On finally finishing Derrida’s essay on ‘Differance’ I needed a change of space so I left to purchase a 2 euro sandwich that I immediately regretted choosing at the moment of touching it. Then on my way to this delightful library I thought some chocolate to be in order and on route lo and behold I was handed a chocolate Christmas calendar which I am currently eating, and not in order. It’s a chocolate calendar advertising a certain nativity and pizza, where every door which opens to a little world of chocolate shaped festive figures also reminds one of the zippy yet delicious delivery of another savior, i.e. hot pizza.de.

I am already halfway through my first calendar while sitting here writing and only now have I stopped to pay attention to their chocolaty forms. Number 5 was in the shape of a rustic cottage; now number 11 the chocolate shape of Santa’s boot stuffed with little toys spilling out from the brim, I am procrastinating heavily as I don’t have the ability to return to what has already taken me 5 hours to read through and underline.

A funny thing happened yesterday night while coming home. I had bought two rolls and while sitting in the tram ride home I began building a sandwich from the meat and cheese that I tote with me in my bag. While during eating, a recorded message plays through the entire tram saying something more than the usual next destination, though I wasn’t paying it any attention I realized the recorded message might have been directed at me since a disproportionately large amount of people began smiling at me. (Number 17 is just a boring chocolate shaped star) So I smiled back and continued to finish my sandwich (belegtes Brot). A fat man sitting across from me with a jolly glimmer in his eyes points above him at a perfectly obvious black globe which houses a camera and asked me if was indeed as hungry as I appeared to be. I responded incorrectly causing him to probe further by asking where I was from. I told him Czechoslovakia for some reason thought fully aware of that country having been disbanded since I was still in elementary school and the mans face became congested, his eyes belying at that moment some hidden indigestion. My stop came immediately afterward and he wished me a pleasant evening and I him and that moment moved into memory.

This morning another telling incident occurred again with the tram, although this time (number 10 is a French horn wrapped in a bow) it was the tram itself and not some fictive Czechoslovakian causing a seen. I arrived for the tram at 7:50 AM joining probably the largest group of other people waiting including a classroom of elementary kids and adults waiting together for the ride of their daily lives. The tram arrived already packed with people yet some how everyone managed to wedge themselves into the tram, the doors making a metallic vacuum clamping sound as they shut. I had decided to forgo this round and wait another four minutes till the next tram would arrives. From within I received smiles again from middle aged woman with elegantly wrapped neck scarves and other dollies all pressed together wrapped and prepared for shipping, but the tram wouldn’t move. It just continued to stay where it had arrived and soon the next tram came, practically empty, where I warmed up and spread out inside. Something was wrong with the other tram though, it hadn’t moved for nearly 10 minutes, but surprisingly (for me) though everyone inside must have been uncomfortably pinched between one another and hard plastic seats nobody seemed to stir about, or cause a seen, or even think to relocate to a profoundly more spacious tram directly behind them even when the doors could be opened and for most of the time were. One might think that a spell had struck them docile upon entrance, passively accepting this moment in over stocked packaging with a regrettable delay in shipping. I nearly drank my entire mug of coffee alone waiting for the tram to move. Eventually the tram jerked to a start causing a collage of pinched faces to appear from the back window as the tram scooted off. I extended my legs as I awaited my own shipping toward the university. (Hey on the night before Christmas there is a chocolate Santa with a plump sack filled with pizza, how perfectly expressed)…