a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam
So, given a different evolutionary trajectory, you’d be quite willing to suggest that murder and paedophilia is morally okay?
Yep.
Wolverines, bobcats, lynxes, and humans kill foxes for food and that is okay.
The Golden Apple
I am taking a wonderful course called Video Games: Culture and Industry and from the sound of it, one could think this was a fluff course, but it isn’t in the least. I’ve taken academic-y courses that have required less work and less thought. The professor is a Ph.D candidate at Columbia writing his dissertation on something about how video games are no longer asocial activities. He is from the Netherlands where he studied French and German Philosophy and Social Sciences. His website: http://www.waffler.org/.
What I like about this course is not only the subject at hand, but also my classmates; this is a rarity. Everyone has a different level of interest in playing and learning about video games and is okay with that, because all seem eager to engage in the discussion. Also, the class is composed of eighteen males and three females which has to be an NYU first, just kidding.
Essentially, the class is heavy in cultural theory and it is really interesting to be in a classroom learning about a topic that is still struggling to find its own space in academia. I don’t mean video game design, rather the discussion of video games as a medium and part of society. There are two (or three?) floors in the NYU Tisch building devoted to teaching students how to make movies and then, another entire department on Cinema Studies, but interestingly, Americans spent about a billion more dollars annually on video games (not including hardware) than movie tickets and videos. Also, English and American Literature is the sixth most popular major in the country; however, successful fiction books sell about 5,000 copies and successful nonfiction book about 7,5000 copies (http://www.authorsguild.org/), while a video game is considered successful when it sells over five million units.
When I took a Metropolitan Studies class a semester past, the professor spoke about how his subject (and Social Sciences in general) had to work hard to gain credential and esteem in the ivy tower and this video game course reminds me of his statement now. It makes me excited to be a part of a class like this! I wonder if in the future, video game study will be a popular major like literature.
Another thing I think is interesting is how we have intimate relationships with the authors of the past–we think we know them because we see their names across the covers of books (sometimes larger than the book titles themselves!); yet, we do not have these intimate relationships with people who build and create the worlds and narratives of video games. This allows us to be the author of the world in a way.
Writing ‘I love Fitzgerald’ is different than writing ‘I love Square Enix’ and you don’t see the latter that often.
The collaborative process of video games speaks more to our world today.
While I rarely have 50-100 hours to play a good RPG anymore (though I have been playing Bayonetta with my girl), I still want to know what is going on in the video game world. Our class discussions focus on escapism, stimulation vs. narration rhetoric, and the human condition. Also, another great part of this class is that it is held in the NYU Game Center; I had never heard of this place before, but they have so many games and consoles! Our class also has a blog (http://nyugames.blogspot.com/) where we each have to make ten postings throughout the semester.
I’m already ahead in the readings too because they are so interesting. We read an excerpt from James Paul Gee’s book What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy and now I want to devour the whole thing. In class, we talk about video games like they are text and we debate the ways video games are different than traditional texts. Gee talks about reading as a social achievement, theories in cognitive science, and how it is often unfair to compare what is happening in the text of video games to its predecessors, namely films and literature, because they lack simulation. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in video games, media, communications, or cultural theory. For me, this class doesn’t exactly relate to my concentration, but the idea of wanting a different world appeals to me.
I think most people would agree that the world of a video game is a fair world. We all start out the same, our characters are devoid of the kind of physical (or gender) limitations that would never let us be the high school football hero (AFI!), and we have the same chance of finding hidden treasures, clues, and defeating the enemy. We can also improve our play on a game in a way you can’t do in the actual world. There are rules to a game and once you learn them, you can prevail. The rules to life are shifty and some people squeak by them. Also, the world of a video game is a manageable world, unlike our own.
Also, in class we discussed how video games allow you to be alone together which I think is interesting. No one ever has the same exact experience on a game. You don’t even have the same experience when you yourself play a game twice (someone gave the new Mass Effect as a perfect example) because you choose different options and make different decisions; therefore, you can talk to someone who played the same game as you, but it was still an individual experience.
In literature and film, the text never changes.
In video games, the text changes constantly.
(I am unsure why there is an Golden Apple. Immortality? Judgement of Paris?)
—
“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.”
-Chuck Palahnuik from Choke, a book I didn’t like very much
I actually tried playing FFX-2 with Isabella and forgot how awful it is. Trish yelled at me on the phone for not buying the first one instead! Oh, Yuna!
Fuck love, give me fire
What I cannot create I recognize.
Let’s watch the night explode, just hold onto me.
I’ll whisper you this truth uncompromised.
Will you live in hope or dark desire?
What can I say?
Fuck love give me fire.
I see the gods in your body, O God, and hordes of varied creatures
Is this evidence of my ambivalence?
I took this at the 66th Street/Lincoln Center stop; the artist is Nancy Spero.
—
III. The Mermaid
William Butler Yeats
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.
In Greek mythology, sirens were half-woman and half-bird, not mermaids.
—
I see the gods
in your body, O God,
and hordes of varied creatures;
Brahman, the cosmic creator,
on his lotos throne,
all the seers and celestial serpents
-Krishna’s Counsel in War, Bhagavad-Gita
Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds if thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? -Foer
Affirmation
By Donald Hall
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
demesne
Monica Cook
“Instead, let’s take that money and give families a $10,000 tax credit for four years of college and increase Pell Grants. And let’s tell another one million students that when they graduate, they will be required to pay only ten percent of their income on student loans , and all of their debt will be forgiven after twenty years – and forgiven after ten years if they choose a career in public service. Because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college. And it’s time for colleges and universities to get serious about cutting their own costs – because they too have a responsibility to help solve this problem.”
-President Obama, State of the Union 2010
Monica Cook
Monica Cook
“Once in your life, if you are very lucky, you will meet the person who divides it to the time before you met her and the time after.” — Charlie, My Sassy Girl
Sometimes, I am afraid I don’t care anymore about being a quote somewhere a long time away from now and I am afraid this is the death of ambition. I don’t like to wish time away and as soon as I do it–in a meeting or in a class or on a date–I pause and ask myself, why am I wishing this to end and if I am, why am I here to begin with? What would I rather be doing? Someone the other night, in my RA meeting nonetheless, said we should ask ourselves if we rock someone’s world. I am adding that to my little routine now (not the ‘why am I here routine’ but others of the sort). Also, this person said we should imagine the most awesome life possible living and do it. I didn’t know people needed to be told that, because I think I have always just done just that.
Made Up
Samantha Neugebauer
I’d forgotten how hard it is to open the plastic coating on CD cases
and I’d forgotten how easy it would be to say I will put this away and not open it.
I have lived longer than I have loved you and I’d forgotten that too.
There was a time before, you know.
It almost makes me sad to realize this;
it is a relief and it is a horrible waste.
I wonder who Emily Brontë wanted
was he unemployed, married, gay?
Or was there no one at all so she made Heathcliff up
which is what we all do
this making up of other people
lovers and not
so our stories–
our lives–
are tellable to ourselves.
Maybe this isn’t even true.
I like poems when they are left-justified better, but then it looks unbalanced with the photos. You never want to look unbalanced.
—
In other news, I am an extra in Kittie’s (a female metal band) new music video “Sorrow I know”. You can see my profile at 1:13-1:14 and whispering into my friend’s ear at 3:02.
Check it out:
—
Also, I really like this song and video by Massive Attack. It is interesting. Because it’s not on Youtube though, WordPress is being difficult about letting me post it.
Here is the link: http://vimeo.com/8195617
It’s unfortunate that when we feel a storm
we can roll ourselves over when we’re uncomfortable
oh well the devil makes us sin
but we like it when we’re spinning in his grip.
“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity” Edvard Munch
Sea Meat
By Samantha Neugebauer
If my memories are not your memories,
forgive me if I invent love over again.
Google alert never tells me anything I really
want to know.
The exact moment you will meet her.
The exact moment I become what I will become:
second, nice, another.
On his deathbed, Klimt whispered,
Bring me, Emily–
his love he never satisfied–
I used to get off on stories
like that
like this
not anymore.
While the finer part of me exists online,
my body surrenders to a midden of memories
as deep our island’s former oyster hills.
Everyone’s away message is for someone,
even someone they don’t know yet.
Then, there is our night on Pearl Street–
before independence
before roads, towns, and taverns
before the Dutch
before the Lenape sold land they
didn’t know they were selling–
when we slept on a bed too small.
There, eaten raw and folded
your fingers smelled like me.
tasted like me.
Such thoughts are as damaging as sea stars
when they are taken on the deck
their five arms hacked off naively
only to have each severed part
become its own monster
once back in the water.
Honest, did you know your sea meat is grown from
suckling the life from the vulva-ly oyster?
But this is only my memory threading to the nearest bottle
you can see it as surviving if you must
as all firsts find a fire.
vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences
“I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.” -Anais Nin
“They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.” -Oscar Wilde
Pablo Neruda`
from Cien Sonetos de Amor (100 Love Sonnets)
`
XVII
`
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
`
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
`
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
`
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1875, James Whistler
I probably posted this poem before.
I carry them stillborn over the threshold
Absence
By Wendy Brown-Báez
I am more here in your bed
than anywhere without you.
It is after all your breath I am
breathing in the thick midnight
walls. Remembering how you told
me you wake up at three, I
awake. You need no mention
of dreams. I carry them
stillborn over the threshold
of this place so mine because
it belongs to you. Even your
past cannot creep between
us when I cradle you in my
hunger. When I stoke your
black hair like silk in my
hands, never doubting the
beat I hear is the high tide coming
to beach me on the precipice
over which I float away,
using my wings like love.
*I don’t really like the last stanza of this poem, but everything else is rather good
an official companion to the empress
Even if I now saw you
Only once,
I would long for you
Through worlds,
Worlds.
-Izumi Shikibu
(George Fuller, Fedalma)
“Izumi Shikibu is one of the towering figures of Japanese literature. She lived in Kyoto and was an official companion to the empress. She married young, but scandalized the court by abandoning her husband to become the lover of one of the empress’s sons. When the prince died a few years later, she took a series of other lovers before eventually marrying for a second time.
She was a social rebel, but willing to be fully engaged in her life. And, like her personal life, Shikibu’s poetry mixes elements of eros with the deep awareness that comes from Buddhist meditative practice.”
-Poetry Chaikhana
Nicoletta Ceccoli
unanimity
Read, every day, something no one else is reading.
Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.
Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do.
It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.”
-Christopher Morley
I am the black-lipped oyster woman
alive with brains, beating heart, and
bombazine skirt
as you swallow me and lick your fingers after
saying, she is such a nice plump girl
obey obey obey the villagers applaud
–their feet threaded to the floor–
when the meal is finished.
-Samantha Neugebauer
do not live as a surface dweller
(Richard E. Loftis’ Susi and Laura Together)
The End of the World
Joao Cabral De Melo Neto
At the end of a melancholy world
men read the newspapers.
Indifferent men eating oranges
that flame like the sun.
They gave me an apple to remind me
of death. I know that cities telegraph
asking for kerosene. The veil I saw flying
fell in the desert.
No one will write the final poem
about this private twelve o’clock world.
Instead of the last judgment, what worries me
is the final dream.
-translated from the Portuguese by James Wright
(Ralph Gibson’s Leda)
nod like shy horses and come together
Those of Us Who Think We Know
By Stephen Dunn
Those of us who think we know
the same secrets
are silent together most of the time,
for us there is eloquence
in desire, and for a while
when in love and exhausted
it’s enough to nod like shy horses
and come together
in a quiet ceremony of tongues
it’s in disappointment we look for words
to convince us
the spaces between stars are nothing
to worry about,
it’s when those secrets burst
in that emptiness between our hearts
and the lumps in our throats.
And the words we find
are always insufficient, like love,
though they are often lovely
and all we have
Picture from the fairytale Turandot, which I saw last evening at the Metropolitan Opera. It is the story of a strong-minded princess who has draconian methods of keeping herself free of a spouse. She does not want to be ruled by anyone but herself, especially not love. She decapitates all her suitors except one. It was wonderful.
“o my darling your eyes are strange soft ocean things that big-bellied humans would dig up and eat raw they are puddles and slugs and i know when i’ve stepped on them by the way they squirm. o my darling your hair melts into my sink like childhood, yours, and you choose your age by the hats you wear. you are everything kindergarten i press my hands to your face like elmers glue and peel you off my palms.”
-for zanne for zanne for zanne, michelle tea
the human sentence
An Older Me
Samantha Neugebauer
Drawn by two black cats,
my chariot–
the fleeting color of
glowing igneous
on its cooling journey from
underworld magma to
basalt newborn–is petrified
by what is to come.
Twenty-two, I stand astride
the dray’s semicircular framework,
unafraid of the open back.
Testing the tectonic plates,
with primogeniture confidence,
I am pulled through the
conditions of time to a holding cell,
called Oak Hill or Apple Meadows or
Maple Grove, the same monikers
of summer camps, yet
the babies put here are
neither tanned nor canoeing;
these places are the hors d’oeuvre
before cemetery, where America
keeps her rotten parents.
And in the window,
under a black nurse’s thumb,
is a woman I
already pity,
and fear.
Edging nothingness,
she is me times
a billion mouthfuls of water,
a million Facebook logins,
a thousand fucks,
two loves;
she spoons nonexistence every night
and makes memory her bridegroom.
Inside her gray-laced bones,
her mediocracy accumulates and
flares like silvery plutonium.
With sudden decision,
the dark felines pause and lick their noble paws
unconcerned,
and the chariot hardens to rock.
It is all done for me;
I am inside with my older self
and she tells me to stop.
I try to stop.
But the clock-less
forces me to her.
I meld into her;
my unlined forehead,
my young girl breasts,
my verdurous ambition,
becomes wrinkled,
sagged, goblin-footed.
I cannot run or type or
see or hear and my
mouth drips with drool
I cannot feel.
I am no longer able to
produce children
nor passion in myself or others.
As the old, I am never old;
only an impounded young women,
with the human sentence
watching the cats slink away from the pasture.
Feel like a monster the second you are done
Strings
by Ruth Stone
We pop into life the way
Particles pop in and out
Of the continuum.
We are a seething mass
Of probability.
And probably I love you.
The evil of larva
And the evil of stars
Is a formula for the future.
Some bodies can
Thrust their arms into
a flame and be instantly
cured of this world,
while others sicken.
Why think, little brother
Like the moon, spit out like
A broken tooth.
“Oh,” groans the world.
The outer planets,
The fizzing sun, here we come
With our luggage.
Look at the clever things
We have made out of
A few building blocks—
O, fabulous continuum.
Days
By Philip Larkin
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
This is interesting, but I have no idea of its origin, though the peer educator in me is screaming, don’t choose drugs! Or God. Or nasty high school people, for that matter.
(Photo source: Livejournal Magpiette)
poetry, publicity, privacy
“Not everything that can be said should be said. Reticence is a particularly important virtue, especially in a time when everything as well as everybody is overexposed. Obscenity, we have learned, is the loss of interiority that occurs when the private becomes public and the public invades the private. All too often people become complicit in the colonization of their own inwardness by soliciting the very publicity that inevitably undoes them. When this occurs, thoughtful refection gives way to thoughtless spectacle: I am seen, therefore I am. What those who seek the spotlight rarely realize is that exposure decreases rather than increases interest in them. When there is nothing more to see or say, People moves on. As the churn rate accelerates, 15 minutes becomes 15 seconds, which in turn becomes 1.5 seconds.”
-Mark C. Taylor in his new memoir, Field Notes from Elsewhere
—
From: http://stereotypist.livejournal.com/
—
(from http://colourmegreenwich.tumblr.com/)
—-
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. -Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
momanon
“If only I could believe in work. I hate work. Creation is not work—it’s play.”
— Henry Miller, letter to Anaïs Nin, 1942
H.R. Giger, Swiss Surrealist (think Alien)
Fred Einaudi hunger
Gerald Brom
Gerald Brom
I just placed an order for this illustrated novel on Amazon. Set in New York City, the novel is a violent and graphic not-for-kids reworking of Barrie’s classic tale. Brom says, “Foremost, the idea of an immortal boy hanging about nursery windows and seducing children away from their families for the sake of his ego and to fight his enemies is at the very least disturbing.”
Check out reviews: http://www.amazon.com/The-Child-Thief-ebook/dp/B002LUHZ5A
Michael Hussar
| “May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art—write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can; and I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
— Neil Gaiman Happy 2010 everyone! |
