Where am I?
In a spectacular fit of paranoia related to the already-daunting project of cultivating credibility and authority in a classroom full of students who have enough reasons to be suspicious without access to documentation, I've decided to make this near-daily log of delights, frustrations, and banal observations A Secret Journal. If the removal of my journal from the quasi-public of the internet at large causes you anxiety, post a reply requesting addition to my "friends" list (which requires that you have an lj account, sorry).
Words I'm less precious about, because I didn't write them:
Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic compulsion that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer. . .(DFW)
I opened up a container of yogurt, and under the lid it said "Please Try Again" because they were having a contest I was unaware of. But I thought I might have opened the yogurt wrong, or maybe Yoplait was trying to inspire me. 'C'mon, Mitchell, don't give up. Please try again. A message of inspiration from your friends at Yoplait. Fruit on the bottom, hope on top. (Mitch Hedberg)
My mother, who lived only a while and was so light that she dared not go out in a wind, could swing me on her back and carry me for miles. There was talk of witchcraft, but what is stronger than love? (Jeanette Winterson)
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. (Karl Marx)
May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan. (Don Delillo)
The absence of the other holds my head underwater; gradually I drown, my air supply gives out: it is by this asphyxia that I reconstitute my "truth" and that I prepare what in love is Intractable. (Roland Barthes)
You taught me language, and the profit on't is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language! (Shakespeare)
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. (E.B. White)
Those who deny [the principle of contradiction] should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped. (Ibn Sina)
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. (Marx)
Water may be older than light, diamonds may crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind may be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery. (E. Annie Proulx)
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. (Roland Barthes)
Good fiction is supposed to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. (David Foster Wallace quoting his teacher)
I threw off the sheets and stumbled across the floor, banging into a table leg. HELLO? I shouted into the phone, but the line was dead. I hung up, went to the kitchen, and took a glass down from the cabinet. The water gurgled in the pipes and splattered out in a burst. I drank some down and then remembered my plant. I've had it for almost ten years. It's barely alive, but it is alive. More brown than green. There are parts that have withered. But still it lives, leaning always to the left. Even when I rotate it so that what faced the sun no longer faces the sun, it stubbornly leans to the left, choosing against physical need in favor of an act of creativity. I poured the rest of my water into its pot. What does it mean, anyway, to flourish? (Nicole Krauss)
though for myself alone
I would not be ambitious in my wish
To wish myself much better, yet for you,
I would be trebled twenty times myself.
(Shakespeare)
I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. (Stephen Jay Gould)
When the noise is on the screen, the sound is muting. (Tandi's television menu)
Words I'm less precious about, because I didn't write them:
Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic compulsion that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer. . .(DFW)
I opened up a container of yogurt, and under the lid it said "Please Try Again" because they were having a contest I was unaware of. But I thought I might have opened the yogurt wrong, or maybe Yoplait was trying to inspire me. 'C'mon, Mitchell, don't give up. Please try again. A message of inspiration from your friends at Yoplait. Fruit on the bottom, hope on top. (Mitch Hedberg)
My mother, who lived only a while and was so light that she dared not go out in a wind, could swing me on her back and carry me for miles. There was talk of witchcraft, but what is stronger than love? (Jeanette Winterson)
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. (Karl Marx)
May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan. (Don Delillo)
The absence of the other holds my head underwater; gradually I drown, my air supply gives out: it is by this asphyxia that I reconstitute my "truth" and that I prepare what in love is Intractable. (Roland Barthes)
You taught me language, and the profit on't is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language! (Shakespeare)
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. (E.B. White)
Those who deny [the principle of contradiction] should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped. (Ibn Sina)
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. (Marx)
Water may be older than light, diamonds may crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind may be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery. (E. Annie Proulx)
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. (Roland Barthes)
Good fiction is supposed to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. (David Foster Wallace quoting his teacher)
I threw off the sheets and stumbled across the floor, banging into a table leg. HELLO? I shouted into the phone, but the line was dead. I hung up, went to the kitchen, and took a glass down from the cabinet. The water gurgled in the pipes and splattered out in a burst. I drank some down and then remembered my plant. I've had it for almost ten years. It's barely alive, but it is alive. More brown than green. There are parts that have withered. But still it lives, leaning always to the left. Even when I rotate it so that what faced the sun no longer faces the sun, it stubbornly leans to the left, choosing against physical need in favor of an act of creativity. I poured the rest of my water into its pot. What does it mean, anyway, to flourish? (Nicole Krauss)
though for myself alone
I would not be ambitious in my wish
To wish myself much better, yet for you,
I would be trebled twenty times myself.
(Shakespeare)
I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. (Stephen Jay Gould)
When the noise is on the screen, the sound is muting. (Tandi's television menu)