What Can We Do with This Space?

Should we re-migrate to Blogger? Or use Tumblr and Blogger in twain? (One of the only dual nouns in English, 'twain' is.) Gah... we don't know.

B. Michael's Notebook Miscellany

Hey guys and girls,


We see that this site still gets some traffic, so we want to remind you that we're blogging about music, literature, philosophy, and ourself over at B. Michael's Notebook Miscellany, on tumblr. So please click on over there, and take care.



Signed,
Then No Sound

What Should We Do?

[The Proud Duck bears "Stunning Witness;" also, in the mirror is prefigured the concept for the video for "Take On Me."]

What should we Do:

a.) Write a story;
b.) Do a Drawing;
c.) Take a Photo; or
d.) Make a song?

Idiocracy

[This is not funny = This is as funny as Idiocracy.]

We just figured out why we didn't like Idiocracy. It was boring, the jokes were dull, and the only persistent image it carried out was an increasingly pessimistic, ultimately quite cynical disposition. The kind of disposition that leads to movements like the involuntary sterilization of white trash.

[Facebook + Thong - Shirt = Rules]

We love facebook. Clean design aesthetic; stalker-tracker mini-feed; they just opened it up to highschoolers; etc. Facebook us.

eBay: 4 Sale Buy Now Fender Pro Junior Tube Amp

Oh, uh look at this thing here. It's cool, isn't it?

Google Me, Bitch

[Looks like a Commercial for Conditioner.]

The NY Times said I should search for myself. I used to come up as the first hit when I put in my name, but since I took off my name from this blog, I don't even come up for like at all ever. (We're using the first person singular here because this is a very first person singular-type post.) Yahoo!, though, gave me more love and I found this. It's a pdf of an article I wrote in college. So, I'm either Tom, B. Michael Payne, Stephanie LaCava or Jess. Rock on.

We got nothing Today

Feeling like an elegy, but we don't even know what that would mean--we call bullshit!--and it's not even our fault because elegies are things you learn about in 11th grade English class and we were drooling and napping. Not banging on desks. We were going to write a post about the soft, nameless loss that comes with familiarity--that is, the loss that Ford M. Ford describes in the Good Soldier: that the moment you know someone you cease to know him because you know your image of him, not him himself--this loss we feel sometimes in our commerce with other people.








But then we just got thinking about commerce and how we got a promotion, and how these summer days have ended before they began; we won't have time to screw around at work anymore, we'll be busy really doing work, etc. Our chest hurts and we don't feel like eating, smoking, sleeping, or fucking.






Finally, we thought about how we'd like to be back in a place where we can listen to music all day, and this isn't that place; but we'll be making more money here than we have ever in our short recorded and unrecorded history made. And we wanted to try to write like Faulkner, but of course we're writing like Faulkner on a weblog, and so, we're writing like Faulkner on a weblog. Duh.







And past finality, we decided just to post pictures of google images, and to try not to split our infinitives.













(And we're incredibly bowled over by this (we don't know why): that one of our coworkers is so stupid, she is so so stupid that she can't make a pot of coffee without blowing a fuse, fucking up the coffee pot, and ending up with shitty brown water and grounds all over the floor--she is so stupid--and now she's an editor and part-office manager; and she doesn't know how to form proper sentences, or how to read for comprehension, so she has to check with another editor every two-and-a-half minutes to see if her first impulse, which she must suspect is just as stupid as she can't even begin to suspect is is, is right--which it isn't--and then the other editor has to edit verbally through her like a retarded, down syndromed medium, the type of spirit from whom you would not seek to elicit any advice, information, or spiritual guidance because it would tell you to walk through a fucking wall, that the Red Sox would win the world series by 1925, and that the fucking Klingons would have landed by the time in which you ask so don't bother, that stupid woman is also our part-office manager,




who is responsible for buying office supplies like chips, soda, coffee, etc. And we expect with no amount of irony for her to return with rocks, used car parts, topsoil, ANYTHING but food, because she's too dumb even to identify what is and what is not food. A dog could do that. We don't think she could. Every time she asks a stupid question we long for the near silence of keys being pressed and depressed, the fax making barely audible beeps, and phone conversations from a few doors away: the sounds that drive us batshit crazy. Being batshit crazy would be a better mode of being than the mode of being that calls for us to listen to her stupid questions.)

Eh-bay

[The Children's Crusade rendered in MS Paint.]

We won an auction on ebay, and we don't wanna pay. Is $10 too much, or will the terrorists have already (always already) won?

Mobile Disco Party

[Come with me if you want to live.]

We got a new mobile phone. We think it's better than our last one, but we miss having a ring volume rocker on the side of the phone. And we hate accidentally pressing the splatter guy, which charges us money. It's the bug-on-windshield-money-suck button. What a bad button for us; what a good button for them

Let's Make a (New) Deal

Is it just me, or does Blogger hate IE? I could never get the fucking photo tool to work with IE, and now that I use FireFox it works just fine thanks very much.

-or-

My snot is bright green, with a viscosity similar to Elmer's Glue.

-or-

CocoRosie was overrated, until their newest album got savaged by Stylus, Pfork et alia: now they're just rated. (And served, they got served!)

-or-

You could say the Brits have a more fastidious sense of style and usage; but then again, you could say that that belongs to the Midwest.

-or-

Grammar, what's the big deal anyway?

-or-

We've always enjoyed the thrill of filling up inventively a white page with black lines, like building fabulous Lego castles with a pen.

-or-

Name that film: "Do you still pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?"



Every day I'm going to post one idea. That's the hook. (And as John Popper intoned famously: The hook brings you back, I ain't tellin' you no lie.) I'll level, dig. I've been sick for the last two and a half weeks; like, really, really sick. So now I feel a little better and I figured out something to do and my job has calmed down and everything has settled into a little groove and this is going to be fun for me again to do that is to post one thing per day but only one thing, and it will probably be brief.

Happy New Year: 10 Things we've learned so Far

We last posted on this blog at the end of December 2006. Since then... well. we spent the better part of the Christmas break hanging out with artistic types. Having rang in the New Year at a party to which they invited us, we got to see Zach sing "My Way" on the karaoke mic, and he got us a job (which we lost subsequently). We did get to hear those silly songs from the Pompeii EP, like, way before the suckers on emusic downloaded them.

And, well, we got really into marmite and building overlarge fires in or smallish fireplace. And we started upping our ratio on Oink. And, uh. We smoked a lot of pot and played some Madden. Oh oh oh oh! And it snowed, like, a shitload in Santa Fe, NM. Like, we were shoveling, for, like days on end. But we thought it was really cute to see all las familias walking to the store pulling in tow children on sleds. Never see people walk around here...

Well. The Christmas break didn't teach usvery much. But we think we've learned, like, a lot since then. James Joyce's birthday has come and gone, and we've decided to start blogging again. (Which decision is really based on material circumstances of leisure and means.)

Top Ten things we learned since the New Year

10. Get blisteringly drunk at a Super Bowl party if and only if you want to blot from your soft head the memory of the wretched game. (You will, maybe, also start lots of fights with your co-revelers; but your beer pong skills may be raised to an illogically keen level.)

9. Guitar Hero--at which we've scoffed to myself privately, with a superior bearing one might say, since we fancy ourselves a Guitarist, and as such, above the game--is really fun. But the songs the game has suck.

8. Reading fiction (opposed, of course, to philosophy and maths books) is surprisingly fun. Gaddis' Recognitions deserves all the credit on this one. And really, the two blank intangibles--ethics and aesthetics--are tied together in that the latter depicts situations in which we may imagine the former existing. Or, maybe we're given an aesthetic appreciation of ethical situations. C.f., Blood Meridian.

7. You really can't tell your friend that you slept with his girlfriend: even if you know and he knows that it's not true; and especially if you know that it will piss him off.

6. Paul Celan was a beautiful genius of man. This title he deserves merely for formulating the word "Worthöhlen," "wordcaves."

A music triptych:

5. So-called noise music includes more than Lightning Bolt. And electronic music includes more than Aphex Twin.

4. If all you do is download lots of music; rarely have time to listen to any of it; delete all your newly downloaded music to make room for to download more music; and end up
only listening to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea anyway: buy a record player, get a few LPs, and listen to those closely. We finally get Black Sabbath and Joanna Newsom. Sweet!

3. Wire. I mean, wow. Really? I mean... Wow. Pink Flag? You've heard it...? You didn't go burn down something? I mean, danced around? ... I mean... wow. Wire. Chairs Missing isn't better than anything Joy Division ever did? Really? Wow... (We're still working on 154.)

2. Ostensibly: you're working on your thesis every day for five hours. Really: you're smoking pot and playing Madden every day for five hours. Then: you realize that you may smoke pot no longer. Finally: you work like hell for two weeks and don't sleep and finish your thesis and the product is awesome. Incidentally: you don't smoke pot anymore because it freaks you out and wastes your time.

1. Try not to fuck over people.

Why bother?

I read in some British list of 100 things you didn't know from 2006 that maybe 9 in 10 airplane crashes have survivors.

WikiHow is pretty ridiculous. Easy to waste time here.

boo ya fuckers.

Midterms, duh

It's midterm election time. Just go out and vote. Of course, I read in Good Magazine last month that your vote doesn't matter.

Midterm elections are so uninteresting that political scientists have been able to write an equation for them:

Y1= B0+B1P1+B2 (∆E1)+u1

Edward Tufte's 1975 Economic Theory of Midterm Elections states that people vote for or against the president's party based solely on his approval ratings and their disposable income. Those lawn signs, local ads, and even the candidates themselves are irrelevant. The equation is more accurate than pre-election Gallup polls. And an easy way to outwonk your dorkiest friends. You want to end an argument with a poli-sci major, just start doing math.

So, uh. Yeah. I'm listening to that Fugazi album, smoking some cloves, editing a book about politics for a local writer, and I've got, like, three TVs strapped to my head to catch all the election day results as soon as they're frickin' available.

I'm not at work work today! (I work as a tutor at some local schools.) Every kid in Santa Fe gets the day off because it's election day. How sweet is that? Growing up in upstate NY, I'd never get such a frivolous day off because administrators knew that we needed our bullshit days to use as snow days. And if we didn't use all our snow days, well, we'd get out of school early.

I swear to god, these kids go to school less and less. That sounds like what my parents used to say. But when I say it it's true. But it's only cause the kids do go to school less and less--they always "ditch." The word "ditch" means to skip school. I don't know why they don't just say "skip," but "ditch" sounds OK. Anyway, they always ditching. Or, as they say, "deetcheeeeeeng."

I don't know why, but I get a lot more hits on my blog now that I don't write very often. Over the summer I would write every day. No one read it. Except for that one time I fucked with Ilm. Good times.

Maybe I'll write about Derrida tomorrow. Maybe later today I'll write about Wittgenstein. I will do all that. But only because I have to do all that anyway. You'll see. Watch this Mr. Show clip.

Gawker's Funny

Tough Life or Why Hot-shit Young New writers Suck

Oh yeah I wish I could be like this guy. [Gawker]

Brian, a 26-year-old M.F.A. candidate in fiction, earns a modest living from teaching, assisting professors, and writing magazine articles. His parents pay his tuition as well as a $140-a-month gym membership at Equinox. The rent for his half of a West Village two-bedroom is $1,800 a month, most of it covered by his parents. Each month, Brian pays $125 for cable and Internet access,$59.31 on his Verizon cell-phone bill, and $96.67 for a shared desk at Paragraph, a writing space.

I thought that, like, Starbucks was a "writing space." There're about eight things wrong with this character(ization).

I probably constituted this meaning a little askew, though, through a vaseline-smeared lens of schadenfreude. How I wish I were one of the few, the proud: the (rich) parent-supported. I'm sitting here looking at two ppl, a guy and a girl, eating some sandwiches at the counter. They're dressed in fatigues, and the guy has a little nick on the back of his buzzcut head. And a weak chin. The guy just got up to grab a napkin and I saw his name sewn on his uniform. "Fike." I bet MFA Brian has nice features, and his $1,680/annum gym membership probably keeps him in better shape than military training. His heart, I'm sure, is stronger for not having to fear the fall of a mortarshell, shrapnel and rubble flying, and the immanent loss of limb that should follow. I'd give anything not to have to support myself; I'd join the army too if I didn't think it would fuck me up, which would thereby negate or render useless the whole end behind not having to support myself.

Dude

I never thought I'd blog again. LOL. Who fucking cares. My friend tonight told me he was something like a little put off by life. I advised him to get stoned and work through it all. It's the best advice I could ever offer. Counseling/analysis via individual drug use. CAVIDU.

I discovered this social networking site called MOG. Shit's fucking sweet.

White Tea + Pseudoephedrine Hydrochloride

I bought this morning a box of Walgreen's brand pseudophed. It took about ten minutes: Pseudophed is kept in New Mexico behind the pharmacy counter; it's regulated, which means that as a step towards purchasing any pseudophed had to enter--a) my name; b) my driver's license number; c) my address--she had to enter these into the cash register; and there's a monthly maximum allowance of pseudophed that a person may not exceed. For reals.

I'm drinking this white tea that I got and it's good. All teas that one's likely to buy in a regular-type (i.e., non-Whole Foods) supermarket are made from the same tea leaves (for the most part). The color of the tea--black, green, (red?), white--is determinable by the duration of time in which a tea is roasted. The process is like that in processing coffee. White tea is roasted least.

I got Kaplan's 2007 GRE book, and I've got to say that I feel a lot better about taking the GRE now. I'm not certain that I want anymore to study Wittgenstein. (This path, which takes the form of a, say, Hegelian dialectic, is familiar; something seems awesome, but once I'm sufficiently immersed I realize it's not so awesome.) I'll figure something out.

I'm glad to see Matt Hasselbeck decided to throw the fucking ball. I still started McNabb and that's going pretty well for me. Have to play next week by ear. Well, actually. It seems now like I'm going to some guy's house to watch the Bears play Seattle and the Bears are home; so I think McNabb will be my starter for the time being. My fantasy team was all kind of injured, and I totally forgot I had Clinton Portis. This week was going great until I looked at the Washington box score and then realizations and questions and screaming and all that shit ensued. Why didn't I start Portis>!~>#?! I didn't even know he was still alive, though.

This blog thing isn't so fun anymore. But as things turned out, I had to take off from life this week. I might be more apt to write now that we're resuming our normal viewing schedule.

I am not afraid of you and you will read my ass.

I feel seachangingly better. I feel like Giotto di Bondone--I've finally found me some perspective. Fuck it, I love getting sick because the feeling of feeling better is one of the best feelings in the world. There is morning but there are no dust motes. There's sunshine but no effluvia. Everything is clear, clean and bright. Rather than smelling of sleepbreathe and ozone the bedroom one finds upon waking into wellness smells like nothing. How good is that?

Music

A few things. I might get bronchitis soon if I don't quit my ways. I need to rest. I'm going to Zozobra, which is a kooky New Mexico tradition in which is publicly burned a huge old man upon whom you're supposed to project all your darkest fears.

I finally get The Knife.

I finally got Joanna Newsom's Ys. (A great story: Pfork leaked the album. Great.)

Indietorrents is awesome.

I apologize for this being such a link-happy post; but I'm really wiped out and I need to save my strength for drinking lots of beer and dodging bullets.

If I Am A Stranger + Unheimlich

Like most people today, when the alarm went off I didn't want to get out of bed. I snoozed. But then I realized that I was being lazy and I got out of bed. Good. Once I got in the car I put on Ryan Adams' song Cold Roses and boy did that get my, uh, juices flowing. Really. Gosh. I feel like a thin line, long and straight; or an electric wire; maybe a razor--sharp and, well, brittle? I feel really sharp and, well, brittle today. I attribute this feeling to not having done any drugs or drinking recently. It does a body good.

I went to Saint John's for registration; what a clusterfuck.

I still haven't done any philosophy lately. I'm working towards a proposition in On Certainty, which is around 501, that says something along the lines of, Am I not getting closer and closer to saying that in the end logic cannot be described? It's a beautiful section, about 30 propositions deep. I can't help but picture Wittgenstein sitting in a room with a chair, a desk and a bed. That bed is his deathbed. He's sitting next to his deathbed banging up against the limits of his language. He's trying to say things; and he says things. Some things maybe go beyond this limit and he's inadvertently speaking nonsense: But he knows it. He often runs his hands through his hair, and then he gets up and stalks the perimeter of the room, pacing lengthwise over and over. He sits down again and writes that he's approaching saying that logic can't be described. But, of course, to say such a thing is to describe logic. He's running up against the apparent paradox concerning boundary-concepts that Kant ran up against in the Critique of Pure Reason: I.e., that the phenomenal is what we experience and the noumenal is the limit of our experience, a purely negative concept. A boundary-concept. Of course you'd like to say, This is it! This object is a noumenon--it cannot be an object of experience. But if you could say that, then the object would be an object of experience. There isn't even a last object of experience; there's only non-experience. A negative concept.

Something like an object of non-experience is an utterance of nonsense. Earlier (around 200 in OC) Wittgenstein says that logically, Moore is certain that he has two hands. To say you know it is nonsense, because, for one reason, the negation, I don't know I have two hands, is nonsense. This typification has to do with a logic to this language-game. (God, hyphens are ugly. This must be why Joyce abhorred hyphens [but not em-dashes instead of inverted commas for dialogue].) Logic in this situation can't be described. Is the feeling one gets upon hearing an illogical proposition something like the feeling of uncanniness? Of not being home, of something vague and spectral that's just wrong? I think it could be. I'm going to do a closer reading of the relevant passages this weekend.

Why not put together the Viennese writers of the early 20c? (I.e., Freud and Wittgenstein.) This isn't a methodological or ideological likening; it's putting two men together in a time and a place; ideas are local because customs and institutions are local.

I'd Like To Thank You All For Nothing At All

You know that sound that a guitar makes when it's cranked up and you play a chord and there's the sound of the chord and then this thrummmm sound that reminds me of whales and that sound leads to a faint suggestion of feedback, a squealing afterthought?

I didn't go to work today. I still heard about the Hitler restaurant in Mumbai or whatever. Fuck that. (Talking Points Memoist Jonah Whatshisname raised a good point when he said we don't mind Soviet kitsch but we abhor Nazi kitsch. I guess the Jews have more clout than the Kulaks or something?)

I watched Devotchka last night. They were ok. Ok, I'm going.