i like complex characters – the people in my life who play different parts, which is not to say that they are not steadfast and unwavering:  they absolutely are themselves at all times.  but those selves that are a complex balance of weakness and strength is i think what’s so appealing.  they’re just worth being around on character inspiration alone (though really much more, but when i’m feeling antisocial i guess that is how i see people).

Pronounced in a certain way, under his breath, with the ‘h’ strongly aspirated, her name sent her crazy. p.80

Reading Colette’s 7, which was given to me by my grandma, who prefers to be called Gigi (from the title character in one of the stories).  She acted very casual and bored when she gave it to me, but I know that this is just her act; I know it meant a lot to her.   I like the line above from the story ‘The Cat,’ which details the relationship of a boy and his cat, whom he loves far above his new wife.  While the style and genre are outdated, Colette excels in convincing description.  She sees her characters completely, clearly.  She can make a cat as seductive as a mistress, and a boy as playful as a puppy.

today my living room is filled with dozens of bags of books from t which i am going to go through, pick the best, trade out that many of my own (i won’t allow myself more than one bookshelf when libraries and the internet exist), then try to sell at work.  even if i got a dollar each for a quarter of them that would be sweet.  and they’re fun to go through.  i especially like looking at the czech ones, even though i can’t read them.  ha i spent years of my life trying to learn that language.  to this day i remember it better than spanish or french or italian, though that’s not saying much.  i wonder if d retained any of his spanish he picked up in costa rica.  oh well, brain plasticity is still awesome.

my favorite line in this is ‘i want to be scared.’

do i?  could i trick myself so well?

but i have so much to say.

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/FourierTransformSpectrometer.html

i will write it goddamn it! sloth-like as i am.  that paper’s gonna blow the whole world apart, but at least right before it does we’ll realize where we went so wrong.  ha welcome to my fairytale world of today it’s named Grandelusia.

We do not know what other purposes life may eventually generate, but creativity offers us our best chance of reaching them. p.414  On the Origin of Stories:  Evolution, Cognition and Fiction


Boyd’s book discusses the idea that evolution doesn’t start with a purpose and work towards it, it is only an intricate system for problem solving, which  relies solely on variation, forever transcending established models.  The purposes (hands that grab, throats that sing n swallow n swallow n sing, etc.), come later, after millions of years.  I wonder what purposes we are working out now, which we don’t even need to find the words for because they will evolve intuitively from our perpetual play.

Whether the ultimate point was preordained and gradually discovered; or created itself out of a vacuum, fashioned itself painstakingly slowly, through trial and error, with endless devotion, until the perfect project occurred, (see notes on Dennet’s cranes vs. skyhooks) – would one be any less meaningful?

I’ve spent a lot of time regretting not having had a focus, like if I had only seen some clear picture of what it was I wanted, I could have arrived so neatly, I could have sifted through experiences and funneled out only those relevant to my goal, I could have saved myself some time, or something.  But looking back this bottom up logic works with individuals too, it was only through all that varied experimenting that the goals even appeared, way after the process had already been set into motion.  On some level it’s just another example of how none of this seems to really need to be talked about (or figured out)…it just happens of its own accord.  I slow it down and try to picture it out of some slowly evolved sense of wanting to feel in control, but the wiring’s all there anyway, whether I chose to participate actively or not.

Actually, I’m lying cause I happen to know that aliens or angels are whispering all of the answers into our ears when we’re sleeping or sleepwalking.  Actually, the black hole gods are just tickling our earlobes with their strangely familiar death-breath, teasing us closer to the bridge we’re gonna fall from, when we realize that the steps just end cause no one found a way to finish it yet.  Actually, if we just pick apart our thinking and reprogram ourselves for immortality then we have it, just as simple as the museum of eterna’s novel…oh what novelty!  To just swim…with.you…with.in…this consciousness…forever… Actually the thing with the museum is you only get to live there if you never get to die, and who would really want to trade in all those little everyday deaths, those fuckingfightingcryingfests, that get you through the day and make the leaves outside glint that much greener.  Actually if we don’t jump off the hamster wheel with all this work and reaction not action and stress than how are we ever gonna have the space to play…without it will our evolution just grind to a halt and hover at mediocre machine?  Actually since when am I in my body at all and not just on the ceiling or spinning somewhere just underneath where the blades of the fan pass nicely over the air like slicing a layer right out from the atmosphere, since when am I not the green leaf if I want to be, since when can anyone tell me where the fuck to be?  Actually, I think I just remembered, what I wanted, if anything, was to make a way to never forget.

notes on Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which i read at work to avoid talking:

p. 39 The little scissors I am holding are
         A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.

p. 40 Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time,
         A singing in the ears.  In this hive I’m
         Locked up.

p. 41 Life is a message scribbled in the dark.  Anonymous.

p. 43 Four hundred thousand times
         The tall clock with the hoarse Westminister chimes
         Has marked our common hour.

p. 52 Iph

p. 54 let a person circulate through you

p. 61 ‘Beyond that orchard through a kind of smoke
         I glimpsed a tall white fountain – and awoke.’

p. 62 But all at once it dawned on me that this
         Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
         Just this:  not text, but texture; not the dream
         But topsy turvical coincidence,
         Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
         Yes!  It sufficed that I in life could find
          Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
          Of correlated pattern in the game,
          Plexed artistry, and something of the same
          Pleasure in it as they who played it found.

p. 63 Making ornaments of accidents and possiblities.

First off, I wanna make a picture of those exact lil synthesis scissors, n second I will work on further ornaments.

dreamed i was rolling around in fennel, and then remembered all of the fennel stalks and feathery branches i would throw into the grass outside of my old apartment, then remembered that the twins were of course one person. the smell of grass is good and i wanna sleep in it. 

going to sigrid sarda’s show at the ‘visceral’ exhibit in kingston tonight with t, who modeled for it.  wanna see t cast in wax, also sarda’s work looks pretty amazing.