post structure

back to the muse(um)

2008-09-04T09:15:00.009-05:00

If anyone remembers that dull period last year after my red hair faded to a mousy brown, you can blame one of my muses, Jenny Lewis. Lately I've been obsessed with a couple Rilo Kiley albums (again), but I must admit I haven't heard Acid Tongue yet (and I'll just go ahead and blame Bambino for that one, too, even though I'm not sure I ever remembered to ask for it). When the lovely Jenny sings, "Any asshole can open up a museum, / Put all the things he loves on display so everyone can 'em," I am always reminded of my thesis (and now perhaps the blog below--see the reference to Ullman and Warhol) and the muddled ideas I'm still exploring about the connections between the MUSE and the MUSEUM.

To summarize very poorly, one section of my thesis muses (haha) about the woman's role in art (as inspiration, closer to divine creation than man, but still incapable of the act of creation--so angelic, so much too good for "work" that work is impossible) and a coinciding fear (and contradictory wish) of being mummified--voiceless, stuffed, frozen, worshipped, a fear also experienced by displaced and revered cultures so that now I wonder if contemporary woman--if we can be considered a culture all our own intermingled with the culture of man--has experienced a diaspora that makes our comm-unity all the more impossible and precious at the same.

Since the completion of said thesis, I have read Francine Prose's The Lives of the Muses and, just today, an article about Ruth Butler's new book Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet and Rodin. Does the subject of the muse and the museum intrigue me for self-destructive reasons? On which side do I fancy myself? Do I imagine I am the man, Dali, Johnson, Nietzsche, drawing on my muses (both masculine and feminine--Jenny, Jackie, and on and on, and my real-life partners and friends), sucking them dry like meat from a crab leg? Do I imagine I am a model, fascinating subject, inspiration to the few poet-seers with whom I have engaged? Or do I, even more dangerous, pretend I am that odd combination, artist-without-muse, the successful woman poet, like Sylvia, feeding on myself like the ouroboros? Although it's meant to be life-affirming, my Poe-loving brain cannot help but conjure up a more grizzly image. Perhaps I only fancy that I am a Hawthorne (hawthorn even), frequently indulging in Emersonian optimism, but never failing to collapse onto the dark side--to de-press into meaninglessness.

There's an important connection, also, between the past (the museum) and the future (poetry as prophecy), but somehow the present prevents me from seeing either.

coffee, email and the death wish

2008-09-03T09:16:00.003-05:00

In the first episode of the first season of my new favorite show, MAD MEN, the advertising executives acquire and quickly dismiss Freudian research regarding the public’s secret longing to hurtle toward its own end. (The conversation is rooted in the first uncoverings of the health risks of smoking cigarettes in the early sixties. Lucky Strikes, I should mention, since Bambino is now scouring the city looking for Lucky Strikes so he can be the next Don Draper.)

What is your death wish? Smoking, drinking, reckless driving, gluttony?

My first inclination is to examine my own habits and decide how I am subconsciously choosing glamour over life. I drink surprisingly little considering the habits of my comrades, and I don’t smoke, also surprising considering my comrades. But boy do I drink the coffee every morning, the dark sin. So is chocolate sinful and so is red wine, but those I can justify, for their deliciousness, their association with celebrations, antioxidants, antidepressants. But I drink coffee because I hope it kills me, in the most emo way. I drink it because I’m sad, because I need something else, because I need to ingest it nonchalantly the way Mrs. Draper puffs on her Lucky Strikes—because I need to cup my childlike hands around an enormous mug and pretend it makes me a woman, it makes me smart, it makes me too cool to care.

And, finally digging deeper like the most brilliant-but-lazy student writers of whom I’m so fond, I begin to wonder what other indulgences are really only tiny suicides. And I think of my current struggle to keep up with a new semester. And what has become perhaps most burdensome is my multitude of email addresses, each of which requires daily checking and responding. There’s three university addresses, one from my alma mater and one each for my two new places of employment, and then there’s my first email address ever (which I check only, ahem, bimonthly—you choose how often that is), and the email address I created for the job search months ago. And then there’s the other forms of online communication: myspace, facebook, blogger—all of which have fallen by the waysidegutterside, died a thousand deaths at my own hand, accounts attached like arms and legs to relationships severely wounded, if not completely amputated (but this is no place for apologies).

And this is me oscillating again, thinking this spreading out of my self is alternately a multiplying and a fragmenting. This makes more of me: more identities, more impossibility of escaping me, of pinning me down. This makes less of me: less cohesion, less possibility of wholeness, less chance of owning my self. This makes me an elephant: I am too enormous for you, I crush you. This makes me an elephant: You can ride me, put me in the circus.

I am thinking of Mirabai, and of Ellen Ullman’s “Museum of Me,” because I cannot deny that I am pulled down into my internet generation while still distancing myself from it, reminding myself that when I was in high school no one was on the You Tube, the My Space, the me-me-me, everyone’s a star, Andy Warhol’s predictions come true and then meaning nothing and I –see my own i-i-i—wonder if I’m possibly bigoted in my elitism, scorned that everyone’s a would-be journalist. I am gentrified. I am in a Woody Allen flick, playing tennis. I am haunted by the harsh judgment of Scarlett Johansson’s character in Vicky Cristina Barcelona: her “death wish” apparently makes her a “mental adolescent” and I wonder if the relationships in that film are the strongest or the weakest for their multiplicity.

Am I spread like seeds, like the divine, infinitely transforming, infinitely becoming every shade of wonderful? Is each incarnation stronger than the last, an affirmation, a version more worldly and wise? Am I a chameleon who selfishly benefits from acting out each fantasy of identity in an enclosed domain that is the e-ddress? Am I a sorry scrap heap of disassembled parts, already dead unless I rebuild?

What is your death wish?

submit to conquer

2008-08-14T11:46:00.008-05:00

Apologies/Fall is Coming, that familiar rush, that familiar relief: that i am not dead, this part of me still lives and leaves, the zombie-fear vanishes, For Now.

Still a sleeping beauty, I became an Adjunct (yes, again, and times two). For those who don't remember, or never really knew, an Adjunct, for the purposes of this paragraph of this blog, is a part-time college-level instructor. I am already at home (back home? if the womb is the beginning and the end); content; with contempt. When I fall away, it is down into a place of uncontested, invisible, indivisible power. As I promised so many months ago, I marry: divisions, here: sadism and masochism, or domination and submission, or any combination thereof.

In another uncontested source of power, Shakespeare takes King John (for whom the play is named, and so, it is, questionably, "his" play, or at least his position is at--or on--the top) and makes him say to a subordinate, I love thee well; / And, by my troth, I think thou lov'st me well, to which the sub(missive) Hubert replies: So well, that what you bid me undertake / Though that my death were adjunct to my act, / By heaven, I would do it.

Ah, the willingness. The fierce, the sexy, the terrifying claim that can be transplanted in and out and in and out of Shakespeare and into everyone: What you bid me undertake... I would do it.

King John will ask Hubert to murder Arthur, and Hubert delights in taking orders, even though his death may result, adjunct to his act. I think this may be the first usage of the term "adjunct," and it is thus the curiously temporary connotation of contemporary usage that strikes me, the reader, as ironic. "Only can die once, right, Sir?" (forgive me for conjuring images of Streisand)--Even Fanny Brice is a sub for Nicky Arnstein in Funny Girl--but that is neither here nor there--as, I have obsessively tried to establish to my invisible and perhaps nonexistent readers, there is no here, there is no there, only gradations of each.

Without drawing too much attention to the politics of gender (with which I am becoming bored), or to the politics of sexuality, or to the possibility that yet another two of Shakespeare's men were romantically involved as is so vogue, I'd like to point out what many would call the "problem" with S&M/BDSM, because it is the same "problem" that deflated my excitement about my new adjunct "jobs" when I searched the term "adjunct" and found this definition: something added to another thing but not essential to it. This is where the power of submission diminishes. Kid yourself, please; it is pleasantly painful; but the doms do not need you. Again, we are dispensable, as woman, as faculty, as human. For every John and Hubert, there is an Arthur. But what the fuck ever, we'll still get off. And because of, not in spite of: another definition of "adjunct" is "a person associated with lesser status, rank, authority, etc. in some duty or service; assistant." Hello, Secretary. No offense to the Nachbar crew, who remain forever divided (note the ridiculously singular term 'crew': people, particularly groups of them, can never be married the way words and ideas can, the words and ideas I love much more, though they lie and lie tragically, without physical bodies central to making love) in their opinions of that film's star-with-the-best-first-name, but how not to recall a MISTER Gray when thinking of the control of a King, the John who doesn't force Hubert to kill, but acts on Hubert's desire to please? We will not forget the age-old connection between orgasm and death, or, more specifically, murder.

And now, finally, there is this definition of "adjunct": "attached or belonging without full or permanent status." Here is the best fit: an ill fit. As I said, I am happy home. A hermit crab I am I am, listlessly slipping on the next shell like a negligee, hoping the next one will be thrust upon me by a Mister and/or King, please-and-thank-you-and-you're-welcome.

Here is the best fit: here is an ill fit.

tony stark and mary poppins: the fun-v or the humdrum-v?

2008-05-13T20:07:00.006-05:00

Well, they’re not books, but movies can be studied in much the same way.

In this blog, I am going to draw completely unfounded connections between a 2008 comic book adaptation, Iron Man, and a 1964 Disney musical, Mary Poppins, solely because I saw the two within a day of each other. (I’m not versed in film crit, but in lit crit, we could accept this connection as long as there’s the flimsiest floss to tie them together.)

While Mary Poppins sets out to teach the daddy (the banker Mr. Banks) a lesson about valuing his children over his monetary ambitions, Tony Stark realizes he is the daddy who has been similarly valuing profit and his penetrating escapades with both his military missiles and his other missile and thus decides, like Mr. Banks, to fly kites instead, which for Tony means creating suits and defeating his dirty-dealing surrogate father.

It must be said that I saw Iron Man over the weekend not because I am a comic book fan (much to the chagrin of every male friend it seems I’ve ever had), but because I am a Robert Downey, Jr. fan. Few celebrities elicit such sexual energy from my being. In fact, only three: Jack White (who sings “You look pretty in your fancy dress, but I detect unhappiness” to me and me alone), Barack Obama (who beams those teeth just for me and moves those hands just for me), and RDJ. Okay, four: I’ve also got a dirty job for Mike Rowe.

Robert Downey, Jr. gets me every time, the quintessential quasi-intellectual bad boy: in Less Than Zero, when I wanted to wipe his brow during his drug withdrawal, in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which left me incanting for weeks “Harold, use your awesome might to save me from this hopeless plight,” in Wonder Boys, when I wanted to be his James when he says “I feel this kid in my bones” and Grady so appropriately responds: “Only in your bones?”, and now in Iron Man as the nearly-admirable Tony Stark, which makes me think I really am Pepper Potts, after all, the only one who can’t have his sex.

The movie is admittedly not the best action flick ever. The gang of boys with whom I attended the theatre seemed to be rather disappointed, in fact. But they did not have the same voyeuristic pleasure as I did acting out fantasies of being not Iron Man but Mrs. Iron Man. (But then maybe only Iron Woman, who in some sense I am, allowing suits to do the work for me.)

So I began wondering, in a spasm of unoriginal thought, what is the female equivalent of a superhero? Although many little girls read comic books, I’m sure, the target audience has traditionally been male. (And let's face it: Wonder Woman is just a man with boobs, long hair, and a killer costume.) In Iron Man, in Spiderman, in Superman, and all the others, little boys see themselves: usually ordinary Joes with flaws who get to cope with the enormous responsibilities their powers bring.

Enter the rebellious nanny played by Julie Andrews. With the maternal instinct to care and teach—but without the obligation to stay—Mary Poppins lives a floating life, literally floating in and out on her umbrella, not unlike the wild thing that was Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s only three years prior. And then of course there is also the character Vianne, so beautifully played by Juliette Binoche in Chocolat, who also comes and goes with the wind after she has imparted her maternal wisdom on an early sixties French village.

Not having seen Mary Poppins since I was a youngster, I was particularly struck by the spoonful of sugar-coated (pardon me) but unabashed political agenda of the film, which pushes for a rosy “female” sentiment, as Mr. Banks calls it, to take the place of uptight masculinity. Repression, begone! it seems to shout, but in the same breath that it accuses the little suffragette wife of being a scatter-brained fool. When the painting scene comes around, with the adorable Dick Van Dyke, I wonder if my literary training (which some call borderline pornographic) is to blame for my thinking, on this viewing, that Mary Poppins is just a big ole tease, flirting with Burt but always leaving him. She is the butterfly, the Cara McFall of early 20^th century London. Burt sings: “When Mary holds your hand, you feel so grand; Your heart starts beating like a big brass band.” And Mary, although later she is visibly miffed when Burt begins to list positive attributes of other women, compliments him in turn on his never “pressing [his] advantage.”

Iron Man's Tony Stark, on the other hand, is quite good at pressing his advantage. Though Robert Downey Jr. lets us know Tony is grappling with his, for lack of a better word, morality, he still disposes of women, condones violence, and has the unforgiving financial prowess of a Mr. Banks. Perhaps loosening Mr. Banks' tie was never the answer and the floating femininity solved naught.

And so my question, I suppose, is this: male or female, does the fun-v always drive away? Is part of being a hero always sacrificing hum-drum (but stable and loving) domesticity in order to roam the world slaying enemies, delivering chocolate, and caring for rich kids? And why do the movies always have to make that look so fucking glamorous?

heads, tails, and semesters

2008-05-06T18:17:00.006-05:00

Forgive me, father; it has been thirteen days since my last confession. In those thirteen days, I have massacred. And worse still, I am proud of my work, of the death toll. I am a dictator, crazy with power. I have destroyed, I have undermined, I have selfishly indulged in childish fears, in adolescent rebellion. There were supposed to have been 76 heads on sticks, but three got away. I am a mad scientist, but without Frankenstein's output, without the sanity to attempt to reverse my mistakes. I am recklessly creating a new generation, if they will let me. I don't want them to be bitter, but I want to make them vulnerable, like me, to expose themselves, to feel every tender prick in the world.

This was my April curse. Well, the first of two parts: there was this terroristic madness, but it was coupled with an intense examination of said madness. The idiom goes: "April showers bring May flowers." And, for the House of Brown, every year since '74 has brought a stormy April. This month has seen members of my immediate family injured, robbed, killed, or otherwise devastated. I thus approach April with (and I think I'm not the only one in my clan) a sense of impending doom. You may call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I have hence been struck by the curse this year, not in the usual way--this April I was cursed with a sickening, despicable case of Nostalgia. So now, safely in May, I recount the symptoms of this disease.

I love about the academy what I loved about the theatre: the ephemeral nature of it. Each semester begins and ends, and thus leaves little tiny openings for the devil Nostalgia to run in and grab you by the throat. I could call him Reflection, or Reminiscence, and thus lend some significance and maturity to the process; I could refer to Michelet and Freud, who both thought that woman is the vessel for the repressed past, devoted to reminiscence. But both would be evasion. (Ironic how the most powerful language comes from a desire for clarity and a desire for concealment all at once. Words: demons, eaters of souls, sending us off in packs like innocent uniformed schoolboys about to discover responsibility. And girls.)

And so, at the end of this particular semester, perhaps my last at this particular university, I find myself crying: Goodbye, Suck City; I love you. There, I said it. As I start packing up books, I feel a responsibility to this city, this place, Bowling Green, Kentucky. I have been a horrible lover; I am like the mother who held a car above her crushed son for a full five minutes, just standing there--I saved myself, but only after standing there, for a full four years.

But this is my Ode to Home, what was to have been the purpose of this particular blog. How it has all changed. Here is where my coming into being is still coming, where college follows me like a puppy, and I am passing through beds, being resigned to an unremarkable life, feeling like cement churning sluggishly in a truck, remembering when I "hitched my wagon," walking by dormitories, standing in the stairwell in the light booth, watching Travis being followed by a photog, and all of you with your cigarettes--why did I never smoke?, I'm in the experiment on Center, I'm with the Mimosa girls, I'm wearing all the Halloween costumes, sitting at Froggy's when it was Baker Boys, glaring at Wayne when he hated my shoes, wanting the show to never be over, feeling my legs turning blue but there's still one more left, painting circles and watching Tim Burton, annoying Gretzsky on the ice, planning ahead at SATCO, at Cattie's, at Kessley's, dancing with Susan and Shea at State Street, holding 'meetings' at Spencer's, walking ominously up those cobwebby steps at Jason and Jeff's, receiving a naughty gift from Aimee, being "found out" by Missy, remembering that Louisville is one way and Nashville another, and here is the place in between.

To what extent, I wonder, have I lived "by the rules"? And what have I hoped to accomplish when I transgressed?

All this Nostalgia. Emerson says it's ok--it's my job as a scholar to Think. Michelet and Freud say it's ok--it's my job as a woman to Think. But then there's all of you-and-you-and-you out there, still alive, who call Reminiscence and Thinking "worrying" and "impractical." But I create, I know, you-and-you-and-you "in my own image"--and can there be any other way? We are all gods, some of us better than others, creating, multiplying, eating and breeding. It's disgusting. But perhaps by expelling here, I hope to purge that desire to colonize my students.

obstinate questionings

2008-04-23T09:12:00.005-05:00

Yeats apparently heard voices in his head saying "Hammer your thoughts into unity." A hammer, sometimes, I think, will not suffice. At every turn (and I even recognize it in my own rhetoric), there is a this and a that, option A and option B, nature and nurture, war and peace, Hillary and Barack, to be or not to be. No union there.

Today, for example, I see an inside and an outside, an internet connection and a candle, a jellybean and a Vitamic C drop.

It was Earth Day. Like most, I hope, I can still experience spring as I did when I was sixteen: with a giddiness, a freshness, a gravity that draws me to the soil, to humanity, without weighing me down. Ah, but for the unmanageable allergies and other practicalities. So I stay inside. I read and read and write and write and this becomes as unmanageable and impractical.

Yeats' dialogic poems explore just such a back and forth. This, too, is two-dimensional. The most fundamental "conversation" is a two-party one, a call and response, a first term and a second term taking turns like a see-saw, cause and effect, response and reaction. It is endless, but never linear because it can never be complete. It does not stretch "into" infinity; it simply is infinity. You choose which parts deserve response and the rest is lost forever. The words just fall away. Perhaps they melt and half-freeze again, forming a soft snow-like cushion for the chosen words, resigned to being the throw-aways, the have-nots, second-rate to the meaning-makers. They are often invisible even in text messages and myspace comments. There are smiley faces, though: a symbol of a symbol, signifying in (not into!) infinity. What, then, is signified?

In my first post, I referenced my arrested development. And is this hammering into unity childishness? Often times the philosophizing makes me feel foolish, impotent. And other times it makes me feel whole and proud and innocent and untainted. No, no--not the innocence. Wordsworth writes of the "perpetual benediction" he feels toward "the thought of our past years," but not for our childish innocence, "but for those obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things." Perhaps my questions veer toward petulant, but I hope not to grow "out of" obstinacy.

"The Black Cat": one example of an uncomfortable crossing of worlds: the incompatible images of the self. There is me, relaxed as I attempt to be, professioning (I'm Timothy Leary, folks, passing out knowledge and crying Tune in!) in front of students nearly as old as me, some perhaps as smart, and it still feels a bit like show-and-tell. These things I "learned" in graduate school jump out of my skin like chronic eczema and I want so badly to pentrate our authoritarian-subordinate barrier and share. It is ok for them to know some things (I dig the new Raceonteurs) but not others (I didn't grade your papers yet because I was drunk on Tom Collins). Some things (I think Robert Penn Warren sucks), not others (if you quote your pastor in class one more time it's an automatic F).

So this barrier was crossed the day we read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat." I mentioned one of the some things (I have a black cat) and it led to not-others ("What's his name?"). What is your cat's name. The question paralyzed me--perhaps my defenses were not as strong that day as they usually are--so i blushed. I was mentally transported to my messy apartment where I live pathetically alone and there are things I don't want them to see--a bra lying on the floor, a half-eaten bagel, post-its sticking out of books with My Private Reactions! (and other things I cannot even bring myself to write in a virtually anonymous blog). I am in a bright classroom in Cherry Hall but I am afraid they can see my dark apartment and my black cat -- Benito Burrito Mussolini -- hissing for them to leave. Get out!

Well, which is it then: in or out?

the guilty (and unreliable?) narrator

2008-04-21T18:13:00.004-05:00

Yes, I sometimes call you/them stupid, but only indirectly, and at least I feel guilty about it.

This semester, I made my students read Joey Goebel’s Torture the Artist. And yes, this was selfish of me. And yes, this was rather fundamentalist of me, hoping that I could force my love of subversion-via-rock-n-roll on them.

In the novel, a very lovable narrator, Harlan Eiffler, is recruited by the evil magnate of a global media corporation. The figurehead is attempting to redeem himself by creating a division of his company called New Renaissance, which will attempt to permeate popular culture with “real art” (“whatever that is,” I hear you saying, recognizing the age-old conundrum) to replace the trashy entertainment that has become a signifier for a shallow dumb-ass culture. (Gee, sound familiar, VH1?) Harlan’s job is to torture the most promising student of the arts, Vincent. The best art, after all, comes from the tortured, does it not?

I won’t give away more of the novel here, but I’m perplexed that my summary focuses solely on the crux of the viable argument-paradox—the issue which allows this novel to be considered “appropriate” for study—when really I meant to reveal my true purposes: to say, Oh how bitchin’. The subculture lives. We, the elitist rock-n-roller hipsters who love our Ginsberg as much as we hate our Bush are “right.” We have access to what is True. We are the only Poets, whether we write lines or not. Pretentious as it is, we have been, as James Dickey writes, “the masters of the superior secret, not they.”

And this need to assert ourselves “above” frat boys and office drones is false. For some, this is an attempt to turn the hierarchy on its head and say ‘art rules, commerce drools’ much in the way that some feminists mistakenly think it is women’s role to say, ‘no WE are better.’

But to truly be an Other in America, do we have to be non-white, gay, lesbian, Middle Eastern, etc.? To be culturally Othered within our own culture, if such a thing exists, can it be a choice to be bohemian, to be scenester/hipsters with subscriptions to ReadyMade magazine? Is this Emerson’s new patrician class? It would be rash to generalize about the multitude of subcultures, but there is a (perhaps mistaken) commonality that used to be closely related to economic class in addition to artistic tendencies, whether chosen or imposed. But when I see kaffiyehs at Urban Outfitters and hoards of Jackie O wannabes sprawling around the bars at indie shows, I’m not so sure…

I feel guilty for it all. Wanting to be sub, not being cool, criticizing, not criticizing.

So just how subtle am I, introducing this text to my students with the intention of converting them into living, breathing, thinking beings with passions for what I think is inherently "good"--rock n roll, literature, etc.? Go read Torture the Artist.

P.S. I love ReadyMade, Urban, and Jackie O—I am a polyphonic text.

preface: the interstices of truth and aporia

2008-04-21T16:07:00.007-05:00

The following concepts, and the pleasure I take in them, are the impetus for this blog. But, quite frankly, I am hopeful that the breadth of this apparently philosophical and literary introduction will allow me to write here whatever the fuck I want. Take pleasure!

aporia: “a difficulty encountered in establishing the theoretical truth of a proposition, created by the presence of evidence both for and against it”; “a figure of speech in which the speaker expresses or purports to be in doubt about a question”; “an insoluble contradiction or paradox in a text’s meanings.” (all definitions from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/aporia)

negative capability: John Keats’ concept of a state of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

jouissance: For Jacques Derrida (that silver fox!), jouissance is the pleasure with which a deconstructionist approaches a text. For Luce Irigaray, jouissance is feminine sexual pleasure, in all its plurality. For me, an American girl (not sexist—my age may say woman, but I am in arrested development), the pleasure of reading and the pleasure of sex are inseparable. When deconstructing, I rarely reach orgasm (come to a meaning), but the foreplay is the most fun, rebelliously, perhaps sometimes pugnaciously, contrary to a linear conception of ‘progress,’ moving toward an end. Instead, there is an Eastern meditative principle at play, where a ‘goal’ is insignificant and a sustained state of enlightenment is preferable.

And so:

When, for example, J. D. Salinger’s Buddy Glass writes so lovingly of his dear brother Seymour, who shot himself, he cannot help but answer when he asks, perhaps in Socratic, perhaps in Yeatsian, form, but certainly inhibited by a two-dimensional kind of meaning (even if it requires a metaphysical leap) like we all are:
“Isn’t it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say… I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.”

I am looking for a place, and I hope this is it, where I can reconcile without reconciling the hideous world of academic thought with the equally hideous worlds of the aesthetic, the mundane, the bodily, the colloquial.

At the interstices of truth and aporia, I hope to find an uneasy tantric peace, the Chaos of Home. I hope to write this blog with all my stars out, and have it mean, all at the same time: a. the stars are out and burning clearly, b. the stars are out as in "off," dimmed, hiding, and thus, of course, c., which means, quite stubbornly, with a satisfying finality, "?"

P.S. (post-script AND post-structure AND just p.s.!): the image here is a version of the ouroboros, or "tail-devourer," inspired by a painting belonging to my office mate, whom I'll call The Guru Dr. Drew.