hospitalterrorizer

on a couple songs. some reading. no drawing. cooking, today was very regular. no writing either. should be making myself write. the reading today was more of baudelaire's late fragments and i've decided to go back to the start, i noted, opening it the other day to read it between matches in marathon how dense and long the introduction was, and the introductions between sections, it seemed like a lot, i wanted the fragments, something smaller to live in. so i was looking at those but i felt i was missing out on something, and so i've restarted the book, rather than somewhere in the middle which is where the prose poetry seems to begin properly. but it's worth reading this other matter, it's a rather well written thing, to me, at least, and maybe this is in part because some of the writers referenced / cited are ones i have particular interest in, blanchot comes up a few times, nietzsche is around in places, agamben, much of the philosophy i am interested in is intoned here, even in quotations from baudelaire himself. sartre and walter benjamin appear, sartre's analysis of baudelaire as the obverse of klee's angelus novus, as benjamin analyzes it, instead of flying forward, propelled by the annihilation of history into the future, this lovely thing which embraces the immanence of things, baudelaire via sartre is instead blown from some terrible moment, facing history and dragged away, watching the rubble come down upon all that was, attempting to reconstitute it and incapable, as it has already fallen, is already falling, is already not. in its moving around these ideas, as well, i feel the citing it does, limited and precises, gives very good examples of some of the ideas of these writers / theorists / philosophers, in particular blanchot and agamben, bare life is rather concisely put at a point. i will get to citing these shortly but first i ought to work out so i can go to sleep sooner rather than later, it is also late. i believe the quotings will be short / not too long, anyhow. oh, also, a couple good words, parataxis / paratactic, i'd never seen nor heard this one (and it means, in grammar, the joining of phrases/clauses without conjunction, or short clipped sentences, the example given on wiktionary is i came; i saw; (etc.), and in literature it means images or fragments (sentences or otherwise) juxtaposed and of stark difference, connection being unclear, it is a very pretty thing, this kind of construction, and the word itself, or derivations, paratactic is often used in the introduction (i saw it twice, it's a word that is easy to be fond of)) , and horripilation (goosepimples, roughly). oh, also, i have written some lyrics today. i need to work out now, though.

here i am, now, now being instantly gone; then, then, but now, now. anyhow, now, quotings:

the first is a quotation from baudelaire himself:

'from some time now, i have been on the verge of suicide, and the only thing holding me back has nothing to do with cowardice or regret. it's out of sheer pride that i don't want to leave all business matters in a mess. i shall leave behind whatever needs to be paid... i am not, as you know, a sniveler or a liar. in the last two months, i have fallen into an alarming state of sluggishness and despair. i have felt myself attacked by a kid of malady a la gerard [de nerval], namely the fear of being unable to think anymore, or to write a single line. it was only four or five days ago that i managed to verify that i wasn't dead in that respect. which is not negligible.'

i found this rather affecting, mostly. especially those final two lines, i managed to verify i wasn't dead in that respect. which is not negligible.

the region regarding sartre / that quotation of sartre:

'(...) baudelaire is constructed by the marxist sartre as an emblematic figure of bourgeois self-alienation and self-reification. for such a subject, there can be no progress, no history, no development, no revolution, but merely (as walter benjamin says of allegory) an ongoing state of 'petrified unrest.' as the victim of an original fall (or false existential 'choice')that occurred at age seven, baudelaire will therefore always be experience his life as already or about to be over. 'few existences have been more stagnant than his,' sartre comments. (...) if baudelaire does not change, it is because it will always have been too late. 'baudelaire chose to advance backwards, his face turned toward the past,' sartre adds, in a metaphor that recalls benjamin's celebrated description of the angel of history in angelus novus:

'he has his face turned towards the past. what we perceive as a chain of events, he sees as a single catastrophe endlessly heaping ruin upon ruin and hurling the debris at his feet. he would gladly linger on--to wake the dead, to piece together what has been shattered. but a storm is blowing from paradise, so might that it has gotten caught in his wings and made it impossible for the angel to close them. the storm irresistibly buffets him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him mounts skyward. this storm is what we call progress.'

at times, i feel sartre can write very beautifully, in particular his fiction has done this for me. his writing of baudelaire is at once wounding and an accurate portrait of his reactionary character, beyond this, his central wound, and of his lateness to things. there's a mounting failure through his life, and it's as if he orients himself agaisnt that sense, rather than freeing himself he at times rather humiliatingly tethers himself to authority, at one point saying some celebration of shakespeare is really being held for hugo and others to spread socialism, in some anonymous letter, which shoots himself in the foot for his aims of being published by a particular firm. at once full of ressentiment and tied to what he resents, and his poetic project as well, perhaps more than anything else, really. his way of writing and plumbing the past for something new, not accidental, very pointed, but also almost unaware of itself as being somewhat radical a gesture. his being thrown into court of les fleurs du mal seems almost a shock to him. i am quite fond of the discussions throughout the introduction of his rediscovery of the baroque as a form and that it offers a 'new-antiquity,' in his words, written in some letters, i believe. it is to me still an exciting idea. at least the new antiquity.

another quote from the man himself:

'morally and physically i have always had a sensation of the abyss--not only the abyss of sleep but the abyss of action, of dream, of memory, of desire, of regret, of remorse, of beauty, of number, etc. i have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror. now, i am continually beset by vertigo, and today, january 23, 1862, i was given a special warning: i felt the wing of imbecility pass over me.'

'vertigos and repeated vomiting for three days. i was obliged to lie on my back... for even when crouching on the floor, i kept falling over, headlong. i think it was an intoxication of bile... a moment ago, i was about to break off this letter and throw myself on my bed which was quite an effort because i'm always afraid of dragging down the pieces of furniture with me,'

and from blanchot:

'waiting begins when there is nothing more to wait for, not even the end of waiting. waiting is oblivious and destroys what it waits for. waiting waits for nothing.'

'on a copy of this photograph dedicated to malassis, baudelaire inscribed a tag from horace--'ridentem ferient ruinae,' ('ruin shall strike him laughing')-- while lauding his friend 'as the sole being whose humor has brightened my gloom in belgium.'

'living on a diet of opium , digitalis, belladonna, and brandy, he tried to numb himself out as best he could in search of that same soporous state of suspended animation without umwelt--agamben's 'bare life'--for which he had longed for in his early poem 'de profundis clamavi': 'je jalouse le sort des plus vils animaux / qui peuvent se plonger dans un sommeil stupide' ('i envy the fate of the lowliest of beasts / who can pluge themselves into a stupor of sleep'). (...) he now (uncharacteristically) out his ailing animal body on display describing in detail his debilitating attacks of 'rheumatism and neuralagia in the head' (...) this is one of his last self portraits, its late style--noun phrases, few verbs--echoing the depersonalized paratactic jottings of his abortive belgium book: 'sequence of sensations: fuzziness in the head. fits of suffocation. horrible headaches. heaviness; congestion; total dizziness. if standing; i fall; if sitting; i fall. all this quite rapidly. after regaining consciousness, the need to vomit. head heating up. cold sweats. (...)'

'his illness had reduced his speech to that reiterative 'monotone of sound' which poe had described as the essential poetic function of the refrain in his 'philosophy of composition'--the parrotry of the raven's "nevermore!' (or, in baudelaire's translation, 'jamais plus!') no emerging as crenom! crenom! [this is an abbreviated form of sacre nom (goddamnit) which is explained in an earlier section of writing i am not transcribing] in this, baudelaire's palalia had also come to resemble that of egaeus, the diseased hero of 'berenice' who used 'to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind,' in short, baudelaire had plunged into that abyss of language (as blanchot would call it) prior to, or subsequent to, all articulate speech--the idiom of a-phasia of a-logos, located not in the cortex but in the more primitive basal ganglia of the brain.'

'je jette ma langue aux chiens.' word for word, this translates as 'i toss my tongue to the dogs,'

quite a lot to love, here, in particular i am very fond of this articulation of inarticulation, the abyss of language. into the sound of some single thing, repeated endlessly, into the tendons and minutiae of these things meant for communication, to the point they spin apart, reveal the void beneath. speech as condition for loss of speech!! speech itself as loss of speech. the head spins before the possibilities these things offer. i can see distant shapes of things i must write but there is no concretion. i am left seeing, blowing towards them, hopefully.

also obsessed with the turn of phrase 'i toss my tongue to the dogs,' he goes on to explain that this means, basically, that he hasn't got a clue. but it's so evocative. the admission of the failure of words, in a very delicate and blunt way, simultaneously. it preserves that loss, it is then so careless with it, cruel about it. laughing at itself.

hopefully i carry on with reading, the next section seems to be introducing an actual chunk of his fragments, and not just introducing him at the end of his life, and analyzing his work and letters, in a way which brings to mind klossowski's analysis of nietzsche.

i must be sleeping now, though,

so,

this channel, particularly:

these videos are really good. i found myself wanting to just see what anybody might have said about prototaxites, because i found myself wanting to see more stuff generally about that period of time, i was kind of wanting to see that old series, i forgot its title, but the one where there's rather elaborate 3d animation done for very early periods. the world before dinosaurs i think, or something like that. it's tragically subordinated to those things even by standing apart. but this very early kind of life, especially these edges where things had evolved such that they are unrecognizable to us now, i find that very inspiring and interesting. another good one about the first things to live on land:

i really like the reconstructions of cooksonia that i've seen. all those early land plants / things were really mysterious to me as a child, the world's strangeness was kind of contained in the fact that these things used to be here, to me. that and the rather amazing fact, to me, that our spine was the product of early fish, i would go around telling people about that and no one believed me. i liked it because i liked fish so much, it made me feel closer to them. despite the years between us all.

but this channel is a good way to waste time. i found out about a really well named ediacaran creature named the shaanxilithes. very pretty word. they are a kind of tube creature, not necessarily a worm. but maybe a worm. the very interesting thing about these kinds of animals and lifeforms, the thing that i find very exciting, at least, is that they seem rather outside of the configurations of life we are used to. classification is a profound struggle, the farther into the past we reach. each fossil is a kind of gamble and each interpretive act is only based on what is, for a thing that seems itself impossible. centuries spent wondering what the things are, and as with prototaxites, it seems possible to have that revelation, that they might wound our ideas of knowledge, the entire act of organizing threatened by these intimations. they are very poetic objects, these early fossils.

otherwise today's been slow. i prepared chicken, i played video games, i read a little bit of baudelaire but not so much, i want to read some more of these collected late fragments, though. i drew. i also had a moment that worries me quite a bit, where i was making a sandwich and when i looked up from the plate, a pressure entered into my head, and it was as if my eyes came unglued from one another, producing images i could not look at, there was vision but i was struggling to parse it, i knew what was there roughly but my right eye felt like it had begun doing its own thing, looking its own places. it's like being dizzy or like after spinning a while, the room keeps turning, your vision kind of loops on each turn, everything is spinning but never leaving your sight so it's always reentering center vision, escaping, reentering. it was like that in only one eye and i found it very scary and kind of stunning. it corrected itself but i really wish i knew what was going on. it's so sudden. i don't think i've done anything to myself to make that happen. i could say the things i am glad it is not but i don't want to curse myself, despite not believing in curses really.

tomorrow i will try to work on music. i wish i liked how things sounded. i wonder if it's an attitude issue. i don't know. i think it's just that i don't know what i'm doing. it's an issue with my hands being useless. i played guitar and that made me happy, at least.

here is the doodling from today.

i had a dream, i scarcely recall it. i was caught in a mall wandering. i remember many complicated feelings about the act of buying, the slate colors of tiles on the walls and the epoxy floor, or epoxy between tiled areas. some parts were older and more designed. it was all sad and dying.

i need to go sleep,

so,

maybe i should say fuck dynamics and stick weird distortion algorithms / harmonic shaping things on problem songs. it certainly made this thing i've been working on very interesting sounding, which is ideal. i want interesting sounds. sometimes dynamics are good. but what i need is a level of clarity where i can begin to figure out vocal rhythms and more importantly i need a sound which makes me feel ready to perform. i have inched nearer that. it's a sound that kind of scratches my ears, a bit, meaning it is satisfying, i think. may be too loud. i can stand to turn that down soon-ish but maybe it's not as terribly loud as i think. i dunno. dunno dunno dunno dunno. would like it to be instantly perfect, but it's not, but it's interesting and texturally dense in the way i need. it behaves strangely, which is good. some aspects of the sound feel pulled out by the thing i am doing.

i didn't expect to work on music, i was honestly feeling dire about it, and the sense that maybe i should give up was appearing to me as something sensible. this has snapped me out of that, hopefully for a decent amount of time. but who knows. it's hard to be positive about things sometimes, is all i can say.

today we went out, though, here i was, very basic, today:

my gf ended up scheduling us hanging out with a guy she knew since highschool, he knows her brother and he started texting her out of nowhere about hanging out. it seems kind of innocent though, i guess. she said i'd come too and he didn't back out. he seems like he just wants people to talk to about games and anime, his taste doesn't totally align with either my gf's or myself but he's a nice guy, it feels like. he seems pretty into those things, he like started talking about digital circus also, which isn't something i watched but his interest in it was a bit charming. i have seen all that jax fanart because my gf sees it and tells me that i'm 'like that,' and she finds all of the fanart rather cute. he and i talked about some videogame stuff but like i said i don't think we're like, into a lot of the same stuff, which is fine it's nice to talk with him. though at times it feels bad having to like, hold my tongue, like about attack on titan, it's my first time meeting him and he thinks it's like a great ending and great thing, and i just feel like it's all ugly and bad and i don't wanna be a prick. and it's best to not be a prick anyway, but it's also like, how well can i get to know you, how comfortable will i be or how much am i gonna be trying to just keep things flowing pleasantly. because i don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings, my hating stuff seems to do that and it's really rather impersonal, for the most part. it's not like i want to tear anyone down, all the time at least. he's given me no cause to wanna do that. or like, he likes shonen stuff, he likes normal guy stuff, he likes smash, i kind of hate smash, it's just sort of doofy to me i don't know. and it sounds like i think this guy has awful taste, it's just different. more that it's like, hard to talk with people about shared interests or a medium of shared interest and to just have different kinds of values. there was a bit where he was talking about how youtubers now making movies is like really exciting for him and that, for him, that's indie filmmaking (he was in particular interested in obsession which just seems like something i would be allergic to), and it's like, there's so so much, which made me think it'd be fun to show him stuff. but who knows if that'll ever happen. i'd like to, though. i dunno what i'd show him. or anyone, really. maybe we should just invite him to the theater if we're seeing something, or if they show an interesting anime film or something. i'd like to see him more, though, i think it'd be nice to at least try and be comfortable around him, and do stuff with him and talk about that, or see new things and talk about those, like it was nice talking to him even about stuff i don't like at all because he clearly does engage with it pretty closely, and he clearly has creative ambitions which make his viewing of things a bit studious in ways too. i mean, i dunno, i guess if not for my gf i'd probably never talk to him in the first place, and him talking to her again is kind of crazy, since her brother gave him her number, i think because he wanted to ask questions about his upcoming trip to japan, or maybe nothing in particular. or maybe ... (and i wonder, is that on his mind, the especially obvious things (and if so i wonder if comparing himself against me makes him think he has more or less of a shot (could really go either way))). she knew him in highschool, then as her brother's friend. he feels like a class of guy i'd never really interact with, he feels like he has a background that's sort of unfamiliar for me socially.

but we got lunch with him, told him about people we know and stuff we've done and he told us likewise, how he recently had an awful time at edc getting too drunk and then getting the flu, stuff like this. i should have told him about vomiting on a tree in san francisco. after this we got gelato at a nearby cafe, and talked more.

the way to lunch was annoying, we had to walk and it was so windy out, it really blew.

but after talking a while he took us home. i also wonder if we could get him around our other friends.

at home i saw that there was a camrip of the backrooms movie somebody put on twitter which i ended up like, curiously clicking through and then deciding to just watch. i don't know how i feel about it. i would say i'd like it more if it were just the found footage stuff stretched out as much as possible. more silence. i think i do like that the monster stuff in the movie is these weird people-things, more than the weird wire creature. this feels more interesting, at least. a bit more affecting looking too, and the sequence with the woman one in found footage is a bit scary. or her in the room, that looks good as well. i'd say there's a lot that just feels damaged by the a24 stylings coming through, everything is too centered and there's a kind of filmic logic that's too digestible that prevents any of its stranger ideas from being fully confronted by the audience, i think. like that one scene where her house degrades through this system of memory, until it's featureless and there's a misplaced archway. that's an interesting thing, or it could have been, it could have been a much more textural film but it feels like this is foreclosed upon by a sheen and aesthetic guidance that makes this, beyond legible, something that can go beneath notice, it's like how things 'ought,' to go, even if the centered framing of so many shots kind of points to an artifice in the camera it's always a little uncomplicated, it's always pretty much the shortest line between the viewer and information, it's a kind of naturalism of logic, and it's the kind of thing that only becomes painfully apparent if one notices it, it's hard to stop. that's why the found footage stuff works out so much better, it feels like it lands on much more interesting shots. i think they should have tried to work the whole thing like that.

there's probably more to say, but really i think i have some kind of warmth towards it, despite finding it basically like a movie a 20 year old would make, and that the psychologizing stuff, though at points seemingly critiqued by the film (her infomercial thing putting her in league with clark, as well as how at the end her psychological framing of her conversation with him has to fall apart for anything to progress), to be a frustrating thing in the space of the film because at times it feels like it is trying to get you to know it is doing something. i dunno. it feels less like kane and more like a24, that it seemingly neurotically remind you that it's doing something. but i digress, there is some warmth, from me, because that scene in the showroom house thing is a rather shockingly placed texas chainsaw massacre family dining scene pull, and i dunno, it kind of worked. or it made me a little giddy. and it wasn't nearly as brave as that scene is, with its long shot on the eyeball of sally, that it kind of feels like landscape photography there, which makes me think about all the wonderful shocking things you can do with a camera, ways to create tension between images and make us feel ourselves, each inch of being and the fact of embodiment, and that this film largely avoids the experience of the body (outside of some moments in the found footage sequences which feel like a muscular kind of filmmaking and do emphasize one's own presence and infirmity, the way they are thrown around, tape interference and poor focus and unsteady hands), still, clark being giddy about being able to eat the fake people is something i didn't expect. i also didn't realize there'd be a saturn eating his son bit, but that's pretty fun too. it's like more fun than i thought. i guess i hope he can make more movies, and is able to get away from this way of shooting.

i should also probably see it again at some point because a camrip isn't the best way to judge a thing, i was just rather curious about the thing. i do wonder if i'd come away a little less positive because the low quality of a camrip adds some fraying to the images that are not found footage that might cover up some of the sheen that seems to be there.

also found myself rereading john cheevers' the swimmer. they mentioned cheevers in this atlantic article about postliteracy. it'd been a while and i've been curious about revisiting it. i'm not entirely sure why. i don't have a special fondness for it, i think it's good enough, i don't love it, really. i guess that just means it works as a piece of short fiction, beyond any affection it's an interesting enough thing. there are certainly moments i quite like, the description of the storm coming on, the swelling of the clouds and the way they were likened to a city seen from a distant hill, now darkening, now a city over another. the description of the fall constellations and his sadness over seeming to see them. his misplacing himself, and the way it talks about his 'discipline for the repression of unpleasant facts,' it's not so subtle that something bad had happened, the precise dimensions also aren't so unclear but they're a bit floaty, the feeling of losing track of this, not wanting to know these things, and coming up with things like this and being surrounded by a sociality that seems to enable something like this (the kinds of summers where everyone talks of how drunk they are, how they've been too drunk recently), or references to him being a pilgrim, always moving from something. that sense is strong. it makes me think i should have a friend read it, it's the kind of thing i think he'd really really like.

i would also say that it feels like it is the genesis of a lot of bad kinds of writing, and it feels like the kind of thing taught to some extent in writing workshops that creates too great a sense of what a literary affect is / should be. it's not so good that it needs to be that kind of thing, i think. not that anything is. at the end of the day i have a different hunger for things, it's interesting to read something i had to read for a class some years ago, though, and thought was alright.

speaking of writing, though, i got some done today as well. i think i need to try and force myself to do so tomorrow too but i think i found the paragraph necessary to join one thing to the rest of itself which i had planned out and written some of. that feels very good. that and another portion was written, which may be what directly follows that.

i should sleep now,

so,