Tips from Jack Keroac

Words to live by (or at least puzzle over), taken from his Belief and Technique in Modern Prose. They're really more writing tips than New Year's resolutions, but whatever. Living well and writing well require the same things. They may even be the same thing.

I'm writing now about whether thought requires language. The mind boggles. Are we alive or conscious if we don't encode our thoughts in words? Will we have been alive if these external brains of ours were to disappear? There's always wordless memory, I suppose. But that fades so quickly. Vanity demands something longer lasting.

Anyway, here they be:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Happy new decade, everyone. 

There is grandeur in this view of life

This is kind of a follow-up to a previous post in which I ranted about Meaning, and how looking for it is a waste of time. Rereading it, it comes across as slightly nihilistic, which doesn't represent my feelings about the matter at all. Or maybe it does, and I'm twisting "nihilistic" to my own purposes.

Anyway, here are two essays that seemed pertinent. The first is a lovely NYT piece on why science is actually wonderful and meaningful and fulfilling. The second is my favorite essay from Daylight Atheism on how the Enlightenment and all that rationalism stands for is responsible for most of the progress we've made as a species since then. There is incredible grandeur in this view of life. It's the view that has always seemed most natural to me, and the one, barring anything truly catastrophic, that I hope to stick to.

Avatar

I enjoyed it, but I didn't think it was that great. It was visually stunning, just beautiful. Zoe Saldana was wonderful. But the characters had no depth and limited development. There were no difficult moral dilemmas and the Noble Savage meme was really overplayed. The bad guys were irredeemably awful, the good guys were idealistic and pure-as-the-driven (and the scientists were right, godammit… I liked that part, but it did irritate me). Above all, the natives were supremely harmonic and peaceful and in balance and such. It was Pocahontas in space. The only thing I didn't quite anticipate was the ending being as treacly as it was. I didn't think Cameron was going to go there. He did. Ordinary white man goes into the woods, learns to paint with all the colors of the wind, gets the girl, out-natives the natives and then saves the world.


So, in sum: absolutely gorgeous, but ultimately a rather transparent white-guilt-redemption fantasy. I came home unsatisfied.


The internet!Right, with hilarious predictability, flips out.


Congratulations, libertarian/contrarian commentators: you are smarter than all of us. You’re wise to the hippie leftist, socialist, pinko-commie Marxist agitprop being churned out by Hollywood in their evil plot to... what was it again?


Linking this to climate change was a smooth move too. Climategate proved beyond doubt that global warming is a liberal fantasy. No truth behind it whatsoever. Even if there is, it’s just science, right? Skinny nerds in the pay of the blue elite pumping out misinformation in a desperate bid for grant money. It’s not really as bad as the pantywaist fearmongers would have us believe. Yeah, ok.


I have some questions about that after the jump.

Dogma (and to all a good night)

Merry Christmas!

I love Christmas. I really do. Lights in snowy darkness, and music and parties and a tree (a tree!) inside your house, just dripping with baubles. Oh, and presents. I love giving presents. Receiving them is nice too, but there's a very ingratiating part of my personality that makes me warm and fuzzy when someone reacts happily to something I've given them.

As secular as Christmas has become (thank goodness), it becomes impossible to escape the presence of tradition around this time of year. We take comfort in ritual as we try to assess what's going on, and how another year could have possibly passed so quickly.

At the dark end of the year, we try to sum up what's past into a coherent package and charge it with meaning. Maybe you'll use it to inform how we live the next year. Or maybe this is the sort of package you can't wait to get rid of.

More packages (and modules!) after the jump.

Sweet freedom

I'm done with finals! And I'm on the internet! On a bus!

This is magical.

No sooner said than gratified

As previously noted, I have been lusting after a rosemary bush for some time. The boy, being lovely, just got me one. It's sitting in my room, smelling wonderful, and I couldn't help decking it out with a few Christmas ornaments. Happiness.

I spent last night making 70+ cookies for a bake sale for Linguistics Society instead of studying for a class I have not attended since the midterm. The textbook is 500 pages long and denser than a fruitcake, and I've got tonight and tomorrow to get through the thing. Most of the theorists featured in the text are fruitcakes too.

So far I'm averaging 9 pages of font size 10 notes per unit. Just a few more to go, then I'll actually start reading the notes. Feh.

Notes, thoughts, and a rant after the jump. Today's special: I think "Meaning" is meaningless.

Finals week madness + sexy links

I've got my schedule for the next two days plotted out to the half hour, but it's all over on Monday. I'm shipping home an hour after my last exam ends. In tow: two computers, enough other electronic devices to keep a small army amused for decades, and an entire suitcase full of Christmas presents.

Many sexy links after the jump. Major tl;dr, but comb through and see if anything catches your eye.

Winter blooms (foliage is love)

I want growing things everywhere. I want vines climbing my walls and I want chloroplasts pumping out oxygen, the better to set things on fire. I want that fragile, green scent in the air and I want to see little buds coming out when everything outside is dead and frozen.

Picspam after the jump.

Hello. This is a blog.

I'm not sure I have anything of value to say, but this is the internet. I wouldn't be the first.

I'll write mostly for my own amusement, but if anything here makes you feel warm and fuzzy, please do read along.