Mikarrhea

Fuck synchronicity
Disaster. I came to the computer this AM pruritic to get down (out? off? over? at? behind?--just where exactly am I in relation to them?) at least some of the hypomaniacal lucubrations of an all-but-sleepless night (watched Adaptation late w/L, animated conversation, then thoughts racing off in so many directions like a dropped handful of marbles, several more of which no doubt I then lost) and discovered a calamitous glitch in the matrix: every single date of every entry from 2003 had been changed to 8/22/03. A few days ago it seemed that only some dates from this summer had been homogenized. Now it’s infected the entire year. This was in many ways a transformative summer. I’ve been writing so much more. How fucked not to have a record of when my brain was meandering and loitering where. I suppose I can recapture the last few days from the blog. But that’s not much. Should I start printing this shit out on paper?

Raymond Smullyan's penis, jism flying everywhere, Adaptation
Raymond Smullyan’s penis must have exploded in a ripsnorting orgasm, jism flying everywhere, when he watched Adaptation. Can you imagine it? He probably owns the DVD and masturbates to it every night.

In my poem about the film (sneaking a branch from Ellen Levy's tree) I want to say something about Charlie playing himself and playing with himself. The movie certainly thematizes masturbation (and leaves itself spread legged to the obvious criticism). One great thing is that though Charlie's scopophilic masturbation to pictures is typically male, it is to head shots of really talented and beautiful women, which, presumably, is not.

Uh, that, Capability, would be a negative
This year’s idée fixe seems for me that the successful representation of flat contradictions unresolved is the asymptote toward which great writing aspires. Of course, Keats and Fitzgerald have famous formulations of this notion, as does just about everyone who opens mouth or uncaps pen, from Johnson to Norman Rabkin to Harold Bloom, as regards Shakespeare. The difference from what I'm saying is this: their focus is on that refusal-to-resolve-flat-contradictions quality as rare and valuable in, indeed constitutive of, the artist. Sure. But I'm saying in addition that the great writer takes as his or her task the attempt-- through language, a medium that by its nature must express discriminations -- to recreate his or her transcendental contradiction-resolution-refusal (sounds like i'm speaking german) in the reader. The glass just is both half full and half empty. A may well be A. But only "A is B" is worth writing about. Nietzsche’s “Truth & Lie” comes in here.

One penis leads to another
Last night it seemed that Raymond Smullyan (or his penis anyway) is going to loom increasingly larger as a character in my blog. Remember thinking about David Bowie’s penis and in what state of the world it would to come to pass that I should have access to it. My life is now officially over—I have stroked David Bowie’s cock into a hard-on! I wanted to write a poem about that. What’s weird is that I don’t fantasize so much about making him come as I do just making him hard . . . .

Plus ça change . . . .
Think about how people are eternally obsessed with the phenomenon of change, transformation. The Mutabilitie Cantos. The same-but-different. Trope, metaphor, plot. Compare Matrix Reloaded, Adaptation and The Corrections (which one of these things is not like the others? i guess it's debatable) on this issue of change, transformation, same-but-different—not at all in order to reduce them, and every plot, into that formulation, but rather then to hold the reductive compulsion itself up for examination. Suppose I made a Brooksish argument that all plots (all great plots, all modern movies, all the good movies this summer, whatever) can be described as agonized meditations on the same-but-different. Would I have added anything to the store of the world’s knowledge? I don’t think so. The conclusion looks pretty analytic to me anyway (Right, Van, the analytic/synthetic distinction is passé).


Leigh is making me go help her put up curtains in her office. I told her I'd do it a half hour ago. She said to write that I'm a bitch.