Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

— Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"

I read Kerouac's On the road. I didn't think it was bad, I just thought it was generally outmoded, all that was interesting in it might as well be taken for granted, and that furthermore it was, on the whole, like the whole damn beatnik thing which it may be supposed to epitomize and represent, simply part of the machine. I am not sure exactly what the machine is—some system abstracted from this old world by the faculties of historical perspective, sociopsychological discourses, which keeps a mostly invisible, patriarchal grip on our minds and lives, keeps money flowing, ultimately, from the bottom to the top, buys our souls, etc... I am not a socialist, I think. I think I am some kind of individualist, when it comes down to ists, but still i don't get on board with the whole damn beatnik thing.

Well i tried to say all that to a fella, and not really any more or less vaguely and incompletely (I haven't quite sharpened up any of my thoughts on the novel yet, nor had I then). And he explained that he found the novel intriguing (my word, not sure exactly what he would have called it) because on every page you can read this sadness.. and that's something that seems to push the novel into that transcendent realm of literature, past being "part of the machine."

you can read a note of sadness through every life, every book, can't you? maybe here i would like to add the qualifier "nontrivial" after "every"—that would seem to make the claim more justifiable. I'm not sure what it would mean exactly. I'm not sure it's necessary.

I don't find it hard, anyway, to read a strain of sadness through my life, or through On the road, or about Anything else i seem to run into these days. But then, i don't find it hard to read a strain of joy through these either. And i think this kind of reading is generally missing the point.

There are really souls tending towards morbidity. That's a certain kind of psychic attitude that is different than, say, the reflection that years of funky fresh adventures won't leave you happy at every moment throughout the rest of your life. Maybe what i was trying to say was that the beat generation pursued that same old American lie/dream even when they made themselves think they were chasing their own desires, and maybe what i was told was that, yes, they were pursuing that same old American lie/dream and it left them unfulfilled (and drove the wise ones to buddhism or something).

i happen to think that a lot of people are intrigued by "romantic figures" like Dean Moriarty or unlike dean moriarty who are alive and running around today for, well, a lot of reasons. And i think that one of those reasons is, as it is for a lot of the books that intrigue us, that we read this note of sadness through them. I would like to say that, in these cases at hand, we can at least as easily read a strand of joy through them, of activity, of boredom, of sexual intrigue, of individualism, of socialism, of... and well i guess the best i can really offer is a sophomoric psychoanalytic interpretation of all this: we get into whatever strands we find that give release to the most awkwardly repressed desires and fears we have in our souls. "Get into" may mean enjoy a book, or something more drastic. But...

in any case, we find sadness just about wherever we want to (and there are probably some pretty complicated reasons that we want to find it in certain places, and not others) because sadness is fuckin everywhere. More particularly, i think we (who?) are pretty obsessed with reading sorrow in the lives of young people, adolescents and young adults. Children too, some of the time. And i don't think this tells us so much about what is really there in the lives of young people, young people in America, as it does about the structure of our repressions.

(why do we want to consider On the road any more transcendent for tracing a line of sadness through young lives than for tracing a line of exuberance, joy of life? we know of course words per se mean nothing)

one clarification i have wished to make: i said there are really souls tending towards morbidity: i think of someone like Holden caulfield perhaps teetering on the edge of this (no, i am not going to try to claim that Catcher in the rye is more transcendent. i definitely liked it better and i guess that says something about me or my "repressions" whatever those are).

This said, it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.

— Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities

A morbid soul erases its city or is erased by it. That is rough, imprecise, and taken out of context, but i don't think it's too far off the mark. I want to make this distinction, though, because i think that morbidity is something else altogether, a sort of mode of operation of the human soul, while sadness and joy more generally, and boredom and contentment, are the stuff of lives, and that line or trace that we read is not the stuff of lives. You can build a bridge with stones but not with the form of their arrangement.

We might formulate the question, what is the chronic state of this soul? when it rides the ups and downs of life, are the times of joy just a temporary masking of the state of sadness, or the other way around? I am inclined to deny the chronic state. or at least call it irrelevant. This question has got us into the fly-bottle. That magician, our language, has misdirected our attention. How does one play the game of evaluating a life? (especially our own life, for aren't we mostly interested in evaluating the lives of bookpeople as metaphorical or hypothetical uspeople?) It is a game for a people that remember, but remembering is not like experiencing. May we not judge a life of nearly constant joy and activity as a sham, for our present remembering soul of sadness? or a life of misery as a life of great joy for our present transcendence? we are here more concerned with the whims of memory than the abstraction of a continuity in this various life.

We are interested in these abstractions, meanwhile, because thinking of, say, the sadness of young american lives piques our souls in some way. it releases something, in one manner of speaking. perhaps there is some agitated, unrestful daemon or pattern-recognition-and-completion-mechanism in our brains which reads, in some book or some life, the sort of thing which it has wished to say, but either could not find the words for, or the rest of the society of the mind had been hitherto uncooperative in the mobilization of these words, and the reading is a kind of saying, and the daemon, successful at last, gives its signal to the reward systems of the brain, releasing the chemical pleasure of literature, which oozes through that monochromatic matter, modulated and colored by the other inevitable neurophysiological results of an expression of the sadness of young, vibrant, independent, partly disillusioned but still candid american lives. or do our books rather read us?

The University of Cincinnati offers resident students a variety of meal plans for its dining halls. First year residents are required to purchase one of the full-sized resident meal plans:

• 209 Value Plan - 209 meals / quarter - $1239 / quarter
• 154 Plan - 154 meals / quarter - $1178 / quarter
• 132 Plus Plan - 132 meals / quarter plus $100 on "Bearcat Card" - $1239 / quarter

The Bearcat Card is simply the students photo ID, which can be used as a debit card at a limited number of locations, and which provides the student a modest discount at the university's pricey vending machines.

Returning students are not required to purchase one of the meal plans above, but they may purchase an "Independent Meal Plan":

• Platinum - 45 Meals + $100 on Bearcat Card - $405
• Gold - 33 Meals + $50 on Bearcat Card - $276
• Silver - 25 Meals + $30 on Bearcat Card - $214
• Bronze - 15 Meals + $30 on Bearcat Card - $140

Notice something odd?

Absolutely absurd.

Another song.

—> Your Times Are Gonna Get You (160 kbps) <—

And also lyrics.

I'm posting a couple songs that I didn't at first post here on the blog.

—> 2017 (160kbps) <—

—> Teenage Ambition (160kbps) <—

These have already been up on my Fuzz page. If you want to listen to them (why???) you can click on them but also you can go to my fuzz page and listen to them through the embedded songplayer. Is arright.

You can also read the lyrics (why???) to 2017 or Teenage ambition.

Happy February 29 leap day. It is like another day added to your life for free, courtesy of Julius Caesar. A free day added to your life in the most miserable time of year. Hoorj.

Sometimes people think I am always being funny, only not very funny. These people are wrong.

I am always deathly serious in everything I say. As serious as death. Some think that death is the most serious thing that can happen to you.

Some regard it rather capriciously. I'm not sure where on the spectrum I am. But wherever I am, that is how serious I am.

I am probably in the whimsical band of the spectrum. I place great emphasis on whimsy. Others before me have also placed great emphasis on whimsy, saying: What's important in life is not just a sense of humour; a sense of humour is nice, but it's a sense of whimsy that's important; a sense of whimsy in life.—If someone asked me: What is a number one important life-attribute? I would say: Whimsy. And I would be deathly serious.