blurbs

Ugh, anyone can come up with a syllabus. Seriously. Here's mine. 

This is the syllabus for a major in nowness and the past (career options: librarian, groupie, glamour vlogger, stand-up comedian, performance artist, ecological activist)

The Now And The Past major is one that challenges as much as it encourages the student to critically experience the immediacy of the present through a lens shaped by the grinding stone of the past. The program prepares the student for the practical aspects of daily thought that is maintained by an analytical inquiry into the theoretical frameworks of the past and present. Understanding and appreciating the sensation and jouissance of thought is crucial; it is through the splicing of experience into meaningful categories of study and the process of holistic consideration and consolidation that the program reaches its crux in its inquiry into the human experience. 

Course sampler

NATP BC1001 Introduction to Stuff That Is Pretty Much "Now"

Examination on the meaning of the term "Now" opens up a host of questions relating to experience, even the experience of experience, and the course progresses, experience of experience of experience. This stages an attempt to introduce Nowness into the intellectual consciousness as not just a general theory of the world but as a a field of knowledge and a state of mind. Questions raised include: What is Now? What, then, is the Past? What is the What of the Now and the Past and how do we locate it and how can we enumerate all its various details if at all? What Now? Now, What? How Now is Now? Should Now be on Twitter? If Now was on Twitter how would its tweets be constructed? 

NATP BC 1002 Articulating The Now in relation to The Past 

In technicalizing the articulation of experience, this course attempts to reconsider versions of The Now and The Past and ways and means in which they are articulated. It is inherent in the very act of articulation that it is simultaneously destroyed. While gaining an awareness of limitations, students will explore and exploit new and novel expressions of the present in relation to past to build a distinctive, expressive foundation of thought. The course will also prompt inquiries into the relationship between Now and Past, and ways and means of describing this relationship in a coherent, constantly analytical manner.

NATP AH 3111 Diane Arbus and Now

In this course we explore the life and work of Arbus, detailing her conquests into the landscape of Otherness, the celebration and solace found within her expression of immediacies. The beauty, drudgery, connivance and blasphemy of a "past" interacts almost sculpturally with her work on the mortal subject, raising relevant and resonant questions about the nature of Now and the relationships between Now and Past.

Coursework: interpretive dance

NATP IS 2219 OK So What About The Future? — An epistemological glance of what is Now

In this necessarily personal and intimate class, students will inquire deep within and question the empirical methods used to ascertain experience. The persistence of the Future perturbs with its unpredictability and illogical empirical existence. Through the cognitive and spiritual dissonance of anxiety and excitement, students will embark on private projects to answer questions that cannot be articulated in the mortal languages. 

Coursework: metaphysical thesis

NATP PQRST 1010101 I Guess We Should Talk About Feminism Since We're Here

A radical social, economic and cultural shift in the intellectual landscape with roots beginning in the Biblical narrative of Ruth, the course seeks to understand the impact of Feminism on intellectual thought and our perception of what is Now. The course will study diverse fields such as marine biology, business and management, game theory and art history to gain insights and perspectives that reveal greater, deeper truth about our singular existence. The introductory class will take us from Austen's grave to Lady Gaga's secret fashion lair, from Marie Curie's schoolroom to the aesthetics of Ke$ha's manager's antiheteronormative powder room.

Coursework: potato sculptures (an exercise in Otherness and the fertile vision)

NATP KFCKCRW 1221 Food of the Now (this is NOT lunch, you guys!!!) 

An exciting, interactive daily journey into our confrontations with the immediacy of food. The routine-like structure of the class arrests us with a familiarity that resonates with an unsettling, cognitive dissonance, featuring the olfactory and gustatory effects of visual, edible sculptures and forms. The striking immediacy that hits the perceiving subject, upon interaction with these forms, is examined and then responded to. Attendantly, the recalling of the past through this intimate immediacy is observed and reflected upon.

Class meets daily at 1200 in the John Galt Dining Hall.

NATP BC 666 Perceiving Time

As an exercise in duration, the class requires patience and concentration. Be enriched as Prof. Mary LaBelle DeLaName raises issues of temperance and temporality, tackling a range of hands-on time perception in the Tibetian, Mesopotamian, Middle-American and Alaskan cultures, even taking excursions farther afield into the experience of time in the Saturnic moons of Sianarq and Tarqeq.

Health warning: students may experience the Rip Van Winkle phenomenon in certain scenarios.

life of the mind

I have new spectacles!!!

This is an online repository of the profound and the banal.

I ate from a tub of mascarpone cheese and discovered it had gone bad. It's that indescribable disappointment when mascarpone becomes mascarpon-yay and then mascarpo, ugh, nay.

I am fattening up for winter (in Hanoi)

Should I subscribe to the Paris Review?? I think I would really like a Paris Review Café au Lait cup.

It would go really well with these new spectacles.

25

Mrs H passed away last Saturday night. Here is a list of some of the many things, both practical and profound, that she had taught me.

1. How to pronounce tonkotsu when ordering ramen
2. That the world is filled with possibilities if only I move my lazy ass and look for them
3. I can find good Italian food at Spizza
4. That if I don't move my lazy ass to look for possibilities there is still someone caring enough to send  emailers listing these possibilities
5. How, and why, I shouldn't screw up a debate speech
6. Humility, and why this is a thing worth cultivating
7. That cancer isn't a death sentence
8. That it's not impossible to do what you like as a career
9. Philly cheesesteaks are good. (This has got to be the the 3rd most understated truth of all time.)
10. Strength, in its wonderful polysemy

there is only beauty

a quick painterly update

In a fit of rage I painted over the entire collage with thick, white acrylic. Truly I am an artist.

dinner in the apocalyptic urban pastoral

Gravlax n' greens! (broccolini and arugula, of course) ft. mascarpone artery killerz

Close-up

Tagliatelle

White asparagus, lavender and a rum-butter sauce. I have said it before and I'll say it again: they look like dildos. This vs. this. 

lonely ampersand is lonely

I know this blog isn't the first thing I turn to when I'm feeling angsty (Joke!) but I feel oddly Blurgh this evening and I don't really know why. It's an absence of that jouissance shit that people get when they feel like they are really hitting that self-realization tier in the hierarchy of needs. In the stolen words of something I saw on twitter, I'm not Van Gogh depressed, just Morrissey depressed. 

I'm kinda sick of hyperreality. Please bring back the Regency Period and good ol' Western Imperialism... I'd rather be colonized by the British than Post-Industrial Proto-Material PRC. I'd rather be colonized explicitly and in name, than coerced into tacit arrangements that hide some secret, dark core. I'm tired of hearing about what's going on in the lives of everyone else I know by the minute, and I miss expecting phone calls on my house phone, teleconferencing, living with less information and more wisdom in general. 

Oh the things I would give to be able to un-know.

give me a back massage and I will love you forever

Hey you guys! I've started on a new art project!

It's a diptych and this afternoon I have just started work on the first panel. I have cut up a 2001-era map of Singapore into strips that I then pasted on stretched canvas. It's a meditation on the topographies and taxonomies of memory, how I relate to my sense of place, and how the work of memory necessarily pieces and un-pieces fragments in a mysterious pattern I am not entirely cognizant of. This is probably going to change as I add on more layers of these fragments.

The formal qualities of this piece returns to the idea of making approximations — each strip and fragment is measured and cut with less attention to precision than to the sensation of fibre tearing and giving. I suppose this gives the act of creation a sense of the aleatoric and arbitrary, even the sensual. But it is in no way an invitation into an allegorical realm. The piece is not an allegory of our increasingly fragmented sense of nation, but rather, a subjective insight into a personal sense of dislocation and of, sense of, sense of, sense of, sense of, sense of, sense of

Obviously you can tell that I haven't planned this well enough. But the idea is, I am going to do a collage of old maps and it's inspired by dislocation/distance/departures/development/disaster.

It is decided:

I shall go gallery-hopping and sketching tomorrow. Perhaps I will also read a book in a quiet café in a self-conscious and parodic fashion, and I am hoping that it will rain. Oh no I have lost the ability to be genuinely sincere about pleasure. :(

By the way, this is how I look now.

edgar is a good name for a hamster

For the first time in a very, very long time, I will be home for a full weekend — and more! It is therefore regrettable that I have no idea what to do with all this time. To celebrate, I have spiked a milkshake from McDonald's with a splash of rum. Currently I am staring at the ceiling. Yay!!

On 12/9/01

When I was 9, my grandfather woke the house up with his death-knell voice. It's an ominous, booming newscaster's voice — he used to be a weatherman during the Japanese Occupation, you see. "America is getting bombed" he said, wait, no, he proclaimed. On hindsight, what is now interesting to me is how I failed to respond with the horror that, say, Jennifer Aniston must have had as she clutched her tiny little heart and brushed her Rachel-era hair off her moist disbelieving cheeks while waking up to the news on CNN. I filed this piece of information in the part of my brain where phrases like "Gaza is getting bombed", "East Timor is getting bombed" and "Afghanistan is getting bombed" resided amongst other sinister half-truths. I guess growing up around one of the gray-haired horsemen of the end times had rendered me utterly indifferent to the suffering of others. Or perhaps I had perceived the suffering of others the way I perceived the suffering of Cinderella when her coach turned back into a pumpkin and she had to walk all the way home in uncomfortable peasant footwear. Whatevs, I was only 9. My only impression of that day was how black the front page was and how it inconveniently stained my fingers before I left for school.

The visual magnificence and scale of the horror will probably remain unmatched for a long time, but then again I may be speaking with the hubris of a stable present. Will anything come close to even echo the extent of tragedy, and so clearly and shatteringly demarcate an era in history with a single event? Many disasters remain a national or regional tragedy. I'm thinking of SARS or the Bali Bombings or The Tsunami. They don't really result in a pivotal change in anything other than an increased usage of words like "resilience", "vigilant" and "secure". This tragedy, on the other hand, proclaimed the end of the Happy Nineties, cast a shadow over the entire idea of being Muslim (or Jew, or Christian, or adopting any sort of religious identity for that matter), opened up a Pandora's Box of other issues that would be boring to talk about right now, and became a sort of irreducible proposition that provided the reasons for the shape of the geopolitical and economic world today. (Also, people just can't stop talking about it! But this is a consequence of its far-reaching effects, that a person in Asia, in Singapore, should feel affected by it. And not just affected by it, but self-reflexively questioning his own secondhand experience of the event.)

A decade has passed and I am looking back at this with a sense of the Kantian Sublime — that no matter how overwhelming a thing can be, there is a pleasure to be located within the idea that there is something that also overwhelms that overwhelming thing. What is overwhelming is again overwhelmed. (Very, very loosely. Sorry Mister Kant!) Yes, viewing pictures of the towers crumbling, and people jumping off the buildings is overwhelming and rightly so, but watching the two beams of light every night at Ground Zero overwhelms that original tragedy because it unmasks the horror and reveals it to be a triumph of the human spirit at its prenatal stage. 

Somehow I don't feel comfortable with leaving it at that. I think the idea is that continued discussion and thought on this is the point of the triumph. To be content with calling it a "triumph, The End" is to miss the point of the sublime triumph over the tragedy. What did 9/11 (or in my circumstance 12/9) teach us? Is it debasing to call this a teachable moment, or is it contributive to the sense of triumph? And why "sense" of triumph? 

It Was Raining in Delft

A cornerstone. Marble pilings. Curbstones and brick.
I saw rooftops. The sun after a rain shower.
Liz, there are children in clumsy jackets. Cobblestones
         and the sun now in a curbside pool.
I will call in an hour where you are sleeping. I’ve been walking
         for 7 hrs on yr name day.
Dead, I am calling you now.
There are colonnades. Yellow wrappers in the square.
Just what you’d suspect: a market with flowers and matrons,
         handbags.
Beauty walks this world. It ages everything.
I am far and I am an animal and I am just another I-am poem,
         a we-see poem, a they-love poem.
The green. All the different windows.
There is so much stone here. And grass. So beautiful each
         translucent electric blade.
And the noise. Cheers folding into traffic. These things.
         Things that have been already said many times:
leaf, zipper, sparrow, lintel, scarf, window shade.


— Peter Gizzi

furrow

Blogger has a new interface! This is going to revolutionize the way I write! It's all about context! Context context context!

I am incredibly tired. I am so tired I feel like I will never experience vigour and life ever again. I am giving too much of myself away. But what is "too much"? And why would anyone care, anyway? I am just the machine that checks your temperature every half hour in the depths of the night like Florence effing Nightingale. (Whoops! I'm being too fresh!) 

Somewhat relatedly: "What exactly do you write about?" ask some when I tell them that writing is an activity that I enjoy. These are the same people who grow up to be accountants/corporate lawyers/physics tutors/the kind of literature teachers who wear Tina Fey glasses and speak like physics tutors while wearing a cropped cardigan thinking that it's "edgy". Deep inside — on a very visceral level — I want to snap and say that I love writing ingredients lists on the back of canned produce, and would love to spend my entire life typing "sodium bicarbonate, water, asparagus" into a word processor, because I'm beginning to think it's a ridiculous question. It is ridiculous because when someone says "Hello, I am Jimmy McSurnameSurname and I enjoy playing soccer" no one asks him what sort of terrain he plays on, or "What kind of soccer do you like to play?" 

My rant hasn't ended. When I say "I write poems and occasionally prose" (because I'm losing interest in communicating with said person) it is usually followed by something inane like "Have you written poems about a girl before?" The only answer to that is "Yes, your Mom". 

Writing isn't about categorizing the things you write in tidy boxes which you then whisk away for storage; it's a consequence of language and experience, it's an affirmation of our human-ness. Because it is composed of consequence and expectation, it is simulacra and not experience itself. But it is such amazing, delicious simulacra.