Monday, July 23, 2012

function

It has dawned on me that maintaining a personal blog in the age of twitter and facebook and tumblr and pinterest (and so on) is BIZARRE. The Internet is becoming a hypersocial space, and the personal blog is a novelty, a vestige of pubescence, a relic from a more genteel era of friendster and online quizzes. It does not feel relevant amidst the omnipresent bombardment of information in aggressive streams and "live feeds" on screens both portable and mired in stasis. One cannot really claim to be able to keep up with the news anymore.

Originally a digital progression from the analogue diary or journal form, the writerly force behind personal blogs was a desire to recount and archive experience — both the experience of daily life, as well as the life of the mind. Much like the diary form, blog entries tended towards an interiority that was naive about the social space it broadcasted itself in. Inadvertently, the private sphere became conflated with the public; sometimes this was a good thing, and sometimes this led to undesired consequences. In any case, blogging was a thing used to express an individuality in a massive digital world — to differentiate yourself as a perceiving, thinking, feeling subject located in a new and vastly expanding reality of kinda anonymous voices. 

Arguably, this spirit of personal journaling and diary-keeping now manifests itself in spaces like twitter and facebook and instagram. As a record of daily life, we upload photographs, leave behind messages both mundane and life-altering, announce births, deaths and marriages, etc. Our profiles don't merely assert our individuality, but also reveal our personality. The spirit of the age is: we'd rather forsake our humanity for a sense of having a personality, than feel bland and drone-like. What, then, is the point of the personal blog? How does it still persist with all the funky, well-designed alternatives hanging around? How has the form changed, if at all?

I refer to the seminal feminist text by Virginia Woolf that uses spatial metaphors to describe the experience of women in literary history and practice — spaces of constraint are also spaces of liberation. Like the room encapsulating feminine experience, virtual spaces such as the personal blog continue to exist as the praxis between experience and writing on the Internet. They don't suffer from a (relative) poverty of information, but instead offer a depth of perspective that negotiates between the two worlds of direct experience and recounted memory tinted mildly by the limitations of a lingual medium. The personal blog tells us that there is a different way of knowing a person.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

pet peeves (updated July 2012)

curation vs. "curation"
HTHT
people who complain that anything mint-flavoured reminds them of toothpaste
freshman orientation camps
Glee
chihuahuas
Instagram
truffle fries
Facebook
Club photography
coffee aficionados who righteously declare "coffee made using a super automatic machine isn't espresso"
K-Pop
reselling shitty vintage furniture with a 300% markup
ST's Urban pull-out
Ordering a burger with all the vegetables removed

adulthood

garlic scape pesto
arugula pesto
miso mayonaise
aubergine and mint bruschetta
strawberry-filled cardamom cupcakes
brownies with kahlua, sea salt and olive oil
coriander and lime chicken wings
grilled peanut butter and jelly pad thai sandwiches
pulled pork
creamed onion gratin
maple syrup-roasted tomatoes
fennel and radish salad
cherry and ginger muesli on earl grey ice cream
kouign amann


Tuesday, July 17, 2012

do not revive





turn "ugh" into "hug"!! no.
When is it OK to dress like we're all going to Lilith Fair '98 again?
Is it OK to post sad photographs on Facebook? 
I said some nasty things about Keats during tuition and I only regret 30% of what was said.
I want to have a HTHT with everything that moves.
I hate the world. 
Just kidding I only hate about 3/5ths of the world the rest is fine.
I need to come up with witty things to say on my deathbed. 
Forgot the times when "stupid" was a bad word, but I remember how stucco walls gave me finger blisters.
Saw a kitten about 3 hours ago but it ran off.
It was a balmy evening.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

nunc dimittis

I am not a wine person. Nothing interests me.


In other news, I connect with Bridesmaids on a spiritual level. Is this a bad thing.
Will someone be so kind as to slap me with a fish because I really need to get my shit together. 
Also: It's Gustav Klimpt's birthday!

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Stowaway

1.

Aging, I am a stowaway in the hold of my being.
Even memory is a finger to my lips.
Once I entered down the center aisle
at the Comédie Française, the Artemis of Ephesus
on my arm, all eyes on her rows of breasts and me.
“Who is this master of her ninety nipples?”
the public whispered.
Now the ocean is my audience,
I see in secret my last secret.


2.

Mid-December, my old felt hat that I could have imagined
myself leaving behind in a restaurant for eternity
blew out into the Atlantic. The damn thing so familiar
I saw myself wearing it even into the deep,
an aging Narcissus, in white foam and northern sunlight,
on my way to becoming a conch. It is like seeing music
this growing from flesh and bone into seashell:
undulating salts become a purple mantle,
and the almost translucent
bivalve of memory and forgetting closes.

— Stanley Moss

transcription

Thesis: I think that I often fail to understand the gravity of the various things I land myself in, and perhaps this is a good thing. 

An elaboration in the guise of an example: I'm singing again. Sorry? What? I don't like singing on my own. And neither do I identify myself as a person who hums randomly while washing the dishes, before bursting into song while hanging up the dishtowels to dry. Maybe it's the idea of singing that I love — that it comes from a primal place, a sacred place. Maybe it's the idea of "having a voice" that I am especially attracted to. It is a means of assertion, but also of deep inflexion and interiority; it is a site of power, but also a site for the transgression of power. It creates modalities of thought alongside tonalities that are musical and moving. There is a physicality tied heavily to the "conceptual" voice: how the muscles push air from the lungs through the vocal folds, how air is displaced to create waves, how this is received by an audience and transcribed into sound — the voice, a simple and complicated path of energy that is we give and receive, over and over again. To reference Barthes: like the photograph, the voice is a transparent medium that we glaze over to look into our own specific realities.

Clarifications to put me back on topic: it's not practical concerns that bug me, but purely theoretical ones. I'm singing in a choir (duh) and, inasmuch as committing requires some sacrifice, it's how this preoccupation fits in with larger questions about the roles that voice and text play in my experience of life. I enter into these projects without consciously perceiving their significance, and find myself discovering themes that recur mysteriously and wonderfully. 

Parenthetical asides that work paratactically:
A: Life is a consequence of love. 
Q: Is love a consequence of life?
What happens when the answers come before the questions?
I want to bake a mandarin-scented olive oil cake!

Sunday, July 08, 2012

tai tai to-do list

1. Watch Bridesmaids
2. Figure out how to use this newfangled mio tv thing
3. Make an orange-scented olive oil cake (and solve a personnel dilemma concerning lavender: to add or not to add?)
4. Catch up on HBO's Girls
5. Find out if "ombré" is a colour or a pattern or a lifestyle
6. Complete Season 2 of The Office
7. Catch up with a zillion Western educated people who have returned for the summer months or whatever summer "is"
8. Wash this beautiful glass bodum mug I made a latte in
9. Rearrange bookshelves
10. Figure out what's the deal with my notoriously tardy Paris Review subscription (?!)