Shit 'n' Shit

jsf99 — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 04:14:14 +0000

Whenever I see “remember me” on the login screen, I think of the Eminem song.

I feel really guilty about how much I slack off during the school year. It only stresses me out. I really need to get off my ass this year. I always get worried, and become irritated with myself, but I rarely do anything to stop it. I think I’d like to make an appointment with a counselor at the school to help me take action. I find I am no good when I try to do it myself.

Blogging is so depressing.

At the end of first year, I did a project for Elements of Art where I recorded and empty room, and then used a looping program and a reverb/delay pedal to make generate a tone; that room’s tone, something between C and C#.

I want to expand on that. I would like to record different rooms, to get a series of tones. I’d like to do a few things with that: I’d like to splice the tones together to create a slow (atonal) melody; I’d like to compose modal music to each of the tones. (I wonder if different places in the same room would generate different tones? Because I’d be in a different place? That could be cool?). I’m not great at playing “modal music” at all, other than simple (usually major key?) jamming (doesn’t count), I guess, so writing it is a bit of a stretch.I don’t know. This blog post seems like a bit more of a downer, but I guess it was helpful?

jsf99 — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 05:38:09 +0000

While walking home tonight I saw a car stopped in the middle of the street, emergency blinkers on; there was a lady walking around the car with a snow-brush, looking concerned. I walked over and asked if she needed a phone to make a call, and she said, “It’s kind of a weird thing, but there’s a bird under my car. I saw that I was driving into it, and I slammed on the brakes. I think he’s hurt.” I looked under the car and there was a bird sitting there.

“Have you tried prodding him?”

I asked her if she had tried to scare it, by yelling or honking the horn. She honked the horn a few times just then, but the bird, a pigeon, by the way, wouldn’t move. I took the brush and tried to nudge the pigeon but it wouldn’t really move. As soon as I backed away, the pigeon walked towards the end of the car, and stopped. I told the lady if she drove forward, the pigeon had enough room to not get hit by the car. She got in the car, and started backing up. The tire was about to hit the pigeon when I pushed it out of the way; it seemed pissed off. “Drive forward!” I yelled, and the lady apologized. She pulled ahead (slowly), and made it over the pigeon just fine.

“I really hope the pigeon gets off the road.”

I feel like the pigeon was probably pretty hurt, and will probably die soon. I wasn’t planning on talking about death when I started writing this, and I’m not going to start now.

I hung out with a whole slew of people tonight and it was really nice. I went to the cafe and got some cajun red lentil soup (which hit the spot) I didn’t really hang out with someone for more than a few hours (which is strange for me, as I usually lean more to the longer side of hangout times), but I went for a nice walk, listened to Pink Floyd, and watched 90′s rap videos with townies. It was cool; “the locals” even invited me to a potluck, and it cheered me up a bit. I’ve been a little bummed this summer (likely a result of being bored, waiting for summer jobs to start), so it was nice to have an unexpected, cheer-me-up evening. Until I saw the car parked in the middle of the street, which was just weird.

jsf99 — Tue, 10 May 2011 03:59:34 +0000

Every time I restart a blog, it is because I can’t sleep. I get bored, and I restart a blog, or start a new blog, and it doesn’t usually last long. I think I try to make blog posts ‘quirky’, because sometimes I know the people who reading them. You can’t force quirkiness, that’s lame and creepy. I try to give posts clever titles; they are never clever. I’m pretty sure I had a blog in High School where every post title was just a song lyric.

Whenever it’s rainy I always listen to acoustic blues music. I have so many nice memories of friends playing blues music outside in the summer, it kind of reminds me of that, except ‘real’ blues is way sadder.

Selection from “The Outsider” by Richard Wright.

jsf99 — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:56:59 +0000

“Maybe man is nothing in particular,” Cross said gropingly. “Maybe that’s the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true; but at the same time he does not wants really to know it? May not human life of this earth be a kind of frozen fear of man at what he could possibly be? And every move he makes, might not these moves be just to hide this awful fact? To twist it into something which he feels would make him rest and breathe a little easier? What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man…”

Houston rose quickly; there was intense excitement in his face and Cross grew afraid. Maybe he had talked too much?

“Maybe my theory is too wild,” Cross said with hasty self-deprecation.

“No,” Houston pulled down the corners of his mouth. “I’ve had the same notion and I can’t get rid of it.” [...] Houston paused, smiled cynically. “All my life I’ve been haunted by the notion that this life we live is a pretense, and all the more deadly because it is a pretense. And woe to the man who tries to reveal that pretense. He is the criminal…” He pulled deeply at his cigarette and laughed softly. ” ‘Man’s nothing in particular’,” he repeated Cross’s words. “I think you’re pretty close to something there, guy [...].”

Selections From ‘Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr’ by Miguel de Unamuno u Jugo.

jsf99 — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:44:03 +0000

“… Religion does not exist to resolve the economic or political conflicts of this world, which God handed over to men for their disputes. Let men think and act as they will, let them console themselves for having been born, let them live as happily as possible in the illusion that all this has a purpose. I don’t propose to advise the poor to submit to the rich, nor to suggest to the rich that they submit to the poor; but rather to preach resignation in everyone, and charity toward everyone. For Even the rich man must resign himself– to his riches, and to life; and the poor man must show charity– even to the rich. The Social Question? Ignore it, for it is none of our business. So, a new society is on the way, in which there will be neither rich nor poor, in which wealth will be justly divided, in which everything will belong to everyone– and so, what then? Won’t this general well-being and comfort lead to even greater tedium and weariness of life?”

“There is no other life but this, no life more eternal… let them dream it eternal… let it be eternal for a few years…”

“He taught me by his life to lose myself in the life of the people of my village, and I no longer felt the passing of the hours, and the days, and the years, any more than I felt the passage of the water in the lake. It began to seem that my life would always be like this. I no longer felt myself growing old. I no longer lived in myself, but in my people, and my people lived in my. I tried to speak as they spoke, and they spoke without trying. I went into the street– it was the one highway– and , since I knew everyone, I lived in them and forgot myself…”

Another selection from “Zapiski iz podpol’ya” (“Notes from the Underground) by Fydor Dostoevsky.

jsf99 — Wed, 19 May 2010 22:24:30 +0000

“… To reach by way of the most irrefutable logical combination the most hideous conclusions on the eternal theme that it is somehow your own fault if there is a stone wall, it is abundantly clear that it is not at all, and therefore to abandon yourself sensuously to doing nothing, silently and gnashing your teeth impotently, hugging the illusion that there isn’t really anyone you can be angry with; that there is really no object for your anger and that perhaps there never will be an object for it; that the whole thing is nothing but some imposition, some hocus-pocus, some card-sharping trick, or simply some frightful mess— no one knows what and no one knows who. But in spite of these uncertainties and this hocus-pocus, you have still got a headache, and the less you know the more splitting the headache!”

Zapiski iz podpol’ya (“Notes From The Underground”) by Fydor Dostoevsky

Selection From “Zapiski iz podpol’ya” (“Notes from the Underground”) by Fydor Dostoevsky.

jsf99 — Thu, 13 May 2010 20:08:04 +0000

(possibly the Constance Garnett translation)

“Upon my word,” they will shout at you, “it is no use protesting: it is a case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall … and so on, and so on.”

Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.

Selection from “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison.

jsf99 — Sun, 09 May 2010 04:10:47 +0000

“Play the game, but don’t believe in it– that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way– part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate– I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment. We’re an ass-backward people, though. You might even beat the game. It’s really a very crude affair. Really pre-Renaissance– and that game has been analyzed, put down in books. But down here they’ve forgotten to take care of the books and that’s your opportunity. You’re hidden right out in the open– that is, you would be if you only realized it. They wouldn’t see you because they don’t expect you to know anything, since they believe they’ve taken care of that….”

‘Man, who’s this they you talking about so much?’ said Crenshaw.

The vet looked annoyed. ‘They?’ he said. ‘They? Why, the same they we always mean, the white folks, authority, the gods, fate, circumstances– the force that pulls your strings until you refuse to be pulled any more. The big man who’s never there, where you think he is.’”

That’s Right– More Henry Miller!

jsf99 — Sun, 09 May 2010 03:25:15 +0000

A few more selections from The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. My quote book is running dry.

“I had to travel about ten thousand miles before receiving the inspiration to write a single line about America. Everything worth saying about the American way of life I could put in thirty pages. Topographically the country is magnificent-and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.”

“The most difficult adjustment an expatriate has to make, on returning to his native land, is in this realm of conversation. The impression one has, at first, is that there is no conversation. We do not talk—we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines, and digests.”

“What is the greatest treason? To question what it is one may be fighting for. Here insanity and treason join hands. War is a form of insanity-the noblest or the basest, according to your point of view. Because it is a mass insanity the wise are powerless to prevail against it. Above any other single factor that may be adduced in explanation of war is confusion. When all other weapons fail one resorts to force. But there may be nothing wrong with the weapons which we so easily and readily discard. They may need to be sharpened, or we may need to improve our skill, or both. To fight is to admit that one is confused; it is an act of desperation, not of strength. A rat can fight magnificently when cornered. Are we to emulate the rat?”

“I believe with John Stuart Mill that “a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.” I would rather my opinions and appraisals were proved wrong-by the emergence of a new and vital spirit. If it takes a calamity such as war to awaken and transform us, well and good, so be it. Let us now see if the unemployed will be put to work and the poor properly clothed, housed and fed; let us see if the rich will be stripped of their booty and made to endure the privations and sufferings of the ordinary citizen; let us see if all the workers of America, regardless of class, ability or usefulness, can be persuaded to accept a common wage; let us see if the people can voice their wishes in direct fashion, without the intercession, the distortion, and the bungling of politicians; let us see if we can create a real democracy in place of the fake one we have finally been roused to defend; let us see if we can be fair and just to our own kind, to say nothing of the enemy whom we shall doubtless conquer over.”

Simone de Beauvoir on Jazz.

jsf99 — Mon, 03 May 2010 06:06:00 +0000

“It’s here in these modest clubs, among these unknown musicians, rather than in Carnegie Hall or even at the Savoy, that jazz achieves its true dignity: there’s no entertainment, no exhibitionism, no commercialism— for certain men, it’s a way of life, and a reason for being. Compared with art, poetry, and printed music, jazz has the privileged emotional impact of a communication that is immediate and fleeting, like the very moment it transfigures.”