A single that might be on Ben Folds’ new album, due out at the end of the month: “You Don’t Know Me At All”
While not necessarily a track I’d recommend as representative to someone who’s never heard Ben Folds before (he is one of the few artists who can, in the space of a single album, make me laugh out loud, cry, and feel envious that he seems to have so much damn fun making music), I can’t help but enjoy a new song of his featuring Regina Spektor.
A couple of Ben’s tunes (”Late” and “Still Fighting It” among others) are on the shortlist of my favorite songs of all time.
And Regina Spektor… well, not only is she working her way onto that same list, but she makes my poor heart pound harder than is healthy.
This is what I see in my dreams about final exams:
two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill,
the sky behind them flutters,
the sea is taking a bath.
The exam is History of Mankind.
I stammer and hedge.
One monkey stares and listens with mocking disdain,
the other seems to be dreaming away–
but when it’s clear I don’t know what to say
he prompts me with a gentle
clinking of his chain.
A favorite author of mine has some sage advice for bloggers and people participating in social networks and why it can be a valuable activity:
[An account of a trivial event] would be rather pointless were it not for the instruction that I derived from it for myself [...] Now as Pliny says, each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up. What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.
And yet it should not be held against me if I publish what I write. What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another. Moreover, I am not spoiling anything, I am using only what is mine. If I play the fool, it is at my expense and without harm to anyone.
He goes on to address the question of the value of the privilege granted to “experts” as opposed to exploring and thinking for oneself:
I have no doubt that I happen to speak of things that are better treated by masters of the craft, and more truthfully. This is purely the essay of my natural faculties, and not at all of the acquired ones; and whoever will catch me in ignorance will do nothing against me, for I should hardly be answerable for my ideas to others, I who am not answerable for them to myself, or satisfied with them. Whoever is in search of knowledge, let him fish for it where it dwells; there is nothing I profess less. These are my fancies, by which I try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself. The things will perhaps be known to me some day, or have been once, according as fortune may have brought me to the places where they were made clear. But I no longer remember them. And if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.
[...]
I have no other marshal but fortune to arrange my bits. As my fancies present themselves, I pile them up; now they come pressing in a crowd, now dragging single file. I want people to see my natural and ordinary pace, however off the track it is. I let myself go as I am. Besides, these are not matters of which we are forbidden to be ignorant and to speak casually and at random.
[...]
I speak my mind freely on all things, even those which perhaps exceed my capacity and which I by no means hold to be in my jurisdiction. And so the opinion I give to them is to declare the measure of my sight, not the measure of things.
And, as many bloggers have been noting lately, it is important to honor our own diversity:
Not only does the wind of accident move me at will, but, besides, I am moved and disturbed as a result merely of my own unstable posture; and anyone who observes carefully can hardly find himself twice in the same state. I give my soul now one face, now another, according to which direction I turn it. If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways. All contradictions may be found in me by some twist and in some fashion. Bashful, insolent; chaste, lascivious; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; clever, stupid; surly, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; liberal, miserly, and prodigal: all this I see in myself to some extent according to how I turn; and whoever studies himself really attentively finds in himself, yes, even in his judgment, this gyration and that discord. I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply, and solidly, without confusion and without mixture, or in one word. Distinguo is the most universal member of my logic.”
And to embrace the diversity of others who do not think like us… no groupthink!
I do not hate all opinions contrary to mine. I am far from being vexed to see discord between my judgment and others’, and from making myself incompatible with the society of men because they are of a different sentiment and party from mine, that on the contrary, since variety is the most general fashion nature has followed… I find it much rarer to see our humors and plans agree. And there were never in the world two opinions alike, anymore than two hairs or two grains. Their most natural universal quality is diversity.
However, in being an individual who is also part of a networked community, we must carve out the space for ourselves… the participatory network should be the small visible part of an iceberg of contemplation, consideration, and thought:
We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh as if without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them.
In solitude be to thyself a throng (said Tibullus).
And in a disclaimer more than worthy of adaptation to my own, he notes:
If I had written to seek the world’s favor, I should have bedecked myself better, and should present myself in a studied posture. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed. Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature’s first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.
Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.
I agree, too, that we don’t need less of the personal, introspective and individual in blogs and other networked communications, but more– don’t buy into the lie of the “merely” personal:
Custom has made speaking of oneself a vice, and obstinately forbids it out of hatred for the boasting that seems always to accompany it. Instead of blowing the child’s nose, as we should, this amounts to pulling it off.
[...]
My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him order the architect to speak of buildings but not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man’s knowledge, not his own…
Perhaps they mean that I should testify about myself by works and deeds, not bare words. What I chiefly portray is my cogitations, a shapeless subject that does not lend itself to expression in actions. It is all I can do to couch my thoughts in this airy medium of words. Some of the wisest and most devout men have lived avoiding all noticeable actions. My actions would tell more about fortune than about me. They bear witness to their own part, not to mine, unless it be by conjecture and without certainty: they are samples which display only details. I expose myself entire: my portrait is a cadaver on which the veins, the muscles, and the tendons appear at a glance, each part in its own place. One part of what I am was produced by a cough, another by a pallor or palpitation of the heart– in any case dubiously. It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence.
Montaigne wrote these wise words almost 500 years ago… maybe we should start listening.
I no longer plan to write. So, for the time being, I have no further reason to maintain this site.
Whatever I once had as a writer appears irretrievably lost. Maybe it was all an illusion. Regardless, everyone I grew up with and everyone I met when I was younger and first considering what it meant to write has given art up. They all appear happier after doing so.
I’m tired of toiling alone. I’m tired of being the invisible man. It’s time for television and happy hour. It’s time to figure out what to do "after." The path I’ve been on has brought me nothing but loneliness and disconnection from other writers and other people. I fit into no group. The only people I feel a connection to prefer someone else. One from the past who moved on and away, one from the present who continues to choose an admittedly loveless relationship. So be it.
I’m not in danger. Something in my head has always been broken. I’m just finally accepting it and moving on.
Birthdays of Poets — An interesting blog *and* a useful reference resource in one.
Poets, put up your fists and fight — A writers’ spat is not the sole preserve of the big names - the most exciting and vicious scraps are to be found in the poetry blogosphere
No one will ever talk me out of my love for the Big American triad of Faulkner, Fitzgerald and (yes) Hemingway. By now I’ve probably heard all the criticisms and they are irrelevant in the face of the work itself.
Anyway, anyone who has spent much time with either of the latter two will have come across the remarkable scholarship of Matthew Bruccoli, who died a few days ago. When it came to Fitzgerald, Bruccoli had no equal… and his writing about Hemingway was very influential on my thinking as well. He was also– and I didn’t know this until today despite using it all my life– a founder of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
An amazing scholar and, by all accounts, a generous man. I wish I’d written him a note of thanks while he was still alive.
David Foster Wallace’s essay on John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign is being re-issued as a book called McCain’s Promise. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, DFW responded to the question of whether he had changed his mind about his assessment of McCain:
"The essay quite specifically concerns a couple weeks in February, 2000, and the situation of both McCain [and] national politics in those couple weeks. It is heavily context-dependent. And that context now seems a long, long, long time ago. McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now—for me, at least. It’s all understandable, of course—he’s the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing."
Some other good stuff there about the book (and about signing a bazillion advance copies of Infinite Jest).
Put a Little Science in Your Life (Brian Greene) — ‘Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension.’ I know, I’m all about the NYT tonight…
It’s not just that the invisible man will never see what he looks like in sunglasses and that he knows everything better than the back of his own hand and that his invisible skin can sting with the indignity of sunburn.
It’s that every room he is in remains empty. It’s that closing his eyes is nothing of the sort and all of his seeing is a kind of peeping. The rules of invisibility are unclear and maddening. Why do his clothes disappear but not the walls he leans against to listen to slow breathing of each apartment’s occupants? Why invisible glasses but not the random car he sits in singing softly along with the radio? What if he wore a suit of armor?
It’s that his origins are as invisible as he is, as is his eventual end. Did he come from nothing and will he return there? Did he have invisible parents? A translucent dog whose barking took the shape of memory?
Once the invisible man excitedly stalked a set of wet footprints on the sidewalk until they disappeared, imagining they belonged to one of his kind, also wandering, but they came to nothing. Then he fell in love with a girl who roller-bladed to the park every day and sat at the table right by the bushes he dozed within, her crazy ringlet curls stuffed partially, awkwardly in her helmet. He read her journal silently over her shoulder and whispered in her ear exactly what she wished to hear until she started shaking her head, saying "no. no. no." and committed herself to a locked ward and regimented medications that even the invisible man couldn’t sneak through.
When the invisible man dances even he can’t be sure that his feet touch the ground. When he runs he is taken for the wind. When he stomps in a puddle everyone around instinctively looks up at the sky. In the water he is a hollow splash.
The invisible man is alone and loneliness, by its nature, walks unseen suffering no light from sun or star.
Air dry washing - TipThePlanet — Via Darren Barefoot comes the Air Dry Wash wiki, what has to be the most comprehensive site dedicated to ways to air dry your clothes ever.
Pentagram has published a series of 14 fun cryptograms. I would pay good money to have these on correspondence/greeting cards. Here’s one example, though each in the set is quite different:
September 4, 2008 
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ben folds, Music, regina spektor, video
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