Last blog before the death of Xtie

That's right.
No more plurk, no more wave, no more blogging.
I'm pulling the plug, just in time to dig my heels into Spring.
I'll be writing in my journal, talking IRL
Commenting on bathroom stall posts
The wall that makes a public space private, momentarily
where writing turns personal into political
or shamelessly inspirational.

First bathroom stall post on a clean, white wall:

- "I refuse to shave or otherwise get rid of my public hair.
       Am I weird?"

-  No, but trimming is nice.
-  Nope, it's yours.  Do what you want with it!
-  No, go natural, but too bushy could result in thicker undies.
-  You should try shaving or waxing at least once.
       I think you will love it!  You feel so clean and sexy if you do.
-  Yeah, sexy as a 7 year old girl!  Gross.
-  You won't be able to wait for it to grow back -
       itchy and comfortable for weeks!
-  but you can't go muff diving if she doesn't have hair there!
-  Start the revolution!  Natural normal again!
-  Yoni love!"

Hilarious!  Pricelss. 
Annonymos except for the handwriting.
Three of the nine responses were mine -
Can you guess which three?
You would never find that on plurk.
The timeline is ticking, you're plurking
waiting for more of the same.

Plurk is a prision in time space
It makes me feel like eating frozen pizza
and popping social interaction pills.
It's addictive.  Sometimes I overdose
my brain feels mushy and my eyes hurt
too much straing at a radiating screen.

The death of Xtie will be nothing like the death of nanotext.

That was a case of a host being too busy with an overload of high-maintence guests.  It became impossible to have that many conversations at once, while preparing the "meat" of the course, feeding his parasite babies well. 

As nanotext, he thought he could keep up at nanospeed, while trying to have a life as Tony outside this context.  But he was falling behind, digging his grave.  He was tired and not sleeping, strung out on stress. 

He had no choice to back away from his level of involvement, but as a good teacher/parent/host, he knew that consistency is key, so he deleted nanotext and opened an account for the_author.  The author rarely needs to contribute or mediate because the books we're reading have already been written.  Also, the parasites were already able to navigate through this spaceless space with less direction and explaination.  Their identities were already established and could live on thier own. 

But the parasites were sad and confused about their change in host.  They experienced separation anxiety.  They wanted to be nutured again.  They wanted to be in-utero, or at least nurse again.  Like a teenage riot who lost a leader, some of them will forever lift their cups in his honor.

The death of Xtie will be nothing like that.

I don't have a cult following.  My only "fans" that follow my plurks are in Cypress, because my profile used to say I lived there, and they (thought) I live(d) there too.  Now they must find me just as looney as everyone else does.  I tend to disagree with most people about most things, but tire of so much arguing in this weird personal/public space.  I don't belong in this context, and no one will miss me.  If I stay here, I'll miss myself.  I'm breaking free, liberating myself from cyberspace as much as possible, at least for Spring and Summer.  So if you're ever wondering what happened to Xtie, that's where you can picture me--under the sunny summer sun, living, breathing, being outside.  Planting, harvesting, climbing, swimming.

The Excluded Third

          Play, play with words, like Laurence Rickels, with his intentional malapropism extras (in parenthesis).
          I'd like to play with numbers and the words they represent, particularly 1, 2, and 3.  I hate to pull an Austin, but I have to say... I know this may seem painfully obvious, but I need to break it down.
          One:  The individual, independence, unison, a whole.  Single, alone, one man for himself?  The beginning, Ace's Fool...
          Two:  Dualism, binaries, complementary balance, a joining of opposites, or a breaking into two (categories).  Yin and yang, traditional marriage...
          We could compile an exhausting list,
          left/right, black/white, good/bad, right/wrong, etc.      
          ...but you don't even have to be a good little lit student to know all about binaries and what it means to challenge them.  The easiest way for humans to divide the world is in this fashion, and much of the world operates this way.  You can look at the excluded third and ask what binary it is challenging.    
          Is the vampire dead or alive?
          In symbolic logic, there is only true or false.  A third option is excluded, the excluded third.  Perhaps, this is why there has been no major breakthroughs in philosophy in recent years  The field is stuck in a binary perception of the world, and cannot see any other possibilities.  I guess it makes more logical sense to exclude, rather than include.
          Playing with numbers, to add and multiply or divide and conquer?  I think it depends on whether you're adding or dividing in the binary step.  Is the symbol of two more represented by an adding 1+1 = 2, or dividing the whole into halves to represent the number two?  Do you see it as a joining of opposites or a division of the whole, into hierarchical parts?  (Both or neither are also acceptable answers here, of course).
          Division is easy, far past number two, but inclusion is the challenge.  Even with just two, most symbols deal with separation, rather than union.  One of the main concrete examples I can think of is traditional marriage (to again pull an Austin) which is pretty hard to imagine, right?
          Deductive logic is pretty straightforward - the answer is contained within the question.  It's harder to  explain or prove anything emphatically using inductive logic, but every premise in an deductive argument is a conclusion from an inductive argument, so, what?
          Waste no more time in symbolic logic, that's what.
          Three is a magic number
          Three:  excluded - "the third wheel," third class,
               included - three amigos, three musketeers,
          Oh no, I think three might need a third category:
          equal parts - body/mind spirit, the trinity, 
               primary colors: red, yellow, and blue
          Flag of Sicily
          What else breaks into or comes in groups of three?
          What about three on the love-seat?
          Threesomes, the topic of my next blog post as Venus Uprising, the love and relationships column.
          Number dynamics for these first counting numbers are sometimes illustrated by legs on a table.
One leg is hard to stand on.  It's possible, but it's lonely and uncomfortable as a specter, and just as phallic.
Two legs fall together.  Three legs is about minimum for a sturdy table.  Four legs is standard, and the number five represents change (this table metaphor isn't working anymore, we need a change).
          Me, I like to play connect the dots.  One point is just a point.  Two points can form a line.  Three points can form a plane, and a two dimensional shape, a triangle.  Four points adds one more dimension to the triangle shape, forming a tetrahedron, a very special pyramid with 4 sides, each one an equilateral triangle.
          One is a point, two is a line, and what can you do with a line?  Go back and forth between opposites or extremes?  There's something to adding a third, to anything.  Like a breakthrough, it can be risky, but well worth the risk if it can be accomplished.  It can be as simple as acknowledging a third possibility, a third choice.       

Talking to Myself, no need to read this rant

The Parasite, Michel Serres will make you go on tangents, if you let it. Streams of thought like you would connect the roof pieces of a geodesic dome, but neglecting to go back and fix the mixed metaphor, straighten the kinked connections of a brain.  No filling in the blanks, no making right angles, no connecting dots, no explanations, no organization.  Prose, but unpolished, natural without chemicals or preservatives.  No one can pin this one down.  It's a live one, a slimy one, not from around here.  A parasite, a different species.

Serres is a nut, but I like him, and not just because his name is an anagram.  He makes me want to think in circles, not back and forth a linear origin.  Parasites multiply exponentially: Y is N to the x, as opposed to polynomial growth: Y equals X to the n.  Symbols, language.

Language is a parasite.  Symbols are parasites.  
Poetry a parasite

love is a parasite.  Humans.  Sex a means to spread the parasites.

Population growth, exponential in one generation.

I still love this quote.  "The societies of giving have disappeared... since then, we have been caught up in an economic history..." (Page 31).  


Brings me back to economics, again: the study of how consumption leads to happiness, util by util, and The Corporation.  The full-length documentary is really worth it, but there's a trailer.  Reminds me of Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn and how we were "meant to live" and the "givers" and the "takers."  And, of course,The Lorax Part 2 Part 3.
  
If The Lorax is Ismael, then the Onceler is the Corporation.  Monsanto, the corporation of corporations.  Food, Inc. just one of several documentaries about Monsnanto and genetically engineered food products, which are completely integrated into the market in this country, but many countries, especially European are resisting the International trade of genetically modified foods.  


Consider Maslows Hierarchy of Needs.  I remember this from Psych 101 my first semester of college.  Oldskool!  The theory goes, once people have their basic needs taken care of, then and only then does one seek intellectual and/or spiritual paths.  Hmm...Maslow, whatever the fuck he thought, about the brain and the human psyche.  "Self-actualization" at the top of the pryamid looks very much like enlightenment to me.  


While I'm in this sort of a vein, while I'm standing in for this archetype, or whatever identity it is that I have fallen into, I'm just going to got for it.  Here, I have nothing to lose.


The invention of the mallet, and later the hammer, was useful in the evolution of tools for work, to build shelter, at the very basic level of needs, or maybe a baby-step above breathing.  


The internet is not a mallet.  It has become not a tool to build a structure, but is the structure.


The environment is which mallets exist is an active one.


Contrast that image to one plugged into cyberspace, the screen.


I wonder if the addiction comes from the high-class need for intellectual/spiritual growth/self-actualization.


We crave magic.  We have a need to "tap into" something outside ourselves.


As nature is beginning and continuing to melt away --> Polar ice caps --> polar bears, seals, etc. another type of cold weather species extinct, as Spring gets earlier every year, I wonder.

What do you do to make you feel human, living in a digital reality? 

The Magical Realism of the Tomcat Murr

In reading the introduction to The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, by E.T.A. Hoffman, I was very excited to discover that it considered to be magical realism.  I have to admit, I'm not that well-read in the genre, but what I have read and seen I've enjoyed immensely, especially the famous Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, which also made for a brilliant and beautiful film.  A very common style for Latin American authors, Like Water for Chocolate, or Como agua para chocolate, is like the poster child for magical realism in my mind.

There has been much debate over the category of magical realism, because many critics will overuse the term to give a work of fantasy fiction or science fiction more credibility, when really magical realism is really a very specific genre.  The authors are not creating a different world, rather illuminating the seemingly magical elements that exist in our world.  It is not escapism, but "serious ficiton" seeking and exploring truth.  At this point, I can't help myself from inserting a rather large excerpt from an article by a credible source on this matter:

"Science fiction and fantasy are always speculative. They are always positing that some aspect of objective reality were different. What if vampires were real? What if we could travel faster than light?

Magical realism is not speculative and does not conduct thought experiments. Instead, it tells its stories from the perspective of people who live in our world and experience a different reality from the one we call objective. If there is a ghost in a story of magical realism, the ghost is not a fantasy element but a manifestation of the reality of people who believe in and have "real" experiences of ghosts. Magical realist fiction depicts the real world of people whose reality is different from ours. It's not a thought experiment. It's not speculation. Magical realism endeavors to show us the world through other eyes. When it works, as I think it does very well in, say, Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, some readers will inhabit this other reality so thoroughly that the "unreal" elements of the story, such as witches, will seem frighteningly real long after the book is finished. A fantasy about southwestern Indian witches allows you to put down the book with perhaps a little shiver but reassurance that what you just read is made up. Magical realism leaves you with the understanding that this world of witches is one that people really live in and the feeling that maybe this view is correct."

(From: "What is Magical Realism, Really," by Bruce Holland Rogers - http://www.writing-world.com/sf/realism.shtml)

For all of these reasons, the Tomcat Murr is the most believable, well educated Tomcat anyone has ever met.  Suppose Ponto had never exposed him to the professor, and no one ever found out of his ability to read and write otherwise.  Then the magical nature of his abilities would be in an isolated circumstance - in the middle of the night hiding all evidence from the master Abraham.  Then it would be solely from the perspective of the Tomcat, which could be a creative angle to take in regular fiction.  But the Tomcat does get found out and some of them believe is true that the Tomcat is indeed educating himself.  I think that's part of what pushes it into magical realism because the people believe it, enough for the professor to go so far as to get jealous and compare his knowledge and intelligence to that of a cat.  This whole book is magical realism of the truest sense, which is a hard thing to pull off.  In terms of context, how did Hoffman do it?  He created a context so consistent, so believable that he his "gentle readers" racing through the princess sections to get back to the Murr sections.

To create the fantastic character of the Tomcat Murr, Hoffman used a mixture of rich details involving the real, the believed, the implied and the imagined nature of a pompous cat.  And what do we know?  We're just humans.  We feed and shelter them and talk to them in English, but they don't talk back in English, so we know very little facts about their feelings and what goes on in their secret societies.  What we know definitively is sort of a mute point, but a good starting place for character development.  The Tomcat Murr and his comrades do some very ordinary cat-like things that could be easily observed in normal reality, but having the cat narrator from his perspective so seemingly accurate is what is magical.

I love the scenes with Murr and master Abraham together where Murr has got beat up in the real world and has come down from his place of high and mighty, accepting the love and comfort of his master.  Like after he got in the "duel" with the Tabby that stole his Kitty away, he comes home all bloody and broken and master Abraham finds him on the straw matt outside and brings him in to fix up his wounds.  When he's done, he says, "keep quiet now, and when it's time for you to lick your wounded paw better you'll get the plaster off yourself.  As for your injured ear, though, there's nothing you can do about that, my poor friend; you'll just have to put up with the plaster."  And Murr, "I promised my master I would, offering him my sound paw in token of my satisfaction and my gratitude for his aid.  As usual, he took it and shook it slightly without applying the least pressure.  My master knew how to associate with cats of culture and education!"  I love it!

My favorite parts are the times when he learns a new lesson from the real world that he couldn't learn from being a bookworm, no matter how diligant a student.  He starts his education a pretentious poet, seeking enlightenment.  It's so cute how he starts writing love poems by imitation, not coming close to his direct experience.  It's not until quite a bit later that he falls in love for the first time with Kitty, and she breaks his heart, he becomes the jealous boyfriend, etc.  The mixture of clique expressions with Hoffman invented ones that add to the believability of the context.  Like following the fraternity party, when Murr is feeling hung-over and overtired, Muzius is trying to get him out of the house saying don't let your master get a chance to tell you that you look like something 'the cat brought in," or who used you as a cat's paw, and the Hoffmanism must be: "the hair of the dog," which Murr finds out to be soused herring.  

The notion of "book smarts" vs. "street smarts" has always been a point of wonderment for me.  It almost correlates to enlightenment vs. romanticism, but there is so much overlap, it's hard to make definite boundaries, and there is, of course always a balance.  In this story, they seem to intertwine and then reverse roles.  Murr starts on the path of isolated enlightenment, then with the help of his friend Muzius warning him not to fall into the lazy role of the Philistine cat, seeks a more experience-based path.  And for Kreisler, the opposite.  He ends up in a monastery!  Ah, the irony of it all!

Out of Context

Context is a fun word to play with, especially for me, a person who has been infected with a need to define all terms, someone who has become obsessed with categories. Context: a compound word: you can break it in half and analyze the parts. Con, according to dictionary.com, as a noun is the argument, position, arguer, or voter against something. As an adverb, it means to be against a proposition, opinion, etc. (arguments pro and con). In its verb form, it means to learn; study; peruse or examine carefully or to commit to memory. The third is the nautical context, to direct the steering of a ship. It's not until the fourth definition that you get to the con, as a trickster, a con artist, but there I'm adding my own connotation. 4. con: adjective - involving abuse of confidence, verb - to swindle; trick, to persuade by deception, and nouns - a confidence game or swindle, and a lie, exaggeration or glib self-serving talk. I have no choice but to look up glib: readily fluent, often thoughtlessly, superficially, or insincerely. There it is, the con artist, the first connotation of the word that pops into my head when I think of the word con, but it is hidden in other perhaps outdated meanings. Context, the front half has been fun to play with (feel free to have fun with taking that one "out of context")! Reletively speaking, text is a fairly boring word to define, until you trace back to the Latin roots from the 1300's, textus, pattern of weaving, texture (of cloth), or tex(ere) to weave. And as may be obvious, when you combine the two words together, you get what we generally understand to be context: parts of a written or spoken statement that precedes or follows a specific word or passage influencing its meaning or effect, and a set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event or situation. But, what is the most fasciniating to me, out of all this perhaps boring rhetoric I'm subjecting my readers to is that the Latin roots of context (contextus): joining together, scheme or structure, has basically the same meaning as textus: pattern of weaving, texture. It's as if the con aspect has always been a part of the text.

Recently, I got to see an old friend from my old college, and we were catching up a bit about life. I told that that one of my classes is bumming me out about technology again. He knows that I've always struggled with this and he would make fun of the old 35 mm Pentax I used to drag around with me everywhere, and get into arguments about digital vs. film all the time. He said he's happy to be my friend on facebook and see my context. Context, I thought, and I tripped out about it for a second. My context. He could see my pictures, my profile, what circumstances I've been surrounding myself in these days. I said, yeah, so I got a digital camera, aren't you proud of me? He can add one baby step of technology to my context. I realized then that I appreciate different people in different contexts, that I too fit better in some contexts more than others. Walking, second to dancing, is my favorite context. Walking home, I was contemplating taking something or someone out of context. What boundaries are being crossed? It makes people feel uncomfortable; it is considered rude. It is an interruption of a comfort zone. For my thought experiment, I think I will try to take myself out of context. I will attempt to make the claim for technology, bring on the digital era. Hail the post-cyberpunk generation. Go for it, cyborgs! Maybe it will be satire. I'm not quite sure yet.

I've been trying to digest Austin and Derrida into my mind, to little to no avail. I've read and re-read several times over in the quietest focused circumstances and still don't really "get it." What I notice, is a reoccuring theme with both of them of stating how obvious it all must be, nevertheless a need to dissect it into bits, starting from the very origin of writing itself. It seems to me that the distinction has already been made by linguistics between communication and language, and between oral and written communication. Language is communication that is specific to humans over the age of three, that involves using words to convey meaning. Supposedly, all animals communicate, but only humans over three years old have the capacity for language (the apes can succeed, after much training, in simple language akin to a toddler, but not beyond). The distinction between oral and written communication is even more obvious, included in the name. "A writing that is not structurally readable-iterable-beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing"(Derrida, pg 7). He then of course, apologizes for stating something that may seem obvious and goes on to tell his readers to "imagine a writing whose code could be so idiomatic as to be established and known, as secret cipher, by only two "subjects." I would think he would attempt to classify this as an example of non-writing, but no. The question of whether we will be able to understand it after they are dead and gone he answers yes, because there is no such thing as a code. "The perhaps paradoxical consequence of my here having recourse to iteration and to code: the disruption, in the last analysis, of the authority of the code as a finite system of rules; at the same time, the radical destruction of any context as the protocol of code." What does that mean? Isn't that a contradiction? Can I get an example of this hypothetical non-writing? Oh, I get it. No, because it didn't live on in history. Yet the writings of Austin and Derrida live on in history.

In Austin, How to do things with Words, lecture II, he lists the six conditions for a performative utterance to be "happy" that describe, in detail, the context that the performative must be uttered. But prior to, of course he must include the premise of, "I fear, but at the same time of course hope, that these necessary conditions to be satisfied will strike you as obvious"(Austin, pg 14). And afterward, states that if we "sin" against these herby rules then our performative utternace will be "unhappy," and then proeeds to break down all the various means of unhappiness. All I can think of is how unhappy these weary scholars must have been, becoming so obsessed with words as to personify them with feelings. When you break language down into small enough pieces, it ceases to make sense anymore. Like a koan, “A paradoxical anecdote or a riddle that has no solution; used in Zen Buddhism to show the inadequacy of logical reasoning.” Or another definition, “A koan is a fundamental part of the history and lore of Zen Buddhism. It consists of a story, dialogue, question, or statement whose meaning cannot be accessed by rational thinking, yet it may be accessible by intuition.”

Fits and Starts

question and answer
beginning and end
post and comment
fits and starts

these all dissolve
beautifully into one
(a one with no parts)
when we let go
of our heads
and enter our hearts

(http://www.short-zen-poems.com/search/label/Koans)

Defining Parasites

               One time when I was a kid, I noticed a strange toothy spoon that looked like a kitchen tool by the toilet next the toilet brush and plunger and inquired. As you may guess, it was for poking around in the worms after a parasite flush. We never had a spaghetti spoon in the kitchen, so I didn’t know its intended use, and to this day, those things freak me out. My mom was a health nut, still is, but more so in those days. The health fads would cycle through the house from time to time: colloidal silver, blue green algae, supplements and herbs galore. I hadn’t seen a parasite pamphlet in a long time and temporarily forgot they existed (hadn’t encountered a spaghetti spoon in a while) until, like the return of a bad dream, my mom suggested over the phone that I may have parasites. I was having pregnancy symptoms but negative test results, and supposedly the symptoms are similar. She delivered the box, the complete kit, but I never opened it, which is a good thing. I was pregnant, and am so glad I didn’t believe my silly mother. I’m assuming the remedy would have negative effects on my child.

             The notion of human life itself as a parasite fascinates me, because in the earliest stages, it can be ambiguous what it living in your body. Speaking of interruptions, I am suddenly reminded of Ray Bradbury’s short story “Tomorrow’s child” where the character Peter Horn fathers a small blue pyramid. Having a child is quite the interruption, but I don’t think we can classify a baby as a parasite because the host is the same species of organism, and by definition, parasites feed off organisms of different species. That is in the modern sense of the word, but looking as the Latin roots parasitus and Greek parasitos, meaning one who sits at another’s table, in ancient Greece, “a person who receives free meals in return for amusing or impudent conversation, flattering remarks, etc.” Children are certainly amusing, and free meals? The majority of American children could eat countless meals a day, having the undeniable rights to free food, and did they work for it? Not likely.

So what really is a parasite and where do you draw the line? I suppose that is the point of all this academic rhetoric we are reading for this class. You can easily look up the definition and find the obvious most common usage first, and second projecting those leachy characteristics onto people who act in that way, living off, sponging off others. The second definition is in the broader sense of the word, but also getting back to the Greek roots.

There is a definite symbiotic relationship between organisms and their offspring. It is part of the natural life cycle. For example, breastfeeding for humans causing the uterus to contract in order to expediting the healing process (“bounce back into shape”) and all the fat they consume from the milk is helpful for that as well, and not to mention that breast milk is the perfect, ideal nutrition source for the baby, something that infant formulas could never replicate… don’t even get me started. I would say that a parasite is something that interrupts that natural life cycle. Defining “natural,” that’s the hard part.

There’s been a bit of talk about technology as a parasite, which is why we are subjecting ourselves to social networking programs, etc. The internet is rewiring our brains, right? Dr. Gary Small is one of the leading researchers in the study of this phenomenon, comparing the “digital natives” from the “digital immigrants.” He found that the “digital natives” who were born into computer land have greater skills in multi-tasking, complex reasoning and decision making, but lack social skills and empathy. We all should see examples of this every day, if we are paying attention. Like have you ever had someone friend you on facebook, then you run in real life and they don’t say hello? Or someone looks really familiar to you and you can’t place them, until you might realize, “oh, I think I saw them on a friend of a friend’s facebook pictures." Or the (becoming) classic email breakup. Lame! The social downside of the digital era is becoming commonly understood, but what I would question is whether even more is lost that the way people interact in the “real world.”

So you can multi-task, can you focus? Did I stop every few minutes during writing this blog to check my plurk? Maybe, and man has my innocent post degenerated – into porn. I swear, with boys everything degenerates to shit or porn, which is shit.

Anyway, what I find most interesting about the increasing amount of time humans are interacting with machines is the element of choice and resistance. I’m sometimes surprised about the so-called hippies that friend me on facebook. They get peer pressured into it, and at some point the convenience outweighs the privacy or freedom and they begin to subscribe. In a world full of screens, you don’t want to be screened out. Who doesn’t want to know where the party’s at? Well, calling everyone on your phone list is pretty cumbersome, time consuming and expensive, in terms of cell phone minutes, so you send out a facebook invite, and call it good.

Pretty soon not having a facebook will be like not having a driver’s license or a SSI card. From a paranoid creepy perspective, it’s so convenient for the FBI or any other interested government or other agency. They don’t have to waste time profiling people; we’re profiling ourselves. Did this infection spread exponentially? Is that even a qualifying factor of parasites? In contemplating choice and whether or not to subscribe, and to what degree I’m reminded of the tapeworm diet. Some people want to avoid them, some people want to get rid of them, and some people want to consume them – anything to lazily lose weight.