August 2010
Glenn Gould Goldberg Variations, 20 (1955)
You...
No Age “Depletion”
I’ve gone...
The Aforementioned Brief Description
[I could not figure out how to hack Tumblr chat post + markdown integration. See this passage from Infinite Jest here to get what I’m talking about.]
Wallace’s semi-pseudo-psychoanalytic babel rhetoric got much sharper between Broom of the System and Infinite Jest. Like, one of those plateaux-hopping level-ups he describes with such relish his characters undergoing or not undergoing...
Long Dialogue, Brief Exposition
Dr. Dolores Rusk: On the level of objects and a projective infantile omnipotence where you experience magical thinking about your thoughts and the behavior of objects' relation to your narcissistic wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some special agency or control to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma having to do with the absence of control.
Ortho Stice: Over linoleum?
Rusk: My suggestion might be to forget linoleum and objects in general. In for instance an analytic model, the types of traumas counterphobic reactions cover are almost always pre-Oedipal, at which stage objects' cathexis is Oedipal and symbolic. For example small children's dolls and Action-Figurines.
Stice: I don't play with no goddamn Action-Figurings.
Rusk: GI Joe typically being cathected as an image of the potent but antagonistic father, the "military" man, with "GI" representing at once the "General Issue" of a "weapon" the Oedipal child both covets and fears and a well-known medical acronym for the gastro-intestinal tract, with all the attendant anal anxieties that require repression in the Oedipal phase's desire to control the bowels in order to impress or quote "win" the mother, of whom the Barbie might be seen as the most obviously reductive and phallocentric reduction of the mother to an archetype of sexual function and availability, the Barbie as image of the Oedipal mother as image.
Stice: So you're saying I'm overestimating objects?
Rusk: I'm saying there's a very young Ortho in there with some very real abandonment-issues who needs some nurturing and championing from the older Ortho instead of indulging in fantasies of omnipotence.
"Nicotine and Pay Me"
The title of this post is clearly a bad pun that refers to a no matter how you reckon it lesser Beck jam. But if we keep calling into question the parameters of the task itself, how can we ever complete the task? Even start it?
You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this: a bodega at nine am in the heart of Queens, trying to figure out the best value-for-nicotine ratio of the...
Programming Note
Because we care about our readers, from time to time B Michael Tumblr Post Industries likes to release an informal ‘programming note.’ This text post is one such ‘note.’ Given these past few alternately too-hot and too-rainy weeks—combined with our ongoing struggle with solvency and, well, trying to remain unvanquished by ennui—we have not posted at anything...
“Best of all, many college football fans are college age men between the ages of...”
– Drew, at Deadspin
I often have to tell myself that I’m not the target audience for Deadspin, even as I enjoy many of its features and the dubious benefits of Denton’s pay-for-scoops regime. I mean, the above sounds freaking terrible to me. I hate it. Am I getting worn down, though, by...
Mogwai “Glasgow Mega-Snake”
...
“Critics function that way often. They make art easy, safe, and wholesome. But...”
– William Gass, in another one of those Dalkey interviews. (via mcnallyjackson)
I bought Gass’ Finding A Form at McNally Jackson, which is my favorite bookstore in New York. As a recent arrival in the city, I’ve struggled with finding a good bookstore. McNally J-town has good food,...
Tumtaster for Safari by benzado →
Adds download links to tumblelog audio posts, so if you really like that song you can save it to your computer and listen to it later.
Based on a Greasemonkey script by bjornstar. (safariextensions)
If you use Safari and like music on Tumblr, then this is for you.
jakec asked: What does the notion of "10 listens" mean to you? Do you use that milestone because you believe that's the average amount of times you need to absorb an album, or because it's sufficient to gain a basic understanding of an album?
“Furthermore, if you knew anything about Eminem’s personal life from...”
– This comment on Doyle’s Eminem piece is, like, really strangely funny to me. First, Eminem’s self-proclaimed domestic abuse problems become this black swan type thing where the woman was actually the abuser so—twist, I guess? I think, then, the commenter means to say...
Of Montreal “Sex Karma”
Of Montreal...
Initial Response To False Priest (brief) →
This album is going to be big. It has the tone, bounce, and muscle of the best Of Montreal. It retains some of the post-disco jitters of Skeletal Lamping, but its lyrics are more incisive. I have high hopes for my repeated listens.
“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the...”
– Alfred North Whitehead (via superfluidity)
Of course. This makes a lot of sense. I mean, since existence is contextual (well, since meaning is contextual, and hermeneutics really is ontology), the idea of ‘independent existence’ really means having a god’s eye view of the...
Titus Andronicus “Titus Andronicus”
...
College Fail: An Insanely Pandering, Scared Take... →
Color Lines has published their take on the LA Times’ huge teacher study, which will soon be published. The paper is going to publish data for over 6,000 teachers, including the grades they teach and standardized test score data over the last seven years. Color Lines calls this study…
“The advantage to writing this slack is that the writer can’t hang himself...”
– William H Gass on Bright Lights, Big City. A fairly disengorging critique of the writer, for sure. I happen to love it. This essay on the present tense is no ars poetica. It’s simply a verbal assault, like boyars matched over a steep cliff. It conjures my undergraduate stomach butterflies to...
Drawing From The Well
This piece in Wired on The Well was very interesting.
For a lot of people, five or six hours a day online was as good as their social life got. If the wired world was a response to the breakdown of physical community, then this wasn’t such a bad place to be. And some people were turning to The Well precisely because they could avoid real life encounters that way. These people, who might...
English As A First Language
Lynne Rosenthal, a college English professor from Manhattan, said three cops forcibly ejected her from an Upper West Side Starbucks yesterday morning after she got into a dispute with a counterperson — make that barista — for refusing to place her order by the coffee chain’s rules.
Rosenthal, who is in her early 60s, asked for a toasted multigrain bagel — and became...
“There’s really nothing u can do to ‘jazz up’ a crazy lady playing a harp, so I...”
– Hipster Runoff on JoNew’s Kimmel appearance
Sometimes laughing at Hipster Runoff makes me feel like I’m laughing at a racist joke or something.
Wanna go for walk?!
Don’t give me any lip, Hektor! It wasn’t a rhetorical question.
NO HOBO
(via fingersinpies:morninggloria)
Hah!
Hey. Hey. Hey. No hobo, but I’m gonna eat this sandwich I just found on the ground. No hobo. Oh, uh. Hold on a sec. I think I just saw a nickel on the ground, no hobo. Yeah, of course I’m going out in this tattered flannel shirt and dirty jorts—no hobo.
1 tag
Radiohead “How I Made My Millions”
...
Lady Gaga “Bad Romance”
I’ve...
Oh sweet goddamn I can smell the White Castle from my desk.
Eatin wack rappers alive shittin out chains
Stream Jay Electronica live in Paris.
I'm a real person again in the age of...
I just finished reconstructing my Billings application, which, thank god I don’t have that many clients. Er, maybe not. It would be great to have more clients. #goodproblemstohave But still, I’m not entirely sure why I deleted my hard drive and reinstalled OS X. I’m confident, now, in my present install, though. If Apple could fix how my screen is always flickering, I’d be...
Another GREAT read on getting yelled at on the... →
I’ve both seen and dispensed enough unbelievable and unnecessary stupidity to know that, when it comes down the to the coffins and the floral arrangements, you will not get to do a rebuttal, you will not get to clarify yourself via a sober DM, and you will not get to copyedit whatever your black-suited survivors decide to put into that obit they threw together on deadline. Those are all people...
A Must Read about getting yelled at on the... →
Here is a story: For a few years, I was an advice columnist, in a very interesting context: I was the advice columnist on IGN.com from late 1998/early 1999 to 2001. Along with a brilliant guy named Julian Rignall and some other super smart dudes, I helped shape IGN.com into the crazy site it is today, and along the way became a bit of a personality known as Ask Leah. Yes, that’s right, I gave...
1 tag
This is why neighborhood 1 is better than all of...
The ninety nine and one rule. To wit: working in any genre or posture, it is most effective to be 99% realistic and one% off kilter. Like the snippets of mythology in the early Lost episodes or the slightly unhinged manner of Leland in Twin Peaks or the THING in never let me go or the stream of consciousness in Portrait or the antimodernism of Ok Computer (subtler than it seems).
The slight...
Oh Hey There: random, arbitrary opins. →
I’d like to find a way to log some of the pop culture I’ve recently consumed and share my passing observations about them and in the process perform a little self-disclosure. This post and maybe more like it will try to do just that.
Prop 8 got overturned—hooray! I read through the opinion and…
I may be wrong, but I suspect Tristan hasn’t been posting a lot on Tumblr, lately....
