sustainable intensities

[starfrosting]

"Endurance," writes Rosi Braidotti, "is also an ethical principle of affirmation of the positivity of the intensive subject, or in other words its joyful affirmation as potentia." And then, I swear to G-d, Iggy Pop comes on the radio singing about his lust for life with that bopping AEGD throb. I think my thesis is diverging significantly from the outline I made a couple months ago, but what's most promising is that the threads I seem to be pulling out were there all along and my focus is sharpening, however slowly.

Even though it's been dark for 3 hours and it's cold, I'm settling into it. Sweatshirt and slippers and an unopened can of diet Coke to my left, fuel for the next few hours and note-taking and, G-d willing, writing. Write write writing.

And how are you all, barely more than a month away from midwinter?

Comments

[agoraphiliac.livejournal.com]

Hello. I don't comment much lately, but still I read your posts. Just saying.

Um, not sure how to answer the "how are you?" question. My ailments still ail me, plus they take up time, what with the physical therapy and the worrying. I am looking forward to the following things, pretty much in chronological order:

The Thomas Pynchon novel; I'm number 3 on the wait list at the public library, so I should get it right away. But still I'll be a week behind them as can buy the hardcover on the first day.

Thanksgiving: not with close friends, exactly, but with people I know & some other people I don't know.

Bela Tarr films at NW F i l m F o r u m, in December. Including the full 7 1/2 hour Satantango. What is it? What does that mysterious title mean? Can I prepare by falling asleep to Werckmeister Harmonies every night? (Don't answer these questions, please.)

[starfrosting.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear from you! Who is Thomas Pynchon? Should I check him out (at some point when I don't have my thesis as a bizarre excuse to not read things I want to read, 'bizarre' because I don't spend nearly enough time on it to constitute any sort of acceptable permission slip)?

I hope that your health improves or, at least, that it doesn't get any worse and your mental + physical pain lessens. Do you eat meat? (Are you excited for turkey? Because I sure am, after 7 years of vegetarianism.) Are you really going to see something that lasts 7 1/2 hours?!

[agoraphiliac.livejournal.com]

Oh, you kids, with your hipster eyewear and the crazy haircuts and the "who is Thomas Pynchon?" You slay me. He got famous way back when alongside the big meta-fiction men like John Barth and Robert Coover. I think he's worth checking out, maybe start with The Crying of Lot 49.

Also he's famously incognito; his only public appearances in the last however-many years have been voiceovers on the Simpsons.

Next week, you might see some book reviews claiming Pynchon is "difficult." But don't believe them. I think his own description of the novel, from the Amazon site, is the one to trust (whether or not Thomas Pynchon really wrote this blurb):

"Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.
................
Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction."

PS: yes, I eat meat & especially turkey!

[cislocative.livejournal.com]

as far as I know, he's also allegedly the father of the (in)famous Tristan Taoromino, she of anal sex fame.

[climberblues.livejournal.com]

noting the darkness this afternoon, and wishing to be on the other side of solstice, for the days to increase again.