Periodically bloggers call a 30-second time out to step out of their virtual bodies and observe. Here we go again.
The consciously-stated guiding principles here (staying on topic, avoiding making myself part of the story, and overall continence in rate of production) have been stetched over the years, and they're being stretched to the breaking point now. Where to go from here? On the topical front, it no longer seems constructive (or even possible) for every post to relate directly/explicitly to music. Still, music is the focus. This can no longer be an editorial policy vis-a-vis content itself, but it is very much still true of the larger project. Everything here can still be read with this front of mind. If doing so makes a particular item seem especially farfetched or off topic, then that is your cue as the reader to keep searching for the connection. These are my intentions at least, and I am stating them. I won't tell anyone how to think. I used to read a lot of musicians' blogs and felt that in most of them there really was no such connection, nor much of anything else worthwhile. This I found frustrating in light of the obvious potential of the medium, and this frustration has informed my direction here. At this point I can forgive any reader who finds my insistence that music is still the focus to be insincere and/or meaningless. For me this focus is very much still there.
The quote-mania aspect needs to be addressed specifically. I realize that it is often unsightly on any number of levels. Specifically,
--things taken out of context will be misunderstood, rendered useless, etc.
--authority and/or proof will be implied where they should not be
--the reason for posting the excerpt (am I agreeing? disagreeing? bolstering myself? questioning myself? looking busy?) is not always transparent in absence of more (any) commentary
--there is an element of aggression, showboating, etc. in saying, essentially, hey everyone, look at me and how many obscure books I've read and taken notes on
I am aware of all of these dangers. For me, now, they are trumped by a deeply-felt need (the first rumblings were
here) to ground my thinking (and action!) in something bigger than the peasant empiricism which previously prevailed here. I'm comfortable courting each of the above dangers in order to try to get at something better.
Biases and perversions are more than mere social deviancies. They also channel our attention in constructive ways. For every basic reality they cause us to overlook, there is a hidden (to others) reality which they cause us to notice. I do a lot of playing with rhetoric and verbiage, because I enjoy those things and we're allowed to have fun sometimes, but my ultimate aim here is to notice things, secure in the knowledge what is biased or perverted about my noticing sense is precisely what makes my observations worth sharing publicly. My end of the bargain is to also mix in some sources which compensate for my blind spots.
Some biographical details which may or may not explain my behavior as an adult:
--Sometime around eighth or ninth grade, I had a teacher assign us to write our homework assignment on an index card. Often teachers would merely suggest materials, but I remember that in this particular case the requirement that we use an actual fucking index card, as opposed to any other kind of paper product fashioned into index-card-like form, became non-negotiable and was factored into grading. I believe the conceit here was to condition high-level "academic" skills and organization, but I'm not sure. In any case, despite my father being a goddamned tenured college professor and my mother an exceptional salt-of-the-earth intellectual, despite the house being filled to the ceiling with intellectual artifacts both externally procured and internally generated, the proper index cards which this teacher considered to be as essential to academic production as the books themselves were not an item that our household typically kept in stock or would have any reason to. Without a car, before Amazon, and in a midwestern city that runs on farmer's hours, it was, odd as it sounds since this was not really that long ago, hardly the easiest thing in the world to acquire the cards in time for me to earn full credit on the assignment. Happily, Mom did eventually manage to locate an old supply of recipe cards, buried deep in the scratch-paper cupboard underneath the kitchen phone, lost among all manner of hoarded paper oddities (more on this later). I suspect the card was older than I was, perhaps even older than my teacher. It was college-ruled with very thick dark blue lines, which I found obnoxious. I suppose you could say we got through this together, a strong intellectual family weathering (this time) the tyranny of mediocrity which prevails in intellectual life and in every other kind of human institution. Memories change the more we access them, so some detail could be off here, but the point is that I recently started accessing this memory more often after realizing that I have spontaneously/organically lurched toward a maniacal-compulsive perversion of the index card theory of intellectual inventory management. The glib observation that students in more vulnerable home circumstances don't always receive these small pieces of support is VERY apt here, and it does make me viscerally angry, RIGHT NOW, as I type this, to think that small-minded bullshit like this is undoubtedly part of various Achievement Gaps that can indeed be placed at the doorsteps of the petit-bourgeois overachiever index-card class of college completers. I had GREAT teachers, actually, but this still happened, there was real trauma involved, and it pisses me off a lot because it's so unnecessary. I had to "unschool" for about a decade before I could function intellectually. At that point I started buying Post-Its and Moleskines by the case. No seriously, I spent almost $400 online on a case of Moleskines because single Moleskines are crazy overpriced at OfficeMax! I had to look really hard to find this, even on today's internet! This will only pay off if I eventually use them all! My mock-superstition is that when I fill the last page I will die! But at least I will die at my own hand rather than that of some small-minded bureaucrat.
--Sometime later in high school, when we had started writing pretty serious papers and shit, the bibliography bugbear really began to roar. My thoughts on this nowadays are basically the same as above, and my evolution has followed the same ironic path. The index card moment here was the time I found I had failed to harvest all of the bibliographical info I needed from a certain library book which had since been returned. I made a special bus trip downtown, found the book on the shelf, took down the info, and probably missed a couple of hours of sleep which undoubtedly will come off the end of my life. I never considered just fudging the info, never considered that as hard as it was for me to retrieve it so hard would it be for the teacher to check it, never considered that teachers (even the good ones) don't love grading papers, they just want their students to "get" the lesson. I did not need the lesson and was punished for it. By myself or by the teacher? Here is a good old liberal vs. conservative topic for talking-head debate! I wish this trip downtown had not happened, but I survived and have now lived long enough that it has shaped me in what I feel to be a constructive and meaningful way. Now the internet has made bibliographies both too easy and too difficult. Now it seems excessive, aggressive, showboaty, etc. to provide even the minimal bibliographical detail that I do here. But in my working notes I record ALL THE THINGS MOTHERFUCKERS, just like a GOOD FUCKING BUREAUCRAT, and then I FUCKING SIT ON THEM like a goddamned mother hen.
--My dear mother, of scratch-paper cupboard fame, has unfortunately never quite gotten her act together in the area of actual intellectual production. What she has done is filled the family home to the ceiling with her sources, refused to cull a single one of them until she has produced her masterwork, and then neglected to get on with it. I'm omitting lots of relevant details from this story. The point is, now that I know what this looks like, I reeeally don't want it to happen to me. I often receive books from LAPL which previous patrons have mutilated with notes, underlining, pages folded over, etc. Usually this is unobtrustive, but sometimes it's not. The first bell hooks book I got my hands on this way had had the entire final chapter ripped out; it must be really good or really bad! People have a thousand and one ways of avoiding the hard work of intellectual production, by which I mean not merely formal publication but rather ANY personal practice of intellectual synthesis. Passive consumption is fine too, but only if you are content with it. Contrary to the boat stabilization brigade (BSB), I think that few people really are content with it, and I wonder if every neatly folded page corner in a library book is not really a cry for help, a coping mechanism of high-functioning procrastinators (HFPs). Fucking write it down! At least take a fucking picture of it with your goddamned smartphone. DON"T JUST STAND THERE, DO SOMETHING! And do it NOW, while the spark is fresh. You can clean the toilet and shave your crotch tomorrow. This cannot wait. I made many blind lurches away from HFP without ever quite breaking free. It is a disease that you have to confront, and you may have to change your surroundings in order to be able to confront it. I finally stared it down for good in the CalArts library (yes, I came crying back to school one last time) when, having once again strapped myself to the railroad tracks of small-minded bureaucracy, I was required to produce program notes for my graduation recital. Instead of just blowing off empirical steam on my blog, I found that I could launch myself off of other authors like a missile. I could launch onto my desktop, into my email, or straight onto the 'net; I could unburden myself into stacks of Moleskines, index cards, stickie notes, or junk mail; I could post it, stick it, stack it, hoard it, or cull it; I could indulge in creative mutilation of books I own while respecting the sanctity of my community-of-choice's Clean Copy. Only pension-chasing crotch-grooming overachievers have absolute beliefs about which of these is The Way. What matters is that you strike while the iron is hot so that you can move on without fear of loss, so that your living space doesn't become a suffocating fire trap, and so that the few other people who give a fuck about the same things you give a fuck about don't have to smell your stale shit in every library book you've ever touched even though you scrape the shit off your toilet bowl faster than you can expel it from your body. You will retain more knowledge and less shit this way, rendering your prior productions inessential to your general ability to think, and therefore liberating yourself from fear of loss. If you are steadily improving yourself, your best production always lies ahead of you and your previous productions cannot dominate you by threatening to pass out of existence (as all our productions eventually will, it must be said). It's also fine to read with no prententions beyond the moment! But please don't let your unrealized pretensions kill you, not from the inside and not from the outside, and please don't project them onto shared community materials. We all have our own demons to grapple with and don't need yours staring back at us.
Quite unexpectedly, just as I was really starting to launch into this process, I got a full-time job. I was still able to read and record at about 70-80% of the previous rate, but eventually some "synthesis" beyond stream-of-consciousness notewriting needed to happen, and now there was no time for it. Though I was growing on the inside, I still felt headed for stifled hoarderism. And then of course, as jobs do, even more quickly than it had appeared it went away. This brings us more or less up to the present. From unschooling to unstifling.
For any readers here, the most important result of this to be aware of is that this blog has acquired a new function for me, hopefully in addition to those which it already served and not in place of them, but perhaps in place of them for yet-to-be-determined stretches of time. Namely, I want to gather as many of my virtual "index cards" as I can and begin organizing them by topic. Only time will tell whether this has been worth the trouble, but from where I stand (and I do stand at the computer, because I'm over six feet tall) some objectives seem obvious:
--when casual conversations turn uncasual, it's nice to have one's sources organized, available, and sharable anywhere via the information superhighway's most infamous vehicle
--though it seems unlikely that I'll ever do mainstream publication, I also won't rule it out, and so it's best to get organized now than later; why not do it here?
--many things I wrote previously really badly need to be fact checked, rethought, qualified, footnoted, bolstered, demolished, reiterated; or, less spectacularly, they need to be incrementally revised, deepened, fleshed out, balanced out, etc. I remain committed to avoiding revision of the old posts themselves wherever possible, such that the blog remains an honest and true document of my thinking in particular moments, even when this thinking now strikes me (and could strike others!) as quite wrong. Rather, any "post" can now also become a "thread," living and dead at the same time. From an intellectual perspective I find this a very intriguing (mis)use of the basic blog architecture, a use for which said architecture is made worse and not better by the vicious McLuhanization which has now maimed every other online medium that might have served similar purposes. The comment functionality here is actually much more awkward than a shoebox full of index cards! The crotch-trimmers get some poetic justice! Yet this awkwardness can also be, to conjure a precious faux-deviant academicism, reclaimed as a generative strategy. Hence I am sticking with Blogger for as long as Blogger will stick with me!
Regarding the flimsiness of the sources themselves, I must beg forgiveness and patience. I started with psychoanalysis because it seemed to be underlying (often explicitly but not always) most of the assumptions about art that I wanted to work towards refuting. What I found instead is, first of all, that holders of said assumptions cannot possibly have actually read or understood any of the seminal psychoanalytic writers. Secondly, I found that works which are ultimately completely crazy and wrong can still be quite edifying, and that certainly they can help to explain "intellectual history" even if they hold little water otherwise. Third, I believe I also found that psychoanalysis is not totally full of shit, even if it is mostly full of shit. These three points apply equally to my second major reading project, Guy Debord and the Situationists. Again, forgiveness and patience please. I had been involved in a performance which claimed to take Situationist "psychogeography" as one of its inspirations. The architect of this monstrosity has either not read or not in the least understood the Situationists. But I only suspected that. I had to confirm it on my own. In book time, this confirmation is costly and comes slowly. I'm sure it would be more ideal to have Marx, Habermas, or Bourdieu under my belt by now. These have long seemed, from a distance as it were, like urgent oeuvres for this tuba player to encounter. Yet no one in my working life was making them quite so urgent. I have decided to make daily necessity my guide. This is a thoroughly reactive rather than proactive posture, which I hate in principle, but it does ensure motivation and purpose, and even, dare I say it, some direct quotidian applications of some very academic ideas. The next themed investigation relates to my job, and it's under wraps until that situation resolves itself. If you think these are intellectually trifling bodies of work that I have thus far worked though, you simply will not believe what this latest one ended up being! But the same three discoveries apply, and this time they reflect more poorly on my own people than on my opponents. Around the edges there have been some side projects (how I despise that term) which relate only distantly to these themes. And eventually, for balance, there came a period of free-for-all, in which we currently find ourselves. All of which is to say that this has not unfolded in any kind of intellectually logical or ideal way. That's life. It doesn't always work for the logic to come first. My sincere hope is that the logic might emerge, eventually, from the emergent, ever-sprawling Fickle Ears.
