one more thing before i go to bed, a free woman



this ad was on the top of my site when i looked at it just then. essays on marx as commodities - heh. along with the berlin wall thing of a few posts ago, i should start compiling a list of "ironic commodities". and then i should sell the list.

brian clark, you go girl!, 2004

this is very good. check out the artwork and the manifestos.

I have such Gold FM taste... listening now to Sheryl Crow's "All I Wanna Do" - tasteless pop really does have all the answers.

Listening to the Velvet Underground's "I'm Set Free", which takes me back to a little under a year ago, when I had this song in my head while reading Nietzsche for the first time... So happy. The warm, oppressive security blanket of overdue essays has been lifted, and it feels as though the world is dancing, even in the silence of the night.

(I've chosen to fail one subject - cutting losses - lovely.)

maybe it'll be like a cartoon, and he'll take on a different personality everytime he gets a knock. (or so we hope.)

How liberating: I just emailed my tutor and told her that I will not be handing the second essay for the subject in, and that I accept that this means that I will fail the subject.

I feel very good about this. Goodnight folks.

i was so wrong to think that the next few days would be comprised of intensive work - i just don't want to write this essay. it has to be in tomorrow morning, or i fail the subject. i want to do... well, nothing. to come down with some terrible illness so that i can be excused from having to do anything ever. melodramatic? perhaps. oh, how i wish i could pause time.

me girlie's just heading off to NY, and i have mucho work due by tuesday, after which i'm heading off for a brief family holiday - so my apologies, but there won't be too much in the next week.

ooh! ooh! one more thing.

my dad just got back from a conference in berlin. as a souvenir, he brought back a tiny piece (1.5 cubed centimetres) of the berlin wall. it's in a little plastic bag with a certificate, and he assures me that it's not like buying "a piece of the true cross", that it's an authentic piece of rock...

i was telling my girlfriend about my dad buying the piece, and she pointed out that it's a testament to the power of capitalism. not only did the berlin wall fall, in other words - it was then broken up into little pieces and sold to western tourists for 5.5 Euros apiece! how perfect is that?

and to think that i'd previously only theorised the lump of cement along the lines of its "auratic quality" (cf. benjamin)...

silly me - i only just realised that guy has a blog of his own.

meanwhile, exam in the morning, so am reading up on anarcho-syndicalism... who would've thought that a syndicalist (georges sorel) could've been a key influence in the development of fascism? not me, certainly. back in my 17-year-old socialist days, i thought that anarchism and fascism were worlds apart, that never the twain should meet. "ah, youth." (or some other such derogatory statement about my naive first interests in political theory.)

am reading dostoesvsky's notes from the underground, otherwise. that's my procrastination for the moment - it sums up the desire that i felt for absolute bitterness and denial last sunday. and last night, now that i come to mention it - i feel obliged to point out that i posted last night / yesterday morning while quite drunk. mmm, drinking alone in the depths of the night.

i'm also attempting to make my way through hegel's master and slave dialectic in his phenomenology of spirit. i have not yet accustomed myself to hegel's particular style of dialectic writing. there's a long road ahead of me... seeing as though i'm thinking of doing my honours on something hegel / nietzsche / deleuze-guattari related. ah, nuts.

if ever there could be a better example of an american politician only understanding others by noticing what is exactly the same between the u.s. and the rest of the world - if ever there were a better example of u.s. universalism, then i'd like to see it.

this quote appears in the age, and was stated by richard armitage in relation to recent debate in australia about the australia-US alliance. check it out.

"Some in Australia doubt the wisdom of so close an association with the United States," Mr Armitage said. "It's not an entirely frivolous debate you're having and it's not a superficial political joust. Serious, sober-minded Australians have been pondering the matter and come out on various sides. Some question America's judgement. Some question America's competence. Some question both and more. Well, in that you're just like Americans. We ponder. We debate. We question ourselves - not least over how Abu Ghraib could have happened, and what we need to do to make sure it never happens again."

(my emphasis)

other peoples' lives look much nicer than mine right now

i wonder what the consciousness required by music-playing is?

it's driven by rhythm - it's a different type of presence, i feel, to be pressing keys and hearing the noise immediately. roland barthes writes that there are two types of music - that of listening, and that of playing. that of playing is muscular. it's quite a different presence. it's not that sort of distant awareness of brightness that comes with other moments - it's sound. it's pathos, it's dance - it's dionysian. it's levels and order and patterns. it's expectation, accordingly.

and to be watched playing - to be the sound and the spectacle... and a medium !

(find barthes and music and jouissance...)

----

(i don't even know if it would be such a bad desire to just dribble through life.)

one more amusing search term:

JANET JACKSON NUDE SUN BATH (MSN)

hahahahhha

goshdarnit, "grandpa anarchism" (as he is described here) - noam chomsky, that is - has a blog. it's called "turning the tide"... hmm. i really got into him in year 12 or so - or at least i wanted to. but then again, looking on my old, busted year 12 laptop the other night, i noticed that i had a folder of things on proudhon, and i didn't even know who proudhon was, so i wouldn't trust my 17 year-old judgement...

(i gave a cliched speech once, ripped off from naomi klein's no logo, outside the state library, as i thought i was leading the revolution, the fire underground that couldn't be stopped... *sigh* i shouted indignantly, "that nike building, just up on swanston street" - at which point i stopped and pointed - "is a hub of exploitation..." it was only later that i realised that i had pointed in the wrong direction.)

two nights ago, i was sitting at my desk at home, with a silly beanie pulled down to the top of my eyes, a glass of wine in hand, the heater on... and wishing that i could live my whole life in denial of everything. denial of time and responsibility, primarily, but also of fulfilment. i also wanted to deny even denial - nothing could be unaffected by it. i thought that the grating against myself might produce something - a web of shit and denial into which i could crawl, as i thought this might be a way of producing the ballooning, dark world explored by writers of prose. i'd sit under the desk and read notes from the underground...

now, after yesterday madly rattling off an essay, i'm at uni. i finished something - i talked to "my lover" on sunday night (as we will call the individual in question), i straightened myself out and pointed myself in a direction that was not "turning back in on myself", went to bed... slept like the dead, was called by my lecturer yesterday morning, who told me that she was leaving the country the next day SO I'D BETTER HAND IN THE FREAKING ESSAY...

and now, here i am the next day. i have a new set of books in my bag (existentialism, totalitarianism), and a sense that i can write.

i really was barking up the wrong tree, methinks, in previous attempts at essay-writing. one just has to go with what one contingently writes down: this is not an indicator towards the pure, idealistic thought-form lying behind the essay - it is the essay, it's the material words. words and thought: two sides of the one sheet of paper, right saussure? can't cut one without cutting the other. writing begets writing, and holding back does not engender perfection - only constipation.

meanwhile, here is quite a nice blog that i have hap'd upon: 'infinite thought'. i'm really quite taken with this blog thing at the moment.

am i allowed to do this?

here is the final paragraph from the essay i handed in on thursday, that i wrote in a state of ecstatic delirium and which still tickles me a little pink. i talk about my essays so much, they may as well make a cameo:

Rather than antithesis, post-structuralism is the ultimate point of structuralism. It is not ‘ultimate’ in the sense of a high-point or an apotheosis, however. An apotheosis is, literally, the elevation of someone to divine status. Post-structuralism, on the other hand, is an ‘ultimate point’ in the manner of the shattering of the Tower of Babel. It marks the occasion, after all, of the failure of great structures to reach an ultimate truth; it follows the last attempt at this truth, and is the dawn of disintegration, multiplicity and heterogeneity. We may no longer speak the one language or find a single, unified structure, as we are without the presence of these great builders, structuralist anthropologists and readers of myth. Even so, we may still build and be productive – it is just that the linguist is no longer a scientist, but a bricoleur looking to make very good, strategic use of the rubble of the Tower of Babel.

i also described deconstruction as "critical judo" (teehee), and included a quote from the collection of interviews, points..., in which derrida states that deconstruction "never proceeds without love." heheh. oh, jacques, you amuse me so.

(along the travels of my essay writing, i found this collection of derrida photos. good god...)

eek... it feel likes i'm reading myself in glueboot.

for all of those worried about my health, good news: i finished an essay, got some sleep, and my eye has nearly stopped twitching (now there's an alarming sleep deprivation-related involuntary mannerism that i'm glad i didn't develop during term-time.) only three more to complete in the next week: one on walter benjamin and greek tragedy, one on "how 'modern' and 'european' is totalitarianism?", and another on the influence of hegel in sartre's being and nothingness and de beauvoir's second sex uh-huh, you say... a week...

meanwhile, the good k-punk has mentioned me in a post: i feel all giddy. oh, the egalitarian world of the blog... "i'm gonna make it after all..." and so on.





does this image fill you with gooey nostalgia? me too. i found an interview with one of the writers for the series, lary detillio. turns out that many of the she-ra characters were named for their toys - indeed, as i read somewhere else, the series was sold cheaply to tv stations as it was more or less a glorified advertisement for the toys that mattel was putting out. he-man was the first series to be release at the same time as its merchandise... at which i wipe away a little tear of joy. mmm, post-modern production of culture in the 1980s...

My goodness, I’m sick of essay writing. I’m sick of deadlines, staying in my house, having the same intractable issues before me, having headaches from lack of sleep, lamenting my disorganisation, having to leave the house when under-prepared for the world outside, needing to get up in the morning, feeling that time is both pressing and meaningless... and I'm even more sick of my lack of motivation. And drinking so much coffee. Christ.

i love checking out the stats on where people have come from (websites, that is) before visiting my site. at the moment, the top three searches are: "baudrillard & infomercials"; "Beyonce Barney's Pictures"; and "boob flash pictures". quality. my last webpage had a slightly stranger top term, given its content - "angelina jolie oiled fuck". i was impressed by the specifity of the request.

meanwhile, this playschool-two mums-conservative-knee-jerk-reaction shenanigan is starting to get me a little hot under the collar. particularly this one, from deputy/acting prime minister john anderson:

"this is a vew serious example of putting indulgences and the particular wheelbarrows of adults before children ... we know that from an incredibly early age children of both sexes look to mum for nurture and warmth, dad for stimulation and play."

yes, this segment on playschool will obviously confuse children about which parent is the nurturing, soft, supple, breast-parent, and which is the playful, stimulating penis-parent.

still, perhaps the stranger comment by anderson is this the one about how people who make the 'lifestyle choice' of being gay should learn to accept that they "can't have it all". without doubt - it would just be presumptuous to expect that gay people can go against the proper roles for their gender and expect representation. good god! sinful sex and acknowledgement of existence! bloody abc...

have been reading this for a while now, but thought i should link the exemplary k-punk.

yikes, sitting on a uni computer (or 'at', rather) writing an essay on euripides' bacchae. it's incredible that take-home exams can force me to write so much in such a short space of time. it's like an aenema (is that how you spell it? or is it 'enema'? i think it's the latter... damn TOOL and their punning ways.)