Joan of Arc

Showering / Life

Everyday
I open my eyes,
born to a dead mother.

I shower and ask:

"Brush whatnow when?"

I answer with action:

"In order for clean to make any sense,
dirty must first exist

In mirrors,
time reserves the right to itself.

Time is dirt,
which is not

Clean is immortal and human
Transcendence
is clarity,

a reckoning with nothing of any importance
beyond its reckless elimination

in vain.”
I pass the toilet as I exit.

Back 2 School Blues

I don't remember my dreams very often, and when I do, I have either a hard time piecing together a narrative because my dreams are often so chaotic I can't put them into words, or I don't have the attention span to focus long enough to fictionalize the raw data. However, when I do have a lucid dream or a lucid episode, I take note.
This is why I know now that despite struggling with the notion of returning to academia for the entirety of my short leave of it, I am clear on one thing: I never want to take a foreign language class again.
Last night I dreamt that I had returned to school and my first class of the semester was German Idealism in Ham-Smith 19. Equally excited and suspicious (characteristic of my love/hate relationship with the field), I am waiting patiently for the Professor to show up. After a few minutes, in walks a man who looks a lot like Professor DeVries but much less substantial (clearly reared on corn flakes as opposed to schnitzel). Not three steps behind him is an even shorter man with black, thick-rimmed glasses and a mane of white hair.
To my surprise, pseudo-DeVries proceeds to just stand in front of the class, slightly to one side, jovially saying and doing absolutely nothing as the other man, nameless, begins writing on the blackboard. I quickly become anxious and confused and realize that the man is writing an elaborate schedule on the board that is beginning to indicate that a.) I would be spending more time in this class than I had intended or wanted to, and b.) this probably isn't a German Idealism course. I raise my hand and not-pseudo-DeVries calls on me.
"Isn't this German Idealism?" I ask.
"This is Spanish class," he viciously responds.
Taken aback by the misunderstanding, I promptly blank out and the next thing I know I am watching porn in my dorm room.

"Never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes"

Presently the highlight of my work day is the ten mile commute, which depending on traffic takes anywhere from fifteen to forty five minutes (yesterday an accident on the bridge into Newington stretched the ride home to almost ninety minutes). I've learned to pack an extra snack for the drive and I've been using the time to rediscover some old favorite albums.

This week's soundtrack:


Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid: Bob Dylan Soundtrack - If I could only take five Bob Dylan albums with me to a deserted island, PG&BtK wouldn't make the cut. Give me six and this shambling, ambient afterthought would be a lock. Three chord instrumentals bleed into three chord western fairy tales ad nauseam - multiple songs named "Billy" with only the slightest of variations - but the effect as a whole is oddly moving. Having seen the movie definitely improves the experience; every time I hear the opening of "Knocking on Heaven's Door," I see Slim Pickens, gut-shot and brokenhearted, staggering down to the river to die in his baby's arms and I get all choked up.

Key track: "Final Theme," woodwinds carry the melody and Dylan harmonizes a wordless, moaning eulogy for the dying West.




Illmatic - Nas - "Stop fucking around and be a man" advises the intro sample (from the graffiti film Wild Style) and stuck in traffic, pondering the wrinkles in my business casual attire, the grim existentialism of Illmatic resonates in a far different way than it was probably intended to. Illmatic stands head and shoulders over other hip hop classics in both lyrical and production consistency; the beats are uniformly forceful and Nas transitions seamlessly from documentary style street narratives to metaphysical musings. No skits, no bullshit dance tracks for MTV, just line after line of tough, thoughtful hip-hop.

Key Track: "Life's a Bitch," AZ and Nas trade verses about a world where "fuck who's the baddest/a person's status depends on salary."



What's in your car or on your headphones on the way to and from work?

Moose + Sprinklers = Glorious Awkward Mammal Fun!

Oodles of sprinkler fun:

Red Shift by Ted Berrigan

Here I am at 8:08 p.m. indefinable ample rhythmic frame
The air is biting, February, fierce arabesques
on the way to tree in winter streetscape
I drink some American poison liquid air which bubbles
and smoke to have character and to lean
In. The streets look for Allen, Frank, or me, Allen
is a movie, Frank disappearing in the air, it's
Heavy with that lightness, heavy on me, I heave
through it, them, as
The Calvados is being sipped on Long island now
twenty years almost ago, and the man smoking
Is looking at the smilingly attentive woman, & telling.
Who would have thought that I'd be here, nothing
wrapped up, nothing buried, everything
Love, children, hundreds of them, money, marriage-
ethics, a politics of grace,
Up in the air, swirling, burning even or still, now
more than ever before?
Not that practically a boy, serious in corduroy car coat
eyes penetrating the winter twilight at 6th
& Bowery in 1961. Not that pretty girl, nineteen, who was
going to have to go, careening into middle-age so,
To burn, & to burn more fiercely than even she could imagine
so to go. Not that painter who from very first meeting
I would never & never will leave alone until we both vanish
into the thin air we signed up for & so demanded
To breathe & who will never leave me, not for sex, nor politics
nor even for stupid permanent estrangement which is
Only our human lot & means nothing. No, not him.
There's a song, "California Dreaming", but no, I won't do that
I am 43. When will I die? I will never die, I will live
To be 110, & I will never go away, & you will never escape from me
who am always & only a ghost, despite this frame, Spirit
Who lives only to nag.
I'm only pronouns, & I am all of them, & I didn't ask for this
You did
I came into your life to change it & it did so & now nothing
will ever change
That, and that's that.
Alone & crowded, unhappy fate, nevertheless
I slip softly into the air
The world's furious song flows through my costume.

A Winning Mentality

Apropos of Father's Day:



One day I hope I get to say something as profoundly inspirational to my own children.

Making Headlines - Complete

The complete headlines from the "Ballads" section of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. Outside links to the recordings provided beneath the headline when available; all songs 1927-1932.

Henry Lee - Dick Justice
Fatal Flower Garden - Nelstone's Hawaiians

The House Carpenter - Clarence Ashley
Drunkard's Special - Coley Jones
Old Lady and the Devil - Bill and Belle Reed
The Butcher's Boy (The Railroad Boy) - Buell Kazee
The Wagoner's Lad - Buell Kazee
King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O - Chubby Parker
Old Shoes and Leggins - Uncle Eck Dunford
Willie Moore - Burnett and Rutherford
A Lazy Farmer Boy - Buster Carter and Preston Young
Peg and Awl - Carolina Tar Heels
Ommie Wise - G.B. Grayson
Bandit Cole Younger - Edward L. Crain
My Name is John Johanna - Kelly Harrell
Charles Giteau - Kelly Harrell
John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man - The Carter Family
Gonna Die With My Hammer in My Hands - Williamson Brothers and Curry
Stackalee - Frank Hutchison
White House Blues - Charlie Poole w/ The North Carolina Ramblers
Frankie - Mississippi John Hurt
When that Great Ship Went Down - William and Versey Smith
Engine One-Forty-Three - The Carter Family
Kassie Jones - Furry Lewis (link is to Lewis in '68)
Down on Penny's Farm - The Bently Boys
Mississippi Boweavil Blues - The Masked Marvel a.k.a Charley Patton
Got the Farmland Blues - The Carolina Tar Heels

German Idealism REDUX

If philosophy isn't your cup of tea, please scroll down and enjoy Josh's delightfully introduced link to TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People list. For everyone else, please enjoy/criticize the following:

The ALL – The concept of ALL is similar in function and nature to the concept of infinity. That is, both consist in irony. In other words, the concept ALL is not and can never be identical to the ALL per se. Infinity and the ALL are both originally and essentially positive. Subjectivity itself is defined by the revelation of the ALL as differentiable, which consists in negation, i.e. subjectivity.

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The ALL and its remainder – If the ALL is fundamentally a paradox, like nothing and infinity, there is an insurmountable chasm between the sign and the signified. These words by definition resist identity-thinking because they are expressly non-identical to that which they refer to.

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The primacy of belief – Any and all forms of negation consist in belief. Belief itself can be divided into justified belief (knowledge) and dogmatic belief (faith). The structure of belief is a wall, or a point beyond which questions pertaining to the ontology of that which is in question become incoherent and unintelligible. The wall of knowledge is the cogito, while the wall of faith is the ALL.

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What does it mean to disbelieve? – To disbelieve is the essence of skepticism, which itself paves the ultimate path to pure knowledge. Skepticism recognizes the fundamental reality that all positive knowledge really consists in negation, and thus all knowledge consists in belief. In fact, Hegel’s project in the Phenomenology consists largely in showing that Kant provides a realization of this paradigm, insofar as he assumes an absolute skepticism towards reality per se, and imagines a secondary contingent reality – the phenomenal realm, or realm of possible subjective experience – of which, he claims, positively justified knowledge can be known. As an idealist, Kant had faith in this distinction. He achieves the absolute separation between the subject and the object by creating an absolute separation between the object and non-objective reality, or the ALL. By dividing the ALL per se into phenomena and noumena and simultaneously extracting the subject from the ALL, we are confronted with the absolute, unquestionable subject/object distinction.

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Hegel vs. Kant – In response to the unquestioned irony built into Kant’s epistemology, Hegel inverts Kant’s reality by giving phenomena primacy and dismissing noumena, which cannot be objectively known, as “less than shadows.” Hegel’s distressing fear of irony* forces him into a repetitious, often circular epistemology that aims at a communion of subject and object. Hegel’s Absolute, the totality of objectively knowable reality (thus everything), has no outside and thus claims to be the ALL not simply identified, but identified as the totality of that which is always already becoming.

*Hegel and Irony – It is not irony in itself that Hegel fears; it is the unexamined, assumed irony that Kant unquestioningly uses as the bedrock upon which he erects his three critiques. Attempting to overcome irony, rather than ignore it, although necessarily futile, proves to be the nature of life itself. Thus when we find that Kant was bound to his hometown and was no traveler to say the least, the hermetical odor that pervades his work makes perfect sense, while Hegel, not afraid to confront uncertainty without writing it off as such, produced works that have a far more human flavor. Hegel’s Romantic grandiosity exists in truth, while Kant’s certainty-driven epistemology exists for truth.

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Apperception as negation – Apperception is essentially negation. In other words, if I call to mind the fact that I am currently formulating ideas and writing, I am essentially saying that I am absolutely doing nothing else, thereby making an a priori objective statement. If the conditions of the possibility of my formulating ideas and writing are met, I am necessarily doing nothing else but formulating ideas and writing. In order to believe this to be a proper description of reality, I must grant knowledge – i.e. the primacy of the objectively answerable question – primacy. Pure knowledge, of course, does not consist in positivity, but in negativity. As an epistemologist, Kant had to first negate reality (ignore it as unknowable) in order to assert anything positive about it (as phenomenal reality). Pure knowledge requires that we disbelieve that it is itself a form of belief.

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All knowledge is reducible to self-knowledge – Within the Kantian framework, knowledge can be reduced to self-knowledge insofar there is only one Self, i.e. the rational agent. Within the Hegelian framework, knowledge can be reduced to self-knowledge insofar as there is only one Self, i.e. the Absolute, or Geist. The difference between these two notions of Self is a variation on the subject/object theme, which itself is a variation on the opening theme, that of the ALL. Specifically, the Kantian Self consists in an absolute separation from the world, i.e. the universe not only exists independently of Self, but Self probably can’t even say anything necessarily true about the universe. The Hegelian Self, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with collapsing this differentiation by a return to ALL. In religious terms, we are faced here with the schism between Protestantism and Catholicism. The Kantian world has no metaphysical structure beyond our ability to describe it in terms of how we confront it, while the Hegelian world resolves into the Self by making the Self, or subject, not an object, but the Object.

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The Voice of the Remainder – Kant’s world, though like Descartes he didn’t necessarily intend it to, annihilates the remainder through the doctrine of “the condition of the possibility.” Thereby, Kant sees but does not hear the remainder. On the other hand, Hegel annihilates the remainder through his rigorous practice of the science of phenomenology, or the taking of phenomena as more real than noumena. Thereby, Hegel hears but does not see the remainder.

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Transcendence and Immanence - Kant believes in an outer ultimate reality, while Hegel believes in an inner ultimate reality.