Quotidiana

I was being harangued at the bar the other night.

"You see," he said, "that every itinerary is itself a place. You may move from one apartment to another three blocks away, and find that you are no longer in the same neighborhood; not because you've crossed a border, but only because the base sequence you encounter in your comings and goings has changed. What can seem bucolic from one angle can be nothing but paving and pigeon from another; oases become wholly habitual, and hideaways become theaters. The very in-between places that charmed in their irrelevance have become quotidiana."



I know all about quotidiana. I can quote it chapter and verse: to wring out the sponge when you're done with the dishes, to make long phone calls on Thursday nights, to run the dryer 55 minutes on hot,to reach the cafe before 9 on Saturday mornings (if you want to duck the crowd). These actions, even, are functionally somewhere where I've been sitting too long.

Patently Untrue Statements

I've made a few. You can't say that you minded; the worst that they could have done is take up space, and there's enough space in the world.

Something patently untrue is precious. It brings out the hunter in you. You spy it between the leaves, in a clearing. It's easy to hit.

By giving you this untruth, I have given you the opportunity to bring out your keen common sense. The more you keep that common sense at hand, the more sensible you feel.

You really ought to thank me!

There Is A Song, The Song I Want

It is processional. The sense of the performance corresponds to any unit in a parade--it approaches, pauses to be taken in, and moves on. It is likewise made of quiet and bright components, the sort that can make racket together.

A typical method: you'd empty water onto a snare drum, then strike it.

It has a certain keyed character, operating between definite junctures--so the song is its own index. It's scored thematically, but these themes are graced by felicities, first-thoughts, and side conversations. You could see in it some humanists revisiting the bare of the Twenties, bringing a lilt from the Nineties. Or a neighborhood's girls and boys on a Sunday, chanting down the void.

Think of it in company terms. Oratory and pleasant silences. Then oratory and pleasant silences. An all-day roundtable, with shuffled participants, the subject being _________. End result: an impromptu invitation to the public on watermarked paper.

It depicts the frame of reportage, while omitting the picture; so it shows vast lines across nearly nothing, with no view of the acting pen. It will translate easily across scales (an engineer's scale; an architect's scale).

Nonetheless: it takes less time to hear it than to read this post.

Why We Committed It To Tape

Because we didn't want to care to fully hold it, and so sheathed it, and jettisoned it.

It shared our mood so well that we wanted to share it with you.

We're very confused and wanted to be confused again in the future.

It deserved to be only what it was at the time.

We knew it was economical since it told a truer story in a shorter time.

It was the shortest way to a band of holograms.

We want to put a composite in the market, and assign resulting value to our own respective contributions.

It is a viable organelle, for an appropriate cell, for the growing cultural body.

It isn't here very much if it isn't there.

It didn't share our mood, and so we translated it to better speaking terms.

Bag Full Of Shot

I pray in my dream to be a poacher, and to run at some hundred sorts of game on this estate--all the subtle and variegated things, a tactic at least to levy against each one. Snares at a flexible tempo, rods camouflaged and dipped in the water, rags fitted snug over smoking barrels, and barrels with their lids pried off.

Houndsteeth and buckled boots and bristling leashful of hounds, on a smoky November day--I'd like to be a thief, a blackjack, against that and of it.

Procedurals

The two of us have in common an unreflective love of long, slightly varied series. I don't know if it's a function of our culture, or of organized capital, of consequent formal lines of product, and so, and so--but we both find that what we really crave is not a continuing development across dimensions, a great and varied work, but a single finite line of production. Its various products represent a formal approach applied to a series of objects or sites, themselves relatable along a pre-existing thread (even if tenuous).

It is a great thing to come across a new or unknown component in a common series. But the happiest times we can remember have come with discovering some new series, up until then wholly occluded from us--strange compounds parceling out physics, biology, and
geometry, in terms that urgently announce themselves to any desiring body.

Uru Dance Party

I hope I don't bore anyone when I have to run over all the details from the party last night. Each of the details from last night. It's just so good to hear strangers come forth and speak for themselves; they are fearless, and then some of them are sick. Wine gives you a free field. Women give you a free field. Song gives you a free field.

But I don't like making it to the early morning, when the situation simply turns base.

Less You Or Less

For instance, I'll tell you that I spent today mulling that particular minimalism that didn't trouble itself to excess with perfections. That is, it would leave an erasure on and not buy more spotless paper. If it set about to make a line, it would make the line once, and not care to draw it again. It would love, even, the humps that slid under the ruler, and its pencil's breaking leads.



I called this "the ringing grid", and I thought about it often back then. That the structural idea could move, and resound, when caught in physical circumstance. How could an idea subsist anyways?--were it not obstructed, misunderstood, deflected, so on--like a singular impact that would die in an instant, were it not seconded and thirded by the area of air that makes it a sound.



All of which is--in that dreary humanist realm that all things get annexed to--one devised measure of comfort against the fleshly frustrations that trouble clear thoughts.

"C'mon, Doopa!"

We're currently pitching "C'mon, Doopa!", an hour-long dramedy set in the post-industrial suburbs of Boston. The show centers around JV QB Christopher "Doopa" Doomanian and his family: brother Frankie (whose nagging catchphrase gives the show its title), mother Rochelle, father Victor, and enigmatic uncle Champy. However, the show's radius takes in their entire neighborhood (an overgrown cul-de-sac), as well as the high school that Doopa and Frankie attend.

The show takes its starting point from the assorted family sagas of the past few years (especially of the "Southie" variety), but incorporates several key differences. Most notably, the show engages in drastic (if gradual) shifts in tone over the course of a season; some episodes present a mix of low-key family comedy and minor scholastic mishaps that could easily air on the Disney Channel, whereas others engage in depths of ultra-realist reportage (one episode is to be a wholly plotless real-time depiction of Frankie's study hall period), depravity (the strange impulses afflicting Doopa's sweetheart Lynn), and Jacobean intrigue (Champy's relentless quest to be elected to the school board). In short, the show seeks to assemble a holographic portrait of human reality by cleaving it into its constituent fictions, and examining them one by one.

HOWEVER, it should be understood that the primary aim of "Doopa" is to present the assorted milieux of Milltown Massachusetts without the mediation clear empathetic points of reference (save for the assorted narrative conventions). There are no pontifications--no ostentatious good taste--no encounters with sublimities. Morals assume a paramount importance, but one of neutral valence: there are no incitements to the true or the good in "Doopa", only an acute awareness of the continual moral calculus of quotidian existence.

We hope to attract Joanna "Jojo" Levesque for the role of Lynn.

He's A Libran

There is one advantage to having no firm position, which is being able to occasionally claim an alignment with correctness--that dialectical medium which flutters between the ends of the argument.

Long Accounting

...I'd start the Long Accounting movement to run far-sighted cost-benefit analyses for corporate entities; to tell them in the beigest terms to draft empathetic, ecologically-minded, egalitarian charters. On our part, any emotional appeals, or appeals to virtue, would be discarded in favor of the advancement of a simple factual proposition: that the attainment of the greatest sustainable density of the most affluent over the widest demilitarized area ensures the highest potential profit for any given corporate entity over significant extents of time. All non-essential resources, the thinking would go, should accordingly be diverted into efforts to prepare this fruitful field.

The successful implementation thereof would inevitably result in a near-instantaneous reallocation of resource and value so as to create classless masses of free and sensible consumers, their conflicts enacted in one benign ceremony or another. Impersonal, massive entities--the surviving corporates--would provide a mute, self-sustaining infrastructure, a skeleton for the spanning human community.

One thing: the place of the creator in such a society--in any truly harmonious society--would naturally be to mar that harmony at key intervals, so that the rest could pull themselves tight together once more to fix the failure.

"Rude Mechanicals"

1.
If sand dollars are the most insipid of the animals, it is because they barely have space to be animals. I've never seen the flesh of a sand dollar, no doubt because I'm not meant to; they are intended as inert tokens. Of what? A vacationer's manna.

They are only made as animals because there is no expedient geological means to produce them. Their flesh lives its term to produce the shell, and having done so has the grace to melt away. The fleshly sand dollar, then, is a little sort of stagehand.

2.
In the common imagination, construction workers heckle the rest of humanity as they make their buildings. They are lusty and fearless; while they are never seen to work the results of their work are more evident than anyone's. These workers, then, act as the visible exemplars of a split between the careful performances of the social realm and the dreamy acts of the workaday. They can be seen to directly build humanity's haptic unities out of its wispier notions and fancies.

Ferry 'Cross The Mersey

I love a ferry for its constraints. It turns sailing and all wild navigation placid; it is endeavor itself put out to pasture. I'm perverse enough to stand on the deck of a ferry and make it out to be another, slower moving sidewalk.

We've had a few conversations where we've gotten enthusiastic about urban boating. That you could paddle to work on a canal, put in at a bare little dock, and walk up into the hustle of the city. It's nice enough, but it's fine too as is to just make a break with a recreational ferry, to somewhere unnecessary. The pilot's quotidian can at least be your secession, if you don't overindulge.

(Given that we're always having to step into each other's territory, we might as well make interesting territory to step into, OK?)

Kindergarten Questions

1. WHAT DO DOLDRUMS LOOK LIKE?

Lumps of congealed water, bobbing slowly on quick sea.

2. WHY ARE LEOPARDS SEXY?

Each of their spots is a semi-enclosed pleasure cell, opaque walls containing pocket-universes of erotic possibility. Imagine the cave where Dido and Aeneas weathered the storm, multiplied indefinitely across an arid plain.

3. WHO TEACHES IN THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS?

Precisely those persons and things that do not intend to teach.

Sunday Mornings

1.
The paramount thing is to put off breakfast as long as you can. Avoiding dressing or bathing helps, but you really can't begin working until you've had your breakfast. To cultivate the leisurely Sunday morning, then, you place that breakfast at some indefinite point in the future.

Present involvements and pertinent thoughts are batted away.

Five books to read for five pages each, and then a drift through their illustrations. One side of a record of classical music, to ignore. Any inconsiderable bodily motions--sheet-kicking, pillow-building, and eye-rubbing. A look at the wondering dial of sunbeams through the room. Overall, put-on notions of seriousness are essayed and quickly abandoned. It's a style to enable writing of precisely the present sort: a chain of single half-fogged propositions conveyed by the sentence fragment.

2.
The author, having spent some years refining this practice, decides that it has been perfected, and must now be made to dwindle away. Instead of budgeting to spend a fourteenth of her waking time entirely absent of contemptible cares, she seeks to wholly assume a better, more engrossing class of concerns. Her customary miserliness demands a value for the valueless time she has spent, and she constructs one accordingly: a working understanding of everyone's leisure, of everyone's in-between time, of everyone's unchronicled time as a body-in-bed. Not as a thinker, nor a lover, but as a slow volputuary.

She can then emerge with her half-thoughts, with native intelligence to sell.