aspiration and desire

Composing anything, even a list, involves a shift in thinking. You have to stop thinking about how the thing is supposed to look, and think about how you want it to look. 

covers

best cover versions: 

no quarter by tool (originally by led zeppelin)

lose yourself by Kasey Chambers (originally by Eminem)

crazy in love by Sofia Karlberg (originally by Beyoncé)

we can't stop by Boyce Avenue with Bea Miller (originally by Miley Cyrus)

wild horses by the sundays (originally by the rolling stones)

sweet dreams by Marilyn Manson (originally by the eurythmics)

knockin' on heaven's door by Avril Lavigne (originally by Bob Dylan)

I love you more than you'll ever know by Amy Winehouse (originally by Al Kooper)

with a little help from my friends by Joe Cocker (originally by the Beatles)

I'm shakin' by Jack White (originally written by Rudy Toombs and sung by Little Willie John)

California dreamin' by Jose Feliciano (originally by the mamas and the papas) 

maybe I'm amazed by Rod Stewart and the faces (originally by Paul McCartney)

isolation by Johnny Depp with Jeff Beck (originally by John Lennon)

where is my mind? by Placebo (originally pixies) 

immortality by seether (originally by Pearl Jam)

the sound of silence by disturbed (originally by Simon and Garfunkel)

all along the watchtower by Jimi Hendrix (originally by Bob Dylan)

sweet child o' mine by Sheryl Crow (originally by Guns n roses)

feeling good by muse (originally by Nina Simone)

I just don't know what to do with myself by the white stripes (originally by Dusty Springfield)

the scientist by Avril Lavigne (originally by coldplay)

voodoo child by orianthi (originally by Jimi Hendrix)

I heard it through the grapevine by creedence clearwater revival (originally by Marvin Gaye)

while my guitar gently weeps by Powderfinger (originally by the beatles)

are you experienced? by Eric Johnson (originally by Jimi Hendrix)

bad gasoline by Justin Townes Earle (originally by Lightnin' Hopkins)

acute

No one really comprehends depression, even people who experience it. When you're not currently going through it, you don't appreciate how bad it is. 

I remember looking at lists of side effects of benzo withdrawal, and the worst ones pass more quickly, but depression and other mental health issues linger for a longer period of time, and I'm like - that's not too bad. I can handle that - because it sounds mild and manageable, but depression and anxiety can be anything but mild and manageable. 

unthinkable

I watched a video that came up on my youtube feed. It was a news report about a priest who allegedly bit a member of the congregation coming up to take communion. I thought, I have to hear this. 

So, I watched the video and, like pretty much everyone who commented on the video, I was actually on the side of the priest. 

You got to hear her side of it first and she said that she just wanted one of the 'cookies' - yes, she used that word to describe the eucharist multiple times. She said that the priest was refusing to give her a cookie (again, her actual words) and he explained to her that she hadn't met the necessary requirements - because apparently he knew her and they had talked before about what she needed to do to accept the body of Christ in an appropriate way. There's nothing unreasonable about that. As a non-Catholic who went to a Catholic high school and also went to mass many times, I know that I can never take communion at mass, unless I become a Catholic. 

So, she goes on to say that, because the priest wouldn't give her 'the cookie' she grabbed a whole handful of the 'cookies' and scrunched them up, knocking some to the floor....that's when the tussle between the two happened. When they interviewed the priest, he was very calm and reasonable and he just explained that he was trying to stop her from committing this act of desecration. 

To hear someone refer to the eucharist as a 'cookie' - something I've never heard before - and then to have a tantrum and desecrate the eucharist because they couldn't have one, is disturbed, repulsive and abhorrent. I found it hard to believe that anyone would ever talk and act like that, but apparently they did. 

get out of the way

I really loved Tiphaine Samoyault's biography of Roland Barthes. It was perfect - the weaving together of his life, his intellectual development, the development of his theory, his connection with other key figures and historic developments. A masterpiece. 

So, I thought, I really like this genre - the biography of an influential scholar that treats their life and their work, and I bought another one. I was really looking forward to it, but I was disappointed, probably because I was expecting something like Samoyault. 

The main problem, from my point of view, was that the writer wanted to insert themselves into the book. They talked about their friendship with this scholar and why they wanted to write their biography, and they just had their own things to say, and everything was over-dramatized. Like she talked about one academic who had promoted and protected the work of the subject of the biography, 'to his very last breath'. She shared all this insider information about the relations and interactions between famous figures....and I'm like - who cares?! I'm interested in the life and work of the person that the biography is about. That's why I'm reading the book. I have zero interest in the person who wrote the book, to be honest. 

It made me think that, to write a good biography, takes a kind of humility. It's interesting that a biographer of Barthes should embody the death of the author so nicely. 

can I read?

Even though I am a Christian, I don't agree with the usual Christian critique of critical theory, because critical theory has been and still is an important part of my education. It's never been ideological, for me. It's not about dividing everyone into oppressors and oppressed. It's not about social change. 

For me, and for a lot of other people, critical theory provides a framework for understanding texts. It's an academic pursuit, and it was really liberating for me to learn about the different theoretical approaches. In high school they taught us one way of understanding texts as if that was the only way, and I didn't get it. I didn't like English in high school. But then, years later, I studied English at university and in the first year we learnt about all the different theoretical approaches, or at least some of them, and I engaged with each of them. They were helpful and interesting in understanding literature and how it works. So, it taught me that there are lots of different ways of approaching literature, which was really exciting. 

I understand that it's possible to make the connection between critical theory and activism, social and cultural change, ideology, worldview, etc. but I'm not interested in doing that, and there's no imperative for me to do that. I'm a Christian. That's my ideology. For me, critical theory is a framework for understanding texts and academic discourse. 

theory

I've been listening to and watching videos of Gabriel Rockhill. It's fascinating what he says about how the CIA took an interest in French theory (Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, etc) for the purpose of opposing the global left. 

I'm not completely convinced though. His thesis is a little bit far-fetched, and he doesn't make it accessible. He's very critical of Zizec, which I don't like. I like Zizec. 

art LXVIII

apple sauce

Andy Warhol asked Lou Reed to write a song about Edie Sedgwick, and the result was 'Femme Fatale'. 

ebb and flow

I always worry that bad things are going to be permanent. Like, when I get a migraine, I have a visual disturbance and then that passes and the headache and slightly nauseous feeling comes on, and I always think, what if the visual disturbance doesn't go away, but it always has, and probably always will. That's the reason for the headache. Some kind of reaction causes the contraction of blood vessels, which is the reason for the visual disturbance. Then, your brain (or body) releases a chemical to dilate the blood vessels, and it's that chemical which causes the headache. 

divergence

It blows my mind that some people went on with their life as normal through 2019, 2020 up til 2024. I'm not talking about the pandemic. I'm talking about the upheaval that I experienced. But that's exactly it - it was the upheaval I went through. 

Some people are still living in the world that I have left, and it seems weird to me because that world is dead to me, but for some people, life just went on. 

matrix

I don't have facebook on my phone. I understand why I see ads on facebook for things I've looked up on my computer, but today there was a website I looked up by clicking on pinterest ON MY PHONE and then ON MY COMPUTER on facebook I saw an ad for that website. I guess the common factor is pinterest which I have on my phone and on my computer, but still it's surprising. I would understand it better if I used google chrome on my computer, because I use it on my phone, but I use edge on my computer. 

So, facebook knows what I'm searching on a different device with a different browser

@ != i

Shoshana is the best character in Girls and Anya is the best character in Buffy

Stella's adventures

critique

Harold Bloom wrote that 'A canonical reading...attempts to stop the mind by making a text redundantly identical with itself, so as to produce a total presence, an unalterable meaning.'

I'm reading his book Poetry and Repression and that sentence stood out to me because it's not a sentence you could write in an essay. It's literary. It's figurative. It isn't literally true. 

bonds

I really wanted to cater to my anxiety, and she said, 'you don't owe your anxiety anything but you owe your life something'. 

spoke

We always want to make stuff like everyone else. That may be a good starting point, but to create something really worthwhile - something great - you have to be yourself. 

It's about tension.....between what is known and loved, and what is new and authentic. 

timing

It was very apt - the analogy she used....2 different plants. I had always cultivated the noxious weed of anxiety, depression, maladjustment, by withdrawing and ruminating. I had preferred that to my life. 

rune

A ruin is a collaboration between people and nature. People constructed a building and then, over time, nature augmented it. 

People make things with straight lines or exact proportions, but nature distorts. The distortions are a vital part of beauty. 

cookie

I looked up udemy because my subscription has expired, and then also today I've been researching different DAWs (digital audio workstations) because I've been learning LMMS and I'm interested in making music....it's so much fun. 

So then, when I go to facebook, there was an ad for udemy, featuring among other things, courses about frootloop studio, and an ad for domestika with courses about music theory and mixing and different DAWs, and heaps of other ads about sound production and audio assets. Also design....I've been watching videos about graphic design and looking at behance and dribbble, and I saw ads for courses about design. 

The other day I was researching print on demand, so on facebook I saw heaps of ads for different print on demand websites. 

it does happen

Now that I'm starting to very clearly experience healing from Valium, I'm struck by the similarity of this healing to healing from a different injury - my sprained ankle. It has taken a lot longer to get over Valium, but for both processes there's the same sense of it taking a long time, but steadily making progress and reaching palpable and very definite milestones of recovery. 

figures

One of my favorite poetic devices is when the poet states that something is not the case, but mentioning that thing puts the idea in your mind, so it takes on a kind of reality. 

conventions defied

The only way to read a book like The Waves by Virginia Woolf is to suspend all ways of making sense of what you read and just take it in and allow it to form its own sense in your mind. 

inscriptions

Harold Bloom speculated that ultimately all literary criticism will become poetry and poetry will become literary criticism. I don't know about that but I think it fits with Bloom's views. What I like about his literary criticism and that of some other great literary critics - Bakhtin comes to mind - is how poetic and strange it is. 

on the screen

I generally don't like blockbusters and mainstream films. I prefer foreign films, arthouse films and that kind of thing. 

fearless

What makes Top Notch Idiot's videos entertaining, is that those guys have no fear, or at least they don't show any fear. When someone comes in and they try to do the same thing but they're a bit scared, they come off as aggressive, because they instinctively feel like they have to show that they aren't scared, and it spoils the feeling of the video.

real

Reality is always more complicated than our stories about it. 

👀

I sometimes get in trouble because of my INFJ stare. 

ፃ☸ћ🎼🈸🍒🧶🌀㉇❇Å

My first panic attack happened out of the blue, with no obvious cause or reason. 

a film

One of my favorite films is the Iranian film Closed Curtain (2013). I liked it because of how experimental and strange it was. I'm sure there was a profound meaning behind the film but I didn't really get that side of it. 

About 2/3s into the film, the director and film crew become part of the film - so you actually see them filming. Also, the writer plays himself in the film. Characters who already left come back for no reason. 

analog

I've found that corresponding with someone by writing and receiving letters by old fashioned mail is a much richer and more meaningful experience than corresponding by email. 

fall

As I make progress on my taper and become less reliant on Valium, and the end of my taper comes into view, I have entered a new phase. My depression has reasserted itself. 

It's a different kind of depression now. It's not the depression of my withdrawal from Valium. It's my old depression from before that, and it's a reversion to deeply ingrained thought patterns. 

It's scary. I've fought this thing and I've made great progress, only to end up facing this, in some ways, greater, lifelong challenge. But then I realize something. 

I'm not at the mercy of this demon like I have been in the past. I've emerged from my battle with Valium, better, stronger, more whole, and with a battle-hardened spirit. 

langue

I love the way that words like, conceit, fiction, nice, and many others have a very rich and deep history of meaning. 

Б⚛🍡🇷🔆🍄Ə🌠❋

It takes so much energy sustaining the myth that you're at breaking point - that you're always at that point, beyond which you can't go. Then something happens where you have to go beyond what you think are your limits, and you cross a threshold, and it's like remembering who you really are. 

requirements

an impossible desire to return and a need to do an inordinate amount of corresponding mental work for every physical act