Things Remain the Same (2008-2009)

Not Facebook

Jessica Millnitz suspects she has a better sense of what's expected of her than she trusts herself to have. Suspicion and trust of course being two different things, I've stayed awake one and one too many an hour after getting in bed. Standing in heels made my legs sore in back just below the thigh but above the pit of the knee and sore just below the calf but right above the ankle. Walking in flats moves the latter soreness up the leg some inches and the former up the same number of inches plus two and a half.

Transitional Period

STEVE MARTIN (Born Standing Up, 54):

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naivete, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

[&]

My final day at the magic shop, I stood behind the counter where I had pitched Svengali decks and the Incredible Shrinking Die, and I felt an emotional contradiction: nostalgia for the present. Somehow, even though I had stopped working only minutes earlier, my future fondness for the store was clear, and I experienced a sadness like that of looking at a photo of an old, favorite pooch.

Facebook/Proust-Groos Mondegreen for Ref.

What's this malarky about you write on your own wall now?

I feel really uncomfortable about it. A level of uncomfortable I wish other choices I make would achieve as it might be the single strongest motivator for me in all things when it exists: away away away!

I love you but I don't need this much of you and feeling this accessible makes me draw my cheek into the crook between my collar bone and shoulder. No no no, it won't do. If I can't get a grip in under a week, I can't envision my stay lasting too long.

It's good to try things out and to test your limits for the sake of broadening your horizons, but if there are no horizons to broaden and only your own sense of self worth to be tested and commodified? Just, all the words.

ELO - Don't Bring Me Down

After Three Years...

...I'm back on Facebook. I will say no more on the subject beyond that I already feel kinda like I moved my queen out without checking carefully enough about it. I make no guarantees about the duration of my stay.

Suburban Insomnia

If you couldn't tell, I couldn't catch a wink last night. It's supposed to get up to 96 today and I don't have to work till 3:00. Who wants to hit the pool over brunch?

P.S.
I called for the second time yesterday about that job I mentioned really wanting. They did not pick me, nor did they pick any of the other applicants. We were all unfit. The position is still open. Despite the fact that my future goals and past experiences are SO TOTALLY COMPATIBLE with the position they're trying to fill. So I am still pretty much unemployed as a jaybird and open to suggestions.

Chess Facts:

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First, mysteries solved: 1) Kenny and I once played a game of chess that lasted 4+ hours. We were talking about how there are three phases. It turns out there actually are, to every game. They are called the opening, the middle game and the end game. 2) When we'd play Bobby Fisher chess, Walker would remind me Fisher said this was the best way to focus on tactical play. What does that mean you might wonder, as I did, because isn't all of it tactics? It turns out, no no my friends, in chess tactics and strategy are, firstly, not the same thing and secondly, two specific things. Tactics are like primates and strategies are like mammals. Tactics are the various pockets of action that break out on the board and strategy is more the orchestration of those pockets to converge (if you're a winner) toward checkmate. Or rather a style of playing that tends not toward pockets of action at all, but of deliberately mysteriously forming positions of trappery. Now I know why I'm great at Bobby Fisher chess though...

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Open position- Positions in which there are many open files and diagonals, and fewer locked pawn structures. Often incites quick contact between enemy pieces, resulting in tactical play. This is more how I play, as opposed to...
Closed position- Type of position in which there are few pawn trades and pieces are locked in behind pawn structures. Players who like long-term planning thrive in closed positions.

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E4 is the most popular opening move, only slightly moreso than D4. Playing black has always seemed easier for me, for my way of playing. But according to the USCF black is always at a disadvantage, especially if white is at all better than you.

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The László Polgár experiment refers not to an opening or variation or anything but to a Hungarian educator who, while mediocre at chess himself, decided to use it as the key to the homeschooling of his three daughters, assigning as much as six hours of work a day. You see, before he'd even impregnated anyone, he wrote a book about how to bring up a genius, saying they were made, not born. A woman named Karla--with a background in theory and education herself-- liked his style and looked him up and they got married and had three daughters. The result was one international master and two grandmasters. László and his girls, Zsuzsa, Zsofia, and Judit, are all still alive. In 1984 at 15 Zsuzsa became the first female Grandmaster. In 1991 baby sister Judit would be the second. She was two months younger than Bobby Fisher was when he broke in. In 2002 Judit would beat Garry Kasparov, who has said that "women by nature are not exceptional chess players."

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Today only 11 out of the world's about 950 grandmasters, including Susan and Judit, are female.

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The Lincoln Chess Club meets downtown, Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7-10pm. I'm thinking of sneaking a peak tomorrow. Like a spy. It's really really geeky of me but right now I'm sooo tempted to shell out money via the internet to become a USCF member, sign up for some tourneys and get me a ranking. Chess is one of the few things about which I care even less than I know how bad or good I am, but which, like swimming, feels so purely fun to me that I feel good at it. Or, more like, good about it. In a very can't-take-that-away-from-me kinda way. It is one of the few things about which I am a very good sport.

Name Me This Movie If You Know It

I don't know what I'm watching but it is a black and white movie with Norman Bates playing kind of a Prousty type bloke except overly chatty and perhaps a little dubious but I think only because of the Bates role and because his character seems like more of a twitchy-neurotic than a daydreamy/Prousty-neurotic, just a hair more suspicious. The cinematography reminds me of Alphaville--there're these amazing shots w/ lines lines lines and movement in the foreground, or structured entirely around perspective like a painting compositions that'd make for great stills. There's this sleepy, sassy eyeliner babe w/ a vague cold war Mary Poppins accent and Anna Karina bangs and they're both in a rooming house and her apartment is all floral patterns and Norman Bates is as attractive as you might think he would be while watching Psycho if only he hadn't been such a secret creepster. Because after all, the blonde never woulda stayed at that hotel if he and his taxedermy hadn't charmed her at least a little, am I right?

Right now there's this INSANELY long tracking shot of this woman with a fake leg (or a leg brace) dragging a trunk across this cold landscape but with apartment complexes and church bells in the background--think Let the Right One In type stark buildings--and they're carrying on this literate argument the whole time, dragging dragging dragging and then he offers her the birthday cake he's been carrying by it's string in exchange for letting him carry her trunk for her and the argument reaches its climax under street lamps, evidently because of his liasons--with a minor, with eyeliner babe? Earlier, before kissing her he prefaced it with this finely argued quirky little monologue about guilt--it must be only for those whose thoughts are innocent. one hun dred per cent, and even saints have their temptations--one part richie Cunningham, one part Norman.

But none of this is straight drama, it's all a little Larry David, a little absurd. Though there's a scene in a closet though...less Larry David, more razor's edge. And some weird Cocteau playing around with dry ice, some Orson Welles with a sheet mask and a deep voice omitting fog from beneath a pile of blankets.

EDIT: The names are German, and the cast of extras is MASSIVE. The music is Agatha Christie. The sound also reminds me of Alphaville--you get more Norman than anything else, sometimes his voice is even louder in his head than his footsteps. Outloud, his lines seem filtered, spoken through a can, while everbody else sounds like as clear as Gene Kelly. This had to have been a play. Or a short story. Maybe a novel.

EDIT: Turns out he may be a little psycho after all, my judgement may be less trustworthy than I'd thought. There may be multiple eyeliner babes too, there are many european accents, "A girl like that wouldn't be able to sacrifice herself for a man. If you don't know where she's gone, she must not mean that much to you, otherwise you'd find out...He's vain, like everyone else. I'm vain myself too, that's why it bothers me that you don't like me very much." They appear to be makeout fighting in a pile of rubble. I'm beginning to suspect a major coincidence in television programming tonight. The German and the Jewishness of the violin, the tight stiff suits, the small coy comedic turns teasing through these larger threads of thick anxiety. "I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid of any of them personally. I just want to get out of here and be alone."

PS (Stalkers and Chasers)

There also used to be Kangaroos bigger than you!


More awesomes:

CHRISTINE JANIS (Brown University): People always think that big predators are like the top of the heap, the king of beasts, the king of the jungle. And in fact, those big predators, particularly ones that sort of highly specialize in just eating meat, they're very vulnerable.

NARRATOR: Scientists are sharply divided about what caused Thylacoleo and all the other giant animals in Australia to die out. One view is that the final climax of cold conditions toward the end of the Ice Age, 30,000 years ago, pushed the great creatures into oblivion...But a rival theory places the extinction much earlier, around 50,000 years ago. At that time, climate changes were probably less severe. And the first humans to arrive in Australia, the ancestors of today's aboriginal people, were entering the continent.

GIFFORD MILLER (University of Colorado): If we look at what was happening in Australia, 50,000 years ago or so, we can see a relatively stable climate, not that much different than today. And we also see that that's when the first humans colonized Australia. So it raises the question: could it be a human impact that's the main driver for these big extinctions?[...]When humans come to Australia, we know they have fire on-demand. And so that's one of the tools people use in modifying landscapes to their benefit. And humans burn for a whole range of reasons. I mean, partly, they just burn to clear the land so that they can move across it. They hunt along the fire front, they signal distant bands, they promote the growth of plants that respond after burning. So there's many reasons why humans might be burning the landscape in a way that they thought was a positive impact.

CHRISTINE JANIS: It's sort of like a snowball rolling uphill, if you like. The big predators are the ones who are going to feel any effects first, because they're the ones on top of the pyramid, and they're dependent on everything below them.

Or on the outermost layer of the snowball, if you like.

Thylacolea (2 Kinds of Hunters)

NARRATOR: But the name raised more questions than it answered. Marsupials share the characteristic feature of a pouch the females use to nurture their young. The specific bone structure needed to support a pouch in marsupials has been found in Thylacoleo skeletons.

Some marsupials live in other parts of the world, but Australia's geographic isolation contributed to the evolution of many unique species, like wombats, koalas and kangaroos. So the perplexing question is how did Thylacoleo, the extinct "meat-cutting lion," come to share features of both marsupials and big cats?

NARRATOR: Since this skull is so well preserved, it promises to deliver clues that have eluded previous researchers. Mark Walters is a doctor who uses forensic techniques to rebuild shattered human faces and skulls. Today he's using a CT scanner for a different kind of detective work. For the first time, he will peer deep inside Thylacoleo's skull, and try to reconstruct the creature's ancient brain.

MARK WALTERS: CT data provides us with a stack of images, and we can bring those into the computer, and then we can create geometrical files. And from those geometrical files we can do a number of different types of manipulations, including taking a cast of the internal surface of the bones.

NARRATOR: The CT images are transformed into a plastic replica of the skull. Then Walters takes a set of precise measurements of the interior cavity. The final result is a remarkable three-dimensional cast of Thylacoleo's brain.

MARK WALTERS: There's a lot of information that can be derived from such a cast. We can see, quite clearly, the lumps and bumps on the bone. And they correspond to different parts of the brain. Well, the very first thing and obvious structure is that we see these very large olfactory lobes. So this animal is going to be able to detect its specific smells over very long distances. Also we can see the parts of the brain associated with sight. And we can also see the big nerves that go to the eyes. And these nerves are quite large, so you can see this animal also required a lot of good vision. So, what we can quickly see by this cast of the brain is that this animal had a very powerful sense of smell. It also had a good sense of hearing, and a very good sense of sight. So it was using all of its senses in its day to day activities.

Of Course an Island

John Banville (Ghosts, 21):

An island, of course. The authorities when they were releasing me had asked in their suspicious way where I would go and I said at once, Oh, an island, where else? All I wanted, I assured them, was a place of seclusion and tranquillity where I could pursue my studies of a famous painter they had never heard of. It sounded surprisingly plausible to me. (Oh yes, guv, says the old lag, standing before the big desk in his arrowed suit and twisting his cap in his hands, this time I'm going straight, you can count on it, I won't let you down!) There is something about islands that appeals to me, the sense of boundedness, I suppose, of being protected from the world--and of the world being protected from me, there is that, too.

House Night 3

Driving all the way "home" to out here in this weather was like being captain of a small craft. Cars.

David Letterman and "
Dr. M. Sanjayan (Lead Scientist for The Nature Conservancy)" are riffin on the future of the climate. Dave says Denmark's got a plan to save the planet by pumping carbon dioxide into the earth's core. Or the sea?

On Craig Ferguson Holly Hunter says the other day she met someone without a computer. "You can't do that anymore, ride the rails. Just jump on a train, there was something kind of romantic about that life." She lists to one side of the chair with her chin out, "Or do you not have that in Scotland?"

Here there is no weather, only neighbors. Here is venetian blinds. Here is the book I am reading now:

Here they are. There are seven of them. Or better say, half a dozen or so, that gives more leeway. They are struggling up the dunes, stumbling in the sand, squabbling, complaining, wanting sympathy, wanting to be elsewhere. That, most of all: to be elsewhere. There is no elsewhere, for them. Only here, in this little round.

John Banville. Hadn't read him since before I read Robbe-Grillet. Informative.

Inquisitively Yours

Letters to Milena (Kafka, 142):

And the doctor?
So you often see the stamp-collector? Not a sly question, although it looks like it. When one has slept badly one asks without knowing what. One wants to keep on asking forever, not sleeping means nothing but asking: if one had the answer, one would sleep.

MTV True Life: I'm Moving Back in With My Parents

I'm not, but I have been finding myself more often than not on their couch. Though I'm comforted by the fact that these phases coincide w/ the times my partment's w/o internet. I think a large part of the reason I feel anxious about blogging is because whenever I want to do it, I have to come to my blog and confront the times I've done it in the past. The recent past.

Tonight I've been laptopping w/ MTV's True Life on the tube, they've played two episodes in a row about young folks living w/ their parents. There's this really amicable very mid-sized-American-town family where mom and dad chill on their massive wrap-around sectional sofa all weekend drankin wines and beers--dad doesn't wear a lotta pants, mom wears a lotta mascara, but mom and dad cuddle which is something I'm incredibly endeared to for lack of exposure--Adult romance. For Easter, instead of hiding eggs all over the yard, the lawn furniture, the sheds, decks and patios, they hide beers. Dad and Kid--who loves weed and graffiti and being unemployed--hunt with equal gusto. Mom tries to prevent them from cheating (i.e. finding beers out the window during Easter meal). I really like this family, though not really any of the individuals in it. Does that make sense? I would not want to see a television show about just one of any of them unless it were also a show about the others just as much.

Do you watch The Unusuals? I think it's a really cute show. Amb Tamb is still the cutest, the Detectives Banks and Delahoy have an incredibly cute symbiosis, Walsh is cute like Sealy Booth but a hair badder (and shorter, but no less iron-jawed), and Adam Goldberg has always been the sexy pole of the Steven-Wright-Spectrum (sorry Steven Wright, you're the unsexy pole). I much prefer a lack of direction in the first season than in the fifth know waddamean? Let your show find its feet while the audience is too, but don't let the audience know you're guaging guaging guaging. Do you watch television daily? How much advertising are we exposed to? What correlates? What about when we watch tv as a family? I worry sometimes my mother and I are growing apart as tv watchers, that our partnership is not just going through a rough patch. Family family family. Volcano burritos. Bing.com.

Can we change the larger themes of our narratives once we've already begun to establish them? What I mean is, once they've already grown into themes. I am not talking about patterns. I am not asking whether or not people can change.

Raiding Your Room,
Jessica

(project notes)

letters
pen
open, close,
dear
address
reply, answer
"secretary"
dictation
seal
signature
epistle
deliver
message, messenger
carrier
send/t
write
scroll, scrawl, scribe
package/ing/d, bundle
present
invite
question
request
qu'est-ce que c'est

Slash and Dash Excursuses

Parents' basement. Animal Planet.
(I've decided to take a much more epistolary approach with this blog. Let's not kid ourselves, I know you're out there and you know I'm in here.)

Dear Blog,

I've been socially weird this summer/year/I'm getting socially weirder with each passing year I stay in Lincoln and accumulate relationships--I'm sorry I cyclically ignore your attempts to make contact and then strike out in a moment of bungled need and miscommunication, quickly regretting my behavior and resorting once again to irresponsibility over availability, avoidance over explanation, and, ultimately impulse over obligation. Redundantly, I am a pack of hyenas to your pride of lions--forgive me always.

The narrator on television explains, "it's not easy to tranquilize a rhino," as a man in a blue tee shirt and white baseball cap, standing knee-high in a grassy plain, about five feet from a rhino, holds out what looks like a long stiff hose with a handle and which emits an airy, expulsive whisper and something feathered which sticks to the rhino's shoulder. The rhino's skin appears to tremble though she herself remains stiff, small-eyed and wary. Finally her joints shudder and she topples onto her side.

There are words I use almost if not every day--words like relatively, like, wonder, wish, man, probably, maybe, bored, antsy, jeez, light, watch, articulate, think, head, go--and there are words which briefly find their way into this company, temporarily, an inadvertent sign of the times--words like austere, lexicon, absorptive, process, locate, migratory, autonomous, oblivion, literacies, guilt. With adjectives especially, it seems like there are never more than 10 rotating slots, never more than a handful of immediately available ways to describe things. Lately it's been stiff, everything all stiffening, stiffed and stiffness--I know, but I'll bet you prefer it to rigid--You start using one so much and you begin to wonder what all these things were before they were stiff, what words were you hung up on before you were hung up on these? My worries always rotate around whether to be more or less declarative. (<--Even that one seems like a commitment I aspire to make but feel nervous about once made.)

My mom bought a copy of The Secret at a rummage sale for a quarter. I've never thought about the implications of all her accumulation of self-helpy type materials because she tends to accumulate a lot of materials in general and the great majority of them go unused, not actually reflecting on/effecting her, her attitudes, preferences or lifestyle. I think this is big part of why I'm fixated on accumulation and use.

"So I'm thinking I'm in the wrong place and I have got to get out of here. When dealing with large predators you always have to give them the utmost respect." The attacking chimpanzee's name is Frodo, the camera man narrating his tale of woe has a very Steve Coogan british accent. "So yes, be calm, be submissive, let him make his point...He just climbed down a tree, walked over, and pushed me down a hill. That was Frodo...You leave a bit of your heart when you leave a place like that. It gave me a lot and it meant a lot." Cameraman. Nature documentary cameraman living amongst the non-human natives, how I want to be the proverbial you.

I received The Ballad of Jack and Rose in the mail today--The love stories in my dvd collection usually feature one if not all of incest, mental illness or complicit criminality as prominent concomitant themes and can only hesitantly be called love stories. Also I love stories that take place on islands, the less tropical the better--Other things in the mail to me at the moment: Louis Wayne kitty magnets, more books translated from the French, a vibrator, sandals, wall hooks that look like branches, and The Sopranos on dvd. I would be so wealthy without the mail.

I had a job interview Wednesday for something I'd take pride in doing. I'm not particularly superstitious about talking about the job, but it's the internet and what harm did a little breath-holding ever do anybody? Or rather, you should know by now how fixative I find holding my breath to be. Won't know more until the 11th at the latest.

Stiff until then and twenty pages of Proust a day--driving home at 3:00am,
Jm

Proust Questionnaire

Proust, 170:

But we play certain favorite parts so often for the eyes of others, and we rehearse them so much in our hearts, that we come to rely more readily on the fictions of their evidence than on a reality we have all but forgotten. (170)

What is your most marked characteristic?
What is your principal defect?
What do you most value in your friends?

Grades...

...are always better than I expect. Sometimes it feels as though I do better simply by worrying, as though my grades are effected less by actual quantity of work done than they are by the quality time I spent really freaking out and/or feeling guilty about my academic commitments over the course of the semester.

My last undergraduate report card:

African American Lit w/ Peabody: B-
Blacks in Film 1970-Present (actually Ethnicity and The Western) w/ Dreher: B
Japanese & Asian Cinema w/ Foster: A+
Writing of Poetry 4 w/Anthony: A

Tomorrow is my 23rd birthday. I want to wake up early for coffee, see a matinee after lunching and laundering at my parents, and then go to Pioneer's Park for a chess picnic. What do you think?

Small and Twitchy Things, Fear, Creepings

I have been walking out of bed for a cup of coffee every morning and getting into it every night with a bowl of strawberry ice cream. In the three years I've lived here, its the first time I've had internet in the whole place. Last night the lights attracted to my bedside a giant moth I thought had already left the apartment to go terrorize someone else. I wrote a poem about this once when it happened before, inevitable open windows at night in spring, expect a pillowcase full of gregor samsa in the morning and you swatting flies with your shoe, it began.

Things I'm afraid of include rodents, moths, bats, fish, frightened birds, locusts, locusts and junebugs and cicadas and all other spazzy giant bugs, basically alive, non-domestic, small and fast creatures of many textures which seem, at any given moment, to be moving quickly with little idea in which direction they're heading and could, as a result, get on you and twitch on you. Smally and fastly. Things I could never kill but would find just as difficult to capture due to the potential twitching/touching that could occur. They could hurt themselves against you. You could get a scrape or a disease or a greasy-feeling spot on your skin which you will think feels greasy for long after, making you wonder if the skin of yours they touched with theirs was ever actually any greasier for the encounter.

The poem I think went on to be about socially feeling that way, about the way some people make you feel safe and others the opposite while hopefully most make you feel neither, about some boy or another because it was epistolary. In truth, flies are not on the list of things which frighten me, but I often relate to Samsa's surprise in regards to unexpected fears realized without opportunity for recognition.

In the past I've hopped onto a chair and dropped to the floor without thinking in order to escape, climbing up or burrowing down in my own living room to avoid something tiny, only realizing after instinctively drawing my balled up fists to my chest, only after I was already on the ground gripping something large to swing with, or balanced barefoot on the arm of my chair that I actually return to myself (enough to feel a little silly, not enough to get your fight or flight under control) seeing how unprepared I was. Didn't know I was scared of a thing, which usually fails to disturb me otherwise, until confronted with its illogic, threatening my space, accidentally, erratically, anxiously.

I am not the kind of person who opens the old doors and steps out, holding and placing that first foot like one of two rocking chair's skates, into the dark of dark grassy yards and carpetted hallways, places where the ground is noiseless, in pursuit of ambiguity, some suspicious sound, creaking beyond the lamp light, crackling against the drainpipe outside the window. I've always been the opposite of curious in regards to that which frightens me. Chess helps with this, as does smoking, walks, and the quiet. Summer summer summer and summer.

The Big Sleep