DISCOVERY

SLOUGH

Slough --> Swamp. Inlet on a river. A place of deep mud or mire. Backwater. A state of moral degradation or spiritual dejection.

OLD TIMES

SOMETHING FROM 11 YEARS AGO

GOD

FROM MAY

"We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one's total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One's religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.

[several passages later, May is quoting from Erich Fromm] '...There is much less difference between a mystic's faith in god (by which he means the indigenous convictions of the religious person rather than other-worldly creeds) and an atheist's rational faith in mankind than between the former and that of a calvinist whose faith in god is rooted in the conviction of his own powerlessness and in his fear of god's power.'"

- Rollo May, Man's Search For Himself

1920'S RUDENESS

In slightly higher quality:
- here
- and here

MORE SIMIC

"Seeing is determined not by the eye but by the clarity of my consciousness. Most of the time the eyes see nothing."

- Charles Simic, The Unemployed Fortune-Teller

THE NEW PORNOGRAPHY

"In the 19th century, everybody knew about death. In the 20th century, nobody knows about death. People die in hospitals now. In the 19th century, nobody knew about sex. In the 20th century, everybody knows about sex. Death has become the new pornography. We don't talk about it."

- Helen Sclair, from Studs Terkel's Will The Circle Be Unbroken?

A PERFECT THING

RUDENESS

Drawn @ the Rt. 59 Omega w/ Linus and Harley in Bic pen... sometime in 2005?

ADONIS

THE STOMP POST

Marty taped Russell's hand to the stomp post... and sure enough in due time his hand was stomped outta the picture so to speak. A simple stomping shouldn't signal any shame, but Russell, my old buddy Russell can't sit still when we all start stomping.

THE BABY

INTENSE FLAPPER

- from The Show of Shows (1929)

PAXTON'S METHOD

Make 20 of them and pick the best one.

LATE NIGHT INSOMNIA

7 REECE MEWS

 

- Francis Bacon's studio photographed by Perry Ogden, 7 Reece Mews

CHICAGO: THE WAYSTATION IN TIME

"The home park of the big soap-chip and sausage-stuffing tycoons, the home cave of the juke-box giants and the mail-order dragons, the knot that binds the TV waves to the airlanes and the railroad ties to the sea, but also the psychological nerve center where the pang goes deepest when the whole country is grinding its teeth in a nightmare sleep."

- Nelson Algren, Chicago: City On The Make

PROCESS

"I sit down to write with a blank page and a blank mind. Wherever the organ of reality (the brain) wants to go I follow with the blue-pencil of consciousness. Poetry is sanity, full brain thinking, where the shape of the thought is more important than the particular thought. It is a way of mind more than a technique."

- Russell Edson

6 FACES

01. Tornado Chaser

02. Cigarette Tester

03. Drug Dealer

04. Builds Lawnmowers (freelance)

05. Quarterback

06. Stanley Kubrick's Cousin (Lars Kubrick)

PLAY (PART TWO)

PLAY

Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing- it didn't have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I'd see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn't have to do it; it wasn't important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn't make any difference: I used to invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I started to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate- two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, "Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it's two to one?"

I don't remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass of particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, "Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it's two to one is..." and I showed him the accelerations.

He says, "Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of it? Why are you doing it?"

"Ha!" I say. "There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it." His reaction didn't discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics, QED. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was "playing"--working, really-- with the same old problems that I loved so much. that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems, all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was: the diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

- Richard Feynman, "The Dignified Professor", Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!

EATING BANANAS IN SILENT ANGER

"She sounded like when my mom eats bananas in silent anger."

- David Cross, I Drink For A Reason

TWO PANELS

MOIRA HAHN

-Moira Hahn, Double Trouble II

THE LARGE THING

A large thing comes in.
Go out, Large Thing, says someone.
The Large Thing goes out, and comes in again.
Go out, Large Thing, and stay out, says someone.
The Large Thing goes out, and stays out.
Then that same someone who has been ordering the Large Thing out begins to be lonely, and says, come in, Large Thing.
But when the Large Thing is in, that same someone decides it would be better if the Large Thing would go out.
Go out, Large Thing, says this same someone.
The Large Thing goes out.
Oh, why did I say that? says the someone, who begins to be lonely again.
But meanwhile the Large Thing has come back in anyway.
Good, I was just about to call you back, says the same someone to the Large Thing.

- Russell Edson, The Tunnel

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

"There is no love other than one which manifests itself in a person's being in love. There is no genius other than one which is expressed in works of art. Proust is the sum of Proust's works; the genius of Racine is his series of tragedies. Outside of that, there is nothing. Why say that Racine could have written another tragedy, when he didn't write it? A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing. To be sure, this may seem a harsh thought to someone whose life hasn't been a success. But, on the other hand, it prompts people to understand that reality alone is what counts, that dreams, expectations, and hopes warrant no more than to define a man as a disappointed dream, as miscarried hopes, as vain expectations. In other words, to define him negatively and not positively. However, when we say, "You are nothing else than your life," that does not imply that the artist will be judged solely on the basis of his works of art; a thousand other things will contribute toward summing him up. What we mean is that a man is nothing else than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships which make up these undertakings."

- Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions

SPLITS

HUMAN AMERICANS FROM THE PAST

ON THE UNEMPLOYED

"His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. Research work has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time-- inner time --which is the result of their unemployed state."

- Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

WORKING

When you ask most people who they are, they define themselves by their jobs. "I'm a doctor." "I'm a radio announcer." "I'm a carpenter." If somebody asks me, I say, "I'm Nora Watson." At certain points in time I do things for a living. Right now I'm working for the institution. But not for long. I'd be lying to you if I told you I wasn't scared.

I have a few options. Given the market, I'm going to take the best job I can find. I really tried to play the game by the rules, and I think it's a hundred percent unadulterated bullshit. So I'm not likely to go back downtown and say, "Here I am. I'm very good, hire me."

You recognize yourself as a marginal person. As a person who can give only minimal assent to anything that is going on in this society: "I'm glad the electricity works." That's about it. What you have to find is your own niche that will allow you to keep feeding and clothing and sheltering yourself without getting downtown. (Laughs.) Because that's death. That's really where death is.

- Nora Watson, editor (age 28), from Studs Terkel's Working

CREEP CITY USA

LOU REED AT HIS MOST LOU REED

MY BANGS WILL KILL YOU

AT THE DARK END OF THE BAR

"I'm in a dayroom at a retirement home. A television plays Oprah in the corner. An elderly man sitting before it has fallen asleep in an old wicker wheel-chair. Others stare vacantly, some drooling, everyone in the room at various stages of decrepitude...

...But there was a time long ago, when they played hopscotch, pin the tail on the donkey. When they swung from monkey bars, chased one another in games of tag, jumped rope, climbed trees, and lay on their backs in the grass gazing up at the shapes of shifting clouds. And on their way back from the beach or the country were enfolded, sleeping in the arms of their loving parents. Who knew that there, in that shining child, lay the future.

...And now, this is the future...

...Well, welcome to life. Have a seat, make yourself comfortable. Here, have a pillow. Would you like a glass of urine? A beaker of shit? Ask me what time it is and I'll tell you how the watch is made."

- Joe Frank, At The Dark End Of The Bar

A NOTE ON THE FRIDGE

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE...

You get to spend eternity with Reg Kehoe and his Marimba Queens, performing this song in an endless loop forever. Sort of like Sisyphus. It's the next best thing to spending an eternity with the lady in the radiator.

I can't decide if this is heaven or hell.

MARTHA STEWART WAS A MODEL

In the early 1960's.

LENNY

HOPELESS MESSY MIXTURE

"Suppose you don't believe in either Hobbes' notion that man is evil and society is good, or Rousseau's that man is good and society is evil. Suppose you believe in the hopeless and messy mixture of everything."

- Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

BURIAL RITES

"Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make. You can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for 20 years and you may never, ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is, it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain wasting years for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes, or it seems to, but it doesn't really. So you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected. Something to make you feel whole. Something to make you feel loved. And the truth is, I feel so angry. And the truth is, I feel so fucking sad. And the truth is, I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long. And for just as long, I've been pretending I'm okay, just to get along, just for- I don't know why. Maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they all have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen."

-The priest's burial speech, Synecdoche, New York

PIZZA KIDS

KAFKA, 1910

"Sunday 19 July - slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life."

-from Diaries 1910-1923

THE CHRISTMAS BEFORE LAST

JCO

MENTAL BLOCK

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case."

 -Chuck Close

YEARBOOK

LATENIGHT G-CHATS

dbrouwer:  yo

 me:  yo

dbrouwer:  mapquestvagina

 me:  ahh

you win

 dbrouwer:  yeah, i been savin that good idea for years

i thought of it one day when i was printing out directions to a vagina

FEELING BETTER

SHAKIN' THE BLUES AWAY

FIRST THING

"Just get something on the page, you have nothing to lose except your life, which you’re going to lose anyway. So get with it, enjoy this special moment that brings you to the writing table. Relax into the writing and enjoy the creative bowel movement, remembering all is lost anyway."

-Russell Edson