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objet · petit · a
Every scene has a lack, its fundamental lure
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Its midnight and I have worked all day and all night to write a single page. I only need to do this 248 more times. |
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I lack any and all superlatives, i'm doe-eyed and insanely happy. god, who once burnt my back so fiercely that the skin tore off just by one crazed sonic youth fan brushing up against me, and I screamed like a two year old, that one, now he says to me, not the kid, god says to me - sorry, and here, and thank you. and now my feet don't hit the ground when I walk. |
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My dog and cat are best friends. 
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you won't understand me unless i use my hands. 
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Again, i rock the presentation. maybe my natural state is presenting things. all of a sudden i become the popular kid. i could do this forever. |
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No one so far has said that even if Kerry did botch the joke, he was absolutely right - education = middle to upper class lifestyle = you don't have to go fight. |
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The problem with my art is that it take a lot of time and looks like i spent 5 seconds on it. This happens across the board. 
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So I’m re-reading the Gradiva myth, this crappy 19th century German novella that became as epic as the Odyssey, but only after Freud, Dali, Masson and Derrida found it stunning beyond words, a story so good that mediocre writing couldn’t ruin it – all of this for a man that falls in love with a statue of a woman walking, Gradiva means she-who walks, and then dreams the statue is real, then wakes to find the statue is real, well maybe, its not really ever clear, but he dreams she’s in Pompeii, so he goes there, he’s an archiologist and he knows of these things, not a small deal in the 19th century, to find the woman that may or may not be a statue, Gradiva, she-who-walks, and of course he finds her, well, maybe he finds her, that’s not really clear either, he finds someone, and he can’t really tell where imagination ends and reality begins, it is she-who-walks between dreams, between sculpture and Pompeii, between poetry and film and the lure of the place that is absent, the missing piece in every statue. |
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So e calls, i'll call him e in case the police are reading, and he says he's just ate a ton of goulash, again I say goulash in case the FBI is reading, and now he's watching the Simpsons where Bart is born and just as soon as he's cleared the opening he takes off running, and e laughs uncontrollably, until he tells me the story of e, another e, which I'll say in case the CIA is reading, and her ablity to take an entire bottle of bubble gum, I say bubble gum in case Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are reading, and after this entire bottle, feels just fine. Like an Austrailian snake hunter who has built up a tolerance to all poisons, overdose is no longer an option. |
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Essentially I write love letters, I mean, they never say I love you nor do they necessarily point at anyone, but really, everytime I write something that seems like its my own, a genuine product of my voice, its a love letter. So this novel and this dissertation that keep me glued here while Binny holds a sock and asks me to throw it are, for all practical purposes, giant love letters with extensive treatments of Lessing's Laocoon or pun's on Lacan's Imaginary-Symbolic-Real.
The novel begins in lots of ways, maybe I think, it begins again every chapter. Right now it begins:
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It’s a film about film. No, of course it isn't, but that's what they'll say for the next year at conferences and panel discussions. Anything on film is always about film. But its really not about film at all. Its about one second. The 24 blank spaces between the frames that make up one second. Really, its about Mils, Brooklyn and Lily.
No, its not that either. It’s about me. Its about my memory.
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I am all about the collage. 
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Essentially,
I rock the presentation.
I used to rock the stage, the slopes, the skatepark, and the wacky hat party.
But now, I just rock the presentation.
Our drummer Chad, who we called Chubaka in my first punk rock band, always wanted to have a guy dress like a robot and then have Skim, the bassist, battle and eventually destroy the robot with lasers that shot from his base as all the tension built up from the last song culminated in that final explosive moment. We never rocked as hard as Chubaka wanted. We were afraid to rock that hard, so hard that we would call upon some new age of rock or instead send us all back to pre-time, the primortal ooze reserved for those who can rock some hard that they become unglued from time.
Of course, my presentation could not live up to Chubaka's dream either, but it still, for all intensive purposes,
rocked. |
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Comps are done, my one class is only a step above high school. So, here's the to do list: finish dissertation - May 2007
finish novel - May 2007
Make a film that could be submitted to a festival - May 2008
Defend dissertation - December 2007
Get job offer from ultra-hip university and turn them down because I'm so swank. May 2008
Read a book for fun. Dec 2008
Develop chocolate peanut butter hybrid, chocobutter. It will be highly caffinated. June 2008 |
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So, its not poverty that scares me but the prospect of it, because in a few months I quit everything, live off of leftovers, and write a dissertation. To do this, UNLV demands that I take two full semesters without any kind of employment, except of course, working for them. Apparently working for the English department isn’t like other work. So, instead of taking the crappy teaching job, I just decided to starve and write the paper full time.
I don’t really get why I have this great life, this terrific, cushy, well-paid job where I don’t have to buy or sell or process or sell anything processed, this endlessly inspiring girl, a groovy little house and a dog with giant jowls and I don’t understand for a minute why I’d put this all in jeopardy for this degree which requires that I quit my job and live off savings (which I have none) and write this giant paper in a subject that I often don’t believe in at all that is really nothing more than a game smart people play because its cooler than jenga.
Nevertheless, the ship is moving forward and it will not be stopped. So, I’ll keep this journal to remind me of the process years from now when I’m taking jobs on Alaskan Fishing Boats with Marky Mark and George Cloony just to bring home a paycheck and a lot of frozen fish.
UNLV is kind of an ugly girlfriend. I can try to tell people she’s pretty on the inside, but it doesn’t fool anyone. She might not really be that great on the inside. I love my graduate committee, even though half of them don’t reply to my emails.
The school will not let you hold any employment UNLESS it is employment with UNLV – I guess they’re different because, well, who the hell knows. Apparently it is because they say it is.
They want to give me a graduate school experience. This is where I sit around in the lounge and chat playfully about Lacan. Please. There isn’t even a lounge to make this happen. UNLV is a graduate school only by the fact that they offer graduate degrees. Everything else is extreme metonymy, a metalepsis.
I should be mad that half of my graduate committee doesn’t reply to my emails. I am mad. But I’ll deny it if asked.
I’m happy here and I can’t stand it. That’s why I quit and go to school.
Here are some charming words from the head of the graduate program, which he lovingly sent directly to me:
Greg:
I can only repeat, Greg, what we have told you already a number of times. A year of residency means NO OUTSIDE WORK.
I would appreciate the common courtesy of your responding directly to my e-mails. I have spent considerable time on your case, presenting it in the best possible light to the Graduate Committee and in my last e-mail, presenting you an assistantship possibility which would serve a number of your interests--but which you apparently did not think deserving of a response. I do not understand this rudeness.
Somehow, my final year of graduate school is frighteningly similar to my first day in fourth grade. |
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mlkcarton's journal