Here is Damien, from my favourite South Park episode ever.
30 January, 2006
29 January, 2006
[Insert timely quotation here]
Internal life on a crisp sunny Sunday: random thoughts and sayings.
“Am I not an insecure person? Do I look like I’m feeling insecure right now? There must be a reason.”
(happiness)
“there is such a thing as a correct mistake”
For the first time in years, I am optimistic.
26 January, 2006
Stasis
Loxias is sad this morning. He is sitting in his office staring out of the window at a place he has struggled to put up with, and failed. He is wearing a suit, ready for a press conference, he looks at his To Do list, he thinks in dread of a long dry stifling summer ahead.
Loxias is fearful about the future, about the strength of tensile materials — like humans are. Loxias was sobbing yesterday, after a sweet and soothing conversation even, while dark was falling in the room, he even screamed, like a child who had just lost a parent. “We have achieved nothing here, except getting this stupid cat” — who was poignantly asleep at the time. “Enough with conclusions, what are we going to do?”, a call for action, what Hamlet is struggling to avoid.
Loxias is trapped in the future. Loxias is tired of persevering and rationalising and bearing it with a smile. Loxias feels alone and fearful of the future this morning, the part of the future that matters most. He is already tired of the past, of advice, of patience.
This is not an anniversary post, as you might think it would be: I only realised while writing this that it’s four years today in this miserable exile that has corroded us inside. I wrote this as an exercise in self-pity and as yet another gimmick to muster strength.
24 January, 2006
Ignorant (et ignorabunt)
One striking fact about the majority (maybe) of Outposters is their blinding ignorance on matters of what we usually call general knowledge coupled with a sense of their country being the undisputed centre of the world (whereas everybody else knows it is Ojai, California). I have said bits and pieces on the matter before, but it is a topic that inevitably keeps resurfacing.
There is a wealth of anecdotes on the matter, most of which come from perplexed and bewildered Outposters themselves (e.g. “the idiot thought the Principality has a Prime Minister, she’s lived here all her life, for *^#%*$#@$ sake!”). Recent examples include yet another student (I mean, they are supposed to read books, right?) who asked her teacher of Spanish what part of Spain Latin America is in and a candidate in a competition for a Propaganda Ministry job consistently translating the term for United Nations into English as ‘United States’.
I don’t want to dwell on more of the colourful examples; their plentiful abundance making itself manifest every now and then has lost all novelty by now: I have been here for four years (sigh). I am only interested in why there is so much ignorance. I think I can identify two reasons:
a. Outposters do not seem to be interested in whatever takes place beyond the horizon of their everyday experience. Recall that, for most of them, ‘kids, houses, food, chauvinism’ is all that matters. In this respect they are not really exceptional or even different from, well, quite a lot of human beings. However,
b. Outposters are raised in a society where criticism is actively discouraged in education, society, politics and relationships and this culture of anti-criticism is quite pervasive and, at the end of the day, oppressively inculcated. Naturally, there are discernible reasons for that: a recent colonial obscurantist past superimposed on a sturdy quasi-feudal socio-economic organisation (with the Church as a major player) would make any criticism very unwelcome anywhere. Moreover, this being a small, family-oriented, social-network powered place with a violent recent past of abject poverty for most, criticism would be corrosive of highly prized power relations and social dynamics: your butt of jokes is someone’s relative, and you somehow rely on this person, your one-night stand is someone’s daughter / sister (male perspective assumed throughout, of course), and so on.
Introvercy and a culture of anti-criticism hardly encourage anything but reproducing the ideology, especially in a rote fashion. In our case (and others), we are dealing with an ideology featuring a formulaic and distorted interpretation of the world in black-and-white, a sentimentalist iconography and irrational foundations, as well as disdain for excessive ‘detail’ and ‘useless ‘information.
19 January, 2006
Other people’s crimes are heinous
Dedicated to devious diva and her (online) struggles.
I have finally found time to locate the link to an extremely important article on Orhan Pamuk, Turkish crimes and the British way of doing genocide (and then going on to hush about it).
18 January, 2006
American Memory V
I marvelled at many things but I only learned one: that Europe is miserable in at least one thing, namely the morosity, Angst and bile of its intelligent and cultured people (or, really, every European, bar the Portuguese). Plainly put, if you are intelligent and / or cultured in Europe, you cannot be happy, you cannot be fun, it is inconceivable that you may smile or be pleasant. You must be possessed by the sullen spirit of Schopenhauer, you must look at the world throught the eyes of Raskolnikov, you must despise the world more intensely than that poor fictional New Yorker, Holden Caulfield, you must despise it at least as much as Nietzsche.
America taught me (Boston first and New York definitely) that you can be of a happy and kind disposition even if you are intelligent and cultured. Also, sullenness and grumpiness or pose, rudeness and obfuscation can hardly conceal emptiness and stupidity. In America. In Europe they are sufficient hallmarks of a true intellectual.
American Memory III
The Garage jazz bar: cool place, relaxed crowd, great martinis, delectable jazz. A trio: a black guy (bass), a white guy (piano), an asian guy (drums). A singer: looking like Morrissey in 15-20 years. On Seventh Avenue at (roughly) 12th St.
–
Update on 31.I.2006: actually it is at Grove St., very close to Bleecker St. Hyperlink added, too: even memories can use a hyperlink.
American Memory II
Walking in the street and understanding, for the first time, why The Battle Hymn of the Republic is maybe as important — and as (excessively) iconic — as L’ Internationale. Among other things, it is a candid and clear voice from a time when American Protestants were all for Civil Rights.
