banked in memory

Asking me to pick which one of Bill Gibson's books is my favourite is more difficult for me than (I imagine) picking a favourite child. His tend to be the books I reread the most, and the ones I hold closest to my heart. This time I've gone back to Spook Country, the second in the (loosely) Bigend/Blue Ant Trilogy. The character that has always stood out for me has been Tito; a young Cuban male of a certain Soviet flavour living in New York City. He's part of a family; a boutique "firma" concentrated in the direction of interstitial crime. Very niche. Some DGI/CIA ties. The chapters that revolve around Tito are especially captivating. He has a very rigid set of physical protocols that he adheres to but at the same time there is a side of him which is obviously deeply spiritual. The passages evoke a sense of deep peace. There's something about the promise of methodology that will flow out of this person and how it is being kept in check. A subscribing to some sort of higher knowledge, playing a part, then acceptance and obedience. Perhaps it's something that I find fascinating because it feels foreign to me, personally. I like that he is constantly aware of himself and his relation to the space surrounding him. An obscure comfort brews there.

I've always concentrated on the main character through my readings, but this time around I've finally consciously hit on an elegant inverse symmetry between the chapters with Tito and the ones with Milgrim. How to explain Milgrim. He appears out of thin air and is being (sort of) kidnapped by what the reader assumes is a Fed (Brown). What keeps him there is his dependence on anti-anxiety meds. He seems bland but he grows on you (or at least on me) because of his childlike demeanour which belies a serious intelligence in terms of streets and academia. Both Tito and Milgrim are bound in certain physical and mental ways, Tito by protocol/the firma, and Milgrim by meds/Brown. But what's dynamic about it is how they use this to their advantage. Tito works with his protocol, his "systema," and ends up succeeding, as much as his character can. Brown, however, through underestimating Milgrim tends to let his work and whatever protocol he has internalized get shoddy and Milgrim uses this to his advantage. It's just a small complementary aspect in a larger body of work, but it makes everything that much more enjoyable. And there's more to discuss regarding the work as a whole.
Which is why I won't pick favourites.

Inertiatic

Time has gone by.

I have to find something to put here.

I've been composing my next post in my head but it's not the right time to drop it. My brain is feeling spongey in that it would like to soak up all the knowledge possible, so right now only snippets are coming out. To be honest a lot of the things I have been mulling over I can't really express here, and the act of physically writing them out has been, for lack of a better word, therapeutic. The upside of so much material going in the hopper is that the limited material that trickles back actually feels very much up to snuff.
So there's that.

like a bad indie movie

The past year of my life goes like this:
I drink more than I eat.
I smoke more than I drink.
I ingest more caffeine than a European soccer team*, and still sleep all day.
I have not written anything of substance since before I remember. I have slipped into the other side of melancholy, where there is no more creative--well, anything.
I feel guilty about this. It is too early to tell but so much life feels already wasted, opportunity bygone.

I fucked up at school. Nobody to blame but myself. So I guess I'm dealing with the self disappointment, and it is a lot worse than being disappointed by others. My life, in a sense, is at a full stop.
I have created a mess. I fucked up so beautifully that moving forward is difficult. Fixing things is difficult.
Owning up to wasted potential is arresting. Admitting it is leading to even more self loathing.
And yet.
And. Yet.
I realize, rationally, that from an outside perspective, I am whining. Self indulgently.

Mostly I am kept up by the fear of Monday. Of going in to see the registrar and possibly losing my temper. As I have every single time before (and thus have left as to avoid a scene).
The paperwork alone makes me want to run away. I am good at facilitating that.
I have done that four times in the last year now.
Time to be a "grown ass" adult?
Shit man, that is terrifying.

So life is like a bad indie movie. If it were French I would die. But since I'm technically Canadian it will probably just end up boring and somewhat saccharine.



*I don't know why I said a soccer team, nothing else came to mind

a sample of my Vic&theMachines essay

The Victorian Era, following the wake of the Industrial Revolution, was a time of immense ideological change. Those who lived during this period were still some of the first generations to live during the time of the invention of the steam powered engine, and subsequently all of the development it instigated. The ushering in of the Mechanical Era left an indelible mark on people’s perception of good versus evil. At play in many minds was a complex take on the simple adage (or proverb): “idle hands are the Devil’s play ground.” To others, “The Mechanical Age” represented a shift in morality by way of enabling the idiom “a means to an end” (Carlyle, 442).

These two aforementioned ideas corroborate and fall in line with many religious tenets, specifically those of Christianity. Where the adage of idle hands is self-explanatory when linked with fears about machines, the idea of machines being a means to an end requires some further explanation. The dawn of the machine age as the harbinger of capitalism is one of the most potent examples of the means to an end idiom.

With the benefit of modern day knowledge, hindsight is 20/20. Although it may seem anachronistic, religion, back in early post-industrial revolution England was, in a sense, still an unsophisticated system of classification for the “unknown” or the “unexplained.” This much is supported by (at least) the example of the Catholic Church’s stance towards science and the figures therein, such as Galileo, who tried to validate the empirical method. (However, this is not to discount the value of faith, etc.)

Post industrialist England’s (as well as Ireland and Scotland’s) constituents were predominantly of the Christian faith, belonging to one of its three major divisions: Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Protestantism (Britannica). Many of the ideological and philosophical shifts that happened as a result of the industrial revolution and eventual acceptance of technology and machinery presented valid fears for the religious populace. In a way, machinery and technology was another unknown variable threatening the status quo. That which is unknown is easily sensationalized, and technology in the Victorian era was still unfledged.

Enter Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle rebelled against sensationalism while (ironically) taking part of it himself, in one of his treatises: Signs of the Times he railed against mass printing technology:

The king has virtually abdicated; the church is a widow without jointure; public principle is gone, private honesty is going; society, in short, is falling fast in pieces and a time of unmixed evil is come upon us. (Carlyle, 441)

The same technology that enabled Carlyle to print his treatise also enabled the mass production of monthly, weekly and daily journals, as well as newspapers, etc. In Carlyle’s view this capability to print on a mass scale facilitated dissemination of, at times, erroneous or sensationalist material (440).

Carlyle, as an educated man, is clearly in a superior economic position to the rest of the British populace, and it is evident from the reading of Signs of the Times that he does not trust the average working man’s intelligence to accurately discern fact from sensationalism one hundred percent of the time. The subtext of Carlyle’s essay is twofold; he sees problems with the rise of machines—specifically with how this relates to the loss of faith, and the new allowances made for Catholicism in England. The Catholic Emancipation Act was no doubt influenced by the proliferation of written material. The populace could now form their own opinions and make better-educated choices.

For Carlyle, the loss of arts and crafts inspired work and a turn to more assembly line type of work is correlated to a loss, and then a misappropriation and mis-association of faith. “No individual now hopes to accomplish the poorest enterprise single-handed and without mechanical aids; he must make interest with some existing corporation…” (Carlyle, 443) Carlyle is under the impression that if people put their faith in technology and machinery they are not leaving enough faith for Christianity, as if faith were a finite resource. Carlyle’s essay also illustrates a fear of the shift of faith from one form of Christianity to another (497). In the essay, Carlyle sees Christianity as the “crowning glory of life, soul and modern culture” (450) he espouses a Protestant view of religion and Christianity by talking about it in terms of simplicity and as faith starting within a “man’s soul” and by natural efforts, (a view very in line with Protestantism).

Carlyle observes, “Men have lost their belief in the Invisible, and believe, and hope, and work only in the Visible…” (452). Carlyle’s hypothesis of the shift in faith and beliefs was prevalent during the Victorian era. The discourse of this issue, as well as the issue of ideologically conflicting sects of Christianity eventually made its way into some of the fiction of the time. An example of this type of discourse takes place in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Stoker’s novel brings together three major issues that were commonplace during the Victorian Era, the discourse of Protestantism versus Catholicism and the way it relates to reverse colonialism (which, for the sake of being concise, will not be discussed here at length), the sinister implications of the loss of faith, and finally, the way in which technology manifests itself in Victorian Era Europe.

Looking back through time, specifically following the notion of how technology and machinery influenced the way of life following the industrial revolution, it is clear that there is an ongoing subtext pertaining to the uses and attitudes towards it within Dracula. Two compelling challenges within the text are: Where is the discourse regarding the two sects of religion leading, and how is it related to the idea or metaphor of machinery and technology? This paper proposes that if looked at retrospectively, Dracula is actually a text that espouses modern views toward technology and machinery. It does this by simultaneously comparing and contrasting two sects of a faith, while assigning each a positive and negative value. Furthermore, Stoker aligns specific technological elements and characteristics with characters within the text. These characters, then pitted against each other, through close examination are revealed as associated with specific faiths, ultimately affirming two things. Dracula effectively confirms the idea that technology and machinery is beneficial for humanity, and, secondly, that it does not have to interfere with humanity’s attitude toward faith.

smashy, smashy

Look, I'm not saying I'm actually omniscient. But there is a degree of knowledge that you partake in when you're part of all of this "social media" (fuck that term leaves a dirty taste in my mouth). It can make you feel like you're surveying the world from your lair. But this information overload is sometimes deafening. Alex, Anth and I were talking about this a while ago, Facebook/Twitter/etc., to an extent it's for those of us who like stalking. But not stalking stalking. Just... can't stop our curiosity. (We watched too much James Bond growing up) And although it doesn't literally kill the cat, it can wear on someone.

I partially use it as an escape, but it is also a compulsion. I hate the idea of not having cleared my cache in google reader. Lately I'm trying to leave it alone, or not go through everything, to test myself, maybe. And then I realize, the reason that I read so much...escape. It's all just a distraction, but from what?

So I went and met with someone on Tuesday morning, and in our hour or so together, he helped me understand the reasons behind the formation of the thought patterns in my brain. Not fully mind you, but it was a start.

It makes me want to run away to somewhere where there is no internet, and where I can't keep tabs on things.

But the idea of not keeping up with my daily trickle of information terrifies me.

Because:

The idea of being irrelevant terrifies me.

Hm, progress.

How can one person have gotten this far under my skin? That I'm willing to drop his class this late into the semester, and leave school for a year?

I can't deal with people's expectations anymore. I can't deal with my own either.

I love this guy.

Guy's name is Michael Hainey, Deputy Editor of GQ.

First saw him on the Sart, and I just love how mischievous he seems, even when he's not grinning. Pure cartoon character. Looks like he'd have good stories. Oh and he reminds me of Alan Ruck circa Spin City. +a billion points for the hair

photos c/o Sart and GQ.