The art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, caries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to every day life:

* Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
* Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
* Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western though has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
* Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
* Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
* Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.
* Do not become enamored of power.

(Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Œdipus)

One of the best parts of procrastinating is that I finally get around to the web-slacking that I know I should’ve attended to for some time. Joined Reddit and Vimeo. Also discovered totally badass video series Target Women. This summer will be time spent with Donna Haraway and Robert Bolaño, also, in the garden, and with my baby:

my baby

Sometimes the library’s the only place to be, and sometimes my room is the only place to be. Huh.

God is dead.
– Nietzsche

And on the back:

Nietzsche is dead.
– God

I didn’t know what to think. Of course I did anyway, but I’d wish I’d asked her what it meant to her.

On another note, I like some of the graffiti scrawled on the walls of the study rooms in Raushenbush. I found this particularly affecting:

I forget that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character and that therefore what one does in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetops.
–Oscar Wilde

Today begins the long haul.

I got fucking sunburned yesterday, but then I took a cold showerfollowedbybath like three times and it made me well. I drank a beer and it put me right to sleep but not before I put on Aloe. Now I have a tan. It was ninety yesterday. It’s going to be ninety today. I can say, without a doubt, that I find this to be the most perfect weather in existence, fuck all y’all west coast people with yr insistence on “dry heat.” It’s not that pretty. I like being wet. So do you (I know it). It’s awesome, and the sky looks dense and filled with things, there are many more beautiful clouds and the soft haze that floats above the city and the fields during the golden hour makes me feel like I’m in a movie about the future or an alternate dimension and Tim Burton’s doing the set design. Anyway I had to lay around with little clothing. It made for a happiness I cannot explain even though I felt like a vain douchebag.

I’m gonna write. When it’s finished, sometime tonight, I will post the sheet music and you, web denizens, will be able to see what things look like.

I’ve been thinking about race of late. (That’s always true.) But it seems to me that whiteness is whatever everything else isn’t. When I look at a site like Stuff White People Like, I get a little upset at their attempts to ascribe middle-class triviality and self-absorption to white culture. I’m not sure why.

My intuition tells me that I have good reason, that this facade of critical, self-deprecation is little more than a cover for self-indulgent fawning. There’s an acknowledgment and a tacit acceptance of the notion that America’s class structure favors whites. It’s not obvious, but I doubt that the site appeals to any people of color unless they are forced to deal with what they perceive as the social conventions of the bourgeoisie, and that they see themselves as something else.

I think what bothers me the most is that the site functions as a corrective measure against the only good thing that whiteness has to offer, that is, it’s malleability. As far as I can tell, the more people appropriate middle-class values and achieve material wealth, the less ‘whiteness’ will be conflated with bourgeois culture. For any person of color who happens to like old school hip hop, they will suddenly feel the inadequacy of inauthenticity that so often demarcates white culture, even though the beat or a message in the music might truly speak to them, they’ll be pressured out of listening to that music because it essentially amounts to them being ‘white.’ In this way I think SWPL functions to maintain the color lines of other races as well. Also If someone reads about how only white people love coffee, they will have to think to themselves that these white people actually are ridiculously self-absorbed, to the extent that they think their excessive consumption of caffeine is in any way unique and therefore something funny. Things that aren’t true aren’t generally funny. You’d have to have your head stuck up your ass not to realize how popular the drink is just about everywhere on the planet.

Of course the site’s entire premise, be it tongue in check or not, is that there is something essential and categorical about race, so maybe I shouldn’t be particularly surprised by any of this. Still, I can’t stand it. I think it totally undermines the notion that there is such thing as class (which I believe) and that it imputes, in an ideal environment or system, some sort of meaning about a person (which I also believe). Somebody has to get exploited… right?

On another note, I can’t fucking stand living with people who smoke cigarettes. There’re two closed doors between me and them and this shit is still driving me crazy.

Not that I don’t have one now and then…

But I think I’ve broaden my understanding to include a more satisfying and illuminating range of ideas. I’m reading this text called Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture and it’s made me realize that post-modernism is about a new level of process-orientation-awareness. The pre-modern era, in the mythology of Kant and the Enlightened, is little child, lacking self-awareness. Modernism is realizing agency and taking an active role in the processes and patterns that human beings come to see as describing their behavior; in a way, self-awareness. Post-modernism, then, is becoming aware of and affecting the patterns and processes describing our way of becoming aware of and affecting the patterns and processes describing our behavior. I see a parallel in mathematics and physics in the idea of rates. The mind in the pre-modern era is about inertia, matter; in the modern era the focus shifts to constant speeds, velocity; and in the post-modern era it is about acceleration, or speed at which speed changes, the rates of rates of change.

It’s easy to see why so much of the literature comes off as convoluted and abstruse. It’s weird, highly referential way of seeing things, but it is a higher level of reality inasmuch as it’s a valid and logical representation of things, grounded ultimately in common-sense facts about the world. When I read this kind of high-minded literature I get sucked up into the myriad junctures of ideas at levels of abstraction at which I’m not used to thinking about things. All this language is a network of patterns extending human knowledge outwards, all of it constructed from base kernels of logic that seem innocent and unprovocative enough and yet you can blow them out to seemingly meaningless, irrelevant levels of discourse and the whole thing, the patterns of language, still maintain structural integrity.

It’s inspiring and somehow way more empowering than I had assumed to think of things on this level. The undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in this culture runs deep. I don’t know when I become affected by it. Thinking about my backyard in terms of process makes obvious what my top gardening priorities should be. This approach makes even more sense in music. I guess I wasn’t heavily influenced by the dogma of theory until recently, but I realize what a flawed paradigm it is in that it limits the motivic range of music to something unduly formal. Music takes on new meanings all the time! It’s deeply involved in and influenced by its environment! I should embrace the flexibility of meaning in music given context by looking to anticipate any and all environments into music. My next artistic priority: music with sophisticated mobility.

Pretty unparalleled.

I been thinking about the hipster class. They got a lot of nerve. Very nervous.