to begin:

All of the content below was written in the last few months. I was reading Moby Dick throughout most of it. Original posts will be added regularly.


COMPOSITION PROJECT

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

I am herein commiting to an endeavour with the express purpose of busywork, of production for production's sake, in the interests of keeping a well-exercised mind and tongue immediately at hand. I have heard tell of many author's pursuits toward perfection, and their trials in both life and in art, the most common of them being a rigorous commitment to composition, typically on the order of one thousand words per day in pursuit of a total million words transcribed. I think this to be a noble pursuit, and not for the glorious ends of literary accomplishment. Rather I see it to be an enticing exercise, both in mental and historic efforts. Not only does the recording of thoughts into syntax cultivate respect for the harmonies of right language, but a commitment to conjure up so much verbiage concominantly forces a collection of content, both from the history and the present of a life. Towards that end, which simply put is to have something to write about, I hope to cultivate a habit of experimentation with the world around me, with my own mind, and with the space between the two.

[I witness a bird, smaller than a pigeon with irridescent breasts but black head, wings and beak hop across my porch mere inches from the door and drop, without a flutter, onto the stones beyond the far edge. He later prances through the background, near the fence.]

Because I am not in pursuit of an aforementioned literary accomplishment, my regimen will be that much less rigorous - I expect only a minimum of 500 words per day, at least at the outset. This should be sufficient space to outline any thoughts worth recording for a day, and to retell any experiences of particular import. My first pursuit in the course of this exercise will be to transcribe a few concepts which have been circulating in my mind the past few days. Two are stories, and one is an image. Here is the first story concept, long lived but only now recorded:

{

1-UP

The frame is built as such: In the near future, scientists successfully accomplish two long-sought goals: to wholly transplant a human brain, and to perfectly clone a human. When each of these operations has been perfected clinically - that is to say, survival past the operating room and an appreciable quality of life immediately thereafter - they are merged together by a private biosciences firm. Their product is the 1-UP, or an Extra Life.

The client will be cloned decades in advance of his death (preferably as early as possible to obtain the highest-quality clone donor cells (or perhaps the technique is to synthesize sexually distinct genomes from the client and transfer those chromosomes into healthy egg and sperm, which then grow normally, albeit in an artificial (or perhaps surrogate) womb)) and, upon a date of maturity for the clone (grown either in some sort of stasis, or on life-support with a removed brain, or in a secure facility), the client's brain will be transplanted into his ideal-aged clone body, thereby extending his brain's life into a healthy, young body.

The client presumably retains all of his memories, capacities, skills, relations, etc. The brain transplant is assumed to be perfect and metaphysically complete, and medically ideal, as the host and donor bodies are identical. The only precautions taken are on behalf of the client to maintain the health of his brain as much as possible, presumably with the help of the 1-UP staff and facilities.

The possibilities here are multitude, as are the opportunities for dramatic action and discourse. There are numerous moral dillemae in question - what happens
to the life of the clone?

what kind of person would offer their womb to such an enterprise?

perhaps creating the perfect clone requires selection and adjustment of parent gametes to re-create particular genetic conditions - what are the ramifications toward, sacrifices of, attitudes of the client's parents who must cooperate?

Who wants to undergo this procedure?

How much difference do physically retained traits like weight, strength, tatoos, scars, callouses, skin traits, hair growth/loss, etc. have on a personality? on brain function? on body function?

How would the psychological effects of the mind on the body carry over between donor and host? Would a new body quickly become stressed with an unhealthy mental state? Would a fresh set of organs help rejuvenate psychological states?

Is there untriggered phenotypic or hormonal expression that is latent in people, and could your clone be nurtured in such a way as to significantly differ from you physically?

What is the elasticity of a cloned genome? How much can expression deviate between two identical organisms?

Who will this person know as a young person? Would an old person hang out with his friend in a young body?

Would couples re-embark on a second life together? Could the promises of a sexual rejuvenation possibly be overcome by a lifelong relationship?

What sort of means are required, both materially and psychologically? Obviously money is a huge question but what would be required of a client physically?

What carries over from your previous body - could an official with lifetime office continue his reign into perpetuity? Could a businessman perpetually control his assets?

Could an organization to which you are highly valuable, i.e. a political party, government, financial firm, spiritual organization, people's movement, royal family, etc., compel you to continue living for its own sake? Think Mao or Stalin, or the Dalai Llama, with multiple lifetimes or possible immortality.

What are the religious implications of such an enterprise, especially with respect to reincarnation, baptism, original sin, and the purpose of the afterlife?

What are the political implications of such an enterprise? Where would this possibly be legal, and under what rubric would such a clone fall under 'property' or perhaps 'non-living' or some such legal category?

What are the legal rights of identical persons? Could an escaped or otherwise emancipated clone claim ownership of his progenitor's property? Was this already done in that Ewan MacGregor movie?

What about the children of one of these clients? They could conceivably have children 80 years apart. What happens to their inheritance? What happens to populations, families, wealth in such a state of interminable, rejuvenating life?

How many iterations could a single brain undergo? Certainly not more than one, but is there the possibilities of brain therapy using stem cells culled from one's own clone? Could you feed your clone brain to yourself, or somehow transfer in toto your mind to the new, younger, healtheir brain?

Does a brain have less or more capacity as it ages? Capabilities slow down but memory seems virtually bottomless. Could quantum computing interact with memory storage to allow this, a la The Field?

What is the total capacity of the human mind? Could you eventually learn every language or master every physical skill? What and where is the limit of the memory and of the intellect to process memory?

[it is currently raining with a renewed vigor, including a brief moment of hail, but throughout these showers today (which have been numerous but brief) there is still sunlight piercing through an open patch of sky. The sun and the rain are meeting the same area by different angles]

}

Obviously this is a subject rich for dissection and elaboration, and a top candidate for further development. I must, however, move on to another subject while I still have the concept fresh enough to record. I will continue this composition with an image and finish with the other story concept later.

{

My response to something I heard on The View by some dumb shrew:

Her comment went something like this - things are bad over there in Iraq, but our soldiers are doing one hell of a job, really putting out their best. The Bush Administration really owes it to them to bring them home.

My reaction went something like this - I hope I can parse it into a full logic as I go...

She's taking a perspective that is horribly skewed in relating to the war in a way that accurately represents reality and responsibility. She seems to be saying that one of the big problems of this conflict is that Bush is abusing the military itself, the members of which are entitled to relief within reason. In reality, the experiences and treatment of the troops is a non-factor - they are mercenary soldiers who sign on with the explicit acceptance of trading their legal status as persons for an occupation, compensation, benefits, etc. Certainly there is a great deal of internal racism within the army, which expresses itself in the demographics of treatment, rank, advancement, etc., and there is absolutely a veil of lies surrounding every recruitment station. There is no doubt that certain subordinate groups of citizens are essentially being tricked, bullied, and economically pressured towards joining the Armed Forces. However, because of the black-and-white legal language of a soldier's duty to the military, this is not an element of the discussion about the role of the military salient to our presence in Iraq.

I briefly viewed a metaphorical image of this as I thought it last night, and I will try to resuscitate it:

This is like encountering someone weilding a handgun in a crowded bar and complaining, "You're really mistreating that gun." Instead of focusing on the gunman or those the gunman intends to kill, focus is kept on the plight of the gun itself, about the awful smoky conditions of the bar in which it is forced to operate and about how it's such a nice gun that it deserves to be put away.

This is in contrast to every other rational person in the bar, who would immediately be wondering why the fuck some drunk guy is being allowed by everyone else to threateningly wave a gun around in a crowded public place and fire wildly, killing both those who attempt to resist his gun and innocent bystanders.

The reality is that the gun is simply a tool, effective in its own right, and loyal only to its inner mechanics. The concepts which in a free society allow gun rights are the same as those which allow a standing army - tight restrictions on their lawful use. In our real-world case the military is designed only to operate in certain ways and towards certain targets - it is constructed around legal requirements which prohibit the military and its members from acting illegally, notably in the case of international law, which supercedes national law. Instead of pleading on the troop's behalf, we should be admonishing the troops for failing to follow the laws which allow their existence, and furthermore before this subject even comes up we should have long settled why the lone gunman in our case was allowed to terrorize innocent people for so long without being adjudicated by some responsible gun-user.

Here's another iteration I hope will be cleaner:

A crazed, drunken man is robbing people at gunpoint in a bar. People who resist him are killed. People who do not resist are filed into his van, where he plans to take them to live under his rule for eternity. Certain observers watching under a drunken stupor debate whether his use of the gun was appropriate or not in terms of the condition of the gun, the ammunition used, and whether or not his use of the gun was menacing enough to warrant the title "inhumane." Everyone else is wondering why no one is trying to stop him, how he can be stopped, or how to help those he's attacking. No one has yet asked how the madman managed to disable the gun's internal safety features.

Okay that did not go nearly as well as I'd hoped it would. Basically the only important thing is shut the fuck up about the troops - they signed on to be mercenaries and we wouldn't even be over there if they had the fucking spines to disobey an illegal order. The only thing to debate in that vein is why they are prosecuting a clearly illegal operation, and why POTUS is still allowed to exist, much less command the armed forces.

}

Third and finally, I'm going to re-explain a story idea that is recorded in a neighboring file. It is a much more concrete narrative than the previous concept, which requires articulation into a storyline before it can become something.

I was going to do this but I've written enough today. That idea is fleshed-out enough for now.

_________
2111 words |



Friday, April 11th, 2008


Television is an enormous problem for everyone exposed to it. I'm sitting here trying to compose 500 intelligible words but simultaneously, my favorite comedian Louis CK is having his seemingly very old comedy central special re-ran for the after prime-time hour. He's doing some material now that I haven't heard, so I will go listen to it.

The bit was short, about how at a shitty fast-food job he knew he would get fired, and not on the whole worth my distraction. But, I did discover that the nervousness I felt in him was most likely real, as evidenced by deep burgundy patches of sweat staining his maroon dress shirt around his midriff. This is a far cry from the Louis CK I saw at Penguin's in Iowa, who was both dressed and tempered like a seasoned professional. He had by that time clearly abandoned any pretense of showmanship and was wearing what apparantly was his everyday apparel. He didn't have the nervous attention to the crowd obvious in his TV special, either - unlike basic cable, where swearing is discouraged and grandstanding is the norm, he was working material for its own sake, without kneeling to the peculiarities of the audience. That's not to say, however, that he ignored the audience during the set I had the privelege of being present for. They were at times the object of ridicule and a significant distraction.

Television is also an enormous problem for everyone that is not exposed to it. I've made a similar analogy to the plight of women and their menstrual cycle; the argument being that while it must be unpleasant to have to endure the discomfort of monthly fertility cycles, it's downright terrifying to live as a species in which half the population feels justified in going psycho at irregular intervals. In the case of television, it endangers even non-users by affecting the majority of the population around them. For the most expansive public medium to be one so totally devoid of insight, consideration, self-awareness, or restraint would be unhealthy at best. But to also have such a system openly advocate ignorance, obscure or ignore relevant truths, manipulate and deceive the public for material gains, and crowd out all possible dissenting messages in both personal and technical terms, all the while purporting to uphold a neutral and objective perspective, is to have a system so totally criminal and anti-public that it can no longer be considered an instrument of the culture, but rather a vehicle with which to inform and direct the culture towards calculated ends. To be someone who doesn't take the daily prescription of mind-numbing therapy is to be like an unanchored buoy, lost amidst a seemingly infinite emptiness into which you cannot subsume. No, this image is too passive; it implies that the buoy is merely a unique structure in the context of a larger, more fundamental experience. In reality the buoy is a victim, abducted from the order and purpose of its construction in order to feed the workings of some vast, distant, bottomless whirlpool. That's a terrible analogy I know, but it sounds pleasant enough.

__________
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Thursday, June 5th, 2008


After a sustained haitus from this project, I am returning finally to record some of the exploits of Brent and I on our road trip to Michigan. I sincerely hope this will be the start of a dedicated practice of writing regularly. Before a description of our journey, I intend to at least sketch an impression of a subject worth writing about.

In The Way of the Gun, the character of Hale Chiddick remarks to his hired womb, "a woman needs security like a man needs approval." This maxim made a substantial impression on me, and I think this lesson deserves a place amongst the pantheon of timeless American aphorisms. Not, however, for its inherent truth, as I don't believe it speaks to anything biologically or psychologically innate to either gender, although I do believe it is a stunningly accurate and concise description of American gender roles. The intrigue it offers is instead coiled within its inherent assumptions and the explicative power of this type of duality in terms of the social mechanisms of subjugation and disempowerment. What are these assumptions, and what are these mechanisms, and how do they reinforce each other?
A WOMAN NEEDS SECURITY
The assumption here is explicit - women require security for their emotional well-being. The implication is that a woman cannot provide her own security and must obtain it from elsewhere - that it is a 'need' and not a condition borne of competence and self-sufficiency. I would argue that in modern American society this continues to ring true, and that women are still led to believe that their primary sources of financial, physical and emotional security lie in men - see for example Sex and the City, innumerable reality shows idolizing useless cunts propped up by rich families or fighting for a chance to wed a millionaire, the entire chick-lit enterprise, rates of rape and abuse, the plight of single mothers, etc. These messages are packaged with tokens of female empowerment such as a broad consumer product base, the alleged importance of women as a voting constituency, and a cultural focus on improbably wealthy or powerful women such as Oprah, Tyra Banks, or Martha Stewart. This two-sided indoctrination belies the seldom-reported but continuing disadvantage of women in economic, political, social, and sexual dimensions, and in doing so reinforces females' self-identification as an inherently weaker, more vulnerable, but somehow equally empowered gender.
LIKE A MAN NEEDS APPROVAL
Again, there are explicit and implicit messages herein. Explicitly, men require approval of their choices and/or accomplishments for their emotional well-being. The implicit message is that approval is inherently superior to, or somehow more satisfying than, moral or logistical self-guidance. A broad analysis of social approval versus individual determination is beyond the scope available here, but a cursory examination will, I think, plainly expose the former as the methods by which those in power maintain their status, while the latter is an unpredictable, destabilizing, but organically generated and ultimately democratic form of self-interest. Furthermore, the notion (of approval being necessary) presupposes that the heirarchy which witholds or dispenses approval is justified in doing so, or even in existing. The assumptions implicit in these signals are that while women are dependent on men, men are inherently entrenched in and dependent upon a heirarchy of power and value relative to their age, economic power, breeding, etc. This entrenchment is particularly apparent in regards to the cultural institutions historically open to men over women, or clearly to some men over others: the military, academia, politics, police, corporations, etc. The need for approval is a universal and pernicious concept which affects all members of society, but for men specifically, who are offered a valid cultural message of opportunity (at least relative to women, homosexuals, and people of color), the drive to appease the gatekeepers of power and influence is self-interested. In struggling for approval and reaping the benefits, men eventually earn these gatekeeper positions and reinforce the heirarchy by which they are originally oppressed.

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Tuesday, July 29th, 2008


The tension in my back and shoulders has wound my sinews tight as steel cable. My torso is the block on a ship's wrigging, threatening to shear apart at the intensity of a gale. The discomfort comes from sitting continuously for two consecutive days on a poor wooden chair at a sinisterly vapid computer. I'm caught for days alone with it, hamstrung between obligations which make futile my efforts to take my life forward, and although it is a remarkable, unprecedented, and unfathomably vast store of knowledge, I browse the internet in the same listless, childish way a tv surfer does.

This vastness can offer more than any university could possibly match, the content free from pedagogical interference. But I immediately lack the discipline or the framework to effectively instruct myself. My education is to thank for this in no small part, but I would be a scoundrel if I didn't admit my own failures, which are many. Even as I percieve all the subtle tragedies of my socialization bubbling up, I cannot seem to overcome them. My lack of motivation, for one, is certainly learned - the process of browbeating out what could variously be called the curiosity, entrepreneurial spirit, or the inherent sense of freedom of self of children specifically and humans generally is the goal of mass education, mass conditioning and social framing. I was lucky enough to have similar influences coming simultaneously from within my family, in the form of an overbearing, pressuring, image-obsessed parent prone to alcoholic tirades.

The general spirit of both methods of, to coin a phrase, self destruction, is to impose so fully onto one's worldview the obligations, expectations, and needs of society (or the family) that the conception of the self, and with it the range of emotion and personal faculty, and the sense of what is possible to do or achieve, is forced into a state of retardation, from which it may never recover. This is a tragic and unique crippling, like binding a foot. Children are given a perverse sense of purpose in their rise through the grades - a sense of utility to their penultimate handlers, all of whom are orchestrated by distant and invisible forces. The implication that this is in the student's interest is just explicit enough to stifle objection, but fragile enough to fall apart if the studen't actual interests were to jeopardize some element of the educational program. I remember teachers threatening and students prognosticating the dangers, responsibilities and expectations of middle school from elementary school, and this was repeated up through high school and college, although in higher education the pretense of learning for personal elevation was eased and replaced with the interests of industry and government.

For me, there was a parallel set of obligations and rigid expectations in my family life. Church attendance, boy scout meetings, little league baseball, religious education, and "extracurricular" programs were all meant to hone the conscious mind into an ideal form, often depicted in the literature of each institution as bright-faced blonde young men and women working in unison for a greater glory, whether it be in terms of sporting victory, saving souls, theater production, domination of the wilderness, or any other vaguely Aryan trope. Ideally an indoctrination such as this will dovetail with educational conditioning and produce someone happy to submit to continuous, lifetime management in a workplace, happy to exchange their life for the permission and means to live. When slavery apologists insist that some slaves were well fed and provided for, they ignore that the wealth and materials needed to feed and provide for them came directly from that slave labor. The ideal worker produced by the various institutions of American socialization is similarly deceived, and his acceptance relies crucially on his inability to detect, or failing that, his hopelessness in opposing, the subterfuge. In fact he is a good deal worse off, for his basic subsistence is no longer guaranteed, merely conjured up and portioned off in the form of a currency whose value is constantly shifting. This monetization of labor itself puts the worker in a debilitating situation, and serves to occlude the net value of his labor by focusing on compensation rather than wealth generation.

The worker must generate more than enough wealth or value to pay himself. Without this condition companies would have no reason to employ anyone, as they would be fundamentally insolvent. Furthermore, the value work generates is totally dispossessed of the worker once he or she is paid. Thus, corporations as they are structured today are fundamentally exploitative - they are weedling in on the worker's ability to generate wealth in order to divert (most of) that flow to managers and the corporation itself. This internal heirarchy depends completely on the ignorance or acceptance of this system by its workers. Ultimately, the value of a corporation is derived from its profitability, which in this sense means the amount of money generated for the corporation itself, namely its shareholders. This means that we value the most exploitative company, the company which can skim as much wealth as possible off its laborers and pass it off to the owners, who in our system are generally stockholders or investment banks.

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4188 Words |


Friday, August 8th


I was confronted over the weekend - at Judd's horrific Southern Baptist wedding - about my general apathy towards applying myself and my resistance towards "progressive" or "reform" efforts. This beration came from my good friend Jarred, who through a dense fog of alcohol insisted that I admit Ralph Nader was America's new Messiah and prostrate myself before him begging for a job. I tried valiantly to convince him that because I didn't give a shit about the organization's goals - even though I fundamentally agreed with them - I shouldn't bother or risk fucking things up. He wasn't buying it. However, he was a poor opponent for a real debate, not only due to his severe inebriation, but because he immediately dismissed my core argument, which is that all work outside of a specific goal-set (dismantling industrial civilization) is counterproductive. He called it 'unimaginitive' and 'nieve'. I wanted to tell him that if Ralph Nader winning the presidency was the most positive thing he could imagine happening politically then he was the nieve one, but he was far enough gone that I didn't pursue my points any further. But, I wish that at some point throughout the weekend I could have discussed in full the weight of real environmental, political, and social priorities. I kept trying to direct the conversation into this arena - generally by stripping petty debates down to an analysis of power disparity. I was truly surprised at how bogged down in irrelevant bullshit like party politics and media dysfunction were the opinions of many people I respect.

That being said, I couldn't help but begin to hate myself a little more completely when I was confronted with the expectations of my peers. They generally think I am quite capable and would be a fine asset to any organization. However, they had little to no faith that if left to my own devices I could succeed to any degree, and the consensus was that I would likely be imprisoned for any of my personal pursuits. The stark contrast between the depth of their delusions (i.e. their faith in electoral politics, economic theory, and their dismissal of the environment) and the height of their arrogance (in assuming that revolution is probably impossible and that that's for the best) only served to highlight my internal dilemma. I am more and more feeling like a worthless shit for not applying myself, and more and more I am convinced that there is nothing "productive" worth applying myself towards. Unfortunately I have a distinct sense of self preservation which inhibits me from doing the work I believe in. My options are narrowing drastically.

The flip side of this is that I am experiencing a renewed interest in writing, at least in terms of my thoughts per day. Actually forcing myself to write will be another thing, but I think that if I could get paid regularly for writing I would be much closer to being satisfied with myself, and with my contribution toward this big cluster-fuck called civilization. I want very much to be able to call myself a technical writer, and I am currently searching for vehicles for that goal.

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