Skip to content

Contemporaneity

posted by shanusmagnus on Sunday, May 30, 2010

Contemporaneity, in the sense of being “up with the times,” is of no value. A competent wakefulness to experience — as well as to instruction and example — is another matter. But what we call the modern world is not necessarily, and not often, the real world, and there is no virtue in being up to date in it. It is a false world, based upon economies and values and desires that are fantastical — a world in which millions of people have lost any idea of the resources, the disciplines, the restraints, and the labor necessary to support human life, and who have thus become dangerous to their own lives and to the possibility of life. The job now is to get back to that other perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all competently wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having.

– Wendell Berry


Filed in writing | | View Comments

Time Spent

posted by shanusmagnus on Friday, May 28, 2010

DDB made a comment the other day that I’ve been thinking about. In my last post, I said something about how I’d spent ~150 hours watching Lost, and DDB said something about how my comment had made him re-evaluate how he’s spending his time. I think the idea was that the notion of spending 150 hours watching tv was pretty alarming. And I agree — all else equal, it is.

What’s remarkable, though, is that I don’t regret spending all that time, not even a little bit. Watching Lost was a thoroughly worthwhile pursuit, which raises the question about what a ‘worthwhile pursuit’ actually means. What about the other stuff that I do? I spend at least ten hours a week in cafes, thinking about stuff; maybe five hours a week at the gym. A lot of working, some time cooking and cleaning, going to meetings, reading papers, seeing friends, reading the Economist, watching basketball …

What do I have to show for all of that? What does anyone have to show for anything, ever? When’s the time well spent? You could spend forever trying to systematize the answer to that question, and I don’t have forever. So I’ll just give my preliminary results:

I think that any undertaking that makes you understand the world better is worth doing. From watching Lost I understand more about certain kinds of storytelling; what works, what doesn’t. It was, in many ways, a groundbreaking display of serial narrative. If you’re interested in the craft of narrative, then it’s like taking a class. It’s like watching a master carpentar building a bigger, more glorious house than any you’d seen before. (Nevermind that he fucked it up in the end.)

In a fuzzier way, though, Lost gave me what good stories always give you: a peephole into another reality, into other peoples’ lives. And it doesn’t matter that the ‘people’ were fictional and their ‘lives’ implausible and fantastic. Good drama turns all the knobs turned to 11, and as such throws aspects of the human condition into stark relief, where details that might otherwise have been hidden jump out at you. The best drama, the best writing, the best art is sufficiently rich that the pretend reality maps onto the real reality in some profound way. This is why Lost is worthwhile; this is why Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” has something to say to us, even though nobody in the real world ever turns into a giant bug. And so on.

You know what isn’t worthwhile, though? Most of the time I spend screwing around on the internet. Arguing with people, to no purpose. Researching trivialities. I’ve spent more time, by far, preparing to do things, or trying to figure out the optimal way to do them, than actually doing anything. More time writing about writing than writing. Etc. That’s wasted time, and I want to do better.


Filed in writing | Tagged | View Comments

Lost

posted by shanusmagnus on Tuesday, May 25, 2010

I watched the Lost series finale yesterday and it’s been stuck in my head since. I won’t spoil it — by which I mean I won’t give any details on what happened — but I will say that it was 1) extremely disappointing from a plotting and craftsmanship standpoint, and 2) extremely affecting emotionally. It was like getting hit in the back of the head with a horseshoe, and I found myself in that weird borderland where if I could still cry, I would have cried, but since I can’t I just stared at the screen as the charged waters rose up around me, and when the water pooled around my ears I wondered if finally I would be submerged. It never happened, but I can’t recall the last time a work of fiction has moved me so.

I’ve spent an unsettled night and morning wondering how points 1) and 2) could coexist, and here’s what I’ve come up with: whatever else is true, I’ve spent something like a hundred-fifty hours with these characters, in this world: 6 seasons times twenty-four or so episodes per season. That’s a _lot_ of fucking time to spend with somebody, especially since those hours were peak hours. We weren’t sitting in the living room together, reading; we weren’t sleeping, or doing the dishes. A hundred twenty hours of intense experience, intimate revelation, trauma, striving, love, death.

So I shouldn’t be surprised at feeling unsettled today, and emotional. In elementary school, on the last day of the school year when you were just kind of milling around, and the teachers had flown the white flag and weren’t trying to control you anymore, and everyone was just kind of running out the clock, I’d look around the room at some of my classmates, kids I knew nothing about other than their name, who I never talked to, and who I’d see again in a few months for more of the same non-interaction –

I’d look at them eating glue or picking their noses or playing paper football, and I’d get a lump in my throat, because even if we didn’t know each other and had nothing in common we still had shared something, lived through something, passed the same hours walking the same stretch of road, and as it turns out that _is_ having something in common, is having something fundamentally important in common. Passing the same hours walking the same stretch of road means an awful lot in the end.

The other thing I realized, just a few minutes ago, is that Lost is our best national myth. It’s taken over from Star Wars, which seems kind of silly these days, but which did yeoman’s work for at least twenty years. It says who we think we are, what we aspire to, what we’re afraid of, and what we take comfort in. Viewed this way, despite its failures, it’s something to celebrate. There are worse places to live than a nation that closes its eyes and dreams this.


Filed in Uncategorized | Tagged | View Comments

Sexy Elia’s Long Straight Highway

posted by shanusmagnus on Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Nah, not really.

I’m done with school for this semester, so let me tell you a story about an end of semester:

I stayed with Beth for extended periods both years I was at NYU, after classes ended in the Spring. Both times I had a class where the teacher gave us till the last possible day to turn in our semester-long projects, which were worth 100% of the class’s grade. Both times, of course, I did pretty much fuck-all for the duration of the semester, and then, in one fell swoop, tried to make good. This took a staggering amount of work to finish. It’s one thing to write a crappy paper on the Roman Empire for your final; it’s another to write the back end of a compiler.

Anyway, that’s not really the point. The point is that Beth is the world’s greatest hostess: aside from her company, which is of immeasurable value, she gave me a place to sleep, a place to work, and my own keys to the apartment. There were two different keys for the two different locks on the door, and the only noteworthy thing about the keys is that there was nothing noteworthy about the keys — both the same style, both the same general signature. You couldn’t tell them apart without super close scrutiny.

The weird bit is that whenever I came home, from getting pizza and tater tots and ice cream and whatever else I was eating to get me through this dark period, every time I came home I got the keys wrong. I’d put key A into lock B, it wouldn’t work, I’d figure out I’d got it backwards, and that was the end of it. No biggie, but it happened every time. EVERY time. You know how you think that stuff happens every time so you start to keep track, then quickly realize that, no, the light isn’t ALWAYS red when you come to it, no, you don’t ALWAYS miss the mailman by five minutes? Well, I kept track, and I was, indeed, wrong EVERY time.

But, I realized, if I’m wrong EVERY time, that’s still perfect information. So I started taking out the key that I thought was the right key, as per usual, and then, instead of using that key, switching it preemptively for the other key. Except when I did this, I was STILL wrong. So when my instincts said I was wrong, I was still wrong — nothing I did could open that door on the first fucking try.

I mention this as a metaphor for this semester. I’ve been through this enough times to have learned some lessons, which I duly implemented in order for the end of this semester to not be like getting shot in the face. And yet, even after having implemented these measures, largely successfully, I still fucked it up in the end.

Now I have nothing to do except post here all the time.

Filed in Uncategorized | Tagged | View Comments

Pancakes

posted by shanusmagnus on Sunday, March 21, 2010

Does anyone want to have pancakes today, around 12:30 ish, at Fat Nan’s in Brooklyn Park? Call me.


Filed in Uncategorized | | View Comments

Pain pain go away

posted by shanusmagnus on Tuesday, March 16, 2010

So things are getting bad again and I’ve started to track my blood glucose with this little glucose monitor thing to see if I can learn anything. What I really want to track is insulin but you can’t track insulin without a lab test so glucose will have to do. You can mostly infer insulin from glucose levels anyway, subject to a phase shift.

What’s cool is getting data and hacking yourself. What happens in your blood when you eat a low-carb meal, for instance? Now I know, precisely. (Blood glucose actually _down_ from fasting levels — 85 to 76, this morning.) There’s a hypothesis that under fasting conditions if you impose a metabolic demand that glucagon and adrenaline will shoot up to make up the shortfall. Am interested to see how that plays out.

The ultimate point is to investigate how blood glucose tracks with energy levels, pain, mood. I will know eventually. Also will get some Ketostix, since I have anecdotal evidence on extended low-carb’s efficacy for pain control.

I wish there was some more shit I could measure. This was one of the big reasons I applied to both the neuroscience and psychology programs, btw — easy access to do my own blood work. Of course, I didn’t mention that in the application.

Maybe I should get a job as a lab tech after this? Hmm. Or better yet: can you buy the equipment they use to do a full blood workup? I’m sure it’s crazy expensive, but maybe after the initial layout running a single test isn’t too prohibitive?


Filed in science, superdork | | View Comments

Why bother?

posted by shanusmagnus on Saturday, March 13, 2010

Chick and dude walk into cafe this morning, about an hour ago. Since then the chick has been on the phone that entire time. Why the fuck do you bother coming here if this is your interaction? And it’s not some important business call that came through unexpectedly; it’s just normal blabbering about nothing.

The chick looks like Meat Loaf, too, although probably that is not relevant. Or is it?


Filed in rant | | View Comments

Save us

posted by shanusmagnus on Saturday, March 6, 2010

I just overheard a cop at the cafe talking about how she reads Garfield every day because it’s ‘hilarious.’

I think that if someone thinks Garfield is hilarious they probably shouldn’t be allowed to have any sort of firearm.


Filed in philosophy | | View Comments

Wait!

posted by shanusmagnus on Friday, March 5, 2010

The other day TLAT Pam sent this link of hair metal videos on YouTube. I watched a bunch of these, including the one for White Lion’s “Wait” which you should watch. Here are some observations:

1. Can you believe this ever happened?

I mean, there’s a stretch where the singer is standing on stage, dressed in a bunch of clothes it looked like he picked out of a rubbish bin at Salvation Army, kind of dry humping (from a standing position, mind) the air. And this was sexy. This drove a generation of girls from 15-25 into having to change their underwear. Can you fucking comprehend this? I cannot comprehend this.

2. I want to shoot myself again.

because what a glorious time. What a magnificent, glorious time, not for me particularly, because I could never dry hump the air and have chicks change their underwear because of it. But because _someone_ who looked like this could do it. Because there was a time of life — which I shared in in the way the people in Plato’s cave watched their shadows playing out on the wall — when this was possible. And now it is not possible. Even if I had a billion dollars and was suddenly a playboy, living on a fleet of yachts in Monte Carlo crewed by a saucy team of Russian hookers, drinking champagne out of Gisele’s golden shoe and scratching my ass with the trophy they give for the Nobel Prize in literature –

even then, it wouldn’t be as good. Nothing on this earth could be as sweet as that delusion, as that shared fever dream. Unless I got a robot body somehow.

All my hopes are now hung on the prospect of a robot body.


Filed in cat-blog | | View Comments

Whammers!

posted by shanusmagnus on Thursday, March 4, 2010

Got to cafe 5 mins before they opened, narrowly beating ‘alternative medicine’ dude who smokes like an effing chimney and who’s been stealing my spot for the last two months. Ha!

Also, I’ve forgotten to update on this lately, but the tally stands at 11 total submissions of six different stories, which have resulted in four rejections.

What should I do when I get accepted? Maybe I should start planning. Thailand + whores? Fly to Sydney to see Swanky? Buy a second house? Suggestions welcome.


Filed in writing | | View Comments