Pay Attention

From Susan Sontag's essay “The Novelist and Moral Reasoning”:

By presenting us with a limitless number of nonstopped stories, the narratives that the media relate—the consumption of which has so dramatically cut into the time the educated public once devoted to reading—offer a lesson in amorality and detachment that is antithetical to the one embodied by the enterprise of the novel.

In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always—as I have argued—an ethical component. This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution—which is the opposite of the model of obtuseness, of non-understanding, of passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling, offered by our media-disseminated glut of unending stories…. (“Time exists in order that it doesn’t happen all at once … space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”)

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

Notes From The Watergate

The internets are making me happy today, full of funny things like this.

I brought back a real camera, with real film, so I'm ready for you to be my real model (outdoors).

I want to see you in all your new clothes. When shall you and I celebrate the holiday? W. doesn't have gall bladder problems. More tests this week... And yet, we fought it out once over break over him not wanting to come out and I felt like I really spoke my mind, and now I feel much, much better, and then, so in love with him again...

Let's make art projects.

A. says sometimes I am too touchy and kiss him too much. He told me this when i was on top of him on the kitchen floor this morning.

W. not coming tonight to clothing exchange and I'm both hurt and pissed and tired of this.

suffer, suffer, suffer more

Shooting from zarteknoepft on Vimeo.

Baby Dream #1

I dreamt last night W and I had a baby, specifically me breast feeding in public and him being slightly embarassed, until I explain that I just need him to toss me a baby blanket. I show him "This is a baby blanket" so that he'll do it right the next time. All in all, it is a good baby and I think we're happy in the dream.

This all stems from him kissing my chest last night before we made love and me thinking -- he looks like a baby doing this.

On Repeat

I am thinking about how many times over the course of a weekend ODB told us that cottage cheese makes him nauseated.

Emotional Photoshop

It's weird to finally see photos of your ex-boyfriend with his new girlfriend, even though they've been together for over a year. Vacation photos particularly, it's so easy to imagine yourself in the same pose with him in some earlier vacation, summers ago. That new photographic classic, the "put your two heads together and hold the camera out at arm's length", is particularly haunting to me for some reason. I have those photos with him, now he has those photos with her, and now I have those photos with my new man. It's like looking into a mirror into a mirror into a mirror, an exponential visual explosion where every face is exchangeable and interchangeable. No doubt it's a trope that will occur in every new facebook album in every new relationship we experience from here on out.