josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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20 Jan '14 02:20:48 AM

We use stones to mark graves.

20 Jan '14 12:46:47 AM

'They conjure and interpellate a more expansive "we".'

19 Jan '14 08:46:42 PM

Not $746,090. Nope.

17 Jan '14 04:08:30 AM

Counting and telling

17 Jan '14 03:38:38 AM

A few days ago I had an idea. I have ideas all the time, but they don't always go anywhere. It's often hard for me to let them play out: you have to have a less clouded mind for that, I think. But for once I had an idea that seems to let me chain several ideas together. I'm not quite there yet, so ever since I've felt peculiarly suspended, in a too-rare but familiar way. I can remember summer days in my office, in different offices, places where I would sit, listen, pace, jot, lay down a paragraph or so at a time in between cautious trips to the cafe or the library or a bench beneath a tree, cautious so as not to lose track of that feeling, of a definite but not yet expressed thought hanging there nearly in front of me, like a cloud of words I could almost feel myself already having said. In this mood, you are seemingly idle: you can't read much, you'd rather not be pulled too far into conversation, you sit quietly a lot, you write maybe a paragraph or two a day, but can't do anything else for several days until you've finished, until you've seen it through.

The feeling aside, often the way I know I have an idea like this is just that I start pacing. I never noticed before that I couldn't really pace in the last two places I lived, but here, I remember: I pace, I am a pacer.

16 Jan '14 11:01:00 PM

'… a living structure.'

16 Jan '14 08:18:26 PM

'Abbreviation is our language'

15 Jan '14 09:35:01 PM

2013 Pazz & Jop analysis.

14 Jan '14 04:39:47 AM

'… I don't do that anymore.'