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Below are the 14 most recent journal entries recorded in
The Monologue of a Nodal Point's LiveJournal:
| Friday, November 6th, 2009 | | 10:54 am |
Fuck it. Just fuck it. I'm frankly terrible at interviews. I have problems negotiating people. | | Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 | | 10:30 am |
| | Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 | | 7:54 pm |
Where Credit's Due, a Mashup Short in Two Parts
Hey there. My friend Jeff Burns and I have been mixing up some mash-up videos 100% composed of U.S. propaganda and fair-use instructional, promotional, and educational films from the Prelinger Archives. Our first release, "Where Credit's Due," recently got featured on Reason Magazine's blog "Hit & Run," the financial blog Educated Risk and a Japanese blog. I hope you have as much fun watching it as we had making it. | | Friday, August 7th, 2009 | | 1:25 pm |
For John Hughes
I was Duckie. I was Duckie and Brian Johnson and when I pulled the trunk, the light wouldn’t go on. I was Gary and Wyatt and Cameron too. Oh, yes, I was Cameron to my friend’s Ferris; we took his dad’s Cadillac for joyrides. I recently got back in touch with this guy, my own personal Ferris Bueller – he’s recovering nicely, but when I greedily ask him, “So tell me more about the stripper orgies,” I secretly think to myself, “I’m glad I was more a Cameron than a Bueller.” Read the rest of this overly personal musing at The Bedlam Review. | | Thursday, July 30th, 2009 | | 10:22 pm |
The matter
The table is circular. On top – a well-worn grey fedora. An unopened packet of Engobi Cinnamon Surge Energy Go Bites, "infused with caffeine." Two half-forgotten letters from the IRS. A copy of You Can't Go Home Again, cover missing. A bottle of Centrium. A new 10-megapixel Nikon CoolPix. The Lonely Planet Guide to Brazil. An opened, half-eaten packet of Planter's Salted Peanuts. The table is rectangular. It holds a dirty hotel ashtray, with ten cigarette butts. Three wadded-up napkins, one gold-rimmed wineglass, two empty champagne flutes, two coffee cups – paper half-drunk, plastic fully consumed – five cigarette packs, Camel Lights; a pack of Orbitz Spearment, a half-drunk 6 Hour Power Energy Shot, a flyer for an art exhibition a couple blocks away (attended), a coupon card for Café D'Alsace (unredeemed), a wallet stuffed with business cards (unread). Cellophane wrappers everywhere. On the left, a vintage amber desklamp, with a hint of Frank Lloyd Wright. Illuminating a postcard from Joyce's Martello Tower, Dublin. A full-spectrum desklamp to the right, unilluminated: the postcard of "You Just Cannot Stop New York City" is darkened. The table is square. On it, a bottle of Le Tourment Vert absinthe (empty); two coffee cups, one paper, one styrofoam (full, old, undrinkable). A cannister of Gourmet Grilling Pepper, nearly consumed. A bottle of Tabasco sauce, same. An empty bottle of Stella Artois. Two wineglasses – one, goldrimmed, with old bourbon inside, collecting flies; the other, goblet-shaped, is empty. A screwdriver, a gluestick, a roll of electrical tape. A flyer for a Hindustani Music Festival (unattended). A Penguin edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses.This is my space: what remains of it, if you were to look through this screen, reach through it, straddle each side of it: the effacement of my tongue from this nonspace, the rubbish of multinational brandings before me in the tangible matters. Tonight, the WHAT IS brings me comfort; naming is control. That Milton said. So yes, let us come to an amity, a mutually beneficial agreement, a political accord that states: you! you over there, over yon thou inwardly moulldering bottle of Naked Juice, I accept your name and shall call you by it. Me is a name I call myself, and far – a long long way to run. I didn't eat – as a child. Peas looked the size of meatballs. I suppose that's why I'm so small. I was an unhappy child. Everyone told me I was happy but I was not. I couldn't eat. I can't eat now. I am thin: a thin man, my ribs show. Ergo:––– I am a thin man. I huff and puff and I blow myself out. Mosquitoes suck my blood in the summertime. They are too quick; I cannot squash them. Even great love does not blanket the flames. But it keeps one alive. O Caliban. The Renaissance paid for your poetry. Yesterday was a bad day for many. | | Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | | 4:58 pm |
The Boy Bedlam Review
Over the past few weeks, we've been putting the band back together, and scheduling to revive publication of The Boy Bedlam Review starting with a hard launch in October 2009. Today, out of absolutely nowhere, a major New York literary agency contacted us offering to represent one of the authors featured in the Review. I am proud to say that we've officially established ourselves as an incubator of fine literary talent -- so if you think you've got the chops, send us a piece. boybedlam at gmail dot com. You could just get your start if you're awesome and lucky. Proof's in this pudding, indeed. | | Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | | 1:06 pm |
The Circle of Corruption is Complete
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer warned about irregularities at Bernard Madoff's financial management firm as far back as 2004, The Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing agency documents and sources familiar with the investigation. Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, a lawyer in the SEC's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, sent emails to a supervisor saying information provided by Madoff during her review didn't add up and suggesting a set of questions to ask his firm, the report said. Several of the questions directly challenged Madoff activities that turned out to be elements of his massive fraud, the newspaper said. Madoff, 71, was sentenced to a prison term of 150 years on Monday after he pleaded guilty in March to a decades-long fraud that U.S. prosecutors said drew in as much as $65 billion. The Washington Post reported that when Walker-Lightfoot reviewed the paper documents and electronic data supplied to the SEC by Madoff, she found it full of inconsistencies, according to documents, a former SEC official and another person knowledgeable about the 2004 investigation. The newspaper said the SEC staffer raised concerns about Madoff but, at the time, the SEC was under pressure to look for wrongdoing in the mutual fund industry. Walker-Lightfoot was told to focus on a separate probe into mutual funds, the report said. One of Walker-Lightfoot's supervisors on the case was Eric Swanson, an assistant director of her department, the Post reported, citing two people familiar with the investigation. Swanson later married Madoff's niece, and their relationship is now under review by the SEC inspector general, who is examining the agency's handling of the Madoff case, the Post reported. Swanson, no longer with the agency, declined to comment, the Post said. SEC spokesman John Nester also declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation by the agency's inspector general, the newspaper said. (Writing by JoAnne Allen; Editing by Eric Walsh) | | Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 | | 11:32 pm |
In hindsight, it seems like Norm Coleman's idiotic battle was in fact a rearguard action, orchestrated by the Last Republican Holdouts, to place a hand-brake on Obama's legislative agenda. | | Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | | 8:13 pm |
Ensign
It's not just that he cheated on his wife. With a woman who worked on his campaign. It's that the "other worman"'s husband works in Ensign's senate office. The two families were "very close," as he said. That's an indescribably low blow: an epic violation of trust between employer and employee. I suppose this is the perfect sexual cognate to the way in which Bush treated the electorate, and how the market treated its investors: deliberately fucking over even the people who support you the most. It's the perfect symbol for a national polity coming apart at the seams. If I were the woman's husband, I'd go over to Ensign's house and knock him out cold. Just before filing the divorce papers. It's a gross violation of basic morality which only starts with the bare facts of fucking somebody who's not your spouse. | | Monday, June 1st, 2009 | | 9:28 pm |
What constitutes bias
While the homicide of Tiller, the abortion doctor, in Kansas is horrifying and odious to the conscience, we must also admit that an army recruiter was shot and killed today at his post in Arkansas -- and this has received very little press coverage. I discovered only one mention: a newswire headline on The Huffington Post. | | Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 | | 7:01 pm |
Writer's Block: Teenagers & Car Accidents
The STANDUP Act would establish extreme NATIONAL regulation on teenage Americans' legal ability to drive. This question aims to crowd-source justification for this law. READ MORE BELOW.
Well, it's interesting that this question is being sponsored by Allstate. Allstate, who's in the business of insurance, is probably suffering from the recession -- and is also probably really suffering on its property insurance claims over the past few years of natural disasters, and on its business insurance claims. I don't know the financial story with Allstate, but it's clear that teens are a major source of auto liability claims. So they're teaming up with cash-strapped, overly protective parents to sponsor the STANDUP Act.The STANDUP Act would establish extreme NATIONAL regulation on teenage Americans' legal ability to drive. It would establish three ascending grades: a MINIMUM of 16 years for a BEGINNER'S PERMIT (and, teens, you know what that is); an INTERMEDIATE, which would PROHIBIT you from driving alone at nighttime; and a FULL PERMIT only at the age of 18. In other words, teens of LiveJournal, especially those of you (the majority) who only live in DRIVABLE areas of the U.S., your abilities to engage in after-school activities that run after dusk; to have a night-time JOB; and to socialize and date ARE SEVERELY CRIPPLED. Not to mention the lives of your busy parents, who will, under compulsion of this NATIONAL LAW, be forced into positions where they will have to drive you or arrange car-pools. This takes time and energy and may indeed limit THEIR ability to work. In many places (and I know, because I grew up in one) the lack of a full driver's license is basically a sentence of home imprisonment. Look at what Allstate and the supporters of the STANDUP Act are doing: by asking this question, they're crowd-sourcing from you, the subjects of this legislation, crowd-sourcing justifications for passing this NATIONAL LEGISLATION. National legislation to which YOU HAVE NO LEGAL SAY, because you are not of age to vote, and therefore do not exist to the legislators who will be voting on this bill. Allstate, and supporters of the STANDUP Act, are putatively interested in saving your lives, and that's not a bad thing. But to do so by this RADICAL LEGISLATION is to ELIMINATE RIGHTS YOU NOW POSSESS. I urge you to advocate for better, more sensible driving education. I urge you to police yourselves. When you're a teenager, you're pretty emotionally volatile. Don't take out your aggro on the accelerator. Driving takes real concentration and vigilance, so get off the cellphones and for frak's sake, don't text while you're driving! Pay attention to getting where you're going without winding up dead. Guys, getting a blowjob while going 80 might seem awesome, but if you have to stop short your sex life might end right there. Don't alcoholize yourself and try going vroom, as you tend to die. Duh. And above all, don't answer this question. Protect and defend your right to drive. Advocate in your school, make arguments like the ones above to the press and to your government. Yeah, everybody knows a story about some idiot who wrapped her Subaru around a telephone pole killing her four friends. But this DRACONIAN LEGISLATION is not the way to prevent it. | | Monday, May 11th, 2009 | | 2:45 pm |
Obama meets the press
MY NEWEST ON 3QUARKSDAILY.COM: Last Saturday night, over dinner and drinks, the President of the United States was overheard saying: Michael Steele is in the house tonight. Or as he would say, ‘In the heezy.’
Wazzup!
For the last time, Michael, the Republican Party does not qualify for a bailout. Rush Limbaugh does not count as a ‘troubled asset.’ That’s right. At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama killed. American humor in the commercial media, over the last decade, has largely trended toward the coarse and snarky, so Obama’s delivery – mature, intelligent, and martini-dry with a hip-hop twist – was thoroughly (in a word laden with meaning) disarming. (Even as he reaffirmed Michelle’s right to bear arms.) Disarming, because journalists and Big Media – in a crisis for survival – are now reckoning with their role in the great failures of the Bush Administration, in the failures of the economy, and the failures of their own profession. All are connected. <Read more.> | | Friday, April 24th, 2009 | | 6:03 pm |
The Book of the Dead
What you may have read, in the entry before this one, is a lie. Someone hacked my account and deleted eight years of my life. I lost a lot of really great writing. The charmer who destroyed my life's work posted a link to a Russian blog. (I'm now informed that site might be filled with spyware.) If you have any hacker friends, I want him destroyed. Everyone here knows what this journal meant to me. I am a writer. It's the only way I really know how to make a living, and I don't do it particularly well, right now, but LiveJournal was the way I learned to write for myself, and for you, at the same time. This was me, my voice. In a life of ventriloquism and mimicry, it was the closest thing to an authentic voice, a precise idiolect of myself as Individual, that I ever possessed. Some of it remains, in shards, in bits, in emails stacked in the bowels of Yahoo. After the scare about LiveJournal folding, early this year, I began copying and pasting this Journal into Word (at the time, the LJ archival apps weren't working; I was confused about the code and its efficacy on a Mac). I have December, 2001 and a complete record of 2002. Then other projects intervened. Much of my political, current events, and music writing was collected, edited, and arranged into a book I'm writing called The Fragment Torch. A few months' worth of Journal entries -- that's all I had remaining to collect, before the book was intact. Now I guess there's a new epilogue to be written. Things I know I will probably never see again: Two years in Chicago; much of my life with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) silvergirl. My "New York Odyssey," an August, 2005 mini-epic blending Homer into a tale of woe and misdirection in Manhattan's mainstream club scene -- gone too. My epiphanies of 2006, my madness in the spring of 2007 – another book I had begun – gone. The first contact between myself and my fiancée, the_audient, is gone, as is the entry itself: an epistle on the necessity to become new and different ideas of the human being in the 21st century. The description of the first time I think we really knew it, really knew it -- on the Brooklyn Bridge, is gone: the snow whirled as we arrived immediately halfway across the bridge; then the sun came glancing out from the south, setting directly behind the Statue of Liberty. Countless others; these are only the few that come to mind. If that Russian man, in the link above, is responsible for destroying my writing, I am not afraid to say that I would pay money (if I had any money) to cause him grievous bodily injury. And I would willingly go to prison for such a crime. I am embodied in my words. Every one of my words is caused by the flexions, contortions of my body, the wrenching and torquing of my spine into my text. I stumble, I wander, I wrench my hands, arms, stab my feet, throw myself across rooms to inscribe myself here before you: it is my muscle, my sinew, my cock and my cleft chin you read. I consider this hacker, whoever he is, to be responsible for a double-murder. Justice is wanting. Justice is waiting. Ha. Hamlet pére et fils, son and ghost, in a single reedy line of impotent text, calling: "Revenge. Remember." Murders, hauntings: fragmented spirits of lost sentences spin round me in a gyre. I should have liked this journal to survive me, in all its pimples and pustules, the authentic immediate as monument. It is now but a cinder of a cinder. Here lies one who writ in water. This time, the poet speaks true.
•••
For a long time I have been obsessed with the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It crops up, as a subject, in two of my favorite literary works: Paterson, by William Carlos Williams; and Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard. Both talk about what exists "on the other side of the fire." You see it occasionally, on the news – a cinder that reverses its smoke: a play by Aristophanes, maybe, or an Archimedes palimpsest. I started this LiveJournal in yet another fantasy of permanence. My juvenile diaries, 14-18, were eviscerated (probably for the better) in a file-conversion catastrophe. The dot-matrix printout of that text, over 200 pages long (single-spaced, 10-point) faded into illegibility after five years. My Paris journals, written in a notebook (a consequence of being spooked by the evanescence of digital) were lost; my Oxford journals, in a Mac laptop, stolen with the backup disc inside after three years of writing. After that disaster, it took me five years to summon the courage to write for myself again, and I was a fool to assume that a faceless online entity could secure my work better than I could. Alexandria. Again, again, again. Cinders there are.
•••
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark
near Tannhäuser Gate.
All those moments
will be lost
in time
like
tears in rain.
| | Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 | | 1:18 pm |
New Blog
Sorry guys, I hadn't updated for a while, and I have to inform you that I've decided not to use this blog any longer, and also to remove all my old posts from here. So, if anyone wishes to continue reading my journal, you may find my new blog there: http://dignam.blogspot.com. As for removed entries, you may find them there: http://dignam.archive.com |
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