All summarised, the soul,

When slowly we breathe it out
In several rings of smoke
By other rings wiped out

Bears witness to some cigar
Burning skilfully while
The ash is separated far
From its bright kiss of fire

Should the choir of romantic art
Fly so towards your lips
Exclude from it if you start
The real because it’s cheap

Meaning too precise is sure
To void your dreamy literature.

This is the opening paragraph of a paper I’m working on. I’m not quite sure what is motivating me to post it up here but if you feel like commenting do so. Excuse any grammatical mistakes. I still haven’t been through the final edit.

One of the truly remarkable aspects of Art Spiegelman’s Maus is the degree to which the story’s rendering through comix enables the constant overlap of temporalities, subjectivities and what might otherwise be described as discrete aspects of a single narrative to coexist in so fruitful a manner. Though Maus is ostensibly about his father Vladek’s experiences before, during, and after the terrible events of the Second World War—his bleeding of history, as the subtitle of the first volume indicates—Spiegelman frames it within his own first person narrative, beginning during his childhood in 1958 in Maus I, and concluding in the early 1980s in Maus II. That the first volume begins with a story Spiegelman is, in fact, retelling himself and not through his father’s words, and ends with a depiction of his father in bed, tiredly asserting to Artie that “it’s enough stories for now…”, conveys the confused, mixed, and not always complementary impulses at play in the work.[1] As if aware of the comic form, diverse content and narratological organization which these interviews would eventually become in Maus, these are stories, not merely a story, to Vladek: not one, but many. This metatextual moment, the final last dialogue in Maus II (followed only by a drawing of Vladek and Anja’s [Art Spiegelman’s mother] shared headstone) indicates the multifarious and collective qualities of memory and history, and the recognition on Vladek and Art’s part that the production of neither memory nor history are purely individuated projects; both exist always already exposed to the effects of the numerous factors, motivations, dialogues, purposes and interpretations. Indeed, stories, particularly historical narratives, are always unfinished, always trailing off. They may, in a sense, be more of less comprehensive as far as their immediate intentions are concerned, but they never fulfill a totality of meaning in a hermetically sealed whole. To say “it’s enough” is not to mean literally that we have enough; it instead indicates the incommensurability and inexhaustibility of stories despite the exhaustive effort demanded in their production. The “for now…” The ellipsis with which the story reaches some sort of open-ended finality demands a continuation. The story must be passed down, elaborated upon, and continued as the passage of time continues to mold, even if imperceptively, its meaning and legacy.

A good piece by The New Yorker on the mysterious procedures of the world’s foremost guide to fine dining. Here is a choice quote:

Bernard Loiseau, the chef and owner of La Côte d’Or, once told a fellow-chef that if he ever lost one of his Michelin stars he would kill himself. Loiseau had made a life’s ambition of becoming a three-star chef, a goal he achieved in 1991, seventeen years after arriving at La Côte d’Or. His ranking led to a line of frozen food bearing his name and likeness, and the Legion of Honor, awarded by President François Mitterrand. But by 2002 Loiseau’s classic cooking was losing ground to trendier fusion styles, business was slowing, and he was swimming in debt. As Rudolph Chelminski relates in his 2005 book “The Perfectionist,” the food writer François Simon published a story in Le Figaro hinting that Loiseau was on thin ice with Michelin. Loiseau, who had suffered periodic depression for years, sank into despair. In early February, 2003, he was notified by Michelin that he would keep his third star. Still, Simon wrote another piece, in which he suggested that Loiseau and his third star were “living on borrowed time.” Two and a half weeks later, after a day at work in the kitchen, Loiseau killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. He was fifty-two.

So my girl Nona Willis-Aronowitz, daughter of two bad ass people–Stanley Aronowitz and Ellen Willis, although you should disregard the Wikipedia article’s characterization of Ellen as “left-wing”, which is certainly being used as a pejorative to suggest that her views were in some ways crazy–was interviewed on ABC News about her new book Girldrive by a woman named Meg Oliver who seemed genuinely interested, fascinated and dare I say supportive of feminism (surprising considering how politically neutral most cable news types have to pretend to be). But, here is an interview in New York Magazine that appeared a few weeks ago.

Here is just one quote:

It’s strange. In a way, the publication of Girldrive is bookended by two deaths, and two deaths of feminists. Emma and I decided to do this road trip over brunch, at which she and I met for the first time since my mom died. As for Emma, she had been suffering from serious depression for a long time. In some ways, she had always both reveled in and fought against the idea of the “tragic female” and I think feminism had saved her life many times in the past. But no “-ism” can save someone from major depression.

Check the book out everyone!

“You can take only so much sweetness before you crave something salty.” Deep ass truism, bruh.

Here is some more depth courtesy of Mr. Windorf:

A quick aside: maybe the cuteness has come for us because of the huge change we’ve gone through in the last decade in terms of our relationships with our machines. Those born in the 1960s or earlier remember a time when (even as full-fledged adults) they did not have something beeping in their pocket, a time when they were not tethered to the Web, a time when they could be truly alone. It’s not a new thing to note that machines have become an integral part of middle-class life in our increasingly digital age. But maybe this is another reason for the cuteness craze. Maybe the same anxiety that has given rise to the Matrix movies, to the latest Bruce Willis action vehicle, Surrogates, and even to highbrow works like Kazuo Ishiguro’s lovely novel Never Let Me Go is in play whenever we take solace in the kittens and puppies of sites like Cute Overload or Cute Things Falling Asleep, or turn our iPod wheels to the unthreatening and unmechanized sounds of Sara Bareilles. The cuteness craze may represent a nostalgia for a lost world. Or maybe we’re trying, in some pathetic way, to animate our machines, to imbue them with sounds and images that strike at the deepest part of what it means to be human: our desire to take care of helpless creatures. We’re like those office workers of the 1960s and 1970s who tried to beat back the alienation they felt as a result of being the first people to inhabit sterile-seeming cubicles eight hours a day by putting up that poster of the cute little kitten hanging from the tree.

Yo, everyone, I’m switching over to Tumblr because I think it’s just straight better than this ish at WordPress. You can find the site here. 

Word, see you all over there.

Nevermind. Tumblr sucks.