Attempt at Erasure #1

in the spirit of my last post, here's attempt number one. original is below, erasure's below that. i took a passage from moby-dick, predictably.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over, three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.---It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.---It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.---It's a blasted heath.---It's a Hyperborean winter scene.---It's the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

puzzled and confounded , hovering
in a nameless yeast. truly,
Yet indefinite, sublimity
froze , till
a bright but deceptive midnight
blasted --- a Hyperborean winter scene.--- the breaking-up of Time. at last that one portentous something
, and all the rest stop; does it not bear resemblance to
himself?



unfortunately, i don't think the format of this post will let me preserve the exact white space. alas, what can you do. enjoy. or hate. watevs =)

iViva la fiesta!

10am am on a sunday, and i'm at bobst library. with a marketing final and a paper to rewrite on robert burns sitting in front of me, i figure the best thing i can do right now is blog. especially since i haven't documented all of the sweet stuff that's gone on this month. number one highlight of thanksgiving break: bonus eventus cd release of canaceros! i think the night over winter (thanksgiving? i don't remember) break last year when we all went to the studio and sang the back-up vocals for the record was one of the best days at home to date. dave words that night way more eloquently on the new cd.

my computational lit theory course is one of the most eccentric courses i've taken here, and my prof assigned a final project of do-anything-you-want-to-do-as-long-as-it-has-to-do-with-words. i did a "deformance," or a text alteration, of pound's "in a station of the metro" which was pretty sweet. my friend, however, had a way cooler project: he created a bunch of erasure poems, which i had no idea existed until he told me about them. i'm sure i'm the only one who didn't get the memo on this one, but for anyone who doesn't know, an erasure poem is one that is derived completely from a prose passage. you erase the words from the passage that you don't want in the poem, preserving the white space. anyway, i want to do one sometime soon. i just can't think of which text to pick.

marketing calls.

keep the faith, as my dad says.

dear william blake: i'm sorry i ever doubted you.

so i always knew that the band's name, the doors, was influenced by aldous huxley's The Doors of Perception -- my friend, tony, who i was an orientation leader with the summer after my freshman year, loved this book. i sort of want to read it, but since it's about huxley's drug experimentation i don't know if i'll be able to get into it. i want to read it anyway. but what i didn't know (and what i found out a couple days ago) was that jim morrison actually used to read william blake:

if the doors of perception were cleaned
every thing would appear to man as it is: in-
-finite.

pretty sweet. i love this quote. and i love william blake a whole lot more now. and i even love my brit lit class -- this was probably one of the only memorable things i actually learned about blake.

!!i'm going to real college, as my sister dubs it, this weekend with lauren: lehigh!! should be awesome to see erica/get away for a couple of days.

!!

typical friday night

i'm here with lauren at my house on the island. we're going to tell you about our night:

- we went to the blue parrot. what's worse than that is:
- we were willing to pay a $5 cover to go to the blue parrot
- we (i) made chocolate chip cookies and we (i) ate all of them.
- we got a surprise phone call from liz who's in london right now! spent way too much (way too little) time on the phone catching up with her.

and here's the best for last:
my basement flooded. no big deal. which leads to:
- we hung out in my house in 3 layers of pants, 2 of socks, uggs, and yes, a scarf. and had to sleep with no heat.

the basement flood was definitely a good time. the rest of the night following was a mixture of internal freak-outs and external attempts to be totally chill. but retrospectively, it was kind of funny. you see, we thought the heat was broken. but really, we just needed to flick the system switch on downstairs--and ONLY that switch. we learned that the hard way, when we flicked a second switch that prompted a gushing a water that we realized about 10 minutes after.

at least we got to cuddle after!

a continuation of summer, really.

it's a sunday night before classes at 10:55 pm -- quite a typical time for me to be doing all of the homework i failed to do this weekend. but i'm not doing that, and it's not because i did all of my reading and writing and everything else on time; it's just cause i can't get myself to do anything. as my work- and happy-hour-filled summer came to an end a few weeks ago, so too, thought i, would my un-disciplined life-style -- not so. apparently, even as classes begin and professors demand papers, my mind doesn't render it worthy of its efforts. i really don't hate it, though. i spent the entire weekend outside: friday in washington square park, saturday at the pier on the west side with a few friends, and today frolicking around the east village. i also finally hung the set list to the Traveling Circus and Medicine Show today in my apartment. The Traveling Circus show was the concert put on by michael franti & spearhead, counting crows, and augustana for the past several months. it came to a close last week, and my sister and i were fortunate enough to bear witness to one of the last concerts of the tour. what's more is that it was in central park! and what's EVEN more, as i alluded to earlier, was that the security guy (who we naturally became friends with as we were right up against the stage) handed the official setlist of the show to me after the concert. a pretty sweet souvenir if you ask me. the thing that most struck me about the concert was the palpable energy between the three main guys: michael franti (spearhead), adam duritz (counting crows), and dan layus (augustana). i specifically remember a moment during the last song they played (which happened to be woody guthrie's 'this land is your land') in which they all three sang into the same mic, looked at each other, put their arms around each other, whispered something i wish i had heard, and laughed. i could really see the love between them. this was also the most i've ever seen adam have fun on stage out of all of the 8 crows concerts i've been to, so i was happy. i'm attaching some sweet pics, compliments of my fellow crows fan, deb, who is a way more legit fan than i could ever hope to be.

september's half over!!!!....

and i've only posted once. i suck, i know. i'm uber excited to write about the crows concert, but i don't want to rush and post right now, so this weekend i promise!

thus begins september....and everything after.

cliche to post my first public blog on september first, given my blog's name? probably, but i couldn't resist. for those of you who don't know, the blog's title is an allusion to counting crows's first album, august and everything after. something about the sound of the word september, coupled with the beginning of a new academic year, seemed reason enough to modify the album's title. this fall's blog posts will be mostly my thoughts amid the hustle and bustle of manhattan, possibly the west coast, and some areas in between. in the spring i'll be studying in london, so i'm glad i'll have this to blog the season's adventures.

this summer's been like no other for me: first apartment in manhattan, first paid internship in about six months, first collaboration with a novelist, and first season i've wound up with more money in my bank acount than i began with (!). my sister, kristin, returned from europe in june, so i spent time with her, and most of my friends from school spent at least a month or so in manhattan. going to the US open tonight, counting crows concert in central park on thursday, and running the 5K "run to remember" race for 9/11 on sunday. definitely an excellent way to wrap up the summer.