titoist - Tumblr blog

[titoist]

the last few books i've read which i formed a meaningful attachment to - which, basically, through my extreme pickiness, amounts to just 'the last few books i've read' - feel like they could be at least loosely classified as anthologies. collections of stories with separate & delineated events but convergent themes & characters & ideas. a macrocosmic exploration of an ultimately small setting, which by the end becomes a neat snowglobe of a narrative. mercifully "homely", or unmercifully "claustrophobic" - invisible cities, winesburg ohio, kafka's zurau aphorisms in-a-strange-roundabout-sort-of-way.

i greatly value focus & intimacy in writing, i think. i value stories constructed as bindings of individual moments. maybe interconnected, but individual nevertheless.

the bad thing about this is that i cannot let go. i start reading them in delineated chunks, forming an emotional attachment to the pages, projecting my attachment on the idealized meaning i would like the book to hold for me & the significance that i feel it should have. the books become objects in the bedroom of my mind - but they're necessarily finite, something one goes through and extracts meaning from & then puts down. but i greatly value the process of extracting more from it. to me, nearing the end, it starts to feel like the book - at this point not a book but a proxy for all the positivities & emotions i associate with whatever is contained inside - is rotting away in my hands. every turn of the page starts to hurt. i feel like my brain is being pierced & something inside of me is definitively coming to an end.

but this is probably directly counterthetical to the feeling, knowledge, or insight that i would ideally like to gain from from any given thing i read. in any case i would probably not be feeling this unique attachment were i conditioned as a child to read recreationally instead of being locked in a room with no guidance except the computer for a decade & a half. as i type this my copy of winesburg ohio is still the first tab in my browser & i've been dreading closing it for the last 5 days

[titoist]

By 1996, global security is guaranteed by a deadlock of four major powers psychic security agencies.

"Remote viewing" or "second sight" is delegated to the neutral German DBK-NK - it enables instant monitoring, and instant targeting of ontological threats to the international equilibrium.

[titoist]

i want to not think about anything except birdsong

[titoist]

Young George Willard got out of bed at four in the morning. It was April and the young tree leaves were just coming out of their buds. The trees along the residence streets in Winesburg are maple and the seeds are winged. When the wind blows they whirl crazily about, filling the air and making a carpet underfoot. George came downstairs into the hotel office carrying a brown leather bag. His trunk was packed for departure. Since two o'clock he had been awake thinking of the journey he was about to take and wondering what he would find at the end of his journey. The boy who slept in the hotel office lay on a cot by the door. His mouth was open and he snored lustily. George crept past the cot and went out into the silent deserted main street. The east was pink with the dawn and long streaks of light climbed into the sky where a few stars still shone. Beyond the last house on Trunion Pike in Winesburg there is a great stretch of open fields. The fields are owned by farmers who live in town and drive homeward at evening along Trunion Pike in light creaking wagons. In the fields are planted berries and small fruits. In the late afternoon in the hot summers when the road and the fields are covered with dust, a smoky haze lies over the great flat basin of land. To look across it is like looking out across the sea. In the spring when the land is green the effect is somewhat different. The land becomes a wide green billiard table on which tiny human insects toil up and down. All through his boyhood and young manhood George Willard had been in the habit of walking on Trunion Pike. He had been in the midst of the great open place on winter nights when it was covered with snow and only the moon looked down at him; he had been there in the fall when bleak winds blew and on summer evenings when the air vibrated with the song of insects. On the April morning he wanted to go there again, to walk again in the silence. He did walk to where the road dipped down by a little stream two miles from town and then turned and walked silently back again. When he got to Main Street clerks were sweeping the sidewalks before the stores. "Hey, you George. How does it feel to be going away?" they asked.

[...]

On the station platform everyone shook the young man's hand. More than a dozen people waited about. Then they talked of their own affairs. Even Will Henderson, who was lazy and often slept until nine, had got out of bed. George was embarrassed. Gertrude Wilmot, a tall thin woman of fifty who worked in the Winesburg post office, came along the station platform. She had never before paid any attention to George. Now she stopped and put out her hand. In two words she voiced what everyone felt. "Good luck," she said sharply and then turning went on her way.

[...]

George glanced up and down the car to be sure no one was looking, then took out his pocketbook and counted his money. His mind was occupied with a desire not to appear green. Almost the last words his father had said to him concerned the matter of his behavior when he got to the city. "Be a sharp one," Tom Willard had said. "Keep your eyes on your money. Be awake. That's the ticket. Don't let anyone think you're a greenhorn." After George counted his money he looked out of the window and was surprised to see that the train was still in Winesburg. The young man, going out of his town to meet the adventure of life, began to think but he did not think of anything very big or dramatic. Things like his mother's death, his departure from Winesburg, the uncertainty of his future life in the city, the serious and larger aspects of his life did not come into his mind. He thought of little things--Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the main street of his town in the morning, a tall woman, beautifully gowned, who had once stayed overnight at his father's hotel, Butch Wheeler the lamp lighter of Winesburg hurrying through the streets on a summer evening and holding a torch in his hand, Helen White standing by a window in the Winesburg post office and putting a stamp on an envelope. The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood. THE END

i was right in my assumption, it made me cry. how could it not have?;

— 07/16/2023 6:42 PM yesterday night: holding my face close to my face in the bathroom mirror, moving & posing & staring at my reflection, lecturing myself, telling me over & over that after the big change or whatever it is that i have to do, after i finally move somewhere else or whatever i have to do, i know i will be scared of the big change, but i will feel better. i know that it is going to scare you, but you will be happier after the big change or whatever it is that you have to do. after it you will be happier

[titoist]

when will it happen

[titoist]

There is something memorable in the experience to be had by going into a fair ground that stands at the edge of a Middle Western town on a night after the annual fair has been held. The sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people. Here, during the day just passed, have come the people pouring in from the town and the country around. Farmers with their wives and children and all the people from the hundreds of little frame houses have gathered within these board walls. Young girls have laughed and men with beards have talked of the affairs of their lives. The place has been filled to overflowing with life. It has itched and squirmed with life and now it is night and the life has all gone away. The silence is almost terrifying. One conceals oneself standing silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a reflective tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes.

[...]

George and Helen arose and walked away into the darkness. They went along a path past a field of corn that had not yet been cut. The wind whispered among the dry corn blades. For a moment during the walk back into town the spell that held them was broken. When they had come to the crest of Waterworks Hill they stopped by a tree and George again put his hands on the girl's shoulders. She embraced him eagerly and then again they drew quickly back from that impulse. They stopped kissing and stood a little apart. Mutual respect grew big in them. They were both embarrassed and to relieve their embarrassment dropped into the animalism of youth. They laughed and began to pull and haul at each other. In some way chastened and purified by the mood they had been in, they became, not man and woman, not boy and girl, but excited little animals. It was so they went down the hill. In the darkness they played like two splendid young things in a young world. Once, running swiftly forward, Helen tripped George and he fell. He squirmed and shouted. Shaking with laughter, he rolled down the hill. Helen ran after him. For just a moment she stopped in the darkness. There was no way of knowing what woman's thoughts went through her mind but, when the bottom of the hill was reached and she came up to the boy, she took his arm and walked beside him in dignified silence. For some reason they could not have explained they had both got from their silent evening together the thing needed. Man or boy, woman or girl, they had for a moment taken hold of the thing that makes the mature life of men and women in the modern world possible.

[titoist]

the penultimate short story in "winesburg, ohio", "SOPHISTICATION", was the first piece of writing to ever make me sort of frantically cry & laugh to myself at the same time, breathing rapidly in a messed up vocal way for a little bit bordering emotionally on hyperventilation. there's no profound didactic lesson or moral parable to be gleamed or given from my recounting this. it is just something that grants me emotional relief to note, and i'm manically waving it in your face, absurdly aware of the uselessness of sharing it.

[titoist]

of course it's a sacred and terrible air reference! i'm so glad you got it :-)) ♥️

of course, thank you for the kind words. smiles big

(sorry for taking 3 days to get to this, my brain has been foggy & my busyness this past month has been above average... i think this is more-or-less reflected in the frequency of my posting, for better or for worse)

[titoist]

an automotive shop fully prioritizes utility over aesthetics & in this process creates (as a byproduct) its own aesthetic that might never have come together otherwise. a person sets up an easel in an automotive shop & paints it. a person’s bedroom is a painting of this-or-that fondness. another person’s bedroom is an automotive shop. another person’s bedroom is a painting of an automotive shop. another person’s utilitarian needs happen to coalesce in the form of a painting of an automotive shop

[titoist]

kole — Yesterday at 12:26 AM there are people i know, whom i deeply admire & judge myself by the standards of... but who are older by a large enough margin to make comparison between the two of us nonsensical. one of them was older in 2016 than i am now. - some who didn't necessarily 'start' having the qualities i admire until their early or mid 20s. and it's crazy, sort of maddening, to think that i still have so much chronoexperiential leeway. you might assume it's relieving, but it really deeply isn't [H] — Yesterday at 12:28 AM the knowledge that you're basically doomed to be a suffering thing that requires a certain amount more pain to become the people you see around you is certainly uncomfortable kole — Yesterday at 12:29 AM right, but more broadly one might see it & assure themselves that they still have a long while to go… but, more importantly, that there's no sense of urgency or immediacy. you become the thing you are through time, that's well & good, & constant hyper-aware paranoia about one's moment-to-moment development can stunt it at worst & kill it at best. but i think strictly this way of looking at it feels like it affords too much leeway to whoever is in question: it frames their development as something that passively comes & one simply waits for it -which was my reigning life-philosophy for around 16 years & which ultimately made me have to act out 17 years of development on fast-forward within the span of 3. [H] — Yesterday at 12:33 AM people treat the journey to personhood as something more free than the life after it, but its sort of like treating the time developing a skill as more valuable or liberating than the skill developed. which is silly. its much more constricting to be putting paint to an easel for the first time than for the hundredth you can neither be sedentary or melting from the pressure… most people just dont have to think about this though. they seem to naturally find the mean between the two kole — Yesterday at 12:35 AM i don't know the inbetween, i never found it, i was never taught it, in league with all the other things i was never taught.

[titoist]

Television's biggest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. In this respect, television resembles other things mothers call "special treats" - e.g., candy, or liquor - treats that are basically fine and fun in small amounts but bad for us in large amounts and *really* bad for us if consumed as any kind of nutritive staple. One can only guess what volume of gin or poundage of Toblerone six hours of special treat a day would convert to.

[titoist]

I love your diamat glasses, very classy

thank you, that's very sweet :) i rarely encounter anyone commenting on my physical appearance - much less so positively. so i tend to think of it as a very neutral manifestation of myself, at best. subconsciously labelled as "what i am when i am not in front of the keyboard", maybe i suppose the glasses are technically an accessory rather than a part of my physicality, but still - i'm glad you like them.

(if describing them as 'diamat glasses' isn't a subtle reference to the sacred & terrible air, i'll be very very disappointed(not really(maybe a little(not really))))

[titoist]

[titoist]

every time i try to think about what Pad Chennington actually represents to me i feel like i'd have to write a whole book for it to not be missing any details. & it still feels like the most core principle of it is still some undeniable feeling in my chest that, after years, i still don't know how to articulate right

it feels like a phenomenon where conversation about it only crops up around its more egregious cartoonish examples ("do people only like this album because of its backstory?"), when really i think it kind of hangs over everything

i guess it's just that one supreme reality for me is that everything just exists. & the more one accustoms themselves to an entertainment landscape where some kind of telos behind everything is an absolute unquestioned fundamental given, the more it kind of deadens connection that supreme reality & distances one from reality a bit overall, in my view

& i'm not talking entirely about art here, so one could raise the question, "is a telos not blatantly essential to art?" but it's not so much about the telos of the art, as much as it's about the art's abduction into a kind of conceptual plane where telos, as it relates to the viewer, is the fundamental substance that comprises it, & the fundamental condition on which anything can even be imagined to exist in the first place, & in everything it must be identified

the sphere of entertainment, the realm that is the total body of media subjected to the lens of being entertainment, of being a service. & i think the more one is accustomed to this sphere the more they place things in it automatically

Pad Chennington says yes, couch yourself in more layers of abstraction & presentation & mere secondhand perception, & accustom to yourself to a perception of art wherein its expressive & communicative utility & value is hollowed out & replaced with the perception of how it can serve you. & insofar as it remains communicative, that too is only in service of serving you

obviously gratification is not fundamentally bad. one can feel the communication embodied in a piece of art & feel gratified by that connection. that is good. it doesn't mean that it feeds into this sickly thing i am trying to delineate here. i am convinced that something more subtle must be at play

it's what happens when someone can't seem to take in a piece of art without spontaneously weaving some brand new interpretative lens for it on the spot, through which it can robotically serve some latent desire to feel inspiration, or fear, or befuddlement, or pride in a musician's "trajectory." & this service is rendered by way of some controlled, predefined model of "art incites effect"

i'll reiterate: the problem is not that art incites effects! that's its beauty. the problem for me is "art incites effect." quotation marks. if art inciting effects wasn't beautiful, i don't think it'd desirable enough to get exploited & muddled up into "art incites effect"

the miracle of inspiration becomes like a service that is successfully rendered at certain times. art can feel like a service worker, but with the "thrilling risk" that it's simply allowed to not always invariably succeed

even the absence of a telos can be retrofitted into the telos of unraveling or puzzling over an enigma in some stilted way that follows in the footsteps of some youtube documentarian ("is this an arg?")

Pad Chennington is just the egregiously undisguised abduction of works of art from the plane of "just existing" to the plane of forced telos. but, like i said, i feel like there is a tendency for things to exist on that plane anyway, once people are too acclimated

it's invoking discordance & disorder in a piece of art on purpose & being called schizophrenic by someone who couldn't dissociate it from the telos of your work being there for them to intellectually conquer by exposing some underlying factor at play

it's Kiwi Farms streamlining the abduction of its targets' entire selves into a framework wherein not even human beings inherently just exist, but have their every action filtered through an interpretative lens that reframes everything to support the telos of gratifying the userbase's desire to feel repulsedly stimulated by eccentricity. all of this collated & tabulated into a convenient & gratifying list of forum threads, an interface, like a DoorDash menu, lives flattened into a list like a supply chain flattened into an app

it's like a phenomenological disease that can become a person's fundamental tone for processing the life happening right there in front of them

[titoist]

i rarely if ever feel anything when touched by another human being, short of an anxiety that i mostly repress

if i have never felt anything from being touched by another person, then what basis do i have to regard that as a problem in the first place? why fret over a phenomenon that i have clearly never had any relationship to? how can i even value it? i must have just decided at some point that i might be missing out on something. that is a silly reason to develop an enduring despondence about something…

[titoist]

friend today (who's seen photos of me) instinctively blurted out that i had blonde hair while describing me, & was uncomprehendingly shocked when i took the time to correct them, convinced i was messing with them for a moment, etc... i'm not sure why this seems to be a running theme.

[titoist]

i want to sit in the sun with somebody