Yesterday morning I woke up and thought, Fuck it, I'm going to read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. And finish it this time. But my resolve flagged quickly, and I ended up reading only the introduction, the first chapter and the conclusion. Oh well, I'm sure I got the gist. Anyway, I found this paragraph disturbing:

Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!

Gah! Ack! OK, I get what he's saying, and it is kind of disturbing to think about how specialized knowledge has become, so that no-one outside of a given field can really understand what the experts in that field are doing. But have philosphers really ever done anything other than analyze language? As in how you know that you know what you know?

I don't know. I guess it's important to learn as much as possible about how the universe works, but beyond a certain point it becomes too abstract and I can't imagine why it matters. As long as the earth keeps spinning, and gravity keeps on... keeping..on, then we can keep studying language, which is infinitely more interesting, and not a comedown at all. So there. Wait, am I still hungover?

There's a really good quote in a Paul Auster book I read recently but can't find now about how making art means always failing. I googled for it and found this quote instead, which doesn't say quite the same thing but I still like it:

I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life.
-- Jasper Johns

It's interesting to think about art and failure and perfectionism. If the process of creating art is striving for an impossible ideal, constantly falling short, and thereby constantly failing, but creating the byproduct art, and if perfectionism is a paralyzing and somewhat delusional fear and abhorrence of failure, then wouldn't perfectionists who try to be an artists drive themselves slowly insane?

I think I'd be a better writer if I could just resign myself to failure, and then (because life is ironic like that) I wouldn't fail.

What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it.
-- Gertrude Stein

Weird... apparently Alice B. Toklas was 4'11" and Gertrude Stein was 5'1". You'd think a woman who called herself Caesar would be taller than that. Then again, I can't imagine those Roman emperors were very tall either.

For your amusement, recent excerpts from my writing journal (not writing writing, just things I write in response to what I'm writing, or to motivate writing, or to avoid writing, oh god sometimes I hate writing):

I worry a lot about the naturalism of phrasing, the likelihood of flow. I’ve given up trying to flow, it never flows. Everything is a fake. Smoke and mirror show. All writing is fallacy.

The torture of theme is overtaking whatever momentum I might have had. It makes me sad. I really don’t want to give up this idea, I really want to explore it, but how? How do writers explore ideas? And if I can’t figure it out, does that make me not-a-writer?

I think the problem might be images – I’m trying to write from images when that’s not what I do; I write from sound.

Write from sound, write from sound, fuck theme, fuck image, write from sound write from sound.

The drudge continues. Steely resolution, but is that what writing requires? Sensitive adjustments also. I don’t know why or how or how well, I just know I want to.

I don’t know. I just don’t know what to write anymore, what to think about, how to approach anything. I’m starting to think starting blank works just as well.

Ahhhhhhhh! time. Of course there’s nothing worse than writing against time. Guaranteed to make the writing fall flat. Or start flat. Crawl flat along the ground. The page. Gah.

My computer thinks it’s yesterday. Damn know-it-all laptops. OK, getting all excited about the work, about design, about chapbooks etc. But, much much left to write still. Counting chickens, eggs, thing, whatevahs.

You can’t go home again. You cannot rest on your laurels, and you can’t repeat success. Try to know this.

Hmmm. Just noticing a Mullenesque quality to the phrasing. Hope it’s not derivativivive.

All the nostalgia and goodwill I've accumulated for Calgary over the past almost-two-years imploded into itty-bitty bits of bitterness when I was wrenched awake at 7:19 this morning by the blare of Alan Jackson and his ilk. Not to be pedantic, but when was Calgary ever a centre for ranching, or rodeo? It was a mountie fort and a railway stop, then it was an oil town. That's about it. Of course there are all kinds of ranching culture across Southern Alberta, but why do they have to rear their most ridiculous incarnations in front of my building, downtown, in what's supposed to be a city? Also in direct contravention of noise bylaws, I might point out, although not to the police, because it's Stampede! they don't care.

This morning wasn't all bad: they did play a couple of Johnny Cash songs. But that didn't last long, so I had to close the balcony doors and play the Smiths loud enough to drown it all out. After eating my breakfast quiche.

Man, I can never rant about the Stampede without making myself seem pathetic. Why is that?

Often I gather sentences to see if they'll organize themselves into some kind of poem, but these ones aren't cooperating, so I'm releasing them back into the wild...

Has your dad ever not got his crop off in the fall? *

How are my wife and I supposed to understand Elfish?

What would tourists think of a habitat of denuded trees with desperate, starving koalas roaming the damaged landscape?

What can't you do with a law degree?!

In BC, you can't deal with beavers like in Alberta.

You'd get laid if you were a rodeo clown.

Your aesthetics won't help you now.

* I love this sentence so much, especially given the context I heard it in: Picture the varnished wood and conservative artwork of a 26th-floor boardroom filled with drilling engineers discussing the effect of heavy rains on the soil in Saskatchewan... Seriously, poetry is everywhere.

!!Optimism!!

A manuscript must be really good if it takes over two years just to reject it!

Another trip through BC, another dead bear on the Transcanada, this time a cub. What the hell is going on? If I believed in, well, anything, I might think it was an omen of some kind. Or maybe there are just a lot of bears around, hungry bears, stupid bears.