Cinq heures du mat' j'ai des frissons, je claque des dents et je monte le son, seul sur le lit dans mes draps bleus froissés c'est l'insomnie, sommeil cassé. Je perds la tête et mes cigarettes sont toutes fumées dans le cendrier, c'est plein d'Kleenex et d'bouteilles vides, j'suis tout seul, tout seul, tout seul.
This month of mine has mostly been characterized by moving into a new apartment and various attempts at having one night stands in or nearby said apartment. It's a small little apartment across the street from the university I live by and I only have 2 roommates, one of them should only be here for another semester. Gone for the summer. I've managed to get all of my bookshelves moved over and we've spent the month occasionally walking to the pool at one of the nearby apartment complexes until it was hit with a bloom of algae. It's the middle of summer so part of my slowness in moving consists in believing that there's only a small window of the daylight hours where moving everything is relatively comfortable. Truthfully I just have no idea how I'm going to fit everything in my room and more than likely there's a few things I'll have to consider getting rid of. These things happen. In positive news I've managed to start drinking less. In negative news I have a weird swelling or growth in the back of my throat that I don't know if I'll have to go to the doctor for and I think my hairline is finally starting to recede a little.
I've read a few different books this month. They're a blur to me. The first was La Déchéance d'un homme which I believe was the 8th book I've finished in French. I finally reached my 10th with my French PDF of Le Pli by Gilles Deleuze. It gets a little easier with each one. My French adventure has been a somewhat bizarre experience, as anyone can readily see my command of the grammar and orthography is still abysmal and I don't know how long it'll take to slowly self correct. I still feel like I'm a good year or two away from being perfectly comfortable in a voice channel with only native speakers. But, I'm enjoying myself. It's nice to be able to watch YouTube with my speakers at any volume with no risk of whatever I'm watching actually being understood. If anything, I'm only a little sad because I'm a poor American and I think I'm likely to die before I ever set a single foot in France. The closest I could ever get is maybe a trip down to Louisiana or up north to Québec. For those of us too poor to travel, I find learning another language to be a form of mental travel, where any time I can choose to be somewhere else in a small way.
La Déchéance d'un homme is a book I've been slightly obsessed with ever since I first read it, unfortunately I consider it one of my literally me
books that I'm sure everyone has one or two of. Much like how I perceive the main character, we've blundered our way through a life characterized by various romantic catastrophes and our highest aspirations, whether being a painter or being a writer, have amounted to nothing. Our most significant difference that I can think of are our stances towards radical politics and thought, but we're together in being rejected from that territory.
I've yet to mention it anywhere publicly but my correspondence with the Maoist Communist Union amounted only to my being rejected for a study course on the grounds of identification with the revisionist and scoundrel Louis Althusser, who I've yet to repudiate. Since then I've ceased communications and although I maintain my sympathies towards Maoism, I hope they fail. It's a rather bizarre thought, but I've begun to think that communism is accomplished in small pockets any time we don't fail others or ourselves. So much of what I detest in other leftists and in American politics more broadly is an incessant repugnance in lowering one's guard and treating someone as an equal. To give a slight impression of what I mean, it's like in every restaurant I've ever worked where after a couple weeks you and your coworkers can lower your guard and come to the agreement, we get paid too little, our management is stupid and sadistic, and our customers are dicks
and part of me wishes every interaction I could have with a person could have a similar register where we don't feel the need to lie to either ourselves or the other person about how ghoulish our sitation is. The road to catastrophe will be paved with failing ourselves and betraying others, in a world where everyone regards each other with only derision and horror. I long for a better world where we treat each other like chummy coworkers and our only dickhead boss is the Earth itself.
Other than that, I recently finished Différence et Répétition. It felt a lot like the first time I read the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the sense that by the time was done I could remember nothing of it and more than likely I'll really enjoy it anywhere from 3 to 5 rereads from now. If I'm lucky I might even have something substantial or interesting to say about it. It's slightly funny to me that I've spent so much time reading Deleuze lately, as I went into my French adventure thinking that I was going to be mostly reading Althusser or Badiou when I finally became capable of reading books so it's a rather unexpected surprise. I think part of it is that I'm at least familiar enough with the Western philosophical tradition that I don't feel completely lost when trying to get through his books, that I'm not totally convinced of his positions with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, but also that I don't think he's completely full of shit. His books feel like the perfect thing to read at my current skill level in French. One of the things I remember admiring about Althusser is that I believe him to be a remarkably clear writer, and one of the things I find fascinating about Bataille's early writings are their remarkable obscurity, Deleuze feels right in the middle where he never feels neither perfectly clear nor woefully obscure. Thus, I enjoy his books. I'm still reading The Fold in English so hopefully I'll have more to say about it later, as I'm starting to think it's one of my favorite works of philosophy that I've ever read. Maybe after I get through the Critical Reader on it that I managed to find somewhere on the internet.
There's a small pool of his books that I'm going to try go get through this month, the trilogy that I'm focusing on other than his book on Leibniz are his early works on other philosophers, particularly his short books on Kant, Spinoza and Hume. I wanted to go for the big 300 page book on Spinoza but I opted for reading his shorter one. The book on Kant I tried to start but I think it'd be better if I read it in English first, which has been the more rare choice for me recently. For his books on Spinoza and Hume I'm likely to consult the French first before clearing up my misreadings with their respective English translations. I expect that work to take up more or less the whole month of June. After that I might see about going back to A Thousand Plateaus or Anti-Oedipus. There's also a few works of secondary literature that I found that I'd like to take the time to consult, one of them being a work on Deleuze's relationship with Hermetic philosophy. This month if I get the chance I'd also like to finally sit down and finish my French translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit as well as finally read a bit of Althusser, specifically Pour Marx and Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes, unfortunately there's not a direct equivalent to the English compilation of Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays so more than likely if I want to reread those in French I'll have to find each scattered essay somewhere on the internet.
One thought that I would like to express at least somewhere before I die is that I really hope one day someone decides to make a tragicomedy mockumentary of the entire minor historical sequence that was Red Guards Austin with the tone and humor of Trailer Park Boys. It could either work as a movie like This is Spinal Tap or maybe just like a short 6 to 12 episode TV series with 22 minute episodes. I know there was a Los Angeles chapter that was probably similar in size but I think as a movie or show it would work better in Austin. For the book I'm working on I think the most important book that I can read for it (at least right now) will be Satanism: A Social History which is only about 600 pages and should give me all of the information I need to begin writing a book intended to serve as the theory-fictional basis for a new strain of Satanism.
Another weird thing I've been thinking about is these blog posts themselves, how they lead to no particular development but merely track and record my own theoretical movements. I never talk about any particular philosopher in any particular detail, always deferring discussion to some abstract later date. The truth is, I never know what I'm talking about, all I can hope is that I can fold and unfold my own soul and study its expansions and contractions the further I get into the works of Deleuze. Each blog post is never complete, but merely the beginning of another larval self ready to head off in another direction. I never portray being, I portray passing. All I am is the smooth space, the recording surface, the magnetic tape of the cassette, trying to repeat what I've read through hiss and static.