there is no worse combination in the world than AT&T Wireless and a Palm Centro phone. There is virtually no way to make or receive a call. If you manage to place or receive a call, neither party can hear each other anyway. The phone reboots every twelve minutes, doesn’t ring half the time, has a confusing user interface, randomly freezes for minutes or hours, and will at least once a week lose signal and never get it back until you reboot it.

It’s complete, total, and utter shit, the pairing of this rotten wireless service with this rotten phone and I have no desire to continue to use either. As soon as I can afford it, I’m switching to something else entirely.

surreal for me, of becoming something altogether other than what it ought to be, not as a matter of content, but as a matter of form. Again and again I have fallen into a metaphysical trap, not into rapid time or empty time or wasted time, yet out of linear time but not into cyclical time in its stead. Rather, I once again appear trapped in a kind of quantum time, in which there is no progression, no movement, no narrative, no geography of the temporal, but rather a number of discrete states, like the orbitals of electrons around nuclei, amongst which I shift unpredictably in a life that consists entirely of several distinct, frozen, instantaneous-eternal states.

This, the “home night” is one of them. That, the “classroom” is another. “Walking the dog” is the third. “Wife just got home but we’re still awake” is fourth. Finally, there is “wife hasn’t gone yet, ambient anticipation is intense.”

Five states, each of which consists not of a timeline but of a frozen moment, an eternal moment, apparently unshifting, seemingly unchanging until the sudden deterministic transmutation to another state. They are not successive states; there is no “yesterday’s home night” versus “today’s home night.”

There is only one home night, and this is it, a state to which I return again and again.

I have become, once more, the intellectual puzzle, the subjective singularity—the self as finite state machine.

—

When one has become trapped in quantum time, has fallen into this strange mesh of the macroscopic and the subatomic and the temporal, all progress or change becomes transcendental.

I am not in a metaphysical prison per se, more like a metaphysical möbius surface, bounded and unbounded, infinite and cramped at once, with no clear method for orientation, or thus, for escape.

—

Most strange when I fall into this universe is the sense, always present, that neither my mind or my body are my own any longer. Instead, they belong to the causal nexus, as do I. Consciousness gives way to algorithm, freedom to uncaught, unexcepted race condition.

—

At times like this I wonder if I am entirely sane, or if other people ever find themselves here, wherever I am now.

Discontent

the number “1” is the original transcendental number. The feat is not in the act of representation or calculation, but in the construction of the unit that the symbol “1” represents, its excavation and delineation from miasma of existence as the result of a coherence of properties, sensations, and self-organizing cognitive processes.

All properties of numbers and matter, all of mathematics and science flows from the original transcendental moment of “1.” It’s really breathtaking when you think about it for a moment.

than feeling vaguely troubled. It’s like waiting for the thumbscrews. The actual thumbscrews are not nearly so bad as waiting for them. The actual cataclysm is actually quite nice in comparison to anticipation of it.

And in the case of the “vaguely” even the temporal linearity of the “anticipatory” is missing. It’s not anticipation; it’s nothing in particular. It’s vague. It’s being stalked by a predator, not knowing whether it is hungry, merely bored, or in actuality paying attention to something else entirely, with your sense of foreboding being nothing more than the shadow of a shadow.

I dislike.

I dislike.

what one becomes accustomed to. As for me, myself, personally (to quote the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland of which I remain very fond to this day despite no longer owning a copy), it is clear that I have become accustomed to the wrong things and, lacking the necessary rage and instability to randomly fluctuate into productivity any longer, repeat them ad infinitum without meaning to.

It is high time that I become accustomed to something else. In order to do this, I will have to engage in a concerted effort to shift work habits toward the prolific. Perhaps it can be done, perhaps it can’t.

That remains to be seen.

—

Earlier tonight I was thinking of posting (because, naturally, I was thinking) that I have never been capable of moderation in anything in my life. I am inevitably all or nothing; I see the world as an all or nothing world; I prefer to traffic in all or nothing, always being frustrated and dissatisfied with the (literal) indiscretion of half-measures.

It is, upon reflection now, something that could be turned to my advantage.

The trick, it would seem, is to spark the “all” to replace, for the moment, the “nothing,” and in the long term to develop a habit of doing this repeatedly.

—

But of course at the moment it is neither clear how that might happen nor convenient to begin trying.

Perhaps tomorrow…

I’m experimenting with is separating my “research” machine from my “writing” machine. The former remains my main laptop, great for browsing the web, organizing files, and generally computering around.

The latter is for experimental purposes an NEC MobilePro 900, a tiny machine with a stripped-down word processor and no real ability to browse the web.

The idea is to try to limit the distraction that the entire world presents to one when one is trying to work. The internet is a very, very insidious thing at times; it simply won’t let go, won’t allow you to work, won’t allow you to be productive.

a more of the age of reason that one doesn’t form an opinion until one has collected and at minimum initially confronted all of the available information concerning any topic at issue. Of course, as the age of reason has matured into the age of information, such a task is impossible; the reservoir of information is literally inexhaustable and generally sufficiently diverse as to make the task of synthesis or narrow analysis seem ponderously difficult, a secondary impossibility layered atop the impossibility of collecting a “complete” body of information in the first place.

The embarrassment of the scholar has no place in the information age. The truly judicious scholar will spend his or her life as the pale human imitation of the computerized aggregator, a Google of the flesh, as it were, tiny and inadequate in comparison, paralyzed by the processes and normativities of a set of traditions that come to us from an age in which there was a clear and infinite boundary between the information that could be collected and the information that could not.

No such boundary exists today; the latter territory, in fact, has become a mythological place, the stuff of legends and of near forgotten dark ages.

If the academy is to contribute, the academy must become lighter on its feet, and must be more willing, as Luhmann implicitly notes, to observe and draw conclusions about a system—of society, of information, of structures or of processes—without being able to observe but a tiny, geographically proximal (whether in time or space) fraction of it.

Ben Folds.

is always an interesting experience precisely because you don’t have it. Or rather, you have the experience of hearing about someone else’s experience of you, in a narrative directly addressed at you, but not the same you that is described in the experience (which is, of course, the virtual you).

Shrug.

—

I’ll certainly never be prolific.

But the question right now is more how to ensure that I am productive.

I am a victim of inertia. Or, rather, I am addicted to it. Inertia is my weakness. Self-confidence is my bugbear. I become complacent because I am too satisfied.

I need to be less satisfied.

—

What is the reservoir of creativity?

I bought a bunch of creativity books some time ago, but they didn’t really help with anything; they were more like “getting past mental blocks” lists. I suppose the bigger question is precisely what I mean by creativity, and in my case, I mean the sufficient will to burn energy in pursuit of insightful/useful/meaningful novelty.

Maybe even the sufficient will to burn any energy at all for any reason.

—

One of the most regrettable things about graduate school is the way in which it can take a bright young mind and turn it off.

I have seen too much of this, both in myself and in others.

Though everyone gets turned off in their own unique and highly flavorful way, the net result is that many of the best and brightest potential problem-solvers and insight-generators of the last several (and, no doubt, next several) generations have been/are/will be lost, replaced by those with a high tolerance for bureaucracy, schmoozing, process, and banality, i.e. the born middle managers.

Iron cage, Weber, etc. Bureaucracy produces bureaucrats, who naturally intensify the bureaucratic nature of society, which produces even more and stronger bureaucrats.

Bleh.

My own form of “being turned off” is precisely a lack of drive. When I went to Chicago, I was driven and ready to do mind-numbingly brilliant things. Instead, process, the inherent conservatism of structural paradigms, and the politics that inhere in those that are extant today combined to sour and dull my output and to press me right out the door after getting my M.A., back to the world of the corporation and the cubicle.

These, of course, I hate, so after a cooing-off period rather like standing up and gasping for air in the middle of an extended and breathless swim in a shallow public pool, I dove right back into academics by joining the New School, once again driven.

Two years later I am done with Ph.D. coursework, have produced a perfect grade point average, several scholarships, a bunch of honors in this and that, and so on, and I am on a roll… and somehow they decide that once again it is a good idea to drop the middle management anvil on me, burying me unexpectedly beneath several metric tons of bureaucracy, red tape, speed bumps, and departmental and interdepartmental politics.

Seven months later, having waded through this sludge and successfully come out the other end, my motivation is once again gone. Once again any academic thought that enters my head wants to flee, or perhaps to be loaded into the barrel of a gun and shot at any pile of paperwork nearby.

They have taken a student that was making rapid, roaringly brilliant progress at the top of a department and stopped him dead in his tracks.

– momentum –

– gone –

I don’t know if I can get it back, and/or how long it will take me to do so.

I do know that I think a great deal less of the world of the academy in general than I did before coming to the New School, just as was the case at Chicago. Just like my wife, I question more and more precisely what percentage of the population of professional scholars is actually of interest to me and what percentage is absolute tenured dead wood with an entitlement complex and a reactionary streak.

—

Before undergrad my thought was 100:0—100 percent amazing intellectuals, certainly no total tripe.

After undergrad my thought was 90:10.

After my M.A. my thought was 50:10.

Most of the way through my Ph.D. my thought is 5:95.

If that.

There are maybe 1,000 scholars worldwide that contribute in keeping with their inflated status and wage. The rest are philistines and narcissists.

is the study of ruthlessness.

—

Success is the practice of ruthlessness.

—

Freedom is the epitome of ruthlessness.

—

Ruthlessness is the regrettable nature of all human progress.