Month: August 2005

Beat the bar scene

A dream has been fulfilled—I’ve finally visited the Spam Museum in Austin, MN.

I’ve tried to quit smoking several times before, but I’m beginning to think that this time will actually be a success. It’s been around seven weeks now, with two weeks of being completely clean with no lapses. It’s one of my last vices. I pretty much gave up on drinking around a decade ago, and I hope that I won’t have to give up on caffeine—now that’s a vice I truly love. Smoking, well, after thirty years the magic is gone.

Roland Barthes’ Michelet is a peculiar little book. It is quotes interspersed with commentary and biographical detail. One of the chapters features Michelet on smoking:

Henceforth, men increasingly resorted to seeking the brutal illusion of drink, of dreams in fumigation. Two new demons were born: alcohol and tobacco.

Arabic alcohol, eau-de vie distilled in the West in the thirteenth century and still, in the sixteenth, a very expensive remedy for the sick, will be diffused, offering all the temptations of a false energy, barbaric overstimulation, a brief moment of frenzy, the flame followed by the moral chill of the void, by humiliation.

And also, narcotics: nicotia (now known as tobacco) substitutes and indifferent reverie for serious thought, causes all ills to be forgotten, and their remedies as well. It makes life undulate, like the faint smoke whose spiral rises and fades away at its own sweet will. Vain vapor in which man is dissolved, unconcerned with himself, with others, with any true affection.

Two enemies of love, two demons of solitude, antipathetic to social concerns, deadly to generation. The man who smokes has no need for women; a widower even in marriage; his love is this fume into which the best of himself passes and vanishes. (65)

It has been hard to try to write lately. I’ve pulled back from writing because I’ve been doing instead. As the readers of Krista’s blog already know, we got married a little over a week ago. We slipped away to Duluth for the weekend, and now we’re headed south for a week or so.

Thanks to QB, I have a flickr account that I’m trying to start using. I’ve actually started taking pictures for fun with the digital camera I got last spring. It’s been fun. An interesting parallel just occurred to me. When I was active as a photographer, I very seldom wrote (or even talked) much. It’s as if there are two different modes of thought involved entirely. But, all the same, my research for the last few years is directed at undermining that observation. I think words and pictures have much in common.

Perhaps its more like this: the activity of interpreting any symbolic activity (word, sound, or picture) seems to follow the same path. However, actively generating messages—in the sense of poesis— usually means concentrating on one mode to the exclusion of all others. But that’s kind of a cop out too. I’m not really taking serious pictures; in fact, I’d like to avoid taking serious pictures. I just want to have some sort of fun this summer!

Now that it’s almost over and all my teaching responsibilities are done for the moment, I might be able to relax. But probably not.