I guess I don't really write about books that much; but:

I am about 175 pages into Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles, my fifth Houellebecq book and the last one that's been translated into English (aside from his book on Lovecraft). I swear to God, Houellebecq writes books with about four hundred textual levels that, at times, feel like there were written directly for me. So far my favorite (possibly) apocryphal events include a dinner party where Deleuze and Benazeraf espouse the intellectual capacities of pornography and a "map" of hippie and social revolution reduced to materialism and an utter lack of faith via rockstars, serial killers, and the viennese actionists. WHY IS EVERYBODY WHO'S INTO COOL SHIT NOT LIKE CONSTANTLY TALKING ABOUT HOUELLEBECQ?

dream analysis from dennis cooper's blog:
22.

here is a dream i had on may 19th of 2007:

crazy crazy crazy fucking post-apocalyptic wasteland decorated with modernist, sparse architecture in the middle of fields and highways. some crazy monkey that was very ill and permanently in christ mode (in terms of how he would rest in my apartment), crazy weird breakdancing groups ("we rest in the restrooms so we can stay together!"), renting a movie from a video store and ending up with a betamax tape instead of a vhs tape (friend says, "Keep it! Betamax tapes are so rare they're worth millions now!") down the street to use the restroom and some kid I hadn't seen since HS ends up telling me last time I partied at his house it was my fault his mother had to clean up the bathroom ("I mean, I know it wasn't really your fault, but you opened the floodgates") someone who was tall with a build a la jim carey in that hipster movie about memory trying to type out on a typewriter that he wants to blow me but my roommate--being a 45 year old business women--was home but at least i got spooned and a few shakes before she came in. then came business time and me and a friend who had shown up in the same room decided to not stay where we were supposed to ("fuck this, I'm going out") and ending up wandering fields and almost dying on the highway but then mark (rl friend) shows up and tells me about how now the dude who wanted to blow me has decided he is into my friend and dude is friends with mark and aparently they have some sort of rating scale that all the friends have to vote on before anything happens and i'm all like "OKAY WHATEVER" and we go to this tent that's a makeshift art gallery and most of the art is shitty but one corner is alright but that belongs to my depressed friend and then mat donovan (rl friend) is there and tells me he didn't get into art school because the "principal person" asked him "is your work bringing anything new to the art world?" and then sitting on a couch by a bunch of random girls who apparently have found out that i'm going to be traveling far away ("how are you going to get there?" / "oh, i'm not leaving america, I'll be walking or hitching I guess") and then watching things from a distance, tired ("can we go grab a soda and light up?" i say as I hold a cigarette in the air, right hand) outside almost fuck up a display of soda, someone yells at someone else and the blame gets slid onto me but i shrug and walk over a poster advertising a show that my band is playing at and this poster is gigantic and tons of people have scribbled things about how awesome we are and under the main text of the poster "AFTER PARTY AT MIKEY'S" ("i guess we are having an afterparty andy" / "well that's okay i guess") and then *******

Comments:

When you actually discuss dreams with the dreamer, you usually spend some time trying to get an account of the predominating emotions in the dream, and get a sense of the relation of dream imagery to these fluctuating emotions. And maybe here is where I should say a word about my sense of what dreams “are”: In my view, they represent the subjective experience of a variety of different kinds of mental states, which run from the hypnagogic hallucinations of sleep onset—the images that (usually) briefly flash before you as you’re falling asleep—to the elaborate narratives of REM-sleep, which seem the most profoundly “psychological”—that is, most inclined prominently to display a lot of intriguing mental associations, whatever the actual physiological stimuli that might give rise to the basic dream imagery.

So that’s just to say that in some dream accounts, you might be most struck by the way that the imagery reflects the somatic stimuli (like a sore throat, the need to urinate, indigestion) or extrasomatic stimuli (your alarm clock, getting tangled in the sheets, someone blowing you as you sleep — I’m just trying to give interesting examples here), and sometimes you might find most interesting the revelation of the dreamer’s characteristic patterns of association of ideas—as Jung called them, “complexes.” (This, by the way, is already admitting much greater variety to dream life than Freud allowed.)

So: One way of looking at dreams (associated with the very interesting and very nice dream psychologist Ernest Hartmann) is that in elaborate dream narratives, the dreamer is having predominating emotional states (presumably in response to the day’s events), which of course fluctuate as feelings will do, which are reflected in the metaphorical construction of imagery characteristic of the dream state (as well as daytime reverie). So it is interesting to see how the imagery pictures these shifting emotional states—but even more interesting to consider that the dreaming mind is testing the boundaries of these metaphors as indicators of how we process our experiences emotionally and respond to them in waking life with behavior strategies.
----Hence the very interesting idea that, essentially, in dreams we are watching our minds fall back upon their most habitual ways of thinking but under conditions that allow us to loosen up associations of ideas so we can explore strategies we would not have thought of in the waking state. Obviously, this is very similar to the function that art (as opposed to rational thought, politics, and, at least until recently, theory in the sciences and humanities) can perform for a culture.
----(And now I will digress to say that one of the first papers I gave on dreaming was a talk on G. W. Pabst’s Secrets of the Soul [1926], which was made to explain Freud’s theories to the masses. My perspective was that an analysis of the dream analysis within the film easily showed that it didn’t follow Freud’s principles at all and was constructed as propaganda for the psychoanalytic movement rather than illustration of Freudian method.

So as I’m about to start, I look out in the audience and see Ernest Hartmann, who, I happen to know, was dandled on Freud’s knee when he was two, as his parents were in Freud’s circle. And I freak; I think I actually trembled. I got through my talk and Hartmann sat with me at lunch and said I’d done pretty good, which was nice but still weird. And I kept feeling that it’s just not possible that I’m one degree of separation from Freud; it seemed unreal. I grew up seeing him as such a mythic figure.)
----Well, I figured I’d say that sometime, so I said it now, in response to a complicated dream, in order to say that I’m not only trying to see the imagery of the dream in my mind’s eye but also feel what feelings it reflects (a process that has always reminded me of imitating someone else’s facial expression to see what it makes you feel).

So this dreamer is thinking about how he feels about the possibilities of standing out from the crowd, achieving the success in self-expression (and this just means actualization of one’s own distinctive way of being in the world, not necessarily success in some mode or genre of actual art-making) that’s signified either by recognition or by a feeling of satisfaction, of understanding and being understood.

In this dream, the shared world of society has been destroyed and the dreamer is wandering in the conceptually streamlined world of the unconscious. The images are of exemplary suffering and vigorous energy, and these are contrasted with the “restrooms” (which is typical of dreams’ capacity to foreground the subtext implicit in terms we use in daytime speech). The dreamer stands out by acquiring a valuable object, that is, achieving wealth (and the betamax tape is a brilliant condensation of the idea of the crowd failing to recognize true value); and explores sexual fulfillment (my guess is that the dreamer associates Jim Carey to some particular “hipster” role, very possibly Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind because it’s so congruent with the approach of this dream).

As the dream progresses, the consequences and emotional shadings of achieving self-expression—the negative ones, such as messing up a bathroom, as well as positive—appear as mini-scenarios, culminating in the awareness of two challenges: first, the very serious question about authenticity posed by “the principal person” (and obviously I only get to these readings by erasing the differences between the dreamer and his various characters/personae because, after all, I see this as a matter of himself asking questions of himself); and second, the consequences of fame, which is to say, self-exposure, signified by the fan girls, the poster, and the party he doesn’t know is happening at his place but accepts. By the end of the dream, the dreamer accepts that others will occupy his dream. Which is, you know, a very nice place to be.

so, apparently this "straight guy" goes to my uni
http://www.seancody.com/page.php?frame=movie&movie=298
(if you can't see that, it's seancody model "bailey")

and according to my somewhat closeted coworker, he works out at the rec on tuesdays and thursdays from 2-4.
(i laugh that he had that detailed of a response)

unfortunately, he is gross and plastic looking AND ONLY 18 (i do not buy that one bit), but it'd be interesting to talk to him in response to my post a while ago about how much i hate the selling of straight-men in gay porn etc.

but, all things considered, it wouldn't surprise me if the only gay porn star in dekalb were straight.

Cinema's 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline. It's not that you can't look forward anymore to new films that you can admire. But such films not only have to be exceptions -- that's true of great achievements in any art. They have to be actual violations of the norms and practices that now govern movie making everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world -- which is to say, everywhere. And ordinary films, films made purely for entertainment (that is, commercial) purposes, are astonishingly witless; the vast majority fail resoundingly to appeal to their cynically targeted audiences. While the point of a great film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achievement, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative film-making, a brazen combinatory or recombinatory art, in the hope of reproducing past successes. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the 20th century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art.

Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia -- the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral -- all at the same time. Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.

As many people have noted, the start of movie making a hundred years ago was, conveniently, a double start. In roughly the year 1895, two kinds of films were made, two modes of what cinema could be seemed to emerge: cinema as the transcription of real unstaged life (the Lumiere brothers) and cinema as invention, artifice, illusion, fantasy (Melies). But this is not a true opposition. The whole point is that, for those first audiences, the very transcription of the most banal reality -- the Lumiere brothers filming "The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station" -- was a fantastic experience. Cinema began in wonder, the wonder that reality can be transcribed with such immediacy. All of cinema is an attempt to perpetuate and to reinvent that sense of wonder.

Everything in cinema begins with that moment, 100 years ago, when the train pulled into the station. People took movies into themselves, just as the public cried out with excitement, actually ducked, as the train seemed to move toward them. Until the advent of television emptied the movie theaters, it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive. Example: It looks good to wear a raincoat even when it isn't raining. But whatever you took home was only a part of the larger experience of submerging yourself in lives that were not yours. The desire to lose yourself in other people's lives . . . faces. This is a larger, more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. Even more than what you appropriated for yourself was the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie -- and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image. The experience of "going to the movies" was part of it. To see a great film only on television isn't to have really seen that film. It's not only a question of the dimensions of the image: the disparity between a larger-than-you image in the theater and the little image on the box at home. The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film. Now that a film no longer has a standard size, home screens can be as big as living room or bedroom walls. But you are still in a living room or a bedroom. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.

No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals -- erotic, ruminative -- of the darkened theater. The reduction of cinema to assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipulation of images (faster and faster cutting) to make them more attention-grabbing, has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't demand anyone's full attention. Images now appear in any size and on a variety of surfaces: on a screen in a theater, on disco walls and on megascreens hanging above sports arenas. The sheer ubiquity of moving images has steadily undermined the standards people once had both for cinema as art and for cinema as popular entertainment.

In the first years there was, essentially, no difference between these two forms. And all films of the silent era -- from the masterpieces of Feuillade, D. W. Griffith, Dziga Vertov, Pabst, Murnau and King Vidor to the most formula-ridden melodramas and comedies -- are on a very high artistic level, compared with most of what was to follow. With the coming of sound, the image making lost much of its brilliance and poetry, and commercial standards tightened. This way of making movies -- the Hollywood system -- dominated film making for about 25 years (roughly from 1930 to 1955). The most original directors, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles, were defeated by the system and eventually went into artistic exile in Europe -- where more or less the same quality-defeating system was now in place, with lower budgets; only in France were a large number of superb films produced throughout this period. Then, in the mid-1950's, vanguard ideas took hold again, rooted in the idea of cinema as a craft pioneered by the Italian films of the immediate postwar period. A dazzling number of original, passionate films of the highest seriousness got made.

It was at this specific moment in the 100-year history of cinema that going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion among university students and other young people. You fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself. Cinephilia had first become visible in the 1950's in France: its forum was the legendary film magazine Cahiers du Cinema (followed by similarly fervent magazines in Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Sweden, the United States and Canada). Its temples, as it spread throughout Europe and the Americas, were the many cinematheques and clubs specializing in films from the past and directors' retrospectives that sprang up. The 1960's and early 1970's was the feverish age of movie-going, with the full-time cinephile always hoping to find a seat as close as possible to the big screen, ideally the third row center. "One can't live without Rossellini," declares a character in Bertolucci's "Before the Revolution" (1964) -- and means it.

For some 15 years there were new masterpieces every month. How far away that era seems now. To be sure, there was always a conflict between cinema as an industry and cinema as an art, cinema as routine and cinema as experiment. But the conflict was not such as to make impossible the making of wonderful films, sometimes within and sometimes outside of mainstream cinema. Now the balance has tipped decisively in favor of cinema as an industry. The great cinema of the 1960's and 1970's has been thoroughly repudiated. Already in the 1970's Hollywood was plagiarizing and rendering banal the innovations in narrative method and in the editing of successful new European and ever-marginal independent American films. Then came the catastrophic rise in production costs in the 1980's, which secured the worldwide reimposition of industry standards of making and distributing films on a far more coercive, this time truly global scale. Soaring producton costs meant that a film had to make a lot of money right away, in the first month of its release, if it was to be profitable at all -- a trend that favored the blockbuster over the low-budget film, although most blockbusters were flops and there were always a few "small" films that surprised everyone by their appeal. The theatrical release time of movies became shorter and shorter (like the shelf life of books in bookstores); many movies were designed to go directly into video. Movie theaters continued to close -- many towns no longer have even one -- as movies became, mainly, one of a variety of habit-forming home entertainments.

In this country, the lowering of expectations for quality and the inflation of expectations for profit have made it virtually impossible for artistically ambitious American directors, like Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader, to work at their best level. Abroad, the result can be seen in the melancholy fate of some of the greatest directors of the last decades. What place is there today for a maverick like Hans- Jurgen Syberberg, who has stopped making films altogether, or for the great Godard, who now makes films about the history of film, on video? Consider some other cases. The internationalizing of financing and therefore of casts were disastrous for Andrei Tarkovsky in the last two films of his stupendous (and tragically abbreviated) career. And how will Aleksandr Sokurov find the money to go on making his sublime films, under the rude conditions of Russian capitalism?

Predictably, the love of cinema has waned. People still like going to the movies, and some people still care about and expect something special, necessary from a film. And wonderful films are still being made: Mike Leigh's "Naked," Gianni Amelio's "Lamerica," Fred Kelemen's "Fate." But you hardly find anymore, at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic love of movies that is not simply love of but a certain taste in films (grounded in a vast appetite for seeing and reseeing as much as possible of cinema's glorious past). Cinephilia itself has come under attack, as something quaint, outmoded, snobbish. For cinephilia implies that films are unique, unrepeatable, magic experiences. Cinephilia tells us that the Hollywood remake of Godard's "Breathless" cannot be as good as the original. Cinephilia has no role in the era of hyperindustrial films. For cinephilia cannot help, by the very range and eclecticism of its passions, from sponsoring the idea of the film as, first of all, a poetic object; and cannot help from inciting those outside the movie industry, like painters and writers, to want to make films, too. It is precisely this notion that has been defeated.

If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too . . . no matter how many movies, even very good ones, go on being made. If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.

From here.

LOL this will probably be followed by my April screening log during my next procrastination break.