Snow and the Digital Gulag

Snow. Not the nice kind that you find in Vermont or on snow days. Yesterday the snow a filth icee came down as granulated slush and it is now crunchy, like walking on squeaky Styrofoam. I shoveled the walk three times yesterday, and walking on it is still like running Celine Dionne’s fingernails down J. Robert Oppenheimer‘s blackboard.

So I’ve invested far too much time into a constellation of websites and digital time-sucks. I’ll list them slowly starting with the professional one: http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/litmag/default.htm. I got invited to join a cluster of graffiti photographers on Flickr this AM, and I’ll post that one later.

So as I eat lunch, (Black Beans with Smoked Turkey Wing, Collard Greens and Rice with Bulgarian Feta and Vietnamese Siracha Sauce), I’m going to limn out my digital gulag a bit. This has all gotten away from me, but I want to give a snapshot of all the directions that my energy is being squandered in.

Before Lunch I was working on the intro to my Diss. I want to just throw out a sentence or two to show the abject complexity that chases me to these various forms of procrastination “The narrator, who is akin to his presumably white readership, is imbued with a full, thoughtful subjectivity. “Freddy,” the object of the narrative’s tale has a natural inchoate subjectivity that is once removed from the author and audience by inexperience.” This of course tells you little or nothing about my work, but I do actually love my academic work, though I do drag my feet.

So this morning (working backwards) I woke to an invitation to be a buddy for my Flickr site (http://www.flickr.com/photos/73436762@N00/). Now, I just threw these photos together after I looked at the images from my “friend.” I saw some amazing graffiti photos, so I wanted to respond in kind. But, because I don’t make time to go through my images in any sort of a methodical manner, I just hit the ones I saw recently.

I also have picasaweb albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/sgregoire). The more I put out there the more dissatisfied I am by my web-gulag-archipelago (http://www.britannica.com/nobel/micro/733_51.html). I march all over the Menlo-Park-Siberia of the Internet, but I fail to look at the images taped to the wall of my cell. So what I am leaving out there is an unmediated trail of mental snapshots. Some are photoshopped, meaning that I thought about them a lot before I toyed with them. Others are fresh, barely named, just ideas that stuck to my camera which I regurgitatewith a minimum of contemplation. I mean, I did choose them out of the 10,000+ pix I’ve stolen, but I have hardly culled them in any orderly sort of manner.

The Picaseweb site is linked to my webpage string. These are the ideas, again the ones I feel equal to editing and commenting on, that float to the top when I have time to play (when I make time to play). Check them out because some of them are actually really quite good: sgregoire.googlepages.com/

I’m working on Freestylin’ Exegesis, I hope it is back soon. It is very interesting.

When I was a wee lad, the first time I was having trouble with school I got dragged to some Harvard Museum with a couple of the other troublemakers in the 6th grade to see a  show of a man who spent his life in a Mexican madhouse.  He spent all his time making up the paper he hid under his cot out of spit, wrappers and toilet paper.  His was a-textual, though rife with symbolism (valleys, tunnels and pert-upright Virgenes DE Guadalupe).

 I actually think I’ve seen his work anthologized in booksabout mad art, and I remember it impressing me with his commitment to art.

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