METALEPHANT

Fuck yes.

In which there is a discussion of the multitudinous frustrations of Modern Life, and the pronoun "I" is overused

I am now 24 years old. I've traveled all over the world, read thousands of books in multiple languages, both extinct and otherwise, excelled at a top-tier undergraduate school and graduated with not one, but two degrees (in two different languages) while playing four years of varsity soccer - and somehow finished my last semester, which included graduate-level written and oral exams, while dealing with a death in the family.

I had thought that perhaps nothing would be harder than what I've already vecu. I had not, up until 2010, experienced Microsoft Excel.

I would rather be faced with a thousand unanswerable metaphysical questions than an infuriatingly complex task that focuses on that draconian torture device we know as the "spreadsheet." I consider myself an intelligent person (you may have gathered this from the last two years of intermittent, masturbatory blog entries). I learn and adapt quickly, and usually find it both easy and enjoyable to solve problems.

Conceptual problems.

I know enough about Excel at this point in my short-lived career as an environmental consultant to know what needs to be done when I'm confronted with a diabolical worksheet containing thousands of rows of data. The problem is that I simply don't know enough about the inner workings of the infernal program to make it do what I want it to do. If I could write code in English - proper English, mind you - nothing would be simpler. However, writing code in Visual Basic for Applications requires some obscure knowledge of what is, in my eyes, the language of the damned. Not Baudelaire's damned; but the true, howling, angry damned that will burst forth from cracks in the earth at the end of days.

All I want is this: Select a date. From a separate worksheet, grab a series of values and insert them under said date, so that every value from the separate sheet shares the same date. Then, select the next date and perform the same task (you'll excuse me if I don't go into exasperating detail) until it ran out of dates.

Fuck me, I almost put my fist through the computer monitor.

First, the simplest of commands - copy and insert 70 blank rows - utterly failed me. Then, I decided I would record a macro of inserting said number of rows, selecting the next row down, and repeating. Brute force, if you will; my code was nothing more complicated than 70 repetitions of the "insert row" command. Except, I couldn't select the next row down - only the next cell, which created an absolute mess of my spreadsheet.

I didn't make it to pasting the outside values. Instead I limped, shamed and beaten, down the stairs to a co-worker's office where I described my desires in excruciating clarity. Together, it took us approximately an hour and a half to work out a solution. I'm not sure if I ought to feel good that he wasn't able to instantly solve all my problems with the flick of a mouse-wand, or frustrated that I could explain exactly what I wanted but was completely helpless to see it to fruition myself.

It has been a long time since I've felt so completely impotent - at least a year, probably longer; and, in fact, I can't remember the last time. Wait, that's a lie - last Halloween I couldn't seem to get a colored costume contact into my eye and put two holes in the bathroom wall. Yeah.

Regardless, I never imagined I'd be put in my place by a piece of software. That's probably because I never imagined I'd work with any software more complicated than Starsiege: Tribes (which, if you've ever played it, takes years to master - and a master I was, without a doubt). It's probably because I never thought I'd experience the word "spreadsheet" on a daily basis - and it's definitely because I hate numbers. They infuriate me.

On Wednesday I had an hour-long discussion with a colleague of my father's on the relationship between Nietzsche's will to power, existentialist authenticity and self-awareness. That's where I want to be; seated upon my throne of obsidian as pathetic minions grovel at the feet of their philosopher-king.

There are things I can't do. There are things I don't want to do. I'm not always sure how to approach stuff that I can't master in moments; and for better or worse, I often don't want to bother with an effort. I'm not sure what that says about me, but as of right now I definitely am sure that I wouldn't be a computer programmer for all of King Midas's Chocolate Coins. Fuck that shit.

MORE AWESOME THINGS TO FIGHT WITH A SPEAR

CHEETANK

UNIKRAKEN (AND ITS BROOD OF ROCKTOPI)

TRICERATOX

I was once going to give a paper, tentatively titled "Aesthetics, Ethics, and Revolt in Baudelaire's Prose Poetry." That never happened...

This is a post about aesthetics and ethics.

I read in passing a moment ago (thanks, internet) that "one cannot be a romantic and be self aware." I feel compelled to refute - or at least complicate - such an overwhelmingly simplistic remark (certainly made in passing, but nonetheless...)

First of all, I suppose the argument hinges on how one defines a romantic - and particularly whether or not one can be one. Is a romantic a thing of the past? What I mean, really, is: has the "romantic" receded to the realm of the symbolic? When the word is used, it connotes poetry - and by extension, the romantic poets. Well, the next question is whether or not poets are dead. In this case, I would suggest that "Poets" have receded to th symbolic. Simply writing poetry is no longer enough of a claim to Poet-hood, and "Poet" itself has become quite the dirty word - that is, until a "poet" actually becomes a "Poet" by gaining some sort of notoriety.

So, let's remove "poet" from the list of romantic adjectives for the time being, and go back to Baudelaire (not as a poet, but as a font of poetry). If we picture the albatross, ostensibly a metaphorical narrator both of Les Fleurs du Mal and of Le Spleen de Paris, it's hard to avoid a vivid sense, not only of self-awareness, but of self-consciousness. An albatross is quite comfortable gliding through the air, but can barely move on the ground and must wallow pitifully until it can catch the next breeze. While aloft, it is provided a most objective (we'll disprove this later) view of the goings-on beneath its wings. It is, however, quite a noticeable beast, and is hardly the composed, adjusted individual that Baudelaire set out to explore in his prose poems.

To be a romantic is, in my mind, to be endlessly searching for that ineffable heroism of modern life; to embrace the epic, to stand at the edge of something grand and watch all of the old gods die. The Romantic is liberating and terrifying, and that void (which is most overtly portrayed in the ever-present "wanderer above the sea of fog" leads - in my mind - directly into existentialism.

The cat, like the albatross, is an incredibly self-aware and self-conscious animal, particularly as Baudelaire constructs it. It is, however, much more put-together. If the albatross landed in the city and put on a suit, you'd have the car. He stays very much the painter of modern life; it's just that the perspective has shifted. I won't get into Baudelaire's definition of the dandy, as that's quite easy to find on its own, so I'll skip ahead to the self-awareness.

Self-awareness relies (see previous post) on some sort of socio-psychological echo-location. I don't want to argue about whether or not true self-awareness is really achievable or anything like that, but I do want to point out that romantic observations, whether they're of a grecian urn; the suicide of an artist's model; or even of April, that cruelest month; all of these things require some sort of relative location from which a gaze is directed.

A Baudelarian narrator is perhaps the most (and at the same time, least) self-aware persona in pre-modern literature. If we turn to "Le Mauvais Vitrier," we can see an example of this: the narrator almost does not know what he wants, or why he does what he does. He does know that he wants to inspect the glassman's wares, and he does know that he wants the glassman to climb several flights of stairs to reach his apartments. He does know that he wants a glass that will make the view from his rooms more beautiful - or, rather, he wants to see something new and different through his windows - and he does know that somehow, this poor man will provide him with the escape that he's seeking.

The violence of shoving the salesman back down the stairs is what brings this back to the current discussion on aesthetics. Instead of embracing a new, nicely-tinted piece of glass for hhis window, he instead creates his own "art." Pushing the glassman out of his door, listening to his livelihood crash and shatter beneath him; this is the beauty that the narrator seeks, to which he attests in the final lines of the poem - which are perhaps the most beautiful, most liberating, and most terrifying of any I've ever read:

"Et, ivre de ma folie, je lui criai furieusement: «La vie en beau! la vie en beau!»

Ces plaisanteries nerveuses ne sont pas sans péril, et on peut souvent les payer cher. Mais qu'importe l'éternité de la damnation à qui a trouvé dans une seconde l'infini de la jouissance?"

Really, aren't we talking about aesthetic pleasures here? Aren't we talking about knowing them? About knowing what we want? About exercising authenticity? About that final realization of damnation? Not of religious damnation, but of Faustian immolation - annihilating oneself in a fit of orgasmic self-awareness, an eruption of the desire for beauty that can come only at the expense of modern society?

Anyway, Baudelaire is dead. Perhaps that means that poets are dead; that romantics are dead, and all we have left are the new artist-automatons; formalists endlessly searching for inspiration in the dregs of their betters, thinking that the grotesque is nothing more than what the public finds disgusting. Perhaps we are doing nothing but romancing the superflat and making endless love to floating signifiers. I don't know - I do think, however, that romantic longings stem from nothing other than self-awareness, from a longing for a golden age that may or may not ever have existed or exist, and from that interminable search for modern-day heroism; undefined and unattainable, hobbled as we are by stunted our albatross-legs.

And thus he, too, immolated himself in a fit of post-modern circularity.