Book Clothing ???

So I stumbled upon this site called outofprintclothing.com and now I'm engaged in an intense internal debate over how badly I really need socks that look like the cards they stamp in the backs of library books (hint: so badly)

  

Their main thing, though, seems to be various items of clothing with famous book covers on them. I'm partial to the 'La Petit Prince' and 'Fahrenheit 451' tee shirts, myself. 

I know there's probably a good amount of baggage involved in wearing a book cover on your body, especially when it's a well-known "intellectual" or "literary" novel. I feel like if I bought one of these, I'd have to accept the fact that ultimately part of my reasoning would be because it would make me look more intelligent and well read (it would essentially have the same effect as very obviously carrying around one of these novels with me wherever I go). The other parts would be because I love the books regardless of what people think of them, and because they're pretty, god damn it, and I think I'd look cute in them. 

Some questions to consider:

Do you even have to have read the books to wear them (Is this the same thing as wearing band tee shirts) ? Do I have to have a certain amount of in-depth knowledge on these books in order for me to be allowed to wear them? Would wearing them make me pretentious? Would wearing certain books be seen as some kind of statement? Can I do/wear/read/say anything without it being somehow construed as having an ulterior motive? Does everything I do/wear/read/say actually have an ulterior motive that I may or may not be aware of because it's somehow subconscious? Are all of my actions somehow tied in with a desire to present myself a certain way to people (including myself) ?

Will I ever be able to do something like casually look at clothes online without needing to dissect it for hidden meanings and philosophical implications? We may never know.

New Words - April 2015

I firmly believe that you should always try to read books that are a little bit too hard for you. I'm not saying that you should never read books that are under or right at your level, but at least for me I think I get the most enjoyment out of reading challenging books because there's a payoff at the end of it. If you have to work at it, I think, you can get a hell of a lot more out of it -- and the more difficult books you read, the better you'll get at reading difficult books, and then you'll be able to move up to books that are even more difficult. This is learning. Plus I think it's important to be okay with not always understanding every little thing that happens to you, so for someone like me that can get really stressed about not knowing things it helps to sometimes have to accept that you may not get something right now, but it will all make sense later. This ends up making an even bigger payoff when you reread books that you used to believe were one thing, but now mean something completely different to you based on how you've grown or learned or changed as a person (see: Catcher in the Rye).

Now, one of the biggest things that come from reading difficult books are difficult words -- ones that you may have never come across before and don't understand. When I was younger I developed a lot of my vocabulary from reading and putting together the meanings of words I didn't know based on how they were used in context. When you're a little older, however, this doesn't work as well anymore. Thanks to David Foster Wallace's extensive use of difficult words in the essay collections of his I've been reading recently, I've been prompted to actually start searching up (the dictionary app on my iPhone is my new favourite thing) and keeping track of the new words I've learned from everything I've been reading. So seeing as this is my so-called writing blog, I think I'll start posting all the new words I learn, and their definitions, at the end of each month. Hopefully by writing them out it'll make them easier to commit to memory -- looking up definitions won't do me much good if I promptly forget them all.

otiose - serving no practical purpose or result 

syncretism - the combination of different forms of (religions, cultures, schools of thought, versions of a word) 

biosensor - a device that monitors and transmits information about a life process 

synecdoche - a figure of speech by which a part is put for a whole 

post hoc - formulated after the fact (eg. a post hoc rationalisation) 

[comes from Latin - post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this)]

episcopate - the position, rank, or term of office of a bishop 

anaclitic - the direction of love toward an object (as the mother) that satisfies nonsexual needs (as hunger)

détente - the relaxation of strained relations or tensions (as between nations) 

antinomy - a contradiction between two apparently equally valid principles or between inferences correctly drawn from such principles (a fundamental and apparently unresolvable conflict or contradiction) 

instantiate - to represent (an abstraction) by a concrete instance 

promulgate - to make (an idea, belief, etc.) known to many people 

Solomonic - marked by notable wisdom, reasonableness, or discretion especially under trying circumstances  

interdict - a prohibitory decree commensurate - equal or similar to something in size, amount, or degree

  

simulacrum - image, representation. An insubstantial form or semblance of something: trace 

intractable - not easily managed, controlled, or solved 

plangent - of a sound : loud, deep, and often sad 

vitiate - to make (something) less effective : to ruin or spoil (something) 

protean - able to change into many different forms or able to do many different things 

peristalsis - successive waves of involuntary contraction along walls of hollow muscular structure (as the esophagus or intestine) and forcing the contents forward 

peripatetic - a follower of Aristotle or adherent of Aristotelianism : pedestrian, itinerant : movement of journeys hither and thither 

staid - serious, boring, or old-fashioned 

laconic - using few words in speech or writing 

tacit - expressed or understood without being directly stated 

prophylactic - medical : designed to prevent disease 

licentious - sexually immoral or offensive 

semiotics - the study of signs and symbols and how they are used 

diaspora - a group of people who live outside the area in which they had lived for a long time or in which their ancestors lived 

ostensible - stated or appearing to be true, but not necessarily so (ostensibly = “for all practical purposes” …)

reticent - not willing to tell people about things, inclined to be silent or uncommunicative in speech

ersatz - copied from something else and usually not as good as the original (an artificial and inferior substitute or imitation)

taciturn - tending to be quiet, not speaking frequently

apocryphal - of doubtful authenticity, well-known but probably not true, fictitious 

OCAD GradEx100

My school day today was spent downtown on a field trip to the Ontario College of Art and Design's 100th graduate exhibition. I was there with my 'media arts' class (a course I am only a part of because I dropped out of physics at the beginning of the semester and it was the only class left that I could take) which meant that three of the four hours I spent there were taken up by visits to two different art technology labs within the vicinity of OCAD. Without going into too much detail, one of them involved a guy who showed us a 3D hologram he had made of his own brain (don't ask), and the other involved a lot of waiting around while my teacher talked excitedly about interactive projections, and I really, really, really had to go to the bathroom. Suffice to say, by the end of it I was bored out of my mind and questioning why I had decided that going on this field trip was a good idea.

The best part of the day, though -- and what really made the whole thing worthwhile -- was the half hour I spent trying to see as much of the OCAD art as I could. After shovelling down a mushroom vegetable pie at the food court across the street (which was actually excellent), I ran over to the gallery building and started looking around. I'd never been in any kind of art gallery type situation alone before, so I had a crazy sense of freedom to look at whatever I personally wanted to for as long as I wanted to (as long as I got back to the bus by 1:40). I took the elevator up to the sixth floor because I had no idea where I was going and that's where the one other person in the elevator with me got off. The actual gallery spaces were large rooms branching off a couple of central hallways, some of which were scattered with high school type lockers that were a kind of stark reminder that all of this was taking place inside of a school. Given my limited time frame  I wasn't even able to see everything on the one floor I went through, but I loved what I did see.

At one point I ran into a class of seventh-graders, so that was interesting. They were all giggling about the nude pictures and daring each other to touch the sculptures they weren't allowed to. A ton of them were taking pictures with their phones of pretty much every piece of art there, too, to which my immediate reaction was one of disdain that I quickly realized was hypocritical seeing as the only difference between them and me was that I had a DSLR camera and a superiority complex. Which brings up the issue of whether or not you should be taking pictures of art. I think you can, but the problem comes in when you have to figure out where to draw the line between taking the pictures for so-called "good" reasons, like wanting to remember the pieces you liked or to share them with people who otherwise wouldn't be able to see them; and just taking pictures so that you can get likes on instagram or whatever, and whether or not taking pictures of art because of that is a "bad" reason. It's hard to say, really, because then you can get into the whole "art for pure aesthetic value vs. art that's saying something" debacle, and what the merits of each are or how you can define what's good or bad in art. I really don't know, but I took pictures of some of my favourite pieces and now I'm posting them on here, and on instagram, and on tumblr so that maybe people will like them and follow my blog or whatever and although my main reason for doing this writing certainly isn't based in that (as of right now nobody's following me, and this post is really long too so it's probably all just a shout into the void so does it matter?) but I've done it anyway. So I think it's mostly for a good reason. Or at least that's how I'm justifying it to myself.