For the first time in, oh, a little less than five years, my flight into LaGuardia today flew straight up over Manhattan.  As in, I looked out my window, and there was the Empire State Building.  Like right there.

I’d forgotten that the routing of planes way the heck out over Jersey or Queens was a recent phenomenon.  I’d forgotten that there was a time when one could get a pretty much direct aerial view of Central Park from the window of a 737.  But today, at least, it’s back.

More from NYC soon.

What’s the relationship between the Kantian sublime and Freudian sublimation?  Is the apparent relationship merely a coincidence of translation?  Or is there some deeper connection that I’d never noticed before?  It sounds as though sublimation ought to be the process of making sublime, which makes me wonder whether Freud understood the sublime not as an amalgamation of beauty and terror but rather the containment of terror by beauty, the transformation of the chthonic into the aesthetic.  Is there anything in this?

This post brought to you by the skin brightening face scrub in my shower that describes itself in French as “soin lissant sublimateur,” which got me wondering whether I really wanted my face to be sublime, or whether I was just channeling my libido into better skin care.

There’s an article that I need to write, one that, in theory at least, I’ve been at work on for some weeks.  In reality, however, I never made it beyond the first day of drafting.

I’ve allowed dozens of things to intervene between me and the writing process—packing and moving, of course, as well as other unavoidables, but also a slew of perfectly-well-avoidables, like that book that I really needed to finish reading right away, even though it was unrelated and frankly not all that pressing, or those fall syllabi that I need to begin pondering, even though those ponderings are at best loose and unfocused.

I’ve hit the point of stalling at which I’ve begun to feel guilty, and guilt is itself a profound disincentive for me; rather than face up to and eliminate the cause of my guilt, I tend instead to avoid it, thereby deepening the guilt, thereby increasing the need to avoid its source.  A vicious circle, indeed.

So I’ve spent the last day or so trying to figure out why I’m avoiding the article, what it is about the argument I’m hoping to make that has me resisting the painful process of shaping it into sentences.  And I’ve come up with a couple of possibly related things.

The article is for a planned casebook on Curtis White’s Memories of My Father Watching TV, and I’ve been charged with focusing on the novel’s representations of television, which is, of course, something I’ve written a little bit about before.  So theoretically, at least, it should be easy—but there’s something I dread in returning to the scene of an old argument, having to find a way to rearticulate ideas that I’ve already harped on about at great length.  This is complicated by the fact that I’m not quite sure I’ve got that much new to say about the White itself; the more I think about the book, the more pedestrian my thoughts seem to become.

But of course, this is in no small part because I’m doing this thinking without writing; it’s only in writing that my thoughts ever become remotely interesting or complex, and the longer I resist writing the worse my sense of those thoughts becomes, as I’m not making any progress, and instead seem only mired in the shallows.

In no small part this post is meant to kickstart me into writing something at least, something that will suck at first but then might have a chance of developing into something I’m interested in.  But it’s also meant to prod you guys for ideas and advice.  How do you get started writing something you dread?  How do you overcome your dread long enough to get started?

Somebody else has noted this recently—I’m sorry I can’t remember who—but spambots are getting weirdly smarter.  Another blog that I have editorial privileges on gets a fair bit of trackback spam, and yesterday I got an email message telling me that there was a trackback awaiting my approval.  The source claimed to be the University of Virginia library, and the excerpted text seemed at first glance to be related to the material on the blog (including the term “EText”), so I followed the link to the MT edit trackbacks page, half-expecting to approve the ping.  Instead, I found that the linked domain was avoidcollections dot info, with “university of virginia library” its subdirectory.  And the text on that linked page is a computer generated hash of text from UVa library pages, interspersed with Yahoo ads.  Yesterday, most of the ads were for credit card companies.  Today, looking at the page again, the ads are for commercial resources related to attending college in Virginia.  There’s something extremely disheartening in this.

90 minutes is much, much longer than 60. It’s pretty rough at that moment, when my yogalates classes would have been wrapping up, to realize that there’s still a third of the class yet to go.

On the other hand, it all feels good, with the exception of my left elbow, which is a bit sore.

Which is not much to complain about, on the whole.

Holy moly. Having settled back in here in Claremont, and having spent the last five days mourning the loss of my beloved yogalates class, I managed to cart myself down to the Bikram place a few blocks from here. And I’m not sure I’m going to be terribly articulate about the class and how it felt yet—today’s state of yoga brain took a couple of hours to arrive after class ended, but arrive it did, apparently with enough supplies for a lengthy stay.

I’m positively dopey. In a good way.

Anyhow, class was amazing. The instructor was sitting at the front desk when I arrived, and was instantly welcoming, friendly, and informative, with lots of good advice for how to approach this first class. Even so, though, when I walked into the studio, I was immediately terrified—it was entirely like walking into a sauna, and I just couldn’t imagine being in the room for 90 minutes, much less doing strenuous yoga. But I adjusted to the temperature fairly quickly while waiting for class to start. And once class began, I was quite hot, and clearly working hard, but really fine.

It turns out that the yoga portions of the yogalates classes I was taking were quite Bikram-inspired; many of the poses were the same, as were several of the sequences. But because the class had a slightly slower pace, and of course because of that heat, I was able to get farther into several poses than I ever have before. And the way that the instructor talked us into and out of poses made me understand them quite differently than I have in the past.

The studio has a special week-long introductory rate, so I’ve got six more days pre-paid; I’m looking forward to seeing how these classes feel in the coming days. But I’m pretty sure I’m already hooked. The trick is going to be figuring out whether I can, say, think afterward.

Having picked up the 40 in Amarillo (despite hearing that Oklahoma City is oh-so-pretty), we sped on through Gallup, New Mexico, as well as Flagstaff, Arizona (don’t forget Winona), Kingman, Barstow –

– only to rediscover the fact that the stretch of the 15 between Barstow and San Bernadino is one of the most unattractive anywhere.  Excepted from this, of course, is the Cajon Pass, which I have a vague memory of being beautiful, but its beauty was tempered by the facts that (a) we were suddenly on a totally packed five-lane freeway, being tailgated by folks doing 90 on some quite tight turns, and (b) we were descending into air that can only be described as brown.  I’d forgotten that.

Anyhow, we made it to the area on Tuesday, and into the condo yesterday.  Today, into the office.  And very shortly, I hope, actual thinking again.

1. The rest area on Highway 287 a few miles north of Chillicothe, Texas has open wireless. I didn’t use it, but I was sorely tempted to blog from there, the middle of freaking nowhere, solely because I could.

2. I did a pre-interview with a public radio producer today, talking to him on my cell phone while riding north on Highway 64 toward the Grand Canyon. The call only dropped once.

3. The weather.com mobile site I pulled up on my cell phone earlier today told me that the low tonight at Grand Canyon, AZ, would be 26 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, weather.com accessed through my browser confirms this. But the local news says it will be 38. The difference? The north rim is 1000 feet higher, and averages 10 degrees cooler.

Some stuff, I guess, technology can’t yet deal with.

(Should be arriving in SoCal tomorrow, and home on Wednesday. More then.)

We’re headed out of town sometime this afternoon, starting down the road toward SoCal.

There’s not that much left to do between now and then, so I’m watching television.

Or not really television. Shows originally broadcast on television, now streaming over the net.

ABC is streaming episodes of four of its series—Lost, Alias, Desperate Housewives, and Commander in Chief, which is what I’m watching, as I never managed to catch it on-air. It’s a pretty decent interface, with limited commercial interruptions.

I’m hoping that this kind of streaming becomes more and more a standard practice, but I fear that there’s soon to be a paywall thrown up around the service—the proud announcement “Watch full episodes online for free!” is followed by the fine print: “May 1 – June 30, 2006.”

We’ll see. More from the road, if I can.

This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:

New York Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton have written an open letter to the United States Senate, asking their colleagues to sign on to a letter to John Sexton calling for negotations between NYU and our union. GSOC members can aid in this effort by calling or emailing their senators and urging them to sign. You can find contact info for your senators at: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Calls and letters from concerned non-GSOC members would no doubt be helpful as well.

The full texts of both Shumer and Clinton’s open letter to the Senate and their letter to Sexton are below the fold.
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