Jess near the end of 2004.

Even far into its mythical decline, still provocative posts in March 2003.

Here is a selection of punctuation marks for you to choose from to complete the previous entry:

!;^#.,?

Drew writes to note that the original source of 'die motherfuckers die motherfuckers die' (that I asked about last March) is Kool G Rap's 'Two to the Head', which Scarface guests on (along with Ice Cube). It originally appeared on G Rap and DJ Polo's 1992 record Live and Let Die

Fuck, how am I ever going to listen to this song on the bus again?

At first I didn't know what the first song on Ted Leo's new album was about at all, except that at one point he says 'bourgeois' (as snidely pointed out below), and that it more or less, to put it concisely, said yes when life says no. As I listened more and followed a few more of the words I got more comfortable in that way of hearing it, filling it out with some sort of sense of its being politically topical. Zeitgeist stuff. One line threw me and I explained its awkwardness to myself by supposing that it was referring to actual people, thus the near-repetition: 'and me and Mia, Ann and Ana'. But today I bought a real copy of the record, and upon reading the lyrics, I'm utterly shaken. I would have spelled it 'Anna' without looking at the liner notes; maybe if I had been thinking 'Ana' I might have had eating disorders in mind. Or maybe if I remembered that 'Mia' is to 'bulimia' as 'Ana' is to 'anorexia' I might have attached some significance to the 'Mia' of the song's title and started noticing all of the food-related lyrics instead of letting them float by as political figuratives. Now, though, I'm at a standstill, I hope only temporary. If it seemed just like an anti-pro-eating disorder song, that would be one thing, but I think it astutely weaves the political and the pathological together - check 'But don't forget what it really means to hunger strike / when you don't really need to / Some are dying for a cause, but that don't make it yours' - precisely because the pro-anorexia, pro-bulimia underground derives what makes it most horrifying (to me, at least - I've surely seen plenty of potentially disturbing things on the net in the past twelve years or so, but none of them have felt as disturbing as the ana/mia stuff that I tripped over belatedly just because I happened to sign up for a livejournal last year) from its conflation of the personal, in the personal-is-political identity politics sense, with the personal, in the individual sense. I'm not sure what that makes 'Me and Mia'. At the very least, as exemplary an anti-ana song as I could imagine. Given that it's addressed to 'you', and includes Leo (forget that not identifying the artist with the narrator shit here, I think) in the 'we' that is 'you' and your friends (those friends), I don't know if I feel right probing the song for more.

Note the error, too.

This sense of being lost is an intellectual one, but it does have its real consequences.

I'm getting to the point again where I start to feel trapped and lost. Both at the same time, which I'm not sure makes sense. To say I feel lost would be right but not enough. I keep thinking, as I inevitably do, that if I could only absorb this book or write that thing or thoroughly have this or that idea, I would then know my way, as if those things would end up having been the maps, once I find myself no longer lost. Note the subtletly: I recognize that these things themselves will not have been what does it, but I demand that they be the things that basically serve that purpose anyway. But none of them fits, none of them suits, and it's not even because I try them and they don't work but because no single one of them pulls me in long enough; which is to say: I cannot make myself give myself over to them enough for the real work to begin, and so I demand that they pull me in, that Hegel or Gadamer or Fiedler or Adorno or Melville or Pound or Zukofsky be so interesting and engaging, that they speak to me so much, that it doesn't feel like work but like breathing in my own air. The map is not a strong enough metaphor for this, because I can always imagine that I'll eventually get there somehow, map or no; so I am not just lost but trapped, because the thing I imagine will help me will not just get me there but get me out, and now.

A note from Jessie: 'the most provocative statements are the ones whose grammar leaves no clear point of entry'.