The Patient Etherized

The Patient Etherized
Q: Et tu, Jonathan? A: Read. Read some more. Buy Red Bull.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Frantically

Going about my daily errands before the trip. I've got to look for apartments today, though I think I may just email people from Craig's List to set up viewings for tomorrow.

I had to get my air conditioning fixed on my car yesterday, which was pretty annoying considering I have no idea why it stopped working properly. Plus AC units cost approximately the per capita income of most people in poor countries. I guess I'm going to be cool at the expense of twelve people in Luang Prabang or something.

I'm not feeling the blogging impulse right now, but perhaps I'll have something more interesting to write about during my trip. I say "during" because it's always so hard to write about what happened after the fact: there's just too much information to lay down so that I get impatient and just say either "more on this later" and never update or don't even make an excuse for my shitty attempt at a recap.

posted by Jon | 10:23:00 AM

Monday, June 27, 2005

I return

having listened to too many people and been made to feel stupid 100 times more. I suppose this is a fine thing to spend one's life doing, and I definitely had periods of fun. Professors, as expected, think they're the shit when they actually are just...professors.

I'm pretty exhausted after all the listening, heat, drinking, and sitting at Murphy's (I'd think we went there more this past week than during all of undergrad).

Anyway, perhaps more later, though I have to prepare for my road trip (leaving on Thursday morning for New York).

posted by Jon | 2:45:00 AM

Monday, June 20, 2005

13,255 words later...

I'm officially done with my paper. Unfortunately I only got 4 and a half hours of sleep or so, but I feel much more tired than that.

I need to procure some ham sammiches. If I were God, I could make my own damn sammich.

Now I will commence to make lewd jokes with Rob involving the word Shinnecock.

posted by Jon | 11:49:00 AM

Sunday, June 19, 2005

Papier Mâchè: A Massage from the Swedish Prime Minister

I'm paranoid about my paper so I've created five different versions of it, which will soon fill up my Gmail account. Funny how I thought I only had 500 words left and some editing and I've written about 2000 tonight. Funny how I drove off at 5:15am this morning wearing an old tshirt (actually just a dirty one), my beard plus five days unshavenness, and flannel pajama pants. But I returned from the Cleveland Circle Store 24 bearing 8 Red Bulls and a package of veronas. The Pakistani guy that works there must think I'm crazy since I always show up between 3 and 5 in the morning and buy 8-16 cans of red bull and one thing of cookies (I mainly buy the cookies so I don't feel guilty just buying red bull -- kind of like the guy who buys ten things and then says "Uh could you give me some condoms and a playboy with that as well...thanks.")

The first red bull hit me like I'd sniffed crack or something. It really worked, but now I'm on my third one and I'm not so sure it's helping as much anymore. Only two days until I quit this nasty habit for the summer though, so I'm quite happy.

I find that when I'm seriously engaged in work I don't think up as many excuses (read: Halo 2) to get me out of my chair or onto the net. I'll only get up to take a pee break or look up a word on dictionary.com (I have managed to use cathexis and incompossibility in my paper so far -- oneiric might not be too far away).

Listened to a set of Tiesto called Magik 8 (I think it's actually 6 because there is no 8 as far as I can tell), which kind of sucked. New Tiesto is too poppy, from the Parade of Athletes album to Just Be to now. Plus it doesn't keep me awake like my favorite Tiesto albums, Magik 2 and 3.

Even worse than that was Sasha and Digweed's Northern Exposure South album from back in the day (1996 to be precise). I think the music was too mellow for me to get into it and didn't have enough melody. We'll see if it gets better on repeat listening.

posted by Jon | 7:54:00 AM

Saturday, June 18, 2005

I'm a cyclical butterfly.

posted by Jon | 10:31:00 PM

Friday, June 17, 2005

Listening to: Spoon, The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine

I've started listening to all this new alternative and rock music lately and it's given me faith that people still have musical talent. I thought mainstream rock had died in the late 90s with the emergence of crappy bands like Creed and the dross of bad grunge bands. But now it seems the New Wave music of the late 70s and early 80s is being recycled and, since I like all that New Wavey stuff like The Cars and Talking Heads, I'm pretty happy with music now.

But enough boring music talk. I can diddle myself over my own opinions somewhere else. (What, you mean my blog is not a place of masturbatory thoughts? Dear God someone should have told me earlier!) And with that...onto boring paper talk.

I can't seem to face up to the facts/ I'm tense and nervous and can't relax

I'm not stressed at all, which is good and bad. It's definitely bad because I don't feel a sense of urgency, even though I'm not sure how much I have left to write (no more than 2000 words I've decided, though). I'll probably finish sometime late on Sunday, which is not a good thing as I imagine I'll have to be there that day and I still have no idea how I'm going to cram a 40-50 page paper into a 30 minute presentation. Maybe instead of analyzing why Baldwin makes himself white in order to talk about being gay I should just say what Eldridge Cleaver said about him in Soul on Ice:

"It seems that many Negro homosexuals...are outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man...The cross they have to bear is that, already bending over and touching their toes for the white man, the fruit of their miscegenation is not the little half-white offspring of their dreams but an increase in the unwinding of their nerves - though they redouble their efforts and intake of the white man's sperm."

Uh, yeah. All good points. There is clearly some insecurity on Cleaver's part if he thinks that a) the only fantasy enacted in interracial gay sex is with a dominant white partner, b) there is no reciprocal fantasy of the traditionally dominant white figure being in turn dominated -- something that would be connected with the fantasy of the black man's sexual prowess, and c) that homosexuals must view their homosexuality in terms of a reproductive capabality as if they were straight. -- you could basically say a million things about this paragraph, so I'll stop here. Poop indeed.

It seems like a lot of people I know are tired, unhappy, or depressed. I wonder why that is -- if it's just the people I know, or if it's how old we all are (and are becoming), or something else. With some people it's because of the complexity of life, the difficulty of resolving weird moral situations; with others it's a feeling that they're not as successful as they might be; and with others it seems like a malaise and depression that reemerges periodically.

My malaise, of course, is connected with the fact that my Halo 2 level on Team Slayer is down to an 8.

posted by Jon | 7:28:00 AM

Thursday, June 16, 2005

Curious Things

I have two Curious George stickers on my laptop, to the right of the touchpad and under where my palm usually rests when I type. I received them as presents senior year in college and they've been on the computer since then. Curious George, in each of his copies, is holding a big heart and his head is peeking out from one side.

About a month ago I added two hearts from Threadless.com which are unworn and shiny red and black (they came free with a t-shirt order). My Curious George stickers are so ingrained into my computer and so worn by the movement of my palm and the oil of my skin that they're almost see-through and almost nothing but the adhesive on the bottom of the stickers. And yet, amazingly, they've retained their shape, even if the colors leave something to be desired (natural white and some black, though I think the black might just be my laptop showing through).

The stickers have that worn feeling that things get when you've owned them for eternity. My comforter is like that -- it's so smooth and soft that, even though it's just an ordinary synthetic-fill comforter, it always feels nice and cool and soft when I pull it over me.

I've always been reluctant to get rid of things once they're old and I've grown attached to them. Maybe it started when I was 9 or 10 and I would wear my Adidas Sambas sneakers until they had holes in the toes and soles -- and then I would get the same pair again for $30. My wallet was like that too. I was given a present of a Dockers wallet my sophomore winter and the leather proceeded to lose all its grain and wrinkles and become one smooth, thin surface until it felt great under my fingers. Now I have a new wallet and while it's more fashionable (present from my mom indeed), I'm not sure if it will ever feel the same way.

I wonder how some people can throw things out so easily and not feel attached to the myriad of junk that they collect in their wallets, in their rooms, and in their lives. That junk gives me a sense of security and sometimes a sense of nostalgia, because the junk you acquire with people attests to the thousands of little moments of intimacy and experience that make up a relationship or a friendship.

I suppose the lesson is, as always, that I'm a big sap.

posted by Jon | 4:42:00 AM

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

I'm sitting in the kitchen, with my back riveted against the wrought iron curves of the chair. I can smell the stink from my armpits rise and feel the dull pain coming from my back, despite the thin cushion of my fleece jacket. I've got a book in front of me and this is what it says:

"What has happened, however, time and time again, is that the fantasy structure the writer builds in order to escape his central responsiblity operates not as a fortress, but his prison, and he perishes within it. Or: the structure he has built becomes so stifling, so lonely, so false, and acquires such a violent and dangerous life of its own, that he can break out of it only by bringing the entire structure down. With a crash, inevitably, and on his own head, and on the heads of those closest to him. It is like smashing the windows one second before one asphyxiates; it is like burning down the house in order, at last, to be free of it."

What fantasy structures of my own have I been building? Is criticism itself a fantasy space where people who are incompetent at life go to congregate? Would writing be a better place, one where original thoughts spring up with creativity, not the laborious work of modifying traditions? Is the social impact and responsibility of a critic any more far-reaching than a writer?

I suppose I'll have the summer to decide. I suppose I have some talent. I suppose I have one testicle after drinking too much red bull.

Spose I'll catch you later, maybe for a heart-baring confession, or maybe just to scratch myself in a new and original place -- where only writers scratch!

posted by Jon | 12:18:00 AM

Monday, June 13, 2005

I'm back from New York, and suddenly summer's in full-force, humidity and all. I sweated my way through Central Park playing catch with Chris and through the 60-or-so blocks of walking (mainly moving around small, large, and extra-large Puerto Ricans, as yesterday was the Puerto Rican Day Parade).

The drive back wasn't as nearly bad as going there, and I only hit one spell of traffic around Stamford. I'm getting more excited about the road trip, but will have to finish preparing for it.

I should update more later.

posted by Jon | 7:52:00 PM

Friday, June 10, 2005

"Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare."

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

posted by Jon | 4:16:00 AM

Thursday, June 09, 2005

For some reason I'm getting a ringing sensation in my left ear. It feels kind of blocked and all I have to fiddle around is some medical instrument that's a poor substitute for an ear picker. On a sidenote, someone actually bought me some ear pickers when I was in Singapore because I was so curious about them. Seems like old aunties and people in Chinatown are the most likely customers from what she told me.

Song that is clearly going to sound dated but right now seems to be an 'it' song -- Mr. Brightside by The Killers. It's also overplayed but I'm slow to these fads so I don't mind it yet. Picking bands for future success based on their debuts or first hits is kind of like choosing a horse to win a race, except that you don't get anything if your band does succeed. With that being said, I think Franz Ferdinand is the best band I've heard in a while. Coldplay's new album is melodramatic, pretentious, and boring. The White Stripes' new album is good, but then again, I like them because they reference old-timey blues and rock.

But enough procrastinating -- I was just supposed to complain about my ear. I have to finish rereading Giovanni's Room.

posted by Jon | 10:16:00 PM

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

"The capuchin is a New World monkey, brown and cute, the size of a scrawny year-old human baby plus a long tail. ''The capuchin has a small brain, and it's pretty much focused on food and sex,'' says Keith Chen, a Yale economist who, along with Laurie Santos, a psychologist, is exploiting these natural desires -- well, the desire for food at least -- to teach the capuchins to buy grapes, apples and Jell-O. ''You should really think of a capuchin as a bottomless stomach of want,'' Chen says. ''You can feed them marshmallows all day, they'll throw up and then come back for more.''"

[link here]

posted by Jon | 3:08:00 PM

Monday, June 06, 2005

Pros of working in the kitchen:

--I am near the refrigerator
--I get more work done because I'm sitting upright.
--Hammy's around (though now my mom took her upstairs because she was worried that the summer heat was going to kill her since Hammy's hair is so long now).

Cons of working in the kitchen:

--The chair! It really brings new meaning to the phrase "pain in my ass." It also gives me back pain because the back is hard and metal. I'm essentially sitting in a wrought iron lawn chair with a tiny cushion that has some stuffing coming out of it.
--animal noises, the damn faucet in the sink leaks

Pros of working in the sun room:

--Couch is comfy.
--More privacy and more light during the daytime.

Cons of working in the sun room:

--Uh I don't work. I just fall asleep because the couch is comfy.
--Lightbulbs aren't working in some of the sconces and I'm too lazy to go out and buy new ones.
--Hard to sit up

Progress: I've sort of written an introduction of about 1000 words. I'm in the stage of the night where I'm tired so I start editing and re-editing the beginning of the paper over and over, or, failing that, I just reformat things to make it look pretty.

Listening to: Ben Harper, Fight Your Mind

posted by Jon | 7:02:00 AM

Snap, Crackle, Pop

Why do certain drinks need to be carbonated? You'd think that when sodas were carbonated at first it provided a sense of novelty to have very carbonated drinks that bubbled over when they were opened, but why are drinks like (ahem) Red Bull carbonated. Red Bull is a bit strange too becaues it's barely carbonated -- it hardly fizzes at all. I wonder if there's some logical explanation -- like it preserves the drink better -- and not something dumb like we've all become so used to carbonation that it would taste funny for it not to be carbonated.

In other news, life sucks, I am procrastinating from writing by blogging, and when I procrasted earlier by playing Halo 2 my ranking went down two levels.

posted by Jon | 5:13:00 AM

Sunday, June 05, 2005

I've started writing!

Yay now maybe I'll actually finish this paper before it's due. I've found that my bullshitting capabilities are now off the charts...in a far left, post-Marxist-liberal sort of way of course :-)

I'm at that stage of night though where my writing becomes harder and harder to get coherent thoughts churned out. I'm sticking to my bread and butter topics though -- the imaginary and minority discourse -- as ways of making a good argument.

It's trance time: interestingly enough, I think Justin has the taste of a small (or large) Singaporean girl, since he was quite happy to find out I had Thrillseekers' Synaesthesia on my iPod. I think I still prefer Xpander as a pick me up trance song, with Heaven Scent rising up the charts. (Jon charts songs by how much or little he scratches his nuts.)

posted by Jon | 4:48:00 AM

When Animals Invade

While I was sweating in the kitchen today I felt something crawl over my foot...only to discover that a giant winged ant (a carpenter ant, as I later found out) thought I was a good place to climb up.

It turns out that I would end up killing several hundred half-inch winged ants with a 1994 copy of British Home & Gardens (which is still on the radiator behind me in preparation for tomorrow). I've killed so many I'm no longer grossed out by it.

And just now I heard the lid of the trash can fall off, so I went to the window to see if I could see a raccoon or two. I figured I would just go out and scare it off and then I would move the trash. So I peered through the window, shielding my eyes so I could see the dark, and lo and behold I did see a raccoon foraging through the trash. I went to the closet to get a broom, which turned out to be a midget's broom, but I thought it would do the job.

So I turn off the burglar alarm and open the door...to see what looked like the world's largest raccoon -- the thing probably weighed close to 40 pounds. I yelled out "Shoo" at the coon and swung the broom. Mr. Coon did move away -- about three feet -- and then crawled back. Resigned, I went back to the computer and decided I'd have to clean up the trash tomorrow.

Damn suburban coons.

posted by Jon | 2:12:00 AM

Saturday, June 04, 2005

Ok I have T-minus 16 days now. I have to start writing today. No more procrastinating. No more Halo 2!

posted by Jon | 10:40:00 AM

Thursday, June 02, 2005

"For example, I hesitate between staying home and working or going out to a nightclub: these are not two separable 'objects,' but two orientations, each of which carries a sum of possible or even hallucinatory perceptions (not only of drinking, but the noise and smoke of the bar; not only of working, but the hum of the word processor and the surrounding silence...). And if we return to motives in order to study them for a second time, they have not stayed the same. Like the weight on a scale, they have gone up or down. The scale has changed according to the amplitude of the pendulum. The voluntary act is free because the free act is what expresses the entire soul at a given moment of its duration. That act is what expresses the self."

-- Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

posted by Jon | 10:13:00 AM

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Procrastination will begin in earnest today:

The plan is to buy Xbox, Halo 2, and the XBox live hookup. So God help me. I'm already addicted to the game like no other and I'm determined to become really good at it, even if becoming "good" at the game means I'll be taunting small boys who haven't cracked puberty yet and have screen names like SirsNutsalot and ChoadFuzz69.

I'm planning the schedule for my trip in July and I'm really excited, but what I really should do today is finish reading Deleuze's The Fold and begin writing about Baldwin. So far my idea is to use ideas of race used by Walter Benn Michaels (on why race is not a social construction) and try to explain why Baldwin can face this idea but cannot face his homosexuality (at least not in public) except through creating white characters in his novels who face the same problem. Michaels' writing makes me cream myself because it's so thorough (it also made me buy Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity to understand WBM's view on essentialism). However, I would like to explicate the turns of the text more than just create a philosophical investigation about how an idea like race works.

So here is how the jumble of thoughts seems to be sifting itself out: I want to show the overlap between homosexuality and racial discourse in Giovanni's Room and a few select essays from Notes of a Native Son (essay on Baldwin in Switzerland) and Nobody Knows My Name (essay on Gide). This topic itself overlaps with Fiedler's idea of the homosocial/sexual interracial relationship being paradigmatic of American literature (Huck Finn and Jim, Ishmael and Queequeg etc). But in Kerouac and Baldwin's work the interracial relationship does not provide salvation for the white man -- the question is why this is the case? Is it a product of modernization? of a society that does not admit homosexuals or interracial images?

Then the question becomes, what do the utopian spaces ("impossible communities") mean to these people and what is their political and cultural logic? How do they work?...even if they eventually fail or are only temporary. Bring in the idea of minor literature here.

So a rough structure and outline of argument:

1) Racial ideas of Baldwin, with look at what he thinks of Kerouac
2) Then explain Michaels' idea of race
3) Problematize this idea by showing what happens when someone has to negotiate between multiple things (aka also homosexuality). How do they interfere with, support, or stay separate from each other?
4) Contrast this relationship with the general American Studies interpretation put forth by Fiedler. Revise the standard interpretations of Fiedler by showing how he is only showing that structural constraints exist that prevent heterosexual sexuality from being an explicit topic among writers. Reference Wiegman and Pease articles.
5) Show the material result of the intersection of the negative interpellation of homosexuals and racial others: Baldwin leaves for Paris for six years.
6) Analyze what he finds in Paris, what it means to live outside the country, outside regulations.
7) How is this place represented/imagined in the novel?
8) Now show how it's represented in the form of minor literature. Show how ml is a way to construct a platform out of the problems of race and sexuality in the works.
A) Bring in ideas about essentialism and race and how they apply to minority
discourse. Reference Kripke, Michaels, Rey Chow, and Gayatri Spivak here.
9) Talk about the importance of displacement of race and switching in Baldwin's essays and novel.
(I'm tempted to follow this argument with Kerouac as a point of contrast as well, but I may just talk about Kerouac in the beginning and end of the essay.)

And congratulations to C for getting a literary agent.

posted by Jon | 1:39:00 PM