Q: Et tu, Jonathan? A: Read. Read some more. Buy Red Bull.
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| The Patient Etherized Q: Et tu, Jonathan? A: Read. Read some more. Buy Red Bull. |
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Friday, May 27, 2005 I try to talk myself out of caring twenty times a day, and I construct elaborate arguments about why I shouldn't like someone, but I always conclude the same way: despite all that, it was still worth it. posted by Jon | 1:47:00 PM ::cheerful beat:: I think all the time how I'm going to perpetrate love with you And when I get out, there's no doubt I'll be sex offensive to you Blondie, "X Offender" I'm starting to get the jitters I often get before committing myself to writing something serious. It's the kind of nerves that prilosec can cure, though I don't have any of that right now so I guess I'm stuck here with my Red Bull. Speaking of which, I think I've come up with the best drink ever: 3 parts lemon ginger echinacea juice 1 part red bull 1 part vodka I have only tried the drink with the first two ingredients, but I imagine the vodka would make it even better. I think I'll call it the New Age Alcoholic or maybe The Cure for the Common Cold. So this is my drink of choice, though I find that Red Bull mixes don't keep me awake as well as drinking it straight. I've got about 70 pages left of my third Rey Chow book, which is about stereotyping and cross-ethnic representation (the topic was more promising than what the reading's yielded so far). Then it's onto a hefty set of papers on minority discourse and some papers by Pease and Wiegman that came from an earlier Futures Institute conference. I'm excited to read Wiegman's paper on Leslie Fiedler because I have the sneaking suspicion that most people don't confuse what he says are limitations on sexuality in American literature with what he believes American literature should be like. I'll be back with more procrastinating goodness...maybe after I piss seventy-six times from the Red Bull (it has to have at least one negative effect, and I hope this is the only one -- yeah right). posted by Jon | 1:40:00 AM Thursday, May 26, 2005 From Ripples/Leaves The Lotus Speaks: I seem to feel fishes kissing all over my body, Then flowing away in small detailed patterns, Amid these movements, I want to hold on — yet cannot Grab any stable centre I can use for a pause, I cannot but let go of the safety of the soil, turn over the silt sediments inside of me, and feel the waves brought by the light breeze -- Leung Ping-Kwan posted by Jon | 1:15:00 AM Wednesday, May 25, 2005 I didn't lose myself in the crowd During one of my earlier incoherent rambles, I said something about how I have to sort out the past to understand how I want to behave in the future. I think that effort might be valuable, but I don't think it will change how I will behave in the future. I've realized the it's the knowingness that causes the pain, the generally unshakable belief that something you think is right. That belief is a burden on me and I've tried many tasks to escape it, but like Sisyphus I always seem to wind up back at the bottom of the hill. Now logically, I know many things and I probably believe a few of them to be right as well. Even if I've lost my humor recently, I think I've become better at interpreting human behavior (though maybe not better at interpreting myself). But it's that feeling that's burned deep into my chest that is nearly inescapable. It may go dormant, get scarred over, but I'm afraid that it will never disappear. Reading is a form of therapy that does make the feeling go dormant. Strangely enough my reading of Rey Chow's Ethics after Idealism coincides with a lot of my thinking in this blog about nostalgia, memory, identification, and love. I need to stop letting myself have these moods that oscillate between, on the one hand, feeling hopeless and unsuccessful, and on the other, steeling my-self against the world and preparing to work with the available materials I can acquire at Brown. I'm much happier when I'm acting more like the second person. That self-reliance is important, because it makes me feel I am not being a coward. Cowardice just came on my mind because I've been reading criticism about a Hong Kong movie called Rouge, in which the main character, a prostitute from the 1930s named Ruhua, plans to commit suicide with her lover, Shier Shao, who comes from a respectable family that won't let him marry her. The movie, and Rey Chow, point out that his cowardice leads him to not swallow the opium, allowing Ruhua to die. Chow's additional point is that it is also a breach of trust for Ruhua to come back as a ghost fifty-three years later to look to see if Shao has indeed committed suicide. What occurred to me is that the entire premise of killing oneself with your lover is an act of cowardice, or at the very least it's an uncertain act that may not even reunite you with your partner. Killing oneself in general is a cowardly act, but to do it with someone else seems cheating -- when Virgil in Better Luck Tomorrow attempts suicide while one of his friends waits outside his locked door, the narrator, Ben, says that maybe he didn't have the guts to do it alone. One of the symptoms of my current existence is that I feel better once I start reading, though sometimes it takes hours for me to muster up the motivation to start. For example, I've been reading intermittently for the last twelve hours and I feel very peaceful. But I also think that this is almost a cowardly act that takes my mind off the problems of life and existence and places me squarely into the world of ideas (I'll leave aside the fact that I do have to read these books for my paper). I always swore that I would never try to become a professor of literature because I found refuge in books; on the contrary, I think that the link between fiction, criticism, and the real world should be drawn as strongly as possible, bringing politics and economics into the forefront of discussions of texts. So it's strange that I find myself taking flights into books. And it's making me reevaluate what this change means. Did perhaps the people that I've observed who seem to lose themselves in books change once they started reading heavily? Is it not a weakness in the person, but an effect of reading to use it as a therapeutic device? I don't have answers to these questions but they do expand how I've been thinking about the issue of reading. So this change may be cowardly, but it also may just be a natural acclimation to reading as a way of living. I may have to be vigilant and make sure I don't get lost in a fantasy world of characters with lives that are more exciting or exotic or impoverished than mine. Would I read as much if I were in a serious relationship? I don't know; I'd like to think so, but the motivations would not be as great except intermittently and my energies would be diverted much of the time to the other person in my life. I know that it is necessary if I want a happy life to be able to balance these obligations and I'd be more than happy to do them. It's just not a skill I think I'm good at yet. And so I'll go back to reading and know that I can keep trying to plug that hole with a different kind of knowledge. posted by Jon | 6:04:00 PM A Windy Night "[L]ove is of such a nature that it changes man into the things he loves." -- Martin Heidegger (citing Meister Eckhart), "The Thing" It's been raining and cold like it always is at the end of May in Boston. I kind of like the huge gusts of wind blowing through the trees at night while I read. Not sure why -- it makes me think of how nice it is to be in bed or inside during miserable weather. Recently I've been wondering why I've been moping around the past few days. I have had several hour stretches where I feel grumpy or nostalgic. I know the quote above is not true as a way of explaining my mood, but it would be kind of funny if it were. My grumpy blog entries can't in the least bit be entertaining, and as a record of myself I don't know if they say anything either. So I'll try to write about more interesting things in the future. But for now, I want to sleepy sleep posted by Jon | 9:03:00 AM Monday, May 23, 2005 Bleh I don't feel like doing anything. I need to hole up in a ball for a few more weeks because socializing certainly isn't my thing these days. At least if I'm in a ball I might be able to read, and maybe even hop around like Sonic the Hedgehog. ...traumatic kernel that I am, I am the Real... ...i'm having second thoughts about graduate school (wait, second? maybe these are the sixth-six thousandth thoughts). call me a spoiled brat, but the only thing i can think of that i did wrong was to not visit schools and talk to professors... ...i want my life back the way it used to be, or at least to the point that i can take a small breath and be happy that all i have to worry about are the (small) things that frustrate me. someday maybe i'll have that fortunate situation again... ...(do depressing blog entries have to be in lower caps? should i even answer that question? No, of course not, so I'll stop being retarded and I'll also stop using ellipses)... ************************************************************************************ Well this little bit of emoting helped a little I guess, as I feel better. It's mainly just that I realize I have to be strong and that I'm having another relapse back into my altering states of unfeeling and unhappy. Unnoying it is, I tell ya. I've been reading about lack in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory lately, and how there must be a positive meaning to doing things because you lack something in your life. I certainly hope I can understand what that lack signifies, because I have almost invariably interpreted everything in my life recently as the product of lack, as me projecting something outside myself because of a lack I feel. Maybe it's just that that lack is not part of my nature but is the result of the one or two (I tend to think of just one even though that means I'm a heartless bastard) traumatic events in my life (again, I'm sure my trauma makes me a pansy compared to most people in the world, but I'm the alienated white boy dammit, and I will make my little roar, even though I don't want to drown out the more serious traumas). Judgment: I've been thinking, and it seems like the sooner that you pass judgment on something, the less you learn about what that thing is. Learning from impressions may be important, but I think that you can learn a lot from any bit of trash or art you pick up (and that judgment I just made should be ignored in learning also, or at least you should say "Why isn't this considered art? or what's so fucking important to have that difference all the time?). I saw Kingdom of Heaven yesterday night, and it is a movie more concerned with the present politics of Muslim-Christian interaction (the movie advocates, not surprisingly, the liberal plan for conciliation and common understanding. Orlando Bloom is the uber-knight who can only speak the truth and can see the humanity in both Muslim, Christian, and probably bovine life forms) than historical accuracy or an attempt to understand how people thought in the 1100s (let's just say that rational scientific thought didn't exist in the same way that it did after Christianity lost some of its monolithic impetus of defining time). But I digress and ramble, because I can, much like the old story about the dog licking his balls. It was not the wrong time in my life. I just lacked maturity I realize. I lacked faith, maybe because I had never known such a powerful feeling, or maybe because I really just had no concept of the world. Innocence protected me and invigorated me; it prevented me from understanding how the feeling of entropy enters so many people's bodies and they must do anything and everything to quell that absence, that worm inside. Time and decisions are punishment enough for me to deal with, and I am prepared to deal with them because I want to answer and atone. I want to understand how the way I've felt off and on for two years is not reason enough to become nostalgic, that I have to suspend the quick judgment in favor of a real examination, one equally tied into my ideas about reading and writing and my ideas about how I want to spend my life. I need to understand how the pain of loss can be dealt with and how it must become a life-giving affirmation of love for more than the ideal. It can't just be a melancholic way of understand my past. I must recover the essence and understand what really made me feel so wonderful, what made me want to be a better person. Obviously this isn't an easy task, because it means separating myself and my experiences with another person, and with the world in general; it means analyzing with a particular vigilance the objects, trips, all physical things, and the words in a way that can both recreate the events from memory as best as possible and look at them as things that can stand separately and together as a whole. I must understand that this symbolic identification with the past may be just a way to hide the present state, and I have to undercut that identification with some other way of seeing the matter clearly. Clearly: what I have not been in the preceding paragraph, but what I will try to be. When I breathe through my nose and hear some of these words in my head I feel like I can write a thousand books and wait a thousand more years for happiness. Or at least two-six more years :-) Listening to: a whole gang of trance music to calm myself down Maybe I should blog about concrete events (i.e. my weekend in New York) for once so I won't veer off on so many tangents. Not bloody likely, haha. posted by Jon | 10:10:00 PM Friday, May 20, 2005 Good Riddance I'm eternally glad that Reggie Miller is finished. I hate when media members write glowing stories about dirty, worthless, annoying, whining basketball players. I'll concede that he could shoot the three very well, but he was never a great player. posted by Jon | 1:20:00 PM Thursday, May 19, 2005 Back... home after running errands at Dartmouth for two days. I slept an ungodly number of hours each night and feel better rested, though I didn't get much reading done. I did, however, photocopy a lot the last two days and probably have enough critical material for writing (just have to cross fingers and hope I get accepted, etc. etc., though I suppose I'd write the bloody thing anyway if I didn't get in). Going to New York tomorrow to do a bit of bumming, drinking, and golfing, and maybe make some progress on James Baldwin's Just Above My Head, the last book of his I have to read (should read Giovanni's Room again right before writing though). This is one of my "practical entries," and is the product of a pleasantly groggy brain which was just woken up twenty minutes ago from dreaming about shooting born again, early 80s ford pickup drivin southerners with a sawed off shotgun (in self-defense) on a humid, hot night in the swampy flatlands of somewhere Mississippi or nowhere Alabama. Yes, I have weird dreams. And, no, I do not need valium or morphine, thank you very much. Ok off to dinner. [5 minutes later, Jon is still here, because his mom got a phone call...very rapidly his entry is becoming impractical, and, who knows?, even ridiculously retarded and/or gay] Beard status: received compliments from C so I guess that's better than my earlier attempts at growing one, which usually ended up with "Jon you look like a fucking hobbit that fell in the manure pile." This time I just look like a tennis player because I was unshaven and wearing a striped white and black Adidas polo shirt (bought with my hard-spent two dollars in Ho Chi Minh City in 2003). We'll see what happens when I have to get to the trimming stage. There could be some problems. My general hairyness got me to thinking though: since I'm naturally hairier than what seems to be some sort of cultural ideal of smooth and no haired dudes, should I start another trend and take advantage of my hairy genes and become a hot yeti? or just an ugly fucker of a chewbacca? (click for a funny really negative review of Revenge of the Shit -- I'm definitely on an anti-all things Star Wars kick recently. Maybe it's indigestion). It can be done, oh yes, it can. So on the stage of one to ten, with one being Macauley Culkin and ten being an Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, I'd say I'm currently at a 6.5. Other things that may interest no one else but me: Diprolene is some fucking great ointment. It kicks the crap out of hydrocortizone cream, hands down. It got rid of my dry skin in one or two applications, especially that severe itching problem I had down thurr...err we won't talk about that, even in Chingy-talk. je suis un autre je suis le tired je suis un monkey capuchin To do (medium-long term): Read The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, re-read Our America. posted by Jon | 8:10:00 PM Tuesday, May 17, 2005 Forgotten You can't hug a memory, and I can't keep hanging on that way any more. Yet it's funny how people move on, each at their own pace, sometimes because they're afraid of connecting, sometimes because the incredible ties, which last longer than the boundaries of a relationship, have finally started to dissolve. What kind of metaphor can there be -- "ties" doesn't work -- for the imbalance in attachment of one person to another, after one person has let go? Physical metaphors don't make sense, since if you're attached to someone, you are dragged along when that person moves. Invisible ties seem to bind more than real ones. How can you explain one person thinking about another person when you're almost certain the other person doesn't feel the same way? I don't know what makes me feel worse sometimes, the state of mind where I feel wounded by the incredible meanness of people, or the slow drifting away of the people who are important to me as they get more involved with their jobs. I hate the idea of making new friends for temporary periods of time, only to be forced to repeat the process six years from now, and maybe six years after that as well. I'm in an odd place I guess: I'm secure enough to get my work done as well as I could hope for, but I have these overwhelming surges of vulnerability sometimes, and I don't know if it's caused by hurt or a genuine caring that I need to answer. I know I've been hurt recently and I sometimes still feel the hatred brewing up inside me, but more than that, I am concerned about how to negotiate with my feelings. When I feel those pangs as I have a little bit recently, are they simply a panging for a healthy relationship, are they a panging for one person in particular, or am I just seeking out this particular person because in her I feel safe and happy, even though it may not cure my vulnerability or my anxieties, except by preventing me from being hurt or screwed over as I feel I have been. It was so much easier five or six years ago, when I didn't even have the presence to second-guess my feelings, and I just followed them blindly. This constant questioning makes me doubt myself, doubt that I have two legs, two arms, dry skin and a week old beard. I wonder if my intermittent philosophical mopings mean that I've become a less optimistic person than I used to be. I didn't get depressed at all from the last breakup, but I can't say I've been overly happy in a long time either. Where is all this headed? posted by Jon | 8:02:00 AM Finished! As much as I like The Library of America series for providing compact, comprehensive works of single authors, it also takes a tremendous effort to finish a single volume, which is usually about 900 pages. It's also pretty hard to read essay after essay for 842 pages -- definitely not the same as reading You Can't Go Home Again, or any Wolfe or Henry Miller for that matter. Now I have to decide what to read next (well it's going to be a long Baldwin novel, but the real question is what can I do for the next hour or two that I'm conscious). God some "punk" music on this No Thanks! anthology is so damn poppy. "And I don't want to get over you/ and I don't want to get over you/ it doesn't matter what you do." Blech. Feces. Penis. Squirrel monkeys.  And I feel like a beetle on it’s back And there’s no way for me to get up Love’ll get you like a case of anthrax And that’s something I don’t want to catch I'm halfway considering ponying up the $20 for a copy of Americans in Paris, but I'm a little wary of purchasing books when I'm either a) drunk or b) very tired and I'm definitely approaching b. I did just buy a tshirt in the intervening ten minutes... ...so scratch what I just said. cum grano salis is apparently my motto today. posted by Jon | 6:28:00 AM Monday, May 16, 2005 Too close to home Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convlusion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed. "Nothing Personal" posted by Jon | 4:25:00 PM Baldwin on why not to go into therapy: To my black and toughened, Puritan conscience, it seems an absolute scandal; and, again, this peculiar self-indulgence certainly has a dreadful effect on their children, whom they are quite unable to raise. And they cannot raise them because they have opted for the one commodity which is absolutely beyond human reach: satiety. posted by Jon | 4:16:00 PM On James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison I've now read about 1500 pages of both these writers' essays, and I'd say I'm getting a sense of their characters. Though I don't think they would agree on many issues, they share one pivotal feature in common, which is that they attempt to show how the African-American is part of the entire American culture, rather than simply a "problem" or a ghettoized minority. Part of me has been wondering how I'm going to make a Deleuzean interpretation -- that densest of theorists -- to writers who write so clearly and don't usually make tendentious ventures into the history of ideas. I think that this emphasis on universality is really why there is also a focus on the underground and the invisible in Ellison and Baldwin's writings. Baldwin is more directly quotable (and perceptive) on this point. For Baldwin, Paris was a place to run away from fears that he was homosexual, that he might marry to cover up this homosexuality, and that he had caused a friend to commit suicide by suggesting that love didn't exist. Out of all these tormentingly complex categories came Paris, a place for Baldwin to find himself and to find out who he was and why he could never be apart from the country that made him. For Ellison, there is no Paris, there is only the home that he left, Oklahoma City, a place he associated, like Twain did with Hannibal, with both the south and the west, and at the same time, neither of these places. Home contains the mythical freedom that he didn't find anywhere else. More so than Baldwin, Ellison hammers home what would disparagingly be called the integrationist viewpoint and shows how whiteness and blackness are concepts applied to a wide variety of realities. Reality, however, is what Baldwin makes his own. He never feels comfortable with liberal notions of reform, and tries to emphasize the alienation and injustice of black life in the cities and the south. Reality means for him describing and representing the humanity of a people who have never had their humanity on display before, only their debasement. (This kind of writing is the reason that I can no longer think funny thoughts dammit--because this stuff pours out of me like Red Bull piss.) posted by Jon | 3:14:00 PM "If this country does not find a way to use that energy [educating children], it will be destroyed by that energy. [nuclear weapons, ignorance]" -- James Baldwin, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. posted by Jon | 1:22:00 PM Sunday, May 15, 2005 How I feel sometimes: "[N]o one wants to wishes to remember it: the really agonizing privacy of the very young. They are only beginning to realize that they are, themselves, tormentingly complex and that the years that stretch before them promise to be more dangerous than the years that are behind." (James Baldwin, "They Can't Turn Back") I'm a little bit past this point, which is really how you feel when you're nineteen or twenty, but I still feel that immense span of time pressing in on me as I move ahead with life. posted by Jon | 5:37:00 PM
Scary I had a flashback just now to when I was a kid and would wiggle a loose tooth in my mouth. I remember one time I lost a baby tooth and then I hid it (from the tooth fairy of course) until I was about to lose another tooth. This time, however, I just reached into my mouth and nearly ripped the tooth out of my mouth (I remember dimly some blood, but I could be wrong). I thought for some reason that I would get more money combined for two teeth than if I had lost them individually, perhaps because losing two teeth seemed like such a rare occurrence. Let's just say I was disappointed when I didn't get any more money :-) I thought of this because I was just now fiddling around with my teeth while reading. And I got very scared when I found that you can in fact still wiggle your teeth around, even some of the bigger molars. It was fun to do when you were little because you know it's supposed to happen, that it's a sign of maturing when you get your adult teeth. But now it's scary, because you just think of the holes that would be left behind if you did something wrong. Though I'm not quite worried about being a one-toothed hobo quite yet. I feel recently like my life is getting suffocated by quotes and other people's thoughts. It's hard to keep my own brain above water and try to write interestingly or sarcastically, anything like I used to write. It seems like everything I write now is so fucking earnest, as if I can't put my own spin on ideas and just have to spell it out directly, flatly, like I'm writing an academic paper (it's not exactly a coincidence I am trying to do just that). I'm worried that I'm just sacrificing one side of my personality (letting it get rusty from disuse) in exchange for a slight improvement in writing and thinking about ideas. It's nice I can philosophize myself neckdeep in shit if I want to, but I need to get out of it every now and then. I'm not even sure if I was a good writer at all when I wrote columns for the paper. I think I was juvenile and insecure, and wrote for an audience by appealing to a common bank of pop culture knowledge. Granted, a childhood of watching The Simpsons will do that to you. Still, there is something to be said with trying to be funny -- you have to be more concerned about creating a piece of artwork...or you make a poop joke...whichever you want to do. I could also chalk up this no-fun Jon to being largely alone for the past two years and with having to discipline myself into being able to work on my own schedule, a skill I definitely lacked in college. It's almost a shock sometimes when I go down to New York and have to bullshit with my friends. I feel so rusty. Ok this was meant to be a short entry and digressed (no not from perfume from a dress, more likely from red bull and my hairy chest) into my usual moping about small issues no one cares about expanded into long meditations. If you had prepared twenty years ago You wouldn't be driftin' from door to door Why don't you do right, Like some other men do Get out of here and get me some money, too --Lil Green, "Why don't you do right?" Reading: James Baldwin, Collected Essays Listening to: Fattenin Frogs For Snakes: The Essential Recordings of the Blues Ladies posted by Jon | 8:25:00 AM Saturday, May 14, 2005 From "Runagate Runagate" Hoot-owl calling in the ghosted air, five times calling to the hants in the air. Shadow of a face in the scary leaves, shadow of a voice in the talking leaves: Come ride-a my train Oh that train, ghost-story train through swamp and savanna movering movering, over trestles of dew, through caves of the wish, Midnight Special on a sabre track movering movering, first stop Mercy and the last Hallelujah. Come ride-a my train Mean mean mean to be free. Robert Hayden (1913-82) posted by Jon | 11:06:00 PM Birds It always surprises me how early birds start chirping for the new day. It's not at first light but much earlier (this morning they started chirping at around 4:10am) that they begin. I'm awake because I slept early last night until about 9am, but then still felt exhausted from residual sleep deprivation I guess, and then fell asleep again from 2:30-7. I feel great and am making my way through some of the later Baldwin essays. I finished my proposal the other night, though I'm not sure how good it is. It's turned in and that's what counts I suppose. posted by Jon | 5:00:00 AM Thursday, May 12, 2005 We are criminals that n e v e r broke no l a ws I am about to enter my own world for the next month, not totally voluntarily either. I just want to be left alone by certain people for a while, while at the same time other people I know are leaving Boston, thus cutting off what limited social life I had in the past two months. I've also switched to a nighttime working schedule and have been sleeping around 8 in the morning so as not to be distracted by the emotional vicissitudes and struggles of life (ok ok I realize that vicissitude is an annoying word -- it just popped into my mind and I was happy that I had used it correctly). In some way I'm trying to channel the singleminded focus I had in Paris last August, where I would leave my apartment twice a week, once to buy groceries, and a second time to go play baseball at the Bois de Vincennes (bottom right of this great map of Paris). The rest of the time was devoted to reading and writing. I deleted every single distraction from my computer except Microsoft Paint, and Swingers and Eddie Murphy Raw. (Perhaps this is why the one night I went out a few days before my plane home I ended up with a Portuguese guy from the baseball team in Pigalle at 5am, after leaving the last Irish pub had closed, in a club filled with French businessmen, bad trance, and a gang of 6'3 transsexuals. Nothing beats trannies and waiting for the metro to open at 6 while you look down the Blvd Rochechouart to the public toilets along the sidewalks on the median, one of whose door was open revealing two heroin addicts splayed on the floor apparently passed out.) I can see my lifetime piling up As you can see, I'm back on one of my song-lyrics-for-life-topics blogging rants (this time I'm using lines from The Talking Heads instead of The Doors). My desire for stability was really strong a couple of weeks ago, but I feel it dissipating as I get more secure in my solitude and work habits. Yes, yes, retarded stupor is more like it since I've mainly dithered along while trying to write my project proposal tonight. I guess this return to the norm is a bit reactionary, as I got pissy at someone the other day and really shouldn't have. (Lord knows I've acted much worse myself to that person in the past.) Florentino Ariza, Florentino Ariza, I say. The name rings purer for me now than the words I said to myself to cheer myself up a few months ago, namely the absent lover in Love in the Time of Cholera, Fermina Daza. Now that I've switched to repeating this flowery Latin name in my head from time to time, I have regained a certain strength in myself I lost for a little while (I really do sound like a Victorian right now -- I might as well type "inner fortitude"). Repeating the male name, the narcissistic one that represents myself, is perhaps not completely healthy, as it threatens to wall myself off from the rest of the world -- in this case a refuge behind the LCD screen and keyboard of my computer. However, it's a safe haven now from the torments of being thrown off the ship of a relationship which you feel you have done your fair share of the right things. Freshly tossed overboard, I felt outside myself, and I had to look elsewhere than inside for moral support, because my insides felt bankrupt. Exercise and thinking about good memories were helpful steps toward eliminating this inner darkness and to stop thinking bitter thoughts. Love Comes in Spurts No, not a Talking Heads song, but a title so dirty I just had to use it. I've been listening to an amazing four disc compilation of punk songs from the late 70s called No Thanks! The '70s Punk Rebellion. I'm not so sure that love really comes in spurts for me. I think I'm condemned to learning how to love in the same way that I learn everything: I work half-assed at a topic for a while with little understanding, and then one day I wake up and I'm suddenly infinitely further ahead than I had been the day before. This happened to me with reading, with algebra, and perhaps most recently with writing the critical essay (though I wouldn't mind a few more quantum leaps in the future). Love doesn't come in spurts, but in dams and flows. Desire comes in spurts (what the title of course really refers to, and I worry that sometimes I give into those spurts which don't always dovetail with the stronger but often dormant flows of genuine feeling. I frittered away my chances for another relationship because I was worried about this lack of correspondence between lust and liking. Another worry I have is that this formulation is all bullshit -- that this paranoia is a form of defensiveness and it will render me incapable of opening myself up to another person through avenues such as sexual desire, which, with two caring people, can lead to love, though certainly not always. I saw Crash today, which was a provocative and interesting movie about racial intolerance and modern alienation in Los Angeles (every movie about L.A. seems to be depressing, and this movie combined some of the features of L.A. Confidential with the social (magic) realism of Grand Canyon). The movie opens with a car crash, in which Don Cheadle's character makes a brief remark about how people in LA almost seem to get into crashes as a way to make genuine contact with each other, to get past the barriers of glass and metal they always put up between each other ("Nobody brushes into you in L.A. on the streets," he says). Needless to say from reading the above-"impure psychologies," as Kerouac would say about himself, it's obvious to say I identify with Cheadle's statement. And, as Kerouac wrote to Cassady on Dec. 27th, 1950 (I think that's the right date), "Today this holy night, December 27th, 1950, I enter with you in the underground." Ah Denfert Rochereau and the catacombs, full of transplanted bones, exhumed and reburied because of urban expansion, I return to you. Invisible man, invisible black man: "The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off." posted by Jon | 6:36:00 AM Monday, May 09, 2005 Ironies of the Left and Right: There is No Independent Action This is my observation from the Garfinkel: that it's interesting that the left takes a stance on individual rights in the face of institutions (think unions), while the right tends to support institutional rights. At the same time, the right tends to support individualistic explanations of events and denies the effects of social forces that arise between individuals, something the left believes in much more. It would almost seem that in trying to champion the individual, both left and right deny him any independence as a political entity. He either must collectively bargain for his rights to deny exploitation (the leftist view) or he must let the market work out its optimal results (the conservative Adam Smith view). Either way he is denied the right to act for himself. posted by Jon | 4:21:00 PM "Anyone who has played Monopoly knows that as the game advances, it becomes more and more tempting to the players to form coalitions, in which A and B pool their resources to wipe out C and share the spoils. This is another important factor reducing the number of competitors and producing a concentration of holdings. (The rules of Monopoly prohibit such coalitions, but no serious player feels constrained by the petit bourgeois moralism of Parker Brothers.)" Oy From an otherwise excellent book, Forms of Explanation, by Alan Garfinkel posted by Jon | 4:36:00 AM Sunday, May 08, 2005 Four Quartets, Quartet No. 2: East Coker And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate - but there is no competition - There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. -- T.S. Eliot posted by Jon | 2:42:00 PM Saturday, May 07, 2005 The life... has been sucked out of me reading Henry James' The Art of the Novel. Sometimes when you read your mind sticks to the words and the pacing pushes you forward, almost of its own volition. James' remembrances of the origins of his fiction push my mind away to Snood and porn and assorted other distractions, all of which I should delete but won't (though Snood is getting less entertaining...wait a minute, so is the porn!). On a somewhat related note, I feel grumpy. I haven't had any motivation to either A) finish the last two prefaces of James; B) read this other fascinating book called Forms of Explanation; or C) finish my project proposal for the conference in June. There was a line of Stendhal's that James quoted that resonated with my life quite strongly: once you've experienced a beaute parfaite, a perfect beauty, you are predisposed to spend the remainder of your life languishing after that feeling, that (possibly) forever . It's one thing to not know what you want to do with your life; it's quite another to know exactly what you want and be incapable of affecting a means of getting to that point. So I'll stay in limbo for the foreseeable future. posted by Jon | 2:10:00 PM Wednesday, May 04, 2005 How to drink whiskey There was always a bottle present, so that it would seem to him that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan's base and baseless hope of acquiring thereby the virtues of cunning and strength and speed but in salute to them. William Faulkner, "The Bear" posted by Jon | 3:05:00 PM Oh my god, the new Gorillaz album is unbelievably good. Fantastically good -- every song, start to finish. Ok, fine, it won't be released until the end of the month, but I downloaded an advance copy because I'm cool like that, down like that. UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...that's pure musical pleasure right there. posted by Jon | 1:04:00 AM Monday, May 02, 2005 Returning to the work of a lonely reader... Blood in the streets of the town of New Haven... Blood on the rise is following me Thought I'd write here since I don't have much desire to read right now. After spending Wednesday night through Sunday morning in New York I've decided that it's interesting to have what amounts to a mobile profession. Upheaval and movement may make it more difficult to read constantly and achieve focus, and I certainly haven't written much of my 2-5 page project proposal, but I like the ability to read in different cities, on the bus, on a park bench, or on my own aquamarine couch in my house. After finishing the Fiedler book, I made short work of Rey Chow's Writing Diaspora, which is essentially a collection of her essays surrounding Chinese literature, intellectuals, and other assorted issues of minority discourse. The book felt like an easy read after the small font and long pages of Love and Death. I'm a spy in the house of love Went to eat at Tomoe Sushi on Saturday night (overrated and overpriced given the no frills attempt to say "we care about our fish, not our decor" and the bad appetizers -- though the sashimi was good). During dinner I was talking to a friend who was having problems with a long distance relationship. I realized how endlessly proliferating relationship talk is, as it spins out of the actual experiences of the relationship, and sometimes only out of flights of the imagination engendered by the small signs of a potential target. All my boring drivel about what I'm reading and writing is an attempt to transcend that incestuous world of worrying about finding or securing a mate. I want to figure out what goes on around the world, how people are connected with the objects in the world -- without wasting too much time fretting about emotions and metaphysics. Ironically enough, of course, this desire to find some philosophy that encompasses my thoughts about relationships may just be an effort to repress my subconscious desires toward sex and women. Some criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari's work claim that they are overzealous in their efforts to eliminate spiritual fathers, and that they actually reproduce the same oedipal effects in their efforts at escape from the Freudian weltanschaaung. So I equivocate over this topic, especially because I'm confident that who I choose to live with will be the most important decision in my life. I understand that I need to find out what works for me in a relationship, and I think I spend an inordinate, if undocumented, amount of time coming up with ideas about what traits are right for me. Difference et Repetition There is a discernible difference between these two modes of thinking, which I am trying to articulate here. Both overlap in important ways, in terms of how my private and public life will be shaped. I think one of the major differences are the actors at play in the different forms of communication. Relationship talk usually takes the form of discussions in person or over IM with a friend about an absent third party (e.g. girl/boyfriend but usually ex or prospective-g/bf). It can only occur between two people and the discussions tend to repeat themselves unless both people are equally interested. I have more serious relationship talks with girls than male friends, if possibly because male codes tend to proscribe too much emotional talks and guys would rather talk about sex instead. Another aspect of relationship talk, which is something that pertains to most friendships, is that each person is not in position to give too strong a recommendation. This is usually because the friend would rather put the friendship ahead of his or her opinion about what to do -- s/he'll side with the friend or just listen to what the friend has to say. The other mode of thinking, which attempts to develop a philosophy of life, is a solitary affair. Though there is no dialogue between people, you have the ability to bounce off and receive ideas from books. Though there is no active discussion, there is a wealth of recorded experience and of interpretations of experience with which to make your own judgments. I think this information allows for a more detailed analysis of an idea. For me, writing about Singapore taught me how to think about how the city works and how subjects are objectified (and vice versa) in modern society. The negative aspect to this deep thinking is that it's hard to put in the effort to get back to the same level of thought in order to question your conclusions. As a result, your ideas can crystallize and you won't be able to accept criticism. I suppose that these attempts to sketch out the differences point to some basic differences between speaking and writing. Speaking is determined by the interlocutors; writing is a solitary affair that affords revision. The negative sides of speaking and writing are just as important -- listening and reading. When I'm listening to someone speak, I am also thinking of how to respond, and sometimes I will elide the most immediate portions of someone's speech because I've already been holding onto a topic of conversation for a minute or two. I have that problem of impatience, and I always want to air out a new topic. This narcissistic impulse in me points back to what I've read and is a bit needy because I want to talk or relate whatever that reading was. Reading also requires significant attention in order to not get distracted by one's own thoughts. However, this speech is hardened onto the page and you are comforted in knowing that it won't disappear if you found you've started thinking about that girl who did you wrong or how you need to improve your putting skills. I really don't want to date someone who is only capable of talking about what we've both just read, at least not if the conversation is mutually unrewarding for the other. I've just never liked people too much that do the same things as I do -- I didn't like hikers because they were too unthinkingly liberal; I don't like English majors because they oftentimes lack discipline. As a result I've often been attracted to social science people, though I would definitely say I've met with staggeringly different results in the relationships (majoring in a social science says nothing about how active or passive you are, I've concluded, absolutely nothing). Well now that we know each other a little better, why don't you come over here... and baby feel allrriiiiight Link of the day: I am a Japanese schoolteacher posted by Jon | 4:18:00 AM 
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