The Patient Etherized

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

Monday, January 23, 2006

"I could not accept the academic idea that the purpose of music was communication, because I noticed that when I conscientiously wrote something sad, people and critics were often apt to laugh. I determined to give up composition unless I could find a better reason for doing it than communication. I found this answer from Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player: The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences. I also found in the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswammy that the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation. I became less disturbed and went back to work."

-- John Cage

posted by Jon | 3:41:00 PM

Efficiency Rating

If my paper were a third down conversion rate, and I were an NFL team, I'd definitely be ranked dead last in efficiency for this damn Jane Austen/Walter Scott paper. Granted, I have 9 pages done (err...roughly done), but I haven't even finished a section well.

I've done a good job staying calm, though I think my method of staying calm is to just do things I enjoy. Hence I've played lots of Madden, watched bad movies, downloaded music. Unfortunately, I haven't been in the mood to write and read and I don't have the exam pressure to make me do the work.

I've been listening and relistening to the Neutral Milk Hotel album, which has to be the best music I've heard in a long time. I only wish that Easynews would post their other albums, as well as some of the other Elephant Six bands. I've also been listening to the Beach Boys too, after watching a documentary on Brian Wilson and the making of SMiLE which was pretty good, not to mention a good portrait of someone you would expect more to be your depressed suburban neighbour than an icon of pop music.

I'm purposefully procrastinating until I see the highlights from Kobe's 81 point game. It's too bad that it had to occur on the same day as the relatively mundane AFC and NFC championship games (not that they are usually close anyway); otherwise it would have received a lot more press coverage. I like how he's now averaging 45.5 pts per game for the New Year. But, no, Kobe cares about winning of course: "For me, uh, it's about the W."

The highlights didn't really confirm anything for me, except that the Raptors were playing no defense. There was some good passing, some bad defense, and a lot of shots by the Black Mamba.

To the Maddenmobile.

posted by Jon | 1:23:00 AM

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Goals,

without urgency, sometimes don't happen, especially when it involves me waking up at 8:15am. I was trying to get a headstart on my paper on the role of landscape in Northanger Abbey and Waverley, which I want to finish in a couple of days (let's just say that doesn't look like it's happening right now since I only have two pages out of twenty). The basic problem is trying to talk about how many different things are going on with the protagonists in the novels, and how their very inexperience in the world and misplaced expectations for it due to their education (limited to "improper" reading) are somehow conducive to their final successes in gaining a spouse and a fortune. Then, especially for Austen, there is the additional problem of talking about how these authors use earlier languages of the novel -- of sentimentalism and the gothic, for example -- to create their own novels.

So I guess I'm using the bloggy blog to lubricate my writing skills now, just like back in the day. Ah the benefits of getting up late. And getting showered and leaving

Now

Listening to: Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane over the Sea

posted by Jon | 10:58:00 AM

Monday, January 09, 2006

L'Avventura

I just finished watching L'Avventura and have to say that Monica Vitti is ridiculously hot. Yup, that was my first reaction. The movie was a good movie -- and I'm not being redundant here, I think, for it seemed to be about the way a person can become diminished in a replaceable society and in a landscape full of permanence being eroded by impermanence.

"Tell me you love me." "I love you." "Again." "I don't love you." (This picture is from a later movie, and that is not the costar. I'm feeling a bit like the guy who speaks the lines, Sandro, I guess.)

I'm annoyed that I haven't been getting much done lately. I have to go get my car inspected tomorrow and I have to get a copy of my license, which I lost. But I've been waking up incredibly late ever since I got home from New York and I haven'been reading much since the day before Christmas when I finished the F.O. Matthiessen-Russell Cheney letters. The irritation also comes from not being in my own apartment and not having a routine each day, i.e. going to and from the library. The irritation also comes from sources I don't want to talk about in my blog -- so much for me starting a blog where I could be completely honest.

So tomorrow I'm leaving for Providence to get ready for a new term, for three new classes (Literature and Photography, Theory of the Novel, and Space, Place, and Imagination). I've got 16 days until the next semester begins, and in the meantime I have to write a paper on landscape in Northhanger Abbey and Waverley. This will probably be accomplished between cups of coffee (I now drink coffee) and much bitching, perhaps even writing as Thoreau, when he says:

"Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine.""

Except I'll be whittling my dried up pieces of shit-thoughts on a topic I've written about one too many times, the relation between the individual and the environment, between the subject and the object, and the thing and the person. I don't think I can write about landscape without my language disappearing into metaphor, unlike Thoreau's sentence. But we'll see if I can make a shanty-shack nonetheless.

***

Well, I seem to have gone through an entire set of moods in the space of writing this entry -- I suppose writing is as therapeutic now for me as it was when I first set about writing a blog. My new hobbies should include blogging and downloading music. Oh wait, it already includes the second one. My hobbies should also include writing a coherent blog entry on a topic at some point in the future, a topic non-literary and personally invested. My coherence has suffered since I've started writing again, possibly due to the dwindling audience :-) Oh yeah, don't forget how academics sucks all humor and fun out of life! I think in earnest all the damn time now, and not in an Ernest Goes to Jail sort of way, let alone The Importance of Being Earnest. Ah Jim Varney, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Well, it is 2006 and I'm old. I've only got limited time to decide what I want to do with next year. But I shan't stress out too much. Instead I'll go and read a bit of AR.

Listening to: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah...

On my BRAND NEW SOUNDDOCK. Yippee! Yes, yes, thank you for playing The Price is Right. We'll see Jon later to spin the wheel for a chance to play for the grand showcase.

posted by Jon | 1:41:00 AM

Friday, January 06, 2006

Cabin Fever

I feel restless and annoyed all the time and I'm not sure why. Maybe it has something to do with this general malaise of a cold hanging over me. All I know is that I'm perpetually dissatisfied without feeling depressed. And though I'm not depressed I feel scared about the future for the first time perhaps ever -- the few times I've felt depressed in the past I didn't think at all about the future. This kind of trepidation isn't specific, of course, but just a general sense of dread.

Shit, I sound like McKenzie's Harley or Scott's Waverley, characters overly concerned with how they experience the world. Time to go into the real world and perform a deed. Ergon over logos...

posted by Jon | 3:23:00 PM

Thursday, January 05, 2006

To Think is To Act

While thinking about changing the purpose of this blog, I came across this motto, which was the header for Emerson's journals. I had just finished a collection of letters between F.O. Matthiessen and his partner, Russell Cheney, and one of the things that editor mentioned in the introduction was how the letters helped Matthiessen develop a writing style that would later be seen in American Renaissance.

More than anything else, I think this blog is where I work out my thoughts about life, which, in the case of English, tend to intersect with the more circumscribed world of academic thought. I want a philosophy that allows me to make interpretations, and I can't always use the space of an essay to work out fine points about the relations between form, language, and matter, which seem to me the three big categories that are important to understand for literature -- and for anything else. So when an academic essay casually poo-poos "metaphors of growth" and "biology" I want to use this triumvirate to understand what's going on.

Even in this post I'm getting bogged down in talking about what I read. It's pretty noticeable that what I've been doing has been thrown by the wayside. I need to talk about events in my life, to use the blog as a record as much as a soundboard. Sometimes, however, working out a philosophy gets in the way of telling narratives about what happened (i.e. New Year's or relationships or anything else).

But I'm feeling sick and need to blog more when my head is clear. A week in New York will do that to oneself, I guess.

posted by Jon | 2:02:00 PM