please be patient with me

Ok, I really like this new Wilco album. It's so 70s and nostalgic sounding. Not that I was alive in the 70s, but my parents were, and my earliest music memories reflect this.

Tonight I am staying up all night, just because it's easier that way. What's the point of sleeping for a couple hours, just to be incredibly late and not rested and worse at life in general? Besides, early morning hours are good for wallowing.

Today I went to a student reading of poetry and prose and there was some really amazing stuff going on there. My tutor for fiction class was one of the people reading and her stories were really great, which makes me feel good about the fact that she always compliments my writing (which is even better when I consider that I don't actually try very hard at all in that class because it annoys me). The other three people were great too; I won't go into it, but you can just take my word, I suppose. I wondered to myself how it is that these guys who are only a couple years older than I am manage to take themselves so seriously, not just as writers, but in general. I have a lot of trouble taking myself seriously. I feel the need to apologize for the things I do, or laugh them off as silly even when I don't think they are silly at all. At this point in my life, however, this may be for the best.

Tonight I had a strong urge to get in my car and go running (that is, driving--this is america, after all) for the hills. More specifically, the foothills directly below mount baldy. I'm not sure what caused this, besides the pure and pathetic need to escape. The season finale of Lost depressed me a lot, among other things, and I just wanted to get out. Maybe it's just spring fever. Maybe the sun just needs to come out (did you know in san diego they have something called "may gray"? "June gloom" doesnt quite seem to cover it down here by the ocean. they had to come up with "may gray" as well to articulate the extent of this dismal mediocre weather that is the bane of every student's springtime existence). Maybe I just need to do my german grammar exercises and not write so much poetry, or papers about it for that matter. Yeah, must be all the poetry.

is it ok
if your poem doesn't make
sense even to you
as long as it is arranged in
lines like this?


Man, I hope so.

back to school,
back to green bed,
back to black coffee,
back to clean air.


Finished Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West. It was really good. Also hugely depressing, but in a good way. Gotta read 3 short stories, one off them being The Metamorphasis, by Wednesday, and who knows what else. The quarter system is indeed merciless. In an hour I begin poetry--first reading it in german, then writing it. I am scared!

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

If you look at the kinds of posts I have been posting the last couple weeks, you will get a good idea of how busy I have been. I have thus far managed to not get very stressed and overwhelmed, which I am proud of, and I hope I can continue that. But man, I am so tired. It just doesn't end, not even for one day, you know? not even on weekends. not even on my birthday. gotta keep on trucking. The only thing that bothers me is that now that I'm really a lit major, I feel like I spend too much time reading about life and not enough time actually living it. It's a strange thing though, because it's not like while I am reading I cease to exist. Reading itself is an experience that is part of real life. But sometimes, for obvious reasons, it doesn't feel like it. I cannot be content to simply read and apreciate other people's work. Reading has always been for me a kind of research. If I like something, I make a mental note to do something like that someday (not just like it, but something like it). If I don't like something, I lose respect for the writer and promise myself never to write anything like it. What I'm trying to say is that I read a lot now under the assumption that someday it will be someone else who is reading me. This assumption is what makes it OK forme to spend so much of my life reading. It's what gives my education, at least for the time being, a purpose. I do not plan to always be reading, but for now, it is the best thing I can think of to do. And maybe that's why I don't get too stressed these days.

On an almost related note, A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf is amaaaaaaazing. I'm not even kidding you, I feel so enlightened. I feel so inspired. I feel so ashamed. Here is the feeling I was trying to describe a few days ago about that mountain goats song:

... the beauty of the world which is soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

uuuuuadfjghbrgiuruuuuughkjsdfngkafg I am such a failure.

Hand that pen over to ME, poetaster!

How can someone with such a passion for reading end up being such an excruciatingly slow reader? I will never be able to accept it. Of all the things I hate about myself, this ranks very high. I see now that it can only end in my ruin. Or at least it would, had I not at least one other hand to play.

The good news is that my workshop group really liked my essay about working at Logan's Roadhouse. The bad news is that my next assignment is to sit somewhere for 3 hours and write about what goes on there, but I can't think of anywhere to sit. Suggestions? And no, I can't use a coffee shop.

Oh where is my inflammatory writ?
I wrote it and I was not inflamed one bit!

The one person I am capable of loving despite my jealousy for his talent:

double standards

Within the past couple of years I think I have become somewhat of a feminist. Or maybe not so much, but at any rate I have lately been noticing a lot of things that suck about the way we think about women and men. Here are two things that have recently annoyed me.

1. The notion that in order for a woman to be a singer she must have a good voice. There are plenty of men who sing who have very average or very bad voices. Yet a woman feels that her voise must be "pretty" in order for her to use it. I discussed this with Sarah and she suggested that part of this might come from the fact that when girls are in band, they often sing and do nothing else. So in that case it would make slightly more sense that we expect her to have a good voice, but is still not totally fair in my opinion. If a person wants to play music and sing, they should do it, and if it's socially acceptable for a man to get up there and belt out complete crap, it should be for a woman as well.

2. The notion that any book with a woman as the main character is necessarily a girl book. Or even that any book written by a woman must be a girl book. So not fair! Women read books about men ALL THE TIME. Yet a man can't pick up Jane Eyre without being gay. Just because a character is a woman, just because the story may have something to do with love or marriage, doesn't make it sappy or stupid or girly. Obviously what brought this to mind was all the thinking I've been doing about Jane Austen lately. Her novels are notoriously known as chick books, love stories, etc. But anyone who's actually read one of them knows that this is entirely not the case. Her novels are actually about the economics of marriage, marriage without love, marriage because it's your only choice. They are about choosing the lesser of two evils. They are about the marginalized position that women of a certain time period and social class found themselves in, and the limited choices they had to make within those confines. There are no romantic love scenes, Darcy proposes to Elizabeth casually during a walk through the park, and Wentworth finally tells Anne of his true feelings throuhg a slightly anticlimactic letter. I could go on. But more importantly, they are well written, full of irony and double meanings and the subtle sarcasm that makes them so enjoyable. I think that Oscar Wilde said something like there is no such thing as a good book or a bad book, a book is either well written or badly written. And I think the same goes for this; there is no such thing as a girls book or a boys book. If it's a good book, everyone should be able to read it without some social stigma attached to it.

...

girl power!

P.S. I lovelovelooooooove my classes! Especially the writing one (I feel inspired already!) and the Jane Austen one (today we spent the whole time analyzing the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice!). I actually want to do my reading for once and that in itself is an incredible feeling.

Here are some things which I have recently enjoyed:

Tha Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (half of it anyway)

the Santa Anas

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

Flannery O'Conner

Wolf Parade

sleepsleepsleepsleep

leftover Christmas candy



I am totally incapable of being productive these last few days of break. Hopefully when I return to school I will have the proper motivation to finish my application for England. I mean I will do it anyway, but hopefully I am motivated to. I can't believe I am actually doing this. I literally cannot believe it. And I can't decide whether I am looking forward to the moment of realization or not.

If the ice caps are really melting,
I would like to climb to the top of the world
and take a slide
down the slippery side
maybe hitch a ride
on a shard of ice
and ride the wave to California.

If the sun is really exploding,
I would like to climb to the top of a building
and take some shades
off the top of my head
and watch and feel
and drink the red
of the best-ever sunset.

If God is really coming,
I would like to crawl into a moldy basement
and hide beneath the cardboard
and my dog's old bed
and shudder and sputter
and hold my head
and try to be sorry enough.

-Anonymous

sneaky sneaky

Yesterday I read the 1850s novella version of that riddle where the kid and his dad get in a car accident and the surgeon says I can't operate this is my son and you're like well gosh i dunno maybe it's his stepdad or something and then later you find out that the kid's mom is the surgeon and are accused in front of the whole dinner table of being a sexist because that possibility simply did not occur to you. It was called Benito Cereno and it's by the same guy who wrote Moby Dick. Basically there's this ship where there has been a slave revolt and the black people are now in charge, but they are pretending like the spanish guys are still in charge, because this american captain has boarded the ship. They go through a lot of elaborate stuff to keep him believing this until the moment is right, and it's all quite brilliant, really. The whole time he's on the ship he knows that something is off and the whole thing is pretty much freaking him out, but he can't for the life of him solve the mystery. Most of the time he is either suspecting the spanish captain of being a pirate or telling himself to not be so silly. Never once does it occur to him, never does it so much as cross his mind, that these silly black people could be running the show. And, as the reader, you are for the most part carried along in this tricky tide of racism and prejudice, and it doesn't occur to you till almost the very end, or at least it didn't for me, that oooooooooh the slaaaaaves are controling the white peoplllllleeeeee. And at the end when the american captain has his moment of epiphany and your shamefully recently concieved suspicions are confirmed and the epic battles ensues, you're left there like damn you, guy who also wrote moby dick, damn you, I am a racist.

Or maybe I just don't read enough mysteries?

flame-proof writ

I wasn't messing around about that whole not enough sleep thing.

Just took a four hour nap. From 5:30 PM till 9:30 PM. Worst time ever to take a nap. I feel like shit. Gotta read a lot of stuff now. Don't really care to.

Joanna Newsom makes me really sad about my talents and also myself as a person. Her lyrics are really really good. It's horrible. The worst part about them is that they are sometimes about her own insecurities and shortcomings as an artist, and yet the very lyrics where she expresses these doubts are some of the most beautiful words I have heard in my entire life. The perfect example is as follows:

...And all at once it came to me,
and i wrote and hunched till four thirty
But that vestal light, it burns out with the night
in spite of all the time that we spent on it
on one bedraggled ghost of a sonnet
While outside, the wild boars root
without bending a bough underfoot
O it breaks my heart; I don't know how they do it
And as for my inflammatory writ?
Well, I wrote it and I was not inflamed one bit.
Advice from the master derailed that disaster
he said "Hand that pen over to me, poetaster!"
While across the great plains, keening lovely & awful,
ululate the last Great American Novels
An unlawful lot, left to stutter and freeze, floodlit
But at least they didn't run, to their undying credit.


I tried to only put a small part but I felt the need put the whole second half of the song. Damn you Joanna, damn you! At least I have learned one thing from this: make up more words! It's so fun.

Some thoughts on the recent election, which are most definitely not mine, but belong rather to our good friend Henry David Thoreau.

(normally I would have reworded this and pretended like I had thought of it all on my own, but beside the obvious fact that it would have been immoral and also quite pathetic to do so, I really don't have the time and energy for it right now)

"...All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions, and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men..."
(from "Resistance to Civil Government," aka "Civil Disobedience")

True, true. But I am willing to bet that even Ghandi himself skimmed Civil Disobedience.