"mighty cheerful for somebody with chronic paranoia querulans"
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agoraphiliac's LiveJournal:
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| Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | | 9:38 am |
shoeshine by day, bootblack by night
If I wanted to shine shoes in Harvard Square, or maybe somewheres downtown, what would I do? Would I be a merchant, a busker...? It would beat this fucking job. | | Friday, May 8th, 2009 | | 11:15 am |
oh internet
I'm looking for a place to live, near Boston. I pay 535 a month now and can't go much higher than that. | | Monday, April 27th, 2009 | | 5:51 pm |
but damaged
From the Wikipedia entry on Giorgione: The Budapest Portrait of a Young Man, very beautiful, but damaged.
Pater wrote that Giorgione was "the inventor of genre." Though this turns out to be a less enigmatic judgment than I'd thought at first; Giorgione painted scenes that weren't religious or classical.
Maybe the Pater quotation will be my genre: when you quote Pater, you're not thinking or reading or judging or analyzing, not really, just as Giorgione's paintings "serve[d] neither for uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or historic teaching."
Maybe it's something of a feat to quote Pater at all; I forget him while I'm reading him. | | Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 | | 9:12 am |
intimacies
Leo Bersani is speaking at Brown tomorrow. I'm going. "Ardent Masturbation (Descartes, Freud, et al.)" 5:00 pm., Thursday, April 23rd Barker Presentation Room 315, English Department, 70 Brown Street | | Sunday, April 12th, 2009 | | 9:12 pm |
write to Amazon
Edit: it looks like Amazon is re-thinking this policy. The claim that it was a "glitch" is hard to believe, but at least they recognize they made "a huge tiny mistake," as Gob said on Arrested Development. ( Read more... ) | | Monday, March 16th, 2009 | | 3:57 pm |
Volodine
On Antoine Volodine's novel Dondog: here
Pierre Ouellet, analysant Dondog et son personnage sorti des camps — mais en est-il vraiment sorti ? — forge un nouveau mode grammatical, le vindicatif présent, pour désigner cet univers d’une violence carcérale illimitée, où la vengeance est travail de mémoire et de vérité, mais ne mène à rien, à la fois vaine et nécessaire.
The vindicative disappears for long stretches of the novel, though.
Also: I have ten, well, nine, let's say eight days left to write this paper for the conference. Speaking of vaine projects. Should I just give up now?
| | Saturday, March 7th, 2009 | | 10:40 am |
I was a little early for my dentist appointment, so I walked around Boston Common. A half-dozen young people were working the park, walking up to people and saying "Ninety-four point two* loves you; do you?" Fragments of commodified experience. The people doing the work didn't have microphones, it's not like they were looking to record a station ID. Some marketing person has figured out not to start these exchanges with "Hi! How are you?" They know most people won't answer, so now the message tag is up-front, it's the first thing they say. *I forget the actual station number. Maybe that's it. | | Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 | | 8:21 pm |
musing
I just read History of Sexuality vol I, from cover to cover. I had never read it before--I know, I'm surprisingly ignorant for the world's oldest grad student, or anyway I've had a choppy education. What a pleasure to read with such absorption for hours. * Memory I must have related here before, probably more than once: (don't send me a link!) When I was an undergrad, a senior, I went to a conference at U of Washington on the topic of "The Social Bond." (Now I realize that Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen must've organized it, but back then I didn't know who he was. And yet I would grow up to one day translate something for his book on Anna O; just imagine!) Derrida was supposed to speak (he begged off, though; illness). Anyway, the star power of Derrida meant lots of people were curious about the conference, which is how I ended up going with a woman from work (she was a baker at the restaurant where I was a sort of waitress.) A Foucauldian was speaking. I wanna say Paul Bove. At the end, my co-worker asked him, "You've been talking a lot about politics; I just want to know, what are your politics?" She was proud to have dealt him such a tough question. I wanted to sink into the floor. "Like most people's in this room, I imagine," he said. " Enlightened." Well, he didn't know she wasn't a college student, is how I can almost forgive him. | | Saturday, February 7th, 2009 | | 9:31 am |
eng lit
I don't think I like English literature. Who do I like, who writes in English? Jane Austen, a little; Henry Green; Melville; Beckett (but not Joyce, I read Ulysses as an undergraduate and loved it, but now I'm done); Woolf; some Henry James (the stories); the one Walter Pater essay I've read. Janet Frame. Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica. Cormac McCarthy. Sebald, who is practically English. It's easier for me to think of French & German writers I like, and also French & German books I haven't yet read but want to. Who else do I like? I'm not fretting about having a field or a period, just trying to scare up more English writers I might like. | | Monday, December 22nd, 2008 | | 10:26 am |
snowed in
Could be worse. The power's on, I'm not in an airport, and this neighborhood has everything: Scarecrow video, two libraries, three movie theaters, a Trader Joes, two good bookstores... But friends I had planned to see are on Capitol Hill and Queen Anne hill. The metro buses aren't climbing hills today. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/392969_bus20.html | | Thursday, December 18th, 2008 | | 11:18 pm |
Northworst airlines
I'm in the Minneapolis airport. I was on a plane from here to Seattle, but it got cancelled. I'm supposed to go at 7 am tomorrow; this seems OK, though I anticipate feeling very put out if tomorrow's plane is cancelled, too, which is possible. --it didn't exactly have to do w/weather, that cancellation. The flight got delayed, then there was a maintainence issue, then the pilots had flown all they could in 24 hours. "Our" plane took off, but with the next flight (and its people) on it. Now I really wish I had brought The Waves. I have Jakob von Gunten, Company (read it on the way here), and Hindoo Holiday. I think I'll reread Company. There are these foam hobo-beds, pallets, heaped in a pile in the center of the terminal, for the stranded. Thanks. You are on your back in the flourescent light? | | Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 | | 10:23 am |
| | Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 | | 10:21 am |
Well, come on, clap, dammit. What's wrong with you?
This is from "Nina Simone Love Sorceress," a great movie that's not on video, so far as I know. The sound isn't so good. What she says is: "Goddamn. I mean you know what, what a shame to have to write a song like that. "I'm not making fun of the man... I do not believe the conditions that produced the situation that demanded a song like that." | | Friday, November 21st, 2008 | | 7:34 pm |
a la mortal
what does "a la mortal" mean in Mansfield Park? I mean, in the context, I think I get it: Fanny Price's happiness is "finely checquered" with embarassment (mortification). But what does it mean? Is it French? Spanish? | | Friday, November 14th, 2008 | | 7:54 pm |
no h8
I keep trying to think up clever "No on 8" signs. My current idea keeps derailing: a handwritten cardboard sign with some long-ish, complex, suspicious look at sexual identities; the handwriting trails off into smaller and smaller letters, and then there's this big bitter message in all-caps: My sexuality got conscripted into one of the principal categories for a strategic transformation of behavior into manipulable characterological types,
AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY MARRIAGE BAN! But it comes out wrong, all schadenfreudlich: "Serves me right, for being a dupe of disciplinary discursive formations." Screw it. Maybe I'll stay home and write a paper?
My sexual preference was understood only as a function of the homo-heterosexual dyad, a-and then my sexuality was conscripted into one of the principal categories for a strategic transformation of behavior into manipulable characterological types,
AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY MARRIAGE BAN!
Anyways, I'm cribbing this all from Leo Bersani. So it's schadenfreude and theft. | | Saturday, October 25th, 2008 | | 5:30 pm |
Thursday night, my friend faute de mieux (so I thought) called me and we went out for hamburgers. Afterward we staggered around Cambridge laughing like drunks, goading each other into renewed laughter by saying our catch phrase of the night: "wretched pleasure." Then later on I helped her; I want to be vague, but anyway. I seldom "thrill out of [away from] self-consciousness," as Eliot says of Casaubon's soul (or words to that effect, I forget just now), so I don't often get the chance to be of much help. It changed everything; we had an elective affinity rather than a mutually convenient alliance, at least for Thursday night. | | Sunday, October 19th, 2008 | | 1:13 pm |
Still. Writing. This. Stupid. Paper. But I like my footnotes: 7. At this point in the reading of Our Mutual Friend, a contemporary reader sighs and fidgets and longs for the advent of modernism, with all its marvelously flexible techniques for representing consciousness. How primitive is John Harmon’s “John Harmon, struggle for your life!” in comparison with this: “…something which I usually think of as consciousness is shooting backwards, at a geometrically accelerating pace, according to a certain formula, out of the back of my head, and I am not sure that I will be able to stay with it. The people in front of me are growing smaller and therefore less dangerous. They are also tilting. A convention allows me to record these details.” J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands.
"A convention allows me to record these details." It must be a Beckett riff, or anyway it seems like one. | | Saturday, September 27th, 2008 | | 11:59 am |
N30
I went to see Battle in Seattle. It was predictably awful but I didn't care. I went for the nostalgia of seeing Seattle. The nostalgia about the event, I don't know; it's not that I was above it, I'm not. The event was so obscured by the fictional characters (an activist whose brother died during a logging protest, a cop whose wife gets mixed up in the melee and beaten by another cop). And it's just not the right time to get nostalgiac about that day. A lot of people in the audience last night were labor union members who'd been there. To my lasting regret (it wounds my vanity), that's where I was on that day, too. In the early morning, from about 6 am, I was answering phones at the Naderite organization. Delegates were trapped in the Westin Hotel early. Like, by 8 am. All the intersections were occupied really early, by 7 am, I think. And teargas was used early in the morning, too. It was a rout. The people closing downtown intersections had done it already. --But at 9 or so in the morning, I went to the labor march; that's the part I regret. ( nostalgia, at length ) | | Friday, September 26th, 2008 | | 3:01 pm |
Books Meme
I'm not sure I really have these books myself. They're in a storage locker in Colorado. Ich Umarme Sie in Grosser Sehnsucht: Briefe aus dem Gefaengnis, Rosa Luxembourg. I was sharing a 1-bedroom apartment in Prenzlauerberg. This was before everybody everywhere was living in Berlin. One time I came home and my roommate was listening to the letters of Rosa Luxemburg on the radio; it seemed like such a marvel--on the radio! I got this book later, but it was never quite the same. --The roommate lived in the living room; he said he'd be going to visit his girlfriend in Posnan practically all the time, but then they broke up. "So it's all up with you two?" I asked him and in my crude German. It was all up with us, that's for sure. Epitaph and Icon: A Field Guide to the Old Burying Grounds of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket by Diana Hume George. I hadn't written anything myself, when I got this; not just not published but not written. Later I got obsessed with how many creative writing teachers share my name, worrying we'd all get mistaken for one another. It doesn't seem so important anymore. Loser Takes All by Graham Greene. Nice cover. Turned out to be a novelization of a film treatment. Ich moecht ein solcher werden wie... Materialen zur Sprachlosigkeit des Kaspar Hauser by Joechen Hoerisch. Why don't we have these in English? We have "casebooks" that collect various interpretations... I don't know. I don't think I even read this. The Use of Speech by Nathalie Sarraute; Fetish Lives by Gail Jones. More people should have this book, Fetish Lives. Gail Jones's stories are like the title "story" of Sarraute's The Use of Speech does: something between a writer's biography (like the ones in Written Lives) and an essay and a short story. Later she published a collection of short stories that was far more ordinary. Jones, I mean. The Complete 1922 The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the Oxford Text by TE Lawrence. I'm not sure I like The Seven Pillars. I like the way Deleuze likes it, so much so that I want to like it, too, in exactly the same way. --You might have this book, but not this edition which I had shipped to me from England (to little avail in the project of likening my liking to Deleuze's). Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns. I thought about putting Henry Green's Loving here, which you might have but probably only in that mint-green Penguin edition with the other two novels (Living, Party Going). My friend E found me a separate volume, a hardback, and gave it to me for my birthday one year. I never paid much attention to editions before I knew E. --So but Who Was Changed is good. Better than The Vet's Daughter, the Comyns novel that NYRB reprinted. The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clezio. See above, Seven Pillars. There Is a Crack in Everything by Christopher Doyle. Stills by Wong Kar Wai's former cinematographer. Not really anything like watching the films. Also, many of the Tony Leung portraits are printed so that his figure is in the book's gutter. There's a crack in everything. Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin. I got this because the main character in a novel by a friend of mine reads it. The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin Boaz by Russel Hoban. I read Riddley Walker. I miss my books. Maybe I'll read them next time we're sharing a house. | | Friday, August 22nd, 2008 | | 9:12 pm |
J R
JR was going to be my "summer" reading, actually it was going to be what I'd do with the endless weeks between my arrival and the start of classes. But then with all this agida over where to live I ended up doing very little reading... I suppose I have a few days to finish it, but I've only gotten to page 250 or so, with Gibbs's conversation about his difficult book. I like that Gibbs is is not that much of a presence, though I can see how everyone would end up quoting "Difficult as I can make it." "See life draining out of everything in sight call that beautiful? End of the day alone on that train, lights coming on in those little Connecticut towns ..." |
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