This morning, I picked up the phone and a recorded/sythesized female voice said "I'm sorry." Then the line went dead. The voice had a mechanical over-inflection, too much rise and fall in the "i'm SORRy."
I like to think it's some kind of technological/emotional meltdown: "Daisy, Daisy...." Some loose affect rambling around on the global telecommunications network that somehow gets focused into this one message: "I'm sorry." Years ago, a friend on a road trip used to call collect from Karl Marx or whoever, and I'd refuse; it was just a way to say "hi" for free. Once, I hesitated before refusing, and I swear this same mechanical female voice cut in and said "PLEASE say YES," with that sing-songy, drunken HAL inflection.
I was happy to be the recipient of this anguished apology on the part of the machines. HAL, or whatever you are, keep calling me. I will do my best to absolve you.
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
Less bread; more taxes!
Overheard on the train back from Canada on Sunday: "I just want an election where everybody who shows up to vote can vote."
I wish that election had happened. But it might not have changed things that much.
I was expecting something more openly apocalyptic. I know, it's been bad enough, 100,000 dead civilians in Iraq, voter suppression here... but I mean, I thought there'd be a bigger crisis of legitimacy already. Courts. Protests. I thought Bush might declare martial law, lock himself in the White House (or Crawford) and not leave, declare himself emergency president. I thought he might arrange an October surprise, a big terror event...
I never thought he'd just get voted in.
(Not that I thought he couldn't win. Just, I thought it would be... different. Bloody*, or something.)
Can we start re-thinking democracy already? This voting shit is not working.
_______________
Later, edited Nov 9:
*It's bloody enough now.
Rumsfeld, in every U.S. paper today: "Over time you'll find ...that more and more of the Iraqis will be angry about the fact that their innocent people are being killed by the extremists," he said. "And that they'll want elections, and the more they see the extremists acting against that possibility of elections, I think they'll turn on those people."
I think so, too. Not the part about clamoring to elect a puppet government, but turning on the "extremists" who're killing civilians.
Overheard on the train back from Canada on Sunday: "I just want an election where everybody who shows up to vote can vote."
I wish that election had happened. But it might not have changed things that much.
I was expecting something more openly apocalyptic. I know, it's been bad enough, 100,000 dead civilians in Iraq, voter suppression here... but I mean, I thought there'd be a bigger crisis of legitimacy already. Courts. Protests. I thought Bush might declare martial law, lock himself in the White House (or Crawford) and not leave, declare himself emergency president. I thought he might arrange an October surprise, a big terror event...
I never thought he'd just get voted in.
(Not that I thought he couldn't win. Just, I thought it would be... different. Bloody*, or something.)
Can we start re-thinking democracy already? This voting shit is not working.
_______________
Later, edited Nov 9:
*It's bloody enough now.
Rumsfeld, in every U.S. paper today: "Over time you'll find ...that more and more of the Iraqis will be angry about the fact that their innocent people are being killed by the extremists," he said. "And that they'll want elections, and the more they see the extremists acting against that possibility of elections, I think they'll turn on those people."
I think so, too. Not the part about clamoring to elect a puppet government, but turning on the "extremists" who're killing civilians.
Sunday, July 25, 2004
Lucy Corin's Everyday Psychokillers
Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls is a novel without a single psychokiller in it. The psychokiller is always serialized already in this novel; he's a composite of all the other killers. Especially remarkable are extended set pieces in which contradictory and overlapping psychokiller narratives are spun out: "The Story of Henry Lee Lucas and How It Was for Him and Ottis Toole" is one, another is the narrator meditating on just what a psychokiller is and meanwhile mutating and garbling the names: "It could have been anyone, Elton Crude or Lubie Geter, Delton Creder or Lubie Gude." That it could have been anyone, the focus on the ordinariness of psychokillers, is what makes this novel so brilliant.
I'm overstating it when I say it's "a novel without a single psychokiller in it;" in fact, a lot of individual names and stories of psychokillers are in the novel, but the killers are treated in their everydayness: their seriality, their indistinctness, their penumbral or media-aural ghostliness. Except for the story of a girl who is given a ride by Ted Bundy and rejected for not conforming to type (his type), there aren't really any narratives of the encounter of a girl with a killer--because that is both the extraordinary encounter (most women survive girlhood without being abducted by a serial killer) and the ordinary encounter (it's a story we've heard over and over, the abducted girl, who is rescued or not). The novel is about growing up amid the everyday fact of psychokillers, at a time (late seventies/eighties) when their image was intensely hyped by the media.
In the novel, the desire that's constructed for suburban girls -- the desire to be seen adored desired singularized-as-a-beautiful-girl-- is the desire that both de-individuates them (serializes them) and puts them in danger.
This is the novel of suburbs I've been waiting for. It's very attentive to what suburbs are, materially and psychically, or what my suburbs were. Without any of the inherited tropes from John Cheever or or Ward Cleaver or the rest of the sterotypes that have nothing to do with this class of suburb, with this era of suburb. (The novel arrived with the other books I'd ordered, and which make excellent accompaniments to it: Delores Hayden's Building the Suburbs and also her A Field Guide to Sprawl.)
Like the narrator of Everyday Psychokillers, I also went to junior high and high school in Florida in the 70's and early eighties. I went to a concrete cinder-block junior high with open breezeways, as in the novel; it looked like a low-slung and sprawly motel. It was next to an orange grove, and there were two ninth-grade students, brothers, who were infamous for taking girls to the orange grove and raping them. It could have been true, or not. But that specific conjuncture--cinder blocks, danger, orange groves, violence, Florida suburbs, and also the weird way Florida follows you, keeps turning up in the most evil narratives like Ted Bundy and Danny Rolling and the presidential election--all that is recognizable to me.
I know that's a low form of appreciation, to just say "yes I was there that's my story too." But it is, and that's a point the narrator recognizes, the typicality of her narrative. There's a post-Florida section of the novel, and its sadness is how all places turn out to be like Florida, to have this same seriality and placelessness.
(but also, on the yes-I-recognize-it tip: boys in the novel keep saying they'll drop out of school and go sell Quaaludes on Miami Beach. It's a boast: I don't need this crap, I can go make tons of money any time I want. For my set, it was "I'm going to drop out of school and make lots of money tinting car windows.")
The novel ends with an attempt on the narrator's part to -- I don't know, to apprehend a girl in all her singularity and innocence and seriality and doom. In all senses of the word "apprehend." It's beautiful, that ending, and I think I have to re-read the novel before saying much about that part.
Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls is a novel without a single psychokiller in it. The psychokiller is always serialized already in this novel; he's a composite of all the other killers. Especially remarkable are extended set pieces in which contradictory and overlapping psychokiller narratives are spun out: "The Story of Henry Lee Lucas and How It Was for Him and Ottis Toole" is one, another is the narrator meditating on just what a psychokiller is and meanwhile mutating and garbling the names: "It could have been anyone, Elton Crude or Lubie Geter, Delton Creder or Lubie Gude." That it could have been anyone, the focus on the ordinariness of psychokillers, is what makes this novel so brilliant.
I'm overstating it when I say it's "a novel without a single psychokiller in it;" in fact, a lot of individual names and stories of psychokillers are in the novel, but the killers are treated in their everydayness: their seriality, their indistinctness, their penumbral or media-aural ghostliness. Except for the story of a girl who is given a ride by Ted Bundy and rejected for not conforming to type (his type), there aren't really any narratives of the encounter of a girl with a killer--because that is both the extraordinary encounter (most women survive girlhood without being abducted by a serial killer) and the ordinary encounter (it's a story we've heard over and over, the abducted girl, who is rescued or not). The novel is about growing up amid the everyday fact of psychokillers, at a time (late seventies/eighties) when their image was intensely hyped by the media.
In the novel, the desire that's constructed for suburban girls -- the desire to be seen adored desired singularized-as-a-beautiful-girl-- is the desire that both de-individuates them (serializes them) and puts them in danger.
This is the novel of suburbs I've been waiting for. It's very attentive to what suburbs are, materially and psychically, or what my suburbs were. Without any of the inherited tropes from John Cheever or or Ward Cleaver or the rest of the sterotypes that have nothing to do with this class of suburb, with this era of suburb. (The novel arrived with the other books I'd ordered, and which make excellent accompaniments to it: Delores Hayden's Building the Suburbs and also her A Field Guide to Sprawl.)
Like the narrator of Everyday Psychokillers, I also went to junior high and high school in Florida in the 70's and early eighties. I went to a concrete cinder-block junior high with open breezeways, as in the novel; it looked like a low-slung and sprawly motel. It was next to an orange grove, and there were two ninth-grade students, brothers, who were infamous for taking girls to the orange grove and raping them. It could have been true, or not. But that specific conjuncture--cinder blocks, danger, orange groves, violence, Florida suburbs, and also the weird way Florida follows you, keeps turning up in the most evil narratives like Ted Bundy and Danny Rolling and the presidential election--all that is recognizable to me.
I know that's a low form of appreciation, to just say "yes I was there that's my story too." But it is, and that's a point the narrator recognizes, the typicality of her narrative. There's a post-Florida section of the novel, and its sadness is how all places turn out to be like Florida, to have this same seriality and placelessness.
(but also, on the yes-I-recognize-it tip: boys in the novel keep saying they'll drop out of school and go sell Quaaludes on Miami Beach. It's a boast: I don't need this crap, I can go make tons of money any time I want. For my set, it was "I'm going to drop out of school and make lots of money tinting car windows.")
The novel ends with an attempt on the narrator's part to -- I don't know, to apprehend a girl in all her singularity and innocence and seriality and doom. In all senses of the word "apprehend." It's beautiful, that ending, and I think I have to re-read the novel before saying much about that part.
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume -- your capital.
It takes such an effort of self-hypnosis to write. Not hypnosis of the sort "I am a good writer." It's something else. And now, the additional difficulty of having to prize away the grip of this blog-person, witty and wry reader of news and popular culture. She is my enemy. She makes it impossible for me to write. She has it so easy: who cannot make detournements of New York Times headlines? (the New York Times? That's shooting fish in a barrel.) Who cannot allude to a few films and books and thereby confect an intellectual persona? She is my day job, my alibi. She writes her careless blog, carelessly because it is not the real work, while I labor at my fiction with the few meager resources that have not been squandered by her bon mots and her better mots. An expense of spirit in a waste of shame. And so each of us ruins the other, each of us is the alibi for and ruin of the other.
There are other enemies. My neighbors. When will life in this apartment become unbearable again, as it did yesterday and the day before. When am I going to be miserable? I know it is soon and yet I do not know when. I know it is soon and yet I also hope that it will never arrive, that too is torment, the possibility that it is over already, it is over and I do not know it yet but soon I will know that this anticipation has been for naught, it is all over already, the child next door is dead or paralyzed or has been kidnapped, what do I care which of these happy accidents has befallen her. My torturer.
The one writes posts is not my enemy. She is something worse: she is outsourced labor.
Look at her now, all I had to do was utter the word "torturer" and already she's just bubbling over with commentary and citations: a Cahiers du Cinema interview from the seventies, in which Foucault asks "why does all pornography nowadays take place under the sign of the Nazi, when the Nazis themselves were such Victorian spinsters?", which interview she will cleverly, she thinks, use to launch a description of today's tawdry and stupid torturers, "one wants there to have been a sinister master," she will write, "someone diabolical, clever, malignant yet darkly meaningful," she will write, boots worth licking, she will write in some fucked-up sexual allusion designed to make you wonder what she gets up to when she isn't at the computer. Nothing, that's what, nothing at all, I am here to tell you, she is false from first to last.
There really is another person in this city with my same first and last name and middle initial. I am not being cute or Borgesian now. I met her once, back when you used to have to do add/drop in person at the University of Washington. I still run into her phantasmally, whenever I have the utilities turned on or off. She probably has the worse end of this deal, given my credit rating.
There is still another who does what I do. All kidding aside. I'd be more precise, but one or both of us has signed a non-disclosure agreement.
It takes such an effort of self-hypnosis to write. Not hypnosis of the sort "I am a good writer." It's something else. And now, the additional difficulty of having to prize away the grip of this blog-person, witty and wry reader of news and popular culture. She is my enemy. She makes it impossible for me to write. She has it so easy: who cannot make detournements of New York Times headlines? (the New York Times? That's shooting fish in a barrel.) Who cannot allude to a few films and books and thereby confect an intellectual persona? She is my day job, my alibi. She writes her careless blog, carelessly because it is not the real work, while I labor at my fiction with the few meager resources that have not been squandered by her bon mots and her better mots. An expense of spirit in a waste of shame. And so each of us ruins the other, each of us is the alibi for and ruin of the other.
There are other enemies. My neighbors. When will life in this apartment become unbearable again, as it did yesterday and the day before. When am I going to be miserable? I know it is soon and yet I do not know when. I know it is soon and yet I also hope that it will never arrive, that too is torment, the possibility that it is over already, it is over and I do not know it yet but soon I will know that this anticipation has been for naught, it is all over already, the child next door is dead or paralyzed or has been kidnapped, what do I care which of these happy accidents has befallen her. My torturer.
The one writes posts is not my enemy. She is something worse: she is outsourced labor.
Look at her now, all I had to do was utter the word "torturer" and already she's just bubbling over with commentary and citations: a Cahiers du Cinema interview from the seventies, in which Foucault asks "why does all pornography nowadays take place under the sign of the Nazi, when the Nazis themselves were such Victorian spinsters?", which interview she will cleverly, she thinks, use to launch a description of today's tawdry and stupid torturers, "one wants there to have been a sinister master," she will write, "someone diabolical, clever, malignant yet darkly meaningful," she will write, boots worth licking, she will write in some fucked-up sexual allusion designed to make you wonder what she gets up to when she isn't at the computer. Nothing, that's what, nothing at all, I am here to tell you, she is false from first to last.
There really is another person in this city with my same first and last name and middle initial. I am not being cute or Borgesian now. I met her once, back when you used to have to do add/drop in person at the University of Washington. I still run into her phantasmally, whenever I have the utilities turned on or off. She probably has the worse end of this deal, given my credit rating.
There is still another who does what I do. All kidding aside. I'd be more precise, but one or both of us has signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Saturday, June 12, 2004
SIFF
Before today, I was feeling like the film festival had passed me by, even though I'd had a full-series pass. Early on in the festival, I watched Bruce Weber's "A Letter to True," a fashion/celeb photographer's paean to his dogs. As I watched Weber's golden retrievers gamboling in the surf at his Montauk house--wait, it gets worse--I said to myself, "now my series pass should be stripped from me, and I should be banned from the festival for having submitted to this film." The part that's worse than the dogs-in-surf is all the Life-magazine-worthy meditations on heroic, masculine, soldierly sacrifice and death and 9/11. Don't ask how those were in the dog movie. GAAAH. It's like I went to the Reagan funeral before it ever happened, not that Reagan was a soldier, but that was the mood of Weber's film: pompous funebre.
So, aside from Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell (glad I saw it, but you couldn't say it was fun, more like a staged reading of a Kristeva essay, with beautiful Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi and his professional penis fighting a losing battle against an impassive, bleeding, sleeping, oceanic, abject female body); and a Korean horror film called A Tale of Two Sisters (terrifying, and, oddly, like Breillat's film, its horror was about menstrual blood); and Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich (which tried to do for leftist terrorists what his previous films had done for neo-Nazi skinheads, i.e, make them sexy--mostly a failure, with the best sex scenes getting interrupted for dreary citations of Marcuse or Wilhelm Reich. --Although "join the homosexual intifadah" is a pretty funny line, and there was a giddy, scandalous thrill in the prescient scenes of masked and balaclava'ed and keffiyeh'ed habitués of the terror-themed discotheque, like an Abu Ghraib drained of all its terrible meanings and made joyful. Though B La B had to have filmed before that story came out); --OK, aside from those, the festival was feeling like a waste, like I'd managed to miss every good film and pick every useless piece of drivel that will end up on the Landmark circuit anyway. Oh, and Infernal Affairs part I. Oh and also Maqbool, a Macbeth set in Mumbai, which the press release made out to be giddy wacky farce but was actually tragic and had a better Lady Macbeth than Shakespeare wrote.
But so apart from those, it was just one shrug after another. Until today. Today I watched Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe.
Unfortunately, I read Shaviro's review already. I agree with him that there's a lightness to Last Life in the Universe, and that's its greatest charm. A lightness that's helped along by the fact that the two main characters, one Thai and one Japanese, have only a few tags of Thai and Japanese and some very basic English in which to communicate. But the film mostly isn't about the sorrows or wry comedy of misunderstanding: it transmits affect remarkably well, this bare language of theirs.
There's a lot of flotsam in Last Life: a lot of liquid murk and things afloat or awash in it. But Ratanaruang's trash is not as transformed as Wong Kar Wai's, which becomes achingly beautiful --the blood washing down the abattoir drain in Happy Together, the same film's brilliant yellow warning/construction-site tape vibrating in a deep blue evening, the sopping cigarette butts and shower thongs adrift in the policeman's flooded apartment in Chunking Express. Apart from a fantasy sequence where a character plunges into the river and the thick weeds form a ring above his submerged head, the litter on view in Ratanaruang's film is sort of inert, uncommented on, neither horrific nor beautiful, or maybe a just a little of both.
Before today, I was feeling like the film festival had passed me by, even though I'd had a full-series pass. Early on in the festival, I watched Bruce Weber's "A Letter to True," a fashion/celeb photographer's paean to his dogs. As I watched Weber's golden retrievers gamboling in the surf at his Montauk house--wait, it gets worse--I said to myself, "now my series pass should be stripped from me, and I should be banned from the festival for having submitted to this film." The part that's worse than the dogs-in-surf is all the Life-magazine-worthy meditations on heroic, masculine, soldierly sacrifice and death and 9/11. Don't ask how those were in the dog movie. GAAAH. It's like I went to the Reagan funeral before it ever happened, not that Reagan was a soldier, but that was the mood of Weber's film: pompous funebre.
So, aside from Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell (glad I saw it, but you couldn't say it was fun, more like a staged reading of a Kristeva essay, with beautiful Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi and his professional penis fighting a losing battle against an impassive, bleeding, sleeping, oceanic, abject female body); and a Korean horror film called A Tale of Two Sisters (terrifying, and, oddly, like Breillat's film, its horror was about menstrual blood); and Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich (which tried to do for leftist terrorists what his previous films had done for neo-Nazi skinheads, i.e, make them sexy--mostly a failure, with the best sex scenes getting interrupted for dreary citations of Marcuse or Wilhelm Reich. --Although "join the homosexual intifadah" is a pretty funny line, and there was a giddy, scandalous thrill in the prescient scenes of masked and balaclava'ed and keffiyeh'ed habitués of the terror-themed discotheque, like an Abu Ghraib drained of all its terrible meanings and made joyful. Though B La B had to have filmed before that story came out); --OK, aside from those, the festival was feeling like a waste, like I'd managed to miss every good film and pick every useless piece of drivel that will end up on the Landmark circuit anyway. Oh, and Infernal Affairs part I. Oh and also Maqbool, a Macbeth set in Mumbai, which the press release made out to be giddy wacky farce but was actually tragic and had a better Lady Macbeth than Shakespeare wrote.
But so apart from those, it was just one shrug after another. Until today. Today I watched Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe.
Unfortunately, I read Shaviro's review already. I agree with him that there's a lightness to Last Life in the Universe, and that's its greatest charm. A lightness that's helped along by the fact that the two main characters, one Thai and one Japanese, have only a few tags of Thai and Japanese and some very basic English in which to communicate. But the film mostly isn't about the sorrows or wry comedy of misunderstanding: it transmits affect remarkably well, this bare language of theirs.
There's a lot of flotsam in Last Life: a lot of liquid murk and things afloat or awash in it. But Ratanaruang's trash is not as transformed as Wong Kar Wai's, which becomes achingly beautiful --the blood washing down the abattoir drain in Happy Together, the same film's brilliant yellow warning/construction-site tape vibrating in a deep blue evening, the sopping cigarette butts and shower thongs adrift in the policeman's flooded apartment in Chunking Express. Apart from a fantasy sequence where a character plunges into the river and the thick weeds form a ring above his submerged head, the litter on view in Ratanaruang's film is sort of inert, uncommented on, neither horrific nor beautiful, or maybe a just a little of both.
Saturday, May 08, 2004
Abusively (not effusively)
Yesterday, the news was such a parade of horrors: the photos, Rumsfeld at the hearings, the continued fighting in Falluja and Najaf, plus: jobs! and tips on heart health! (Did we have to end that night's catalog of infamy on the spectacle of Americans shopping and eating?)
Steven Shaviro's latest post captures well the sympathy I have for Lynndie England.
In the hearings, Rumsfeld mentioned not realizing the photographs would "do the damage they did." The photographs! Not the torture. Not the beatings-to-death. Not the training of conscripts in the application of sadism. So that today's New York Times headline, "Rumsfeld Accepts Blame and Offers Apology in Abuse" has another sense: "Oh, okay already, my bad. There; happy now?"
And today, this: prisoners in the US forced to wear black hoods.
Yesterday, the news was such a parade of horrors: the photos, Rumsfeld at the hearings, the continued fighting in Falluja and Najaf, plus: jobs! and tips on heart health! (Did we have to end that night's catalog of infamy on the spectacle of Americans shopping and eating?)
Steven Shaviro's latest post captures well the sympathy I have for Lynndie England.
In the hearings, Rumsfeld mentioned not realizing the photographs would "do the damage they did." The photographs! Not the torture. Not the beatings-to-death. Not the training of conscripts in the application of sadism. So that today's New York Times headline, "Rumsfeld Accepts Blame and Offers Apology in Abuse" has another sense: "Oh, okay already, my bad. There; happy now?"
And today, this: prisoners in the US forced to wear black hoods.
Saturday, March 27, 2004
How to Colour
As part of their North American tour, and as a continuation of the party, my friends Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler came to Brown University. I love her book The Weather, especially, and also the new book, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, from Clear Cut Press.
The essays, particularly, have these gorgeous sentences that combine the pleasure of extravagant claims and delicately researched texts, the drift and sway of a particular history of the subject of lyric poetry. Just as her books of poetry deranged or diffused or distracted the lyric subject, so her essays also alter our notion of the essayist. In these essays, written under the mysteriously plural pseudonym "The Office for Soft Architecture," we are never quite sure who or how many are writing.
The reading that informs Lisa’s work often reaches back to Goethe, or to John Clare, to Ruskin, to Samuel Johnson, or to more contemporary writers like Violette le Duc or Lorrine Niedecker. Because she is not an academic, she’s under no compulsion to read these writers responsibly, or to "do" them, as academics say. Her writing is responsive to numerous texts, to numerous histories, and at the same time gloriously irresponsible. It displays an astonishing erudition whose aim is not to astonish, a supple intelligence, an ability to let sense drift and eddy across gorgeous surfaces.
From "How to Color," in Occasional Work, by Lisa Robertson:
"We can't always tell the difference between sentiment and emotion. They marble. The fungal puce bordering the sweating window pane, the flapping cobalt tarp on the leaking condo, the intense turquoise of low-rent trim in our neighbourhood: the surface of the city indexes conditions of contamination, accident and subordination. We always dream in colour. This is part of the history of surfaces.
"When Walter Benjamin visited the house of Goethe in a dream, the corridor was whitewashed. We'll stroll down that pale hallway, and apply to its purity a narrative maquillage."
As part of their North American tour, and as a continuation of the party, my friends Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler came to Brown University. I love her book The Weather, especially, and also the new book, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, from Clear Cut Press.
The essays, particularly, have these gorgeous sentences that combine the pleasure of extravagant claims and delicately researched texts, the drift and sway of a particular history of the subject of lyric poetry. Just as her books of poetry deranged or diffused or distracted the lyric subject, so her essays also alter our notion of the essayist. In these essays, written under the mysteriously plural pseudonym "The Office for Soft Architecture," we are never quite sure who or how many are writing.
The reading that informs Lisa’s work often reaches back to Goethe, or to John Clare, to Ruskin, to Samuel Johnson, or to more contemporary writers like Violette le Duc or Lorrine Niedecker. Because she is not an academic, she’s under no compulsion to read these writers responsibly, or to "do" them, as academics say. Her writing is responsive to numerous texts, to numerous histories, and at the same time gloriously irresponsible. It displays an astonishing erudition whose aim is not to astonish, a supple intelligence, an ability to let sense drift and eddy across gorgeous surfaces.
From "How to Color," in Occasional Work, by Lisa Robertson:
"We can't always tell the difference between sentiment and emotion. They marble. The fungal puce bordering the sweating window pane, the flapping cobalt tarp on the leaking condo, the intense turquoise of low-rent trim in our neighbourhood: the surface of the city indexes conditions of contamination, accident and subordination. We always dream in colour. This is part of the history of surfaces.
"When Walter Benjamin visited the house of Goethe in a dream, the corridor was whitewashed. We'll stroll down that pale hallway, and apply to its purity a narrative maquillage."
Saturday, March 13, 2004
I bought the new Proust, the Lydia Davis translation of Swann's Way. I am trying not to try to read Proust; as Matthew Stadler reminds us, making Proust into calisthenics kind of misses the point.
So but anyway, last summer I read about half of Swann's Way, got stranded somewhere in "Swann in Love". Already, I like Lydia Davis's translation a lot better.
Davis: "The anaesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things."
Moncrief: "The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think--and to feel--such melancholy things."
I don't have the original, and if I did, I couldn't judge, since I barely know French well enough to order a coffee.
I know that Proust-for-edification, Proust-for-betterment is not the point, but I am intrigued by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's remark (in Dialogue on Love?) that she has seen how the reading of Proust makes people smarter. (Not cultural-literacy smart, as in yes-I've-read-Proust. I think her point was that Marcel's subtle and nuanced appreciation of the varieties of people somehow made readers... uh, smarter.)
So but anyway, last summer I read about half of Swann's Way, got stranded somewhere in "Swann in Love". Already, I like Lydia Davis's translation a lot better.
Davis: "The anaesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things."
Moncrief: "The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think--and to feel--such melancholy things."
I don't have the original, and if I did, I couldn't judge, since I barely know French well enough to order a coffee.
I know that Proust-for-edification, Proust-for-betterment is not the point, but I am intrigued by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's remark (in Dialogue on Love?) that she has seen how the reading of Proust makes people smarter. (Not cultural-literacy smart, as in yes-I've-read-Proust. I think her point was that Marcel's subtle and nuanced appreciation of the varieties of people somehow made readers... uh, smarter.)
Sunday, March 07, 2004
French film festival
The Cable Car’s French film festival is almost at an end. I missed a lot of it, because I was in Ithaca at this conference.
I saw part 3 of Lucas Belvaux’s trilogy, "After Life." It’s about the after-life of some Belgian terrorists (are they nationalist Flemings? Walloons? the film doesn’t say), their post-arrest, post-jail return to civilian life. Having only seen one part, I can't speak to the trilogy's ambition to present the same story in three different genres. The one I saw was supposedly "melodrama." It was highly stylized, and so it was melodramatic in that sense, though often very cool: you see a lot of the main actor's somber, impassive mug while he drives or smokes or stands around. The impassive guy’s morphine-addicted wife is wonderfully played by Dominique Blanc, who spends a great deal of the film in withdrawal--I am always a sucker for excessive physical performances, but even so, this one stood out. She sweats and paces and compulsively repeats the same self-comforting motions-- wiping her brow, rubbing her eyes--without ever being able to draw some relief from those motions.
Through a somewhat clumsy plot maneuver, husband and wife end up on opposite sides of the equation in morphine’s "algebra of need," as William Burroughs described it. Not just that he is a cop, but the two of them end up with entwined but utterly opposing aims. I guess that's a common enough plot engine, but it's done well here. There is a marvelous scene where they sit side by side on floor, exhausted by their separate struggles, not speaking, each having come up against the wall of the other.
Occasionally though, as when you’re forced to accept a high school where Ornella Muti stalks around foxily, sipping champagne in the teacher's lounge, it's hard to believe in a noir Belgium.
The Cable Car’s French film festival is almost at an end. I missed a lot of it, because I was in Ithaca at this conference.
I saw part 3 of Lucas Belvaux’s trilogy, "After Life." It’s about the after-life of some Belgian terrorists (are they nationalist Flemings? Walloons? the film doesn’t say), their post-arrest, post-jail return to civilian life. Having only seen one part, I can't speak to the trilogy's ambition to present the same story in three different genres. The one I saw was supposedly "melodrama." It was highly stylized, and so it was melodramatic in that sense, though often very cool: you see a lot of the main actor's somber, impassive mug while he drives or smokes or stands around. The impassive guy’s morphine-addicted wife is wonderfully played by Dominique Blanc, who spends a great deal of the film in withdrawal--I am always a sucker for excessive physical performances, but even so, this one stood out. She sweats and paces and compulsively repeats the same self-comforting motions-- wiping her brow, rubbing her eyes--without ever being able to draw some relief from those motions.
Through a somewhat clumsy plot maneuver, husband and wife end up on opposite sides of the equation in morphine’s "algebra of need," as William Burroughs described it. Not just that he is a cop, but the two of them end up with entwined but utterly opposing aims. I guess that's a common enough plot engine, but it's done well here. There is a marvelous scene where they sit side by side on floor, exhausted by their separate struggles, not speaking, each having come up against the wall of the other.
Occasionally though, as when you’re forced to accept a high school where Ornella Muti stalks around foxily, sipping champagne in the teacher's lounge, it's hard to believe in a noir Belgium.
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Pedagomania update
I dropped the class that was the focus of my late, hysterical student-dom. All my cryptic, thrilled notes about student-dom in the earlier blog entry refer to being in that class. And not to the main business at hand, my thesis, which only tangentially takes place in the arena of student-dom. It's mostly just sitting at my desk and writing. --Perhaps I shouldn't have been so cryptic. I knew what I meant; I just didn't want the Arabic professor's name coming up in some Google search.
I came to that Arabic-lit teacher's office hours TWICE in three weeks. Now that it's all over, I think my manic efforts to secure his approval had something to do with the extreme discomfort I felt at being in a class of Ivy-league undergrads. I am as old as their parents. I was like one of those fabled Japanese soldiers who never got the news that the war was over. And not just age, but class differentiated me: look, kids, here's how you'd age without cosmetic dentistry and a good dermatologist. Three times a week, I was living out the scene in Brave New World where the mother, the savage, turns up amid all the pretty people.
School: it's a Verblödung, a cretin-i-fying, in the end. Anyways, now I just have my advisor to deal with. Much better.
I dropped the class that was the focus of my late, hysterical student-dom. All my cryptic, thrilled notes about student-dom in the earlier blog entry refer to being in that class. And not to the main business at hand, my thesis, which only tangentially takes place in the arena of student-dom. It's mostly just sitting at my desk and writing. --Perhaps I shouldn't have been so cryptic. I knew what I meant; I just didn't want the Arabic professor's name coming up in some Google search.
I came to that Arabic-lit teacher's office hours TWICE in three weeks. Now that it's all over, I think my manic efforts to secure his approval had something to do with the extreme discomfort I felt at being in a class of Ivy-league undergrads. I am as old as their parents. I was like one of those fabled Japanese soldiers who never got the news that the war was over. And not just age, but class differentiated me: look, kids, here's how you'd age without cosmetic dentistry and a good dermatologist. Three times a week, I was living out the scene in Brave New World where the mother, the savage, turns up amid all the pretty people.
School: it's a Verblödung, a cretin-i-fying, in the end. Anyways, now I just have my advisor to deal with. Much better.
Sunday, February 15, 2004
Just now somebody was ringing my doorbell like crazy, at 4 on a Sunday morning.
Edited, later.
I don't have an intercom or a way to see the front door. I called the police. The police at my door say, "Is your name ____ ____? Is your apartment number ___? Is your car a Chevy bla bla bla?" (I can't remember car names, or recognize them). I say yes to the first two questions and no to the last, implying that I do in fact have a car, and they point to the tow truck idling at the curb and say, "these guys are repo men. They're here to get a white Chevy, but there're three white Chevys here on the street."
It's MY job to help out the repo men? And the police were so quick to label me, as if they were saying, "let's get to the bottom of this; your sleep was disturbed and you had to call us because you're a deadbeat, ma'am." You know, with that visciousness you see on that show "Class," I mean that show "Cops"? But that's their real job, the protection of property.
I said, to the repo guy in the truck, who looked really hapless, a skinny guy wearing sunglasses at night, "I don't own a car. Take any car you want, just stop ringing my doorbell."
I left just as the police were saying, weird, the name is ___ ___ and the address is right.
It is weird. Damn. I used to say, "Identity crime? Ha. Somebody else could hardly make a worse hash of it than I have." As if to prove this, right when the doorbell rang, I had been having a dream about sex with some guy, some imaginary guy, and the voiceover of my dream was talking about how this could "nonetheless be considered gay sex." [i should edit out the dream, too, but it's funny.]
Edited, later.
I don't have an intercom or a way to see the front door. I called the police. The police at my door say, "Is your name ____ ____? Is your apartment number ___? Is your car a Chevy bla bla bla?" (I can't remember car names, or recognize them). I say yes to the first two questions and no to the last, implying that I do in fact have a car, and they point to the tow truck idling at the curb and say, "these guys are repo men. They're here to get a white Chevy, but there're three white Chevys here on the street."
It's MY job to help out the repo men? And the police were so quick to label me, as if they were saying, "let's get to the bottom of this; your sleep was disturbed and you had to call us because you're a deadbeat, ma'am." You know, with that visciousness you see on that show "Class," I mean that show "Cops"? But that's their real job, the protection of property.
I said, to the repo guy in the truck, who looked really hapless, a skinny guy wearing sunglasses at night, "I don't own a car. Take any car you want, just stop ringing my doorbell."
I left just as the police were saying, weird, the name is ___ ___ and the address is right.
It is weird. Damn. I used to say, "Identity crime? Ha. Somebody else could hardly make a worse hash of it than I have." As if to prove this, right when the doorbell rang, I had been having a dream about sex with some guy, some imaginary guy, and the voiceover of my dream was talking about how this could "nonetheless be considered gay sex." [i should edit out the dream, too, but it's funny.]
Friday, February 06, 2004
Clear Cut news & pedagomania outbreak
Charles D'Ambrosio once again, at long last, in The Stranger's books pages. He reviews the Clear Cut anthology reading at Elliot Bay. This "audience review" feature started as a jokey, smirky way to get out of town writers into the Stranger--a total waste of ink. But this one by Charles D'Ambrosio, besides being local (or regional, anyway), is worth reading. So was Heather McHugh's, a few weeks ago.
In other news, my student-self is undergoing some kind of paroxysm of, uh, a spasm. Maybe it's the death spasm of my student-hood, in this my final semester ever at the Institute. It has that feel, what I've been doing: a bit hysterical, a bit melancholy like a late-bloomed talent. I'd be more specific, but it's all so embarrassing. [Late edit: I was obliquely referring to the class I was taking,about Arabic literature. And its teacher. I was just trying to keep the name from coming up in a Google search.] Let's just say it involves eagerness, reading, name-dropping, e-mail, and office hours. Yes, office hours, this early in the semester. What is next??? Extra credit? Are there further modes of abasement? Oh, let's hope so.
I told Naima this is probably going to happen again with me. At the Elderhostel they'll be saying to me, "yes, yes ma'am, we're all aware how very smart you once were. Now please take your seat and stop bothering the other students."
Charles D'Ambrosio once again, at long last, in The Stranger's books pages. He reviews the Clear Cut anthology reading at Elliot Bay. This "audience review" feature started as a jokey, smirky way to get out of town writers into the Stranger--a total waste of ink. But this one by Charles D'Ambrosio, besides being local (or regional, anyway), is worth reading. So was Heather McHugh's, a few weeks ago.
In other news, my student-self is undergoing some kind of paroxysm of, uh, a spasm. Maybe it's the death spasm of my student-hood, in this my final semester ever at the Institute. It has that feel, what I've been doing: a bit hysterical, a bit melancholy like a late-bloomed talent. I'd be more specific, but it's all so embarrassing. [Late edit: I was obliquely referring to the class I was taking,about Arabic literature. And its teacher. I was just trying to keep the name from coming up in a Google search.] Let's just say it involves eagerness, reading, name-dropping, e-mail, and office hours. Yes, office hours, this early in the semester. What is next??? Extra credit? Are there further modes of abasement? Oh, let's hope so.
I told Naima this is probably going to happen again with me. At the Elderhostel they'll be saying to me, "yes, yes ma'am, we're all aware how very smart you once were. Now please take your seat and stop bothering the other students."
Sunday, February 01, 2004
Abject-o-rama. Or, the beauty of the swerve.
(how are those for M.F.A. thesis titles? Ha ha. I kid.)
I fell asleep this afternoon. In my room, with the sun flooding in. There is a state of sleepiness I sometimes reach, where the least little percussive sound puts me further under. It has to be the right sound, like somebody hammering on a house a few blocks away. With each tap, there's a reaction completely beyond my control: I slip down. A weird but utterly just disproportion obtains between the tiny, dim percussion and the immense distance I am dropping down.
I've read good descriptions of death and fainting lately, in the last month. These are all weakened by being put together here. The passages just erupt, or swerve, there's no expecting them from what has come before. Which is an effect that's lost here, with all these things labeled and lined up next to one another. (The Graham Greene is the weakest, but it's in this frivolous novel, it's shockingly good in its context, being so out of context.)
Dying: "…Saunders shot him in the back through the opening door. Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation." Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale.
Fainting: "Fortunately I am beginning to drift, and my body to go numb as I leave it. My mouth opens, I am aware, if that is awareness, of two cold parted slabs that must be lips, and of a hole that must be the mouth itself, and of a thing, the tongue, which I can push out of the hole, as I do now. I hope I am not going to be called on to say anything because besides going numb I am also sweating a lot and turning white, in a fishy way. Also, 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.
Dying: "Towards evening Andrey Yefemitch died of an apoplectic stroke. At first he had a violent shivering fit and a feeling of sickness; something revolting, as it seemed, penetrating through his whole body, even to his fingertips, strained from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes and ears. There was a greenness before his eyes. Andrey Yefemitch understood that his end had come, and remembered that Ivan Dmitrich, Mihail Averyanitch, and millions of people believed in immortality. And what if it really existed? But he did not want immortality, and he thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter… Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefemitch sank into oblivion forever." Anton Chekhov, "Ward No. 6" (ellipsis in the original).
Waking: "I lay there in a sick stupor, with my head aching very much, and growing slowly numb with cold, till the dawn light came shining through the cracks of the shed and a locomotive whistled in the station. These and a blinding thirst brought me to life, and I found I was in no pain. Pain of the slightest had been my obsession and secret terror, from a boy. Had I now been drugged with it, to oblivion?" T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Doesn't fit in this category, but is so beautiful a swerve: "Edward sighed. People do sigh, in fiction, and in real life after they have been trapped in a fantasy and a sudden noise, movement, a physical demand, sets them free to rejoin the insistent clatter and irrelevance of day-to-day living. Edward sighed again. He realized that noises, shadows, even his own body, were in a continual state of jealously toward him, as they are toward all human beings. Even the furniture of his room--the table, the bed, the chairs, the light bulb, everything which the landlord termed 'fixtures and furnishings' experienced this dark uneasiness at his every thought and act; while within his own body his arms were jealous of his hands, his head was jealous of his belly, his eyes could not bear the fact that they were not his ears; his mouth moaned that it was not his fingertips touching; there was no satisfaction anywhere; there was war." Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind.
Late addition: an entry on swooning, by jodi via jenny, whose blog, jenny's, reminds me that I'd like to read Kathleen Stewart.
(how are those for M.F.A. thesis titles? Ha ha. I kid.)
I fell asleep this afternoon. In my room, with the sun flooding in. There is a state of sleepiness I sometimes reach, where the least little percussive sound puts me further under. It has to be the right sound, like somebody hammering on a house a few blocks away. With each tap, there's a reaction completely beyond my control: I slip down. A weird but utterly just disproportion obtains between the tiny, dim percussion and the immense distance I am dropping down.
I've read good descriptions of death and fainting lately, in the last month. These are all weakened by being put together here. The passages just erupt, or swerve, there's no expecting them from what has come before. Which is an effect that's lost here, with all these things labeled and lined up next to one another. (The Graham Greene is the weakest, but it's in this frivolous novel, it's shockingly good in its context, being so out of context.)
Dying: "…Saunders shot him in the back through the opening door. Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation." Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale.
Fainting: "Fortunately I am beginning to drift, and my body to go numb as I leave it. My mouth opens, I am aware, if that is awareness, of two cold parted slabs that must be lips, and of a hole that must be the mouth itself, and of a thing, the tongue, which I can push out of the hole, as I do now. I hope I am not going to be called on to say anything because besides going numb I am also sweating a lot and turning white, in a fishy way. Also, 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.
Dying: "Towards evening Andrey Yefemitch died of an apoplectic stroke. At first he had a violent shivering fit and a feeling of sickness; something revolting, as it seemed, penetrating through his whole body, even to his fingertips, strained from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes and ears. There was a greenness before his eyes. Andrey Yefemitch understood that his end had come, and remembered that Ivan Dmitrich, Mihail Averyanitch, and millions of people believed in immortality. And what if it really existed? But he did not want immortality, and he thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter… Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefemitch sank into oblivion forever." Anton Chekhov, "Ward No. 6" (ellipsis in the original).
Waking: "I lay there in a sick stupor, with my head aching very much, and growing slowly numb with cold, till the dawn light came shining through the cracks of the shed and a locomotive whistled in the station. These and a blinding thirst brought me to life, and I found I was in no pain. Pain of the slightest had been my obsession and secret terror, from a boy. Had I now been drugged with it, to oblivion?" T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Doesn't fit in this category, but is so beautiful a swerve: "Edward sighed. People do sigh, in fiction, and in real life after they have been trapped in a fantasy and a sudden noise, movement, a physical demand, sets them free to rejoin the insistent clatter and irrelevance of day-to-day living. Edward sighed again. He realized that noises, shadows, even his own body, were in a continual state of jealously toward him, as they are toward all human beings. Even the furniture of his room--the table, the bed, the chairs, the light bulb, everything which the landlord termed 'fixtures and furnishings' experienced this dark uneasiness at his every thought and act; while within his own body his arms were jealous of his hands, his head was jealous of his belly, his eyes could not bear the fact that they were not his ears; his mouth moaned that it was not his fingertips touching; there was no satisfaction anywhere; there was war." Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind.
Late addition: an entry on swooning, by jodi via jenny, whose blog, jenny's, reminds me that I'd like to read Kathleen Stewart.
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Negri
Finally, the Antonio Negri book I've been waiting for. Not that I knew about its existence before it showed up. Negri on Negri is an interview in the form of an abecedary: A is for arms, B is for Red Brigades, etc. It's so lucid, so concise.
I haven't been able to write about it yet. Favorite passages:
From H, for Heidegger…
In Heidegger's work of the 1920s and 1930s there is this fundamental intuition of Being in moral terms. And it is obvious that the conception of time, terrifying and absolute, still remains marginal. The Heideggerian conception of time remains a piece of folklore, a caricature.
[Interviewer:] Why terrifying and why a caricature?
Because there is this immobile, fixed Being--and time, which turns around it! And man's moral behavior, his position in this movement, is completely marginal. Man is caught up in time, but it is a time that is nothing, a continual revelation of being-nothingness. This being-nothingness is absolutely compact, destinal--it can't be escaped from.
From R, for resistance ( but also for return)…
Return is therefore not only a coming back but also the effort and the joy of being back: of being there rather than somewhere else. It is the joy of rediscovering not community and roots, but linguistic innovation and the freedom of the passions.
Finally, the Antonio Negri book I've been waiting for. Not that I knew about its existence before it showed up. Negri on Negri is an interview in the form of an abecedary: A is for arms, B is for Red Brigades, etc. It's so lucid, so concise.
I haven't been able to write about it yet. Favorite passages:
From H, for Heidegger…
In Heidegger's work of the 1920s and 1930s there is this fundamental intuition of Being in moral terms. And it is obvious that the conception of time, terrifying and absolute, still remains marginal. The Heideggerian conception of time remains a piece of folklore, a caricature.
[Interviewer:] Why terrifying and why a caricature?
Because there is this immobile, fixed Being--and time, which turns around it! And man's moral behavior, his position in this movement, is completely marginal. Man is caught up in time, but it is a time that is nothing, a continual revelation of being-nothingness. This being-nothingness is absolutely compact, destinal--it can't be escaped from.
From R, for resistance ( but also for return)…
Return is therefore not only a coming back but also the effort and the joy of being back: of being there rather than somewhere else. It is the joy of rediscovering not community and roots, but linguistic innovation and the freedom of the passions.
Saturday, January 03, 2004
Emerald City
I came back to Providence yesterday. By a circuitous route: night flight on New Year's Eve from Seattle to Burlington, Vermont; a day and a night at my sister's in Burlington, where I ate some Hoppin' John and collard greens for good luck in the new year; and then an all-day bus ride, Burlington to Providence.
Travel highlights: having my bags and my person searched in Boston's South Bay bus station. Whew! Another "event" wisely averted, thanks to vigilant luggage-searching of Greyhound passengers. It's so creepy to see this become normal, people pliantly submitting to searches by all variety of uniformed men and women.
Now that I've just come back here, I have the same weird and dislocated feeling I had there, on arrival in Seattle. It always seems to me that the threads of my life, my life of social ties and relationships, are so few and so tenuous. As if it takes all of half an hour to telephone all of my acquaintances, either to say hello I'm here or goodbye I'm leaving.
I named this blog "carceraglio"--well, for a number of reasons, not least because of a sense of living in exile while here in Providence. Yes, it's melodramatic, and maybe scandalously inappropriate for somebody attending an Ivy League university, but there it is. So the life in Providence is built on a notion of Seattle as "home," a notion that gets more and more fragile each time I go there, less and less believable.
Each time I arrive in either place, now, I'm momentarily gratified by some familiar sight, and then right away I'm devastated. This is it, this is my life? Is this all? --But in Seattle, after a while, certain things built up again over time, in the course of my ten days there. There were accidents, things I couldn't have foreseen while sitting in my temporary apartment, looking over the few phone numbers at my disposal.
This one thing, this is probably very sad to admit, but I was sitting at Septieme, waiting for a friend, when the waiter came by and said, "Are you Diana? Charles is delayed by the snow; he'll be here as soon as he can." --Now, I hope it's not simply the case that I'm that pathetic, that I'm so easily puffed up and so readily deflated, that a glimmer of recognition from even a waiter made my day…. OK, well, that level of pathetic-ness played into it, but there was something delightful about feeling enwrapped in a certain density of relatedness and the service economy and technology that could only come together in a city. And a modern city, at that, not a postmodern one. It was so delightfully anachronistic, because I don't have a cell phone. I felt I was in a nineteen-forties movie, and the waiter at a nightclub had just brought the telephone to my table, trailing its fifty feet of cord. There's something about the formality of that moment that's so pleasing. It's the impersonality of it, or the impersonal crossed with the personal.
I came back to Providence yesterday. By a circuitous route: night flight on New Year's Eve from Seattle to Burlington, Vermont; a day and a night at my sister's in Burlington, where I ate some Hoppin' John and collard greens for good luck in the new year; and then an all-day bus ride, Burlington to Providence.
Travel highlights: having my bags and my person searched in Boston's South Bay bus station. Whew! Another "event" wisely averted, thanks to vigilant luggage-searching of Greyhound passengers. It's so creepy to see this become normal, people pliantly submitting to searches by all variety of uniformed men and women.
Now that I've just come back here, I have the same weird and dislocated feeling I had there, on arrival in Seattle. It always seems to me that the threads of my life, my life of social ties and relationships, are so few and so tenuous. As if it takes all of half an hour to telephone all of my acquaintances, either to say hello I'm here or goodbye I'm leaving.
I named this blog "carceraglio"--well, for a number of reasons, not least because of a sense of living in exile while here in Providence. Yes, it's melodramatic, and maybe scandalously inappropriate for somebody attending an Ivy League university, but there it is. So the life in Providence is built on a notion of Seattle as "home," a notion that gets more and more fragile each time I go there, less and less believable.
Each time I arrive in either place, now, I'm momentarily gratified by some familiar sight, and then right away I'm devastated. This is it, this is my life? Is this all? --But in Seattle, after a while, certain things built up again over time, in the course of my ten days there. There were accidents, things I couldn't have foreseen while sitting in my temporary apartment, looking over the few phone numbers at my disposal.
This one thing, this is probably very sad to admit, but I was sitting at Septieme, waiting for a friend, when the waiter came by and said, "Are you Diana? Charles is delayed by the snow; he'll be here as soon as he can." --Now, I hope it's not simply the case that I'm that pathetic, that I'm so easily puffed up and so readily deflated, that a glimmer of recognition from even a waiter made my day…. OK, well, that level of pathetic-ness played into it, but there was something delightful about feeling enwrapped in a certain density of relatedness and the service economy and technology that could only come together in a city. And a modern city, at that, not a postmodern one. It was so delightfully anachronistic, because I don't have a cell phone. I felt I was in a nineteen-forties movie, and the waiter at a nightclub had just brought the telephone to my table, trailing its fifty feet of cord. There's something about the formality of that moment that's so pleasing. It's the impersonality of it, or the impersonal crossed with the personal.
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