public displays of self-revelation

i was reading the current new yorker issue at a local coffeeshop when this made me misty-eyed. the bit that really packed a cardiac punch: "The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy."

of course, then, i proceeded to silently whisper as i gulped my cold latte, reminded of my own betrayal of such principles.

a lesson...

...learned. always check to see if you have your wallet in tow - today i was driving back to dc + soon realize i'm empty on gas. i pull into a station to refill, only to find that i don't have my wallet. scrounge up a couple dollars worth of quarters found in seat pockets, crevices, the whole spiel + drive back to md. now i'm stuck here, drinking my nth glass of cab in head-splitting solitude.

i'm teaching...

...kazuo ishiguro's a pale view of the hills next semester except i decided i don't really like it. or i'm a bit ambivalent about it. concerns a japanese expat in england whose daughter's suicide echoes with memories of ww2 + the a-bomb unleashed over nagasaki. while the novel's subtlety + quietude in approaching such devasting events lend the book its initial promise, i thought the connections between present and past are ultimately too forced, almost secured with glue with the frayed edges of connect and disconnect, for that matter, obviously showing. a raggedy story - but what i'm trying to figure out is if that's what ishiguro intended - if the form and structure of the novel are supposed to mirror the unreliable fragmentation of memory and how, with time, both the individual and collective "we" succumb to a certain kind of "psychic numbing" to borrow robert jay lifton's term. simply on an aesthetic level, i'm not a huge fan of ishiguro's writing...but he is able to create images and so maybe more than a prose-writer, he's a visual-writer. there's nothing quite controversial or provocative about this novel- nothing that really steals my heart. i'm almost persuaded to yank it from the syllabus but a long prolonged sigh, i've already ordered my books + i don't want to deal with bookstore politics. perhaps a re-read will change my mind.

the question...

...of next summer. costa brava. labastide esparbairenque. a collection of short stories, a pinch inspired by john berryman's dreamsongs ... dali's short films...chopin's noctures...and shroom-induced hallucinations during one jaunt to amsterdam. i divulge many secrets here.

i live...

...quite a solitary life. wake up, read, write a little, read some more, wander the sidewalks with otherwise bursting head contained in earphones, imagine myself in the little film always running in my head, of which i'm the auteur and the audience, all conjured up. for no one will ever view this film - just me in unpredictable seizures of daydream and fleeting snapshots of distilled reveries, rose-colored and bursting in the brain.

getting older i see that i'm becoming more cautious, hesistant, even to the point of reluctant, of engaging with people that i know would bear some semblance of artificiality or deceit on my part. i hate acting. i despise pretending. i would rather die with my secrets than share them with a stranger half-hazardly, and most likely my secrets will die with me, scratched into the permanence of silence.

so i lied, this blog has nothing really to do with my life in academia. but perhaps what my life could be beyond its very confines. every day is a war of killing: between reality + imagination. head + heart. how things are + how things should be. need + desire. me + my not-me. you as friend + you as lover. domestic + international habitation. oh, what i'd do to escape such derridean forces of opposition. there. that was my plug for the blog's purpose. when in doubt, drop derrida.

la llegada de volver...

...finally! pedro almodovar's volver, that is...well not until this fri. the 22nd but i've been looking forward to this film for months now. one reason why dc takes a backseat to nyc: i bet volver came out months ago in the latter city, and we just got the leftovers. i'm seriously discontent with the films out in theaters now...although i'd like to see john cameron mitchell's shortbus. otherwise it's a wretched drought. that's why netflix comes in handy. of the films i've recently seen, i highly recommend: de battre mon coeur s'es arrete (the beat that my heart skipped), 2046, chungking express, grizzly man

late last night is early morning...

...and the moment at which i suffered a mental breakdown of sorts. it was not beautiful by any means, folks...but involved lots of snapping and screaming on my part. unleashed in the process was an effluvia of hurtful things said to people who didn't deserve it. displaced anger, i'd call it. or perhaps it's better described as poisoned frustration that began at some indiscernable origin and just culminated beyond its breaking point. the volcano has finally erupted. and so, with my head tossing on my tear-stained pillow, i watched the moon seep beneath the shaded window + wondered why human existence was intended to be so lonely. why it felt like we were condemned to tread the bald curve of the moon's surface alone, even if swarms of familiar bodies crowded in around you. why i'm bound to live according to the pattern of past disappointments and heartaches rather than the anticipation of a future that would reveal the past for the illusory sham that it was all along. then i awoke and realized nothing had changed and without a change in my step i insisted that i persist treading and treading and treading...

a bullshitting machine...

...that's me! i bullshit my pants for a living. i just don't know when to stop really... i don't know how i've managed to crank out approx. 40 pages of seminar papers in the last week. call it an out-of-body experience - for all i know, it was 40 pages of sheer babble which sadly, i'm responsible for unleashing in our already babble-bursting world. and of course, this is all playful - i feel so lucky to do what i do. getting paid to learn, write, and be surrounded by intriguing intellects, dead and alive. talking about dead, i feel quite so...

time to snooze.

conferences galore...

...pleasing news today. actually it might be more stressful than pleasing but i got accepted to present at another conference set for march 2007. it's at the univ. of westminster, england. cheerio!

seattle...

...in early january! to see a kindred spirit of mine.

semi-productive...

...so far. woke up at 9:30, early for me. morning coffee. nearing the end of my 1st seminar paper (16/20 pages) . quick outdoor run with dog. listening to a random slew of tunes forgotten on my itunes. oh and now, the blogging ensues so i guess that brings my productivity level to an abrupt halt. affirmative, i've fallen victim to our constant stimuli-ridden mediated experience that my attention span hovers on the brink of extinction. right now i'd say it matches red panda level - not quite dodo bird yet.

a happy 16th to my sister, katie. so young but solely ancient for her since in my mind, she'll always be the babe of the bunch. tonight family + i are headed to corks for dinner. i expect disgraceful amounts of wine, eats + philosophical droppings.

the goddess, sylvia

First + foremost, a cheerful welcome to my newly anointed blog. I've decided to change gears + devote this one solely to my rants, revelations + mostly, brain-rumblings, related to my life + research as a grad student - minion of the rankest cesspool! It's a lonely existence, I think... living inside of my mind all the time + struggling to retain that fragile distinction between dream + reality. I process ideas as I write them, so here's to hoping this blogging project will whip me back into mental shape. This also comes on the heels of my mournful habits of scribbling notes on napkins, post-its, the backs of hands, etc. never to be found again. It's all about efficient organization, while giving + receiving meaningful creative output. After all, 'tis the season to be...?...I forgot how the age-old adage goes, someone help me out here.

So.

Concurrently I've been reading Sylvia Plath's "lost" short stories..and James Steeves' Imaginary Bodies, which considers Merleau-Ponty's thoughts on the body's role in enacting imaginative scenarios in otherworldy realms. Most striking and I think, valuable, about MP is his definition of le corps virtuel, or the virtual body, since he argues that we are capable of embodying another's projected experience through the shared materiality of our own bodies. He writes, "[The virtual body allows] for a certain style of seeing, a new use of one's body; it is to enrich and recast the body schema," while also positing that the body has its own system of language through a standard set of silent gestures and movements. His exclusion, though, of disabled bodies makes me question to what extent it is possible to think of the body as a referential point of experience - or must the notion of having a fit, "normal" body precede the ability to imagine the post-WWII monstrous, deformed bodies (of veterans, a-bomb v ictims, radioactive mutants, aliens) that plague both literary and filmic "fallout"?

Now back to Plath: I want to think of her short stories, "The Shadow" (1959) and "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" (1958), in light of MP's virtual body (and I'm sure Lacan and other psychoanalytic theorists on dreams will be able to ground my assumptions a bit more). In both of these stories, the narrator experiences personal revelations in dreamscapes, and abstract concepts are personified, given human bodies. In the former story, the "Shadow" possesses a "nasal, sardonic voice" that asks, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" and has a lesson to teach: "somewhere innocent victims were being turned into rats by a vicious, experimental drug, burned on their bare feet with candles, fed to an indoor pool of piranha fish." After seeing a Japanese prison-camp film at a girl's birthday party, the narrator experiences repeated nightmares: "Night after night, I saw the same scene come back, poisonous, sulphur-colored, the starving men in their cells..." Bodies here are made to suffer, and in some sense, the narrator inhabits (and awakens to) these experiences through her dreams.

In the latter story, "Johnny Panic" is really just that - sheer, raw panic itself. Plath writes, "I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all." Interestingly enough, the narrator calls herself a secretary to Johnny Panic, collecting patients' dreams which all somehow point back to the way panic (real or imagined) diseases the mind/body - almost as though in these dreams lurk certain elusive personal and collective historical truths. In her own dream, she sees a lake "swaming with snakes, dead bodies puffed as blowfish, human embryos bobbing around in laboratory bobbles like so many unfinished messages from the great I am." By the end, the narrator is revealed as a patient herself, as she's undergoes electroshock therapy + Johnny Panic comes upon her as the only viable God, "His Word" said to "charge and illumine the universe." Of course, this can be read w/Plath's own bio in mind, but I wonder how the imaginings of another, virtual body allow intersections of personal/historical experience to occur on the narrator's body. Or how the Shadow, Panic, and and these days, thanks to the Bush administration, so-called Terror, are given corporeal weight in its access through the body. It seems that the human body + imagination are inextricably linked, if shock therapy is intended to physically purge her of this strange obsession with dreams authored by Johnny Panic. These dreams or fanciful imaginings, I'm not quite sure how to call them, appear to derive their materiality through the bodies they inhabit, are made flesh through...