So it's supposed to be a beginning. That's why they call it commencement. I wonder if the speaker tomorrow will mention that. I'm sure it get mentioned all the time.
I can barely believe I survived this semester. I took on five classes, and all five of them were demanding. I have never read nor written so much in such a short period of time. I wrote around fifteen papers, I think. I read about thirteen novels, plus other miscellaneous stories and stuff. Today, when I realized I was done writing the last paper, I got a little emotional. It was such hard work. This semester more than all the previous ones made me really self-conscious about my writing. I had one professor who kept writing comments on my essays like, "baffling," "confusing," and "wordy." I got so nervous about this one professor (I had him for two classes) that I became really blocked creatively. I had to keep reminding myself that I have good ideas, and if I can just begin to articulate them I can always revise them in the future. He was just sort of...rude. I wonder what he really thought of me. He is this really great, brilliant guy who is known for being really witty, understanding, and the object of academic crushes galore. He is known for hanging out with students, bumming a cigarette, going to the bar. It really sounded like someone that I could get along with. He taught a graduate course this semester on Melville, and so I wanted his feedback on my Moby Dick paper. He never got back to me about it, although he had me email it to him twice. When we would sit down together in his office, he would give me a little bit of advice, like one time he told me this gem: read the MLA Little Brown Handbook. I don't think he was ever, I don't know, bad to me, I just had really high expectations of him going into the semester, and aside from some fun times, he almost always seemed to relish, just a little bit, shutting me down.
Everything else went great. My senior seminar was the best. The instructor was probably my favorite at DH, ever. I gave awesome presentations, and had the best discussions in that class. We read some incredible books, like Everything is Illuminated, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. And I had fun with a lot of people in that seminar. We laughed a lot.
Commencement is tomorrow, and for the first time in my life I'm going to participate in a formal graduation ceremony. I'm overwhelmed at the thought of being the first person in my family to graduate from college. And I'm thrilled to have the summer off.
On Monday Todd and I leave for London and Paris. We've never been, and it will be an awesome way to celebrate my success, and our 11th anniversary. So, next time I'll have some photos, and hopefully some great stories to tell.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Writing at the Café
Of course I would be an idiot, one not fit to write anything about anything, if I didn't observe and give homange to the great café writers of the twentieth century. Especially do I have to look at, admire, and kiss the hand and foot of Ernest Hemingway, a man (yes, just a man! Imagine!) who had reached nearly one-named status through writing about writing, and writing at cafés. And writing about writing at cafés, at cafés. So yes, I'm not doing anything new or revolutionary, except, perhaps, that I'm writing about writing at cafés, at a café, in America. And as I'm writing about writing in cafés, at a café, in America, I'm acutally at what is called a diner. Everyone here, as far as I can hear, is American, and most likely is a local. I can't walk here, I live on the other side of town, but I'm still a local, in a sort of sweeping urban sense of the word.
I guess there are other writers who wrote about writing in American diners. What's his name did that painting of the lonely man in the coffee shop in the early twentieth century. Maybe hard-boiled detctive and noir fiction gave its first mucusy cough in an American diner. Interaction with the usual features of a diner is certainly inspirational. Some people are forced to be here, forced to make wages. Some are enjoying being waited on. I certainly enjoy having my coffee cup refulled without asking. The food is actually excellent here. French influenced, west coast, psuedo-soul fare. Great shiny onyx coffee and unusual cucumber infused still. Aside from the dark sage and white linoleum checkered floor, dark sage wainscot, and baby lemon curd walls, everything else in ways of decor is a carefully arranged mix and match of antiques and strangely iconographic configurations of kitsch. The radio from the nineteen tens on the counter masking the modern cash register, the patina green metal scale which holds drink menus, the blackboards on walls hanging out with mounted children's chairs and old serving trays, plates, and a colorful vintage Chinese checkers board, a few do-it-yourself paintings ranging from a nude feminine bust to a fogged-in Golden Gate. The seating is French bistro style, with chairs made of bamboo and woven plastic. Everything together making it hard to imagine just one person arranging things.
Does the diner want to acknowledge France? Yes, but it wants to look only so long, then it says, thank you so much for these great chairs, goodbye. It doesn't linger on France like a voyeur with a pocket busting with quarters for the empire's cultural peep show. Are the baguettes perfection? I wouldn't know, but they are good enough that I always save my hunk of airy and crusty bread for last. I wait until all other breakfast foods are consumed, and then I spread butter on each slice and eat them like exquisite desserts.
I think more than many other locations, cafés give you the impresison that you're being watched, and therefore you really should be doing something. Writers are solitary people in my experience. And even if they are socialites, they are elitist, and imagine themselves isolated. That stupidly talented writer Jonathan Franzen says that if you truly want to be alone, read a book. I can't remember if he extends his theory to writing, but I think it might be just as true. If you write like the narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, alone in some dank uninhabitable basement, projecting your voice out of the obscure darkness, you eventually lose touch with the point, the desire, the means. Well, if you want to use a deranged Poe narrator, someone who exhibits unabashed self-destruction like reality T.V. characters before reality T.V., then perhaps you do need to lock yourself up in an attic like that father character from Absalom, Absalom!, finally refusing the hoisted up buckets of bread crusts. It just doesn't work that way for me.
When trying to look at and understand Toni Morrison's arguments in Playing in the Dark, I do better when I'm out. When I'm alone in my home, with the T.V. begging me to stop thinking critically, I can't help but have to read her over and over until I have to look up every other word, and I just end up napping. If I'm at the café, three coffees in, being asked intermittently by the wait staff about things like the local college baseball team, or how I'm doing in school, I feel just the right amount of self-imposed, self-conscious pressure that seems ultimately necessary in keeping up with Morrison. Here, I get just enough outer stimulation that the sabotaging images of my instructors, who have dubbed my writing "unclear," "wordy," and "confusing"; dubbed it so through glaring marginal repetition; just enough white noise (there's a reference Morrison would be interested in), to quiet the doubter within. How am I doing in school? Barely. Barely staying above average. Barely crossing finishing lines. Barely getting any kinds of attention. Barely ever having to say, oh no, I'm married, but thank God you asked because I've been internalizing all this "average" criticism and feel like I have no wares left. Nothing to flash. Nothing to tantalize you with.
Being out, being a member of the diner microcosm, helps to facilitate the understanding of lines like this:
Of course, Morrison is talking about her term Africanism, and the other here is defined by marked or markable racial difference. But I'm in the café, it's not black and white here. Yet, I'm surrounded by others, through the very processes that Morrison describes, and I have been influenced to see things in the context of me/others/else through the way of structuring my self and the world that her work describes. I'm a universal consumer, and the other is everything outside of the voices in my head and impulses in my body. I think she is right, we know ourselves through others. And not just racially, but in all kinds of ways. What is it that Derrida calls it? Differànce? Differánce? It's how we know ourselves. But something escapes. The soul, maybe.
I think the diner worked its voodoo today, and I've been able to formulate something about Benito Cereno that will make my previous essays look concise, sparse even. I mean what's not wordy if Playing in the Dark is not wordy, and confusing, and ambiguous, and unclear? That's what the café does. It gives you just the right amount of hope that maybe you are unclear because you are a genius, or that maybe even if you are an idiot you can write about something, which is more than most dare to dream to do. It's the kind of stimulus that helps the writer to skate the edge of brilliance, or at least to resort to nice chit chat when the glare is too painful. It's the tightening of the mind at the bottom of a mimosa. The possibility of sharing an insight, and keeping it all to your greedy obese self, alone with everyone.
I guess there are other writers who wrote about writing in American diners. What's his name did that painting of the lonely man in the coffee shop in the early twentieth century. Maybe hard-boiled detctive and noir fiction gave its first mucusy cough in an American diner. Interaction with the usual features of a diner is certainly inspirational. Some people are forced to be here, forced to make wages. Some are enjoying being waited on. I certainly enjoy having my coffee cup refulled without asking. The food is actually excellent here. French influenced, west coast, psuedo-soul fare. Great shiny onyx coffee and unusual cucumber infused still. Aside from the dark sage and white linoleum checkered floor, dark sage wainscot, and baby lemon curd walls, everything else in ways of decor is a carefully arranged mix and match of antiques and strangely iconographic configurations of kitsch. The radio from the nineteen tens on the counter masking the modern cash register, the patina green metal scale which holds drink menus, the blackboards on walls hanging out with mounted children's chairs and old serving trays, plates, and a colorful vintage Chinese checkers board, a few do-it-yourself paintings ranging from a nude feminine bust to a fogged-in Golden Gate. The seating is French bistro style, with chairs made of bamboo and woven plastic. Everything together making it hard to imagine just one person arranging things.
Does the diner want to acknowledge France? Yes, but it wants to look only so long, then it says, thank you so much for these great chairs, goodbye. It doesn't linger on France like a voyeur with a pocket busting with quarters for the empire's cultural peep show. Are the baguettes perfection? I wouldn't know, but they are good enough that I always save my hunk of airy and crusty bread for last. I wait until all other breakfast foods are consumed, and then I spread butter on each slice and eat them like exquisite desserts.
I think more than many other locations, cafés give you the impresison that you're being watched, and therefore you really should be doing something. Writers are solitary people in my experience. And even if they are socialites, they are elitist, and imagine themselves isolated. That stupidly talented writer Jonathan Franzen says that if you truly want to be alone, read a book. I can't remember if he extends his theory to writing, but I think it might be just as true. If you write like the narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, alone in some dank uninhabitable basement, projecting your voice out of the obscure darkness, you eventually lose touch with the point, the desire, the means. Well, if you want to use a deranged Poe narrator, someone who exhibits unabashed self-destruction like reality T.V. characters before reality T.V., then perhaps you do need to lock yourself up in an attic like that father character from Absalom, Absalom!, finally refusing the hoisted up buckets of bread crusts. It just doesn't work that way for me.
When trying to look at and understand Toni Morrison's arguments in Playing in the Dark, I do better when I'm out. When I'm alone in my home, with the T.V. begging me to stop thinking critically, I can't help but have to read her over and over until I have to look up every other word, and I just end up napping. If I'm at the café, three coffees in, being asked intermittently by the wait staff about things like the local college baseball team, or how I'm doing in school, I feel just the right amount of self-imposed, self-conscious pressure that seems ultimately necessary in keeping up with Morrison. Here, I get just enough outer stimulation that the sabotaging images of my instructors, who have dubbed my writing "unclear," "wordy," and "confusing"; dubbed it so through glaring marginal repetition; just enough white noise (there's a reference Morrison would be interested in), to quiet the doubter within. How am I doing in school? Barely. Barely staying above average. Barely crossing finishing lines. Barely getting any kinds of attention. Barely ever having to say, oh no, I'm married, but thank God you asked because I've been internalizing all this "average" criticism and feel like I have no wares left. Nothing to flash. Nothing to tantalize you with.
Being out, being a member of the diner microcosm, helps to facilitate the understanding of lines like this:
Such studies will reveal the process of establishing others in order to know them, to display knowledge of the other so as to ease and order external and internal chaos.
Of course, Morrison is talking about her term Africanism, and the other here is defined by marked or markable racial difference. But I'm in the café, it's not black and white here. Yet, I'm surrounded by others, through the very processes that Morrison describes, and I have been influenced to see things in the context of me/others/else through the way of structuring my self and the world that her work describes. I'm a universal consumer, and the other is everything outside of the voices in my head and impulses in my body. I think she is right, we know ourselves through others. And not just racially, but in all kinds of ways. What is it that Derrida calls it? Differànce? Differánce? It's how we know ourselves. But something escapes. The soul, maybe.
I think the diner worked its voodoo today, and I've been able to formulate something about Benito Cereno that will make my previous essays look concise, sparse even. I mean what's not wordy if Playing in the Dark is not wordy, and confusing, and ambiguous, and unclear? That's what the café does. It gives you just the right amount of hope that maybe you are unclear because you are a genius, or that maybe even if you are an idiot you can write about something, which is more than most dare to dream to do. It's the kind of stimulus that helps the writer to skate the edge of brilliance, or at least to resort to nice chit chat when the glare is too painful. It's the tightening of the mind at the bottom of a mimosa. The possibility of sharing an insight, and keeping it all to your greedy obese self, alone with everyone.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
They Have Faith
The University is recognizing exemplary students on Friday night, and yours truly happens to be one of them. I am apparently slated to graduate Cum Laude, I think, in my major only. Still, I have worked really hard to always get good grades, and not just to get high grades, but because I actually believed that if I did all the assignments, and put a lot of heart into them, I would come out of the system having taken full advantage of my education. In other words, I didn't want to miss a thing. Throughout this experience I have wanted to take the path that would push me, that would make me grow. It has definitely been worth it.
I'm not sure what my grades are going to be for my final semester. Things appear to be going well, but one of my instructors just doesn't seem to get my writing. I'm not clear enough, I'm too wordy, etc. I'm going to talk to him tomorrow, and hopefully we will be able to communicate better in person, and I can get some helpful feedback in order to fulfill the assignments to his and my liking. Which of course means As. I got a B+ on my Medieval Lit Midterm -- no big surprise, it's not my thing. The final is on poetry explication, which I'm fairly good at. I'm almost sure that I can pull an A- in that class. The seminar in lit class is going swimmingly, all As, and the Studies in Lit and Comp. Class is also going well. That just leaves the two American Lit classes with The Professor That Doesn't Understand Me. I don't dislike him, but I'm sad that we aren't communicating well.
I don't know where my grade point average will end up, so maybe this convocation will be just be a glimmer of the dream of graduating with honors, but even then, I still enjoy a party that celebrates my academic achievement. Which, by the way, has certainly been something to behold!
Graduation is very close, and my future is uncertain at the moment. I'm probably going to spend the next "semester" researching on my own, and sending a horde of applications out to various schools. I just don't know where the money is going to come from, and then, when I'm finished with graduate school, what the education system will look like. I can always do hair, but after all this hard work, it seems a little depressing to think of the future of education in this state. But we'll see. The University seems to have faith that I'll keep my grade point average up, so perhaps I should have a little faith in the University.
I'm not sure what my grades are going to be for my final semester. Things appear to be going well, but one of my instructors just doesn't seem to get my writing. I'm not clear enough, I'm too wordy, etc. I'm going to talk to him tomorrow, and hopefully we will be able to communicate better in person, and I can get some helpful feedback in order to fulfill the assignments to his and my liking. Which of course means As. I got a B+ on my Medieval Lit Midterm -- no big surprise, it's not my thing. The final is on poetry explication, which I'm fairly good at. I'm almost sure that I can pull an A- in that class. The seminar in lit class is going swimmingly, all As, and the Studies in Lit and Comp. Class is also going well. That just leaves the two American Lit classes with The Professor That Doesn't Understand Me. I don't dislike him, but I'm sad that we aren't communicating well.
I don't know where my grade point average will end up, so maybe this convocation will be just be a glimmer of the dream of graduating with honors, but even then, I still enjoy a party that celebrates my academic achievement. Which, by the way, has certainly been something to behold!
Graduation is very close, and my future is uncertain at the moment. I'm probably going to spend the next "semester" researching on my own, and sending a horde of applications out to various schools. I just don't know where the money is going to come from, and then, when I'm finished with graduate school, what the education system will look like. I can always do hair, but after all this hard work, it seems a little depressing to think of the future of education in this state. But we'll see. The University seems to have faith that I'll keep my grade point average up, so perhaps I should have a little faith in the University.
Friday, March 20, 2009
The Scarlet Letter -- Chapter 2 - End
I hate to say it, but I just don't have time to get As and read for myself. My American Literature instructor seems to be an expert on all theory EXCEPT Jung, so I don't really get a chance to discuss my ideas about gender with a specialist in the concepts of male and female unity/equality, at least not the ones that I imagine are driving American Gothic in the nineteenth century. So, just to kind of generalize about the concepts I see in this novel, I think I will say that I see Hester as a sort of Mother type who gives birth to a female Messiah. I love the ambiguity of the novel, the way it second, and third, and fourth guesses itself. I'm more of a Melvillian cynic at heart, but there is a beauty in Hawthorne's criticism of idealism -- a reverence for the worst possible fear to be just as true as the best possible comfort--a dismantling of the whole idea of paradox--well. I think the Emerson is getting to me.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
A Return to the Scarlet Letter -- Ch. 1
I love this book. Not only is it a study of the strictly ordered communities in our national history, but it is also an examination of signs and signifiers, those pesky things through which we try to make sense of the universal chaos we seem unable to tolerate. What I'm noticing this read is how much Hawthorne seems to be commenting on the arbitrary nature of signs, and how close to the edge of reason he takes the reader, without letting them fall into the void.
I used to think that the opening chapter of The Scarlet Letter was to orient the reader using a man v. nature construction. I saw the prison and the cemetery as emblematic of societies' struggle to control the natural instincts of humans, which stretch even to how they order their burial -- death and decay being the last triumph of the forces of the universe. Yet, the last paragraph of the chapter "The Prison Door" causes me to wonder just how much Hawthorne is playing with our sentiments concerning signifiers. It reads
First, I am struck by Hawthorne's narrator's tone. I am almost convinced that this entire paragraph is meant to be satirical. The narrator comments that the appearance of the rosebush "has been kept alive in history." What is this "history"? Is it the historical texts of the 1600s that Hawthorne was so fond of pouring over? Is it the oral tradition, the folkloric tradition, the mythological rendition? Or does the narrator suggest that it still exists, is still alive? And what of this "old wilderness"? Is the narrator referring to the original clearing of the forest where the colony now sits? The next aside, about Anne Hutchinson, contributes heavily to the passages satirical tone. To suggest that the rosebush magically sprouted from under the feet of Anne Hutchinson is to either put a stake in, or sarcastically undermine, the feminist movement of the 1800s. Which is it? I think for Hawthorne, it has to be both.
The novel is ultimately feminist, and critical of the ways in which feminist arguments digress due to sentiment and nostalgia. If you want to argue that Anne Hutchinson is a feminist icon, a legend concerning a rose bush springing up under her feet as she marched to prison to await trial for her feminist heresy would only serve to genderize a rosebush. It's the act of using gender as a signifier that Hawthorne is ridiculing. I don't think the narrator is as neutral as he claims to be. The narrator says that "we shall not take upon us to determine," but giving the comparison between the story about a strong thriving rosebush surviving the "rape" of the wilderness by the colonists, and a fable concerning its association with Anne Hutchinson, allows the reader to focus on the significance of a rosebush in the first place. I usually like to go on about the rose as the old chivalric symbol of feminine purity, and gnostic symbolism, which uses the rose to symbolize the divine feminine. I don't think this information is lost on Hawthorne. I do think that when the narrator "plucks" a rose for us, it is not, as it says, to "serve to symbolize some sweet moral blossom." I think it is handed to us so that we can examine what we think the rose, and by extension, gender, means.
I used to think that the opening chapter of The Scarlet Letter was to orient the reader using a man v. nature construction. I saw the prison and the cemetery as emblematic of societies' struggle to control the natural instincts of humans, which stretch even to how they order their burial -- death and decay being the last triumph of the forces of the universe. Yet, the last paragraph of the chapter "The Prison Door" causes me to wonder just how much Hawthorne is playing with our sentiments concerning signifiers. It reads
The rose bush, by strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,--or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Anne Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,--we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about the issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
First, I am struck by Hawthorne's narrator's tone. I am almost convinced that this entire paragraph is meant to be satirical. The narrator comments that the appearance of the rosebush "has been kept alive in history." What is this "history"? Is it the historical texts of the 1600s that Hawthorne was so fond of pouring over? Is it the oral tradition, the folkloric tradition, the mythological rendition? Or does the narrator suggest that it still exists, is still alive? And what of this "old wilderness"? Is the narrator referring to the original clearing of the forest where the colony now sits? The next aside, about Anne Hutchinson, contributes heavily to the passages satirical tone. To suggest that the rosebush magically sprouted from under the feet of Anne Hutchinson is to either put a stake in, or sarcastically undermine, the feminist movement of the 1800s. Which is it? I think for Hawthorne, it has to be both.
The novel is ultimately feminist, and critical of the ways in which feminist arguments digress due to sentiment and nostalgia. If you want to argue that Anne Hutchinson is a feminist icon, a legend concerning a rose bush springing up under her feet as she marched to prison to await trial for her feminist heresy would only serve to genderize a rosebush. It's the act of using gender as a signifier that Hawthorne is ridiculing. I don't think the narrator is as neutral as he claims to be. The narrator says that "we shall not take upon us to determine," but giving the comparison between the story about a strong thriving rosebush surviving the "rape" of the wilderness by the colonists, and a fable concerning its association with Anne Hutchinson, allows the reader to focus on the significance of a rosebush in the first place. I usually like to go on about the rose as the old chivalric symbol of feminine purity, and gnostic symbolism, which uses the rose to symbolize the divine feminine. I don't think this information is lost on Hawthorne. I do think that when the narrator "plucks" a rose for us, it is not, as it says, to "serve to symbolize some sweet moral blossom." I think it is handed to us so that we can examine what we think the rose, and by extension, gender, means.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Individual and Collective Fate
If you haven't seen The Reader, I highly suggest that you do. It is a movie that I think will go down as one of the best movies, at least, of this decade. Upon the second viewing, I agreed with my friend Joe that the actor David Kross gives one of the best performances I've seen that deal with the themes of the film. Stephen Daldry is amazing. I can't recommend it enough, and recommend that you really contemplate the reasons why Michael is so deeply affected by Hanna's treatment. It's my choice for best film.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Cheerio
I know that for the last couple of years I have been using this blog to, well, complain. I've often come here to complain about things that no one in their right mind would give an ear to. I've also used this forum to discuss literature, film, and art, but, let's face it, not as often as I've come here to rant and moan. So to make it up to you, and me, dear reader, I've planned to make the next few posts about some of the better experiences I've had in the past couple of months, and as soon as I have access to the hard drive with some pictures, some images to go along with.
I promise I'm not always an ungrateful wretch. In fact, just today I thought that my life has been a boon of blessings, and I can't imagine that I've ever done anything to deserve it.
Just on an evil sidenote, today in American Gothic we discussed the fabulous Hawthorne story "Roger Malvin's Burial," and guess what, I commented, "You know, it seems like Malvin has no problem with Bourne leaving him, but he doesn't respect that Bourne wants to stay -- Bourne should have stuck with his gut feeling that he should stay." And the instructor kind of blew me off, then went on to discuss that Bourne is actually suffering from a horrible guilt that Freud says results from committing an act that everyone tells you is okay, but that you have a personal issue with. Am I the only one that sees that I was pretty much alluding to this?
Happy post next time, I promise.
I promise I'm not always an ungrateful wretch. In fact, just today I thought that my life has been a boon of blessings, and I can't imagine that I've ever done anything to deserve it.
Just on an evil sidenote, today in American Gothic we discussed the fabulous Hawthorne story "Roger Malvin's Burial," and guess what, I commented, "You know, it seems like Malvin has no problem with Bourne leaving him, but he doesn't respect that Bourne wants to stay -- Bourne should have stuck with his gut feeling that he should stay." And the instructor kind of blew me off, then went on to discuss that Bourne is actually suffering from a horrible guilt that Freud says results from committing an act that everyone tells you is okay, but that you have a personal issue with. Am I the only one that sees that I was pretty much alluding to this?
Happy post next time, I promise.
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