(500) Days of Sughmmer

Listen, you. You took it all -- Say Anything, Better Off Dead, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and even other relevant later films, like Reality Bites, and High Fidelity, and you barfed your stupid movie all over their precious memory. Using The Smiths and Joy Division and the Pixies? Shame on you! Pretending L.A. is New York? Ridiculous. Your stupid, stupid, stupid sacrilegious movie. I can't think of one original moment in this film. And that actor? What, was Shia LaBeouf too expensive? While I liked these actors in other, less pretentious films, like Ten Things I Hate About You (yes, that actually was a pretty decent kids film), and Elf (she was pretty good in that one, but I really doubt she's worth all the attention she gets), their work here is sub-par, at best.

I actually think that this movie was my own personal "Summer." Lured in by the promise of an unusual kind of love story, I find myself biting down on the most phony "indie" sanctimonious bullcrap. No, the girl is the not the bad guy! You, you stupid movie, you are the bad guy. I hate you, movie.

Back of the Line, Lady!

Guess who's thirty. Actually, don't.

The summer class went well. Sometimes I felt a little outnumbered, a sort of lunatics are taking over the asylum thing, but overall I liked the practice, and think my writing is better than ever. I'm enrolled in the P.E. class that will give me the unit I need to officially graduate, and now I have about a week to decide how many programs I'm going to apply to for Fall 2010. I'm still very confused. I don't know if I want to apply to Master's programs or Ph.D. programs, or both. I'm back in that uncomfortable position of starting over, moving to the back of the line, you know. I'm always fighting the voice in my head that warns me I might be accepted and then be the dumbest person in the room. That might sound as pathetic as it is, but I do have to worry a little, a consequence of departing from CSUDH where I've often been the smartest student in the room. Maybe that is what this college business has really been about. If I have a Ph.D., maybe I'll be able to say, hey! I'm kind of smart...or something.

So I'll be researching and applying to the usual: USC, UCLA, UCR, UCI, Claremont...maybe less, maybe more. I have to proof my submittals to death. I'm so terrible when it comes to the details. I'm going to update/redo my statement of purpose. I think I have a bit more confidence now. I have to be more Shakti-like, able to destroy and give birth to worlds, and less pick me! Pick me! Pick me! It's challenging.

I'm also going to write a paper about the 80's British band The Smiths, and the solo work of its frontman, Morrissey. When I went to London in May, I had to study maps of the Underground in order to know how to get around. What I discovered was that I knew a ton of the names of the underground stations. I had never been serious about a map on London before the trip; the familiarity was due to listening to The Smiths and Morrissey, and the several references to these locations that are in their albums. I realized that I already had a relationship with these places, simply because I was a loyal fan of the music. So I'd like to write a paper -- a kind of "thought experiment" in which I discuss the implications of place in popular music, or maybe what it means to have expectations of a place, based on a mental landscape arranged according to a composite sketch implied in lyrics. I'm also curious about the limitations of fan loyalty. Did I let myself create my own experiences in London? Or was I overly influenced by sentiment created through lines like, "Here is London, giddy London; is it home of the free or what?," "And if a double-decker bus crashes into us, to die by your side, such a heavenly way to die," "Piccadilly palare was just silly slang, between me and the boys in my gang." It is going to take some research, but I think by the time I'm through I might have something kind of interesting and novel to shop around.

I also need to work more on my ideas about Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick. I've got to be more persistent, or I'll be one of those terrible ABD professors, demanding that students turn papers in on time, but too chicken to self-impose a deadline.

And it's still summer! More surfing! More beer! More happy hours!

Rodney Dangerfield and I

My degree. It just never came in the mail. So I went to university advisement -- as opposed to major advisement, which is the only advisement I've been to, or been advised to go to -- and they informed me that I am four credits short of the units required for a bachelor's degree. Panic. Registering in Fall for four units would cost me $2000. I quickly scanned the university website for the second summer session class schedule. Two courses in advanced composition -- one taught by a dreaded, loathed instructor (by me, anyway), the infamous ponytail man who caused me so much distress in my first semester at DH, but there! The other section presented by the greatly admired Dr. H, who taught last semester's senior seminar. The one who sweetly told me I'd better ask him for a letter of recommendation or he'd be insulted. Ah, sigh. A late night email went out, begging him for late admission. A sincere acceptance followed, including the melodious phrase, you are one of the best students I've had in a class. Oh, tell me more! (This experience is doing nothing for my appreciation of Virginia Woolf's note about the ability to write without praise -- that I read...in her own hand...at the British Library...where I cried...and had to hide my face.)

So I'm in class for the summer. As usual, my classmates are...well, they act and speak as if they are in a sort of academic halfway house. As if they can't quite manage to get by in a real university, and the class is some kind of gateway to real life. Of course, it is a real university. And Dr. H is very forgiving and tolerant of insanely off the mark student comments, which I appreciate, even though I know that my face is scrunched up in cerebral pain at the ignorance and insolence. Even though composition is hard for me. Argument is so...logical. I'm not worried about the class, but I am a little but worried about my writing, so this class is good practice, good reminders, you know.

And don't think I wasn't mad as a hornet when I found out that I had never been advised about those four units. But there comes a time when you just can't waste your breath on things that you can't really change. So it's back to school.

A Strangely Moving Costume

Well, hello. Just in case you were wondering, I graduated.

I really don't think anyone looks good in this getup:

Celebratory mimosas, with lots of family and friends.


Three days later we were on a plane to London, and then a week later we took a train to Paris. Happy Graduation to me, and happy eleventh anniversary to us. I loved Europe, and will share those photos in a future post.

He Kind of Looked Like My Grandpa Lyle

It was just a little while ago that I was writing how much I adore the film Baby Doll. The greatness of this film is undoubtably due to a number of things, like the writing, photography, and, of course, the acting. Karl Malden plays Archie Lee, and the film couldn't have been as good without him. Malden's acting is superb, no matter what role he's playing. He won an Oscar for his performance in A Streetcar Named Desire, and seemed to have a special talent for capturing the tortured and disillusioned American in all of us. Malden died yesterday, and the Los Angeles Times generously gave him a small square near the bottom of the front page which announced his passing. Malden was able to hold his own while acting alongside the likes of Marlon Brando, Charleton Heston, and Montgomery Clift.

I was delighted to see Eli Wallach on a recent episode of Nurse Jackie, and I think Carroll Baker is still alive, and maybe even living in Los Angeles, although the Times seems not to have been able or willing to reach her for comment.

Beginning Tomorrow

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.

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:

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.