1:19 a.m. - 2008-05-14
FROM DERRIDA TO DIDION: AT LEAST MY HEAD DIDN'T ACTUALLY EXPLODE
So this is the longest I've ever gone without writing (excluding the 22 years and 8 months I went before starting this thing 3 months ago), but in my defense I've been busy as hell. This is a list what I have done while I've been gone, organized numerically, with frequent interruptions:
1) wrote 3 papers, titled respectively: "Reading Scenes of Castration and Phallic Reconstitution in The Marquise of O," "Modern Characters in Victorian Settings: The Provincial Crisis of Between the Acts"," and "The Time Machine - Endnotes" (Mon-Fri; 28 pages total)
2) actually did the research for said papers (Mon-Fri; would rather not think about # of pages, but probably well over a hundred - more Derrida, Lacan and Co. than I care to remember)
The assignment on Wells was actually pretty fun. We'd already written two long-ish research papers in this class, so the last one was set up as kind of a fuck-off assignment, where we had to present 4 real footnotes to the text, made up of actual research, and four fake ones. I was particularly proud of one of mine (posted below), in which I actually managed to cite a Pravda article. Ah, late Victorian novels and hilarious post-Soviet science reporting: two of my favorite things, together at last.
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FOOTNOTE
(p. 4) There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it: Later research proved this hypothesis, on which the Time Traveler based the construction of his machine, to be true, and it apparently forms the basis for Stephen Hawking's text, A Brief History of Time. We say 'apparently' because we, the editors, sent our intern to buy a copy of the bestseller and, to be frank, not a single one of us could get through the damn thing. In fact, we have since discovered that Hawking's U.S. publisher, the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, conducted a customer satisfaction survey in 1990 and successfully located a mere 6 people who said they finished the book, only one of whom claimed to have understood it. Their research and development department identified him as a 23-year old named Matthew "Big Mo" Richardson, a self-described "student of the Real, hydroponic gardener, and temporo-anarchist". Wells' and Hawking's theories have most recently been adapted by Vadim Chernobrov, experiment administrator for the the construction of Russia's first-ever time machine, which is still in test stages. At the time of writing, several successful time travel experiments with small animals have been reported, though the subjects do seem to experience some unfortunate lingering side effects. Lena Ksandinova, trans. "Gates to the Future Become Reality This Spring" Pravda. 22 Feb. 2008. (accessed 6 May 2008); available from http://english.pravda.ru/society/anomal/22-02-2008/104194-gates_future-0.
END FOOTNOTE
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3) went to Boston for a minute, met up with dad and Stepmother, saw a dear friend who once put me up on extremely short notice in her apartment in Paris (think less than an hour), and then Newport for my brother's 21st birthday (Fri-Tues; no pages, but much train riding, along with veritable buckets of wine) (I'm planning another post about this, supplemented by the story of how the American taxpayers bought my last illegal drink)
4) took Comp. Sci. final (Tues; 4 programs and far too little studying)
5) read Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder and Other Stories, Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love
REACTIONS
The Didion novel was everything I'd heard it was - beautiful, eloquent, sort of makes you suicidal.
My reaction to the Atwood stories was a bit more complicated. It could be that I'm simply too young to enjoy this style of reminiscent writing, but the stories about her childhood (excuse me, her character's childhood, yeah right) seemed a little...bad. Like 'I can't really remember a whole lot from being that age, but I'm getting older and would like to take a moment to revel in my unashamed nostalgia for the carefree days of youth, so, if you'll excuse me, I'm just gonna pull some hive-mind style memories out of this Louisa May Alcott novel and reset them on a lake in Vancouver, cool?'. I almost left the book on the train, but ended up holding on to it. And I'm glad I did, because the book took a definite upswing around the time she starts narrating her twenties. The thing I admire about Atwood - aside from the fact the she's incredibly fucking prolific, a trait I would kill for - is that she embraces the dark bits of her characters, but balances them with moments of real joy. No matter what she's writing, she has the ability to be painfully perceptive, introspective, and, when it's called for, downright brutal. This is what was missing from her childhood stories, but what was particularly impressive about the later ones. In what is obviously a memoir of some variety, there are moments of clarity and total honesty about herself as a young woman, without cynicism for its own sake, or as a defense mechanism. A rare and beautiful thing.
The Gilbert book was given to me by Stepmother, and was (thank god) a bit/lot lighter than the other books, in tone if not in plot. Packaged and written as a beach-blanket read, the story of one woman's quest for spiritual enlightenment, at moments it's easy to forget that you are also reading a nonfiction about a woman emerging from a literally suicidal state, in the aftermath of a divorce, stripped of her assets, pushing herself to mental and physical extremes in an attempt to reincarnate herself as someone entirely new. Again, maybe I'm just too young to entirely understand, but I found myself wishing she'd adopted a slightly less frivolous tone to deal with something that is, to me, unimaginable. However, I did enjoy reading the bit set in Bali, and found some of her realizations there to be a bit more relatable than when she was being all new-agey and transcendent in the ashram.
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You know, when I finished my papers, I felt like I was never going to write again. Like there were No Words Left. It doesn't seem like this is going to be a problem.
-Britt
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