Things are looking up. I'm looking up, actually, out through the skylight in the middle of the room, watching the rain. It's such a nice sound. I'm listening to Simon & Garfunkel, and I've finished my two big seminar presentations for the week. I talked to my mom, my sister, and Enoch. I just got a really good grade on an english paper, finally. And I just ate a cinnamon-raisin bagel, warm and gooey, soft and chewy. I've got about twenty-five things to worry about at the moment, but I don't have that sinking feeling I had a week or two ago, like I couldn't even imagine finishing everything. And, tonight I might get a good night's sleep, wake up with my homework done, and go running.
I suppose satisfaction and content is boring fodder for a post, but I don't mind. It's remarkable how much my attitude has changed in the last few months--I just don't really care about going to bed on time, wearing matching shades, putting myself out there in class even if my thought isn't totally formulated. It's working out quite well. And now I finally have a bike again, complete with a milk crate strapped to the back and a fancy headlight and new tires and a portable bike pump. Now I'm all set to be a faux-biker vegetable-eater campaign-organizer ocean-ogler washed-up californian. Yup. I'm ready to get out of here.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Friday, April 13, 2007
Cultural Capital in the Corner Café
This is a copy of my latest English assignment - to imitate an author's writing style, in my case Hemingway's. I guess I just thought it belonged here, and want to remember it. I really wish I could have kept writing:
All the noise came from below the street. Before I found that alley off the Plaza de Toledo there was always the smell of fresh tulips in the air, and suddenly there I was among the pashminas and the waffle vendors and dozens of children were pouring out of the candy shops into the street. I would walk past these shops every Sunday afternoon that semester, making sure to drop twenty cents into the hat of a lone guitarist, and I’d glance up from time to time once I reached the view at the top of the hill. Sometimes when I had only bought mandarins and a pair of earrings I would walk home afterward. If I walked enough in this city I might not need a map anymore, and anyway it didn’t matter where I walked in Madrid because I could lose myself among the ham shops and the fruit stands and the pickpockets so that there was always something to do in the afternoon.
At first I couldn’t help but think of my American friends back home and wonder what they might be doing, but then a paralyzing nostalgia would grip me around the neck and I would duck into a small boutique to forget about it. If not for that initial fear mixed with a sense of brash curiosity I would certainly not have found my hidden flamenco cafés or bookstores and I might not even have followed a city cat down her secret path to the riverbank. These were the unwritten pleasures of my semester in Spain, where I learned of the daily rhythms and the tortillas de patatas and all the slang words for “see you later.”
All students should abandon their routines and their comfort zones to travel somewhere in the world, to be adventurous, to learn from other people’s habits. We all need to get lost when we’re five thousand miles from home before we can really know what we’re capable of, and that’s a personal truth we can’t just find in novels.
Walking through the thick desert air with the sun pressing down on me was not a feeling I could read about. The invaluable companionship of my walking shoes could not reveal my joys and fears from the comfort of a classroom desk. On the day that I first put away my map of Madrid and stepped out onto its fresh familiar sidewalk I knew that the city had entered me, and no literature professor could have captured that feeling.
Only after you have been surrounded by beautiful and immaculately-dressed Spaniards for two months can you understand the logic of buying a pair of boots with a week’s worth of lunch money. In my case it was worth the eye-widening hunger to click down the street in confident brown leather, a conclusion I never would have come to in the lazy streets of small-town Iowa. When you’ve been weaving empty-bellied through crowds all day and finally submit to a city bench, there is no word to describe the satisfaction of a slow conversation with the weary señora sitting next to you.
At last, as you find yourself accustomed to the rapid-fire Spanish bartering of the Sunday afternoon market, you realize with indescribable emotion that you are about to leave this dream world and return home. When the caipirhinas at the bar and the old man on the library steps become commonplace, when the mobs of tourists ask you for directions, when you know that your favorite bakery is coming up on the left and you can already smell the dough, then you are ready to go back home and think about your next adventure from the unsettling comfort of your dorm room desk. There is never any ending to Spain and you will never know that about a city until you strap on your scuffed shoes and look for it.
All the noise came from below the street. Before I found that alley off the Plaza de Toledo there was always the smell of fresh tulips in the air, and suddenly there I was among the pashminas and the waffle vendors and dozens of children were pouring out of the candy shops into the street. I would walk past these shops every Sunday afternoon that semester, making sure to drop twenty cents into the hat of a lone guitarist, and I’d glance up from time to time once I reached the view at the top of the hill. Sometimes when I had only bought mandarins and a pair of earrings I would walk home afterward. If I walked enough in this city I might not need a map anymore, and anyway it didn’t matter where I walked in Madrid because I could lose myself among the ham shops and the fruit stands and the pickpockets so that there was always something to do in the afternoon.
At first I couldn’t help but think of my American friends back home and wonder what they might be doing, but then a paralyzing nostalgia would grip me around the neck and I would duck into a small boutique to forget about it. If not for that initial fear mixed with a sense of brash curiosity I would certainly not have found my hidden flamenco cafés or bookstores and I might not even have followed a city cat down her secret path to the riverbank. These were the unwritten pleasures of my semester in Spain, where I learned of the daily rhythms and the tortillas de patatas and all the slang words for “see you later.”
All students should abandon their routines and their comfort zones to travel somewhere in the world, to be adventurous, to learn from other people’s habits. We all need to get lost when we’re five thousand miles from home before we can really know what we’re capable of, and that’s a personal truth we can’t just find in novels.
Walking through the thick desert air with the sun pressing down on me was not a feeling I could read about. The invaluable companionship of my walking shoes could not reveal my joys and fears from the comfort of a classroom desk. On the day that I first put away my map of Madrid and stepped out onto its fresh familiar sidewalk I knew that the city had entered me, and no literature professor could have captured that feeling.
Only after you have been surrounded by beautiful and immaculately-dressed Spaniards for two months can you understand the logic of buying a pair of boots with a week’s worth of lunch money. In my case it was worth the eye-widening hunger to click down the street in confident brown leather, a conclusion I never would have come to in the lazy streets of small-town Iowa. When you’ve been weaving empty-bellied through crowds all day and finally submit to a city bench, there is no word to describe the satisfaction of a slow conversation with the weary señora sitting next to you.
At last, as you find yourself accustomed to the rapid-fire Spanish bartering of the Sunday afternoon market, you realize with indescribable emotion that you are about to leave this dream world and return home. When the caipirhinas at the bar and the old man on the library steps become commonplace, when the mobs of tourists ask you for directions, when you know that your favorite bakery is coming up on the left and you can already smell the dough, then you are ready to go back home and think about your next adventure from the unsettling comfort of your dorm room desk. There is never any ending to Spain and you will never know that about a city until you strap on your scuffed shoes and look for it.
Monday, April 9, 2007
eternally yours...
Quick passage of Deleuze in Nietzsche & Philosophy, page 187:
"The eternal return 'is the closest approximation of being and becoming', it affirms the one of the other; a second affirmation is still necessary in order to bring about this approximation. This is why the eternal return is itself a wedding ring. This is why the Dinoysian universe, the eternal cycle, is a wedding ring, a wedding mirror which awaits the soul (anima) capable of admiring itself there, but also of reflecting it in admiring itself. This is why Dionysus wants a fiancee: 'Is it me, me that you want? The whole of me?' (Here again it will be noticed that, depending on the point at which one is placed, the wedding changes sense or partners. For, according to the constituted eternal return, Zarathustra himself appears as the fiance and eternity as the woman loved. But according to the constitution of the eternal return Dionysus is the first affirmation, becoming and being, more precisely the becoming which is only being as the object of a second affirmation; Ariadne is this second affirmation, Ariadne is the fiancee, the loving feminine power)."
188: "But Dionysus teaches Ariadne his secret: the true labyrinth is Dionysus himself, the true thread is the thread of affirmation. 'I am your labyrinth.'" Cute.
"The eternal return 'is the closest approximation of being and becoming', it affirms the one of the other; a second affirmation is still necessary in order to bring about this approximation. This is why the eternal return is itself a wedding ring. This is why the Dinoysian universe, the eternal cycle, is a wedding ring, a wedding mirror which awaits the soul (anima) capable of admiring itself there, but also of reflecting it in admiring itself. This is why Dionysus wants a fiancee: 'Is it me, me that you want? The whole of me?' (Here again it will be noticed that, depending on the point at which one is placed, the wedding changes sense or partners. For, according to the constituted eternal return, Zarathustra himself appears as the fiance and eternity as the woman loved. But according to the constitution of the eternal return Dionysus is the first affirmation, becoming and being, more precisely the becoming which is only being as the object of a second affirmation; Ariadne is this second affirmation, Ariadne is the fiancee, the loving feminine power)."
188: "But Dionysus teaches Ariadne his secret: the true labyrinth is Dionysus himself, the true thread is the thread of affirmation. 'I am your labyrinth.'" Cute.
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