Marginalia 2.0

I was just innocently writing a paper in the library and then my brain decided this was more important…

I definitely smell like a French whore right now.

Looook how many fucks I give!

Prof. McCannon (pointing to a piece of medieval art): “I’ll be danged if he’s not copping a feel.”

(slightly later)

“In Hinduism, they’re not clothed…it’s hot there.”

“Spring has not come to your door.” – Prof. McCannon in response to my rant about love being a farce

Harold: “But I love you.”

Maude: “That’s wonderful, Harold. Go out and love some more.”

“She looks like you, if you got dressed in the dark.”

“Kingdom of Heaven…a fabulous Orlando Bloom movie.” – Prof. Barrett

There’s a reason they call it wanderlust.

“I can’t really speak to the inner workings of thievery since I’ve managed to keep my police record fairly clean.”  – Prof. Barrett

Lots of triptychs…I’m so fucking bored.

Student: “Why did churches catch on fire so much?”

Prof Barrett: “Not paying attention…too much of the wine on the altar..”

“Tristan and Isolde, a very unfortunate movie that James Franco was in…which I actually really like, but anyway.” – Prof. Barrett

“Later, when you think of America, it all goes back to Lord Shaftsbury’s liver.” – Dr. McBride

If one more person tries to take this seat, I’m going to say it’s reserved for my invisible friend.

….15 Minutes Later….

Starting to feel like that might actually be true.

Maybe my phone is on my side and it died in order to force me to do work.

…Yeah, pretty sure phones don’t take sides.

Sometimes I get scared that I’m asymptomatic dead person.

And there you have it, the inner workings of my brain (and those of others), which is currently sabotaging me by refusing to make words happen that have anything to do with why we should study pre-modern art…

An update, for anyone who cares (probably just me): I have less than a hundred pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls left! Wooo!

Thoughts from the margins of my notebook

In case you’ve been wondering what I’ve been doing instead of reading lately…

Aristotle was kind of an idiot.

“I want my life to count for something.” – Richard Wright

Mrargh! I’m a demon!  (accompanying drawing of a demon hand – we’re reading the Inferno)

After leaving your apartment… – Young the Giant

Art History teachers who are obsessed with rainbows are fucking adorable.

It’s really cute how she puts about a dozen exclamation points after something when it’s in the Met.

“In any event” is such a weird phrase.

Please stop using the word sumptuous, it’s a bit creepy.

The fact that the UVa art museum has a copy of the Nike of Samothrace is probably the most pathetic thing ever.

Nefer-titty is the best thing ever said.

I really can’t do this right now.

I am a visitor here…I am not permanent. – The Postal Service

Dear God are you capable of not talking

Why you feel the need to raise your hand and say “I have a question” is beyond me. Just ask your fucking question.

Sometimes I want to give my life to someone who would actually do something with it.

As you can see, I’m kind of a bitch. I hope this is not news to anyone. 

 

On uselessness

I have decided that I may be the most useless human being ever.  Here is my evidence:

1. The amount of time I spend derping on the Internet is not even inordinate. It is gratuitous. It is disheartening. It is massive.

2. I manage to do this WITHOUT a facebook. Enough said on that matter.

3. I have no willpower.

4. Most of my thoughts are centered on the same five pointless arguments I’ve been having with myself for an amount of time that is also sickening.

5. Today, I used one of my jackets to mop up detergent.

6. I sometimes think about how I would make a good homeless person.

7. I don’t have a job or any source of income. My entire existence depends on the charity of others and theoretical money in the form of loans.

8. I think my prediction about not finishing For Whom the Bell Tolls before the end of the semester is going to come true.

9. I have a volunteer job that I detest and therefore passively-aggressively let reside at the very bottom of my priorities list, which leads me to my conclusion –

10. In addition to being useless, I’m just a generally shitty person.

These streets will make you feel brand-new

big lights will inspire you, let’s hear it for New York.

Sorry I’ve been mute for so long, but this city is magic. I’m working my way through For Whom the Bell Tolls, though. You know what they say about slow and steady…however, it is worth noting that at the “steady” rate I’m going I may not be finished by the end of the semester. Ha. But who cares? After all,

I’m the new Sinatra, and since I made it here

I can make it anywhere.

And just to prove I’m still me/because this new life is too perfect to lose, knock on wood. 🙂

I’m so tired and my hands smell like latex

but McDonald’s iced coffee makes everything better.

Why am I in a McDonalds, you may wonder, drinking iced coffee at 11:30 on a Friday night?

I would say it’s all part of my grand plan to become master of the universe, but that’s stupid. The truth is that I needed to come here to check my email so I could get the wifi password of the people I’m house-sitting for, and my feet really hurt from working all night and I don’t want to go back to a dark, empty house and clean up the cat vomit I didn’t have the time or energy to deal with earlier.

You’re really wishing I’d just said it was all about becoming master of the universe, aren’t you?

In other news, I am no longer on the hook for everything I own to the American justice system! Yay! I have to do twenty hours of community service and then my trespassing citation just goes away. POOF. LIKE MAGIC. LIKE IT NEVER FUCKING HAPPENED, except, oh wait, I still spent two months worrying and stressing and saving because of it. Which brings me to….

I’M RICH!

Not by adult standards, mind you. But by broke soon-to-be college-student-with-massive-debt standards, I’m doing okay. Okay enough that I bought For Whom the Bell Tolls today, AND got complimented on my literary taste by my cute coworker. CLEARLY, MY LIFE IS ON THE UP AND UP. IT’S ALL ACES FROM HERE ON OUT. IT WAS 11:11 AND I COULDN’T THINK OF ANYTHING TO WISH FOR! WHAT?! (Insert superstitious knocking on wood.)

Yeah. Ignore me. This coffee may have made me feel human again, but I’m still really fucking tired.

life is so distracting

Not that I’m complaining, of course. It’s just that between art class and figuring out student loans and work and trying to see people before I leave in…omg, 25 days, it’s a bit difficult to find time for my erstwhile mustachioed paramour. Slash I can’t find my dad’s copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and there is no way I’m shelling out 30 bucks at Barnes and Noble. But, er…watch this space? Or don’t. Whatever floats your kayak.

Fuck you, Mark Zuckerberg. Fuck you kindly.

I deactivated my facebook 11 days ago. Result: I kind of feel like I no longer exist in a social sense, which is maddening because I DON’T WANT TO USE FACEBOOK. I DON’T LIKE IT. IT MAKES ME FEEL BADLY ABOUT MYSELF. IT’S A WASTE OF LIFE. IT’S BORING. THERE’S SO MANY OTHER THINGS I COULD BE DOING (not necessarily productive, but at least not soul-sucking). But honestly, the only thing that’s keeping me from going back right this minute is that I don’t want to look like a spineless fucking moron.  I made kind of a big to-do about deleting it. Then I chickened out and just deactivated. Now I’m considering going back. DO YOU SEE HOW IT NEVER ENDS?!

I’m so frustrated right now. And yes, I do realize that this is yet another blog post which is not about literature, but rather things which are distracting me from literature. It’s becoming yet another one of these patterns in my life that I can’t seem to shake. And honestly, it all just makes me vaguely nauseous, because it’s so disconnected from anything resembling real.

Is there anybody going to listen to my story

all about the brooding Hemingway?

I know I said I didn’t care, and I don’t, really. But zero total views? Ouch.  But I don’t care. I’M JUST KIDDING, WHY DOESN’T ANYONE LOVE ME?! No, no. That was irony. I’M SO BORDERLINE. And I mean that in both the “edgy” and “personality disorder” sense of the word. OOH, DOUBLE ENTENDRE.

Seriously, though…my Hemingway binge continues. I finished A Farewell to Arms. The rain was a nice touch. Other than that, I’m not sure how I feel about the ending. I know Hemingway’s not one for sentiment, but it was so understated that it was almost cruel. I did like how Henry stayed with her in the hospital, though. I may be being sadly misled by my impressions of 50’s movies where men sit in waiting rooms and smoke cigars during the woman’s labor, but I don’t think that was all the common back then. I also particularly liked the part where he said “I felt no feeling of fatherhood”, especially contrasted with when he tries to say goodbye to Catherine and “it was like saying goodbye to a statue.” The comparison is interesting to me because at that point he wasn’t aware that the baby was born dead. Are we supposed to believe that he felt nothing for his son because he was so worried about Catherine? I don’t have an answer, but the near-complete absence of emotion for the child in the book seems mildly noteworthy (at one point, they even speculate about whether “the brat will come between us”). And the way they pretend they’re married – it’s like they’re children playing house, in a way, which gives the affair a quality that is both innocent and tragic.

It seems to me that the theme of the novel is that we can’t escape our fate. Henry tries to escape the war, chooses love and life instead, and is rewarded by having the only person he truly cares about wrenched away from him. But seen through the lens of the quote I posted the  other day, Catherine seems to me to be at least “very brave” if not also “very good” and “very gentle”, and, in a sense, unbreakable. I mean, think about it. She loses her childhood love to war, is willing to try again, hides her pregnancy for three months, demands nothing from Henry, always puts on a brave face for him, and even tries to protect him from seeing her in pain in the middle of childbirth. That’s a pretty amazing woman (and to think I found her annoying at first!). This also begs the question of whether Hemingway could only portray a woman admirably in a traditional gender role, but that’s an issue for another day. Running with this theory, Henry is able to survive because he exemplifies none of those characteristics – we can be sure that the world will kill him too, in no special hurry, but will he be strong at the broken places? He promises Catherine that he will never feel for anyone the way he does for her, but the more fascinating question, I believe, is that of whether he will ever feel anything again at all. It seems likely that he will revert to being the man Rinaldi described, “all fire and smoke and nothing inside.”  This is Hemingway’s masterstroke, the dagger at the heart of A Farewell to Arms: life is pointless except for the few people that give it meaning, and the world always breaks them first.

The world breaks every one

and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

Serious Point Number One. I like this book much better than The Sun Also Rises. The Sun Also Rises feels to me like a dumbed-down conglomerate of A Moveable Feast and A Farewell to Arms – it has all the aimlessness of A Moveable Feast with none of the uncharacteristic softness, all the passion of A Farewell to Arms with none of the depth of emotion. I have to admit that I was skeptical when I first read Catherine and Lieutenant Henry’s declarations – I’m a hard sell when it comes to whirlwind romances. But Hemingway’s prose is so beautifully restrained, his dialogue so strange and heartbreaking, that I believed in spite of myself. When Catherine says things like “I’m a very old-fashioned wife” and Henry offers to cut out his tongue after his words offend her, I ache for both of them. Their situation is so tragic and yet somehow so pure that I can’t help but root for them even though I feel pretty confident that their love will not survive.

Serious Point Number Two. The above quote is one of the truest I’ve ever encountered. One of my favorite things that I discovered while reading A Moveable Feast was that Hemingway’s prose, which sometimes makes me cry because it seems too perfect to be real, was not something that just came to him. When he admitted to spending all morning working on a single paragraph, I felt a strange determination seize me. Writing has come naturally to me, if not always, at least for a very long time, and I think that’s why I can’t ever bring myself to stick with a project. A few days ago, for example, I had what I thought was a pretty amazing idea for a novel – a sort of Peter Pan retelling, only more magical realism than fantasy. The problem I ran into with it is that I wanted Wendy to choose to stay in Never Never Land. This is something that annoys me to no end – I know that people can’t live forever. I know that everyone has to grow up, and you can’t live in a fantasy forever. But who the fuck would choose that? You’re offered immortality – immortality with someone you love, no less (I see you, Tuck Everlasting), and you CHOOSE TO DIE? That’s actually the one thing about Twilight I can uncharitably call brilliant – Bella stays with Edward. And if we’re being honest, who wouldn’t?!

The problem with the story, then, is that it becomes too happy. No one really likes nauseating Happily Ever Afters, re: the reaction to the Harry Potter epilogue.  So what I wanted to happen was for Wendy to choose to stay with Peter, to never age or change or grow – and then have them be cruelly separated anyway. That to me seems realistic, that to me is devastating.

This all sounds great, right? HUGE PROBLEM NUMERO UNO (I can say that because I speak Spanish): I can’t write it. I tried. I knew I would fail, but I tried anyway. I’m in love with the idea, but the execution is uninteresting. I don’t have to struggle, the words flow easily, and I am bored, ending scenes before they are finished, straying to other occupations. I need more struggle in my writing – less angst, more pathos. Less commas, more truth. I need to be more like Ernest Hemingway, and by God I’m going to give it my best shot.

And now, a levity break –

Ridiculous Point Number One. I would still totally hook up with Corey Stoll if he were wearing a wig and a mustache.

RPN2: I saw a great Comic-Con video with fake auditions for Peter (Joshua Jackson)’s role on Fringe and couldn’t enjoy the comedy because I was too afraid they meant it when they said he didn’t exist. Over. Finito. Cue the ugly cry.

RPN3: Since I’ve been at my dad’s again, I’ve eaten a whole pizza, watched my brother Cyrus sucker my dad into buying honey buns, heard disturbing details from several Cold Case Files episodes from the other room, and had my dad tell me “Don’t worry about the money [college]”. Feels good to be home.

RPN4: I spelled “Stoll” “Stool” the first time and didn’t notice. Now I wish I’d posted it that way.

RPN5: This is obscenely long. Watch me make it longer…and longer…and longer…

I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf

while jacking off listening to Mozart
you bitch and moan about LA
wishing you were in the rain reading Hemingway…”

Still a good song.

On some real shit, I read like 74 pages of A Farewell to Arms today! WOO! I tried Milton for a couple days, but Paradise Lost is just not a beach book. Besides, I kinda hate myself whenever I pick it up for being so goddamn pretentious.

Bah. I honestly never want to leave here. It’s so beautiful, I love the ocean. This morning it was overcast, and the weather’s been strange all day. Right now the blue sky is partially obscured by ethereal mists, the sun a white blot of dulled radiance – it’s so lovely it’s breaking my heart, making me wish I never had to go to college or live anywhere but beside the sea in a limitless July.

Please, please, can this just be real life? Can I somehow convince everyone I love to move here and get dead end jobs working at gas stations just so I can be by the ocean and be happy? Because I seriously think I could be fulfilled as a person by working just to get by and lying on a beach reading Hemingway for the rest of my life.