Oh, college. What other time in your life can you shamelessly begin your day by singing not just any duet, but "A Whole New World" with the guy in the neighboring shower stall (far from Pyramus and Thisbe, I assure you) and end it on a spirited discussion with a 50-something-year-old woman with a Ph.D. regarding the possibility of the soul being 5/16 of an inch too big for your body?
We're finally reading House of Leaves and I can barely contain myself. Reading that book isn't a light affair. It puts your mind in a different space with eerie echoes and manipulations of light and forever question marks winding inward. Some of my notes are:
*the manipulation of boundaries with drugs
*concept entering my head. how many corridors do you have? meaning how open-minded?
*pieces of writing as buildings. passages. passageways.
*communal thinking is better. webs. bricks.
*ear to shell to labyrinth
*reliance on echoes for our sense of space
That's enough for now. I don't know if I have anything left to spill.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Yours truly, Liberty Drunk
Guess who didn't get the newspaper gig or the German syntax apprenticeship? Guess who counted her chickens before they hatched? Guess who ate an entire bag of grapes today in one sitting?
Friday, September 7, 2007
If they ever come up with a swashbuckling school, I think one of the courses should be laughing, then jumping off something.
It's almost two in the morning. I had one bottled coffee drink that's mostly milk anyway and now I'm all wired. Maybe it's a placebo effect. Maybe I'm just excited because I looked up around seventy-five words in my German dictionary this fine evening. Maybe it's that I'm too excited to sleep because I know how amazing tomorrow will be (and each tomorrow thereafter!). Maybe it's that eightball of coke I did with the security monitor earlier before we all watched V for Vendetta on 8x rewind.
... Nah.
Anyway, I'm in a strange mood. My English class is changing the way I think. Come to think of it, all of my classes are. I know that sounds like such a cliché thing to say about college, but it's such a rapid, dramatic explosion. In my English (lit & media theory) class we're talking about time and space as an endless stream of data, and we're discussing the ways in which we dissect it and how each of those separations are a form of mediation. Time divided into 24s and 60s and yesterdays and next years. 26 letters in the alphabet, ABCDEFG in the musical scale. Time before the invention of the clock. Time before handwriting and history. What is it we're trying to convey from one person to another through literature? What are we trying to immediately access? The body as a medium for the spirit. Culture and ideology as forms of mediation. Our words are overpopulated with other people's intentions. The phonebook as literature. The medium, like the window, is both a conduit and an obstacle (!) and when we read are we looking at or looking through? Technology and spirit as two sides of the same coin, something I was pretty reluctant to admit. I love it!
And the man with the talons playing the cymbalon. And the muttering loons and the poetry on the sidewalk and the moonshadows and young ideas and smiles cutting through fog.
I'm ready to go dream now. Goodnight.
... Nah.
Anyway, I'm in a strange mood. My English class is changing the way I think. Come to think of it, all of my classes are. I know that sounds like such a cliché thing to say about college, but it's such a rapid, dramatic explosion. In my English (lit & media theory) class we're talking about time and space as an endless stream of data, and we're discussing the ways in which we dissect it and how each of those separations are a form of mediation. Time divided into 24s and 60s and yesterdays and next years. 26 letters in the alphabet, ABCDEFG in the musical scale. Time before the invention of the clock. Time before handwriting and history. What is it we're trying to convey from one person to another through literature? What are we trying to immediately access? The body as a medium for the spirit. Culture and ideology as forms of mediation. Our words are overpopulated with other people's intentions. The phonebook as literature. The medium, like the window, is both a conduit and an obstacle (!) and when we read are we looking at or looking through? Technology and spirit as two sides of the same coin, something I was pretty reluctant to admit. I love it!
And the man with the talons playing the cymbalon. And the muttering loons and the poetry on the sidewalk and the moonshadows and young ideas and smiles cutting through fog.
I'm ready to go dream now. Goodnight.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
We like to praise birds for flying. But how much of it is actually flying, and how much of it is just sort of coasting from the previous flap?
It's Sunday morning and the sky is gawgeous. I started classes a week ago and I still haven't gotten around to writing about my teachers. So, here goes:
Linguistics: Professor Harold von Syntax. He seems nice enough, and I don't have any serious problems, it's just when I do the reading I can see how amazing this stuff is and he's a little less firecracker than I would have hoped. He's kind of mouse-like, and the closest he gets to pure enthusiasm is a sort of shrill nervousness. He is short with very dark, very short hair. He clears his throat often and wears crisp shirts. He seems like a momma's boy, like any second Mrs. von Syntax will come out, spit on her thumb and start wiping his cheek, telling him he's got schmutz. And he'll say mother, will you stop? That's not schmutz, that's facial hair! And she'll say Harry, mein Liebschen*, who are you kidding, you're not old enough to grow facial hair.
And then directly after that I have Deutsch, with Nina Merolle, who's aces in my book. My first German teacher is someone I'll never truly get over, but she was older, a lot more nurturing, and very, how you say, Americanized. Prof. Merolle is about twenty-six I'd say, very spry, hilarious, and so German she makes me feel like for an hour a day I'm there again. It's great! She has that unexpected directness that I love about the German folk, so there are no awkward, superficial formalities about anything. If you're wrong, she doesn't grab the spoon and the applesauce, she just says "Falsch!" loudly and clearly, and with a big grin. There are other German mannerisms I've missed since I was last in the land of beer and schnitzel, but it's almost difficult to pick them apart and describe them, so I shan't, for now.
Then Peace and Conflict studies with Prof. Giovannini. She's Italian, very emotional, lots of hand gestures and very brilliant. She worked with the UN in Lebanon and Palestine, so she has plenty to say, if the class would stop wasting 1/3 of the class with their ego stroking, trying to prove that they belong there. I have a feeling this class is going to be incredible.
Finally, my English seminar on media theory. Small class of about fifteen or twenty students, with a teacher whose brain is like a bottle of champagne that's spilling all over the room. She's wide-eyed, always wearing straight knee length dresses, and she is really good at turning your ideas inside out. She makes it so we're constantly a little disoriented and dizzy, which has so far proven to be a great environment for coming up with odd ideas about literature. More on her later. These introductions feel so forced, but I need a framework for later details. She's an excited and exciting teacher.
I also started taking piano lessons with Heather, this 27-year-old jazz composer who lives about fifteen blocks away. It's a really pretty walk to her house, and my fingers love the exercise. Right now I'm at the basics: learning the scales of C, G & D. Then learning those same basic chords and their inversions, and also a little bit of learning to read sheet music. Heather is great. She answered the door in fishnets and a vintage dress, and she had Radiohead posters and strange little knick-knacks all over her studio. I'm gonna do whatever it takes to support my $50 a week habit.
I've got a lot of reading to do, but I'll be sure to update after my first archery club meeting on Wednesday.
*changed to accommodate newer, more Teutonic last name
Linguistics: Professor Harold von Syntax. He seems nice enough, and I don't have any serious problems, it's just when I do the reading I can see how amazing this stuff is and he's a little less firecracker than I would have hoped. He's kind of mouse-like, and the closest he gets to pure enthusiasm is a sort of shrill nervousness. He is short with very dark, very short hair. He clears his throat often and wears crisp shirts. He seems like a momma's boy, like any second Mrs. von Syntax will come out, spit on her thumb and start wiping his cheek, telling him he's got schmutz. And he'll say mother, will you stop? That's not schmutz, that's facial hair! And she'll say Harry, mein Liebschen*, who are you kidding, you're not old enough to grow facial hair.
And then directly after that I have Deutsch, with Nina Merolle, who's aces in my book. My first German teacher is someone I'll never truly get over, but she was older, a lot more nurturing, and very, how you say, Americanized. Prof. Merolle is about twenty-six I'd say, very spry, hilarious, and so German she makes me feel like for an hour a day I'm there again. It's great! She has that unexpected directness that I love about the German folk, so there are no awkward, superficial formalities about anything. If you're wrong, she doesn't grab the spoon and the applesauce, she just says "Falsch!" loudly and clearly, and with a big grin. There are other German mannerisms I've missed since I was last in the land of beer and schnitzel, but it's almost difficult to pick them apart and describe them, so I shan't, for now.
Then Peace and Conflict studies with Prof. Giovannini. She's Italian, very emotional, lots of hand gestures and very brilliant. She worked with the UN in Lebanon and Palestine, so she has plenty to say, if the class would stop wasting 1/3 of the class with their ego stroking, trying to prove that they belong there. I have a feeling this class is going to be incredible.
Finally, my English seminar on media theory. Small class of about fifteen or twenty students, with a teacher whose brain is like a bottle of champagne that's spilling all over the room. She's wide-eyed, always wearing straight knee length dresses, and she is really good at turning your ideas inside out. She makes it so we're constantly a little disoriented and dizzy, which has so far proven to be a great environment for coming up with odd ideas about literature. More on her later. These introductions feel so forced, but I need a framework for later details. She's an excited and exciting teacher.
I also started taking piano lessons with Heather, this 27-year-old jazz composer who lives about fifteen blocks away. It's a really pretty walk to her house, and my fingers love the exercise. Right now I'm at the basics: learning the scales of C, G & D. Then learning those same basic chords and their inversions, and also a little bit of learning to read sheet music. Heather is great. She answered the door in fishnets and a vintage dress, and she had Radiohead posters and strange little knick-knacks all over her studio. I'm gonna do whatever it takes to support my $50 a week habit.
I've got a lot of reading to do, but I'll be sure to update after my first archery club meeting on Wednesday.
*changed to accommodate newer, more Teutonic last name
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