the old guy i bought my car from, remember the one that sounded like jimmy stewart? none of you ever met him, i'm sure of it, but i do the voice all the time. anyway, i was at home last night and this morning and i found out that he died a few days ago. this morning, the car's alarm was going off even though i have it turned off and i had to go through all the papers he gave me to go along with the purchase, papers from years ago with his handwriting and little notes in fading pencilled lines. the alarm was going off because the battery was dead.

finished free love and other stories last night-- lovely passage from the last one:

"[...] You were laughing and laughing in that scared way and then you noticed that the new girl Laura Watt in front of you three along wasn't laughing, not at all, she was watching, her eyes were going back and fore from Sally at the board to the woman at the window, the Ark, the shoulderblades in her cardigan, her hands resting on the window-sill and her eyes watching a seagull gliding from the roof of the huts to the field. Laura Watt, the new girl, watching it all from behind her dark straight fringe, her chin on her hand, leaning on her elbow watching it. The girl who even though you hardly knew her had heard you say you liked a song and had made you a tape of the whole album, Kate Bush, The Kick Inside, and copied out all the songwords off the back of the sleeve for you in her nice handwriting, even though you hardly knew her, had hardly spoken to her. The paper with the words on it folded inside the tape box and smelt strange, different, of what it must be like to be in her house or maybe her room, it was a scent you didn't want to lose so you found you were only letting yourself fold the pages open when you really needed to know what the songwords were."

-- Ali Smith, "The world with love"

so greg and i were talking about robert herrick last night, and just now i realised that you can sing "to the virgins, to make much of time" as a replacement to the lyrics of leonard cohen's song "stories of the street."

and you should.

wonderful cloud cover today. feels more like fall, but with those occasional bursts of sun that make it seem much hotter just at the moment. i had a bad weekend for the most part but today was good: easy classes with plenty of laughs, corn muffin (though my milk spilled), reading free love and other stories by ali smith outside on a bench during community time, carnivàle with laura, then talking to mary for a long time. a few more days like this and life might almost make sense again.

sure, she has that "i'm a columnist" condescension running through parts of the piece, but this is great (emphasis mine):

"I read of this new Pope, the one who blue-skies in public and makes silly, ill-considered remarks about Islam and apologizes, only to insult Jews in the next breath. This leads to ponderous BBC backgrounders asking: 'How infallible is the Pope?' But to an atheist, you’re either infallible or not. By apologizing, he proved himself fallible. Does this mean he has to resign?

The BBC says no. Apparently the Pope only speaks infallibly when he announces ahead of time that he’s going to. This is the journalistic equivalent of 'going on the record.'

Also, and I could have told the Pope this, never quote anyone from the 14th century. With the exception of Chaucer, people weren’t at their brightest then. Things didn’t perk up intellectually until the Renaissance. And one word reverberates: Crusades. Blood. Axes. Spikes. Takes two to go on a crusade, and I mean you, Pope Urban II.

As for the Pope pointing out that worshipping the cross was really worshipping the Jewish tool of execution of Christ, it only made this atheist think of that Lenny Bruce line about how if Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

And all of the above reveal the problem suffered by people like me when the world’s religious types get upset. Devoid of religious belief or interest, I don’t have the faintest idea what people are angry about. Atheists don’t get it. The only joy in these disputes is one I share with the British writer Marina Hyde: She loves to see mad placards in demonstrations. Her favourite was the American soccer mom who had embroidered 'God Hates Fags' on the Confederate flag."

see, she doesn't mean "atheists don't get it" in the way some centrist american pundit would chide more liberal elements for disrespecting the jesus magic of the heartland. it's more about the insane saturation of our news with religious viewpoints and how, if we didn't live through it daily, we would really be confused about why-- but we are anyway. seriously, what happened/is happening? i'm no atheist, but organised religion on the world stage at this day and age should make anyone remotely reasonable very uncomfortable.

if nothing ever happens in autumn, that's okay
i wouldn't hold a thing against it if you'd stayed.

--

[...everything rushes together and you start to suddenly realise that you are, at this moment, living through one of the most important moments of your life-- and you're doing it wrong.]

--

"we're lesbians!"

--

you're allways laughing and it makes me happy.

--

twelve hours.

i've come to the following realisation: at any given moment on any given day, i'm most likely doing something or other that is completely socially repugnant and being completely oblivious to this fact.

i'm so sorry, everyone.

sometimes i get hopeful and i want to think that life will really just be a series of great conversations.

companion piece to previous post:

“and i've heard all those stories
about the black cabs and the way they drive
that if you take a ride with them
you may not come back alive
they might be psycho killers
but tonight i really don't care
so i say turn up the music
take me home or take me anywhere…”

-- jens lekman, “black cab”

i’m more of a country boy than anything else didn’t expect or need this oh no where are we? reading the odyssey these days and had a bit of one myself— we’re all making fun of homer for his repetition, “hey, so, is calypso lustrous, or what? i forget,” but would have given almost anything for that kind of textual predictability in the veering courses our own lives just took. not lost but a bit helpless and a bit out of place, night but not late-night (late-night which the diners call nite): boston public transit mishaps. saying you’ll meet people in one place but they don’t have cell phones and there’s no service anyway but they don’t know the lines and oh no what next it wasn’t supposed to be this way. where, when,: inconsequential—the feeling: universal. oh no. looking around thinking it’s really the mercy of the system now and home seems so far away.

damn you little artist inside that says write right now when i’d rather just sleep.

so a station was closed and a shuttle was close right when we needed it but not so close and next thing there’s we running for it like a movie, like we’re center stage and running hard is me and it’s like there’s theme music. you can hear it. later scouring the station get some type of cop on the job, on the horn with a description very helpful where are they? they shouldn’t be wandering around alone out there. and for a second we feel important but we’re hungry and we’re tired and, actually, well, there’s your poor, underground right here, and it’s not us. we have problems but not the worst problems and we’ll inflate it and seem cinematic because it’s never real tragedy up on the screen. later driving back safely say a litany of the almosts and maybes and could have beens and line up causes and jinxes and blames and ifonlyitoldyousoes.

later still keep driving through night look back and say it was like five hours only and jesus it seemed like a life and by this time tomorrow what would fade and what would memory change details and inventions adddropsubstitute when next we tell the story. and hey, reunion day years later it’s like we’re already there talking about it now remember that night when. remember how surreal and how we were talking about “the twilight zone” until just a moment before it got all surreal and claire had a four-leaf clover and we’re actually lucky, they could have stolen the car. cars.

and we’ll forget some later and some will come back and then there’s what remains,

what remains: some city dirt washed clean off in a late shower and some errant words scrawled sleepily against waiting page like stories we’ll tell later.

stories we’ll tell.

we spent about ten minutes of thursday's english lit class talking about trolls when we could have been talking about something like this.

so. things going well at school, so well that i don't have time to myself to write about how well it's going. that's the measure right there. how often does that happen? keeping me away from the computer for a while because there's various levels of fun to be had, up early daily and always cycling into itself, one statement: it's great to be here. the days are long and the weeks are long and we all talk as if we've been here a long time. "oh, we used to..." referring to something from mere days ago. it's lovely.

then why did i go home? practical concerns, wanted to see the cat, see how my sister is doing in the dawn of her high school years. they moved the house around while i was gone, and home is never the same as it was when you left it, mainly because you've changed...but there i go again. i'd been gone, what? not even two weeks. and i didn't stay. just spent the night in my bedroom there, which is starting to serve as something of a storage area because no one really lives there most of the time. ah, growing up. wanted to come back to salem as early as possible so i was up just before the light this morning, window open, house darkened and silent. when i would have been waiting for the bus in earlier days down the street. that bed is still comfortable so i went back to sleep. all of it felt like travel, like i actually belonged at some hour of the intermediate night at some third place between where i came from and where i am now.

epic poetry is so much more lovely when you read it to each other.

i wrote this earlier, between classes:

[elia was, as i have the feeling i will be writing many times in the future, correct. we do remember the bad times above all, in those dark corners of night or morning where we find ourselves alone with our thoughts and nothing else; where we set the scales and try to see what sort of balance we found that day, if we are satisfied with who we are and who we are becoming, or if the inescapable memory of who we were still haunts us. and that's where you have to capture the self, rein in your delusions, and dispense with recognised shortcomings and regrets. that's where you're alone like death, alone like practice for death -- maybe that's all sleep is -- and you step back from yourself and think "okay, me." it's who you actually are, whether you want to be that or not; and, like the finality of death, you have no real choices to make in the face of those certain things which never change. but, unlike death, tomorrow there is always a chance for joy once sleeping is over.]

later, on the long ipod-accompanied walk between north campus and central, i started listening to the ladybug transistor and searching for textual meaning in the lyrics (perhaps the consequence of two lit classes in one day). in the right mood, i can twist anything to be about anything else by wild leap of metaphor and deliberate mistakes in hearing ("if nothing ever happens in our town, that's okay" becomes "if nothing ever happens in autumn, that's okay" by sheer force of will depending on my mood when i listen to the mendoza line), so once i realised what day it was my mind was full of "this song was written for this moment" flights of fancy. i could figure out the exact dates of certain "this time last year" events that plague me, but it's not worth it, i just know that second day of class feeling like i know jeff baron's guitar nudges in "in december," so put the two together in just the right location and my day turns epically sour. sour and poignant like a movie striking the perfect emotional chord, because unfortunately that's how my mind is tuned: it's so easy to see myself as the tragic figure walking by a place as just the right song comes on and the viewer thinks, "damn, that fits perfectly, i love this film."

and it's actually more like death, because there's no future in that.

1. "canadians underestimate themselves. she can do it."

2. the french have invented a teleporter shaped like a cell phone. beware.

interesting how returning works-- most of us are back at school after a long summer, but it feels like we never left. all it takes is one or two familiar activities: a walk for chinese food made somewhat longer by the location of our new dormitory home, some comics on my door from last year making a comeback, yams, and all the rest. i love my new room after exhausting myself setting it up, and i'm ready for whatever will come next. it will hopefully be quite a bit, because this year has the potential for much, much activity.

also:





my window looks out on the setting sun.

click to enlarge-- via cat and girl.

following up on the list from the 2005-06 academic year:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce (re-read)
Ulysses – James Joyce
The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses – Harry Blamires
Josephine: A Life of the Empress – Carolly Erickson
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer – Steven Millhauser
Empress Orchid – Anchee Min
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
Katherine – Anya Seton
The Mists of Avalon – Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
The Solace of Leaving Early – Haven Kimmel (re-read)
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates
Something Rising (Light and Swift) – Haven Kimmel (re-read)

so as august turned into september and i was just settling into an early bed and thick darkness after an angela carter short story, my phone went off. i've had this thing for years about wanting people to call me in the middle of the night, because late-night conversations have a certain dreamlike edge to them, less inhibition and more intimacy. but i'd never do the actual calling. it was mary, checking first via text message if it was okay to call. of course it was, and she did, and she's one of the few, interestingly enough, who could offer any type of perspective on what has been bothering me the last few days. so that helped everything, and the month is off to the best start possible. last year's events needed to be talked through.