i never remember holding a full drink.
  my first look shows the level half-way down.
what next? ration the rest, and try to think
  of higher things, until mine host comes round?

some people say, best show an empty glass:
  someone will fill it. well, i've tried that too.
you may get drunk, or dry half-hours may pass.
  it seems to turn on where you are. or who.

-- philip larkin, 'party politics'

a strange mind in a strange body moving across the surface of the world, lightning buzzing in the horizon.

'listen to me: there are a few times when out of the marble-and-mud that is life there is one layer of solid marble. there are a few times when the songs that are written, the poems that are written, the plays that are written, come alive. by accident you fall onto a stage-set put aside for a tragedy for the lesser gods, and you utter words that were in the script written in the leaves and in the grass for some heroic cast.'

-- sylvia plath, journals, 16 march 1951.

'almost everyone jumps from the eastern side of the bridge, facing the lights of san francisco.'

-- john vanderslice

watching other people graduate from college and two days of parties and juno are making me think about high school, when we talked and posed absurdly, in ways that only characters in movies ever would.  i tend to symbolise this with the night i was lying out on the yard with my car stereo still on playing 'here' by pavement on repeat.  that never actually happened, and the night i wanted to do it happened before i could drive.  and even when i could drive i wouldn't have known how to play a song on repeat.  it got stuck on repeat once, but christine fixed it.  and i wouldn't lie in that grass for the dirt.  neurotic people have that sort of trouble with spontaneity.

but almost through another four Best Years of Your Life i'm ready to start treating that story as real: again, because of the symbolism.  

this is true: there were these two girls named meredith and julie.  a joke developed that because i kept getting them mixed up (they didn't look alike in any way) i should just make up new names for them.  i did, every time i needed to address them.  one time, i helpfully reminded myself in my notebook of the period, julie referred to herself on the phone as 'the brown-haired girl' so i would be sure which i was talking to.  she was the one i had a thing for, now that i look it up, but until just now i thought it had been meredith.  i can't picture either of them.  for a couple of weeks my group of friends at the time were connected to those two, and factually, empirically, that's as far as it goes.  i thought about them a lot with a low-fi indie soundtrack in my bedroom to back up what i scribbled about them, imagining it as a montage in someone else's movie.  or my own.

so the days of such unexamined lushness have passed.  i still quote lyrics like scripture and sing in the shower and have a song categorised away mentally for everyone i care about, except these days i realise how these things are remnants of a bygone era, or at least of an era waving goodbye effusively as it backs slowly out of the room, off into the unknown adulthood and 'real world' we've been hearing so much about lately.

no, dude, you have to sign. it's not anonymous. it's totally nonymous.

'you may have thought things would come right again
if you could only keep quite still and wait.'

-- philip larkin, 'myxomatosis'

'successful and prosperous, though not without calamities and setbacks.'

-- samuel beckett, murphy

memory is the thing. we play the tape of it over and over again in our spare moments, light or dark. we play it as though we expect to be able to change something. it doesn't work like that-- i get to live through the parts that still play once again, but the outcome is always the same. can't bring back time, like joyce said. like holding water in your hand. no matter how many times that memory reel spins for me monica always leaves, the embarrassing moments and missteps happen, catherine doesn't give me contact information, i never get to know a lot of people i would have liked to, and all the rest i constantly allude to on here.

maybe the part we miss is that the good things get their spot too, if we let them. just as we cannot change the past, nothing can take it away from us; it is wholly ours and comfortable if we leave out the nostalgia part. laura always falls in love with me, i always have the chance to know christine, i always get the unexpected opportunity to be closer to emmie after all these years, and the scattered good times play on and on: nicole before things got weird. the only painful part about all that is that it's over, but at least it happened. what went wrong eventually led to somewhere right, and what was right stayed right, if you know where to cut. i suppose the key thing is becoming an experienced memory projectionist, which requires a lot of time alone, which is sad anyway, so never mind.

i come back to the contrary influences here-- tilford tried to convince me that regret was pointless and julia never wore a watch. didn't believe in it. if you don't know what time, what day something happened, it can't get back to you the next time around. was that her theory? i don't think i ever asked her. sounds like i'm projecting myself onto her, but it was so long ago i don't see how i couldn't be.

--

i've been living in this place for about a year now. last year's thoughts. i get another summer here, which means low windows and limited sunshine and imogen heap.

an ongoing series:
summer 2005 , 05-06 academic year, summer 2006, 06-07 academic year, summer 2007.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem – Joan Didion
Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis [re-read]
In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 – Mary Beth Norton [re-read]
On the Road – Jack Kerouac [re-read]
Intercourse – Andrea Dworkin
Hiroshima – John Hersey
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Howards End – E.M. Forster
Nickel and Dimed – Barbara Ehrenreich
Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
The White Album – Joan Didion
Letters From a War Zone – Andrea Dworkin
Ice Time – Jay Atkinson
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl – Harriet Jacobs
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce [re-read]
The Favourite Game – Leonard Cohen [re-read]
The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories (Penguin Classics) – Leo Tolstoy
Coyotes – Ted Conover
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf [re-read]
God Among the Shakers – Suzanne Skees
A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway
Anna Karenin – Leo Tolstoy
Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant – Andrea Dworkin
Goodbye Tsugumi – Banana Yoshimoto
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West – Cormac McCarthy
The Club Dumas – Arturo Pérez-Reverte
La Bête Humaine - Émile Zola
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
Rabbit, Run – John Updike
Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths – Ilene Philipson
Saturday – Ian McEwan [re-read]
The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century – William Chester Jordan
The Wall and Other Stories – Jean-Paul Sartre
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
Washington Square – Henry James
The Merchant of Prato – Iris Origo
The Rainbow Stories – William T. Vollmann
Joan of Arc: Her Story – Régine Pernoud and Marie-Véronique Clin [re-read]
Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe: Second Edition – Charles Nauert
after the quake – Haruki Murakami
Omensetter’s Luck – William H. Gass
Hotel World – Ali Smith [re-read]
The Other Boleyn Girl – Philippa Gregory
Beautiful Losers – Leonard Cohen [re-read]
Reformation Europe – Ulinka Rublack
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller – Carlo Ginzburg
The Trial of Joan of Arc – Daniel Hobbins (trans.)
Fathers and Crows – William T. Vollmann
Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters In Captivity, 1945-1946 – Ezra and Dorothy Pound
The Pisan Cantos – Ezra Pound
The Chelsea Whistle – Michelle Tea
Blue of Noon – Georges Bataille
The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 – Barbara Tuchman [re-read]
Mencius – D.C. Lau (trans.)
Rabbit Redux – John Updike
I, etcetera – Susan Sontag

'a good rule: any party is depressing, if you think about it. but you don't have to think about it.'

-- susan sontag, 'debriefing'

so many people to miss, comings and goings that do not always set themselves into solidity. sometimes there are goodbyes, other times things slip away, both sides unwilling or unable to get a conversation going again after so much time has gone by. or maybe you do get the lines of communication open again, only to wish you hadn't. in the past there were letters, maybe lost overseas; messages delivered from person to person in a vain attempt to find someone far away. today, text and e-mail in the night, either lost in electronic ether or read and not responded to.

or else nothing. could be there's a reason we don't talk anymore.