I just turned in my last essay of my undergraduate schooling. I guess my graduation isn't official til I get the diploma, but it feels pretty real right now.

I'm confused.

I still have over 500 photos from my Europe trip unprocessed and sitting around on computer storage. Most of them are pretty similar -- I became obsessed with headless statues and took several hundred photos of them in museums all across italy -- but there are some gems that I discover each time I open up the folder to resize and crop one or two a month.

“I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.”
—Dylan Thomas

"I have a superficial, decorative concept of deep love and its useful employment. I am subject to visual passions. I keep whole a heart given over to unreal destinies."
--The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

"I enjoy using words. Or rather: I enjoy making words work. For me words are tangible bodies, visible sirens, sensualities made flesh. Perhaps because real sensuality has no interest for me whatsoever--not even in thoughts or dreams--desire has become transmuted into the part of me that creates verbal rhythms or hears them in other people's speech. I tremble if I hear someone speak well."
--The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

It's really sort of devastating and wonderful both at once that I find expressions of my deep secret inner soul on nearly every single page of this book. Wonderful because, well, obviously such a thing is wonderful. Devastating because it's such a nihilistic and depressing text -- not always, but often. 

"'The world is certainly a small place,' she said.

'What makes you say that?'

'I mean sudden,' Frankie said. 'The world is certainly a sudden place.'"
    -The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers

...

(sometimes in the dark I see cities in my cigarettes)

( simply a sky )

I miss Wyoming skies. California just isn't the same -- probably the lack of wide empty space, the constant foggy claustrophobia of the air. I like to go to the Berkeley Marina just for the air -- heavy with salt, but cold, and windy enough that it feels like it's cleaning your spirit.

It's easy to be nostalgic for a place when you're no longer there.

CHILI-PEPPER CHOCOLATE.

VILE.

Lesson well learned.

Madeleine L'Engel died on Thursday.  

This makes me very sad! I say we should all reread A Wrinkle In Time this weekend. I, for one, haven't read it in roughly twelve years. I can't think of a better way to mark an author's passing, even a childhood author with whom you haven't spoken in over a decade, than by reading her work.

"Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth." -- Proust



p.s. I FUCKING HATE SCHOOL. And everyone in it. God save me.

At some point this summer I fell out of the habit of writing down snippets from books. I hadn't even realized it, it was just something that slipped away. Only tonight, searching through two different notebooks for a perfect turn of phrase that I only vaguely remember and thought for sure I must have recorded, did I discover this. All I find are a few fragments of poems, several straight pages from Mrs. Dalloway, and this:

"Now, I believe that all troubles come from the misconception that human brains are located in the head. They are not: human brains are blown in by the winds from somewhere around the Caspian Sea."
"The Diary of a Madman," Gogol

So it would seem.

“He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”
 — Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

...

Back in the bay area and feeling far too much like Maugham's Philip Carey in my inability to go into public without wanting to claw my face off with anxiety every time someone looks at me. Over-identification with fictional characters is vicious.

"300 BC. The Ptolomies founded the great library at Alexandria.

400,000 volumes in vertiginous glory.

The Alexandrians employed climbing boys much in the same way as the Victorians employed sweeps. Unnamed bipeds, light as dust, gripping with swollen fingers and toes, the nooks and juts of sheer-faced walls.

To begin with, the shelves had been built around wide channels that easily allowed for a ladder, but, as the library expanded, the shelves contracted, until the ladders themselves splintered under the pressure of so much knowledge. Their rungs were driven into the sides of the shelves with such ferocity that all the end-books were speared in place for nine hundred years.

What was to be done? There were scribes and scholars, philosophers and kings, travellers and potentates, none of whom could now take down a book beyond the twentieth shelf. It soon became true that the only books of any interest were to be found above shelf twenty-one.

It was noticed that the marooned rungs still formed a crazy and precarious ascent between the dizzy miles of shelves. Who could climb them? Who would dare?

--Art and Lies, Jeanette Winterson

(No, I feel no guilt about typing up two and a half pages from this book. But I will take it down if anyone complains.)

I keep trying to think of interesting things to say here, but I never can. It's been so very long since I've written here regularly that I have no idea what to say or how to begin to say it. You all are strangers to me, and that idea gives me performance anxiety or something. So how about a picture of Venice's San Marco instead of a proper entry?

Lately I am constantly aware of my toenails. I can feel them growing. All the time. I check them first thing every morning when I wake up because I can never quite believe that they haven't grown into talons in the night.

I don't think I would find this as disturbing as I do if I had the same awareness about my fingernails. But I have never felt them grow. They don't seem to grow at all anymore.

My summer plans on Bainbridge Island fell through spectacularly on the fourth morning we were there, so forget everything that I said about coffee and chatter -- I am back in Wyoming. I may or may not put the full story up here. Who cares, really? The most basic way of telling it is that E. and I had a disagreement with the woman whose house we were staying at and she evicted us immediately. We drove back down to Oakland the next day -- thirty hours of driving in five days. I didn't have money to stay in the bay area, so I came home. Hopefully I can find as many jobs as possible and just work constantly.

I think that, in order to survive a summer at home, I must devote myself to writing fleets and fleets of emails and letters. And reading. Lots and lots and lots of reading.

I am going to be in Seattle for the summer starting TOMORROW (!!!) and going until mid august. If anyone is in the area and wants to meet for coffee, drop me a line, though I don't know that I'll have internet access at the house I'll be staying until June.

I'll be on Bainbridge Island, actually. Should be good.

Today was really great.

I got out of bed very early to skip class and go to Nordstrom.

I feel a bit distraught because I am out of cigarettes and nicotine withdrawal is making my ears itch.

Last night I had to finish my term paper on the history of pre-communist Russian society. I focussed on the needs of women. I think it's ok, but if I don't pass this I'll lose my scholarship.

I want to tell the world that I love you all! You're all so special to me!

I am updating this journal for the first time in ages because I've been in prison.

I went to the doctor yesterday and he said I have a terrible skin disease which prevents me from coming into contact with other human beings. And bipolar disorder.

That's enough for now. But I'll leave you with the assurance that I am indeed alive and will post something real soon.

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I have recently decided that the key to my survival really does lie in poetry. Reading, not writing. Today on the steps in the sun reading Frank O'Hara and reveling in his joyfulness I thought this, this, this is it! and I forgot to be afraid.

But tonight I started crying as I sat outside in the dark reading Laura (Riding) Jackson and I couldn't tell -- was it because of the poetry, or not having talked to my grandmother in a month, or the fat possum snuffling across the courtyard, or my aloneness?

I am blatantly stealing this quote from my friend Tessa's profile (hi Tessa!) to post it here because I have a presumably large readership and everyone needs to see this. And then do it.

---

Get a radio or a phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down and listen to a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or Schubert's C-Major Symphony. But I don't mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down on the floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking. Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music.

Is what you hear pretty? or beautiful? or legal? or acceptable in polite or any other society? It is beyond any calculation savage and dangerous and murderous to all equilibrium in human life as human life is; and nothing can equal the rape it does on all that death; nothing except anything, anything in existence or dream, perceived anywhere remotely toward its true dimension.
—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

---

P.S. If you love George Eliot, please say so. This is your chance to lead me to a greater understanding and appreciation of her work.

I have been memorizing poetry lately; it has become my new favourite pasttime. It's like prayer for me, or meditation: it calms me and takes me out of my own head.

Recently I decided that I need to know more Shakespeare. The only Shakespeare I have memorized is the "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" part from Macbeth. But it's so hard to decide which bits I should memorize! There's just so ... much. So.

What are your favourite Shakespeare passages?

Also: marvel at the wonderous icon. ladytalon made it, as well as several similar others that I am using, and I adore it.

Craving:  an all-night library or bookstore. I can't be the only person who gets intense hungers for Sartre in the dead of the night, and I'm sure there are others who would welcome a quiet bookish place to read or study in at three am.

I'd even work those late shifts to spare diurnal folks the trouble.

The Shampoo
by Elizabeth Bishop

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
--Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

"So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If on a winter's night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn't published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

( continued )

...

OH all of those capitalized words have exhausted my typing abilities!

I bought this book in Italy, and thus was spared this ordeal because I could not understand 90% of the books in the shop.

This particular book is lovely, great fun. A little farcical at times, but with moments of great loveliness or thoughtfulness. In addition to being fully worthy of the time it takes, it is an interesting stylistic experiment. The chapters of the books-within-the-book are a delightful array of different styles and ideas.

This sounds like a book report, doesn't it? Sorry. There is another part that I would love to type up and share -- a few pages in the middle in which you, the Reader, has a discussion with the Other Reader about the nature and purpose of literature -- but I'm afraid I have already wildly violated copyright by putting up as much as I have. I might delete this entry in a few days if I have an attack of conscious.

...

This is the only successful lengthy work in second person that I've come upon. Does anyone know of others?

I have compulsive book buying disorder and I may need a support group. Help?

In other news, here's a nice quote from Ernest Hemingway. I don't know how I feel about old E. H. in general -- I'm not sure I've ever read anything of his that I truly liked or disliked in a visceral way -- but he's interesting enough as a literary figure. I am intrigued by his famous sparsity of prose, since that is something that evades me. Anyway, here's the quote:

"Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
-Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

In movies they always scrawl furious messages on mirrors with red lipstick. Has anyone ever done this? More importantly, has anyone ever washed it off some time after it's been done, and does it come off easily without leaving a stain? Does anyone know of something I could use to write on mirrors that would wash off easily?

I want to write poetry and chunks of books on my bathroom and bedroom mirrors. It's the next best thing to writing poems on my bedroom walls, and I think it will be an amazing way to memorize beautiful words.

My obsession with William Carlos Williams has taken me quite by surprise. I had none of his poems in Europe: my companions there were mostly Sylvia, Keats, Wallace Stevens, and dear old Eliot. I've always liked Williams, but right now I can't read any other poet. This has nothing to do with school. I was trying to write about Wallace Stevens because my love for him is well documented, but no, WCW has captured the whole of my attention.

Here is a poem of his.

( Smell! )

I have gotten a lot of people who comment saying they're adding me specifically for all of the posts I make about books and poetry, and, I assume, all of the posts that include full poems or quotes from things I've been reading. What isn't obvious to people who visit my journal itself is that I have been backdating all of these entries. I originally started to post them only for myself, not expecting that others might be interested.

I have thought of several ways to solve this problem that range from adding everyone who has friended me and constructing complicated friends filters or just sticking everything behind a livejournal cut and forcing everyone who doesn't care just to skip those posts. I am guessing that the latter is a better solution, but before I start to do that I thought I'd make a poll because it's been a really long time since I made one and I kind of feel like it today.

Poll #862528 of poems and quotes
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Are you interested in the poems and quotes and excerpts from things that I read?

To keep this post from being totally boring, behind the cut is a picture of a sculpture of a small boy riding a tortoise.

( boy on tortoise )

These are some of my photos from Europe.

I didn't take these macro photos of insects (and one frog), but I do enjoy them very much. Praying mantises have fascinating eyes.

...

Maybe sometime soon I'll figure out how to write here again. I have forgotten how to communicate properly.