belle de jour

i saw it again with k and i didn't think any more of it than i did the first time, which isn't that bad of a thing considering how terrific i found it. but what was interesting is how k saw it, which was significantly different from me. she put a good deal of emphasis on the flashback moments intimating severine's childhood sexual abuse, and the fairly clear evidence of her virginity and generally on how her relationship to sex is NOT HEALTHY, that her interest in getting roughed up is a worrying thing born of that childhood trauma. and this understanding is reinforced by the ending, in which the carriage is empty and you can understand it to mean that she's cured! that it's over! that healthy, conjugal relations can begin! and that is reasonable, compared with my understanding that this movie was about the supplement, the certain basis of happiness provided by a marriage and the other stuff that necessarily exists outside it, which doesn't really make sense when you think about how their marriage wasn't the proper thing by any standard, and her refusal to have sex, etc, and that now she's cured and can BEGIN having a proper marriage.

but that is so disappointing to me! that makes the movie into this psychoanalytic thing a la some of hitchcock's stuff like marnie where it's practically educational and literally clinical, rather than opening doors it's about reaffirming the properness of the present! and i don't think my initial understanding of the movie gets entirely discounted by that empty carriage at the end, by the idea that this movie's about a cure, but i just find that rather less progressive and intersting than what i was hoping for. la la la

want this to be over

it's raining out and the library is almost empty. i haven't been doing very well in school and, especially amidst all these people writing honors theses, i find this rather stressful. i mean it isn't that big a deal in part because i don't like what i'm doing, i don't like school anymore, and this isn't some kind of pathetic-recluse-failure thing, i'd rather be doing other things. writing things like that thing on miami, etc, which rpesents a whole new frontier for sadness and failure, but you never know. but anyway, this has required the difficult rejiggering of the things on which i base my sense of self. if i continue to see me as my gpa, etc, esp in contrast to the gpas of the marvelously successful people around me, it's all rather ugly and sad. and so i'm blustering through a disavowal of this whole school thing, of declaring myself misunderstood and underappreciated by the system, all kinds of the hazy angriness (blog thing is underlining this word as not being a word, is angriness not a word? i fucking hate when it underlines things, it distracts me enormously, when i write papers on people with funny names i spend an enormous amount of time adding them to word's dictionary which i suppose now has a fairly respectable catalogue of classical names like "alcmaeonidae" and "alcibiades." never stop learning, computer programs) i've associated with silly, rebellious teenagers with masturbation-fried dreams of piers and freedom.

anyway, stupid british lit profs and avant garde japanese cinema no longer have any sovereignty over me, i'm out of that stuffy backward land and into the bright future of rambling, self satisfied literary non fiction. that's what i'll do, i'll be. oh what an excellent man i am!

this felt nice.

AMERICA ALLEN GINSBERG

THAT IS SUCH A FUNNY, WRY, TRAGIC, HOPEFul, critical, schizophrenic poem

what a fucking great poem. i have never read anything so funny, so bemused, so perplexed at how america's "libraries are full of tears"

what an excellent thing what a most great thing.

clark walk

I just went for the most incredible walk. I walked from Prince Arthur and Clark all the way up to Arcade and Clark where it ends and curves off to the left across the highway. It was such a fucking beautiful walk. Above all, it was beautiful because of the sky. The sky, I kept thinking for some reason, was like the Gatorade flavor ice. It was grey and silvery and powerful, looking at the clouds you could believe that lightning gets formed in those dense puffs, they looked like the stuff from which the hands of gods are made.

I’m in K's house and N is in his room making funny noises, every now and then he laughs so suddenly and abruptly that it sounds like a violent hiccup. I really want to go see what he’s doing, but he had sturdy headphones on when I came in that make you feel the privacy of not being able to hear yourself. If I came in, it’d probably be a bit of a shock, maybe as if he’d been bellowing his secret amusement like the way I talk much too loudly when I blast my music in the library. He literally forgot himself, felt too loudly. What a wonderful thing, a terrible thing to interrupt

Clark is a phenomenally beautiful street, but what I remember best is just after it ended, in that awkward shape around rue Arcade. There was a fat brick of a building in front of me, just beneath the quicksilver elephant sky, and on top of it was a fat, squatting water tower. It looked like a water bug, but also something to worship. Off to the right, across the highway, were two NDP billboards featuring Jack Layton with blurry, photoshopped features. It is difficult to express how crazy and appropriate they were, as if one of those quicksilver elephants had assimilated itself into the rigid dimensions of the earth and launched a political campaign straight out of the sky, as if the transition from sky creature to Canadian party boss was a bit hazy, but that would only add to the mythos.

Later, after I met K and gave her flowers that are also called Protea, that I had carried with such clumsy delicacy on this very windy evening, like a sea captain who had to take his little girl whale hunting (unfortunate custody battle) when she should have been skipping rope and who ached with impotence when she got lashed by the waves and rigging. It is horrible to have your flowers hurled and jerked by the wind, we saw some Hasidic ritual. There were about 50 men, dressed in that black, formal garb, marching in ovals and singing. It was a beautiful sound. There are a lot of Hasidim in Kira’s neighborhood, and I always see them individually, walking purposefully somewhere or another following rhythms of life I do not know. I remembered that Shabbat was Friday night because of the bizarre number of them on the street at hours I felt didn’t befit religious observance. Seeing all of them in this parking lot, circling, was like stumbling on an exquisite ant colony after so many in isolation, and all the more like an ant colony for how symphonic and wondrous it was. Concentrated, their eccentricity was totally magical. Overlooking the marching men were half a dozen little boys standing on a fire escape staircase that descended the wall above them. Unlike the men, the staircase was lit up and the variety of the light made me want to invoke painters of whom I know nothing but their names if only to express how historical and uncommon the moment was, how worthy it was of the talent of centuries if they would deign to be alive.

studying

in reading the readings i did not read for the class discussions for which they were topical, i'm now realizing that the people i thought were having incredible insights were actually just people who read the readings. this is so silly, i mean, no shit, read what the person who has thought about this subject for decades has to say. what sophomoric nonsense for me to think i can watch a scene out of a movie i have never seen and have read nothing about and expect to say novel things, interesting things, anything worth hearing? life is so simple sometimes.

having dignity

it's funny how having power in this world is the power to ignore other people. the most wretched thing about homelessness is how you can't distill your social interactions down to the ones you want to have, you have to be open to everyone. this is literalized, of course, in the case of the homeless person because they are ON THE STREET, but it puts having a door in a new perspective. as much as it's about keeping out the weather and other dangerous things, it's about having the ability to shut the door on that which you don't like, to make them unseen. the more powerful you are in the world, the more doors both literal (in your large house? THREE different bathroom doors to slam?) and figurative you'll have to close on people.

I was thinking of this because of ipods, and their headphones in particular. headphones are a kind of door we can carry everywhere. HA! you know how people sometimes just DO NOT hear you despite yelling at them comically and embarrassingly loudly? we always excuse that kind of thing, for our own sake, as just loud music. But i wonder if someone has pulled that shit with no music at all, just embracing their right to not talk to you if they don't want to. headphones are a symbol of impunity to ignore other people. anyway, this is terrible for so many reasons. but as it relates to this social distillation, it's terrible because it empowers everyone to wield that dubious power, to take comfort in the sense of superiority that comes from having rejected other people. but it's an ultimately hollow one, being in that house with 30 doors gets rather stagnant, and to stretch the metaphor, one gets a draught from opening them strategically. how terrible that in public we should have that right to that solitary dignity, a dignity which is really just a way of declaring your loneliness purposeful.

there is a boy sitting across from me with an exquisite little face and fancifully swoopy hair. what a pretty little person. he has a budding mustache but it's so small that it's pretty too.

the cave

i'm in the large computer room behind the elevators surrounded by other students staring into computers. it's very early, and i wonder how many of them have been here all night. you can do that now. there's a guy sitting next to me who swaggered over blasting michael jackson on headphones audible 6 feet away. he has a particularly, blank, saliva-dripping expression on his face with his lower lip curled helpfully like the pouring lip of a beaker (i just tried to find if there was a word for the pouring part of some kind of vessel, and apparently there is no better way of describing it than "pouring lip"). he is playing some sort of racing tetris game with two different columns and many neon colors flashing. his fingers are knobby with effort, keyboard claws. there are several bright yellow ladders in this massive room with men in blue jumpsuits fiddling around in the ceiling. occasionally they drill things and everyone sleepily looks over. silence is a right to be protected and fought for. tetris man just left. it is so vividly comical to have the heads of those jumpsuited workers in the ceiling while ours, those of students, are staring here.

i'm getting out of this place! I CANNOT WAIT TO GRADUATE! I CONSTANTLY FEEL AS IF SOMEONE IS PLUCKING TINY HAIRS FROM MY BODY! I had a nightmare last night about school, which has almost never happened to me (except for last term when I had a recurring one that I was taking a german class and it was the end of the term and I spoke no german). I got another paper back from hepburn who wrote "you have no respect for words" or something like that, something so sprawlingly mean that i remember thinking in the dream that i wanted to write and that this teacher, in his meanness, had encroached on my private life and dreams in his zealous hate. horrible.