who knew law schools start accepting applications next week? not i.
off tumblr/lj indefinitely; message me on gmail if there’s something urgent you feel needs to be called to my attention, like, oh, pictures of maru dressed as a twinkie (this will never not be relevant to my interests).
01 When it comes to relationships, I’m constantly calculating and rationing out my affections. How much do I put into this person? Does he or she appear as interested in me as I am in them? Who is it that’s making the phone calls and initiating meet-ups? How do I stand in relation to them and our other, mutual friends? When we talk am I a sounding board for all of their problems or do they take the time to ask me how I am, in order to show that they care? In other words, am I made a priority?
K.’s recent post resonated with me in this respect. I think we all do it to some extent. In romantic relationships I can imagine these tendencies being amplified a hundredfold; but luckily, me and B. are pretty equal in how into each other we mutually are.
02 I talk to B. for hours every night and at lunch. He is interesting and smart and patient and liberal and devoted and so well fitted to me that it kind of deeply freaks me out. YOU DEAR, SWEET MAN, COULD YOU POSSIBLY BE REAL?
03 Still nuts for football. I want to quit my job and watch this sport forever. :(( Drunken caterwauling with Em outside and inside of sports bars need to happen when I next come to Chicago.
In which, very beautifully, nothing happens.
The back cover calls Mrs. Dalloway the first novel to split the atom. Congrats, Harcourt. That’s a ingenuous way of marketing what would for most people be utterly unreadable, unbearably stuffy drek. Did I just say that aloud? Whoops. Well, no surprise: there’s a threshold between you and liking this book. If you have an ear for rhythm in language, if you like artless, offhand, china-boned meditations on life and living, if the idea of all of this set to the tune of roughly six ongoing and interpenetrating levels of leitmotifs and symmetries and Big Ben striking hour upon hour upon hour thrills you to no end, you are much more likely to bear through two hundred pages of Mrs. Dalloway nattering breathlessly about flowers.
Do I sound mildly disgusted? I don’t mean to. Mrs. Dalloway is an extraordinarily beautiful book. I just don’t want to oversell it. I could say stuff here about living tapestries of words and beautiful breathable metaphors and prose that radiates, like, unremitting showers of priceless gold coins. And I suppose that I just did. But, honestly. I read this for an undergrad survey course when I was nineteen and came away indifferent. Now it’s like a hearing aid has switched on in my ear. The meter is masterful. There are sentences that read like they were so carefully sewn. I can just feel Woolf briskly snapping off the thread with her teeth and knotting it tight.
I’ve come to realize that I read so much because books are music to my ears. Language ripples, is musical, scales worlds in a jump. Sentences ring like singing through my head. Literally, if you were to take an MRI of my brain while I read Lolita or James Baldwin the areas that’d glow neon on the x-ray would probably be the same ones that’d flare up, with my brain on Chopin. So in many respects, this was eye-popping stuff. Certainly Woolf is in complete command of her writing, and her knack for pinning the kicking verb, for netting bagfuls of lively flopping characters, is I’m sure unsurpassed.
Still, this book really illustrates for me the irritating and apparently omnipresent tension between “beauty of writing” and “something fucking happen before I put my foot through my computer screen”. It’s a rare combo platter that features both. Natalie is supposed to be writing me The Perfect Novel that does just that — in other words, the greatest, loveliest, most moving novel you could ever dream of, about organic vampires — yes, please harass her with me, I’m amassing signatures for a petition — but who knows when that’ll come out? And in the meantime, I’m lost. There’s only so much Dorothy Dunnett in this world.
UNFAIR. UNFAIR.
David Silva is also magical.
That smile. It slays me every time.
Kaka: Hello, children! Thank you for welcoming me to your school on the wonderful day. I am really looking forward to answering your questions, so who has the first one?
Dani: Hi, Kaka. My name is Dani and I’m eight. My question is: What is your favorite thing about Spain?
Kaka: That’s a very good question, Dani! I have lots of favorite things about Spain. The people, the food, the culture. It’s all very special. But above all else, I love my friends here. Like all of you! Thank you, Dani. Who has another question?
Bill: Hi, Kaka. I’m Bill and I like Real Madrid. Will you kill Barcelona until they are dead this season? Please say yes.
Kaka: Heh, no no no, we don’t want anyone to die, Bill. Of course we hope to beat them this season and win the title, but that’s all. We don’t want violence in football.
Felix: Hi, Kaka. My name is Felix and I’m nine. If you are sold to Chelsea or back to Milan for a lot less than what Real paid for you, does that make you a failure?
Kaka: Wow. Where did you get that idea, Felix?
Felix: I read the papers.
Kaka: Uh, wow, you’re a little young to be reading newspapers, aren’t you, Felix? No, I don’t think it makes me a failure. I’ve had some injuries and couldn’t do as much as I would like for Real, but I think this season I will prove my worth to those papers. Who, uh, who has another question?
Briana: Hi, Kaka. I’m Briana and I like hammers. Why did you let Brazil do so bad at Copa America? My mother said you abandoned them the way my dad abandoned our family when he met that tramp Sandy.
Kaka: Oh wow. Wow, I, uh- I didn’t abandon anyone. I just needed a break after the long season and I knew Brazil would be better off calling up someone else. Wow, I’m sorry about your family and Sandy, but. Wow. Does anyone else have a question? Maybe about the new season and how exciting it will be?
Xavi: Hi, Kaka. My name is Xavi and I’m 31. Cesc is suffering.
Kaka: That’s, uh, that’s not a question Xavi. Why are you here? Please, do any of the children have one more question? Perhaps a question about football and happiness?
Eric: I have one!
Kaka: Excellent! Please, ask away, young man.
Eric: I’m Eric and I have two dogs. Xavi just gave me a note telling me to ask you this: “Cesc is suffering.” And then he wrote 18 exclamation points. I think he’s crying now. Why did you make him cry, Kaka?
Kaka: Jesus.
— from this Dirty Tackle Exclusive.
I—I have nothing intelligent to add. sob.
Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull. Everything is damp: the piebald trunks of the plane trees, the juniper shrubs, the railings, the gravel. Far away, in a watery vista between the jagged edges of pale bluish houses, which tottered up from their knees to climb the slope (a cypress indicating the way), the blurred Mount St George is more than ever remote from its likeness on the picture postcards which since 1910, say (those straw hats, those youthful cabmen), have been courting the tourist from the sorry-go-round of their prop, among amethyst-toothed lumps of rock and the mantelpiece dreams of sea-shells. The air is windless and warm, with a faint tang of burning. The sea, its salt drowned in a solution of rain, is less glaucous than grey with waves too sluggish to break into foam.
It was on such a day in the early thirties that I found myself, all my senses wide open, on one of Fialta’s steep little streets, taking in everything at once, that marine rococo on the stand, and the coral crucifixes in a shop window, and the dejected poster of a visiting circus, one corner of its drenched paper detached from the wall, and a yellow bit of unripe orange peel on the old, slate-blue sidewalk, which retained here and there a fading memory of ancient mosaic design. I am fond of Fialta; I am fond of it because I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers, and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its viola; and also because there is something in the very somnolence of its humid Lent that especially anoints one’s soul. So I was happy to be there again, to trudge uphill in inverse direction to the rivulet of the gutter, hatless, my head wet, my skin already suffused with warmth although I wore only a light mackintosh over my shirt. I had come on the Capparabella express, which, with that reckless peculiar to trains in mountainous country, had done its thundering best to collect throughout the night as many tunnels as possible. A day or two, just as long as a breathing spell in the midst of a business trip would allow me, was all I expected to stay. I had left my wife and children at home, and that was an island of happiness always present in the clear north of my being, always floating beside me, and even through me, I dare say, but yet keeping on the outside of me most of the time.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Spring in Fialta
Full text here.
It makes me cry to know that English was this man’s second language.
When I hear the introductory drum riff of Sincerely, Jane, my heart drops and rolls, and I think of jogging along in Brooklyn by myself in 103 degree heat, bedeviled by mosquitoes, greasy with repeated applications of tiger balm, eating yogurt and chicken hearts on skewers and 99c packages of chemical tasting sugar wafers in the evenings, but perking up and feeling peppier every time I heard this song.
(via war-inmy-mind)
So Janelle Monae is kind of my idol.
