The Diary of Antoine Roquentin

Let’s get the obligatory concert shots out of the way. I apologize for the haphazardness of this post, but it’s two weeks jammed together.

ACRYLICS @ MERCURY LOUNGE

I guess the last time I wrote was after the funeral. I’m still not sure how to put that behind me.

I haven’t really been doing much more than usual, other than going to the university pool a few times this week. Also, my voice recognition software is getting more and more unreliable. It randomly inverts the last two letters of any word it transcribes. I’m just going to roll with it.

Tonight is the first night that I’ve been at home in what seems like forever. It’s so quiet here that all of my thoughts have a certain sheen to them. I wish they were in higher resolution.

I think I’m just feeling depressed because I read the end of House of Mirth and it’s an ending of absolute despair. I’m also in my abode and it’s overflowing with papers and tickets and magazines and envelopes that I have to go through this week, and the painting that I still have to finish for Matt (it was supposed to be a Valentine’s Day gift).

That’s not to say I haven’t been doing anything fun. On the contrary, I saw Neon Indian on Friday of last week after my Aunt Anna’s 97th birthday party!

At the venue, I ran into the lead guy (the band is really only him) and he cut in front of me to use the bathroom. I thought it was pretty funny. There were these crazy drunk girls on acid in front of us who couldn’t have been a day over 16, but they were absolutely enamored with the band and made it a much more fun show.

The IFC Center is doing this program of Beigelow vs. Cameron midnight movies, so Matt, Yevgeny, and I went to see The Abyss on Saturday. It was the first time that I was introducing them to each other, but they got on very well. We had dinner at French Roast before the show, which was delicious. I actually hadn’t seen the movie all the way through, and it was beautiful (especially on the big screen).

Sunday I’d been looking forward to for weeks: it was the Washed Out show at Mercury Lounge. However, the day of the show I wasn’t really feeling it. The Washed Out EPs that I’d been listening to nonstop a few weeks ago were feeling tired. I had looked forward to it too long to actually not go, but my excitement was renewed at the very first song. One, the Washed Out guy is ccuuute as fuck. Two, that type of dreamy, gritty pop really excels in a tiny venue. Three, the audience was loving it and I couldn’t help be swept away by their enthusiasm as well as my own. My pictures didn’t come out, but I have video:

“Belong”

“New Theory” (probably my favorite Washed Out song)

“Hold Out”

This week my social calendar isn’t as jam-packed. Tonight Yevgeny and I went to see this silent Gary Cooper movie on loan from the Library of Congress (this is the only print extant) called Wolfsong. I met up with him an hour or so before the movie and we got some cake and coffee at this little bakery on Bleecker. The movie was actually pretty cute, although a bit implausible. Since it was silent, this man played this piano score that he had written specifically to accompany the events onscreen through the entire film. It was a wonderful piece, so much so that I was almost shocked at the end of the performance when the announcer said that it had been composed specifically for that viewing.

I always feel as if someone I personally know has died once one of my favorite characters die in a novel. I felt like Lily Bart (of House of Mirth, which I finished a few hours ago waiting for the bus) was my secret accomplice, peeking into the indelicacies of Fifth Avenue magnates. Now, she is almost a pathetic character, destroyed by her hubris.

Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint the humming-bird’s breast? And was it her fault that the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples?

I am to write a Marxist critique of the book, but that must take a back seat to the largest of the papers that I will be working on this spring break: a six-page opus on Emily Dickinson. I went out and bought her collected poems yesterday at the Union Square Barnes & Noble and headed down for a quick coffee and study session at Think. I feel like I’ve been going at a breakneck pace these last few weeks and I just need to spend some time at home: clean off my desk, answer some of my letters, finally get that second bookshelf so I can get rid of the stacks of books all over the floor.

Tonight I’m devoting to relaxation, after all of the tedious work I did today. Oh! How wonderful, I have my Critical Writing book. I left it here by mistake last week, but now it’s perfect because I can use it for my paper.

I have three due.

6 pages – Emily Dickinson
2 pages – House of Mirth
4 pages – (but doesn’t have to be “done” on Monday) Critical Writing [on climate change]

I need to dump all the photos off my camera and upload them (I have pictures of countless shows on there) but I’ll do it tomorrow.

I’m taking my GRE on Saturday. I’m not really prepared, but I’m not sure what I would do to “prepare,” since it’s supposed to test analytical thinking. Right? I think my nervousness will probably bring me to check out some test prep books at B&N tomorrow.

Also on Saturday I’m going to a this cocktail party/tour of the new exhibit at the New Museum for Contemporary Art. The New Yorker has an interesting take on the show.

I can’t wait until school is over and I can get back to pleasure reading. Notable books on my queue that are waiting patiently on my shelf:

Marcel Proust – Schwann’s Way (the first book in In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past)
Roland Barthes – S/Z
Jean Baudrillard – The Intelligence of Evil (Or the Lucidity Pact)
Roland Barthes – Mythologies
Jorge Luis Borges – Collected Works (I’m 2/3 done with this, he’s one of my favorite writers these days)
Edwin A. Abbott – Flatland

And, of course, Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories. They are almost so beautiful I can’t bring myself to read more than a few at a time.

I was going to write a detailed post about my feelings post-funeral.

But as I drifted upstairs to get a sandwich, my grandma was up (at 1 a.m.) and we talked about the family for two hours (well, truth be told, she did 98% of the talking, but when you are in your eighties that’s well within your rights).

Basically, to put it in a concise way, I feel numb and that nothing is quite right—like when the character in the sci-fi story realizes that they are in a slightly different world because the time line has been altered. They don’t know what’s different, they just know that it’s not right.

I have to go to sleep now to have any hope of making it to class on time, but I guess I’m fine. I spent some time with Matt, which made me feel better, but I still feel like there is this veil over the universe. I keep trying to get enough sleep to make it go away, but it’s still there, filtering everything that happens through the lens of he’s dead. Dead dead dead dead dead.

I remember a point during the last viewing where I was remembering all the cruel, selfish, insensitive things he did to the family and couldn’t stop crying anyway. That was another dimension to the tragedy: when someone is alive you can always hope they will change their ways and be a better person. When they are laid out, all doubt is gone. They are just as you remember them.

I never write poetry, but in lieu of writing this all out in prose I thought I would just focus on the most salient images.

The last day
Shoveling, shoveling, shoveling
Then crunching through the white to the parlor
His blanched face made ruddy with rouge

A cell phone rings in the silence
Before the lid is closed

The click-click, click-click of hazard lights
Following the hearse
We carry him into the church
Same sermon as my grandpa
Down to the very last word

My aunt is
Paralyzed by sobs
Falling over her husband in the pew
To kiss the casket

Half-hearted Twitter posts
About “Madonna” cemetery
Don’t make it any easier

When we all throw on our roses
And set off driving home

So…it’s been a day, and I’m absolutely sick of this funerary shit.

I’m also sick of having to shovel out all this snow

of everyone waking me up at some godawful hour

of the implicit ban of having my boyfriend here.

Where do I opt out of this funeral bullshit?

Can’t we just put him in the fucking GROUND?

I just don’t have the energy for this.

Fuck my family.

The first viewing was today.

It was just as heart-wrenching as I expected. The thing I will remember most will be the snow—no, I’m lying, the thing I will remember most is that I missed Ulrich Schnauss’ only tour date in like four years.

I suppose I could’ve gone, but I was in no mood to go. The snow was coming down thick all day today—heavy mushy slushy flakes weighing down the sky. it took us an hour to get to the funeral home and an hour to get back, crunching along in the crushing traffic. Google Maps was peppered with accidents and traffic blockages. Streets that hadn’t been plowed were closed off with cones.

I assumed that he would be laid out in the same funeral parlor as my grandpa, but I didn’t realize that it would be the exact same room. The exact same chairs. The exact same casket.

We thought we would be the only ones there, because of the weather, but a few of my aunt’s friends showed up along with some relatives. It was the old lady cousin who has black teeth and smells like she hasn’t bathed since the Reagan administration accompanied by her comparatively well-put-together husband.

My cousin Patty took it terribly hard, she came in after her own chemo appointment because she thought she’d be too weak to attend the funeral. She has some cancerous cells in her lung. She was absolutely inconsolable for about ten minutes—her despair was so palpable she could have been sobbing into a megaphone.

This whole experience—I have no idea how to process it. I think I understand why a Albert Camus chose a funeral for the beginning of The Stranger. It touches on the most primal aspect of our existence, that of life and death. To see my uncle there all made up like he was going out on a date—it seemed a tragic monument to the absurd.

One of my strange old lady cousins was going around assuring everyone at the funeral home that we would see my uncle again. I felt like I had crossed over onto the other side of reality. Did she really believe this tripe? Does anyone? The funny thing is, if there was some type of afterlife James would be just as self-centered as he always was: ignoring us to talk to strangers, never paying when we went out to eat, letting forth a gale-force wind of bullshit at all times. That’s what I’m going to remember, but it didn’t make the scene any less tragic.

I remember a few months ago my mom told me that she wasn’t as much mourning for her brother (who did unforgivable, heartless things to her when she took care of him) but for the brother that she could have had. I think that’s pretty much the lens through which I’m seeing this entire situation. It’s funny—it was actually relatively easy to get to my uncle’s place when I lived in Sacramento. He could have been a great force in my life—I mean, for fuck’s sake, he was my godfather—but instead he lived a life with strangers. I have his doctoral thesis sitting here in a bound, typewritten copy. I want to typeset it and have it published in a nice binding. I’m sure he’d like that.

I’m not sure what I have left of him, save for some random things I inherited when we cleaned out his house. A pair of cufflinks, some ill-fitting sport jackets, his Rorschach and TAT cards.

What does a life leave behind? There are some numbers in a bank account, I’m sure. All of his fake California friends who probably still don’t even know that he’s passed on. The part of our family that we don’t talk to even sent a gigantic bouquet.

I think the most tragic part of all of it is that he never understood how much everyone around him loved him. He never married—and I can’t help but think how I would feel if I never had anyone that meant anything to me after what, nearly sixty years? He had a long-time girlfriend, Joni was her name. She wouldn’t even return his calls after he got sick.

I’m not sure what he ever wanted out of life, but whatever it was, he sure did get it. He had enough money to go wherever he wanted, do whatever he wanted. I just can’t help but feel that I never really knew him.

I know I’ve been posting a lot of my schoolwork, but I absolutely loved writing this paper and it’s probably the most satirical and biting thing I’ve ever written. The prompt was to analyze these two New York Times articles on the problems with our “culture.”

The first column: David Brooks’s “High Five Nation” 9/15/09

The second column: Bob Herbert’s “Behind the Façade” 7/3/09

I turned this in last week but haven’t gotten it back yet. However, my critical writing professor tapped me on the shoulder on my way out of class today and said that she really liked my ideas and that we should have a talk sometime, which makes me think I got an A.

[EDIT: She loved it, and I got an A both on content and style.]

Antoine Roquentin
Critical Writing
Susan Fischer

High-Five Dystopia

Two columns in the New York Times, David Brooks’ “High-Five Nation,” published September 15, 2009, and Bob Herbert’s “Behind the Façade,” published July 3, 2009, paint a picture of a morally bankrupt culture obsessed with self-congratulation, immodesty, and infantile fantasy. Herbert’s uses the caricature of a childish, self-indulgent Michael Jackson as a metaphor for the prevailing attitudes of our time. Brooks, while writing in a similar vein, uses the image of a humbled America at the end of World War II as the shining example of a people who had achieved so much while displaying mass modesty.

Where Brooks’ backward-looking vision seems to be intended less to indict the present than to venerate the past, Herbert doesn’t spare our “culture” any criticism, linking Reagan’s willy-nilly deregulation of the economy with a sort of cultural deregulation, where things once thought to be childish and immature were allowed and even encouraged. Herbert writes: “Jackson was the perfect star for the era, the embodiment of fantasy gone wild.” It’s difficult to argue with his assertion that our behavior as a society has moved more and more beyond self-indulgence to abject fantasy. As he writes, “[m]ost of the nation seemed fine with the idea of going to war without a draft and without raising taxes.”

Brooks and Herbert have very different rhetorical styles in play in each column. Brooks, with his nostalgia for better times far behind, uses a detailed description of the subdued but joyous feeling at the end of World War II in America to make us pine for those bygone days of humility. “The war produced such monumental effects, and such rivers of blood, that the individual ego seemed petty in comparison[,]” he writes. Herbert, on the other hand, takes a different tack by listing the most egregious of our failures both as a society and as individuals: politicians abandoning the poor, repackaging a mountain of debt as an economic boom, decimating American jobs, and “[letting] New Orleans drown.” The angry staccato of these lines show that Herbert isn’t willing to pine for modesty. We should be ashamed of what we’ve done. Like wayward children, Herbert seems to be saying that before we can move forward, someone needs to become enraged about this type of shortsighted, unrealistic behavior. Talking of Jackson’s pedophilia cases, “the details of which would make your hair stand on end[,]” Herbert links the Jackson fever that erupted after his death to a recapitulation of the worst traits of our society, that of our ability to forget horrendous crimes and opt for fantasy over reality.

Despite using a more subtle rhetorical style than Herbert’s, Brooks makes a similar jab at our complacency and self-satisfaction by subtly contrasting the heroic achievements and sacrifices of World War II with the shameless self-congratulatory buzz that has come to pervade our society. Instead of listing our failures as a society, Brooks seems to focus on individual acts of egotism, such as the iconic episode of “Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won.” He ties this to earlier developments in what he posits as a gradual slide from modesty to egomania. Linking the ubiquity of advertising to the development of shameless self-promotion, from Muhammad Ali telling everyone who would listen that he was the greatest of all time, to Norman Mailer’s book “Advertisements for Myself,” Brooks is highly skeptical of this direction we’ve taken. As he puts it, “This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live.” His subtler message doesn’t convey the sense of urgency that Herbert’s does: Brooks’s most egregious example of our collective hubris is Michael Jordan’s self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech.

In using a lighter touch, Brooks dilutes the seriousness of his argument, making it sound like a curious historical anecdote. Herbert makes the opposite mistake: using the fanciful metaphor of Michael Jackson ends up making his argument look hyperbolic and his assessment of our lack of collective restraint a bit laughable. Despite being a bit over-the-top, the metaphor does highlight our society’s obsession with meaningless ephemera: Twitter trends, nip slips, and best-dressed lists taking over the space in our consciousness once devoted to hard analysis of society’s efficacy. As Herbert astutely notes,“[i]t was almost as if the adults had gone into hiding.”

Another key area that the arguments differ is where the two columnists speak of the implications of our “problem with no name.” Where Herbert seems primarily concerned with the arenas of public policy and our lack of ability as a society to take responsibility for our frivolous and indolent ways, Brooks seems to resort to giving our society an etiquette lesson from a time that is not relevant to 2010. His big metaphor is that of a radio program sent out to the troops the day of the victory in World War II with celebrities sending a message of humility to be a counterpoint against the grandiosity and pomp of the Fascists. Instead of commenting on Kanye West, Brooks would do well to highlight the ills of actual Americans. Herbert does this well, showing a more linear progression instead of Brooks’ flash-forward from the 1940s to now, as if there were no one to take the blame for the social changes that created these grevious faux pas that offend Brooks’ delicate sensibilities. As Herbert writes, “Ronald Reagan was president, making promises he couldn’t keep about taxes and deficits[.] The movie ‘Wall Street’ would soon appear, accurately reflecting the nation’s wholesale acceptance of unrestrained greed and other excesses of the rich and powerful.” Celebrities will always be a capricious bunch, but what’s unconscionable is when American society thinks that we can get away with the same shenanigans, which is exactly what happened.

Brooks and Herbert are focusing on a growing problem in our society, one that has already borne fruit as an ill-informed electorate fixated on meaningless ephemera, knowing more about the characters on Dancing With the Stars than the legislators that represent them. However, both columnists carefully skirt the idea just below the surface: that the media plays an increasing role in churning out people with these types of shortsighted, infantile behaviors. The New York Times itself is a dinosaur, and once it inevitably goes bankrupt, the greased wheels of shallowness and self-absorption will roll on unchecked. What possible check or balance could we have on our masturbatory psyche as a nation? While our schools fail, more and more people fall into poverty, and healthcare costs spiral out of control, what are we thinking about as a people? We’re busy living the lives of people even more spoiled and childish than ourselves on television.

The real fear is for the next generation—the generation that views the childish antics of the people on reality television as a background level of vapidity. In a world completely removed from any kind of societal context, everything becomes reality television. Did 200,000 people really die in Haiti, or is this just CNN’s reality show of the minute? As Bob Herbert has so astutely points out, “we descended as a society into a fantasyland, trying to leave the limits and consequences and obligations of the real world behind.” We will reap the dividends of our shortsighted choices, and soon we will be back to our humbled selves, but until then, can’t we just have one more Coach bag? One more trip to Neiman Marcus? One more vacation to the Côte d’Azur? Someday, the free ride of the rich will come to a crashing halt, and the nation will have to do a lot of hard thinking about what an entire society obsessed with supporting the whims of the leisure class means.