the diary of antoine roquentin

Yes–I know–I don’t really believe in omens, but foreshadowing happens so much in novels it just might as well happen in real life. I mean, do novels reflect reality or vice versa? Well anyway, I went to Wal-Mart, and I went to pull into a parking spot and I drastically misjudged and came within inches of this car. This wouldn’t have been so catastrophic except for this elderly couple had just gotten out of it. I was kind of freaked out, because I thought that I hit them from the way they were gesticulating. The husband was standing by the back fender of his car. So I got out of my car and walked around to where he was standing.
“I didn’t hit you, did I?”
“You came within like THIS MUCH” he held out a tiny space between his fingers for emphasis “of my car!!” And I did the thing I hate. I played like I didn’t care. Nonchalantly, I replied, “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Look at that!” he said, “You need to straighten that out!” I looked. My car was catty-cornered in the space. It was a HORRIBLE parking job. I think my worst yet. I grimaced, mostly to myself, and walked over to the driver’s side to fix it. I was deathly afraid of actually hitting his car this time, so I went back as slow as I could, paying careful attention to his facial features so I didn’t hit his car. I straightened it out, gathered some change from my front seat, locked the doors, and started walking towards the store. OH MY GOD was that embarrassing. All through my ritual of buying the rechargeable batteries (which are now charging in the office here) I was consumed with guilt and self-loathing. I made up my mind to just drive home, as that whole situation was indeed a bad omen. But, I said to myself, “What are you doing? You need to be a true nihilist and recognize that omens are simply fiction.” And then I got my conscience tied up in the “does fiction imitate reality or vice versa” debate, so I went back to the college simply as an experiment in whether omens really are true. So if something else shitty happens to me, then I’ll have proof of omens. Or just proof of coincidences. We’ll see. I wish I could hang out with the Lethargy Club gang. I know they’re all going to see Harry Potter, I should go. Jill is here. Gotta go, we’re going to look for Molly.

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Yesterday I bought a sketch pad to keep by my bed so I could write down my dreams. So every time I came out of sleep, I’d jot down what happened. I guess it’s part of my comprehensive plan to blog twenty-four hours a day. Well, here they are. I’ll first have what I jotted down, and then the dream.

Weird bugs in room: I dreamt that Kelly and I were watching TV in my living room, and there was this show about bees. Well, with that, bees started coming from everywhere, so I ran into my room and locked the door. When I glanced around my room, I noticed there were bugs everywhere—ants, bees, everything—and that my carpet was all earthy and mushy. Well for some reason I started building this train set that turned into a launch system for this satellite that was probably about as big as my fist. It was all silver and metallic, but there was some mechanical glitch and I couldn’t get it to work. Then I woke up.

Carrie creepy house NY: Well, I was in New York—actually I think it was New Jersey. It was all grimy and there were no trees and there were all these weird places that we didn’t feel like we could go into because there were too many black people in them. So me and this group of maybe two others went into this high school prom, and they were really mean to one of the people I was with, and I said something about Carrie and that they’d get what they deserved. Well, I left and next door to the school was this little shack and out came out this really big black man who was evil and all covered in gross-ness and rags and it was somehow obvious he was going to kill everyone, so I ran away. Then I woke up.

Halloween party: I really don’t remember this dream. I guess it had something to do with a Halloween party, obviously.

Harry P. Tree Man: Well, this dream started and I was in this cool city, it was all beautiful and kind of French village, but in some aspects Harry Potter-ish. Well, I was walking around and something happened, then I started talking to this guy, saying “Yeah, I’ve read the first two (Harry Potter) books, I just did it because I couldn’t find anything good to read, and my friends were doing it.” “Yeah.” He said. Later, we were looking for someone, so we climbed up this ridge and on top of it was this cottage. We went inside looking for some guy and he wasn’t there, but then we noticed this sculpture on the wall of this tree-man and how lifelike it looked. Then it came alive and stepped out of the wall, as if to say “your quest is at an end, you have found me.” Then I woke up.

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Today was a no-computer day due to my carpal tunnel thing, but I thought this was interesting. I just wanted to share this. It’s the introduction to an illegal ebook of “Crash”. The paragraph breaks are screwed up because I pasted it from Acrobat, but I tried to make them as well as I could. Well, here it is.

The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia. Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly. In addition, I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – massmerchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality. In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction – conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud’s classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.
Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathology? I feel myself that the writer’s role, his authority and licence to act, have changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.
Crash is such a book, an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. Crash, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful than that provided by reason?
Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography. is the most
political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.
Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.
J. G. Ballard
1995

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I just got to 200,000 words! Yay! I’m going to the bathroom, will continue this post later.

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> Orgy – Fiction (Dreams In Digital)
> Kylie Minogue – Dance Floor
> Lords of Acid – Cybersex
> Madonna – What It Feels Like For A Girl
> Orgy – All The Same
> Marilyn Manson – The Death Song
> Garbage – So Like A Rose

I’m awake and it’s 4:00 in the morning. I love this song, it’s so gravy. The video is stupendous. Hot androids, Jay Gordon, Amir–glorious. Jay Gordon so used to be my god until he came out with “The Obvious,” this horrible six-song CD that came out this year. I went to the uniform shop today and got a plain black t-shirt, and stopped by Wal-Mart to get some black socks (where the hell do they all go? I used to have six pairs, now I only have one!) I think Jordan accidentally stole some. I’m talking to Jeff (prankstrofluv) and one of his friends died. It reminded me of a Crash quote:

“This bogus comiseration over the dead man irritated me, merely as an excuse for an exercise in moral gymnastics. [...] I had thought of his last moments alive, frantic milliseconds of pain and violence in which he had been catapulted from a pleasant domestic interlude into a concertina of metallized death. [...] Catherine’s mock-grief was a mere stylization of a gesture –I waited for her to break into song, tap her forehead, touch every second temperature chart around the ward, switch on every fourth set of radio headphones.”

–J.G. Ballard, “Crash,” p.36-37

I LOVE THAT QUOTE. I really need this job, my bank account is now around $190. And that’s without buying my books for summer session. I think I’m going to take Molly’s creative writing class, because writing is really the only thing that gives me pleasure nowadays, and journal entries are kind of boring.

dariusofthedark: I went and got a job application today
PrnkstrOfluv: where?
dariusofthedark: the newspaper here, they’re looking for some kind of clerk
dariusofthedark: and since I volunteer at the newspaper at the college, I thought that might give me some kind of advantage
dariusofthedark: I can’t really picture this hick town being chock-full of people with master’s degrees in journalism
PrnkstrOfluv: lol
PrnkstrOfluv: good luck
dariusofthedark: it would be so great to have money
dariusofthedark: I could spend it frivolously on clothing
dariusofthedark: yay!
PrnkstrOfluv: haha faggot
PrnkstrOfluv: lol
dariusofthedark: lol
dariusofthedark: I love coats, they make me happy
PrnkstrOfluv: i love pants.
PrnkstrOfluv: god they get me horny
PrnkstrOfluv: haha
dariusofthedark: I need to move to somewhere cold so I can wear ornate coats all the time
dariusofthedark: LOL
PrnkstrOfluv: a dude in a nice pair a pnts.
PrnkstrOfluv: mmm.
dariusofthedark: omg, I was in new jersey at the boardwalk, and I saw this guy in white pants with lime-green pinstripes!!!! It was SO COOL
dariusofthedark: I will so never forget that guy ever
PrnkstrOfluv: lol

Yeah, the guy with lime-green pinstripes. I want to have his babies. And really, can someone with that much style really be straight? Nope. I really hate–stuff. Just thought I’d say that. Um, can’t think of anything else to say so I’m going to post this. Oh! I remember! I went into the office this morning and someone had put a “badger badger badger” wallpaper on the computer, it was like the Leonardo DaVinci drawing of the man in the circie, but it was the badger–it was so cute. Oh, I went online and found this GREAT vocabulary list. I’m going to print it out tomorrow. I’m uploading it with this post using the “upload” feature. I’ve never used the “upload” feature before. It may pleasure me in ways hitherto unknown to the human race.

Whoa, I just uploaded the vocab list and it gave me this link:Vocab List I don’t think it will work, because I had it upload it to the root folder. I’ll change the link accordingly. Oh, I just heard the coolest thing about Diane Keane today from Molly: Diane’s favorite book is The Haunting of Hill House! Diane is the coolest person ever. Too bad she’s a chronically broke part-time community college teacher. I can so see her working in an upscale gallery in SoHo or something. Actually, I can’t picture her anywhere but Greenwich Village. I can see her walking her dogs in Central Park, talking derisively to her bohemian friends about the abysmal new exhibit at the Guggenheim. I wonder why she’s here. I’m so going to get my doctorate. Then I can teach anywhere. And make lots of money. Well, lots of money to me who has no money. I’m dariusofthedark, if it wasn’t obvious.

dariusofthedark: whoa, I just found a chat window that had been idle for a long time
PrnkstrOfluv: heh which?
dariusofthedark: it’s weird when people just stop talking for no reason
dariusofthedark: oh some guy
dariusofthedark: we started talking because we both liked manson, he’s on drugs all the time for a bad back
dariusofthedark: so he feels that he has to go online and brag about it
dariusofthedark: how inordinately lame
PrnkstrOfluv: haha

God I’m bored. Whoa, it’s 4:57! Weird. It’s almost time to get up. Well, get up meaning go into the living room to use the better computer. I’m starting a new post, this is getting way too long.

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