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.
Categories: Ennui
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.
Categories: Ennui
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.
Categories: Ennui
I had to write a paper for my Methods of Literary Analysis class (the portal corse for English majors) about the imagery used in the film Bright Star which presents a fictionalized account of the life of the Romantic poet John Keats.
I just got it back today, she wrote “well-written—very good work!” on it. I thought I’d post it, since all my writing these days seems to be of the technical variety:
Antoine Roquentin
Methods of Literary Analysis
Judith Broome
Bright star, would I were affluent as thou art
In the 2009 film Bright Star, the primary imagery of the film stems from an Elysian conception of nature, with flowers abloom and an idyllic forested landscape of unspoiled beauty. The imagery of wealth, privilege, and class also pervade the film—which can be read not only as a meditation on beauty but of a fall from the leisure class.
The extensive images of nature in the film help to underscore its focus on Keats’ poetry, which uses much natural imagery. The poem that the film takes its title from is filled with images of nature, from the obvious comparison of himself to a star, to “gazing on the new soft-fallen mask / of snow upon the mountains and the moors[.]” The film also attempts to make specific connections with imagery provided in dialogue, such as the scene where he emulates his dream floating on the branches of a magnolia tree.
The blooming flowers and butterflies also symbolize the sexual frustration that Keats and Fanny feel. The constant over-saturation of blooms and color, such as when Fanny, enraptured by beauty, falls down into a field of lavender, serves to underscore how the imagery of the natural world mirrors her affections. In another scene, where Fanny has her brother and sister fill her room with butterflies, she is trying to extract from nature the symbols of her love, and fill her life with them. Nature imagery, as well as being a mirror for the positive aspects of Keats’ romance, also serves as a symbolic backdrop for times when the story takes a dark turn, such as the rainstorm before Keats is taken ill. Also, in the scene where Keats is enraged that his friend has offered to marry Fanny, this takes place not in an area of lush flowers but in a barren stand of trees, further underscoring the relationship between Keats and the natural world.
The film is also replete with the visual language of privilege and class—not one person in the film, save for Keats, actually has anything we could consider a job. One could argue that if Fanny had to work hard putting food on the table, she wouldn’t have had time to let her obsession with Keats take hold of her. Her days spent doing nothing in bed serve as an embarrassing reminder of the capricious nature of the upper classes. It’s also worth noting that the production team of the film didn’t think the actual houses that Keats and Fanny lived in were appropriate for the film. Instead, the film was shot on a sprawling estate in the country, amplifying the quality of the film as a documentary on the trials and tribulations of the rich, rendering much of the heartfelt sentiment of the film embarrassing.
The myopic treatment of the historical context of the film is understandable, as the focus is on nature, beauty, and love. The sumptuous color and warm, summer breezes so adequately captured in the film are meant to evoke Keats’ words, but the imagery of his poetry, in cinematic explication, loses some of its best qualities.
Categories: Ennui
Uncle died today.
Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.
No, it was today. My cell phone barely works in the dorms, and my mom had called two or three times while I slept. I remember telling her she was in my dream, before she told me.
I didn’t know what to do—I stayed in bed until 3:30 in the afternoon.
Woke up
Made breakfast
Washed my clothes
Took a shower
(we must continue to do our routines, never stopping, never stopping)
Went to my American Lit class, and surprise surprise we’re discussing Emily Dickinson’s poems about death. I felt this one the most apropos.
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning
And untouched by Noon—
Lie the meek members of the Resurrection—
Rafter of Satin—and Roof of Stone!Grand go the Years—in the Crescent—above them—
Worlds scoop their Arcs—
And Firmaments—row—
Diadems—drop—and Doges—surrender—
Soundless as dots—on a Disc of Snow—
Roommates were listening to gangsta rap all morning—I wanted to walk over and switch off the circuit breaker. Found out the cafeteria doesn’t take credit cards…wtf is up with that? The bitch was really rude about it too, I took it out and she just gave me this condescending look. I hope she finds centipedes in her vagina.
I’m having a beer and trying to think about doing this essay for my methods of literary analysis class. I called and asked my mom whether I should come home today or miss my classes, and Grandma said that I should go to class. After all, the first viewing isn’t until Thursday.
The death just doesn’t feel real here at the university. Nothing ever feels real here, it’s like I’m fourteen once I walk through the student center. Some might find that liberating, but I hate it. I hate being around these childish imbeciles for three days a week. People were throwing snowballs and rocks at our window earlier.
Most of the people in my classes aren’t really trying to be writers, they want to teach third grade and instill them with the same lasseiz-faire bullshit that has destroyed our society.
I saw my uncle a few days ago in the care facility—he was so tired, kept slipping off to sleep. He was on oxygen, which is always a sign that the end is near. He could barely remember us, but he would always respond to my mother’s voice when she told him what the nurses wanted. When we left, I said goodbye, but I couldn’t tell from looking in his eyes whether he knew who I was or not.
The banter of my roommates continue in the background—flies buzzing a melody of football and corrupt bourgeois values.
I need to write this damn essay or there’s no reason to actually show up on Wednesday.
I know this post has been kind of a downer, but I leave you with some humor from the Ten Word Wiki’s article on broccoli.
Categories: Ennui
I know I haven’t written in forever, but I was really busy last week. I was writing like mad, with a four page essay due in my critical writing class and this other two-page assignment for my methods of literary analysis class.
I had class all Wednesday long, but I managed to get through it all and get on the bus to see Four Tet at Le Poisson Rouge (with Matt, of course).
The next night we went to see Chris Garneau (this band Matt adores) at City Winery, then headed over to Mondo. I’m sad to say that whatever DJ was being amazing during the summer, they have gone on vacation. There was a lot of weird stuff that I couldn’t even identify, although they did play the Smiths and Le Tigre.
The next day I went to meet up with Marvin in the city and we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and took some pictures in DUMBO.
(from here on, all these photos were all taken with my brand-new Nexus One‘s 5-megapixel camera)
(I adore the High Street/Brooklyn Bridge station, the tunnel is deliciously curved and looks like you are going to take off into space.)
Marvin couldn’t stay late because he had to get back to the university (last bus is at 11:30), so I went with him back to the Port Authority. After that, I headed to Brooklyn to meet up with Matt to see The Golden Filter. It was a fabulous show, although I forgot to bring my good camera. We did end up in some of the crowd shots:
The Golden Filter chick moves around like crazy, but I did manage to get one good shot of her:
Here’s the link to the actual professional photos.
I should be sleeping right now, but I’ve said that for years. I’ll sacrifice an hour of sleep for journaling—I always have. It’s odd to use the word “blogging,” since that really refers to something else these days, the realm of Gizmodo, Engadget, BrooklynVegan, and Boing Boing.
Writing for yourself is a subversive act.
I encourage everyone to do it.
I have to admit, I didn’t keep my promise to myself to finish writing my story. I’ve barely done any work, save for reading a ton in House of Mirth for my lit class. We are supposed to write an essay about how the main character is treated as a product.
In other news, I think my critical writing essay was a tour de force. I will find out tomorrow afternoon whether my professor agrees. I also think I did fantastically on the Grammar & Style test on Wednesday.
I also did that presentation on Jean Baudrillard (wow, this is the first time my voice recognition program spelled his name correctly) and I think it went perfectly. I was quite nervous and I really should have made some kind of outline of what I was going to talk about, but I had no idea how to sum up his theories so I just got up there with no notes and talked about his work for about 15 minutes. My professor looked like she was going to fall off the chair and then gave a little mini-lecture on philosophers even more obstructionist than their writing than Baudrillard.
Ok, soI really didn’t want to go back to the dorms today and give up my gigantic monitor and my lovely workstation, so I’m leaving ridiculously early in the morning. My alarm is set for—are you ready?—SEVEN ANTE MERIDIEN, BETCHES.
My whole goal for this weekend was to get new glasses and write a story, and I have to say I failed on both counts (but had an absolutely amazing and fun weekend). Eh, you win some, you lose some. Next week will be better.
Next summer
Next year
Until some undisclosed time when I’m going to have to “get my groove back.”
I want to graduate. Immediately. Also, I’m taking a much higher course load next semester. This shit is too easy.
Categories: Ennui
I had such a fantastic Valentine’s Day with Matt. He came over Friday afternoon and hung out at my house for a while. My grandma loved him, it was hilarious. In the evening, we saw the Taken By Trees show at Union Hall (my mom couldn’t go because she was sick). It was absolutely beautiful. Her voice was like crystal wrapped in lace, fringed with her Swedish-accented words to the crowd between songs. When she sang “Watch the Waves” I thought I was going to pass out.
Saturday I went to Greenwich Letterpress and bought cute handmade cards for the family, and went up to Chelsea to find my mother a bouquet. I was turned off by all the dead flowers, so I found her this wonderful potted succulent with a beautiful flower.
While walking around one of the stores, I saw this adorable cactus that needed me to take him home. I named him Kenneth.
On Valentine’s Day, Matt and I went to Dao Palate and had a fantastic vegan meal and a bottle of wine. There were music and people and they were young and alive.
Today I went with Matt and a few of his friends to this amazing Indian buffet in Jackson Heights. It was an epic meal—this was lunch, and I wasn’t hungry again until midnight. On my way back to Manhattan, Yevgeny texted me that he was around so we met up for coffee in Times Sq and were going to watch a movie, but there was this odd discrepancy between the times that were listed online and the ones they had in the theater. So we went to Whole Foods instead and I did my weekly grocery shopping. I got some Lambic and this English beer I like. I need something to deal with my roommates, and I’ve decided that it will be fancy alcoholic beverages, at least for this week.
Tonight I’m supposed to be writing this essay for my critical writing class, but I’m not feeling terribly inspired, although I’m sure she will think it’s a tour de force. It’s due tomorrow though, I should get writing.
I know I’ve been saying this for years, but I need to force myself to write some fiction. I will write a Borges/Calvino-esque tidbit by Sunday, I have decided. I hate when I’m happy and have no desire to be creative. That hasn’t really happened yet, since I’ve been painting a lot despite my school responsibilities, but I need to write. I’m a writing major—I must get over this writers’ block.
Instead of writing stories, I think I’m going to write fake technical writing. Since that’s mostly what I do, I think it will have an eerie verisimilitude to it.
Categories: Ennui
I forgot that I’d taken a bunch of pictures of the gigantic snowstorm at my university on Wednesday. For your viewing pleasure:
Here’s the main part of campus in front of the library
This is my view of New York City (taken from the roof of the science building, someone had left the door unlocked). Anyone have any idea where it is? I need to get a telescope to make out the actual buildings.
Snow heaped underneath Ben Shahn Hall
View of the dorms at night (don’t they look like prisons?)
Another far-off view of the dorms (taken from the science building)
Without the sign, this could be a Christmas card picture.
Lonely chairs in front of Raubinger Hall (where I have most of my classes)
One of the older buildings on campus (taken from Raubinger Hall)
Another of the old buildings:
Trees in front of Raubinger
Sculpture in front of the Atrium
Categories: Ennui
I’m here to chronicle a mistake. Not a large one, but a miscalculation nonetheless.
So, I sort of ignored my new roommates pretty much the entire semester, and one of them gave me a “talking-to” tonight after class.
I realize it was a mistake to ignore them, and forgot that the only reason that I had such relatively painless interactions with the old roommates was because I tried very hard (against my usual introverted tendencies) to talk to them, to say hi, and all that.
I wanted to be friendly, but I didn’t know my new roommates’ names. Well, I do know, because the names are on a paper on our door, but I don’t remember for the life of me which one is which. So probably ditching the first day to see Charlotte wasn’t the best of ideas, but it’s not going to impact my grades.
And really, the bottom line is that I’m never going to see these people again after this semester. However, I feel like that attitude pervades our culture so much that. The idea that even people are disposable—which Alvin Toffler vigorously asserts—really offends my moral sensibilities. However, I’m a mass of contradictions and I think this is one of them. I absolutely can’t fucking stand the girls in my class that sit in the back and clickity-clack-click on their BlackBerries all damn class long. It’s like, what the fuck are you sending that can’t wait 45 minutes? It’s damn distracting. At least with an iPhone there isn’t that clickity-click nonsense. On the other hand, I’m supremely guilty of connectalysis.
I think that I’m guilty of treating people like disposable commodities too—and I could blame society, but we don’t exist in a vacuum. We exist inside our society, so I am part of the problem. I’m obsessed with getting a Nexus One, even though I know the lack of a keyboard would frustrate me to no end.
To be a disciple of consumerism and to simultaneously revolt against it is itself a consumer product: that of apathy, which benefits the ruling class innumerably.
I view the football players as members of a lifestyle brand opposed to mine. In the future, we will only fight wars because of brand loyalties. The Frito-Lay Republic vs. the McDonald’s Empire.
“In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!” -J.G. Ballard
Categories: Ennui
In my grammar and style class, our homework was to come up with words for things that didn’t have words. I was done 10 minutes after class:
interdoubt – the state after you connect to a new wi-fi network where you’re not sure if it worked or not (you’re opening your Web browser, checking to see if your IM client will connect, waiting for the “new mail” sound)
subhalcyon – the slow, shallow rush of air that happens in silence inside the subway tunnel which means that surely a train is approaching
connectalasis – the foreboding feeling (when at work or in class) that you are missing out on something awesome going on online (be it an Apple keynote, celebrity nip slip, or a Facebook post from your best friend)
I’ve been terribly busy this week, but I did still have time to see Hot Chip at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Friday. I’ve basically had to read Huckleberry Finn in four days (I’m about 2/3 of the way through), and then read all these critical essays on it. My lit teacher is basically obsessed with the idea that Mark Twain invented the American novel, but I think that’s poetic bullshit. I think his comment about Salinger borrowing Twain’s style of dialogue rings true—Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield would have a grand old time together—but I don’t see what the big deal is. I suppose I will come class tomorrow.
I just got back from the gym and I’m feeling a bit tired. I need to read as much as possible in that book and prepare for my presentation on Jean Baudrillard on Wed. It should be epic.
Categories: Ennui