the diary of antoine roquentin

I just went through a whole bunch of stuff to theoretically increase the recognition accuracy. I’m not sure if it worked.

It’s very hot down here in my room. I would have the fan on, but that interferes with recognition accuracy. I don’t know what it is, but as soon as I sit down at the computer it is immediately two o’clock in the morning.

I suppose this whole journal is time I could’ve spent sleeping. I need to try and write a story this week. I was thinking of writing something very lascivious and very semiautobiographical. If people won’t talk to you, might as well immortalize them in fiction. I tried to write this story where he had this big nervous breakdown, but to tell you the truth I wasn’t really feeling much what was going on so I can only dispassionately describe the situation. Honestly, I was really done with it while it was happening and just wanted to get to bed. I don’t think that’s a good place to start a story from.

I really don’t want to write about death any more. Dave Eggers spread the (fictional?) death of his parents over an entire novel. It doesn’t interest me, save for a passing desire to write about the day that we took my grandma to the home. I had this idea this week to write reviews of something fictional, but I forget what it was exactly.

I think I’m also very hesitant to write a story because I feel like the last story I wrote directly resulted in the end of my relationship with Jon. Or perhaps it was already over. Perhaps I should write a fictional movie review.

NOW PLAYING
L’Infer
Director Antoine Roquentin’s 2002 tale of erotic despair and alienation—to be reprised July 29 at the Alliance Française—stars Paul-Henri Leroux as Karel, an anxious but subdued functionary at an art gallery. His relationship with Augustin, an aspiring writer, is front and center as the couple decide to experiment with what constitutes attachment, desire, and, of course, jealousy. The haunting landscapes of a sinister, claustrophobic Manhattan loom large in the foreground where the characters, as Karel puts it, “aller au-delà de l’idéologie de la propriété hétéronormatif [move beyond the heteronormative ownership paradigm].” Even as art house fare, the moralizing can be dense at times, in the vein of Catherine Breillat in Anatomie de l’enfer. Despite the similarity in title, Roquentin’s work, while displaying some of Breillat’s critical and unshrinking eye in the discussion of raw sexuality, presents his characters in an unquestionably masculine way. Dialogue is sparse while Karel and Agustin perform acts that should draw some sort of reaction from them, but perhaps this is Roquentin’s concession that both participants know the end result of their experiments—the wide-eyed realization that there is a place to be found outside of the stifling universe of the hétéronormatif. — A.L. Sloane

Did I mention that I started using the Kindle app on my Nexus One to read a book for the first time tonight? When I was writing that paper on artificial intelligence and feminism [PDF link], I bought this book called Artificial Knowing on the Kindle store so I could use it as a research source on my computer, but it was so interesting I wanted to read it in its entirety instead of just skimming for stuff relevant to my paper.

I’ve also been reading this book called Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton (that my literature professor loaned me). It is one of the most concise, interesting, and easy to read summarizations of literary theory’s origins and doctrines. I loved this passage about New Critics:

[...] New Criticism was the ideology of an uprooted, defensive intelligentsia who reinvented in literature what they could not locate in reality. Poetry was the new religion, a nostalgic haven from the alienations of industrial capitalism. The poem itself was as opaque to rational enquiry as the Almighty himself: it existed as a self-enclosed object, mysteriously intact in its own unique being. The poem was that which could not be paraphrased, expressed in any language other than itself: each of its parts was folded in on the others in a complex of organic unity which it would be a kind of blasphemy to violate.

I sent a message to Isabel, my friend that I would always have Marxist dialectic with in my literature class, and I hope we can hang out this week. I suggested we go to the new exhibition at the New Museum (I’m dying to go, but I haven’t made plans with anyone yet). I was thinking of Isabel because she and I had this conversation about how Abby Rockefeller started the MoMA.

It’s almost an insult that Americans own The Persistence of Memory, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and The Starry Night. Or would these works not have “value” without the promotion machine of the MoMA? Should I use “quotations” because they remind me of Carles? Should this be the “end?” Should all “articles” end with resolution? Am I rly having a “twitter tiff” w/ Best Coast? Should this post reveal my “deepest inner dezires?” R u turned off by discussion of “faux reviews?” Am I jeluzz I dont own “Broadway Boogie-Woogie?”