the diary of antoine roquentin

This end of the semester is so close but so far away. I am realizing this week that I have no idea what to do for my book project. My original idea was to do a book on web typography, but Princeton Architectural Press is printing one that comes out this summer. My teacher said that was the kiss of death, but what subject isn’t done to death?

Let’s take stock of everything I have to do in order to graduate:

1. 1-2 page paper for Critical Writing
2. 7-ish page project for Book and Magazine Editing
3. 4-6 page paper for Ethnic American Literature

After next week, all I have to do is study for my final in Human Biology. I keep racking my brain for some assignment that I’m forgetting, but I can’t think of one. Tomorrow we’re going down to my aunt’s house to see Alexis’ performance in some kind of school event. I went last year and remember it to be a bunch of preteen girls gyrating to Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. I hope this is something a little more—wholesome.

I did a bunch of work for the magazine today so that I would be as caught up as possible until finals are over. There were so many e-mails piled up. I just want school to be over with so I can actually get some work done for the magazine. I was looking into iPad publishing, and it’s a very expensive endeavor. I think we are probably just going to have to go with an iPad-enabled version of our website. Oh, I actually met someone in real life who subscribes to the magazine! It’s this girl that’s in my human bio class who I walk home after class sometime (she lives in Heritage too).

I’m feeling a little lost tonight. For some reason I’m dead set on watching Claire Denis’ White Material, but it’s already 2 a.m. I really should hit the hay. I’ve been reading Roland Barthes’ Mythologies to try to get some inspiration for my critical writing piece, which should be a re-imagining of some kind of historical or cultural narrative. Well, I do have my bookshelf near me. What could I do? Dante’s la Divina Commedia seems like great fodder. Unfortunately, on skimming it, the language is too abstruse. I should reread the assignment. Hmm.

Beatrice on Dante

[Editor's note: Beatrice Portinari was Dante Algiheri's "muse," despite his only meeting her twice: once when she was eight years old and once when she was in her twenties. The following are selections from Beatrice's diary, only recently made available by Italian authorities for translation into modern English.]

I know he says I’m his muse and all that, but I hardly even know the guy. He knew my dad and all from the bank. You know Florentines—they talk a big game about supporting art, literature, and sculpture, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the bottom line. My dad and all the nobles would go upstairs to his study to drink wine and talk investments. Us kids would have to fend for ourselves on what was supposed to be a party. I must have been eight or so at the time, because I remember seeing him [Dante] hiding behind one of the chairs in the dining hall. His father must have been upstairs drinking with Dad, because he was just standing there like a doorman while his mother went on and on to my mom about some bolt of silk she’d bought.

Dante. You wanted to know about Dante. So he’s hiding behind the chair, and then comes out and introduces himself. He was different, you know? There was something kind of off about him, like he was looking right through me. I mean, I know, in the poem he’s waxing poetic about my soul and all that, but really, when I was there, it looked like he was looking through my clothes. You know I married Simone dei Bardi. He’s not a fantastic guy, but Daddy hooked me up with him anyway. He’s got to protect the banking dynasty, you know. They were probably talking about divvying me up along with all their stock certificates and ledger books.

So I’m standing there, nine years old, and Dante is there undressing me with his eyes! The whole affair just turned my stomach. Simone is such a gentleman by comparison. I know, the name isn’t exactly the most manly, but his family has a formidable position. I think you’re starting to see why this whole muse business is more clever marketing than anything. I’m not as much a woman as a living statue for him to use in his work. I guess I could find it flattering if his poetry wasn’t so disturbingly personal. Am I really the “queen of glory?” Who can live up to this kind of rhetoric? Simone was far more down-to-earth. Sure, he doesn’t compose volumes of poetry dedicated to my otherworldly beauty, but at least he has the decency to treat me like a lady. Dante never saw me after a night when I can’t sleep, that’s for sure, or he would think twice about putting me on a pedestal.

So there we were on that day in [12]’98, and he is still staring straight at me. The minutes were getting longer and longer. I tried to do something with my hair, hoping he’d find something else interesting (men always have such short attention spans, after all), but he just kept staring. How rude! Thankfully, the maid came in from the kitchen to collect the dinner dishes, and I was able to sneak over to my secret hiding spot under the stairs. And to think, for the rest of my life, it’s Dante’s muse this, Dante’s muse that. Really! I’m a married woman. How awkward is it when we’re strolling through the Piazza and I see somebody reading those poems and I’m not “dressed in the whitest of white.” Can’t I just go to church and pray on a whim and not be this vision of perfection?

I really don’t understand why the Florentines go nuts over this guy. I say “hi” to him one time and he writes about how I’m naked sleeping in some man’s arms? No thanks. Let’s not even talk about when Simone bought La Vita Nuova. Dante, in all of his wisdom, should have come up with a more accurate title: Non Mi Guardano, Mi.

***

A good start? I think it’s time to hit the hay.

Categories: Ennui

Easter was fun. We left on Saturday afternoon and stayed the night at Gail’s house. When we got back, a light bulb went on in my brain. L’Avventura is playing at 9:00 tonight!

I checked the bus times, and I had to leave in 20 minutes. Luckily, I was all showered and ready to head out the door. Have Kindle, will travel. The thing was, it was Easter Sunday and I wasn’t sure if anything would really be running, Google Maps be darned. I decided not to take the bus the whole way (after being stuck on a bus in heavy traffic for around five hours the evening of Christmas Day), so I hopped Hudson-Bergen Light Rail to PATH to the F. It’s a more convoluted route, but the part where there could be traffic (the tunnel) is replaced by PATH.

I got to the Lower East Side around 45 minutes early. It was pouring down rain, which I didn’t mind so much, as it was around 80 degrees out. I got my ticket, then tried to find this bar that’s always empty and great to wait in on Houston. For some reason, I walked all the way to Mercury Lounge without seeing it, so I gave up, and walked back to Anthology Film Archives to buy my ticket. I then went over to Whole Foods and got a coffee to nurse for the intervening fifteen minutes.

I’m so glad that I have no more awful “ethnic” novels to read, so I started Vladmir Nabokov’s Lolita. It’s such a modern classic, and one that I feel ashamed of not having read. I’m not sure what to make of it so far. I expected the prose to be weightless, but it comes in stops and starts. For one, I didn’t realize that the protagonist was European. That gives him this aloof air that is rather unique in the books I’ve read. A Swiss man lost in an Ohio suburb.

I finished Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories last week. She just breaks my heart. I used to think that “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” was my favorite story, but I think in terms of pure storytelling, “Tumble Home,” the titular story of her third collection, is stellar. There is just so much feeling, so much subtext, so much despair. I was a bit disconcerted to read that Gordon Lish was Hempel’s editor in light of the controversy surrounding Lish’s editing of Raymond Carver’s stories. Still, the collection stands on its own. Some of the stories can get a bit boring, the ones that go on about get-togethers of married couples, kids, and dogs (zzzzzzz). However, there is a thread of humanity that binds them all together. Also, most of Chuck Palahniuk’s (sp?) novels are novel-length adaptations of Amy Hempel stories.

What I’m supposed to be writing about (it’s 1:30 a.m. and I’ve been up all day) is this prompt from my Ethnic American Lit class. Need I remind you that it’s taught by a fat old white guy, clearly the expert on ethnic and gender difference.

Okay—time to look back.  This semester you’ve read and written about five novels:  one by a Hispanic author, one by a Native American author, two by African American authors, and one by Chinese American author.  Of course, another way of looking at it is that you’ve read five novels by American authors who are also authors of a particular ethnic or racial identity. 
What do you think these novels say about being a member of a particular group?  What do you think they say about being an American?  What do they say about times when these two identities conflict?  What do they say about when these two identities reinforce each other? 

Reading these books, I can’t help but feel that in branding these novels “ethnic,” we risk a kind of literary segregation, where authors who are concerned with race get slapped on a different shelf than serious literary works. Does Song of Solomon only deal with race? No work is unipolar, and no work explores only one topic. Certain writers we studied would not be out of place on a list of the greatest writers of the 20th Century (I’m looking at you, Toni). However, other works were of such dubious quality that they are laughable as a subject for study at the university level (don’t quit your day job, Sandra).

These works do explore the experience of having multiple identities and the experience of switching back and forth between identities. At their best, they exhort us to feel what it might feel to, say, grow up with an Asian mother. At their worst, they feel like exploitative tourism that does more harm than good (are we really going to argue that Erdrich is in line for a Nobel Prize in literature?). These are interesting, engaging works. However, they beg the question of what, in an increasingly global world, the distinguishing mark of a work that needs to be considered “ethnic.”

Another of the problems with this particular selection of novels is that the writers’ ethnicities fit neatly into hyphenation: Asian-American, African-American. This makes me think of an apropos work called Dictee, written by a Korean artist who was born in America but studied in Paris for many years. Is she Korean? French? American? Most of the people we’ll meet in the real world don’t follow these novels’ easy categorization of people in little boxes. An African-American who has just arrived from Nigeria will have a completely different ethnic identity than the characters that populate Song of Solomon, but in our clever hyphenated world “they” are all the same.

Is this “Non-White” literature? “Non-European?” All this obsession with things being American is also rather myopic, isn’t it? Next time around, perhaps we could swap out one of these for a work of real ethnic importance, like Things Fall Apart. The novels we have studied make cute ethnographies, but the criteria for their selection is—to say the least—opaque.

Categories: Ennui

I’ve been in a really foul mood this week.

Perhaps it’s because I slept through my class on Tuesday. I should be jubilant since I picked up my cap and gown today. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been reading Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories, which plays my my heartstrings like an orchestra. Mixed metaphor?

I just want to read “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” over and over again. Listen to sad Charlotte Gainsbourg songs sung in French. Wallow in something—I don’t even know what. I’m afraid of the future. Afraid that my unhappiness won’t end when the semester does.

Jorge is probably mad at me. He’s taken to sleeping on the couch in the living room because I’m always up so late. I haven’t been too genial this week either. I had to do all this work tonight, so I was cranky. I got two of the four things on my list done. I guess that’s something.

I was almost too bashful to turn in my ethnography today, but I’m not writing another one. I turned it in. I’m sick of all of my classes.

I’m mad that I haven’t seen George Condo’s show at the New Museum yet. The most recent issue of the New York Review had an article about it, and I haven’t even been there. Perhaps I’ll invite Michael. He fancies himself an artist anyhow. I’ll get to meet his latest fling. Everything is always a competition with him. I win, though, because his fling is from way out in Long Island and doesn’t know the 4,5,6 from a hole in the ground. To use my mother’s colorful phrase, he doesn’t know shit from Shinola. Oh, maybe he’s nice. Maybe he’s attractive. I don’t know. It’s still a competition.

I didn’t want to write this. I wanted to sleep. As Fran Leibowitz says, when you’re writing you’re always doing something else, like drinking or smoking, to punish yourself for playing god. In my case, it’s insomnia. I’ve been forced to read The Joy Luck Club for my ethnic american lit class. It’s very politically correct. I wish I could spin my ethnicity into a way of marketing my book.

My ancestors, at least on my dad’s side, have very little tie to me. My grandpa’s parents died when he was a child, so he was raised by his aunt and uncle. He’s told me about all this genealogical research he did, but I never saw a family tree. All of his kids are missionaries. Once my grandpa and his wife pass, I will have no contact with them. They are nice people, though. One of them lives on this remote island off of Alaska with his Inuit wife. I am quite sure I would go mad that far from civilization. Or perhaps I would have more time to write. More time to read. I can see why people in their fifties are drawn to places like Brookings and Hiouchi. Sell your house in civilization, buy one three times as big in the middle of nowhere, then live out your days reading and gardening. It’s not such a bad fate.

However, I ever leave New York, I will know I have failed. I may fail. I may even get sick of it here. I used to think I could live here for the rest of my life, but after this hellish winter I just don’t know. Sometimes it seems like a better idea to move to Wichita and hole up with my books. Outside of major cities, everywhere is the same. Rent isn’t really so much less anywhere else. You get more space, but I don’t care about that. Even in Carmichael it was $700, $800 a month for a place. I’ll take my closet here for a few hundred more any day of the week.

I thought I could get through this semester by ignoring the future and then letting it hit, but I’m realizing I have no real plan for the summer. Eh, crap. I can see the Empire State Building out my window silhouetted in the blue. The new day is starting.

I am going to make some big changes in my life come May. I’m not sure if I’m even ready for them. I need to be free this summer. I need to make some money. I need to do something. Anything. I’m sick of this rut I’m in.

I leave you with my insomnia anthem. It is exactly 5:55 as I post this (okay, I lied, 5:59).

I can see the sun nestled in the blue clouds. It’s too late to sleep and too early to wake up. I need to put my head on the pillow and think of something happy. Somewhere I’d like to be. In my treehouse petting my first cat. Paddling in our canoe with my dad down the pristine Smith River. Driving eight hours through the night to go visit Kelly in Sacramento. Waiting at Civic Center for the 3 a.m. Owl bus after seeing Crystal Castles. Running into the waves at Ocean Beach with Christen in the middle of the night. Impromptu trips to Six Flags. Smoking cigarettes outside of Old Ironsides. Driving my Vespa everywhere on warm summer nights. Going on dates with people I know I’ll never meet again. Sleeping on the beach. Waking up next to Aaron.

But those things don’t make me feel sleepy. They make me feel like my heart is about to break.

I need to think of things I won’t mind forgetting.

Categories: Ennui

The last month of my undergraduate career is upon me, and I couldn’t be more over it. Senioritis is real. To have as much fun as possible, I’ve been going out during school nights (bad me!)

1. Ice Skating with Jove at Wollman Rink (March 19)

I very much enjoy spending time with Jove. We only rarely get to hang out, so when we do of course we have these really awesome conversations about life, New York, the future, etc. I had gone to Wollman Rink previously with Jorge, but he could barely skate without holding onto the sides of the rink. Jove, on the other hand, was an accomplished skater. It wasn’t like he was doing flips (although that didn’t stop him from trying), but we were both skating at a pretty good clip.

It was the perfect day for such an event: pleasantly chilly, sunny, with no breeze. We must’ve skated for at least a few hours as he told me about his latest dating drama (that guy playing the cello in the last series of party pictures randomly stopped calling him). We also talked of our plans in the city, our future (fantasy) employment, and about the absurdity of dating in the city.

After we were done skating (our feet were getting sore), we went up to the third floor of the mall in the Time Warner Center to Bouchon, the restaurant that’s the sister restaurant of the French Laundry. The prix fixe dinner runs about $200 a plate, but they have a bakery that serves some of the same stuff for hoi polloi prices. Despite the fact that a cookie and small hot chocolate was $12, the craftsmanship was very good. You could easily tell that the hot chocolate was actually made with cocoa, not some powder mixed with water.

2. High Line, Chelsea galleries

Matt and I went out and visited some galleries in the twenties. There was some great stuff and some bad stuff. We also hit up the High Line.

3. On Tuesday, Jorge and I went out to this dance party at Happy Ending, in Chinatown. It was really fun and a good mixed crowd.

4. My mom, Gill, and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We saw a ton of things, but Gill was mostly there to see these special guitars that they had on display, as well as this turn-of-the-century photography exhibition.

Afterwards, we went down to The Organic Grill off St. Mark’s and had a nice dinner. Matt was in the neighborhood and dropped by, I gave him a Rothko print I got him. (I got another for my dorm room).

5. The night before the “last” LCD Soundsystem show, Matt and I went to the pre-party on the tenth floor of this swanky Meatpacking District hotel. We made fun of people and I drank three vodkas on the rocks. I did not have a nice morning the next day, but I pulled it together enough for us to go to Republic off Union Square for some noodles and walk over to the High Line.

The Andy Warhol statue in front of the former Factory (which is now a Petsmart).

Categories: Ennui