Limbo Friday, May 23 2008

Here’s what I have finished in the past week:

Ignorance by: Milan Kundera.

Werewolves in their Youth by: Michael Chabon.

Here is New York by: E.B. White.

Slowness by: Milan Kundera.

No One Belongs Here More Than You by: Miranda July.

The Last Window-Giraffe by: Peter Zilahy.

Today I am starting:

Riding Toward Everywhere by: William T. Vollmann.

The Invention of Everything Else by: Samantha Hunt.

Notes from Underground by: Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I have to say that I hope Libraries in New York are different. I’m trying to chalk all this up as a life lesson in how to deal with extremely difficult and unpleasant people… because that’s something that one cannot escape in life. Only 30 more days of this. That moment that we leave the Athens county line in that U-Haul will be one of the most best and exciting moments of all time. Can you imagine me staying in this library in this town? I might as well go outside, dig a hole, and sit down in it. That would be the equivalent to what I’m doing right now all day every day. Repeat after me: Learning experience, learning experience, learning experience, learning experience… one more month, one more month, one more month. I’m going to try not to deconstruct. I’m going here… to my happy place.

Now on to the actual bookiness of this blog. The Last-Window Giraffe has me now obsessed with Belgrade…pictured above. Eastern European…and pretty, no?

Anyway, Here is a passage! from this a-z picture book…

“In the beginning was chaos, but we decoded it and understood everything, because we could read between the lines. Now we have to decode what we meant by ‘everything’ that not so long ago seemed so clear-cut. In the Sixties Kadar emerged from the quelled revolutionary bubbling, and in the early Seventies our parents began to breed at an unprecedented rate. How can I explain to a teenager now that the better future we once sang about is here today, because the better future always comes. How can I explain that he will never understand? It’s as though I were looking at my own parents, who believed that it would last for ever. Dear Mum and Dad, this is the country you wanted to emigrate to! You don’t even need to learn another language! How can I explain that the change of regime in 1989-90 was the school-leaving exam, and that the old order passed away at the party afterwards. Our teenage rebellion swept Communism away, the new soft democracy crowded out the old soft dictatorship. The era that had treated us like children and held us back from growing up suddenly collapsed and vanished into thin air. And I stopped growing. My generation had supposed things would carry on as before, which they didn’t, but we carried on pretending to be the way they had always wanted us to be. A conspiratorial consensus of our parents over our heads, a mute orgasm with revolutionary momentum. Because of what happened in ‘56, Hungary didn’t have a ‘56 in ‘89. Our parents had children instead, and brought them up to stay alive. And now we are going to live.”

I also love this really long thing about freedom:

“Freedom is everyone’s concern. It is not an empty word. It comes and goes freely, is free as a bird, its head reels from the taste of freedom. Freedom is a state of being. Freedom is a feeling, a greeting, a hill in Buda, a newspaper. Freedom is freedom of thought, universal freedom, freedom of the press, freedom of the seas, a car -oh no, sorry. Pobeda’s a victory. Freedom is a radio station. Free days, running free in the open air, let you thoughts run free! Free association, free thinking, free verse, free-living, freewheeling, freeloading, free entry. Freedom in Russian, freedom in sign language, physical freedom, freelancing, freestyle wrestling of swimming. Freedom is a free kick, a free ticket, a free transfer, free love, kisses are free. Freedom is a free lunch, free time, a free house, let’s go to Freeport. Freedom is a free phone, free spaces, free fall. The harbinger of freedom, the taste of freedom, the sweet bird of freedom. Freedom becomes her, his freedom is cramped, the limits of freedom, he hasn’t got a free moment. Is this table free? Is this Freedom Square yet? One can be given a free hand, savour a whiff of freedom, not know what to do with one’s freedom, devote one’s free time to something, want to be free of someone. Freedom can be discarded, sold, exchanged, devolved, violated, curtailed, blighted, trampled underfoot, and a little bit of freedom wouldn’t hurt. Freedom is the Freedom Stature on Budapest’s Gellert Hill, the land of the free, loss of freedom. Freedom is inalienable and belongs to us all, one freedom, two freedoms, people’s freedoms. It is free agents, free trade, free enterprise, breaking free, feeling free, being free to roam. Freedom is freeing a city, freeing one’s slaves, freeing oneself of one’s calories. How free is freedom? Are we free to touch it? To smother it? To stroke it? To eat it? To have a small glassful? Freedom is there on the label: tax-free, fat-free, duty-free, sugar-free, alcohol-free, carefree. Free your mind! Freedom is a freebie for short, when the road is free and you’re free to do it, time for a free-for-all, leave your body free, defend yourself freely, free yourself of your clothes, of your emotions, give them free rein, my soul soars free of its prison walls, come, freedom, bear me away on your wings! Freedom is a free bed, a free university, freemasonry. The bloody banners of freedom. Hang free, grow freely, be freestanding, have a free choice, feel free to walk around. What is freedom? Am I free to ask? Free sex, free range, thrust freedom upon or deny it someone, free oneself from an embrace, be freed of a sweet burden, be free to decide. Are you free for a dance, for a moment, for a bit of free enterprise? Personal freedom, free will. Freedom is freebooting, freedom fights. One can make free, be freespoken, lose one’s freedom. Give me liberty, and deliver me from the devil…”

So there it is, I love the freedom statue on Gellert Hill.

Enough for today. More on another day. Much love.

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Possession Tuesday, Apr 8 2008

I am not sure how I feel about the new set up here at wordpress, I think I might grow to like it. That’s really neither here nor there. (I love that saying in writing). I found this de Kooning painting on a website and also this quote:

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts it size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter– the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last– the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

- E.B. White, “Here is New York”

Apparently this is a neat little essay written by E. B. White in a hotel room in New York City, and I want to get my hands on the whole thing. I could start a whole shelf devoted to these musings on my future home.

Something weird is going on when I don’t want to do anything but listen to Pandora and while away the minutes until I get to go home. I don’t want to read or think about my responsibilities right now. I think it’s called a mixture of Spring Fever (the trees have turned and I must be under them!) and Graduation-itis (a rare form of ‘I don’t give a shit-fever’ coupled with an amnesia like sensation of not knowing who you are or where you are or who those people are who are telling you to write them papers.) I’m not sure if I will survive. But The Mountain Goats guy is singing me through it.

I’m still reading, don’t worry, just not as much as usual. Trying to get through Auto da Fe by Elias Canetti. and Possession by A. S. Byatt. Both are excellent and pair together well. I’m pretty annoyed with Interlibrary loan for this major disruption in Proust reading, but there’s not much to be done about that. I am wanting a book from the Science library which is not on North Campus so I have no idea where it is or how to get there, how I’m going to find time to get there, etc. I’m also really excited about the next few months worth of new releases that I won’t be able to afford to buy myself and they are:

Chuck Palahniuk-Snuff

Louise Erdrich-The Plague of Doves

Maureen Freely-Enlightenment

Salman Rushdie-The Enchantress of Florence

David Sedaris-When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Haruki Murakami-What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Just to name a few. Also going now to research Sanford Berman, a radical librarian.

Love, Jessica

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