Did I take too long in between posts? I feel like I have. I had to take time out from writing in my blog to do other things, like begin finally attending college. That was important. Oh, yes-- very important.
Two things have become painfully real for me over the past few days:
There is no way in hell that I am going to be a French major. As much as I love the language, there is no way that I could spend my life trying to learn another language. And there is one reason for that:
People in my country cannot speak their own langa franca; in college (yes, it is a community college-- I understand this, but that should be no excuse) I have heard an amazing amount mispronunciations of easy words, I have witnessed fellow students stumbling over easily spelled out words; easy concepts like objectivity vs. subjectivity; bad penmanship runs rampant, and a staggering amount of students haven't the ability to understand a three page long story written by Garrison Keillor.
So, what is a girl to do? A girl who is fairly literate, who enjoys the written word, and would blow a fortune in a bookstore if possible.
Son, there is only one answer to what I am feeling. I am going through college to help those around me become literate. Not testing literate, not I can read stop signs literate-- but for the love of all things Holy-- people need help learning how to actually read.
As many of my readers know (thanks, both of you) I have been reading Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence. I have sworn that not only would I obsessively up my readership, I would also include book reviews (for my own good, for your own good, just to make a point, because I feel like, because my analytic writing is really horrifying so I must find some way to improve it, etc...) on my blog. I hope that the more of these I do the better they become.
I think that there are enough social parameters that I can skip over when it comes to this novel-- it was banned for obscenity, it contains language that was considered unacceptable, etc. As I had written previously, this was the first D.H. Lawrence novel that I have read, though I have read some of his short stories and I wasn't unaware of him as a writer, and I had some concept of him as an artist. I had a friend who was obsessed with good ol' D.H. and would claim up and down that there wasn't a writer in print who could match Mr. Lawrence at fiction.
There is no great action in this novel; most of the work happens within conversations and private thoughts. The novel is known for obscenity and for sex-- as a post-post modern reader this is, of course, funny and uncomfortable. The sex, and there is a bit of it, is not at all obscene by today's standards. This was the first book of 2011 that I have finished, and after a point I had to start kicking myself into reading until the book was finished. I enjoyed it, and I could understand and identify with some parts of the narrative-- but I couldn't help but be off-put by the overwhelming feeling that D.H. Lawrence couldn't really understand the female psyche at all. I'm sure that this is something that most female readers can appreciate and identify with; I have heard the same sentiment uttered on other female ran book review blogs.
Bonne Annee, mon frere et mon amis-- Bienvenue! I haven't written since 2010. I wanted to start my blog out fresh and give myself a few days to figure out why I decided to write a blog in the first place. It initially began out of the inspiration to create a fashion/ style blog, but I believe that the vision has changed. A lot of what has been going on my life has been a moving away from style/ looks/ shopping etc., and has moved more into the field of reading, writing, thinking, seeking, eating (not eating), adoring, feeling-- with certain mixtures of anxiety, hopefulness, sloth and rude will. Also, not having a camera is a hinderance in me being able to make a style blog. C'est la vie, non?
Today actor Pete Postlethwaite died of Cancer; I don't usually take much notice of celebrity deaths but his was special; or rather, he was special. He played the part of Friar Laurence in Baz Luhrman's Romeo+Juliet and delivered one of my favorite Shakespearean monologues, which I transcribed below:
find myself quoting parts of the soliloquy often-- that and with several from Hamlet which I am sure to get to sooner or later.
I am smack in the middle of reading my first D. H. Lawrence novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and I find myself wondering why on earth I hadn't read any of his novels before. His writing is sublime-- quite English, quite sublime. I want to, one day soon, write eloquent and important summaries of what I read and accurately transcribe my thoughts and feelings without being too abstract or too forceful and mechanical.
I have also been spending time trying to figure out exactly what it is that I want to do with my life. I have spent so much time outside of what I want to do that I am excited to start making headway into knowing what it is that I want, which is to be a librarian.
Books, art, thoughts, films, music-- all of these things are tremendously important to me, and much of my life revolves around loving them. As I come more into my own it becomes clearer to me that I must take action and live the life that I want-- which is to archive, protect and serve the written word and the dewey decimal system.
I want to be a librarian-- which involves six years of schooling-- and I want to be a great chess player. If not great, than slightly brilliant.
I have been a slow reader this week. I have finally finished Audrey Niffenegger's sophormore(ish) novel "Her Fearful Symmetry", and to my surprise I feel apathetic to having read it. I was eagerly awaiting the release of her second book for years, and then when it came out I hesitated to read it. I don't why I hesitated. It might have something to do with my Proust reading theory (more on that, later), or I might be able to blame it on an already clogged up reading list. I first bought it when it was in hardcover, but sold it to Half Price Books when I was hard up for money. I kept returning to the book, though, over and over again, wondering and plotting out when it would be that I would read it. The time came when I borrowed it from my mother in law, after I saw it sitting in a pile next to her couch. She highly recommended it, I was excited to begin.
And I did, and I initially loved it for the same reasons that I loved the Time Traveller's Wife-- the pacing was very nice, the overall feel of the novel was well thought out and the imagery and language was good. Pop-bubblegum-y with a side of sugar, but good. The novel felt like it had been dipped in light violet and pink dye and everything was drenched with color.
Color was something that stood out immensely in her novel; as were clothes, shoes, food textures, stuff that is utterly mundane. The descriptions, though, didn't enhance the mundane and lift it into a more delicate and/or vibrant world. This becomes a problem when the characters start venturing around London and Highgate Cemetery: so much of London and the cemetery is foreign to a vast majority of her readers, but somehow she manages to forget to render it into life-- in other words, I don't really care what Mouse and Julia are wearing, but I would love to know what the Tubes were like, and more about the cemetery, and what does Tracey Philips' store look like?
Things go smoothly, albeit slightly syrup-y, up until Part Three when things go haywire for me. Without giving anything away (like Reading Rainbow said, "Don't Take My Word For It") the novel became riddled with major issues for me. The fictional dream was, in a way, totally ruined. There was not enough ground rules set up for the way characters that were dead could act and there were not enough clearly defined emotional rules for the characters-- in the sense that arbitrary emotional muck surfaced very quickly toward the end of the novel and was not resolved. Nothing is really resolved as far as the book goes. It felt as though the writer didn't know how to end things and began to write frantically just to get to some end-- and it was an alright end-- but it was also a let down. I still really like her writing style and I think that she is a really fun and inventive fiction writer. I think that she just got some sophomore blues on this novel.
I haven't updated in two days, two days longer than I have intended, and I don't wish to let it go any longer. Last night I went up to Austin, TX with my husband on one of our usual excursions. We try to do special and fun things to commemorate our time with each other; he finished his finals at UTSA yesterday and is one semester closer to becoming a lawyer or a teacher or whatever else he wants to be. It is 3:10 in the morning and my husband is watching Easy Rider on the couch.
The scene is the part where the two main characters find themselves in a hippie commune camp, where everyone is singing continental soldier and she'll be coming 'round the mountain. This scene takes me back to a time when I had this intense and all consuming desire for a life that wasn't mine, and that I knew instinctively that I would never live, but needed to experience in the realm of imagination-- an eternal journey of filthy hair and sacred mountains and waters that run sweet from spring fed streams; gypsy trailer parks, pork and beans and bandanas filled with mystical objects; canyons filled with wild coyote spirits and cactus growing out of the earths purple fingertips-- to be a desert saint in the realm of madness.
I loved Conor Oberst's music-- the soundtrack to this desert madness.
I got to live out a few of these fantasies for a crusty and weird year. I became obsessed with gardening and making my own bread and political dissent-- I also became severely enamored with mind expanding drugs (though I never took any) and alternative thought. I was one of those kinds of people-- the kind that said there was no difference between doing heroin and shopping, going so far as to suggest that the latter was worse than the former. I also desperately wanted a desert retreat and obsessed over going to Marfa, TX.
I did get to experience my desert idyll, though.
So what is the point?
I think the point, to me, is that there is some essential self to a person, and it often is the one that you imagined when you were young. My desert idyll, my crusty creature, were all beings which sprung from the collective imaginations of people that I befriended in my late teens/early twenties. Wonderful people, filled with ideals-- hard living losers as well-- but people that made up the cultural geography of my imagination and deeply affected my perceptions.
When I met my husband I slowly but surely disconnected myself from that frame of mind and began to re-embrace (and am still learning to wrap my arms around) the things that really make my heart sing.
I always wanted to be this kind of girl.
I wanted, and still want, to sit on a crescent moon.
When I was in high school I dressed as Theda Bara to go to a prom.
So what else? Yesterday, when I was in Bookpeople in Austin I made a huge realization when I was looking through a book of 666 Photography-- I love reading and bookstores, and I love glamour and kitschy fashion. Bookstores have always been my place of personal Nirvana, wether it is a big chain like Barnes and Noble or Borders, or it is a small dive like the Antiquarian Bookmart or Cheevers Books, both on Broadway in San Antonio. The smell of old books is enchanting to me, absolutely an aphrodisiac. (I am not ashamed to say that I am an unabashed book sniffer-- the older, the better. I especially like books that were bound in the forties and have stayed in a closed personal library for years; now that is a vintage I can get behind).
Below this I have a visual list of the books that I intend to read after I finish the Niffeneger (which should be tomorrow) and before I get anymore new books into my library:
And lastly, my favorite picture of David Foster Wallace:
And my dream reading room, without the television.
