Still stuck into, in a savouring way, the True History of the Kelly Gang. Yesterday stumbled across the Jerilderie letter that Ned Kelly himself wrote and that Peter Carey used for the narrative voice. It is a little bit beautiful and the state library of Victoria has scanned and transcribed it. Bless them.
I can't wait to live with a bit of space around me, somewhere warm. And I really can't fucking wait to live around libraries again. What a good fucking idea public libraries are and how I took them for granted as a child. I sometimes have this sort of impersonal memory of my adolescent self mooching around the library, my nose stuck into some book by some author a million miles away in time and space and thinking from my northern Ontario shitburg in the 1990s. And even though I was an angry young thing, these strange escapes made everything tolerable, and now I'm so glad I had that to keep myself from sniffing glue all the time, but at the time I didn't notice at all, and I think assumed it was what everybody did, which was silly because the library was always empty.
Travel abroad and the absolute library dependence engendered by the humanities degree stopped me from taking libraries for granted by my 20s. And then whilst studying in Paris, the school not having its own library - having lending agreements instead with the semi-private libraries of the French 'public' institutions or whoever (by the way, if any young nymphos heading to Paris read this, the military library in Paris is a fucking awesome place to meet fine, trim martial ass) - well, that's when the yearning started in me for the proper way that books were made accessible, face-slappingly accessible back home, for students and the public.
And while there is a whole truckload of things I miss about Toronto, the public library system there has to be close to the top of the list. It is AWESOME. A fucking behemoth with outlets everywhere and a delivery system so you can get books from anywhere and drop them off anywhere, new releases super-fast, and just about everything I wanted. I only had to dip into the U of T library about 20% of the time whilst writing my thesis for the Parisian school, that's how fucking awesome the public library was there, and I was an absolute pig in shit.
Now here I am . . . yearning for a library the same way I'm yearning for space and warmth. And I'm yearning. Yesterday meeting his parents wasn't nearly as awful as I'd been expecting but it was still awful. They look so much like him, which stands to reason, and his father has the same giggling laugh. I just wanted to hear that laugh over and over because it was like hearing him laugh again.
Anyways, afterwards I really badly needed to get wasted, and so became so. Came home to the fucking freezing Art Nouveau apartment, cranked up the futile heater and lay on the couch for awhile, trying to finish my brain off for the night by getting enormously high, bundling up in a housecoat and the Snuggie Magnum had sent for Christmas. And while I got comfortable pretty damn fast because this Rotterdam reefer could soothe Richard Simmons at his tweakiest, I felt so fucking oppressed by the damn Nordic darkness tapping on the window and leaking in through the cracks, and the heavy housecoat and the heavy Snuggie and the lightless blue of the gas fireplace and having to curl up on the couch just to be warm enough to get comfortably numb, and I wanted with all my heart to be somewhere where I could be outside - where I could sit under the enormity of the sky and look over the enormity of the earth and not be fucking shivering - I felt that I was already buried in a tomb here.
So yeah, I'm fucking yearning. I feel that I'm close to the end of my tether and I'm starting to choke.
giovedì, gennaio 21, 2010
mercoledì, gennaio 20, 2010
Rethinking Freud
Last week I showed up to one session of psycho-analysis, and then decided to dump the idea. That's not what I need right now. What I need right now is to emigrate. And grieve. In view of that whole 'grieving' thing, we get to meet his parents this afternoon and I'm dreading it, dreading it to the point where I am really having to rethink Freud and his ideas of the stages of human development, especially in tandem with my decision to drop Jungian analysis, and in tandem with certain revelations about a certain member of my extended family, who is a very active poo-retainer.
That's right. This person will go for a week or more without taking a shit, complaining more and more about their physical infirmity (ie, their inability to take a shit) and all the while steadfastly refuse to drink more water; eat vegetables, fruit, whole-grain breads or cereals, or yoghurt; forebore from eating cream - steadfastly refuse, in essence, to do anything that might help them take a shit, until whatever fucked-up psychological point that needs to be made with this person's immediate family is made, at which point this person takes a laxative and soon thereafter a massive fucking sasquatch dump. And then the whole beautiful cycle, which has been going on for decades, begins again.
What does this have to do with the present situation, you ask. First, I've realized that the term anal-expulsive nails me down as stunningly accurately as Sagittarian (and with probably about as flakily), and second, this morning, the fully-fledged thought crossed my mind: "I can shit myself this afternoon just before his parents get there and then I will have to go home, and not have to meet them." And it was one of those thoughts you actually have to think about, to weight the pros and cons of, like in that Margaret Cho bit about being really drunk and considering whether or not you should get out of bed to pee.
Anyways, it's a stupid idea. I never shit in the afternoon.
But fuck, do I ever, ever not want to do this.
That's right. This person will go for a week or more without taking a shit, complaining more and more about their physical infirmity (ie, their inability to take a shit) and all the while steadfastly refuse to drink more water; eat vegetables, fruit, whole-grain breads or cereals, or yoghurt; forebore from eating cream - steadfastly refuse, in essence, to do anything that might help them take a shit, until whatever fucked-up psychological point that needs to be made with this person's immediate family is made, at which point this person takes a laxative and soon thereafter a massive fucking sasquatch dump. And then the whole beautiful cycle, which has been going on for decades, begins again.
What does this have to do with the present situation, you ask. First, I've realized that the term anal-expulsive nails me down as stunningly accurately as Sagittarian (and with probably about as flakily), and second, this morning, the fully-fledged thought crossed my mind: "I can shit myself this afternoon just before his parents get there and then I will have to go home, and not have to meet them." And it was one of those thoughts you actually have to think about, to weight the pros and cons of, like in that Margaret Cho bit about being really drunk and considering whether or not you should get out of bed to pee.
Anyways, it's a stupid idea. I never shit in the afternoon.
But fuck, do I ever, ever not want to do this.
martedì, gennaio 19, 2010
Desecrated tombstones
Well, I've been home sick, and while I've been home, they've cleaned off his desk, and I've been negotiating clearing out his apartment. His apartment is weird enough, but it's his desk that's filling me with dread. It was somehow very nice to go to work every day and having everything just as he left it, like that semi-conscious expectation of mine that at any point he'd walk around the corner and just sit down was right and true . . .
This experience is teaching me something about the nature of pity, and how damn useful it it. It is an interesting and unique emotion in that, more than love on its own, more than compassion on its own, it has the capacity to overwhelm negative feelings - disgust and disdain and anger, even hate - you can feel all of those and then feel pity on top of them, and while it doesn't neutralize them it certainly makes it easier to live with them without turning into the world's massivest fucking bitch.
Anyways.
This experience is teaching me something about the nature of pity, and how damn useful it it. It is an interesting and unique emotion in that, more than love on its own, more than compassion on its own, it has the capacity to overwhelm negative feelings - disgust and disdain and anger, even hate - you can feel all of those and then feel pity on top of them, and while it doesn't neutralize them it certainly makes it easier to live with them without turning into the world's massivest fucking bitch.
Anyways.
Silver lining of my fucking umpteenth Belgian cold and/or flu.
Sick. Working from home. The coffee is better here than at the office. Booyah!
lunedì, gennaio 18, 2010
Arranged marriages
Reading The True History of the Kelly Gang and really getting into it. Australian literature has been posing some problems for me because relative to Canadian literature, for example, there doesn't seem to be a great galumphing tonne of it. Yes, yes, tonnes of Australian writers, Malouf and Coetzee - he counts as Australian now, right?, and Nick Cave if you must, and - well, I'm writing this as a Canadian, so take it with a grain of salt.
But there is something so intimately Canadian about Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, James Sinclair Ross, Robertson Davies, Leonard Cohen, Timothy Findley, that chick who wrote Fall On Your Knees, Gabrielle Roy, Gaetan Soucy - about any Canadian author I can think of, actually, whether I like their work much or not, there's something that is obsessively and inescapably Canadian. And in each case, though you can see, for example, what Laurence owes to Sinclair Ross, and what Munro in turn owes to Laurence - it's different relationship with that Canadianness. Sometimes I don't think it's a good thing. In Atwood's case, for example, I only enjoy her short stories, her poetry, and those of her novels which make the strongest effort to ditch her national identity - I think she's a writer who's badly hamstrung by this quality of Canadianness - whereas with Laurence, it's hard to imagine her bothering to write about anything else besides her emotional relationship with her nationality, and I think the result was pretty smashing.
Anyways, my problem with Australian literature so far is that it's not giving me any sort of feeling at all for Australia, and I can't think of the books I've read by Australian writers and get an impression off of that of what Australia is. So far that's almost certainly my fault for not having read enough, and in the case of Peter Carey, this is the first of his books I've really been able to sink myself into. I tried with Oscar and Lucinda a few years ago and to my shock, because it doesn't happen that often, I felt like I'd been pitched out of the book by my ear - I couldn't read it. I forced myself through a hundred pages or so and had to give up. Probably from having watched the film as it's also happened with Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and usually I take to Thomas Hardy like a fish to water.
So obviously The True History of the Kelly Gang is obsessively Australian in the way that I, about to step into that great unknown, and looking for, and it's a great read so far too, one of those unputdownable things. There is a slight tweeness to it, because the way that it blends a poetic stream of consciousness with a half-educated narrative voice once in awhile throws up a phrase that Ned Kelly was never going to fucking say, but that's alright. And I'm not saying it's an authentic or correct vision of Australia or anything like that, but what it is, is something that convinces me Australia really exists as an emotional entity - that it's a place with its own soul, that you have a relationship with - and as I'm going there more or less determined to find a way to love it forever, that's important.
But there is something so intimately Canadian about Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, James Sinclair Ross, Robertson Davies, Leonard Cohen, Timothy Findley, that chick who wrote Fall On Your Knees, Gabrielle Roy, Gaetan Soucy - about any Canadian author I can think of, actually, whether I like their work much or not, there's something that is obsessively and inescapably Canadian. And in each case, though you can see, for example, what Laurence owes to Sinclair Ross, and what Munro in turn owes to Laurence - it's different relationship with that Canadianness. Sometimes I don't think it's a good thing. In Atwood's case, for example, I only enjoy her short stories, her poetry, and those of her novels which make the strongest effort to ditch her national identity - I think she's a writer who's badly hamstrung by this quality of Canadianness - whereas with Laurence, it's hard to imagine her bothering to write about anything else besides her emotional relationship with her nationality, and I think the result was pretty smashing.
Anyways, my problem with Australian literature so far is that it's not giving me any sort of feeling at all for Australia, and I can't think of the books I've read by Australian writers and get an impression off of that of what Australia is. So far that's almost certainly my fault for not having read enough, and in the case of Peter Carey, this is the first of his books I've really been able to sink myself into. I tried with Oscar and Lucinda a few years ago and to my shock, because it doesn't happen that often, I felt like I'd been pitched out of the book by my ear - I couldn't read it. I forced myself through a hundred pages or so and had to give up. Probably from having watched the film as it's also happened with Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and usually I take to Thomas Hardy like a fish to water.
So obviously The True History of the Kelly Gang is obsessively Australian in the way that I, about to step into that great unknown, and looking for, and it's a great read so far too, one of those unputdownable things. There is a slight tweeness to it, because the way that it blends a poetic stream of consciousness with a half-educated narrative voice once in awhile throws up a phrase that Ned Kelly was never going to fucking say, but that's alright. And I'm not saying it's an authentic or correct vision of Australia or anything like that, but what it is, is something that convinces me Australia really exists as an emotional entity - that it's a place with its own soul, that you have a relationship with - and as I'm going there more or less determined to find a way to love it forever, that's important.
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