Future employment/housing prospects

At lunch with WN on Saturday:

Me: [bitching about some office conversation where we talked about who was doing well was moving where was going out with whom] Every time we have a conversation like we had that day, I think I have to leave before it makes me even bitchier.
WN: You'd probably get the same experience in any MNC.
Me: But not in the cardboard box on the street corner that is going to be my home.

Oh did I tell you about the customs guy at Newark when I flew into the States?

Passport-stamping guy: [flipping through my passport and seeing my old US visa] What did you study here?
Me: Political science.
PSG: Wasn't that a mistake?
Me: Um.
PSG: I have a degree in political science too.

And the passport guy at JFK one of the times I flew in while I was still at Columbia told me he had a masters in international relations.

Kids these days

My brother is reading something scientific and incomprehensible and chatting on MSN at the same time.

Me: Are you doing homework or reading your own stuff?
Him: My own stuff. I don't do homework.
Me: I see. Sorry to have made that assumption.
Him: My teachers have all come to terms with it.
Me: Even your GP teacher?
Him: Oh, no-one does GP homework, so it's ok.

What are kids coming to these days?

Reading your mind

"Damage to the right frontal lobe, for example, sometimes led to a heightened interest in high cuisine, a condition dubbed gourmand syndrome. (One European political journalist, upon recovering from a stroke affecting this part of the brain, profited from the misfortune by becoming a food columnist.)" From Of Two Minds.

Strawberry Jam

Confession

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman's body.
Also, well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress's neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognize greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I know what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud.
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

- Czeslaw Milosz

On re-reading Francis Spufford

I find Julian Barnes' description of an adolescent: "a creature part willing, part consenting, part chosen for."

What is needed

Anthropologist Joel Sherzer on the Kuna gathering house (the Kuna live on the San Blas islands around Panama): “A talking place, a chanting place, an angry place, a serious place, and a joking place.”

Strawberries/ice-cream

Diane Arbus on "the Mad Man from Massachusetts" (she photographed him for a magazine article on eccentrics): "He is said to have once stolen a box of strawberries, taken it to a police station and invited the police to go out and steal a box of ice-cream so they could all have some dessert."

Shall we attempt to be assaulted by cakes next week?

thank you note

Diane Arbus's note to Lisette Model (Model was her photography teacher and on this particular occasion had written Arbus a letter of recommendation for the Guggenheim Fellowship):

"Dear Lisette, my father told me to thank you but your eloquence is your own and your friendship is mine so I cannot. But I want to see you."

back

can we go out?

[pure whingeing]

Have probably left out something important - like my passport - but am too tired to think about it. Shall I work? (Hah.) Sleep for half an hour and miss my plane? Stare blankly into space?

Not even half-baked

Ah this is why grown-ups tend not to write submissions, however half-assed to start with (the submission I mean), at 3 a.m. after consecutive restless nights. When I grow up, I'm going to sleep properly and write in the day and do sensible grown-up things.

Laster minute

Three t-shirts, a pair of jeans, 3 books, a tupperware full of tea and soup-making fungus and 99 pieces of voice. And a towel, like the Hitchhiker Guide says. That's all I have to bring to the States, right? We're not going anywhere that won't allow sneakers and jeans?

At the last minute

Er. Do I need a visa?

Also

I have forgotten how cold 50-60 degrees F is. How cold is it?

Anticlimax

Found it! And my old civil service pass. And an envelope full of US dollars ($250) and another envelope full of Renminbi. And letters from Columbia telling me I owe them 10 cents (they've stopped sending them; possibly the postage cost more than my debt? How could I owe them 10 cents anyway?), various receipts, credit card bills and other items best left unmentioned. I astound myself sometimes.

Defining panic

Where's my passport?

It's not in the places it should be and not in the places I might have put it. Will they let me leave the country?

(Anyone wants anything should let me know by any means - preferably email if after Saturday morning. If I find my passport.)

(People I might be imposing on, if you're reading this and haven't yet, please give me phone numbers. There is probably a working phone in NYC and I'll possibly find it.)

Self-knowledge/parts of conversation

Me: ...and I'm going to go pretend to work.
Him: Why don't you decide either to work or not to work, and just focus on that?
Me: Me, focus on something?
Him: Instead of fooling yourself into thinking you're going to work.
Me: Nono - a little self-delusion is necessary.

Gonna go pretend to work now.

Putting out the call

I'm going to the States for the last two weeks of April to visit people in NY and Minz and Von in Cambridge, Mass. - anyone who wants to give stuff to Minzhi, Von, Billy, Zak, Yish or anyone else we might both know should tell me soon.

What it should have been

This site is long overdue for a revamp - in content if not in look - but before that, or since I'll never get around to it - things I should have said -

(1) That you're married! and that takes away all my words;

(2) That I'm sorry for being anti-social tonight - I'm truly glad for you, and appreciate the introduction, and do let's hang out soon;

(3) That I wish you would write to me, establish contact in some way, keep some line of communication open, so that in the far future we may yet start to be friends;

(4) That I saw La Jetee earlier today, followed immediately in the same tape by Buck Rogers and Bambi Meets Godzilla (whoever put that tape together either had a cruel sense of humour or no conception of the appropriate - which may come to the same thing in this case);

(5) That your name runs through every narrative I write, except I don't quite dare to say that, whether out of a belated reticence or courtesy (do you read this?) or wariness I don't know.

Endings. Frederica sat and waited for her lover, and wondered what the end of the affair would be. She had begun to think that there was always only an unreal moment's grace between the beginning of a love affair (the phrase was already old-fashioned, but she had a growing distaste for the word relationship) and this steady self-questioning about how and why and when it would end. The moment's grace was the moment of being 'in love', which brought with it a clear, driven purposefulness, an impersonal directed energy that was desired in its absence, and frightening in its presence. (Not least because at thirty-three a woman knew that the dreadful belief that it was possible to prolong this state forever was the most tormenting aspect of the illusion.) For days, or weeks, or months, as the case may be, Frederica thought, putting on a short white cotton nightdress, brushing her red hair, we do nothing without the accompanying image of the loved face, the imaginary limbs, and then, one day, we notice it's gone, there is no more, love is over. And what kills it? Often enough (she put out all the lights except the bedside lamp, she turned down the cover) a failure in oneself, or in the beloved, to conform to an ideal pattern put in the mind long before these particular two have met. ... [Love] is a dance. It has a formal pattern that friendships don't. It is a made-up story. Love. Something else, fiercer and harsher and hotter (Life?) needs us to believe in Love for purposes of its own, which are not ours. And we collude. She remembered playing the young Elizabeth I in the garden, the virgin queen whose power wsas the recognition that separateness and solitude were safety.

All a bit metaphysical, Frederica thought, waiting for the tap on the area window, from the basement steps down to the flat where she lived. All a defence against him not coming, which we always fear, even if really we are indifferent as to whether he comes or not.

But a month ago, six months ago, I wasn't thinking in language about what (if anything) is love. I was thinking about his mouth, and his arse, and his hands. People like me, who think too much, are so glad, so grateful, at least at first, to be overcome by thoughts of lips, hands and eyes.

...

She opened the door, and John and the night air came in, and he opened his arms. And immediately she knew that he was someone, not her idea of her own lover, and her idea of John Ottokar, but a complicated troubled breathing man, with ruffled hair and an erection. She closed the blind and with four quick hands they undressed him, and tumbled into the bed.

- A. S. Byatt, The Whispering Woman

[blank]

What is there to say? It's roundabout 4 pm in the afternoon and I've been awake for the last two hours or so - and all I want to do is curl up and go back to sleep. Not - naturally - as a result of any great exertion of the mind or body but because I appear to be entering into what Diana Athill called a dormouse hiberation. I need to get the hell out of myself, is what I need.

(Which is not to say that the surface drift of my life is exactly empty. There was chamber music on Monday, and that's more or less all I can say about it. For the nth time - Clive Bell said that the few who could truly appreciate artistic form could scale the peaks of sublime aesthetic pleasure - but everyone else, the ones who listened to a concert and thought about that pleasant summer holiday they had three years ago, could only remain at the warm foothills of humanity. I might be able to splash around in a puddle at the foot of those foothills. But there was wine and company and all the better for it. Wednesday Steph, Bee Leng and I went for a walk in the Esplanade Park, which was good in all ways. Thursday was a sober couple of glasses of wine and an early night at Bala and Friday Wendy, BL and I left Ricciotti at 10 clutching paper cups of red wine and sat by the river wondering if anyone would leave us a few coins. And then the weekend. It's a pleasant enough drift but, and but.)