Sem Break Snippets 1

I was at Seattle's Best a couple of days ago with Maita and Anina (finally, FEMALE companionship! not that I'm complaining about my guy friends), talking about recent romantic mishaps over Almond Mocha JOY (I said I wanted to drink something happy...I had just filed a leave of absence from my MA...but that's another story). And I threw this quote up in the air, because it seemed appropriate:

"I have withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance...(Someone tells me this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?)"
---Roland Barthes, "affirmation," A Lover's Discourse

Lasting vs. burning: why the opposition? Shouldn't there be a way of burning that doesn't burn out?

(That last paragraph seems too Sex and the City for words...I can just picture Carrie typing away on her laptop in bed.)

Larry texted back: "We seek the quotes that affirm us, 'no?" Touche.

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Anina lent me Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things, which I finished at 5 a.m. last week. Now I understand why B (who could be a version of the scholarly Samuel Farr) loved it; it has all the tropes and themes he loved: the quest for a missing person, memory's slipperiness, the City, a worldview based on randomness, provisional endings.

It was so heavy, so desolate, I needed to text people about it. Or send quotes from it (yes, this is still my strange way of keeping in touch...just a more elitist version of forwarded cutesy messages).

To Egay: "That is what I mean by being wounded: you cannot merely see, for each thing somehow belongs to you, it is part of the story unfolding inside you."

To Vince: "There are many other possible kinds of talk in this language. Most of them begin when one person says to the other: I wish. . . . I refuse to speak the language of ghosts."

To the runaway specter: that long quote about the Runners, how they run as a group in the streets until they run out of breath and die.

To others: "Our lives are no more than the sum of manifold contingencies, and no matter how diverse they might be in their details, they all share an essential randomness in their design: this then that, and because of that, this."

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I wrote a final (overdue) paper weeks ago on Szymborska's poetry, which I entitled "The Existential and Ethical Mathematics of Wislawa Szymborska." Despite the rush and rigor (and scrambling for Papa's books on mathematics and the chaos theory), I really enjoyed writing it, I hadn't been that excited about an academic paper in a while. My thesis was that, in some poems, Szymborska uses mathematical concepts/processes (e.g. pi, statistics, calculated coincidences) to arrive at existential insights and express an ethical stance. And how, despite the world's irrationality and her constant critical questioning/qualifying, she manages to see it as a "miracle fair." I want to write more about this later, but I'd like to receive comments on my paper first. Haha.

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My Reading List

Just finished:
Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things
Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Still reading:
Robert Hass, Human Wishes
Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves
Eric Gamalinda, Empire of Memory
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie
The Chicago Handbook for Teachers; A Practical Guide to the College Classroom

Stuff on my shelf I have been wanting to read:
Kobo Abe, The Box Man
Iris Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
Angela Carter, Bloody Chamber
Randall Jarrell, Collected Poems
A. S. Byatt, Possession
Structuralism and Since

Stuff I intend to read next semester (once I find copies):
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
The Diaries of Anais Nin
Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition

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May continuation pa dapat ito. Bukas na lang siguro. Let's just say I've stopped listening to Natalie Merchant's "One Fine Day" over and over. Finally.