Steinbeck's house

I went to Salinas and Monterey yesterday with the family. While spending time with my family in close proximity was hardly the joyous occasion my mom wanted it to be, going to the National Steinbeck Center and the Steinbeck house made me that much more complete. What an extraordinary man!

I read East of Eden yesterday for the hell of it. I read that book some three times a year. I reread nearly all of my books at least once, but East of Eden is one of those that I have to pick up just about every time I have a break from school. In fact, the cover is ripping away from the rest of the book and is curling around the edges in a sad way. I'll have to get another copy very soon. I don't think that my current copy will last me another year's worth of re-readings.

Actually, it reminds me of the fact that both my copies of Atlas Shrugged look as though someone tried to shred the books by mistake and then pull it out after some five seconds of publishing doom. (Other well-loved books that I read repeatedly include The Fountainhead, Marie Antoinette, The Journey, The Bell Jar, and White Oleander. Some books that I've read this summer/year that I know I will be rereading for ages are Big Sur, Allen Ginsberg's poems, Incubation: A Space for Monsters.)

One of the first exhibits was the East of Eden one. I started crying over it, I was so happy. Oh the gloriousness that is timshel. If I get another tattoo, it'll say "timshel". I don't have to believe in God to believe in choice. Choice sets me free!

So, that's one more thing off the bucket list.

Fulfilled . . . For Now

Today I got inked.

Ginsberg and Neruda will be with me for forever now, in a way.

I feel so badass, and it feels amazing.

I had a friend accompany me on my little adventure today, so that I would have some wonderfully accessible support nearby. And she was. I jokingly said to her, "I ran a half-marathon 3 weeks ago and then signed up for a full one to do next year. Now I'm getting tattooed. If I were thirty years older, people would think that I'm going through my midlife crisis."

She laughed and agreed.

That's another thing I can cross off my bucket list.

I finished both The Myth of Sisyphusand Twilight of the Idols at the beginning of this week and was much more pleased with the former rather than the latter. Camus is a very interesting writer and critic; I think I almost prefer him to Nietzsche. Sometimes. While Nietzsche seems bent on insulting the entire thinking world (which is highly entertaining), Camus gives much more fair critiques. Both men are convincing, but hmm Nietzsche writes with a huge holier-than-thou complex.

Oh, and I saw Merlin and was happy.

Sitting, Waiting, Wishing

Recently I've been freaking out about college and what will happen this year with the essential ETS-produced tests and the need to start looking into grad schools, which I've already started.

I like plans.

Next year's summer plans include studying at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University. What a mouthful. It'll be an adventure, literary-ly and physically (being at a school out of state) and mentally and all that jazz. Mom and Dad have heard me talk about it, but I don't think they realize how serious I am. But I NEED this learning experience like I need water and space to grow.

I'll be in Washington DC for the Presidential Inauguration in January. There's a week long conference that I'm attending. I don't know a single soul that is going, and I like it that way. Of course, my mother is terrified and thinks that I'll be scared and lonely without a solid friend and traveling companion. I really don't mind because I see the trip as a journey outside my comfort zone.

I'm really not a very politically oriented individual, but it wouldn't ever hurt to be informed and take part in once-in-a-lifetime sort of opportunities like this conference. It also wouldn't hurt to essentially travel 3000 miles across the country, friendless, to see what I can make of myself in my situation.

It's good prep for Naropa in Colorado.

I think I need a visit to San Francisco. I want to lay on the floor in the City Lights Bookstore and have Ginsberg's poems read to me. He writes gritty and makes it musical and makes it work. I want to find my center or something; ground myself in words that are real. Something like that.

I need to stop worrying about futures I blindly grasp at-for.

I want Merlin to make me believe in the power of magic again. I don't mind the distraction.

UPDATE: My friend pointed out that I start out my sentences and paragraphs with "I" quite a bit. I'm very me/I-oriented and I won't be apologetic for it. It's MY bell jar, after all.

Merlin, Where Art Thou?

I've been very much the lit hermit these past few days . . .

After reading some Arthurian stories (such as Le Morte D'arthur), I feel this gaping hole of a need to watch Merlin, the miniseries from 1998 with Sam Neill and Helena Bonham Carter (two very fine actors, in my humble opinion. I love how creepy yet beautiful Helena Bonham Carter is.) I CAN'T FIND IT ONLINE AND I WANT TO WATCH IT NOWNOWNOW. Was that insistent enough? Netflix won't deliver it for a few days. I think I'm going to die from the anticipation.

I returned Pedagogy of the Oppressed to its owner (I had borrowed the book from a friend) because I figured that I should stick to my own stack of books, which includes all the wonderful GRE practice stuff that I swore I would get a head start on this summer. There's so much that I need to read and so little time! I'm still half-heartedly re-reading Herodotus' The Histories. I've also started "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus. He's a rather candid writer, so this lengthy essay has begun quite promisingly.

For the purpose of light reading. I've binge-read some John Grisham over the past two days: The Partner, The Runaway Jury, the Summons. All are very good and entertaining, of course. Grisham makes the law seem almost exciting. Then I remember that I don't have the patience nor grasp of logic to struggle my way through slews of LSAT practice problems, nor do I have genuine interest in studying/practicing/teaching law in my future.

I've also read through some La Fontaine fables (aka poetry versions of Aesop's fables, if you will). Even children's literature can be fun. Especially after attacking small mountains of denser stuff filled with (sometimes) unnecessary clauses and words that require very comprehensive dictionaries.

Herodotus needs to be DONE.

Morte

I'm re-reading Le Morte D'Arthur (The Death of Arthur) with great pleasure. It's helpful to review it for the GRE Literature subject exam that I'm taking next April. BUT I HAVE been meaning to re-read it for some time now, just for the sheer pleasure of revisiting a lovely tale from my child hood.

I used to love King Arthur stories. Knights carousing and killing dreadful monsters and terrible sorceresses. So much excitement and drama and lifedeath! The Norton Anthology of English Literature explains, "Nostalgia for an ideal past that never truly existed is typical of much historical romance."

I concur. Romanced pasts are so much more fun.

Since I'm a literature nerd, I'm also attacking a book called On Literature by Umberto Eco. The book is a collection of some essays on some really great literature and his takes on various aspects of what qualifies good literature, including Dante's Paradiso from his Divine Comedy. So much fun! The book was a present from a dear professor I worked with this summer. She's such a sweetheart and knew exactly what would suit me.

Packrat Tendencies

I've lost a journal.

Correction: I have temporarily misplaced a journal of mine. This is devastating to me because I write myself real in my journals and chronicle myself in my language privately in ways that no one should dare to read me because understanding does not follow.

I feel misplaced, and I am frantic to regain the pieces of me that have gone missing.

There's always the other journal that I kept for even more scrambled half-formed thoughts and reminders to myself that I rarely look over. But it isn't the same.

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Oh my goodness! I've found it. It was hiding under my bed. I wonder how it got there, but I won't ponder that little mystery too much.

This well-loved and well-protected journal is orange with red curlicues dancing on the hardback cover. I've recently started writing in red ink only in this journal. Or sometimes orange. I like these vivid colors that burn. Perhaps that is because I have been mulling over everything too much in this strange latemid summer heat. Perhaps it's influenced by the idiot arsonist that's causing the most ruckus Cupertino has ever known in its recent histories with hisher marvel-at-my-ability-to-cause-chaos fires. Everything around me is smoldering. I'm writing in the red of blood and my journal is flaming and bleeding inside to match the outside.

Part of me is found and I am happy.

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I am still not writing the way I want and as much as I want. I'm sad and slightly frustrated with myself, but I tell myself that I can be flexible and that I have time. Words stumble and bottleneck and I choke on them. They cause a stroke and don't come out. I suffocate because they aren't coming. There's no satisfactory release of tension. Something's going to burst. Perhaps I'll have to resort of color-coding my sad, little empty-word meanings to give them some depth that seems always to be conspicuously void.

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I'm working my way through two entrees: Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire & The Mindful Leader: Ten Principles for Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves and Othersby Michael Carroll

I'm greedy still.

TRANSGRESS TRANSGRESS

I fucking LOVE Kathy Acker.

I remember saying to a friend and fellow classmate that she writes like an angry vagina after reading her book Blood and Guts in High School for my Contemporary Feminist Literature class this past spring quarter. Acker is known to write the way a pornstar-meets-postmodern-writer-meets-graphic-artist-meets-raging-sad-feminist would. She tracks mud and menstrual blood all over the pedestal of "good literature".

Now I'm reading Pussy King of the Pirates and my opinion hasn't really changed. I don't think. But perhaps I just need more thinking and a few more misinterpreted readings and more thinking to follow that. Still the same blaring neon-lit confusion of sexualities and wanting space to survive.

Interestingly enough, I could never really casually flip through the pages of Blood and Guts in High School because of the rough-sketch-cartoonish drawings of vaginas, penises, couples locked in some erotic fantasy of a pose, etc. (Who said that good literature can't have freaky random porn drawings?) THIS TIME . . . I'm a little embarrassed to be flipping through a book that has the title "Pussy King of the Pirates". "Pussy" and "Pirates" don't exactly signal "good literature" in my head. It's all Kathy Acker writing her transgressive self again.

Acker always makes me think that I have to break down my walls even more and get comfortable with the dirty stuff. Kapil makes me feel as though its ok to be a monster. Monsters can be dirty. And goddesses can be monstrous. I'll be a dirty, monstrous goddess.

I officially have a few favorite quotes from this book:

-"We wondered at our bodies."
-"I stood on the edge of a new world."
-"Finally free of johns, the whores, now alone, spewed out bits of ink, words in ink, sexual or filthy words, words that were formed by the scars and wounds, especially those of sexual abuse, those out of childhood. All the women bore their wounds as childhoods."
-"She decided that she must be a victim, though she had never before thought she was was a victim, a victim of her society's definition of women her age. These women, no longer children, according to the society were no longer sexually desirable to men, except perhaps as prostitutes; more important, according to her society they no longer possessed sexuality."
-". . . if I didn't throw away the old blood, something dreadful, like rot or disease, was going to touch my body."

Note: I secretly don't understand why the world fears (and hates) feminists. There is absolutely nothing wrong with strong women, and many people like strong women more than they'd admit. "Feminist" is just a name, an official word for strong women who love the strong part. Not all feminists are angry. Not all feminists hate all things feminine. So why all the hate? Is it just from a lack of misunderstanding and a lack of desire TO understand?

My-thology

I've been reading The Arabian Nights and a book of folktales from India. I don't know too much about West/Middle-Eastern/South Asian mythology. I figured that it was time to start exploring sometime this summer. After all, B. Kapil told me to write complicated goddesses and I have every intention of doing so.

But I don't think I can write my goddess real without knowing what already exists in the myths of ancient cultures. I think it was Donna Harraway that condemned looking backwards for the origin myths of powerfully feminine goddess beings. Personally, I find nothing wrong with referring to the beginning of various his/herstories for the sake of create something new from it. It's good to know where things come from.

There are so many demons in these myths/stories I'm reading! If there's one thing I can conclude from my current project, it is that deities are incredibly petty. And I do mean all god(desses). Even the Jewish and Christian god proclaims himself to be a jealous god. What a petty, human sentiment for such a powerful entity!

People write so many human characteristics into their deities. No wonder they aren't perfect. The jealousy and pettiness of all these powerful entities is found in all the stories. We can't fathom perfect, and therefore can't write a perfect supreme being real. But we have managed to write our imperfect humanity perfect through our monstrous gods. Oh the irony.