Virtual Flaneurism

Sorry, blog-o-readers! I have been in NYC all weekend for the parade and, serendipitously, the PASSING OF A MARRIAGE EQUALITY BILL! Thoughts to follow on that (mainly about my disappointment at the general lack of excitement I witnessed while there).

Also, someday I will go back to class (someday being late August), and have my computer and a trusty internet connection all day, and blogging will be reborn and run rampant through your interwebs. Until that day, a thousand apologies for the past, present and future dearth of posting. It's not you, it's me.

I've been chugging through my house's most recent selection for our book club, Everything is Illuminated. I was struck by a certain passage tonight. It contains no spoilers and goes as follows:

"Do you like thinking about Mom?
No.
Does it hurt after?
Yes.
Then why do you continue to do it? she asked. And why, she wondered, remembering the description of her rape, do we pursue it?"

This lingered with me: why do we somewhat fanatically revisit the memories of lost loves that give us pain? I don't find my wandering mind returning to a bad smell or a bitter taste. I don't continually relive stubbed toes and broken bones. And while I realize the difference between the simple, nonpartisan agony of a punched gut and the what-was-is-no-more despair of reflecting on something once good, I nonetheless find it peculiarly anti-evolutionary that we compulsively return to agonizing thoughts as if they contained some veiled lesson waiting to be gleaned. God knows I can't think of one thing I've learned from ten years of on-and-off lament over the men that got away other than to avoid them altogether. And genetics says a compulsive habit resulting in a "I can do fine fucking myself, thank you" attitude is about as likely to get passed on as a penchant for eating live bees.

Anyway, here's one of my favorite depressing Beatles songs. Also, don't mind me -- I've been figuratively man-menstruating for a few days now and there's only so much Aimee Mann can do before the moodiness tumbles over onto the blog. Count yourself lucky that I was waxing philosophical and not posting a polemic about love or badgers or something.

"The question isn’t who is going to let me, it’s who is going to stop me."

- Ayn Rand

In light of the NewSouthBooks edition of Huckleberry Finn, replacing the n-word in its many usages throughout the text with "slave", Gothamist has a great article about Richard Grayson's satirical hipster-ized version, noteably replacing NewSouthBooks' "slave" with hipster. A taste:

"Jim was monstrous proud about it, and he got so he wouldn't hardly notice the other hipsters. Hipsters would come miles to hear Jim tell about it, and he was more looked up to than any hipster in that country. Strange hipsters would stand with their mouths open and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder. Hipsters is always talking about witches in the dark by the kitchen fire; but whenever one was talking and letting on to know all about such things, Jim would happen in and say, "Hm! What you know 'bout witches?" and that hipster was corked up and had to take a back seat.

Jim always kept that five-center piece round his neck with a string, and said it was a charm the devil give to him with his own hands, and told him he could cure anybody with it and fetch witches whenever he wanted to just by saying to it; but he never told what it was he said to it. Hipsters would come from all around there and give Jim anything they had, just for a sight of that piece; but they wouldn't touch it, because the devil had had his hands on it."

Edgar Allan Bro

"But surely, said Rasselas, the wise men, to whom we listen with reverence and wonder, chose that mode of life for themselves which they thought most likely to make them happy."

"Very few, said the poet, live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and with which he did not always willingly co-operate; and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbour better than his own."

"I am pleased to think, said the prince, that my birth has given me at least one advantage over others, by enabling me to determine for myself. I have here the world before me; I will review it at leisure: surely happiness is somewhere to be found."

- Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

A well-written short story by Joshua Ferris from Tin House Literary Magazine. His book "Then We Came to the End" is one of my favorite novels from this past year.

Editorial note: I am oddly compelled to post pictures with all of my posts, to give some visual meat to entries that would otherwise be blocks of text. However, I find it bizarrely uncomfortable to post authors' photographs: having invariably read the work I'm posting about before seeing what the author looks like, looking up their picture feels like a massive invasion of their privacy- like I am some uber-voyeuristic peeping tom who has taken these author's willingness to let me read their written work as an invitation to take an extra dip into their person lives by looking up their faces.

Anyway, good short story, bad self-inflicted self-conscious self-loathing.

The longer I am in the law school, the more often I find myself longing for some mode of artistic expression. It is interesting to me that when my aunt (a practicing lawyer) attempted to warn me away from pursuing my J.D., she suggested that law would stifle and kill my artistic side. This, as of yet, has luckily not been true. However, law school is peopled with individuals significantly less...quirky than those I left in NY, which, combined with all the time law school devours, has led me to yearning, physically aching, absolutely lusting after the chance to do something creative. Though I am sure that a majority of you will scoff, one the main impetuses in me beginning this blog was to latch onto some kind inventiveness, even if it is not my own.

Anyway, here is a wonderful short story by the prolific Donald Barthelme. One of my favorites. A good break for those of you preparing for finals - as a short story, it shouldn't take you more than fifteen minutes to charge through.

In the eight or so months since I left New York, I've found myself struggling to reckon with my seeming abandonment of the city. I'd like to be able to excuse this in some fashion by saying that it is people asking me hard questions that prompted this quandary, quizzing me over whether I miss baseball games in McCarren park or dodging tourists outside the Seaport. Unfortunately, that is not true. On the contrary, most often I am the one bringing up New York, pretending to be bashful about it when I tell people where I came from while immediately careening into an unsolicited explanation of my feelings about leaving the city. I know that much of this is me being defensive about a decision only I could ever judge myself for. I have to wonder: f New York is the American Mecca, the destination of of destinations, who am I to have left it behind? And what does that say about me if I have yet to regret it?

Part of the answer I allow myself revolves around an essay I first read in a creative non-fiction class I took as an undergraduate. The piece is by Joan Didion, and you can find the text here. Didion, who now lives in Los Angeles (or did when she wrote the essay in 1968 - I actually have no clue where she is now), writes about the eight years she spent in New York and her slow disillusionment with the idea of "New York" that had initially drawn her to the city. In my experience, this is a relatively common story.

Having thought about the essay so often over these past eight or so months, earlier tonight I dragged out my Lopate "Art of the Personal Essay" tome and thumbed through to it. I hadn't read the essay in a few years, certainly not since leaving New York, and it was a distinctly different read having now performed the very escape that the essay described. A much more depressing read, I should say, though not for the reasons I might've expected. As much as I miss New York - and I do - the piece wrenched my gut because Didion's reasoning for leaving the city rang so true. I found myself tripping through my own memories about bad parties and vapid people and dirty places in New York, millions of little moments that, added together, led me from loving New York to wondering why I was still there. Correctly, Didion does not pinpoint one reason or one sentiment that turned New York sour. Suddenly one is in the city, meeting the same people, having the same coke-heavy $10 drink, taking weekend visitors to stare at the same Met exhibit with the same stupid suit of armor and wondering when New York became predictable and boring and uninspiring. And wondering how some place so big and so diverse can turn so white bread.

I don't know why I'm rambling like this when Didion's essay says it so much better. I also know that it killed my drive to keep working for the night; being validated in this kind of way is unpleasant and distracting.

Anyway, do read the essay. Here's a particularly good chunk to whet your literary appetite:

And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guatalajara, Village parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kind of parties. You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.