Self-indulgent post about moving
Dear Diary,
All my books are now packed, unless I turn my head slightly to the right and see the 20-odd books that aren't, or look at the floor and see, scattered variously, the ten or fifteen books that aren't, or even look just below the bottom left corner of my monitor and see the book that isn't. Oh, and there's another one on the right side. And there are at least three in my bedroom that aren't packed. But mostly they're all packed. The bookcase of whose construction I was very proud when I finished it is empty, and I imagine I'll take it apart soon (it's made of steel and copper pipes and planks, so it assembles and disassembles pretty easily). Clearing off my desk I found a picture of me which my mother took when I was in the process of moving in fourteen months and seven days ago, shortly after I had reassembled the bookcase. I need a haircut, and have placed on the second-highest shelf copies of The Symbolism of Evil (which I still haven't read, and which is yet unpacked), and The White Goddess and The Golden Bough (Frazer's abridged edition, obviously; both of these are read and packed). I note that at that point I was still in the habit of clipping a pen to the collar of my shirt. I found along with it a picture each of myself and my sister at her apartment last year for Thanksgiving. I don't really know what to do with these pictures. I have a group of photos in my bedroom, most of which date from a high school trip to England (one of the people on the trip got into the practice of taking a picture of me whenever we were waiting for something, for some reason, and I wound up with copies of the pictures), and the rest of which are from a latin convention at my high school in the first week of college. Some of them have started to stick to each other, because they spend almost all their time packed next to each other in an envelope gathering dust until I happen across them and, in going through them, separate them.
I keep running across various things of a pictorial sort about which I've completely forgotten. A postcard of a bee pendant from Knossos, various doodles I've made to which I'm inexplicably attached. I have some prints—now in a rather sorry state from lack of care—a friend, Andrew (whose last name I can't remember how to spell, so my plot of his finding this through egosurfing will likely fail), took when we were at the same summer program the year between my junior and senior years. I used to have them on my walls, but when I moved here I never put them up. They're not really that great. There's a part of Joe Frank's "A Tour of the City" in which he says "no photographs. Only memories", and although I don't, as a rule, take pictures (as a rule and as a side-effect of not owning a camera)*, I'm very averse to getting rid of them once I have them. Which is certainly true of more than just pictures. I tied a rope in a sort of decorative pattern around a 90-degree corner in a railing and I don't really want to undo it, and I recall that one summer, when I found out that used but relatively complete copies of Chrono Trigger were going for a fair amount on eBay, I couldn't bring myself to sell mine (nevermind that I hadn't, at that point, played it or any video games for a few years). I hav a small rubber snake that was sent to me, probably as an Hmas present, probably by Stacia of alt.religion.kibology, which, had I not happened upon it a few weeks ago but rather had at some point lost it, I would probably never have thought about again—but now that I've noticed it again I have to make sure to bring it with me and then forget it in some corner somewhere.
I think the proximate cause of this post is my having to decide how best to transport one of the few seals I haven't yet lost—in the box in whose area unfilled by books I also put the wax (which will probably break in transit, but, even with a recent increase of the number of letters I've been sending, I hardly use it anyway: I don't have a lighter, you see)? Can't go there, because it's small enough that I might forget about it when time comes to unpack. So instead it goes into a smaller wooden box where I tend to keep such things anyway, and a five-year-old fork bent such that I have in the past claimed it is a representation of a lamia goes in in its stead. That and the observation of an inside-out half of a lime in whose corners, two years ago or so, I poked holes and threaded some thread, following which I dried it out, and in which, depending from various things (currently part of my desk) I have kept my komboloi.
Question: am I ever going to look through the notebooks from my last one or two years of college again (having immoderately thrown out their ancestors)? Maybe the next time I move. Nevertheless I keep accruing crap. I think I really have managed to lose some in the past year, though.
I also finished reading Mimesis as Make-Believe (for the most part; I skimmed the sections on ontology since I'm not really invested in it), and now I want for what to read next. A surfeit of choices, but I think it'll be one of the following three. Anyone who's read this far can HELP ME DECIDE! Either Art of the Modern Age, by Jean-Marie Schaeffer, which looks interesting (and is introduced by the inescapable-by-me Arthur Danto), or (at least some of) the Gormenghast trilogy (which would entail rereading Titus Groan, but I'm ok with that), or Wolf Solent. The last would entail rereading Wolf Solent, but I'm quite ok with that. It has been reminded to me in various ways recently: first, of course, I happened across it in packing (though since it is at the top of a box and they're all unsealed it is easily retrieved); I'm thinking of taking a course called "Subjectivity" and I recalled thinking when reading it (in unusual circumstances!) that Wolf, the main character, undergoes what an acquaintance from the previous year's colleging referred to as a rape of the self (he was an odd guy, and given to such terminology) (of course in the absence of a description I really have no idea what it's about, but the point is that the title was suggestive), and then a conversation with Kotsko today reminded me of that guy (Soumya by name; he is, apparently, entering an economics PhD program this fall despite believing that economics is the greatest intellectual fraud of the 20th century and probably, so far, this one as well) which, in turn, reminded me again of the book. I read it while ostensibly working at a cancer laboratory where no one actually had any work for me, so I just brought a book in and read it. I also read, during this time, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, a book whose physical dimensions can be likened to those of Wolf Solent if one has them in the editions I do. I was reading Pierre solely because I had been left rather confused by the movie POLA X (the title referring to the fact that the filmed script was the tenth revision, not hermetic at all), which I saw almost solely because Scott Walker did the soundtrack. This was not long after I had gotten Tilt. Walker apparently signed to 4AD recently, and I would be rendered a liar if I didn't mention that a shared prompter of my actually writing this post was my listening to the Mountain Goats' Protein Source of the Future … Now!, which pre-dates their 4AD records. Would it be unbearable of me to say that I prefer their earlier, lower-fidelity stuff than their newer, cleaner, more "arranged" material, given that until late 2003, when I was asked to see what albums of theirs WHPK had, and shortly thereafter given a copy of All Hail West Texas, I hadn't ever heard them? Probably, but it's my opinion.
So it's probably going to be Wolf Solent again, but you can still suggest otherwise. It does begin with Wolf moving away from the city, after all, and current circumstances are optimal for allowing some agreeably unpleasant nostalgic associations to come to the fore, such as is not the case with Titus Groan, most of my associations with which concern reading it in an uncomfortable chair and Kant. (Though I find that, just as when you're feeling sad-bastardly, almost all music is conducive to more sad bastardy, when you're in a wistful/nostalgic frame of mind, almost anything makes a decent starting point for further pastward thoughts, and yea, even now I can picture before myself the room in which I mostly read it, and either asking or being asked by a girl who is now married, of all things, to see Shadow of the Vampire—actually I have no idea if that happened while I was reading Titus Groan, though it was the same academic year, I'm pretty sure. But Wolf Solent is probably more naturally conducive to such an attitude, I think, as it shares in parts the same hazy late-fall or summer-evening atmosphere as is present in The Wanderer or A Month in the Country, or the endward scenes of In the Mood for Love.)
I (mostly) wrote this post while listening to Willie Nelson's Complete Liberty Recordings. I think he had a contract with them whereby he would only record downers. Even "There's Gonna Be Love in My House" is melancholy, as if by "love" he meant "consumption". (And then Nature and Organisation, but I more or less knew what I was getting into there.)
*I did a study-abroad thing in Greece one quarter, and there was a guy there, Devin, who took pictures of absolutely everything, multiple times. I recall that when we were on Delphi and he was taking pictures of a vista I thought of him that he could only regard what he saw as a picture he hadn't taken yet (as though I somehow had access to a more immediate experience—what's more, if I hadn't been before, having that thought about him certainly led me to think of what I saw as fodder for future camera-unaided reminiscences). And of course if I don't take pictures as a rule, why did I buy cards which I never intended to send through the post?
Comments
on 2005-08-14 21:40:54.0, ben wolfson commented:
Self-indulgent, thereby distinguished from everything else here.
and, further, on 2005-08-14 22:28:44.0, eb commented:
I buy postcards and never take pictures. Doesn't seem strange to me. I just wish there were more postcards of things I'd take pictures of, if I were inclined to take pcitures.
and, further, on 2005-08-14 22:30:39.0, ben wolfson commented:
One of the things that struck me at Delphi were how absolutely assy almost all of the postcards were.
and, further, on 2005-08-14 22:30:50.0, eb commented:
I have a slightly different rule, though; it's not so much "only memories" as it is a reluctance to be the one putting borders on things.
and, further, on 2005-08-14 22:37:44.0, eb commented:
The postcards that really annoyed me were the ones of the cube houses in Rotterdam. I just wanted some basic pictures that could give a sense of what the buildings look like, and they all went for the artsy, black-and-white approach.