in the hall of mirrors

Far away and horrible

My colleague and friend David flew yesterday to India on a three-week trip which includes an extensive stay in Mumbai – fortunate that he'll stop in Delhi on his way, before he goes near the chaos, the shooting, the bombs.

I assume he will change his plans – or perhaps have them changed for him (I wonder if they'll be allowed to land or travel without constraint?). In any case, I'm glad he didn't travel a day or two earlier...

Astounding. Terrorism of the most primitive, and most alarming, kind.

bring back the seventies

The end of the second of three long days: long, at least, by my current standards – I have become, over the past very quiet year, rather unaccustomed to following other people's schedules, so three or four days of appointments, meetings, classes, seems like a great deal.

Very tired, thus: fairly winded. Didn't have a beer after the research seminar, just a low-alcohol ginger beer, but still sleepy and relaxed.

And even more relaxed from the lovely craic with Annie, my Irish postgraduate student; we giggle, tell stories and make jokes so fast they pile one on top of another. She wanted to borrow my CDs of the Great Lesbian Singers of the 1970s/80s, Cris Williamson and Meg Christian; I played her my favorite Meg Christian (Meg's not as fine a musician as Cris, but had a couple of good hits), 'The Rock Will Wear Away', which despite its sentimentality always leaves me teary-eyed; and what I think is a funnier song, 'Ode to a Gym Teacher.' Annie did think the latter predictably, and touchingly, hilarious.

The next track, for some reason, was something so utterly seventies... such a burst of exactly the right sound, it took me back, to when I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. It's real time travel, when you're tired or relaxed, and something that highly charged takes you back – I find myself, unexpectedly but very realistically, in an earlier body, for just a moment – when I was eighteen and excited by everything, and cute, and very, so very...

oh my. So far back now. Far back enough that going through that much time is a strain, it pulls at you.

Some of the same emotions must be floating around the gay community, as the film Milk opens this weekend.

I don't know how easy it will be to see that film... and the hard thing about going back that far is that we don't get to stay there. (Tangential query: why do the right-wingers not have any assassinated heroes? Is it because the left isn't as likely to kill people?)

After I was deported from Australia from being HIV+, and broken-hearted about place, time, and loss, I would talk to people about how I loved San Francisco, and Sydney, and other different places; and they would say, okay, so where do you want to live?

And I would say, San Francisco, but in 1976. And you can't get those plane tickets any more.

It was a joke: but a joke on me, it seems, now....

The Greek Poet

Now here is a fine webpage:

http://www.cavafy.com/index.asp

The Cavafy archive, with most of his work neatly and openly available... plus some obscure things that were generally unknown.

That is how the web should work, I think. At least in regards to literature....

A bit dim

After all that travel, as the days get short, my days are not sharply defined – my body seems a bit off to me: as though my liver, my body's processing systems, are slightly out of whack. Some work gets done, fragmentarily: I am in focus for an hour or less, then tired for an afternoon, sometimes strangely exhausted and nauseous for a few hours, then sleepy for an evening...

and television seems atrociously stupid, plus a braying, dismaying cloud of Christmas advertisements. Somehow merchandising seems especially desperate and nonsensical this year: as though the multinational corporations, fearful of general disintegration, can only demand with increasing shrillness that we buy things from now until the twenty-fifth.

I'm afraid I won't help them out much – I'll probably buy only contributions to Oxfam for my family. That isn't as dull and stingy as it might seem – it's too complicated to mail them anything really interesting, and of course my family doesn't for the most part need things bought for them.

Feeling a bit faded, intermittently a bit ill, takes the edge off all my ambitions: presentations, applications, even a performance coming up on my birthday. If I were of some aristocratic, non-working background; or alternatively if, years ago, I had chosen to go on disability in some way; I would probably now be quietly, gratefully, not doing much of anything for a few weeks. It is strangely easy to imagine – easier than it usually is, in fact.

But there are flurries of snow; and occasionally a sentence is better-written than it was; occasionally a paragraph actually makes an interesting point. And that makes the day worthwhile.

Italians and circuses

Reading a Fellini biography; and watching many Fellini movies, plus other bits of Italian neorealism – it's avoidant, I know (still fallow after that long trip, must get back to work).

I've always loved a few things of Fellini – notably Satyricon – but I didn't know any of the early work; it's addictive – sentimentally charged Italian lifestyles of the 1950s; I find it startlingly easy to identify with these people.

And with their problems, as in 8-1/2: "I really don't have anything to say... but I want to say it all the same."

It is even affecting my dreams: which are now of circuses and symbols....

Asa nisi masa! Asa nisi masa!

James!

It’s interesting to notice that James’ The Aspern Papers actually works off the same mechanism as The Turn of the Screw – the obsessive narrator and literary detective, who thinks he is so valiantly pursuing truth and the papers themselves, hears what he wants to hear, distorts and twists everything, pushes every conversation away from what it meant to say into something that answers his obsession….

Nota bene: it is hard to read James in airports. High noise levels and complex sentences don't mix well.

A vanity of musicologists

The American Musicologists Society annual meeting, in a city that has its own characteristic reputation – Nashville – but which doesn’t really have all that strong a character, really: a large collection of people who have devoted careers, lives actually, to something that is perhaps not terribly important. A collection of mostly rather dull people, leavened with a handful of brilliant ones – and I think that my friends are the brilliant ones, of course: Mitchell, Judith, Nadine, Andrew, both Susans, and so on – but perhaps every group, every clique, that threads among this mildly unimportant mass thinks itself the only interesting one. And, pathetically, some of them are at each others’ throats – including people I thought I liked and approved of – which leaves me, at points, wrestling with a confused need to figure out which of them are right and which are wrong: but, as the younger Susan says, in the chaos of projections and unreal stories an outsider can only pick one’s ginger way… and avoiding making any final decisions.

My own presentation goes very well indeed: throughout the conference, many people keep coming up and saying how good they thought it. But I think: yes, but – what will that do? Will anybody remember it for long – like a television show that passes in the night? Or, perhaps more importantly, will it get me a job in a warmer and more amusing city? A new job might endanger me by exposing me to vast new demands, in any case; the two charming musicologists from the southern UK who take over my return trip, kindly and brusquely squiring me through their family circles rather than leaving me in a dull airport for eleven hours, are richer and more successful than I and mine, but they also seem endlessly engaged in work, work, work. But I would doubt there’s another job to come through this venue – no one who has a job available seems to care that I spoke well; the brightest spot, when two plump women from Brandeis tell me that I inspired them to stay in the field – through the simple realization that our work could actually be interesting – is more the kind of thing that will happen to me: to inspire, occasionally and fragmentarily, from above, but never to impress from below.

That last, short, night in the hotel, while having trouble sleeping for just a few hours before the airport shuttle comes, when I am fretting about all of this, Mitchell kindly tries to reassure me by reminding me that this is just how things are: and that the field of English literature, similar yet so different, is comparatively an ecosystem of flash-flood trends... so the boredom of our field can be compared with the problems of other fields, and nowhere is perfect.

The hard thing is that our field, with its vast stretch of prizes given to vain mediocrities and its startlingly dull ventures into familiar territory, is so minor: I have the uneasy feeling that this is why I want to become an analyst – caught in one rather vain, useless field, I want to go somewhere where life, where work, is deeper, more important. Of course, I know that Jungians in various cities tend to splinter into groups that don’t talk to each other, so it’s probably more of the same.

Where are those thinking types, those people of the Swords suit, who are not shrill and competitive vanities, who are not consumed by their pettiest and most juvenile impulses? Consumed, until there seems to be nothing else animating their graying, respectably-dressed forms….

How disappointing it would be, if all of those satirical-academic novels were true. True, because we are all like this, and nothing else.

In any case, my Ecclesiastesian musings have led to what must be the correct collective noun for us....

Spaces

So: somewhere between Newcastle, London, Philadelphia, Washington, New York and Nashville; somewhere among the planes, trains and cars, and between various family members and old friends; and somewhere among a 'historic' election (but aren't they all historic?) and my luggage getting lost for a day and a half, and my credit card falling afoul of possible fraud...

somewhere in there I'm in various spaces: the large rooms and full-to-bursting cupboards of my brother-in-law in suburban Virginia, the small, crowded urban apartment of my sister in New York, cafés, restaurants, streets, stations, bookstores.

As a trip, it's actually going very well – my family has helped make everything ridiculously easy, my friends look happy and busy, the transportation wasn't bad (except for the luggage).

But I find myself a little disoriented by the spaces – they are all so radically different, they make such different basic assumptions: my brother-in-law's house, somewhat like the new house just bought by my brother and his wife, are truly huge, much like the vast suburban grocery stores where we shop. Even having grown up with such things, I remain overwhelmed and intimidated by the massive fields of goods: and even though I do like choice and luxury, these suburban monuments to consumerism seem a bit over the top, even to me. (They can't possibly sell all that, can they? – is there much waste, much food going in the trash?)

And then the dirtier, more chaotic but exciting, streets and spaces of New York: which seem difficult or interesting, maddening or attractive, depending on the moment. (It was interesting to go into the famous Strand bookstore, and realize that it isn't all that large, really – I could imagine something larger. Something more, well, pharaonic.)

In this time when I'm applying for jobs back in this country – which doesn't mean much, of course; I've applied intermittently for years – it makes me wonder: what kind of spaces will I need to get accustomed to, if I'm ever successful?

And what will those spaces do to me, to my expectations, my moods, my awareness....