One of the last three books in my personal bibliography will be replaced by The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers by Daniel L. Schachter. Hold me accountable, non-existent audience!
Addendum
August 3, 2009I Don’t Wanna!
August 3, 2009
Let's Stay Up All Night!
…even though I keep on yawning!
Personal Bibliography
August 3, 2009In this program, we have to pick a “personal bibliography”: twenty books we plan to read in a few months that will either inform our writerly existences or directly influence the manuscript upon which we are working. The following is a rough draft of my personal bibliography, just for kicks:
D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
Beloved childhood classic, and one of the best customer reviewed books on Amazon I’ve ever seen. If you are even a little educated in these classic plot lines, you will realize how much Western culture descended directly from them.
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
The Pulitzer Prize winning effort by Ernest Becker to evaluate all human behavior in light of fear of death.
Her Husband by Diane Middlebrook
I’m reading this now, in my breaks from Infinite Jest; story of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s marriage.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
DFW!
Appetites by Caroline Knapp
What I’m up against, I think.
A Writer’s Life by Gay Talese
Self-explanatory.
Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy by Irving Yalom
Part of my manuscript deals with the potentially negative effects of group therapy, and so I’m going back to one of the pioneers of the practice, Irving Yalom. He wrote quite a few seminal books on therapy but this one feels most relevant.
Girl, Interrupted by Susannah Kaysen
This will be a re-read. It relates to my MS as well. I don’t want to give too much away, otherwise you won’t buy it on Kindle!
Can Somebody Shout Amen!: Inside the Tents and Tabernacles of American Revivalists by Patsy Sims
Patsy Sims runs the program here, and she’s the sweetest little old Southern woman who, in her youth, infiltrated such potentially hostile, male-oriented spheres as prison, the Klu Klux Klan and snake handler’s churches. I myself have a fetish for communities on the fringes of society (I’ve expressed this before, I’m sure, a million times) and am really interested in how these groups operate. She’s given me driving directions to a snake handler’s church, which ought to be pretty interesting, when I’m ready…
Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dali
Anyone who has the balls to title his book so deserves to be worshiped. (I jest. Infinitely.)
The Next American Essay edited by John D’Agata
I met John D’Agata in California last year…he’s considered one of the pioneers of the “lyric essay”, and this volume (apparently, I obviously haven’t read it) attempts to showcase some of the new, inventive forms of the essay.
Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
Frame is one of New Zealand’s most famed writers. This is a fictionalized account of her eight year on-and-off stay in a mental hospital for schizophrenia, a diagnosis that was later reneged. Like Kaysen, she’s interested in the lines we’ve drawn that demarcate “crazy” from “sane”, and how it was that she came to be in the first group for a time. Her Autobiography, which I have read, is superb, as is Jane Campion’s film version, An Angel at my Table.
Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass
The formidable German writer examines his past and the fallibility of memory.
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealey
I’ve always wanted to read this. I’ve heard it’s just stunning, and it works because I’m trying to study the way people construct the narratives of their lives.
Play of Consciousness by Swami Muktananda
This is the “spiritual autobiography” of the guru of the guru I occasionally visit when I’m “home” in order to chant and calm the eff down. I’ve heard parts of it read aloud at “services”, and am curious to hear more of it, and to learn more about the teachings of “Baba”, as he’s called.
Architect of Desire by Suzannah Lessard
This is the memoir of a former mentor of mine, a fiercely smart writer with a history at the New Yorker and an eye sharper than a scalpel. The book is about her grandfather, famed New York City architect Stanford White, and his many dalliances, bad habits, and eventual demise.
Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
I haven’t read a lot of Sontag, and I really want to. There was something else of hers I wanted to read, but I forgot which…this seemed thematically appropriate, as I’m also interested in catharsis via observation…Aristotelian tragedy, I guess. I have to work on unpacking this subject, and building up my vocabulary/knowledge of it. I once read that Susan Sontag directed a production of Waiting for Godot in a ruined church during the War in Bosnia, and the concept of this has been lodged in my brain ever since.
The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
The New York Times Book Review calls it a “hectic, gaudy saga.” Kickass.
The Story of O by Pauline Reage
French erotica. Done.
Strangeland by Tracy Emin
The “autobiography” (diaries?) of a visual artist. I don’t know too much about this one. I found it on an old reading list I made while living in Paris. I’m not entirely sold on this choice…
HA on the Iphone
August 2, 2009“This little keyboard is really bothersome too- feel like the iPhone’s for people with identity problems ie it will tell you were you are, remind you what you look like, what to do next, where friends are & what they look like etc.”
Jesting, Infinitely Part N
August 1, 2009“The alley was dark as a pocket.”
My Letter to Netflix
July 31, 2009I have been thinking and I believe that there should be a shuffle option for Netflix. Many people go through spurts where they put a line of documentaries or chick flicks or ____ (some genre) films on their lists, and theyd like them to be arbitrarily mixed up, much like people feel about their iPods. I am not good with technology, but it seems like it should be pretty simple? If you do it, I think you should just put on the bottom, by way of credit, This was Itinerant Daughter’s (obviously not what I wrote) genius idea.
PS Excuse me if this doesn’t fit under the category of “Business Development”; I didn’t know where else to put it.
Things I’m Thinking About Instead of the Lecture
July 31, 20091. The fact that my copy of Infinite Jest, which I had overnighted to me (via FedEx) from my house, is stuck somewhere in a FedEx warehouse in Baltimore because, the website claims, of “incorrect address” (no!) and I am terrified it will get lost somewhere in the warehouse or in transit and I will have to mourn my copy.
“Why don’t you just get another one?”
“Because that one is MINE. It’s where I put the orchid petal to dry it. It’s where my notes are. It has a life, and if one of your children gets lost, you don’t just buy another one.”
2. David Foster Wallace is quickly gaining iconic, and beloved (important differentiation) status in my mind, and this is…scary?
3. On August 31st, in the HBO documentary series:
Youth Knows No Pain: Follows filmmaker Mitch McCabe, the age-obsessed daughter of a plastic surgeon, as she journeys through America’s $60 billion a year anti-aging world. In this “Alice in Wonderland” tale, McCabe spends two years traveling across the country visiting doctors and experts, living with a cross-section of characters from Minnesota to Texas who have gone to varying lengths to “beat the clock.”
4. Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath, specifically in light of:
“Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop
In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage
In the morning they wore each other’s face” (Hughes)
And Assia Wevill, of course.
5. The fact that when I went to the grocery store last night, I wanted to buy an avocado, and noticed that all the rock hard avocados had stickers on them that said, “RIPE NOW,” which is a fucking LIE! I can tell you’re not ripe, and just because you wear a little button saying you ARE doesn’t mean I’m going to be fooled into believing you. Asshole.
6. Shoes
7. I’ve never listened to This American Life and I feel super inadequate for this reason. I always plan to and it always gets away from me.
8. I don’t know all the details of the Henry Louis Gates case, and insert consequences drawn from #7 here.
9. Calvinball, from Calvin and Hobbes
10. All the things I’d like to write that “later when I have time”, which…never? comes.
Image Craving
July 31, 2009
I am not at all a Kate Moss devotee, but I do think she was quite spectacular looking in her youth, before her face started to look a little haggard and her body a bit beaten.
A Master of Insults
July 31, 2009If you listen to Bob Dylan’s music, you can hear many a great jab. The cheery lightness that seems infused in a lot of his music seems to overshadow some of the more vitriolic comments. Sorry to go all cliche on everyone’s ass, but I still think one of the sentimental Hate Ballads (or…schadenfraude ballads?) is Like a Rolling Stone, in which he kicks Edie Sedgwick while she’s doped up and down.
“Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They’re drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you’d better lift your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.”
Not to mention Positively Fourth Street, far less poetic and adorned but straight to the heart of the matter:
“You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, “How are you?” “Good luck”
But you don’t mean it
When you know as well as me
You’d rather see me paralyzed
Why don’t you just come out once
And scream it”
Or about the Masters of War:
“Even Jesus would never forgive what you do”
This is a man on whose bad side you do not want to be.
I would like to name my daughter Edie, because two of my most beloved cultural icons are Edies, but they were also both irreparably fucked up, and so my friends tell me I cannot do that. But I can give her that middle name.
I am in a rambling mood, partially inspired by and inspiring the writing about Bob Dylan. As my teacher said this morning, “Somebody please stop me from talking!”
Residents of the Uncanny Valley
July 29, 2009My dear friend PS (who you may remember from the Zoloft egg conversation) introduced me to the idea of the Uncanny Valley. Yes, Uncanny in this context is meant to imply all the Freudian. In his own words, the Uncanny Valley is populated by, “things that are a certain distance away from us that are sort of creepy and yet we’re comfortable with them because they remind us of something…a nostalgia, perhaps…like cabbage patch dolls=our childhood. They remind us of ourselves, of humans, but a little too much to be comfortable so they create a sort of revulsion.”
He contradicted himself, I see, but I hope it makes some sense, nonetheless. We’re comfortable with them yet they create a sort of revulsion, a kind that might make us a little nauseated but we aren’t totally turned off. Like the visual/psychological equivalent of whole milk, for many.
Things that Exist in the Uncanny Valley
Amanda Bynes
Puppets that are human-like (the cast of the now-defunct Avenue Q, par example)
PS: Toy Story — approaching uncanny
Baby chimps in diapers
Artistic renderings of babies, and even just infants themselves, seem to fall quickly into the Uncanny Valley. Have you ever seen that infomercial for the program Your Baby Can Read? Absolutely the most uncanny thing I’ve ever seen. One year olds READING! Terrifying.
Boy bands
Dolls that come to life (Twilight Zone’s Talking Tina, Chuckie)
Stephen Hawking, and other computers that read
The guy next to me in this computer lab just audibly farted…
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