File Under: Why I’m Not in Grad School

It has been nearly a year since I left the comp lit program at LSU, and I am only now beginning to regain my hunger for literary exploration and to seriously consider the reasons why that experience nearly killed my love of literature.

I don’t want to know literature, I want to get to know it—to experience it. Or, if you don’t want to give me the benefit of the doubt, I’m just a slow learner—I need time to think over what I’m reading, not just skim though it. I need time to digest it.

I like to luxuriate in an author’s thought, travel down some of the same streets, take in the sights, crawl into bed with him, drop him in the bath tub a couple of times, follow his pen strokes.

School is all about required reading, which paradoxically one is expected not to read but to either gobble up and regurgitate or to skim over and “be familiar with.”

All I can say is that my brief stint in graduate school was extremely unsucessful, which was very surprising to me. I can hope that it was a result of a mismatch between student and program, but I know better than that. I’m too old and set in my ways to prostrate myself at the altar of the academic ego.

Vogons Sighted at Office of Motor Vehicles

Managing to break free of the binds of apathy, I finally, after moving here from Texas nearly 2 years ago, managed on Friday to get my Louisiana Driver’s License to replace my Texas “driver license” (Texans have a serious issue with proper use of the apostrophe).

Lo! What progress has been made! I immediatley went to the Baton Rouge Public Library’s Main Branch and got my library card, which was the impetus behind it all. Of course, I had to pay a small fine from 1998, when I left the city, but that’s better than not eating in order to buy new books. Of course, every book on or by Sylvia Plath was checked out, but that didn’t stop me. There was still Ezra Pound, Oscar Wilde, e. e. cummings, and a plethora of lesser-known poets waiting for me to thumb through their inky musings.

Oh, back to the Office of Motor Vehicles. If you can avoid it, do. Images evoked: sardines in oily tins, whale blubber, the smell of urinals, Kafka’s castle but in smell-o-vision. And then there’s the “Designated Smoking Area.” Could they be Vogons?

The Questionable Romance of Suicide

I never thought suicide a very romantic thing, merely a last-ditch option for escape from a very unpleasant situation or, more accurately, state of mind. Such being the case, even as a morose, maladjusted teenager, I avoided Sylvia Plath. Maybe I scorned her work because my interest in it would have been clichéd.

In any case, once I reached 30, I figured, “Maybe I’ll give this Sylvia Plath a chance.” So I did. Her poetry looked interesting, but didn’t manage to hold my attention. (I had bought a second-hand copy of The Colossus.) I did read The Bell Jar in its entirety, but compared with its literary offspring, such as Girl Interrupted, it seemed pretty anemic, and, frankly, dated. The Great Book Purge of 2004 took both The Colossus and The Bell Jar; a few cents more for Ramen was of more value than what Plath gave to my soul.

Enter Ariel: The Restored Edition. I am a sucker for trying to divine an author’s “true intentions” through study of previously unpublished and annotated material. This book reeled me in with reproductions of the original typewritten manuscripts plus handwritten notes. Not to mention, “Oooh, which parts did Ted Hughes leave out? The bastard.”

What this edition offers that others do not is a concise yet revealing glimpse at Sylvia Plath, wife and mother. In the foreword, Frieda Hughes offers her unique insight into her mother’s condition and her parents’ relationship, and the edition’s post script offers a brief biography of Plath that discusses some of the details of her battle with mental illness that I’ve not seen elsewhere. Particularly of note is that Plath was on antidepressants to which she had previously had a “bad reaction” when she ended her life. This and other details offered in the article point to the possibility that Plath was actually bipolar (Type II, in modern parlance), and in a antidepressant-induced manic or mixed state when she committed suicide.

This look behind the scenes goes a long way to painting a fuller and more realistic portrait of Sylvia Plath and to dispelling the myth of her as a martyr for some twisted vision of girlish feminism. This treatment breaks through some of the fog of myth that obscures the clarity of her writing, allowing the reader to appreciate her work for its own merit.

Hacked Moleskines

On the left is “my brain,” iconized with a file drawer label holder, and to the right is my notepad for learning CSS.

When you get your first Moleskine, you think, “This looks so cool, just like it is,” and you vow never to desecrate its stark black beauty, especially with anything so pedestrian or inane as stickers.

Then somehow, your sole little Moleskine begins to reproduce, and soon there are black notebooks everywhere. What do you do? Which one is which? One is for sketching, another is for writing, but which one is which?

One solution (for there are many others) is to iconize (yes, I just made up a word) the cover of your favorite black notebooks. Just like you might dress up a little black dress with a favorite scarf or piece of jewelry, why not decorate your Moleskine, but with a purpose?

A Filtered Experience

It’s very odd to experience the cigarette without tasting it on the lips. The smoke still has a taste in the mouth, but part of the nasty, brutish, makes-you-feel-alive bit of the experience is gone, especially when you have become accustomed to smoking completely unfiltered cigarettes.

To backtrack a bit, I’ve gone and bought some disposable plastic cigarette filters/holders. Mainly, I wanted to see what smoking with a holder is like before I go spending big bucks on eBay for some crazy vintage flapper or ‘60s thing. I was also curious, after seeing these “aquafilter”things, to see what, if anything, they do to the properties of the smoke. The packaging claims that they “reduce tar and nicotine” and provide “cleaner, cooler smoke.” (“Scientific research confirms that wet filtration is the most effective method to remove the tar and nicotine from cigarette smoke,” proclaims the packaging.) One filter per pack of cigarettes, it also says.

It’s nice not to have the bits of tobacco left in your mouth, but taking the butt out does subtract from the taste experience. The smoke flavor does seem to be more of a taste, less of a nasty, smokey nebula. Maybe the taste is more concentrated? But, again, it makes the whole experience more about smoking than tasting, which may be a plus for inhalers, but certainly isn’t for me.

The plastic extension does deflect some of the more unpleasant aspects of the experience—the smoke is farther from the eyes (and nose), the hand is kept off of the cigarette (which tends to leave a god-awful stench on the hand after a few).

Trying an English Oval now. Definitely less taste, more smoke. I wonder if this will also be true of a simple holder with no pretensions of filtration, i.e. how much of the reduction in taste is due to lack of direct contact of the cigarette with the lips and mouth, how much is due to any actual filtering of the smoke that may be occurring.

This is more like sitting next to a smoker than smoking oneself. And seeing as I’m in it for the taste in the mouth rather than as a nicotine delivery system, I’m left not only unsatisfied, but also irritated by the smell. It’s very much like second-hand smoking.

The plastic filter definitely sterilizes the smoking experience. What’s the point of smoking when all you’re left with is smoke? A nicotine delivery system.

All smoke and no taste makes ciggie a dull drag.

Rituals and Atmosphere

The texture of life is about rituals and atmosphere: drinking tea made in a teapot from loose tea, smoking a pipe or an unfiltered cigarette, filling your fountain pen with ink from an inkwell, writing with a wooden pencil on real paper bound into a nice journal.

I found someone else who delights in the texture of life:

I’ve really come to enjoy the ritual that comes along with “real” writing. Like the ritual of filling, tamping, lighting, and enjoying a nice pipe with a friend, I take joy in the process of selecting ink, drawing it up into the pen and putting the ink to paper in a meaningful way.

Why I Read with a Pencil in Hand (or Why the Internet is Webbed)

Fernando Pessoa tells me why I love classics!

However much my soul may be descended from the Romantics, I can find no peace of mind except in reading classical authors.

(Emphasis mine.) A sentence which immediatley causes my mind to vomit up the quote that I love so much from Thomas à Kempis:

In omnibus requiem quaesivi et numquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.

Roughly translated, it says, “I seek peace in everything, but find it nowhere except in a corner with a book.” And who do you think old Thomas was reading? Certainly not the Romantics, about whom Pessoa is complaining.

Pessoa goes on to say,

The obsessive analysis of our sensations (sometimes of merely imagined sensations), the identification of our heart with the landscape, the anatomic exposure of all our nerves, the substitution of desire for the will and of longing for thinking—all these things are far too familiar to be of interest to me or to give me peace when expressed by another.

(Again, emphasis is mine.) Yes! The misidentification of empathy, feeling in common, for real communication is at the heart of the postmodern malaise that our society suffers.

feeling ≠ thinking
relating ≠ knowing

I feel what you mean, I don’t know what you mean.

Pessoa continues:

Whenever I feel them, and precisely because I feel them, I wish I were feeling something else. And when I read a classical author, that something else is given to me.

This calls to mind Donna Tartt’s depiction of her main characters (classics students) in The Secret History as seeming and acting in a way that is “chilling to modern tastes,” which, in turn, brings me to her take on the Furies/Erinyes:

And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it.

Ahh, contrary to popular belief, reading classical authors is an escape, a pleasure! Reading Pessoa, on the other hand, is exhausting.

All of which brings me back to . . . smoking. Here’s a little addition to a previous post: smoking is…a break from the intensity and intelligence of Pessoa’s profound musings. Oddly enough (or, appropriately enough, given Pessoa’s preference for writing), the same goes for writing vs. reading. One calms and soothes the mind, while the other agitates it into action.

Cheap Shoes

I found these at the Goodwill Store next to HobLob on College. They were either $2.99 or $3.99 a pair. I love them. They’re gaudy and they’re name-brand and they smell like somebody else’s feet (hyperbole) and I love them.

I also found a $50, huge, chunky wooden desk just like about three others I have bought before and left behind in various states. It has been sitting in Greg’s parents’ old mini-van for over a month now, waiting for me to clear a place for it in my apartment. I’m working on it.

Barriers, Compartments, Containers…

Maybe being bipolar is about the disintegration of barriers—barriers that are supposed to be there, like those between people and groups and classes, like those between the different compartments of the mind.

I find that when it is flaring up (when I am out of lithium, for example), I treat others as I treat myself, which is not at all gently, and also that I can’t compartmentalize my thoughts, with different thoughts leaking into categories where they just don’t belong.

I find too that I cannot decide into which container I should place the activities and products of my fevered brain. For instance, I want to blog about Pessoa. Which blog do I post it to? Why do I have separate blogs for…I don’t even know what they’re for. Why do I have three different blogs, each with a separate purpose which even I cannot divine? Why can’t I have one blog like a normal person?

Futhermore, why am I here metawriting and metablogging instead of writing about what Pessoa had to say about the Romantics as was my original intent???

Welcome

Welcome to the new home of this is your brain on lithium. The previous entries are nothing new—they’ve merely migrated from LiveJournal— but take some time to look around at the links and the interface. One of the reasons I am so excited about WordPress is that it allows content pages! I don’t have any up yet, but I will definitely be taking advantage of this feature very soon, at which point, you’ll have even more reason to come back and explore.