So there's a lesson that keeps being forced all the time and it's kind of integrated into myself but really not enough, so that it's something that comes up in thought reasonably frequently but doesn't govern all decisions and thoughts as much as it really should, so that situations still creep up that confront thoughts and show how biased they are even though this lesson is forced all the time and thought to have been learnt reasonably well, it clearly hasn't been learnt well enough. That lesson is about the depth of other people's existences independent of my own, that they have inner lives that certainly may have some common elements but that have a huge amount of differences as well. It seems simple, but it's so infrequently lived properly, deeply. So there's always this complaint about why the hell the lesson hasn't been learnt yet, how many times must it be taught to be learnt, as though somehow the brain is just supposed to do all the work with only minimal conscious input. Well that's probably not really how the brain works. You can't just expect it to develop itself. You have to actually do stuff. (This is, lolzily, another obvious lesson that needs the same sort of attention). So maybe what needs to be instituted is a rigorous process of thought deployment. Have to include the idea of other peoples' person-ness in everything all the time. There can be no exceptions. No indulgent giving in to allowing one-sided ideas to do their thing. Even if the concept can't be felt fully at all times, it must at least be thought of as fully as possible. If it's difficult, try just making up a story about the other person's life that lead them to act the way they do. Never let judgementalism have unchecked reign. It's a simple principle, easy - the only pitfall is times where willingness is lacking. But keep trying.

This is a practice that can be used for many things.

For Esme - With Love and Squalor, JD Salinger

Also ok. Good simple portraits of people, non judgmental simple realism. Unfortunately, I'm not that big a fan of normal realism. I wish I had read more lit criticism so I would have better language and understanding for these things. But I'll say that I do feel like this sort of realism isn't very realistic. It's too simple. I guess it's more like you're actually observing these people - no authorial insight, just seeing them - but the thing is that the tone of supposedly transparent language, to me, is never transparent, always get in the way and makes things not quite right, Because it tries to be transparent but it's most definitely shaping the subject through its tone, though all the words chosen. That said, I didn't hate its type of realist language - not the way I've been unable to stand things like Zeitoun - because at least it's slightly more in line with the characters than that terrible book's airy fairy shit. Although, reading over it now I can't discern that much of a difference between their styles, making me think that part of it has been my attitude coming into each book. But not all.

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Now I'm going to post all at once on a few recently read books.

White Teeth was ok. Liked it kind of in spite of myself: enjoyed it although I didn't like like it as such. Full of important things to be written - race, class, gender etc. things. I'm glad I read it, but I don't really have much to say about it.

Yes, there are always the feelings and the aching desire to hold them and keep them. To become one with them, to cherish them forever.
I apologise for the cliches, but they seem the closest to right words I could come up with.

There's this specialness to things, inside me there, that seems powerful yet fragile - powerful in desire for things, fragile in the face of the reality of life, the difficultly of holding on to things.

Maybe it's not so difficult, I've just never managed to spend the necessary time.

Keeping these things is difficult because it involves being able to stay with them enough to experience them and then turn them into the right words.

Maybe.

Then again, the round about ways of keeping them could be more important - the way that some art evokes these things just by being about lots of things rather than trying to hone in on this singular feeling.

It feels like this poem I read once that said something about the worm of feeling in the heart...It was a strange image, using a literal worm, but ended up being so powerful. I'm going to go find it.

Found. Read the whole thing and ended up touched less by the worm part than all the rest of it. Going to reproduce here because I really love it, and I could be wrong but I think Bob might like it as well. Or at least some things about it remind of her. Unable to find it online so will type it.

Middle of the Way

Galway Kinnell

1

I wake in the night,

An old ache in the shoulder blades.

I lie amazed under the trees

That creak a little in the dark,

The giant trees of the world.

I lie on earth the way

Flames lie in the woodpile,

Or as an imprint, in sperm or egg, of what is to be.

I love the earth, and always

In its darkness I am a stranger.

2

6 A.M. Water frozen again. Melted it and made tea. Ate a raw egg and the last orange. Refreshed by a long sleep. the trail practically indistinguishable under 8" of snow. 9:30 A.M. Snow up to my knees in places. Sweat begins freezing under my shirt when I stop to rest. The woods are filled, anyway, with the windy noise of the first streams. 10:30 A.M. the sun at last. The snow starts to melt off the boughs at once, falling with little ticking sounds. Mist clouds are lying in the valleys. 11:45 A.M. Slow, glittering breakers roll in on the beaches ten miles away, very blue and calm. 12 noon. An inexplicable sense of joy, as if some happy news had been transmitted to me directly, by-passing the brain. 2 P.M. From the top of Gauldy I looked back into Hebo valley. Castle Rock sticks into a cloud. A cool breeze comes up from the valley, it is a fresh, earthly wind and tastes of snow and trees. It is not like those transcendental breezes that make the heart ache. It bring happiness. 2:30 P.M. Lost the trail. A woodpecker watches me wade about through the snow trying to locate it. The sun has gone back of the trees. 3:10 P.M. Still hunting for the trail. Getting cold. From an elevation I have an open view to the SE, a world of timberless, white hills, rolling, weirdly wrinkled. Above them a pale half moon. 3:45 P.M. Going on by map and compass. A minute ago a deer fled touching down every fifteen feet or so. 7:30 P.M. Made camp near the heart of Alder Creek. Trampled a bed into the snow and filled it with boughs. Concocted a little fire in the darkness. Ate pork and beans. A slug or two of whiskey burnt my throat. The night very clear. Very cold. That half moon is up there and a lot of stars have come out among the treetops. The fire has fallen to coals.

3

The coals go out,

The last smoke wavers up

Losing itself in the stars.

This is my first night to lie

In the uncreating dark.

In the human heart

There sleeps a green worm

That has spun the heart about itself,

And that shall dream itself black wings

One day to break free into the black sky.

I leave my eyes open,

I lie here and forget our life,

All I see is that we float out

Into the emptiness, among the great stars,

On this little vessel without lights.

I know that I love the day,

The sun on the mountain, the Pacific

Shiny and accomplishing itself in breakers,

But I know I live half alive in the world,

Half my life belongs to the wild darkness.

***

That poem is amazing to me. The way it perfectly balances all these things to make everything wonderful: mundane with profound, micro with macro, inspirational with sad. And just these piercing insights and beautiful images.

I think that if I write this on here I can own that feeling. Or if I print it in the perfect formatting and stick in in the perfect spot in my room. these days I think perhaps I look to outward things like that too much, as a direct response to my former exact opposite tendency. But it does seem to work often. It shouldn't, but it really does. I feel more at home in my room now that I've got a light that actually provides good light, and some pictures around the place, and a bit of organisation on bookshelves and floor space. I feel more at home at Jared's when I get there and clean it all myself. Then it feel like I can be there. These things I've always thought of as in truth internal things are so effected external.

When I click publish will all these feelings leave me because I'll feel like there right there on this blog for me to retrieve at any time? I'm going to go with yes; so, I have to take measures. This was supposed to be a measure, but it feels that more are required.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino

I don't really have anything to say about this one. It was ok. Currently uninterested in theory of reading.

White Noise, by Don DeLillo

So after thinking about it for a while I have decided that the whole novel is 'white noise' - it's about things (things debatable, but mostly accepted as being major themes) that are always there in modern (or mid '80s but still issues only in slightly different forms) western (specifically American, but to some degree transferable to others) consciousness but not too often made conscious. This gives the book a sense of unification of theme that turns out not to exist - it goes through stages where one issue seems and overarching thing to unify the whole book but then it's all but dropped for another. Instead, the overarching theme is 'white noise things'. This got to me a little because I'm so pedestrian in basic cognition I like to have a short phrase in my head that I can refer back to, to remember as the thing, so it was a bit jarring, and yet there was still a sense of unification in it all, which I think lies in this idea of exploring things that are white noise - it brings a sense of very quiet foreboding and yet also general uncertainty, including about the reality of the sense of foreboding. I think the only time actual white noise is explicitly acknowledged is when the protagonist is trying to claim his life, break through the figurative white noise.

So it uses a pretty typical framework - just a family, hanging around being a family - with some slight surrealism and/or hyperrealism and/or silliness, to deal with issues that are pretty central to all US postwar satirey stuff. Perhaps it was less super typical - in the issues it deals with - at the time it was written? I do get the sense that it's an important book - though that might mean it popularised the issues?

It was ok, filled with interesting and important issues, I only wish it wasn't so damn short. It should be 1000 pages long or something, not the measly 362 in small pages and large words so that I got through it in two days without even trying very hard. Because it was so short everything was just put out there and glossed over and would have been so much better and so much awesomer to read if it still had all the same things just fleshed out so much more. Things should be fleshed out.

Flaws in the Glass, by Patrick White

An autobiography, or more like an impressionistic portrait. Not a fan of his style - with its choosing random places to leave out punctuation in a way that I can't find solve into cohesion (doesn't mean there isn't a theory behind it, just that I can't find it) and general old timey lyricism and then also overly non lyrical parts. But I went with it as I've been doing and it ended up being ok - some nice ideas about and approaches to life that resonated with me. Overall, just ok.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her, a film by Jean-Luc Godard

Decided to post about this film on here. I should post more films, because it would be nice to catalogue and think on them more.

I was really in the mood for taking art things for what they are when I saw this, so despite the fact that it was mainly made up of musings on reality that can often be annoying because they can differ so much from one's own, I took them as they were and tried to experience them, and this ended up being awesome. Eye opening to ways of negotiating reality. I anchored my thoughts while watching to an idea I've been focusing on a lot because it seems to end up being a very fruitful approach to things despite its seeming limitations - how does one live in the modern world? In this vein, I imagine that the protagonist is a lot like the protagonist of The Book of Daniel - struggling and uncertain in the modern world - except that she is French instead of American (and my film watching has taught me that this is a very significant difference in approach to life, the French being a lot more into philosophising at length and living kind of more poetically) and that she hasn't latched on to the external obviously and self consciously fallacious outlet that the American male has.

It was all the greatest things about film to me - the way it just mused along in life, creating beauty and meaning by cutting up words with images in the way of poetry, so that it was full and interesting and Important. Plus I could have sympathy with the protagonist. Plus it was occasionally endearingly obvious, as things often fall to - like it ended with words not obviously related to a zoom out from some modern consumer goods laid out on a lawn. One of my favourite sort of films.

The Book of Daniel, by EL Doctorow

I ended up enjoying it very much in a way I didn't think I would. Because I wouldn't call it a masterpiece as some have apparently called it - with it's occasionally clunky language unsure if it belongs to the old writing's rococo style or the direction writing was moving more and more towards at the time (1970s USA; admittedly, Doctorow was educated in the past style but was trying to do the new, and a lot of people end up being sometimes awkwardly caught between the two, even today - DFW's answer to this is to embrace both as well as the awkwardness that comes with it, although if he gets it right could be debatable; plus, on the other hand, it tends to make for maybe even more annoying writing if you try to make everything to submit to one or the other as though they are completely distinct, like I was taught often in my writing course) and its maybe quite pedestrian ideas about the complex social and political issues it dealt with (the modern world, twentieth century USA, McCarthyism - although I suppose this is forgivable because he's a fiction writer, a casual observer, not an expert, and it's not like he didn't make an effort, or differed too much from some experts, plus I'm not sure to what extent this justifies anything [probably only to the extent that they make an effort that's not a complete fail]. In spite of everything, however, I decided from the beginning to take it for what it was and make what I could from it because I don't want to be a total hater - and this ended up being really rewarding, as it always tends to. It helped in my quest to bring myself in to the world and feel more at home in it - stories, knowledge, history seem to be always invaluable in this. It taught me more about enjoying writing that may not be my ideal style and how if you let yourself really feel the writing, really internalise what it's trying to get at, it ends up being surprisingly adequate to experience. I even let myself be taken in by its musings on the things of the modern world, such as the sort of weird culture that's embodied in Disneyland - the sort of things I've read about many times and decided to get over - and really think about it and get something from it.

So the conclusion is that lots of things are pretty awesome if you let them be, and thinking and learning is fun.