reasons not to have a girlfriend: reason #4

If you could see the lover in me

And we could join our hands together

If you could see how good it could be

We'll sing these stupid songs forever

Can you feel it?

Love is here

It has never been so clear

You can't love what you have not

So hold on to what you've got

Is Judy really smiling for me?

I'd change my name in case she found me

Trembling I can't believe

I've got to leave the girl behind me

Can you feel it?

Love is here

It has never been so clear

You can't love what you have not

So hold on to what you've got

If you could see the aching in me

I'd change my name in case you lost me

Trembling down to my knees

I've got to leave the world behind me

Can you feel it?

Love is here

It has never been so clear

You can't love what you have not

So hold on to what you've got

whoa--oo--whoooa--o

-- Starsailor, Love Is Here (emphases mine)

reason #4:

i've got to leave the girl behind me...

i've got to leave the world behind me...

forgive me, blogger, for i have sinned...

...its been four days since my last confession.

i have a pretty heavy reading load this semester. it could be because i am taking four english courses, a philosophy course, with a chocolate covered fourth semester latin course for dessert.

i would like to get back to some posting, as being in school always has my head bursting with new ideas, but i've got some work to do -- its the second week of school and my grip is about to slip already. so that means head in the game, feet on the ground, and fingers out of the blogosphere for the next few (units of time measurement).

no, no....not a hiatus. this is just a warning that posts will be sporadic, and unpredictable in length....as well as depth.

i will say this much:
Lolita is a fucked-up, fantastic book...and Nabokov is a fascinating writer.

did you know he met Joyce?

confessions

i feel compelled, in the interest of full disclosure, to admit that my previous book-count for both African American Literature until 1940 and 20th Century Drama were mistaken. they are only about eight books each. which isn't as bad as 15. i think i must have added them together. well, about nine for AfrAm -- one of them still hasn't come into the bookstore yet. still. that's twice the bookload of AfrAm after 1940.

when you're carrying them, they feel like 15...

day one

today was the first day of school.
this semester i will be wrestling with Descartes, and Kant (among others) in my philosophy class, and i am more than a little bit scared. i've taken all sorts of philosophy before, but those classes are flakey, buttered breakfast pastries compared to this stuff.

also i will be taking on Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Villon, Voltaire and three authors so monumentally bad-ass that they all go by the mysterious nom-de-plume Anonymous, i.e., the authors of the Mabinogion, Tristan and Yseult, and the Carmina Burana.

i will also be making a full frontal assault (notice how i'm into the phrase "full-frontal" coupled with a word you expect to be nudity but ends up being something else? its so delicious) on Latin 202. i haven't taken latin in...almost two years. luckily we are using the same book i used back then, and i don't think i've forgotten as much as i was afraid i had. still, it is latin, and as for being the great grandad of all western languages, it is nothing to be trifled with. seriously. latin don't take no for an answer, and it don't take shit from nobody. it don't mess around, and pussyfooting will not be tolerated.

not to be outdone, though, today, certainly unattended, is African American Literature Until 1940. there are what feel like a hundred books for this class, though in reality there are only about 15. yes. that's right. ONLY 15 books. i took this class because i knew and liked the professor from AfrAm Lit Since 1940. i got an "A" in the class. there were only five books. which is about what you'd expect for an English class...even a bit light. apparently one of two things happened: the number of African American writers since 1940 either a) decreased exponentially, leaving us with only five African American authors in the last 50 years, or b) exploded since 1940, thus limiting the number of books and authors we were able to consider. my guess is it is most likely the latter explanation at work here, which makes me wonder: are we reading every book written by a black author before 1940?

seriously though. not every book, but damn well near every author at least.
i guess over the span of 200 years, that's not a lot of books to consider...but over the span of 10 weeks it is.

and that's just on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Monday/Wednesday/Friday classes are as follows, though still yet to be experienced:

20th Century Drama (also damn near 15 books)
and
Lit theory and criticism


anticipate many future detailed posts about reading related headaches.

reasons not to have a girlfriend: reason #3

"i feel this need
to be self
deprecating, to
lower your
expectations on
impact...becaus
e if you are
going to be a
person who
knows me it
means full
frontal
honesty...not
just what i think
you can handle,
not just
everything but
my dark and
treasured
secrets...i want
to get
disappoinment
out of the way. i
want my own
deconstruction,
and i want you to
be there when
the smoke
clears, and how
else will i know
unless i destroy
pleasant
falsehood now,
before your very eyes?"


reason not to have a girlfriend, number three:

i am a pleasant falsehood that i can't bear to destroy

shower, shave, and shake it off

with all this nice weather, and all these nice anti-biotics in my bloodstream, i think i can pull my self out of this year end grave. its about time. turns out i will have enough money to pay for both my car, and my rent, and still have some left over so that i might be able to pay rent again very very soon.

now all i have to do is knock my sleep cycle back into place, get some teeth pulled, and get some new contact lenses. and i'll be in perfect shape.

school starts on tuesday. i can't wait. my books are going to cost almost $400...thank God for deferrments. i am going to have loads of reading this semester...but that's the reason i became an english major: to become well-read.

sometimes life sucks, and sometimes life works out too.

i'll be back to actual posting soon. at any rate, here are three haiku...s...es that i wrote last night after a couple beers,a couple shots, and a late walk up on my roof.


the stars do flicker;
the waning moon a lozenge
in the mouth of night

this haiku: a lie
i wrote it about a truth
when it was not true

this haiku: a truth
it is more true than truth is
because it transcends

and those are my haikuses.
i've been working on a perseus/pygmalion and gorgon/galatea poem for awhile now...i don't know if i'll ever finish it or if it will ever be good when i do....the ideas have been swarming my head for a few months, but i can't seem to get them out right. perhaps i should apply more alcohol to the affected area, and see what comes out.

here are two stanzas that i may or may not keep (they go near the end of the poem):

you have looked into my heart
see now, what a peach pit
you leave behind
an ore of a fallen star
its fiery pulp
eaten

i have flown away on the horses
of your blood;
i have wrapped your
writhing memory in a bag of
forgetfulness
and dropped it into
the sea
-------------------
i wrote these to go write next to eachother, but now that i read (and type) them, i'm not sure if they fit together that way. i suppose i should try writing the rest of the poem to figure out where they would fit better, huh? it would be a start.
------------------
i was thinking today, that if i had enough poetry that i could scrape together and not completely hate, i'd like to publish a small chapbook...at first, when this was a project for my poetry class at school, i thought of entitling it something pretensious like @delphi. but now that i unofficially withdrew from that course and am thinking of doing my own chapbook for fun and profit (ha!) rather than an actual grade, i'm thinking of dropping the pretense and entitling it something like VALIDATE. i think as a title it explains a lot -- about the reason i would even think of self-publishing at all, about my insecurities as a thinker and writer and person in general...and about the reasons i find myself writing sometimes. but that's all contingent on whether or not i can scrape together enough decent poetry, like i said......which, in my case, may take some time.

what i feel has come and gone before...

for the last approximately ten days i've had a sore throat which has only increased in soreness each day i've had it. most of the rest of me feels fine, except for this damned throat.

and also my eyes. my eyes bother me constantly, because i have been working off the same pair of contacts for longer than i care to publicly admit.

and my teeth. my wisdom teeth actually; they need to be pulled. i have two of them. they've both come all the way in. i've had them for years. one has a cavity. the other one bleeds...i think because i tried to pull it out myself a couple times. but i just didn't have the nerve.

and worst of all: my glands are swollen.

lately i've been on a 12 hour sleep cycle that starts at around 4 am, and -- you guessed it -- ends at around 4 pm. i'm highly unmotivated. i feel like crap. i need a reason to get up earlier. i need to feel productive.

also, my vocabulary is too small for a writer. i need to learn some new words.
and my car is going to cost me $600 to get it out of the shop...not to mention it needs plates and, oh yeah, insurance.

and i've been living at my parents house. i've stayed a total of...two nights? at my own apartment since before christmas. its driving me crazy.

at least i finally finished "The Sorrows of Young Werther." it was fantastic.
it is older than the United States of America, by like nine years, and i somehow managed to feel connected to it. but then again, i shouldn't be surprised.......Beowulf is a thousand years old, the Metamorphases is two thousand years old.....and i read them and i feel like they could have been written yesterday.

i'm off to mope, shower, drive with my sister somewhere, maybe go to starbucks, write some meandering and senseless words, and try to get to sleep at a reasonable hour so i can get up and go to work tomorrow.

wish me luck.

new years, cruel months

"last year at this time we were crushed by a snowstorm; the streets were swollen with snow for days, but it was ok, no one was really going anywhere anyway.

right now we're having a bit of a thaw..."

its january. its january, 2006, in buffalo -- and it looks like spring. the forty-degree air has eaten away at the wayward curbside mounds of lingering snow, now dirty and scorched by the hot breath of wet street traffic. all around, matted grass seems to be struggling for life, reaching for the promise of the cottony grey skies overhead. it is like the opening of the Canterbury Tales, and of The Wasteland...

it is a tease, of course. we still have the rest of winter to ride out. which is why the comparison to The Wasteland is appropriate. yet i can't help but think: the sun is returning now, and while winter has only officially been with us for twelve days, why couldn't this thaw just continue into official spring, and why can it not officially introduce us to summer? for meterological reasons that i officially don't understand for one. that's ok. i know better than to hold the fickle weather to a promise it never kept, and i don't need doppler radar to tell me we've still got at least one or two big snows left before winter truly breaks. but an early start for spring would be nice, not just for the fact that we could all avoid a wind chill factor that is so excruciating that it is 99% effective as a birth control and 100% effective as a means of suicide.

it would be nice, simply because it would be appropriate: this is the new year. i want spring now. i want to grab the new year by green and growing things, to wrap them around me, to bath in such liquour as the rain, to mix the dried tubers with my bare hands: i want the blessing of green and growing life for my pilgrimage through this next year. an early start to spring would be nice because i just cannot wait out the length of four months without it and everything it represents. i need that life. i need it now. what better time to have it?

i can't help but thinking of this new year's as tidying several seasonal and calendrical milestones together: it is, of course, the new year, the time for new beginings. it is also the uncanny spring, a time for growth and renewal, a time for anticipating regeneration, resurrection. and, as i think about the death of the old year, and looking forward, clutching to the hope that the symbols of spring and the new year offer us, it is a Groundhog Day, a Candlemas of sorts...and while all my life i have abhored any acknowledgement that the rodent in punxatawney was my namesake, i can't help but see significance in the tradition of Groundhog Day and how it is appropriate here...

as a kid i was confounded by the tradition: the groundhog seeing his shadow in the sun just never added up to six more weeks of winter for me (and yes, i know that there is always six weeks of winter left by the time we get to february 2nd, but still...) -- shouldn't the sun be an indication that spring was hurrying on its way? what was always more significant to me about Groundhog Day was that when the world is enshrouded with darkness and winter, everything is in shadow.

Candlemas lore holds that the groundhog, being afraid of his shadow, scurries back into his hole to wait out the next six weeks. i am waiting for the groundhog who can confront his shadow, who can grab the untimely sun by its rays and pull us into spring. to go back in the hole is to go back to winter, back to the dead year, back to the tomb of old Kronos. somewhere there's got to be a hero groundhog who isn't afraid of the new year, of spring, of neither sun nor shadow, who can march headlong into it and bring it back for the rest of us. maybe then i wouldn't mind sharing my name with such creature.

the cruelty of april is the cowardice of february, is the fear and trepidation of the new year. and right now is the new year -- and right now i am looking ahead to a time of greener pastures -- and right now i am grabbing spring by its teasing vernal shoots. i have too much to lose to let winter linger.

as much as i hate that much of my writing on this blog seems to be getting more and more inspirational, i just as equally can't help it. i want big things to happen with my life; i need to have them happen in my life...and writing is the only way i can get there. still, the dry and sterile thunderclouds only lasted for so long...and in the end the thunder spoke, so i suppose i shouldn't feel so bad.