ooh

also-ran

So anyway I've been vacillating from abject despair to jocular carefree abandon today. Thanks for the kind words. I left school early, had a mocha latte at Café Galilee (fetid) while reading the essay Regarding the Torture of Others and yearning, desperately, to die young. Had Ben and Jerry's for lunch (it was execrable). Then I read some Barthes, accidently fell asleep, and went to visit my grandfather. He can't speak properly, and tried gesturing, but the tubes held him back. He has also forgotten how to spell. I shall read him the papers tomorrow when I visit, and then have lunch at Popeye's, crying into the mashed potato and Southern chili. (Not.) Soon he will forget his son, his grandchildren, his wife, his name... and then the world will become an extension of the self, which will dissolve into the world, which will be reduced to the sepia-spotted photographs, which I will touch, but find that the past's smiling communique in Konica colour is empty, lonely, desperate.

words

a stupid but necessary rant after the jump

foreheads

So while this song was stuck on replay in my head, I rushed my grandfather to the hospital in an ambulance, weaved in and out of traffic, and am now feeling like the rest of this week is going to be a very violent farce. I found him on the floor when I got home at lunchtime with my grandmother beside him, who coolly informed me that he had been sprawled on the ground since 9 AM and wouldn't get up. That's four hours on the floor. Have some porridge, she told me. And I'm like, Good thinking, Grandma.

fiction and complexity

Foods consumed today:

1) Greek yoghurt and maple syrup
2) An awesome bowl of lontong
3) Half a chicken breast sub
4) An apple strudel that turned out to be strawberry, with scoops of Dreyer's toasted almond ice cream.
5) A third of a somewhat plump custard apple
6) Seaweed Saltines
7) Spaghetti tossed in pesto
8) Wild mushrooms and cream soup
9) Grilled portobello mushrooms with sea salt
10) A naked garden salad
11) Baked salmon
12) Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Cups

I've managed to eat only delicious things! *\O/*

(And now I'm listening to an interview with Sontag on her novel The Volcano Lover. Love her, sigh.)

Gotta love the green line for its weirdos. (Alternatively, she could be a deranged JC tutor.)

"poufs"

I have decided: after the A levels are done, I'm going to Kinokuniya to buy a book of SAT practice tests as a sort of sadistic reward for myself. And then, I'll amass a decent collection of Sontag's works — already, I have Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, and At The Same Time. I've already read Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will, but I still don't own the books. (*BIRTHDAY PRESENT HINT ALERT*) I want to read AIDS and Its Metaphors, but I'm apprehensive about starting on her fiction for the same reason why I haven't touched Ayn Rand's books yet. (I chickened out on Atlas Shrugged and read an anthology of love poems curated by Duffy; please stop berating me for Cowardice Of The Intellect.)

After which, I will bake a cake, brush up on Friends trivia en route to Melbourne, and actually start to seriously think about what I want to do when I grow up. At the moment, the future feels too distant and made-up. Life with a buzz cut feels like a lamentable state of affairs, but NS life to me is still shrouded with myth and mystery. Studying in college feels like a happy dream that's just as nebulous and elusive. In fact, I cannot conceive of life with the post-prelims timetable until it actually happens on Monday.

Additionally, I've also decided to apply for baptism, which will probably be held end-November. I've no issue with getting wet. I'm just a little nervous about appearing in front of everyone who has seen me grow up since I was a strange amorphous thing articulated only by my parents' joy, and declaring, in the rite and ritual of Protestant ordinances, my beliefs. I know that ordinances are not necessary to have a relationship with God, so why harp on baptism so much? I'm guessing that instituting outward expressions of faith is fundamental to the strength of the church, and there is an inherent assumption that institutions anchor and govern. I'll write more about that sooner or later, prelim results permitting... D:

Oh, do come if you wanna see me get baptized, even if you're polytheistic/monotheistic but skeptical of Judeo-Christian religions/staunchly atheist/staunchly apathetic. Think of it as a chance for participant-observation in a non-denominational independent church slightly divergent from the modern megachurch, and filled with nice people with opinions of their own. We study the Bible without becoming Bible-thumpers ourselves, occasionally find humour in the rhyme schemes of old hymns (feminine rhymes in an a-a-b-b structure anyone?), and Quran-burning is certainly frowned-upon. :)

shrine

Omg — skip the first half of the clip to see Susan Sontag speak (and ignore Jack Kroll and Agnes Varda). In an average Hollywood movie, she declares, you don't see real people (whether mainstream people or marginal people), you see ideas that people have about what people are supposed to be or the way people are supposed to be represented— (here, to my annoyance, Varda interrupts.)

Also, allow me to gush about the incredible sangfroid she possesses while coolly lighting a cigarette at 1:57 and then leaning back resplendently on the armchair at 2:02. In a cloud of tranquility so gauzy and diaphanous, she turns her head to face Varda at 3:00 with a gaze that is at once so intense and disinterested that it kills me. If, hypothetically, I were Agnes Varda, I would just die. In a bowl-cut and a floral minidress, no less.

Additionally, Terry Castle wrote about Susan in the London Review of Books. She regards Robert Walser as required reading (we could have been friends!), is friends with Marina Abramovic (but of course), and says things like "Don't you loathe academics as much as I do? How can you abide it?" Reading these, I'm like, Terry, G.T.F.O. (in jest of my own envy, obviously.)

Alas, I am twice removed from the lady I fanboy about all the time: she prefers other women, and she's been dead for nearly six years now.

rachmaninov

there's dust in your mouth and poems in the air

This morning, I tried to ward off an existential crisis through the act of creation. I made baba ghanoush and very rustic oregano flatbread for brunch. What's baba ghanoush, you may ask, and why is it grey and lumpy? Besides being the name of my future grey tabby, (along with Smiley Muffin and Smooches DeLuca my other two feline minions), baba ghanoush is a Middle Eastern dish made with mashed roasted eggplant, garlic and tahini. Since my dad came home yesterday with the Greek yoghurt my sister seemed crazy about, I added that in too for good measure. It's a little lumpy because I couldn't be arsed to haul out a food processor, and it's grey because I used unhulled tahini from the health foods section of some glitzy upper middle class grocery place. 

In other news, I am spending an inordinate proportion of my allowance on books. That I will actually read. Good/Bad?