I had had the expectation that this class would be somewhat of a personal narrative writing class, with the blog posts resembling curated diaries, digressions on the Parisian lifestyle and our own experiences living in Paris in the spring of 2015 and all that. It is just about 95 years after Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast — that which would stand for a centennial anniversary of the lost generation. I am not certain whether the assignments posted on canvas are prompts for the blog posts or for the conversation in class, so in my confusion I have written a hybrid of the two.
I also have to say how I feel uncomfortable in sharing my entire private life with the entire class, and thus, auditing myself poses a difficulty and somewhat of a burden on my creativity and on my desire to write these posts. I like the idea of constructive participation, but as those are true accounts of my life, being judged on my writing takes a new form of familiarity that I wished never to encounter in my adult life. I feel if I were writing fiction this would be different. I would love to be able to account for my semester in Paris by these short narratives, however I feel stifled by the looming threat of literary analysis, and by the general sense of apathy I get from the class. That being said, I wish to participate in this class in more than just presence, and this post will hopefully catapult me back into the mindset I was in at the beginning of the semester.
I have spent the last few weeks reeling with illness. I had never gotten sick in New York, nor in Los Angeles, and I am surprised by my sudden susceptibility to bronchial infection (which I imagine could make a great band name). Normally, my tolerance for these spring bugs is very high but something about Paris, maybe the proximity to other sick people, is what is different. Almost everybody I know has come down with some kind of bronchial illness — probably all the same one — and a few have had other issues. My ulcerative colitis has flared again, and I wonder if it is because of the cigarettes, caffeine, dairy, meat, bread, cold, alcohol, that I have introduced into my diet recently. Fortunately, nothing seems to soothe my IBS so at this point it is more of a meditation on removing stress rather than dietary irritants.
I also find that there’s another kind of contagion which is much more detrimental to health than infections are, and that is the sense of apathy which I mentioned earlier. The table in my living room only became more and more dirty until last night when I decided that it was time for my life to again be worth something. I feel like my table represents and reflects everything in my life, my laziness, ennui, etc. As Lauryn Hill says, “everything is everything.”
I have also become empty of music — I want to buy a guitar but I have been spending so much money that I can’t rationalize spending on that too. I figure if I spend very little for a few months then I’ll have saved up enough to buy one, but at that point I don’t see why I don’t just wait until I get back to New York where guitars are cheaper and I have an apartment and more stationary life.
It makes me very sad to know that I, again, will be leaving to make a new life for myself. I feel like I am creating conditions for myself to replicate the instability of living in a split custody household, but instead of household, life — 6 months in New York, 1 month in Los Angeles, 6 months in Paris, 1 month in Los Angeles… ? months in New York and who knows what else. I am restless — attention deficient or impatient, which it is, I am not sure. I have noticed this pattern, however, and I feel like it is a symptom of the anxiety that eats away at me. I went to talk to the councilor that Parsons Paris provided, and he turned out to be a wonderful man, a musician, too, raised in Greece, lived in New York, etc.
I keep getting urges to trip — I feel like I am looking for something in my waking life that my day dreams are not sufficient enough to find. I have been sleeping a lot, too, hoping that I’ll remember some of these revelations or realizations that I have in my dreams so that I can figure out what I am trying to figure out, but I guess since I am so sleep deprived, my mind is being greedy with its lessons. Writing also helps me discover these things, but since I’ve felt the emphasis of this class shift from writing to literary analysis I have lost my desire to write. A lot of my personal disposition tends to be reflective of the educational environment I am in; this was especially so in high school, when I was in class from 7 am to 3 pm every day.
I need to find a musical community, people with I can play music with and talk with about these things. I feel like artistic communities have the same sensibilities, and are self selecting as a result, so finding one will only be a matter of searching for one.
I have also become very interested in astrology, and, while I am sure I shouldn’t be revealing this, as mine advised me to study astrology and metaphysics in secrecy, I feel a need to share this information. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized how binary people and situations tend to be, and I believe that astrology (as well as many other human behavioral sciences) are true. I am very much a libra, and that is satisfying and enlightening for me.
I didn’t get a chance to finish the Dos Passos reading, but from what I got through, I recognized a similar trauma as is in Hemingway’s writing. Dos Passos has the same innocent narrative that Hemingway writes, with an unassuming and non-prescriptive voice, for example, when Dos Passos is sequestered by Sheffield into his love-den type living room, there is a definite implication of homosexual tendencies, but Dos Passos plays possum and gets himself out of the situation without prejudice or phobia, and the ambiguity of the situation tells this in itself. He also has this innocence when he is describing the violet-eyed couples that he keeps encountering, where he’ll hope to find friendship but then realizes that he is mentally impotent because of his presence in the military and battle trauma.
I don’t have much else to say, except an apology for being somewhat mentally absent these past few weeks, and for being physically absent in several different places, several times, for whatever it’s worth, and that I want to get more tattoos.
I understand about the apathy. I experience it as a sort of inside/outside thing, meaning it's hard to relate to the city because I don't have a mental map of it. Hemingway's specificity is an attempt to nail down something he knows is fleeting. However, it's also the voice of the stranger - no one is that specific about a place with which they are familiar. In Dos Passos' excerpt the character is alienated from and different from his surroundings and only has one purpose: to get to Paris. There isn't much discussion of modernism here, but you could have interwoven these readings with your own difficulties - after all, they are about alienation in a human sense, not just a historical thing. To do this might even give you some distance from the personal.
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