Rainy day, Young Marble Giants, the feeling that I smoked too much last night; not-inconsiderable beard-burn. Yes, there was a party here a few hours ago, and nobody wants to admit it, least of all my shoulders and eyelids.
And therefore all day I wanted to be alone. Like, really alone, even to the point of cabin-in-the-wilderness alone, not just the house to myself. The influence behind this thirst for solitude may well be a recent brush with Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, to which I haven't treated myself in a very long time. I was telling myself on the bus the other day, just to have it ready in case somebody asked me, that it was one of the ten best books ever written on writing, and that I have never read the other nine. But nobody asked me.
Instead, a teenage boy last night asked me what language the poetry I was reading on the bus was written in. "Old Ionic Greek", I said, realizing that sooner or later I'd have to say that it was Sappho, specifically Anne Carson's new translation of the complete fragments [chew on that for a while]. Whole pages go by with two words and a scattering of brackets on each page. The Greek is printed in wine-red, like the words of Christ, the sigmas strange and siculate. The pages are deckled; it is a treasure to read. Yet I regret buying it. I was supposed to be finding a teeshirt cool enough to wear to my own party. It never works on demand: I ended up going to the same five stores I always go to, and some of them twice, feeling confused and incompetent. I ended up at the H*rv*rd C**p's clothes section (the kind of place where I am comforted by the thought that I won't be seen there because none of the people I want to impress comes near the joint); I bought a plain blue one and wrote Mountain Goats lyrics on it (900 CCs of raw, whining power -- no outstanding warrants for my arrest -- the pirate's life for me!) and a little Jolly Roger below. I felt silly writing "whoa-oh-oh, hey, hey", so I left that part out. It was in an early seventeenth-century style italic, with curling little s-t ligatures of which I was quite proud.
I would really like to go out for coffee this evening and have a long, rambling conversation with somebody I haven't seen in a long time, but none of the people I want to see is in town (except KM, who is busy a lot). Is? Are?
I've been playing a lot of the younger Bachs and early Haydn lately. Something about the seventeen-seventies is suddenly looking terribly attractive; I am craving it like General Gau's seitan or something. Late-galant/not-quite-classical music is just right for early autumn; it's reflective and elegant, and the depths it plumbs (when it does this sturm-und-drang-wise) are generally emptier than the simple joys of its melody. Perhaps it's just a trick of the historiographical light, but music of the 1760s and 70s is so forward-looking, so directed, so fresh-faced. It feels like eleven in the morning. It is a gracious music, but at its worst is complacent and tedious. I noticed that by junior year my music tastes were pretty set by season: in the winter, high baroque, especially French. In the spring, renaissance music, particularly English. In the summer, indie-pop, particularly Wasps' Nests, over and over again until I didn't feel like crying [Awww... --ed.], and then for fall, celebratory but hard work, Mozart and Haydn chamber music.
Speaking of crying: Rufus Wainwright's cover of Hallelujah. People around me have already taken their GREs; I am avoiding them altogether, and will probably prepare for them by drinking heavily the night before and chugging smart water the day of. I don't trust my mind any longer -- not since I read the Blue Flower: "But he [Dr Brown of Edinburgh] held that to be alive was not a natural state, and to prevent an immediate collapse the constitution must be held in perpetual balance by a series of stimuli, either jacking it up with alcohol, or damping it down with opium." Likewise, I'm not sure I can think any more without somebody telling me what to do about it. Scratch some or all of that. I have never quite trusted my mind, and the vision of departmental mailboxes and linoleum floors has recently had less of the air of the Promised Land about it.
Music, now: Blond Adonis.
Food: epic breakfast, de rigueur after a f�te accomplie, wearing off; must think more clearly about showering and eating pasta.
General mien: Indescribably, inexcusably melancholy. Still haven't processed the deep-dyed loneliness I felt shopping for a tee-shirt in H*rv*rd Sq**r* in the rain last night. Even after all these years I have mixed feelings about the shortening days. Also, EN's birthday (a few days ago) begins the unshakeable progression towards my own. And this one's a big one, all the fingers on the year's hand showing.