l'enfer, c'est la rentree

Greetings from the seventh circle of hell. I have been sent here to expurge the sin of assuming finding an aprtment in Paris couldn't that difficult. I was wrong. Worse, I was naive.

I don't even want to go into the specific details of this experience until I have found a place, moved in, and decompressed. Right now, it's just too painful to talk about at length. Suffice it to say, I don't feel that I should have to fast this Yom Kippur because I've done enough atoning in the last 72 hours.

next time I post I WILL have a flat and it will NOT be sketchy/dirty/tiny, it will NOT be in a shack, it will NOT have a fold-out sofa for a bed and it WILL permit me to live by myself in relative peace and comfort.

later gator

off to paris... !!

before I go, I would like to borrow a phrase from the ever-eloquent ashlee simpson:

"you make me wanna la la!"

that said, I take my leave. ciao ;)

dis-tinc/tion

n. 1. State or quality of being distinguishable or distinct. 2. Act of giving special recognition; also, the mark or indication of such recognition; the state of being so distinguished; eminence. (Webster's New Collegiate)

as in, "I passed my comps with."

as in, I have no idea what I wrote on the comprehensive exam I took on 8/20, but I must have said something that sounded really smart, because I PASSED WITH DISTINCTION. Maybe it's because I used the word "homosocial." I read the letter over like ten times to make sure it really said what I thought it said.

It's just kind of reassuring to know that someone thinks I'm good at what I do other than my parents!

cross-referenced!

thanks for the link, bombshell, you da bomb. More on our Natasha Lyonne run-in.

happy new year!

If you weren't in shul today and don't know why lots of people weren't at work and there was no traffic on the LIE, I feel I should be the one to tell you that Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, began last night; today was the first day of services. They continue tomorrow and then we're done. The guy will finish blowing the shofar, we'll yell "tequila" one last time, and it'll be over, our names inscribed (or not, as the case may be) in the Book of Life for another year.

(ok a confession: I got the "tequila" joke from Greg T. the Frat Boy on Z100 this morning. But it was pretty funny, no?)

The Jewish New Year is awesome because the numbers are really high so you really feel like we're getting somewhere (it's 5765, kids!) as a culture. Or like we should have gotten there already, or something. And the other awesome thing is that Dick Clark is still in hiding for another couple of months til the secular new year rolls around.

I'm spending this year with my extended family in a ridiculously wealthy suburb on Long Island. Today consisted of: little girls in Burberry frocks, women in Chanel suits, matzoh ball soup, me running away from gefilte fish (vile, vile substance), getting drunk on chateauneuf-du-pape, doing astrological natal charts with my cousin elissa and imitating her husband's british accent.

so I'm a tipsy brit with virgo rising, thank you very much. cheers!

so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu

Had my going-away party last night... it rocked... and check it out, we made Gawker (courtesy of a certain brazilian bombshell...). Yes, that's right folks, as exciting as it was to say goodbye to my nearest and dearest in the East Village last night, it was extra special fun to say goodbye to Natasha Lyonne as well. She followed me around for a little while muttering "how you doin', how you doin', how you doin'." It was actually kind of alarming. I was like, Djuna, don't do this to me, I know you're a cheerleader but don't be a crackwhore too.

View pix here

I heart Brooklyn

It has nice buildings and people and places and houses and stores and restaurants and bars. It has backyards with campfires and front yards with hammocks and trees. It has people I love and people I will miss. It used to have more people in it that I love and miss but she moved to England.

I will be back next summer and maybe I will live in Brooklyn then.

top ten things your maitresse has learned this summer:

10. I can still play the piano for hours on end.
9. I can still get thoroughly engrossed in a novel and read in bed for hours on end.
8. my parents’ dog, although he is 15, is still sprightly and still likes to play with me.
7. karaoke rules.
8. long island sucks.
6. I’m too old to live with my parents
5. seedy strip clubs are not as scary as they look on “the sopranos.”
4. single boys suck.
3. I’m poor, yo!
2. everything—including love and heartbreak—is relative
1. my ability to string words together into sentences has diminished in direct opposition to the level of education I have attained.

let them read kipling

Leave it to The New York Post to bring culture to the masses.

I totally cracked up earlier this evening when I saw a commercial on channel 4 for the new promotion the Post is running. They're handing out massmarket copies of classic works like Alice in Wonderland, Frankenstein, and The Jungle Book with any purchase of the Post, only at participating realtors, available while supplies last (500,000 copies!). The promo is interesting in and of itself, but the commercial-- well, it looked like the kind of joke commercial they do on Saturday Night Live. "Build your library of family classics!" the voiceover urges, while featuring shots of children reading. They showed a guy working at a newsstand in the city handing a book to a customer along with his Post. It was totally surreal. I kept waiting for the punchline and it never came.

But I did get a real kick out of the shots of kids reading-- one showed a bully engrossed in Huck Finn while dangling a little wimpy kid by the collar (books are for bullies, too!), and there were a few others, but my favorite was a kid reading during gym class. Someone threw a basketball at him and it bounced right off the book.

Brought back fond memories of my own gym days... that is, when I actually showed up to class.

So if you're looking to save money on books this semester, consider letting the Post furnish your library! I know you've been trying to get your hands on some free Moby Dick...that's next week.

blame it on the rain (yeah, yeah)

Ok; usually I try to say something on this blog that a general public (albeit one with a more than healthy interest in books) might find interesting; sometimes I cave and put something quasi-personal on, but tonight I just have to vent.

This was the worst fucking week in recent memory.

Stuff I haven't dealt with in YEARS came up and bit me in the ass. And it wasn't just me--a lot of other people had bad weeks too. My cousin Elissa says it’s because last week Pluto came into direct alignment with somebody or other, and thus, as she put it, "the gates of hell were unleashed."

That accounts for Hurricane Frances, the bloodshed in Chechnya and Israel, the RNC, and my own personal Gehenna.

I really don't mean to reduce the evil character of cataclysmic weather patterns and international terrorism (not to mention conservative Christians) by attributing them to an astrological shift, but I do think Elissa is on to something there.

My own problems? in case you care? moving to france, papers and reviews to write, and relationship issues of all kinds, stripes, genders, permutations, and temporal categories. As Aaron Karo so eloquently puts it whenever he can, Fuck me.

I'm ok now though. Thanks for letting me vent. Do excuse the aberration.

hurry up and wait

well, my experience of the RNC got even more [fill in the blank: labyrinthine, kafkaesque, absurdist, postmodern] yesterday as I tried to make it from 34th and 5th to Penn Station in time for the 7:11 train to Long Island. Hurry hurry hurry hurry, weaving through slow-walkers, trying (unsuccessfully) not to hit people with my overstuffed herve chapelier...it was hot but soon I'd be in the AC; praying the convention wouldn't hold me up.

I arrived at the corner of 34th and 6th, where people were streaming across the intersection. Just as I stepped off the curb my progress was curtailed by a large piece of orange netting and a beefy, scowling policeman. "Oh please let me through I have a train to catch," I implored, using my very sweetest voice. He didn't hear me or he chose to ignore me.

Stuck behind the netting for ten minutes that felt like hours, watching the people on the other corners come and go as they pleased according to the whims of the traffic lights and not those of overworked servants of the law. Why our corner? Why the northeast corner of 34th and 6th? what had we done to deserve this?

finally they let us through, and I made my way somehow to Penn Station, proceeding through the orange mesh fences as they blocked and opened up paths for me. It was like being in a video game.

When I got to Penn Station, before decending into the underground terminal, I caught a glimpse of the people behind the security barrier, up on the mezzanine at MSG. They clustered in groups of twos and threes looking fresh, clean, and well-dressed in red and black suits, sipping drinks and having what looked like delightful conversations. I was hot, dirty, and getting a nasty headcahe from schlepping my heavy bags around, and it was all their fault. Fucking Republicans.

Then once on board, a police officer sat next to me, on his way home after a rough week of arresting innocent people no doubt, and he had the gall to try to chat me up. I still don't have a protest button so there's no way he could have known that under slightly different circumstances he'd probably be slapping cable wires on my wrists and sending me off to the slammer or something. Interesting to think about the way power relations fluctuate with the different roles we play in different situations...how the power structure between a young woman and a beefy policeman changes according to the context...makes for an interesting constellation of gender and class...

Here's testimony from someone who didn't make it away from the convention as easily as I did .

"whose streets? our streets!"

Well, I'll tell you one thing: I'm still waiting to see a Republican.

I've seen hundreds and hundreds of police, swarming 34th street (where my school is) like ants at a picnic, all decked out in riot gear, cable wire handcuffs dangling from their waists. I've seen hundreds and hundreds of protesters, ranging from high school students to pushing seventy, with all manner of signs and t-shirts and buttons. (but no one seems to be handing out buttons. I want a button!)

But the delegates? They're hiding behind the tinted glass of their tour buses. The only Republican I've seen up close has been the one I lived with for the past two years, whose place I've been staying at to avoid the hell of penn station this week. He came home from the convention last night with a sign that read "4 more years." We argued till we fell asleep.

Last night my friends and I went to "our" pub near our school after our Non-Oedipal Psychologies class. By the time we tried to leave, around 9, we couldn't-- because the police had decided to arrest at least a hundred protestors right in front of O'Reilly's, which is on 35th b/t 5th and 6th. Apparently the protestors were walking down the street, even though 35th St was closed to traffic. The police told them to get up on the sidewalk, but by the time they had reached the sidewalk they were cut off from it by a line of police motorcycles. Not being able to break through the motorcycle barricade, they kept walking in the street. The police threatened them; they resisted; next thing you know they're being cuffed and packed into paddywagons. We watched everything from the second-floor window of O'Reilly's; the police kept everything under control, making more motorcycle barricades to keep the pedestrians blocked off, settling about fifty protestors down on the ground, hands still cuffed behind their backs. A few put up a fight. There were lawyers on the sidelines wearing neon green baseball caps yelling questions at the protestors. There was a policelady brandishing her nightstick at the crowd, cracking her neck from time to time. Non-Oedipal Pscyhologies class notwithstanding, Freud would have had a field day with her.

We finally were able to leave around 10 but had to walk all the way around toward 6th avenue and up across 36th street to get to the subway at 33rd and Park. We encountered angry people at every street corner, fighting with police about where they had to walk, or complaining about the takeover of the streets. Earlier that night we had seen protestors marching down 5th ave shouting "whoose streets? our streets!" Now, on 5th avenue it's pretty easy to say that, because the police presence is only so-so. But the further west you got...the most evident it became that in fact these do not seem to be our streets. There is a very strong force at work to control the public space and allocate it to the police and the invading Republican army. Native New Yorkers: stay inside or collaborate with the police effort.

So you'll understand, in view of all this, why I couldn't watch the Bush twins on TV last night for more than a minute or so. The two of them standing there all shiny and pretty, talking about "this great country," and their dad taking them to soccer games and stuff-- and Jenna's face especially, which bears such a strong resemblance to the smirking face I'd seen on t-shirts all day long that read "International Terrorist"-- I tried to watch them but my stomach protested.

For more coverage of the RNC and the protests and the election:
The Village Voice
Gothamist
United for Peace and Justice
MoveOn
Rion.nu
Alexis Robie's photoblog
those lawyers I mentioned
when protestors go too far end up looking like racist assholes

a couple of other things, while I'm ranting:
--in response to schwarzenegger: if you're a homophobe, you're a republican. "don't be economic girly men"?? This from the man who gave birth on screen.
--the yankees suck almost as hard as the bush twins. WTF?? 22-0 to the Indians??? the horror.