Dreams

Happy Easter. At church-time I was in the nursery, distributing off-brand Rice Chex to the toddlers. I kept on yawning: “I’m tired.” They were skeptical. “Really,” I insisted, “I want to sleep.”

My night had not been restful. But I’d awakened after a nice dream: I was in Ecuador with my friends Brandon & Sarah; first I showed them my old dorm, and then the dorm changed into the soccer stadium. (In my dreams, I’m always returning to the soccer stadium.)

I also dreamed of Downton Abbey. Lady Edith had (clandestinely) been learning to smoke a pipe. She’d been practicing tricks, i.e. blowing smoke-rings. A visitor had discovered her doing this. “I daresay,” said the visitor, “you smoke better than I do.” Lady Edith batted her lashes at him and blew a smoke-ring. Of course the visitor was middle-aged, and of course he and Lady Edith began an affair.

I know, I know, people always think their own dreams are interesting when really they’re dull as dirt. Still, I’m rather proud of my Downton Abbey dream.

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries” is based upon a dream of George Saunders’s. It took him 12 years and 60 pages to build a story around that very simple dream. I didn’t like the story, but you can judge it for yourselves. At the mall’s Barnes & Noble with Stephen and Mary & Martin, I used up much willpower refraining from buying Saunders’s first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. It’s typeset in Cochin, which is pleasurable to me (though I prefer URW Cochin because the italicized, lower-case s isn’t in cursive). We also ate in the food court and looked at forlorn, expensive pets.

Respite/remorse

Yeah, Ecuador defeated Paraguay, yeah, yeah, yeah. The hero was Jefferson Montero. We are good. We are very, very good.

Six more games. The arithmeticians say that in order to qualify for the World Cup, we need just 5 more points (5 draws, or else 2 draws + 1 victory, or else 2 victories (which’d give us 6 points)). I can’t get my own calculations to agree with the arithmeticians’, but OK.

I liked how savagely you blasted George Saunders, my friend said. (My friend had given me George Saunders’s book.)

I felt badly about that, I said.

(We were at Popeyes.)

Why? said my friend, with the kindest expression.

You know, I said. I’m biting the hand that feeds me.

George Saunders

His old hipster voice repulses me. But I’m also comforted, because while I’m reading George Saunders I’m thinking, I could do this; in a way, I already do this. (How: Embed colloquialisms into strange contexts; transcribe each auditory quirk using punctuation that respects the ear, or logic, but injures the eye.)

No, these days, the stylist I envy is Michael Dummett. His sentences are enormous but never too long: comma after relentless comma gently cushions each from crashing. Read the preface and introduction to Dummett’s opus; download the entire book here (would that be legal? Would it be moral? On Tuesday, at the bus station, I refused a beggar a dollar, on the ground that begging is against the law; when the beggar asked if I always obey the law, I said, Yeah, pretty much. But now I’m encouraging readers to ignore the law). Again: Read Dummett’s preface and introduction; enjoy his ire, in a tome on sense and reference, quantifiers, proper names, etc. (and what a lovely old typeface!).

I’m not sure I believe what I wrote in the first paragraph. It doesn’t quite describe what’s so weird about George Saunders. His interior monologues, for example. The low-prole boy might be chained up in the yard; the low-prole kitchen table might have a tire on it; those details aren’t so weird. What’s weird is the low-prole mother’s private thought-stream: not low-prole dialect but Standard English, no, worse, Hipster English, with silent punctuation (slashes) intruding into her thoughts. 

So what she’d love, for tonight? Was getting the pup sold, putting the kids to bed early, and then, Jimmy seeing her as all organized in terms of the pup, they could mess around and afterward lie there making plans, and he could do that laugh/snort thing in her hair again.

Why that laugh/snort meant so much to her she had no freaking idea. It was just one of the weird things about the Wonder That Was Her, ha ha ha.

Freaking, ending in i-n-g, not in i-n-’. And the ha ha ha echoes the language of the other woman in the story, the foil, the middle-class woman. The low-prole woman uses language above her station. That’s weird. It’s not like the scene in King of the Hill when Boomhauer talks “normal”; no, it’s as if Saunders were saying, I’ll “humanize” you by lending you a voice you’d never have, not even in your imagination, ha ha ha. And so we’re always conscious of the author talking over – drowning out! – the character.

Myers-Briggs

Not that I have much confidence in Myers-Briggs, but it’s interesting how my (unofficial) test results have changed. Before I went to graduate school, I consistently and unambiguously was categorized as an INTP. (Surely most philosophers would be so categorized.) Nowadays the I and the N still clearly win out, but the tests tell me I’m an INFJ.

Of course, for all I know, my personality hasn’t really changed. Maybe I’m just getting different results because I’m trying to conform to a different ambition. I used to want to be a philosopher’s philosopher; now I want to outdo my colleagues by becoming a (super-complicated, inscrutable) saint.

People who can know themselves are so BC.

My brother David has a new gf.

I think I need more oxytocin (you know, the cuddle chemical). One good thing: on Saturday, for two hours, I got to hold my friends’ new baby. :)

Rereading

I’ve been rereading my blog entries from 2003 and 2004 (what a twerp I was!) (but I certainly believed in myself) (my Xanga is nearly 10 years old !!!).

Who prompted this rereading? Some unknown persons who’ve been paging through my blog chronologically. Whoever you are, I’m flattered. But when you decide to quit reading, I won’t be offended.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve been rereading “Eliminating Material Proper Parts” (2005), the essay which secured my admittance to Cornell. I barely recognize myself. The author is a stranger. But he really does have a knack for philosophizing, and he’s hilarious; stylistically, he’s a parodist of Trenton Merricks (but with more flair, because he cuts more corners, because he doesn’t know not to). Argumentatively, he’s pretty bold (though only because of not knowing enough of the literature).

So it was naïve, reckless overreaching that produced the writing that charmed my admitters. And that is a tendency which I continue to see in myself.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

For the fourth time, I finished reading Youth by J.M. Coetzee. I recommended it to Stephen, but he didn’t like it as well as I did. Youth is wasted on the young.