Look to the mountains and I'ma take you to the sea
Every half-decent day we get lately makes me think that I should be at the sea. Today is cool and light-filled, breezy and brushstroked with cloud at the horizon. Last night after the rain there was a smell of salt that came in with the morning, like a seagull's cries. I hurt too much and slept too little. I feel landlocked.
I had to run an errand this afternoon, which took me past the post office in Winter Hill. Like a surprising number of buildings in our immediate vicinity, it used to be a movie theater. So did the ex-Star Market and the now-Cambridge Health Alliance. All closed—1918, 1923, 1963—before I was born. I couldn't buy a ticket for any of them without a time machine, or without being a ghost. And I thought suddenly that all I am doing when I study the lost cities of film noir is a kind of hauntology, but then I think most things I do are a kind of hauntology. I don't say it in criticism. I don't want to make myself nostalgic for nothing but not now and I don't want to subscribe to a perpetual year zero. I want to know what's under me.
1. Shofar has posted a submission call for their next special issue: What's Jewish About Death? They are looking for creative work as well as academic articles.
2. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
larryhammer: Rupert Brooke, "Sonnet Reversed." I had no idea when he died on his way to Gallipoli that he was in danger of growing up to be Edwin Arlington Robinson.
3. Whatever else you are doing today, take a few minutes for Margaret Noodin's "Miidash miinawaa zaka'iyan sa: And you have set me on fire." The rest of the article's title is "Translating Sappho into Anishinaabemowin."
Imprecision upsets me. I don't like misrepresenting and I don't like being misunderstood. I don't like discovering that I have conveyed wrong or incomplete information, not just because I feel like an idiot, but because I feel I have contributed materially to the overall inaccuracy of the universe. I had to make peace years ago with the fact that in order to have any commerce with other human beings I had to feel as though I was lying slightly about something all the time, but I still don't enjoy it. I really don't enjoy this administration.
I had to run an errand this afternoon, which took me past the post office in Winter Hill. Like a surprising number of buildings in our immediate vicinity, it used to be a movie theater. So did the ex-Star Market and the now-Cambridge Health Alliance. All closed—1918, 1923, 1963—before I was born. I couldn't buy a ticket for any of them without a time machine, or without being a ghost. And I thought suddenly that all I am doing when I study the lost cities of film noir is a kind of hauntology, but then I think most things I do are a kind of hauntology. I don't say it in criticism. I don't want to make myself nostalgic for nothing but not now and I don't want to subscribe to a perpetual year zero. I want to know what's under me.
1. Shofar has posted a submission call for their next special issue: What's Jewish About Death? They are looking for creative work as well as academic articles.
2. Courtesy of
larryhammer: Rupert Brooke, "Sonnet Reversed." I had no idea when he died on his way to Gallipoli that he was in danger of growing up to be Edwin Arlington Robinson.3. Whatever else you are doing today, take a few minutes for Margaret Noodin's "Miidash miinawaa zaka'iyan sa: And you have set me on fire." The rest of the article's title is "Translating Sappho into Anishinaabemowin."
Imprecision upsets me. I don't like misrepresenting and I don't like being misunderstood. I don't like discovering that I have conveyed wrong or incomplete information, not just because I feel like an idiot, but because I feel I have contributed materially to the overall inaccuracy of the universe. I had to make peace years ago with the fact that in order to have any commerce with other human beings I had to feel as though I was lying slightly about something all the time, but I still don't enjoy it. I really don't enjoy this administration.