BNBechtel: Were you quoting Hamlet with “words words words”?
Sarie Q: Yes.
BNBechtel: Hehe.
Sarie Q: I hate writing papers.
BNBechtel: Aw. Just imagine you’re writing a letter about it to your blog.
BNBechtel: Then you’ll churn out 20 pages effortlessly
Sarie Q: I wouldn’t blog about this.
BNBechtel: What’s it on
Sarie Q: The Uncanny in a Borges poem and the collapsing of binary oppositions between the canny and the uncanny therein.
BNBechtel: Little Sarah is deconstructing binariiiiies awwwww.
Sarie Q: Yes. Well, sort of.
BNBechtel: I’m so proud.
Sarie Q: I want to go back to preschool.
BNBechtel: Actually, it sounds like you’re getting into a lit analysis class that would really interest me.
BNBechtel: I’ve thus far only read papers on the Internet exploring those subjects - it’s a vernacular that would be very helpful to me when discussing things with established writerly people.
BNBechtel: I’ve seen … pictures of you and loverboy.
Sarie Q: I’m sure it would. The topic is okay. Basically how the last two stanzas in ‘Mirrors’, by what is probably an idea taken from Ecclesiasticus, reverse the supposed textbook ‘uncanniness’ of the previous stanzas by making them standard or default. In a sense then, making the supposed fragmentation into a natural unity, or a natural fragmentation with origins (in opposition to postmodernism’s fragmentation without origins). Although, not a fragmentation in the Romantic or Modern sense of the word, as in, there is not a previous unity that is being lamented…such as in, say, The Waste Land, or Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ or other Modernist lit, etc. Or rather…to spin Boudrillard, in this case, the map and the territory collapse into one another and are inextricable. The ‘uncanny’ that the poem originally puts forth is just a subset of the canny after all; both words collapse into one another and become somewhat indistinguishable. Which of course, is an opposition that Freud denied as well. Eh. Vanity of vanities. Etcetera, whatever. This paper is due in two days. We hates papers.
Sarie Q: God (I’ve begun to think) implants a promise / in all that insubstantial architecture / that makes light out of the impervious surface / of glass, and makes the shadow out of dreams.
Sarie Q: God has created nights well-populated / with dreams, crowded with mirror images, / so that man may feel that he is nothing more / than vain reflection. That’s what frightens us.
BNBechtel: I think you should just turn in a page of random-generated computer text.
Sarie Q: He seems to be into that well enough. www.krapp.org
Sarie Q: Loverboy? I think you’re supposed to say ‘the boy that is courting you’ or the like.
BNBechtel: The suave Don Juan.

There seems to be hardly any way around it any more — I just cannot abide writing papers.

The electricity was turned back on the other day. Which is good. I was running out of dollar-store ‘emergency candles’. And it’s become decidedly chilly outside.

Dover Beach

THE sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the Straits; on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the ebb meets the moon-blanch’d sand,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

      Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Words,words,words.

My roommate forgot to pay the electricity bill and we’ve been without power for three days because of the negligence and ill-management of the electric company. I am starting to run low on candles.

All is quiet, all is calm, all is dark. We are phantoms.

And I am writing a paper on Borges, reflection, the moments of doubling, and the simulacra by a candlelight that is mimed, doubled, and perpetuated by the various mirrors in my room.

‘Everything is a symbol, even the most piercing pain. We are dreamers who shout in our sleep. We do not know whether the things afflicting us are the sevret beginning of our ulterior happiness or not. We now see, St Paul maintains, per speculum in aenigmate, literally: “in an enigma by means of a mirror” and we shall not see in any other way until the coming of the One who is all in flames and who must teach us all things.”‘

and you’re coming up roses everywhere you go
red roses