feelings??

last night wes and i were sitting in my room playing music to each other and talking about how the music made us felt - like how shostakovich's jazz waltz no. 2 was a checkerboard-floor ballroom with several couples dancing in sync, the women's identical long skirts twirling in unison. i showed him rex orange county (which he didn't seem to like) but i said that this was some guy our age in london with acne who made music about how much he loved his girlfriend, which wes thought was cute. then i showed him "les yeux d'elsa" by louis aragon (which by the way is not the same in english translation at all) and told him it was about this guy's love for his wife. (also, after doing some reading over the vac for an essay on surrealism i found out that aragon was a hardcore communist and a surrealist, which is so interesting because that poem itself feels like a really conventional work of french literature with meter and rhyme and fancy words and all that.)

at the same time i was reading both "too much and not the mood" by durga chew-bose (which i bought at blackwell's after reading that interview) and jenny zhang's "how it feels" online, again. (and then also "having a coke with you.") both durga and jenny zhang's works have this honesty but they could not be more different: zhang's poem is this typical zhang relentlessly raw and unflinching work that makes me want to self-annihilate every time i read it, like i really just want to disappear off the face of the earth because i just cannot deal with the emotions that she doles out on a platter like that, it is just unbearable how much feeling there is in that piece, like, oh my god?

and durga's honesty is sincere and tender and gentle. i'm still in her first essay called "heart museum" and she's talking about all the times her heart has skipped, and the soft way in which she talks about the feelings she had when she was in love - she isn't embarrassed at all to talk about her emotions. i don't understand how people can be so absolutely vulnerable in writing, immortalising the strength of the way they felt.

when i write, sometimes i feign authenticity - sometimes it sounds like i'm being vulnerable and honest, but i truly have not been for years. and when i look back at actually honest works i cringe so hard that i just want to die. why am i so afraid of having emotions? or more specifically of letting other people know i have emotions? it seems so embarrassing... and yet i am bouleversée, bowled over, by other people's emotions. like frank iero's "they wanted darkness", the absolute teen angst of that, that feeling of being so sad and angry and resentful and truly feeling like you're the only person in the world who feels that way, that self-absorption and self-indulgence and lack of shame... let's face it, i could never write about myself in such an open and unbothered way. maybe my destiny is to be like elif batuman, cynical and over-reflective, opting for the filters of self-deprecation and witty self-awareness, opting for telling stories about herself and for teleology instead of having to face the fact that those periods of angst and agony we went through were completely... completely... arbitrary and never did lead up to any kind of vindicative or conclusive moment where everything fell into place like a common app essay.

i guess i'm supposed to become a semiotician ... i'm too obsessed with meaning.

bad poems #10: feeling like white noise at the social science department café where i like to study because it has an almost perfect level of white noise noise that doesn't suffocate like complete silence does but also isn't too loud or distracting (except during lunchtimes when people sit at my table and speak at length about their boring lives) and where i can get a hot drink for very cheap

i

earlier i spilled tea

all over myself in the

ssl café

ii

55p tea

regular, milk and sugar

in a huge cup that

iii

i didn't put a

lid on because... i don't know

i guess i'm just dumb

iv

i was opening

my notebook to check something

about h. wölfflin

v

when it fell over

a burning sensation on

my lap and my thighs

vi

it splashed on the floor

(but thank god not my laptop)

i had to move spots

vii

my body was moist

my brand new brown pants felt cold

against my sad skin

viii

only after a 

while did i notice that my

favorite shirt, which

ix

i bought in japan

was wet, and would stain slowly

as it dried, a brown

x

patch with dark edges

i thought about going home

(which was very close)

xi

to change my shirt and

soak this one before it stains

but i had only

xii

recently arrived

at the ssl to do

some work, finally

xiii

and could not bear the

waste of time and energy

i also could not

xiv

simply take off

my shirt because the turtle-

neck is see through. so

xv

i have been sitting

here, sunken into a deep

inexplicable

xvi

state of depression

as if that tea had been my

only connection

xvii

to some kind of will

to live. i don't know if this

stain will wash out now

xviii

and it fills me with

incomprehensible sadness.

i'm demotivated.

xix

i was going to

go to edamame but

i don't think curry

xx

will heal me today.

nothing seems to matter now

all i want is to

xxi

lie in my bed and...

wait. no, not that. i want to...

i don't know. i want...

xxii

some kind of respite

(temporary) from being

conscious and feeling

xxiii

so i can stop this

void that has opened itself

in my tea-stained chest.

an article i saw

I've been procrastinating studying for my collections and found this really interesting interview where two close friends who are both writers have a conversation that's mainly about one of them, Durga Chew-Bose's, book of essays that's just been published. I just thought it was really cool and interesting and makes me want to go out and write more too so I'll paste the link here for future reference: https://www.bookforum.com/interview/17729