because people make it into something strange, that art should be created every ten years rather than every ten months. It’s part of the reason why I’ve delayed What Remains of Monstropolis, feeling that I should wait until I at least finish my first novel before starting a new one. But, it’s not about starting a new one versus an old one. It’s about entering into a new door of yourself that you suddenly find unlocked, the moment before that door closes. You end up spending hours thinking about how great it would be to have entered it, and that maybe you can still enter it; the door is closed, but certainly not locked. But, now, there’s so much more effort in getting that door unhinged; you try to push it, but it pushes back. You bet it would have been so much easier had you just done it when you should’ve. So, now I’m about to start this second novel, but it feels closed to me. Yet, I know I have to write it. The problem is that I have too much to say, and I’m dumping it on the page, to unload my anxieties, to feel like I don’t have to have so many worlds, so many characters, so many emotions, stuck in one body. Yet, it makes my work feel undisciplined, that I don’t have the energy to stay with something for a few years and perfect it. But, how do I stay with something when, in three months, not one, but five doors will open, and I have to choose which one to enter, if I even enter one at all?
My parents put a picture of myself in Indian formal wear as the front of my Christmas car -> I feel ugly. I hate the picture. I thought I had gotten over the fact that I hate my facial features, that I hate the way that I look, that I hate things about myself that are out of my control, that I hate there are things that are out of my control, that I can’t choose my race, I can’t choose my skin tone, and I can’t choose the way I look. I can, however, control how I see beauty in myself, and I have learned this last semester to begin the process of saying that I am good-looking, because others who aren’t as biased against my Indian-ness the way I am, others who don’t automatically think ugly the moment they see South Asian features, others who don’t look back in the mirror and think “why do people think of me as good-looking when I’m so average looking?” can somehow see something worth enjoying at my face. What hurts me the most is that I really thought I was over it; I had stopped thinking about my hatred of my Indian-ness this entire semester, and now it is back. There is something deeper here that I have yet to understand.
Sitting with my parents as they open Christmas gifts -> I am hyper self-conscious. I hate always thinking back and forth between infinite chains that only plunge deeper into self-destructive banter. I hate feeling like, the reason why I always forget people’s birthdays or find myself incredibly out of sync when everyone else is in a moment is because I live in my head. Being a person who lives in his imagination, I can’t connect to the outside world. I feel sorry for the people who care for me, that they have to care for someone so unconsciously and unintentionally narcissistic.
December 27th, 2011: “personal facts about literature I love…”
1. I think Dubliners is Chekhovian realism. I think A Portrait of an Artist of a Young Man is realism becoming modernism. I think Ulysses is modernism defined. I think Joyce transformed with an era.
2. I think realism is an artistic aesthetic highly over-rated. It’s one thing to create representations of humans that are realistic and complex; it’s another to waft in 19th century writing style (third person, dry, detached narration) as if it is still a part of the 21st century.
3. I secretly want to marry a Yukio Mishima look-a-like. I have a thing for biracial Asians, and I think that type of detached sado-masochism is kind of sexy.
4. I rejoice when I read Flaubert’s letters to George Sand. There’s a letter in which Sand tells Flaubert to basically calm the fuck down and enjoy life. I’m glad he didn’t. Flaubert is considered one of the greatest writers of the 19th century. Sand, as Tolstoy succinctly said, was forgotten and replaced by Zola.
5. I have incredibly Western taste. Even my love for Japanese literature and Indian epics could be arguably considered Western. I hope to become global in my taste.
6. I need to stop obsessing over modernism. Like, seriously.
7. I do think Romanticism, however, is incredibly under-rated. Pushkin? Melville? Hullo!
8. I want to write like I’m dipping a feathered pen and starting a pillow book.
December 28th, 2011: “Argentina?”
Recently, I’ve started working on a love story. When I was in the American embassy in Madrid, trying to get my passport pages re-filled, I ended up making small talk to this woman who was going to the States to marry a boyfriend of hers for thirty years. The catch: they hadn’t seen each other since they had been exiled to other continents because of the Dirty Wars of Argentina. They kept in touch through letters, calls, and now, probably Skype and facebook, but they didn’t need face-to-face to keep their love in tact.
Now that I’ve ended a moment of freckled ecstasy with another human being, and old loved one has returned to my life, almost as a blip of what was once the beauty of the tip of our sea-covered iceberg, I want to write this story. The catch: I’ve never been to Argentina, and I know very little of the Dirty Wars. The good news is that, so far, the story is writing itself very smoothly. It is, after all, a story of how communication may change, but that love will always remain constant. The bad news is that I just feel so unqualified to write something that’s a representation of a place I don’t know (damn you postmodernism for making me self-conscious!!).
So, because I’m going to have to leave Portugal to see my parents during their anniversary (July 7th), and I’ll have to wait three months because of Schengen rules to enter into the EU again, I was planning to spend that three months living in another country. I was originally thinking South Africa, and largely still am, but now there’s a part of me that wants to go to Argentina. I won’t make any money teaching English (there’s a lot of jobs, but they pay the US equivalent of 3 bucks an hour), the plane tickets are expensive (easily a thousand euros), and by then, the story might not be a world that calls me anymore. I’ll perhaps have moved on to others. I also have Argentinean friends who have promised to read my story and tell me what they think, so they’ll be around to push me in the right direction in terms of facts. At the same time, I feel the need to viscerally feel and emotionally connect with the land, the subconscious of a culture, before I write about it.
In others, I just don’t know!
December 29th, 2011: “A Reaction to The Brothers Karamazov, but not really…”
I am in the process of slogging through the enlightening, but slightly slow The Brothers Karamazov. I find it very interesting how Fyodor Dostoevsky named the main antagonist, Fyodor Karamazoc, a maniacal patriarch that is then killed by his four sons. I wonder if these four sons represent the act of Fyodor killing himself. He did then die a year later after the book was published.
But, the real reason why I find this book badass is this sentence: “Connoisseurs of beauty could have foretold that this fresh, still youthful, beauty would lose its harmony by the age of thirty, would “spread”; her face would become puffy, and that wrinkles would very appear upon her forehead and around her eyes her complexion would grow coarse and red. She had the beauty of the moment, the fleeting beauty which is so often met with in Russian women”
SOOOO TRUEEEE!!! Although Fyodor didn’t then mention that the Russian men, two hundred years later, still bear a creepy resemblance to the Cavity Creep.
December 31st, 2011: “It’s already 2012?”
When I was in college, I would get mad when another year passed by. I hated that I was still unpublished, undiscovered, immature, etc. It didn’t help that my New Year’s Resolution for the preceding year would always begin with “I will at least get one of my stories in a magazine by the end of this year.” To this day, those resolutions have gone unpromised; I’m still not published. Yet, when 2010 became 2011, I