The Bell Jar

This marks the second book I have read this summer and truly enjoyed, the first being "Life of Pi". The Bell Jar may be femlit, but it's GOOD femlit, "The Devil Wears Prada" but with a spine or, to be decidedly un-feminist, balls. It managed to be quick and witty without becoming trite, and really explores themes above and beyond the run-of-the-mill story, but in a more accessible way than, say, "The Awakening". Just good, depressing fun.

By the way, I'm going to Hawaii for a week on Tuesday. Any advice/suggestions welcome!

It's Tuesday

And already this week is hectic: a response to last week's calm. I got my visa for the UK...on Sunday went to the beach and, when it was so crowded we could not get a bonfire spot, just gave up and went to Islands to eat. Started reading Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar", which I am, surprisingly, really liking. On Monday, had about 6 hours of rehersal for rehersal's sake and for our Butoh performance at the end of this week. After rehersal I went walking with Rachael, who is leaving for college and New York tommorow (it doesn't start yet, but she's driving up), and broke into El Marino where we went to elementary school together and wandered around the halls for nostalgia's sake. Today I went to a delicious Asian curry place with some friends and stuffed myself to the point where it sustained me with nothing else eaten until 10 tonight. I went swimming at Andrea's pool, which was fun, and biked back. Rehersal again, which is turning out to be really fun and actually a little relaxing. Then, went to say goodby to Rachael, and here I am now. I am in an strange mood, which partly explains how inarticuate I feel/am right now.

A new era!

My desktop is officialy dead and I am now making my first entry via laptop. It is changing my habits of what I do on the computer in interesting ways--since its new, lots more figuring stuff out, playing with new functions, trying to recover all of my links and et cetera from memory alone.

Other than that I finished the book "The Man Who Was Thursday", a great Dickens-y detective novel (100 pages, almost a short story) that has a lot of surrealism and philosophy and continues hilariously and pretty stongly until the disappointing ending. Now I'm moving back to "The Illiad", which I'd started and have been reading through this year, with large gaps. I've decided I want to finish the damned thing, so hopefuly making that a priority will get me through it. I'm really enjoying it, but its language, cultural oddities and sheer girth make it daunting, though all the more interesting.

Thats all for now. Today was a boring home-day, and I actually had to pick up the phone for some peer-contact. Very un-Brian.

Thoughts

Art sent an e-mail thinking about this quote:

We imagine that our mind is a mirror, that it is more or less accurately reflecting what is happening outside us. On the contrary, our mind itself is the principal element of creation. The world, while I am perceiving it, is being incessantly created for myself in time and space. Rabindranath Tagore

The thought, I think, is valid in thinking about the influence of our minds on the world which we percieve, but the language seems arrogant to me. Rather than saying "our minds create reality", why not "our minds dramatically misinterpret a reality which is 'above' it, seperate"? I have trouble with the concept that the world is merely the construct of individual minds (like dreams), and have a far easier time accepting that our minds are constructs of a larger foundation of reality. We cannot share dreams (not that we cannot dream the same dreams, just that we cannot dream with each other), but we cannot deny that we do share a common world, however different our interpretations of it may be. In the same way that we believe animals cannot "see," or think about ideas, we cannot "see" the base reality--it is beyond us, and we see only one small slice which we project (inaccurately) onto the whole.

Accepting that we create reality, though, there is the famous question, "if a tree falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?" Here again, the question is too simple--it assumes that we entirely create the base reality! If one person is there, is the sound real? Is it more real if there are more people? What if a person is there to hear it, but not paying attention, and it passes under their conciousness? Is it more real, then, if that one person's life depends on that tree falling and it consumes their entire conciousness? Part of my problem with the world existing solely as perception is that there are such different levels of perception.

So I guess I think that we are all looking at one thing, but from different angles. Your thoughts?

Is it the 24th already?

Wow, I've been gone for a while. I've been wonderfully busy--here's why:

Last week on Thursday and Friday I headed up to San Fransisco and stayed with Art and Michael for a couple days. Ate lots of good food, walked quite a bit, and went with Art to Yoga. I've been to San Fransisco quite a few times, but not recently, and I noticed quite a bit that I had not before. The city really is, as Art says, "compact", with neighborhood personalities which, in LA, would be spread out over miles, all compressed into a few blocks. I walked to-and through-downtown in an hour or so, and every street's architecture and focus was different. San Fransisco is, of course, famous for being radically gay and environment friendly, and while these were certainly the most distinctive undercurrents, what I did not expect were the age and eccentricity of the place (reflected mostly in the buildings, architecture and otherwise), as well as the fact that it IS really an urban center, and so has basic "building block" elements that you could find in any city. All together, a great first semi-solo trip.

I came back on Saturday afternoon to a party my parents were throwing at our house. It was fun having something at our house where I at least knew the people (most of the time parties at our house are for Dad's grad students), and watching adults getting terribly drunk is always fun.

Then, for the last two days (Sunday-Monday), I have been sitting on the couch with my mom (and occasionally dad) reading the final Harry Potter book outloud, switching readers every other chapter to give our voices a rest. I won't give any spoilers, but let me just say that this is an absolutely worthy ending to a series that has paralelled my journey through Middle and High School. Beautifully done.

And today? Sitting around. And yennow what? It's kinda nice.

Life of Pi

Last night I finished Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I had tried to read it a few years ago and dropped it out of boredom. I found it engrossing this time around.

I'm not going to bother with plot summary, which you can get anywhere. Suffice it to say that it is a story about a boy who lives for months in a life raft with a Bengal tiger. It can be wandering and reflexive and I found the narrators voice putrid the first time I tried to read it, but it didn't bother me this time around. What this novel does very well is end. And I mean that in a good way: it has the best ending of anything I have read or seen in a long time. The ending in a way is a "suprise"--an alternate version of events--but rather than coming across as sleight-of-hand, it really forces you to re-evaluate both the events in the novel and your own feelings about stories. One review described the book as magical realism, and I think I agree. You are presented with outrageous events (a story to "make you believe in God") in stunning detail, without the narrator telling you how to feel about them, or even whether to believe them or not.

The book contains good insights into a suprising breadth of topics: zoology, religion (Hinduism, Chistianity, Islam), survival and the ocean, and storytelling as an art. I would definitely put Life of Pi in the "quirky" catagory--I can't say it affected my belief in God one way or the other, but its been the best thing I've read this summer.

Haven't posted for a while...

I've been really busy so I haven't been posting. This is just a nice journal-type list of things I've been doing.

Friday: Voice lesson, went to a bonfire at a secluded area of beach near Malibu. It was small, dingy and cold, with insects everywhere, and we roasted chicken.

Saturday: "Rediscover Your Childhood Day" was not a great success as only a few people showed up. Nevertheless, we managed a water baloon fight in the scalding heat, then decided to go exploring up Bilbots (the hill the park we were at is on), which is all constuction and oil pumping equipment and buildings. From the top you can see the whole of LA to the barriers at the edges which fade into smog, but the buildings up there have not been touched in such a long time that it resembles a ghost town. Really a very special place. Afterwards, watching SouthPark and Flight of the Conchords at Jessica's and a sleepover with Robbie.

Sunday: After Robbie went home biked to Rez's house (about 40 minutes through upscale Culver to "the ghetto") where we played a bit of Guitar Hero. Then back to my house for a Butoh meeting. Performing (even as a quasi-rehersal when no-one is watching) in your own home is a bizzare experience. Everything becomes strange, objects that normally pass under the radar as scenery become tools, shapes stand out. It is highly uncomfortable.