the dust in the corners of my mind

I have been wandering around my head for the past few hours, trippped up by the ethics of the atomic bomb and women's role in revolutions. I wanted to write something about Milan Kundera, who is never far from my thoughts, and I wanted to explain how I don't have an ethnic identity but I can feel a heritage, a stereotype, a stencil fitting over my skin and self. But all that is too hard when I have no sense of bien dans sa peau, so instead, I present a joke, from Milan Kundera

A Czech requests a visa to emigrate.
The official asks him, ''Where do you want to go?''
''It doesn't matter,'' the man replies.
He is given a globe.
''Please, choose.''
The man looks at the globe, turns it slowly and says, ''Don't you have another globe?''

Well, don't you?

(joke from here)

(to clarify, because i had a gigantic freak out on the train home - this is not a racist joke. it isn't intended as such. it is an example of what Kundera calls "the Prague spirit" which is "an extraordinary sense of the real. The common man's point of view. History seen from below. A provocative simplicity. A genius for the absurd. Humour with infinite pessimism", which he explains in that interview. Got it? Good. Now, go find me a new globe)

frankenstein's maddie

At the urging of the universe, I went back to university for my final undergrad year. I promptly fell into a term long argument with Henry James*, rediscovered my interest in Indo-Anglo writing**, managed my usual schtick of writing a history essay on something that 'not really historical' *** and fell in love with Eastern Europe****.

Before that I went to Vienna, where this happened.

And then I came home, where this happened.

And now? Well now I am Frankenstein's Maddie, a patchwork of tea consumption, historical generalisations and a marked distaste for Socialist-Christian-Marxists. I am reading too many things with too many words and I am thinking alot about silences. I also work at a place patronised by retirees who have nothing better to do than tell me about how my generation is an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

*based mainly on his hatred for Germany

**and the politics surrounding Indo-Anglo writing - should people write in English? What's magic realism got to do with it? Are we all colonialist pigs?!

***I'm writing a treatise (yes, a treatise) on the importance of American Jazz in WW2 Europe. It's awesome and going to send me to an early grave.

****not really a hardship, seeing as Berlin and Vienna, and now Prague are my three favourite places ever, and grumpy intellectuals like Kundera and Milosz are my role models.

shuffled

oh gods. i have a blog, right? apparently? you'd never ever think it. it feels like i only sign on to apologise for not ever signing on. how Beckett-ian of me.

truth is, i spent so much time staring at a computer screen this semester that now i'm on break, most days, i don't even turn my computer on. it's bliss. you oughtta try it. connectivity is overrated, and Moloch is eating you alive. Ginsberg would be so crushed if he knew how much time we spent staring at a screen, guys. do you want to upset Ginsberg?

i had a strange term - it was so so so much hard work, with over 30 books to read, not to mention all the extra reading, the american lit discussion board, major essays, minor essays, essays that i didn't need to write but wrote anyway. so much writing and reading, which is what i signed up for. so i probably shouldn't complain too much.

but now summer is here in all its muggy glory. which means i am spending my days in John Le Carre novels, fighting over the sofa with Lottie (who is not allowed on the sofa, no matter what she thinks), drinking copious amounts of Pimms&Lemonade&Cucumber and steadfastly not thinking about Christmas.

what i am thinking about is 2011. which seems, so far, like it is going to be awesome. my last year of undergrad classes, a european jaunt in feb, employment, housesitting and undoubtedly more forgetting to blog.