The play of the signifier

By the way, to any newcomers: this journal's been friends-only for a long time, but honestly, it's really not terribly scandalous at all, so if you drop by and comment, I'll probably friend you. :-)

Very quick update: Berlin is fabulous and I want to live here. So, who's going to learn German and join me? When we're all too poor to pay New York rent and our student loans, I think we should find a fabulous apartment here where it's like a quarter of the cost and hang out in a country that's not ruled by Bush.

Super-fast update, as other students are waiting! And I feel dirty writing this in English. See, I don't speak English here, and I am quite proud of this in a slightly smug and annoying Hermione Granger sort of way. Heehee. School has started! Today was a language placement test. Part of it was one of those "write a story to go with these pictures" things, like on the AP test. So I wrote a bizarre story involving a father and son discussing the possibility of absinthe for breakfast (to go with their eel soup), and used all sorts of other vocabulary I picked up from Harry Potter und der Orden des Phönix. Hopefully they will be entertained. I better be in the Advanced group, or I will be sorely disappointed with myself. Eight years of German classes ought to count for something.
Hmm, what else? Am living with a very, very cool host mother in Zehlendorf, which is like a German Haddonfield but without the teen angst or cheerleaders. She's got no children, which is Of The Good.
I am officially a Freie Universität student! I had to go to about 4 offices to accomplish that. The FU is really nothing like CU, except that it is also on the subway line 1 and is entrenched with bureaucracy.
Man, for a while I wanted nothing more than to get away from the academic world. But now I am right back in total-nerd mode! Because I'm a bad person, it makes me feel superior.
Hey, humandiscoball, did you see my interview questions for you? They are hidden in the comments on one of my entries, or perhaps one of yours. Right after you asked for them. But I didn't want you to think I was skimping on the interview lurve!

humandiscoball and I are hard at work creating slashy icons! I am posting to show off mine. She almost managed to convince me to use Smiths lyrics, but I think the Sindarin is more highbrow...

What started out as a productive attempt to learn more Swedish quickly degenerated into mad giggling with humandiscoball over how my phrasebook has this "dating" section. Now, if your command of a language is based solely on memorized phrases, attempting to seduce someone in that language seems kind of hopeless. But the folks at Berlitz are clearly more optimistic than I am, including phrases like, "You look great," "Can I buy you a drink?" and "Would you like to come home with me?" They're so earnest and straightforward and don't prepare the hapless traveler to understand one word of the response they might get, but we eventually decided that, really, nearly all of the phrases in the rest of the book could be successfully applied to dating.
Among those we read to each other in Swedish, to our amusement:
"Is service included?"
"Are there special weekend rates?"
"Can I take photos?"
"I'm interested in contemporary dance."
"Can I join in?"
"What size are you?"
"I don't understand Swedish sizes."
"Are you married?"
"I feel faint."
"It's infected."
"It's contagious."
humandiscoball says that all I really need to know is "hovercraft" (svävare) and "Potionsmaster" (sadly, not in the book) to get by.
Now, I still say I've been productive today, but perhaps my definition of productivity has loosened of late.

All is well. I'm back in New York, staying in my old room that's not really my room, in a strange but pleasant state between transience and familiarity. Today I've just been settling back in; I went grocery shopping and chatted with humandiscoball and talked on the phone with musetoself and made dinner and listened to my strange music, and oh, the normalcy of it all is wonderful. Tomorrow is for many errands; must buy a new ethernet card, go to the bank, write emails, find youth hostels (yes, I wish I'd done that sooner, but planning anything like that in the presence of my mother is nearly impossible and makes me want to cry), call the German consulate, and hopefully get some writing done, but everything seems manageable again.
And before all of the worklike things I have to do, tonight is social fun: seeing RoTK with kimpire and moonlightalice!
To continue with my disgusting lj-namedropping (god, you'd think I was popular!), when zealboy came to pick me up for our little anime night two days ago, my mother saw his newly bleached hair and said, "You look like Spike from Buffy!" She really is adorable, and I feel bad that our relationship sours when I'm in New Jersey for too long. We get along so much better when she visits me. And despite my complaints about her, she really does deserve some credit.
In other news, moonlightalice and I have a screenplay in the works. Be very afraid.
More fun things to do tomorrow: buy hair dye, as my roots are terrible and I am vain, and finish my corset!
There is no point to this entry. But I'm glad it's not single-minded angst.

Got something rather hilarious in the mail today: a brochure and order form for a class ring. I was about to just throw them out, as I've never understood the purpose of class rings. What kind of memories are you supposed to attach to them, anyway? The halcyon days of... filling out order forms and choosing white or yellow gold? If you want a college memento, why not just swipe some plates from the dining hall? At least that's got a practical use. Still, I had a laugh reading the brochure:
( Marketing is creepy. )

My subconscious likes to entertain me. Whee! Like, for example, last night, in which I dreamed I was in a mall that was somehow both stereotypically Scandinavian and Eastern European. It was this odd combination of swanky minimalist design and Eastern Bloc bureaucracy and all of the signs were in both Finnish and Romanian! And I remember feeling very clever, reading the signs by using my tiny knowledge of Finnish and deciphering the Latin roots of the Romanian words to yield some kind of combined meaning. I had just arrived, but with some sort of group, and I suppose I knew the people around me. I was about to buy my first meal in whatever country/ies this was, but then I looked in my wallet and all I had was a $20 bill. So I went in search of somewhere to change money, except... there wasn't anywhere. I waited in all sorts of lines and showed ID to get down bluish, dreary hallways and even through this palatial bathroom that took up the entire ground floor, but I found nothing. So then, because this is all too ordinary to continue, I'm suddenly Franka Potente, complete with Lola Rennt red hair, riding a PANTHER (!) out of the mall and down the street, chasing some girl in a shiny leather jacket and acid-green eyeshadow of which I'm still terribly jealous. With the Sugarcubes' "Cat" playing in the background, of course! It's this super-campy chase scene, like two Bond girls in a catfight (ha! ha!), but halfway through I realize that it's useless; although this girl holds the secret to money-changing in this city (wtf?), it's two years after my arrival, which gives rise to a paradox. I couldn't have survived there two years without money, I think, so if I still need to chase her, I don't exist. At which point the panther takes a sharp curve and throws me off into the street, where I stand, confused for a moment, and then wake up.
Clearly, my mind goes to great lengths to occupy itself here. But back to New York tomorrow!
Yesterday I went to the fabulous used bookstore in Old City (Big Jar Books, if anyone's interested) and got a copy of Goedel, Escher, Bach, which I've been meaning to read ever since Rob and I sat around talking, he about this book and computer science and information systems and me about linguistics and semiotics, and we realized we were talking about more or less the same thing. And though it was very cold yesterday, walking around in the cold has been no problem, now that I've decided not to hate it. Which makes me doubt the stability of any unchangeable, "essential" who-I-am. For years, I've been a warm-weather person, someone who can't deal with the cold, but I remember when I was twelve years old and first decided that that was true. And now that I've got an interest in liking cold (Arctic circle, here I come!), deciding that I liked it was absurdly easy. This all might have disturbed me terribly at one time, but now I think it's fun. I'm already constantly accused of being fickle, but I rather like the possibility that comes with thinking of "I" as an infinity of occupiable spaces--agghhh, get out of my head, de Saussure, get out! Anyway, I kind of like thinking of myself as a series of decisions and statements and places and words, and I don't think I really care if there's a center to it or not. And I'd rather surprise everyone around me than bore them to death with consistancy. (Whoa, I'll spare you the digression, but that totally reminded me of the double (and beyond double) meaning of "true" in Shakespeare's sonnets as they relate to mortality and identity... clearly I do not understand the meaning of vacation.)
But hey, I'm not angsty today! Look at that.
I'm also considering making a mix CD for musetoself... because I can. It will probably be bouncy and weird. Sound good, musetoself?
Today, I think I ought to be lime green and neon pink, and sound like dancing robots. Dance, magic dance!

I talked to my mother about how I want more space when it comes to planning my trip, and how I think it's better if we don't discuss it for a while and I just make my plans on my own. And I think I did a great job of communicating-- lots of I-statements! Go me. She was pretty defensive, but I think I would be, too, if I were in her place, and I think the message got through.
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"Giles, no one's using the I-statements!" -Willow
( I have no life, part 1 )

( I have no life, part 2 )

I bought my plane tickets a few days ago. I fly to Oslo on 22 January. I fly back from Berlin on 18 August. I realised that I'll be spending my 21st birthday alone somewhere in Norway. Mostly, this makes me really happy; it's exactly the kind of life I want to live. But here, where I can spend hours talking to people but still feel starved for social contact, I'm afraid of the solitude. I'm afraid I'll be too insecure to go anywhere or talk to anyone because I don't speak the languages and I'll be terrified that everyone will know I don't belong. I know I'm a traveller, I know I thrive on strangeness and motion, but right now, I find myself unable to imagine anything but a shabby sort of bored loneliness and long, cold nights with nowhere to go. I read guidebooks and I'm in love with the coastlines and the city maps and the museums full of archaeological Viking goodies, but, in excess, guidebooks leave me empty and disappointed, as if I'd already come back from my trip and written down the highlights of where I'd been but can't for the life of me remember what cloudberries tasted like or how the wind smelled coming off the North Sea.
I know that solitude isn't what makes me loneliest, that I have spent weeks in solitude before and loved it, but I need a lot of reminding right now. So remind me. Tell me about something extraordinary you learned or saw or whatever that only could have happened Somewhere Else. Tell me about some trip you've taken; I don't care where or how big or how far. I'll even start.
When I was fourteen, I went to London and found myself waking up every day absurdly happy. I figured out that it was because we were staying on a busy street, and I was waking up to the sound of traffic. That was how I learned I loved cities.
Your turn?

Who was I kidding to think I could really spend a month in New Jersey? Next Friday, I'm scuttling back to the city like a roach to the sewers. I've secured a place on my old living room couch and I'm feeling the sanity return already.
It's depressing here. My brother's here on break from his first year at Arizona State, and he hates it as much as I do. He's out of his element; it's painfully obvious. This place is as poor a substitute for the desert as it is for Broadway. "Do yourself a favor," I told him, "and find a job that'll keep you out of here for the summer." I've never spend a summer here since I moved out, and I can't imagine it. Winter break is bad enough. I've always gone back early.
If it were just that I had to deal with being away from the city for a while, maybe I could do it. But what kills me is that being here makes me forget what it's like to be anywhere else.

A few days ago, I went and took some pictures of (mostly) abandoned buildings in Northern Liberties, one of my favorite neighborhoods (and neighborhood names!) in Philadelphia. ( Lookee here... )

Today, I went to the Mütter Museum, which I absolutely recommend to anyone visiting Philadelphia! It's a museum of medical history, and mostly consists of dead things in jars and nineteenth-century wax models of horrifying diseases. There's a wall of malformed fetuses (maybe I'm a horrible person, but it's really, really cool), a collection of brain slices, and a series of models showing eye conditions, including about ten kinds of conjunctivitis, gangrene of the eyelid, and a splinter sticking out of an eyeball. Plenty of skeletons, of course, and a wall of skulls. Each wax model is a disgusting thrill all its own, but particularly awful were the smallpox ones- I think I understand a little better why people were so terrified of it for so long. (You know, that and the part where it kills you, but whatever; it's the ugly diseases that really scare the crap out of people.) Oddly enough, the leprosy model was one of the less gruesome ones. My favorite might have been the gangrene of the head. How the hell do you get gangrene of the head? How do you survive long enough for the gangrene to actually set in? Would a doctor have ever gotten a kick out of pointing out that amputation was the usual treatment?
The biggest lesson of the day, however, was this: syphilis is really, really, horribly digusting. I mean nightmarish. I pity even the wax heads for having been molded into such grotesque ickiness. Suddenly, Victorian morality makes perfect sense to me-- if syphilis were prevalent, incurable, and not even fully understood, I think that I, too, would associate sex with hell. Three cheers for penicillin! It's made happy sluts of us all.

Am currently in New Jersey, which is not so interesting, but since my techie geek father got a router, I can go online from my own computer, which is rather nice. And means, of course, that I can read slash with impunity while here. :-)

For the first time, I cut my own hair. It took a while to make the first cut; the scissors bent around my head awkwardly and it felt like I could barely control them. They weren't even good scissors. I've used them for fabric for too long and they stick sometimes, half-closed. I tried holding up a mirror while standing with my back to the mirror on the wall, but I couldn't do that and cut at the same time, so I put the mirror down, leaned back over the bathroom sink, and started out blind. I felt the tips to find out if they were even, turned around every few seconds to check and watch the sink fill up with pink clumps of hair. I went on for a while, wondering how my fingertips could keep track of where they were, wondering if it was a good idea at all. Then, I stopped wondering; I went faster, more smoothly, cut off longer locks than I'd have dared to in the beginning, trusting my own hands and not wishing for sight.
I'd been meaning to have my hair cut for weeks, I remembered, but I'd never gotten around to it. And tonight the building's nearly empty and most of my friends are gone, and I'm leaving tomorrow, sad to leave New York but glad on some deep level to empty my room of any evidence I was ever here. I stepped back into the shower, washed my hair, got dressed, and cleaned the hair out of the sink. My wet hair prickles on the back of my neck, made noticeable by sudden difference.

Oh, fabulous. Tonight I finished my last final, put on my Eowyn dress, and went down to Times Square for Return of the King! Am now in Middle-Earth for the rest of the night. ( Read more... )

Tomorrow is my Modernism final, in which I will have to answer the essay question, "What is Modernism?" Cute. Though the question does lend itself to creative exploitation. At this point, my sanity is so far gone, I'm thinking that it'll be a really good idea to write the whole essay as a dialogue between me and the zombified corpse of T.S. Eliot.
Imagine: What is Modernism, you ask? I thought I'd go to the self-styled authority himself- T.S. Eliot. I was slightly discouraged by the knowledge that he is dead, but then I remembered that he couldn't possibly believe in the death of the author. Sure enough, when I dug up his grave and hacked open his coffin with a pickaxe, he was a little worm-eaten but very much undead. "Good morning!" I said, throwing a rope down to pull him out, "I just came to ask you a few questions about Modernism."
He tried to speak, but I could see through a rather gaping hole in the side of his face that his tongue had been gnawed off by what must have been some rather nasty rodents. Not having the heart to point out that the rodents had, in a Freudian sense, castrated him, I attributed his difficulty speaking to the effect of his fragmented world on language, which had been emptied of symbolic meaning. As fascinating as his demonstration was, I feared that my interview would not be able to continue. By strange coincidence, however, the spirits of Homer, Ovid, and Dante happened to be strolling through the same cemetery, and I managed to catch their attention and ask for help. For some reason I will never understand, the three were carrying a cannon, which they fired into Eliot's grave, causing his dessicated but perfectly functional tongue to fly out of the earth and onto Eliot's outstretched, partially skeletal hand. He reattached his tongue, rather grotesquely, but once able to speak, he did apologize. "Mr. Eliot," I asked him, "from your perspective as a zombie, what do you think about the concept of the death of the author? Have your views on the status of the author changed since your death?"
"No, no, not at all," he cackled. "Look at me, hm? I'm not dead, am I? I may be a little rotten, but hey, it's like my buddy Yeats said in 'Sailing to Byzantium:' 'Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is; and gather me / Into the artifice of eternity.'"
"And what do you take that to mean?" I asked.
"It means," he said, chewing thoughtfully on the head of a nearby squirrel, "that I've joined the canon! I've lent myself to the voice of tradition, and just look where I am today!"
I nodded, inching away from the squirrel entrails that Eliot had begun to drop all over the ground. "So, Mr. Eliot, we know that the fragmentation of the world is one of the chief issues addressed by Modernism. What's your take on how different Modernists reacted to this?"
"Ah yes, shoring these fragments against my ruin and all that. Well, Virginia Woolf had that curious response- breaking the sentence, breaking the sequence. It sounds interesting, but I'm not sure how much I buy that; it's quite a break from tradition, and this world has moved so far beyond tradition, we can't even understand what tells us who we are! But I digress. As you know, I stuck a little more closely with it, fragmenting tradition the way the world does and then putting it back together in a new way. Now, Ezra Pound--he knows where it's at; you'll have to remind me to tell you about that dirty weekend we had in Trieste--he went about it pretty similarly, what with all the Chaucer popping up in the Cantos, just in time for the epiphanies. Speaking of epiphanies, of course, there's always James Joyce--nice guy, but you would not want to hear the stuff he says about Yeats after downing a Guinness or two--who I think was on the right track but maybe a bit more pessimistic than me and Ezzie..."
"What about Gertrude Stein?" I asked. "You haven't mentioned her."
"Oh. Her." A dark look crept into his moldy eye-sockets. "You know, I just don't know where to start. I mean, if you want to talk about fragmentation--look at her language! She just takes the fragments and chops them up even more, into little nonsense syllables!"
"Like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia?"
"Um--"
"Never mind. Go on."
"Honestly, Alice could do so much better. Once, when we were playing a round of Exquisite Corpse with Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp at one of Gertrude's weird parties, I could've sworn Alice gave me a look..."
Struggling to change the subject, I asked, "Um, so what about gender? Androgyny? How did you all deal with that?"
"Oh, you are lucky you aren't asking D.H. Lawrence! Once--and maybe it was at that very same party--I found myself on the recieving end of one of his "matriarchy" rants. You know, like he wrote about later?"
"You mean like in 'Cocksure Women and Hensure Men?'"
"Yes, exactly. Haha, I think he came up with at least some of that while gossiping in the corner about Gertrude with James Joyce."

...Dear God. I could go on. So hey, think the professor will appreciate the zombie content?

Is it just me, or is the Smiths song "Cemetry Gates" really a very clever joke about the death of the author? Like a comment on how the concept of "originality" is tied to the traditional role of the author as "owner" of the work and creator of a consumer product?
Shit, it really is just me, isn't it?

WHY THE FUCK AM I NOT WORKING ON MY PAPERS?
Curse you, last-minute panic! First, you hound me into paranoia, then you abandon me as I gleefully waste time online, checking the weather in STOCKHOLM, as if I didn't have a paper to finish and another one to start.
I also stayed very late at CUSFS, lingering in one of those fabulous long geeky conversations I always get sucked into, but I don't regret that. After all, it was my last CUSFS meeting of the year (eek! I'll miss it! Must find sci-fi geeks in Berlin!) and I never pass up conversations that include Pokemon slash, Baudrillard, dead baby jokes, and virgin sacrifices to Cthulhu.
On the way to CUSFS, in a terribly sleep-deprived state, I found myself thinking about how I've become nocturnal. And if I'm nocturnal, I reasoned, I could just reverse AM and PM, so that 8:00 PM, which felt so late before, could suddenly become early! For some reason, I thought that this would solve my problems. But 2:00 feels creepingly late, either as an AM or as a PM, and that logic didn't seem to have a very long shelf life. In any case, I do like working all night; we don't articulate very subtle differences between times of night like we do with the day, and so any dark time seems at least half-removed from time, a space where I can sit and write and not watch the light changing, always more quickly than I want it to. In the middle of the night, deadlines and professors seem irrelevant to what I'm doing; it's just the light of the computer screen and my eyes, seeing less and less of the dark.

"The inhumanity of our ulterior, asocial, superficial world immediately finds its aesthetic form here, its ecstatic form. For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance. "

"Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. Admittedly, there is the primal shock of the deserts and the dazzle of California, but when this is gone, the secondary brilliance of the journey begins, that of the excessive, pitiless distance, the infinity of anonymous faces and distances, or of certain miraculous geological formations, which ultimately testify to no human will, while keeping intact an image of upheaval. This form of travel admits of no exceptions: when it runs up against a known face, a familiar landscape, some decipherable message, the spell is broken: the amnesiac, ascetic, asymptotic charm of disappearance succumbs to affect and worldly semiology."

"This is why even the flight from London to Los Angeles, passing over the pole, is, in its stratospheric abstraction and its hyperreality, already part of California and the deserts. Deterritorialization begins with the disconnection of night and day. When their division is no longer a matter of time, but of space, altitude, and speed, and occurs cleanly, as if vertically, when you pass through the night as if it were a cloud, so fast that you can see it, as if it were a nearby object revolving around the earth, or, by contrast, when it is reduced to nothing, the sun remaining at the same point in the sky for all twelve hours of the flight, then this already marks the end of our space-time..."

-Jean Baudrillard, America

Yes, yes, disappearance in speed, in distance, in solitary motion. Maybe Baudrillard would find it amusing that I'm aching for obliterating travel but leaving America to do it, but it's distance I want these days, sometimes, any distance, and the ocean can be as good as a desert when you're seven hours in the subzero clouds and below you is darkness so thick and absolute it's got nothing to do with light. So many times today I wanted the speed of takeoff, like a gigantic, mechanized intake of breath.
It's not that I don't want to be here. It's not that I want to be somewhere else. Right now, I want to obliterate here and there, obliterate the notion that I exist in a place I can point to and remember, succumb to the infinity of occupiable spaces, of selves, of points on a line.