Perkily Ironic

"Tell him, 'Wir sind gebounced worden.'"

*****

That still seems hilarious two hours later. Despite, you know, being gebounced...

I am SO EXCITED about this new album, and this is SUCH A GOOD SONG.



Also, this is pretty adorable.



Best thing of all? I am SEEING R.E.M. on JULY SIXTEENTH in BERLIN, because my parents preemptively bought me tickets for my birthday.

Which means I have some real incentive to figure out something to do with my funding from Swarthmore that is in Berlin. I'm pretty sure I'm going to work at a concentration camp for the first two weeks of July and then I hope one of my professors will tell me what to do.

SO EXCITED ABOUT GOING HOME.

1. "Das ist SO ehemaligsten DDR." Used to describe things that are ugly in a particularly socialist manner. Clearly used by Germans on their historical markers and such. Unclear if students use it ironically, which makes it Denglish. I'll post pictures of some ehemaligsten DDR stuff soon.
2. "Er hat mit meiner Zimmercollegin upgehookt." I was just really proud of this terrible, terrible excuse for a seperable-prefix verb.
3. "Wahrs" is to "wahrscheinlich" as "probs" is to "probably." Like, duh.
4. "Ham wa' nick" is actually the way people in Berlin say "We don't have that" but not the way other people in Deutschland say it, and I use it ironically to mean "I don't know the answer to your question," more or less.
5. "Was-ever" is something I really wish I would stop saying, but can't. Same with "Can we ausgehang?"

We'll stop there, where it's still mostly German and clever and not just embarrassing, huh? Still not much Internet, I have two "real friends" in that way of the velveteen rabbit, one Natasha of Davidson and one dude-Erin of Macalester, I haven't cried once, not once, I made the walk down all of Karl-Marx-Allee, I found a really atmospheric cinema which specializes in Spanish films with German subtitles, I got really drunk and still found my way home once, I had a conversation about US race relations with some guys on the subway another time, and right now I'm sort of having the time of my life, so all cool, eh?

It feels nice. I'm thinking for my thesis I might do German-language narratives of American Indian captivity and look into how they formed German-American communities and their transmission back to Deutschland? It's either way too big or way too small, but I am recording it now. I bought a copy of Winnetou for an Euro, which is why I was thinking about it.

Tschuss Leute.

Stumbled across the story-made-of-tattoos project while doing research for my paper, I remember that one of you was considering getting it a long time ago--flats, maybe? I still like the idea--it's one of a very few things that might make me consider getting a tattoo.

Two papers due tomorrow at 5 PM, one on the historiography of rape and one on the future of hypertext literature--both maybe 4/5ths done? I'm burnt out on this paper writing thing--I've been tinkering with some interactive fiction instead. The thing with hypertext literature is that it is still looking for its breakout star, and so I really want to learn how to write hypertext (and how to write interactive fiction, for that matter) sometime when I'm not at Swarthmore and unhappy. Maybe this summer--a 9-5 job, no television, and not very many friends, so the plan is lots of books and writing and cooking and playing with the cat, who is named Mr. Washington. I'll post about the people I'm living with (and the cat) later, when I don't have two papers due tomorrow at 5 PM.

As a treat for finishing everything (five papers! five papers!) I am going to write up that "101 Things in 1001 Days" meme so that I can prove to myself that I am an interesting person. I think it needs a "Writing" category and a "Social Life" category and a "Working Through Personal Trauma" category and a "Learning More German and Being Generally Awesome" category.

Tomorrow is now today. But that doesn't mean it's time to post about the cat.

Today I went through 350 backlogged e-mails and managed to delete 300 of them. This is a sort of reading that's not much fun--a lot of looking at subject and sender and deciding on that basis whether it even needs to be re-read, a lot of feeling guilty about not having responded to people sooner, but also a cleaner inbox when it's done, a cleaner inbox which will only fill up with crap again. Terrible.

I felt an obligation to have some sort of final wrapping up entry for my "reading journal," but what to talk about? I've been doing much more academic reading, which prioritizes efficiency over anything else, and that's all I've really been able to notice about my reading habits... who ever said reading was fun?

_swallow gave me an idea for my personal reading memoir while we talked (and I cried) in front of the circulation desk and the library.

( This is so incomprehensible I cut it for you. )

I'm having a bad day.

I've been reading a lot for my classes but unfortunately not writing enough.

When I need to assauge my guilt over not working hard enough, I tend to take overly detailed notes on my readings. It makes me feel like I'm doing active good-Swattie reading even if I'm not. Case in point? I remember much more of the re-enacting book I read without notes last week than I do of the book about Japan I read, and wrote three pages of notes on, yesterday. Maybe writing notes allows me to displace what I'm learning into another place, copying it like an automaton instead of actually thinking about it. I don't know. I'm so tired of school-reading.

*****

Other reading I've done over break includes Internet-reading (LiveJournal, Facebook, Wikipedia, NYT Online, College Confidential and the Daily Jolt when I want to feel homicidal, my buckets of e-mail) and museum-label-reading, since Thursday I went to the Met and then AFAM with my parents and boyfriend.

At the Met was an exhibition about Modernism in Barcelona. We got the audio guide, which I like because it lets you both absorb information about the painting and look at the painting at the same time. I have a bad habit of spending more time with wall text than with paintings, which the audio guide prevents. That said, I would never not read wall text, and Leon was very happy with the wall text at the Met because "There's no bullshit." In this case, I thought the wall text didn't have enough bullshit. Don't tell me that "This painting features a man and a woman," I know that... tell me what the Freudian and post-structural interpretations are!

It's also interesting to be looking at a language that you used to know or that you sort-of-know because it's sort-of-like another language you do know. In this case, I used to know a little bit of Catalan, and it's also close to Spanish, which I do speak. So seeing bits of Catalan on paintings is like seeing people you knew in elementary school--familiar face, but who are they and what do they want?

At AFAM, we were looking at the Martin Ramirez exhibit, which spans a full three floors (out of four! go Martin go!). I worked at AFAM two summers ago, and I was pleased to see that they were still handing out a flyer inviting patrons to "put the cost of your ticket to a yearly membership" at the ticket desk, an initiative which I recommended in a report I wrote while I worked there. I guess it's working--go Lauren go!

Anyway, the wall text for this exhibit was written by four different people, and so each theme--trains, horses, Madonnas, immigration, was he or wasn't he crazy?--was treated by four different voices. It was nice because each of them had slightly different takes on the art, but they tended to repeat each other a lot, and some of them had really far-out-there theories, and one guy thought he was a poet. (He started a text about Ramirez's drawing of a train with "Where does this train go? To Drawing City," and then described what was in Drawing City. I didn't like his texts very much.)

Leon muttered that the exhibition was "schizophrenic," which was funny, because the artist the exhibit was about was also schizophrenic. He really didn't like all the bullshit he was smelling, but you know Leon. Boy sees bullshit everywhere. Personally, I thought it was awesome.

*****

I'm reminded of how scared people are of the written word every time I hit somebody up for an interview for the paper, which I did yesterday, inspiring this reflection. They always want to see their quotes before they go in the paper, they sometimes drop hints that they've asked around about your reputation and do the flattery thing, they generally have a horror story about how they've been represented in the past, they always think that the story will have more influence than it actually does, and after it's been printed, they sometimes beg you to change the story and end up buying you dinner.

It's all quite a power rush--I would seriously considering going into journalism if I didn't, you know, get jittery and nervous around power.

Friday: I returned a total of 23 books to the library. The person behind the Circulation Desk said "It must feel really good to return all of those."

I wasn't enough of a snob to tell her that actually, I had 20 more in my room where those came from, and I was planning to spend my afternoon requesting more books (about historical reenactment, since Tri-Co has pretty shabby resources) through ILL.

Earlier this week I was checking out six books, and all of them were missing those card-pocket things in the front, which led the student to say "Wow. None of these have been checked out in the last fifteen years." I smiled awkwardly. "I'm a history major. It happens a lot."

Many times, when I approach the circulation desk, one of the librarians behind it will say "Oh, I'll get Lauren's books for you," since I have something on hold almost all the time. There's something very strange about having the librarians recognize you as "that problem girl who reads a lot of books" on sight.

Once I was standing in line by the circulation desk and somebody else was checking out books. There was a problem with one of her books, and the student worker called back to the librarian to figure out what it was. The librarian looked up, looked at me, and said, "Lauren's account might have a problem because..." but of course this was the one time when I was going to present no problem whatsoever. I blushed.

This is a long way of saying that I check too many books out of the library. I'm the person who checks out the readings instead of printing them off Blackboard (example? The Cheese and the Worms), the person who orders three times as many resources for a project as she could ever conceivably use, the person who orders things on a whim when she knows she'll have no time to read them, the person who uses the library for self-help books.

At night, I played Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Game instead of reading. Mea culpa.

Saturday: My father came to pick me up. I read War Games by Jenny Thompson on the way home. The book is about reenactors of 20th-century wars--I was reading it because I felt I should be doing academic reading, and this relates to a final paper topic, but unfortunately I have two papers due the week after break which I do not feel like reading for. My parents were both surprised to learn that there were Vietnam War reenactors.

When I got home, I devoured two old copies of Newsweek and appraised the contents of a new pile of books on my desk. My parents picked up a bunch of books at the Outsider Art Fair for me--essays by Dubuffet, the Judith Scott monograph, a neat book of A.G. Rizzoli drawings, something about the relationships between outsiders and modernism, pictures from the Shein collection. Yes, all of those names mean something to me, and yes, I collect books about outsider and contemporary folk art. When I grow up I imagine they'll make crazy coffee table books.

There was also a copy of Lucky, the memoir by Alice Sebold about her rape, lying on the stairs somewhere. I finished War Games last night and started another book about the Elgin Marbles--I think today can be a reading-for-myself day.

If you want to hear about a willful misreading that puts Menocchio to shame, you should contact me sometime. Just provide a punching bag.

I wanted to start doing reading for my Orientalism paper last night, but that kind of went to hell when I started thinking about this particular mis-reader.

(Hint: he comes from a time that rhymes with GASP, and also ASP, and also WATCH MY LIFE GO TO CRASP.)

Once he said to me "You read too fast to understand anything." From him it was an insult, an insinuation that I was the bad reader, not him, but this is a sentiment that has been expressed to me several times in several different contexts. Although it depends on what I'm reading and why I'm reading it, my typical pace ranges from 100-200 pages an hour, topping out at the high end for academic reading (sorry, Swarthmore) and more on the low end for leisure reading. Speedy is the only way I know how to read, which is probably the reason that I've never been a fan of poetry.

My roommate's pretty jealous of this reading business and my boyfriend treats it like a fetish object. (He's been known to lead his friends into my room and say "Watch her read," which is creepy, but also cute, right? Right?) I tend to see my habits in the same favorable light, given that I can always get my seminar reading done on time, but every once in a while I wonder what I'm missing out on. I know that I'm not the best person for picking up the finer points of an argument, and literary language doesn't make much of an impression on me, but I feel that I get what I want out of most books most of the time.

The question remains: is what I want out of books what I should want out of books? I decided to prioritize volume over intense engagement a long time ago: why did I do that, and how has it effected my experience of reading? Was it a "bad" or a "good" choice?

(The tentative answer to that last question?

As long as you're not reading The Second Sex as an apologia for rape, you're doing pretty OK.)

Dear Regulars,

We have to keep a reading diary for my "History of Reading" class. I like to read. Sometimes I write about reading in here. If I am going to be writing about reading, I might as well write about it here, so you can read about my reading, and I can read about my reading, and we can talk about our reading, and we can all be intellectuals together, but not ones who deserve a fist in the face. It will be tons of fun for everyone.

Love and LJ smooches,
Lauren

Dear Newcomers,

As you know, since you are part of my class, we have to keep a diary. I want to keep mine here because the interface is better and because it won't be deleted when Blackboard is deleted. I'm sorry if you find it inconvenient. Please don't let the regulars scare you away.

Welcomes and more welcomes,
Lauren