Wednesday, August 27, 2003

I’m sure I’ve had much more insightful things to say over the last few weeks, but this springs to mind now that I’m at the computer – that I often wish that I could become physically part of a song, really feel it in my skin. At the moment, sleep deprived and drinking red wine, I wish I could become part of Fiona Apple’s version of “Across the Universe” – it’s just so lush...

Monday, August 04, 2003

So I've got this notebook, like I was always told to have by visiting writers at my school, it's my "ideas notebook", for cool phrases, words, drunken insights, crucial gems that I must hold onto and not lose amongst all the rest ... Someone says something cool, a devastating phrase somehow comes to my attention, and in it goes ... And I begin to wonder: These thoughts are just caught like fish in the sea, they're what I just happen to catch as they go past - how can I call them mine at all? They're not spawned anywhere "within", really ...

Which is where I notice myself losing that crucial distinction (necessary for retaining sanity, perspective, etc.) between what I'm studying and how I comprehend lived experience ... Wallowing in Nietzsche rather than breaking him down and putting him in conversation with his contemporaries and writers since ...


I'm also attempting to inflate the songs I'm listening to, turning them up to hear the detail, ruining my hearing ... Still reading Kafka, as the semester moves on, noticing how it reminds me of being drunk - colours and lights also inflated, moved that bit closer to me, obscuring the space between things, giving significance to everything, it takes up all the space so that it's suffocating - Allowing me to fully comprehend everyone's motives, insecurities, perspectives as I converse with them, Yet somehow getting constantly sidetracked as the there is so much detail and no overall view, no overall direction, just endless detail and the need to digress, so that I can cover all the ground...