anticlimax.

[zubird]

my roommate has taken all the posters down off her wall, and put her things in boxes. her stereo, our coffeemaker. (she's left me the lamp, which isn't particularly magnanimous of her, since it's currently being held up by strings and pieces of cardboard.) uhh. i am not the sort of person who's inclined towards pithy summations, so i'll just say

Comments

[staterejectsbus]

hmm.. agency. yeah, i see what you mean. but--i find agency to be fairly loathsome in most cases, so i found myself sympathizing far more with Tereza than Ludvik. i mean, yeah, Helena at the end of Joke, yeah.. but i guess, and this is probably a limitation of my vocabulary and point of view, but, i tend to see something like that not so much as a judgment Kundera's making on women, but a judgment he's making on Helena. and, moreso, it seems that judgment of any kind tends towards the smallminded, though much fiction deals with making somebody look sad and somebody else look strong, and that's a reflection of the flawed nature of life. or something. i have no idea. (i dunno. i'm thinking about this friend of mine. loves his mom, relates to her more than his dad, but simultaneously holds a generic, knee-jerk bitterness towards the female gender that i find puzzling and somewhat disconcerting. but, at the same time, it's not puzzling, because it stems from a few emotionally trying experiences and, mostly, many unquenched desires. is he a misogynist? yes... but. at the same time, i suspect he sees that in a longer view of things, he's being angry and absurd, for reasons utterly personal. i'm not approving or apologizing for it; in fact, i get pretty openly annoyed at him when he mutters things along those lines, but. i dunno. him and Kundera. i dunno. i try to shy away from words like misogynist, mostly because i'm never entirely sure what they mean.)

as for me, i find, in general, men to be the more repulsive gender. though i've been trying to keep my generally misanthropic tendencies in check, lately. of course, we all start out the same and end up the same; so i suppose i should just get over it. finding one thing more annoying than another, i mean.

i'm skimming the list now..

if it was for most influential American, i'd probably go with Ford: suburbia and interstates. not to mention all the rest..

but greatest is an awful word. it should only be used in describing personal reactions, memories and moments. when you start using it to describe anything much bigger, problems arise.

still skimming list.

yeesh. okay. yeah. we've got the whole cult-of-politics thing going.. (Reagan got something like four hours of Charlie Rose interviews, that same week, i remember, Ray Charles got like fifteen minutes. weee, obituaries!) and all the "glory" and relative lack of here-based wars must be a big part of that. but, i dunno, i've been able to find things, here and there, in music or movies or books, that i sympathize with more than a little. elements of American culture that admit that things end and that a good thing is usually a bad thing for somebody or something somewhere. the wry and sad parts. not all that victorious stuff.

what bits of American counterculture in particular do you find annoying?

is Massachusetts nice? i've barely been anywhere, and never there. it always looks nice, in pictures and movies, etc. the trees, i mean. i'm a fan of trees. though Iowa has trees, and nice skies, so i shouldn't complain.