Blarg

Je suis en train de lire un livre tres etrange entituler L'Age d'Homme. L'auteur s'appelle Michel Leiris, et he thinks many bizarre and wonderful things. Much of the book is beaucoup plus subtil for me in French, but I'm interested in Leiris' ideas concerning the origins of his fetishistic behaviors, and the analogies he draws between suffering and artistic creation (discussing memoir-writing in terms of bullfighting, for example). A third of the way through, I'm really digging this one, but it is slow going, even more complicated than Duras. Next up we've got the old stand-bys in any class Guevremont teaches: Sartre and de Beauvoir, both of whom I enjoy a great deal.

The lighting here in Periodicals kills me; it's way too bright, and by the time 8:30 or 9:00pm rolls around, my eyes hurt from the fucking flourescence. I wish I could turn off every other ceiling fixture, or at least the ones directly over the desk, because the tired eyes cut into my reading time, and then I end up looking at the computer, which tires my eyes even more.

I'm sick of hearing my moronic assistant gasp and pound the desk in frustration at the Yankees/Sox game online. It's been a super-slow night here, perhaps because the Sox could tie up the series tonight. I remember when I used to care about baseball, when I could rattle off the stats of every American League position player and pitcher without difficulty, when I wasted hours at Memorial Stadium and watching broadcast games or listening to them on the radio. Sometimes I miss that strange involvement, which is wonderful and frightening all at once, and writers like Leiris and Georges Perec use sports analogies (allegories!) in their works as a means of understanding or explaining that involvement (Nietzsche, when I used to read him flying high on LSD or after ten bong hits--I don't recall sports analogies but his discussion of the role of the satyr play at Greek dramas hit some of the same chords). I went to a couple Ravens games two years back and noted the ritual, the give and take, the primal energies surging (and the odd prevelance of homoerotic music to fire up the crowd). Leiris says bullfighting has to be la survivance directe d'un culte, or une manifestation chevaleresque. All sports have the same functional antecedents: ritual, rule, sacrifice, courage, cowardice, failure, victory. The stuff of myth.