soundtracks for a nonexistent past
nostalgia around my college years doesn’t appear so frequently and with force as it used to. now it’s more an odd matter of ahistoric memory through sound. music that i hadn’t heard until after college gets transposed onto places and scenes from my past, like i’m laying down a soundtrack across time. or maybe more accurately, it’s wishful thinking: it’s music that i associate with aesthetics, places, and people that i wish i had known or been immersed in when i was younger — nostalgia for memories that never existed for me.
i wish i had been at the greek theater in berkeley for this, if only because it would have been so apt:
watching and wishing this, though, i remember events that actually are part of my fabric: lots of events at the greek — common, ozomatli, pep rallies (!), graduation, and hearing/watching this under california stars:
silently, quietly
on repeat, and at the top of my early summer playlist –
and i don’t know why; it’s definitely not blonde redhead’s best song.
maybe it’s tictactictac … tumtumtumtumtum; or the sailor and port metaphor; or those wispy background vocals that inch up when the melody steps down; or a sound that crosses the rhythmic thumps of blondie and the melodic earnestness of 60s girl groups.
sounds like: leaving for the summer to the unknown known.
method woman
three years into grad school and i’m finally tackling questions of method. on the table:
- what do i, can i hope to, prove through a close examination or reading of my archive?
- what is close reading anyway? what kind of work do i do, to (re)construct the text, and through what lens?
- and, as i sit in on and skim readings for a history seminar: how do other disciplines use their archives? what are their assumptions about texts and what can they tell us about the underpinnings of their investigations?
- what of this process of carving out an archive, setting out dates and periods to frame it?
texts are not reflections of culture and/or history. they do not reveal symptoms of a particular political unconscious, as tempting as it might be to take jameson’s side. it is part of the modern condition, i think, to accept them as the source of some kind of truth, though i don’t know what yet. with that said, one should probably be cautious about investments in texts and in their various truths to be found or revealed under layers, knowing that it is our modern condition that implants these investments in the first place.
—
valentine’s day, 2008: an empty cafe; flower inundations at two supermarkets; a bottle of wine; fake meat; a chinese film about love and futility (maybe. i’m a bad reader.); mojitos and tostones; serenades in spanish; an odd sense of not being in seattle; a final glass of wine.
periwinkle sky and clear views
the sky this morning is a blue i don’t see often. it’s periwinkle, giving way above it to the usual sky blue sky, and to the right the blinding white of clouds.
the leaves on the trees across the street are falling, leaving the branches bare and the windows in the building they usually shade, unguarded. winter voyeurism begins.