Week Six - The Rings of Saturn

I wonder if this piece is focusing on the concept of sanity, or something else. I feel the text alludes me, which I find ever frustrating. On one hand I sort of understand what he's saying about whether this is real or that is real. I have had moments myself where the eyes gloss over and the mind numbingness and for a second reality itself seems to fall back to the timeless structures that are seen ad nauseum and the customs of daily life that we follow. I feel as if the patterns I follow just trying to keep the day, are a lost cause considering the best days are spontaneous and patternless. This becomes especially true when I spend too much time inside, as I am occasionally wont to do when I want to play video games or read or watch TV. I forget that merely walking out the door is an act of random self realization that helps the day awake to its goals and wishes and wants. I find that the view I charish becomes a mockery of the white skied solitude that seems to bear down on me, like buckets of water over the shoulders, never splashing. My laziness often desires to blame this on other people instead of myself, that if someone would actually call me, and talk to me, and wish of my company, that maybe the day would change and something would happen. The truth of the matter though is that no one ever calls, and the responsibility for my own day and sanity lies not in the dirty hand of chance, but in my own. And if I am willing to go out and walk somewhere and spend time doing something, anything, especially aimlessly, I will remember that glass is only a prison when you've seen one side for too long, and that you are your own gate keeper.

I find the questions at the end to be extremely helpful. They confirm that the reading has no more subtle purpose beyond the telling of a stylistic story. I can grasp that, it rings true that even if I struggled to find a point to this writing, I could at least noticed that there was a unique style at play. Still, I feel very thrown out of the narative through a random bunch of textual movements which I think only aids my own sense of displacement. But maybe displacement is the point? After all he talks about getting lost and losing his mind and ending up displaced in what sounds like a psychiatric ward. Maybe this writing should be equally displaced as him, since he is writing for a style, and what better what to invent a style that from an experience you had, a hidden theme. I may just be inventing all this as a wanton reader is to do, so forgive me. I also notice the pictures placed here and there, and the lack of paragraph breaks. I tend to write long paragraphs myself when I'm in a good mood, but my paragraphs I feel are merely the adult verson of my people's idea of writing a paragraph; with a scalpule I cut out the spacing perfectly, with spare blood do I attempt to fill my writings with humour, and with a natural sense of proportion do I chose when to sew intro to body to closing lines. Maybe this is what I'm supposed to understand from the Rings of Saturn, the power to invent your own writing, regardless of its point.

Week Five - The Death and Life of Great American Cities

I was a walker of streets. I was born in New York City. I lived in Chelsea till we moved out to Paris for a year. I remember the playground where I ran around while my nanny Sophie watched me. This is my youngest memory, though I am told we lived somewhere else even before that small apartment in Chelsea with the wrought iron gate and rose bush. I was told that I once left the house with my little red boots and walked four blocks to the grocery store to meet the people there. I wonder how my parents ever found me. Beyond this, I struggle to relate to the concept of bullies in playground. I was picked on growing up in Wellesley where we settled a lot, but not for lunch money or pride, but because I was a big fat kid. The other kids didn't need a better excuse than that in the snotty town called Wellesley. I think this was good for me though. It helped give me a sense of right and wrong, of fairness outside my own desires. It help gave me something to struggle over personally, an internal image I wished to overcome. And eventually I did. I grew tall, ever so damn tall, and my weight just faded into me. I'll never forget being a fat little boy though on the playground, or the way I was pudgy. It's like how so many girls still believe their fat when they're not, except I have enough sense left to know I'm not fat really. Hell, girls have turned me down for not being chubby enough, which I consider bizarre.

So now, beyond this I cannot relate to the life of city streets, sadly. I can relate to parks though, having often visited a large number near my home. That was one of my favorite parts of Wellesley: suburbia covered in sprawling plains of grassy plateau. You could run for minutes on grass in the large football/soccer/track field a few blocks from my house. There was a huge park called Centennial that I didn't even know existed in my town till my first girlfriend in late high school took me there (I would learn later that some dear friends mine, Analise and Boner, had gone here at night with another two friends when they both tried their first tab of acid). But there were parks hidden everywhere! Behind the downtown stores were little fields, behind every elementary school was a massive field (many of which I played ultimate Frisbee on). There was one in front of town hall, even the gaudy country club greens at night were a field really. Wellesley though never had the same problems as unattended city parks I think. Most of the things that happened beyond kids being simply dumb, were more kids just looking for a way to push boundaries and limits and have a good time. Some kids would go out and do drugs as mentioned. Others like me would drive around with friends, following cops and finding unique sites to enjoy like the oversized lawn chair on Route 9. Others drank (and crashed), and others simply talked. But the point of this is that while these are actions most communities would abhor, it felt normal to me. It felt part of growing up, and many of things kids do, they do simply for fun, to feel alive, and to experience. Not to bother or harm someone else. I like to think I still carry that sense of doing things for fun and experience, without any intention to truly bother other people.

Week Four - Flaneur

I think I have always been a Parisian. I lived there for a year when I was five, went to preschool there, but that is not it. It's the way that I live my life for the moment haphazardly that does. I dress up when I go out, considering the opportunity to see people and meet new ones on the street to be more than a valid cause to wear my semi-casual attire (corduroy jacket, dark jeans, a button up shirt). I would never miss the chance to impress some stranger on the street who I may end up having a conversation with because it is a lie that we are not an objective people, a superficial people. We are certainly more than that, but to deny what is almost a primal instinct fueling the creation of life itself, as well as society, would be a crime. I took French so I could maybe go to grad school there, as silly as getting a masters in literature in english in a foreign country probably is. Yet I have been a Parisian all my life in other ways: never would I reject the moment for the future, for the moment would never come again. Thus I take time to do everything, especially the activities with friends that I really shouldn't have time for. I'll sleep over on couches or floors, I'll go driving till the sun comes up just to drive and feel air moving by face, I'll be out till 3am socializing and then come home and work through dawn till lunch, carefree so long as everything gets done.

This summer especially have I become one with the concept of a Flaneur: Will and I have walked everywhere in this city this summer. We go out aimlessly, for the place does not matter, and head foward ceasingly. I always had to walk around a lot, never having held onto a car of my own for more than a couple of months because fate, and thus I have learned the leisurely walk past green brooks and ducks, past confused citizenery and more often past trees that shall always hold their tongue. I do the same in Boston with Will. We walk and walk without break some evenings, maybe slightly drunk to make the experience more amicable, but not always, and it becomes a game. It comes easier for Will than me, his mind I feel being less organized than mine, and thus I follow down random lefts and rights. I ask why we went that way and he honestly cannot answer. I tell him the bar is 4 blocks in the opposite direction and he shrugs and starts walking parallel to it if I'm lucky. Sometimes I get drunk and then I really don't care how far we walk: I have crossed the city with Will in under two hours while very drunk at night, and felt the concrete beneath my feet, the cars ever moving at my side, and known that existing itself is reason for existing, nothing else need apply for the job.

Week Three - A Home in the Heart of the City.

I find my self seriously able to relate to the stories about JP. While I have only visited the area once, and found it beautiful, I grew up in another small town kind of place. Less problems, more snobbishness, but the same sense of community and family all over the place. Now when I think about where I want to live someday, I think of many places. I don't want to go back to Wellesley where I grew up- the people there are simply too stuck up. I think I want to live around Boston, though I'm not sure where. So many different parts of the Boston area have grown into my heart that I find it hard to decide. I generally say that Somerville is my favorite area, the strong sense of a unique creative community fills the halls and walls. Good unique resturaunts, indie video stores, beautiful tiny houses everywhere. Bike paths and a huge concetrate of young professionals, its nots hard to understand why I might want to live there. Still, in relation to Boston, Davis Square may be on the T, but it feels very far from the heart of Boston. An area much closer that I have also come to love is Allston. Its like younger college sibling of Somerville: much more ragged, more more raw and bare and honest and full of personality. Many a night have I slept over on my friends couch in Allston, and found the sounds of running traffic and apartment complexes to be strangely comforting in the dark.

I also really like the description of JP in the beginning. I can relate to the sensations that are described because I have a strong sense of home all over New England since I lost my own actual home, and little communities hit me pretty hard. JP has this sort of green hue to it in some areas thats really reminesent of where I grew up, which I love. I can totally relate to the pond, having had many a pond or babling stream at home I called my own. I also think that Roxbury is a community thats waiting to burst open and flower, and no just in the political sense like they have already done there. I think Roxbury wil eventually become so gentrified that it'll be this JP area: lots of housing crammed in around greenery and a rare sense of community. I know people are always telling me how dangerous the area is there, but I've walked on those streets at 5am alone and felt safe, so I tend not to take the threats so seriously. I hope I find my own community some day to own a home in, it'll be really when that happens.

Week Two - Paterson

No truth but in things. No truth but in facts. That stays in my mind throughout Paterson. The way he interweaves the natural landscape into a person, along with the historical memories of the place reminds me that the only truth in Paterson is the facts, the lost aspects of these peopled places. I find the way he interrupts rampages of poetic thought with informational sections and paragraphs to be sometimes strange, and I didn't find it comfortable until after a while. I like that he finally explained that the reason he writes in bursts is to mimic the strange way the Greeks wrote poetry, very tainted by their surroundings and personal impulses or memories. An unclean form of verse is part of it, and I sense the lack of cleanliness in the juxtaposition of history and wonder. I think its really great how Paterson becomes the only man, though there are many woman. Its a very unique thing, and maybe also sexist that there would be many woman to one man, but maybe thats how Paterson has to be, being nothing else but a man in the end. I think its interesting when he starts to defend being old, and I agree with him. There is nothing wrong with getting older, or being old, so long as you don't let the way you seem to look effect the way you think. You should almost always be you despite what your body looks like, because that's personality. I think Williams realizes that his body may age, and he may pick up more baggage, but who doesn't have baggage? Who doesn't have roots and memories? The town, the man, the poet, all and each roots and memories that tie them to the past and the present, help to define the originality of the person or place.

Something else that came up while reading Paterson is the concept of sustainability. Especially sustainability of the self. Will also found himself pondering what that idea meant, though we had different views. To me it was about pragmatism: sustaining my good feelings, finding things to think about and work for so I'm always moving and changing and growing like any person might. Will on the other hand thought about the sustainability of the honesty of the writer, and how a writer betrays himself when he describes something plainly or in a manner that is not his own. I don't feel this is the idea that I had, which was really about how one goes about being an emotionally sustainable person, especially after losing people they were close to (my just girlfriend left for grad school in NYC though we're technically still together). Will was more worried about the authenticity of the piece of writing that is composed, but both ideas comes back to a core principle: no truth but in things, no truth but in facts. I need things to work toward to keep my spirits up and remaining running without having a nervous breakdown for example. Will needs his writing to always be from him in his own manner or its a betrayal to the style and creativity that he aims to sustain for a long time. This is how sustain ourselves: with the facts that define us and the things we work toward.

Week One - The Image of the City

Cluttered claustrophobic collections of streets are listed again and again. I am overwhelmed with imagery I can't see and have no memory of. Yes I have been to the gold dome court house. But I was young, maybe 8 when my parents took me along with them. Otherwise I have no sense of Beacon Hill, and the entire section frankly puts me to sleep and feels lost on me. I want to see the city in my minds eye, taste the environment, but I can't. The way its described is too technical, too dry. I feel like I have a mouth full of cotton in my mind. I think Lynch is trying too hard in some ways to capture the area he looks into. I like that he talks about the topography, that helps me get some sense of a visual hold on the place, and the kind of buildings that color it. I like that he talks to people, because I think that people of an area are the major defining aspect of its presence. Still, I wish he would just slow the heck down, describe it, make me see it, not just feel the shape of the hill and a overwhelming panorama of words that are chained to it like the prisoner and the dungeon wall.

I have a much easier time grasping the feel when we get to the section of Scollay Square. I'm not sure if I've really been there before, but Lynch sort of nails a better overall picture together in my opinion when describing Scollay Square. I think I might have walked around here a little once while following my girlfriend on a trip, but I am not sure. Either way the image described comes to life so much easier in this part: the dilapidation that is easily found hiding among the nooks of Boston; the terrible traffic that flows around and over the sound of civilization; the absolutely messy street organization despite proper planning (supposedly). This actually almost feels more like the image of the city that Beacon Hill I think. I know what this place looks like without ever having been there, and I know its people, cars, shops, roads, and life. Still, I wish he talked to the people more, asked them why they live there, what they like about being there, what they don't like. Not just what they notice walking through it, which is apparently not that much in comparison with that iconic gold dome.