Noel > Recent Status Updates

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.

I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

I had to order these used from France. I’m pretty sure I’ll love them, though.

After the lilac passage, Proust describes Swann’s garden in a feat of both literary and horticultural virtuosity that climaxes in the narrator’s rapturous communion with the pink blossoms of the hawthorn hedge. Through the hedge, Proust’s narrator could see even deeper into Swann’s garden. There, surrounded by jasmine, verbena, and pansies, sat a little girl. The young narrator, failing to…

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Fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe. It makes laughter the instrument for cheating happiness. To moments of happiness, laughter is foreign; only operettas, and now films, present sex amid peals of merriment. But Baudelaire is as humorless as Hölderlin. In wrong society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society’s worthless totality.

The pernicious love of the common people for the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities. … It calls for Mickey Rooney rather than the tragic Garbo, Donald Duck rather than Betty Boop.

I also have books by Machen, Blackwood, Smith, Chambers, James, etc., like I said in my reading goals for this year, but Lovecraft seemed like the logical place to start.

Have to return this to the library soon.

The superiority of nature in the competitive struggle is repeatedly confirmed by the very mind which has mastered nature. All bourgeois enlightenment is agreed in its demand for sobriety, respect for facts, a correct appraisal of relative strength. Wishful thinking is banned. The reason, however, is that all power in class society is beset by the gnawing consciousness of its powerlessness in face of…

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The most interesting thing in the last chapter—the most interesting in the book so far—is Bergson’s rejection of the question of where memories are stored. For Bergson: (1) there’s no real distinction between the present and the past—we inhabit an indivisible and heterogenous movement, which he calls “duration”; (2) our thought, like the universe itself, is continually existing, and thus its…

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Sorry, I haven’t been checking my feed at all the past couple weeks. I’ll probably be able to get caught up soon. I had a really nice time in Vancouver. I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. We explored the UBC campus and took the bus downtown the next day. We went to the Vancouver Art Gallery and saw a Nan Goldin exhibit and explored Davie Street (Vancouver’s gay village). I also had a Japadog :)

“You define the present in an arbitrary manner as that which is, whereas the present is simply what is being made. Nothing is less than the present moment, if you understand by that the indivisible limit which divides the past from the future. When we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet, and when we think it as existing, it is already past. If, on the other hand, what you…”

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“To picture is not to remember. No doubt a recollection, as it becomes actual, tends to live in an image; however, the converse is not true, and the image, pure and simple, will not be referred to the past unless, indeed, it was in the past that I sought it, thus following the continuous progress which brought it from darkness into light. This is what psychologists too often forget when…”

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This and maybe another Hughes book—The Expendable Man—will be the last American noir I read for now, before beginning my project of forcing my way through Simenon and Manchette in French.

Il me tenait serrée contre lui, soulevée, la tête sur son épaule. En ce moment-là, je l’aimais. Dans la lumière du matin, il était aussi doré, aussi gentil, aussi doux que moi, il me protégeait. Quand sa bouche chercha la mienne, je me mis à trembler de plaisir comme lui et notre baiser fut sans remords et sans honte, seulement une profonde recherche, entrecoupée de murmures.

Sur ce sentiment inconnu dont l’ennui, la douceur m’obsèdent, j’hésite à apposer le nom, le beau nom grave de tristesse. C’est un sentiment si complet, si égoïste que j’en ai presque honte alors que la tristesse m’a toujours paru honorable. Je ne la connaissais pas, elle, mais l’ennui, le regret, plus rarement le remords. Aujourd’hui, quelque chose se replie sur moi comme une soie,

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The guy who sits next to me in my French IV class is THE most obnoxious person I’ve ever met. He wants to be an English teacher abroad so he’s “learning” about half a dozen languages at once. Every so often he’ll interrupt the professor with some banal comparison to some other language. He’ll mutter things under his breath in various languages and quietly burst into random song. He drives me nuts 😤

Much better than the movie, as books always are. (I’m just kidding, although it is better than the movie.)

Last month I watched the Nicholas Ray adaptation with Humphrey Bogart. I didn’t like it very much tbh, so I’m very interested to see what the book will be like.

I’m not hooked, tbh.

Set aside for too long. Will probably finish this week.

I just had my last French test today! I’m definitely at B1 now. (I’ve kind of fallen off with French reading since I’ve been doing so much of it for class.) Besides registering for the last course in the series (hopefully the last I’ll be able to take before I graduate), which should get me to B2, I’m trying to make a list of proper books that’ll be good practice. So far I have:

I was talking with some people in Her Majesty’s presence – or it may have been something I said as a result of her own words – and I remarked, ‘At times when I’m beside myself with exasperation at everything, and temporarily inclined to feel I’d simply be better off dead, or am longing to just go away somewhere, anywhere, then if I happen to come by some lovely white paper for everyday use and a…

On a bright moonlit night, when your carriage is crossing a stream, it’s lovely the way the water will spray up in shining drops at the ox’s tread, like shattered crystal.

Things that are near yet far – The Miyanobe Festival.

Relationships between siblings or relatives who don’t like each other.

The winding path up to Kurama Temple.

The first day of the new year, seen from the last day of the old.


Things that are far yet near – Paradise.

The course of a boat.

Relations between men and women.

Things now useless that recall a glorious past – A fine embroidery-edged mat that’s become threadbare.

A screen painted in the Chinese style, that’s now turned dark and discoloured and developed a scarred surface.

A painter with poor eyesight.

A switch of false hair seven or eight feet long, that’s now fading and taking on a reddish tinge.

Grape-coloured fabric when the ash dye has turned.

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