Five depressing texts (and counting)
I still can't believe I posted only two blog entries in September. Joseph the once-hardcore blogger--who would have thought? Oh well. There's always something blogworthy really; I just don't have the time.
It's now 3:18AM and I have a 9AM class. Why am I blogging? Do I really have the time?
No. Not really. Sleeping is the better thing to do.
I'm just sad. And maybe it's time for a wee bit of catharsis, courtesy of the Moonstruck Inc.
* * *
I've read from one of Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson that it's sadness, not happiness, that's hard to place. The book, about an ungendered person, relating his/her romantic experiences with women and even a few men, but most of all her intense longing for Louise, a married woman whom he/she has since been forced to leave. This book is one of the texts for my EN3249: The Body module, and it acutely describes a certain erotic perverseness, but one that is but a reflection of an intense desire to "corporealize" what has long been gone.
The other books we have discussed in that literature module are Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, an academic discourse on the bodily issues in photography but which is based on Barthes' very sentimental experience of his death of his mother (whose Winter Garden photograph, he claims, captured her very essence); and J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron, a tale of an old lady living in apartheid-governed South Africa, who was dying of cancer, and who now writes a letter to her daughter in America. She can relate to no one, but an alcoholic who one day appears by her doorstep.
Yesterday, we discussed Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, a short story about a young man, working to support his family, who one day wakes up as a gigantic insect. I won't give any spoilers, but yes, it's another depressing story. In my trip to Czech Republic with the choir last year, one of the attractions was this room in a row of apartments (which have become tourist shops now) that was supposedly where Kafka did his writing. I knew he was one of literature's icons, and I bought a book by him, and even kept a coffeebag with his image on it, when we ate at this Franz Kafka cafe. I vaguely knew he led quite a sad life, but I did not realize until now, how depressing really he lived. He wasn't dirt poor and pathetic, in fact he was always smartly dressed, but he had this air of melancholy about him in photographs. He's a Jew, too, and that's a significant explanation. Metamorphosis, he claimed was not a confession, but an indiscretion, indicating just the same the personal and societal issues he was conveying through his literature.
I've also spent a long time during the midterm break reading Michel Faber's Under the Skin. It is the story of a female driver, who picks up hunky, muscly hitchhikers, drugs them and brings them home. She does this every day for years. But no, contrary to what readers may initially think, the book takes a darker, more depressing turn, and enters the realm of the grotesque and ugly and unnatural. It leads us to think about what really is human? What is natural? Are we really the same 'under the skin'?
It's an engaging book, but I was slowed down because I had to do close reading (very close reading in fact) of it, as I was to present the corporeal issues in the book in the tutorial in a few weeks' time (20% of the final grade). But yeah, no spoilers, but it's another depressing book.
More depressing texts to follow, I believe, as we encounter more of Kafka next week in The Penal Colony and later on, Sylvia Plath's Fat Black Woman's Poems, among others.
* * *
It's so much easier to place sadness when you have a scapegoat. I do. It's the five literary texts I've read for my EN3249. Literature is just fascinating that way. It affects you in ways you don't quite expect. It's escapism at its finest, a new realm, with new characters and more exciting events.
Escapism, really, for people who are burdened with work, and have strained physical, mental, and emotional states. Social states too. Academic states too, predictably.
Maybe there is a causative relationship between exhaustion and sadness. There is, I'm sure, between exhaustion and sleepiness, now, at 3:58AM, Joseph Sorongon will sleep.
