Archive for February 23rd, 2009
children shouldn’t smoke
Someone recently told me – with all or at least some of the prefacing requisite to such a statement – that I am a bit childish about work. It is not simply that I grumble about having to do things that I don’t want to do. It is that I literally at this point won’t do them. That’s not quite right. I will do them, but I do them incredibly slowly, sulkily, inefficiently. I will read a review copy of a mongraph that should take me a night or two to finish over the course of a month, more than a month. I will allow to weigh down upon me and my time until the people around me are staring in amazement: how can you still be reading that? What else have you been doing? I answer: nothing, nothing – I have been working on nothing but this. And they shake their heads, make prefatory statements about the fact that what they are about to say comes only from a caring and respectful place, and then they will call me a child – a child in a hulking man’s body, but a child nevertheless.
One of the reasons that I smoke, aside from the heroin-level addictiveness of nicotene, is because it gives me leave to stroll around the neighborhood, thinking about the things I’d like to be writing instead of the work that I’m actually doing back in my office. Today I have been thinking that I’d like to write a piece about the essential if vaporous difference between the sort of life one lives as a semi-bourgie intellectual in London vs. the one that one lives (that I might have lived in New York). The essential, the vaporous. I am not talking about playgrounds and the difference between Sunday Lunch and Sunday Brunch, although of course those things have something to do with it too, are contributory factors or maybe symptoms. It’s hard to know the difference between the one and the other.
So I smoke and I think about that and then I go into the student shop and buy the papers and some mints to hide the tobacco stink when I get back to my department, the hallway, my office. It’s just the sort of thing for Journal X I think. They would love the geography involved, and I am singing a song that their readers, demographically, would want to listen to. Perhaps I should write a bit and send it on to Y.
Back to the monograph now, and my desk, and my fancy computer. The blog allows the smokebreak to linger, to materialize itself. It is definitely a cheaper habit and less carinogenic, literally if not metaphorically.
liebster vater, cher père, dearest father, дорогого отца, 最亲爱的父亲
I am right now reading Kafka’s letter to his father. A few reactions, right in the middle of things:
- If one has father issues (as I most certainly do, no did, no do, no did), one reads this perhaps as I do: with a voice inside saying things like No, it’s not like that. That’s close but it’s more like this. Which is a strange effect, when reading a “literary” text. I don’t, you know, do that with novels, or any other text I’ve ever read.
- Therapy helps. Whatever I said in the previous point, I feel a bit distant from the intensity from this sort of letter, which is a good sign, I am sure. Proper psychotherapy helps, I am a big advocate.
- This is the first time I am reading some Kafka that I actually feel like the text in question should not have been published. It feels like reading a very great man and writer on his very worst day. Perhaps it should have been published pseudononymously. Perhaps I won’t finish it because perhaps I shouldn’t finish it.
- Father issues only get stranger and tougher – sorry to be obvious – when you are a son and then you have kids yourself, become a father yourself. As then you read a document like this from both sides of the “dearest,” don’t you.
- One bit that’s particular poigniant to me is the bit about the verbal abuse of others. I understand just what he’s saying when Kafka writes the following:
Your extremely effective rhetorical methods in bringing me up, which never failed to work with me, were: abuse, threats, irony, spiteful laughter, and—oddly enough—self-pity. I cannot recall your ever having abused me directly and in downright abusive terms. Nor was that necessary; you had so many other methods, and besides, in talk at home and particularly at the shop the words of abuse went flying around me in such swarms, as they were flung at other people’s heads, that as a little boy I was sometimes almost stunned and had no reason not to apply them to myself too, for the people you were abusing were certainly no worse than I was and you were certainly not more displeased with them than with me. And here again was your enigmatic innocence and inviolability; you cursed and swore without the slightest scruple; yet you condemned cursing and swearing in other people and would not have it.
I suppose that this is just the type of post that would have to go if I put my name on the blog, eh? You’re right, all of you – fuck it. The name stays off.