rain and thesis

Back in New York with clouds that sit on the ocean, gray and damp like a lonely afternoon commute and it's not even four.

I've been taking some notes for my little master's thesis, this involves writing down random thoughts and making playlists for writing down random thoughts. It also involves tomato soup, a quick run to the deli and phone calls in which I talk about what I'm not writing down.

I already feel like a movie. Something to stare at. I'm eager though, to start some of Mary McCarthy's writing about the Vietnam War. I have The Seventeenth Degree just sitting on my bedside table, right above some Dumas, which I've almost started dreaming about, Dumas to me, means time to sit and read and get lost: there's no better author for that.

They almost ruined reading for me, the bastards, but then, thankfully, I found the 18th Century, and there was Gibbons:

"A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste."

Somewhere, in about three notebooks, I have that written down, and came upon it again just a bit ago in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I have always felt, culturally, that we reflect the 18th Century quite well. Even our geniuses have the same broadness in approach, there is not the intensity of the 19th Century very often, at least not since Gatsby and Holden, in character, but there is in idea. I suppose I'm thinking of Borges mostly, because he is so good. But also in DeLillo, Kundera, Abe, some of the others who I don't like enough to mention. Usually when there is an intensity in character in novels, there's a pretty direct connection to the author and not necessarily to any abstract idea of the author. These are generalities and could easily be argued. I'm thinking here of Bukowski, Exley, Roth and Munro.

Like the 18th Century, this is definately not an age of poetry, which is reserved to being an afterthought and firmly in the hands of the deadened and deadening academy, may they rot in hell. Walcott, Heaney and the bastards all. Tedium in poetry is like a chaperone on a date. Any chance of anything interesting happening is lost to a sea of predictability and safely navigated destinations.

Anyway, how did I get here? Ah yes, a little more work on the thesis!