Seizure

Okay, my computer sabotaged yesterday's entry. It was pretty long too. I don't understand why I can't seem to buy a computer that doesn't seize when I have just written something that I want to save, and think of saving, but do not save. Ever. It's the worst feeling. Suddenly nothing moves. The world falls down through the bottom of your stomach. Curling like a bladed kidney stone in your guts.

I think I wrote something about Sunday which I spent with Rob and his brother Chris. We went to Chapters/Starbucks for something to drink and to browse around before going out into the real world to do some serious drifting. We looked like three three-toed sloths on the make.

I encountered something funny at Chapters though. The whole store seems to be undergoing some type of restructuring or renovation. Easing through the popular fiction sections -- science-fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, romances -- I look up suddenly for some reason and there, nestled between the mystery and the romance section, I spot the literary criticism and essays section. I chuckled. If only those high brow authors and scholars knew where their books were placed --

Yeah, I'm not hard to entertain. After the bookstore we zipped over to the mall, which was packed, and slouched around for a little while Rob hunted down some forsaken Country and Western CD he's been pining for since before the wheel was invented. Some people have no taste. I mean, I'm sorry, this New Country bites. If I'm going to listen to country -- they'll be serving ice water in hell first, of course -- I'm going to listen to Johnny Cash or Hank Williams.

I'm almost finished Jeanette Winterson's book of essays. It's a bit draining. Her opinions on art seem to waiver and seem to contradict themselves but not quite, I find it exhausting. I also find exhausting people telling me how to write, especially when I don't agree with their opinion, and yet some of what they say makes sense. She thinks plot or story in novels is obsolete. Style and language are the most important elements in fiction. Standard elements like plot and characterization are 19th-century conventions that authors, TV, and movies have worn out. But then she says that the beautiful thing, the essential characteristic of art, is its timelessness, that we can be moved by Shakespeare or Homer or Virgil. But isn't it the stories that move us? Not the style, not the language, not words, but the stories. It's the reason translations from another language move us. One of the most moving books I've ever read is Kafka's The Trial.

Whatever. The book makes me think and question my assumptions. I like that.

Today I went to the University bookstore to get my books for Philosophy of Mind -- I must have had a seizure just at the moment I selected this course, because the course number alone -- Philosophy 490 -- strikes darksome fear and dread. The books were outrageously expensive. Like a tub of Vaseline should have been included, thank you very much. Check these titles out and see if you don't go white from all the blood fleeing your extremities to take shelter behind your ribs: The Absent Body, Whatever Happened to the Soul?, and Kinds of Minds.

The other course I've signed up for, "Writing Nonfiction", is all booked up and I'm on a waiting list that stretches into eternity. I'm considering another course called "The Early English Novel" -- where we would get to read massive novels, and pay for the privilege!

If I sound cynical in this entry, it's because I'm just waiting for my computer to seize again. Oh yeah, come on baby, I just dare you, you want a piece of this, come on let's go.