Noel > Recent Status Updates

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 😤

Very fun so far with its use of the Tarot and its carnival setting.

Keith Haring in Tokyo, 1988.

Grace Jones painted by Keith Haring at Paradise Garage in New York City, 1985.

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

Arrested in the subway

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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It’s beautiful the way the water drops hang so thick and dripping on the garden plants after a night of rain in the ninth month, when the morning sun shines fresh and dazzling on them. Where the rain clings in the spider webs that hang in the open weave of a screening fence or draped on the eaves, it forms the most moving and beautiful strings of white pearly drops.

I also love the way, when the sun has…

Awkward and pointless things – … In the grip of foolish jealousy, a wife takes herself off and goes into hiding from her husband, certain that he’ll come looking for her – but he’s in no mind to do so, and goes about his business with brazen indifference, so she must face the fact that she can’t stay away from home indefinitely, and finally decides to return of her own accord.

Things that lose by being painted – Pinks. Sweet flag. Cherry blossom. Men and women described in tales as looking splendid.

Things that gain by being painted – Pine trees. Autumn fields. Mountain villages. Mountain paths.

Winter is best when it’s fearfully cold, while summer is most summer-like when it’s impossibly hot.

Toward the middle of the twelfth month there’s a great fall of snow. The ladies decide they should have a snow mountain built in the garden. All the servants at home are asked to come help create an “absolutely towering snow mountain” under the threat of losing three days’ pay. The Empress asks everyone how long they think the mountain will last. Everyone gives opinions ranging over a week or two, but…

Things that create the appearance of deep emotion – The sound of your voice when you’re constantly blowing your runny nose as you talk.

Plucking your eyebrows.

(Finally on my reading break after days of being sleep deprived, so hopefully I’ll get through this the next week.)

Perhaps the strict and pure concept of art is applicable only to music, while great poetry or great painting – precisely the greatest – necessarily brings with it an element of subject-matter transcending aesthetic confines, undissolved in the autonomy of form. The more profound and consequential an aesthetic theory, the more inappropriate it becomes to such works as the major novels of the nineteenth century.

In “Wolf as grandmother,” Adorno contests the arguments of those who defend cinema as “popular art” against “the norms of the autonomous work.” According to him, they’re mistaken in comparing the film, with its “lying stereotypes” and its “barbaric cruelty that divides the world into good and evil,” with the greatest fairy-tales, “which have the stepmother dance to death in red-hot iron

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The bad comrade.* – In a real sense, I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood. As a conqueror dispatches envoys to the remotest provinces, Fascism had sent its advance guard there long before it marched in: my schoolfellows. If the bourgeois class has from time immemorial nurtured the dream of a brutal national community, of oppression of all by all; children already

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All the little flowers. – The pronouncement, probably by Jean Paul, that memories are the only possessions which no-one can take from us, belongs in the storehouse of impotently sentimental consolations that the subject, resignedly withdrawing into inwardness, would like to believe the very fulfilment that he has given up. In setting up his own archives, the subject seizes his own stock of

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Expiry. – Sleepless night: so there is a formula for those tormented hours, drawn out without prospect of end or dawn, in the vain effort to forget time’s empty passing. But truly terrifying are the sleepless nights when time seems to contract and run fruitlessly through our hands. We put out the light in the hope of long hours of rest that can bring succour. But as our thoughts run wild the

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Part Three 😮‍💨