Palimpsestic

I’ll have to admit, this current impetus has come from two sources: I saw Julie and Julia, and from the pragmatic and wise mahapurush who incited me to watch it (“it’s about you”). So this then turns out to be an intertextual meandering. There is no “original” text, everything has been said or done before, and I’m choosing a new combination from the paradigmatic system, putting “new” cultural transformations together. Rather, it’s all a palimpsest. Oh, I love the word.

[There I’ve done it again. Please note: I will not solicit any comments or queries on the validity of my theoretical assumptions or statements. This is not a paper.]

This entry is supposed to be about the film.

I liked it, though I had to watch it in two parts (its over 2 hrs long).  I haven’t seen a feel good, all’s well film in ages. And the best part was that this wasn’t pretentiously so. Meryl Streep was of course brilliant. But I just adore Stanley Tucci – I’ve seen him play only supporting parts in such films and he’s oh so good. The men in the film are saints and Amy’s character a total wreck. What I wouldn’t do for such support (hint hint)! But as Julie realizes it can be so annoying to be with someone who is so perfect and understanding and accommodating, with no hang ups of his own, while she is confused, conflicted and obsessed about her private self.

This doesn’t make sense, or it makes too much sense. I don’t care. I’m logging off. It’s late.

Me Against Myself

The trouble with being scholarly is that one is wont to self-scrutiny. Ah, this word, “self” has been short-circuiting my brain since at least last August if not longer. I do not even want to attempt a definition or a justification; I just want to rid myself off it. Alas, that will not be.

I have just concluded a course on autobiography, and might I say its been all-consuming. There is nothing else I see around me just shades and shapes clamouring for self-(re)presentation. Edward Said has written that writers and intellectuals “represent something to the audiences, and in so doing represent themselves to themselves”. While striving to be a Saidian intellectual I have embarked on a trip to understand modes of self-writing, life writing, representation and such like. Endowed with “a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public”, in the process of “scouring alternative sources, exhuming buried documents, reviving forgotten (or abandoned) histories and people”, I know I am searching for a means to represent something to myself.

Write my own “autobiography”?

Isn’t that what I am doing right now? Isn’t blogging, social networking necessarily narcissistic?

Maybe I should just put the theoretical questions aside, and just write for now. As someone has told me: over-thinking is more injurious to health than smoking. Just be.  

On comebacks

Writing has been the hardest thing for me in the last four years. I was coaxed into starting a blog, and as is quite evident, hardly managed to keep it up. Then I started another on a theme, and then another on midnight bored lonely musings. Nothing came out of them. I have always called myself a "writer", but haven't written seriously in at least four years...can I still call myself that? I no longer maintain a journal. I no longer scribble on margins and last pages. I hardly ever write personalized cards with bits of poetry. I hardly ever mentally create...

I have always had a fear of exposure. What if someone read and commented...can I really give something so dear to me up for public scrutiny? It is like my most intimate thoughts for my perusal only. Worse, what if someone stole them?

Besides, there were no new ideas, no new adversities to drive me in to the comfort of words, no real "inspiration". And I had stopped reading (well not completely 'cause after all I'm a literature student and a young academic...reading is what I do; and well, writing too...) I stopped reading contemporary stuff, purely for pleasure, only for myself. My literary training made be incapable of objectivity; everything after all was a "text" to be "read" and got something out of. I had made the profession out of my passion, and killed it.

But I learnt alot. A lot. And most times, I have no regrets. I couldn't have done anything else. I could have done things differently, but not else.

Well, here I am on a full moon night, under a cloudy sky, welcome breeze in the scorching heat of summer, smelling the rain and filling myself with anticipation, beginning a new chapter...