Based on a true story [Thalia]

hey guys

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:44:16 GMT

This is where my blogging has moved mostly! http://apoemadayfromharvard.blogspot.com

It's not a typical blog per se, but instead I've been writing a poem every day for the last 18 days there - I'm trying to do it every day of my sophomore year. I'd love it if you checked it out and pressed 'follow' (you don't get any emails or anything, it's just a way of letting me know you're out there readin' :) ).

Sophomore year is great. I am 200% in love with my tall Yid scientist boyfriend of eight months. I am a scholastic bum bum bum bum. I'm a comparative literature major. I'm dragging my feet through second-year Russian making sloppy cursive loops. I don't like the way college kids mock religion uncouthly but sometimes religion can be repressive and cruel.

In class I discuss things like the Babylonian creation epic and Buddhist dance. Cambridge is surprisingly sunny in the fall. Good things in the air. You know you're in love with someone when they never fail to pry you up out of your gloom.

hum de dum

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:56:15 GMT

off to Iceland on Sunday - a mere 2 days! I am excited to go off and acquire a whole new set of experiences in a country I've never seen, whose language I don't peak -- go stare at geothermal vents and pull rhubarb from the cold, damp earth. I'm bringing Icelandic sagas, Buddhist scriptures, "East of Eden" and a whole host more, a few sweaters, jeans and hiking boots, and a whole lot of excitement. I seem to have all these convictions - that it's good to farm, sail and travel, that I want children, that the earth is sacred and overconsumption is ugly - that have appeared out of nowhere. I know I want to spend some years after college working odd jobs on ships and farms and seeing the world. That's the plan.

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 01:50:55 GMT

Dear Everyone,

I am leaving to Iceland June 22nd. I plan to bring a few pairs of jeans, sneakers, Tevas, no laptop, no phone, and a lot of books. Since I will be on a farm in the middle of nowhere, with eighteen hours of daylight and nobody I know, I will presumably have a lot of time to read. But I want these books to be special.

So recommend me some books that have changed your life. One to three, since I obviously can't bring (or read) all of them. I don't care the category or the nation of origin, poetry or play, essay, manifesto or novel. I also don't care if you think I've read it before--chances are, I haven't. Just give me something that will knock my sheep-crap-sodden socks off in the land where geyers spring and the Northern Lights shine.

Can you do it? Yes you can!

Love,
Talia

home from college

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:34:21 GMT

Retrospectives are stupid, especially of monumental years.

Took a lot of classes... found a boyfriend who wears a kippah who is, like me, a datlash ("dati l'she'avar, or: formerly a religious Jew, and now not observant). Farming this summer in Iceland and rural Virginia. Reading Slavic folktales. A paucity of close friends at school, but hopefully that'll change.

Things I did this year I never thought I would do:
take a telescope safety class; do (a whole lot) of stand-up comedy; write for a television show; date a boy who wears a kippah; eat a gypsy pancake (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3463/3307476123_a79b225831.jpg?v=0)...

So much to do left!
I wish I'd partied more and had more adventures. These things can be cured-- three years of college left!

beautiful mountain goats lyrics.

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:42:27 GMT

what a surprise on this blog.
thanks for reminding me of this song [Bad username: _twoheadedgirl"]

In comes you, not the same person I knew.
Looking roughly the same, but something hungry getting restless in your brain.
So there I go.
Not the same person you used to know, peaking through a fish eye lens at you.

And the cornet blows where the oleander grows.
And us too, not the same people that our old friends knew.

And so down the street you head in the high summer heat.
White long sleeve oxford pushed up to just before your elbows.
Black pumps & a medium length black skirt, eating a path through the dark, damned birth.
I hope they've got plenty of money where you're going.

And the cornet blows, where the oleander grows.

poetics from lately

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:07:56 GMT

Could I have picked a more pretentious post title? Maybe not. Even so though, today I got out of class in Harvard's Semitic Museum and there was a streak of skywriting turning yellow against the setting sun. To my left the herbarium with five million dried plants in glass held its quiet, wreathed heavily in snow. I'm translating a sonnet cycle by Shaul Tschernikovsky, who wrote from 1890 on in difficult Hebrew, defiantly, about the Greeks. I read his translation of Goethe's "Prometheus" into Hebrew and the fifteen sonnets I am translating are about the sun. It's called "To The Sun," and the epigram is a quotation from the Talmud in Tractate Succot, saying, "And the rabbis deemed that it was all right, when no sun shone on the Holy Temple, for the people to pray facing the sun in the east" (obviously a very rough translation). In Hebrew, in Petrarchan meter, to the sun!

Here's sonnet #2 because I feel like it. My translation is terrible, the poems are much more rigidly structured and they rhyme... I want to make this into a longer project, and perhaps I can bring back the sophistication of the language, but for now I'm just focusing on conveying the images (which is hard enough in his Hebrew, let me tell you):

Like one of the golden ears in wheat-stalks heavy with grain,
that rose in full beauty and will flourish in all of its plenty,
like a single grain that hides within its breast its secrets,
a guarantee of eternal life, and a remainder of something already;

like the ear of grain stolen from the field, that suckled at the village's breast,
and wet with the juice of life, dreaming a dream of her beauty,
I also grew! and yet my soul thirsts for more.
ah, day will chase day! and will I collect this debt?

ere my dream comes! my path is hidden from my eyes.
as I turn this way and that--I turn: what is mine, who is mine?
and have I come to the border? or have I passed it already?

did my father lie to me, did he not guard what came from his mouth?
I am a bud of grain, and my father is my sun,
and he summoned for me the hot rains, and commanded the mountain mists.

Tschernikovsky love. They called him "The Greek," but he was a Russian.

All my classes are making me think a lot but not work too hard, which is, I think glorious. It leaves me time to be in love, which is a good thing to sandwich into a schedule. Love has crept up on me suddenly, not unpleasantly, as if I'd eased my body into cool water. Suddenly the whole flesh is engaged; every pore is present. It's a good thing to walk around in winter continually being surprised at your own joy.

two new poems

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:16:16 GMT

that pretty much sum up what has been going on.

Maglite Flashlight/Anemone Enemy

When you looked into my throat with your little black flashlight—
pustules like white anemones
in a red garden—its light was strong;
and when you kissed my lips afterwards, parched with fever like two
wrecked mosses in the dull humming of cars and
the dull reoccurrence of light in the window,
you held that cylinder pointed towards the mattress like a gun
like it was worth all your money
like you couldn’t unclasp your hand around it black
and fine as it was with its unwavering light.

what an unwavering light you hold on my red soul! what suppurations
at its corners,
why do they call it a flashlight if it ought to hold steady,
as you hold it, beam level with your eyes
and pinning mine, your hand square on the small
of my back, black metal in my mouth, four of your knuckles
bracing the yawning cheek and your soothing murmur likewise a brace,
and the kiss afterwards too fervent, as if the lips must forget what the eyes have seen,
the hot mouth teems with pain, and unwise the hand
holding the Mag-lite drops; the overstretched diamond, its pin-sharp beam, swings low,
the smooth handle spitting back light, grooved notch for the fingers,
the light held in a bell or a silver cup and the bulb like a white bud ready
to be tamped in earth;
Maglite, my father’s favorite flashlight, which you hold
in your big fingers with ease, the same one he used
to retrieve his parents’ letters after their deaths from the big
old cabinet in their basement he called “the hutch” while water
dripped into the mold spores in the corners and the washer on the tiles
thumped with laundry for the final time, the ruined dress of a funeral guest;
How I wondered at you, mouth open,
hands out like a starfish,
as you observed the sickening bloom I could not see,
and returned to me, seeking your prize.

Macaw

Unlikely, my heart, like a scarlet macaw
descends from its barren tree,
and the snow, a heavy wreath, hangs on the ground.
When, in what hour, and was it alone,
when it grew such a coat of feathers?
No, it was with you, in your company,
that it burst out in reds and blues.
All the world holds its watchful silence
as, shyly, hopping from branch to branch,
at last fanning its marvelous wings,
my heart descends; it thrills with brilliant blood
then settles, murmuring, against your hand.

Laocoon Turns Twelve

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 04:25:24 GMT

"Laocoon Turns Twelve" (or "Fever Poem")

At twelve in the grip of fever
with one ear on the muttering in my bedroom
and one ear pressed on the pillow I knew
my power was as the power of a king
whose kingdom would soon be annexed
pooled entirely in my poor fate
the worried faces hung above me like cold
crescent moons in dark air ripe with sweat
they were cooing me back to life they wanted
to woo me back
i pressed my face to the pillow i breathed
hot breath into it serpent's breath
 i wanted to be immersed in fire an extraordinary
thing i could sense it stirring
my limbs up they cycled
out of my power
i wanted to bloom like a ranunculus
red hot as the breath of god
they lifted me
they bore me
in the blankets they left my sweat
on my scratched hands
fire had scraped its teeth
they placed me in a bath filled with ice
and left me there a small brown figure
the grown moon erased itself
in the window o sky like a mouth

WOOO

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:45:01 GMT

i just ran this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primal_Scream_(Harvard)

http://www.ivygateblog.com/2008/01/harvard-comes-early-at-primal-scream/

:)

my favorite quote from moby-dick

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:23:52 GMT

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs - commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. What do you see? - Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster - tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand - miles of them - leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues, - north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say, you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent- minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries - stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger- lilies - what is the one charm wanting? - Water - there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:46:46 GMT

Dear LJ world at large,

Is anyone else interested in working on an organic farm this summer? There's this organization called WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms - www.wwoof.net) that provides info for organic farmers all over the world; you can work on these farms in whatever country, in exchange for room and board - no fee. You pay your own airfare, though.

I emailed some farmers in Iceland. I want to spend all of July there, going up to the mountains with the sheep in the first week of July and then spending the rest of the time harvesting rhubarb.

Working with my body in the sun.

BALLER.

Now I'm just seeking a companion - while a month in Iceland an hour from Reykjavik and close to the sea sounds amazing even alone, it might be a little much...

Anyone in?
-Talia

Love and Wild Boars

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:07:17 GMT

Love and Wild Boars

I read in the newspaper that there are wild boars, a pandemic of boars from the forests of Brandenburg, in the streets of Berlin. They come out at night, snuffling in the green spaces, feeding on compost, stepping with ungraceful menace in the paths of cars; males can weigh up to two hundred pounds and thus they interrupt the flow of traffic in the guts of nocturnal Berlin. They're the only thing I can think of to compare my passions to--snorting, inconsiderate, with teeth hanging over their lips and rank odors, stout, ungainly bellies, persistent hooves. How I wish to go about my business, but I am hopelessly interrupted, like those hapless drivers hanging out of their cars at dusk, at midnight, a little haggard and all disbelieving, peering at the carnage in the teeth of the radiator grille, all that unfortunate, costly damage, snuffed life, and tangled metal…

I’m exhausted by these little accidents, these too-warm winters. Tired of my too-passionate friends, their shameful and constant earnestness, their sensational eagerness to be hurt, the seeming obliviousness of their youth. I want them, finally, to protect themselves. I’m tired by mock-fellatio on the dance floor at parties, tired of all weeping and all recriminations, of old loves poignantly recalled, and of all tawdry drunkenness. I would like my life to be filled with pat approximations of feeling. I wouldn’t mind aping love as I ape happiness or concern. I’ve become so wearyingly aware of my body: each breast softly offered for a man to take his repose upon, the wide, shameless hips, the abundant mouth--in sum a stumpy, peasant body, not admirable, but welcoming. I’m tired of my open and approachable body, which is nothing if not self-advertising. “This body is honest, but the mouth is a liar,” I want to scream at the phalanx approaching me. I know them so well, down to their genitals and back up again. “The mouth will caress you, it will recall your name, your every comment. But don’t listen to the mouth, or the big, malleable body, this girl is tired, she’s absolutely exhausted. She’s too tired for you…”

It isn’t the genitals that bother me -- harmless as they are, naked. I’m not afraid of them, as I once was, I don’t hesitate before that blind, self-promoting little stub. No, it’s the flat, freckled torsos, the faces, that bother me--their wordless pleas and spoken imprecations, their declarations. “I’m falling in love with you.” “I want to see you again, I know it’s been a long time.” Or even, in the past: “You need me too much, this isn’t right, count me off your little list…” … The brutal miming they require, my lovers and friends, the mantles I assume--mother, because my breasts are soft and expansive; lover, with humble, pliable flanks; friend, that generic, absurd, and dessicate term, because even my mind is ripe for vitiation. No, I’m tired of this theater, which is constant, very modern, requiring real finesse in body and speech. I’m ready to give up all finesse. How can I exist this way, prodded like this, turned red, then white, by urgent thumbprints? Let me and my stubborn skin, instead, avoid all sun. Turn translucent, then transparent. I’ll go featureless then, like the Communist tenements of Berlin, my eyes slack as their shaded rows of windows. I’ll go square and uninviting, I’ll wreck entire horizons, I’ll go dour, dire, a sign of greater menace. No, I don’t care how I, mouth and mons, inflame any and all. I don’t care how well-meaning, how fresh and innocent this yearning is--how profound their need, or how little they knew their strength when they so abused my flesh. I refuse these inflammations and applications. Requests, remands, relations. West Berlin was kept free of boars by the razor wire that also kept it free of Communism; once it was slashed loose, the edict shaken off, the boars escaped the forests. Now they paw at the pavement, snuffling at skinheads and old churches, and their purpose is grim. But I won’t make the same mistakes as you, Berlin. I’ll keep the razors up. I’ll build fantastic walls around my person. How many times, after all, can I lie in that coital laxity which breeds the tender fevers of my love? How many fevers can I suffer, even with my good health? I’m tired of histories and anniversaries! Traveling-together, banter, and skin, skin, skin! Too many lovers breeds an incalculable sense of loss. A vanishing self. A rendering-familiar of every relation. Hapless, white, and horizontal, I hear: “My mind and heart are still with you in my bed.” “How is it that I could go so long without you before, and now…” “I think the real problem is that you‘re oversexed.” “You dive right back into love because it’s the only thing you know about.”

Wan, drooping, like an ungainly lily, I’ll bend my head. I’ll stammer. I’ll drop my eyes, losing my gaze in my lap, like a loose pair of glasses. My body will bend like a reed on chairs and at tables. But in the night, faced with new prospects, dark shapes will sidle up with familiar proposals...Berlin, finest of my imagined cities, so lately riven in twain, and now recalled to yourself, how will you survive? The boars have their nostrils open wide. They can sense --what can they sense? -- some treasure, a damp bloom of woe in a dark place, and they are beginning to pick up speed.

long update, adapted from a letter

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:34:56 GMT

I've been thinking a lot about how people fall out of your life despite (maybe because of) your best efforts, and how much I hate that decline, gentle slip, disappearance, maybe more than anything. I'm writing this in the bus station in Hartford, CT, because I got stranded on the way back to Boston, and bus stations seem like excellent places to write about disappearances. They smell like pee, and everyone is in an elaborate process of pretending to already have left. On some level I feel like this vestibule, with garish lights and corporate slogans, cynicism, anger, weariness, and abundant pee, is a good metaphor for the consciousness in the absence of narrative (or some other roundabout way of phrasing the way you feel at 9pm on a Sunday with no one to talk to).

I'm writing this like a diary entry, or something I think won't have readers. I hope it does (like I hope the people next to me will stop smoking so heavily while they play dominoes, or at least that the smell won't permeate my clothes). Sometimes lately I feel a big part of me pinching up and going brown or gangrenous, ready to drop off, not neatly, but completely. It's the part of me that woke up at 3a.m. in junior-year February and scrawled on a stickynote by her bed, "I want to suckle at the great teat of the artistic universe!" and then fell back asleep again. You know, the part that can get past being dumpy and bourgeois and pampered and a little too smart, maybe complacent, and can read "The Autobiography of Red," and can fall in love over and over again without turning boys into a nasty little numbers game. When I was encouraged by teachers in high school in all that mischief (Dadaism), and they made me feel the grandeur of it, I really felt the grandeur of it. I haven't gotten over feeling grandeur in things although I have felt it less, like I write less. I haven't stopped wanting to be the agent of grandeur--as poets are the agents of grandeur. I like this notion, it's germinated in me and keeps germinating, the poet as Prometheus, a broad figure with burned palms and an eagle-pecked liver. Noble! I like it in one word with an exclamation point. It's still a pretty big leap from me to Prometheus - I'm after all a girl from Teaneck with professional parents and a few too many sweaters to really attend to the haggard demons of the past. To really attend to anything. Being fifteen and ragingly and purposelessly sad is the closest I've come to really attending to anything--after all, I cried when I read Camus and slashed at my arms with matches. It was mostly vanity. I've fallen in love a few times maybe but after all, that's pretty transitory (which is why a lot of my peers, particularly the cousin that drove me to Hartford too fast in her red VW Rabbit, persist in counting obsessively, rattling off the figures of guys they've kissed, etc. She has two boyfriends at once. I'm impressed, but don't empathize. Actually I think it's terrible--not the situation itself, but ticking boys off on your fingers, having them tick you off on theirs, quantifying, numbering, it's kind of dehumanizing).

Right now as always I'm bourgeois and I don't know what I'm doing. I want to describe my life to you as it is now but I don't know where to start--I feel like I should start where you last saw me, which is, I guess, Israel--I feel like I should tell you about all the raw little genius friends I'm cultivating here or tell you silly anecdotes about other people or at the very least give you a sense of last year but I don't want to. The real problem with people falling out of your life as I see it, at least people who knew you "when" (before you had any polish or any experience to speak of) is a sense of having once been, and now no longer, completely understood. After all--there are very few people who I can talk to about wanting to be, I don't know, Johns Cheever or Donne, or turn Teaneck into Roth's Newark, or wanting to turn all my dreams into Dream Songs, and have them understand it for real--what it means, not some glorification, or thinking I'm cool for it when I'm not cool for it. It isn't cool just to want something terribly. It isn't cool to want to be Prometheus at all, not when you aren't willing to give up your liver for it at any rate. But I am perfectly willing to give up my liver (consider how many writers are driven to drink) although it is currently intact. But it isn't cool or admirable even to want to give up everything. You have to "do," you know, writers write. But I get paralyzed, I feel the immense distance between me and that Titan prostrate on the rock, between me and being fifteen, between me and our conversations which are like "steamy bells of light" (your phrase) in my memory. I want to tell you, in bad form like a belch, about things--observations about Israel (all the old women who dye their hair purple; the Russian neighborhoods in Haifa; the perfect blue O of the sky above the watering hole on the kibbutz). I want to tell you about my friends here who get together and watch Werner Herzog films or wander for nine hours from midnight to mid-morning and come back looking drunk in all the same clothes, who wear tarbouches and are stupid with joy and stupid with sorrow in turns. They're learning the equations for relativistic string theory, composing electronic operas, writing political exposes. They're kind of the people I've always been lonely for. But even so.

hell fuckin na we can.

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:51:50 GMT

voted. rioted in the streets of harvard square, and by "rioted" i mean "yelled a lot and high-fived people in cars." am happy and disbelieving. go the soul of america! whoda thunk you could abandon yr antiquated morality?

i'm curious about the future of americana kitsch -- will it have to take on a sheen of multiculturalism in order to remain relevant? are we now utterly in the age of minority-as-majority?

i like the guy hanging out on the john harvard statue in a green spandex thong and nothing else. what did he want the headline to say? not so much "harvard celebrates obama" as "man in thong on pedestal" it seems...

history brings out the oddity in people. i do enjoy having run through the streets and stood on low structures and hollered the president's name. pretty exciting.

life!

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:34:08 GMT

I don't know, man, I'm just so happy. I have a lot of work and things, and the Jewish holidays (and my spontaneous decision to keep them) didn't help much, but everything here remains incroyable. I was in a stand-up show last night and then I stayed up til three a.m. with four friends, talking about our weaknesses and strengths and singing songs on guitars and bringing up religion. I found out that one of my best friends here won the Intel international science fair twice and hadn't bothered to bring it up for the first two months. Life here is rife with mind-fucks like that. Russian continues to sound like a mouthful of glorious throat cold, with a series of strange endings; I'm writing a short story for Jamaica Kincaid to review; I've lost a whole bunch of weight, in a good way; I will spend six hours writing a paper today; at six p.m. one of my favorite comedians will meet with the stand-up comedy society; everyone is exciting here, everyone has interesting things to say, everyone is strange. All the boys hold themselves really oddly. The heat hasn't been turned on yet, and it's freezing. I'm still just surprised by joy impatient as the wind. The other day I walked a few miles down a street that has houses from the 1650s, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's house, the French Consul General's house. The ground was scratchy with dead leaves as I shambled along and the berries were bright on the branches. The old shingles, crooked and shining, grapevine patterns carved into mantels, the broad wind hurtling around my head!

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 21:08:23 GMT

Yesterday I got high and thought about anthropology a lot!

hmm

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:24:05 GMT

This is my second college update. I should really get around to updating this thing more frequently, with shorter posts, like Ji. Anyway, life is good. I continue my campaign of wacky pranks and Russian language learning. This weekend, for Columbus Day, I went up to Maine to my roommate's house, and jumped in the ocean in Maine in October, and took a five-mile hike to the top of a mountain and looked at the awesome array of foliage, and picked apples, and baked apple crisp... and ate delicious transgressive Maine seafood...

And then at college I:
-read Lady Chatterley's Lover
-realized I knew how to say "Your mother is like a tiger in bed" in Russian
-pulled off one of the most elaborate wacky pranks I ever attempted (more later, lest the prankee discover this blog)
-critiqued fiction with Jamaica Kincaid
-learned how to write "baller" in cuneiform
-picked up a juicer and $44 worth of fruit that Harvard bought for my friends and I, because we told them we were starting the Harvard Juicing Society
-made crepes
-successfully tried out for the Harvard College Stand Up Comedy Society (HCSUCS)'s show next week
-wrote "Tatyana's father doesn't live in New York with his family because he loves vodka and marijuana, and does not love his wife" on a Russian test (and will probably get extra credit)

So basically, college gets an A+ for fun, although I could do without the utter celibacy. Lame!

harvard

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:37:50 GMT

So I know I haven't written at all in the three weeks I've been here.

This is because I am Il Capitan of Lame - I know this phrase, "Il Capitan," because I have been exposed to so much diversity here and I just spontaneously become fluent in other languages that way. No but for real, there is just a lot of diversity. I've learned to say "hi, how are you" in Swahili, Macedonian, Russian (I'm taking Russian, so I guess that doesn't count), and Hindi, it's hot. Diversity, it's attractive. So are many of the international students.

Everyone here is just excessively talented; I tried out for eight plays and got one callback (status undetermined), two bands and I didn't get into either - in fact, the only successful audition I had was for Shani, the Jewish social action a capella group that sings in nursing homes. And is just as super cool as it sounds. However! One compelling reason to try out: the conductor/leader wears a beret all the time and basically just resembles Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, minus the bulky chest and shoulders, but with the ponytail. Imagine Gaston as a twenty-year-old macrobiology major/professional cantor with a beret on, and you would have the right idea. Right. Right. I myself am as fluttery and flustered as usual, this is not a surprise. My courseload is all-English, all-the-time, which is, I suppose, a good thing, although perhaps will be overwhelming ... I am taking:

-English 154: Literature and Sexuality (the reading list, which I bought most of yesterday, is all, 'Freud! Foucault!' and then it's all 'Venus in Furs! The Story of O! The Sluts! Lady Chatterley's Lover!' and so, essentially, yesterday I bought drinking chocolate, cup noodles and sexy-books; it was pretty decadent)

-A 12-person fiction writing course WITH JAMAICA KINCAID! You had to write a three-to-five-page autobiographical statement to apply and I got in as a first-semester freshman. Pretty rocktastic - and given that I want to be a writer, this achievement definitely cushioned the blow after mariachi band rejected me. !El jerkos!

-Russian A. I really enjoy this class because Russian is so trippy to speak. Everything, from 'hello' to 'here it is!' sounds like you scooped up random letters from alphabet soup and tried to pronounce them despite a severe throat cold. I love it and I love learning new alphabets (Russian practically has two alphabets - print and cursive. That shit is crazy.)

-Expository Writing 20. Required course, but we get to analyze poetry for it, which is a bright spot. Still: bleah. Too much writing, writing, writing. Of essays, essays, essays.

My roommate is excellent, her name is Ashley, we are somewhat inseparable and are taking Lit & Sex together (thus earning us the handy appellation of "sex buddies"). I bombard her with tales of my Jewishness, but luckily she wants to go into international politics and thus has a healthy interest in Minorities and Their Customs (which allows me to blather at length about the esoterics of Jewish law, which I, in a multi-ethnic context, cling to and find increasingly interesting.) --I have been spending a /lot/ of time at the Hillel, I like it quite a bit, it's a very accepting community, meaning no one cares where I eat dinner (and what I eat for it), and no one questions my desire to lead services, and no one questions me wanting to wear a prayer shawl. Things of this order. I go there for comfort food and general comfort; it's funny how little time in a context like this allowed me to get over my rage at Judaism (see a few posts ago). Essentially, all I really needed was a break from the constant cultural assumption of Orthodoxy, which is, I believe, pretty stifling. --My other roommate is from Shanghai and she is an adorable bustler. She just bustles, bustles, bustles. We're both hideously messy and sleep in the same room, which works out well, I enjoy mounds of clothing for decor. We decorated our common room like a Turkish coffee house with shawls on the walls and invited everyone in the dorm to paint our coffee table. So naturally there are five languages on it and chemical symbols and swirly designs from Zimbabwe. Oh, Harvard. Harvard, Harvard, Harvard.

I GO TO HARVARD!

hmmm

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 06:04:00 GMT

I move in to Harvard on Friday.

I wish Jamaica Kincaid would post the application requirements for her fiction writing class already, so I can start neurotically fixing up some kind of fiction portfolio (JAMAICA KINCAID ZOMG).

I spent five days in California with the boy who is going to be an engineer, although it's over, and frankly I am as usual in a questioning and perfervid tizzy, as when am I not? The questions of love and physicality are too deep for me. They're stranger and older and more brutal than I could ever be. The East Bay area is beautiful, Sonoma County has these very wide and baked-up hills, these green vines, these blue skies, this bright, crisp heat, this shark-filled cold Pacific, and redwoods towering up like slim and faceless gods... I dig. I dig highly. I could see myself living around there. I like San Francisco although it's nothing close to New York for scale. I finally met schiarire, and she was, as promised, quiet, but delicate and brilliant as I had expected, and she and the engineer boy showed me around the city. Excellent times. I love being with quiet, deeply intelligent, black-haired people I adore and admire.

Weird things happen on the streets of New York. I am just thinking about this for unknown reasons: my last week of work I recall seeing someone's porno collection smashed on the sidewalk near a slightly crumpled cardboard box, for all the world as if some irate girlfriend had dumped it from a third-story window. This was right next to a nice car that had a big key scratch on the side of it. I felt like I'd wandered into the set of a music video. Also that same day in Grand Central Station there was an epic showdown between an older, white, portly man and an obviously homeless African-American man begging for money in the station. I overheard some of the dialogue and it was sort of like ---

HOMELESS MAN: Go back to ya mansion!
PORTLY MAN (extremely heavy Brooklyn accent): Get outta here! Nobody wants you here!
HOMELESS MAN: I don't want you here! You here that? Go back to ya mansion!

Then another African-American man, fairly prosperous-looking, came over to break it up.

PORTLY MAN: What, ah you his friend? I'm gonna call the cops! Get outta here! Nobody wants you here!
PROSPEROUS LOOKING MAN: No, I'm not his friend, sir, can you let him alone?
PORTLY MAN: Soon as he gets outta here! I'm gonna call the cops!

It went on but I had to get home. I mean... really, New York, must there be so much human drama on your throbbing streets at all times? Every walk to and from work I passed a few people crying for no apparent reason. I cried a few times in the streets myself. And the endless propositions! NYC: constant street theater. I don't know what kind of human dramas will play out in the Harvard dorms. I'm expecting a lot. I keep expecting and expecting. We'll see what happens.

episodes from the life of a working girl

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:12:12 GMT

Why are men in New York City so weird?

ME: (walking to work, humming, generally out of it at 8am)
RANDOM DUDE WALKING BEHIND ME: You got strong legs. You got strong legs and strong calves. And you walk well on those strong legs.
ME: Thank ... you?

-

ME: (spacing out as I walk to the subway, and whistling a tune)
RANDOM MAN ON STOOP: Hey, this girl is whistling! (wolf-whistles)
ME: (hurries by)
RANDOM MAN ON STOOP: (continues to wolf-whistle until I am out of earshot)

-
ME: (waiting for the light to change, eating a peach purchased from a street fruit stand)
RANDOM MAN NEXT TO ME: (mimes fellatio until I notice, then gives a salacious grin)
ME: (hurries off)

Also: I get many, many, many helloes and good mornings. And waves. And nods. And predatory gazes.

It's not that I mind the attention all the time - it's kind of flattering, especially if I'm feeling insecure. But when I'm in a bad mood, and the gazes are particularly vulpine, it makes me feel really vulnerable - especially if I'm alone at night or even in the evening. And even on a sunny day when I'm in good spirits, it's still kind of upsetting that I can't whistle or eat in public without provoking surrounding males. It's not that I'm even so attractive - it's just that I am well-endowed in the chest area. I watch them watch them as I walk by, and it's, frankly, kind of unsettling. And these are normal, baseline phenomena for any girl in her teens to mid-twenties in a pretty dress in New York. It's men in their twenties, sure, but it's also men in their sixties, and everyone in between. Well-dressed, poorly-dressed. I guess it's a bit shallow to focus on this/blog about it, but it's really kind of remarkable to me - and it's certainly an everyday phenomenon. Or rather, an *every* *day* phenomenon. And given that I overthink everything, I start pondering the phenomenology of it ... the philosophical dimensions ... the righteous-feminist-anger facet... etc.

I mean, philosophically, right, it's kind of interesting ... when I am in a positive mood I think: I am a young and fertile girl and I am in possession of what EVERYONE wants. Within my loins lies the key to the perpetuation of the human race, right? In a way, the nods and comments are a kind of tribute to that status. They're an expression of Man's desire to perpetuate himself, a primal outpouring of life-force, a whistle against oblivion. It's an obeisance - expression of the desire to give a libation. After all, fertility goddesses were the first kind. This is particularly evident in the case of the older men - they are telling me they're not ready to shuffle off the mortal coil yet, they can still appreciate my legs and shoulders, the mortal & effervescent beauty of youth. "Beauty is momentary in the mind,/the fitful tracing of a portal,/but in the flesh/it is immortal. ... So gardens die, their meek breath scenting/the cowl of winter, done repenting/so maidens die, to the auroral/celebration of a maiden's choral." (Wallace Stevens, "Peter Quince at the Clavier")

Feminist rage, though: I guess this part is self-evident. I would like to be able to walk down the street without the stares. It makes me feel lonely sometimes, and, well, not to toss around an overly tossed-around term, but objectified... like I'm being stripped of being anything but being a mobile body for appraisal. I am not walking on the street for your appraisal or approval. I am walking on the street to get to work. To pay for things while I am in college. Harvard, actually, not that you would ever know that. Or want to know that. Or care. Seriously, dudes? Go turn your predatory gaze on someone who gets paid to absorb it, on your computer screen. Let me alone, I'm tired and I schlepped in from New Jersey to get here.

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:14:55 GMT

It is time to make a bold statement in a bold and public venue which is nonetheless private enough ... because none of my real-life friends read it...

I hate religion.
I hate it with a passion. I dislike Orthodox Judaism fiercely. I dislike everything about it. I dislike its misogyny and general disenfranchisement of women; its barbarism; its ridiculous, minute laws; its xenophobia; its isolationism. Its hearkening back to a patriarchal tradition. Its hallowing of texts which are filled with violence. All my friends are religious and I can't seem to respect them enough to really consider whether I am putting the right forks in the right dishwasher, to not hold hands with my notreallyboyfriend outside the house, to care about turning light switches on and off on Saturday. To respect their views on halacha. My parents desperately want me to be religious. They force my poor not-boyfriend, visiting from California, to wear a kippah at all time in the house. They cry when I express my opinions. They want so badly for me to be good like my sisters.

I'M TIRED.
I'm SICK AND TIRED OF PRETENDING IN ANY WAY THAT I CARE ABOUT THESE THINGS. HERE IS MY COMING OUT STATEMENT. I EAT CHEESEBURGERS IN PUBLIC. I KISS BOYS. I TURN LIGHTS ON ON SATURDAY. I HAVE TRIED PORK AND SHRIMP, TOO. I DON'T CARE ABOUT LEVITICUS, AND I CARE LESS ABOUT THE TALMUD - BABYLONIAN AND JERUSALMITE - AND I DON'T CARE WHO KNOWS IT.

I HATE RELIGION.

I DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD.

NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT.

SO STOP TRYING TO MAKE ME.

I WILL TRY SOMEDAY TO RESPECT YOUR VIEWS BUT I AM PISSED OFF. SO PISSED OFF. AND I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE.

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:55:02 GMT

I am working in the Colorectal Surgery Department at Beth Israel hospital, being a research assistant for a resident's study. I got the job because one of the heads of the department is the dad of a very close friend, with the result that he wants to educate me (as does the resident I'm working for)... Thus, I carry around pamphlets like "A Patient's Guide to Colorectal Cancer", "Colon and Rectal Cancer: Treatment Guidelines for Patients," "Guide to Colorectal Cancer," etc.; in addition to various plays by Ionesco and Miller my purse is weighed down by "The AJCC Cancer Staging Handbook" and "Cancer: A Multidisciplinary Approach." If only my mentors knew how disappointing I was, however: I secretly think that most of the cancer terms I am learning sound like interplanetary royalty in trashy sci-fi novels. Like so:

"Prince Hartomatous climbed the biliary tree slowly, carefully, one hand on his laser, the other three clinging to the trunk; he *would* rescue his love, the fair space maiden Glioblastoma, if he had to die- or kill - to do it!"

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:01:14 GMT

So I'm back on my home continent - have been for three weeks now! It's unclear whether all this country-hopping has done me any good. What can someone like me possibly say to Jerusalem? To the somewhat impossible life its hot country?

But anyway, last week my family was in New Hampshire, up in the presidential range of the White Mountains- so, Mt. Jackson, Mt. Jefferson, etc., and Mt. Washington, the famous one. It was nice - my parents, younger sister, and older sister are very Outdoorsy and Like Hiking and Kayaking and Whatnot, so we wound up going on some eight-hour hikes, etc. Unfortunately, I am afraid of heights, which resulted in scenes like this:

(SETTING: The summit of Mt. Jackson or Jefferson or Clay or whatever. Dramatic granite rock-faces dappled with hardy lichens. TALIA is clinging to the rock with tremendous determination, attempting to find footholds with her eyes screwed shut. A steady stream of venomous muttering, interspersed with feeble supplications, issues forth from her.)

MOTHER: Talia, how about those hundred poems you memorized? How about reciting some of them?
FATHER, wryly: "As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..."
TALIA, gutturally, between LaMaze breaths: YOU CALL THIS A VALLEY?!?!

The mountains were, at any rate, deeply wooded, appealingly breastlike in shape, etc. Mostly I was astounded by all that febrile green and ALL that WATER. I have spent the past year living in a desert region, if you recall; the green season was about two weeks long, and then the ground returned to the color of parchment and you could see the hot beige flanks of Jordan for miles and miles. And in New Hampshire there is abundance upon abundance, massive falls, such that if they existed in Israel the greatest national park of all time would be erected to preserve them ... Israel's most famous waterfall/springs complex, Ein Gedi, is kind of tetchy comparatively, though it's probably sacreligious of me to say it. Oh, I don't know what to say, how to summarize this year of adventures. Many of them don't feel quite real.

Here is a short list of things that don't feel quite real that happened to me in Israel - it is difficult for me to substantiate them in a more elegant manner unfortunately:

-I went to a mystical festival on a mountain with 250,000 Jews, mostly ultra-Orthodox, at which they handed out slabs of kugel and there was tea and coffee coming out of faucets (separate feeding stations for men and women)
-at aforesaid festival I almost got bitten by a scorpion, but a benevolent Hasidic woman smashed it with her shoe as I sat there cluelessly
-when aforesaid festival was over, my companion and I attempted to catch a bus along with 10,000 other people, and didn't manage to leave the isolated mountain until seven in the morning...
-at which point I decided it was futile to take a bus south all the way to Jerusalem in order to go back north again, so I got off at the rest stop seven minutes outside of Afula which was half an hour on easy public transit with a plan of hitchhiking, but failed because it was by a busy highway, so wound up trekking for two hours over corn and pea fields in the burning sun and finally hitchhiking from the outskirts of town to the bus station - with a man whose jeep was filled with bales of barbed wire - and getting two deep gashes which have scarred ...
-I ascended the Temple Mount [yes, THAT Temple Mount] ... I ritually cleansed beforehand by dunking naked into a freshwater spring and saying a blessing, and I learned all of The Book of Lamentations on the bus ride into Jerusalem. Standing before the Dome of the Rock was a really intense experience.
-I went to Egypt ... I mean that doesn't actually qualify as "in Israel" but it was in the context of my year abroad. But yes. I went to Egypt, saw the Nile, rode upon it in a felucca boat, was inside a few pyramids, smoked hash on the roof of a hostel in Cairo, drank sugarcane juice in the village, was stalked by an Egyptian man who followed my sisters and I for half an hour, was generally harrassed by Egyptian men who were not used to seeing scandalous things like women's wrists and calves and hair - I must have been welcomed to Cairo at least a thousand times, in addition to the marriage proposals... bought Friday night dinner materials in the Egyptian souk, celebrated Shabbat there with my sisters and some Fulbright Fellows... rode a broken-down cab over the Sinai Desert and saw the sun rise over the Gulf of Aqba, against the cliffs of Saudi Arabia ...

ETC. DO YOU SEE WHY THIS YEAR IS DIFFICULT TO CHRONICLE IN NEAT, BITE-SIZED CHUNKS? IT IS SO SURREAL.

Last week an Arab-Israeli citizen of East Jerusalem hijacked a bulldozer and went down the main drag of West Jerusalem, Jaffa Street; he was apprehended and shot but three people were dead already and forty-two injured and four critically injured. And I spent so much time on that street in the past year you wouldn't believe it. Israel is the strangest country. I secretly want to go back a lot.

Later I will say more about the excellent boy from California who is an engineer.

four poems about living for a year in israel

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Mon, 26 May 2008 09:05:44 GMT

1.

The roofs of Adumim slant down to Azariya
in a welter of orange. Between them the cypresses
are dark and curved as commas.
Out of the blue sky newer
than anything in this place the light
is hot and whitens lips and eyes.

Framed like little movies
your eyes behind glasses,
your head against my breasts.
I clasp you there in a fever of sincere
motion. The flowers nod like drunks in Jerusalem,
nanny goats run through the streets. Jews dancing,
kneeling, sunflowers
at the side of the road.
Silence taut as a drumskin.
Monstrous hills with springs
at their feet. The sun comes down
to the wadi, bends its head,
waits for the parched pools to fill.

----------

2.

Into the hot night
we open our windows.
The wind wails from the desert
and pricks our arms.

From the mountains the ocean
seems sky and sky, ocean.
The palm trees are rustling
like pages in rows.
Green: the water in still pools,
small shrubs in the desert,
olive trees behind barbed wire.

In every park, a memorial.
On calves hot as candles you run from me swiftly
and stretch with thin shoulders to get back the ball
you've lost in the cypress,
so red, like a flower. The leaves fall around your hands
like a woman's hair. The birds you've disturbed
shoot high, getting higher,
curling big circles into the light.

---

3.

In rows, tail-to-tail, peacocks and their children
march under stars
gorged fat as mosquitoes.
Orion stares with his absent mouth open
and we stare back.
In the good storehouse of my soul
I am taking you in, small hands and curls.

The heat makes us blush,
fresh water and fig smells.
An old tank is buried, rusting, in the hill.
From its mouth spill white branches
covered in flowers.

The lights of Jordan
in the heat-hazed air waver,
like a curtain to be parted.
Your hands in the small light
of the lampposts are cupped up,
ready to catch rain
that isn't going to come.

---
4.

Memorial Day:
Ravens skim the yellow grass.
The wind is hot on the ground.
Atop the plastics factory the flag
falls at listless angles.

The siren comes on in a kibbutz graveyard
filled with the neat graves of its young sons.
A startled yattering of birds:
a cloud lifts off into the neighboring fields.
Cows and dogs bay from cramped throats.
All eyes are lowered. Hands clasped at backs.

Independence Day:
Jets fly in formation over Jerusalem.
Blooms of smoke from charcoal in the parks.
Hot blue, hot white, carnival colors.
We walk until the dusk
sets in, the desert chill returns.
The coffee houses open again.
We clasp hands,
wipe our mouths.
The stray cats under the jasmine
cry out coarse songs of greeting.

tinuviel8994@gmail.com — Wed, 21 May 2008 09:35:06 GMT

Dear Gang,

I don't think I'm good enough for the Big Time In Writing. For reals a la Cheever Bellow Roth Doctorow Et Alius.

THAT SUCKS.

Dejectedly,
Talia