Oh Oh Oh Oberlin

So, I'm back at school, overwhelmed with such a winter and such a state. I feel less alone than I have in a very long time, and yet, I can tell I'm a different person from when I left. In a good way, though. But it's still a strange feeling. I feel like I'm doing things I could have never been capable of, even if I had been willing to do them in the past. I'm glad I'm living life in such a way that makes me become more like what I want to be, and even more, what I've always felt I'm supposed to become. Going to school at Oberlin has certainly been part of this.

Currently it's Winter Term, so the campus is bare--but that's part of the beauty of it. Not to mention, I'm not overwhelmed with billions of people around me. In Paris there were many people too, but as it's a city (and especially Paris) people keep to themselves there. I feel like I'd gotten so good at being alone that I need to learn a way to cultivate that skill, to be happy being alone, in a way. But I'm also happy to be meeting many people for lunch tomorrow, at Java Zone.

All this might seem irrelevant, but it's very relevant to my writing, so I guess that's why I'm posting it here. A book of places to publish to should be showing up in the mail soon, so some EXTRA EXTRAs will be popping up soon here. My writing projects have come to a halt, with the unexpected culture shock, as well as other reasons. My thoughts are preoccupied, but, not to worry friends, at least I am still reading (even if what I am reading is in French and I have once again halted reading Middlemarch).

The world is quite bizarre sometimes. I'm listening to Sufjan Stevens, and that helps. But I'm happy, be sure of that. I'm happy.

Everything!

First of all! I've got so many papers, papers, papers! Oh mon dieu! So I'm really busy with that...so I can only dream, presently, of doing any writing of my own. Either way I hope to submit some stuff before I leave Paris. I'm leaving in less than a week!

Projects I've really had the urge to work on lately:
-Botany story (reading the Modiano has given me a good way of thinking about structure when it's got to do with self-discovery and being adventuresome, yet intelligent.)
-Finishing up the short story collection of Los Angeles/ Strange English. It's almost finished! So I should make a point of doing that before I leave for Uruguay, and if I don't finish it by then (which is likely), I should finish it in Uruguay. No ifs ands or buts because I have a lot of work starting in the Spring (with Honors!), and I would like to do some fun writing this winter, which does not mean finishing up stories and editing them but starting on totally new things! Like...
-Working on a short story project this Winter Term (on my own, not for credit) about a cafe in Paris. I'm thinking my reading in French (which is my real winter term project) should help with this.
-Sometime in my writing life: interviewing my grandmother for stories. I did this a while back, in high school, but I'd like to get my memory refreshed. Perhaps do something Duras-style, about photographs, or something like that. Hmm. Something to think about, anyway. Thanks to Isabel Allende for this idea, since every magical realism writer does this. And speaking of magical realism...
-finishing up the magical realism novella. I'd like to get that done this winter, too.

Reading Projects:
Finish reading Isabel Allende by end of Uruguay trip (because I'm still pretty behind on it).
Finish reading Middlemarch. I'm about halfway through. I want to have that finished by the end of Winter Term.
Winter Term project--reading a bunch of modern French writers.
Read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the original language (starting Winter Term, continuing during the year).
Get into a poet. I haven't done that in a while.

At this very moment, I am dancing to Mika and writing about the Algerian War. Yes!

Elisa

Honors, Papers, and Sleeping with Scarlett

So! I got accepted for Honors! I keep remembering it and it feels sooooo unreal! It was way scarier than any sort of place I've applied for publication, because, as opposed to just judging only my writing, people looking at my application were also judging my work ethic and my ability, and eventually, me. So I'll be workin' mah ass off next semester and the one after, especially since I'll be finishing up two majors. But I'll have a summer inbetween to work, too, if I need it. I'm going to be translating a book and then I'm going to be writing an Honors paper. Yikes! Michael and I can angst together, although his will probably be super-hard--he's going to Honors in philosophy.

Papers--I'm putting together currently a really intense paper on Marguerite Duras' The Lover and it's totally driving me crazy. I'm writing about something that I've found impossible to find in JStor. I'm a little scared that it might totally suck, but at the same time, it's a totally badass idea.

Sleeping with Scarlett is going well. I'm going to translate it into French to show the un-translability of things ultimately in a presentation for my conversation class. Oh, man. What a sad story. It's totally my goodbye to Paris, too...I can tell I'm really going to miss this place. Excerpt time:

“Oui,” I said, practicing the native language. “Let me just get my tie on.” I took out a green one from the fake wood drawers, where I kept a couple watches and some spare condoms.

“Real men don’t wear ties anymore,” she said, grabbing the tie from my hands and throwing it back in the drawer. After sex, we walked over to the nearby Metro stop and we took the eight line to Bastille. It was a little cafe she said she had come across, where people recognized her but weren’t rude and wouldn’t ask her for anything, except the three euros sixty for a hot chocolate. She ordered her usual chocolat chaud, and I ordered a kir d’alsace, some sweet wine.

“So I’m leaving tomorrow,” she said, sipping her chocolate slowly.

Work so far!

Okay, well, I finished part I of the magical realism novella much faster than I thought I would. My friend who is very picky about fiction she likes--and knows a lot about magical realism--read it and loved it. So that's a good sign! It's called The Beasts We Knew, and takes place from 1860s-1920s Spain and Connecticut, two quite different places. And there might be a short stop in England, but I'm not sure. So, I can send that off to Spiral on Monday. Alyssa's going to take a look at it, who has done lots of work in genre fiction, so that will be helpful, too.

Here's a little something from it (yes, I've been sucking at putting up excerpts lately, so I'm starting again):

I never believed any of those stories they told when I was younger, when I was intent on growing up, but suddenly, I was with child, and when I gave light to a baby boy, I knew that there was something within him that I could never let go. I was fifteen years old and being a mother had made me more beautiful. It doesn’t matter who the father was, only that I wasn’t one of those girls who made up stories about ghosts or gods. His father wasn’t human at all, and ghosts and gods as any Católica knows are very human, and that’s why people make them up, because all humanity wants is more and more of us. I never told anyone about his father, and whenever asked about it, I would give very human descriptions without giving any lies: big hands, strange smile, wouldn’t take no for an answer. They just smiled and looked at me like I was the monster.

Currently, I'm finishing up the short stories in the Los Angeles collection: Los Angeles, The Disease, and Sleeping with Scarlett. Today, Sleeping with Scarlett seems to be the biggest focus. I'm considering translating it into French (it takes place in Paris) for my conversation class, but, we'll see about that. It would be exciting to talk about Scarlett Johansson's body in French. Totallay. Duffy's great to listen to for working on this. Here's a little something from that, too:

“Oh,” she said in her low voice. “Oh,” she repeated. I couldn’t stand looking at her and walked away, fingering my pockets for a second cigarette. I was a cameraman. Moving things like this woman I walked away from shouldn’t be burning into my eyes the way she was. But the important thing is, that’s what she was doing. And that meant something. I headed for the doors as fast as I could and took a taxi home. The Paris sky, that meant something too.

I'm hoping to have all the Lost Angeles short story stuff finished by Sunday, so that I can start to focus on my new projects.

That is all!

Suddenly, everything around me is changing.

I'm becoming more competent at everything: reading, writing, organizing my time, dealing with writer's block and just writing, writing, writing, reading, reading. I think it's a couple things: (1) I'm really homesick, (2) I visited two museums this weekend and (3) getting more fluent in my other languages is having an astounding impact on my English.

It all started with the Centre Pompidou. As a result of said museum, I finally started on 'Sleeping with Scarlett,' a short story about beauty (and, yes, Scarlett Johansson) and just aesthetics in general (I would love to show it to a philosophy prof sometime who won't judge me for the popular icon use--or perhaps I will and change their mind). I also worked a little bit on 'The Disease,' which is a reaction to a kind-of-well-known short story a friend sent me a while ago--it involves a lesbian and an oxygen tank, and talks about love. And music. I also began work on a serial novella, that I would like to submit through my friend's Oberlin publication, Spiral (I may have spoken about this in my last post...). This novella involves a bunch of crazy stuff, like fate, incest, reputation, curses, love...anything you'd expect from a genre-type story that I write, especially when it's semi-magical realism, in French-thought, Spanish-thought, and English-thought (it takes place in Paris, Montevideo, and a small town in Connecticut).

Today I did some work on some poetry (tried at a sonnet--it's been a while!), reread some old stuff, and worked on some nonfiction that's really hard to get through--I ended up crying a little bit because that's what happens when I face my honest feelings about things. I also printed out the botany story, finally, so I can rewrite it, and the rewriting's going very well. My narrator has a more distinct voice now, and now that I know more what it ends like, I'm adding in little things to the beginning that show that he knows how it's going to end, too (because it's written like a confession). Best of all, this week I had been thinking, and today I finally picked up Benedetti's La Tregua. Finally. I think reading Allende has made more comfortable with my Spanish, and finally, I see the blaze of Benedetti's writing, its sharp beauty, its disturbing sorrow. I'm going to apply to translate that book--if not also others--for an Honors project. He's not translated in English. And I know, I know, oh God, I know that he will be so beautiful in this language.

My goal in all this: Be respectable. Grow up as a writer. Honor literature and language, but most of all...the so many billion ways that humanity can experience itself--in other words, honor life. If I do that, even if I'm not famous, etc, then I will find my life worthwhile. Not just as a writer, but as myself.

PS- I really, really miss philosophy classes.

How Everything Goes, Presently

So, I guess I'm going to post again on how is everything is going. Sorry about the lack of entries, but after all, I am in Paris! While my quinoa cooks, I'm going to type up a little bit about how everything goes.

I finished my magical realism short story, so now my projects I'm working on intensely are buffing up the botany story, a magical realism novella in sections (that I will submit to the genre magazine at school, Spiral), and anything else that I happen to stumble upon. Here's an excerpt from the story, originally titled Tunnel of Love (after the Dire Straits song), currently titled Strange English:

I’m sitting in the sand, the Oregon shore, that ocean, the tips of your fingers, everything blue, you open your mouth to say something, and I watch your eyes flashing devotion, but those words still within you are something else, that I can only hear now, as this man gasps and grunts, the way no American boy would dare to do, with your thin bones and light hair, all men like you can do is run, dissipating slowly into air. It all ends as I look into your eyes, emptier than the others I have seen, and this man in front of me, bellows, whispers in anguish, the name of a city which I will later learn, in one of our few last meetings at the coffee shop on Baker Street, and is as split as his heart and as our lives, a blue body of water running through, like a sculptor’s cut, like a ruptured front line.

That's not a very magically realistic part--there's a part with ghosts, and that's the part--but, I really like the trick with tenses I do, which doesn't make much sense here, but does in the context of the rest of the story.

As for reading, I read Colette's Cheri and Camus' The Stranger for my English class recently, I finished an *abridged* version of La Bete Humaine in French for my class (because it's really, really long), and I'm now working on Bonjour tristesse by Francoise Sagan, also in French. I finished Swann's Way pretty recently as well, in English. I'm currently reading Allende's La casa de los espiritus in Spanish, and it's absolutely amazing, and Benedetti's La Tregua is next. As for English reading on my own, I'm a little bit behind. But it's probably a good thing to do some work in my other languages, if I wanted to keep them in good quality.

I e-mailed Prof. Faber and he agreed to work on a translation project with me over the summer, so that's very exciting! I need to pick a poet I enjoy. I should head to a bookstore soon and delve.

I've been listening to Cat Stevens and Billy Joel a lot lately. It's very uplifting. I'm in a really good mood lately, even if I seem to be constantly coughing. I'm going to be doing some grunge work on the botany story TONIGHT and TOMORROW because I decided to make my characters better people so I have to change the plot a little bit.

And that is that, presently!

Paris!

Now that I'm in Paris, my mind has cleared for new types of writing. Turns out none of my Sept. 1 contest are actually viable (they all have word limits that I don't make in any of my current stories, or have changed their deadlines to later), so that's good because I don't have to stress out about them and can concentrate on my writing. I've made My Dearest Tomcat into a personal project (a way to practice writing that I won't try to publish), but I'm sure it will have its own effects on the rest of my writing. So, that one's easy to work on because I don't have any publishing deadlines. So, I'm working on the same old projects:

-Benedetti poetry translations
-botany story
-short stories in Los Angeles
-France short stories
-read La Tregua for Benedetti novel translation

I might add more on as the semester continues. It's a really great environment, because as France attracts many artists, people here are very artistic and thoughtful! Yay! I'm very excited about writing here.

Los Angeles, etc

I finished writing the Los Angeles story (yay!), and editing it, as well, so I'm going to be working on finishing up a couple more stories (Devil's Den, and another one I started about a man with an oxygen tank (it's from the point of view of a lesbian?)) I think after these two, I should try to put together a collection. I'm going to be writing a story about/in Prague (I'm there now), but we'll see if that goes into this collection or not. I guess it depends on how the short stories develop while I'm in Paris--if they're *all* Europe-oriented, I'll put the Prague story in there. If they're all Paris-oriented, however, I'll put the Prague story into the Los Angeles collection. I'll be working, in Paris, on My Dearest Tomcat (which I might change to Mon Chere Ohio?), and on the botany story. I'm going to go now, to do some handwritten work on one of the three stories I need to work on.