Well, here I am, starting sentences with “Well,” and flooding them with commas.

I don’t even know how to continue that paragraph. Honestly, I need a purpose. After two years of business school, one incredibly wasted year of cultural studies, and three years of English literature, I am finally finishing one long chapter of moving from things to things, and starting another chapter of God-knows-what. After I have finished writing my last essay (on the representation of city life in Madame Bovary, L’Éducation sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pécuchet), I will be officially done.

What’s next? (Didn’t I just answer that question already?) I don’t know. Read More »

For some reason, the WordPress RSS feed has always been a huge pain, so I switched back (for the umpteenth time, or so) to FeedBurner. You can find it here.

Siri Hustvedt, in this year’s issue of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art (No. 49), has written an excellent piece on reading and, most importantly, remembering literature. From her observation that “[v]arious texts call for different [reading] strategies” (122), to the fact that we as readers often unconsciously imagine things in literary works that are not even to be found in the text itself (124), Hustvedt is spot-on.

I especially liked her example of a literary text coming to life in the reader’s mind (and, if it’s a good work, staying there):

I have vivid memories of some books that last in my consciousness. Novels often take pictorial form in my recollection; I see Emma Bovary running down a grassy hill on her way to the chemist’s shop, her cheeks flushed, her hair loosened by the wind. The grass, the cheeks, the hair, the wind are not in the text. I provided them. (122)

“After I write, I have nothing to say,” she said in an interview in the bar of the Lutetia Hotel on the Left Bank. “The commentary afterwards is superfluous. I write. And that’s enough.”

— Yasmina Reza.

Excellent New York Times article and “interview.”

“As it cost [Frédéric] very little to make extravagant resolutions …”

I’ve just decided to enter a new phase of being.

“I can never be angry with anyone who tries to kill me. I understand their point of view too well.”

Read More »

It’s a bit odd, isn’t it? [Backstage stress. Audience reactions. After-parties.] A [theatrical] life that will never end.
— Julie

It has been over a week since Heaven forfend! opened in Amsterdam. That first laugh, after months of stress, anticipation and rehearsing, turned out to be a golden moment, one I—and, I know for certain, the entire cast as well—will remember for the rest of my life.

After day three, the production had come to an end. We started out in February, last year, when Lenette Vlasman (who played the female lead) and I decided that we wanted to put on a play. Not knowing which play to perform, we picked a two-scene draft of a stage play I had started-and-stopped to write the year before, and, after I added a few extra scenes, presented it to the university for consideration. Well, I say we “presented it for consideration,” but in actually it was more a “this is the play we’re going to do, suck it up” kind of deal. Read More »