S Beck

Took no. 3 to kindergarten this morning. We were late, so I just threw on a sweater and a coat, still wearing the sweatpants without underwear I had slept in.

On the way back a policeman calls me over, insisting that I jaywalk to other side.

Two cops in the copcar, and the partner demands my id.

Cop: "What are you doing?"

SB: "Just took my daughter to kindergarten"

Cop: "Where you talking to some little girls?"

SB: "Didn't talk to anybody... except in the kindergarten"

Cop buttons up window of copcar, talks on cop radio. Probably reading in my i.d.

Then he unrolls the window and gives me back my i.d.

And of course, the whole time I am thinking:

It's not a crime not to wear underwear, is it?

Tomorrow somebody else is taking her... And I am wearing underwear whenever i leave the apartment.

One no more puts one's misfortunes into a book than one puts a model on the canvas; one is inspired by them, and they remain what they are.

--Jean-Paul Sartre, "Writing for One's Age," in What is Literature.

What was this something called Go? As death was approaching, the novelist Naoki Sanjūgo wrote what was for him a curiosity, an autobiographical story called 'I.' He said that he envied the Go player. 'If one chooses to look upon Go as valueless,' he said, 'then absolutely valueless it is; and if one chooses to look upon it as a thing of value, then a thing of absolute value it is.'

--Yasunari Kawabata, The Master of Go

Hope deceiving
Hope destroying
Hope despairing
Hope defaming
Hope defecting
Hope depoping
Hope decocting
flock democting
bock restockting
grooble nort nie.

We will meet at noon, in a café just outside the campus gates.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not -- this is the beginning of writing.
-- Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

Is that a tone of exasperation when she sees my name on her caller ID?

Did she make a date with friends "for the evening" so that we could see each other only during the day, on campus?

I can't try to see things for her perspective, because from her perspective, she has no reason to see me at all.

Need to get away from the computer, so that I stop checking every five minutes whether she has emailed me

I reread her email, her response to the umbrella line.
Really it gives me much less hope than I had thought.

What does it mean, that in the 12 days since she came to my office, she hasn't called me once? We have spoken twice, and once at length, but both times I was the one calling.

אני צריך לעקור מליבי כל שמץ של כמיהה למונוגמיה

I have to root out from my heart any remanent of longing for monogamy.

She's going to meet me.
She's going to meet me.

Sing it to the tune from Madame Bovary
I have a lover. I have a lover.

When she came to my office she brought me a translation of Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties.

She said it was time they I learned to appreciate Japanese literature beyond Murikami, whom she thought third-rate.

Yesterday I started reading it. Literature, desire, and death -- we are communicating on the same wavelength, beyond a doubt.

So why hasn't she responded to my email asking her out for Thursday?

The umbrella line worked.
But maybe I shouldn't have responded to her email by asking her out for Thursday

I should have shut up and taken your umbrella.

I should have taken your umbrella and shut up.

He measures his work by its value for seducing women.
Since 1994 he hasn't accomplished much.

She: I may bother you after I read some Nietzsche.

He: I may bother you, but for reasons that are less academic.

She: It depends on what the reasons are. My personal life is very complicated right now.

He thinks: Not as complicated as mine. I have a wife and four kids.

He thinks: If you thought dating was hard when you were single, just wait until you're married.

Another item that won't help in my quest to escape my obsession with that student is Tolstoy's The Devil, which I just had to read in order to grade a paper.


Hopefully writing about my crushes will be more cathartic than my usual method, telling my wife...

Reading Roland Barth on love is a truly terrible way to stop obsessing about the student from last year who showed up in my office on Thursday to chat and bring me a book.