Tolentino, Jia. Trick Mirror. New York: Random House, 2019.
8/6/20 – 8/9/20. Transcribed 8/20/20.
- (8/7/20) Good (but great?)
- I like Anastasia Steele as dark doppelgänger of Bella (Twilight). Wait not even dark, just erotic.
- I admire the athleisure essay (it was the one split from yesterday to today). I admire the way she splices that all together, the blend. Noted that in the first essay too when she said: five things. Then noticed one of them much later but without her explicitly being like (exquisitely, I though — see? aural? See journal entry). The salad the barre the athleisure.
- (8/11/20) I have to say though, there is something about her that I do not like or do not want to like or maybe want to like but can’t. Cool girl hot girl Asian girl.
- (xi) “I began to realize that all my life I’ve ben leaving myself breadcrumbs. It didn’t matter that I didn’t always know what I was walking toward. It was worthwhile, I told myself, just trying to see clearly, even if it took me years to understand what I was trying to see.”
- (100) QUoting Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik:
hush hush the sea-soft night is aswim
with wrinklesquirm creatures
listen (!)
to them move smooth in the moistly dark
here in the whisperwarm wet
- (113) Quoting Rebecca Solnit: “There is no good answer to being a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question…. “It is a literary statement of purpose, and later, Slnit wonders if the reduction of women to their domestic decisions is, effectively, a literary problem..”
- (121) Radically tedious
- From I love Dick: “Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement?’ she asks him, explaining her desire to be a ‘female monster.’”
- (125) Paraphrasing Adriana Caverero: Identity is not something we innately possess but something we understand through narratives provided to us by others. “SHe writes about a scene in The Odyssey where Ulysses sits incognito int he court o the Phaeacians, listening got the blind man sing about the Trojan War. Having never heard his own life articulated by another person, Ulysses starts to weep. Hannah Arendt called this moment, ‘poetically speaking,’ the beginning of history: Ulysses ‘has never wet before, and certainly not when what he is no hearing actually happened. Only when he hears the story does he become fully aware of his significance. Caverro writes,’The story told by an ‘other’ finally revealed his own identity. And he, dressed in his amagnificent purple tunic, breaks down and cries.”
- (143) “‘The safest road to Hell is the gradual one,’ Screwtape reminds Wormood, ‘the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.’ WHen I first came across that sentence, I felt like somebody wy was reading my palm.”
- (144) Sir Alister Hardy’s database of narratives … Revelations of Divine Love. Religious ecstatsy. Woman. Aeon.
- “Hardy’s archive is, tehcnically, a compendium of religious expereices — in Aeon, Jules Evans calls it a crowdscources Bible.”
- Aeon.
- (278-9) Left eh Peace Corps early. Cooked a lot. Played role of wife. She also lived at home after college. “At the time, I didn’t technically need a job right away. Andrew had gotten a full scholarship to Rice, and so his parents paid his — now our — $500 rent, giving him the money they had saved to subsidize grad school tutition. This year of free rent was transformative, as free rent tends to be. But I was terrified of what it meant to depend on someone else’s money. I was afraid of making myself useful through sex and dinner. I spent hours every day on Craigslist looking for work and, int he process, discovered lifestyle blogs, wedding blogs — websites that overwhelmed me with despair. I stopped cobbling together grant-writing gigs and started ‘helping ‘ rich kids with their college application essays , which effectively meant writing them. Propping up the class system paid terrifically, and with this ill-gotten cash, I bought myself a sense of permission. I wrote some short stories and got into Michigan’s MFA program. “