negative capability
I've been popping in and out of bookstores all week, largely because I am convinced that everyone else here is a more natural graduate student/literary scholar/critical thinker than me, and that I need to go out and do some secondary critical reading in order to repair the enormous gaps in my knowledge and not sound like a total boob in class—today, for instance, I think I said some boobish things. A side discovery has been that out of the nearly dozen bookstores in Berkeley, not one carries the Southern Review or appears likely to do so in the future. It's all Glimmer Train and Tin House and weird anarchist social thought journals. So I keep going to the magazine rack and discovering that, shockingly, I'm not famous yet. I did leave one of my contributor's copies in the English department lounge, thinking that bored grad students might pick it up—come on, guys, it's easier than Julia Kristeva! Meanwhile Lauren accidentally gets into ZYZZYVA.
The money is going. I'm not sure how I thought that I could live in the Bay Area and not bleed money from my ears and less delicate orifices, but it is disappearing at an alarming rate. And I'm not even being that irresponsible, mom, it's just that Andronico's wants $4.50 for a little bag of granola. I'm going to have to get on the Steve Marlowe All-Rice Diet soon. Chris mentioned the other day that everyone here is working some job they're indifferent about while waiting for their big break in another venue; in that sense I certainly shouldn't complain about trying to attend school and finish the book at the same time; but most day jobs don't pay a salary of negative eleven thousand dollars a semester. Christ, what am I doing to myself?
