January 11, 2004

I gave Heather no cactuses, street signs, or other gifts of darkness on her birthday. By the time I made my way uptown most shops were closed, and as I found out two days ago, street signs are impossible to remove without help. So I got her a neutered rose, since the sellers of roses conscientiously remove all the lovely thorns. O Rose, thou art sick!

Feeling hungry, four of us took a cold walk to the Rude Native bistro, a place that tastefully borrowed African imagery to create a pretentious space for white people. We ate and warmed ourselves, and then savagely fought over murderous ideas. Ironically, we celebrated Heather’s birthday by screaming at her and telling her that her ideas suck.

After dinner we moved from high society to the line in front of Phil’s where we froze for half an hour before deciding to go away. It was a night of aimless and beautiful drifting. At some point I remember thinking that it’s relatively hard to keep things simple, open, and beautiful — important questions get no responses and situations are easily muddled beyond belief.

Shrish made me tea at three in the morning and it made me feel better. In odd ways, last night’s outing was the end of my social self. I’m swamped with projects from now until April — I’m not quite sure how I’m going to pull everything off.

This weekend I started to seriously re-evaluate my research interests, in light of a New York Times article which exquisitely summarizes the idea that’s been troubling me for ages.

Two years ago I became interested in mapping out literature and tracing the subtle interactions between texts, but it seems that someone is already exploring this idea. According to the New York Times, Professor Moretti sees the whole body of literature as an organic and evolving whole that has to be dissected with a computer.

It was this perspective I was trying to articulate a while back, but I managed to lose my way. Thanks to the article, I’m again interested in the possibility of creating a “genome map” of literature to explore the evolution of the word. I’m eager to see how far Moretti got, and what new avenues are now open.

So let me forget about silliness, and dance with ideas once more.