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I cut my teeth as a literature reading junior on William S. Burroughs. Burroughs was, among other things, a great writer of satire. His satire always creeped up in these oblique quasi-parable/allegories. In any case, my writing notebook has been laying on my floor for the last few weeks by my chair. I was reading Society of the Spectacle last night when I picked the notebook up and wrote down what amounted to "Homeless people are so ethical today." The gag of what I wrote was that the story had nothing to do with homeless people in the conventional sense at all. Rather it was a satire about a family who would rather be homeless than live in the house built for them by "illegial aliens." I really wanted to write something about this email forward my wife received from her friend who sends (from our perspective, well maybe from any perspective) questionable email forwards. I've also been turning over the beer story in my mind. But more on that some other time. I may put the story up here since it is not that long. By the end of writing it, however, I felt very ambivalent about it. You see (always beware a sentence beginning with "you see") the point would seem to be that this family's act of "resistance" was harmful, even ridiculous. I tried to show how these people so clearly misperceived their situation. But what situation? I found this hard to define. This reading would represent the kind of entropic movement that most satire (I think) exhibits. But in another way what the story (which of course you can't read right now) laments is how far fetched it is that anyone would actually go to such lengths to resist something. Well, these are just things that are on my mind when I should be doing things like, oh, studying for oral exams and so on...
I'm feeling quite bad about myself at the moment. I've stayed up too late wasting time. Tonight was the first Italian class taken in preparation for the summer trip to Italy. This has made my day into a 12 hour learning extravaganza. I know that I am going to be tired tomorrow. I called and cancelled my doctors appointment in the morning because the thought or huffing up and down Chicago Ave. all day fills me with horror. Meanwhile, there is a backlog of reading piling up for Friday. Least of this reading includes the gazillion poems that I am supposed to have read in order to teach them. Also, my prof for Afterlife of Marxism suggested an extra session for grad students (even though it became an open invitation) for which we are supposed to read Society of the Spectacle. Now this little treatise is quite complicated because it is so enigmatic. It deals with the organization of the economy and society into images that produce or incite desire. There is a somewhat well known French philosopher coming to campus. This requires reading as well. There is no worse feeling that staring dumbly at the people sitting around you at a talk hoping they have hung on to a thread of the paper long enough to say something. All of these pressures have to do with the pressure I am putting on myself to "professionalize." This basically refers to the process of turning your will into laffy taffy (not the rump shaking kind though). There are stupid jokes involved in this process. Basically it means running around campus and sitting in ill lit corners of the university frantically reading materials that are too dense to be read with your back up against the wall (this reminds me of an article in the Times I saw about Airbus' plans for standing room only seats on planes: instead of groundlings of the old theatres I guess they'll have to be called "airlings." Why don't they just develop enormous ziplock bags and sling shots and just hurl people across time and space?). Oh and I'm supposed to be studying for oral exams. Right now I'm racing through Woman in White by Collins. Its a lovely novel (fortunately I read it before). But now that I've learned my committee is going to be comprised of two profs I barely know and one who has a disarming propensity to be simultaneously hot and cold. Needless to say, I'm a bit concerned. Everyone says that I will do fine on the exams. Surely I will. I have experience since January, however, a recurrent feeling that I cannot retain information in my brain. It is as if some thrifty shop mechanic went into my skull with a diamond bladed grinder and just made my brain resemble the chicago bean. (Note: I realize that link is a bit overkill in so far as it is meant to show/reveal what the bean is, but I digress...). BAsically, my complaint boils down to the genre of the "grad student's lament." There is nothing new to this. Only now it is my turn to be jostled down the gauntlet of self-doubt, inscrutable demands, and pressure.
I often find myself overwhelmed by the sheer multitudes of people I encounter whilst scanning the internet. I particularly find flickr unnerving. How does one account for the multiplicity and plurality of bodies and moments and places? I guess this is a case of digital voyeurism gone bad (Zizek says that no real encounters can take place in cyberspace, hence the slogan that appears on my cell phone "No sex please we're digital"). After all what could be more unsettling than to think that you are leisurely peering into the intimate recesses of some stranger's existence only to find yourself confronting the meaningless facticity of your own life?
I should be reading Paradise Lost right now. Instead I am distracting myself on the computer. I have been trying to break this habit of late. I have been mostly successful. It is astonishing how much interest one can take in the flat surface of the internet. I never really learn anything interesting online. The internet really is a non-event. A perpetual revolution of the same. Yet I still stare away. Back in the pre-Internet days I used to spend many hours reading my CD-ROM Encarta encyclopedia (of course I used to spend many hours reading, writing, and making mix tape covers, ie I used my time creatively). Then, at least, I learned something. The internet is sometimes just too hyperactive for my already hyperactive state of mind. In any case, I have been listening to an excellent album, Suicide's 1977 eponymous debut. I have known about this album since high school. At that time I purchased the excellently titled album, Some Girls Wander by Mistake, a collection of early singles and B-sides by the Sisters of Mercy. Andrew Eldritch mentions in the liner notes being enamoured with Suicide. Now, Denver had/has a great record store downtown called Waxtrax (many a weekend pilgrimage on the 0 bus that shot down Broadway were made to Waxtrax in those days. During the summer, I would ride with mom to her job, pick up the bus and spend the day downtown, going into thrift stores, sitting at the Market (back in those days the cafe was split into two halves, one smoking and the other non-smoking), walking around alleyways; quite fantastic days those were). You just couldn't find Suicide albums back then (or at least I couldn't and that was before Amazon etc. I often feel that pop culture became too hyper-intense with the internet, no longer does one have the thrill of the collector upon the experience "stumbling" upon something, even though I have the nifty "Stumble-Upon" plug-in installed on my computer). In any case, Mute re-released the album in 2000 (who has populated by collection of CDs with everything from Throbbing Gristle to Einsturzende Neubauten (yes, I was an industrial-head back in the day). Anyhoo, the Suicide album is very nice, a kind of affect-less sublime sort of affair (work out the paradox).
I know that I have reached my limit when I begin dreaming up projects, particularly when I am reading. I spent a good part of last night reading Paradise Lost thinking about an idea for a website called "Learninglists." See, in another class (ie not the Milton one), we are reading bits from Deleuze's Cinema I and II. Deleuze has interesting things to say about Westerns, particularly how they take place in a milieu and how they involve binomials: structures of anticipating the other and so on. I've also been quite obsessed with Joss Wheedon's amazing (now defunct, damn you Fox!) TV show, Firefly which has much to do with Westerns. So, I have the thought: I would like to learn about Westerns. But how? You see reading a book about it would be fine, but books are often argumentative (presenting a certain position in relation to other positions) rather than pedagogical (presenting how one arrives at certain positions and why). I want a list of 5-10 excellent Westerns that exhibit some kind of formal or thematic development and ruminate on them. Where does one find such a list? Enter my idea. A website with various "tutorials" or "learning exercises" in form of lists of whatever (books, movies, and so on) with accompanying commentary, pointing out key features, posing questions and so on.
I also find that when I have hit my intake threshold for information, I begin to daydream about writing. Of course, I often find when I read new theory (Deleuze) I work through it by imagining it in terms of characters and stories (this probably makes me a better creative writer than critic). In any case, I have often thought that since I cannot complete my "Cora" novel, also known as "Hudson" I should just start scanning every scrap of paper that has gone into making it over the last 5-6 years and just put on-line. I don't know what good this would do other than constitute an archive of failure. I also think about my "zeppelin" story that I have been ruminating over for a few years now. Unfortunatley, the more pressing task at hand is to interpolate Bleak House, read Paradise Lost and Mille Plateaux, and not lose my mind...
I have expended much paranoid energy on my preparation for the oral exams at the end of May. I constantly, restlessly, examine myself. Endlessly, I wonder if I am preparing the right material, thinking the right thoughts. What makes academic work so painful and frustrating though, is the way it is always motivated by a negation of the negation. You come to realize that the moments of harrowing despair and desolation, far from proving that you are doing it wrong, actually means you are doing it right. Alas, you cannot outwit the cunning of reason. Oh, vanitas vanitatum!
