Friday, March 24, 2006

morning happening

There's something wonderful about the confluence of maintream pop culture and over-edified acadmedic intellectualism that I represent right now. I'm working at the coffee shop with my laptop on the counter. Eve's "Let me blow ya mind" is playing on the stereo, I can't help but bob my head and shake my tush, even if it is stuck on a chair as I read Proust et les signes (Gilles Deleuze). I'm working on my introduction, and now I'm singing along to Phife, "You see you, your career is done like Johnny Carson's . . . "

Hope y'all are having a good day.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Morning peregrinations

"The job facing the cultural intellectual is therefore not accept the politics of identity as given, but to show how all representations are constructed, for what purpose, by whom, and with what components. . . . Every society and official tradition defends itself against interferences with its sanctioned narratives; over time, these acquire an almost theological status, with founding heroes, cherished ideas and values, national allegories having an estimable effect in cultural and political life."
—Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

[cited by Cyraina Johson-Roullier in the epigraph to her book Reading on the Edge: Exiles, modernities, and cultural transformation in Proust, Joyce, and Baldwin]

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

The sun is shining

In my mind. I slept well last night and am heading into the home stretch before the playoffs. I'll be handing in a draft this upcoming Monday. After that, it's a whole lot of finessing and tweaking, but no more big chunks of writing. I've taken to listening to Daft Punk, Basement Jax and the like while editing my chapters. This may have to be changed as I get to more substantive edits, but for now it's like a party on my keyboard. I combined my chapters into one document for the first time last night: 57 pages. Actually, I spoke too soon about the no more big chunks of writing part, I still have an intro and conclusion to write which will probably bring my page total up 80 or so pages. I want every sentence to be to the point. I want a concise but elegant argument. Editing over the next month will probably (hopefully) bring me down to 65–70 pages, which would make me happy. While my project could easily be turned into a book, I don't think the issues I've managed to address warrant much more than 65 pages. In some instances I've included extra examples of identical or similar phenomena, which well good for argument's sake, create unneccesary repetition. I will probably relegate many of those to footnotes. Anyways, it goes well is the point. I also got a presentation out of the way yesterday which went very well, and got my Logic mid-term back, which I came oh so close to aceing. Hopefully that means I won't have to spend endless hours on natural deduction anymore. It seems like most of the course from here on out is an expansion of the ground we've already established. Yesterday we added the backwards "E" ("there exists") and the upside down "A" ("for every"). Such fun.

Love Ev

Saturday, March 18, 2006

"Et en effet les femmes qu'on n'aime plus et qu'on rencontre après des années, n'y a-t-il pas entre elles et vous la mort, tout aussi bien que si elles n'étaient plus de ce monde, puisque le fait que notre amour n'existe plus fait de celles qu'elles étaient alors, ou de celui que nous étions, des morts?"

["And in effect the women whom we no longer love and who we encounter years later, is there not, between them and you, death, just as if they were not of this world anymore, since the fact that our love exists no more makes of those who they were, or of them who we were, dead?"]

Friday, March 17, 2006

I hate you thesis

Such bombast is rarely true. For example, I don't ?????? as I find it hard to hate anyone or anything I don't personally know. If I were to say about someone I know, "I hate you" (I haven't done so since I was wee tyke), it would be just as much an expression of my affection for that person as my displeasure. Why? Because in that context, "I hate you" would likely be a reaction to an offense I felt was caused by someone I cared about. For people I don't know, in whom I have nothing invested, hate isn't worth the effort. So, I don't really hate my thesis (indeed, I've had a lot of fun working on it today), but it is St. Patrick's day and I am still working on it, so, "I hate you thesis." I should be out at a bar smugly making derisive comments about green beer while I sip my creamy nitro pumped Irish brew, drinking Irish car bombs, taking my yearly oppurtunity to do the frat-boy thing and say "kiss me 'cause I'm Irish". Of course, I'm not really Irish, except by adoption, but I think my Scottish and Welsh heritage gives me due claim to patriotic revelry on this day of Irish pride. You see, as a descendant of two parts of the subjugated Celts, I feel a kindred link to my Irish brethren, and the literary critic in me might say that my positive presence implies my absent brother, but then I might get kicked out of the bar, so I'll just have a few shots of Redbreast and order another pint of Kilkenny. Moreover, we Scots and Welshman have nary a holiday to call our own. There is the undercelebrated Robbie Burns day (January 25th) for the Scots among us, but few of us actually like Haggis, and too many people don't enjoy whiskey.

All I have to console me is my pathetic can of Rockstar and a cold burrito. I hate you thesis.

(Oh, and I have Cat Power, but I should probably stop listening to it as it brings me to tears.)

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

:)

I love natural deduction. Like a nice challenging crossword in a Sunday afternoon, it brings a certain playful pleasure and allows me to ignore the rest of the world for a little bit (my thesis).

Appalled

I'm generally not appalled very often. Perhaps I should be. So much of what passes for democracy and the defense of liberty in this country is appalling, but it doesn't surprise me and so I forget to feel appalled. Rarely do I every find music appallingly offensive. But yesterday, while playing pool, some adolescent freshman put on the song I Like It When the Strippers Cry by the Bloodhound Gang. I somehow missed the Bloodhound Gang growing up, perhaps because I was only about 12 when they made it big. My god. In other appalling news, I continue to unearth mounds of publish drivel under the guise of literary criticism. I can only hope that I am not adding to the pile.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Chapter 3 begins

"To understand a metaphor is by its very nature to decide whether to join the metaphorist or reject him, and that is simultaneously to decide either to be shaped in the shape his metaphor require or to resist." (Booth, Wayne C. "Metaphor as Rhetoric" in On Metaphor ed. Sheldon Sacks. 63)