Citational: from J. Hillis Miller's The Ethics of Reading. Also other things.

It is impossible to get outside the limits of language by means of language. Everything we reach that seems to be outside language, for example sensation and perception, turns out to be more language. To live is to read, or rather to commit again and again the failure to read which is the human lot. We are hard at work trying to fulfill the impossible task of reading from the moment we are born until the moment we die. We struggle to read from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we fall asleep at night, and what are our dreams but more lessons in the pain of the impossibility of reading, or rather in the pain of having no way whatsoever of knowing whether or not we may have in our discursive wanderings and aberrancies stumbled by accident on the right reading?

...there's something almost comforting about old-school deconstruction on a grey Saturday afternoon.

Yeah, so. It's been awhile. I guess the short version goes something like this: there was the week where all I did was sleep and do the minimum I needed to do to get through teaching. And then got the stomach flu. And then there were some more disappointments, and a large-scale freakout about my brother's wedding, but more about the fact of my attending by myself and feeling like an enormous loser for it. But then snapping out and finishing the damn prospectus, save for another nip and tuck revision and possibly the addition of a paragraph.

There was the night The Poet and I went to Hoboken and made up stories about alternate lives for ourselves. There was the brunch I went to where I ended up having one of those conversations where some dude who is not a literary scholar tries to tell me how to do my job as a literary scholar and you can tell that he mostly feels authorized to do it because he's a dude and you're not. Extra bonus points for his being the older brother of someone who I had a very awkward night with at one of the absolute low points of last December. Though I don't think he knew that.


I did midday zazen at the Village Zendo last Wednesday. Just an hour of sitting. Amazing. I'm going to try to make that a weekly thing.

And today I've been reading, mostly. Which has kind of been nice, though not as nice as seeing J. Who I haven't seen for like two weeks. Again. But how do I tell him that he needs to work harder to get me away from The Poet?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of being kind to oneself. And about how much of what I allow to pass as a kindness to myself (often in the form of drinking, several hours at a time of stupid television, poor food choices) are really not kindnesses at all but indulgences that redouble my own reasons for being unkind to myself.

I've been having fun with my students. It has been amazingly fun teaching them a text that I love. At least the ones who are actually doing the work.

I bought the latest Bob Dylan album, Tell Tale Signs, off of iTunes a couple weeks ago. (An unusual event in my world.) It's amazing and you should download it immediately. I have been doing this thing where I listen to the version of "Most of the Time" that's on this album and then listening to the Sophie Zelmani cover from the Masked and Anonymous soundtrack right afterwards.

I got my travel zafu in the mail this week. It's basically a beach ball with a cloth cover. But it's kind of awesome. I'll also be bringing Xanax to Indiana with me because even though I'm not as actively stressed out by the wedding as I was last week at this time (and boy was I rocking the word vomit at this one party--I'm sure anyone who's seen me in the last ten days, my students included, is tired of me talking about hits), I still think it's better to be safe than drinking too much and saying something unintentionally nasty or angry.

I've been practicing with what it means to trust the present, to trust others, to trust myself. What I think made that midday zazen so great for me was that I realized, most of all, that I could trust my posture, that I could trust myself to know how to sit, that what I did at home was also what I was doing there.

And I'm trying to believe that I don't have to be my own worst enemy.

The aforementioned prospectus post

...which I can no longer afford to delay, now that I've finally read the last couple pages of "The Angel in the House." (Seriously, I don't know why more people don't read this poem. It's amazing in its ability to generate wtf? moments. I have a post about this up at the group blog where I use my own name, should anyone be interested.)

Okay.

I need to pick up the threads on my prospectus, which have been completely dropped since I crashed midweek. Before that, though, I was actually doing okay. I didn't do a lot of writing last week, but I did put in some intensive work on my bibliography, which mainly meant sorting out several stacks of files into piles that made sense--one stack for theory, one for general articles on the field (including both periodization and state of the field articles as well as ones that treat multiple authors or non-poetic texts) and finally, one for critical articles on individual poets. There's a lot on the bibliography that I will probably never look at, but I decided that it's easier to take things off the list than put them on there later on. And, for what it's worth, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of things I had looked at and did know about. (A lot of these particular files were from when I wrote the fake prospectus for a class in the spring of 2007.)

The bibliography thing also had the advantage of helping jog my memory about the state of the field. It's lucky for me that the big journal in my field published two issues devoted basically to self-reflection within the last five years, though I do wonder if the field is almost too-self-reflective to the point of being almost paralyzed. And in some ways, skimming through a couple of the articles (especially the ones that are calling for a greater attentiveness to language and performativity) helped me better understand the contribution that my article is going to make to the field and the kind of intervention that VIE was steering me towards. While I continue to see myself as a theorist more than a historicist, I've gotten to the point where I can deploy the historical strategically when I need to. And I'm beginning to think, too, that what I got in the habit of calling "historicism" (after The Professor) is probably closer to an untheorized materialism, the kind of scholarship that makes book reports from the archives. (I ran across a particularly egregious example of this recently, where the author was basically making a very basic argument about a certain poet, with the only real contribution being that s/he had OMG touched the book!) But I'm beginning to think, too, that in order to get anywhere, the field is going to have to get even more comfortable with explicitly theoretical gestures rather than crypto-theoretical arguments that attempt to erase their provenance. (I wish I could be more specific, but I can't totally do that here.) I think that my committee member who says that deconstruction has largely become an uncontroversial part of the tools of close reading; I'd say the same for gestures of attentiveness to historical context and the situatedness of the text. Where we go from there--as a field, as a profession, seems up for grabs.

It's possible that one of the reasons I've had such trouble getting the actual prospectus down on paper (as opposed to notes and paragraphs and sets of disjointed ideas) is that I was trying to start with the texts when I needed to start with the field. When I did the fake prospectus, I began with Tennyson, Arnold, and Wilde--now that it's for real, I realize that I may have to begin with the recent work in the field more generally. For some reason, this feels like a capitulation to...something: I mean, shouldn't my dissertation be coming directly out of the texts from day 1? There's a very specific place in Coleridge that sparked all of this: shouldn't my prospectus begin with that? I'm finding the answer to be no. What I realized when I was going through my files (especially those reflective issues of the journal in which I will soon be published) is that my thinking on this topic has always been directed, at least to a certain degree, towards making an intervention in the field. But I think my project makes more sense in that context. And that feels like a weird place to be. What I need to do today (one of the many things I need to do today) is to push back against that weirdness and just write the way it works. I think I'll be a lot better off when I get that down.

One of my other big realizations of early last week is that I've been a Victorianist all along, despite the forays into Romanticism. At least for dissertational purposes. I mean, I do still plan to talk a lot about Coleridge and a few others. But I don't feel compelled to talk a lot about, say, Shelley or Keats. (I managed to get through my orals with a Romanticism list that had no Keats on it.) On the other hand, I do still want to talk about things like the sublime, and I'm worried that there's going to be a huge time gap that I will need to somehow justify from a thematic perspective. Possibly by applying de Quincey. I'm suddenly aware of the ways that my interest in the Long Nineteenth Century is spread rather unevenly....I'm all about, say, the 1790s and the mid-1810s Coleridge. And then I don't really care about anything until the 1850s. I'm slowly inching into the 1860s and, with Augusta Webster, touching barely on the 1870s. And then there are several female poets of the late 1880s and 90s that I love but really can't justify writing about here. Ditto for Wilde. This leaves huge swaths of uncharted decades that are making me ever so slightly nervous. I may simply just have to atone for it all by promising to write my second book on the 1830s and 40s.

I've been walking around for several weeks saying that I'm going to write my chapters on concepts and themes rather than on a single poet or text. While I'm not going to discard that right away, I may do single-author chapter breakdowns. I can't really see past chapter 1 and whatever chapter the article becomes right now. And I'm not sure I'm really going to know what I'm writing about until I do the first chapter. This is a bit scary. But this is the point at which I should probably remind myself that the prospectus is less a document for planning the dissertation as it is the creation of a projected document that people would want to give you money to work on. Meaning that I don't necessarily have to write the dissertation that gets prospectused. If I can keep that in mind, I should be able to get it done fairly quickly, as I'm sort of frustratingly good at writing documents that predict interesting projects that I don't really intend to write. Of course, this makes me miserable later on, but it gets you through. And then I can go back to reading for a little while and perhaps coming up with an abstract or two.

I think I'm always looking for things in academic books that literary criticism is no longer able to deliver. And, as I begin my own project, it's possible that I'm beginning to realize the impossibility of my being able to live up to my own expectations.

On the plus side, the summer's article writing experiences seem to have had the effects of making me a more generous reader. Not in the uncritical "this is published so it must be good" way that I was when I started grad school, but in a way that nonetheless tempers the tendency to go into every article ready to rip it apart or be disappointed. That's probably a necessary stage to go through in grad school, and it's no doubt a side effect of certain seminar assignments, but in my case it was probably taken to more of an extreme because I was hanging around with The Professor so much. Cultivating a bit of generosity has, at least, begun to make my intellectual life a bit more rewarding.

I kind of just want to put off writing for another day and curl up with something old school like The Ethics of Reading, but I'm not going to.

Realization: my approach to my prospectus thus far has been plagued by the same problems as my approach to my personal improvement. Both of these projects have been undertaken with something less than the strategic organization that they require and as a result I've been wasting energy trying to think along too many different lines at once, forgetting what I already know, and having very little to show for the effort. I've also been worrying about the wrong things a lot of the time. I finally revisited the assignment sequence for the dissertation prospectus in our department's required course and realized the value of that kind of process and of at least revisiting it selectively to build on the work I completed a year and a half ago. Would that there were an assignment sheet for fixing one's life and not being all about the negative attention getting.

Anyway. Probably time to start working with the specifics that I can't post here. Either that or grading. (Shudder.)

Me vs. the Gothic

I'm beginning to think there's a common reason for some of the difficulties that I'm encountering with my two projects. (I think maybe I'll just start calling them the Victorian and the Romantic, though I've mentioned the specific authors / texts here frequently enough that it probably doesn't matter.) On the surface, they don't have a lot in common: the Victorian project has me reading books on live burial and playing around with what I can see of popular periodicals of the nineteenth century, while for the Romantic project I am mostly still treading water with philosophy--lots of Kant, some Hegel, and a smattering of more recent people like Nancy and Lyotard. (Derrida, as I was discussing with some faculty from my department last week, is oddly absent from both of my bibliographies right now, though I think that "No Apocalypse, Not Now" may end up having some relevance to the Victorian project.)

In both of these projects, however, I keep running up against The Gothic. And it's making things hard. The Gothic has always sort of skirted the edges of the work I do--last summer at this time I was working on an earlier version of the Romantic paper and it was centered around the theme of humiliation. I did a fair bit of coursework around early Romantic / late eighteenth century texts (particularly those by Godwin and Wollstonecraft) from the perspective of the discourse of sensibility, and the best thing I ever read in the last American lit class I took (more than three years ago now--it was my first year in grad school) was Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, which I still plan to teach and publish on someday. Dealing with these kinds of texts and just generally being someone who works on long nineteenth century literature means that I have to have a decent working knowledge / awareness of the Gothic and how it works.

But that doesn't mean, on the other hand, that I'm particularly interested in it. Okay, that sounds more horrible than I meant it to. I mean, I do like a good Gothic potboiler every now and then, and I feel like I can certainly appreciate what it is and how it does what it does, why it was important at the time, and so on. I guess it's more that my own critical investments are elsewhere right now and have been for a long time. What seems to be happening right now, though, is that the texts, concepts, and passages that I'm working on, have all largely been labeled as Gothic, and I'm finding that this makes reading them against that particular grain to be something of an uphill battle. And it's not even that I find myself wanting to argue that these texts are not Gothic (I mean, premature burial, yo), but rather that calling a poem "Gothic" or identifying its sites of sexual guilt or whatever doesn't actually constitute an interpretation these days. While the work of people like Eve Segdwick and Judith Halberstam (both of whom I've been skimming madly since last week) is aimed at showing the Gothic to be worthy of study and complex in itself, I wonder if the term as used by others is falling back into a critical shorthand. Not one used to dismiss entire passages--about 22 years ago, my adviser dismissed the passage at the center of my Victorian project as being "luridly gothic"--but certainly as a way to imply that there is a certain group of texts whose readability (and even whose unreadability) is assured according to this set of codes. And so the question for what I'm doing largely becomes one of the supplement, the so what, and the why bother. And I find myself wanting to say, "because it's just more interesting," but I do feel like I'm fighting against the weight of a historicist juggernaut here. But I soldier on.

The other common thread between these two projects, by the way, if the feeling that I'm completely behindhand on my de Man.

---
Mostly unrelated, before I go scavenge myself some lunch: a "Dickensian" toilet policy? Really?

The black box

I wrote this into my notebook shortly before I left to go meet him:

If Psyche remains alone, it is first because she is alone in knowing nothing of this. There again the meaning of the sentence bursts. Into bits, I mean. Psyche is the only one who knows nothing (nothing of herself, of her extension, of her recumbent being-extended); but further, by being alone in knowing nothing of this, she is also alone for not knowing anything of this. She finds herself alone without knowing it; her solitude is radical because she knows nothing, nothing of herself, of her extension, of that which others know; she doesn't know what they know and that they know, that is, the content and fact of their knowledge. On the subject of herself. Indeed, she is the submissive subject (extended object), the support or subjectile of their knowledge but not of hers because on her own she knows nothing of herself--on the subject of herself.

--Jacques Derrida, On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, p. 15

I always have a good time with him, even now. For one thing, he remains one of the nicest people I've ever been with, completely supportive in so many ways, supportive and successful in a way that makes me almost automatically my best self when I'm around him, my best self in a way that I am for almost no one else, certainly not K., not The Professor, not The Poet. And it was kind of fun, in a way, to find out that he thought of me as an ex, to have retroactive confirmation that what we had last summer wasn't just important to me. What happened to me on the train home, I don't know. But it wasn't like some of the other crying I've done lately--it didn't actually feel like a breakdown until I was on the phone later--and so I wonder if it had simply been mourning. Like I've never really just sat down and let myself cry specifically about what happened last summer and early fall, to mourn the loss of those two months or so when I really was enjoying my life, when I was more confident than I had ever been (or have been since). And maybe in a certain sense this was okay. I never really cried about the abortion at the time; I kept working on my German homework and teaching my class and I went out and found a new apartment and spent the night with K.--yesterday The Professor and I were talking about getting over things and I realize now that it's not a matter of my getting over things faster, it's a matter of my not standing still. And while I have cried over certain losses with E., maybe...I don't know. It could all just be a rationalization for too many vodka tonics and some drunk phone calls. But I'm trying to figure this out because it wasn't like he got to the bar and I wanted to jump him immediately. I don't really want him back, I'm happy for him to be in love with the woman he is in love with (even though I do sometimes panic about always being the person that you're with right before you meet the person you love--or whatever the married-guy equivalent is); I told him last night that I would have liked it to have been possible for us to have been together for a few more months than we were, but probably not forever. And that he had to find me someone just like him, but not him. It's not--or no longer--that drop-everything attraction that I periodically feel for K. So I'm trying to figure out what it is, and also how I can be friends with him and not have the crushing train ride home every time.

The writing is almost nonexistent, though I do have a two-week reprieve on the sublime thing. I think maybe today I'll work a bit at West Village Coffeeshop--maybe even splurge on lunch there--before going to school, where I'll be until at least 8:00 anyway. I'm beginning to think that sitting in front of a computer so much may be doing more harm than good.

I had a dream where my mother was helping me decorate my apartment for Christmas and I thought it was this apartment except that my bedroom was in a different place and there was a window and we watched the lightning with our neighbors and the outside was different. And the dream was set in mid-November, so it was early to be decorating for Christmas but there was some reason why we were doing it that way. We had a lot of red and white lights and my mother was really big on my placing festive objects around the room.

The other dream I remember was a sort of old-time outdoor market--the kind of thing where people are selling handicrafts and jams and things--there's something like this at the big festival that my town holds every September--they call it the Folklife Festival, I think, and they have a bunch of 19th century reenactors. But anyway. I was looking at some rugs but not with the desire to buy them--I don't have any money for that kind of thing right now--but the guy selling them kept following me around and trying to sell them to me--I don't remember it being creepy, more that I was feeling bad about not buying anything. There was also a team dance contest. With the non-Lindsay Lohans.

What I really want for myself this summer is to fall madly, stomachdroppingly, headoverheels in love with someone--someone who has the same effect on me that E. does of making me want to be my best self and actually end up believing it. Because if I don't get swept off my feet, I think there's going to be quite a fair bit of inertia left behind.

Bloomsday Edgestories

I learned today from reading Jean-Luc Nancy's The Discourse of the Syncope that the feminine form of Kant--die Kante--means "the pointed, the thin and sharp edge, the angle, of a ridge or divide" (91). I am thinking of this as a razoredge or a tightrope or--to think less laceratingly for the moment--the silvering of the mirror (and I'm thinking here of Derrida's reading of Ponge's "Fable," mostly in "Psyche: Invention of the Other") and watersurfaces of the kind that lend themselves to a confusion of shadow and substance, as in the scene in Book 4 of the Prelude--a kind of multiple vision--the sky and trees reflected there, but also the reeds and fish underneath the surface, a dual visibility that in some sense makes the surface "itself" in-visible. (This all seems, at times, like a hopelessly old-fashioned exercise in deconstruction deployed to cover over my own personal stupidities. If I could set the scene for you I would, but I'm not sure I could do it unless I could make it into the third person first and even then I'm not sure I would despise myself any less.)

And I am thinking, on this Bloomsday (inevitably a legacy of my ex-boyfriend; there are certain textual transmissions that occasionally make it hard for me to do what I do) of tightrope acts and walking on water and I have been trying for the last couple of hours to recover from a certain multiday stupefaction (something like this always seems to happen when I should be writing--I end up reading, and badly) and to think in paragraphs, to make another try at staking out a position within the Critique of Judgment and I am turning around on what seems to me to be the dual question of the essential spontaneity of aesthetic judgment and the suspension that secures the instance (I hear this with a French accent today) of freedom. (Simply being here is to risk a complete collapse; I come here, I say, so that I will be more productive and more disciplined than I would be at home; coming here, though, is always a risk, and there is so much that can go wrong, so many ways to force myself into a kind of disappointment. Why can't that be me? Suspension is exhausting; I didn't know what I would be getting into; in some ways the forced lightheartedness is almost worse; having him know what he knows about my life is worse than him not knowing anything at all; this is not conductive to writing about the sublime except when it is and I wouldn't have written this if I had stayed home today.) I find myself wondering as I contemplate this spontaneity--and I'm not sure Kant ever uses the word, only implies it--this instability--I find myself recurring again and again to the question of the razor edge and the water surface, specifically: Do you ever get used to walking on water?

The story goes that Peter was okay until he looked down. What's the opposite of looking down? What did it mean for him to look down? Is it simply a matter of knowing or not knowing what you're doing? This seems to make faith a matter of ignorance--no, it's more than this, to walk on water you almost have to know what you're doing at every moment. (I see you past the shoulder of the person I'm talking to don't you realize that all I wanted was to be able to do this with you, to work side by side? This is all I've ever really wanted of the people I've loved, and perhaps this is why it would be difficult, as things stand now, to fall in love with The Poet, who seems very far from here as it is.) To know but not to look--some sort of action, some kind of energy--nervous energy, tension, a suspension that is almost a churning, lifting you just far enough above the water not to fall. You can't get used to walking on water--that's when you fall, that's when you go slack, you let your guard down and you become ever so slightly too heavy--there was never much of a margin for error to begin with and now it's over and you might never be able to regain that first lightness, you will have to learn some other trick. (It's only now that I come face to face with how much I have been depending on some illusion of a singularity that went both ways--not in an absolute sense, but at least in terms of the immediate context--and by a bad accident of positioning, a choice that I made before anyone else was here this morning--I get to watch this get chipped away moment by moment--)

And I am trying to write about Kant and get myself back to Christabel and I am still turning over the same set of ideas, more or less. I call it something different now, moving beyond humiliation and its overdeterminations, thinking now more broadly in terms that I am preparing to live with for years--funny, how one's longest relationships are revealed to be with texts, with certain words, as people themselves come and go.

Late on Friday night I told The Professor what I have been thinking for several weeks now--that I would be happier if I could write something like poetry, if I could regain the kind of relation I used to have to theory, philosophy, and literature, that graphomania that had me writing in several locations and in several discourses all at once. No doubt this was dangerous when I was 20 and 21; no doubt there would be risks this time around, too, not the least of which being a kind of absolute self-indulgence or just trying too hard. I might be happier, too, if I could slip into the third person sometimes, like I did one afternoon sitting in the St Mark's Churchyard in the summer of 2000. I used to write to survive; when I stopped writing, I stopped surviving. I am still working alone; I have been looking outside to see if we're getting the storm they promised us (we're not); I need to decide what I have the heart to do the rest of today; maybe I will let myself get beer if I go to the gym first.

Another Friday, in disjointed form

I'm feeling better today than I've felt on recent Fridays. Possibly the big change being that I woke up to a mouse poop-free kitchen this morning. The Poet helped me pull out the stove yesterday morning to figure out where the mice were coming from, and I sealed up the hole with some tinfoil and about a gallon of caulk. (Left over from when my mom was here and the soap dish fell off the wall in the shower.) And, at least for now, this is holding. That was easier than I expected it to be, but it's still the kind of thing that needed another person and a leveler head than mine to force me to deal with it. I mean, I would have figured something out eventually, but I'm sure this would have ended up being a huge, distracting, and stressful issue.

And that, my dears, is why I need people in my life.

If I can stay in this mood--not exultantly great, but not churningly miserable--for the next five days until my exam, then I should be okay. The exam itself will probably be anti-climactic, but I do feel a little bit crunched with the Victorian lists, in terms of secondary and theoretical sources. I'm also somewhat regretting my decision to put Robert Elsmere on my list, but finishing it seems (irritatingly) central to my Victorianist street cred. So I press onward with Mrs. Humphrey Ward.

The big intellectual realization of the last couple of days has been a sense that I'm entering a new (and smarter) phase in my relationship to theory. Like, all of the sudden it's fun in all kinds of new ways because I have a better working knowledge of Hegel and Kant. And so de Man and Bataille suddenly make sense. That was kind of cool. I'm also really enjoying Judith Butler's Excitable Speech. I've--embarrassingly, perhaps--managed to get four years into an English PhD without ever reading Butler until now--I mean, certainly, I get the whole performativity thing--but this book is pretty damn good so far. And I can feel the ideas starting to take shape in my head: the dissertation, the articles that I have to start on when I get home from Wisconsin, and so on. It feels good, but everything I do is also edged with a bit of fear and doubt, too. Self-doubt: not so much that I lack the ability to carry this out but more that I don't trust my brain not to keep turning against me, not to collapse like it has so many times recently, not to get distracted. Fear: what if none of the paying jobs for the summer and fall work out? I can't get through the summer on $2500. I hate worrying about money, worrying about the logistics of feeding myself sometimes. (One of the best things I did for my work this past week was order a pizza that I ate for a couple of days--but I'd like to not get fat this summer.) And so on. I'm not going to dwell. I need to get back to work soon--I don't have a lot of time today, since I have to leave for school around 2:30-3:00.

It's the department party tonight. Last semester, I made a big deal about being very careful not to get drunk and do anything stupid--I even skipped all the afterparties--and that's the night I met The Poet because I told him I liked the poem he'd read. Which is either the most or the least stupid thing I've ever done at one of these things.

He was very kind to me on Wednesday. But there are times when I think the strain will be too much. But this is a better Friday than I've had lately. He's sending me some beginning Zen books to read while I'm in Wisconsin.

I sometimes wish I could love him--that's what that was, last month, almost an attempt at a performative, a self-projection. On a certain level, this would all be so much easier if I loved him. It would help explain why I'm doing all of this. Maybe I will find at some point that I do love him, and that realization will help at least to retroactively transform some of the darkness of this past couple of months. Sometimes I come close when I am with him, but I am never fully off the razor edge. It's still lacerating to admit that I did love K.--and you can say all you want about how of course I would love him because he's the super-inaccessible married guy and of course that's what I always go for: if I think back to the submerged moment, back in October, where all of this became possible, when I felt something drop in my stomach: it was before I knew he was married, and my biggest worry was still, ugh, I can't be with anyone who's a student here.

But of course, if he really wanted to do me a favor he would have left me alone.

I'm not going down this road today. I have to write out some questions for the Romanticism portion of the exam, and do a bunch of Victorian poetry stuff. I wish the weather were less disgusting so I could wear my dress.

I haven't talked to The Professor since Sunday. I feel bad about this because for once it wasn't totally about him. (Though it was a little bit, just not the initial thing that made me angry / sad.) I keep wanting to email him again, but at this point I may just have to wait until my exam is over, keep working without hanging out with him.

I kind of miss my students already, but not enough to grade their final papers today.

"I keep making these to-do lists but nothing gets crossed out"

In that spirit, two passages I will try to live by, at least until my orals are over.

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air your breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning.” --John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

“The moment the innocence or authenticity of our sense of being in the world is put into question, a far from harmless process gets underway. It may start as a casual bit of play with a stray loose end of the fabric, but before long the entire texture of the self is unraveled and comes apart. The whole process happens at an unsettling speed.” --Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality"

I am trying to be better today. It's another one that's all cold and gray and pissing rain; at least this time I'm not going outside much, maybe just to the bodega-like grocery story a block away because I could use soy milk and more coffee and probably some lunch.

I want creative work that's something more than self-immolation as performance art.

Virtual bookmarking--Bataille on erasure

I'm copying this as it's quoted in Writing and Difference (266) so I don't forget to go find it in Inner Experience when I take up Tennyson again. Just go with me here.

If one goes to the end, one must erase oneself, undergo solitude, suffer harshly from it, renounce being recognized: one must be there as if absent, deranged, and submit without will or hope, being elsewhere. Thought (because of what it has at its base) must be buried alive.

Mostly better today. Brunch with The Professor and working at school. I think I've been more productive in the last hour today than I was all of yesterday.

Telegraphic: Bataille on Hegel on sovereignty. Also, shoes and the radio.

“The essential thing is that one cannot attain it consciously and seek is, because seeking it distances it.” --Georges Bataille, "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice"

This comment feels rather widely applicable right now. It also somewhat misrepresents how I've spent my day. I was pretty listless, took a long nap even though I had already slept for eight hours or more the night before. Did too much poking around on Facebook. (I'm now friends with someone who works for Focus on the Family--how crazy is that?--But he's an old friend of mine, someone from camp who was really, really cool back in the day--or at least I thought so 10 or 12 years ago.) So I decided to drag myself over to Atlantic Center to use the two DSW certificates I had that were about to expire. I think I'm taking one pair of shoes back, as they aren't fitting as well at home as they were in the store. A much better (and, as I cannot help myself from saying, fiercer) purchase were these. I'm not sure the picture does them justice. The heels are about 2in, which is still a little high for me, but they don't feel as high as my other pair in that height--possibly because of the slingback thing.

This may seem like an entirely frivolous post, except for the fact that a year and a half ago, I didn't have any shoes with more than a 1-inch heel that weren't platforms. This might be a transformation worth thinking about at more length at a time that isn't now.

One of my greatest pleasurs of staying in on a Saturday to work (besides not having to be around a bunch of yobbos and frat boys) is listening to Danny Stiles on WNYC.

Speaking of that work, I think it's time to move on to some Derrida. As you might have guessed, I have not even gotten near De Man yet.