Tiananmen

I was in Beijing just a few days after the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It was still closed to the public for “renovation,” in anticipation of protests and commemoration events. I could only get a few shots of the huge Mao poster above the gate before shuttling along to the next stop on our tour.

I was attending a conference on biography and life writing at Peking University, presenting a co-authored paper entitled “Politicizing the Trivial: Life Writings of Virginia Woolf & Slavenka Drakulić.” It was basically a comparison of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Drakulić’s How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, an evaluation of how early twentieth-century capitalism and late twentieth-century communism had failed in gender equality and how those failures resonate with each other across geography and time. I was still surprised I had even been given a visa after the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade the previous month.

Since I never technically saw Tiananmen Square, I’ll rely on the description from Jan Wong’s Red China Blues, a brilliant memoir that should be required reading in literature, politics, journalism, and cultural studies.

Tiananmen is gargantuan, the biggest square in the world. It is a hundred sprawling acres in all, flatter and bigger than the biggest parking lot I have ever seen. I used to get tired just walking from one end to the other. Moscow’s Red Square was intimate in comparison. Tiananmen could simultaneously accommodate the entire twenty-eight teams of the National Football League plus 192 other teams, each playing separate games. It could stage an entire Summer Olympics, with all events taking place at the same time. Or if you put a mountain in the middle, you could hold a Winter Olympics there instead.

Tiananmen Square made me feel tiny, insignificant, powerless. That was no accident. As the geographic and political center of Beijing, it was enlarged after the Communist victory to celebrate the grandiosity of Red China. In 1949, the Great Helmsman stood on the rostrum, in front of the Forbidden City, to proclaim: “The Chinese people have stood up.”

Tiananmen, which means Gate of Heavenly Peace, is also one of the least hospitable squares in the world. There is no bench or place to rest, nowhere to get a drink, no leafy tree to offer respite from the sun. Only the one-hundred-foot high Monument to the People’s Heroes punctuates it, and, after 1977, Mao’s white and gold mausoleum. Tiananmen is also one of the most monitored squares in the world. Its huge lampposts are equipped with giant speakers for crowd control and swiveling videocameras. The commercial photographers, with white pushcarts and colorful shade umbrellas, are actually plainclothes police. For a modest fee, they snap photos of Chinese tourists posing in the square and mail you the pictures a week later. That way, they have your name and address, too.

Here is a well written op-ed from the New York Times: China’s Grief, Unearthed by Mia Jian. For those of you less squeamish, here's an excerpt from a BBC report nineteen years ago:

the grandeurs of risk

I'm convinced that such a circle [that is, the unclosable circle of an encounter, which revolves around the undesirable] only exhausts the strength of those who don't enter into it with the grandeur of risk, the amorous and loving truth, slow devastation which breaks every tie with a life that is still immediate. To forget that is the obverse of disaster, because time's subtle desire upsets every foundation. A faithful weakening must meet the other and immemorially lose the other in the self.

--from Abdelkebir Khatibi's Love in Two Languages [Amour bilingue], translated by Richard Howard

This desire and promise let all my specters loose. A desire without a horizon, for that is its luck or its condition. And a promise that no longer expects what it waits for: there where, striving for what is given to come, I finally know how not to have to distinguish any longer between promise and terror.

--from Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, translated by Patrick Mensah

The principle that birth is presencing-of-total-working concerns neither the origin nor the end. Even though it is the great earth and empty space, it neither obstructs birth-qua-presencing-of-total-working nor death-qua-presencing-of-total-working. When death is presencing-of-total-working it becomes the great earth and empty space and it neither obstructs death-qua-presencing-of-total-working or birth-qua-presencing-of-total-working. The great earth and the empty space exist exhaustively in birth and death.

-- from Kigen Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, qtd. in Geron Kopf's Beyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida, and a Phenomenology of No-Self

15 Songs for a Solstice

...to help keep the cold in on the first day of winter. (As if most of us needed help with that.) Here's to a new season of personal (and universal) growth.

For those of you not on MySpace, I'm currently reading Edmond Jabès' The Book of Margins. After only the first 35 pages, I can definitively state that it will be one of my most favorite books I have/will ever read:

The word is distance within non-distance, that is, the width of a gap that every letter stresses while bridging it. What is said is always said in relation to what will never be expressed. At these extreme limits we recognize ourselves.

This winter will (always already and yet again) prove the truth of the infinite distance I must travel in order to recognize myself in the extremities of the here and now. And now to the soundtrack that will be playing on that trip:

• "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye" by Leonard Cohen
• "Winter Kills" by Yaz
• "Drink Before the War" by Sinéad O'Connor
• "Dreamer" by Toni Childs
• "All the Candles In the World" by Jane Siberry
• "Bells Ring"by Mazzy Star
• "25th December"by Everything But The Girl
• "Trouble In Mind (The Return)"by Marianne Faithfull
• "Mad World"by Gary Jules
• "Untitled 3" by Sigur Rós
• "New Lost World" by Chris Whitley
• "Soon This Space Will Be Too Small" by Lhasa De Sela
• "Baby In Two" by Pernice Brothers
• "Wo willst du hin?" by Xavier Naidoo
• "Archangel" by Burial

Excerpts

Something I've been doing for the past several semesters is offering excerpts of my academic work here at the end of the semester. When I'm not writing here--which is happening more and more frequently--I'm most likely working on papers such as these. The work I did this term just about did me in altogether: I started working on the first paper in May, but I was able to write the second paper in just a few weeks. It seems I always shoot my load on one project (usually the one for my major professor and mentor) and then do a second quickie. (And yes, all academic metaphors must be sexual; otherwise, you're not doing it right.) By the way, my first essay earned me a "gifted," and the second one was termed "brilliant." (I'm not braggin'; I'm just saying....)

In die Fremde der Heimat:
Celan’s “Schibboleth” and the Ethics of Translation

Mem’ry, in addition to being short, is also (always already) a matter of convenience. A covenant both enjoins and excludes. Our inclusion in a community is a function of how we enact our communal memory—which flags we pledge allegiance to, which political slogans we cry out, which language community we find ourselves born into—in short, how we embody our covenant. Memory is the shibboleth we use to segregate: it either allows passage or cuts off the return passage home. This scar—this syllable pain, this wounded word, this death sentence—bears the memory of our covenant, a circle of forgetting, bereft of a center. Memory, therefore, is what must be transversed, transported, crossed over, and translated; it is the liminal border between the alien and the homeland, the superliminal space where the blood of the Passover sacrifice demarcates between the Chosen People and the(ir) other. Memory is the shibboleth—mispronounced, death-bringing, inarticulate; the unsayable that demands utterance, performance, invocation. The promise—the sign of the promise—the promised covenantal sign scars the human body. This scar—a genital, genitive scar—wounded by the past, is passed on to future generations, to those also born of the wound, born of disaster.

The half-mastness on both sides of mem’ry bisects “Schibboleth” with a reference to a political act: commemoration of the dead, of national heroes. Yet this flag at half-mast (from the fourth strophe) is not (necessarily) the same flag to which the poet has sworn no allegiance (from the second strophe). Instead of being unfurled in the market square, demanding allegiance, this flag at half-mast signifies the presence of death. Yet Celan’s dead remain doubly absent: not only are they no longer present (having been murdered and reduced to ash) but neither have they been properly buried and mourned for. No national flag had been set at half-mast to commemorate them. They are absented in both language as well as cultural memory, and it is an inherent characteristic of Celan’s poetological project to call those absent dead back into presence through language and to rescue them from forgetting/forgetfulness.

But just as Heidegger wants us to think being as some thing other than beings, so we too are called to think the other as some thing wholly other, as something more than the sum of all others—uncoordinatable and incalculable, unbounded and aporetic, unmappable and undateable. The wholly other exceeds all Cartesian coordinates as well as any Cartesian cogito: all that I can know of the other is that I do not know.

Initiation into Redon’s Initiation to Study

The fifth and final work in Redon’s two-woman sequence is his circa 1905 Initiation to Study. This oil painting is marked by a flattening of the pictorial space as well as by a sharp delineation of line of the two figures. The priestess is clothed entirely in blue; the novice wears white. Instead of holding a red branch as in the 1896 oil painting, the novice casually holds a scroll that has been partially unrolled. It seems that the natural element from the first painting has been replaced with a cultural artifact; the mysteries of nature have given way to the mysteries of a secret society whose knowledge is written down on the scroll. But no text is exposed; to the viewer, the scroll is empty and blank.

Though the novice’s eyes are still downcast, we get no sense of her emotional state from her otherwise expressionless face. The priestess, however, appears somewhat sterner than in previous depictions: she is clearly frowning, and the severe profile line only accentuates her one visible eye. Redon’s noirs were often populated by round, globe-like eyes, but in this series, the women’s eyes are almost always closed, further resisting the viewer’s gaze.

The women appear within a space defined by heavy brown lines to the pair’s left and right as well as beneath their feet. The light brown floor recedes a short distance before ending at what looks to be a white plaster or stucco wall behind the figures. The pictorial plane, nevertheless, is further flattened with blotches of paint that transgress across all three strong defining lines. No shadow or shading interrupts this compression to give the viewer any impression of dimensionalized space. Redon flattens the vertical as well by repeating the light brown of the floor in the upper right. Moreover, the illusory depth is shortened by the dark pink tones of the oil paint: Redon uses the same tone for his signature and the dominant background behind the priestess. In this way, the surface and the background are the same color, disrupting any sense of depth and preventing any penetration beyond the work’s surface.

Bullet-Point Friday

• Thumb drive? Check. I do, after all, need to record the grades of the precious students enrolled in the US history course I TA for.
• Stack of history quizzes? Check. I finished grading them over breakfast this morning, but I told my professor I wanted to re-evaluate a couple of them just to ensure I’m being fair (and consistent), so I’ll return them Monday. I’m still a bit perplexed by one student’s response: “Truthfully, I have no idea of what I should write because I haven’t read the book just yet. Fortunately [sic], there isn’t a way for me to pass this class having failed two of the last tests.” It continues for a couple of pages. I don’t like this conflicting sympathy-annoyance I suffer from: I really am too sensitive at times to be a professor, but I also work ridiculously hard for my courses, even the ones that only annoy me and waste my time. (After my last presentation, there was a hush before the professor exclaimed, “That was a damned good protocol!” I felt like crying, relieved after putting myself under that much pressure for a two-page paper.) But, of course, I’m not a freshman too lazy to read the assignment. (If I skip a required text, I have some deep-seated reason … usually. And I always make sure it’s one I won’t be tested over.)
• Sophie’s World? Check. I read it originally back in the fall of ’97 in Japan. When I moved into my apato, it was one of the few books left by a prior occupant. Because it was in English, I read it. I was annoyed because of its overly contrived narrative. I cringe when I feel like someone is trying to trick me into being educated. Now it’s a required text for my introduction to philosophy course I teach at the community college downtown. I had/have no say in the matter. But after drinks Tuesday evening with my brighter-than-average colleagues, I just may finally stop hating this book. Both of them swore that it was a more-than-suitable text for an introductory course. I’ll trust them (since they are so painfully freaking intelligent). Lesson learnt: stop fighting the flow and see what there is to learn instead of overly complicating things.
• Knitted skullcap? Check. In the mornings here, the temperature has been quite a bit more tolerable: in the mid-40s. It’s almost as if things are starting to cool down like they’re supposed to this time of year. In Poland I would’ve already had several days of snow by now.
• Crappy Apple laptop? Check. Thankfully it isn’t a problem connecting to the wireless here at this college campus (where I spend my “free days” writing, working, and doing research). I wonder how many other people here aren’t really supposed to be here? I spend more time at this school than I do at either the campus where I teach or the campus where I’m a student. But no one’s ever asked to see my identification or to justify my presence. At least I finally started bringing my own computer instead of using the one’s in the library.
• Internal (and upcoming) deadlines? Check. One paper due Wednesday. Another portfolio/project due on the 30th. And a final paper/presentation on December 3rd. Final exams in history to grade; five-page essays and final exams in philosophy to grade; eternal and continual paperwork to endure for classes taught as well as taken. Yes, I’m almost done with this term. But now I have to buckle down in order to check these things off. One by one.
  

Northern Latitude Dreaming

Instead of just sitting still long enough to grade 39 quizzes in US history over my break/office hour I've instead read through a couple of blog posts, did a search for Joris-Karl Huysmans' novel À rebours at my university's library (we have several copies), and ate a 280-calorie dark chocolate "energy" bar. I've holed up on the 5th floor of the library, sitting next to a window from where I can see--apart from a few office buildings in the distance and a handful of cars in the parking lot--a line of trees running alongside the western creek on campus. I seem to have caught fall fever: I don't want to be in love or run naked in nature. Instead, I'd really prefer to wrap up in some warm clothes in front of a fire somewhere and read a good book (perhaps Huysmans' novel) with a warm drink and even warmer cats. Considering this is Texas and today's high is in the mid-80s, it is unlikely I will get to have this experience any time soon. Even the promised thunderstorms don't seem to be on their way.

I have slightly more than a week to complete my term paper over Celan, about two weeks before submitting my final drafts for the translation workshop, and maybe three weeks before my project on Redon is due. Then there's final exams in US history to grade and then finally my final for philosophy is scheduled for December 11th. Now if only I can get through these damned 39 quizzes to set the rest of the term in motion. Ah, December! when life comes due.

Bullet-Point Friday

• Well, I kept my cell phone on buzz from late September until today hoping that I'd get that call either from the MacArthur Foundation or Sweden. No such luck. I guess I can switch it off (and hold my breath) for another year.
• Since besides keeping a fairly sophisticated monthly budget I don't dabble in economics, and since rarely do I delve into cutting edge scientific research, I thought I'd surely be shortlisted for either the prize in literature or maybe (as a last resort) the peace prize. I guess I need to write more than term papers and angry blog posts. And perhaps do more than save the world everyday from my utter disgust.
• Congratulations to Doris Lessing, whoever she is. I browsed through the table of contents of the Norton Anthology of British Literature last night and couldn't find anything by her. If Norton doesn't bother with her writings, why should anyone else? Perhaps she's just trans-canonical.
• Congratulations to Al Gore, whose name was in the news just a couple of days ago when a British court determined that nine statements in his film on global warming were in error. Thankfully he wasn't up for the Nobel scientific prize. Polar bears drowning, indeed! (Although I have to admit I chuckled out loud during that part of the movie when the computer-animated polar bear went kerplunk into the Arctic waters! Ah, good times. Of course, if you were in the audience and couldn't tell that that scene/scenario was designed purely for an emotional response, then perhaps you deserve a Nobel for naiveté and gullibility.)
• No Nobel. No Genius. At least I'm in good company.
  

Bullet-Point Friday

• I'm enjoying my trek through Daniel Weissbort's From Russian with Love, a book about his friendship(s) and (professional) relationship(s) with Joseph Brodsky, translation theory, Russian, literature, and death. It is everything that John Felstiner falls short of. Throughout Felstiner's work (specifically Translating Neruda and Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew), he steers the reader toward this totalizing conception of identity and poetry: he reads Neruda and Celan as if their names were always in capital letters, as if they were homogenized, monolithic, unified Cartesian subjects, as if his biographical/literary/psychological/physiological uncoverings and excavations had the final say on what their poetry was all about. Weissbort, on the other hand, speaks toward an actual and real person he met, befriended, and knew, and yet who escapes any insincere attempt toward totalization: was 'Joseph' a Jew, how much of a Jew was he, how does his translation of his own poetry speak the same as their Russian versions. 'Joseph' is always moving away, eliding Weissbort’s efforts to read him, his words, him through his words, his words in his (own) voice, his words in his Russian (or Russified English). Felstiner reminds me of why I stopped reading literature and poetry all those years ago; Weissbort makes me want to read everything Brodsky ever wrote (as well as everything Weissbort ever wrote).
• I have approximately 50 pounds of books about Mark Rothko I need to work through this weekend as I prepare for an in-class presentation on the Rothko Chapel next week.
• Tonight is First Friday at the Ft. Worth Modern. I thought I would take myself out for the evening to enjoy the new exhibit and then maybe a nice vegan meal at Spiral Diner. (I can’t wait for the Spiral Diner to open up in my neighborhood!)
• Tomorrow is already “full up to the neck”: German class from 10:00-12:00, a visit (during the Texas-OU game) to the Dallas Museum of Art to come up with a subject for my term paper, and then Lauren’s party in the evening celebrating the release of Superficial Flesh. Perhaps one of these days I’ll actually have some down time and do some pleasure reading or spend an afternoon just brushing my cats. Maybe December.

Il y a / n'est plus

A hundred years of his undying death articulating as if the singular unsaid, unsaying, unsayable, in its fully exteriorized impossibility against the homogenized totalization of a text, an other. He always already (yet) exceeds his own excessive supplementarity. I hereby sign and countersign your centenary as we both recede in our mutually singular oblivions.

Rugged Ascent

This afternoon I had my students do a close reading of Plato's Allegory of the Cave for the entire class period, and I have to say that they did an amazing job. I remember being wowed by Plato when I first read him as a college student, but several years later (and after one absolutely useless semester at the University of Dallas--the most narrow-minded, ideologically driven mockery of education) I just don't get that excited about Plato. Derrida? Yes. Blanchot? Heidegger? Yes, yes.

I wanted my students to get a feel of how a much more advanced philosophy course might be, doing a hermeneutical exercise for an extended period of time. Of course, we only covered two of the four-page excerpt, but I had students who I had assumed had already checked out of education altogether raise their hands and want to argue/discuss/interpret/analyze. One student in particular--one who has never spoken up in class before--started doing a Freudian analysis of Plato's allegory. Granted, he had never heard of Freud before, but his interpretation was dead-on. (I have colleagues at the university who would've been lost with what this college freshman was saying!) I joked with my students that they were doing advanced philosophy and that I wanted them to dumb it down a little.

In my own philosophy course this afternoon we read a short poem by Celan, taking three hours to barely cover the three stanzas. My head is still spinning. And of course I feel even more like I need to go back and reread all that Plato I haven't been excited about in twenty years. Being/Becoming a professor opens up all kinds of avenues of (feelings of) inadequacy.

Poet/Novelist/Writer/Blogger/Scholar

toothpastefordinner.com

Guilty.

I wrote bad poetry until my poetry was published by a publisher of bad poetry. Then I was too humiliated that my heart-wrenching poems were enclosed in the same volume as this stellar work:

There once was a mouse.
He saw some cheese.
He went for the cheese.
But it was a trap.
There is no longer a mouse.

In college, when I was president of the English honor society, I organized Bad Poetry Readings. If you showed up with none of your own bad poetry, I would hand out that collection and have each person find an equally bad poem to read for the group. I haven't written poetry (too) seriously since.

A few years ago, when I was gainfully and woefully underemployed, I too participated in a "write a novel in a month" program. My novel remains unfinished--like much of my life--as I do actually concentrate on finishing the Ph.D.

Perhaps Dr. Skajlab will revisit that writing project at a later date, perhaps when tenure is not looming quite so large overhead. Perhaps retirement. Perhaps when Wendy Faris reads the last sentence of À la recherche du temps perdu I'll be walking to the post office with my manuscript in a brown paper envelope to send it to a respected and reputable publisher of fine letters. Perhaps.

Until then I have much work to do on my dissertation. And all those writing assignments for my last semester of coursework. And articles to submit for publication in peer-reviewed journals. So it looks like I'll be able to delay and postpone the fear that I'm really a shitty novelist for years.

Until then, I'll just focus on the fact that I'm a pretty shitty blog writer.

Pieces of Me

If it’s not the hunger and lack of interest in any of the food I find on the streets here—I mean there’s only so many cheese pizzas, cheese sandwiches, tomato salads, falafel pitas, and gummy, cheesy pasta dishes with limp vegetables I can stomach—that will kill me, then it will be the utter inexplicability of my inability to sleep throughout the night. Last night I went to bed at a reasonable hour (11:30), but I was wide awake (again) by 12:45, and I couldn’t get back to sleep until almost 3:00. In the meantime—and I mean this in its meanest and most unreasonable sense—I began reading another life-changing essay by Derrida about Gadamer and the poetics of Paul Celan. And then I took out my iPod and listened to some tracks from my Lazy Sunday Afternoon playlist, just allowing my mind to drift and reflect in a letting-be (perhaps—as if—a move toward Gelassenheit). Perhaps it will be the anticipation of the arriving/letting-go that will finally do me in.

“There are pieces of me you’ve never seen. Maybe she’s just pieces of me you’ve never seen.” These lyrics by Tori Amos continually float through my head. Knowing that people—and ultimately all things, including the great to be (it)self—are ultimately unknowable, I know that I don’t even really know myself. So, how can anyone else know this me that I don’t even know, this no-ing, unknowable I that reverts to a me when faced with the face of the radically alter in its (own/un-owning/un-(kn)ownness) radical alterity? A good question to reflect upon and face at two-fucking-thirty AM. Kids: don’t try this at home without adult supervision. I am a trained professional, and it still hurts when I do it.

I like the subtle subversion of irreplaceability these lyrics hint at: as if to say, you don’t need to replace me with her because we are the same. Do you not see that which draws you to her is also present here in me? Do you not see that the continual/continuing race toward the (metaphysics of the) new is just as questionable as the issue of knowledge of self and other (it)self? We are ultimately reflections of one another, each other: “The killer in you is the killer in me.” (Lyrics by Smashing Pumpkins. Maybe I should just stop listening to music altogether.)

I like how da in German can mean both there as well as here. I like how nach can mean both to(ward) as well as after. This is a great language in which to lose oneself, especially when the first person-pronoun is never capitalized (except, of course, as the first word of a sentence) and the second-person polite Sie is always capital(ized). But true Gesprach takes place only between (ein(e)) ich und (ein(e)) du....

Speak my language.

Required Reading (definitely though with love)

This Independence Day it's important for us Americans to finally get it through our thick heads that there is a fundamental, essential difference between nationalism and patriotism. And that neither of those has anything to do with hegemonic warmongering. Just to keep us straight on those points, here is one of my favorite poems from patriot Nikki Giovanni:

I Laughed When I Wrote It
(Don’t You Think It’s Funny?)

the f.b.i came by my house three weeks ago
one white agent one black (or i guess negro would be
more appropriate) with two three-button suits on (one to
a man)
thin ties—cuffs in the bottoms—belts at their waists
they said in unison:
ms. giovanni you are getting to be quite important
people listen to what you have to say
i said nothing
we would like to have to give a different message
i said: gee are all you guys really shorter than hoover
they said:
it would be a patriotic gesture if you’d quit saying
you love rap brown and if you’d maybe give us some
leads
on what some of your friends are doing
i said: fuck you
a week later the c.i.a came by two unisexes one blond afro
one darker one three bulges on each showing lovely bell-
bottoms and boots
they said in rounds:
sister why not loosen up and turn on
fuck the system up from the inside
we can turn you on to some groovy
trips and you don’t have to worry
about money or nothing take the commune
way and a few drugs it’ll be good for you
and the little one
after i finished a long loud stinky fart i said serenely
definitely though with love
fuck you
yesturday a representative from interpol stopped me in the
park
tall, neat afro, striped hip huggers bulging only in the right
place
i really dig you, he said, i want to do something for you
and you alone
i asked what he would like to do for me
need a trip around the world a car bigger apartment
are you lonely i mean we need to get you comfortable
cause a lot of people listen to you and you
need to be comfortable to put forth a positive image
and digging the scene i said listen i would sell
out but i need to make it worth my while you understand
you just name it and i’ll give it to you, he assured me
well, i pondered, i want aretha franklin and her piano
reduced to fit next to my electric
typewriter on my desk and i’ll do anything you want
he lowered his long black eyelashes and smiled a whimsical
smile
fuck you, nikki, he said

And below some more worthwhile reading this holiday: first, an op-ed about immigration hysteria, and secondly, an interview with probably the most intelligent conservative thinker I've ever heard on what's wrong with the current administration.

• The Founding Immigrants
  By Kenneth C. Davis
  Published: July 3, 2007
  Disdain for what is foreign is, sad to say, as American as apple pie, slavery and lynching.


• Interview with Victor Gold
  By Bill Moyers
  Aired: June 29, 2007
  The impact of the sound bite mentality which you find in both parties...is there's been a debasing of the system. Because if you listen to these — I call them the Stepford candidates — on both sides in these debates the only two candidates that speak clearly are the ones they call the kooks.

Simple Things

It really is the simple things that make life worth living. The complicated shit only makes me mad.

I’ve been spending much more time at the local YMCA. Lately I’m exercising at least five times a week, mostly there but also sometimes in the neighborhood. I’ve even been much more able to engage in the senseless chitchat with the woman behind the counter at the Y. I think it’s funny she wished me a happy fathers’ day and then asked if my father was still alive. Do I not exude the fatherly vibe myself? Am I (visibly) at that age where fathers typically die off?

I’ve been diligently reading since the spring term ended, preparing for the courses I’ll be taking as well as those I’ll be teaching this fall. I’ve read some really hard books. I wonder why all knowledge always comes in book format? To study music, you have to read books about music. To study art, you have to read books about art. I’m beginning to hate books more and more.

I’ve been slacking when it comes to studying German on my own. I’ve only gotten through the first six lessons in the Pimsleur program. Last summer I’d gotten through the entire Russian I course (30 lessons) in the same amount of time and had began Russian II. I hope my dedication comes back once I’m actually sitting in class in Germany next month.

Tomorrow I’m returning all the books I’ve checked out to the university library. I have eleven. And the Pimsleur German CDs. I need to get them back since I’ll be gone when it’s time to renew them online. And when I return, the fall semester will already be in its second week.

Today, the CIA released hundreds of pages of internal reports on assassination plots, secret drug testing, and spying on Americans. That’s nothing: you should see the secret reports I keep on the government.

What’s in heavy rotation on my iPod this week: “North American Scum” by LCD Soundsystem, “Everyman Everywoman” by Yoko Ono w/ Blow Up, “Hammering in My Head” by Garbage, “Girlfriend is Better” by Talking Heads, “Bump!” by Nylon Room, and “Guilt is a Useless Emotion (Mac Quayle Vocal Mix)” by New Order. Maybe I should write a book about it.

"conversant on existentialism"

After hearing about yesterday's NPR article "For Shakira, an Emotional Homecoming Show," I imagined an encounter between Shakira, Beyonce, and French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Shakira: (Twisting Beyonce's hair into braids.) You know those lyrics from "Hips Don't Lie"? It goes, "Oh boy, I can see your body moving / Half animal, half man / I don't, don't really know what I'm doing / But you seem to have a plan / My will and self restraint / Have come to fail now, fail now / See, I am doing what I can, but I can't so you know / That's a bit too hard to explain."

Beyonce: (Giggling.) Yeah, I remember.

Shakira: I was really trying to articulate Sartrean nausea in the face of overwhelming freedom.

Beyonce: Yeah, I got that.

Shakira: God, Beyonce, you're so smart! Your friendship is like the unavowable gift Derrida writes about: it unhinges the narrative contingencies of pure spirit and opens the word into the openness of being.

Beyonce: (Twirling her own hair.) Uh-huh.

Shakira: It's like what you sing in "Irreplaceable." It reminds me so much of Rilke's first Duino Elegy. (Taking the text from the nightstand, she reads from the original German. Then she paraphrases into English.) "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror."

Beyonce: For sure!

Sartre recedes in disgust. Derrida turns in his grave. And Rilke wishes a rock would fall on Shakira's head. (Actually, we all wish a rock would fall on Shakira.... But really a rock should fall on Juan Forero, the idiot NPR reporter who wrote such drivel.)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Sen nocy letniej
by Wisława Szymborska

Już las w Ardenach świeci.
Nie zbliżaj się do mnie.
Głupia, głupia,
zadawałam się ze światem:

Jadłam chleb, piłam wodę,
wiatr mnie owiał, deszcz mnie zmoczył.
Dlatego strzeż się mnie, odejdź.
I dlatego zasłoń oczy.

Odejdź, odejdź, ale nie po lądzie.
Odpłyń, odpłyń, ale nie po morzu.
Odfruń, odfruń, dobry mój,
ale powietrza nie tykaj.

Patrzmy w siebie zamkniętymi oczami.
Mówmy sobie zamkniętymi ustami.
Bierzmy się przez gruby mur.

Małośmieszna para z nas:
zamiast księżyca świeci las,
a podmuch zrywa twojej damie
radioaktywny płaszcz, Pyramie.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Draft I)

The forest in Ardens already burns.
Don’t come any closer to me.
Senseless, senseless,
I was getting to know the world:

Eating bread, drinking water,
a gale grazed me, a drizzle doused me,
So be on your guard around me, get away.
Cover your eyes even.

Get back, get back, but don’t go by land.
Set sail, set sail, but not by sea.
Fly away, fly away my good man,
but don’t lay a finger on the sky.

Let’s look at each other with closed eyes.
Let’s speak ourselves with closed lips.
Let’s catch ourselves climbing the city wall.

We’re an insufficiently funny team:
it’s not the moon making the forest gleam,
and the blast tears off your lady’s shroud.
We are shadows cast by a mushroom cloud.

Uncovered (and recovering)

Last night at 10:00 I submitted my grades and officially ended the spring semester. Now (with head freshly shaved) it's time to rejoin the human race by returning to the gym, reading books and articles for fun, drinking and socializing--scandalizing--and fleshing out this virtual site.

Below are a couple of excerpts from my writing projects this term:

Irigarayan deinos and the Distance of Home

Our conception of nature—just like our grasp of masculine and feminine—is itself always already enculturated. That is, we cannot make sense of nature without resorting to culturally constructed tropes of intelligibility, without imposing human agency or scientism upon natural phenomena. Even when we attempt to make room for the inexplicability of nature (for example, relying on a “God works in mysterious ways” mindset), our conception of the mystery/mysterious is already encrusted by and ensconced within a cultural framework. We cannot conceive of nature that is not culturally formed/informed/deformed and is not a consequence of man’s greatest violence—the imposition of intelligibility. And yet “true” nature (physis) is first (at the beginning) and foremost absent of human beings. It just is—“measureless to man” and immeasurable. Only when man knowingly acknowledges that he neither has agency to grasp ungraspable being nor ability to run after receding being can he find his place, his home, as a resting place displaced—not at the center of being nor at its origin—but nearby, near-within, wherein man’s being calls forth being itself. At last being arrives but not according to man’s timetable, for it is only when man steps out from history, away from the act of historicizing, that he is able to attune himself to being’s already arriving. Only when man allows for a cultivation of the female/buddhic to be and accepts a position of repose, of rest and contemplation, does home—always already present even in its absence—draw close. When man’s fabricated home is no longer the site centered on the male to be, his true home opens up to the full belongingness of all beings.

Wounded Writing:
The Reticent Witness of Wisława Szymborska

From this lexical evidence, it seems that silence here has its own efficacy in opposition to names; silence, in effect, serves as a non-name that finds its own name in Szymborska’s poetry. Ultimately, there is no resolution to these antinomies; thesis and antithesis do not move gently toward synthesis in a semantically consistent form of Hegelianism. Instead, each image, each theme, each term flies free from any core meaning a reader might impose upon the text toward newly formed orbits of signification. This motion of silence and voice alternates back and forth like breath; every silence becomes a calling for(th), yet every shout is voiceless. This directed ambiguity resonates with the process of breathing: one cannot breathe by oneself; one cannot produce one’s own breathe. Similarly, the process of speaking and not speaking (that is, silence) alternates back and forth in Szymborska’s volume, always requiring the other and speaking through the other.

Becoming Pirate*

Two poets—
one male, one female—
walk into a bar.
The bartender asks:
What brings you here?
The male poet replies:
My ship. Arrrrrrgh.
The female poet: Squawk!

Two poets—
one male, one female—
walk into a bar.
The bartender asks:
See anything you like?
The male poet replies:
Your booty. Arrrrrrgh.
The female poet: Squawk!

Two poets—
one male, one female—
walk into a bar.
The bartender asks:
What can I get you?
The male poet replies:
Yo ho ho: a bottle of rum. Arrrrrrgh.
The female poet: Squawk! …
and crackers.

* with apologies to the staff at the New Amsterdam, 831 Exposition Avenue, Dallas, Texas.

Invitation/Reading

I'll be reading some of my new translations of Wislawa Szymborska's poetry as well as some of my own writings tomorrow evening (Thursday, March 29) at South Side on Lamar as part of WordSpace's Writers in the Universities program. It begins at 7:00pm at Opening Bell Coffee. If you are around, please come out and support us.

What remains unburied.

To what extent is the unburied corpse in Greek literature an indictment against the Zoroastrian practice of allowing wild dogs and birds to devour the flesh of the dead in order not to contaminate the ground? The opening stanza of the Iliad reads:

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.

The world is topsy-turvy because corpses litter the open ground. And Sophocles’ Antigone is all about Polyneices’ unburied corpse and angering the local gods—i.e., the gods of the Greeks as opposed to the god (Ahura Mazda) of the Persians, who might actually delight that Polyneices remains unburied. Considering that the Greeks and the Persians were always at war, the argument can be made that they influenced each other to a great extent: each was aware of the cultural practices of the other. I think it is also safe to say that the reason Thebes suffered so greatly for not burying Polyneices is that the Thebans employed a Persian practice and thereby angered their own gods.

Something to think about, I suppose, as we face another week of too much (and too rushed) reading.