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There are some great leaders that are just a joy to behold, I think His Holiness is one of those. He just goes around with his big shoes and his sparkly eyes, speaking truth in a world gone half-crazy... I could eat this picture for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

His Holiness Dalai Lama listens as cellist Michael Fitzpatrick plays as he enters the stage to speak at the Canseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, Friday, May 14th, 2010. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

Again, a wonderful piece linked on Racialicious about bodies being together, affective conversion and heightened political consciousness:

Curate

“Happiness and Queer Politics”
Sara Ahmed

Since I'm not really participating in Facebook for the moment, this blog is going to experience a resurgence in "that's neat!" posts. Here's a bit of optimism that made me feel better about today:

The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future

by Janna Anderson, Lee Rainie

Mar 31, 2010

via boingboing

Lately I've found that my skin has grown too thin to participate in the conversation going on in my internet communities. This presents a particular problem for me, given that I place so much emphasis on the ability to talk with people, understand their viewpoint and express my own. I hardly ever have specific aims for such conversations, although they are usually precipitated by some offense committed on either side, and in this case, a particularly painful conversation took place on Facebook catalyzed by some of my friends' gross and hateful simplifications of "religion" as an ignorant, malevolent and destructive phenomenon in human life. The generality of these characterizations is what motivated my critique, and I tried to point out the way such reductions are themselves destructive, malevolent and ignorant. What I was really responding to was the hatefulness, the readiness to express such caricatures as a way of putting people down, especially people my friends haven't met. I posted my opposition on an academic point, but as I continued to fight for this perspective, I realized that this was really an emotionally motivated discussion, and that I was defending not "religion" (as so many of my friends wanted to characterize my position) but the loving religious people who brought me up and taught me about the value of loving public service, social justice and compassionate care. That kind of fight will always overflow whatever academic point I decide to make, and I realized that despite the fact that people claimed not to be talking about those "good" religious people, there wasn't anything I could say that would convince them that their discourse was hurtful to people I love very much, not least myself of course. Maybe there isn't anything I can say that would make my friends think twice about expressing themselves that way. When I have intimations that this might be true, my hope dies a quiet, whimpering death.

Today is Easter, and I've been on a Facebook fast this whole week because of the heartbreak I experienced during that conversation and in people's status updates to the same effect. I thought maybe I would login today, check my events and just browse around, feeling stronger and more open than last week. The first post I see, unfortunately, was from a friend whose company I once very much enjoyed but haven't seen in a bunch of years, and don't feel particularly close to anymore. She writes: "'jesus' was a chump and all you god loving idiots can just go ahead and delete me." Now, this person is intelligent, creative and has worked her world in a way that is both admirable and inspiring. I know that if she could see my tears she would feel bad on some level about writing that, but I can't bring myself to comment on her post. I DO want to delete her, just so I never have to read something like that ever again, but I recognize that to do so would be simply an act of avoidance. I can't walk away from everyone who hurts my feelings, or insults people I love. I can't disengage from friends just because they don't understand or appreciate my sense of the world, but I also don't feel that I can really engage these sentiments either. I find myself feeling like a bit of a martyr, suffering my friends' animosity in silence. Nobody understands my particular religious experience, it's not part of their image of what "religion" is. If I try to explain that I have a religious framework that fits pretty well into most humanist discourses, I'm still a "god-loving idiot" and in the manner so similar to narrow-minded missionaries who pray that I come to their particular salvation, I know that my friends simply hope that I will eventually come to my senses. If I suffer these insults in silence, aren't I doing the same thing? Is there a way to force them to respect my experiences, even if I don't think that my particular orientation is really explainable, let alone that someone could "convert" to my view?

It's so painful, I don't even know if I could talk to this particular person without devolving into an emotional puddle. For the moment, Facebook remains a little too much, my "public" is kicking me while I'm down, and I crave that open loving space that I find with others who think like me. A precious few, to be sure, and I worry about the elitism and isolation that comes with retreating to an ideological shelter. The challenges of diversity are real, and heartbreak is among the worst dangers in my particular universe right now. I love these people, and they break my heart. Such is life I suppose, I'm no stranger to it, but I've always resisted the notion that I had to break with people once they broke my heart, and distance doesn't seem much better. It's just more isolation, more loneliness, more misunderstanding. At least for the time being, I have to enclose myself a little, stop being out there so much, stop listening for a while because I can't really take it and the temptation to cynicism and ideological extremes is knocking at my door. I have to believe that this is just a provisional break, a purposive fast from public discourse, and that something will come from somewhere that will give me the strength and the confidence to listen to my friends without taking what they say so personally. Among my many "religious" convictions, I've had my rabid atheist friends point out that I believe without reason or justification that conflict and pain are both temporary and instructive, that much can be gained through suffering and loss, and that these experiences are all the more beautiful for that. If I can remain unapologetic in that view, maybe read a little Dostoevsky and remember all the wonderful things these friends have said and done in the long course of our friendships, I think I might be fine. God help me.

This is a teaser, but someday I'm going to use this song as the basis for a lecture on "full speech" and "true speech":

Working out the implications of wordiness... It's not really the words that are the problem. Somehow I'm able to preserve that faith in myself that really I'm using all these words to pretty good advantage. I make a comfortable (if ever tenuous) living, people that I admire and respect admire and respect me, I'm able to negotiate the various minor complications the world throws me into. What's the problem?

The hunter Gracchus is 1,500 years old, eternally boatridden by a cruel dysfunction of death and a young man happens upon him. The young man -- as is typical -- would like to know something about this impossible person, and so he boldly demands a bit of coherent information. Of course Kafka gives no stage direction, but I have it in my mind that the hunter laughs at the young man, all the while heaving a long, sad sigh:

"Ah, coherence. That old, old story. All the books are full of it, teachers draw it on the blackboard in every school, the mother dreams of it while suckling her child, lovers murmur it while embracing, merchants tell it to the customers, the customers to the merchants, soldiers sing it on the march, preachers declaim it in church, historians in their studies realize with open mouths what happened long ago and never cease describing it, it is printed in the newspapers and people pass it from hand to hand, the telegraph was invented so that it might encircle the world the faster, it is excavated from ruined cities, and the elevator rushes it up to the top of the skyscraper. Railway passengers announce it from the windows to the countries they are passing through, but even before that the savages have howled it at them , it can be read in the stars and the lakes reflect it, the streams bring it down from the mountains and the snow scatters it again on the summit, and you, man, sit here and ask me for coherence. You must have had an exceptionally dissipated youth.”

I just found this on my friend's amazing blog all we ever wanted... (was everything)



Gil Scott-Heron is new to me, I'm totally floored.

This is what it all comes down to, if I might be reductionist for a moment: when I close my eyes and turn off my wordy brain, there's a silence that is only broken by the contact of our skin. I have forgotten the bed, the sheets, the blankets, the pillow. The only sensation that intrudes is the feeling of touching and being touched. I can single it out in the darkness of all my other senses, and my I oscillates between owning and being owned. I can finally give myself up, but in the gesture remains my movement, my will to self-abdicate. I am brought to my self in bringing myself to you.

Running contrary to all my habits and inclinations, I know that I cannot spell it out. I can lengthen the moment and fill it with words, but eventually they will overwhelm and cover over what I have aimed them to describe. What I can imagine will gradually overtake what I can grasp and hold of the Real moment. In all this production there is a self-sabotage, an obstinate will to savor what cannot be preserved, a wish to represent what can only be presented once and by powers so far beyond my control they seem to mock me at times.

There is no answer, no way to master or control the chaosmos. The Real breaks through as it sees fit, occasionally leaving desire and trauma in its wake. My wordy brain seizes upon each sumptuous feast, masticating with relish the detritus of a flawed memory. Without Real moments, I will end up gnawing my own flesh. Yet in pursuing such moments I am just as easily lost to despair and self-destruction. The balance is never struck. It is a fluctuating fuel gauge, and I am never wholly full or wholly empty.

The trouble of course, as always, is the transmission. Without traction I will floor it to the red lines. While the mud flies around me in every direction I will rage, and my impotent fury will fog up the windows with all that hot air. I will be confined in the obscurity of my vessel.

So this is what it all comes down to: I am a word, I need the sentence.

Idealize This | Feminism

So I'm working (slowly) on a paper for Dr. Wallwork on Durkheim's sociology, specifically his notion that individualism has been steadily developing and gaining prominence in (European and European derived) cultures from the beginning of human time. He warns us though -- as recently as 1895 -- that individualism, with all the inevitability of its ascension and attendant empowerments, orients individuals to their own particular interests and not to the interests of the society that for all its ills still sustains us in what peace and harmony we can muster.

The larger two-paper project is to try and fit Durkheim's analysis with some of the transnational feminisms I read with Angela Davis. Part of Prof. Davis' project with us was to try to conceptualize a collective individuality, a notion of our interdependence that can short-circuit the inevitable divisions of identity politics and civil rights movements in a way that does not give in to the simplifying and homogenizing unity or solidarity that would trivialize our very real differences. The radical realization is that a homogenizing solidarity can only ever be a reinstatement of some empowered and thus defining hegemony. We are not all "one", we are many, and we depend on each other. What would a political consciousness that can tolerate that kind of ambiguity look like?

Well, as usual, I was procrastinating at a good breaking point and read this article on Racialicious:

Idealize This | Feminism

by Guest Contributor Catherine Traywick, originally published at Hyphen and Femmalia

Part of what really impresses me about this article is the way Traywick articulates her own sense of ambivalence and frustration, critiques the institutions that support the opposition, and then remains on the fence. I think that's what we have to do. We have to start to understand ourselves as standing in multiple camps simultaneously. We have to critique the institutions and points of view that exclude or dehumanize the people with whom we identify in those several camps, and narrativize our lives as individuals amidst all that ambiguity such that we can share them. An engagement with people cannot be structured as an oppositional binary. Spivak's "strategic essentialism" has its place -- in my view -- in opposition to institutions, which cannot but function in binary. Human beings, individuals, are not binary. My allegiance with "feminism" doesn't function on an on-off basis, I don't recognize "feminism", I recognize women and the feminisms they bring to the table.

Part of the privilege of living in a culture where life is in the key of individualism is that I get to develop my perspective as a person who is accorded certain powers and dignities. I get to say yes and no, and I am expected to live with the consequences. I can move as a white, straight, monied, able-bodied woman in the world. As such is the case, I will develop my perspective to try and comprehend as much as possible the ways in which my movement is made possible and supported by the individuals I meet and do not meet. As such a moving person, I will recognize as much as possible that my movement is contingent, that it is not guaranteed and that it does not come without a human cost, however much the market seeks to obscure this cost. However much the heroic stories of the ages want to convince me that one person can rise above the fray and live on that azure mountaintop, autonomous and independent, I will remember that however far I may rise, whatever freedom I may enjoy, I have risen within a collective wave that reaches back to the beginning of human time and moves through to the distant end. I will remember them, and I will recognize you, as far as is humanly possible. I will stay on the fence, in order to see better, and I will work for our future together, because we are together, even now.

This just soothes my soul...

(I don't know who drew this, I found it randomly)

So I've stopped going back to Ithaca every weekend, which is always a difficult transition to make. I never really make the commitment to stay here, get acclimated and do my work. At the least sign of unshakable boredom or uncomfortable isolation I bail. It's not as easy now, that's one factor. Although Uroy's totally fine by himself for a night, he doesn't like it and neither do I really. I've grown so attached to him that if he's not at my ankle or hip I start to feel like my world is creaking unhinged, like I'm missing a little furry, flatulent ballast.

That's not the point. The point is what do I do instead? There has to be a substitute, I can't just go without that sense of being at home, the solidity of being in a space that's predictable and comfortably rote. When I want to shut off my brain I have to be in a situation that only requires muscle memory. In Ithaca, I already know the shortcuts through the permanent fixtures. I can avoid the hazards with minimal research. So what am I doing to provide that for myself in Syracuse? What am I doing to be self-sufficient?

Well, I guess I'm not sure yet. I suppose that's why I'm writing about it. I'm starting with work. I work at least 6 days a week, for more than ten hours a day. I'm still cutting corners, but every weekend I stay here I get closer to completing everything on time. For instance, the seminar on Black Feminist Theories is starting on Monday and I haven't finished my Gadamer and Derrida paper from last spring. I never really pulled back into the routine after the exams last year, I needed a break I guess. Comps and relationship detritus blew a hole in the semester rhythm.

But now that I'm more or less confined by good sense to my office and living room, I'm enjoying the work. Every week I have to read 5 or 600 pages and comment on them in one way or another. I get excited imagining that I really could do it all, AND get the house in order, AND maintain my own and my animals' health... Sometimes I work all day and it feels almost as good as the drive home after the market on Saturdays, but it's not quite the same. My exhaustion isn't rewarded by my Mom or her eager Shi Tzu, I'm not flopping down on Dom's couch to watch good television or kick each others' asses at Soul Caliber.

I'm alone, in my apartment, with my animals. My options are television, hobbying, more writing and reading of one form or another... "Cry me a river?" You sneer. Well yes, yes it's all very wonderful, but you won't mind if I do? I don't know why, after all these years, I still don't enjoy my own company. Hence the tension, right? I want to be alone because I'm tired from all the work that people take, but I don't really want to be alone. Tough truths, tough truths... I can encourage myself and say that recognizing it is half the battle, but really that's not much of a consolation. My poor animals, my poor friends, how little I really value their company, despite all appearances. I think I have to react against them sometimes, although it tears me apart because otherwise I am positively consumed in my relationships, inter- and intra-species. It's so painful to want to reject all that. I walk away from the crowd, but when I get past the last set of eyes I smoke my cigarette and I wonder "what now?".

I'm gonna walk the dog.

This post is a bit of a pet-centric journal of self-examination. It started as a fluff piece about Smokey and Uroy, with all my whining about social alienation and disappointment lately, I wanted to add a note of positivity about these, my most beloved of "social" responsibilities. Along the way, it turned into the kind of narcissistic self-examination the reader has no doubt come to expect from me. So it goes. One of the things I've learned in the past year is that human beings cannot be "loved up", you can't take a broken person into your heart, love them, and expect that your love will fix all the cracks and fissures that are or were breaking that person down. My standards of "fixed-ness" are also to blame, being vastly higher for humans than they are for animals.


Smokey, for example, was basically a neglected elderly cat with no taste for humans and more than enough defensive aggression to keep potential admirers at a distance. I've had him now for almost two years, and I'm satisfied if he wants to sit/sleep next to me and doesn't bite me every day. This summer I've been leaving him alone in Syracuse four days a week to work in Ithaca, and when I return he won't leave me alone, following me around just to be pet and talked to. The change is remarkable, and reinforces my sense that indeed, this anti-social cat is now more or less socialized and misses me when I'm gone.


Uroy, on the other hand, came to me from the Speisers', and although he was a healthy dog who grew up with a family who loved him and taught him good manners, he wasn't getting enough attention or exercise for his relatively modest needs. This is life in a family, really, and a totally dependent dog does not take priority over an adorable 7 year old boy, for example. With my single family-lessness, and my very flexible schedule of sitting around, reading and writing, I can take him around the block 5 times a day, haul him around to all outdoor events, and even take him to work with me at the market. Since the winter especially, Uroy has gone from a kind of lethargic, totally dependent -- but unbelieveably adorable -- lump of sleeping wrinkles to an astonishingly active and social dog. He comes with me practically everywhere and has developed a fighting trim and precocious cheerfulness that I wasn't quite expecting. He has a wonderfully balanced energy -- as Cesar Milan would say -- that mellows other dogs and people, including over-excited puppies and children.


More often than not, I think my loneliness despite my rich social life comes from an instinctual urge to nest, to make a loving home for myself and others, an urge that is only getting stronger as I get older. Contrary to some advice I've received, I don't think I can simply make a choice about the person I make such a nest for and with. Sometimes it defies my imagination to conjure up some person I could seriously commit to and build a home with. Every criteria I imagine turns out to be either completely unrealistic or not at all sufficient. On the other hand, making a home suitable for Uroy and Smokey is more or less a snap. Food? Check. Water? Check. Acceptable places to poop? Check. Demonstrations of love? Check.


Of course our little domestic paradise has its problems. Smokey still bites me occassionally and Uroy's flatulence and spats of serious attitude continue to embarrass me, and I haven't slept alone in my own bed since Smokey showed up. But the pros vastly outweigh the cons, and I see little unexpected improvements in both of them nearly daily. I have, indeed, successfully "loved up" my furry rejects and we are all better for it. I'm less self-centered in general and less anxious about my ability to sustain serious love for another creature, an ability I have seriously doubted in the wake of past romantic relationships.



The problem of course is that this increased faith in my own ability to care for another creature has pushed to impatience my desire to find another person to nest with. There are so many differences between pets and "boyfriends" it's hardly worth mentioning them, but perhaps the most thorny of nettles for me is the "live and let live" attitude that I have toward my pets' idiosyncrasies and the exacting, vocal expectations I have for the one I'm with. On the one hand, I've accepted too much in the past and been burned REALLY badly. In a sense I need to raise my standards, change leagues, get better at cutting my losses etc. That's an issue of self-esteem versus my impatience and the things it makes me hallucinate about other people. On the other hand, what I really need to accept is that sooner or later someone is going to surprise me, blow apart my expectations and only THEN will it be an issue of accepting this or that flaw or idiosyncrasy. People are not pets, you can't just pick out the needy and damaged ones and lovingly chip away at their rough edges. It's a balancing act and a waiting game rolled into one and there's no end in sight. As crazy as that makes me, as proactive as I want to be about it all, there's nothing I can really do. I have to learn to be satisfied. I have to analyze and work on myself. I have to make myself and my pets happy, and I have to enjoy and appreciate my own company and the company of my dear ones. All of this takes patience. I have to develop a little "live and let live" in relation to my own life.


In the meantime, I guess I have managed to experience another kind of relationship that prepares me in some way for some serious commitment, even if I can't really imagine it. I have my friends, that's one. I have the charred hellscape of my previous entanglements, that's another. I have my family, whose dealings are always an education in love. Now I guess I know that in some scenarios my selfishness doesn't rule supreme, and I can enjoy the little considerations and providences of caring for a dependent. Of course the next logical step is children, but that is certainly a topic for another post.

I guess we're on an upswing in personal content here. This is my blog and I'll write whatever I want I suppose, but I thought I was transitioning out of putting a lot of deep inner monologues on the internet. Wouldn't be the first time I was wrong about myself... certainly won't be the last. It's two in the morning, I'm sober in Syracuse and I want to move on from the alienation post... so here goes.

I think I'm finally coming around to realizing something about myself. It's something I've heard myself say a thousand times, and if one were to scroll through this blog I'm sure the same declaration has worked its way into my self-examinations. I am essentially a solitary person. I live most of my life in my head, even when I'm surrounded by people... I'm embarrassed to say that I'm usually in my head somewhere even when there's only one person talking to me. I'm a pro at "active listening", at picking up the breaks in the conversation and saying something innocuous and vague that lets the other person "know" that I'm being attentive. I'm usually not being attentive, usually I'm not listening because something is rattling around in my head making too much noise and taking up the space usually reserved for real-time interlocutors. I'm always overwhelmed in some way or another, and I guess lately I've started burning out.

I was always looking for something. That was my excuse before. I wasn't popular in the early years, being awkward and pretentious, always reading books that were way over my head and hanging out with people that were way older than me. I was always reaching for something that I wasn't quite ready for because wherever I was supposed to be wasn't working out. I've always taken such a proactive approach to everything. I think I can fix things that are going wrong just by making it all so much harder, because -- I suppose -- if something is difficult then I'll learn something even if the end result doesn't meet my expectations. The problem at this point presents itself: I'm old enough and competent enough to be able to do pretty much anything I want. All those books didn't go entirely over my head, and now the challenge is hanging out with people who are so much younger than I am. But the results are still not meeting my expectations.

What are my expectations? This is the sticky part. Undoubtedly they are wholly unrealistic. Undoubtedly whatever it is that would unwind this knot in my chest is not something I can just go out and grab. If it were, I would have grabbed or at least grasped it by now. So... *deep breath* ... I have to own the knot in my chest. I have to stop pushing myself out into the world, trying to talk to every person that crosses my path. I have to stop looking for the riveting conversation, the surprising sense of humor, the beautiful turn of phrase. I *have* all these things, I know all these beautiful people who literally make my world turn on its eccentric axis and who pick me up when I fall into that self-deepening, imaginary hole of nobody loves me. It's unconscionable that with all the love that I have in my life, with all the people who listen to my ridiculous stories and put up with my manias, that I should still be looking over their shoulders for something else.

Kierkegaard, somewhere, talked about "dissipating oneself in conversation." I think of that phrase over and over again. I don't remember which book it's from or how long ago I read it, but it's stuck like an orange traffic cone in my wheel well, thump thump thump thump thump. I don't know anything else, what else is there for me but conversation? But I can feel myself being dissipated as the years go by, and all these millions of conversations don't bring me that thing that I want. In the moment I am elated, I can't stop thanking the powers that be for giving me such an interesting life. But there's a part of me that still wishes desperately that I were invisible, so I could just enjoy my friends' faces around a bonfire, so that I could tune in and out, attending to the images and threads their insights fill my head with. There are so many times when I wish I could only express myself like this, to an empty page, to some ideal person who could... I don't know, understand it all? Make it all seem worth it? It's the problem of my expectations, I don't know what I want, just that when I come home I'm both relieved and devastated, because it wasn't tonight, I didn't find it, and I'll have to try again tomorrow.

I'm tired of trying. I have everything I ever said I wanted. So, my ideal interlocutor doesn't exist yet, I can't describe them, I don't know that I'd know them if they spoke to me, so in the meantime I'm just dissipating myself in conversation. I'm neglecting my true friends in the pursuit of imaginary soulmates, and it's making me miserable. What's the plan of action? I'm going to become a homebody. Obviously I'm not going to stop going out or meeting new people, but that's not the mission anymore. I'm going to make a little home in my body that I can take with me, where I can peer out the windows and only invite in the people who I know won't muddy up my carpets or pocket my knick-knacks. There's been far too much of the open door policy lately, as though I had no boundaries or personal possessions. As though I couldn't lock my door or even pull down the blinds. I prefer the comfort of a wingback chair in my own living room to the stark naked trust of full disclosure. This is new and old at the same time. I've always wanted a comfortable wingback chair, with an ottoman to put my feet up and wings wide (and low) enough that I could just doze off in the middle of a chapter. I've just always thought I was too young to retire. Maybe now is the perfect time, since I couldn't have gotten here without everything else I've put myself through. Maybe all this alienation is just the tide I never allowed myself to feel before, because I hadn't done enough or felt enough to step back from the high-water mark. It was always just another challenge, another difficult thing that I'd gain in defying. I don't feel so defiant anymore, it hasn't made me happy. I'm going to try to be happy, and leave all the amorphous tortures for the page, for characters that are not me. Maybe I'll write those books instead of living them, and maybe that will be better.

So I've had a rough couple days. There's a sense in which I have to talk about it, like taking a mental shower. Back at home I'm listening to my music, my dog is snoring quietly and I'm alone. When I'm in Ithaca I'm in my Mom's house, or I'm hanging out at Dom's, or I'm working, or I'm hanging out with a hundred million strangers in some crowded bar. The din of my life in Ithaca is deafening... all the more so for all its deadening silences.

I work a job that I love. I love all my jobs, but this one in particular. It's challenging, mentally and physically; it's hyper social; it pays well; my workmates kick ass. We fuck up all the time, every little thing can go wrong on any given shift. We work incredibly hard, and most situations we can handle. The problem is the impatience of the customers, and the way we're treated as Gimme! employees at the market. Somehow we've been implicated in some wrong-doing or incompetence, and people feel free to abuse us; to criticize what they don't understand and demonize us and our bosses. We worked so hard yesterday, and at the end of the day I made the mistake of checking a critical post on the traitorous interwebs. The outpouring of criticism and snide self-righteousness took the wind right out of my sails, and in addition to the fatigue and the hormonal reset of another wasted breeding cycle, I'm feeling utterly defeated.

What's wrong with people? This is exactly what I'm talking about when I mention the "ugly left". The shrill, reactionary "criticism" that takes an ideological position in relation to real people in real situations. Just because there's more than one Gimme! and the owner doesn't want to hang around 25% of the time doesn't mean that we aren't all good people trying to do our best. I'm trying *really hard* to make Gimme! a good experience at IFM and I fucking resent all this petty bullshit. As far as I'm concerned, Gimme! shouldn't continue at IFM after this year. It's just not worth it. Between the hassle and the expense (time, money, effort) there's little room for vitriolic ingratitude, and frankly the nay-sayers can kiss my ass. Don't come if you don't like it, we don't need your business and we sure as shit don't enjoy your attitude.

That all felt good to say, but there's a more general point in there. I'm tired of uncritical criticism. I'm tired of ideologues and their jerky knees. It started with the SU GSO, and the kerfuffle over the Drumlins country club funding. The leftly inclined hear the words "country club" and are suddenly transformed into petition-filing powerhouses of righteous indignation. "How dare the golf and tennis players of SU get free access through the GSO's support!! Aren't the golf and tennis players of SU all rich?! Make them PAY!!" It makes me sick to my stomach. I hated those meetings. It didn't matter how many times someone would try to slow their roll, telling them that a lot of country club regulars are international students who can't go home often (a vulnerable minority), and that many of them are NOT wealthy. Every time there was a new delegate from whatever department who heard about the GSO funding and objected to it, they would stand up and demand a reckoning, and an audit, and an outrage. Uncritical criticism. Infuriating, noisy puppets. Listening to them makes me so angry, sometimes it's hard to breathe.

But breathe I do. I'm not out of patience. I can smile even when I'm grinding my teeth. But it's like a cage, keeping up the appearance. I'm not relaxed, I'm vigilant. I have to keep all the cracks sealed, smile and remain open. People still surprise me sometimes. But I'm tired, and I'd rather be alone than pretend to understand where you're coming from, since you make it so difficult. Somehow I need a straw man, a "you" that the singer sings to. Of course I sigh to myself, and remember that we're all just human beings, ignorant, incompetent, impossible. But lately all that breath-taking and remembering just feels like another cage. Somehow the cages have proliferated, and I'm finding myself -- for the first time -- just wanting to be alone. I have such beautiful people in my life, I'm so fortunate that way. Somehow they all feel really far away right now, even when I'm lucky enough to be standing next to them. I don't know how I came to feel so alienated, I just want it to slow down, or stop.

Maybe it's all just hormones and sleep deprivation. I'm really, really tired. Maybe I'll go to sleep tonight and everything will seem different in the morning. Here's hoping.

Ciampa put this up on Facebook. Issues of the gaze anyone? Performativity? Enjoy:

Will I perish? Yes. But not today...

Analecta Hermeneutica is the annual refereed journal of the International Institute for Hermeneutics (IIH). It provides an intellectual forum for interdisciplinary, inter-religious, and international hermeneutical research. The journal publishes research in the form of articles, reviews, and other scholarly contributions in all hermeneutically related fields, with a particular focus on philosophy, theology, and comparative literature.

My article on Lacan and Plato's Symposium is in the "Retrieving the Tradition" section. In addition to my own shameless self-promotion, I recommend that everyone read Brian Treanor's article on the digitalization of the archive, very good read.

This is such a nice segue piece I couldn't resist...


Snails Go west ! Funny TimeLapse from www.time-lapse.fr on Vimeo.

Another excellent interview with Cornel West:

I'm reading Danah Boyd's dissertation in order to write my paper, you should read it too:

Taken Out of Context:

American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics

by
danah michele boyd

from BoingBoing

I'm going to write my paper here... live, as it were. At least the germ. I need somehow to dovetail my emotional life with my academic, because the energy I seem to have for the former I need for the latter. My life needs to be my work, otherwise this is not going to work.

What is the value of disembodied communication for counteracting desire?
What is revealed in pain?

The Facebook phenomenon has something powerful in it. Through chat, online games, messages (private and public), link and media posting I can spend time with my family, friends and acquaintances regardless of our physical circumstances. My friend could be in Korea or confined by labor of one kind or another, and we can still communicate in real time. I can play scrabble with someone I haven't ever seen physically, and we can develop a relationship without ever reading each other's bodies. Video is possible beyond words, but touch is not. It is so spectoccentric that nearly every other sense is relegated to an ancillary function. Nonetheless, relationships do form, and existing ones change.

Even more than Pia's ball, the internet is not a passive object. It exists beyond me, as something to be picked up or put down, but I am shaped by my interaction with visual communication technology. The disembodied interaction of "social networking" pushes me in the direction of disembodiment: a visual and verbal conceptualization of my experience, even as it happens.This is often what detractors ridicule. When something happens to me, I begin to think of how I will reflect the experience in my status update, for example. Ridiculous as it may seem, I think immediately of my community -- spread far and wide -- and how they will view it. How I will disguise it from the uninitiated; how I will gild my feelings, justifying them to myself and others; how I will be reflected in the eyes I intend as my audience. My mind works hard on these considerations, despite whatever nominal efforts I might expend for the sake of nonchalance. Perhaps I am unique in this, in which case this is an exposition of a curious individual psychology. But somehow I think not. Somehow I think this is an observable phenomenon in others' experience as well. I can only rely on those others for corroboration, I make no claims of universality.

So to the pressing question. It has become obvious to me through various researches, professional as well as personal, that desire is the strong force of human psychology. What is desire? That force of wanting that overwhelms whatever rational or material factors seem relevant to the dispassionate observer. That wanting that makes me act, regardless of my best judgment, my strength of conviction or the knowing counsel of my peers. I will stop short of saying "against my will," because it seems in fact to be the case that my will is transformed in desire and bends like solder toward that object or objective that simultaneously takes up my entire field of vision. I have observed in myself the capacity to read hundred of pages, turning each one with care, and yet to close the book with no sense of what I have just "read". That is only one mundane example, I could think of countless others.

Perhaps all that this indicates is a weak will. That has crossed my mind more than once. I have taken steps and enacted strategies to check myself, and I'm sure that will only grow easier with age and maturity. Nonetheless, I am convinced that the power of this phenomenon certainly warrants at least a passing glance. It is obvious, at least to me, that if I were able to harness this power into those objectives that my dispassionate observers would approve of, I could spend a great deal more of my time achieving those ambitions -- without the strife and self-flagellation --that I have already undertaken at some considerable cost to myself and others.

Such is the aim of sublimation: To bend desire to the accomplishment of socially acceptable aims. Very often the exemplars of sublimation are in fact some of the leading artists and intellects of history. They are held up as accomplishing world historical events precisely because they had the passion of conviction. Luther, Leonardo, Proust, Ghandi... But I often say to myself, the biographies of these men are so often tragic. For all their power and world historicalness, they were miserable human beings. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche for example, these are not lives that I would want to lead, for all their genius and production. I have the feeling that they didn't see the choice, they didn't sign up for the trade off, somehow it all just happened to them and they could not do otherwise. However much it tortured them, however much they gave up in the gnashing process of their lives, they produced these works that exist now as what Serres wants to call quasi-technological subjects: books. Books that change lives and people. Books that have lives entirely dedicated to them. Books that create cultures, even as they are reproduced, sit on shelves, burn and soak like any other paper.

So what is it about sublimation that is still such a radical compromise? I can assume only one thing: That desire is radically insatiable. Now we're caught up with Lacan. Sublimation can make us more productive and socially acceptable, even world historical, but it can't make us happy. Or maybe happiness is just quieter. If I were happy maybe I would just busily pretty up my corner of the world and no one would ever know my name and all that ambition would seem like a silly dream. Maybe that's the ideal that never comes to sit on the couch. That's possible, but it's not the topic at hand.

Isn't there something in common here, between these exemplary books, these cultural productions and this phenomenon of social networking? Disembodied artifacts, ensouled somehow. It is not even the case that they are powerful in the sense of some source. It's as easy to pick up Untimely Meditations, read it and remain unmoved as it is to sign on to Facebook, create a profile and remain disinterested in its possibilities. These are not irresistible subjectivities, they do not insist upon themselves precisely because they are in a very real sense inert without some living person's passion for them. It seems so simple at times: we are shaped by our environment, these are objects in our environment. I might want to call them technological quasi-subjects, but that only changes the orientation of my thinking.

I have to stop there, I'm tired and it's 2am. To be continued...

February 15th:
This is the paper that came out of this. I just discovered Academia.edu, all you paper writing people should get on it. I want to read all these papers I'm always hearing about. Just because we can't get published doesn't mean we can't be read, for better or worse.

Okay, this is an X rated cartoon that you should not watch with your kids, but it's too funny and adorable for me not to share. Be safe people.



From BoingBoing

Susanna sent me this, and I just can't get enough of it. I love the fact that his name went from Francis to Frank when he was discovered to be a "ladies man". Oh how it warms my cockels...

Trucking Duck

There's something infuriating going on with the embed code, sorry for the unexciting click through.