What are YOU studying?

Why do I have to answer this question? When you're an undergrad, it's enough to simply state your major. You don't have to have some lifelong purpose behind it. You don't have to have traveled extensively in Europe to be interested in European literature, and you don't have to have grown up with a mathematician for a father to do game theory. Isn't it enough that I'm here? That I'm interested in what I'm studying and that I'm trying my best to understand what we're talking about?

The question, "Why are you taking that class?" only means "Why do you think you're good enough to be here?" I mentioned I might be interested in literature of the Americas, and someone asked me, "Oh, well, where have you traveled then?" Like it's a prerequisite to read something to have actually been in the place from which it originated.

Fucking bullshit people.

Great Success!

So somehow, I must have faked my way through Lacan. Fools, you think he's actually saying something! You think I think he's saying something! Ha!

Well, one presentation down, seven papers left to write over the next nine weeks. Here's hoping.

Naomi Klein

So on Friday night, I went to see Naomi Klein speak at a little event here. You might have read her book, No Logo, a few years ago, and now she has a new book out. Anyway, I went in thinking it would be kind of propagandist, and wasn't heartened when there were war protesters handing out tons of fliers outside the event when I walked in.

Her whole thesis is just really interesting, though. Maybe it's not her idea, but she's calling this "new economy" which seems to be thriving on natural disasters and terrorism, "disaster capitalism." As opposed to the dot-com capitalism of the 90s, where rich equals flashy, this capitalism is secretive, trying to hide their wealth. And we're not doing anything about it because we don't know about it because they're good at hiding it. She's proposing that the only way to overcome the "shocks" (her book is The Shock Doctrine) we've sustained is to reclaim history, and by understanding it to have our eyes opened to what's going on now.

I'm always hesitant to read a book like that, since I know hardly anything about economics, and even less about history, politics and current events. I'd like to learn things for myself and then decide, instead of having someone present information in such a way as to render me unable to make my own conclusions. (Not that every history book doesn't have its own point of view.) But there's only so much time to read things, and if this idea makes sense on the face of it, and she had obviously done her research, I suppose it couldn't hurt to take this shortcut.

Do you think it's probably not a good idea to read a book like that for information, rather than to find out one person's opinion? Not that your opinions will stop me.

(By the way, an interesting tidbit. I was sitting there, waiting for this thing to start, and all of a sudden there's this really tall guy blocking the light near me. I look up, and it's John Cusack. I was like, weird, John Cusack's here. I guess he must be a big fan. (This thing was held in sort of a shithole.) Turns out he was there to introduce her, and they're friends. Funny.)

First Day

Pretty uneventful, with only one class. Basically just handed out the syllabus. Interesting, though, because this professor's thing is "close reading," which obviously I should have done plenty of as an undergrad, but haven't, at least not with a cogent argument driving it. Close reading will be a part of anything I do with literature, so even if it would be remedial for some people, I need to learn how to do it well.

(Close reading is what it sounds like, by the way. Just looking at the way a text is structured, what kinds of effects word choices and syntax have. He gave this whole spiel about Henry James's quote, "In the arts, feeling is always meaning." I don't quite see how you get around the fact that there really are misreadings of texts, but oh well. That's a different class.)

Lacan

Is this a real sentence?

This passion of the signifier thus becomes a new dimension of the human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but in man and through man that it speaks; in that his nature becomes woven by effects in which the structure of the language of which he becomes the material can be refound; and in that the relation of speech thus resonates in him, beyond anything that could have been conceived of by the psychology of ideas.

I don't think you're allowed to have that many prepositional phrases in a row.

Two Pages

All I had to do was write two pages, and it didn't even need to have any of my own thoughts. Just explain someone else's argument. I didn't write my paper to be the most mediocre in the class, or the worst in the class, I wrote it to be the best in the class. Of course, when the top four papers were chosen (one of which I happened to think was the worst of all 13 papers, but no matter), mine was not among them.

What am I doing here if I can't even write a good two-page, ungraded, analytic-argument paper?

But I guess this is a good time to make these mistakes, before it really counts. But honestly, if I can't be the best at what I do, I don't even know why I would bother.

End self-deprecating post.

Orientation

Graduate-student orientation today. Since my program has been going for a week and a half now, we've already heard from most of these people. By around 3:30, people were in a line somewhere between 50-100 people long, waiting for free beer, soda and appetizers, after having had a free lunch of really good, substantial food only a couple of hours before.

Also read through my discussion group's papers today. I really can't tell if the ones that were bad just didn't try since it wasn't graded, or if there are really some idiots in this class.

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If you've read Dawkins's God Delusion, you already know that this is really funny, especially starting with #36: http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/GodProof.htm

An Open Letter to My Fellow Students

I try to believe the best about people. I really do. But then, you go and spill coffee on the floor in the row behind me, and since it's stadium-style seating, the downward grade of the floor helps it find its way to my personal belongings. I try to believe you're not all cowardly, insecure, privileged douchebags, but then not only does the coffee-spiller not say anything but no one at all says anything to me about it, not even giving me the chance to pick up my bag and save the things inside from being ruined.

"You should feel lucky," you think, "that it didn't soak into your iPod, your phone, your wallet, coin purse and headphones, and only ruined one book instead of two. Your notes were spared, and isn't that the most important thing? Besides, now the smell of coffee will permeate your bag for years to come. And look, the girl in front of you has a Louis Vuitton, so it's probably best this way."

Thanks, fellow students, for letting my bag, my book and a jacket I've had for 12 years get soaked through with coffee. You now number among the many hundreds of reasons why I will never assume that anyone is ever going to be nice to me.

All my best,

Day Six

Registration this morning. Despite fears to the contrary, I got into all my classes (with the help of a signature from a professor). One on fiction in North, Central and South America, one on Goethe and one on interpretive theory. I can't wait for Monday.

The people in my program are as I expected. I've found a few people who seem like potential friends, but for the most part, the students are overly sure of themselves and think they know everything already. The first paper we wrote demonstrated pretty clearly that they don't. Some people have even started skipping class already, which I understand where undergrads are concerned, but really? Paying $35,000 to skip class?

At any rate, I love it already, and I think this year is going to be really challenging. Which I need.

Te Quiero

Just now, in the alley outside my building, a hispanic guy pulled up in his white Suburban, left the lights on, got out (minus a shirt) and blasted a Mexican love song, hoping that the woman on the fourth floor of the building across the street (that was the only apartment with the lights on) would come out and embrace his naked, sweaty torso.

He left the music going for about three minutes and, before the song was over, turned it down out of apparent embarrassment and resorted to honking the horn and shaking the chainlink gate to the complex. After about 60 seconds of walking back and forth from the horn to the gate, he finally got in his car, turned on the ignition and squealing his tires, gave up.

Oh wait, he's back...

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This time, he put his flashers on, left the music off, honked the horn for about 15 seconds, walked once around the Suburban, then drove off. Don't give in, lady!

Year of the Dog

Molly Shannon starts this movie as an incredibly likable, lovable person. She's a people-pleaser, a pencil-pusher's assistant buying donuts out of her own pocket for the office staff. As a sister and aunt, she's generous and thoughtful even in the face of her brother's and sister-in-law's overprotective, neurotic behavior towards their children. She's alone and without real love and of course, she's a dog lover. Her dog really is very sweet.

What she clearly wants more than anything is a real relationship with a real person. Her brother has a life and family of his own and her best friend at work is occupied with keeping her soon-to-be-fiance in line. Incidentally, her brother's wife, played by Laura Dern, is great, constantly talking out of the side of her mouth, quietly, so as not to be understood by children, even when none are present. She and her husband play a great modern couple, preoccupied with being modern parents with typical modern needs.

This film is full of people I would normally look down on: a boss whose life seems to be composed of nothing more than his conviction of his own self-worth and consequent undervaluation by his managers, a best friend completely clueless about real love and relationships who is making the most obvious mistakes and the happy couple who seems oblivious to anything but the lice in their daughter's hair and the red stains - surely put there by the Benadryl with which their nanny is doping their infant son - on their nanny's shirt.

I love the first 20 minutes of this movie. Molly Shannon plays a character unlike any she's played before, with no quirks, no twitchy movements of the body or mouth, no wild enunciation or nervousness. But she quickly goes down a path of blind fanaticism and activism brought on by a truly traumatic event. At first, I found myself trying to identify with her need to plunge into something bigger than herself, to wallow in her grief and feelings of helplessness. After a while, though, it became more and more apparent that her new-found passion for activism wasn't filling the need she had in the first place.

I don't know that we're supposed to feel happy for Shannon in the end, pursuing the cause she has embraced, but I definitely don't. She has become yet another person on whom it's easy to look down, for becoming single-minded in her approach to life, in abandoning truly meaningful avenues of expression for superficial activism that seems for a while to fill a void. Instead, I became happy for the other people in her life who, though from the outside they appear to be shallow and full of meaningless stock phrases and attitudes with which to confront life, have true depth of feeling behind their facades.

Everyone has to find some way to deal with their lives, and if you work at a boring office job, you learn to put on the happy-office-person face and pretend to be upset by office politics and made wildly happy by small percentage raises. If you're a parent living in a suburb, you put on the face that signals ultimate concern over the mental health of your child and general interest in the lives of the normal people around you. But that doesn't mean you give up actual feeling underneath it all, and that you can't show real care and emotion when it matters most.

I don't recommend Year of the Dog because it starts feeling a little unbelievable after a while, but Molly Shannon really puts in a great performance and gives a glimpse into the heart of someone who feels unable to take hold of her life and make it what she wants it to be.

Freud

So now I live in Chicago. I'm not quite settled in, but I'm getting there. It's hard to become attached to a neighborhood where I don't know anyone and don't really have anything specific to do (and also having happened to encounter only rude or unhelpful people), so I've spent most of my days inside my apartment, reading Freud in preparation for my upcoming academic year, which is too bad, since the weather is so great and I only have one more week before classes start.

If I had come straight from undergraduate school (and hadn't had my experience overseas or any revelations about science or truth; in short, if I were still an evangelical Christian), I think I would have literally gone home before classes even started after reading Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. What I can't imagine is that this program is full of over a hundred other people who aren't offended by Freud's openness about sexuality, but I hope in this case that the unimaginable is true.

Freud was never even mentioned at my undergraduate university, let alone made an author worthy of study or consideration, and while I'm not yet convinced he is worthy of too much study, I'm at least grateful to become acquainted with his work. His ideas have obviously become an integral part of our culture, and it's nice to know the foundations on which so many people are working. Also, I like the idea of psychoanalytic criticism of literature, I think it's fun and interesting, but since I've also started to believe that the ways in which we behave are arbitrary and unnecessary, if biologically and causally determined, it's hard to take such criticism too seriously.

Now, I've never studied Freud and I'm extremely unsure of my scholarly ability, but what seems clear is that while his ideas may in many cases be helpful in describing the effects of modern culture on individual sexuality (and overall behavior), they don't do anything to answer the questions of whether things are this way of necessity; whether they are this way across all cultures, classes and races; or whether this is better or worse than other ways of behaving (as far as either individual happiness or the advancement of culture and society). Am I wrong, or does that seem to be the central problem? (Totally ignoring the fact that he had no empirical evidence or basis for his theories about the sexuality of children or women or that his focus on male genetalia as opposed to female seems to be a serious oversight.)

What I'm also troubled by is the pairing of these Freud books with Romeo & Juliet and The Canterbury Tales for my class. Sure, I do think there's something to analyzing these works in light of Freud's theories of psychological and sexual development, but I feel like it comes short of saying anything very important. It seems like it would be as helpful as analyzing literary texts in light of Christianity; that is to say, completely unhelpful and irrelevant for actually trying to get at a real understanding of something.

Help me figure this out.