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.

................................................................

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