Today was marked by a lot of writing on Sri Lanka. It was exhausting. And I read How Reading Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, a hilarious account of Proust's life, in a parody of a self-help version. I was laughing out loud, which I think to date, only Bill Bryson has made me do. (Then again, it doesn't take much to make me bark.)
Had a random lunch with a group of philosophy doctoral students, which of course, over lunch turned into an argument over free will and determinism, and the philosophy of action. It recalled the many discussions of political philosophy we used to have in the LSE corridors. My own view is one that more or less hews to St. Augustine's Christian platonic vision, although it does fudge the debate somewhat in that, individuals, who are fallen, do not possess true knowledge. Therefore, as far as they are concerned, they act with agency, freedom and direct their own life. Crucially, this gives them the capacity to choose between good and evil. God, on the other hand, is all-knowing, omniscient and has full knowledge of the entire life of every individual. He however, is not directive.
The philosophy of action though, which looks at what gives individuals the motive and intent to act, (or particularly, to act in causing harm to others.). This however is where I draw the line at philosophy.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Saturday, July 26, 2008
play-ing
We watched the Importance of Being Earnest today by the Harvard Radcliffe Repertory Theatre, and I must admit, for an entirely student-run production, it was startlingly good, with a diverse cast, (except for some rather affected British accents; why is it that putting on an English accent represents the height of thespian power for American actors?!). It reminded me of the sheer hard work that goes into any production, of the technical aspects of lighting, story telling, directing etc. I have a friend who graduated from the Yale School of Drama who's premiering his play this weekend off-off-off Broadway (and it's called Finding Ways To Prove You're Not an al-Qaeda Terrorist When You're Brown), a one man brown act , which I think is going to be hilarious! After all, graduating from the school that bore such actors as Meryl Streep can hardly be a disadvantage. This young man also has the singular acquisition of the playrights to Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy, the story of a young, gay Sri Lankan Tamil boy growing up in a society that is fracturing. Oh, art and all its possibilities.
a true story
In 2006, the municipal president of Neza, a tough area of two million people on the eastern edge of Mexico City, decided that the members of his police force needed to become "better citizens." He decided that they should be given a reading list, on which could be found Don Quixote, Juan Rulfo's beautiful novella Pedro Paramo, Octavio Paz' essay on Mexican culture The Labyrinth of Solitude, Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude,and works by Carlos Fuentes, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Agatha Christie and Edgar Allen Poe.
Neza's Chief of Police, Jorge Amador, believes that reading fiction will enrich his officers in at least three ways. First, by allowing them to acquire a wider vocabulary. Next, by granting officers the opportunity to acquire experience by proxy. "A police officer must be worldy, and books enrich people's experience, indirectly." Finally, Amador claims, there is an ethical benefit. "Risking your life to save other people's lives and property requires deep convictions. Literature can enhance those deep convictions by allowing readers to discover lives lived with similar commitment. We hope that contact with literature will make our police officers more committed to the values they have pledged to defend.
"Words on The Street" by Angel Gurria-Quintana, in Financial Times, March 3, 2006, as quoted in How Fiction Works.
Neza's Chief of Police, Jorge Amador, believes that reading fiction will enrich his officers in at least three ways. First, by allowing them to acquire a wider vocabulary. Next, by granting officers the opportunity to acquire experience by proxy. "A police officer must be worldy, and books enrich people's experience, indirectly." Finally, Amador claims, there is an ethical benefit. "Risking your life to save other people's lives and property requires deep convictions. Literature can enhance those deep convictions by allowing readers to discover lives lived with similar commitment. We hope that contact with literature will make our police officers more committed to the values they have pledged to defend.
"Words on The Street" by Angel Gurria-Quintana, in Financial Times, March 3, 2006, as quoted in How Fiction Works.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
How Fiction Works
After a rough couple of days in which it was spectacularly apparent to me again that I have completely no clue what to do with my life, a small shining light was revealed in this fabric of night, and I received an email from the local bookstore, saying that the book that I had ordered had arrived.
I doubletimed it to the bookstore, handed in my order number and waited expectantly. The assistant came over to me, his eyes shining. Look at this, he said. it's so well done. The cover is straight out of the 20s, the font of the prose with its myriad footnoting is done in early nineteenth-century style, like Flaubert. I was holding a first edition, hardcover, in hot pink of How Fiction Works by James Wood, a Harvard professor of literature.
I'm halfway through, and I can't stop reading and at the same time I am pacing the reading, not too much at any one time, because I can't remember the last time I encountered such a dry, engaging, contemplative, passionate-about-good-literature, voice. And anyone who can reference Madame Bovary, Mr. Biswas and Robert Fisk at the same time has got my allegiance.
In reading it, I was also reminded of the fact that literary theory is often hijacked by dry academics who seek to impose rather developed discussions of philosophy, historicism and the old saws of culture and identity on a tract about human interaction. Wood's form of literary theory, is more basic, and truly exploratory, focusing on questions like What is a character? and acknowledging his own limitations on interpretativeness. While he is afflicted with a rather quaint adoration for Stendhal, James and Flaubert, and a well-appointed distaste for the postmodern (yay! another person who thinks Updike is a toolshed!), his observations are insightful, erudite and truly eye-opening.
It is an excellent, well-reviewed book (from The Economist no less, as well as the New York Times and I can't wait to continue reading it.
I doubletimed it to the bookstore, handed in my order number and waited expectantly. The assistant came over to me, his eyes shining. Look at this, he said. it's so well done. The cover is straight out of the 20s, the font of the prose with its myriad footnoting is done in early nineteenth-century style, like Flaubert. I was holding a first edition, hardcover, in hot pink of How Fiction Works by James Wood, a Harvard professor of literature.
I'm halfway through, and I can't stop reading and at the same time I am pacing the reading, not too much at any one time, because I can't remember the last time I encountered such a dry, engaging, contemplative, passionate-about-good-literature, voice. And anyone who can reference Madame Bovary, Mr. Biswas and Robert Fisk at the same time has got my allegiance.
In reading it, I was also reminded of the fact that literary theory is often hijacked by dry academics who seek to impose rather developed discussions of philosophy, historicism and the old saws of culture and identity on a tract about human interaction. Wood's form of literary theory, is more basic, and truly exploratory, focusing on questions like What is a character? and acknowledging his own limitations on interpretativeness. While he is afflicted with a rather quaint adoration for Stendhal, James and Flaubert, and a well-appointed distaste for the postmodern (yay! another person who thinks Updike is a toolshed!), his observations are insightful, erudite and truly eye-opening.
It is an excellent, well-reviewed book (from The Economist no less, as well as the New York Times and I can't wait to continue reading it.
Monday, July 21, 2008
the dark knight.
So after having waited FOREVER to watch The Dark Knight, I have to say that it was a trifle incoherent, and though Bale was quite serviceable in the role, he spent most of the movie in that suit, with an obscured voice. It would take a magician to be able to overcome the stultifying effects of that suit. While the movie was chock-a-block with plot developments, action sequences, and a lot of expensive skulduggery, it lacked some grace, a melody, a duality really. I hate to say this because I am indifferent to Michael Keaton, but Tim Burton's Batman and especially Batman Returns with the unforgettable Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, had a crazy camp horror to it which this rather serious-minded, supposedly 'dark' version lacks. The one redeeming part though was the end, when Batman is being chased, forever on the run. Maggie Gyllenhaal however, lightened and smartened what was otherwise, a rather clunky movie. Sigh. And now one has to wait for the abomination of Terminator. Oh Christian Bale of the Art Film, wherefore art thou?
Friday, July 18, 2008
samantha power
OMG! Drama alert!
Samantha Power (Pulitzer award winning journalist and Harvard Kennedy School professor, and former foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama), got married to Cass Sunstein on July 4th who she met on Obama's campaign in January! (Yes, that's seven months of dating and subsequent marriage). Power is 39. Sunstein is 54. And the real goss; he used to be the partner of Martha Nussbaum!!!!
Okay, I gotta figure out what this (pretty unimposing) guy (- check out the Wikipedia mugshot) had that he seduced two of my all time favourite journalists and nonfiction writers. Man. I gotta get some of that.
Samantha Power (Pulitzer award winning journalist and Harvard Kennedy School professor, and former foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama), got married to Cass Sunstein on July 4th who she met on Obama's campaign in January! (Yes, that's seven months of dating and subsequent marriage). Power is 39. Sunstein is 54. And the real goss; he used to be the partner of Martha Nussbaum!!!!
Okay, I gotta figure out what this (pretty unimposing) guy (- check out the Wikipedia mugshot) had that he seduced two of my all time favourite journalists and nonfiction writers. Man. I gotta get some of that.
wow
Wow. Saying goodbye to 2 best friends in 2 weeks, with a few tears at the airport for both of them really blows.
On other news, I have become a day trader!!! MUAHAHAHAHAHA. The plan is to invest my meagre savings in the next penny stock that's going to make 300% in six months, and then I might never have to work a job again (at least for 2 months. so do the math).
I am going to watch The Dark Knight tonight, so get prepared for the usual Bale-ful drooling.
On other news, I have become a day trader!!! MUAHAHAHAHAHA. The plan is to invest my meagre savings in the next penny stock that's going to make 300% in six months, and then I might never have to work a job again (at least for 2 months. so do the math).
I am going to watch The Dark Knight tonight, so get prepared for the usual Bale-ful drooling.
Monday, July 14, 2008
a party
There is a party going down below me, on the grass lawn of a large Georgian mansion. The lawn is about half the size of a football field. It is midnight now, and I am peering into the party below, feeling quite like Sabrina, perched at the level of tree-tops, waiting for Bogart (originally Holden) to waltz out, impeccably attired in a white tuxedo blazer and bowtie, bearing champagne and a bon mot. It is that kind of party, with its patrons attired in backless evening dress, with a jazz quartet playing old Sinatra songs, with laughter spiralling up into my apartment, tinged with alcohol and unaccountably gay. Don't they know there is a war going on? We are, after all, in war time. I imagine these are what parties looked like in the late 20s, when the war was going on somewhere else, when it hadn't yet arrived on these shores. And Cambridge with the bluest of pedigrees harking back to the Revolution, reeking of old-money, and Gatsby-like parties filled with drunken intellectuals, the silliest drunks of them all. The last place where the war would ever come, but come it did, as the monument of the dead in the commons next to us attests. There will be newer monuments, soon enough.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Bone Dreams
I spent two years searching for this poem on the internet, and now finally, some English department, misguided student (by definition) has posted it up!
Bone Dreams
I
White bone found
on the grazing:
the rough, porous
language of touch
and its yellowing, ribbed
impression in the grass —
a small ship-burial.
As dead as stone,
flint-find, nugget
of chalk,
I touch it again,
I wind it in
the sling of mind
to pitch it at England
and follow its drop
to strange fields.
II
Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue's
old dungeons.
I push back
through dictions,
Elizabethan canopies,
Norman devices,
the erotic mayflowers
of Provence
and the ivied Latins
of churchmen
to the scop's
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.
In the coffered
riches of grammar
and declensions
I found bān-hūs,
its fire, benches,
wattle and rafters,
where the soul
fluttered a while
in the roofspace.
There was a small crock
for the brain,
and a cauldron
of generation
swung ar the centre:
love-den, blood-holt,
dream-bower.
IV
Come back past
philology and kennings,
re-enter memory
where the bone's lair
is a love-nest
in the grass.
I hold my lady's head
like a crystal
and ossify myself
by gazing: I am screes
on her escarpments,
a chalk giant
carved upon her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken
fosse of her spine,
move towards the passes.
V
And we end up
cradling each other
between the lips
of an earthwork.
As I estimate
for pleasure
her knuckles' paving,
the turning stiles
of the elbows,
the vallum of her brow
and the long wicket
of collar-bone,
I have begun to pace
the Hadrian's Wall
of her shoulder,
dreaming of Maiden Castle.
VI
One morning in Devon
I found a dead mole
with the dew still beading it.
I had thought the mole
a big-boned coulter
but there it was,
small and cold
as the thick of a chisel.
I was told, ‘Blow,
blow back the fur on his head.
Those little points
were the eyes.
And feel the shoulders.’
touched small distant: Pennines,
a pelt of grass and grain
running south.
By Seamus Heaney
Bone Dreams
I
White bone found
on the grazing:
the rough, porous
language of touch
and its yellowing, ribbed
impression in the grass —
a small ship-burial.
As dead as stone,
flint-find, nugget
of chalk,
I touch it again,
I wind it in
the sling of mind
to pitch it at England
and follow its drop
to strange fields.
II
Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue's
old dungeons.
I push back
through dictions,
Elizabethan canopies,
Norman devices,
the erotic mayflowers
of Provence
and the ivied Latins
of churchmen
to the scop's
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.
In the coffered
riches of grammar
and declensions
I found bān-hūs,
its fire, benches,
wattle and rafters,
where the soul
fluttered a while
in the roofspace.
There was a small crock
for the brain,
and a cauldron
of generation
swung ar the centre:
love-den, blood-holt,
dream-bower.
IV
Come back past
philology and kennings,
re-enter memory
where the bone's lair
is a love-nest
in the grass.
I hold my lady's head
like a crystal
and ossify myself
by gazing: I am screes
on her escarpments,
a chalk giant
carved upon her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken
fosse of her spine,
move towards the passes.
V
And we end up
cradling each other
between the lips
of an earthwork.
As I estimate
for pleasure
her knuckles' paving,
the turning stiles
of the elbows,
the vallum of her brow
and the long wicket
of collar-bone,
I have begun to pace
the Hadrian's Wall
of her shoulder,
dreaming of Maiden Castle.
VI
One morning in Devon
I found a dead mole
with the dew still beading it.
I had thought the mole
a big-boned coulter
but there it was,
small and cold
as the thick of a chisel.
I was told, ‘Blow,
blow back the fur on his head.
Those little points
were the eyes.
And feel the shoulders.’
touched small distant: Pennines,
a pelt of grass and grain
running south.
By Seamus Heaney
cooking
Another successful cooking day! Made garlic-rosemary lamb with cucumber yogurt puree in whole wheat pita, and roasted nectarines to finish off. Next, I think I would like to master a complicated dish- not along the lines of molecular gastronomy, but something with a little more finesse...
Met a Sri Lankan friend who'd spent the year in Sri Lanka, and he talked about having to defend Eastern council elections (when he was against it on principle), on having to defend a rape case of an 11 year child by her uncle, who ended up with a miscarriage, on traffic violations with racist cops and how he was so incensed that he was determined to take it to court: the slow, and steady unravelling of any sanity and calmness.
Met a Sri Lankan friend who'd spent the year in Sri Lanka, and he talked about having to defend Eastern council elections (when he was against it on principle), on having to defend a rape case of an 11 year child by her uncle, who ended up with a miscarriage, on traffic violations with racist cops and how he was so incensed that he was determined to take it to court: the slow, and steady unravelling of any sanity and calmness.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
there used to be a playground
Found myself quite unexpectedly at school again after being unable to get an internet connection or phone signal where I am currently living (in the boondocks known as Harvard Square), and it was quite disorientating to wander these empty corridors, after lunch with a good friend and reminisce about all the times we would be rushing around late for class, talking smack about professors and fellow class mates, furiously working on an (inevitably) last minute assignment, having to work in one of those mandatory group assignments (a favorite of the Kennedy School) and silently grinding a pencil into my thigh as a self-important gasbag drones on about Iran's nuclear policy (a nother favorite at the Kennedy School). Eating from the world's worst canteen known as Sodexho where food comes to die. Trying to print yet another draft of a paper on school printers that ran out of toner and the will to live sometime back in 1975. Reading the NY times coverage of our school and a professor who quite inexplicably was named the "Prince of Darkness" in said coverage. Bumping into the various hookups and breakups on campus fulled by politics and desire. Talking to Pulitzer-winning professors who inexplicably burst into tears when asked about their personal life (or lack thereof). Obamamania on every corner and corridor. Damn, I miss this place.
Monday, July 07, 2008
bale-fully yours,
Managed to haul my (rather large) ass to the gym today, thereby dispelling the contentedness I have been feeling for the last 2 weeks. Man, it still hurts.
I am starting on an intensive French and gym regime. Rented Indochine, an old Cesar winning movie with Catherine Deneuve. This had all better come back to me rather quickly OR ELSE. As for the gym I plan to spend at least 2 hours a day (HAHAHAHAHA) for 22 days (the time it takes to form a habit) this month. It's going to be brutal but I am inspired by Christian Bale who a) lost 63 pounds in 12 weeks by eating an apple and a can of tuna a day (don't worry that is (sadly) not going to be me) and b)got fit for American Psycho and Batman by working out 3 hours a day for 6 weeks. My goals are a bit more modest, but then again, I don't have the body of Bale, who let's face it, is a Greek God with a Welsh accent.
On other news, it is amazing how difficult writing is. Particularly, the architecture of a story with plot, meta themes, character development, denoument, finale. And how the language should not serve itself, but should be in service of the story. Some writers (y'all know who I am talking about), make it seem effortless, like magic. Ahhh. Another aspiration, filed away in Things To Do When I Return As a Grasshopper.
And how could I post today without writing about tennis? I remember when I first saw Nadal play against Federer. It was with my mum, and it was back in 2003, in a hotel room in Cambodia. The sum total of what she knows about tennis can be described as Every *Bleep* Thing Shouted By John McEnroe, but she was quite enamoured of Nadal. (She has a thing for Latinos- cf Desperado, which I think we watched 3 times because of Antonio Banderas.). In any case, what a match.
I am starting on an intensive French and gym regime. Rented Indochine, an old Cesar winning movie with Catherine Deneuve. This had all better come back to me rather quickly OR ELSE. As for the gym I plan to spend at least 2 hours a day (HAHAHAHAHA) for 22 days (the time it takes to form a habit) this month. It's going to be brutal but I am inspired by Christian Bale who a) lost 63 pounds in 12 weeks by eating an apple and a can of tuna a day (don't worry that is (sadly) not going to be me) and b)got fit for American Psycho and Batman by working out 3 hours a day for 6 weeks. My goals are a bit more modest, but then again, I don't have the body of Bale, who let's face it, is a Greek God with a Welsh accent.
On other news, it is amazing how difficult writing is. Particularly, the architecture of a story with plot, meta themes, character development, denoument, finale. And how the language should not serve itself, but should be in service of the story. Some writers (y'all know who I am talking about), make it seem effortless, like magic. Ahhh. Another aspiration, filed away in Things To Do When I Return As a Grasshopper.
And how could I post today without writing about tennis? I remember when I first saw Nadal play against Federer. It was with my mum, and it was back in 2003, in a hotel room in Cambodia. The sum total of what she knows about tennis can be described as Every *Bleep* Thing Shouted By John McEnroe, but she was quite enamoured of Nadal. (She has a thing for Latinos- cf Desperado, which I think we watched 3 times because of Antonio Banderas.). In any case, what a match.
Friday, July 04, 2008
american psycho
"Do you think Soho is becoming too... commercial ?"
" Yes. I read that."
" Oh, who gives a rat's ass ?"
" Hey, that affects us."
"Well, what about the massacres in Sri Lanka, honey ? Doesn't that affect us too ? Do you know anything about Sri Lanka ? How, like, the Sikhs are killing tons of Israelis over there ?
"Come on, Bryce. There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about."
American Psycho
" Yes. I read that."
" Oh, who gives a rat's ass ?"
" Hey, that affects us."
"Well, what about the massacres in Sri Lanka, honey ? Doesn't that affect us too ? Do you know anything about Sri Lanka ? How, like, the Sikhs are killing tons of Israelis over there ?
"Come on, Bryce. There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about."
American Psycho
Thursday, July 03, 2008
random
So... by all accounts... its' been a month since I last posted during which I have a) graduated , b) survived 2 weeks with the family at the Cape, c) moved house and packed up 2 years worth of stuff, and d) continued working.
I have July off so I shall be posting thoughts such as I wish I had tartes framboises and Why are there endless storms in Cambridge and How many movies can I watch per day (record of 5 so far.)
But quite seriously, I have been on a massive Christian Bale streak, he of the cheekbones-so-sharp-it-could-slice-sexual-tension fame. Watched Equilibrium yesterday, a Matrix-type movie in which Bale was quite extraordinary as a robot who learns what emotion is. I had seen him first in Empire of the Sun, a rather prosaic Spielberg tearjerker, in which Bale was so astonishing that they had to create an awards category for him (Best Juvenile something or other). And then of course had seen Laurel Canyon, and American Psycho, and of course the Batman movies. I like actors who do not impose their personality over the role, but rather are in total service to the role and do not try to be likable. Another fine performance seen recently was Casey Affleck in Gone Baby Gone.
Am also reading Dreams From My Father, a poignant, searching memoir written by Barack Obama which was started right after he graduated from Harvard Law and way before he acquired Bono-like fame. Next is A Writer's People by Naipaul, whose nonfiction writing I adore for its simplicity, elegance and insight. He is such an un-showy writer, unlike Rushdie.
Which brings me to my recent Rushdie sighting at the New York Public Library attended with JP. Suffice it to say, that the man was utterly repellent, and for, I might add, not very good reason either. The truly great are truly humble, and those who fall just short of greatness in their work, especially as writers, also lack that humility which allows openness to perspectives and the ability to continue plumbing the depths of the human heart.
I have July off so I shall be posting thoughts such as I wish I had tartes framboises and Why are there endless storms in Cambridge and How many movies can I watch per day (record of 5 so far.)
But quite seriously, I have been on a massive Christian Bale streak, he of the cheekbones-so-sharp-it-could-slice-sexual-tension fame. Watched Equilibrium yesterday, a Matrix-type movie in which Bale was quite extraordinary as a robot who learns what emotion is. I had seen him first in Empire of the Sun, a rather prosaic Spielberg tearjerker, in which Bale was so astonishing that they had to create an awards category for him (Best Juvenile something or other). And then of course had seen Laurel Canyon, and American Psycho, and of course the Batman movies. I like actors who do not impose their personality over the role, but rather are in total service to the role and do not try to be likable. Another fine performance seen recently was Casey Affleck in Gone Baby Gone.
Am also reading Dreams From My Father, a poignant, searching memoir written by Barack Obama which was started right after he graduated from Harvard Law and way before he acquired Bono-like fame. Next is A Writer's People by Naipaul, whose nonfiction writing I adore for its simplicity, elegance and insight. He is such an un-showy writer, unlike Rushdie.
Which brings me to my recent Rushdie sighting at the New York Public Library attended with JP. Suffice it to say, that the man was utterly repellent, and for, I might add, not very good reason either. The truly great are truly humble, and those who fall just short of greatness in their work, especially as writers, also lack that humility which allows openness to perspectives and the ability to continue plumbing the depths of the human heart.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
It's a Beautiful Day (U2)
A new day, a new nominee, a new graduation, a new life. If this country can change, then by god, so can I.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
food!
C and I made dinner yesterday, to wit, the following: watermelon, basil, mint, watercress and feta cheese salad, followed by cava beans, spinach and pasta salad, followed by roast nectarines with a vanilla bean sauce, with of course, copious amounts of zinfandel (and when that ran out), pinot grigio and shandies. The menu tonight, spinach and red onion salad with maple-dijon vinaigrette, roast salmon with fig and onion jam, and sour cream and cinnamon cake.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Gardening
On the return from Quebec City, we drove through the rolling hills of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire (where we stopped off at a true-blue diner), and back into Cambridge. Opened the post to see that my package of Jo Malone samples had arrived and now, having sprayed White Jasmine, Amber & Lavender, Orange Blossom, Nectarine and Honey, and French Lime Blossom on me, I am happily content, smelling like an English Garden, writing my very last paper.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Vive La Quebec
Am in Vieux Quebec City now. Who had a clue that this existed in North America, this old town, that looks like it was plucked out of fairy-tale Berlin, Prague and Paris, where everything is in French (as the proud Quebecois and their independence movement will attest to), and where above all, the food is in French. Although it has been busy with work, being holed up in cafes in Montreal and Quebec on cobblestoned streets with horse carriages passing by, with endless chocolat chaud, cafe au lait and croissants, with rain pattering off the grey stones, with the sun bursting out of clouds, ricocheting off an ancient chateau, and every arrowing spire in the city, with tiny art galleries and Catholic churches around every corner, with Nina Simone singing in every cafe, it feels like I have walked into an alternate universe, and the past and the future both seem very far away.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
negating my ass
I am valiantly trying to write my hardest paper yet: a paper for which I receive no credit, which topic I have to conjure out of thin air, which will be read by one of the few people whose intellectual opinion I consider relevant, and which is daunting because it is about literature, which I have enjoyed as a reader, but never as a critical theorist (and thank god for that).
For example, consider the sentence below:
"What Hegel established is, then, that violence is a necessary moment in the history of the recognition of human freedom. This history initiates a contradictory outcome: it asserts freedom through the negation of freedom. However slavery, generates the conditions of its own emancipation so that the process moves toward the mutual cancellation of servitude and domination. It is a negation of the negation: The negation that instituted bondage is negated in its turn."
I have read this paragraph 3 times and I still don't understand it. ARRGHHGHGHGHGH.
2 more papers before the conferral of a degree- so close and yet so far.
For example, consider the sentence below:
"What Hegel established is, then, that violence is a necessary moment in the history of the recognition of human freedom. This history initiates a contradictory outcome: it asserts freedom through the negation of freedom. However slavery, generates the conditions of its own emancipation so that the process moves toward the mutual cancellation of servitude and domination. It is a negation of the negation: The negation that instituted bondage is negated in its turn."
I have read this paragraph 3 times and I still don't understand it. ARRGHHGHGHGHGH.
2 more papers before the conferral of a degree- so close and yet so far.
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