Your name in lights

Grace runs, and I participate in, a philosophy graduate student group called People in Support of Women in Philosophy (anagram pronounced: pussywhip), basically in response to the underrepresentation of chicks in the field. The group (ok, it's actually pronounced P-SWIP) decided to host a public talk by some well-known female academic, so as to raise our profile and whatnot, and we got a rather big deal from Yale to come down and speak about human rights. And we had decided to have two members of PSWIP deliver responses, prepared beforehand. This ended up being Grace and me (swear to god, there are actually other members of this thing). Anyhow, this resulted in my name being on a poster alongside Big-Deal-from-Yale's for about a week around campus, and then me actually saying some cool shit to her in front of an pretty big audience. Bully for women in philosophy everywhere (but mostly for me and Grace).

Field trip

I run a feminist reading seminar in the philosophy department and today we took our bra-burning selves up to midtown and held our discussion in the courtyard at the MoMA. That's a nice way to spend a fall afternoon.

So hungry today

How hungry were you?

So hungry I had to leave in the middle of critical theory class and get a hotdog from the Sabrett's on the corner, stand there on the street and eat it, and then go back.

It's not all drinks and debauch

Wake up (730), shower and go to work, hit the grocery store (1245), get home, watch y&r, read for class, turn on crockpot (200), go to class, come home (615), eat dinner, do dishes, go to class, come home (1100).

Diuretic of Enlightenment

There is a certain awesomeness - no, super-greatness - about picking up a book you read on your own as a 19-year-old undergrad, and actually needing your decade-old margin notes in order to understand it now. Those interceding years of philosophical reading and education, not to mention the money you spent on that (at last count, at least a hundred dollars)... [finish this sentence].

Somebody's done for

You know what I don't even like anymore? Academia. I've been at this crap for ten years, and have engaged in all of the activities that are at the pinnacle of the next five - publishing, reading, writing, teaching. I do not enjoy these activities. I resist doing them, in fact. I might enjoy them if nobody knew I was doing them.

What do I like? I don't know. Arguing, I think. And travelling. Powerfully subversive action. Somebody guidance counsel me a job out of that. Also try to include the Sunday Times Crossword Puzzle and ska music.

Exeunt

Um, hi. Blog's gone dark, I know. Times are not good; everyone's stressed, everyone's sick, everyone's swimming in the whorls of mental instability that we academics like to masochistically impose upon ourselves every four months. It radiates out from work to time to people to life to health to self. I keep busy staring at the various aporias that every aspect of my life has resolved into: I need to be both here and there. I need to be both with and without him/her/them/that. I need to keep my schedule clear for academic work, which I won't be able to sustain without instead filling it with paid work.

And so, I present to you this commemorative shot I grabbed of the Empire State Building decapitated...



And a decapitated shot of my own, since I look good on Taz coffee and American Spirits.

Done. Now get back to work.

You know when you sign on to write a book review so that you can pad your cv with an itty bitty publication? And how you are all optimistic at first and excited when the crisp cloth-cover arrives in the mail? And how you read through it and think about what you're going to say and about seeing your name in print? And then you get a bout of feelings of inadequacy and decide to set it aside for awhile? And how "awhile" turns into a few months, while you're busy procrastinating on all the other work you have to do, and then you find that you are hiding from the publisher? And then one dreaded day they finally do email you and ask you nicely where the hell it is? And so you agonize for a few days and then email them back promising it will be done soon? And then you buckle down and actually produce the thing and feel a great sense of accomplishment, cuz after all the one God-given, unpractised talent you have is the ability to write?

I know, right!

SMS highlight reel, vol. 2

Whoa, wait a minute. What is becoming of that pie?

This place is the bomb bomb bomb Holy shitness

Yo, that sucks. Btw, G train is running screwy

I just got out of jail.

Ew. I think I just finished my Gadamer paper...

Oddly mesmerizing, sleep inducing

Omg im drunk in long island.

Wanna do easter?!

Well, it's a very hip hipster queer bar in wilsbrg.

Drop that deuce yet?!

Hey babe. Drunk. Miss u. How u doin? Prob asleep.

I don't have any memory of like the last hour of the party AND i threw up IN BED (also dont remember that).

Shit girl lets ride.

Look left

I think i'm straight-up gay. Blink 3 times if you can hear me.

Give me 5 mins to finish this cereal

[]

Today like yesterday, like many days, I confine myself to bed to get reading done. And the combination of Levinas, Spinoza, Gadamer, and the greasy internet machine makes every hour identical, and makes them tick past like minutes. What happens with a total lack of structure, I think.

My neighbourhood, like all neighbourhoods, has a soundtrack. And there is a high degree of temporal organization to it. Trinity Church sounds out the quarter turns; the guts of the building being renovated next door are hauled away at both 6 am and pm; the 2/3 passes underground every couple of minutes. You'd think that the subway noise especially would have become invisible to my consciousness by now, but the opposite is happening. Because I can picture what it's like to stand on the local platform and recoil to an express train screeching and shuddering by, every time I hear the train below me now my brain magnifies the sound to that level. I stop reading. I stop typing. I wait for it to pass.

Breath

Three weeks of chain smoking and chain coffee drinking and shitty sleep and foregone trips and now, the tide has turned, friends. Yesterday was presentation day, and I really rocked it. Compliments left and right. Then I got a latté and wandered around Central Park in the late afternoon sun. I could never get tired of the perspective offered by the high-rise art deco buildings backdropping the green landscape. Plus, it smells good.

Spring break your will

The only way I can tell it is Spring Break is the fact that I haven't been on a subway in two days. I've just been doing errands in my own neighbourhood and sticking close to my laptop. I have to recover from the abject humiliation I suffered last week when I wasn't able to do my scheduled presentation in a seminar. That's right, I dropped the ball.

My friends are trying to convince me to go to Long Island tomorrow, though. The Hamptons, in fact. Hmm... Hmm... Either that, or my one remaining roommate and I can continue to duke it out in this passive aggressive rhubarb, pleased as we are that the other is still here.

Participatory academics

Michael Albert spoke at the New School today. Finally, a lecture worth listening to. I mean, he came in, he told a bunch of funny stories about his life and about organizing, he dropped a few f-bombs, and he dispensed crusty truisms like "The difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is an argument between the haves as to how to deal with the have-nots." We all sat around and listened and gabbed until the facilities guy came by at 10:30p and told us the building was closed. Proles.

Yup

One night last week a bunch of us went to Kristeva's public lecture uptown at the Low Library at Columbia University. We pulled up in a shiny black cadillac, since we had taken the wrong train uptown, and had to use a car service to get across to the West side (it pulled over for us three white kids on Malcolm X Blvd without us even having to hail it). My friends and I were all from Kristeva's class, and when we arrived, she singled us out from the crowd of ivy league faculty and students to give us a warm, enthusiastic two-handed handshake and thank us for coming.

Afterwards, we went for dinner at a Paris-in-New York resto called Le Monde. I had the salade de crevettes, and Grace had the moules frites, and we lingered over Stellas and espresso and the best dessert menu I've seen in ages and I turned to Grace and said, "Yeah, when I decided to come to New York to do my PhD, this is pretty much what I imagined."

Now back below 14th street with you.

Toasted Cocoa Madeleine Clusters

Grace and I had a beer tonight at the cutest, most elegant little candle-lit bistro bar in the West Village. And they were playing Frank. Sigh. Then we drank espresso and read.

If any of you see me slacking off in the next few weeks, kick my ass back to work, because a maelstrom of academic fury is about to rain down on my complacent self. Madame Kristeva returns next week, with a 7-book syllabus we are supposed to have read before she arrives don't waste this woman's time, I have a ten-page paper to write and present for Gadamer on March 15, the same day a ten-page paper is due in Spinoza, and any minute now I may get an email from those journal editors to whom I am overdue with a book review. Plus two reading groups, logic tutoring, bla bla bla.

What on earth have I been doing with my time, you ask? Well, I've been buying a lot of cereal lately, especially since friend reminded me, Proust-like, of the teenage indulgence that is eating a giant pastabowl of it in the evening when it's totally not even breakfast time. I've been revisiting all of my favourite kinds too, like the little wheats with cinnamon frosting on one side (that's the side you want to be face-down when you eat it. Sometimes you have to spend a long time bobbing them around in the bowl. This gets harder as you run out of milk), and Cinnamon Toast Crunch - did you know Cinnamon Toast Crunch is now whole wheat and has SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT less sugar? Jesus, that is (was) a lot of sugar. You can't even tell, though you can tell about the whole wheat. Thumbs down on that. I'm now on to Golden Grahams, which sog really effing fast. I mean, I like my cereal to be a little mollified by the milk, but these things peak after about 10 seconds.

I've also been coming up with new things to blog about every day.

Can't get enough of that strikethrough thing

Well, I didn't get much any reading done today, but I did manage to fill out a bunch of grant forms.

"I've produced nothing, give me more money." Harharhahrarhahrhahr.

I went to the Museum of Natural History yesterday, though. Tick.

There was more to this post. I was going to do a Baconian table of presences and absences to determine whether, after six months, I'm a New Yorker (gym membership, Duane Reade fob, therapist, favourite vitaminWater flavour). But I don't know how to do tables in html. Also: not that funny.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

Grades are in. The winning streak continues.

Who says I'll ever get my come-uppance for spending my life in dissipation?

P.S. Was this post annoying?

Comp Lists

For the philosophy students - other readers will want to skip this post (new posts below).

Remember me complaining about my comps reading lists? I have transcribed the Ancient and Medieval ones here. When the feeling returns to my fingers, I might do the other ones.

ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

Kirk and Raven (eds.)
The Presocratic Philosophers, Chapters II-VII, IX-XI, XIV-XV, XVII

Plato
Euthyphro
Apology of Socrates
Crito
Phaedo
Meno
Gorgias
Protagoras
Phaedrus
Republic
Timaeus
Symposium
Theaetetus
Sophist
Statesman
Philebus

Aristotle
Categories
On Interpretation
Posterior Analytics
Physics, Books I-IV, VII
Metaphysics, Books I-IX, XII (i.e. Alpha through Theta, and Lambda)
de Anima
Nicomachean Ethics
Politics, Books I-III, VII-VIII
On Poetics

Epicurus
Letters
Principal Doctrines
Sayings

Lucretius
The Nature of the Universe

Sextus Empiricus
Outlines of Pyrrhonism

Plotinus
Enneads

MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY

Augustine
Concerning the Teacher
On the Immorality of the Soul
On the Free Choice of the Will
The Confessions, Books VII-XI
On the Trinity, Books VII-XV

D. Proclus
The Elements of Theology

Boethius
The Consolation of Philosophy

John the Scot (Eriugena)
Periphyseon
On the Division of Nature

Anselm of Canterbury
Basic Writings (ed. S. S. Deane)

Al-Farabi
The Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle

Averroes
On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy
The Decisive Treatise in Medieval Political Philosophy

Thomas Aquinas
The Division and Methods of the Sciences
Concerning Being and Essence
Summa Theologiae, Vols. I and II

Duns Scotus
Philosophical Writings
God and Creature

William of Ockham
Philosophical Writings (Library of Liberal Arts)
Predestination, God's Foreknowledge and Future Contingents

Nicholas of Cusa
Of Learned Ignorance

Meister Eckhart
Sermons and Treatises

Francisco Suarez
Selections from Three Works (Classics of International Law, No. 20, Oxford, 1944)

Maimonides
The Guide of the Perplexed

Leonardo da Vinci
The Notebooks

Marsilio Ficino
Commentary on Plato's Symposium

Pico della Mirandola
Oration on the Dignity of Man
Of Being and Unity

D. Erasmus
The Praise of Folly

Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince
The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy

Thomas More
Utopia

Tommaso Campanella
The City of the Sun

Giordano Bruno
The Ash Wednesday Supper
On the Infinite Universe and Worlds

Johannes Kepler
Mysterium Cosmographicum

Galileo Galilei
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

E. Cassirer, P.O. Kristeller, and J.H. Randall, eds.
The Renaissance Philosophy of Man

Now you have it on authority

Another Friday night and another soirée in Brooklyn. Thank God parties here don't start until 10. Gives you time to get stuff done during the day. Like go to a brutalizing pilates (pronounced "pa-LOTS") class hungover, and have the instructor chastise you for not being flexible. And have grilled cheese and a milkshake at a diner. And go see the new documentary on Kazakhstan, which has a male nudity scene in it that I am still recovering from. Wawaweewah!

Yes, I have to post about something other than drinking and philosophy, but this quote from Hume will help explain why I keep doing so:

"I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron'd in the deepest darkness. Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's [sic] amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther. [And] at the time that I am tir'd with amusement and company, I feel my mind all collected within itself, and am naturally inclin'd to carry my view into all those subjects, about which I have met with so many disputes in the course of my reading and conversation."

In other words, it's literally methodologically necessary to drink with friends so as to emerge from the depths of philosophical skepticism. Just as it is impossible to stay away from philosophy once one has had one's fill of merriment.

Babble

I have to tell you something. It's a great feeling when the clouds start to break and a section of philosophy starts becoming clear. Not least because academia is a constant vacillation between feeling grossly, grossly inadequate and discouraged ("I have read nothing/Everyone has read more than me"; "I understand nothing/Everyone understands more than me"; "I am a terrrible instructor/Everyone is a better instructor than me"; "I will never publish"; "I have no work ethic"; "I should just quit") - between that and a beaming sense of pride and accomplishment. It's probably 70/30, but the 30 is pretty damn good. And nothing else would be a challenge.

Went to see Babel this weekend, which was gratifying not only because it's an engrossing flick, but because it was a limited release (major US cities only, I guess) and afterwards I got to fill out a form about what characters I liked and what scenes I didn't and how I heard about the movie. Apparently sometimes they use that information to actually recut the film and sometimes (more likely in this case) they just take it as advice on how to market it better.