Signifying Nothing has shamed me into posting. I admit, my last two posts were about running, and it had been awhile since I posted (more than a week). The half-marathon is Sunday, and then I will have no more to say about running.
I have been silent as a result of the beginning of school. Between figuring out a series of "play-dates" (which is really just a mom-friendly term for "Will you take care of my son while I work?") for Son and figuring out how both Middlebrow and I are going to get to and from school with one car, one bike, the bus and Trax, I have not had much time for contemplating the meaning of life or the status of my imaginative life. Perhaps my imaginative life has no status at present.
I fear I am beginning to exist in Theory World, where words have only contingent meaning. "When you say 'author'" I say to my students, "do you mean 'author' or do you mean 'critic'?" They stare at me blankly. "Are you talking about the 'author function'?" I gave them the whole "Third Bed" speech, and I was happy that I could draw a little stick bed on the board and share with them my prodigious artistic talent. But then I realized I had probably confused them with my picture of the bed, so today I had to revise my speech and draw a bed to represent the bed, and then a bed inside a picture frame to represent representation. You can see why I am overusing quotation marks in my post. "Do you mean 'representation' or Representation?" Soon I will be unable to talk. I will be silent, like the Urn, but I will know everything about Truth and Beauty.
3 comments:
One required course in graduate school should be effective chalk board writing. My board ends up looking like cuttings on a newspaper room's floor.
As for drawing, I usually get only laughs when I try to make a figure of an eye that looks more like a rabbit.
Good luck with the theory--it already sounds more fun that your average lit crit class. Pictures of bed's...going the sexy route, eh?
Glad you're back! Theory sucks! (only the second part of the above is an exaggeration.)
I think "Theory Sucks" could be our Lit Crit anthem (sort of like "Primus Sucks"), it's sarcastic, yet true, yet not true. Quite theoretical.
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