Krzysztof

I was trying to text Mac Krumpak's name, and after I entered "kr" the phone autocompleted to "krzysztof." This is clearly not what I meant. Oh my gosh.

Happy Birthday, V.N.

So it's Nabokov's birthday today. The 23rd, that is. 110 today. 100 years younger than A. Pushkin and officially 335 years younger than Shakes. Some more trivia about V.N.-Day: April 23rd is the major feast day of St. George; 1616, Cervantes and Shakespeare die; 1858, the beginning of the end for classical wave physics; 1928, cocktail-drinking teetotalers everywhere gear up; 1968, Columbia University is shut down for gym maintenance; 1982, citizens of Key West, Fla. bored with rest of country; 1988, the moon finally comes back; 2009, Mac desperately avoids anything remotely resembling work.

Judith Butler

Is here.  Right now.  At Yale.  Sadly, Charlie is not.  But Laura and I are!  And we're liveblogging it!  For you!

4:08:  Howard Bloch is talking extensively about Naomi someone-or-other.  We don't know who she is.  Apparently she's dead.  Where's Judy?  Oh, never mind, apparently Judith's here to honour Naomi someone-or-other.  Binary oppositions are being upset as we speak.  Well, type.  Howard Bloch is speaking.  Apparently it was Naomi's way to take deep breaths and sigh while complaining about Judith Butler.  This is a rather strange introduction. –d

4:10:  He's talking about Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter.  And everything else she wrote.  One of the things he admires most about Judith Butler is that she is unpredictable.  This may be solely because it's so difficult to understand what she's talking about.  He didn't say that last bit. –d

4:12:  OMGWTFJB!!!!!

4:13:  Naomi's last name is Shore.  Shaw?  Apparently she was a strong feminist thinker.  The fact that neither of us knows her last name seemingly means we are not strong feminist readers.  Eve Sedgwick just died?  What?  Dammit.  -d

4:17:  So far she's actually a very clear, concise speaker.  This is surprising and gratifying.  Unpredictable, even.  Howard Bloch was right!  -d

4:19: Someone grumped about the typing. We are pursuing other methods of liveblogging. I will handwrite this blog if I have to. The back row will not get us down. –l

4:22: So—you guys know how certain smells can be deeply connected to long-lost memories?

Or, to choose a more canonical example, you know the Proustian madeleines?  Judith Butler's rhetoric is that.  -l

[Dom says: Smelly? Judith Butler's rhetoric is smelly?]

4:24: I mean, crazily.  Even the spacing out for a minute, then realizing I have no idea who she's quoting, or what it's supposed to support, or what the role of psychoanalysis is in this shifting stage of gender identity.  Because I really have no idea.  It seems like even Judith Butler doesn't know.  -l

4:25:  We are now both writing in notebooks.  This reminds me of note-based communication during SCT lectures.  Along with the fact that she's now talking about shame - oh, Bruce Robbins! - I am now worried that I'm completely instrumentalizing this lecture in order to be all nostalgic about TASP.  Oh well! -d

4:28:  That said, I actually understand some of what she's talking about now.  Or at least I think I do. -d

4:29:  I have begun wondering about the role of discourse as a form of conceptual art.  Emily Chertoff, you should know what I'm talking about. -l

4:30:  Dom doesn't know what I'm talking about.  One time (probably much more that one time), Emily Chertoff and I talked about doing PubSpeaks/a performance for the talent show based on Text, Context, Subtext, Pretext.  It has nothing to do with Said.  Maybe a little to do with Said.  But mostly it has to do with the fact that I don't need to focus on what Judy's saying about subject and structure for me to get a lot out of this lecture. -l

4:31:  Laura lies.  I have a vague idea of what I think she might be talking about.  But I'm not positive.  Basically it seems like she's just saying that there's a certain aesthetic delight in this absurd torrent of words which has very little to do with their meaning.  Or at least to do with the meaning with which she's trying to invest them.  I'm not sure words can be thought of aesthetically without their meanings playing a role.  I'm going to stop writing about this now. -d

4:34:  But it has so much to do with their meaning.  I mean, ish. -l

4:35:  Besides, I wonder what she expects.  Honestly. -l

4:36:  Every time she refers to an "outmoded form of seduction" I imagine Carlos Adolfo Dominguez, smelling like cheap aftershave, leering at her in a back alley. -d

4:37:  I hope I never encounter a form of seduction that outmoded. -l

4:38:  Seriously, Sedgwick is dead?  I mean, shit. -d

4:39:  I think it's illegal to employ forms of impingement upon a child.  Unless they're purely linguistic. -d

4:39:  Judith Butler, radical lawbreaker. -l

4:40:  Just imagine the movie - Judy on the Run.  Dom, what's the tagline? -l

4:41:  "When you get in Gender Trouble, only your corpse will be a Body That Matters!" -d

4:42:  Or maybe "Structuralist Oedipal Subject instinct exogenist seduction matter structure hegemonic of that end quote"? -l

4:45:  How often do famous academics give lectures consisting only of summaries of other peoples' less well-known theories?  First Spivak on Gramsci, now Judy on Laplanche. -d

4:42:  The number of women I've seen at this lecture wearing some combination of black coats, flowing dark hair, glasses, and vaguely ethnic-looking scarves is staggering.  I wonder if they smoke cloves. -d

4:44:  Actually, I really like looking at who's in the audience.  It's standing room only.  There are many girls with shorter hair than mine.  I see six college-age guys in our part of the balcony. -l

4:46:  Including me? -d

4:46:  I think so.  I don't want to gawk too much to look around.  Point being, there are very few. -l

4:47:  It probably goes against the spirit of the lecture that we're breaking down the audience according to which side of the gender binary they fall into.  Oh well! -d

4:48:  Maybe I like being heteronormative. -l

4:49:  Maybe hetero-norms like being you!  Ha.  (In Soviet Russia...) -d

4:49:  She just mentioned a current event - Gay/Lesbian parenting in France.  She is applying her theory to the real world.  Maybe.  She is still talking about messaging, desire, and the Other. -l

4:52:  Is it ever the theorists' job to seriously examine how parent-child relationships actually work, or do they stick to theory and leave practice to psychologists?  Also, I wonder to what extent these ideas she's talking about could be translated into Bardi. -l

4:53:  If one of the logocentric problems of Western discourse is the privileging of speech over writing, why did Derrida ever give lectures? -d

4:54:  I think that the lit majors around us disapprove of the fact that we're being flippant during a J-But lecture. -d

4:55:  I'm just newly glad I'm not majoring in theory. -l

4:56:  I'm majoring in Soviet film and mass-produced Marxist art!  The fact that this isn't actually a major does not in any way deter me in this. -d

So: To sum:

Dom likes bragging about his major.

Much love!

—Laura and Dom

Saw The House For The First Time...

My original intent re: revisiting the House was to wait until someone came to visit Cornell so that I could see it with them, but I'd long forgotten exactly where it is on campus (and most people here have absolutely no idea what the Telluride Association is), and so accidentally stumbled upon it a few nights ago ("stumble" here being used more literally than I would have liked to think at the time).

It was actually kind of funny, because I don't think any of us were quite aware of this, but the Telluride House is right on one of the main frat rows at Cornell. Those beautiful old buildings that surround the House aren't dorms -- they're frat houses, and they house some of the sketchier Cornell frats to be sure. I mean, right across the street from it is one of the more reputable frats in that area that, nevertheless, had a party that night that started at 10, was completely filled by 10:15, had the campus police waiting outside of it by 11, and was closed down by 1. And there was the placid Telluride House, where I can imagine that people were either working or keeping their binge drinking to themselves.

It's actually more fitting that the TA is there than I'd like to pretend, to be honest. Cornell consists of two types of undergrads: Type 1: brilliant slackers; Type 2: ambitious, hardworking dumbasses. While many frat boys and sorrority girls do keep the stereotype alive, I've met an awful lot of them who fit into Type 1 and who filtered into the frats so they wouldn't die of boredom, more or less. Because they're smart enough to coast into (and out of) Cornell, they're also smart enough to know when it's socially desireable to play dumb. You can't fault them for choosing people over some abstract pursuit of... something.

This is getting rambling, but my point was mostly that I was at the Telluride House the other day, and thought of you all.

Egregious

I'm doing linguistics homework. Again.

One of my assignments involves tracing semantic histories of words. I think it's important that we all know this:

"Egregious" was originally composed of Latinate morphemes that literally meant "towering above the flock." This was a metaphorical composition; the word meant "remarkable in a good sense."

But everyone was so ironic, guys. So now the word means bad. Really, really bad. Since everyone was so ironic all of the time.

I'm sort of tempted to tell my professor about our reanalysis of the word, and how it now has an entirely different meaning, but I don't really like sharing in that class.