cygnus atratus

I am developing a ridiculous obsession with swans! Swan upping (another reason to love the English), Odile's 32 fouettés, Juvenal's black swan, Kant's secret friend, Hegel's Minerva swan song ... Someone get me out of here!!

Orange Fetishes

Now Carrot and Pea sit on our balcony. They look like they have been smoking a hell lot.

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So to accompany our pumpkin, Carrot to its gallows tonight, I went to buy another one. Meet Pea!

Colin and Nicole's was very welcoming. We could not take our eyes off their bookshelves (books alphabetically and CDs by colours) and no surprise, Colin reads. Full collections of Bataille, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, modern American and British literatures both cannonical and obscure , etc etc. He's also at the fifth Le Temps Retrouvé, and have read the second volume twice. All in all, nice fellow, so much warmer than what we've experienced.

Pea was quite cooperative throughout the carving session. No unnecessary resistance, no wallowing, her flesh was tender to the knife. I chose a bat design which I thought suited Pea perfectly. Sam's was a cat and Lindsay's was a skull.
Think the prize should go out to a pumpkin with ears and a hat; it
was beginning to remind me of Wilson in Cast Away.
On the way home, we decided that
the three pumpkins should pimp
a ride.

Just so you've noticed what's with the anthropomorphism and furious namings, yes, Halloween also marks the summit of stress: papers time.

Before 'Carrot' Meets the Knife

Meet my first lovely pumpkin! Carrot's its name.

Come Saturday's slash-and-shew party at my classmate Colin's place, Carrot will be no more.... But I'll be posting photos of its reincarnation after.

Another one of those...

abominable but symptomatic rankings:

Singapore tops the 2006 Globalization Index. More grist to the mill in the hot trails of the Derek Wee and Wee Shu Ming debate.

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Meanwhile, heat from California's voting season will soon invade the already reluctant Fall. As ineligible and unknowlegeable as I am to comment (my sole pitiful act of activism consists only of bringing my own bag to Trader Joe's), this is becoming one of my highest-hit ting sites.

Cranical-Cervical Unnervings

Sprained my neck horribly while reaching for my favourite sweater up there on the closet shelf is not only very ta-glam, but typing on my lap-top in a "Bone Collector"-esque manner without having Angelina Jolie to run errands for me is painful to say the least. Plus I have to skip class today just as when we are discussing Derrida. I can only morbidly recount the hilarious moment when Mei remarked that Dex looked like Stephen Hawkins from a certain (twisted) angle.

So meanwhile, waiting for my roomate to come home with painkillers, I am torn between reading Engles online or googling for a new neck. Preferably Sylvie Guillem's. Offers?? Email me please. We'll have to manage through some leftist-Situationist auction, of course.

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Post-script (7 hours later): Received incredible email from professor of abovementioned missed class about his meeting with G. Bennington. Apparently they talked about me and that the latter was impressed with me. Pathetic, little me?!! :) That the sprained and sore neck is still up now reading, this is why it's still worth it! Beats any painkillers, wouldn't you say?

Dependencies

Back on after 6 days of internet-dislocation. And a delightful afternoon reading with dear S.S (since he argues for the absurdity of his name) and watching the wonderfully disturbing "28 Days Later." (No Future!)So, having wireless at home again feels sooo good.

The week had been very strange. After working on the semblance of a proposal for 'Alchemy' class paper on Marx, my brain went dead. Which more often than not brings on lucid bouts of depression mired by medieval-class distress and self-loathing. One then has to treat oneself to junk food, kleenex, a Korean revenge movie, all so as to feel somewhat roaring agin. Meanwhile, I ought to settle myself down to settling the other two classes' papers. Since December is marked by wonderful visits from Mayee and Meiyen, both of whom are the next best things to going home and chay kway tiao. Really.

Meanwhile, it rained tonight in lalaland. For the first time, real weather. It's time to bring out that Bricklane-market checked-coat-of-a-steal-purchase and the red brolly.

What is to be done...

...when there seems nothing more?

"Demeurer."


In our reading-forum, someone asked along this line: "If in 'Eating Well' Derrida is not advocating universal vegetarianism, and in speaking of Auschwitz, one must not admit for a 'provisional' morality and therefore merely to speak 'in the name of,' what good does a critique of metaphysics do? What good does it do for Darfur?"

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The question appeared to be directed at those who laboured to explain the critique of metaphysics and which despite what Heidegger sets out to do, is still an ontotheology. As the straw-(wo)man one amongst many, the indictment was unnecessary on so many levels: for no one, if he or she has read, could or should declare that a thorough critique of metaphysisc would resolve the ongoing conflicts and the present global community's inactivity towards them. No one. To make such a declaration, would be a horrible thing to say. Insofar as 'saying' is a priviledged limitation, insofar as 'saying' still does not amount to a 'doing.' All of us present in that forum and in that room cannot 'say' what we 'do' if we were to ignore and conflate the two.

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Hence the age-old question of theory vs. practice, this time teased to its incommensurable measurement but at the same time also teased with a price it cannot afford. To question their incommensurability -- is that still a theoretical or practical task?

None of us are guiltless in this context. And the academic sphere that we live in should never seek to acquit us of such a guilt - however "ivory" our pleasures are often designated. Indeed, to anyone who dare claim that a gathering to speak of terrorism, to write of terror, evil, justice, etc., let him or her not fanthom that these concepts are urgent because he or she is equipped with the vocabulary and honourary degree to solve them. These concepts are urgent in spite of, and not because of our (in)capacity. But this is not to hide behind the veil of weakness or "practical ignoranace." It is because the drive to make such concepts calculable constitutes their being problems.

And to claim an 'ownership' over problems has always been to partake in genealogical fictions.

What costs humanity very dearly is doubtless to believe that one can have done in history with a general essence of Man, on the pretext that it represents only a Hauptgespenst, an arch-ghost, but also, what comes down to the same thing -- at bottom -- to still believe, no doubt, in this capital ghost. To believe in it as do the credulous or the dogmatic. Between the two beliefs, as always, the way remains narrow.

[...]Can one, in order to question it, address oneself to a ghost? To whom? To him? To it, as Marcellus says once again so prudently? "Thou art a Scholler; speak to it Horatio .... Question it." (Derrida, Specters of Marx 175).

"solitary, poor, brutish, and short..."

Dear Hobbes,

I miss you, you and even Locke, as I trudge through Chaucer now.

The Band and the Other

In the midst of relative gig-inactivity (read: busy), it is a gem to find my favourite professor this term here.

With her unassuming coolness in our 'Alchemy' class, what prices of sublimation and putrification would I not pay to see her play?

Resistence

I know that there are lots going on in L.A. I know... I know. In between my glass-swirlings, video-rentings, clothes-purchasings, and oh, who'd forget, readings, I should give this city a chance.

I know... I know, so what's stopping me?

Response to a Report of Discomfort and Disengagement

As a cut-out to my feeling of discomfort and disengagement at the particular moment when "what do we do with the dialectic" was posed in class as symptomatic of my general unease with the structures of my course -- my response then being absent -- I wrote the only missive I knew, addresed to my old supervisor.

His response refigured as such:

Disengagement with the text is and always was the main frontier and horizon of reading: we'll get to it (as we'll see ... as I will later show ... after some preliminary business ... not there yet? ...); it is even perhaps the provocation and thus following the logic of the a priori the very essence of reading itself ... for your one resource in the face of the issues you mention will turn out to be a powerful one indeed, I can assure you. It is, I believe, extremely hard to catch on to the persuasive effect of a detailed and patient reading when it comes to showing a "grasp of 19th and 20th century English and American lit" (the patient working through (even if only a paragraph or two) of a Dickens text, say Bleak House, makes up for years of reading about the period etc.) One might be accused of cunning but that is better perhaps than disingenuous engagement. Coursework in English can always be negotiated with the sophistication of the so called theoretical and critical reader (this was its curse from the beginning) and then you can infiltrate the Kant and Hegel, the Nietzsche and the Rousseau under all kinds of rubics: our diverse historicities ensure that that must be so. And the philosophical turn always forgets that it is with the readings of it (turned over e.g., amongst the modernist avant-gardes) that it regains its force in the current milieu (which is dominated once again and as always by scientific paradigms as fundamentalist as the divinities that it helps support).

JWP's words are not meant to placate the sense of discomfort and disengagement. If I had expected them to function so, I would not have written "back home." Instead, by working within the immanence of the system to be destroyed, his words mark the force of intervention that separates the one who merely says "deconstruction" from one who experiences it.

Hence as a rejoinder to my previous post on the fear of the dialectic:

With the dialectic it is worth remembering that the only thing that cannot--that constantly fails in a failure more powerful than anything in ethics-- be assimilated in/by the dialectic (it chokes on it) is the dialectic itself, like the ground of reasons (ground/reason). Everything else is simply always grist to its mill. So I doubt that we can aford to do without this powerful failure. This is possibly why the animality motif might end up being quite interesting, for it concerns what can be eaten and what cannot.

How to eat well, since one must and nevertheless will continue to eat? According to the numerous anecdotes that frequented my supervised sessions, a respected scholar, after reading Derrida's "Eating Well" had trouble settling down at his dining table. I eat on my desk, sometimes having to clean up my keyboard. It is to eat with the knowledge that one is, always already in the habit of choking.