Footwork

Not minding the background music, only one kind of footwork can make Eurotrash sublime.

So practice those rusty entrachats and tour en l'air, if you can't write a formidable dissertation on movement. In any case, why is it only now that the pas de ciseaux seems like an onomatopoeia away?

Ordinariness

Note how de Certeau's own writing is rising with this tide, and it is not enough to want to swim against it. For the tide's tumbling is like a futile distillation. One that still believes in getting that pure, unsalted drop against the grain of thought.

The erosion and denigration of the singular or the extraordinary was announced by The Man Without Qualities: "Perhaps it is precisely the petit-bourgeois who has the presentiment of the dawn of a new heroism, a heroism both enormous and collective, on the model of ants." And indeed, the advent of this anthill society began with the masses, who were the first to be subjected to the framework of levelling rationalities. The tide rose. Next it reached the managers who were in charge of the apparatus, managers and technicians absorbed into the system they administrated; and finally it invaded the liberal professions that thought themselves protected against it, including even men of letters and artists. The tide tumbles and disperses in its waters works formerly isolated but today transformed into metaphors of linguistic dissemination which no longer has an author but becomes the discourse or indefinite citation of the other (de Certeau, L'invention du quotidien: 1. arts de faire 1).

c'est tragique...

... to find out that Sylvie Guillem would be featuring her Sacred Monsters U.S. Premiere in May at UCLA when I might be already back in Singapore!!!

Yes, the Sylvie Guillem. 40-years old and still putting every elasticity and beauty characteristic of ballet to utmost awe, and most times, shame. This might be my first and last time ever seeing those limbs on stage. Why do I have to even find myself in a position to miss it?

Derrida versus Evi-dentia. Which would be the (non-)event?

diapherein

Sometime long ago, I was picked up with a pair of feet bare if not for its socks. Down below my parent's flat, the carpark was desolate at an hour just a couple before people rose for our shared commutation. Yet, further in the distant past, the one was too early. With his full shoes and proper attire -- whatever that meant -- we went full-steam for what was to be our work: es spukt.

Tonight in a land where birds want to become trees, I came down to an alchemy of those two. Always too late, the other person had a few minutes of roaming. Almost as if he had one feet socked and the other in brown, aged leather.

And because I might just never learn how to drive, this is always about the proper lesson in waiting.

Sweet Is the New Black

When I'm done staring at this beautiful object (object, object!), I'll find some witty lyric to wax about why his gift was as tear-jerkingly relevant as America Ferrera's Golden Globe winning last night.

Till then, stare with me.

32 degrees FarenheitsI

I am fixated with weather.com. The good folks there tell me what the temperature is, and also what it actually feels like. Phenomenological intuitions aside, it has been near-zero temperatures at night/early morning. Translate: shivering in my red-and-black-terriers pj that makes for a most faux-pas combination with a 'Baby Phat' jacket topped by a funny woollen hat, while smoking out on the balcony.

The week has been crazy, with alternate near-sleep cycles and a renewed temptation to pour from the bottle. Lindsay and I held a very successful dinner party for Seth, Vickey, Colin, Nicole and Manny on Thursday: best sangria and manecotti included. The company was such a blast that I didn't even cry much over missing Ugly Betty and Grey's Anatomy. It was also the week that saw two strange dates, and affirmed why Shao does not date. Putty. Nonetheless, it was semi-interesting to discover a bar close to home that resembles Alley Bar back home -- except with better music and stronger drinks -- and also the best veggie burger in LA, perhaps even in the whole world.

I will thaw soon.

For May Ee

Whose presence has always already been necessary for a certain éventualité:

Are events merely possible? That is, conditioned by conditions of possibility? If they are possible, already possible, then in some important sense, they do not happen as events for the first time, but rather as the unfolding of a possibility that was already there, already in place, a potential that came to be realized in an actual place and time. In which case, nothing happens, nothing comes; there is only realization of what might, could take place, or even a programming of the “event.” But an event that merely unfolds an expectation or a probability is not an event that befalls us without our seeing it coming. The event comes, if it does, from an unforseeable future, without horizon of expectation as Derrida insists over and over. It comes, in other words, as what is radically impossible, beyond or outside the limits of known, foreseeable possibility. To think the event is to think this im-possibility or rather this im-possible. Which is not to say it is impossible thinking, but to convince you of that is what this seminar will be about: that it is possible to think the impossible. Not only is it possible; it is necessary, something else I hope this seminar will convince you of (Kamuf, 'First Seminar Lecture: Derrida's Impossible Events," 2-3).

des choses

A thorough insomnia later, sending Meiyen off in my grandma pyjamas, I love that girl and miss her already. The second term has begun and my eyebags were tethering at some of the problematic structures of our first class, mainly (the poverty) of methodology, as such. Which will foresee some heated discussions, no doubt, revoking my geometrical reveries and so further reinforcing the necessity to return for the Derrida-40th in April.

It was a weekend of sorts, cleaning up the room, clinging on to my beyond-salvation Le Robert Micro, and entertaining a bout of frivolous curiosity. Coming down the stairs, we bumped into an exuberantly dressed Karen; a big hug from her was just what we needed for "Spring 2007."

A passage from Georges Perec's Les Choses, one of the texts for French Lit:

Mais entre ces reveries trop grande, auxquelles ils s'abandonnaient avec une complaisance étrange, et la nullité de leurs actions réelles, nul projet rationnel, qui aurait concilié les nécessités objectives et leurs possibilités financieres, ne venait s'insérer. L'immensité de leurs désirs les paralysait (17).

Perec will not find satisfactory the objectification of human desires. Like some of the greatest: Nabokov, Genet, Perec's language remains inexhaustible by the object-desire clamourings.

Bottoms up, 2006!