Aporias-ah, Also Can

Three presentations this week. Translate: Three pairs of Shoes bought.

Who says I'm not nailing it?

Planes on Barrettes

Miss Chinatown flirted with our singer-friend on stage as Archie Kao from CSI waited in line for the make-shift toilet booth. There was a UCLA gymnast and midfielder in one of those sports-car-floats and around the corner, the representative from USC read "Driving Instructor."

That was the CNY parade in LA Chinatown this year. Festival of Bizarre. After some loving vinyl pursuits at FE's, we sped down to Nicole's art exhibition opening at the funky Brewery where the only pieces we could afford were the signs capializing the artistes' last names. Etc, etc. Manny bought a thingy calles 'Estragon' while FE and I were happy hanging ourselves up on the walls.

So my Charles Brown Superstar comes with planes-on-barrettes and some midnight gyozas. Best things happen; the luckiest ruinations.

The Braindead and the Brainless

In a week when stress marches on the double and every new load takes on a death of its own, Sam and I experienced some intense states of braindeadness and brainlessness. It was an inaugural evening for discussing our co-writing of a paper for the last-minute English department's graduate conference, so without surprise there was much sing-along with American Idol and smoking procrastinations on my balcony. As if throwing out single words like "generality," "echo," "materiality" were not unproductive enough, we found the chance to stand up and see where the firecracker sounds were coming from perfectly excusable as distractions.

After finally adjusting ourselves to the purpose of the evening, some good did come out from those ubiquitous flash-points. There might be a possible paper as long as we keep faithfully to our distracted inspirations and balance the weeks ahead with the 10 papers/presentations still in the drawers. As long as we make time for the other woman. With whom when all else fails, believe in the power of making sleepy name-signs of *feeling-ah* philosophers.

Pigtailed Potstickers

While a white, fluffy animal and the University's acceptance letter arrived at a time last year to guarantee that nothing would go to the dogs, last night there were no fireworks in a stripped Chinatown.

Instead, there was a jazz trumpeter whose timing was lost to the drum and bass beats on the second storey, and earlier in the day, a woman beside us who wept so hard during The Lives of Others that she shook the entire row. But most of all there was a man who used to, back in those days, skateboard all through the docks along historic downtown. Now he helps build houses and as for me, I shall have nothing to say about spatiality. And it's good that way for now. No carpark-symptomale, no defense of theory: nothing wasted on speculating who's going to be the first to stop reading. Yet lest anything threatens to be "new" about this,

I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the business of childbearing -- but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as in necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity (Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play" 265).

Afterthought from the modest midwife: "I believe that the risk of sterility and of sterilization has always been the price of lucidity" ("Answer to Goldmann" 271).

Syllogistic Romance

A most appropriate Valentine's Day card, which comes a close second only to what I feel when I swoon over Leviathan.

O, what would I do without Hobbie?

Topos Noetos

An obsessive fidelity to non-places (not necessarily utopias) notwithstanding, Henri Lefebvre's Production of Space remains the project for my French class this term. Though still problematic, the book is proving to be more interestingly convincing after I calmed down from some stress hysterics. Postscript after chatting with KP this afternoon: so what if I would do a series of 'individual thinkers' type papers? If I don't think it's boring -- and neither does her, it seems -- then it's not. Her good will was so genuine, as always. I'll leave bigger questions of the major-field exam and dissertation to the sea, for now.

Meanwhile, this is an interesting article on Europe's old churches' various transformations. According to Lefebvre, religious-institutional places are absolute spaces that contain within themselves contradictions that in turn make way for abstract spaces (abstraction taken seriously in the sense of Hegelian and Marxist-charged 'concrete universals). Abstractions produce differential spaces.

(Social) Space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather it subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity -- their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder (Lefebvre 73).

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In class today, we learnt that digressional passages in Renaissance literature are referred to as topos, following classical rhetoric. I grew somewhat nostalgic about the predecessor of my whole blogging escapade, which as you'd know, has been overtaken by insane bridal apocalypse.

The name toposnoetos, was of course, taken from the "Différance" essay. It was also chosen because I had thought it can well sound like some Mexican food spin-off. It reached its thrill when lucky but most of the time, it did good being a brave survivor of snide remarks, narcissistic and others.

And now, so much so for spacing....

Azan

Dazzle over my funky Azan clock, courtesy of mr.pannypants from his trip to Dubai. My body still jolts out of my ears when the prayer alarm sounds off. It is like my emblematic reaction to everything right now: having no time to pray and so must pray for more time. GNNCCB. Blasphemous-political-theology makes so much sense for the dire army of me.

Home in about two and a half months. The duration also for five papers. There is a need to develop some form of continuum from the problematics of last term. Instead, my inability to identify them produces despair, which only a thinking like that of "Structure, Sign and Play" can rise up to. Or as they say, to such a task of the "nowadays."

No Way Street

Read the Thing-Formerly-known-as-Climate.