My Muse Mob

(As Colin suggests, my thesis title should be "I do not care about apathy.")

It has been weeks and I do not feel like writing anymore. By right this thought and the coming deadline should scare me, but my courage is on the roll.

Talking about this with Eddie over on the other end, his advice is phenomenal:

"sacrifice for writing by eating cookies and getting fat."

This Antibiotic Overdose

After the Dengue scare turned out to be really a viral fever, wasting the whole afternoon in that dreaded A&E (again), I decided à la Coltrane-Lush-Life style that I shall quit smoking. Here's to smelling better.

And to the impossible completion of a paper by the end of this month. I covet Echo but would she finally know self-love?

Unless one would find the other in oneself, already: the same dissymmetry and tension of surviving in self, in the 'oneself' thus out of joint with its own existence. To be able or to have to be the friend of oneself -- this would change nothing in the testamentary structure we are discussing. It would break all ipseity apart in advance, it would ruin in advance that which it makes possible: narcissism and self-exemplarity. We are speaking about anything but narcissism as it is commonly understood: Echo, the possible Echo, she who speaks from, and steals, the words of the other, she who takes the other at his or her word, her very freedom preceding the first syllables of Narcissus, his mourning and his grief (Derrida, Politics of Friendship 24).

Writing of the Aftermath §I

The Romanian came over to pour more Romanian wine for us, and hey, after a movie that is KTV music videos meet Gothic Poe and Korean melodrama, bring it on, friendly old man with the bushy eyebrows!

"Writing of the Aftermath" may be a title I am shamelessly stealing from a class she taught this term, but nothing of Blanchot's sentimentality is hidden from our shared divergence from the social sciences. She with the brains and feist, I with the thin skin that readily turns red with one drop of alcohol, our conversation went from infamous absences of substance to the blurriness of the just-past colloquium. It did not hit me then just how suspicious a certain comment could pass for Derridian-feeling-ah at that time, but indeed upon second thoughts, what determines a "masculine reading," or reading for that matter?

There would be more of these nights to come. For this one, we celebrated the colloquium for its incredible "reversal" of erotic pedagogy (Ann Carson also writes about the "erotics of doubt" in her sublime Autobiography of Red.) On the train ride back home, I told her about Echo, and she told me about her resistance against that pathos even as we both agree that love can, and will one day -- "sooner or later" -- become friendship.

I came home and telephoned "home." He appeared to still be riding on the idea that I find both alienating and weary, but there is nothing I can do right now. Not even confession. The very least I deserve, after a whole night of echastological insomnia, is to sleep on it and not dream of an ending. Even if such a sleep were to be silent.

"What does it matter. All that remains is the feeling of lightness that is death itself or, to put it more precisely, the instant of my death always in abeyance. [Qu'importe. Seul dmeure le sentiment de légèreté qui est la mort meme ou, pour le dire plus précisément, l'instant de ma mort désormais toujours en instance]" (Blanchot, L'instant de ma mort 10; 11).

demystifying elements

Just two days ago, I joked to Mayee that Singapore is so humid that our air extinguishes any flames. Then the news of the fire came, along with some ashes from a burnt bridge. Has the open space survived that one February afternoon?

From half-way across the globe, you laid with your machete and guitar till dawn.

a cultural veto

I sometimes forget that it's all about wanting to leave. Damn it, if I can't come up with a reason fast enough, would you twiddle my thumbs and wait?

And she thought foreign countries are like the past.

For Sam

Event below to be taken in context of a certain jet-lagged half-brain while signing mouth with paneer.

(Dinner after the first day of the conference, "Forty years of Structure, Sign and Play." Upon hearing the person next to me mention a name.)

Me to A. Benjamin: So how do you make of the relation or at times non-relation between he and ...?

A. Benjamin to me: For all their differences, one thing is for sure, they both taught us what it means to read. To publish a book on Marx -- anything under philosophy or social thought for that matter -- with the title "Lire le capital" at that time is no laughing matter.

The Best Lie...

...is that I'll have more paper rantings. Anyhow, done, done gone.