As I make my grand entrance into this performance of nostalgia, I offer the following obligatory comments about my “real” life for those of you who have not been following along.
Act I
[narrator: off stage]: I hear an indefinable noise, and then a strobing white light dominates my field of vision…
I wake up in a cold sweat to find myself in the midst of my second year of a doctoral program at a large research university somewhere in the south of
I have no answers to these questions. [blackout]
Act II
[stage lights come up to reveal a tan, suburban house with a red door.]
Katie and I have now been married for a year and a half, and are not planning to keep up with the Joneses as progenitors of a race of eccentric children, at least not yet. What’s that you say, by the time I have children Dave’s will be old enough to conduct bizarre medical experiments on them or employ them as improvised music instruments? True enough, but it’s a risk I am prepared to take. Perhaps there will be more of Sarah in this child than Dave. Only time will tell. We bought a house this summer in Bloomington, Indiana because of the spotbillig cost of living in this little college town and are happily enjoying our space after living in an apartment last year. Like Herr Strauss, we too have entertained our share of visitors, and love having people drive down (or up) whenever they feel led to do so. If I can locate a photo of our new home, I will post it at a later time.
Katie is working as a teacher in the local school district, and has just been accepted into an MA program in library science. She will be starting part time in the spring. I taught my first undergraduate course this semester, a freshman writing class equivalent to writing effective prose at
15 comments:
Ok, Andy. I surrender. For nigh upon a week I have been egregiously stalling for time in a futile attempt to develop a response worthy of such a posting. My hat comes off to you. My conscience no longer permits me to let such a virtuosic composition go without its just acclaim. While I'm not sure that it qualifies as drama in a strict sense-- after all, it is, for all practical purposes, not actully performable-- it makes a wonderful Beckettesque jaunt into the realm of pseudo-theatre populated by such works as Samson Agonistes and For the Time Being. Milton and Auden aren't bad company, my esteemed (that's for you Dave) colleague. It drew dangerously close to the heavy-handed stylistics of Don Delilo's so called "postmodern" panderings, but the interal irony of its myopically solopsistic vision of the Kantian subject (that is the self) in tension with the DeBoisian "second-sight" of the contemporary academic redeemed it from the vacuous edge of the merely kitch. Good job. I expect nothing less from you in the future. I think Lacan might have a few things to say about Act I, however...
[A voice from the Audience of Idiots]
Perhaps my dull senses blanket out all the subtle air of nuance; I have no idea what our singing critic means when he references my name with hte dislocated "for." Ah, but perhaps we all speak better than we know.
For:dislocation sets us entirely on stage.
[and who is left? and who is left?]
I'll stage your dislocution
I'll dislactate your staging
I'll distolerate your lactose
I'll milk your anomie
I'll erode the standards and values that provide the basis of your social stability
I'll deconstruct the very fabric of your language capability!
but the very fabric of language capability IS deconstruction
Are you telling me that you word benders have become so rigid that you don't let anyone else share in your fun?
It's not a matter of us "word benders" letting or not letting anyone do anything. It's that the phenomenon we call deconstruction is the condition necessary for the possibility of language, which is why deconstruction always happens and why no text (including any text about deconstruction) is ever finalizable.
...and I'll condition your possibility
[the heavy curtan retraces its well-worn path to an ironic close--a hidden (but always constant) lengh-wise tear. Laughing. They are laughing--but from where? Who is left? A naked speaker crumples, exhausted, spent. On the other side a deflated sound carries: "I tried to pay the price, but missed: alas I cannot read!" another act prounounced: (four??!)] and then:
e^(i*Pi) = -1
Finally, an act that makes sense.
[Another voice is heard, but this time there is no speaker's naked body. The equation sounds throughout the theater, its veracity established by its distance from embodiment. The hollow reverberations echo, "the ontic replaces the ontological, the ontic replaces the ontological". The statitician gods who hold their thrones by refusing to exist can be heard laughing as the fog of certainty engulfs the stage. But what is this? The sound of material footsteps is heard in the mist, and someone detects the scent of perspiration in the folds of a crisp white coat. We can see the soles of hidden feet, and Todo is pulling back the curtain...]
Post a Comment