Who said it?
Peter Brooks or "Norman Bronzino."
1) "Je suis convaincu qu'il n'y a pas de pédagogie sans érotisme...il me semble qu'on n'apprend vraiment bien que des professeurs dont on est amoureux."
2) "I want to talk mainly about bodies emblazoned with meaning within the field of desire, desire that is originally and always, with whatever sublimations, sexual, but also by extension the desire to know .... The desire to know is constructed from sexual desire and curiosity."
3) "J'ai écrit un roman. [...] Personne ne me reconnaîtra: je pouvais tout dire. Et c'est plein du sexe."
4) "Katie, the only problem with this paper is, I want to know more..."
Answer bank: Peter Brooks
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Männersmittel
The later capitalism gets, the more I realize das Leben ist kein Ponyhof, die Honig-Waffeln sind Honig-Waffen, and my Hosen have Hosen (for real...Berlin was at times cold enough to warrant two pairs of pants). But I'm embracing the modern media of mediation, whether it's delicious Antioxidantsmittel ("medium for transmitting antioxidants") or my Gesichtebuchmachine ("computer"), either bei Thorsten or at the post-pretentious cafe that, despite its best intentions, is quite the Ponyhof. What kind of mediation-savvy idiot-savant goes on vacation just to go on the Internet, right?
Jamie: i think i'm in the right place
as soon as i entered the ponyhof, i heard someone say "normativo" in italian
2:14 PM me: hey i need to get off my facebookmachine
where should i go?
Jamie: ok===you should leave kreuzberg
go to the holocaust memorial
me: where is that?
Jamie: its right near the brandenburg tor
on a road that goes south perpindicular
2:15 PM to the tor
its actually on hannah arendt straße if i remember coorectly
then you go see some other cool stuff
and definitely check out Dussmann
2:16 PM its the four storez book / music store
me: ohhh hannah ARENDT strasse
At the Holocaust Memorial children were playing a game of cache-cache (not cacher!). Jamie and I capitalized on the generosity of a German Jew ("Not many left you know! All in America! Universities! You want coffee?") in his trendy boutique.
Ron: You like this store? Or you think it has changed for bad?
Jamie: No, it's super!!
Ron: Thanks God!
Me (loudly, looking at shoes): Jamie I love this Shoah!!
Jamie: I think you mean Schuhe.
When we left, skinny jeans in tow, he said with a conspiratorial flash of rotting teeth, "You come back, we have party." Disconcerting, because his skin was so clear, and the whites of his eyes so white...also, I don't even like to have party.
To make sure gender roles stayed normativo, I again provided Lebensmittel for the Männer, who earnestly but not without the aid of webcomics sought to understand the economies...now when my kids ask me "Madame, c'est quoi le subprime mortgage crisis?", I'll know what to say.
Chris: With banks whispering sweet encouragement, people bought homes they couldn’t afford, and now they are falling behind on their mortgages.
Jamie: But the overwhelming majority of homeowners are doing just fine. So how is it that a mess concentrated in one part of the mortgage business — subprime loans — has frozen the credit markets, sent stock markets gyrating, caused the collapse of Bear Stearns, left the economy on the brink of the worst recession in a generation and forced the Federal Reserve to take its boldest action since the Depression?
Me: Can I have some more wine?
Chris: It really started in 1998, when large numbers of people decided that real estate, which still hadn’t recovered from the early 1990s slump, had become a bargain.
Me (sotto): Make it schloss, make it schloss, make it schloss am dem Hose...
Jamie: Bubbles lead to busts. Busts lead to panics. And panics can lead to long, deep economic downturns, which is why the Fed has been taking unprecedented actions to restore confidence.
Me: Hey do you guys ever feel like women are just vessels for homosocial relations between men?
Back in Marseille I’m feeling better, like neither a phage nor a vessel, but I’m eaten up by a deadening self-referentiality, my (literal [physical] and literal [textual]) body become both subject and object. Metaphor’s a metaphage, it consumes itself to the point of anorexic finitude….what’s all this meta for, anyway?
Jamie: i think i'm in the right place
as soon as i entered the ponyhof, i heard someone say "normativo" in italian
2:14 PM me: hey i need to get off my facebookmachine
where should i go?
Jamie: ok===you should leave kreuzberg
go to the holocaust memorial
me: where is that?
Jamie: its right near the brandenburg tor
on a road that goes south perpindicular
2:15 PM to the tor
its actually on hannah arendt straße if i remember coorectly
then you go see some other cool stuff
and definitely check out Dussmann
2:16 PM its the four storez book / music store
me: ohhh hannah ARENDT strasse
At the Holocaust Memorial children were playing a game of cache-cache (not cacher!). Jamie and I capitalized on the generosity of a German Jew ("Not many left you know! All in America! Universities! You want coffee?") in his trendy boutique.
Ron: You like this store? Or you think it has changed for bad?
Jamie: No, it's super!!
Ron: Thanks God!
Me (loudly, looking at shoes): Jamie I love this Shoah!!
Jamie: I think you mean Schuhe.
When we left, skinny jeans in tow, he said with a conspiratorial flash of rotting teeth, "You come back, we have party." Disconcerting, because his skin was so clear, and the whites of his eyes so white...also, I don't even like to have party.
To make sure gender roles stayed normativo, I again provided Lebensmittel for the Männer, who earnestly but not without the aid of webcomics sought to understand the economies...now when my kids ask me "Madame, c'est quoi le subprime mortgage crisis?", I'll know what to say.
Chris: With banks whispering sweet encouragement, people bought homes they couldn’t afford, and now they are falling behind on their mortgages.
Jamie: But the overwhelming majority of homeowners are doing just fine. So how is it that a mess concentrated in one part of the mortgage business — subprime loans — has frozen the credit markets, sent stock markets gyrating, caused the collapse of Bear Stearns, left the economy on the brink of the worst recession in a generation and forced the Federal Reserve to take its boldest action since the Depression?
Me: Can I have some more wine?
Chris: It really started in 1998, when large numbers of people decided that real estate, which still hadn’t recovered from the early 1990s slump, had become a bargain.
Me (sotto): Make it schloss, make it schloss, make it schloss am dem Hose...
Jamie: Bubbles lead to busts. Busts lead to panics. And panics can lead to long, deep economic downturns, which is why the Fed has been taking unprecedented actions to restore confidence.
Me: Hey do you guys ever feel like women are just vessels for homosocial relations between men?
Back in Marseille I’m feeling better, like neither a phage nor a vessel, but I’m eaten up by a deadening self-referentiality, my (literal [physical] and literal [textual]) body become both subject and object. Metaphor’s a metaphage, it consumes itself to the point of anorexic finitude….what’s all this meta for, anyway?
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Sonnenstudium
Je hais les dimanches, but daylight savings last Sunday provided for an hour less day and an hour more sun. Monday was l’Annonciation, when Marie gave her fiat, c’est-à-dire son “oui” libre, sans contrainte ni réserve, a text tantamount to sex, for in nine months’ time the Son was born (Romain, I’m sure, views his Fiat in similar terms). True or false: if Marwan provided this exigesis for his Catholic girlfriend, who is named Marie, she would realize that the prohibition of premarital sex is not necessarily catholic, and she can make an exception. Answer: True, because Marwan is Actually a God.
I'm in Berlin now, pursuing my career as a digital performance artist (literally), i.e. constructing my identity on the internet until my digits bleed. I cooked dinner for Jamie and Chris while they swilled red wine and discussed mediation, gender roles, how godlessness will get you nowhere and other Stuff Aristocratic Liberals Like. They've gone off drinking and won't be back until late capitalism. My interactions with Thorsten, the landlord, have been limited but rich.
Thorsten (breathing heavily behind me): Hallo!!
Me (turning quickly as fear turns to joy): Oh...hi!
Thorsten (toothy): Hi!
Me: So...lot of rain, huh? I'm trying to be positive, but...I could really use a trip to the Sonnenstudio.
Thorsten: Ja! Sky like porridge!
The Girlfriend: Hallo, I'm The Girlfriend, Dogma. Do You have everything for Your comfort?
Unclear whether she meant "I'm Thorsten's girlfriend, my name is Dogma," or "I am The Girlfriend, not just a girlfriend. I'm no positivist...I'm the girlfriend: [this is] dogma"...we could have sworn her name was Teresa.
I guess I should profiter de Berlin, but it just makes me miss the Hohepunkte and Cocktails-To-Go I enjoyed that summer with kleine Hannah...during my days I just follow the wall, fall into a daze and hear, italicized, in my head, nostalgie, ostalgie, faux-stalgie, ho-stalgie, lost-algie...
I'm in Berlin now, pursuing my career as a digital performance artist (literally), i.e. constructing my identity on the internet until my digits bleed. I cooked dinner for Jamie and Chris while they swilled red wine and discussed mediation, gender roles, how godlessness will get you nowhere and other Stuff Aristocratic Liberals Like. They've gone off drinking and won't be back until late capitalism. My interactions with Thorsten, the landlord, have been limited but rich.
Thorsten (breathing heavily behind me): Hallo!!
Me (turning quickly as fear turns to joy): Oh...hi!
Thorsten (toothy): Hi!
Me: So...lot of rain, huh? I'm trying to be positive, but...I could really use a trip to the Sonnenstudio.
Thorsten: Ja! Sky like porridge!
The Girlfriend: Hallo, I'm The Girlfriend, Dogma. Do You have everything for Your comfort?
Unclear whether she meant "I'm Thorsten's girlfriend, my name is Dogma," or "I am The Girlfriend, not just a girlfriend. I'm no positivist...I'm the girlfriend: [this is] dogma"...we could have sworn her name was Teresa.
I guess I should profiter de Berlin, but it just makes me miss the Hohepunkte and Cocktails-To-Go I enjoyed that summer with kleine Hannah...during my days I just follow the wall, fall into a daze and hear, italicized, in my head, nostalgie, ostalgie, faux-stalgie, ho-stalgie, lost-algie...
Friday, March 28, 2008
passé simple
Across the street from my apartment is a bar ouvrier, always ouvert, which makes me feel less bougie without having to bouger to such vivant milieux as the poor immigrant neighborhood of Noailles. Once, as I was panting up the final hill of a long Mistral-whipped run, a burly arm stretched out from the patio to offer me a full glass of pastis...why didn't I take it? Today, thirsting for authenticity, I dropped in to ironically (?) caffeinate my nascent nihilism and entertained several auditions for the blog.
These days the blog game reminds me of the crack game, which reminds me of Flaubert's cracked cauldron and my stress-fractured foot (I ran too hard, droit au but), which stresses me out...also, as they say in France, I don't care, particularly. But, desperate to go home again, I succumbed to a soi-disant apocalyptic poet whose clichés matched my coffee and cigarette. He asked what I was writing in my carnet; "Je me considère comme bloggeuse..." Nonplussed (literally [conventionally] but not literally [à la lettre]...he could, in fact, have withstood bien plus), he waxed poetic about his own poetry, "lourde, lourde! et noire, noire comme le charbon," because "le cœur de l'homme est dur comme une pierre," and "l'homme est un loup pour l'homme"...he and he alone is on "le bon cheming." Putaing! Though he repeatedly posited that he was "positif," he was positively no positivist: "Les hommes imitent les femmes, les femmes imitent les hommes," he intoned, and this is why the world will end pretty soon ("Bombe! Bombe! Bombe!"). "Mais la sexualité est un continuum..." He just squinted one-eyed into the sun, and muttered something like "la fin du monde viendra avec un clin d'œil"...which is a metonym, I think.
Confronted with such fatalism, I donned dark glasses, lit another cigarette, cocked my head in a cute way, and couldn't help but wonder: what (besides no panties and jeans, no bra with that blouse, etc.) is really so necessary? I find simplistic fatalism makes a fat out of you, you might as well argue the essential link between l'être and la lettre, but enough...I should really stop smoking; je fume, tu fumes, nous fûmes...
These days the blog game reminds me of the crack game, which reminds me of Flaubert's cracked cauldron and my stress-fractured foot (I ran too hard, droit au but), which stresses me out...also, as they say in France, I don't care, particularly. But, desperate to go home again, I succumbed to a soi-disant apocalyptic poet whose clichés matched my coffee and cigarette. He asked what I was writing in my carnet; "Je me considère comme bloggeuse..." Nonplussed (literally [conventionally] but not literally [à la lettre]...he could, in fact, have withstood bien plus), he waxed poetic about his own poetry, "lourde, lourde! et noire, noire comme le charbon," because "le cœur de l'homme est dur comme une pierre," and "l'homme est un loup pour l'homme"...he and he alone is on "le bon cheming." Putaing! Though he repeatedly posited that he was "positif," he was positively no positivist: "Les hommes imitent les femmes, les femmes imitent les hommes," he intoned, and this is why the world will end pretty soon ("Bombe! Bombe! Bombe!"). "Mais la sexualité est un continuum..." He just squinted one-eyed into the sun, and muttered something like "la fin du monde viendra avec un clin d'œil"...which is a metonym, I think.
Confronted with such fatalism, I donned dark glasses, lit another cigarette, cocked my head in a cute way, and couldn't help but wonder: what (besides no panties and jeans, no bra with that blouse, etc.) is really so necessary? I find simplistic fatalism makes a fat out of you, you might as well argue the essential link between l'être and la lettre, but enough...I should really stop smoking; je fume, tu fumes, nous fûmes...
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Marthaseille
My parents are here, which makes me feel alternately like a long-suffering native and an insufferable tourist. I've spent all week shuttling, à la marwanienne, between their bourgeois enclave in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, weakly weaving the threads of my life for their benefit and letting them unravel as I go back towards the looming beacon of Notre Dame de la Garde.
Before I went running last week, I joked to Marwan that I was going to smoke immediately afterwards, pour équilibrer, and by that gesture which inverts Romance to Realism, a gesture that, pour équilibrer, is itself Romantic, he literally had a perfect pétard waiting for me when I came back. This gave me a dangerous sense of my own power over him, such that these past two weekends when he has stood up me and my parents to go to work at Quick Quality Burger Restaurant, I'm more than un peu deçue, mostly because this conversation will never happen:
Marwan: Hello mister how are you yes I am fine, you do what in your life??
Dad: Well Marwan, I'm an employment lawyer.
Marwan: Sérieux?
My linguistic relations with my mother and everyone else remain emphatically phatic, and the longer I live in a foreign country and the more I watch this video the more I'm convinced that contentment lies in communicating without content, or at least devaluing content, and eating organic vegetables. I understand my students' extra-academic exchanges only when they turn meta, when someone thinks to whisper "Mais chuuuut, elle comprend ce que tu dis!", and, by an operation of metonymy, I can pretend that this is true. I asked young Yasmine if she knew what the message emblazoned on her t-shirt, SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL HOOKERS, meant; she mimed the action of hanging a coat on a hook, repeatedly, despairing that I would never grasp the concept...after a while I said Yes, Exactly.
Before I went running last week, I joked to Marwan that I was going to smoke immediately afterwards, pour équilibrer, and by that gesture which inverts Romance to Realism, a gesture that, pour équilibrer, is itself Romantic, he literally had a perfect pétard waiting for me when I came back. This gave me a dangerous sense of my own power over him, such that these past two weekends when he has stood up me and my parents to go to work at Quick Quality Burger Restaurant, I'm more than un peu deçue, mostly because this conversation will never happen:
Marwan: Hello mister how are you yes I am fine, you do what in your life??
Dad: Well Marwan, I'm an employment lawyer.
Marwan: Sérieux?
My linguistic relations with my mother and everyone else remain emphatically phatic, and the longer I live in a foreign country and the more I watch this video the more I'm convinced that contentment lies in communicating without content, or at least devaluing content, and eating organic vegetables. I understand my students' extra-academic exchanges only when they turn meta, when someone thinks to whisper "Mais chuuuut, elle comprend ce que tu dis!", and, by an operation of metonymy, I can pretend that this is true. I asked young Yasmine if she knew what the message emblazoned on her t-shirt, SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL HOOKERS, meant; she mimed the action of hanging a coat on a hook, repeatedly, despairing that I would never grasp the concept...after a while I said Yes, Exactly.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Anatole France Nightmare
Asked "What would you do if you had one day to live?", my Asiangs were the most vocal respondents:
Jianjang: I would...rechercher...wanted! a boyfriends
Chinois: I shoot M. LeBoulaire, I shoot him him him, I rape many girls, I rob bank, I go in supermarket and voler video games, I apport them au ciel!!
Jianjang: I would...rechercher...wanted! a boyfriends
Chinois: I shoot M. LeBoulaire, I shoot him him him, I rape many girls, I rob bank, I go in supermarket and voler video games, I apport them au ciel!!
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
oui-dire
I'm trying to be more positive...at the risk of sounding positivist, I've afforded every utterance a physical, mental, or literal "yes", a sort of sic (sick!) to affirm the existence of language qua language, irrespective of the validity of its content.
I tried to parlay this attitude to my students with a game of gradual linguistic distortion called Telephone, or téléphone arabe (their words, not mine), but the orthodoxy of errancy upset my littlest ones. To my delight my older kids quickly began to treat the game as an opportunity to commit varying degrees of speech acts, and pretty little Khadidja slyly modified "I Love You" to "I Fuck You." Khadidja was already my favorite, because during a pre-Valentine's Day speed-dating activity she insisted--just to be sexy--on dating girls, but with this affirmed commitment to sexual and textual errancy I want to lock her in my room until she causes me unspeakable epistemological agony (sorry BA, not feeling the Proust content?). But enough, this is beginning to sound like my senior essay...
To help my 13-year-olds with their pronouns I made them ask each other, "What do you want me to do?", which got pretty freaky:
"We want Olivier to dance on the chair!"
"We want Juliette to do striptease!"
"We want Julien to kiss Katie!"
"We want Chinois [not his actual name, I'm pretty sure] to do math calculation!"
"No striptease?!? Mais Madame...!!! OK, we want Juliette to montrer son torse"
Incidentally French children are slightly worse at asking to go to the bathroom than they are at understanding "Do You Understand?", and it was all Olivier could do to request "please go Ladies and Gentlemen?" I let him go, but only after explaining that apparently his chair-dance routine, rather than deconstructing the Lacanian Ur-binary of gender difference, had only reinforced it with the absurdity of its inversion. But enough...
I'm trying to dire "oui" with my roommates, too. I got them T-shirts, which they loved, because the French don't even have a word for T-shirt. The other week I think I heard, out of context, Marwan reassuring a tearful Manon that the things you overhear are sometimes "hors du contexte"...but this is all just ouï-dire, and yesterday she even invited me to a dinner party entre filles; she's making couscouscouscouscouscous
I need a job post-fin avril, possibilities suggested by my students in a game of Categories include Bitch, FBI, Superman, Stripteaser...what do you want me to do?
I tried to parlay this attitude to my students with a game of gradual linguistic distortion called Telephone, or téléphone arabe (their words, not mine), but the orthodoxy of errancy upset my littlest ones. To my delight my older kids quickly began to treat the game as an opportunity to commit varying degrees of speech acts, and pretty little Khadidja slyly modified "I Love You" to "I Fuck You." Khadidja was already my favorite, because during a pre-Valentine's Day speed-dating activity she insisted--just to be sexy--on dating girls, but with this affirmed commitment to sexual and textual errancy I want to lock her in my room until she causes me unspeakable epistemological agony (sorry BA, not feeling the Proust content?). But enough, this is beginning to sound like my senior essay...
To help my 13-year-olds with their pronouns I made them ask each other, "What do you want me to do?", which got pretty freaky:
"We want Olivier to dance on the chair!"
"We want Juliette to do striptease!"
"We want Julien to kiss Katie!"
"We want Chinois [not his actual name, I'm pretty sure] to do math calculation!"
"No striptease?!? Mais Madame...!!! OK, we want Juliette to montrer son torse"
Incidentally French children are slightly worse at asking to go to the bathroom than they are at understanding "Do You Understand?", and it was all Olivier could do to request "please go Ladies and Gentlemen?" I let him go, but only after explaining that apparently his chair-dance routine, rather than deconstructing the Lacanian Ur-binary of gender difference, had only reinforced it with the absurdity of its inversion. But enough...
I'm trying to dire "oui" with my roommates, too. I got them T-shirts, which they loved, because the French don't even have a word for T-shirt. The other week I think I heard, out of context, Marwan reassuring a tearful Manon that the things you overhear are sometimes "hors du contexte"...but this is all just ouï-dire, and yesterday she even invited me to a dinner party entre filles; she's making couscouscouscouscouscous
I need a job post-fin avril, possibilities suggested by my students in a game of Categories include Bitch, FBI, Superman, Stripteaser...what do you want me to do?
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