My Life and Thoughts

In concluding the story of the n+1 Bay Area tour, mention should also be made of the events at USF and Stanford.

We were actually invited to USF, which made it a unique venue for us. I got there 10 minutes late because I had somehow parked in Cole Valley and then had to walk like half a mile uphill. Would Philip Roth walk half a mile uphill to get to his own literary reading? I don’t know; that’s just the kind of devotion I have to my craft.

We were reading in the law school, directly across from a church devoted to one of my favorite saints: Ignatius of Loyola. When I got to our room it was completely deserted, except by a bearded intellectual who was standing behind a huge coffee dispenser. The sight of an intellectual, partially obscured by a samovar-shaped object, produced a charming Chekhovian effect.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola Church, San Francisco (across from the USF Law Building)	K.S. Stanislavsky as Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya (1899); note samovar in background.

Because the other readers were nowhere to be seen, I concluded that I was in the wrong room. I then realized that I had lost the piece of paper on which I had written the room number, as well as the name of the guy who had invited us, and also Mark Greif’s phone number. Fortunately, I did have the number of Keith Gessen, whose fans have by now brought My Life and Thoughts a total of 79 viewers. Gessen’s closest rival, with 44 hits from Google, is the word-phrase combination: “venerability ‘Joan Silber.”

“Keith Gessen” and “venerability ‘Joan Silber’”: we do two things here, but we do them right.

Anyway, Keith told me the room number and it turned out I had the right room to begin with, and the guy behind the samovar was actually Jeffrey Paris, a philosophy professor, who had invited us because he teaches Mark Greif’s essays in his Existentialism class. Mark and Nikil turned up ten minutes later, accompanied by their really nice girlfriends, Gabrielle and Shannon.

The reading was attended by 20–30 USF students, and also by the Peruvian-American writer Daniel Alarcón, whom nobody expected would come, since he is definitely at least a “C-list” (cf. D-list) writer. Alarcón has a great piece in n+1 Issue 4, about watching Evo Morales’s presidential inauguration on TV in his aunt’s kitchen in Bolivia. Other guests included the legendary Hugo Blanco, who was exiled for many years in Sweden after leading a Quechua political uprising in 1960, and who was now sitting in Daniel Alarcón’s kitchen, inexorably eating some kind of potatoes while wearing a nylon windbreaker with “a Peasant Confederation of Peru logo on the left breast—and a Nike swoosh on the right.”

A few days after the inauguration, Alarcón attended the annual fair of Alasitas in La Paz, where everyone is supposed to buy miniature reproductions of all the items they would like to have in real life. You can buy almost anything in miniature there: cell phones, computers, Euros, dollars, passports, cars, trucks, pineapples, suckling pigs. Here is a picture (by Alhen):

Apparently they sell a lot of miniature building materials—bricks, metal beams, wheelbarrows, etc.—which seems strange because you can also just buy an entire miniature house. Given the choice, why would you wish for building materials, rather than a ready-made house? Maybe, it’s because of miniature economics, where the miniature house is actually much more expensive than the sum of the miniature bricks you would need to build it?

At Alasitas, Evo Morales reportedly bought a tiny marriage certificate, committing himself to the nation of Bolivia.

Audience questions at USF included: whether n+1 was going to write about “the singularity” (Mark actually answered this with something about DNA, which I registered imperfectly since I was occupied by drinking almost all the coffee in the enormous samovar); and how to resist the growing police state in America. Mark said that there were probably some web sites addressing his concerns (he’s right… I just Googled it and there is a site for the Police State Alliance Resistance), but that, for this particular problem, n+1 is possibly not the first-choice most helpful resource.

Afterwards we went to dinner at an Asian fusion cocktail lounge where I drank some kind of powerful sake and listened to Jeffrey Paris discuss Mark Greif’s work with Mark’s girlfriend, Gabrielle (a philosophy grad student at Harvard). Both Paris and Gabrielle had taught “Against Exercise” to undergraduates, and agreed that it was one of the rare philosophical works with an easy application to daily life. I can confirm this, because personally I stopped running for like 3 weeks after reading “Against Exercise.” (Greif describes running as the “insidious” transposition of the activity of the gym—that “well-ordered masturbatorium,” normally self-contained by its “mirrored and pungent hangar”—into the public space, where runners sweat on people’s civil liberties.) I almost never run anymore, now that I’m versing myself in the lethal art of muay thai. But Gabrielle was actually training for a marathon while Mark wrote that article. She runs lots of marathons.

After reading “Against Exercise,” one of Gabrielle’s students came to her office hours in despair. “What am I going to do?!!” he exclaimed. This was a great moment in undergraduate philosophy teaching. Subsequently, this same student appeared on the TV show Beauty and the Geek (“The Ultimate Social Experiment”). He appeared as a geek, although Gabrielle opined that he was a good-looking young man and probably did work out regularly.

To be totally honest, what I was most struck by during this dinner was the extent to which the discourse of philosophy makes almost no sense to me—this despite my 100+ hours of classroom instruction in philosophy at the graduate and undergraduate level (c.f. the 40 hours of flight time that you need to get a pilot’s license). To this day, when I read/ listen to actual philosophers talk about philosophy, I am brought to mind of a former student’s comments on one of my TA evaluation forms: “We never talk about any of the important issues in the texts; all we talk about is random details and abstractions.”

* * *

Erghh, I knew I shouldn’t have started reading about Alasitas—I got all distracted and now look how long this post is. Also I made myself really dizzy looking at a lot of pictures of miniature ham hocks. Friends, I am sorry, the conclusion of the tour will have to wait until yet another installment.

To be continued…

Tags: academic life, beards, d-list, events, Keith Gessen, n+1, St. Ignatius of Loyola

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.