My Life and Thoughts

Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is, the 11/20 issue of the LRB came out today. The bad news (at least, bad for those non-subscribers to the LRB who still wanted to read my article) is that my 8,000+ word discursion on Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida (Columbia UP, $26.50) is only available by online purchase, or possibly by cutting a deal with the Widener minotaur. Imagine my feelings when, as I was writing the previous sentence, I experienced a moment of doubt about whether discursion was really the word I wanted, and, upon looking it up, found that the very definition is also only available to paying subscribers!

discursion can be found at Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com.

Click here to start your free trial! Click here to search for another word in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

Learn more about “discursion” and related topics at Britannica.com
See a map of “discursion” in the Visual Thesaurus
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It is certainly very thoughtful of them to help you find a job, so you can afford to use the secret fatcat dictionary. On the other hand, if you, like me, don’t have a real job, then you may enjoy whiling away some minutes by typing in random words, to see which ones constitute the true discourse of power and privilege as defined by Merriam-Webster. On still another hand, the fact that you are unemployed is probably a reflection of the fact that you don’t know any of those words: I personally tried all the most obscure and aristocratic words I could think of, and all of them were in the free version of the dictionary accessible to any homeless dude in the SFPL. Finally, in despair, I looked in Google for a list of “ten-dollar words,” and although most of them were also in the free dictionary, one of them, croodle, is, like discursion, reserved for the elite.

But the class system never has been able to confine the intellectuals, who hover so ambiguously between the toilers and the exploiters! Take me for example. Although I don’t exactly have a real job with health insurance, I do have a part-time teaching job with unlimited OED access, and so am in a position to inform you that “The cushat croodles amourously” (TANNAHILL Bonnie Wood Poems (1846) 132), meaning that it produces a “continued soft low murmuring sound.” You read it here and you read it for free.

Philosophy in Turbulent Times	Cushat (Columba palumbus)

As I was scrolling through headlines about the Istanbul bombing, I came across one potentially less depressing Turkish news item, from Sabah: “Mental Patient Beats Doctor in Elevator for Six Floors.” Tor the first time in ages, I found myself thinking of Grey’s Anatomy, a show I used to watch while I was supposed to be writing my dissertation. Grey’s Anatomy is so famous for its use of elevators that, even in the homeland of Genette, young girls are making video montages about it: in the words of Youtube user piluka6: “all happens in that elevator!”

The elevator in Grey’s Anatomy functions much like the inn in Part I of Don Quijote: all plot problems are resolved by dumping the relevant characters in there and letting them sort it out. The characters themselves openly acknowledge this formal property of the elevator, in metatextual remarks such as: “I don’t want any drama today, I’m taking the stairs”; or (meaningfully): “Anything can happen in the elevator.” This is an example of what Viktor Shklovsky called “laying bare the device,” and it always struck me as rather daring because, when you take a cold hard look at the formal narrative possibilities afforded by the device of the hospital elevator, “inexhaustible” isn’t the first word that comes to mind.

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The other day I was really happy to receive a comment on my post about Kamal, from none other than Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of Immortal Muse publishing!   Winson provided some really useful bibliographic background on the “masses/ ass is” passage, reproduced on the bookmark.  It turns out that the poet Zireaux uses this rhyme, not only with reference to Eminem’s ass in Kamal, but also with reference to J-Lo’s ass in an entirely different work called Res Publica (full stanza here).

Subsequently, my indefatigable web master informed me that my site was getting some incoming links from Bernardo Winson’s blog.  Imagine my feelings when I checked it out and saw there is a whole post about me (w00t!).  So what if it’s mostly about what a superficial person I am? 

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Inscrutable youth, with their enormous sweatshirts and tiny telephones: what are their hopes, their dreams, their intellectual interests? It is in my nature to sit around making big generalizations about things, so that is what I was asking myself as I paged through the thesis proposals of my potential future students (see previous post).  Here are my findings.

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I am a great admirer of My Life on the D-List, the reality TV show featuring stand-up comedian Kathy Griffin. The show dramatizes Griffin’s major source of comic material: her own marginal interactions with “A-list” celebrities, who always remain just outside the picture. One episode opens with a monologue about how Griffin was supposed to present an award to Renée Zellweger, whose assistant then called the network and asked for a different presenter (“and I said, ‘Whatever that sweaty, puffy coke whore wants, she should get’”). The episode proceeds to document Griffin’s receipt of a truly enormous crate of long-stem roses, signed: “Warmest wishes, Renée Zellweger.” Griffin ponders the significance of these roses (silencer, peace offering, anthrax delivery vehicle), first at home with her mom, and then in Chevy’s Fresh Mex with her gay friends (who describe Zellweger’s gift as “a modern day Rubik’s cube”); Griffin calls the florist to ask how much the roses cost ($520); Griffin and her assistant brainstorm possible thank-you notes.

Griffin’s treatment of Renée Zellweger reminded me, in certain ways, of Tolstoy’s treatment of Napoleon in War and Peace.

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