All in all, today has been a decent to good day. To begin, the delicious fuzzy navels, sex on the beaches, and tequila timer shots from last night’s Semaphore party thankfully did not come back to haunt me when I woke up this morning. I ate brunch with a guy named Vince. He was on my floor freshman year, and I’ve had a couple of classes with him. He’s an English major, and he’s doing the first fiction comps the department has seen in a while. His project sounded pretty interesting; he’s working on a story/novella playing with the concept of the Bildungsroman. I’ve always liked Vince, even though some of his comments in Lit II frustrated me sometimes. But I really came to respect him in my postmodern American literature class last term. He’s a really intelligent guy, and I found his level of engagement with so many of the texts rather inspiring. I actually remember getting frustrated with him one day in pomo class when we were talking about Barthe’s Snow White. He made a comment about how disconnected he felt this art to be from the everyday American; that no “real” average Joe would ever pick this up and actually make it through, much less enjoy it. At the time I dismissed his comment because I felt like that kind of a question wasn’t really the prerogative of the course at hand. “So what,” I thought, “if the average American couldn’t read it. It wasn’t meant for a popular audience, and that’s okay. Art doesn’t have to be immediately accessible in order for it to be ‘good’ or ‘worthwhile.’” But as the term went on, I began to think more and more about what he had said. At the time, I was working away at refining my comps proposal, and it struck me that what intrigued me so deeply about the potential dialogue between Isak Dinesen and Ngugi wa Thiong’o – indeed about African literatures in general – was that there was a pervasive sense of immediacy in their work. In Ngugi’s case, for example, so much of his literary theory was caught up in the discourse of Marx and Fanon. He believed that language itself could be revolutionary, and indeed when he published Devil on the Cross in his native Gikuyu, it had an immediate and profound effect on the “everyday” people for whom he had written it. People were reading it aloud in huge groups everywhere in Kenya. To get back to Vince’s comment, I realized that he didn’t necessarily mean that pomo theory was illegitimate or useless, but, as we talked about today, he was lamenting what he felt to be a disconnect between most Americans and this art which explores quintessentially intellectual crises. Who can relate to antifoundationalism, or the manifold nature of reality? These are the problems of the white intellectual bourgeoisie. Again, this isn’t a problem, per se, but I would agree with him that there’s a sense of disconnect from real world issues that makes studying it feel somehow dirty. There’s something much more profound for me in studying the deeply felt cultural consequences of textual production that postmodernism could never offer. So yeah, we talked about some of that. I like Vince because he’s so thoughtful and down to earth, and it reminds me that I don’t want to be the pretentious snobbag I often feel I’m in danger of becoming. He keeps me thinking.

So then I danced for three hours. Now, when I say “dance” I really mean sat on nasty Cowling floor for three hours doing slow painful movement as Wynn tried to get every precise detail of the 2 or so minute opening of her new piece for Semaphore. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s going to be really beautiful, it’s just not particularly fun at this juncture. The rest of the material we have, however, is much quicker, more buoyant, and generally excellent.

Then the rest of the day was rather like a blob. I finished reading the first half of Wangari Maathai’s memoir for African environmental history, figured out what I’m writing on for that class, and studied me some Français. Then I watched a ridiculously stupid movie called Hoodwinked with the Creatures. Kudos to Saira for that’n.

But that’s about it. I have so much shit left to do, but it will get done. My Bloody Valentine will get me through. Maybe some Feist, too. Goodnight y’all.

…according to my preposterously attractive French prof, people in New Orleans don’t always have the best French. For example, on the billboard for one church was written: “Dieu blesse l’Amérique.” Unfortunately for them, the verb blesser is one of those dastardly faux amis; it means “to hurt.”