making things

jessica, two year later, i'm going to respond to your last post. i want to respond now because, well, i feel like i'm not making things. in my line of work, i'm supposed to produce knowledge, but i feel like i'm not qualified to the produce the kind of knowledge i'm expected to, and that even if i were, this knowledge wouldn't matter -- it would exist in such a small way for so few.

i haven't really written anything in two years. and now that i'm required to write for my exams, i find that i have nothing to say. i can force myself to write. but i don't know that even i care to read what i've written.

my cat's been wearing a cone for the past few weeks. he had licked off the fur on one small patch near the top of his front leg, and i was worried he would create an open sore if he kept at it. this morning i did laundry. when the sheets came off my bed he crawled underneath, something he has trouble with when the cone is on. many hours later, after i had remade my bed with clean sheets, i could hear the cone knocking against the belly of my bedframe as he tried to get out.

dream-spilling

i'm posting two dreams, because they're probably the most interesting thing to happen to me in a while.

one in which annie had come back from ukraine and we were meeting in the food court of some mall. some random people from college were scattered around getting food. hugged lee, whom i didn't even know very well. anyway, i was getting pizza. i wanted mushroom but they only had it in "double layer," so i got two slices of cheese. then this petite blonde girl, someone i don't know in real life, puts her hand in my hair (in the dream it was still long, and up) and starts moving her hand around. for some reason in the dream, this wasn't only a weird act, but a very aggressive one. she had one or two friends with her, but they weren't really doing anything. she took a slice of my pizza. (somehow, it was more complicated than this in the dream. it was less like outright bullying and more like something else. there was more antagonism.) i was going to leave, but then i realized that i really was quite hungry. and that i had ordered two slices, after all. and the people behind the counter saw the whole thing. so i asked the counter if i could have my slice of cheese pizza returned to me and the lady said she'd have to ask her manager. behind me, the girl saw what i was doing and started. taunting me? i'm not sure what. but it made me uncomfortable. i felt like things were going to get violent. the counter lady came back and gave me free small icecream in a cup. the ice cream was green and she poured dark soda on it. there was some other kind of encounter with this girl, but i dont remember exactly. then i sat down to find annie was completely thrilled, not only to see her, but because i had this ridiculous story to recount. then someone who looked just like annie came down and sat next to us. and annie had a
twin! i recounted the story to them.

i only remember two scenes from the second one. it was after rei's class, not the one i'm in now o the one i was in last year, but a random class that rei was teaching. it was set in a real seminar room in hib, but i've never had a class with rei in that room. mm, class was over, and some people were staying around for various reasons. i was sitting at the "front" of the classroom (it's a seminar room, so the front is wherever the prof decides to sit), facing the windows. but not at the main table (in this room there are chairs that circle the seminar table). polina was next to me. amber, a girl from my high school who's now teaching english in grade school, wanted to read something she had written. (even though at this point there weren't very many people in the classroom. i don't remember the reason for this reading.) she stood up and read. i don't remember much of what she read. i feel like in the dream, instead of listening to her speak, i actually had the text in front of me. part of it looked like a script of which rei was one of the actors:

rei: VASE? what?
er: wer39
rei: 3
prose. (except the text itself was more spaced out)

i am at the same time almost positive that this is not what amber read in the dream, because i think what she read was some kind of personal essay. after amber finished, rei got *extremely* upset and kept calling the writing drivel (this is completely unlike rei, btw). she was so upset that she threw a tall green vase that was in the classroom. she broke the window at the opposite end of the room.
afterwards, polina and i were sitting outside talking about what happened. she explained things in a way that made them seem very evident, although in the dream i wouldn't have thought of things in that way myself. apparently there was a rumor going around about rei and a vase. and
amber's story had mentioned vases. rei took this as a personal offense. as polina explained what had happened, i (in the dream) was thinking, oh. why didn't i get that. i remember thinking in the dream that i was a bit silly for not understanding it right away. which is now weird to me, since dream-polina was also me.

i'm not sure where these came from. except i do remember thinking yesterday that i can't stand it when people are mad at me, or i think they're mad at me.

Beyond making things

Vicki,

Today I went to the movies and saw "Charlie Wilson's War." The screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin--"The American President," "The West Wing,"--so I realize that things probably appear cleaner than they actually are. But I don't know, despite my general cynicism and penchant for pluralism, I left feeling quite hopeless and useless. What is a young person, inheriting these conflicts, supposed to think about them? Even worse, do with?

I worry that I should be doing more, but I honestly can't see what that would be? Should I have gone to law school. Am I wasting my intelligence, making pretend buildings, playing art. I would sign up to help, donate years and years of my life to these problems, if I understood how big changes happen. I think a lot of young people feel this way, which is how they end up in the Army, and then dead.

Tired of boys

I joined a group/club/thing this quarter. I don't think I've been in a club since Marcella and I founded the Bridge Club freshman year. I was pretty awful at bridge.

Anyway, it's SAWA, the student group for Women in Architecture. There was an agenda meeting last Friday, kinda boring, until maybe 20 minutes into it, this woman walks in. Shorter, professor-age, very urban: dressed in all black with funky short hair. (You see this less here than you might expect for a design program). She introduces herself as the dean of the school, all of Architecture and the Arts. And she just wants to introduce herself because she thinks women are great and whatever else, I guess.

But she sits down and starts talking to us about her life and career, being a woman, being an architect, engineer, academic. It was just another of those moments for me, an "I want to be like her" moment. I felt that for my adviser at Northwestern, my adviser here, Dan's mom, and reading this (http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/09/21/naomi_klein/), Naomi Klein. Just super inspired by successful hip women. It's a serious boys' club around here, so it's nice to find that where you can.


And I have to post this, from the same interview:
"There is a new level of integration between homeland security companies and media companies. General Electric, which owns NBC, has been in the weapons industry for some time but has become very active in the homeland security business. They recently purchased InVision, which provides bomb detection for airports. Since 9/11 InVision has received $15 billion in contracts from the Department of Homeland Security -- more such contracts than any other company. A company like that gains from the atmosphere of crisis and fear that is spread through media outlets."

people, will did it first

or at least, independently of this ken rogowski fellow. this is emma the yakkosharkquirrelmus, created jan 2007. try not to think about the stuffed animals that sacrificed their lives so that emma could be. notice instead the impressive stitching!
see http://themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/wild_animals/ (i can't copy the images from the site)

Let the orange embers in the fireplace remain

Orbitz sent me an email, Just a friendly reminder, there are only a few days left until your "Eugene 6/21/07" trip. No kidding, dude. I should be cleaning my room, but instead I've been taking pictures of myself in my Macintosh Photobooth.

Me, yawning when I should be packing.

error

so then there's dictee.

the thing with dictee is that this text comes from a completely different place than pensees. there's no claim to an absolute truth, for one. more generally it's postcolonial, situated multiply (france, korea, china, u.s.), and interested in different forms of visual representation (text, images, handwriting, letters; interesting in affecting these forms). my main concern here is with the presentations of error within the work, and what this use, play, presence, representation of error has to say about [the claim to and rejection of the possibility of an absolute truth and certain knowledge in pascal; the purported absence of the truth/false logic replaced by the logic of a bet]

the necessity of recognizing error for it to be error, in a sense. that is, i don't think error can be fully comprehended as the willful act of new creation and continuous becoming (hello deleuze) because its reception (and, i believe its creation) is forever performed against convention, read against the standards of convention. not that they derive from convention in any simply way, but that just because error differs does not mean that it is liberated.

in dictee, the reader is confronted with commissions of error that vary in type. grammatical error, citational errors, error of genre, subjective historical experience (error of that illusive objective factual historiography). error and non-comprehension: the common sense idea, it seems, is that error produces the experience of non-comprehension for the one who reads it. part of what allows convention to repeat is it intelligibility (this intelligibility doesn't seem to come from some absolute truth but rather is generated from the authority of its repetition)

examples: geneology, elitere instead of euterpe, the sappho quote, divisions of word, disappointing the expectations of how text is displayed on a page, order (non-developmental narrative)

a production of error and a production of different intelligibility that comes from trauma. (in a way, the horror and intelligibility of what comes from "convention"? from history) the ritualization of speech, the errors in the represented catechism.

for pascal, the encounter with error always takes place against an absolute truth. not the case here. "truth" is the veil of repetition. but what i think pensees might be able to remind a reader of dictee is that error is always produced and received against a standard. it's never about easy liberation. the tensions in the text also play with this ambivalence between home, mother language, an original past -- these absolute ideals are never entirely abandoned, cannot be. what dictee may remind pensees would be that the ambivalence is irreducible, in a sense. that having at one the assurance of certain knowledge through reason and the abandonment of reason for the risk of a bet (and also the possibility of error; the risk is the risk of being in error), the abandonment of risk for the certainty of a judgment, etc. is an impossible bind and must remain as such. it can't be a decision of either reason or risk, either certainty or a suspended knowledge. in a way a painful ambivalence, but also holds the potential for pleasure.