With the Lights On

I just set out to key in a few notes I could post at EWM–say anything about
registering entries less frequently in the weeks ahead, about the mid-semester curve which, now
rounded, reveals three seminar projects with deadlines in clear view, about new
ideas and whatnot, about biking through the lovely
fall weather
we’re having in Syracuse–to a meeting at Ph.’s school, to
campus for CCR732–today’s session on service learning as the latest momentous
shift in composition, then pedaling over to Barry Park after class so Ph.
doesn’t have to walk home from soccer practice alone in the rain. 

To end, Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech wins the mid-semester
prestige of most compelling read (and it helps that it was set up by Austin’s
lectures collected in How to Do Things With Words).  It’s got me
thinking about a whole bunch of stuff; a cloudy project emerging from Davis’s
archisemiotics and performative architecture(s) is now jockeying with my other
half-plan–a stir-pot of Barthes, Saper with a yet-to-be IDed ingredient. 
Still something missing and a heap of reading to take up.  One other
project involving weblogs, and one other project on walled classrooms and their
antitheses, deep cyberia.  And in the upcoming week, it’s Lakoff’s Moral
Politics
, the final bit–on mapping–in Comp in Four Keys, and
selections from Gamsci’s Notebooks.

Fade to air up the tires.

4 Comments

  1. Re Barthes/Saper–setting out with curiosity about theory and method mostly. I’m only looking at _Mythologies_ (bc it *was* on the 631 syllabus) and _Articifial Mythologies_ because it takes up _Mythologies_, turns it. My worry is that I don’t think I’ll have time to check out Camera Lucida or any of B’s later stuff for this project. Still getting lost. Maybe there’s a space for ‘intervention’ through Lakoff and the public intellectual. Mostly just trying to play along the invention-critique fissure, crack open a bit of culture-making. Recently got my hands on _Networked Art_, too, but I’ve yet to open it.

  2. George–guess I ought to bring more complaints to the blog, eh? Yesterday I started out with a huge gripe then trimmed it away. For what? The program’s great for a lot of reasons, but, like every place, every job, there have been one or two frustrating events. Ah, grad school–ivy-covered edifices, heavy backpacks, collegiality, the tower chiming “God Bless America” as I walked onto campus this morning. Some day when I’m older I’ll read back on these blog entries with a nostalgic forgetfulness and wish for days like these. In the meantime…

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