Are you Hung Up

2011-07-11T09:08:00.001-07:00

On Self Love

After one year in this place, I am adopting the attitude of leading a blameless life in an impersonal city.

This is what I mean. There is nowhere more impersonal than a crowded 7 train running slowly to Manhattan during morning rush hour, yet I have felt the most personally angry, anxious and frustrated inside those wagons. At least commuters traveling in the L train from Brooklyn get to flirt with each other on the ride to work. They get to post Craig's list ads trying to find each other after the commute is over and meet up in Prospect Park later.
This is not the way we people from Queens ride the 7 train. Most of us are very defensive because we have to get to our non-alternative lifestyle jobs on time, and are inclined to take everything personally. So in my case, these feelings rise from the belief that other commuters want to shove their hand bags in my face on purpose, elbow me, make me late by blocking the door so that I cannot get out, also on purpose, eat their fish and seaweed sandwich in front of me at seven am so that I feel nausea all the way to 42nd street, sit with their legs spread open unnecessarily, and on purpose, etc.

I have traveled in an impersonal environment almost every day of my life for one year, and I have taken most of its annoying occurrences personally. I am not the only passenger who adopts this attitude though. I have seen a woman hit her head against the pole when the conductor announced a delay in Queensboro Plaza once, heard Latino men cuss in my language plenty of times, and a good friend of mine who has taken public transportation for the past two years has to decided to either get a car, or move to another state.

Public transportation sucks, especially during the summer months. But riding public transportation and taking every occurrence personally or blaming every occurrence on someone else is bound to drive us city dwellers crazy. Other examples from my life that involve taking an impersonal city personally are: trying to swim laps at the YMCA in Flushing while the summer camp kids and other really slow swimming people are sharing a lane with me, trying unsuccessfully to find a seat to read in the public library, waiting in line at the post office to mail a letter for my Dad, waiting for others to be done watching so that I can stand in front of that Edward Hopper painting at the MET that I like so much, spending Sundays at the Laundromat waiting for others to be done with the dryer, asking questions at the Q & A of the MOMA's Film events and having other New Yorkers boo at my self-evident question... All these and more also apply. But, the worst one really does involve taking public transportation.

To protect my precarious sanity, this summer, and to enhance my survival skills, I can either a) not leave my apartment until September, or b) approach life in the city with a different attitude. Taking things personally in such an impersonal place is a self evident contradiction, so to alleviate it I now think of bad luck as anything but accidents in a very busy place. The 7 train is stopped at Queensboro again because another person tried jumping on the rails this morning? I cannot get to class on time, again? A guy from the other lane just groped my butt while I was working on my backstroke in the pool? This lady’s elbow is piercing my back in the crowded train? I have to stay in the Egyptian section at the MET because all the tourists are flooding the Contemporary art section? I am five blocks away from getting to work on time but there is a concert on Lexington and 42nd and the whole sidewalk is blocked with half naked bodies cheering and singing along?

It’s all just accidents, accidents, accidents in a busy, busy, busy.

.
On Self-Respect

Stephenie and I are trying to find a park to sit down and eat our Chinese take-out that is getting cold. We pass through a church in the East Village. The church has a rainbow flag and a sign that says WE WELCOME THE LGBT COMMUNITY. Stephenie stops to comment SINCE WHEN DOES A CHURCH NEED TO TELL ME THAT IT’S ALRIGHT FOR ME TO GO IN AND PRAY IN THEIR BUILDING, HUH?

Untitled # 1

2011-06-02T19:56:00.000-07:00

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, then doing the same thing over and over again expecting the same results is just masochism.
This is to say that I am considering applying to graduate school, again. And there is a huge chance I will get rejected to every school I apply to, again. And that may or may not be a form of masochism, depending on how you see it.

After next semester I will have an MA in Philosophy, and I am vaguely considering going for a PhD either in Philosophy, or in Comparative Literature. If that is the case, I better start doing some research during the summer.

If you know me well, and are my friend, I know what you are thinking as you read this:

“But I thought that you were frustrated with philosophy Carolina!”

But, if you really are my friend, you also know that I was ALWAYS frustrated with philosophy, and that I may never be NOT-frustrated with philosophy, and that I am pretty stubborn. If anything, such frustration is good. It has helped inform my ideas.

The only reason I am vaguely considering putting myself through the hell of the application process a SECOND TIME, is because I would like to get money: I would like to get funded for doing philosophy, and because I think I would be an awesome philosophy teacher in the future, and I am more than happy to teach both at an undergraduate or at a community college level, making a contribution to society somehow. I know. I know this is cheesy.

On the other hand, I am not interested in using philosophy to feel superior to others, to justify my shitty or unethical behaviors, or to get laid, nor am I using Philosophy to hide from the real world while my life goes by and my relationships are left unattended; although I am probably guilty of all of these things.

I have a real job already, I like it. I have a skill. But, if anything, being around youth of different backgrounds has informed my philosophical ideas, and given me all the more reasons to stay in the field of philosophy, to try and communicate and justify my perceptions, and to critique the false narratives and universalisms based on culturally limited intuitions that are harming, rather than aiding our task of creating more meaningful communities, identities, and lives.

So, I think I want to do philosophy for the right reasons. But, now I have to convince a graduate program of this. And I was never good at selling myself.

I do think that my chances of getting accepted may be higher now that I will obtain an MA, have presented papers at two different graduate conferences, have a stronger writing sample, stronger letters, and will hopefully beg a couple of journal editors to publish my mediocre book review by the end of summer. See? I can sell myself better this time.

But the real question is: do I really want to spend even more time than I already have stressing about Philosophy? Do I even want to bother having to answer this question? And also, remember Carolina? There are 300 hundred applicants for the average schools and only 5 of them get picked. Do you know what that means? That’s just like winning the lottery. That is just putting yourself and your life plans at the mercy of luck and chance. Do you really want to waste your time again? Can’t you just be happy with what you have?

This morning, I was looking up a philosopher who teaches at Yale, but Google directed me to the “Graduate Café” instead, this is a website were applicants post their acceptances or rejections to graduate schools in Philosophy. I looked through the site for a few minutes and it brought back memories of anticipation. I remember going through this website a lot two years ago as an undergraduate student, when I was waiting for my acceptance or rejection letters to arrive. I guess I got a sense of community by reading about others who were just as anxious as I was. I saw that one particular guy who had gotten rejected from Yale, wrote this:

“Yale. Rejection letter. This means that I'm 0/17. I hate this world. Sometimes, cutting myself is the only thing that makes the pain go away. Since this was the last school I had to hear from, there's really no point in going on. Why apply next year? I'll just get rejected again. So tonight, or maybe the next night, I'm going to take my whole bottle of Adderall and wait for the darkness to come.”

Wow. That’s all I have to say.

But then again, why am I laughing at this guy like I am so different and less dramatic?

Some of my students act like this often when I give them a B. They have written e-mails to me of this sort. Some high school students I've taught are also applying to schools such as Yale because they are all unique, because they are so self involved in their own drama and poetry, and they don’t realize how similar they all are; always thinking that they will be the next David Foster Wallace. Some of my high school students have the maturity of this undergraduate student whining about his rejection in a blog, exactly the way I am whining in my blog about the sole thought of getting rejected again, and one has to wonder if graduate school is only contributing to lowering my maturity level even more.

But, I am trying to remind myself that I am not the same person I was two yeas ago, that this city has changed me, that I am older, that I look older, that I can handle things better now, that I can handle cover letters and rejections, that I have mentored people. But, I may be fooling myself. This process may go further than the insanity parameters into the field of masochism. I just don’t know. This 1,000 word blog entry is obviously proof that I am analyzing things too much, that I am being dramatic. That, in fact, I haven’t changed that much. I am going to go take my strawberry niquil now, and wait for the darkness to come, thank you very much.

2011-04-25T23:11:00.001-07:00

My Dad is a teacher, my Mom is a teacher, I am currently a teacher. You know what my Dad has to say about teachers? "If you are ever at a party Carolina, and you start talking to someone who tells you that they are in the field of education, just run away to the other side of the room."

Hi Ho.

Despite my Dad's high opinion about teachers, and specially about teachers at parties, I have to warn you: this blog is about education. I also have to warn you that if I ever met you at a party, I can probably get your attention by talking about Derrida and Leather or about Hegel's Dialectics...But deep down, I will secretly be waiting for that moment when I can bring up education.

1) On Detachment: I was walking down the hallway today and overheard a student of mine complaining to another student, "We never learn ANYTHING in Spanish class." At this stage of the year, I try not to take anything personally. I am used to my younger students having no problem telling me that something is boring them. "Ms. Drake this is boring, we KNOW this already!" But I always take their complains as constructive criticism "Alright then, moving on..." And in a way, I am thankful that at least they say this to my face. But this specific student is a girl whom I have gone out of my way to help and prevent her from failing my class. So I think that a side of me was a little hurt by her comment. I secretly feel happy when my students tell me I'm their favorite teacher. But this was not a compliment, yet I just smiled like a grownup and kept walking down the hallway. Later during lunch, I confessed to the math teacher that I was sightly upset.
Math teacher, who has been teaching since he was 22, offered his response:

"You know what Carolina? ten years of teaching have taught me that you can get upset about someone whom you can't control, or you can just realize that in the end, they are all just dumb kids."

I like the idea of my students just being dumb kids. It makes sense. And it helps me put things in better perspective. I have, at times, been told that I care too much. And I guess I never really knew that there was something such as "caring too much" until I started teaching and realized that whenever a student was upset in my class I would get upset too. I suffered from excess empathy and it was harming rather than helping my performance. This is all to say that I still need to perfect my detachment skills from my job and from my students but I am getting much better at it. Teaching is a though job and nobody likes to be criticized, and yet, at the same time, teenagers are teenagers, they really are just dumb kids. The same kid who loves you on Monday may hate you on Tuesday. It's part of the job, it's part of my series of lessons in maturity, and it's a part of education.

2) On Hair Care: Out of curiosity, I have decided to throw out the shampoo and wash my hair with baking soda. This supposedly makes hair look better and restores its natural oils. Why not? All I know is that my hair, specially my bangs look so frizzy that I am beginning to look like an authentic middle school teacher. I don't know if this is good or bad.

3) On the subjunctive tense in Spanish: I am teaching the subjunctive tense this month and I think it's my favorite verb tense so far and I am teaching it through a socio-political perspective. My students are showing signs of life again: They seem to be engaged while learning, well, grammar! The Spanish subjunctive is the verb tense of wishes and wants. At one point in the history of Latin America, it was used by emancipatory movements who claimed "Si tuvieramos los medios de produccion, seriamos realmente libres." And sadly, it is not being used anymore. It is being replaced by the verb tenses of capitalism: by the NOW and the objects of possession of the immediate future. Whatever happened to all the longing and anticipatory tenses in our language? Saussure had it right, the mutability and immutability of the sign is such a paradox. But enough philosophy, let's get back to education.

2011-03-18T20:14:00.001-07:00

New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation. I am sitting at the moment in a small room in seventy degree spring weather, halfway down an air shaft, in Queens. My cat rests near the open windows and some air moves in an out of my room, but the building is quiet and still for the night. Yet I am curiously affected by the emanations from my daily surroundings. Today I walked twenty-two blocks from where Woody Allen filmed "Hannah and her Sisters." After work I took a Ballet class with a dancer who studied under Balanchine himself, and found out that one of my classmates writes for the New Yorker. Today I was thirty-six blocks away from the Empire State Building, and only two feet away from one of my favorite philosophers, Linda Alcoff, who was presenting a paper at the Society for Women in Philosophy. Just a couple of hours ago I had a beer somewhere with thinning lights in the Bowery area where bars are mirrored and chromed and the lingering traces of poetry and lamps are made out of whiskey bottles. Here people write their first novels made out of fresh memories. Circumstances of this sort become a part of one's daily routine in this city and put one at risk of feeling very small. And despite how many times I have complained about its never ending pace, there are nights like this, when I cannot imagine myself living anywhere else. Patti Smith used to write poetry for New York, and E. B White writes how "The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck." It all comes down to being able to handle privacy and participation in equal amounts. Too much participation can drive one insane in NYC, but too much privacy puts one at risk of missing out on luck, on the poetry made out of fresh memories and the grandiose ideas developed while riding crowded subways at midnight. Nobody should come to live in New York unless they are willing to be lucky.

2011-03-13T18:08:00.000-07:00

Leaving the gray building with the gold colored doors and walking down Lexington to take the 6 train, crying loudly on the street, after another frustrating day of teaching middle school.

Outside it is raining and a homeless man stops to ask you if you are alright, and hands you a paper napkin from his pocket which you accept to wipe your face with.

Later that same day after graduate school, getting a drink with classmates and finding out that one of them also teaches middle school. Cornering her to talk and asking her to mentor you for the night. She tells you that she went through this on her first year too and recommends you read books with cheesy titles such as “Love and Logic” or “How to become a successful Urban Teacher.” Books you should have read before the first day of class, instead of six months later when it is too late and you are facing the consequences of your acting like their big sister instead of their teacher.

She tells you that, next year, you will set the ground rules from the first day of class and show them who is the boss. She tells you that everybody goes through this, and that books don't always help you with what you have to live. You confess to her how you wish reading Derrida and Hegel would have prepared you better for the turbulence of the real world. But next year you will know what to do. Next year you will use all you learned from these mistakes. Is that not what you tell your students? "You should see this as a learning experience," or "mistakes are good because you get to fix them!" Somehow, maybe it is the almost empty glass of beer, but this situation reminds you of that relationship that could have been saved if you had read your “Love and Logic” books ahead of time and had known, had set the ground rules from the first day before it all turned against you. Somehow it is never about saving the relationship but always about facing the damage. Always and all about the owl of Minerva spreading her wings at dawn, precisely, too late. Maybe reading Hegel did prepare you, not for that, but at least for this.
* * *

2011-03-11T14:35:00.001-08:00

I am repeating myself, but I must. I just finished taking a Ballet class with Sabra Perry at Ballet Academy East and frankly I cannot put any words in here to describe her strength, her giving. I watch her showing us a combination, watch her jump, and can only think of a love she has greater than I could ever contain. To me she is energy itself. Each time she smiles, I can only cry, and I think of something I read about the sadness of beauty: just to find it is not so hard, but to bear it, that is impossible. If Sabra were totally aware of the beauty and energy she was creating, she would stop in awe of herself. She somehow makes life so much more than it is and then – well, I am absolutely at a loss.

Philosophy/ Food

2011-03-07T14:05:00.000-08:00

Back in North Carolina, my roommate and best friend Elizabeth used to love reading books about Zodiac Signs. I never took those horoscopes very seriously, not because of skepticism, but rather because of a biographical fact that conditioned me to disbelieve in the Zodiac. My mother used to be a journalist back in Argentina, and one of her first jobs was to make up the fictional predictions in the horoscope section of the newspaper. After learning what happened behind the scenes of horoscope writing, I was unable to take the zodiac predictions seriously.
But Liz did owe a funny book about signs which she read to me one evening. The title of the chapter was “How to deal with a Taurus Roommate.” I was her Taurus roommate. One of the things she read to me was that: “The Taurus roommate likes to keep to herself, and usually stays in her room unless bribed with food.” This detail did seem to match my personality because, as far as I can remember, I have usually kept to myself when I live with other people, but I do come out of my room when I know that people are making food, or sharing food, or having a pot luck in my house, etc.

This is all to say that I joined the Society for Women in Philosophy here in NYC. We meet once a month at NYU to discuss papers and hold each other accountable for our writing goals. But if you really want to know the real reason why I joined, and the reason that motivates me to leave my house on Thursday evenings, is the food. Yes, we can sign up to bring food and drinks, and before presenting papers there is a pot luck with lots of really good food. I am making a couscous salad for the next get together, and I’m already excited about trying different plates of food…It must be a Taurus thing.

Would you sign up for this class if you were in eight grade?

2011-01-27T20:23:00.000-08:00

Spanish Cartooning and Comic Books (Spring Semester)
Ms. Drake

(Eighth Graders only)

Comics have sometimes been controversial and they are a wonderful medium to use in the study of race, class, gender, nationalism, popular culture, consumerism and national Identity. This class will look at the development of comic strips during the different dictatorships in Latin America. While newspaper comics were censored to some extent, comic books were not. Many were extremely violent and caused a move towards censorship after WWII, others had subtle political denounces that will be interpreted in class. A new comic character, the superhero appeared at this time. The amazing characters that followed him were extremely popular and had a different audience than prior comics. These heroes were created by and for people that needed them. In this class we will explore the comic medium as pop culture as well as the world that they were born out of. We will look at cartoonists from Argentina such as Quino and his idealist and pessimistic characters, and the famous series "El Eternauta" by German Oesterheld. This class will have a foundation in the spanish language. We will focus on comic strips written during dictatorship years in different Latin American countries, between 1960 and 1983. Ideas behind this will be largely student driven and can range from conversational spanish critiques to creating spanish subtitles for cartoons, and your own comic strip.

The Making of a Philosopher

2011-01-24T18:23:00.001-08:00

I have a seventh grader who is a bad student, but incredibly smart and witty. He is secretly one of my favorites, and I think he is a potential philosopher. I don't think his parents support his philosophical interests though. Last time I talked to them at the parent-teacher conference his Dad's response to my comment was: "Yeah, Norman thinks he is a deep thinker... in his head." and then recommended I make sure he is not reading his science magazines under the desk during my class like he does in all the rest of his classes.

We recently had a seventh grade test, and he failed it. Apparently, he misunderstood the assignment. So I wrote an e-mail to his mother about this:
"Subject: Spanish

Norman did not do as well as he could have done on his Spanish Test. I think he did not understand the assignment in a major portion of the test, and this did not benefit his score. I really want Norman to get a good grade. If it is alright with you, I could give him a take-home version of this exam so that he can re-do it. I also want to ask him to do a vocabulary presentation to the class, if he is interested, for some extra credit."

And I got this reply from his mother, who also misunderstands Norman's philosophical mind...

"Hello Ms. Drake,
I had a feeling Norman didn't do so well when he came home saying the test was easy and that the answers to the questions were in the questions themselves. I figured he didn't understand the directions.Please let me know how we can help him understand the work better.
Thank you."

I know it's too early to tell, but I think Norman is exhibiting early Heideggerian thinking. I think he deserves an A.

It's just High School

2011-01-17T18:53:00.000-08:00

With final exams next week and report cards almost due, my high school students are beginning to act very stressed out about their grades. I try to do my best to act like an understanding teacher, but most of this involves a lot of pretending. Deep down, I still don’t see why high school matters so much. Maybe this is because I never attended an expensive private high school that prepares students to (hypothetically) get into Harvard, and my memories of public education don’t really include passionate teachers who were trying to make a difference in my life or parents pressuring me to get into a good college. And even if I did have a bunch of those passionate teachers, I probably wouldn’t have noticed them anyways. It was high school and I was a normal teenager occupied with extra curricular teenager thoughts.

Even when I witness daily how my male students insult each other sarcastically in the hallways during lunch, and how the female students have a best friend one day, and a different best friend another day, or how somebody is made fun of because of their outfit, or their body type, I am now old enough to know that all of this is not a big deal. Its high school, and sometimes I just want to tell these kids that nobody is going to remember if you were the popular student, or the nerdy guy with acne, or the slutty Goth girl, or the girl speaking broken english. Nobody is going to care if you sat by yourself during lunch or if you always had a crowd of people following you and dressing like you because you were so unique. It really doesn’t matter if you made out with three guys in the same night and accidentally took your shirt off at a party because you were too drunk to leave it on, or if you wear the wrong brand of shoes, or if you are gay and have a secret crush on your best buddy, or if your crush makes out with your best friend, or if you think you are a lesbian, or if your parents catch you smoking weed in your room and ground you for a week. It doesn’t matter because its high school and you are just a teenager, and one day you will gain perspective of how dumb and awkward this whole experience was overall. And one day you will also realize how it didn’t even matter.

But all I can tell my students when they complain to me about their peers, or about grades is this: “It’s just high school.” And I think some of them interpret this as: “It’s not as bad as you think.” And although my message does glide along that line, what I am really trying to tell them is: “You don’t know how lucky you are. If you make a mistake now, it’s early enough in life that you can probably fix it. Trust me with this one.”
But this, I keep to myself.

I think that every teacher copes differently with having to interact with teenagers. For example, last year the English teacher at my school published a fiction novel about, well, an English teacher working at a prep school in the Upper East side ( for a review of his novel, check: http://tlcbooktours.com/2010/07/joshua-gaylord-author-of-hummingbirds-on-tour-october-2010/). One of the central themes in the novel is his description of the highs and lows of teenage life. And one has to wonder how many years of being around teenagers did it take him to want to write about them poetically and with symbolic references, because so far, all I can say about them is that they take themselves way too seriously for their own good. Regardless how cruel and confusing these years might seem like, it really is just high school and ten years from now nobody is going to remember what they did or did not do in their junior year, or any of their passionate teachers who tried making a difference in their lives and failed, or the novels they were assigned to read and used Cliff Notes instead. And none of them will remember me either, and most of them will probably forget all the Spanish they learned. And this is why high school should never be taken too seriously: We forget too quickly why it all mattered so much.

( We forget, that is, and then life invites us to teach high school, to revisit those cruel awkward years through different eyes. And it all comes back.)

The Blizzard Monologue

2010-12-26T20:36:00.000-08:00

I’ve been too busy trying not to lose my job as a high school teacher this semester to rate my philosophy graduate program in good or bad terms. But I did meet some of the funniest, most interesting people in there. You see, most of my effort this fall involved fighting to stay awake during the evenings, which was also the time when lectures took place. While my friend Bart helped by photocopying his Hegel outlines for me whenever I did space out, my friend Olas kept me awake during class with his loud munching noises from his peanut snacks and during the subway ride back to Queens, joining me in engaged debates over the innate qualities in a red square. Olas is the only person I know from the program who is from Colorado and, for only this reason, enjoys camping out and being around “nature” (whatever that is). He tends to blame his lack of people skills on his job, given that he takes care of mentally challenged adults for a living. A lot of the people I met in graduate school tend to blame their lack of people skills on their jobs, or on the fact that they spend too much time reading Philosophy. But I don’t know what comes first and I am no one to make comments about that, at this stage.

*

“At this stage” seems to be a predominant theme in my life lately: “I cannot afford to make any more bad decisions at this stage.” “I think that, at this stage, I should know better than to go ahead with this plan, or than to go out with this person etc.” “At this stage I should just be happy to have my sanity.” Saying things and later adding at this stage makes me feel wise, but it also reminds me of how old I am getting.

*
Back to Olas, although discussing our papers and our jobs led to a friendship, what really made us bond was the fact that we both have a dad who is currently unemployed. It is the last fact that makes us similarly edgy and watchful people, always looking for the funny side in everything and always willing to share stories, as a form of self prescribed therapy lasting as long as our rides in the seven train do. At times I have wondered why most of my best friendships have started out with a common denominator personal misery, but that’s just how it seems to work for me. Such is the case that when I realized my friend Jasmine also has a currently unemployed dad; I began to feel a sense of community that allowed me to realize that unemployed Dads are not that different from one another. Now then, I have some good news for you sons and daughters of unemployed dads. After the initial period of re-adjustment, and once dads accept that they will be home alone for long periods during the day, they also come up with a daily routine that is as predictable as it is humorous.

*

Lately, when I think of comedy, the people who make me laugh my head off are the Marx Brothers. I don’t find Woody Allen funny anymore, although I did follow him down Lexington Avenue last month, when chance made us cross paths one morning. I was already late to work and he was wearing a green hat, those huge glasses, and was carrying a coffee mug. He noticed I recognized him as he walked past me, and accelerated his walk to avoid me. But this is not the reason why Woody Allen stopped being funny to me. Something happened and suddenly his repetitive philosophical insights about death and suicide, his portrayal of failed relationships all felt too unrealistic compared to my own experiences. And at this stage there is nothing worse to me than superficial comedy. But the Marx Brothers still do make me laugh because there is something tragic about them. These men are too sweet to survive in this world, and are in danger all the time because of this, and they could be so easily disappointed.

*

Speaking of disappointments, my sister asked me today, why was it that I did not read as many (or any) Philosophy books anymore. During the holiday break she has witnessed my new hobbies which center on watching low budget action movies and Hollywood romantic comedies through Netflix in my computer. And she’s starting to get worried whenever she suggests polish films, or argentine philosophers, and I answer with things such as: “I don’t want to be exposed to anything that will make me think or feel any sort of empathy for anyone or anything anymore. I can’t handle that now.”

Another example, I woke up this morning as the snow blizzard covered NYC, and instead of staying home reading, I decided I wanted to go into Manhattan to take a Ballet class. To my credit, I am rehearsing, and I am also preparing to audition as a bear for the Radio City performances. So I convinced my sister to join me and we walked into the blizzard and headed to Ballet. After class she suggested I just change my MA to Dance, and added:

“If you devoted all the hours you spend taking Ballet classes and watching bad Hollywood movies to reading and writing Philosophy, you would probably be Foucault by now.”

But that’s not how things really work, is it? And I did not explain to her that sometimes, what we spend so much time avoiding, is what actually really matters to us.

*

Before I end this monologue, I would like to tell you that these are the major characteristics of unemployed dads, and that if you are a friend, relative, or child of an unemployed dad, you should know that you are not alone. There are many of us who are adjusting to Dad’s new lifestyle in the recession, and many of us, including our dads, who have learned how to see the humorous side of these circumstances.

1) Unemployed Dads make friends with the Customer Service people: Now that there is less income coming in, unemployed dads make sure they call every customer service number in the afternoon to complain about any extra charges in their cell phone, gas, water, or cable bills. They do not mind being put on hold: they can wait. Secretly, unemployed dads are looking for new opportunities to be social. They give themselves away by asking the customer service guy what he thinks about the weather, for example.

2) Unemployed Dads have projects: It can begin with the idea for a t-shirt company, or an online investment project. Sometimes it involves creative projects such as writing a novel. It recently occurred to me that, maybe our dads should start a band together.

3) Unemployed Dads spend a substantial portion of their day training the house pet: I got a kitten this summer and due to my job and graduate school schedule I was not in the house during the day. The cat spent most of its formative months with my Dad, who feeds him, chases him around the house, and talks to him. Jasmine’s Dad also talks to the cat, and to the houseplants. Olas once got back home to find his Dad “training the house pet” which meant that his father was rolling around the rug with the dog.

4) Unemployed Dads are constantly trying to “re-invent” themselves, and they constantly use this word: Olas’ Dad got really serious about his T-Shirt Company for a while. My Dad figured he might have a chance working at a law firm, so he stopped by the local college in Queens to find out if he could transfer some credits from UCLA (which he attended in the seventies) to get his degree in constitutional law. Yes, you heard it, constitutional law: the degree that usually takes students ten years to complete. Now that’s a feasible career. Jasmine’s dad was a scientist, but is now thinking about photography as a new career path.

5) Unemployed Dad’s discover that there is no line at Costco or Target at 11:30 am: And they don’t mind waiting in line. It secretly gives them another opportunity to be social, and ask the cashier what she thinks about the weather today.

6) Unemployed Dads check out four hundred page medieval history novels they find at the public library and wonder why nobody else has bothered to discover such great literature: My Dad also checks out four hour Polish films with lots of religious symbolism and titles such as “The Deluge.” He later wonders why nobody else in the house but him has discovered such great cinema.

Before I get out of here, I am including some online sources for those of you who have an unemployed Dad:

Aaron Crowe’s “Tales of an Unemployed Dad” Blog: http://www.aaroncrowe.net/category/unemp/

NY Times articles on unemployed Dads.

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/unemployed-dads-at-home/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/fashion/23dads.html

Unemployed Dad comic:

http://en.wordpress.com/tag/unemployed-dad/

Hi Ho.

2010-12-08T18:05:00.000-08:00

I know this is cheesy, but on days like these when I have to stay up writing papers for grad school, when I have to wake up extra early to empty New York City streets, to get to work on time so that I finish grading papers, and doing my lesson plans, little things like these really keep me going.

One of my seventh graders has been acting pretty suicidal lately and was really behind on his schoolwork, so last week I met up with him at the library a couple of times to help him with his Spanish work. Today in class I noticed he was doing way better (emotionally and intellectually) and wrote him an e-mail to which I got a reply that made me smile.

"Good work in class today Scott! Keep up the good work.
Srta. Drake"

"thanks. i will. thank u for everything. You are the best spanish teacher ever!!!
Scott"

So, yes, I am human and I also like it when, every once in a while, other people think I am good at what I do. Oh the days...
* * *

Something I am writing for my Phenomenology Class

2010-12-07T19:49:00.000-08:00

While in "Eye and Mind" the central claim is that vision is more than thought, in "Phenomenology of Perception" Merleau-Ponty argues that the body is more than the sensible.

The case of the missing limb provides us with a good example to reconnect, or revisit the affective dimension of the self through the notion of embodied memory. The case goes like this: A soldier is injured in battle and his arm is torn and shattered by splinters. His arm is amputated but he still feels it as if it were a part of his body. Merleau-Ponty writes that “a man wounded in battle can still feel in his phantom arm the shell splinters that lacerated his real one.” (p. 88) He feels the arm resting on top of his chest when he lies in bed; he sees doorknobs and feels how his now absent arm leans forward to open the door. And the world as he knows it still responds to his body as if his arm were still there. Eventually, when the world is reconstituted so that it corresponds to his new way of occupying space, the phantom limb disappears. The phantom limb case is just another example of how the self continuously escapes through the cracks of the strict categories of presence and absence of the objective world.
The case cannot strictly be explained by alluding to psychology, and yet a physiological explanation would also be insufficient. Later, in "Eye and Mind" Merleau-Ponty refers to our own image in the mirror and explains how a strict Cartesian model of thought, would only conceive of this image as “a dummy,” an effect of the mechanic of things, or a specter that is not precisely coming from inside our minds but from an outside. The phantom limb that is still felt in the body long after the arm is gone would also be, under this traditional model of thought, unexplainable- a ghost.

“How crystal clear everything would be in our philosophy if only we could exorcise these specters, make illusions, or object-less perceptions out of them, and keep them on the edge of the world that does not equivocate!” (Eye and Min p. 169)

But of course we can’t, because in some way, these specters have affected us, still affect us. Here I think, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can allow us to move away from the largely cognitive dimension of experience through which we think of art and move towards an affective experience of art. Merleau-Ponty remarks that we cannot explain this case, these ghosts, if not by alluding to a state of memory and emotion that call up this phantom limb.

“if we put back emotion into being-in-the-world, we can understand how it can be the origin of the phantom limb. To feel emotion is to be involved in a situation which one is not managing to face, and from which, nerveless, one does not want to escape.” (p. 99)

This medical case about loss might also allow us to understand the process of grief and its relationship to the embodied self. For example, we do not understand the absence or the death of a friend until the times comes when we expect a reply from him and when we realize that we shall never again receive one. In this case, pretending that the friend is still around and denying the loss, or feeling his presence long after the loss, are both modes of representing the world that go beyond the presence/absence categories. Merleau-Ponty explains how in such a case, at first we avoid asking in order not to notice this silence, we turn away from areas in life were we might meet this nothingness, “but this very fact highlights, necessitates that we intuit them.” (p. 93). So the subject, caught up in the dilemma of having lost a part of himself “breaks in pieces the objective world which stands in his way and seeks symbolical satisfaction in magic acts.” (p. 99)

After the sudden death of her husband, Joan Didion wrote a famous memoir titled "The Year of Magical Thinking" were she presents us with an account of her grief. I think this short passage provides us with an example of how grief is an affective process that breaks apart the categories of presence and absence. But also, how writing as an expressive form is always more than thought because one writes about perception.

“Of course I knew John was dead. Of course I had already delivered the definitive news (…) yet I was myself in no way to prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone (…) I needed to be alone so that he could come back. This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.” (p. 33).

These “magic acts” that Merleau-Ponty alludes to in the case of the phantom limb become rituals of habit when a part of our world is gone, and thus, a part of ourselves appears to be caught in between the categories of presence and absence until we manage to restructure our world. When the patient who lost his limb restructures his/her world in such a manner that the things in the world do not beckon to the lost limb, then the experience of it vanishes. But until then, the consciousness of the phantom limb remains itself unclear. The man with one arm feels the missing limb, same way as I feel keenly the existence of a friend who is, nevertheless, not before my eyes. The patient has not lost his arm because he continues to allow for it. So the phantom limb is, not a representation of the limb, but rather the ambivalent presence of the limb. Merleau-Ponty concludes from this case that “the psycho-physical event can no longer be conceived after the model of Cartesian physiology” that considers though and extension as separate modes because “the union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought together by arbitrary decree.” (p. 102). Instead, what the phantom limb case shows us is that the body is more than the mere sensible, more than a mode of extension and cannot be reduced to it. Merleau-Ponty concludes by stating that “the awareness of the amputated arm as present is not of the kind “I think…” Only once the memory stops affecting my daily experience can I restructure my world.

Without attempting to solve the ambiguity, the affective dimension of experience that still haunts the patient with the splinters in his long gone arm, can allow us to re-think how we categorize presence and absence. It may also allow us to think about the body in broader terms that connect to art, but also to an ethics of the other. So far as memory and emotion can call up the phantom limb, this is not comparable to the action of a thought necessitating another thought. But rather an existential attitude motivates another and “memory, emotion, and phantom limb are equivalents in the context of being in the world.” (p. 99).

2010-11-06T22:31:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite Ballet instructors here in NYC always tells us, students, that “you never know when will be the day you turn three pirouettes in class!” This is because Ballet is focused on controlling the body so that it fights gravity, so that it looks like it is floating: the arms never out of place, the neck always appearing long, the hours of work put into the body. But then, there are moments in class were we do center work, and we get to turn. Turns happen so fast that we are not always in control of the movement. This is bad at times, because we may crash-land from a turn, but it also means that pirouettes in Ballet open the way for luck. One might get to class one day, sore from rehearsals and in a bad mood because work is a nightmare. But then you stretch, work a good bar, and when it is time to turn, unexpectedly nail three pirouettes. There is always that one day were we dancers can get lucky with our turns, and you never know when that day might come.

I don’t know why, but I am still looking for my three pirouettes with my graduate studies in Philosophy. I am repeating to myself, “Keep writing, keep going to class, keep reading, keep looking for ideas, don’t give up Carolina.” Because just like with my pirouettes, I never know when will be the day I will get a grandiose idea. Sadly, it’s been a long time since my last good thesis, or my last presentable paper was written and my patience, my perseverance, is starting to disappear. I cannot blame this on anybody or on anything anymore, and sometimes I wonder if I just chose this discipline to prove something to somebody else. Maybe I am writing this because I have spent way too many hours drafting a paper I am not happy with, and because I have been drafting unimportant, uninteresting papers for the past year. And because all this time I spent drafting an unimportant paper, my mind kept drifting towards the contingent: Trivialities about my job as a teacher, about report cards I have to finish, about my unemployed dad, about money, about not being funded, about how things would feel like if I were funded, about how the last thing I would want to do right now is to be in a funded PhD program anyways, about the math teacher, about being cold, about my friends, about the Brooklyn Bridge in winter, about longing.

Who knows, maybe I am having philosophers-block. I don’t know yet, I am still waiting for my three pirouettes to happen in the realm of my ideas. I am not a quitter. So I keep reading, keep looking, keep asking myself if this is even worth it after all, because one never knows when that day will come, the day of luck, the day of the three pirouettes.

The Smoke

2010-10-27T16:13:00.000-07:00

"I hopped on the 6 train this afternoon after work, in a rush to attend my graduate school class on time. The subway was crowded, as it always is in Lexington, but I found a seat and decided to grade a pile of papers from my ninth grade class, until my stop at 28th street.
I could not find a pen anywhere, so I used a pink marker that I usually write with on the white board, and I began marking papers with check minuses, or check pluses depending on the student.

I think I am very expressive sometimes, or I might have laughed out loud at one moment, because one of my ninth graders titled his pop quiz “ANOTHER QUIZ” in one of his usual sarcastic attempts to complain about the fact that I quiz them every day. The lady sitting in front of me kept staring at me, but in a good way, as if maybe I reminded her of someone she knew, or of the girl she used to be a few decades ago.

And suddenly I heard a voice in the subway, coming from near by, and the voice said “God Bless you!” But I kept to myself, because that is what we all do when we travel in a crowded NYC subway: we just keep to ourselves. But then I heard it again. It came from a black lady who was about to get off at 33 street. “You are a teacher aren’t you? God bless you.” And then, the lady who was sitting in front of me joined in, and mentioned something such as “Yeah! I could tell you are a teacher!” and a couple of other people suddenly stared at me, but in a good way, and the older ladies were smiling.

There I was, holding my pink marker, after another long day of work, crammed inside another crowded NYC subway, getting blessed by a lady, getting the smiles of other ladies as if what I did made some sense to all these people who traveled in the train with me, as if it made sense to everybody else but to me.

There it was, another foggy humid day, no different from all the rest in this city, and yet this incident felt strange and wonderful to me, like when in the middle of the darkest night one finds a lamp shining in a window."

Farewell Michael Eldridge, a Sad Song.

2010-09-19T20:42:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 2006 I was taking my first class at UNCC after a long time away from school. A hot wind blew through the city that summer, blew until it seemed that before August broke, all the sand in Wilmington would be in Charlotte, would have drifted over the rooftops and stopped only when it hit the uptown area where no wind ever blew. There was nothing much to do that summer except for my job at the Deli, so I attended, four mornings a week, a philosophy class titled "Ethics" at the college campus.

It was taught by a man who frowned a lot and had a sense of humor called Michael Eldridge, who fell asleep during his student's presentations and dragged his feet when he walked. That summer of 2006, while the hot wind blew outside and the rest of my life was a constant unstable mess, I sat on a heavy chair inside a freezing, air conditioned classroom, and listened to Michael Eldridge's readings of western philosophy. I heard him tell a student that his task as a philosopher was to "reconstruct philosophy." Heard his grumpy voice for months until it became a footnote to all my readings. Heard him tell us students about the philosophy of John Dewey, which at the time sounded like a very refreshing line of thought. Heard him tell me about his days at Yale Divinity school, about the Vietnam Warm, and about American Pragmatism. Heard him ask me, again and again, as I presented my different topics to him "Yes, but why does this matter?"

Heard him announce how the traditional substance/accident distinction, along with the sharp division between doing and knowing, and between body and mind, were all humbug.
Heard him repeating again and again that these distinctions were the big problem of philosophy. And then at some point he convinced me, and my ideas after him were not the same.

And I tell you this neither in a spirit of self-revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to show you that, when Michael Eldridge taught me philosophy that summer, he determined somehow, the shape and end of certain of my ideas in this discipline. It all seems so far away, and most of his teachings have become almost intuitive now that I am doing graduate work. But something I can say is that, since that summer of 2006, I have been thinking and re-thinking philosophy somehow differently than the way I would have originally thought of it. Had Michael Eldridge not stood there in that freezing, air conditioned classroom to argue against most of my naive conceptions about western thought, I don't think I would be doing (or trying to do) useful philosophy right now.

I only tell you this because tonight I received a phone call from my friend Hannah, telling me that this man who passed through the footnotes of my mind, who taught me so much that summer, who had a good sense of humor, unexpectedly died last week. And even as I write here, I can still hear his grumpy voice from the back pages of my mind. See him walk through the hallways of the Philosophy department at UNCC, dragging his feet, smiling that familiar smile and waving at me from a distance. And I have the sense that his voice, his face, is still more familiar than those of my current professors here in New York. If I may confess something to you, it is that I regret one thing: I did not keep in touch ever since I left Charlotte. And I never got the chance to tell him how all of it, all of his lessons really mattered to me.

So farewell dearest Michel Eldridge, the grumpy philosopher, the hopeful skeptic. You made a difference in my life. I wish you the best in pragmatist heaven, in the heaven that works for you, in the heaven that matters after all, or not. And even as I write here, I still see you walking through the hallways of that small philosophy department at UNCC, smiling and frowning all at the same time, waving at me and saying "Hello" with that familiar voice. I will miss you Michael Eldridge. Farewell.

The Days

2010-08-17T23:56:00.003-07:00

Gypsy girl from Turkey wakes up every morning and feels that today is like all the rest. She wears a red robe around the apartment, it looks like silk but was bought in Wall Mart for five dollars. She smokes in the balcony and underlines her favorite parts of “The Stranger.” The summer sun makes her red robe look shiny like those worn by movie stars. Gypsy girl from Turkey left her town and her father because she wanted to be a movie star in New York City. She now wears short black dresses with ruffles; she walks in platform shoes and has two shiny diamond piercings in her wrists. She takes Ballet lessons, voice lessons, acting lessons.

We walk together to the subway stop in the evenings, after our Ballet class. Sometimes a summer breeze from the Hudson blows in between her legs and she opens them, they are long and they must have resisted many men who attempted to…because in her home town, life was worth nothing. I heard that her father would drink and lock her inside a bathroom. I also heard that her father would drink and fall asleep with his cigarette lighted, and that he would start fires in the house. I listen to her stories and feel empathy, but this city has left me no strength to feel pity or compassion for anyone anymore.

Gypsy girl from Turkey left her town to be an actress in New York City and enjoys talking to me because I am from Argentina. This means that we both speak broken English. This evening before class she fixed my hair in a tight bun, and offered me some hand lotion. We now walk down seventy eight street and men turn around to stare at her long legs. We get inside the six train and sit together. I don’t talk much and mostly listen. She tells me about her latest purchase of underwear that says OPEN DAY AND NIGHT. She makes a joke about this and later asks me if I go to the tanning bed and if I like sex on top. Her anecdote reminds me of a confession by another friend of mine who recently told me, also while riding the subway, that she doesn’t know what to do to get her husband to pay attention to her. She has tried green underwear, red shimmery underwear, leopard printed underwear! I don’t understand underwear. But overall I don’t see why friends would ask a single person what underwear to buy or if she enjoys having sex on top. And I don’t understand why people always begin these conversations with me while riding public transportation.

The subway stops at Union Square and is delayed for thirty minutes. Passengers begin acting less and less patient. A man decides to express his anger by cursing loudly in my train but most people ignore him. A drunken lady is walking through the wagons singing out loud, her pants wet from her own urine, but most people ignore her. A homeless man is asking for some spare change, but most people ignore him.

Thirty minutes go by and passengers in the crowded subway get even more impatient, but gypsy girl from Turkey appears to ignore the crowd and enjoy my company. She opens her leather bag and puts on more hand lotion. She offers me more hand lotion. I see a big stack of twenty dollar bills rolled inside her bag and wonder how is it that she makes a living in New York City. I find out that she studies philosophy at Hunter College, and that her favorite subject is Ethics. I ask her how is it that she can afford to live in Manhattan, and she tells me that she has “Sugar Daddies” who help pay for her Ballet lessons, and for her acting classes.

I tell her that she is such a New York story, and she smiles at me like this is the best compliment anyone ever gave her. She smiles like if she just heard something she was eagerly waiting to hear. So I tell her that I will write about her. She hugs me good bye and I transfer to the seven and head back to Queens with fingers still greasy from her hand lotion.

Back home I find out in the local news that there was another suicide attempt in the Union Square Station tonight, and this is why our subway was delayed for so long. I wonder if this would have made a difference to those who complained. Probably not. I think of the violence in this city. I think of the racism I see everyday inside my subway wagon, not as much between whites and blacks, but rather and so bluntly between Asians and Indians, Dominicans and Mexicans, Indians and Chinese. I think of my latest conversation with another friend of mine who recently got into an accident and is required to wear a brace covering her entire upper body. How she confessed to me her biggest fear: “I fell yesterday on the street, and was afraid somebody would just step over me!” And that famous line in “Heart of Darkness” comes back like a song from the frozen sea. I remember the horror and then I realize that this world can be pretty sad, no matter where you go, no matter what big city or what small town.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever see you again. I wonder if you ever feel any empathy. But I don’t blame you for feeling nothing but hundreds of neurons firing through your brain. I don’t blame you anymore. I blame this world which can sometimes be a sad place, no matter where you go. I think of the frozen sea and write about gypsy girl from Turkey instead.

Professor of Parody?

2010-08-10T00:16:00.001-07:00

My friend Carlon sent me the link to an article (www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf ) where Martha Nussbaum presents a critique against Judith Butler’s position in Gender Trouble. He then asked me for my opinion.

I am not an expert when it comes to feminist philosophy, and I’m too busy hitting on younger men and auditioning at Radio City Music Hall as a bear-dancer to think about feminism. But I am on vacation until next week and have plenty of time to blog. So here is an extremely long response to my friend. It is so long I couldn't send it to him on facebook and had to, instead, post it as a blog entry which is not worth reading unless your name is Carlon and your last name starts with an R.

“Carlon,

The Martha Nussbaum article that you sent me last week is the most famous, and most uncharitable, inaccurate critique of Judith Butler I ever read. I remember that my friend Hannah shared this article with me last winter, when we were both trying to make our way, and stumbling, through Frames of War. After reading this, I wanted to throw it against a wall. Not for what it said ( although I am beginning to anticipate how philosophy might, one day, give me an anger problem) but rather because it represented a lot of what is wrong in academia and especially in the world of Philosophy nowadays. So I wanted to give you my comment, mostly because Nussbaum’s critique of Butler and her misreading go back to a larger problem that affects politics in general. But also because deep down, I think that making one’s way, or stumbling through Butler’s work, is a worthwhile task.

I’m going to skip the part where Nussbaum declares Butler to be a “quietist,” politically “passive” and also the parts where she spends at least two pages laughing at Butler’s concept of “subversion” and later at her writing style. This is normal in the history of Continental Philosophy. Heidegger got laughed at by Carnap for being inaccurate and obscure about “dasein” a few decades ago. Yet very few take Carnap seriously nowadays, but we are all still reading Heidegger. So it goes.

I think the clear misreading appears in part III of Nussbaum’s article. In p. 5, Nussbaum claims that the main problem is Butler’s idea that gender is “a social artifice.” Here, I think that Nussbaum understands Butler as a post-modernist. I really think this is the biggest problem and I will explain this to you if you care to keep reading.
A lot of people understand Butler as a post-modernist although I don’t have enough citations to back this up.
This is not how I read her, and this is not how anybody should read her.

Briefly, post-modernism is a tradition of thought which declared the end of all grand narratives, the end of history, the end of art, the end of politics, the end of substance, the end of unity, the end of the end.. (A philosopher who defends this popular view teaches at my school: Hugh Silverman, but I don’t have citations to back this up either, so you will have to trust me.) Those who accept that it is the end of a lot of things, are now free of the constraining power of metaphysics, of grand-narratives, of the Hegelian struggle for self-realization. The term “anything goes” also represents this line of thought (especially in art). Now, post-modernism which sides with the idea of deconstruction, or the idea of a lack of unity (I am explaining this with no charity whatsoever) also adheres to an anti-essentialist stance. And although Butler holds an anti-essentialist position, she is not necessarily a post-modernist. Nussbaum, on the other hand, assigns to Butler the role of an anti-essentialist philosopher who is also a post-modernist. This leads Nussbaum to declare that Butler’s philosophy cannot get us anywhere politically, which allows her to laugh at Butler even more for being politically “passive” and for having no normative to accompany her thought.

And if Butler’s thought is understood as adhering to post-modernism, then for sure Nussbaum’s critique gains accuracy.

In my view, Nussbaum argues that to reach political action, we need some sort of conceptual, biological, metaphysical, or categorical unity. Without this, there is no representation. This is my reading of Nussbaum, and she is not explicit about this in her article, but she writes on p. 9 that “even where sex difference is concerned, it is too simple to write it off all as culture…” and that “feminists should not be eager to make such a sweeping gesture.” So the fear we find with Nussbaum, the “passivity” she argues against, is linked to relativism and to post-modernist thought where “everything goes” is fatal to politics. Nussbaum finds in Butler’s use of parody, of subversion… the end of real politics. So to gain representation, Nussbaum defends the need for a solid category (that of “women” for example.)

So let me defend this; that Butler is not a post-modernist, yet Butler adopts an anti-essentialist stance because, I think, she already previews the problems generated by essentialism in politics and gender issues. These are problems that Nussbaum completely overlooks. Butler also anticipates that before representation, comes recognition. I cannot tell you how important I think this Hegelian term is.

I know you read Gender Trouble so I’m not going to write about her theory of performativity, or about the entire problems Butler finds within our western “metaphysics of substance.” But a question that rises, or at least, something that I think is important to ask is, can we have anti-essentialism without post-modernism? A lot of Michael Kelly’s work in Aesthetics follows this line of thought. So I’ve had this question drilled into my brain endless times. But this question is important to me because it allows for politics and ethics, to enter the realm of anti-essentialism without having to give up the fight and surrender to post-modernism, allowing us in the end to actually do useful philosophy, or as Arendt claimed, allowing us to “think in dark times.”

I strongly believe Butler’s account of recognition is a key term to argue against the so called “passivity” that Nussbaum attributes to Butler’s thought. It is also a key term to link anti-essentialism to political action, and to develop a contingent ontology of the body. Maybe I am romanticizing philosophy too much; in that I think we can still change the world by reading a couple of old white guys, and a bunch of younger white ladies, but here is my constant love-hate affair with this discipline. I think that philosophy is a two sided coin: that it has the ability to harm, but also to aid us in the search for meaning and better lives.

Butler is not a “passive” philosopher. She sees essentialism as problematic because the more this thought tries to “embrace” persons, or forms of life under one category, the more it covers up or leaves out other persons, other forms of life. So her further goal, at least in Gender Trouble is to get to the root of the problem, to declare gender as a social construction, thus, allowing for more space towards the recognition of other forms of gender, of life, that also deserve to be recognized. So the main problem to Butler is that some persons (prostitutes, transgendered, black women, and middle-eastern women, children in Hamas to give a few examples) are less recognized, or not recognized as persons at all under a “metaphysics of substance” which unifies to the point where it problematically “covers up” the visible forms, the body, and life itself.

Nussbaum does not give us a solution to the problem that Butler is so strongly aware of. She rather turns to essentialism in her article, demanding we seek out for a normative, for another grand-narrative. So we could say that Nussbaum is also and again, a slave doing philosophy in the master’s house. But maybe I’ve been reading too much Hegel.

After finishing Philosophy of Right this week, what can I tell you? The concept of Recognition has come up again as a relevant problem to me. Two hundred years later, in the face of the ever lasting violence and never ending wars. So I am currently revisiting Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage, because here is where I find the master-slave dialectic that applies not only to gender and race issues, but also to the issue of personhood which Butler focuses on in her most recent work, when she asks: “what is a life anyways? And “what are the conditions to secure a life so that we don’t justify its destruction?”

Within Recognition I see the struggle between consciousness and self-consciousness, which is a constant struggle that keeps taking place, at every minute, in every corner of this world. When there is no recognition there is also no representation so representation presupposes recognition, although it should not. This is Nussbaum’s mistake, that she presupposes recognition within representation. But the way I read Hegel and consequently Butler is through this sequence: When there is no recognition there cannot be representation, so there is violence: If you don’t treat me as a human being, you refuse to recognize me as a person, or as a life. If you refuse to acknowledge that I exist as a living being, and rather rationalize my life as a life worth dispensing, then war and violence have a justification within the normative powers and frames at work. This happens on a large scale with war, immigration policies etc. but it also occurs on a smaller scale with domestic-violence for example. So this is how I’m reading Butler, through Hegel. This is how I see her anti-essentialist stance as one which is not post-modern at all, but can lead us to more egalitarian norms of recognition.

So Nussbaum argues against the post-modernist thought that she mistakenly sees in Butler, and Butler rejects essentialism. My point is that Nussbaum’s position assumes a little too much about Butler. It assumes Butler to be a “passive” post-modern thinker because of her anti-essentialism, it assumes post-modernism to be a joke, it assumes that representation is granted to every human being as a natural right, it assumes that relativism is the death of politics. Yet there is another reading to Butler’s thought. We can read her as an active political thinker who disregards both essentialism and post-modernism. And we can ask: who gets recognized within essentialism? Who might have the possibility to be recognized within anti-essentialism? And how can we do philosophy in dark times, in the face of violence, if we remain unable to grant recognition in more egalitarian ways?”

More Bargaining in Good Faith with Destiny

2010-08-07T20:32:00.000-07:00

Here is another attempt to discuss life without mentioning love. I am not sure I will succeed at it, but I might just fool you into thinking that love is not important to me, that love can be poisonous, and that what matters instead is bargaining in good faith with destiny. This attempt will probably be a failure, just like all my attempts of writing an autobiography were a failure. Because all I can put down are fictional accounts of the way life feels like to me, and “how it feels like” never matches the reality of my circumstances, but this is usually for the better.

*

Speaking of fiction and reality, I went to a movie theater in Times Square with Dad last week. We watched a film about a group of experts who professionally entered people’s unconscious minds for a living, and who infiltrated in their dreams. I wasn’t extremely excited about the film. I, also, have the attention spam of a five year old. This plays against me when I have to sit through a two hour screening. But watching this film in 3D helped capture my interest, and Dad really enjoyed the movie. I think the twist to this plot was that, not only could these experts enter people’s dreams, they could also infiltrate inside dreams-within-dreams. This created an infinite regress of dreams within dreams which, I suppose, attempted to raise a deep and extremely original philosophical question which I am sure nobody else ever came up with, at all.
The question was of this sort: What is the difference, or is there a difference, between dreams and reality?

Hollywood is so mind blowing. Always one step ahead of Descartes.

But I found that this film could also raise a political question, which aligns better with the way life feels like to me these days. The question is of this sort: What is better, your dreams or your reality?
Let me explain the nature of this question to you.

When we got back home to Flushing, Queens, after the movie theater, our Filipino neighbor in his late sixties was riding his wheelchair backwards around the block. He appeared to be having fun, and did not even see us when he almost crashed into my Dad.
To this, my Dad politely said hello to our neighbor and kept walking towards our apartment building. But later he mentioned something to me that I would not forget, and it went like this:

“If I had known twenty years ago that I would be walking down the streets of Flushing, Queens, saying hello to my retired Filipino neighbor who rides his wheelchair backwards, I would probably think I was dreaming.”

And what followed...

“This could be just like in the movie! I am in a dream and I will soon wake up back in LA and realize that this is not my reality.”

To this statement, I just laughed and kept walking. Who can blame this man for not giving two cents about the philosophical difference between dreams and reality when what really matters at this point, what really makes a difference to him, is which one of the two is better?

*

Speaking of dreams, there have been times when I’ve fooled myself into thinking that a glass of wine would help me go to sleep faster. The effect has always been the opposite.

On nights of that sort everybody I could possibly want to really talk to, is asleep. So I have this new disease late at night involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk and call long distance to Argentina. The time difference between hemispheres helps me find others who are still awake. But what I love the most about Argentina is that we still have operators. So in my best drunken elegant voice, and using my best Spanish, I ask the operator to connect me with this friend or that one, with that cousin from whom I haven’t heard in years.

I got Mariana on the line this way. She was tall and I was short. I liked to read and she liked to draw. She had a scientific mind and I had a writer’s mind. We were best friends all through middle school. We got our noses pierced at the same time when we were in high school. At the age of eleven, we got locked outside of her house in winter while her parents were out of town. Her sixteen year old brother, who was supposed to be looking after us, came back home the next morning after partying all night, to find us literally sleeping in the dog house: Two eleven year olds and a dog, sleeping inside a doghouse in the backyard. I had forgotten all about this episode, but she remembered it well. So we bonded with that memory, after so many years.

I later asked her how she was doing, and she told me about her life. But then she mentioned something that I would not forget.

“I have this disease late at night involving alcohol and the telephone.”

I pictured Mariana in the southern hemisphere. Still up in her room, still reading while everybody else was asleep.
I felt lonesome no more.

*

Free-Lance Ballerina

2010-08-05T22:09:00.000-07:00

The New York Times published this article today...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/arts/dance/18dancer.html?_r=1

which inspired my idea of becoming a Ballerina for hire.

I don't have time to do it professionally and am already committed to a teaching job and graduate school. But I am in the best shape of my life, have way too much energy for my own sake, can go on pointe, don't have a boyfriend (which gives me extra free time to concentrate on Ballet technique and go to auditions), live in New York City (the place where anything is possible) and need an extra job for the school year to compensate for other bills which need to get paid.
So I came up with the idea of being a free-lance ballerina!

What does a free-lance ballerina do? This is not related to stripping I promise. Free-Lance Ballerina goes to auditions for cheesy dancing roles, usually as an extra, or as a backup dancer with clothes on. If she gets hired, the job offers no benefits and lasts no more than one month, but offers experience in the dance world and a good amount of cash that goes into free-lance ballerina's rent and grocery budget.

For example, Radio City is conducting auditions next week for their annual Christmas Spectacular. And although I wouldn't show my legs in front of a crowd even if I got payed for it, I am willing to dress up as a bear and be part of the "little people performance crew" this Christmas. So I will attend my first audition next week. The role is as a bear dancer at the Radio City Hall Christmas Special this winter.

By the way, August is the best time for free-lance ballerinas because this is when they start recruiting people for all the cheesy Christmas musicals in this city. So if I get rejected as a bear dancer, don't you cry for me my readers, there will be more auditions to write about...

Cheers to this.

Death and Dying Revisited

2010-08-05T22:07:00.000-07:00

And no matter how many higher powers, how many extended family members, how much happiness, frustrations, nothingness-es I collect in this world, I was thinking that my idea of death still adheres to the Epicurean idea of death. That all good and bad consists on sense experience, and death is the privation of sense-experience. Although what is behind this argument is a strict empiricist claim, what follows from it is the idea that longing for immortality is pretty pointless. As this conclusion reveals:
When death is, I am not. When I am, death is not.

That getting along with others while we are alive and still have sensory experience is the most important thing. Helping each other out while we still have perception and it's not too late. Being done with the guilt and shame, making an awesome sensory-experienced heaven in this hell-hole of a place called earth, because so far, it's all we might be able to ever sense-experience, and on good days, that is enough.

The only problem I find in the Epicurean claim is not related to my own death, but rather to the death of those we love, to the loss of our loved ones. Only in grief can we acknowledge that as the other self dies, a part of ourselves is gone forever. So grief mediates between self and other as it points out that we lose ourselves and regain ourselves at the face of death. Most of my current research in Philosophy these days, is related to perception, phenomenology, and sense-experience in relation to loss, grief, and violence. I have also been thinking of ways to relate this to personal identity.

( By the way. I just sat in front of the computer ready to write about dating websites, and I ended up writing about death. I wonder how THAT just happened.)

2010-08-02T22:42:00.000-07:00

Flushing, Queens, is the last stop of the seven train. It is also the most "exotic" neighborhood in New York City. It is the real Chinatown. But this is only according to the white people who live in Brooklyn. Flushing, Queens has ginger tea with honey and bubble drinks, it has Vietnamese food and seaweed snacks of all kinds. It has Chinese karaoke bars open until eleven am of the next day. It has Chinese ice cream trucks. It does not require it's neighbors to speak in English. It is crowded and it never sleeps, but Frank Sinatra would never have sung about Flushing. It is Love going to the Disco. It is home, somehow and magically, Flushing is home.

Teach to Learn/Learn to Teach

2010-08-02T21:14:00.001-07:00

I have been working on my seventh and eight grade lesson plans this week, and besides all the boring Spanish grammar and workbook stuff, I decided to incorporate some experimental philosophy ideas such as:

Total installations: Immersing students in a sensory experience with objects/subjects. Re-arranging the things in the room. Making students match the Spanish word uttered to the object/subject in a language and reference game. Becoming aware of how important embodiment is in the acquisition of knowledge.

Undoing gender in the classroom (this might not work because it is an orthodox Jewish school): We pick a group of Spanish concepts that stand as universal signifiers for each gender and, through five minute performances we give examples of how we can undo gender (a drag show is not allowed though). We look at Latin American artists who present us with examples of undoing gender (such as Fridha Kahlo. And, no, we are not going to look at Lady Gaga.)

Escaping monologues and leaning towards dialogue, a Hegelian Experience: An example of communicative rationality, in Spanish. One student writes a simple monologue in Spanish and hands it over. The other student includes herself in the monologue of the other by re-writing it using sentences in the first and third person. The result is the Hegelian uniting of consciousness with self-consciousness between two students. They read it out loud to the class. We first study the spanish words, then become aware of the self/other dialectic. The goal is to understand how much we gain when we escape self-consciousness: when the other is included in our initial monologue and there is space for dialogue.

Creating your own Mexican Soap Opera movie script.(It cannot be based on your life though, or the lives of your family members.)

Forgetting to sit

Reading the Spanish textbook while walking (this might not work in winter).

Learning Spanish colors and shapes at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

Wearing costumes to teach a certain historical period.

Learning while making (Mexican wrestling masks, ten minute short films in Spanish, short movie scripts in Spanish).

Another Love Song...

2010-07-31T23:47:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 2010 I was back in New York City, after a year in Charlotte, North Carolina which, as painful as it felt at the time had led to lots of self-discovery. I am talking about the self-discovery of the cheesy type, the happy-ending in the movie screen that makes us cry of happiness, yet is shameful to mention out loud to those who were born simply knowing how to manage. A hot wind blew through the city that summer, blew until it seemed that before August broke, all the sand of Coney Island would be in New York, would have drifted over the Manhattan sky-scrapers and the rooftops in Brooklyn, and stopped only when it hit the terraces in Queens. There was not much to do during the day, a summer like that: there was the day when I signed the papers that would commit me to a teaching job in a Manhattan private high school, and the evening I returned the forms that committed me to a graduate program in Philosophy for at least two years. There was the local YMCA with an indoor swimming pool that I used every morning; which had a small waiting room where artificial blue rain fell behind the glass. The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my friend C and I, to the movies.

The MOMA was free after six pm every Friday. So we went three and four evenings a month, sat on the dusty red chairs in the darkened theatre, and it was there, that summer of 2010 while the hot wind blew outside, and so late in life, that I first saw John Wayne in a “Western Movies” screening. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, “at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow”. The only other Western I ever saw before this, was one with Asian cowboys riding somewhere in a snowy land, maybe in Nebraska. But there was no John Wayne in that film, and I was still in Charlotte at the time, I was still watching how the rain fell and complaining about humidity.

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and I now wonder if having watched Westerns as a child would have possibly made me this woman. And although the men I have known have had virtues, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. “Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.”

I write this tonight not out of self-revelation or fictional nostalgia, but rather because I went out again to the MOMA yesterday evening and I heard John Wayne saying “hello there!” from his horse as he later rode into the horizon of the golden screen. And I knew then that I was attracted to his character because there was no cheesy-self discovery in any of his films. He was a man, and he simply knew how to manage. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” simple as that. And deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain still falls, there is that line which stayed with me even after John Wayne rode away into the horizon of the golden screen: “ A man’s gotta do…”

2010-07-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

I am sitting at a bar in Brooklyn with my friend B. We are playing “War” with a deck of cards and placing our bets on the girl sitting by herself next to us. I say that five men will approach her tonight; he insists that three men will approach her at the most.

In less than one hour I win at “War,” he wins the bet.

We finish our beers and run out of games, but don’t want to head back home yet.

"Tell me things I won't mind forgetting," he suggests. "Make it useless stuff or skip it."

I begin. I tell him that whenever I drink Canada Dry Ginger Ale I like to pretend I am in Canada.

I tell him that catching fireflies and trapping them in a jar is a fictional childhood memory that I made up after hearing other people talk about their childhood memories, always involving the act of catching fireflies, because I did not want to feel left out.

I tell him that I secretly thought “Inception” was a stupid movie and that to start with, not everybody believes in the unconscious.

I tell him that I've been trying to look more tanned lately. Mostly because the diversity committee at my job is sending people to Spain this year, and I really want to go to Spain, but I have to look like a woman of color to attend the conference.

I tell him that last Saturday I met an anthropology graduate student who is trying to buy a funeral home to start her own business, and that this idea was inspired by her job working at the mortuary.

I tell him that my niece has recently discovered death, and that he sneaks into his mother’s room every night at three am. That he has a small glow in the dark watch attached to his small wrist. That every night, he gets close to his mother’s bed to make sure she is still breathing and then goes back to his room. I tell him that watching over the living must be a tough job for such a young child.

I tell him that all of this is useless stuff that he will forget by tomorrow. So I win the game. By now my friend looks confused, but he buys me another beer.

What he doesn’t know is that I always win this game. I am an expert at ignoring the big picture, the abstract concepts. But I never skip on the useless details, on those contingent things that only seem to matter to me, the closest things.

Maybe this is why I am so bad at philosophy, and so good at telling people things, useless things. This is why I am still a stranger to the world of concepts.

2010-07-20T21:03:00.001-07:00

Learning to love all over again and from the beginning is like going to Coney Island at night to ride the Cyclops roller coaster. It is changing your mind at the last minute and letting your friends get on it without you. It is watching their smiling faces disappear into the night the higher up they travel as you stay safely on the ground waving at them. It is realizing that you are not ready for it. It is buying a tacky post card at a hot dog stand instead. The postcard says "I rode the Cyclops at Coney Island." It is keeping that postcard with you just in case you ever have to tell somebody that in fact, there was a time when you did ride the Cyclops and that you have evidence. That you would rather stand and wave tonight, but that there was that time.

Learning to love again is like making a list with your best friend. The list includes old lovers who used sentences such as "your eyes are like pools of water" in their letters to you. It is realizing that this is the common denominator in most bad relationships: That they never even cared to look at your eyes long enough to figure out that in fact, the color of your eyes is not the color of a pool with water. Realizing that it must have been dark, or that something must have gone completely wrong, and that this is also a common denominator of failed relationships. that it must have been too dark. that something must have gone wrong.

2010-07-19T09:49:00.001-07:00

It's Friday evening and I am sitting inside a small movie theater at the MOMA with my good old friend Hannah who is up here for a visit, and my new friend Carlie who suggested we attend this event. We just finished watching a Brazilian film, and are waiting for the Q and A session with the director to begin. The members of the audience look like New Yorkers, but most importantly, they act like New Yorkers.

So here is an entry were I write about other people.

1) This is what is funny about New Yorkers; while most of us are used to sitting through dumb questions at Q and A’s, their tolerance level is extremely low. One would assume it would be high, given that whoever has ridden a crowded subway in summer with somebody’s armpit stuck to their face must know about tolerance. But this does not apply to cultural events, and here, pretentiousness might just beat tolerance. So when a member of the audience asks a pretty obvious, self-explanatory question, the other majority begin to get irritated. While in other states people are most likely to keep their intolerance to themselves, or slightly roll their eyes; in this city people are somewhat more explicit about their feelings towards a dumb question.

As soon as the first irrelevant, self-explanatory question was addressed to the director of the film, I could hear a crowd of complaints coming from other members of the audience:
"Duh!"

"This is obvious!"

"This question is so irrelevant"

And I swear I even heard an:

"Ass-Hole" uttered by somebody in the crowd.

This is good to know, given that now I will probably never ask a question to the film director if I am at the MOMA again.

2) The other typical New Yorker thing that I noticed is that every time you attend a cultural event in this city, there is always that one dude who goes to an event by himself and takes out his journal. Before the film/performance/reading is about to start he will sit in a reflexive mood, sometimes barefooted, and write on it.

Journal guy always looks contemplative, lost in his own thoughts, and yet there is that slight feeling that he might just be in need of attention, might just want others to think of him as a serious, reflexive, contemplative guy who goes to the MOMA by himself. So although he would not admit this to us, journal guy is lonely and just wants to make friends here in New York.

Sometimes I think that if I didn't blog and if I didn’t know any people up here, I would probably have to carry a journal around with me whenever I attend a film/reading/performance. Which makes me think that if I didn't blog, I would also probably be journal guy...

2010-07-13T21:51:00.001-07:00

On other terms. Tonight after Ballet class I decided to go practice a variation by myself in the first floor studio. I accidentally left my clothes on the other, second floor studio, and everybody left, and they locked it. So when I realized what had happened, I also realized that I was wearing a leotard and ballet slippers, and that this would be my outfit for the night. I caught up with a Ballet friend who was still at the door, and she let me borrow her flip flops, but did not have an extra T-shirt and lived too far away for me to go get one at her place. So I rode the seven train back home in a blue leotard and ballet tights, and flip flops. I think this is the most embarrassing thing that has happened to me in New York so far.
But I'm sure there will be plenty of other stories in the coming months...

So I still Think I can Dance

2010-07-12T14:07:00.001-07:00

This to say that I take Ballet classes in a small studio in Manhattan, five times a week in the evenings. I am not a good dancer, and I am not being humble. Whoever has gone out with me and got dragged to a dance floor, knows how terrible of a dancer I am. But I attend these classes because Ballet makes me happy. I don’t know how to explain it but it just does. So Ballet is meaningful to me, despite the fact that I'm a bad dancer and will never get extremely far in this discipline. To top it off, I recently read an article on the New York Times Magazine about how my generation has been raised by parents and teachers who have always motivated us to "follow our dreams" and do "what makes us happy." Yet somehow there has to be something missing in this model where human motivation is guided by self-interest. That is, I have plenty of friends who are paying the consequences of naively "following their dreams" in their early twenties, and now being in tons of debt, unemployed, undecided about their career etc. This was also the point of the New York Times article.

So speaking about following my dreams, last week, I found out that a girl in my Ballet group is also a composer at Julliard. She showed her work to my Russian teacher, and he decided to organize a performance. This means that my group will get to dance on stage in the fall, with a real orchestra playing. This also presented me with an unexpected philosophical issue which I formulated with this question: Is taking Ballet because it makes me happy a good justification for making this a priority, even if I'm not (objectively) a good dancer?

Here I am making a decision between committing to something I am not good at, but that I love doing ( Ballet) and committing to something else which I am potentially good at (philosophy) but am not very positive about doing. For example, to be in the performance, I will probably have to take less graduate school classes because rehearsals take time. So I will spend less time in my philosophy department, and more time with my Ballet group. This might bring consequences in the long run (for example, it will take me longer to graduate).

I read Susan Wolf's Tanner Lectures last night, about meaningfulness in life. In a very simple manner, her proposal is that meaning arises from "loving objects worthy of love, and engaging with them in a positive way." The category of value she defends involves objective and subjective elements, inextricably linked. So Wolf's view is an interesting combination of egoism, or self-interested motivation models (do what makes you happy as long as it is meaningful to you. Find your inner passion. Go for it.) and the idea that we should also be involved in something larger than ourselves (which might not always be what we want to do.)

Drawing from her proposal, can I justify my decision by arguing that I am also involved in something larger than myself? Hopefully yes.

Most of the people in my group are in their twenties and thirties, some of them used to be professional dancers too. We are all facebook friends by now. We exchange youtube videos of Ballet variations through facebook, and on Saturday evenings, after Ballet class, we go out Salsa Dancing at Lincoln Center. Next weekend I am attending a film screening with another Ballet friend, of the movie "Only when I Dance." I've never been in better shape in my life. I am surrounded by artists and eccentric people. But fundamentally, we have a common goal to work on. So not only do I get the personal satisfaction of being happy when I dance, I also get to be around a community of other people who dance because this makes them happy and for the common goal of rehearsing a good performance.

So here we have a community: One of the few things that actually helps us humans be involved in something we love, that can also be larger than ourselves once we set a common goal.

Does my defense work? Probably not. Am I still seriously thinking about being in the Dance performance this Fall and skipping on a philosophy course? Hell yeah.

(Note on the side: Whatever dumb thing I decide to do to "follow my passions" is still justified nowadays because I have a job. So another argument would be: as long as I keep my job, I can do whatever makes me happy. But this sounds like an easy way out.)

In Between Days

2010-07-09T22:39:00.001-07:00

Today the Rabbi explained my teaching schedule to me, which differs in winter because there is less sunlight, which differs every week because of prayer times for the students, and then he suddenly got busy with the phone. So I had time to look around his office, at his dusty existentialism books, at his framed paintings of Spanish ruins. On his desk there was a pile of photocopies of the Tanner Lectures about “Meaning in Life and why it Matters” which he must be teaching to his students. And I am pretty obvious when I snoop around, because he noticed I was trying to read his photocopies backwards from where I was sitting, and invited me to take a copy.

So I left that office today with the Tanner Lectures in my hand, rushing to catch the seven back to Queens. And maybe it was the day, or the fact that I had not slept enough the nigh before, but I felt sort of jealous that he could afford to live in such an intense, wonderful spiritual world to the point where reality, where things such as having no AC in the seven train, having an unemployed dad, having to count your pennies, having to die, become the mere icing on the cake to something else, to something larger and apparently much better.

And then, I am not sure why but all of this talk about "why meaning matters" just reminded me of acts of love. There is this piece in a biography by Tennessee Williams. The essay is titled “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair,” and at one point in the story his therapist tells him that to forgive the world, he first has to forgive others.
I remember reading this essay one night not too long ago, and thinking about the way life used to feel like. Realizing that I could forgive the world now, and I could forgive others. But that forgiving myself was always the pending, the most difficult act, the one nobody warns you about. It was the act that brought the most resistance. And that I, pretty much, was on my own with that one.

2010-07-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

“I can’t believe it,” my mother said from the other end of the phone, “I simply can’t believe it.”
First you got into graduate school, and now this. Who would have thought a year ago that I would be hearing news like this!”
“I know” I explained from my end of the phone. “I’ll get to go shopping for new clothes and everything! And I will wear skirts over the waist more often.” I don’t think I remember the last time I walked inside a store that was not called “Goodwill” and bought brand new clothes that actually fit me. But it was time.
“It’s a big thing, my mother commented, it will change your whole life.”
“I know” I responded, “but the clock was ticking and it was time I did something about it.”
“Are you sure this is what you want?” my mother asked.
“It is too late to turn back now” I laughed. “I took the urine test this morning and everything says we are good to go.”
“I can’t wait to tell you sisters, they will be so proud of you!” my mother exclaimed.
“I won’t tell my friends yet, until I’m sure it sticks. But you can tell the rest of the family” I answered. “They are going to be so happy to find out that you are going to have” _ my mother paused and I could hear a sigh from her end of the phone, “a job!”
A real job.
I couldn’t believe it either. After I passed the first interview, the teaching assessment, and the drug screening, I got an offer to be a Spanish teacher at a Jewish private school in Manhattan today. I could hardly pass the offer up. My bosses seemed like very interesting people, my seventh and eight graders looked pretty harmless, and when I found out that I was going to get a stable salary I impatiently waited for the Rabbi to finish his sentence so that we could shake hands and get this over with.
In all honesty, this is a relief.
I have been working an extended series of odd jobs these past years (babysitting, cat sitting, unofficial backup dancer at Snug Harbor and other bars, emergency room Spanish interpreter, Spanish substitute teacher, house cleaner, graduate assistant, etc.) that paid my rent while I was a full-time college student and spared me enough left over money to, maybe, afford a box of frozen pizza.
The last steady job I held was as an insurance sales person selling policies on the phone from inside a cubicle. The other steady job I held was as a coffee shop supervisor. I worked for a lady from Venezuela who cursed loudly in Spanish and would come to work even if she were dying with swine flu. She, thus, expected us employees to be as obsessed with the job as she was.
My new job requires I teach Spanish to two classes of seventh graders, and two classes of eight graders. It will allow me to be creative with my lesson plans. It will allow me to pay my college debt. It will let me be the center of attention every once in a while. It will let me speak basic Spanish with students, and not have to worry about speaking in English.
Cheers to that.

Art and Boredom?

2010-07-06T23:03:00.000-07:00

I am part of a group of graduate students organizing the annual Philosophy and Art Conference, at Stonybrook University. We meet once a week on Sundays at a classmate’s apartment to discuss themes and ideas for this conference. Honestly, I decided to volunteer with this project because I recently moved to New York and needed to be part of whatever is similar to a community up here. This means that I primarily attended the meeting to hang out with other students, go through my classmates' bookshelves, and eat free snacks. Half of the time I couldn’t get past the students’ dense, GRE word loaded, vocabulary to understand what is it that they were arguing for or against. But this, like many other things about New York, is also growing on me. And I have to say that I began getting a little more interested in actually helping out, when I discovered that one of the possible keynote speakers of the conference would be Arthur Danto.

So yes, this will be another long entry about aesthetics. Sorry.

Last year, the theme of the conference was “Collectivity.” This year each person defended their favorite theme, we all took a vote, and “Boredom” was the winner.
At first I thought this was a terrible theme for a conference. Especially given that most philosophers already get laughed at for embodying boredom pretty well. But I went along with it and hoped for the best. I am now beginning to understand why boredom is a problem in aesthetics, and why it might not be such a bad conference theme after all.

I’ve recently found in Daniel H’s blog an entry about the art world that made me think about this issue. Daniel is a graduate student at CUNY who has his doubts about contemporary art, and who can blame him? In his words:

“While wandering through a modern art exhibit, I sometimes experience a pair of conflicting thoughts: the suspicion that what I am looking at is totally meaningless junk, together with the nagging doubt that since all sorts of perfectly intelligent people have devoted their attention to it and conspired to place it in such a venerated viewing location, there must be something to it.”

So what is going on here? Two issues: The first is that the artworks he alludes to are probably contemporary, and thus, do not have beauty as a primary property or as a property at all. The second is that these artworks appear to have no meaning, and are thus classified as useless “junk.” I think Daniel’s view is very common and worth looking at. So I first want to say something about beauty, then something about usefulness, and then I will connect these two concepts to uselessness which appears to be one of the causes of boredom. Hopefully this will allow me to clarify the stigma that contemporary art faces.

1) As long as an artwork is beautiful, or has beauty as a property, it can be useless and still have popular approval. Talk to anyone who has gone museum touring around Europe and you will find out that they can handle standing in front of useless art for hours as long as it is beautiful, or has this property.
But I have a better example from literature. I am reading “The Gift of Asher Lev.” A novel by Chaim Potok, about a young boy’s Orthodox Jewish experience in New York. I picked this novel because I’m trying to understand more about orthodox Jewish culture, now that I will be teaching in a Jewish school. But I also think that this novel presents us with an interesting tension between beauty and uselessness. Through the story, the main character struggles between his love for art, and the views of his father, who claims from his religious faith that any form of art not related to Judaism is useless, and a waste of time. In the novel, Asher admires the beauty of artworks despite their “uselessness.” He begins to go to art museums where he studies paintings. He becomes very interested in the paintings, especially the ones of the crucifixions. He starts copying the paintings of the crucifixions and nudes, and this gets him in trouble with his father. Besides the religious conflict going on here, I think Potok’s character believes that beauty has value in itself, thus, he cannot see the “uselessness” his father perceives. This is also an example of how beauty appears to be a necessary condition for useless art. That is, as long as an artwork is beautiful, or has this property, the majority of audiences can accept the fact that it is useless.

2) As long as an artwork has a purpose (political, ethical, affective etc.) that provides meaning or usefulness, it can afford to be non-beautiful, or recede from having beauty as a property, and still have the approval of the general audience.
In Potok’s novel, for example, Asher’s father makes usefulness a priority and, coming from a religious perspective, claims that only art that divulges salvation is useful. And from a militant front plenty of political artists have claimed that either art should be political or else a mere decoration: a useless ornament. Interestingly, a lot of religious and political art centers on suffering, themes which are not in themselves beautiful but might have some ethical, religious, or political purpose. So here, purpose, meaning, and usefulness are necessary conditions for non-beautiful artworks to be approved by the general audiences.

Now, the problem rises when we encounter works like the ones Daniel mentions. Apparently, these items do not have beauty as a property, and when we cannot for sure decide if the work has any sort of political, ethical, or affective purpose, these get classified as “boring,” “junk,” “useless,” “bullshit” etc. So the problem lies with the encounter of works that have no beauty, and apparently, no purpose either. Thus, they are useless. This is also how uselessness gets connected to boredom, the main theme of our conference.
I wonder how Potok’s character would have reacted to the contemporary art world given that his defense of art is primarily a defense of beauty.
And here lies the stigma of non-beautiful, non-useful art.
How many audiences that enter the Guggenheim daily have uttered these statements? “What is the point in this?” or, “This is bullshit,” or further “My little sister could have done that.” And lastly, “I am bored in this museum; can we go have a sandwich now?”
(I have to admit that I am guilty of this last statement.)

So boredom appears to be a problem within aesthetics because, as I wanted to show, it is directly connected to the stigma of uselessness that non-beautiful, contemporary art has to face. That is, if the work cannot prove its purpose, or its meaning, then it is sadly categorized by the audience as another “junk” artifact.

And yet, hopefully for artists and for philosophers of art, artworks escape most logic because although they appear useless, they are indirectly useful. I recently read an interview with Christian Boltanski, one of my favorite French sculptors, who explains this humbly and better than I can. Here, Boltanski defends the purpose of useless, non-beautiful art. I am translating one of his responses from Spanish:

“I am a professor in the School of Fine Arts, in Paris. What I tend to argue is that if I like teaching there, it is precisely because the School of Fine Arts is the most useless place in Paris. It has no purpose whatsoever. And in this world, almost everything is useful you see. People study to be businessmen, doctors…to be a doctor you must learn something precise. And in the school of Fine Arts I have a few students, and we talk about things that are completely useless. We talk about the color of the sky, about a spot on the floor…And talking about useless things is so strange, and naturally, in the end it is the useless things that are the most useful. I think that museums are full of useless things. In art schools one does nothing more than talk about useless things, but then the only places that contain this paradox are churches for example. Churches are useless and it is precisely this inutility that makes them useful, because there is no direct objective to them. For example, in a restaurant one eats; but in a church one waits, one reflects, but one does not have a delimited objective. I think Art is so wonderful because it is not directly useful. This is not completely true. But partly, this is true.”

Moral of the story: Be careful when you stand in front of a piece of useless junk in a museum, it might be the most useful, wonderful piece of junk you will ever encounter.

2010-07-04T21:11:00.001-07:00

Today after swimming, I stopped by my neighborhood's Argentine market to follow the first part of the Argentina-Germany game. Last time I was there, with dad, Argentina was playing against Mexico. The place was so crowded that a drunken Mexican girl who was cheering for the wrong team had to sit on my lap to avoid getting thrown out for standing in front of the TV.
This time I decided to make my way into a corner and remain squished between other bodies, feeling people's elbows, just to join the crowd of viewers.

And all I wanted to say is that I had forgotten how much Argentinian's can cuss.
As soon as we started loosing to Germany, people got really emotional: Vamos Boludo! move las pelotas.

Another one: "Dale boludo corre!"

Vamos, vamos, reboludo!

reboludo!

Vamos CARAJO!

Making Sense of Things, Part 1

2010-06-06T21:05:00.000-07:00

Keeping a blog is the closest I will ever come to writing fiction and I want to call this account “Slapstick” in commemoration of Kurt Vonnegut’s only attempt to write an autobiography, which, according to him “was a complete failure.” My fictional account will also be a complete failure, because it will be about what life has felt like to me this past year, in other words, it will be an autobiography.

Surprisingly, life to me has resembled one of those black and white, silent films where characters interact with each other through mimic and pantomime but there is never any direct dialogue. And there is very little love in these films. I have been so intoxicated by these films which have been playing through my head ever since my move to NYC that I now find it natural to discuss life without even mentioning love.
It does not seem important to me anymore.
What is important to me right now is making sense of things.

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*

I am a philosopher who hates doing philosophy, and a writer who dreads having to write. This paradoxically does not imply that I am hypocritical about these disciplines; it just means that I need an extended family of other writers and other philosophers to help me out in this extensive mission of conquering my own stupidity.
Something I learned this past year is that I can create my own extended family with all the members I need. And this has little to do with love, and a lot to do with common decency. Oh, yes.

You see, it all started because I had an uncle who used to attend A.A meetings for this reason. Exhaustion and deep money worries, made him believe that he was not good at life. And he would sometimes tell me when I was a child, that the only people who really understood his mind where other alcoholics. So I used to go ahead and imagine him sitting in rooms, introducing himself with his name, and later that brave confession “…and I am an alcoholic” which gave him the credentials for membership in an extended family, and I was slightly jealous.

*

Oh yes, so months later, I attended a meeting for people who are related to alcoholics. I guess it was loneliness as much as it was dread what brought me to attend my first meeting. I had failed at love, many of my relatives had died, I was unemployed, and I needed to look for more brothers and sisters. I found out that there were several meetings I could attend daily, and that I could even get a sponsor, who is a person I can call whenever I am having a problem. This idea became amusing and comforting because I suddenly had brothers and sisters, and aunts and grandparents, everywhere and was lonesome no more. In Charlotte most of us even recognized each other outside of the church basements, and would say “Hi” always in a low key tone, protecting the anonymity of this extended family.

*

Before I left North Carolina, my friend Hannah suggested I stop going to so many of these meetings, and actually attend real social events in NYC if I want to make real friends. She might be right. So I have been attending lots of free events in the evenings. For example, I went to a book reading last week at an Art Gallery in Chelsea. There, the author who also writes for The New York Times read a chapter of his new “witty” novel. The novel was about a boy who gets taken out of his medication for schizophrenia and gets himself into trouble. The announcer commented that this novel had a resemblance to “The Catcher in the Rye.” I hate it when people say that something has a resemblance to “The Catcher in The Rye” because usually it does not. I also find it amusing that every writer has a job with The New York Times in this city. So despite how much I enjoyed the free wine, and the gallery, I still felt lonesome. “I could have just gone to a meeting tonight” I kept thinking, “I could have gotten to speak to my extended family.” Some habits are hard to break, I suppose.

*

Somebody else who has strange habits is my Dad. I will never ever understand this man’s philosophy of life. Ever since I was a child he has been waking up at the crack of dawn to start his day reading bible passages and praying. After this routine he goes to work, currently as a Spanish teacher in a public high school in the South Bronx. At night, before falling asleep, he always picks one of these two novels religiously: Either Dostoevski’s “The House of the Dead” or Charles Dickens’ “Hard Times.”
Start the day with Jesus; end it with Dostoevsky, who would have thought this philosophy would work for anybody?

*

My father has also incorporated Joseph Conrad as part of his philosophy of life ever since we moved from Argentina. He likes stories about the sea. But I think Conrad might be the reason why Dad has not been on a boat, or at sea, in a long time.
Let me explain. Dad likes to fish stripped bass. But ever since our last move, his fishing poles have been stationed in a corner of the apartment, and my mother even tried hiding them behind a book shelf. I’ve recommended he take fishing again on weekends, once he begins his vacation, because it might allow him to make new fisherman friends. But Dad is too picky about his fishing group.
“I’m looking for a specific fishing group, you see Carolina. They have to like Joseph Conrad.”
All I learned about how to alienate myself from people, I probably learned from Dad.

*
Something else Dad and I have in common lately is that we will both be unemployed after next week. The school year is over, and so are our jobs. This means that we will both be job searching for teaching positions this summer, and we both have some hurdles to jump over. In my case, I am too young and don’t have enough teaching experience to get hired as easily. In dad’s case, he is too old and has way too many years of experience that allow him to claim a higher salary that few employers want to pay. I talked to him about my slight fear of not finding a teaching job, and consequently, not being able to afford my graduate school classes. To this he responded,
“Well Carolina, you shouldn’t worry. The women always look better at closing time.” This saying applies to him too, I suppose.

*

But Dad is not extremely worried, and I’m not extremely worried. Guess who is worried? My mother, duh, the only person who does have a job for the next year. You see, we live in Queens and most of our neighbors are Chinese immigrants under rent control. Some of them are also on disability or unemployment compensation. I have the day off on Tuesdays, and can tell you that in the afternoon my neighbors just hang out in the hallways. Sometimes they play Chinese karaoke, sometimes they boil fish with their doors open and the smells filter into my room.
There is one neighbor in a wheelchair who likes to hang out in the main hallways and open the door to people. There is a catch to this, whenever he lets you in, he also asks you for ten dollars. I cracked this joke today at the dinner table, about how Dad and I would be hanging out with our neighbor next year. We will be opening the door to people, asking them for ten dollars if we don’t find teaching jobs. But I don’t think my mom found it that funny.

“Don’t say that Carolina. The teachers and the kids love you at your current school, and I’m sure they will offer you a job for the next school year. As for your father, he can be sent away to teach at a boarding school, anywhere in the country.”

All I learned about survival in hard times, I learned from Mom, I suppose.

*

But back to my extended family that I see in church basements, I have to say that sometimes we loose people to insanity. Not all stories have happy endings. For example, last week I met a man in A.A who was looking for a new sponsor, because his current sponsor had relapsed. I had never though this could happen and it made me somewhat afraid about the reality of this fellowship. What if we are all just blind people leading other blind people? Is this how it always works, in every family, in every group, in any discipline? I think I asked this question to my Dad once, and he told me something I would never forget, and it boiled down to this:
“The reason why we are here Carolina is to help each other get through this mess that life is. Who cares how we do it.”
I think he stole this quote from Kurt Vonnegut, but I believe it, and now that I write it down, it just makes sense.

2010-06-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

Near my subway stop there is a little Greek stand. Here I get my falafel with rice for lunch, usually on weekdays when I get back from teaching. But today I got off the subway hungry from exploring flee markets and bookstores through Chelsea. Hungry from not wanting to spend one dime in Manhattan after I was charged two fifty for a bottle of water once, and actually bought it, and have had to redeem myself ever since. So I stopped by the greek stand to get my usual.
I'm transcribing the last part of my exchange with the guy who works there, because I thought it was pretty funny.

"Me: Don't put too much dressing on my falafel!

Falafel guy: Why? Is really good! You from Brazil aren't you?

Me: No, from Argentina.

Falafel guy: Oh, yes! You want more dressing then?

Me: No! It's going to make me fat.

Falafel guy: I like women fat. ( To this, he makes a round shape in the air with his hands as if it is the body of a "fat" woman I guess?)

Me: Ok, stop it with the dressing that's enough. Thanks!

Falafel guy: I tell you what.

Me: What.

Falafel guy: If you gain some weight, I'll give you my number."

Anyway, conclusion of the day: Wow.
But also: I really like this neighborhood.
* * *

Philosophy for Children?

2010-05-31T20:33:00.000-07:00

1) My six year old nephew who lives in Argentina recently realized that old people die. That is, he still doesn’t think he will ever die. And he doesn’t think his mother, or his little sister will ever die. But he does realize that people “with wrinkles” die. To this, he has called my mother long distance from Argentina, asking her if she is going to die, and demanding she tell him in advance when. My mother calls her grandson a modernist. And I think I agree with mom: my niece is such a modernist. Yet, what I find interesting about this child is that he has begun to ask an ultimately philosophical question. Good for him.

2) This is my third week working as a substitute Spanish teacher for seventh grade. My seventh graders are petty difficult according to the other teachers, but I have come to the conclusion that they are just modernists, like my nephew is. “What is the point in all of this?” they ask me various times throughout the day. “I don’t think Josie is a person, she is weird” I overheard one of the girls say, and “Guys let’s all act reasonable at least for a while!” A Friday class question tends to be something such as: “Ms. Drake can I throw a desk at Babe? He is bullying me and I want to get even!” I find it interesting that ultimately, these utterances could also be developed into really interesting philosophical discussions. Part of me wants to use these questions for a more engaging class debate about ethics, existentialism, and maybe even death. Instead, I have to stick to the lesson plan, and tell them to go sit back down and finish their Spanish grammar. But boy am I dying to start a philosophical discussion instead.

3) I attended high school in Argentina and there, same as in Europe, philosophy is part of the curriculum in public and private schools. Why not in the United States? Is it because the educational curriculum is already too full with science and math requirements? Is it because we are scared our children will turn to skepticism too soon in their young lives? Is it because we think that philosophy can only be done by a few “bright” students in small groups? These might be valid issues, but what happens to those children who show strong potential to be good philosophers? Those children who like asking questions and are dying to understand, but have to wait until they get into college to discover philosophy? And anyways, I noticed that even the kids who don’t do well in academics, really like engaging in philosophical debates, and are good at it. Teaching philosophy to children earlier in their academic life seems like a great idea. And although I met people who have been exposed to this discipline since they were young and are now sick of it, I also know people who regret not having been introduced to philosophy earlier in life, so what do we have to lose?

Today I read an article on “Times Online” Magazine about a new trend in France were children as young as six years of age attend tea parties where the main subject is philosophy. Apparently, the parties are held in cafés, public libraries and at home and involve food, drink ... and debate. The article mentions how, although some may dismiss it as further proof of their pretentiousness, the French see it as an attempt to give children a handle on an increasingly complex world. “Proponents of les goûters philos argue that the subject needs to be broached at an early age when children start asking existential questions.” (For a full view of the article go to: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7138713.ece)
Could we use this idea and take it further, allowing teachers to implement these debates in U.S classrooms? This would also prepare kids for the future confusion that awaits them in our complex world.

For example, children with parents who introduce them to philosophy at an early age engage in critical thinking that can make them stronger problem solvers in the future but, ultimately, makes their life more fun. Last semester, my job as a graduate assistant allowed me to have closer relationships with Philosophy professors to the point where they began asking me if I could baby sit their children, on the side. And I noticed that the kids of my two respective employers had strong critical thinking skills that distinguished them from other children I knew. Here I think, their parents played an important role introducing them to philosophy. And these kids acted like kids. But I’ll give you an example of a conversation I recall going on between two sisters one Saturday night, as we finished watching “Wall-E:”
“Robots are nicer than people”
“Wall-E acts like a person but is a robot”
“No. You can’t be a person and a robot at the same time. But Wall-E is a Robot with a soul”
“No, he doesn’t have a soul; he is just really nice and remembers everything in his mind.”
Fine, maybe you guys don’t think this is smart, but here we have the philosophical problem of personal identity, and consciousness, all in the questions of a five year old and a six year old. I think it proves my point.

Interestingly, the school I work for is one of those “progressive” private schools funded by the new NYC creatives (a bunch of rich film and advertising parents.) The “progressive” part of the school, among other things, requires the students to take an Ethics class every year beginning in second grade. This is another great idea. Not only because children can be exposed to philosophy at an earlier age than college, but also because we future philosophy PhD’s who will be in the market finding a job at some near future, are limited to teaching college level philosophy. But if more high schools could implement an Ethics or a Philosophy class in their curriculum, plenty of unemployed- but eager to teach (and make a living out of it) philosophers could actually improve their options and chances for work. For what I know, Columbia University has an outreach program at the moment where graduate students teach philosophy in high schools. These Philosophy outreach programs have shown themselves to be remarkably successful in drawing virtually all students in the classroom together in inquiry. And the teachers are often surprised, and pleased, to see many of their most reticent, “underachieving” students actively join in the discussion of philosophical ideas in inner city high schools. So imagine if philosophers could get a job teaching high school ethics, and get paid for it? As a matter of fact, I don’t think that the difference between a high school senior and a college freshman is that huge, and a lot of private high schools pay higher salaries to their teachers than colleges do. Further, I don’t think that philosophy PhDs would mind teaching high school classes if these schools where willing to employ them.

Sadly for us, the Ethics teacher of my school is actually a psychology PhD. So my school has an interesting project, but hiring a psychology professional entirely misses the point of their project (which is to get the children to think critically, and philosophically.) It seems to me that at the time of dealing with one of those “big metaphysical questions” a psychologist would probably end up turning to behaviorism, same way that a religious person would turn to God. Both psychology and religion are good fields, but why not just hire a philosopher to do what he/she is good at? Implementing philosophy classes in middle and high schools seems like a great idea, but a very long shot for now. And even the few private “progressive” schools in NYC that implement philosophy in their curriculum, and could be potential employers for philosophy PhD’s, don’t hire the adequately qualified people to do the job. They hire Psychology PhD’s instead. Boo.

Then again, the person who writes this entry is a philosophy graduate student who somehow got hired to teach middle school Spanish, and is probably not adequately qualified to do the job either. Mostly, because whenever her seventh graders ask her a question in Spanish, she wants to turn it to a philosophical debate, in Spanish. It all comes back full circle I suppose.

There is no House but there is Home/ Re-Thinking Home

2010-05-01T14:25:00.000-07:00

I am leaving Charlotte in two weeks, to go work and attend graduate school in NYC. And because I don’t have relatives or family living in North Carolina, I probably won’t be back very often( except for frequent visits to my dear friends). And I found out today, that moving my things on a U-Haul truck will cost me at least six hundred dollars, which is money I don’t have. So the only other option I thought of, to solve this problem, is going for the “immigrant style” move. I am used to this style of moving and it consists on getting rid of as many things as possible (including my mattress) and limiting my baggage to three boxes of books, my bookshelves, and three bags of clothes which will fit in my car. That’s it, that’s all I’m taking with me to NYC. Exciting, huh? Here we have, embodied, the old idea of traveling free of burdens, and from material items from the past. This idea can sound pretty bohemian.
Yet as much as I keep trying to convince myself that “traveling free” is the best way to travel through life, and that half of my possessions I don’t even use anyway, and that my room will be smaller in Queens, I find it slightly difficult to have to say good bye to my room as it’s been for the past few years in Charlotte. Difficult to say good bye to the material structures that gave me a sense of stability I could perceptually label as “home.”

And I cannot help but do these stupid things were I compare myself. I compare myself to the people who get to move away with limited items, like me, but who still have the opportunity to “go back home” for the holidays. They go back home to the structures of stability, and there rests their childhood room with their old teddy bears, and their memories all stocked up, somewhere, anywhere. Yet I’ve lived by the old Tom Wolfe line, “You can’t go back home again” for years, because this is just how it is. We immigrants have to travel light. We get rid of things, we avoid accumulating, and when somebody we know shows us their boxes with baby clothes from when they were children: boxes full of childhood pictures, yearbooks, and items that have helped mold their identities, we turn away. We don’t want to turn away, but indifference is a better response than longing for what we lost through the cracks and leaks of so many moves. Forgetting allows us to travel free. A good friend of mine, who is also my Alanon sponsor, always comments on how she cannot think of the past or the future because sometimes memories are painful, and projections are scary. "All you have is today, and that is enough.” I never thought I would really buy into this whole “live the present” mentality, but I do, and it has allowed me to re-think the concept of “home,” by turning, not to philosophy, but to literature.

In her novel Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver describes an alternate way of thinking about “home.”
“The greatest honor you can give a house is to let it fall back down into the ground,” he said. “That’s where everything comes from in the first place.”
I looked at him, surprised. “But then you’ve lost your house.”
“Not if you know how to build another one. All those great pueblos like at Kinishba—people lived in them awhile, and then they’d move on. Just leave them standing. Maybe go to a place with better water, or something.”…
Loyd rubbed his hand thoughtfully over my palm. Finally he said, “The important thing isn’t the house. It’s the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go. Anglos are like turtles, if they go someplace they have to carry the whole house along in their damn Winnesotas.” …
“We’re like coyotes,” he said. “Get to a good place, turn around three times in the grass, and you’re home. Once you know how, you can always do that, no matter what. You won’t forget.”

In this dialogue, Loyd, a Native American man, discusses his conception of home with a Latina named Codi. Loyd argues that he learned from his Pueblo ancestors that a house that rests on a solid foundation and resists destruction is not necessarily synonymous with a feeling of being at home. In his view, “home” means that you “have the ability to make” a structure in which you, family and friends can reside, and that you can re-build it when circumstances, or you, dictate. This structure need not be literal—just as a coyote builds a metaphorical home by turning “around three times in the grass” I can also build my home through this re-building, re-creating of my ability to make. But to do this, today, I can only stay in the present, and I can choose to stop looking back, I have made this choice a long time ago. This is another reason why I’m interested in the philosophical (metaphysical/ethical/political) problem of personal identity. For example, what might be the conception of the self that underlies such a conception of home? That is, if “home” means that one has the ability to make, then the self becomes a continuous project of becoming, of “shining through” (from the Latin Per-sona) and against the structures of this artificial stability, and what types of philosophy might one need in order to formalize that self-conception?

2010-04-24T22:23:00.000-07:00

To some degree, philosophy has always been a schizophrenic discipline. This is what made me fall in love with it. While there were early claims to a teleological and steady progress towards universal and unconditional conceptions of Truth, there have also always been counter-claims that question the ability to attain such Truths, the value of such Truths, as well as the wisdom of placing such a high valuation on a perfection that is ultimately unattainable.

For example, I always found the problem of personal identity fascinating, until I was told by some philosophers of the cannon, that in order to be a fully legitimate philosophical self, I must be unified and coherent. Yet the self that I am and want to bring to philosophy is not this—it is multifarious, impure, continually in flux and so disjointed that it is often deemed incoherent, even insane by others (and often by me).

In this way, philosophy already limits me to a constant state of fracture, as it prescribes my social identity as pathological and broken. Yet a reason why I keep believing in the discipline, is because philosophy already has within it many of the tools for diagnosing and addressing these problems. Last summer Jacqueline Scott, who teaches at Loyola University, told me that Philosophy had two faces, and I never really understood what she meant until now.

At some point, and in order to demonstrate this promise in philosophy for healing itself and for helping others, I want to examine in the future further the ways in which some in philosophy are using the discipline to theorize about healthier, more meaningful identities. I now begin my own papers with this question in mind: How is this Philosophical view constraining our creation of meaning? How can this view in Philosophy aid us in creating meaningful lives? Yes, I know these questions sound like a New Age advertisement, I know. Yet I have held to this question tightly for personal reasons, and it is helping me come up with better ideas in Philosophy.

But if you asked me now if I want to go through all those years of graduate school, I would probably respond with a "No Thanks," and I am sure that my rational side is the one who demands this, not the fractured, multiple self. Getting my MA first will probably give me a better time frame, and some space to really make up my mind about this field, to re-create healthier meanings, and a healthier life for myself.

This is all to say that I am alright with the way things are right now, fractured or unified, rational or irrational, depending in my identity, depending on the context and on the day. I've led a pretty boring life these past years, with too much silence, and too many books. I just don't want that anymore for me. Substitute teaching high school Spanish classes, while getting my Masters will really help me figure things out. It will also allow me to put all my energy somewhere less selfish than on my own work. I like my life today, and have no regrets anymore, and I realize that it has changed drastically for the better since last summer, when I still did not know that Philosophy had two sides, and that I could keep them both with me. That I could pick and choose in this discipline without letting the counter-arguments bite me, despite the Janus face.

2010-04-18T22:24:00.001-07:00

I finish schoolwork and take a break outside. I have no shoes on and it is dark, but there are lamps shining from my neighbor's window. Here in the south, as the weather gets warmer and the fireflies swim in the dark of the night, there is always a lamp somewhere in a window.

Whenever I have some free time, I find myself making mental lists, attempting to find the source of all my mistakes. This is a bad habit I've acquired lately after so much introspection: Thinking I will find the source of all my mistakes. Could it have been when I was fifteen and my father announced at the dinner table that we were officially broke? Could it have been after the fifth time we had to move in three years? Could it have been that year mom was in the hospital getting chemotherapy, when my insomnia started so early in life? Was it all the different colleges I attended, my lack of adaptation? Could it have been that harsh separation between my sisters and I? Could it be my relationship to this language, the brokenness of my tongue? The list gets broader as I play a pointless connect the dots game with myself until I realize that getting over my past might be the best way to stop making lists.

But then, there is also a side of me that wants to write so badly. And to write I need all of this, all of my past. I sent a letter to you tonight, begging you to help me write again. I already know what your response will be. "You cannot get rid of your past if you want to write, you need to keep diving into the wreck to keep writing." But I may be able to separate things now that I am wiser. I now believe what you said to me: that the difference between missing and losing is that the former has a presence, while the latter is an absence.
That to miss carries forth a feeling, of feeling at least something.
To miss is still to feel, to miss is less than numb, is more than nothing, much more than losing everything. That to miss caries with it a weight of memory waiting to be redeemed. I'm supposed to let go of everything, to detach if I want to stop surviving and start living, but I need at least something. Some things, no matter the God, can never come to pass. If prayer is where nothing happens, then what is writing?

I no longer will tell anyone the story of the wreck. To mention the thing itself is more than enough, but I have no use for its symbolic dimension anymore. I will have loss no longer. I am a thief and refuse to lose. Most of these sentences, for example, have been stolen from you, and I will not give them back, they are also a part of my past.

But I'm Only Dancing

2010-04-17T23:54:00.001-07:00

Let me tell you what I love about dance movies, but first let me give you an insight of my life on weekends. Usually, if I haven’t either baby-sat all evening or watched somebody else’s cats/things/plants, I go to a coffee shop and I read for classes. Lately, the prevalent subjects I’m covering are issues related to torture and violence within the context of war, for my Public Policy class. Different accounts of human rights, different accounts of what life is, different accounts of what being a human is, and ontological arguments about protection of life etc.
In my feminist philosophy class, I’m covering issues related to pornography and the rights of sex workers, but also, gender issues, violence and sexual harassment cases, obscenity law, degradation issues etc.
If I have some free time in the evening, I attend my Alanon meeting at a church. Usually, on Saturdays, somebody always shares how their alcoholic mother/ husband, friend/ son, has relapsed again, or is calling them from a pay phone in jail. If I have even more free time after my meeting, I keep reading about violence and torture in the context of war, or about third world prostitution.

So, the thing is, once I get to a stopping point, it’s time for a movie. I recently discovered Eastern-European films, and the work of Krzysztof Kieślowski, thanks to a friend and professor of mine who is from Pakistan. And this sort of sounds classy when I write it down. But, you know, the last thing I want to do at this point of the night, is to watch a movie where people either starve to death, a child falls inside a frozen lake, peasants are run over by horses, or somebody dies and the only witness is, not God, but the community (there is no God in these movies, and even science and rationality are dogmatic.) So this brings me back to my dance movies.

I love Dance movies. This is my favorite dance movie formula:
A girl used to dance, but something “tragic” happens in her life, so she stops dancing. She then moves to a city, and meets some guy who believes in her. The girl then begins to get her self esteem back, and practices her dance moves in the basement. She applies to some really good dance school in NYC, but something always happens before the audition, and the girl gives up her dream again. Surprisingly, five minutes before the movies ends, the guy convinces the girl to go after her dream, so the girl runs to the audition, and is late for it. There is always a mean looking judge sitting at the audition table who says to her “You are late, and you cannot audition.” But the girl, who has self esteem now, stands up for herself, takes off her baggy clothes as the music plays, and dances so well that she gets accepted to her dream school. And the guy is always at the audition somehow and stands in awe at the fact that his girlfriend can dance, and cheers for her.

This is my second favorite formula:
A rebellious guy moves in to a small conservative town. He meets the minister’s daughter and falls in love with her. He wants to teach her how to dance rock n’ roll, but her dad doesn’t approve of him. Everybody gives the guy mean looks, and they treat him as an outcast. So the guy gets angry, and goes into a warehouse and dances his anger away. The girl is at the warehouse and witnesses how good of a dancer he is, and so they fall for each other and dance the night away.

Other things I enjoy about these movies:

1) Every character is so amazingly one dimensional, it is almost suspicious. The bad guys are inexplicably evil, the mean judges are plain unfair, the dancers are always really nice and hard workers; they are also always good looking and fit. The heterosexual relationships on those movies are always really cliché, and generic, and simple, in a good way. Basically, every character is predictable, and when I’m looking for escapism movies, I like predictable characters.

2) Looking out for the extras! Actors do not know how to dance, so every time there is a really good ballet jump, or a really good choreography, they take a distant shot and never focus on the person’s face, to let the real dancer do his/her job. It is usually fun to look out for the scenes where the actor suddenly looks like a real, lean, ballet dancer.

3) The awesome eighties or nineties music.

4)The awesome dance moves that I can later try to, unsuccessfully, copy in the privacy of my own living room.

2010-04-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

Philosophers are trained to make distinctions. Sometimes, distinctions make a difference, sometimes distinctions are useless.
Something I am looking forward to, in Graduate school, is to take classes with both Continental and Analytic philosophers, because I want to get past these distinctions. For example, Edward Casey, my future professor, specializes in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, but has also written on Philosophy of Space and Time. Simon Critchley started out as a scientist, and ended writing books on Heidegger. Jacqueline Scott, whom I met at Penn State University, is a Nietzsche scholar who recently converted to Judaism and is also interested in Theology.I also want to make sure I take another Advanced Logic class because I know that Logic is one of my weak subjects in Philosophy (mostly because I get bored with it, but this does not mean I can just skip it.)

Professors I’ve had in my classes who do work on meta-ethics, and meta-language(and other fields with a “meta” in it) have always helped me aim for clarity in my work, and I’m grateful for this. So I personally don’t believe in this cliché, generic Analytic/Continental distinction, and don’t think professors believe in it either.

But a lot of amateurs in the field tend to use it a lot as a defense mechanism it seems. It’s like the guy who drives around in a huge truck to cover up his inferiority complex, except that in academia it goes back to philosophers making these immature distinctions between Analytic (the “macho” philosophy) and Continental (the "sissy" philosophy where, apparently, people want to talk about "mushy" real world issues such as politics, oppression, racism, violence etc.)
For example, if you are an “analytic” (amateur) philosopher, and you don’t understand Heidegger, then it must be that Heidegger is not “clear” enough! You don’t get Judith Butler? She is not "clear" enough either! What about Deleuze, or Foucault? They are not really philosophers, probably because you don't understand them either. Other adjectives I’ve heard about these thinkers are: “mushy,” “unclear,” “not a philosopher but rather a social theorist,” not clear, or rigid philosophy bur rather "poetry" etc. Gladly, it seems that once you complete graduate school and meet real students who are interested in approaching philosophy from different sides, these distinctions are blurred and most people I have encountered in the field don’t think they are useful.

I now want to use an example from politics, to look at how logical distinctions can be problematic when they are at work to justify personal beliefs. I will later use an example from my life to look at another useless distinction that has also justified personal beliefs, or inferiority complexes.

I recently had to read a book for my Public Policy class, titled “Ethics in War.” Here, an ethicist made the logical distinction between prima facie moral rights, and absolute moral rights to justify that torture of political prisoners is alright in specific cases. I don’t think these distinctions are useful. The reason why I am against them is because they appear to be subtle logical moves to avoid responsibility, and as Michael Waltzer calls it, to avoid getting one’s hands “dirty,” or admitting that one’s hands are already “dirty” when we enter in the field of politics.

For example, to justify torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, it has been argued that we rightly assume that every person has a prima facie right not to be killed, but we might nonetheless also claim that even that basic right can be forfeited by individuals who might have committed murder or “conspire to do so.” This is how the death penalty is defended too. So there is no absolute right, only prima facie rights, and these can be overridden. With a distinction of this sort, we can now say that while torture would certainly harm the prisoner, it would not necessarily wrong him. Because we can separate absolute from prima facie rights, this leads the ethicist to argue that torture is justified as long as the harm prevented outweighs the harm done.
I can think of many examples of consequentialism gone wrong, and most of them have to do with the use of this distinction regarding torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. But I’m writing a paper about it already, so I want to look at another distinction, dear journal.

A long time ago I was accused of “causing” somebody’s anger problem. And at times, I too have accused people in my life to have “caused” a lot of my own problems. But those people never really believed me when I stated this, and they shouldn’t have, because they really didn’t “cause” anything, nerveless my problems. But how can somebody get away with a statement of this sort? Simple: If one is a philosopher, one can accuse somebody, and then make an analytic distinction between being “morally responsible” and being “casually necessary” responsible for their problem. Using a further example, guns would be “causally necessary” for murder, and yet not “morally responsible” for it. With this distinction I can then be accused for having responsibility for the second sort of “causally necessary” problem, but not the first. Again, an interesting move to avoid personal responsibility for certain defects of character, and to transfer the blame, with a sophisticated logical distinction, to somebody else who does not deserve it (but might just happen to believe it for a while, due to low self-esteem issues.)With this distinction between moral and causally necessary responsibility, one could then say that while this accusation certainly harmed me, it would not necessarily wrong me.

What I’m trying to point out is that these distinctions are good in that they lessen the ethical repercussions of the “harm” done, but they are amateurish. In certain cases, getting rid of the distinction and admitting that people start of with “dirty hands” in politics, or in life, might just get us to a better point where we can really begin to talk about responsibility.

In the case of politics, the tortured prisoner has forfeited his right because he is a "threat" to society. In the case of my personal life, I am causally necessary responsible for a person’s anger because I, too, have forfeited my right to protection and am now a "threat" to the person. So I am the one at fault here. Good distinction, problematic, even traumatizing, results if I chose to buy this distinction.

In my experience, these logical distinctions, just like the Analytic/Continental one, are way too simplified and generic to get us anywhere except in the wrong direction: Towards useless philosophy, and useless accounts of responsibility. Because, really, that's the last thing we need if we are to be "thinking in dark times" like Hannah Arendt writes.

2010-04-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

1) I've been baby-sitting for almost six months now, and I realized that I am only a good sitter when I don't get a kid with diapers who likes to stand up in the living room table. I still don't get diapers, or the whole wet wipe deal, although wet wipes are indispensable in this process. I learned this the hard way.

2) My roommates and I have been watching a lot of bad reality TV at night. The latest one that is traumatizing all of us is "Hoarders." This show is about people who are so emotionally attached to their stuff, that their homes are filled with piles and piles of crap that nobody will ever make use of. I think hoarders are pretty common here in the south. This made me begin to clean up my own room more thoroughly, and donate two bags full of stuff to Goodwill. It is making Lydia walk into my room every evening, with questions for me such as, if there was a fire in this house, what object would you want to take with you? To this, I think I have replied that we need to stop watching so much of "Hoarders."

3)So the professors who teach at my graduate program are really good professors, and the two semesters I have attended, I have gotten a lot out of my classes (despite my complains about how I'm not getting enough out of my classes). But the graduate students are a thing in themselves. I'm not talking about the ones who are trying to get into Law school, or Med school. I'm talking about the philosophers. For example, the new fad is that all my male classmates want to use the MA program as a step towards a phd program in Philosophy. This is a good idea, and it is what I did too.

But the even newer fad, is that these students really believe that they're going to make it to Yale and Princeton phd programs, so they are making philosophy their top priority. For example, two of my classmates don't have jobs, and one of them is making his wife support him. The first pair never finish their work on time, and are always behind on their assignments despite the fact that they don't even work. I have also asked them continuously to submit a paper to the latest graduate conference we organized, because it would give them more experience, but they had nothing to submit "yet."

The last one hangs out in the graduate office all day reading books, goes out for walks around campus in the afternoon, and eats his sardines in the evening before class. Meanwhile, his wife is teaching full-time at a public school, walks their dog in the evenings, and cooks for him. All of this while he attends our Feminist Methods class. She will then have to move with him and teach in some other public school, if her husband really does get accepted into a phd program outside of the state next year. And she will keep supporting him until he finally completes his phd, by the time he is forty, and maybe then gets a real job. I really want to meet this amazing, virtuous, woman.

So, I guess, when my male classmates talk to me about starting reading groups, or how they want to submit papers to conferences, I encourage them, but remain skeptical. I try to make it clear that a phd in philosophy won't get them many women, or many jobs, or anything of that sort. And that once they realize that they won't get into Yale, or Princeton, they might also understand that this whole deal is not as glamorous as they thought it to be. But we all learn the hard way, and they will too at some point. But if one of them really makes it to Yale, I would congratulate him, but really congratulate his wife even more.

4) Hannah and I have push-up competitions now. Sunday I needed a break from reading at Caribou and managed to do five in a row in the parking lot. Hannah beat me doing ten in a row, in the middle of Caribou. I was thinking that next time I will try handstands. Getting stronger is awesome.

5) Last night I submitted a new paper I wrote to the British Society of Aesthetics. I am starting to like the feeling of submitting things, even when all you get back is a rejection letter.
Rejections are not that bad anymore, I've handled seven rejections to graduate schools so far, one rejection to a graduate conference, one rejection from a dude whom I used to love, and two job rejections so far (one from a private school at a convent, the other from a school in Brooklyn.)
And, you know? After the third rejection, you just don't feel the pain anymore. This is so true, and it is also somewhat empowering (once you get past the third rejection) because you sort of keep going without taking it personally until something or somebody decides to NOT reject you, and usually, something or somebody WILL decide NOT to reject you. And so you just keep going, and cheers to that.
* * *

Feminist Methods, brainstorming

2010-04-05T11:08:00.001-07:00

I realized that Judith Butler's recent take on critical politics (found in her books "Precarious Life," and "Frames of War")is not effective with certain political issues within feminism, such as defending the Rights of Sex workers and Prostitutes. This is something I want to focus on.

Butler's argument about frames and norms allocating grievability and precariousness in the perceptual field, is good if one is a radical feminist who views the sex worker, or the prostitute as a victim who gets dehumanized in this industry. I have a radical feminist take to this issue, and share this view. In my opinion we should just abolish prostitution, pornography, and stripping altogether because it dehumanizes, and objectifies women. Apparently, my take on this issue, although for different reasons, lines up really well with Christian conservatism, and republicans. Interesting. I am glad we now have something in common.

Now, there is also liberal feminist approach that sees certain Sex Workers and Prostitutes as autonomous agents engaging in business transactions with their customers, and that instead of seeing these women as "victims," we should work to protect their rights in the porn industry, strip club etc. A good example of strippers starting a workers union happened in San Francisco, and there is a really good documentary about it called "Live Nude Girls Unite!" which we watched in class. San Francisco also hosts annual Prostitution Conferences, where philosophers, doctors, and prostitutes get together to talk about this industry. So Liberal feminism would rather protect, start workers unions, instead of abolishing. This is also an interesting take.

So I want to write about the sex industry, and about how Butler's approach works for radical feminists, but is ineffective to liberal feminists. When radical feminists want to take political action against the activity of Sex Worker and Prostitutes, they too are giving us a representation or description of the "suffering" and precariousness of the "victim" sex worker. Yet here we have an example of Judith Butler's critical politics having problematic effects. Specifically going to the example of Sex Workers demanding autonomy in the field they work in, and creating a workers union for example, and account that represents the as "victims" would not help them out. Further, a case like this would be unsuccessfully accounted for with Butler's critical politics, so I might also be able to argue for a problem I find in Butler's account. And this might be a good paper where I start out with an example, and from there, point out to the flaws in a theory that cannot account for it.

Yet, is the theory flawed, or is the example?
To argue that the theory renders problematic effects, first, I have to agree, or defend liberal feminism. And this may be an issue for me. Do I really want to step away and consider the Sex Workers Industry as a liberal transaction where women are free to sell their bodies for a good (or bad) amount of money? There might be a way to only specify that maybe this could be OK with strippers. And in the end, I need to include class issues. Because there are plenty of jewish girls with a Master's degree living in San Francisco, who strip for the money, and won't necessarily have to do it all their lives. But there are sex workers with low socio-economic backrounds that are "victims" of the system and this reality also needs to be addressed. As usual, socio-economic class issues are central to my account, and yet why are feminists not addressing social class issues anymore? Why is it suddenly all about race and gender?

2010-03-31T22:27:00.001-07:00

Kurt Vonnegut, who survived the bombing of Dresden, still has the ability to make me laugh with his writing. John Dewey, who grieved the death of his two children, is read by many as a philosopher of social hope. Both Vonnegut and Dewey, in different ways, still rely on community relations, on jokes, to promote the idea of hope for humanity and this to me is an example of beauty overcoming death. Another reason why I read Vonnegut and John Dewey is because I now respect those who survived tragedy and can write about hope, about communities, and those who can still be funny, kind, despite their personal tragedies.

Tonight after class I had to walk back to my car, which I stupidly left parked in a far away church to avoid parking fees. I played this game with myself where I had to come up with one statement on which all of us: everybody I know and have ever known, could agree upon. Was about to come up with the first universal statement ever pronounced, but it was dark and I stepped on a piece of glass from a broken beer bottle, before I could utter my statement. I was wearing flip-flops and my foot began to bleed lightly. And the universal statement turned out to be a short utterance revealed in this declaration “FUCK!” So maybe that is what we might all agree upon: That besides hope, and community, there is a universal statement linked to tragedy. In the sense that in some way or another, in a greater or lesser degree, everybody, rich, poor, queer, straight, black, white, get’s fucked over.

A professor today asked me why is it that I want to go to graduate school in philosophy and I answered him with the sad, sad truth: “Because I’m not good at anything else!” He smiled with approval: “That was the answer I was looking for!” he said to me.
But the other response I had debated on was “Because I am getting old and fucked over too much, and I need to take a break from all of it by validating myself with the only philosophy graduate program that accepted me, which happens to be a good program too.”
Except that between those two statements, the one that is truer is “I am not good at anything else.”

My mother’s first husband was “disappeared” during the dictatorship years in Argentina, but whenever my sister and I used to ask her about him, she always changed the narrative to a motorcycle accident. This is another reason why I love my mother so much, because she can turn painful events into fictional narratives. When I was going through an emotional crack-up last summer, I asked her how did she ever survive the pain of loss, and she told me something that I will never forget: “All you do Carolina, to survive the pain of a loss, is survive the pain of a loss.”
Years after her first husband’s death, my uncle committed suicide by drinking rat poison, and was found dead in his bed the next morning. My mother, who has learned to write for survival, who never went through an emotional crack up, gracefully got up to go to work the next day, and did not cry one tear when she found out about this. And that's all you do folks. All I've learned about survival, I learned from mom.

When my older sister was twenty-two she did not miss a day of work either. But she was one hour late the morning after her abortion, because she figured that she would not make it to pay her rent if she missed a day of work. She also figured that the external bleeding would be less painful if she ignored it and kept herself busy with other matters related to survival. My beautiful older sister, who can now afford to have children of her own, always tells me that she would have loved to be a better painter. Interestingly, my sister was always way too mature for her age and yet paints like a child trapped inside the canvas. Beauty can only stand up like a child, against the ghosts of death.

My friend Hannah somehow finds me funny, mostly because of my moves on the dance floor. But also because we can both relate to stupid Indie experiences we’ve had with people of the opposite sex.
For example, I want to end this monologue with the image of a boy wearing either low cut jeans, or a hoodie, or he might have a skate with him. The girl is also wearing a hoodie. It is raining outside and they both wait for it to stop, probably at the Common Market. The girl has an ipod and she is listening to Patti Smith, and the boy asks her “what are you listening to?” The girl says “Patti Smith!” and the boy gets closer, takes one earphone from her ear, and puts it in his ear. They are now listening to Patti Smith together, one earphone each, and outside it is pouring rain. This is another “Indie Moment” in my imaginary domain of our lame Charlotte love life. The one we’ve all experienced once or twice in this town, the one we are all embarrassed to tell other people about. I don't know what this scene has to do with anything else I've just written, except to say that stupidity and late maturity, can also overcome the ghosts of deaths. But I'm not that sure about this one.

Philosophy and Art

2010-03-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

I also noticed that whenever I tell people that I'm interested in Aesthetics, they make a comment such as "You need to take me to a museum!" Sadly, people interested in Aesthetics don't spend enough time experiencing any type of art, but mostly attempting to account for it philosophically convinced that there is a point to all of this.

And for a museum tour, I highly recommend my sister Diana, who is not only a painter, but also an expert in Art History. She is the one who has dragged me to countless exhibits around NYC, bribing me to stay longer in the museum by paying for my sandwich.

All of this to say that I'm really exited to attend my first (and probably last) Graduate Conference in Philosophy and Art, at SUNY Stonybrook. They even have my paper posted online if any one of my readers
(that would be you, mom) wants to look at it.

http://www.philosophyartconference.org/Download.html

Race and Gender: When True Premises render False Conclusions

2010-03-21T21:48:00.000-07:00

I had this conversation at a bar setting one night, and a similar one at some party. So I wanted to share it because it highlights the common denominator view on race and gender that is so problematic nowadays. Friday night, the white (I’m assuming straight) guy I was talking to argued that he got discriminated by the police once, and has been sexually harassed by another male once. So his conclusion was that being black, or being female does not put one especially or anymore at risk than being white.

I’ve heard this argument from white guys, and I hear it a lot on TV commentaries, newspapers and blogs too, so it is worth looking at:

I'll give an example with other arguments of this sort.
1. Even non-smokers can get lung cancer, so smoking does not put one at risk for lung cancer.
2. Even thin people can have high blood pressure, so being obese does not put one at risk for high blood pressure.
3. Even white people can be arbitrarily harassed and arrested by police, so being black does not put one at risk for arbitrary harassment and arrest by police.

1 and 2 are bad arguments and though I suspect I’ve heard the first from some tobacco defenders, it’s not going to fool most people, one hopes. #3, which has been showing up recently strikes too many people as a good argument. Especially if you happen to be a white guy talking to me at a party, who has gotten arrested or harassed by the police (or something of the sort.)

So what’s wrong with it? For what I recall learning in my last logic class, the premise is about there being some instances of a feature, F, in a population of non-G’s. The conclusion is about the probability that a G will have F. In these cases, I can show to the guy that his reasoning is fallacious by producing arguments of the same form with true premises and false conclusions. And I can point to them that nothing in probability theory supports it; the premise is irrelevant to the truth of the conclusion. Because if we agree with this “common denominator” argument, this is where it leads us...

Men can get raped, so women are not especially at risk….

Men can suffer from domestic violence, so women are not especially at risk…

My friend Cherie is good at playing around with the logic of these arguments. In one of her papers for a Feminist Philosophy class, she purposely defended a true premise about race and gender which led to a tragic, unnecessary, false conclusion of this sort. But the place we are led to with these types of "true" premises is problematic, nerveless dangerous.

So what is going on when these arguments are put forward? If the "true" premise is irrelevant to the conclusion, then those who support it may need to either defend WHY a certain premise is, in fact, relevant to the conclusion they sustain, through probability, or quit relying on these types of arguments to make common denominator claims about race and gender in America. Hi Ho to that.
* * *

2010-03-12T21:51:00.001-08:00

1) At the philosophy conference in uptown Charlotte, all morning I help register professors and students; I hand them a name tag and give them a hard time when they mispronounce my name. I send them in the correct direction towards their prospective presentations. I smile a lot. I arrange books that are on sale for eight dollars. I put my hair up, and get bored. I put my hair down and leave my bangs up. I get to pick a free book from the Fordham University Press stand and grab one titled “Thinking in Dark Times.” I like to pretend that I am a “thinker” in “dark times” but I know better than to keep lying to myself.

2) I sit through Maurice Hamington’s paper on Care Ethics and ask him about normative issues. He gives me his card after the panel is over and I slip it inside my purse where I will never find it again. Later in the evening I sit through a panel about Immigration in America. I fall under a five minute love spell with a man who reads with a Mexican-American accent. He asks me where I am from after the panel and I lie to him and say “Brazil.” We talk about the movie “Brazil” instead but I am not listening to him because I am hungry, I am always hungry. As the conference ends I stop by the reception table, grab a handful of cookies, and stuff them inside my purse, to have for dinner later, with a glass of milk.

3) My car is parked one mile away from the hotel where the conference takes place. This was my attempt to avoid parking fees. I refuse a ride once the conference is over and walk one mile back to my car as the sun sets against the few skyscrapers of this unreal city. The streets get more deserted as Tremont turns into Elizabeth Avenue, and I walk under a bridge, under I77, and the rain falls over rooftops and floods the cracks in the pavement.
Here is when I realize that I have loved this world of Philosophy in all its enthralling arguments that lose meaning as soon as on leaves the classroom. I have loved the stuffiness of libraries and dust, the irrevocable proofs. And I am about to exchange it for a Masters in Spanish and bilingual education, for the certainty of a teaching job in NYC, because I am utterly tired of stuffing cookies inside my purse after conferences to relieve my hunger. Because being a "thinker" in "dark times" is not as charming as my hardcover book makes it to be.

4) I want to write a short piece, titled “Goodbye to All of That II” telling you, journal, that when I mention to others, to my parents, how things are not working out in Charlotte for me anymore. When I mention how I only get job offers to make coffee, or to watch other people’s kids. That most of my friends talk about moving, always, to NYC. That the Masters program in Philosophy is not the same anymore, and that I am tired of being poor. I don’t really mean that Charlotte is not working out for me anymore.

I don't.

What I mean is that I was very young in Charlotte, and at some point things stopped glistening, and the fond memories began decreasing. And the sleepy rhythm of the south ceased, and I am just not that young anymore.

That's all I mean.
* * *

Not for the Light-Hearted

2010-03-03T22:10:00.000-08:00

This is a post to warn anybody out there who is planning to apply to graduate school next year, that unless you are prepared to endure under extreme exhaustion, stress, and anxiety for a period of at least six months. Unless you are prepared to spend $300 minimum on GRE exams, and at least $1000 total in application fees. Unless you are able to hold your job, and your current schoolwork load, while also having to chase professors around for letters of recommendation, while editing your writing sample all at the same time. Unless you are willing to loose at least ten pounds in weight, 300 hours of sleep, and all your friends (cause you won’t have time to see them) then, I’m warning you, don’t even try. The graduate school application process is only worth it if:

1)You would like to go to graduate school, but your entire happiness and personal identity does not depend on you getting accepted somewhere.
2)You have a back up plan in case you don’t get into a program.
3)Other professors besides the one who understands your field confirm that you are actually a strong candidate for a graduate program.
4)You are not going through the worst emotional crack up in your life while also going through this application process, and holding a job, and holding a load of schoolwork, and having no car for a month.
5)You explore with time in advance what programs would really suit you, instead of judging a graduate school by the state it is located in, and most reasonably (to you)the weather in that state.

The graduate school application process is usually not worth it if:

1)You are not sure how good your writing sample is, but you are desperate to get out of your town or city, and a PhD program sounds like a good ticket out of all your problems.
2)You are trying to prove something to somebody.
3)Your personal life is a mess, and yet you convince yourself that you are capable of making reasonable judgments. Some of these involve: Forgetting to attach your writing sample in one of the applications, sending your GRE scores to the wrong schools codes, mentioning names of professors you would “love to work with” whom are not part of the department anymore. Deciding a graduate school is the best match for you because you would enjoy the sunny weather of the state where it is located at.
4)You are doing this because your parents want you to get your PhD so that they save you from becoming a Spanish High school teacher, like them. Even if becoming a high school Spanish teacher is something you wouldn’t mind doing, as long as you could do other things on the side.

But if you are stubborn like me, and want to try it out anyway, please ignore all my advice and be prepared for the longest of months of your life. Once the deadlines are over and the waiting period begins, be prepared to feel the urge to check your e-mail 50 times a minute to see if any school has a response for you. Be prepared to postpone every single thing that could have potentially happened in your life, because you are putting your life on hold until you get a response from these schools. Be prepared to compete with 300 other students for 5 slots. Be prepared for running into your colleagues and pretending you are happy for them when they tell you how they got into, not one, but two PhD programs already, with full funding, while all you have gotten are rejection letters. Be prepared to get an acceptance letter from a somewhat ok rated graduate school, only to find out that there is no funding for you. Be prepared to get into a M.A program at a school you really like, to find out that there is no funding for you.
This is to say that applying to graduate school, is not for the light hearted people.

I’m ending this post with my favorite rejection responses posted by others, and cut and pasted from “The Grad Café Blog,” an online journal that I have gotten used to checking at least twice a day, with my commentary included.

1) Purdue UniversityPhilosophy, PhD. Rejected via Website on 3 Mar 2010A3 Mar 2010: “Well, screw you too.”

2) University Of Colorado At Boulder Philosophy, PhD. Rejected via E-mail on 3 Mar 20103 Mar 2010: “At least last time I applied, I was on the waitlist. How fickle these schools are!”

3) University Of Colorado At Boulder Philosophy, PhD. Rejected via postal service on 3 Mar 20103 Mar 2010: Shredded the letter to pieces that went inside my hamster’s cage.

4) New York University (NYU) Philosophy, PhD. Accepted via E-mail on 3 Mar 2010: “Some of the contributors to philosophicalgourmet, along with faculty at NYU, agreed that I would be accepted if they could watch me get fucked by a donkey. I wasn't hip on that at first, but Brian Leiter gave me a tube of AstroGlide... FOR FREE. So I got in. Good luck to everyone else, though.”

And you start getting used to the pain of rejection…

5) University Of Southern California (USC) Accounting, PhD. Rejected via E-mail on 3 Mar 2010: didn't hurt as much as the previous 6 rejections ---Numbed.

A lot of people who got rejected to Chapel Hill got the same generic, personalized e-mail, and thought it was really personalized for each of them, cute…

6) University Of North Carolina (UNC)Philosophy, PhD. Rejected via E-mail on 1 Mar 2010: Nice letter from Geoff...

7) University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC)Philosophy, PhD. Rejected via E-mail on 1 Mar 201o: I almost felt bad for Geoff having to write the letter. He's a nice guy.

8) University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC)Philosophy, PhD. Rejected via E-mail on 1 Mar 2010: The rejection was not all bad news. The rejection letter implies that Geoff (Sayre-McCord) and I are on a first-name basis. Don't be sad about not accepting me, Geoff. Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight...

If it’s not enough to have to check your e-mails every five minutes during the day, guess what?

9) University Of Virginia Biomedical Engineering, PhD. Rejected via E-mail on 1 Mar 2010: "They send rejections in midnight.. " :(((((

10) University Of Virginia (UVA)Biomedical Engineering, PhD. Rejected via E-mail on 1 Mar 201o: They send reject in midnight...

Some people get creative!

11) New York University Philosophy, PhD (F10)Rejected via Other on 4 Mar 2010: had finally found the perfect sandwich. Ham, turkey, cheddar and provolone cheese, lettuce, tomato, sprouts, mustard and submarine dressing. Delicious. As I went to refill my drink, I see a shady, scraggly man run over to my table, and finish the last few bite of my heavenly sandwich. I begin to protest this when I notice that it is none other than Brian God Damn Leiter. Grinning, he begins inching towards the door, looks me straight in the eyes, and shouts so that all in the restaurant can hear him, “No one will ever believe you!!” and walks out. Later in the day, I received word from NYU that, due to recent developments, I would not be offered a position within the department.

And there is always the Christian scholar, with an anger problem…

12) Notre Dame University Theology, PhD Rejected via Other, on 2 Mar 2010: I got rejected but they will get rejected too, by GOD, as he closes the doors of heaven and sends them all to HELL.

Wow...

2010-02-03T21:46:00.001-08:00

1) I take a graduate class once a week, in the evenings, called "Feminist Methods." Here, I read a variety of philosophers and social critics who publish works telling me that, as a woman, I am the other. That under a Hegelian master/slave dialectic, I am the slave. That under structuralist binaries, I am the opposite of rational, the opposite of transcendent, that I am un-intelligible, that my identity is not a unity but rather fragmented. That under anti-essentialist accounts of gender, my gender is performative, that my sex is performative, that my gender is a non-essential social construction, that my gender may be accounted for through the Wittgensteinian idea of family resemblances. That I am an exchange object, that I can essentialize my gender for political purposes, that I am embodied, that even as a lesbian I may not be able to escape patriarchy, that patriarchy is not just economical oppression, that patriarchy is deeper than economical oppression. That my fragmented identity can only be made intelligible through an institution that validates my intelligibility as a mother or wife. That if I am none of these I am fragmented again, and thus, irrational.
And then I recall how I laughed when my father told me that Philosophy had a schizophrenic character to it, but I am not laughing anymore.

2) I got my first rejection letter today. All I have to say is that I have accepted the reality of staying in Charlotte for one more year, and completing my MA in this city... But boy, I just know it's going to be a long year.

2010-01-31T11:59:00.000-08:00

To my sister:
You think of me when you hear a song that I might like and might want to listen to in repeat, on and on until it makes you so sick it’s not your favorite song anymore. You think of me when you find a photo of me or when you are alone or lonely on the subway and a girl with uneven bangs and dark skin, with overdone blush, sits beside you and you pretend that it’s me. You think of me when you wake up feeling sixteen again, wanting me to make you a sandwich and then pick you up from high school one hour early, so that I make strong eye contact with your guy friends, clumsily trying to flirt with all of them at the same time. You think of me when your boyfriend says do you remember how your sister was so crazy? And you say Not at all instead of Yes because you secretly had fun when I grabbed you from the legs and dragged you outside of my room. Because this gave you an excuse to open the window and shout I hate her! from the thirteenth floor, while I threw light objects at you in the hallway while the cats hid in corners. You think of me when you are alone taking the bus in Buenos Aires and a girl with sandals and curly hair sits beside you and you pretend it is me and that you are sixteen again.

To my ex-boyfriend
You think of me when you put my books in a box that you will return to me eventually. You think of me when you park in the opposite lot and enter the philosophy department from the opposite door to avoid running into me. That’s pretty much all that you needed to change in order to forget me. You save on gas and movie theater tickets and you get to spend more time alone, reading theology and getting closer to God. You say to yourself look how better I am, when you are wondering if my absence really makes a difference.

To Tom Waits
It’s too late to get you to make love to me. You are five steps away from death and I am twenty five living in a 3 bedroom house with leaks somewhere in the bible-belt of the South.

Not even the rain can/wash/away/ghosts

2010-01-24T22:05:00.000-08:00

It’s a rainy Sunday night and Hannah and I have readings to finish. We sit in a corner at a near empty Caribou coffee shop and decide to stay there until it closes. I am reading the first three chapters of my “Ethics of Public Policy” book. Later when I arrive home, I will reach for the class syllabus and find that I was actually supposed to read chapters five and six of this book, but I don’t know this yet. Having read the wrong chapters; I will have to work on my class presentation tomorrow afternoon, while babysitting for a one year and a three year old, but right now I believe I am being productive.

Hannah is spread on the couch taking notes, my hair is still wet from the rain, I have no socks on, the two skinny male employees are chatting behind the register, and a man walks in talking on his cell phone. His jeans look dirty; his dark eyes poke out from over the bulges of his cheeks. He has some facial hair that makes him look recklessly unkempt, a jean jacket over his old shirt. Five minutes after he orders his coffee, he begins yelling at the employees. I can hear everything he says and Hannah already looks annoyed. The man mentions how the espresso shot is too expensive, how he is being overcharged. He accuses the employees of wanting to keep one dollar in their pockets, and threatens to call the corporate office. He keeps getting louder and louder the nicer the employees treat him. Yes sir, no problem, we will make your coffee again. Here is the receipt; this was the price of your espresso. The little power this man gets from these young children of corporate America, the more he enjoys it. He makes an employee get him a mug, and then he decides that he wants a paper cup. He asks for creamer, pours it carelessly, leaving traces of white liquid all over the coffee counter and writes down the employees names to keep threatening them.

Hannah and I look at each other. We stare at that man who is giving us plenty of reasons to feel uncomfortable. We stare because we think that if we stare at him enough, he might just decide to leave the employees alone. The man does not leave them alone. Instead, he sits at the table in front of the register and threatens them with his gaze, until one of them turns around facing the wall to rub out the frustration from his eyes. I begin to wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that both employees are gay.

Hannah wants to get up and tell this man to leave: “OK that’s enough, I’m going to go and say something!” She gets up but I make her sit down again. I don’t trust people who threaten and act angry, and I don’t want to deal with this fear tonight. But Hannah, who is younger, who is less frightful than I am, raises her voice and mentions to this man that we are trying to read, and that he needs to stop making a scene. She is louder than he is, and she is not afraid of him.

The man, who was acting so tough in front of the employees, appears to be slightly embarrassed now, as Hannah keeps staring down at him. I stare at this man too, but only because I don't want him to get any closer to Hannah. Only out of fear because I feel uncomfortable and it’s Sunday night, and the situation makes me feel helpless. And I’ve felt painfully helpless for a long period of time, and now that I have past this stage, I recognize this feeling, and it shames me. I am ashamed of my helplessness. I am ashamed of having felt vulnerable in the past, so I stare back at this man to make up for the times I did not stand up for myself.

I am proud of my friend Hannah who has a kind heart, yet no tolerance for other people's cruelty. It takes me back to a saying my father would always repeat to me, whenever I would go to him for advice “Be gentle as a dove, and sharp as a serpent.” The man finally leaves the store; his face is red, his eyes still poking out of the bulges of his face. One of the employees is still upset, his face still against the wall, but the man is gone.

Hannah smiles at me with triumph, but also with dismay for the behavior of this man. Hannah can now go back to her reading and I do the same. But ten minutes later, something about my hair being still wet and the gaze of that man still fervent in the store makes me cold, and I leave the coffee shop, to go back home and wash away ghosts of Sunday under the hot running water.

Nude as the News

2010-01-16T20:51:00.000-08:00

Despite my unwillingness to start dating again, people have asked me if I am either “single, or unattached,” with the ulterior motive of going out on a date with me. My friends, some who are dating, have also had people ask them the same question.
So I’ve ideated a boyfriend pre-screening form for all my single friends, with suggested questions they can ask, which hopefully might help them sort out whom to hang out with and whom to avoid.

PRE-SCREENING FORM
Name: ____________________________
Relationship status: _____________
ONLY SINGLE APPLICANTS ARE ELIGIBLE
Contact info (please enter a phone number and/or e-mail address): ________________

1. Do you weight less than me? _Yes _No

If yes, do you only finish half your plate of food when you eat? _Yes _No

If yes, do you make comments about how much I eat when I finish my entire plate of food and you don't? _Yes _No

If yes, do you secretly think I’m fat because you weight less than me? _Yes _No

2. Will you cheat on me?_Yes _No

If yes, will you act whiny when I ignore your phone calls?_Yes _No

If yes, will you confess to me that you don’t like the person you cheated on me with, only because you want to keep both of us around?_Yes _No

3. Suppose that you and I are in a relationship and you decide to move somewhere to pursuit a career of choice. How do you communicate this to me?

a) You don’t. You dump me via an e-mail and apply to ten jobs out of the state, assuming that I wouldn’t have followed you anyway.
b) You sit down for a talk, tell me what it is that you want to do, and ask me if I’m ok with accommodating myself to that. And also ask me if I’m ok with a long distance relationship.
c) You sit down with me for a talk, ask ME what it is that I want to do, and tell me if you are ok with accommodating to that.

4. Suppose we are dating and you move out of the state and dump me, but come back every holiday vacation to see your family. Do you:

a) Call me up on those specific holidays, and ask me if I want to hang out with you, despite the fact that you dumped me a year ago, and you are only calling because you are back in town and bored?
b) Casually run into me at the local hang out, and confide in me, saying that you don’t like your new girlfriend, only because you want to keep us both around?
c) If you do this? WHY THE HELL DO YOU DO THIS?! DO YOU THINK IT’S OK TO COME AROUND ONCE A YEAR AND TRY TO HOOK UP WITH ME? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!!

3. Suppose you and I are in a relationship and we have a discussion about philosophy, politics or religion, in which it is clear that we disagree. How do you react to the fact that I disagree with you?

a)Assume that it means that we are 100% incompatible, and that we don’t have a future together because I have my opinion, and you have yours. Begin planning how to dump me, most probably, via an e-mail.
b)Demand that I read books on the subject you defend, and bring it up as often as possible until I agree that you are 100% right.
c)Accept that we will disagree on some things and take the fact that I am arguing with you to mean, simply, that I am stating my opinion, and that my opinion is different than yours.

4. Suppose that I am in a relationship with you and we have a discussion, this time in a public place, such as a park, where I end up crying. How do you react to the fact that I am acting emotional?

a) React by telling me that I have ruined your day, walk towards your car, get inside of it without waiting for me, and drive away.
1. If yes to a) WHY DO YOU DO THIS? WHY DO YOU HAVE AN ANGER PROBLEM AND THINK THAT YOU CAN JUST LEAVE ME IN A PARK AND DRIVE AWAY, HUH? WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?
b) Give me books about “Women and PMS Symptoms, and the Men that Love Them,” hug me, and let me act emotional for five minutes, for God’s sake.
c) Accept that I am different than you, and that my ways of handling emotions are very different than yours.

5.Suppose that I have dated you for a few weeks and I am at your apartment, do you:

a)Only let me in as far as the living room, because the rest of the house is a mess and you are a slob who does not clean up?
b)Lead me directly to the bedroom because you want to show me your collection of star wars life saviors.
c)Lead me directly to your basement, because your mom and dad are trying to sleep in the room upstairs, and they don’t know their son has a girl over.

6.Do you have pictures of you, playing with your star wars life saviors, on your facebook? _Yes _No

7.Suppose I meet you at a venue and you are eighteen years old, but I don’t know this. Do you:
a)Try to have sex with me regardless the fact that I’m seven years older than you?
b)Try to hit on all my friends, also seven years older than you, once I reject you for your age.
If yes to either a) or b) WHY ARE YOU EVEN AT A VENUE IF YOU ARE EIGHTEEN. You ARE MAKING ME FEEL OLD, JUST STOP IT AND LEAVE!

8.Do you ever wRiTe oR tExT lIkE tHiS, spell definitely as 'definately,' or use apostrophes inappropriately? __ Yes __ No

9.Do you listen to Classic Rock? _Yes _No

2010-01-03T20:15:00.000-08:00

1) Its fifteen degrees below zero in NYC and tomorrow evening, I have to go all the way from Queens to Manhattan in this cold, to tutor Spanish to Steven Spielberg’s daughter. Steven Spielberg’s daughter is eight years younger than me, and has her own apartment near Central Park. Meanwhile, I’ve never lived with less than two people, but what matters is quality, not quantity. Steven Spielberg’s daughter is interested in Don Quixote, and in getting into UCLA, because she wants to go to college somewhere sunny, with beaches, with tanned people, very far away from the NYC weather. Meanwhile, I’m applying to graduate programs in NYC, because apparently I think I can handle this weather. Steven Spielberg’s daughter is my mother’s high school Spanish student, and she has a real name too, that I won’t mention due to celebrity privacy issues. Steven Spielberg’s ex wife is paying me a lot of money an hour to tutor Spanish to her daughter, so that she gets a good grade in her Language class, and gets into UCLA. But maybe I shouldn’t mention this either, because now my friends are going to think I have money and say: “You owe me for this time, and for that time I paid for your drinks and for that time too. And how about donating any extra money to charity?”

2) You know how I manage to handle this weather? I play mind games and imagine I am some hot detective from Florida who is on a mission in Alaska. That is, in my imagination and under my rags, I am actually really good looking, but over my huge winter coat and upon the sock covering my entire face, I am just another homeless lady. I believe in my mind that this is my original idea, but in reality this theme is from a really bad movie I watched once, about a detective in Alaska who is trying to solve a crime. I’ve noticed how sometimes at parties, a guy will try to show off to a group of people by narrating an “original movie script” to them, something they believe they spontaneously came up with. But then the story is exactly like some famous action movie that everybody has already seen. People are so predictably spontaneous, even Steven Spielberg.

3) Allen Ginsberg once wrote in some biography that one could get fat by eating Oreos. He mentioned that even if you didn’t eat anything but Oreos all day, you would still get fat. Guess what I’ve been eating all day? Half a pack of Oreos. You see, I’ve been acting like a skinny person lately. That is, skinny people are always “too nervous” to eat, and they are always too neurotic, or too stressed to finish their entire plate of food. Boo. Skinny people used to get on my nerves, so I always tried feeding them, hoping this would stop making them act so neurotic and stressed, so skinny. I love feeding skinny people because I feel like I’m caring for a starving child. But then I started acting like a stressed, neurotic skinny person myself. And eating like a skinny person was getting on my nerves, but I was too stressed and moody to do anything about it. I mean, I have all these Italian genes, and not enough flesh to go with them, so I thought: I’ve been acting like a moody depressed skinny person, and I’m sick of it. Pass me the Oreos and let me be happy. Yes, happiness is a box of Oreos don’t you judge me.

4) I used to think that to get a good job you just had to be well qualified. I also used to think that to get into a graduate program, all you needed was a good writing sample that showed you could address a philosophical issue clearly and successfully. I used to think people would select you, for a job or for a program, based on your merit. This is why I spent so much time working on my writing sample. But this is Humbug. Apparently, a big part of succeeding in life is learning how to kiss ass. Screw merit.
Kissing Ass applies to your boss, your supervisor, your professors, and also ( I'm recently learning) graduate program committees. Ever since last summer, I have been introduced to professors whom, if I successfully kiss ass, might have enough influence to get me into their program. When people recommend me to e-mail professors who work in my programs of choice, what they are implicitly recommending me, is to kiss their ass.
At this point and knowing that rejection rate is %80, I am still wondering why do I even have to explain myself with a cover letter! Just read my writing sample which I have spent time on, and if you like how I do philosophy, fine, and if you don't, then spare me the trouble of having to meet you, shake hands with you, tell you that I like your work, e-mail you to remind you that I like your work, e-mail you to ask you for a letter of recommendation, kiss your ass. I have other things to do over here. Like write in this journal, or read chick-literature for example. But also, when I get rejected, I may just wonder if it was due to my lack of philosophical abilities, my lack of ass-kissing abilities, or a combination of the two.

5) My sister is wearing two sweaters and a knitted hat to go to sleep; this is how cold it is in NYC. My sister was telling me that for people who are from Chicago; this weather is flip-flop and Bermuda weather. I guess you don’t know cold until you know Chicago. But then again, you don't know Alaska until you spend the night in Flushing, Queens.

A Child's Christmas in Buenos Aires

2010-01-01T16:41:00.000-08:00

My mom told me this story about my niece in Argentina, and I thought it was sweet in all its innocence, so I’m writing it here. Ana’s mother (my sister) has a Catholic background, while her husband comes from a non-religious background. When she turned five, my sister who had been talking to Ana about Jesus, decided to take her to a church in Buenos Aires for the first time. “We are going to the house of the Lord!” was the theme of the day. So Ana, excited to get to see the Lord, put on her best dress and shoes, tied her blonde curls away from her face, painted her little nails pink and held my sister’s hand all the way o the church. There was no mass when they got there but there where plenty of sculptures and images of a crucified Christ, and a suffering Virgin Mary, crying at the feet of her son, the usual guilt-trip oriented Catholic stuff that we see a lot in Argentina. Lighted candles with melting wax, holy water at the entrance, the smell of wine mixed with salt and lavender, the usual James Joyce-Dubliners-catholic decorative items, etc.

But Ana was enjoying herself, until she sat down with her mother in front of the altar and waited anxiously for God to come out and greet her. It was his house after all, was it not? After a while of silence, Ana began to yell “God! God?” with her five years of youth and her innocence placed at the altar, she was only waiting for God to stop being rude. She wanted a face, she wanted to see. “Mom, this man is very rude!” she complained to my sister on the way back home, “We waited for him and he didn’t come!” “Maybe he lives in some other church! Maybe this was the wrong house Mom! What a rude man!” “Where is he?!”

And at this young age, and given her upbringing, Ana will probably hear two different answers to this question. Her mother will tell her that even though she can’t see him, Ana will feel God in her heart. And that God loves her unconditionally and that through the gospel, she will learn to love the way Jesus did. Her mother will tell Ana that there is an ultimate truth to God, and that part of her life’s mission should be to get closer to this Truth.

Her father on the other hand, may tell her that Truth is at times relative, that she should believe in principles that help her get along in life, without constraining her mind, and that she should not fall into dogmatism. He may tell her that although some people want to look for ultimate truths in their lives, such as a God, others are ok with the certainty generated by a community. Her dad might say that if some truths don’t work anymore for society, then we can discard them, and that this may only be for the better.

Both her mother and her father’s teachings will, hopefully, only strengthen Ana’s perspective, and her critical skills as a religious or as a non-religious person, whatever she chooses to be. I don’t write to take sides tonight (I spent way too much time debating about this in the past.) But what is interesting is my niece’s initial disappointment at such an early age. This disappointment is linked to her want of an easy answer, and a fast relief to her anxiety. How many countless times have I myself experienced this disappointment? Ana, with her five years of age and her ruffled skirts, her childlike manners, wanted God himself to confirm to her perceptually that there was a God. Because in future times of trouble, she would then be sure that this God would back her up regardless.

My niece’s anxiety at the church, related to her inability to see, reminds me of the time I took a Metaphysics class. One of the first themes we had to cover was Aristotelian substance, which is basically a non-changing, intrinsic aspect of being which we don’t see (we only “see” the changing aspects of being). Fine, but when I commented to another of my professors how interesting that Metaphysics class was, this is what he answered: “Metaphysical Substance?! There is nothing such as a substance Carolina! Where is it? I can’t touch it and I can’t see it, so why do we need a substance? Obviously, he was a pragmatist and a pretty cranky one too. He was not a metaphysician, but who can blame him for wondering? Who can blame him for, like Ana with God, having once felt disappointment due to lack of direct proof that it was there and that it was successfully working?

Something I know from experience is that whatever path my niece chooses from here, in faith or outside of it, will probably be equally as arduous. But hopefully she will pick the one that, besides orienting her in spiritual or earthly matters, will also allow her to handle life’s disappointments as best as possible, so goes it.

The Grudge

2009-12-30T19:45:00.000-08:00

Talking to my neighbor A last night, I discovered he is one more in the list of those who think that women “hold a grudge” longer than men do. Trust me; I’m sure he is right. If we assume that this term is connected to a type of emotional response, and that emotional responses are linked to the female gender, and that this response may include feelings such as resentment, sadness, lots of yelling, passive-aggressive bitterness and victimization, then I agree with A: I think that women are able to hold grudges against men, and that they are not scared of holding them.

But I also think women are less worried about dwelling through their “grudge” and of talking to others about “their grudge” (friends, therapists, their mother, their father, ministers, support groups and whoever else wants to listen.) And that in the long run, these women who “hold a grudge” manage to successfully work their way out of it, strengthening their character in the process, even if it takes them time. I may be too optimistic, but I would like to think that this is mostly the case. So it may also be the case that “holding a grudge” the way women generally do, is better than ignoring the grudge and blocking it, or pretending the grudge is not there and focusing on other things instead, like men generally do. So A is right, but for different reasons than the ones he may assume. That is, the problem may be that men don’t know how to effectively “hold a grudge.”

This brings me, again, to my APA afternoon session of the day, the “Women in Philosophy” conference. Gladly, there was a feminist man in the Panel, Tom Digby, who was presenting a paper about the issue of Manhood. I think that his position may help to understand why it is that men don’t “hold grudges” as much as women do. Assuming that a “grudge” is a highly emotional, passive aggressive, reaction to a circumstance or event, predominately held by women, then men don’t hold grudges because they don’t react like women do. Instead, men, who are generally trained since boyhood to be less emotional, to “suck it up,” and to “quit acting like sissies,” are also socially trained to “suck up” the grudge. So Digby, fighting oppression from the other side of the gender sphere, argues that the conception of manhood is damaging to males. Here I can add that ignoring “grudges” may also, in the long term, damage our fellows of the other sex, and indirectly harm women. I’ll make my point shortly.

Digby in his book "Male Trouble" (2003) argues that our cultural ideas of manhood are deeply influenced by the idea of the warrior. This ideal is characterized by a though, hypersexual male who can selectively focus in a war zone, can suspend his capacity to feel compassion for others and can only express “manly” emotions such as anger (so feelings of vulnerability here, are not “manly.”) Because this is a cultural idea, it means that boys are not born fixed in masculinity, but are rigorously trained through youth, often through humiliation by other boys or peers, to be men. What is interesting about Digby’s argument is that he explains how empathy, compassion and the tendency to nurture are biologically grounded in both sexes, but males are more prone to give up these qualities as they strengthen their “warrior” tendencies instead. So what is at stake here is men’s mental and physical health. Digby uses an example of NFL players who are now dealing with PTSD issues and physical deterioration after having spent their best years knocking each other down, and recalling how suicide rates in males are larger than in females because they are powerless over their vulnerability. Also, Digby argues, a male trained socially to be a “real man” would, like a warrior, be unaffected by the suffering of others, because a warrior must suspend his capacity to feel anything for his enemy in war, as to kill him without any doubt. Showing compassion would make “the real man” a sissy, or “a woman,” which is derogatively, the opposite of a man.

Even though none of my male friends are really like this, which is why they are my friends, I do notice that the social sphere and even the media still, explicitly or implicitly, portrays manhood through the idea of “the warrior.” Although most guys are smart enough to challenge this conception, there are some notions that are still deeply embedded in their sociality. Which brings me back to my initial point: Men hold grudges differently than women do, but maybe they could learn something from women. Generally, men either suppress their feelings, having been trained since boyhood that vulnerability is not “manly,” or they reveal them through anger, which is the only “manly” form of expression. And intermediate between these two is harder to find for men, because since boyhood, nobody has taught them how to express their vulnerability, for example. Women on the other hand, can more easily express vulnerability because they where not socially trained under the “warrior” ideal.

So men’s potential happiness is delimited by this notion of manhood, embedded in them since youth, and constrains their capacity to care for themselves and for others. According to Digby, a male raised with a “warrior” sociality, is not only more capable of committing domestic violence to the people who love him the most, but also, is most likely to commit suicide unable to work through his feelings. In conclusion, if men are liberated from this social constrain, then women will be one step less oppressed. That is, if women are less prone to suffer domestic violence, rape, emotional abuse etc. by men trained under this “warrior” ideal, they will gain equality and more freedom. And the more equal are men to women, the better for feminism. So letting men express their vulnerability would involve changing the norms of sociality that train them into becoming men through the idea of “the warrior.” By getting rid of this "manly" ideal, women may suffer less abuse from men, less domestic violence, and thus, be one step less oppressed. And men may even be happier overall as a gender.

Moral of the story, let men hold a grudge as much as they want to, maybe even for as long as women do. But let them do it more effectively. Let them talk, cry, dwell, instead of getting angry about it or suppressing it. It would only contribute to the achievement of equality, and this, hopefully, benefits everybody.

Bad Romance

2009-12-29T20:39:00.000-08:00

When I think of all my bad relationships, I tend to blame it on incompatibility. When I think of the relationship between Art and Philosophy, I also think of incompatibility. This is why I still have fun with this discipline; I can always test my arguments on real life examples. Let me explain, my morning session at the APA Conference today was on Aesthetics. Precisely, about the relationship between Art and Philosophy. More specifically, a drag. Not because these should not work together, but rather due to the way these were forcefully joined. Carlos Garcia from Buffalo State University (NY) was attempting to link art and philosophy by giving us a philosophical interpretation of the art of Carlos Estevez, a Cuban artist. He first provided a definition of art that was in nature essentialist through two conditions: 1) art has to be an artifact, and 2) art has to generate an aesthetic experience. This definition is at a first glance already flawed, because it wouldn’t be able to include much of conceptual art. But beyond this, because nobody cares about defining art except for philosophers. But what is interesting about his project is what is at risk in this relationship.

That is, why are we even trying to constrain the artwork to the cognitive claims of philosophy? Because, I argue, we still want to problematically hold on to the concept of autonomy in art. Garcia, claims that art is not reducible to philosophy, and yet by giving us a “philosophical” interpretation of the work of Estevez, he constrains the ontology of the work to the realm of logic and perception, reducing art to philosophy. What is at risk? For the sake of keeping the autonomy, at the level of philosophical definition, the historical dimension of the work is dissolved. So here we have another form of Iconoclasm in Aesthetics: The more philosophy we put into the work of art, the more distant we get from experiencing the work in its ontological completeness. That is, the less we get to bring in the historical dimension, which allows us to bring in the ethical dimension of the work. Clearly by looking at these artworks, if an installation by a Cuban exile who addresses violence and suffering is not political, historical, if it does not have an ethical dimension, then what is it? If it is not ontologically complete then it’s not art, it’s just philosophy. Talk about a one sided relationship over here.

Then again, to give philosophy a break, I went to the artist’s website to further explore his works, and this is what his statement of purpose said:
“In my art I answer the question, what is a human? What is happiness? What is freedom?”
So now, finally enough, we have an artist who believes that his art can answer philosophical questions. It can solve the problem of personal identity, free-will and also somehow give us a universal definition of what happiness is.
Not only are philosophers playing artists, but now artists are playing philosophers. Garcia’s project is just another example of scholarly work where art and philosophy have to compete for first prize by dissolving each other in the process. After sitting through this panel, all I can say is that Philosophy and Art needs to establish a better theoretical relationship. They are both pretty neurotic disciplines, but they need each other, because what is of the philosophy of art without art? And how can art answer philosophical questions without philosophy? Can’t join them together, can’t separate them.
Basically, another story of all my bad relationships, another bad romance. Maybe this is why I like Aesthetics.

2009-12-28T18:03:00.000-08:00

1) If one really wants to understand why analytic philosophers have turned Art into one big logical problem of indiscernibility, all one has to do is walk around the Contemporary Art section at the Met. Here, we can see so many amazing art objects that are no different from their mere real counterparts. My own personal favorite of the evening: Dan Flaven, who put up a fluorescent light in a corner of the museum, and called the piece “Fluorescent Light.” I love it, I’m not being sarcastic.

2) So I can’t afford Ballet classes in Manhattan anymore. This constrains me to the art of practicing Pointe work at home. I usually use the living room, because I have enough space to jump. But I also like this area because I have view to the building in front of ours, where the neighbors decorated their window with Christmas lights. I like how the colored lights look from a distance, always glistening under the snow. I check my posture by looking for my reflection in the window, unaware if another person could be looking back at me. Mom keeps telling me that there is probably some neighbor, really bored, who could be spying on my ballet class. She could be right, people do seem pretty bored in the evenings here in Queens.
I did not believe her but now I do. Last night, before going to sleep I walked into the kitchen leaving the lights off. While I was getting some water, I looked through the window at the neighbor’s Christmas lights, always on and shining in the cold of winter. There was a figure moving, probably a small boy or girl, and it was twirling around and jumping, apparently striking some basic Ballet positions. Apparently I had a spy. The figure was a mere shadow from the window, but it was dancing and it appeared to look for her reflection in the building in front of hers. Now I was spying at the child, but it was only fair to admire her jumping and turning to the Christmas lights in winter, if she had done so too.

3) I went to the American Philosophical Association Conference this morning and it revived my strange love affair for this city. I don’t know if it revived my love affair with Philosophy, yet, but I have to say New York really does have so many resources and research opportunities, grants, fellowships that one can make use of. And ideas, sometimes it really is good to hear ideas from other people…I haven’t heard ideas like these in such a long, long time. On one side of the hotel; we have a panel addressing post-medieval solutions to the problem of Being. In another floor, the Contemporary Feminist Continental Philosophy panel discussing Foucault and oppression while on the other side of that room, the Radical Philosophy Association is debating Marxism. In another floor we have the panel of Christian Philosophers, on the room besides them, the Society of Existentialist Philosophy. It is hard to decide what panel to attend, and sometimes it is hard not to get lost within so many (sometimes incompatible, but hopefully reconcilable) ideas. But one thing I know is that the more exciting I tend to find these conferences, the duller do I find real life, real jobs, and real people. Which obviously goes both ways… that is, the duller real people, real life, and real employers find ME.

Open Letters

2009-12-27T15:51:00.000-08:00

Reading the New York Times this morning (I’m slowly transforming into a white person) I found an interesting article about a publishing company. Open Letters is a small press affiliated with the University of Rochester that publishes nothing but literature in translation. And this is just a really good idea. Starting out with the correct assumption that English speaking readers don’t have full access to voices and viewpoints from around the world, these translators want to change that. That is, they are trying to change the conditions of recognizability, so that Westerners can begin to acknowledge other voices. Their recent publications include “Season of Ash” by Mexican novelist Jorge Volvi, Brazilian political poetry, and an anthology of eastern European writers titled “The Wall in my Head.”

Open Letters and their recent project brings me to think the issue of acknowledgment in aesthetics. Once the authorial voices gain representation through translation, the public gets to acknowledge these formerly un-heard, un-read voices. No doubt that this is a great idea, given that there is a set of readers out there that’s very interested in translations and international literature, and is not getting what it wants. But it is also a great idea to specifically want to translate social critiques, political poetry, and literature that addresses suffering and the perils of violence. The issue of literary accessibility takes me to Judith Buttler, whom I have been reading these holidays. Buttler addresses photography related to violence in her work, but I believe the issue is the same with political works of literature. It is not exactly true that an excess of images of suffering makes us callous and passive towards these ethical/political issues. It is rather the opposite; the dominant media carefully selects and filters the images we get to see, excluding anything that may have more than a superfluous meaning. This is evident in times of war for example. As Buttler argues, it is in the realm of representation that humanization and dehumanization are confirmed endlessly.

Buttler’s assumption that whoever can be represented stands more of a chance of being regarded as human, while those that are not represented, are at risk of being de-humanized can be used in the realm of photography but also in literature. What this publishing company is doing then, at the level of recognition or representation, is allowing us to acknowledge and, thus, giving others the chance to represent themselves through the translation of these voices. I’m loosely interpreting Buttler over here, so bear with me, but if we fail to acknowledge due to a lack of translated political works, these voices and what they want to represent are at risk of loosing representation. Not just politically, but at an ontological level (because we don’t take into account their precariousness, vulnerability, interdependency etc. if we never get to read them.) So I think that when Buttler argues for more egalitarian norms of recognition at the level of representation in photography, we can also incorporate this view to the literary realm, where more egalitarian norms of recognition would demand for more translators that could help us gain more access to political literary works. So Open Letters press is not only translating but also allowing us to acknowledge, by giving us better, more egalitarian norms of recognition, how’s that for a good book deal.

Talking World War Blues

2009-12-26T19:31:00.001-08:00

I’m here in Queens for a couple of weeks tutoring Spanish, to later spend all I earn on graduate school application fees. I am, also, relying on my parents to proof read my cover letters, because all my professors (whom I have bothered enough already) are on Holiday vacations. Witnessing how my parents engage in this task, allows me to notice the difference between my father’s Christian protestant ethic and my mother’s Italian, war-survivor ethic, both which I have incorporated in my own life.
For example, when proof reading my cover letter, Dad mostly makes sure I put all my commas and capitalize words correctly. He also makes sure there is nothing exaggerated in my narrative. This is important because, knowing me; he also knows that I tend to make up fictions for whatever I lack in reality. So when I mention that I lived in NYC ever since we moved from Argentina, to sound more of a “native New Yorker,” my father reminds me that going to community college in CT may ruin the logical structure of that time line. Or when I mention that I am thoroughly impressed by the work of so and so, my father makes sure I have actually read their works before I state this. Because, to Dad, if one exaggerates or tells white lies regardless the circumstance, one will always suffer the consequences.
Also, this is an example of how my father reacts to the information in my cover letters for Philosophy programs:

Bill: “Queer Theory?! Why are you using the word ‘queer’ in your cover letter? Isn’t that an inappropriate word to use?”
Me: “Because I went to that seminar at Penn State, remember Dad? And we covered Contact Theory, but also Gender and Race Theory, and Queer Theory. Philosophy departments are OK with queer theory Dad, it makes me look cool. Plus, I’m not gay, if that’s your worry.”
Bill: “O.K, then maybe we should capitalize all these philosophy words, such as Structuralism, and Deconstruction.”
Me: “That’s fine, but then we are going to have to capitalize a lot of words.”
Bill: “You mention John Dewey!? Let me tell you, I’ve been working in the NYC Public school system for three years and there is nothing that Dewey has said that changed education one bit.”
Me: “Fine Dad, but I like his pragmatism in philosophy, just keep making sure my commas are in the right place.”

And this is what I always get from Dad who looks for certainty in every story, and who makes sure my terms are not inappropriate. Honestly, I’m glad I have his view to constrain me from going to the other side. ..Which leads me to my mother’s ethic.

My mother on the other hand is proof reading my cover letters for Spanish Literature programs. She is the one who taught me to use some fiction whenever we fall short on reality, and in my life I have mostly fallen short on reality. So I have used this whenever in need to sound more interesting, or cooler than what I really am, specifically in resumes and cover letters. Recently talking to my neighbor Austin (one of those people who likes to act) he mentioned how acting implies unlearning everything you already knew about the craft. This reminded me of what Helene Cixous says about writing, "To live, one must learn to lie, but to write one must learn how to unlie." So as opposed to a craft, which implies unlearning, or un-lying, what is interesting about reality is that to live one must know how to lie.* As opposed to my father’s strict honesty policy, my mother believes that if one doesn’t exaggerate some things, one eventually gets screwed over for being too honest anyway.

So I was brainstorming ideas on who to get a letter of recommendation from, and figured I should find at least one professor in Buenos Aires to write me a letter for this program. Being honest only got me two letters from professors in the U.S, and I needed one more. My mother, who studied in the University of Buenos Aires, contacted Roberto Ferro, her thesis adviser in Argentina. This is all great except that I have never worked personally with Ferro. While Dad would advice me to constrain the search to professors whom I have worked with before, my mother advised me to write an e-mail to Ferro. In it, I should ask him for a letter, promising that I would someday return the favor. In Argentina, my mother grew up practicing the art of borrowing and returning favors. You help me and I help you, because nobody else is going to help us anyway in this place, and nobody cares- so take that as an ethic.
This is the e-mail I wrote to Ferro:

“Dear Roberto, I read your latest work on Jacques Derrida and really enjoyed it. I’m applying to the Spanish program at Columbia University, and was wondering if you could write me a letter of recommendation. If I get in, I would love to have you as one of my thesis advisers in the future. Also, Mirta says Hi.”

Before I sent it, my mother looked at it. While Dad aims for certainty, mom makes sure the fiction is always coherent in its own narrative universe.

“Did you read his book?” she asks me
“No” I answer.
“Oh, OK, you misspelled this word. Also, don’t mention the word ‘future’, in Argentina nobody has the energy to be concerned about the future.
“OK. Thanks Mom.”

Two hours later, Roberto replies to my e-mail. Here is when I remember that this time of the year, in Argentina; everybody is out of work. Hanging in the middle of summer weather, beating the humidity under the breeze of their fans. I also know that Ferro, who directed the movie "Bolivia" is now also directing the movie "Paraguay" in his own apartment, so I’m assuming he’s been spending time inside his place a lot.

“Dear Caro, I just wrote you a letter for Columbia University, Hugs, Roberto.”

(The real version goes: "Caro, te mande la carta a Columbia. Un abrazo. Roberto.")

That was the last piece I needed to complete my Columbia University application: a letter from Buenos Aires from a film director who also teaches Spanish Literature, and I did it my mother’s way. In the absence of certainty, there are always plenty of doors to knock.

Obviously, getting accepted into any P.h.D program this year will be a whole different story, flooded in rejection letters.

But these two ways of doing things are the two resources I use when I am learning or un-learning. The Christian protestant ethic of my father keeping me sane and on the right path. But without the war-survivor ethic of my mother, the times I’ve fallen, the times my reality was way bleaker than my fiction... I would never be able to land back on my feet, never be able to find, somehow, that missing piece.

(* When I say that "to live, one must know how to lie," I'm not talking about cheating, deception or other things of that manner, I'm merely addressing exaggeration, and learning how to pull strings as a survival skill for some of us.)

Foucault and Barthes on Authorial Intent

2009-05-17T20:26:00.000-07:00

Roland Barthes writes eleven years earlier than Foucault about a similar subject. How do we interpret a text with or without recognizing that it has a specific author who created it? And what precisely is an author? Do we need one? Barthes argues that writing is the destruction of every voice, at every point of origin. In this space where all identity is lost, even the identity of the individual author, what we have to focus on is the reader’s role given that the origin of the author is not necessary anymore. This means that instead of a focus on the origin of the text, we would now focus on its destination (who reads it, and how, with what interpretation?) The term author seems to be closely linked with the term authority and Barthes wants to avoid it. Assigning an author to a text furnishes it with a final signified and closes the writing. His view is of an either-or manner: Either we have an author, thus a constrained final signified that prevents us to focus on the reader’s role, or we have a dead author which frees a text to limitless varieties of interpretation from its readers. It may be interesting to inquire on why Barthes is so set on connecting the author’s existence with a tyrannical one that governs upon the text. In his article we find references to how the explanation of the work is always sought to the man or woman who produced it, as if this were the voice of a single person confiding an ultimate secret to us. And although Barthes makes a point, I think that it is Foucault who, while arguing against him, carries this point further away into the universe of discourse.
Foucault addresses the question, what is an author? He excavates through the terrain that Barthes leaves and discovers how a certain number of notions that are intended to replace that privileged position of the author actually appear to preserve this same privilege and suppress the real meaning of his disappearance. For example, Barthes would “kill” the author and tell us that what we have left is solely the work. Foucault argues that the question about what a work is is just as problematic as the one of sustaining an author to a work. Another problem once the author “disappears” is that writing maintains a primal status. Not without rendering certain signs and signifiers that could be traced back to the author. So what is important is to locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance and watch the openings it uncovers. For example an author’s name is not simply an element in discourse, it performs a role and assures a classificatory function (I can read Foucault better if I know his biography and the other works he wrote, these other works go under his name, understood as works written by him) But what is important I believe, is that the author is not a free, independent spirit who is aware of transcendental truths. He is rather located inside a discursive construct and is, thus, either exposed or deprived of certain author-functions that take place in discourse. The author is the principle of a certain unity in writing and the text always contains signs referring to him, again and again. This idea of authorial appropriation is important to Foucault because now we may study discourses by examining the subject who produces and is a part of them (a culture, history etc.) We can now ask ourselves how can a subject appear in the order of discourse, and what place can it occupy in this order. Once aware that the author is not free to create in a world of inexhaustible significations, once we realize his limited functional principle in the world of ideas, we may be able to study him as a subject that constrains interpretation from the reader’s perspective, without assigning a Barthean role of tyranny and authority over the text.

Umberto Eco, The Open Work and its Constraints

2009-05-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

Eco’s notion of “The Open Work” is an attempt to understand modern artworks which can be rendered open by their author, and further completed by the performer, viewer, reader or audience. This notion legitimates the variety of interpretations one work may give us. But despite how we may never know which interpretation is the correct one, we cannot have unlimited interpretations of a work either. I will explain how Eco’s concept of openness relates to Interpretation and to modern aesthetics. Once this is explained, I will point to the consequences that the concept of “openness,” understood also as “unfinished work” or “work in movement,” give raise to. Most of these consequences have to do with the limits of interpretation constrained by the intentionality of the author and the constraints of history. I am also including a few responses to Eco’s notion of Interpretation as to show some of the problems it may have.
In “Open Work,” Eco uses Stockhausen as an example of a modern musical piece rendered open by its own author. The work created rejects the definitive, concluded message and rather multiplies the formal possibilities of distribution and performances. A single music sheet with a series of groupings is presented, and the performer is given the freedom to mount the sequence of musical units in the order he chooses. So Stockhausen’s piece can have a variety of forms given by different composers. We could say that it can have unlimited interpretations, depending on each individual performer who mounts it together. But although no individual interpretation of Stockhausen’s work can be like the other, this does not mean that they are all that different, as if they suddenly rose out of chaos. What is important to note is that Stockhausen, who remains the author of the piece, created the work with the series of musical groupings to be mounted at chance. So with this intent in mind, he also gave the work its openness. To Eco, this idea of “openness” is essential to contemporary art. In “The Open Work” he explains that this idea of “openness” is far removed from meaning “infinite possibilities” and complete freedom of reception (pp.6.) What in fact is available is a rage of rigidly pre-established and ordained interpretative solutions, and these never allow the reader, the performer or the viewer to move outside the strict control of the author. With the example of Stockhausen’s musical piece, it is evident that the performer can re-invent the work in a psychological collaboration with the author itself.
I find it important to stop and expand how important the author’s intentions and authority are according to Eco. He argues that the author offers the interpreter with a work to be completed. But the author is aware that once completed by a third party, the work in question will still be his own. It will not be a different work because a form which belongs to him will be assembled complete, even though he permits this assemblage to be done by a third party. It is the author who proposes a number of possibilities which have already been rationally organized and endowed with specifications for a proper development. So the premises to the work, despite its “openness” or incompleteness, are finitely rendered in the original data provided by the author. Authorial intention is so important to Eco because this is what guarantees that the work will be a work. Without authorial intent, we would only have a mere conglomeration of random components ready to emerge from chaos, in his view.
So what Eco notices about the “openness” in Stockhausen’s piece is that it invites us to identify inside the old category of “open works” (one with indefinite interpretations) a more restricted classification. He calls this new category of contemporary works, “works in movement” because they consists of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units which need to be completed with an ongoing dialectic between the author’s intentions and the performers choices among those options he is given. The “work in movement” is the possibility of numerous different personal inventions, but it is not an invitation to indiscriminate participation. This invitation offers the performer with opportunities to insert himself as oriented by the author, into something which will always belong to the world invented by the author.
I want to point the reason why an “Open Work” does not lend itself to infinite interpretations. It is because there is a closure to this unfinished process, and it is given by the performer, reader, viewer or audience, depending on each case. To show how this “closure” works, I will use the example of Stockhausen again. The composer delivers a work with certain characteristics that give it its “openness,” (in this case the musical groupings on the sheet, the incompleteness of the piece which gives room to chance etc.) Once the individual performer receives it and gives it form through his personal selection of notes the unfinished work is completed. I write completed and not closed because there is a fundamental difference between these two. The work is completed by one performer, but it is not closed because there are hundreds of other performers who will give it different closures, selecting from Stockhousen’s options provided by his work. Eco writes in “The Open Work”:
“Every performance exploits the composition, but it does not exhaust it. Every performance makes the work an actuality, but is itself only complementary to all other performances of the work.” (pp.15)

Another way we could think about this inexhaustibility-about why the work is never closed is by acknowledging the observations of phenomenologist writers such as Merleau-Ponty and Husserl. Eco states that both philosophers are aware of the unperceived side in our perceptions. Husserl observed that in each external perception the sides of the objects perceived suggest to the viewer the unperceived side. This side is grasped in a non-intuitive manner and is expected to become an element of the succeeding perception. Merleau-Ponty observed that the contradiction which we feel exists between the world’s reality and its incompleteness is identical to the one that exists between the ambiguity of consciousness and its commitment to a field of presence.
I am not referring to these thinkers randomly. Their understanding of phenomenology is similar to Eco’s understanding of what an “Open Work” renders. It becomes essential for the work to present itself as open and as always promising future perceptions. This ambiguity found between the work’s openness (granted by the author) and its completeness (given by the performer) that can complete it, but never close it, does not represent an imperfection. To Eco, it appears to be its very definition. In “Two Hypothesis About the Death of Art” he states that when we interpret a work, there is no contradiction in assuming that A) One must appreciate the whole structure of the work as a declaration of poetics. B) That such a work can be considered fully realized only when its poetic project can be appreciated as the concrete, material and perceptible result of the its underlying project. (pp.176)
This move away from necessity and a fundamental reality, towards indeterminacy is seen as positive to Eco. Not only is it a historical event, it also matches the advances of science which started out assuming there was a center and moved away from this idea through discoveries about relativity and physics. History is an important factor in the process of interpretation to Eco. It would have not allowed us certain interpretations in the past that we hold today about the same work. But also, works couldn’t have been created with this authorial idea of “openness” in mind until now. Taking this example to a conventional level, we wouldn’t be able to have medieval flight insurance for example. We need a history that will allow planes to fly first and flight insurance to be created afterwards. This is to say that Stockhausen couldn’t have written the piece earlier than he did, and as a response to other works which did not have a notion of “openness” to them. But what is important to understand is that Eco’s notion of “openness” is one which lets the work be completed by its variety of interpretations which appear linearly through history. So Aesthetics should pay attention to the modern notion of openness and sought to expand it.
Eco understands openness as something intended to be that way by the author of the work. He also understands “the open work” as one with limited possibilities of interpretation. I would now like to place his thought through a more negative lens, and point that Eco’s notion of interpretation is one that may have too many constraints for some critics. Philosophers such as Richard Rorty and Jaques Derrida would, I believe, see this “openness” which renders a variety of interpretations as one which is extremely limited. One reason is due to the authorial intent of the work which regulates it and gives legitimacy to its possible interpretations. Thinkers like Rorty would argue that this sort of “legitimacy” is not of the right kind, that it is too elitist for example. The debates between Eco, Culler and Rorty found in the Tanner lecture focused on textual interpretation. With his defense on authorial intent, Eco suggests that the aim of the text is to produce (through the author) a model reader; one who reads it as it is designated to be read. This reading may include the possibility of being read so as to yield multiple interpretations. The problem with authorial intent seems to rest here: Whoever surpasses the limits of interpretation that the work is supposed to have (as rendered by the author) is over-interpreting. Without necessarily being able to prove that one interpretation is the right one, Eco still places constraints on the interpretation of the work, as to avoid over-interpretation.
Richard Rorty argues against the idea of a limited and legitimate variety of interpretations, he also argues against the authority of the author being essential to the work. He permits the possibility of unlimited interpretations given that the authorial intent is not fundamental for interpreting. Against Eco’s claim that the work has a “nature” and that legitimate interpretation would, in a way, illuminate this nature (even if its nature is “openness”) Rorty urges us to forget the idea of discovering what a text really is. Culler is another scholar who debates against Eco, following Derrida’s notion of “unlimited semiosis.” To Culler, over-interpretation is unavoidable and even necessary. The authorial intention would be unnecessary to interpret a text, given that the author can be considered “dead,” and so can his intentions.
These debates seem to center, among other things, on the validity or legitimacy of the author’s intent to give the work its “openness.” This authorial legitimacy is explored better as a problem in the analytic field, and it has to do with the author’s intentionality towards the work. Monroe Beardsley, an analytic aesthetician wrote an article called “The Intentional Fallacy.” There, he argued against the view that a work of art means what an artist says it means or what he intends it to mean. Briefly, Eco and other romantics would argue that: 1) The artist intended x to be p in a wok y.
2) x means p in a wok y.
Beardsley on the other side, argues that the intentions of the artist are not relevant to the interpretation of the work because 1 does not entail 2, and it does not provide direct evidential support for 2. Given that the intentions of the author are not always available, and that, according to Beardsley, we can have a correct interpretation of a work with little knowledge of its author, this entails that the intentions of the author are neither available nor desirable. In other words, the intentional fallacy is what tells us that, if we ask the author for the meaning of the work, the author may ask us to go to the work to find its meaning, but if we want to know about the meaning of the work we will have to return to the author.
So some of the arguments against Eco’s notion seem to ask this question: “What is wrong with over interpretation?! Why do we need constraints? Why do we need an author to legitimize our interpretations?” Most of these arguments circle around the acceptance or denial of authorial intent. And the main problem regarding authorial intent is that either it cannot be empirically proved, like Beardsley states, or it leads us to circularity. I think Eco would argue that history will sooner or later provide us with empirical proof of the author’s intentionality, through the work. Regarding the negative value given to his notion of interpretation understood as one with constraints, there may also be a response. We are still allowed to have a variety of interpretations of a work, just like we phenomenologically experience a variety of limited perceptions through our visual field. Authorial intent is not a constraint to Eco, it is what prevents us from completing a work out of random conglomerated elements, out of chaos. It is what gives us the unfinished elements to finish the work with our individual reading of it. In this essay, I have tried showing how this notion works as related to modern aesthetics and the problem of interpretation, and I have explained the problem it may present, as related to authorial intent. In the end, the circularity posed earlier may not be a problem to Eco, who does not grant us unlimited interpretations of a work, and yet manages to leave the work “open” and accessible to future readings.

Sources

1) Eco, Umberto. “The Open Work.” Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA.1989
2) Eco Umberto, “Two Hypotheses About the Death of Art.” The Open Work. Harvard University Press. Cambridge. MA.1989.
3) Umberto Eco, “ On Interpretation and Overinterpretation (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values)” Edited by Stefan Collini. Cambridge University Press. 1992.
4) Wreen, Michael, "Beardsley's Aesthetics, Intentional Fallacy.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Weitz and the Role of Theory in Aesthetics

2009-05-17T20:18:00.000-07:00

In the past, the main goal of aesthetics has been to formulate a definition of art. A definition is a statement of the necessary and sufficient properties of what is being defined. This statement has to prove its purpose of giving a true or false claim about the nature, or essence of art and what characterizes it from anything else. Many theorists sustain that unless we know what art is, we cannot begin to respond to it adequately or to say why one work is better than the other. Morris Weitz, in his essay “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” wants to plead for the rejection of this problem. He argues that a true definition of art, consisting of its necessary and sufficient properties is not possible. That a definition only closes the concept of art when in its very use, this concept demands to remain open.
To explain Weitz’s approach to aesthetics, I will first mention Wittgenstein’s approach to language found in Philosophical Investigations, given that many critics including Weitz, have explored Wittgenstein’s refusal to theorize and construct definitions of philosophical entities. In his work, Wittgenstein raises an illustrative question, What is a game? The traditional theoretical answer would be in terms of some exhaustive set of properties common to all games. To this Wittgenstein gives us a list of board games, card games, ball games, and asks if there is something common to them all. Despite the assumption that there must be something common to them or else they would not be called “games,” if we look and see weather there is something common to them all, weather there are any necessary and sufficient properties to “game” will not find it. All we may find are similarities and relationships between different games. If one asks what a game is, we usually pick out sample games and describe them. Weitz, just like Wittgenstein, points out the difference between describing and defining. He writes:

“Knowing what a game is is not knowing some real definition or theory but being able to recognize and explain games and to decide which among imaginary and new examples would or would not be called ‘games.” (pp.31)

The Wittgensteinian problem about the nature of games is just like the problem about the nature of art to Weitz. If we look and see what it is that we call art, we will also find no common properties, only similarities. Knowing what art is has nothing to do with being able to define it, but rather with being able to describe it, recognize it and explain it in virtue of those similarities. While a definition would close a concept, the characteristic of description is its open texture. We can correctly describe something as art by virtue of its similarities, but no exhaustive definition can be given.
To further explore Weitz’s idea of an open concept, I will refer to the example he uses when mentioning Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake. Weitz asks, is Finnegan’s Wake a novel? The traditional way, in search for a definition that would permit us to answer yes or no, would construct this as a factual problem concerning necessary and sufficient properties. The new way, which avoids a definition, would have to decide weather the work is similar in certain respects to other works already called “novels.” As long as Finnegan’s Wake shares some, but not every similarity to other novels, then the concept of art can be extended to cover the new case. So this work is like recognized novels A and B in some respects, but not like them in others. But then, neither was B in some respects like A when a decision to extend the concept was made. Finnegan’s Wake standing as N+1 is similar to A and B in some respects, but not in others so the problem is not factual but rather one of decision making whether the verdict has to do with expanding the conditions as to apply to the new concept. So following Wittgenstein, Weitz notices how an exhaustive definition is not possible, and how it would only close a concept that should remain open. “Art itself is an open concept” (pp.32) he writes. Searching for a definition of what cannot be defined is like trying to squeeze what is an open concept into an honorific formula for a closed concept.
Another important difference that will help us understand the distinction of a formula and what lies behind it, is that between descriptions of art and artistic evaluations. When we say that X is a work of art, we use art as an evaluative (good, mediocre etc.) and descriptive (blue, soft etc.) concept. When X is a work of art is understood as descriptive, what we give are not necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather bundles of properties most of which are present (although they need not to) when we describe things as works of art. Cases where normal conditions are denied are also capable of being true in certain circumstances. So we can have “X is a work of art and exists only in the mind.” “X …and was made by accident when he spilled paint into the canvas.” Etc.
Obviously, if none of the conditions were present for recognizing something as a work of art in virtue of similarities, we would not describe it as one. But none of these is either necessary or sufficient.
Now, the problem with the evaluative notion of art is that instead of describing it praises. Although we may use art to praise, Weitz stresses that what cannot be maintained is that theories of evaluative use are real definitions of art. They are only definitions of chosen criteria which a critic personally decides to use in favor of a work. These honorific definitions only make Weitz’s argument stronger, because they prove, through their debates over the reasons for changing the criteria of a definition, that the concept of art remains open. Weitz writes:
“If we take aesthetic theories literally, as we have seen, they all fail; but if we reconstrue them, in terms of their function and point…we shall see that aesthetic theory is far from worthless.” (pp35)

There is a certain kind of pluralism in Weitz’s argument, which is inclusive of the different aesthetic theories, yet does not accept one exhaustive definition of art. So Weitz, diving into a pool of Wittgensteinian objects, all related transitively through a series of similarities, comes out of it as a non-essentialist about the concept of art. He argues against a definition because he finds it problematic in its practicality, empirical validity and lack of inclusiveness to new art works. Weitz, by pointing that what we do when we say, X is art, is give a description, also mentions that evaluative properties are used to give legitimacy to a work arbitrarily considered to be art. This arbitrariness and the debates going on between different philosophers who evaluate and try to define art are a strong proof to Weitz’s argument. Definitions change because there is no exhaustive definition of art, and once we understand this problem, all we can do is leave the concept open, describe art, and understand what a work is by virtue of its transitive similarities to other works.

Definition of Art: Essentialism, Anti-Essentialism and the Problem of Indiscernible Counterparts

2009-05-17T20:15:00.000-07:00

Arthur Danto places the problem of indiscernible counterparts at the center of his argument in his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, a Philosophy of Art. He begins with a thought experiment which I find useful to lead us through this paper. There is an art exhibition with seven identical red squares framed and hanging on the walls of the museum. Danto establishes several claims about these squares : a) That five of those red squares are artworks, b) that those artworks are not only numerically different, they are also different in genres, such as a landscape, a work of abstract expressionism, an historical painting etc. c) Two of the squares are not artworks at all. These possibilities create a problem of indiscernible counterparts (PIC) which can be given the preliminary formulation:
PIC: What theory of art could adequately explain the possibilities illustrated in this thought experiment?
Finding a theory which would define art and explain all the possibilities of artworks has been the main goal of aesthetics. But first, why is a definition important? A definition is a statement of the necessary and sufficient properties of what is being defined. This statement has to prove its purpose of giving a true or false claim about the nature, or essence of art and what characterizes it from anything else. Many theorists sustain that unless we know what art is, we cannot begin to respond to it adequately or to say why one work is better than the other. So logically, a definition must satisfy the necessary and sufficient properties of the concept it is trying to define. In reality, defining art as a concept is problematic and sometimes even controversial. In this paper I introduce the problem of definition related to Aesthetics. I present Morris Weitz’s anti-essentialist approach to aesthetics with a question in mind; can it solve this thought experiment? I then present Arthur Danto’s essentialist definition of art which presents a solution to PIC as pictured in the though experiment.
I. Why a Definition?
In the past, philosophers have tried defining art by considering the properties of artworks. I summarize some of these theories to point to the problems they have rendered.
a) Mimetic Theories of Art
The first definition of art can be found in Aristotle’s “Rhetoric.” Here Aristotle defines art as mimetic, given that if imitates reality, and also as cathartic, given that it must produce a feeling of catharsis on its audience. Later, Plato in his Republic also states that art must have mimetic properties, because the arts represent or imitate reality. So with these two definitions, artworks become ontologically dependent on physical objects. To Plato, these objects were also ontologically dependent on the non-physical Forms. So it is the real objects which have more reality than the artworks, rendering this conditional (IT)
“If X is art then X is an imitation of reality” But this definition stopped being useful when the camera was invented and photography “captured” reality without having to “imitate” it. This is an example of how a definition becomes too narrow against the dynamics of artistic innovation. So IT becomes insufficient as a theory to define art.

b) Traditional Definitions of Art
Later, traditional definitions of art defined artworks through certain properties such as art being representational (when art imitates reality), expressive (when art expresses something) and formal (when art has a certain form or symmetry.) But if we try to put these conditions together as ones that an artwork must satisfy, it is evident that the definition is deficient.
“If X is representational or formal or expressive then X is art”
Because an instruction manual can also be a representation without being an artwork, and human faces and gestures are expressive without having to necessarily be artworks. Also, both natural objects and artifacts produced for craft or utility purposes have formal properties can even look symmetric, and yet they are not necessarily artworks.

II. Art without a Definition
Many philosophers, skeptic about finding a definition of art, have taken an anti-foundationalist approach based on Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblances .” Morris Weitz, in his article “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” was the first to deny the importance of a definition for art . This anti-essentialist approach to aesthetics derived from Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialist approach to language found in Philosophical Investigations. Referring to language, Wittgenstein raised an illustrative question about the nature of a definition, “What is a game?” He wants to make us aware that although the traditional theoretical answer would be in terms of some exhaustive set of properties common to all games, there may be no properties common to all of these games. Instead, Wittgenstein provides a list of board games, card games, ball games, and asks if there is something common to them all. Despite the assumption that there must be something common to them or else they would not be called “games” what becomes evident is how all of these games have no single property in common. If we look and see weather a ball game, a card game and a board game have something common to them all, whether there are any necessary and sufficient properties to “game,” we realize there are none. All we may find are similarities and relationships between different games. Weitz, like Wittgenstein, points out the difference between describing and defining. He writes:
“Knowing what a game is is not knowing some real definition or theory but being able to recognize and explain games and to decide which among imaginary and new examples would or would not be called ‘games.” (pp.31)

The Wittgensteinian problem about the nature of games is just like the problem about the nature of art. If we look and see what it is that we call art, we will also find no common properties, only similarities. Knowing what art is has nothing to do with being able to define it, but rather with being able to describe it, recognize it and explain it in virtue of those similarities. While a definition would close a concept logically by providing its essential definitions, the characteristic of description is its open texture. We can correctly describe something as art by virtue of its similarities, but no exhaustive definition can be given.
To illustrate how art can be understood as an “open concept” without a definition, I will refer to the example Weitz uses when mentioning Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake. Weitz asks, is Finnegan’s Wake a novel? The traditional way, in search for a definition that would permit us to answer yes or no, would construct this as a factual problem concerning necessary and sufficient properties. The new way, which avoids a definition, would have to decide weather the work is similar in certain respects to other works already called “novels.” As long as Finnegan’s Wake shares some, but not every similarity to other novels, then the concept of art can be extended to cover the new case. So this work is like recognized novels A and B in some respects, but not like them in others. But then, neither was B in some respects like A when a decision to extend the concept was made. Finnegan’s Wake standing as N+1 is similar to A and B in some respects, but not in others so the problem is not factual but rather one of decision making whether the verdict has to do with expanding the conditions as to apply to the new concept. Through Wittgenstein, Weitz notices how an exhaustive definition is not possible because it only closes a concept that should remain open. “Art itself is an open concept” (pp.32) he writes.
I now refer back to the red squares with this question: Would an anti-essentialist theory of art asses all the possibilities in the thought experiment efficiently? If we rely on “family resemblances” as a notion to guide us through the identification of artworks by virtue of their similarities with other works, we can see how this concept becomes deficient. We have seven red squares, all alike visually, and if we approach the thought experiment from this position, then all the squares would have to be considered artworks, given that they all share similar, if not identical properties. But it is the case that two of those red squares are not artworks, they are mere real squares with red paint. So an anti-essentialist approach does not take into account the problem of indiscernible objects (PIC) which would render some red squares to be artworks, such as A) and some such as C) which are squares with red paint, but not artworks. Weitz finds definitions to be problematic in their practicality, empirical validity and lack of inclusiveness to new art works. But his anti-essentialist approach is problematic, I believe, by being too inclusive.
If we base our identification of artworks on the idea of “family resemblances,” then we would logically have to include the squares with red paint which are not artworks into the category of artworks. These non-artworks would have to wrongly be considered as artworks because they share the exact visual properties as their indiscernible counterparts.
III. Art with an essentialist Definition
In relationship to the thought experiment, I explained why an anti-essentialist (AE) approach would not be able to solve PIC. With AE as a theory, we would not be able to say that the squares with red paint are not artworks. AE would assume that if one of those red squares is an artwork, then any square which is similar to a red square, or exactly alike, is also an artwork because they all share the same visual properties. So AE does not solve c) given that we have artworks and non-artworks which are exactly alike, thus, AE is insufficient (and too inclusive) to cover the possibilities of this thought experiment. It is evident then, that an anti-essentialist definition of art cannot adequately explain the possibilities in the thought experiment. What we need is a definition that would help us discern between the red squares considered artworks and the red squares that are not artworks. An essentialist theory of art, on the other hand, would offer a solution to c) and a response to PIC. Danto defines an artwork to have two necessary properties: meaning and embodiment . So x is art only if X has embodied meaning. The point here is that an object such as the red square depends on an essentialist theory for its existence as an artwork. Without essentialism, a reductionist of art would say that red square is just a red square and nothing more. But if the red square is logically dependent, and relies on theories of art, then it is detached as an object from the real world and becomes a part of the world of interpreted things; of an artworld. To Danto, an object o is an artwork only under an interpretation I, where I is a sort of function that transfigures o into a work. So I (o)=W. Then even if o is a perceptual constant, variations in I constitute different works. This form of identification is what Danto calls “the is of artistic identification” and it is closely related to the way we interpret a work of art as opposed to the way we would interpret a real object.
Taking this to the thought experiment, we can now say that there are red squares which have embodied meaning, such as those which have been “transfigured” into artworks and can be interpreted as being more than just objects. The squares in C) are squares painted in red; they are objects reduced to its physical properties and have no meaning as artworks. The squares in A) are artworks because they rely on an essentialist theory that lets us interpret them as such. PIC derives from Leibniz’s law of indiscernibility which states, in one of its versions, that:
“If for every property X, object X has F if and only if object Y has F, then X is identical to Y.”
Danto’s essentialism distinguishes between the manifest, visual properties of the red squares, and the essential, non-visual properties of the red squares considered as artworks to avoid Leibnitzian generality. The PIC that Danto poses can be understood with this formulation:
“X is an indiscernible counterpart (IC) of Y if and only if X and Y share all manifest properties.”
Two objects with the same visual property F can be identical, yet one of them is an artwork while the other is not. So if object X is not identical with object Y, then there must be a non-visual property F, such that X is F and Y is not F. We can see that at one level, the red squares share the same physical properties with their real counterparts. But at another level, some are art while some are not. This solution is similar to those who argue against reductionist accounts of identity for personhood. It would be like saying that a person is a material body and has a whole class of predicates which apply to material bodies. We cannot discover that a person is not a material body, just like we cannot say that these indiscernibles do not have the properties of real objects. They do. But the same way that personhood is more than just a material body (at least to those who are non-reductionists about the self) the red squares are also, more than just physical objects. In this paper I have summarized the most common definitions of art and the problems that these render. I have explained the problem that rise from finding a definition of art solely through the visual properties of artworks. I have also focused on essentialist and anti essentialist definitions of art to present how each theory would work under the thought experiment that pictures indiscernible counterparts (PIC.)

Sources

1) Danto, Arthur. “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, A Philosophy of Art.” Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1981.

2) Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy. Vol.61, No. 19, 1964.

3) Mates, Benson. “The Philosophy of Leibniz” Oxford University Press. NY. 1986

4) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “The Definition of Art.” Htpp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ert-definition.

5) Weitz, Morris. “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol 15, No.1 (Sep. 1956) pp.27-35

6) Wittgenstein, Ludwing. “Philosophical Investigations.” Translated by G.E.M Anscombe. Macmillian Company. New York. 1958

7) Fisher, John Andrew. “Is there a problem with Indiscernible Counterparts? The Journal of Philosophy. Vol.92. Sept.1995

It's Called A Stereotype for a Reason

2008-06-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

Given that I should have graduated maybe two years ago, but haven’t due to various reasons, I can say that I am an expert at sitting in class and noticing the same patterns which re-appear every semester regarding my fellow classmates’ usual discourses.
Every major must have its stereotypical characters: Computer Science people have to live up to their geek status, Business people are also expected to be in sororities and fraternities, and I was assuming that for us Philosophy majors, it was the stigma of being a stoner hippie. Until I declared an English minor that is, and realized that this stereotype was more adequate for students in the English department, poets specially. What might be the stereotype of the Philosophy major then? I guess most would say that it’s the typical guy who talks about Sartre at parties with the ulterior motive of picking up chicks. But I decided to be more charitable and explore further stereotypical options within the Philosophy department, so these are some:

1) The Nihilist

This is the most common stereotype given to the Philosophy major and usually it corresponds to the anguished, black eye-liner, black leather wearing student who holds the “God is Dead” claim and thinks that whoever believes in any sort of religion is a moron. Also, alcoholism helps them get through life and they are usually musicians too. I am against this stereotype given that I love Camus and believe that Sartre’s ethics was humanistic to the point that it puts responsibility back into the hands of human beings. But I have to say, I have seen this stereotype embodied plenty of times, especially at hipster parties, and those who advertise Nietzsche too much and too loudly have to bear the burden of getting laughed the most.

2) The Pragmatist

Common in the United States, students who have read any James Dewey, William James or Richard Rorty, tend to ignore whatever any Ancient, Medieval or Modern philosopher has to say to us about substance, essence, universals and grand narratives in general. Instead they argue that the quest for certainty has led us in the wrong path, and that whatever we think is essentially stable might always change, thus, Truth is only a social construction.
This is how they tend to argue:

I am sitting in my Modern Philosophy class and my professor is explaining Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. We get to the categories of the mind and one of my fellow classmates, also a Dewey fan raises his hand.
“I think that you can still have experience WITHOUT those categories. WHY ARE THERE CATEGORIES I DON’T BUY KANT’S CATEGORIES.”
Etc.
Pragmatism has always interested me for applied Ethics, but the fact that its metaphysics becomes frail and fallible scares a lot of thinkers. Because metaphysics would only be sustained either by “the pragmatic rule” which is what James defended, or based on its usefulness which was Dewey’s approach, it becomes unimportant and this brings consequences to philosophy in general, duh.

3) The Feminist

Female usually, who took plenty of women’s studies classes and tends to submit every western white male in the history of philosophy through the looking glass of feminist theory. This is not always an easy task, but once learnt, it has proved effective in achieving good grades specially when the teacher is a white male and has to respond well to the minority and diversity policies of the college. Example: I have done this a few times when pressed with deadlines. Instead of writing my paper on the different degrees of reality or substance posed by rationalists and empiricists thinkers in Modern Philosophy, I did a feminist reading of Kantian Ethics. Instead of writing a paper on Habermmas’ Universality Principle for my Contemporary Philosophy class, I switched it, asking: “Does Habermmas’ Universality Principle Coincide with Feminist Thought?” This, although interesting can become monotonous when abused, and has kept me from investigating other issues in the history of Philosophy that might have been useful too.
Also, out of experience and following the stereotype, students tend to assume that the feminist is also a lesbian, especially if she dresses somewhat conservative.

4) The Analytic Philosophy student against the Continental Philosophy student

To portray another stereotypical from of arguing between two stereotypes of students I will beforehand explain a few things.

Most of us know about the contemporary Heidegger/ Carnap controversy over here but I’ll still tell you about it. While one was a Continental philosopher, the other was an Analytic. Carnap’s analytic method of verification intended to eliminate metaphysics through the logical analysis of language. He took plenty of shots at Heidegger who supported a unique metaphysics, by stating that Heidegger’s system was convoluted with pseudo-statements, so it meant nothing mainly because it couldn’t be verified in the world etc. At the same time, Heidegger responded back by explaining how metaphysical terms such as his idea of Dasein reveal themselves to us only when we cease to think rationally and when we cease to impose out thinking on the world. This was obviously something Carnap instantly rejected, and none of them managed to find even a common ground to argue given that the method of logical analysis which Carnap defended was as unworthy to Heidegger as his metaphysics was meaningless to Carnap.

This is to say that although plenty of times I have heard how both the Continental and Analytic branches of Philosophy tend to coincide and meet at certain points (Pragmatism.) I haven’t seen it happen yet in class. The few times we students even know what side it is that we are taking, this is what happens:

When one classmate argues for something, the other will find a logical fallacy in their argument. When one makes a claim, the other makes sure this claim has a correspondence in reality. If it doesn’t then it is meaningless and the other argument is fallacious and wrong, etc.

Contemporary philosophers in my experience tend to be more interested in literature, aesthetics and ethics, while Analytic philosophers are amazing logicians, good at math, music etc. I am not taking sides, but being aware that there is something called poetry which is what Heidegger used to explain Dasein when he exceeded the limits of rationality, and that there is something called “metaphor” which is not supposed to be taken literally, might be good advice for analytic philosophers. Then again, if you cannot even tell a modus ponens from a modus tollens, or what a double negation is, then what are you doing in a philosophy program and, yes, how are you even planning to support your claim? (I am asking this to myself.)

5) The Stoner

Not as bad as English majors, but we have them too. I am not planning to describe this obvious stereotype except with a brief example:
I am sitting in my Modern Philosophy class as my professor finishes explaining Hume’s empiricism. He asks us what we think about it and stoner guy raises his hand.
“It’s cool. I think Hume was on grass when he wrote it. Huh. Ha.”
Another example:
“Spinoza must have been on LSD. Huh. Haaaa”
Etc.

6) The Marxist

To the Marxist, everything becomes part of the history of class struggles. Every thinker can be judged from a Marxist perspective and who ever isn’t a Marxist is an Imperialistic capitalistic jerk, basically. I am a Marxist, so I am probably a good example of the stereotype. The problem with the Marxist is that at some point they might have to find a job in an Insurance office or work as secretaries in corporate America, and they might need medical insurance which is not socialist at all in this country, so they might have to sell out a little only for these reasons while keeping up with the Marxist analysis in other areas of their life.

7) The English major who takes a Philosophy class

Here we have the student who reads philosophy as if it were literature. I still do this when I give up trying to understand Heidegger’s arguments and decide to read him like he were Proust. But certain essays by Quine, Davidson or Carnap to state a few are not meant to be read as literary masterpieces nor are they meant to be deconstructed or critiqued using literary approaches. Here, the English major who takes a philosophy class for the first time falls victim of the stereotype. Common responses to philosophy by English majors tend to go like this:

“This is really WELL written. But I don’t understand Rorty’s claim at all, but he does good comparisons between philosophers, and he’s a good writer, so he must be good.”
“I think Dewey’s style is very clear. It was easy to read. He is a good writer”
Etc.

Art Does Not Imitate Reality

2008-06-21T12:23:00.000-07:00

The studio on Broadway which I usually attend has open Ballet classes. This means that depending on your level, you can join any class available and do some barre and center work every day of the week. As convenient as this might be, the competitive level of the dancers can get intimidating. Although most dancers who take those classes aren't professionals, some of them are. Those who are belong to the American ballet Theater, or dance for companies such as the New York City ballet. Some of them take classes at Broadway as a break from their other, more exhausting Ballet classes at their own companies. Dancing, like any other art form, only becomes art when one is extremely good at it. At least with Classical Ballet there are no intermediates, there is no getting away with being a bad dancer because the flaws would be too evident in the movements of the body (unlike plenty of contemporary artists who seem to get away with bad installations or dull paintings, etc.) The division is easy then: there are those who dance and try to make the best of it and there are those who dance so extremely well, so flawlessly that they are able to use their bodies as instruments for artistic creation.

This is all to say that I sucked at my Ballet class today on the Broadway Studio. Not because I couldn't follow the center work or because the jumps were too hard, like it sometimes happens, but only because there was one boy who was so amazing it just killed me. Compared to his saint-like steps, his flight, everybody in that studio was a fallen creature. This boy was of Asian decent and must have been younger than sixteen. He was probably a future dancer for the American Ballet theater. I kept having to stop what I was doing to watch him jump in the air and suspend his body away from gravity, like a small king.

This boy stood in front of the mirror and turned four pirouettes, he jumped, finishing his allegro solemnly, without much thought and then he retired to his corner of the studio, walking humbly after having moved like a fire bird. I saw him standing quietly, his soldier eyes, and wanted to whisper: " Your life will be solitary and difficult, but you have something that nobody else does." Dancers like him are the ones who keep proving me wrong. You see, I keep saying that there are no Ideals of Beauty in Art, that Platonic perfection does not exist. Then I go to a Ballet Studio and there, among the other limb bodies in tights and leg warmers, among the city smoke, I see a boy dancing like he is a small king. And I realize that there is perfection and that human beings can achieve it. Art does not imitate reality, it imitates universals. And I witness so much genius and beauty in less than one minute of movement, and it is all embodied in the figure of this child who has tricked us all, who has carried us away from reality.

This child has proved me wrong, he will be the next Nijinsky, the next great artist. Meanwhile after class, all of us, average dancers, will go back home and continue with our lives. We will try to convince ourselves like others do, that there are no ideals of perfection, that the most one can do is strive for the best Forms and be happy with that, convince ourselves about our fall and our imperfect nature. But we will be lying to ourselves. As dancers, we have seen Beauty embodied, we have witnessed it as it grew thirsty and out of breath in the slippery studio floor, and no imitation theory will be able to live up to, to justify its perfection anymore.

Cortazar and The Minotaur

2008-06-11T23:05:00.000-07:00

I have wanted to translate this ever since yesterday afternoon, when my sister and I watched an old interview done to the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar. The program was in black and white and had been filmed in the sixties. This is when Cortazar was publishing his best works in Spanish such as “Bestiario” (“Bestiary”), “Todos Los Fuegos, el Fuego” (“All Fires, the Fires” 1966) and “Rayuela”( “Hopscotch” 1963). The interviewer was from Spain and asked Cortazar questions about his childhood, his first works, about other writers who influenced him, about death. Cortazar answered everything with stories, the way any writer would have answered. Most of the interview was centered on Cortazar’s amazing way to view reality through the fantastic, and the intertwining of both genres in his literature.

There was one certain observation that Cortazar made about one of his works titled “The Exam.” I wanted to transcribe it over here for Tony, who might understand:

According to Cortazar, before writing “The Exam” he began to explore Mythology, specially the story of Theseus. Theseus was a Greek hero, national hero of Athens; slayer of the Minotaur. The Minotaur was a monster, half-man, half-bull, that lived in the center of a maze called the Labyrinth. It had been born to Minos's wife Pasiphae as a punishment from the gods. The Minotaur inhabited the labyrinth but the paradox is that he was also a prisoner of this impossible maze. In the story Theseus manages to find his way through the labyrinth and he kills this monster. This is what makes him a hero of Athens.

Cortazar partially deconstructs this myth and re-narrates it from a different perspective. In his version, the Minotaur is not a monster but rather a victim of the maze, who lives a tragic and solitary life separated from human beings, trapped inside the labyrinth which is his prison. King Minos in this version comes to be some type of fascist dictator who enslaves him for being different, and so the life of this creature becomes a grave life. When Theseus arrives with his sword in hand, the Minotaur is happy at first. Longing for some type of human contact ever since he was a child, when he encounters humans lost in the labyrinth his only desire is for their company. But once he realizes what Theseus’ objective is, the Minotaur does not stand against him. The Minotaur does not fight because he realizes that he does not want his life if he will have to spend one more second inside that prison. So he lets Theseus kill him, passively and without pain, without a final battle.
In the end, when Theseus comes out of the labyrinth with the creature’s head, he is made national hero by the King and the city of Athens. But he has a confession to make, and he only whispers it to his beloved Ariadna who takes his secret to her grave: “The Minotaur seemed to want to die Ariadna! He did not fight at all!”

And so, to Cortazar, this figure of the Minotaur is also the figure of the poet, the writer who finds himself sometimes trapped inside a prison. The Minotaur is Cortazar's reflection; it is every thinker. And what is so beautiful is that the reader realizes the flaws in the first tale, told by the winners, and acquires a new understanding and a sort of compassion for the story told from the other side of the labyrinth. By giving the Minotaur a voice, Cortazar manages to bring this lost speech back into the world of mythology. In the interview, Cortazar seemed to stress the point that the labyrinth of this Greek story is a well frequented place for many humans or "half-humans" of his kind. So this secret garden of mazes and solitude, of insane and inescapable introspection and silence, becomes not only the land of the Minotaur but also the land of the writer, the reader, the thinker. Alejandra Pizarnick will write years later, how this land becomes " the place for the poetic bodies."

(Note on the side: My sister and I have a few issues regarding the story in this interview. The tale of the Minotaur as narrated by Cortazar has also been written by Borges, another Argentine writer. Borges titles his story “Theseus and the Minotaur” while Cortazar in the interview claims that his version appears on his work titled “The Exam.” We assumed both writers, equally exceptional, came up with a different version of this Greek myth at the same time. To prove my point, if both Borges and Cortazar were attracted to this tragic story it might only be that there is a Minotaur in every writer.)

( Other note on the side: Just to show off my pompous knowledge on literature. It's interesting to point that other poets and writers have also tried rescuing the voices of the ignored in the manifold of Greek Mythology. By reversing the narratives and writing through the perspective of those who failed, new terrains are revealed. The American poet H.D for example, did the same thing with the legend of Orpheus. In her version, Orpheus' wife Eurydice writes the story of her fall into the depths of hell. All thanks to the fact that her lover, who was supposed to rescue her, turned around to make sure she was behind him instead and lost the opportunity to save her from getting out of the underworld. This underworld then, becomes Eurydice's home just like the labyrinth is the Minotaur's land. So it is in these realms where more stories are created. (For a further reading of this poem go to: " H.D'S Collected Poems, 1914-1944, " The God."))

Marxist Ballet

2008-06-07T23:32:00.000-07:00

Here in NYC my Ballet classes are somewhat different from the ones I take in Charlotte. I mean, most things are very similar. All my teachers have wrinkles and love to smoke between breaks, they all have this magnetic, eccentric air to them that I have always been attracted to, and most of my classmates remind me of my classmates in Charlotte. But my teacher Andre is different from anyone I’ve ever known.

Andre is Polish and in his late sixties, he has a white beard and wears sun glasses under the fluorescent lights of the studio. He used to be a dancer back in the days, and now his favorite hobbies are to drink and to talk a lot about Ballet. Sometimes he doesn’t mind actually teaching, but he would rather just talk about Ballet all day if he could get away with it, and drink too. This is fine with me. As much as I enjoy the dancing, I don’t mind hearing a story about a certain choreographer, or how a Ballet like “Giselle” has different endings depending on how tragic you want to make it, or how the Russian dancer Nijinsky committed suicide by jumping out of a window of an insane asylum back in the days.

Andre is also a good pianist, and tends to get carried away playing for the class, instead of teaching the class. He plays Stravinsky like if it were the last time he will ever get to do it, but he also gives us a combination or an adagio we are supposed to repeat until the music stops. Sometimes, the music will go on for fifteen minutes as Andre’s head keeps getting closer to the keyboards, his sweat covering his forehead, and we know we will be dancing for a long time: Oh, the pain of it all. Some evenings, I look around whenever Andre interrupts our work to tell us a story, and we are all boiling in our leotards as Sixth Avenue’s traffic howls through our studio windows. Some dancers listen to him with smiles, while others would rather keep the class moving at a faster pace to avoid cooling off. I have reached the point where I can usually multi-task by doing passes and stretching at the barre while making eye contact with Andre so that he knows I’m listening.

Lately, Andre has tried to get us to improve our battement frappes by applying a Marxist critique to this movement. The Frappe is a simple leg movement that one does at the barre, and it prepares you for jumping. Because it is simple, one’s leg is not supposed to go up higher than 90 degrees, and the emphasis is on the foot brushing the floor. But Andre, like plenty of other people I know, can give a Marxist reading to anything:
“This movement is bourgeois: you need to keep it upper middle class. Don’t go lower than sixty degrees with your leg. Like any bourgeois movement, it is stable and like any bourgeois person it is, well, not very interesting…But that’s how you need to do it. Keep it middle class.”

To this I had to laugh and I’m not always sure how many dancers understood the bad joke, or how many have had to sit through classes on Das Capital or lectures about The Communist Manifesto in their philosophy programs. Even so, what I like about Ballet classes in NYC is that besides getting the eccentric teacher, you also get an eccentric teacher who wants to train his dancers into becoming Marxist dancers. Cheers to that.

Some Time in NYC

2008-05-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

Last night, before going to sleep.

“Diana: I was thinking that you never liked any of my boyfriends.

Me: That’s not true! Plus, you only had two boyfriends, and the first one doesn’t count because you were only seventeen.

Diana: Tommy? Yeah, you never liked Tommy either.

Me: It’s not that I didn’t like Tommy; it’s just that at the time I was jealous because you were picking a dude over me, and I was eighteen and you were my best friend. I was also over protective; I’m your big sister. I’m the only one that can screw up and you should just learn from my mistakes, without having to make them yourself.

Diana: I know you were overprotective. Everyone in this family is so overprotective of me.

Me: I was nice to Christian too; I had nothing against Christian. But, whenever I felt you were unhappy, I just blamed it on him. I think we all did.

Diana: You guys need to stop being possessive of me. I’m not a baby.

Me: It’s not that. It’s just that, well, you are the youngest in the family. We all want to put you inside a crystal box and carry it around with us wherever we go.

Diana: I know. But you guys need to stop. I am twenty-three years old, and I still have a baby tooth!

Me: How did that happen?

Diana: The dentist told me I never had a real one underneath the baby tooth. So it wasn’t going to grow out.

Me: I’m not planning to look for the metaphor in this symbol.

Diana: You don’t have to.

Me: Good night.

Diana: Good Night.”

2)

Also,

Getting into arguments about Morality and Religion, at three in the morning inside the bathroom of your apartment in Flushing, Queens, while everybody else is asleep, and when your best friend Tony has only gotten five hours of sleep the night before and when his temper is just as bad as yours, and when the argument ends with a typical insult such as: “Keep acting like this! Keep it up and you will never do well in life!,” and when the argument also ends with another typical insult such as “ Get the fuck away from my here” and continues in a “ Yes, I am planning to get the fuck away from here” etc. etc,, and when you will be stuck sleeping in the same room with him and two other people that same night, and when you will be living five blocks from his place for the next two moths, is never a good idea.

3)

Diana told me this story the other night, so I am typing it here.

Taking the subway back home from the Art Students League in Manhattan, there was a homeless guy sitting in the seat in front of hers. He kept staring at her but in a friendly way. Diana did not feel threatened and this is what she said:

“I had that Art Students League bag with all these wooden dowels and poles sticking out of it and I guess he saw that, and he smiled and said "you're and artist"-he said it and he was rejoicing. He said it in a child's voice, like a little child that was happy and shy. I just kept smiling at him but I think my eyes were kind of sad from the day. Then his voice changed, it became grave and serious, his face changed too. It was a man's voice that said "you're going to be famous-you already are famous!". Like casting a spell. Then he became a blue eyed child again, he recoiled and hugged himself and still timid from what he had said blew three kisses at me. Then he recoiled again in a hug.
When I sat on the 7 I just kept thinking about that and smiling. I was smiling because he saw me and he knew a secret and I felt we both knew of secret things. ”

At the same time but in a different place, Diana was walking down Sixth Avenue. A hip looking guy with a strange hair do approached her trying to sell her something.

“Are you interested in manicures and facials?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“We have really good prices in our salon, you should check it out. Every woman likes to get a facial!” he kept insisting.
“It won’t last you know,” answered Diana.
“What?” The guy looked at her like she was an alien.
“ It doesn’t last” she kept repeating to him as she walked away annoyed and frustrated at people like that man, and all those women who go to that salon, and all those other women who must think of her as an alien, and all those others who do not know of secret things.

Why My Best Friend is Smarter than Yours

2008-03-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

"Hey,

i just wanted to mention...because it has been irritating me...that i understand PERFECTLY WELL that reversing binaries is not the aim of deconstruction. in fact, one of the things that got on my nerves when i studied it in school is that i didn't feel like my professor understood that. but i think the reason he didn't understand is that binary-reversing is the way in which deconstructive method is almost EXCLUSIVELY employed in literary criticism. i really think that most of the people doing supposed deconstructive criticism are either not seeing the big picture at all or (some of them) are using deconstruction as a means to a political end (which i don't have a problem with but also realize that it is usually not ACTUALLY deconstruction when used this way). anyway, don't underestimate my understanding. despite the fact that i don't remember much of the terminology, i can say with confidence that i "get" deconstruction.

Cherie."

"Cherie,

Sometimes I just repeat things for myself, but if there is something I know is that you get deconstruction. At the same time, I think that Rorty did a good job at placing Derrida and Heidegger on the same level when it comes to other people understanding whatever they have wanted to understand from them, because of their incomprehensibility. In the end, Derrida never set the rules-never defined what Deconstruction was because, just like Heidegger with his Metaphysics and with Being, he wanted to avoid the subject and move on somewhere else, somewhere where the subject would reveal itself. Derrida would talk about "what was differed", while Heidegger would refer to "the nothingness of being," and it is left to us, poor readers, the job of untangling and interpreting, for the better or the worse.

Despite Rorty believing that both of them are useless philosophers when it comes to their concreteness and in relation to pragmatism, I still think they are both great in their unique arguments, taking away the fact that Derrida used to be a Soccer player, and Heidegger joined the Nazi party, the rest is philosophy, and it transcends biography.

Also, sorry I made you read that bad feminist essay, but I found it to be an interesting perspective of what NOT to do when deconstructing. It probably made you really hateful though.

Love Ya

Carolina"

My Attempts at Literary Criticism

2008-03-23T18:21:00.000-07:00

T.S Eliot's Unreal City of God

Regarding deconstruction, The Waste Land manages to subvert the concept of a transcendental signified. The aim of this paper is to show through two sets of binary operations how the meanings of concepts shift causing a prevailing state of undecidability between signifier and signified. The first opposition I will analyze is between Real and Unreal, and here I will point out intertextual allusions to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and compare Eliot’s Unreal City to Baudelaire’s Paris, which is also an Unreal City. The second opposition, which is actually a subset of the first, will be Rational and Irrational. Here the intertextual allusion I will analyze will be to Saint Augustine’s Confessions and the story of his search for knowledge in the City of God. With this reading, I will show how the barriers within the oppositions are destabilized, ultimately leading to the breaking down of anything that could serve as a universal signified within the poem.

Starting with the counterpoised conceptualizations of Real and Unreal, it must be mentioned that Eliot’s use of the term “unreal” leads to a questioning of what constitutes “real” or what represents a real city to him. Upon a first reading, Unreal City is the signifier which refers to the city of London after World War I, but this concept also alludes to the dreamlike city of Baudelaire’s Paris (which affected Eliot so strongly that he included it in his poem). To expand on the origin of this Unreal City, Victor Brombert writes: “Indeed, the Paris of Baudelaire is a Waste Land, where love and especially sexuality are not only manifestations of sin, but the sign and the symbol of sterility.” Characteristic of both these cities are the dreams and nightmares, the secrets and mystery, and their foggy and gray colors, and what is most manifest is the incarnation of sin in a world that gives no spiritual nourishment. Examples of this destructive mechanization and corruption are given by Eliot in Part III, as he describes the waters of the Thames River contaminated with “empty bottles, “silk handkerchiefs,” “sandwich papers,” “cardboard boxes,” and “cigarette ends.”

A further examination of what would correspond to “Unreal” as signified brings us to understand the multiple interpretations of a word that becomes broad in meaning once it loses its prescribed relations. In other words, Eliot’s descriptions break down the expected one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, instead allowing multiple signifieds (ex. London and Paris) for one signifier. As another example of this deconstruction, in the poem London is crowded with ghostlike walkers who cross a bridge, and this image becomes a signifier itself as it corresponds to a purgatory. At the same time, the idea of purgatory signifies an in-between state of life and death, which is a main theme of the entire poem. Thus the signifier of the ghostlike figures corresponds to both purgatory and death as signifieds. The idea of a limbo includes the temptations found on earth which prevent the soul from achieving its maximum level of purity, leaving it at the midpoint between heaven and hell and preventing it from being a universal signified.
I have tried to show the discontinuous nature of Eliot’s objects and subjects. As Donoghue states, “Modern language presupposes a fragmented space made of objects solitary and terrible because the links between them are only potential.” So rather than seeing any one thing as clearly “meaning” or naturally implying something else – instead of signifiers being universally linked to particular corresponding signifieds – each signifier and signified stands solitary, capable of linking and re-linking ad infinitum.

Although the second set of binary oppositions between Rational and Irrational is linked to the first one, I find it important to examine them separately. What is significant to point out is that these two concepts rely on each other to find their meaning: to Denis Donghue, the rational imagination in the poem is represented by Shakespeare, Spencer, and St. Augustine and it is confronted with the irrational in many ways when these figures appear.

In Part III, Eliot makes an allusion to Augustine’s trip to Carthage found in his biography called Confessions, a memoir of Augustine’s path to conversion and Christian illumination: “ To Carthage then I came/ Burning burning burning burning/ O Lord Thou pluckest me out/ O Lord Thou pluckest/ burning.” This trip, taken before his conversion, was Augustine’s attempt to free himself from evil and the temptations of the world (like the evil found in Eliot’s Unreal City) and to reach ultimate enlightenment through faith in Christ. This faith comes aided by the hand of Reason understood in neo-platonic terms. In Confessions Augustine writes:
“By having read the books of Platonists, and having been thought by them to see in corporeal Truth, I understood how thy invisible things are understood through the things that are made. It still seemed what it was that the dullness of my soul allowed me to contemplate.”

This belief in Reason is further investigated in Augustine’s later years, when he wrote The City of God. This image of a heavenly land is important because it stands against Eliot’s Unreal City, and this is how both these concepts are created in the text, by robbing elements from one another and by standing against each other. The City of God, unlike the chaotic and human city of London, exists above Nature as it transcends the world, and according to Donoghue, “The contemplation of the City of God is also complete knowledge.” This idea is helpful in the process of understanding what is considered to be “real” in the poem, and how it stands against what is “unreal” as we come to the conclusion that the Rational and the Irrational do not contradict each other in the poem; rather, they remain together and coexist sharing various elements. For example, it could be argued that the guarantee of absolute knowledge has an evil aspect to it, and that the irrationality of Eliot’s London flourishes with a creative freedom that the City of God lacks, which is more special and less artificial than the one for which Augustine searches. In being conceptually supported by the Unreal City, the City of God, in the poem, loses any claim it might otherwise have to being a universal signified because it relies on the Unreal city to complete its meaning.

Another demonstration of how the link between The City of God and its signified, which represents absolute knowledge, is lost, can be found in the first draft of Waste Land. Before deciding to start out with the Sybil of Cummae quotation as the opener of the poem, Eliot had drafted his work with an introductory paragraph taken from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which he later decides not to use. In the epigraph, Marlow says to Kurtz:
“Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during the supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision-he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than breath-“The horror! the horror!”
Whereas Augustine envisioned complete knowledge as paradisiacal perfection, Marlow experienced it as hellish terror. The fact that Eliot considered opening the poem with Marlow’s statement, combined with allusions to Augustine in the poem, undeniably implies Eliot’s own dissatisfaction with Augustine’s conceptualization of complete knowledge. This deferral of terms (What if enlightenment isn’t all it’s assumed to be?) unveils the hidden characteristics of the City of God, because, like Marlow, we find that with absolute knowledge there is also absolute horror and the price to pay for a life of reason with a goal of complete knowledge could be tragic. Here is marked the failure of a permanent link between signifier and signified, because the signifier (complete knowledge) becomes itself a signified (horror) as it opens the door to other concepts ( for example the Unreal City and its temptation and sin) which represent it.

It is clear then that the poem’s inclusion of contrasting concepts nonetheless reliant upon each other, coupled with its conscious corrupting of Augustine’s City of God, serve to deconstruct any possible universal signified. But whereas any reader could potentially find contrasting elements in a poem and turn them upon each other so that they collapse, the real beauty in Waste Land is that this deconstruction is not merely a function of the reader but also an intentional function of the poem itself. Eliot, trained in philosophy, understood the deconstructive implications of submitting Augustine’s City of God to the corruption of the Unreal City, as is evidenced by his juxtaposing Augustine’s concept of complete knowledge as reason and paradise to Marlow’s experience of it as horror irrational. In examining these binaries we not only deconstruct but actually witness the path of Eliot’s deconstruction.

Sources

1) Augustine, Confessions, Electronic edition. 02/19/2008. Text and commentary copyright (c) 1992 James J. O'Donnell. www.stoa.org/hippo

2) Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism. Third Edition, New Jersey.
Prentice Hall. 2003.

3) Brombert, Victor. Baudelaire: City Images and the “Dream of Stone” Yale French Studies, no.32, Paris in Literature (1964) pp.99-112.

4) Donoghue, Denis. _The Word within a Word_. Words Alone: the poet T.S
Eliot.. New Haven. Yale University Press. 2000.

5) Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land, Prufrock and other poems. New York.
Dover Publications Inc.1998.

6) Parker, Richard A. Exploring the Waste Land. 02/19/2008
http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html

The Dream of Death, or the Place for the Poetic Bodies

2008-03-16T01:02:00.001-07:00

By Alejandra Pizarnik
(Translated by Carolina Drake)

All night I hear the call of death, all night I hear the song of death near the river, all night I hear the voice of death that calls me. And so many mended dreams, so many possessions, so many immersions inside these possessions of a young one deceased in a garden of ruins and lilacs. Near the river death calls me. Desolately torn in the heart I hear the song of the purest happiness.
And it is true, that I have woken in the place of love, because when I heard its song I said: It is the place of love. And it is true that I have woken in the place of love because with a smile of grief I said to myself: It is the place of Love (but trembling, but phosphorescent.)
And the mechanized dances of those ancient dolls and the inherited sorrows and the water running fast in circles, please do not be afraid of saying it: The rapid water running in rapid circles while in the shore the paralyzed gesture of the paralyzed arms are calling for an embrace, in the purest nostalgia, in the fog, in the weakest sun light filtering through the fog.

More from the inside: The nameless object that is born and pulverizes itself in the place where the silence is as heavy as gold bars and time is a sharpened wind that makes its way through a "grieta" as that is its sole declaration. I talk about the place where the poetic bodies are made-like a basket full with the bodies of young girls. And that is the place where Death sits; it wears an ancient suit and plays a harp on the shores of the "lugumbre" river. Death in a red dress, the beautiful, the funerary, the spectral, the one who played the harp all night until I fell asleep inside my dream.

What was there, in the bottom of the sea? What landscapes were made and unmade behind the landscape which contained a painting in its center, where a beautiful lady was painted on it, and she carried a harp and sang besides the shores of a river? A few steps behind, I saw the stage of ashes where I represented my birth. Being born, which is such a "lugumbre" act, caused me laughter. This humor running through the contours of my body turned me into a phosphorescent figurine: The iris of a violet eye changed into blue as it turned in the light, a glowing young girl made of silver paper, half way drowning in a glass of blue wine.

Without any light or guide, I advanced through the path of metamorphoses. A subterranean world of unfinished creatures, a place of gestation, a green house of arms, of trunks, of faces, and the hands of the dolls, suspended like leafs from the ice sharpened trees, flapped and echoed moved by the wind. And the beheaded trunks dressed in lively colors danced in childlike circles near a coffin filled with the heads of madmen that cried like wolves, and now my head seems to want to burst out of my uterus like if the poetic bodies were fighting to come into reality, to disrupt it, to be born from it, and there is someone inside my throat, someone who has been gestating in solitude, and me, unfinished, burning to be born, it opens, it will come, I will come.
The poetic body, the inherited one, the one unfiltered by the sun rays of a foggy morning, a cry, a call, a flame, a calling. Yes. I want to see the bottom of the river, I want to see if it will open, if it disrupts and flowers on this side of the shore, and it will come or it won’t come but I feel it pushing its way. And maybe, and maybe it is only Death.

Death is a word.
A word is a thing; it is a poetic body that invades the circumstance of my birth.
Never, through this way will you ever be able to explore it. Speak, but over the stage of ashes: Speak, but from the bottom of the river where Death is singing. And Death is her, my dream told me, the song of the queen told me. Death with hair the color of crows, dressed in red, molding in her ancient hands the bones of birds to beat over my tomb, she departed singing and from behind looked like a beggar, and young boys threw rocks at her.

She sang in the foggy morning barely filtered with the rays of the sun, the morning of birth, and I would walk with a torch in my hand through all the deserts of the world and even dead I would keep looking for you, my lost love, and the song of Death unfolded that morning, and it sand and it sang.
It also sang in the old tavern near the port. There was a teenager dressed as a clown and I told him that in my poems Death was my lover and my lover was death and he answered: your poems speak the just truth. I was sixteen years old and had no other remedy than to look for absolute love. And it was in that tavern in the port, that she sang her song.
I write with my eyes closed, I write with my eyes open: The wall will fall; the wall will become a river.
Death in blue, Death in green, Death in red, Death in violet, in the visions of birth.
Her blue suit and the phosphorescent silver in the medieval night of every death of mine.
Death sings near the river.
And it was in that tavern in the port where she sang the song of death.
I am going to die, she told me, I am going to die.
Come at sunrise, my friend, at sunrise come.
We have recognized each other, we have made each other disappear, my friend, the one I wanted most.
Me, assisting my birth. Me, assisting my death.
And I would walk through all the deserts in this world and even dead I would keep looking, for you: because you were the place of Love.

I Heart Ballet

2008-03-05T20:54:00.000-08:00

I always tell myself that I am too old for this. That I will never be a prima Ballerina and that this ongoing affair with ballet should be something I could give up by now, in exchange for a different career in dance maybe (something like ballroom, or even modern dance?) or a different career altogether. I thought I was not good enough to join a Company either, given that I’m not good enough to be a prima Ballerina. And in the end, I thought I just did this as an exercise. But I have been lying to myself all along.
The truth is that I am so obsessed with Ballet, again, like I used to when I was taking classes in Argentina. And it is not funny, because I am supposed to be focusing on other things: Like finishing college for god’s sake, or working a better job than one where I make cappuccinos all day. But I enjoy Ballet so much that this is all I want to do, and this is all I‘ve been able to think about. Even on my gloomiest moments, Ballet is all I can grab on to; all that provides me with an escape away from the heaviness of my being in the world.

This is to say that I took a class at the Joffrey Ballet School last night; a rundown studio inside a run down building in Manhattan, where dancers in leotards and leg warmers ran away from the cold of March. How much in love I am with this discipline is hard to explain, especially if I recall the eccentricity of my teacher who kept giving us Swam Lake variations and telling the class that today was Stalin’s anniversary. But how much in love I am with this discipline is easier to explain when I describe his eyes on me as I stepped into attitudes and did my pirouettes and he yelled “Good! Good!
And for a change, last night was the time when I did not finish a Ballet class frustrated at myself for not having done better. For the first time in one year since I took up dancing in Charlotte, I was enjoying myself.
These fleeting moments where I find myself at ease are so rare in my life, that when they happen, all I want is to prolong them. I wanted to extend the stupid, short moment of acceleration and happiness experienced when my teacher kept yelling “Good! Good!” I wanted it to last until summer; I wanted an entire withdrawal from my life in Charlotte in exchange for Ballet classes and an invisible existence in New York City as long as I could enjoy myself again through movement like I was doing last night and as long as some crazy teacher could encourage me from behind his sunglasses. Because sadly, I am the type of person that needs encouragement, or else I will fail miserably at everything.

I love visiting my parents in Queens, but I have to finish school in North Carolina and all I can aim for is to go back to Charlotte next week with a different approach. To keep taking my philosophy classes, to re-take Ballet, to work at my crummy job, to erase the hurtful feelings that have haunted me. And to hope for that other feeling to appear again: the one I experienced last night when I felt I was doing well in front of the class. When I knew I was good, and that I could do no better than that.

The Poet and his Poem (1968)

2008-01-25T11:30:00.000-08:00

Translation of Alejandra Pizarnik

"A poem is a painting granted a voice
and a painting is a silent poem."
(Oriental Proverb)

Poetry is the place where everything happens. Just like Love, comedy, suicide and every other act which is profoundly subversive, poetry distances itself from what prevents its freedom and its truth. To say freedom or truth and to refer it to the world we live in, or we don’t, is to bluntly lie. It is not a lie when we refer these terms to poetry: the place where everything is possible.
(…)
In opposition to the feeling of exile or that of a perpetual wait, is the poem _the promised land_. Each day my poems get shorter: small fires lost inside a strange realm. The eyes of the one who I know tend to wait for me inside those few verses; the things that have been reconciled, the hostile things, the ones that do not cease to haunt me with the unknown; and my usual thirst, my hunger, my horror. From there comes the invocation, the evocation, the conjuration.
About Inspiration, I believe in it orthodoxicaly, which does not prevent me from concentrating on one poem for too long (it is rather the opposite.) And I do it in a way that, maybe, reminds me of the gestures of artists: I attach my blank paper to a wall and contemplate it; I switch words around, I repress verses. Sometimes while erasing one word I imagine another one taking its place, but I still don’t know its name. So while I wait for the desired word I make a drawing that alludes to it, scribbled in the empty space. These drawings I make are like rituals. ( I must say that my affinity to silence makes me unite, in spirit, poetry with painting; So when others say “ privileged instant” I would rather call it “ privileged space.”)
(…)
They have been warning us, ever since immemorial times, that poetry is a mystery. And yet we recognize it: we know where it is. I think that the question, what is poetry to you? deserves either one or the other of these two answers: Either silence, or a book that narrates a terrible adventure: the adventure of someone who parts, and sets off to question the poem; to verify its enchanting power that is exalting, revolutionary, calming. Some of them have already narrated their terrible journey to us. In regards to me, it is a contemplation for now.

Paris, 1962

The Poem and his Reader

If they ask me who do I write for, they are asking me who do I destine my poems to. This question tactfully guarantees the existence of a character.
So then it is three of us: me; the poem; its destiny. This triangle needs to be examined further. When I finish a poem I have not ended it. The truth is that I only abandon it and it is no longer mine, or more precisely, it barely exists.
From that moment the ideal triangle depends solely on the reader and only the reader can end the unfinished poem, rescue its multiple senses, and add others. To Finish means to give life back, to re-create.
When I write I never evoke a reader. It also never occurs to me that I should think about the destiny of what I write. I have never looked for the reader, before or after the poem. I think this is why I have had unexpected encounters with unexpected readers who gave me the intense happiness and excitement of feeling comprehended profoundly; of feeling understood. To this I will add a statement made by Gaston Bachelard:
The poet must create his reader and in no way express common ideas.

Buenos Aires, 1967

The New Year ( Circa 2002)

2007-12-31T18:24:00.000-08:00

I had many fun New Years but this one was my most bizarre and it happened almost six years ago when I was seventeen and my sister Diana was sixteen. We lived in a three-room apartment with my family in Buenos Aires, Argentina and it never snowed there but was always stuffy and loud. We would have dinner together and then mom and dad would go to sleep. My sister and I would usually take the bus to the centric area of town and celebrate in some basement party until the sunrise. But this was the year when I had started staying in my room with Diana every weekend, listening to The Cure and drinking Baileys we stole from our older sister. We had no intention of going out this New Year either and were still feeling funny from the champagne. Our friend Ira called a while later:
“ Hey.”
“ Hey.”
“ I don’t want to go down town and I don’t want to stay by myself in my room. Can I come over?”
“ Yeah.” I answered.
Ira had shaved her eyebrows at the time after one of her existential crisis’s and would paint her eyes with blue eye shadow and glitter. Her hair was sometimes black, sometimes bright pink and she liked singing Ramones songs on the bus with me whenever we traveled. I had never been in Love, at all, at that age, but what I knew was that I loved Ira, and my sister Diana and I loved my friend Jasmine whose picture hung on my wall, and that was enough. I needed no more than that.

Ira came over thirty minutes later and we all decided to go downstairs and sit on the steps of our apartment building, to get some fresh air. Most people would consider this a drag, but it was amazing what could happen after midnight in the city. Old ladies walking their dogs in leopard print tights and bathrobes, musicians skipping back home from band practice, cars honking their horns through the avenue, garbage collectors gathering cans they would later sell for a few dollars. That night we all talked about our day and about next year as the last of the fireworks died off, the city lights melting in the distance under the humidity of summer. And that’s when we saw the flashing light coming from a window, it was half a block away in the building in front of ours. Ira pointed this out and we all looked towards that window were a guy wearing a bathrobe held a flashlight and waved at us.
“ Is he waving at us?” I asked.
“ Let’s go back up and watch TV,” Diana said.
But Ira wasn’t paying attention to her: “ He definitely wants our attention, what a perv.”
That was the moment when it hit me: I knew this guy from the neighborhood and I also knew that he was a male stripper. The reason why I knew it is this:

I used to walk down to the river after school, usually by myself and lost in thought, while joggers ran past me. Once I arrived to the pier there were always the fisherman, so I never felt alone in their presence. But there was one guy, probably in his thirties, who would jog every evening with his dog, and I noticed him because he wore a blue cap and really short shorts that grossed me out. One evening I heard a voice calling my attention and there he was wearing the blue cap and holding his dog on a leash.“ You dropped this.” He said, handing me a small, folded piece of paper.This man looked pretty harmless, but also pretty desperate. I noticed that his legs were shaved and by making this observation I reacted too late. By the time I told him that I did not drop anything, and that he was wrong, the paper was in my hand and he was jogging past me.
“ Carlos Jimenez. Stripper ” It said
“ I can entertain your bachelorete party or birthday.” Underneath there was a phone number.
What a way to offer a service.

But it did not end there. Mr. Stripper also jogged behind me one week later, while I was riding my bike with my friend Jasmine as he kept repeating: “ Hey! You dropped this!” I knew better this time and pedaled faster, telling Jasmine to hurry her pace. Mr. Stripper jogged faster, that small piece of paper in his hand.
“ You dropped this!” he kept yelling.
“ No. I did not drop anything! Stop it.” I yelled back as I pedaled.

And it seemed that he wouldn’t give up. Because there we were: me, my sister and Ira sitting downstairs as the fireworks of the new year died in the night. Staring at Mr. Stripper, who had caught our attention and was waving at us and doing stupid poses. The idea of any type of danger never hit us though and now that I reflect on it, this was just another one of those bizarre events you witnessed growing up in the city, and it was no better or worse than others we had gone through.

Mr. Stripper left the flashlight down and his figure dimmed. We could still see that he was holding a sign now, against his window. The first sign had the number seven printed on it, the next sign: a two, the next: a five and the sequence carried on until he had given us his phone number, again, but this time from the building half-block away. He was dancing stupidly now and maybe trying to look sexy.
Ira kept yelling at him: “ What are you doing! Stop!” I was laughing amazed and Diana was covering her eyes.
This is when he dropped his bathrobe.
Diana yelled “ Oh. No!”
I hid my face in Ira’s shoulder.
Ira must have known that this was coming the entire time, because she just laughed.

The show was over five minutes later, when we all hurried back inside our apartment. We walked in to the living room trying our best not to wake up mom and dad, the ashes of the old year scattered on the floor, our cats eating the leftovers on the table. From our open window I could see the river on one side, colored in silver from the light of the moon, and the avenue on the other side silent and still.

“ I saw it.” Ira commented, “ It was pretty big.”
“ I didn’t see it.” I answered.
“ Ew” Diana’s replied.

And that, was the highlight of our night.

All this time has passed and what I remember is not the confusion and stupidity of my teenage years, not the madness of Buenos Aires, but rather that New Year when we sat in the doorsteps with my best friends. Ira laughing as the glitter in her eyes fell to her face, and my sister’s frail hands holding my arm as she tried to protect me from such a sight. The truth being that Mr. Stripper was the first naked man we ever saw, all of us, years before we met anybody we actually cared about enough to want to see naked. And as much as we admit it or not, as much as this could have been avoided or not, at the moment all we could do was laugh, yell, and go hide back inside our room.

Why we like Queens, NYC

2007-12-29T20:44:00.000-08:00

Because nobody’s native language around here is English.

Because we bang the walls with a broomstick three times when our neighbors are practicing drums too loudly, and they bang the walls five times back.

Because it is not that far away from Manhattan, but it is far away enough to avoid the mob of tourists.

Because the subway line starts in Flushing, so we always get a seat.

Because Asian guys with Mohawks actually look cool around here, really.

Because the Flushing public library has books in Chinese and Korean.

Because there are at least three centers in this neighborhood specialized in helping you “ Quit the Chinese Communist Party.”

Because Asian girls wearing hot pink tights and yellow skirts with their hair died in two colors actually look cool around here, really.

Because if we feel like walking down the street to get a beer and maybe some Indian food, and even some bubble tea at three am, there are plenty of stores open.

Because even though we find it annoying that the personal space policy is non existent over here, and everybody bumps into you like nothing down the streets, and the lady behind you at the supermarket is digging her elbow into your back because the guy behind her is pushing her, at least you never get cold in winter with so much body heat coming from everywhere.

Because if you get really bored, you can always stick your head out the window and look down from the third floor. I can assure you something will be going on within your field of view, hopefully not a crime or drug scene.

Because if we don’t feel like having to come back in the crowded subway, drunk after celebrating New Year’s in Times Square, we can always stay in the neighborhood spending our last moments of 2007 in a family owned Colombian restaurant, paying no more than eight dollars on a meal and actually having a nice time.

Because people are not as rude as they are thought to be in this city. Examples over heard on the streets:
“ Can you tell me how to get to the nearest Subway station, and to Fifth Avenue?”
“ Can you take a picture of me and my sister please, and can you hold my dog while we pose?”
“Do you know of any cheap hotels to stay in around this neighborhood, actually could we crash at your place?”

Because you don’t even have to go through the garbage to find a ceramic monkey playing the tuba, a coffee table, and a framed mirror disposed in the nearest street corner.

Holidays

2007-12-23T17:10:00.000-08:00

I am here in Queens, NYC, spending the holidays with my family. I must say, this city is very different from our last home in Beaufort S.C, the place where time would take a cigarette and dust would accumulate on every bookshelf. Maybe I am feeling nostalgic at the verges at the New Year but I keep thinking about all the places where we lived with my family since we moved to the US, and all the things I liked about those places…

For example, I don’t think I miss Beaufort S.C, except for its lights and ghosts, its silence among the deserted streets in fall, its endless bridges connecting the islands, its African magic on the Bay area, the big sea shells dragged to the shore by the salt in the waves. It’s immense skies at sunset.

I don’t think I even miss Beaufort when I walk around Main street with Dad here in Queens, and every sign is written in oriental symbols that make no sense and Korean ladies sell me a fruit smoothie that tastes like bubble gum and gelatin candy. Where the largest sign hung in a building says: “ We can help you quit the communist party” and the Public Library of this Babel hires seven security guards to keep the peace and quiet. They yell at women to throw away their cigarettes while I read a book of poems by Charles Bukowski and little kids run around the aisles, and here is when I don’t miss the stillness of Beaufort, at all.

Maybe I am lying to you, maybe this picture explains it better. I am home, and looking down from the third floor of our apartment, and all I see is cement and a dead tree in winter.

But I will take the subway to Manhattan, go to political meetings with my Dad, and walk around the city more often. I will spend New Year’s Eve on Times Square and try not to get annoyed by all the drunken people falling asleep on the ground. I will learn to love this place too.

If there is something I am good at, it is learning how to call different places my home.

But I'm Only Dancing

2007-11-30T14:37:00.000-08:00

In my Ballet class we have four guys; three of them are even straight. The amount of males in our group is considered highly abundant, given that some ballet groups have had to borrow male dancers from us to put on performances. And the scarce supply of male dancers could have something to do with the prejudices regarding the discipline. The proportion between male and female dancers is always very uneven, and I believe there are plenty of reasons why guys would dislike this activity: Stretching always seems tedious to them, having to point their toes all the time could be a challenge, and certain positions might not be as adequate for their anatomy.

But the rest is fun; Guys tend to be really good jumpers and this is where all the excitement is: in the air! Also, because their legs are stronger, they do all the hard jumps and get to spend more time out of the ground than us girls. We, instead, have to deal with standing on pointe or getting dizzy with various pirouettes. But the only thing I wanted to say here is that guys CAN become dancers. Even guys who start out from scratch can get good as long as they have the will to put up with our training, and as long as they attain to the dress code. But here might lay the problem…

One of the main reasons why guys get scared away from taking Ballet is that they are required to wear tights in every class. No, no sweatpants or shorts; one is required to wear tights so that the teacher can see one’s legs. This is not a problem for girls usually, unless one of us is having an “I –hate-my-body” day. But men seem to resist it highly. Chris for example used to take karate and is trying Ballet now, the first time he came to class our teacher asked him to get himself a pair of tights.
“Can’t I just wear long shorts?”
“No. I can’t see your legs with shorts.”
“Can I wear short shorts?”
“No. But you can start out wearing tights with shorts over them, if this makes you feel more comfortable.”

Three months later Chris was not only wearing tights, but he was also buying leg warmers in different colors to match his shirts. Still resistant to the abuse though, one evening after my teacher had yelled at him for not stretching properly, he mentioned to me that: “First she makes me wear tights, and now I have to do the splits?!”

Some are less resistant to the tights than Chris though. Demarcus started out looking like a basketball player in sweatpants, and now he stands like a dancer and seems to really like how is body is starting to look. This morning in class he told my teacher:
“I have a new ballet outfit with new leg warmers!”
“Good Demarcus, you will probably look great.”
“I’m gonna look sexy!”

Yes, not all of the guys are bothered by the classical dancer dress code. Jonathan for example has this thing for wearing bandannas, which to me make him look like an extra in the movie “Flash dance” but to him look very cool, and Brian tends to wear bright green leg warmers that go up to his knees, over purple tights.

No, I’m not going to finish this entry by making you guess which one of them is gay. I will only say that in the end it is all about the dancing.
In the Ballet world not everything is what it seems.

Old New York is a Friendly Old Town

2007-11-23T18:45:00.000-08:00

I am in NYC visiting my parents for the holiday. My oldest sister Val is here too. At some point in the day we get bored and decide to take the subway to Manhattan, to walk around in the cold. The city is full of Christmas lights and garbage, siren noises and the scent of expensive perfume on every blond lady that walks by. We tag along together doing our best to avoid the crowds. We explore for hours going in and out of shops, we take our picture next to a gigantic Christmas tree near the Trump tower, we are very cold.

We decide to take the subway back to Queens.

Once at the station we enter the train. My sister grabs a seat and I decide to stand up but ask her if she can hold my bag, in where I carry my wallet and cellphone. The doors remain open as the train waits for more passengers to hop in.

At some point, Val decides that we are in the wrong train, and going the wrong way.
" Should we get out now or wait till the next station?" She asks me.
" The doors are still open, lets get out of here" I answer.

She runs out ahead of me holding my bag. I follow behind but the door closes too soon and I am stuck inside the train. Now my sister's pretty face stares at me, worried through those windows.

" Just come back and meet me here!" she yells as I nod and the wagon leaves with me inside it.

Thirty minutes later I am back in that same station on Fifty First Street, or was it Fifty Ninth that I had to go back to? I have no money or cell phone with me, no identification. I am the ghost of the subway and nobody notices me walking around back and forth looking for my sister. This Bob Dylan song keeps playing in my head. Why would they, I'm in NYC and people walk around with insane faces and names all the time.

I ask a security guard if he could let me use a phone, given that I'm lost and all, but he does not look at me in the eye and points to the direction of a public phone.
" Can you lend me a quarter?" I ask him.
He says he does not have one.
I yell at him, " Well thank you so much Sr, for being so HELPFUL and all. Thank you."

I ask a lady for a quarter and she does not have one. I try my best to look collected so that nobody assumes I'm just picking up drug money.
An Asian guy gives me a quarter and smiles. I thank him and run to the phone.
Where I encounter my first problem, the phone I need to call is my sister's, and it's not a local area code, obviously. The quarter is useless.
I call an operator and ask them if I can make a collect call to a cellphone.
" No, you can't." He responds.

" Well, then. THANK YOU SR. IF I HAVE TO WALK BACK TO QUEENS ALL BY MYSELF IN THE COLD, JUST THINK THAT IT WILL BE THANKS TO ALL YOUR HELP. JERK"

I know. I was getting emotional.

I keep walking through the station as people pass by and get in the train, an old man plays the violin under the greenish underground lights. I miss my friends in Charlotte and I miss my sister. I feel very far away from everything.

My next plan is to beg for more quarters and gather enough money to take a subway back to Grand Central and then to Queens, from there, I'll probably be able to make it home. In the next four hours, hopefully.

I wonder if there is a soup kitchen I could sit at for a while, but I still don't look homeless enough. Just as I am about to run out of the station to start my polar journey this familiar voice yells this familiar name, it's my name, from the other side of the station. It is my sister, and she has saved me from walking in the cold, lonely and miserably tangled in my thoughts. She has found me and I am alright again, like when I was a stupid child and would stupidly get lost all the time. Except that stupidly, I keep getting lost and losing people more and more as the years go by, so stupidly that it just makes sense.

The only real things I seem to have learned so far are:

2007-11-11T00:31:00.000-08:00

1) It's okay to hate hanging out with large groups of people. You don't have to go out and pretend to love being in crowded rooms or be interested in lowest common denominator conversation that you never participate in anyway because you get so anxious when you know lots of people are listening and your head just goes blank and you don't even have anything you want to say but you want to say something just so you won't be the only person who isn't saying anything and you spend all night thinking of something to say but nothing seems right and you go home without having said anything at all and wonder why the hell you bothered to go out at all because you knew it would turn out like this. It's perfectly fine to not have the need to go to a place where the music is so loud you spend all night waiting to get home and take some Tylenol and go to sleep just because that's what people are supposed to love doing so much.
You can just stay home.

2) High school doesn't matter, really. After you leave no one will ever know what grades you got or how much you skipped class or what your SAT scores were or whether or not you had anyone to sit with at lunch. No one will give a fuck if that stupid asshole everyone thought was so cool told you you were a lesbian or if no one ever asked you to a dance that you didn't even want to go to anyway because you hated everyone at your school and they all thought you were a lesbian, and you knew it would suck and you'd have no fun, but you wanted someone to ask you and you wanted to be the sort of person who had fun at dances even though you sort of hated the kinds of people who did.

3) High school is the worst time of human life and anyone who says differently is lying to you.

4)College is not that hard. College has many advantages over high school such as optional attendance and the abundance of weed for Philosophy majors and occasionally professors who are incredibly passionate about what they do, which can be contagious ( but at least high school was free.) Do not go to college if you don't know why the hell you are there, especially if it is a private school; college should not be a $25,000 daycare center. Go do something else. If nothing else let me tell you that working full-time for minimum wage and finding that the body can be sustained on a spaghetti-based diet will usually give you the inspiration you need to find some kind of direction.

5)A BA is an expensive piece of paper and nothing else unless you get it in one of very few useful subjects, none of which interest you in the least.

6)One night you will lie awake and come to the actualization that many people whom you have shared long talks with, whom you have cried with, or whom have seen you naked will have nothing in common with you anymore or live three thousand miles away from you. This will make you very very sad. You will try to move forward and focus on new people whom you will be able to share long talks with, cry on their shoulders and who will see you naked. But you will make sure they all remind you of the ones you have left/have left you behind.

7)Wasting years of your life doubting your sexuality will only make you shy and repressed. There is nothing better than having your gay best friend drag you to a Gay bar one night, and he wears an eighties wig while a drag queen show goes on all night and men wearing cowboy hats have sexual intercourse on the VIP room, to remind you that you are not as weird as you thought you were.

6) Most sex you have in your teens and twenties will be stupid. One day you will be sitting at a Diner with your friends and over coffee you will make a list of the people you have had sex with. You will forget someone. Only the forgotten name will not be constant, it will rotate, and you will wish you had known this earlier and spared yourself a lot of nights laying on the floor sleepless, crying into a telephone, swearing how some boy/girl will be the death of you and swearing it again in bad poetry.

7)Talking about your experiences as if you are experienced often gives the opposite effect.

8)You do not have to have a career or a house, never less a husband to start with the child-bearing operation. At the same time, you do not have to have published your first novel or signed your first record deal or had your first solo exhibit at the Met by the day you hit 18. It is best to not peak too early. Look at what happens to child actors; the rest of your life will just be spent hoping for a spot on an E! True Hollywood Story.

9)Just because everyone from your high school is currently learning how to perform triple bypass surgery or winning law suits while you wouldn't even trust yourself to use your toaster doesn't mean you are a failure. Really. (I'm not really that sure about this one though)

10) One day you'll meet someone who makes you want to do cartwheels and write dirty things in foreign languages on the insides of their arms. While meeting someone who makes you feel so fucking good is awesome, it will simultaneously magnify everyone else's shortcomings and you will get angry that they didn't do THIS or they didn't support THAT or they never cared about THIS because now someone DOES and before you just weren't brave enough to expect it.

11)Being fucked-up is not the only way to be interesting,i t is just the easiest.

12)Sympathy and caring are different words because they are different things.

2007-10-11T21:28:00.001-07:00

The only reason why I was craving pudding and a can of soup for dinner tonight was because I was so tired I did not want to spend any extra energy chewing on my food. That’s why.

Week-End

2007-09-28T11:38:00.000-07:00

“It is noon and I begin to read Heidegger with breakfast, but end up watching Britney Spears videos on Youtube as I munch on my dry piece of toast. I will never understand the problem of Being anyways and I couldn’t care less about Heidegger today. I turn the volume down so that you don’t lose the little respect you have left for me but you couldn’t care less if I liked Britney Spears way more than Heidegger by now.

Outside there are kids playing soccer in the field and every thirty seconds a whistle blows and people clap. Outside the day is windy and the sun creeps slowly above the rooftops. I am still wearing my spider man pajamas and you are in the shower. I already am missing you, I am wondering what will become of me on all the days I will spend away from you, but I keep clicking on more Britney Spears videos and even singing along to them. On the second floor our Mexican neighbor talks on his cell phone from the balcony, the heavy beats of his Cumbia music make our ceiling thump. I wonder if he lives alone and if he hears me yelling at night and banging doors.

The water isn’t running anymore and I can hear you stepping out of the shower. There is a knock on the door, five times like if they are coming for someone, but when I peek through the key hole it is only my Mexican neighbor. He wears a gray shirt with an eagle printed on it and gray sweatpants. His beer belly is sticking out and he is one head shorter than me: “Can I charge my cell phone in your car please?” he asks, I don’t answer. By then you are wearing that brown polo shirt that I like so much and your hair is still wet, you stand near me and tell him that you are about to leave, but that I can help him.

And I do, I leave his phone charging in my car and tell him that I will knock on his door in one hour to give it back. “Gracias” he says, and thirty minutes later I can hear the loud thumps of the Cumbia music coming from the second floor.

Our Mexican neighbor has Christmas lights decorating his balcony and he's had them since last winter. They glimmer and fade in the night, sometimes only the red lights will work and not the green or the white ones. I never told you this but when I come back home from work I look up towards his balcony, and always wish for the white lights to be on. I never told you this but I am sad that he will only be your Mexican neighbor now, and not our Mexican neighbor. I never told you this but now that I write it down, it just makes sense. “

Transformer

2007-09-08T23:14:00.000-07:00

(Current Music: Lou Reed, obviously: " Take a Walk on the wild side")

At work there is a guy named Marcel who’s gay. There is a minor detail to this story and it’s that he’s not aware of it. I’m not going to spend time writing about the way he talks or the way he walks because I would mainly be describing a typical flamboyant gay guy and we all know about those. I will instead mention a few of his character traits. You see, Marcel gets hit on by older gay customers all the time at work; he also flirts back with them without realizing it. Like many gay guys, he surrounds himself with middle aged women who confide in him and cry on his shoulder, he has few male friends. Marcel also used to take Ballet when he was younger and his favorite singer is Joni Mitchell. He has unsuccessfully tried dating girls in the past and this is what we were talking about today, at break time.

Marcel: “Yeah, I don’t know like, I’ve not been in a relationship since I graduated from high school. I don’t know what it is.”

Me: “Well, maybe you just need to, hum, find yourself, you know?”

Marcel: “Yeah, like every girl I like, I just want her to take care of me and listen to me. But I always feel like I’m not good enough for them. My last girlfriend would beat me up, once she even threw a knife at me. It’s hard to find somebody you know?”

Me: “Yeah, well, you just need to find out WHO you like, and give yourself time to, hum, FIND YOURSELF, Marcel. You’ll be fine. I promise.”

And this situation reminds me of those times in Argentina, before my best friend Gabriel came out of the closet. I remember how we all knew that he was obviously gay but still granted him the benefit of the doubt; at least he would talk about liking women every once in a while. The problem was that all his girlfriends were usually Amazon looking women who were three heads taller than him and had coarse voices. Gabi’s last girlfriend, Paula is actually a Lesbian now, and I remember how once when we were all riding the public bus back from the city, Paula managed to grab a seat and had asked her boyfriend Gabi to sit on her lap. Seeing them was cute at the moment but who can blame us for not even raising one eyebrow that evening when we were all snaking at the table and Gabi decided to declare his new revelation to us:
“Carolina, Diana, Jasmine. I need to tell you something.”
“What Gabi”
“I think I’m gay.”
“Hey, can you pass me the cereal that’s next to you Gabs? Oh, so you’re gay, and the milk please, it’s over there. Thanks”

This is why my only wish for Marcel is that he can find himself soon. Because there is nothing as frustrating as lying awake in bed every night, staring at the ceiling and wondering for hours if you just might be gay. I have news, and the answer comes down to this: If you lay awake every night asking yourself if you just might be gay, then you probably are, time to come out of the closet.

Texto de Sombra

2007-09-01T22:27:00.000-07:00

“Un claro en el jardín oscuro o un pequeño espacio de luz entre hojas negras.
Allí estoy yo, dueña de mis cuatro años, señora de los pájaros celestes y los pájaros rojos. Al más hermoso le digo:

_ Te voy a regalar a nose quien.
_Como sabes que le gustare? _dice.
_Voy a regalarte_digo.
_Nunca tendrás a quien regalar un pájaro_ dice el pájaro.”

(Alejandra Pizarnik, 1970)

For Sara

2007-08-31T09:51:00.000-07:00

( Music: Bob Dylan, "The Times they are Changing.")

Yesterday I found out that my friend Sara is moving to Seattle tomorrow. Not only that, but she also got engaged to a computer programmer whom she met at work and will be living with her. Yes, this is what happens when you don’t find the time to hang out with your girlfriends: They get pregnant or married, or they go away and then it is too late to catch up with them. It will be a while until I see her again and many of us here in Charlotte will miss Sara, so this is a post about her then.

Three Halloweens ago, Elizabeth dragged me to a costume party at Sara’s house. At the time, Sara was living with her boyfriend Andre, who is a musician and who had dressed up to look exactly like John Lennon. Liz introduced me to her and Sara hugged me due to her drunkenness probably, but it was nice to encounter so much warmth from a stranger in a fall night. So yeah, I liked her from the start.
The party went on and more and more girls started showing up wearing their slutty Halloween costumes, it was fun to watch them parade I must say. And it happened that one of those girls wearing a slutty costume started flirting with Sara’s boyfriend, who was standing near the kitchen sink opening his beer at the time. I don’t remember much of that night, except watching Sara grab that girl and slam her against the nearest wall.
“Wow” I remember thinking, “Besides being friendly, she’s really cool,” and also thinking, “I really don’t want to be her enemy.”

I am used to this don’t get me wrong. Liz is a big girl and is known for having punched her ex-boyfriend in the balls, after she found out that he kept pictures of naked women on his computer, and I have gotten mad at people before and thrown things at them (a plate being the worst object I’ve ever thrown at somebody) but I was still impressed by Sara’s toughness. I remember her telling me how this wasn’t the first time she had done this: Once she had noticed one of Andre’s ex-girlfriends talking really closely to Andre at another house party. She walked over to them and slammed Andre’s ex-girlfriend against a wall as she slapped Andre a few times. And something I liked about this girl was her courage and nerve, her gut, because she might have had strong legs but she was still shorter than me.

Sara had no reason to be jealous and I personally thought that the rage she kept inside only made her look hotter. This is how she demanded respect, and it is no different from how other girls demand respect. You can walk away trying to look cool and confident from a bad situation, or you can punch back. In these cases, it’s whatever works for you. And now we have all grown and many Halloweens have passed, and many more Saturday house parties have consumed themselves into the ashes of time. We mostly have bunches and bunches of pictures of those parties in Charlotte, which we all hated going to but which we all attended anyways to avoid boredom.

Sara left Andre for a man who promised her some security and she is also leaving Charlotte for a city that will promise her more excitement. But this was a surprise for many of us who stay in this sleepy, predictable, city which we all complain about but which we cannot leave. It is hard to tell if we will ever see her again as that girl that she was. But it was nice to see Sara last night, smiling and talkative, because this could be the last time. I only wish that if she ever finds herself in a shitty situation like she has before, that she does not forget how to punch back.

In Between Days

2007-08-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

"If there is something I love, it’s my drowsy, lazy afternoons spent at the Laundromat. The place is hidden in a corner between Pecan Avenue and Central and it is run by a Chinese lady who owes a rusted sowing machine from before World War II, and who falls asleep in her chair while the local news is on. I have to read Spinoza for tomorrow but I would rather pretend I have more important things to do, like laundry, like watching my underwear spin through the glass as Chinese lady snores and wakes up by her own noise. Once she showed me a picture of her Chinese son who is a lawyer, today she said “pretty, dress” and she must have meant the white dress with flowers I was wearing, that I got at Wall Mart last night. It is so easy to be pretty at the Laundromat, even if one is wearing sweatpants.

I took a Ballet class today, which was completely uninspiring and dull, and this is all completely my fault, because I felt uninspired and dull. I felt the urge to walk around the city after class, to escape having to read Spinoza, except that I was wearing my white dress and it was eight PM. If I had been wearing a fisherman cap and overalls I would have felt free to tread though the cement and lose myself as the empty buildings reflected their neon colors in the night, holding my thoughts. Is there an escape from the problem of being me? There is no escape if one is wearing a white dress; there are mainly footsteps spilled over the cement, there is a glaze of glitter. There is no escape if the problem can be traced back to your wounded eyes and your sailor mouth. I want to eat a tomato sandwich for dinner. I want to take the subway with my sister and sing Ramones songs all the way home like we used to when everything was new and the city glistened. "

John Cusak and Philosophy ( A Bad Idea)

2007-08-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

Sitting in my Contemporary Philosophy class this morning I was reminded why many of us, philosophers, get mocked at so much by other people. There is this guy you see, whom I used to run into around campus all the time and who my friend Elizabeth has a crush on. He has brown hair and wears sleeveless t-shirts to class, even when the air conditioner is on, just to show off his muscles. He is also part of the Ball Room dancing club at UNC Charlotte. I know this because once, Elizabeth and I were waiting to attend a Feminist conference at the school auditorium, and the Dancing Club was practicing in the hallway. He was concentrating on his arms movements as he advanced towards us, practicing his Latin Ballroom steps. I was walking towards the vending machine located at the end of the hallway, when he bumped into me. While I apologized for my clumsiness of not seeing him, he never apologized back for almost knocking me over. Something I hate is rude people, but the only thing Liz had to say about this was:
“Wow. That guy who almost knocked you over looks exactly like John Cusack.”
“Yeah, Liz. By the way, I’m fine and all”
And that is how we gave him a nickname.
“Look Carolina!” Liz would point out whenever we noticed him around campus, “There is John Cusak!”

One long summer passed after this incident which I had forgotten all about. Until now, when I find myself attending class with Mr. Ballroom dancer, John Cusak, who is taking every philosophy class with me. Despite the hard feelings I might still hold, this is not why his presence gets on my nerves so much. There is another reason and it is that I have wanted to tape his mouth shut ever since the first day of class. I will give you an example why:

Mostly in this class, we discuss the readings assigned and relate them to the ideological context of the time. We are reading Charles Sanders Pierce at the moment, and this morning our professor started by acknowledging the problem of language presented by Pierce. I think he gave a simple example of two people communicating, and from there, he moved on to introducing Pierce’s Semeiotic Theory…Which was interrupted by John Cusak guy, who enlightened all of us with his contribution to the scholarly world, which usually goes like this:

(Cusak raises his hand)

Dr. Boisvert: “Yes?”

Cusak: “I don’t agree with this example. I mean, two people can communicate without one having to understand the context of the other’s communication. I mean, if I communicate with you, and I tell you that I like you, but then somebody else communicates with you and you tell them the same thing, and they don’t understand it, it’s like, who cares? If you come up to me and tell me the same thing but I do understand it, then it doesn’t matter if you communicate or not. You know what I mean?”

Dr. Boisvert: (Silence.)

Cusak: “Two people can communicate differently, and if I don’t understand you and you don’t understand me. It doesn’t really matter if I’m talking about philosophy and you are talking about something else. You know what I mean. Like, say that we are speaking in different languages but you understand some of it and you tell your friend what you thought I said, then what would be important is the context of what we are saying. You know?”

Dr. Boisvert: “I’m not sure I understand what you are trying to say.”

Dr. Boisvert: “Anyways”

(Class goes on until Cusak decides to raise his hand, again, with another of his contributions.)

And this precise, unregulated and endless rambling that some consider Philosophy is what makes me and some of my classmates mad. I am not being snobby, at all. I study hard for every class and struggle with the readings. I know how much of an idiot I am and how long it takes me to really grasp what one thinker is saying, but at least I don’t come up with ridiculous and inventive rambles that slow the class down and get us nowhere.

Cusak is a very good Ball Room dancer I believe, but for the future of our already devastated reputation as Philosophy majors, he should stick to Salsa Dancing. It is going to be a long semester sitting in class with him and I already know it.

The Red Shoes

2007-08-25T00:11:00.000-07:00

Another semester of Ballet has started and our bodies are failing us already. After a two week vacation until Fall session my legs have lost their strength again and my feet are as bad as when I started. And yet the movement is still somewhere in my memory: all those impossible rules that turn the body into a graceful instrument. The only requirement is to let the body mend itself slowly in every class. I know how Ballet works and most of it is plain stoicism. You let your hips turn out and ignore the pain, you stretch your back until it arches as much as possible, you warm up doing splits as you think about the music and ignore the volts of pain shooting from your muscles. Then you do Barre work and you remember were all those muscles you hadn’t been using had gone to, and you hate feeling them there. And despite the constant pressure on the ankles and the limpness of the arms, the body slowly awakens and it always comes back for more. There is something very noble in this type of suffering and I know that by the end of the week I will be turning pirouettes again, hopefully, I just don’t know how tired I will be physically.

But this short entry is to tell you a story my Ballet teacher, Mrs. Horne, told us as we were doing center work: It happened that half of the class was going too fast and the other half was moving too slow to the piano music. This infuriated Mrs. Horne, who hates sloppy dancing.

“I knew a Ballet teacher in the seventies.” She remarked, “Called Irma Vlansky. She was a beautiful dancer. Beautiful. She lived in Germany and got captured by the Nazi army one winter.”
Mrs. Horne seemed to be talking to herself now, but we all listened.
“They crushed her feet and tortured her, but she survived and exiled to the United States in where she taught Ballet in my studio. Irma was a great teacher. Great. She could never dance anymore after what happenned, but she wore bright red shoes all the time. They were heavy Mary Jane shoes that she would stomp loudly every time one of her students did not follow the rhythm.”
And here is when Mrs. Horne stared at us all with her cat eyes,
“Can you imagine Irma? Yelling and stomping her shoes like crazy? Because maybe I should start wearing red Mary Jane’s now.”

And I have no more to say about this tragic story but this: You should have seen us all move in unison to the piano music like if Irma Vlansky were there, watching us with her heavy red shoes on. You should have seen us.

Cocaine Blues

2007-08-19T22:50:00.000-07:00

Maybe I haven’t mentioned this, but I work at a Deli in the south area of Charlotte now, were all the ridiculously rich people buy their ridiculously expensive sandwiches and salads every weekend. My co-workers tend to vary every month as people come and go in these types of jobs, but my favorites are two girls from Central America called Silvia and Susan who work with me in the afternoons, and two guys born and raised in North Carolina who have graduated from college and remain undecided about their careers, they are called Will and David and they help me in the evenings. As different as my co-workers are from one another, I seem to get along with all of them pretty well. I communicate in one language with the first set and in another language with the other. Although Silvia and Susana think that Will and David are lazy, while David and Will believe Silvia and Susana are extremely annoying, they all seem to like me a lot. As hard as it is to believe, there IS something that unites them all despite their disparate lifestyles, and this is Religion (yes, how peculiar.)

Silvia and Susana were raised Catholic in Latin America, witch means that they go to church every Sunday to avoid sin and they mention God a lot. Will and David are Methodists for what I know, and they don’t go to church as much but they also mention God a lot, only that in a different way. I’ll give you an example of how God is a constant presence in Will’s life.

Two weeks ago Will gave Mike, a guy who used to work at the Deli with us, one hundred dollars so that Mike would get him cocaine.
We all know over here that these transactions are usually based on trust, given that there is no receipt one can print out for the purchase of a bag of coke, or no specific manager one can complain to if the coke the dealer got you was bad. So Will had trusted Mike with his one hundred dollars and had expected his coke pretty soon.
But it happened that Mike got a better job as a waiter last week and quit the Deli without telling anybody. He left a cell number that got disconnected three days ago and, according to Will, it is impossible to locate him. Tonight as I was sweeping the floor I asked Will,
“So, did Mike ever get you what you paid him for?”
“No. I am so upset Carolina. I trusted Mike you know. It’s not like I have all this spare money or anything. He’s such a piece of dirt, leaving with my hundred dollars and not even responding to my calls.”
“Yeah, well, doesn’t he wait tables at Upstream now? Just go talk to him personally when he gets out of work.”
Will looks at me calmly and answers, “Nah, I don’t have the time Carolina. And I’m not upset anymore you know, I’m a believer, and I know that God will make him pay for this somehow.”
“Oh. Ok.”

I am left somewhat speechless and decide to change to subject, sending Will off to get me more French baguettes from the bakery. God will punish somebody who ripped you off from your cocaine purchase? C’mon! What else will God do for you Will, hook you up with a chick? Pay your car insurance? Turn bread into cocaine for you? And I guess that for some people it all comes down to having tons and tons of inexplicable Faith. So cheers to that.