Repetition

I figured out another (same) way to describe (one manifestation of) my depression during a bout with it the other night. It wasn’t a horrific attack at all, but it looked bad (as they all do) and required some explanation, so I told my boyfriend what I was thinking: that I wanted to die, but that my loathing of life was directed as much at aspects of it like placing one foot in front of the other and putting keys in locks and getting in and out of bed and buses and airplanes as at the aspects of life more commonly thought to inspire “melancholy.” Really the necessity of brushing my teeth (this was what I fixated on) and standing up to do so every day for the rest of my however-blissful life concerned me much more, at that point, than existential insecurity (so formulated) or low self-esteem or dread of loss or death or any such horror. In such times, it is life itself that looms and paralyzes, not the prospect of unhappiness within that life. For some reason I am desperate to have that understood.

In that mood, by the way, I also longed to know nothing. I wanted to look at a faucet and not know what it was for; I wanted to look at a person’s facial expression and not know what it meant. I wished for this desperately, as I never had before. It was very Biblical, I suppose.

I figured out another (same) way to describe (one manifestation of) my depression during a bout with it the other night. It wasn’t a horrific attack at all, but it looked bad (as they all do) and required some explanation, so I told my boyfriend what I was thinking: that I wanted to die, but that my loathing of life was directed as much at aspects of it like placing one foot in front of the other and putting keys in locks and getting in and out of bed and buses and airplanes as at the aspects of life more commonly thought to inspire “melancholy.” Really the necessity of brushing my teeth (this was what I fixated on) and standing up to do so every day for the rest of my however-blissful life concerned me much more, at that point, than existential insecurity (so formulated) or low self-esteem or dread of loss or death or any such horror. In such times, it is life itself that looms and paralyzes, not the prospect of unhappiness within that life. For some reason I am desperate to have that understood.

In that mood, by the way, I also longed to know nothing. I wanted to look at a faucet and not know what it was for; I wanted to look at a person’s facial expression and not know what it meant. I wished for this desperately, as I never had before. It was very Biblical, I suppose.

Yay

NOW I wish I had an iPhone.

Quotation Number 8374 from Urban Public Education in the United States

Me [looking at a student's paper]: What on Earth?!? Guys, when do you use “an” instead of “a”?

Several juniors: When the next word is plural!

Me [fake-hyperventilating]: …

Several more juniors: Wait, it’s not for plurals?

Me: You say “an elephant” but “a pencil.”

Another junior: Oh! Living vs. non-living!

[...]

Me [still looking at the same paper]: And, guys, what do you do when you write a day of the week?

Several juniors: Capitalize!

Me: YAY!

Another junior: What? Really? I seriously didn’t know that.

Me: Oh dear…

Same junior: Actually, I always capitalized Monday, but none of the other days.

All this was in the course of giving a review quiz: “Write anything, but use 20 apostrophes correctly.” People failed.

Me [looking at a student's paper]: What on Earth?!? Guys, when do you use “an” instead of “a”?

Several juniors: When the next word is plural!

Me [fake-hyperventilating]: …

Several more juniors: Wait, it’s not for plurals?

Me: You say “an elephant” but “a pencil.”

Another junior: Oh! Living vs. non-living!

[...]

Me [still looking at the same paper]: And, guys, what do you do when you write a day of the week?

Several juniors: Capitalize!

Me: YAY!

Another junior: What? Really? I seriously didn’t know that.

Me: Oh dear…

Same junior: Actually, I always capitalized Monday, but none of the other days.

All this was in the course of giving a review quiz: “Write anything, but use 20 apostrophes correctly.” People failed.

My Facebook friends have seen this already, but oh well.

Here are the instructions for a chain note that circulated recently:

“15 BooksShare: Don’t take too long to think about it. List fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. The first fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.”

And here is my response:

1. The Waves (Virginia Woolf)
2. Notes from Underground (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
3. The Noonday Demon (Andrew Solomon)
4. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
5. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rainer Maria Rilke)
6. Repetition (Soren Kierkegaard)
7. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
8. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
9. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
10. The Wretched of the Earth (Frantz Fanon)
11. The Courage to Be (Paul Tillich)
12. Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)
13. The Fall (Albert Camus)
14. Women and Madness (Phyllis Chesler)
15. Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis)

It’s an interesting exercise, I suppose. Also, I put together a nice want-to-read list from my friends’ responses.

Excerpt from an email to a friend

I’m getting ready for another year of teaching, and that will be difficult enough to do and think about for the time being, but later on…? I want a Ph.D., but I want it in a field that is both relevant outside of academia and full of smart people. Education is the former but not the latter. Of course, I would like to enter it and change that fact, but I’m afraid of it changing me instead. It’s like I can either become happily absorbed in things I don’t think matter very much, or become jaded and cynical about things I care too much about. I don’t know.

Hello. I am back.

For a long time ordinary individuality—the everyday individuality of everybody—remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privilege. The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination. It is no longer a monument for future memory, but a document for possible use. And this new describability is all the more marked in that the disciplinary framework is a strict one: the child, the patient, the madman, the prisoner, were to become, with increasing ease from the eighteenth century and according to a curve which is that of the mechanisms of discipline, the object of individual descriptions and biographical accounts. This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection.

The disciplines mark the moment when the reversal of the political axis of individualization—as one might call it—takes place.

In a system of discipline, the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent. In each case, it is towards the first of these pairs that all the individualizing mechanisms are turned in our civilization; and when one wishes to individualize the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of the child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of committing.I’m

I’m reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. His arguments were getting a bit repetitive about halfway through, and I began to flag, but the historical narratives he presents as evidence for those arguments were fascinating enough in themselves to keep me going, and then suddenly–these passages reminded me why I was reading the book for more than its historical factoids.

“For a long time ordinary individuality—the everyday individuality of everybody—remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privilege. The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination. It is no longer a monument for future memory, but a document for possible use. And this new describability is all the more marked in that the disciplinary framework is a strict one: the child, the patient, the madman, the prisoner, were to become, with increasing ease from the eighteenth century and according to a curve which is that of the mechanisms of discipline, the object of individual descriptions and biographical accounts. This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection.”

So “the disciplines mark the moment when the reversal of the political axis of individualization—as one might call it—takes place.”

More specifically: “In a system of discipline, the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent. In each case, it is towards the first of these pairs that all the individualizing mechanisms are turned in our civilization; and when one wishes to individualize the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of the child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of committing.”

Now this is my first post in a long time, and filling it with jargon probably isn’t the best way to win back readers who had given up on this blog, I know. And yet, think of the implications. My first disjointed thoughts were:

1. Here is an explanation for lyrics like the Kills’ “I want you to be crazy / ‘Cause you’re boring baby when you’re straight. / I want you to be crazy / ‘Cause you’re stupid baby when you’re sane”–and for my however reluctant attraction to them.
2. I want to apply this argument to the concepts of “authenticity” and speaking for others, especially where race and gender are concerned, and see where that train of thought gets me. Perhaps my squeamishness at reading about female characters in books by male authors can be ascribed to something much bigger than the author’s own attitudes, which often seem too puzzlingly acceptable–non-stereotypical, in any case–to warrant my adverse reactions to them.
3. What else?