The Transparent Academic

Love literature, and other things. (Imperative sentence.)

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Lacan: Therapists cut patients off @ 50 mins. Scribes punctuate #MSS how they see fit. These are not unlike practices.

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We have done what we wanted.

We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry   

of each other, and we have welcomed grief

and called ruin the impossible habit to break.

- Mark Strand, "Coming to This"

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Before I went to elementary school, my mother started telling me biblical stories. She told me that if we are good, we'll go to paradise, and we will stay there forever. And when she said "forever", I started panicking. I kept asking, "Forever?" "Forever?" You mean, it never ends? Like, you wake up, and you know that then, you go back to sleep, and this never ends, never ends, never ends. I started crying. She told me,"What's wrong with you? This is paradise. It will be a lot of fun.

You'll be very happy there." But this idea of eternity, something infinite, scared me.

- Savas Dimopoulos

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It's easy to give up on fruit

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Rare initial K

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Tree bark at the bus stop. I'm pretty enamored.

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For Maddy: If there's anything better than $5 paisley cotton pants, I'm not sure I even want to know about it. 80s Nine West shoes. Leather apothecary necklace from Spain (gift from aunt circa 1993). Velvet blouse.

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You are weaving through your life when a plane falls from the sky. You could not have prepared for this moment, but you approach it as you would any other: you walk slowly through it, trying hard to listen to what the world wants to tell you.

Amanda Davis (1971-2003), "Crash," from Circling the Drain. What a voice, this woman. 

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1996, very interested in Jediship

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About to send this to my mane lady for her bday

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Napkin art, origami dodo bird

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Talking about these transatlantic cables last night with a colleague. Blows my mind that we still rely on them; there's a bunch of them in the oceans that will still be there when the oceans are sand.

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You hang like a bat / from the tall ceilings / of my empty hangar

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..I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language. I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had been water, I had been drowned, sure. She had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and St./Sir Lionel Logue, patron saint of speech therapists, and his wife, Mertyl.

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We all know people on both sides of the debate: Should parents let their kids sleep in their bed? Should pet owners let their cat, dog or chinchilla cuddle with them while they slumber? While the jury is still out on what's best in those situations, what about graduate students who similarly let what's most important to them pile into their beds? Sleeping with books, often multiple books at one time, is a widespread but much-ignored issue for which imperial research is lacking. Until we have hard data that shows that, yes, falling asleep nuzzled next to de Certeau will in fact improve your time to degree, or that the medieval dream visions inspired by snoozing alongside Chaucer actually outline into a viable prospectus, I recommend the book bassinet ($9.99, Target). All of your comprehensive exam texts and embarrassing self-help books are still within arm's reach should you need them (or vice versa), but the compartmentalizing message of this arrangement establishes a firm - and chic - boundary between you and the world's greater corpus of primary and secondary literature. Fits snugly under most nightstands to minimize tripping on your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night following a coffee binge. Any basket-type container will do, really; just make sure that the sides are high enough so that the books won't be able to crawl out. Pleasant dreams.

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Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, first and only female CMH recipient 

"Surviving crisis situations is part and parcel of being effective, 'doing what works' (a core mindfulness skill). However, at times people are more interested in proving to others how bad a situation is than surviving the situation. The problem with proving how bad things are is that it hardly ever works. That is, although it may result in short-term gains (e.g., getting put in the hospital or getting a lover to return), it usually fails in the long run." -- Dr. Marsha Linehan, modern-day Catholic mystic