| thoughts from a cunning linguist | |
Tomorrow afternoon, I'm off to Fredericton with the Queen of Sheba and the PsychoLesbian. There I get to visit the E-Bay Queen and the Renaissance Eeyore in what may be the last time I get to see them all before I head back to New Jersey in the fall. Both have bought new houses in the last little while, so I have go check out the new (or soon to be new) digs.
But aside from the pleasures of the destination itself, there is the road trip itself, replete with good music, clear highways, and Irving Big Stops. Since there will be three of us, it will be hard to divvy up the roles Thelma-and-Louise-style. Nonetheless, I suspect given the personalities, someone will be calling on us to buy the movie rights.
The big question is: what will the theme song be? Any nominations for a song befitting a Bush Whacker, the Queen of Sheba, and the PsychoLesbian?
"Taste," wrote Immanuel Kant, "is the ability to judge an object, or a way of presenting it, by means of a liking or disliking devoid of all interest. The object of such a liking, he says, "is called the beautiful." The "sublime," on the other hand, he says, is "what is absolutely large...large beyond all comparison... That is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small."
The above makes me think that the strongest, most intense forms of desire are sublime. Isn't what we want somehow always in excess of what our minds already have or can hold?
I've found myself thinking a lot about Kant in the last few days. I've always been fascinated by his ideas about the sublime and the beautiful. I've only rarely wanted with great intensity. But each time it happens to me, I get this sense of the absolute largeness of it. The sublime has often been associated with events or states in nature that the mind cannot take in all at once. (Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc" is one of the most famous examples of the sublime in poetry.) But I think it relates to the mind, too.
I'm not sure Kant is right about beauty being devoid of interest. But the sublime itself seems both difficult and delicious, awe- and terror-inspiring--all at once.
Then again, maybe wanting just is what it is, and philosophy is just a poetic way of saying so.
I seem to have a reputation among my friends for picking people up at every conference I attend. It's now a running joke. Nobody asks me how my paper went. They usually look and me with a smirk and say "So?" And I usually have a story to tell.
When flings are flings, the stories are usually not hard to tell. When an affair becomes more complicated or something more important seems to be happening, it's hard to describe to other people--hard to describe without sounding like a Hallmark greeting card, that is. Emotional drama has a Freudian feel about it, whereas social drama seems to exude allure: it appeals to people's sense of prurience and their desire to know the sordid details of other people's live. And we can play to that in telling our stories.
But it's this other thing that stymies me. I can tell you that I met an amazing woman at The Stupids. I could describe the intensity with overused words and cliches. I could talk about sarcasm as the "obstacle" to the happy ending of a romantic comedy that spanned only two days. But somehow, I think, this really means something only to people whom it's about. And even then it's incomplete, barely a gesture. I guess it's just hard to write about desire in the first-person singular. All this is just to say that something very peculiar is happening with this woman and I don't know what the narrative arc is yet. So the story does not yet make sense as a story.
The one thing that does seem to be "the story of my life," though is that my desires seem always to be played out over long distances and often via technology. I've considered this in other blog entries, but I wonder what it's really about. But more to the point, I wonder how one does it well. I'm especially concerned with balance: with balancing the life of the here and now with the emotional life of the elsewhere; with balancing the non-computer here and now with the virtual here and now. Past experiences are good teachers and I guess short of predicting the end of a story too far in advance, the best one can do is occupy the space of "unknowing" or "not-yet-knowing" without being utterly consumed by the lack of knowledge itself.
That, I suspect, is my lifelong project.
My apologies to all of you who have been visiting my blog regularly and patiently to find out the winners of the Lesbian Joke Contest. I can blame conference-going for only a portion of my absence. The rest, well, you'll have to hear that story another time. I'll just say that it involves an amazing woman who was not in town for long enough.
Okay, here are your winners. Now remember, I've just come from a Women's Studies conference where many people believe it is unfairly competitive for some people to win prizes while others don't. So there are prizes for everyone, all of which will be forwarded to the winners by snail mail--as long as you're all content to e-mail me your addresses.
1. Best Joke by a Non-Lesbian and Best Original Lesbian Joke both go to kevin for the following submission to Maurice's blog:
Q: What do you call a gay elephant being trampled by a pack of lesbian elephants?
A: Maurice!
Poupoune, you win the prize for Best Olefactory Lesbian Joke:
Q: What is the height of confusion?
A: 20 blind lesbians in a fish market. : )
Steph wins for Best Cameo by the Bush Whacker in a Lesbian Joke:
There once was a lesbian who lived in a shoe.
She dated so many bushes she didn't know what to do.
She whacked and she whacked.
'Till she thought she would crack.
Then one day she decided it was time to pack.
To keep her sanity she bid them all adieu
and moved to Peru.
Traveling by elephant, of course.
(By the way, Steph also wins the Lesbian Most Inclined to Laugh at Her Own Joke Prize for "*tee hee hee* :D")
And last but not least, David, you win the Butch Appreciation Award for:
Q: How can you tell a tough lesbian bar?
A: Even the pool table doesn't have balls.
To claim your prizes, send in those addresses, folks!
Just got in from yet another evening of conference shennanigans including Thai food and a fabulous evening of conversations with the most interesting conference-goer I've met so far. Women's Studies might not be so bad after all.
Long time, no blog. Or at least no blog of my own. Things have been pretty crazy with the Stupids here in town. I've been entertaining houseguests and a seemingly endless number of out-of-towners. But it's been good to see old friends again. It's always an occasion to exchange good stories, eat good food, and drink more than one should. The empty wine bottles in my kitchen can attest to the debauchery. Some friends from my grad school, Rutgers, came to Halifax for the conference, which was great since I'm heading back to Rutgers in the fall and I'm glad to be back in better touch with people. And my closest friend from my Masters days, the Renaissance Eeyore, stayed with me from last Wednesday until yesterday and we celebrated her birthday at my place with a group of her friends on Saturday night. The bush I burned at last year's conference, we'll call her the Shakespearean Dykelet, is also in town for the conference, recovering from the recent death of her estranged husband. Talk about weird conversations. Oh, and then there was the panel my paper was part of earlier today that included my ex (of the "great Canadian beaver" story). But she didn't show up, so someone else had to read her paper for her. Drama wherever she goes. That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to conference tales. So far, it has not been nearly as much fun as my time last year in Toronto, but it's sure been busy and has produced its own share of stories. More later, undoubtedly, about the Queen of Catechresis, Women in Buddhist Heaven papers, and Pious Ethics.
For those of you still anxiously awaiting the judgment of the lesbian jokes, I promise it won't be much longer now.
Now, though, sleep is of the essence.... zzzzzzzzzzz