there's more to life than books, you know

how to walk between the worlds. how to keep each foot each center solidly in each realm, simultaneously, while living in and enlivening the loamy starry space between.

I did it-- I got into Stony Brook! Found out yesterday via an early (and thankfully pre-Shabbos!) email where they courted me with offers of full funding and maybe even more funding if I get the fellowship they nominated me for. I felt like I was gonna pass out reading the email. Of course Babou found out before I could even call her; she said "I'm kvelling!" and I told her I was still plotzing.

I'm still plotzing, it hasn't totally sunk in. I got into my dream philosophy program! Wanted, and the work begins. If you had any idea how hard I've been praying and spellcasting for this... It is a real hardwon blessing and I am so freaking happy.

"Philosophy stands to gain in finding some absolute [time as flow of unforeseeable novelty] in the moving world of phenomena. But we shall gain also in our feeling of greater joy and strength. Greater joy because the reality invented before our eyes will give each one of us, unceasingly, certain of the satisfactions which art at rare intervals procures for the privileged; it will reveal to us, beyond the fixity and monotony which our senses, hypnotized by our constant needs, at first perceived in it, ever-recurring novelty, the moving originality of things. But above all we shall have greater strength, for we shall feel we are participating, creators of ourselves, in the great work of creation which is the origin of all things and which goes on before our eyes."
(---henri bergson, the creative mind)

So, after reading Krafft-Ebing's brilliant account of sadomasochism and writing a ridiculously not-so-veiled response on Blackboard, I decided a good way to explore my masochistic tendencies would be to lie back on my bed with the lovely Sheila Jeffreys and let her mindfuck me for the half hour I had left before philosophy class. Bad, bad idea. The very first page is now scrawled with my sarcastic, pissed-off comments. I need to get past my emotional response but it's so hard cos most of what she's doing is so motherfucking polemical. I swear to g-d, she opens the book with a discussion of packing, a topic near and dear to my, erm, heart. She totally ignores any history to do with this fine practice and instead locates it solely as an attempt on the part of 90s dykes to valorize maleness and take on male privilege, like those outdated butches used to do back in the day. So I made the mistake of looking up "butch" in the index and was subsequently treated to some very careful, finetoothed scholarship as to how butchness in general and stone butchness more particularly ought to be surmounted in favor of letting your lover touch yr breasts, which you should not disavow because as a butch you are, after all, a woman. Whereas in the 70s, thanks to the saving grace of a surprisingly paternalistic feminism, butches were saved from their masculinity by loving their female bodies in rather conventional ways, the recent queer approach has been for butches to cut up our bodies. I paraphrase, but not much.

In short, this woman makes me want to curl up in a ball and die.

But then I had philosophy class and I got to talk about Heidegger and I think I actually understood some of it, because Borradori assigned me and another jovial lad to present on what we covered in class tomorrow. So, I get to talk about the distinctions between the ontic and the ontological at 10:30 in the a.m. Still, I love philosophy. Philo-sophia, word.

I have a great sense of work now, of purpose. Like, I am now writing and living in opposition to certain 'feminist' understandings of my fucking being, and I am now writing and working and living in the service of certain other feminist understandings of possible ways of being.

I hope that wasn't too obnoxious of a statement. I really feel it. It's great, this purpose.

Arrghh oh my god arguing with Cristina about Derrida and Spivak, in like really, really antagonistic ways. Oh my. It'd be a lot easier for me to engage in a critique of Derrida as eurocentric if C. didn't position Spivak as the panacea to that, having not ever read her. Sigh. As she put it, "I think what it is is that I just don't like philosophy." Ah, so that's why out 'talks' always end with such exasperation! (here let me just re-iterate, in derridean fashion, how grateful I am to have a girlfriend with whom I can argue poststructuralism.)

Oh wait: "I honestly don't find it a useful endeavor at all." Oh, wow.

Well, at least Grosz concedes that philosophy has no use-value in the usual sense of the word. Still, I think it's a useful endeavor. Hmmph.