A Fire in the Belly and a Bug for the Killing

September 14th was my first official day as a graduate student, and I quickly discovered that whatever was in me from Emerson is far from dead…has only become stronger. My note-taking abilities are sharp, my mind is working overtime, and a lecture yesterday put a fire in my belly, or more appropriately, a dictionary's worth of words on my tongue.

Jeff McMahon, our writing advisor, gave a short talk after Professor Miller's words on Rear Window about "entering the conversation." He told us that if things go the way they should, our core ideas and specialties will remain but the specific questions and answers we ask will change, and they will change as we learn new languages, new concepts, and discover which side of the academic conversation we want to dialogue with. When he finished speaking, two thoughts filled my mind…one, "There's so much I don't know still," and two, "Let's get started knowing it!"

One way to enter the conversation is to keep an open mind to all the different disciplines of humanities, and lately, I have been overhearing some of the friendliest people in MAPH talk about philosophy with more passion than anyone else, and so I sought out several people, paramount among them Bill French, who resembles a British Invasion lead singer and speaks to everyone with unfeigned open acceptance. I told him about my work with Trollope, and he suggested I read Michel Foucault. In Wendy and Sox's course way back when I had read the chapter on the panopticon from Discipline and Punish, but yesterday, after some review of class texts, I read a short book which introduced Foucault's ideas and it made me want to read more. Foucault's major thrust was that human identity is based on us being part of a collective where the life we live is determined by practices and institutions with histories of their own which affect how we think and act, in fact control it through the knowledge arising from practices and the power such knowledge brings…but history is also contingent and not pre-determined, so the optimism of Foucalt (which I had never realized before) is that we can CHANGE who we are by "straying afield" from the notion of who we should be, and such change can only happen in common! Did Obama read Foucault? (By the way, it appears my key text is The History of Sexuality, which deals with ethics and institutional change as much as sex.)

By the way, http://chronicle.com/article/Taking-the-Right-Seriously/48333/ is a GREAT article about the lack of politically-conservative educators in America and new first steps towards inclusion. As a moderate who believes that education is supposed to teach you how to think, I THINK this is long overdue and welcome a range of ideas.

Now, yesterday was not all work and no play. I celebrated my first day of class by cooking a giant pot of jambalaya, subsequently shared with Peter (who loves turkey sausage). We talked more about the class and what courses we hope to take over the next year, and it was nice to sit down one-on-one with someone (especially someone like Peter) after a long day of one-way dialogue. I also killed bugs…we have windows and fans open and running because no matter how pleasant it gets outside, the apartment is STEAMING to a degree, and the bugs fly in…but they're so slow in Illinois I can grab them in my hand and crush them…and Peter's friend Maggie, also a Vassar graduate, is crashing with us while she looks for a new apartment…she's moving to Chicago to teach (I expressed my admiration) but took the wrong bus and in her words "ended up in a scene from The Wire."

I have a lot to do today, including reading some of the current conversations about Trollope through literary journals…another great way to enter the conversation as I learn exactly WHAT the conversation is and what terms they're framing it in…but to wrap up…for now…I want to direct everyone's attention to Color Me Veggie at http://colormeveggie.blogspot.com/, where Lisa Huberman shares her vegetarian cooking adventures…read it now before she gets too busy taking the theatrical world by storm…and a prayer for a peaceful rest for Norman Bourlag, the Nobel Peace Prize winner whose work on farming was decried by environmentalists but saved the lives of countless millions, and who died at 96 still trying to feed Africa…and why have I been listening to "The Dirty Jobs" from Quadrophenia over and over?