not enough soul

The "academia" tag is as large as the "berlin" tag these days, I see.  That's abominable.

I'm falling asleep.  Got up to say good-bye to P. when he left for the airport, thought I reset the alarm, fell slowly asleep again, woke up twelve-or-so minutes before I had to leave to catch my train.  I blinked helplessly at the ceiling for three minutes, then hauled myself up, brushed my teeth & hair, threw some clothes on and had just enough time to stop at the "Raw Energy" smoothie window and buy two raw-fruit-and-nut bars for breakfast and lunch: 160 calories, 150 calories, enough to get you through a morning raw.  I finished reading this book on the train:

Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (boundary 2 b

To be honest, I totally bought this one for the cover.  I have also bought strange classics monographs for their covers.   I understand other women do this with shoes.  I think if someone offered me a pair of reasonably comfortable shoes with Xu Bing's artwork on them in a red-and-chiaroscuro pattern, in fact, I'd be delighted.  Fake Chinese script!  Fake leather!   No lie!  I also have a writer/aesthete's sneering disdain for cultural studies, in my (many) intemperate moments, so this wasn't exactly an intuitive choice.  Oh, and...  I don't study Chinese literature... but more on that below.  I circled around this book for a month or so at Moe's, anyway, and finally it became clear that no one was going to buy it but me.  For Good Or Ill.

I've been feeling homesick for Madison for the last few days, in ways I can't explain.  We're accustomed to this idea that outside forces shape us, that identity is a history of transactions with the world, and we recall mostly those transactions and collisions: but we remember not only things, but our own history of being as well; we remember our identities, as it were.  It's not describable places or situations I recall, or even odors or colors, but a self in the world.  And that world now has changed— I'm in a different environment— so the gestalt, figured in memory and consciousness, changes too.  I remembered being myself, as though it were distant, as though something harmless but ineluctable had intervened to translate me from one spot to another.  A pane of glass; a glass-bottomed boat.

You may laugh.  Moving around in the U.S. is nothing; moving from one hippy college town to another is no great shakes.  Not like moving from Tanzania to Canada, or Siberia to Spain.

But observe the form of these sentences.  That is not as much as this.  This is not to be underestimated.  Focusing on this risks marginalizing that, that there, and that other thing, all of which cry out for attention.  We need a robust theory.  We cannot have a robust theory, so we must practice an operational wariness.  We need to talk to one another.  We need to talk.  We can't talk just now.  I can't talk about this.  I don't know why it's hard.  I should just be able to speak.  This dislocation is nothing.  I can walk on it.  This isn't a good place to talk.  The rents are going up.  I smell burning leaves here; I smell an open sewer there (smells like Thailand!, she said, twelve years ago); I am on a train, the train-talk, the secret language of trains, the fact that I experience an earthquake as the conversion of house into swiftly-stopping train—