up all nite

Email record of my last ever coursework-induced all-nighter:

>On May 14, 2006, at 11:05 PM, RH wrote:

I JUST CITED JUDITH BUTLER!
NA NA NA NA NA NA NAAAAAAAAA
NA NA NA NAAAAAA
HEEEEY JUUUUUUUDDE

>On May 14, 2006, at 11:23, CELE wrote:

nice. I just snuck in the truly lyrical Bergson on "the inexorable logic which reality applies to the correction of dreams."

>On May 14, 2006, at 11:34, RH wrote:

If academia were a Nickelodeon children's show, every time someone cited Judith Butler, "Hey Jude" would suddenly play at deafening volume (that's what I was going for). And they would get a bucket of green slime dumped on their head. Then everyone would nod ruefully and chuckle.

>On May 14, 2006, at 11:44, CELE wrote:

i promise to pack slime into seminar if you'll let me douse you when you cite jude. i absolutely recognize the automatic soundtrack phenomena. in our fantasy seminar room, as you may already have suspected, "Clan in Da Front" would start and the Wu Tang Clan would bust through the wall like the Kool Aid Kid anytime someone references "safe in their alabaster chambers."

>On May 14, 2006, at 11:53, RH wrote:

yeah, you've got me doing that now every time i see that poem. damn it. How close are you to done?

>On May 15, 2006, at 12:02, CELE wrote:

i'm on page 19, i have about two more ideas to cover then i have to write an intro and conclusion. then i have to read it over and realize how incoherent it is, panic, fix some footnotes, decide i don't care, read it over again, catch twelve typos, decide to sleep instead of edit, nearly miss the 9 a.m. deadline, and by noon o five i hope to be buzzed somewhere sunny.

how about you?

>On May 15, 2006, at 12:13, RH wrote:

page 15. shoot me.

>On May 15, 2006, at 12:54, CELE wrote:

kay, but by tomorrow you will have written two seminar papers in the time it took me to write one. chew on that, slugger.

i really want to work more coach-style epithets into my vocabulary. chief. but maybe i should just work harder at getting more vocabulary onto page 19.

>On May 15, 2006, at 1:16, RH wrote:

slap more butts.

>On May 15, 2006, at 1:43, RH wrote:

ike a coach, you know. football players. all those tight ends.

>On May 15, 2006, at 2:12, CELE wrote:

yes, tight ends, awesome. i knew this coach thing was a good idea. but you have to explain to people thats what i'm doing, cause if i slap ass and then mumble something about coaching, it might not go over.

10 points for me, i just referenced Wile E. Coyote in a paper on Dickinson. Do you think Cams even knows who that is, let alone that he has a penchant for running off of cliffs before he's realized it? This is crucial to my reading of "I stepped from plank to plank." Maybe the more pressing concern should be why a looney toon has become a pivotal intertextual referent for my reading. I might be in trouble. ya reckon?

>On May 15, 2006, at 3:02, RH wrote:

perhaps the answer lies in Dr. Gene Ray's TimeCube:
http://www.timecube.com/
context: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Ray

this man is batshit crazy. he also has the most emphatic writing style on the planet.

>On May 15, 2006, at 3:54, CELE wrote:

so. tired. I think all this writing on Dickinson is turning me into her--I haven't left my room for hours, and all I do is ponder Eternity (i.e. how long it is taking me to finish this damn paper). I wonder if she, too, had a spiralling jello pudding habit.

>On May 15, 2006, at 4:12, RH wrote:
The civil rights aspect of this story is, I will admit, alarming but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD CAN WE PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE HAVE A "PIRATE VS. NINJA EVENT" PLEASE. Also please note the last paragraph of the article, possibly the most important one.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7279844/did/12303788/

>On May 15, 2006, at 4:21, CELE wrote:

but oh my god, but which would you be? how are you supposed to pick between being a ninja and a pirate? that's like asking me to pick between ... something awesome and something kickass. it can't be done. except that i'm hoping our expensively-trained federal agents would not be so quick to run down a suspicious looking man in pantaloons and a ruffled shirt slit down to his navel. although, come to think of it, why were they so freaked out about a bandana? the old bandana disguise went out with train robbing. you don't see many dudes on COPS these days covering up with a hankie. no no, pantyhose are way more masculine. ok now i've convinced myself that ruffianage and effeminate accessory articles go hand in hand, so naturally we should kneel on any and all ruffled shirts we see. and we should have a pirate/ninja party.

>On May 15,2006, at 4:48, CELE wrote:

Literary term that ought to describe a mode of dancing:
Ekphrastic.

When I'm done this paper, I'mna get ekphrastic up in here. Please lord let me finish this paper someday and praise you with my ekphrastic skillz. Then, at 9:05, I'ma make myself a big old lazy morning breakfast. Eggphrastic!

OK that was terrible. If my room came with a penalty box, that's where I'd go. I'd go, curl up... in the nice... warm... soft... penalty box...

>On May 15, 2006, at 5:04, RH wrote:

here is a desktop-size picture of custard:

http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/media/images/custardbig.jpg

marginally sublime

If nothing but posting is getting done this afternoon, I place the blame squarely on Melville's all but unreadable Confidence Man. So I can't take credit for Hadley's discovery (email excerpted below), but i want to share it cause I know at least a couple of you will get the same tingly joy I did from this scene of the collision of three great texts (Emerson's, Porte's, and our marginalist's):

"I love library books because I love marginalia. I especially love marginalia when it is as compelling as that which appears in the library's copy of Joel Porte's "Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict." The informal annotations in question are cheekily written in pen, all caps. 'FRAIDY ESCAPISM it begins, followed up by - and this is reference to Hawthorne - SELF-POSSESSED NEUROTIC. And then I was hooked. Who was this reader whose hostility toward transcendental thought prompted him (or her) to call Emerson a SCHIZOID HERMIT? Who, despite his or her outrage over the content of the book, kept reading long enough to level the charge of MONKISH HANDJIVER (my favorite new insult) against Emerson's audience? Should we take this as a cautionary tale? Will we too one day find ourselves adding emphatically AND MAKE PEOPLE CRINGE AT YOUR SIGHT to Emerson's dictum: "Now and then a man exquisitely made can and must live alone; but coop up most men, and you undo them." Or is this an undergraduate lashing out at the TA who, like the artists he or she hates (SIMPLY INTROVERTS), dared make him or her read secondary literature? Or was this you, Cristie? .....
....... or Cara?
............ or maybe Rob, working out SC-related aggression?

In any case, I must return to my SELF-SERVING PHILOSOPHY. If any of you monkish handjivers would like a drink tonight, do call. xoxo H"

biodomes and the future of science

Second floor porch, BBQ smoke.

Rob: Remember biodomes?  Whatever happened to the biodome as a utopian project?

Jake: There's still a lone, renegade monkey on the loose in the last biodome.

Simon: And he's probably organizing the other monkeys, building a race of feral biodome superchimps ready to march out of the dome one day...

Jake: No, it's a "lone" monkey.  There's no monkey sex going on in the biodome.

Dewayne: But  it'd still be interesting to think of how many things a monkey could successfully copulate with.

Science is wasted on scientists.