Scenes from academic life—Just say no.

 More academic funnies at whatshouldwecallme.

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Slavoj Žižek

A terrific pleasure to see and hear Slavoj Žižek at City Arts & Lectures the other night. He covered his usual themes with customary élan, saying what he has talked about in more than 2K videos currently available on YouTube. The audience consisted mainly I think of philosophy and cultural studies majors from local universities, and it is interesting to see how he entrances a younger generation of intellectuals, if for no other reason perhaps that he puts forward a new image for the modern philosopher—a scruffy-looking, grubbily-clad contemporary Diogenes with a Slovenian accent and a disorderly manner and a taste for off-color jokes. No wonder he received the Guardian's award in 2011 for "Coolest philosopher of the year." Academic teachers of philosophy look like bureaucratic twats in comparison.

In addition he really delivers the goods, at least if you're interested in Lacan, Hegel and Marx, who have always been my own favorite theorists. Žižek, who can write books faster than I can read them, just released a thousand-page volume on Hegel and Diamat (dialectical materialism) entitled "Less than Nothing." Bang goes my summer reading list.

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Alexander in Egypt

I wrote three history papers last semester, including this essay on Alexander the Great's activities in Egypt. If you've ever lain awake at night wondering why Alexander, having beaten the guacamole out of Darius at Issos, left for a long trip to Egypt instead of chasing the Persian king back to Babylon, then the following may be of some assistance.

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Let it rain

There is nothing quite like the euphoria that sets in after the finish of yet another semester, it's like a grand sigh of relief that rises within one and continues for a week or two afterwards. It's similar to an outbreak of  blue skies and sunshine after weeks of rain in Northern California.

I've been following these rhythms of university life for years, and still I'm always taken by surprise. One starts a new semester with bright curiosity and emergent optimism, and four months later it's nothing but when is this for god's sakes going to be over? There follow some weeks of relative peace and quiet, and then the whole stress parade begins again.

Does it have to be this way? Wouldn't it be more sensible to study straight through the year in a more leisurely fashion? When I was a student in Germany a long time ago, the five months of academic vacation were the time when you got all your work done -- deep reading, doing your research, writing your seminar papers.
The semester itself was for hearing lectures (no exams), interacting tutorially with the instructors, and of course intense socializing, the huge surfeit of youthful energy that disappears by age 40. Then suddenly would come academic vacation, a period of largely solitary intellectual retreat when you'd do your reading and writing for the following semester.

Anyway, Fall Semester 2010 has now collapsed about me like so much fallen timber, and I've  responded by checking out four or five trashy novels and as many opera DVD's from the San Francisco Public Library. Thus fortified I am now squirreled in for the holidays, indifferent to the rains without.

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Geekiness

No time for blogging lately as I am currently awash in geekiness as I struggle to turn in my papers for the waning semester. Numero uno compares Attalid and Seleucid success at empire-building with Demetrius Poliorcetes’ (King of Macedonia) lack of it; number two is a much longer research paper examining ethnicity issues in the Carolingian Stuttgart Psalter (820-830 AD), and three is an essay due next week attempting to explain why Alexander the Great, having arrived at Gordion and having famously untied the Gordian knot, suddenly headed south and messed around in Egypt for two years instead of moving out at once toward Babylon to confront Darius and seize the Persian Empire.

La Maison des Animaux

Intelligence has reached us from Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog that the noted writer's son Louis is now resident in Oxford at what appears to be some kind of fraternal organization called Maison des Animaux. We are very fearful of the outcome.

At Oxenforde, litel Lowys semeth to fare ful well. He hath founde newe freendes and ys doynge wel in his classes. He boardeth yn a smal hous yn towne yclept the Maison des Animaux, and telleth me many a storye of mirth of the aventures that he hath wyth hys freend Pluto, the whych ys a grete janglere and a goliardeys.


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