On Reading A Notebook

Derrida, Limited Inc: "The first consequence of this will be the following: given that structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content. The iteration structuring it a priori introduces into it a dehiscence and a cleft which are essential. . . . Above all, this essential absence of intending the actuality of utterance, this structural unconsciousness, if you like, prohibits any saturation of the context" (18,59).

i was biking to school on Monday morning and i crossed Main at University to talk to the black man wearing a KKK shroud and bobbing a sign that read, on one side: "Lesbian work at court house." On the other side was a list of judges. i have no idea what it "meant."
So i just said, "Your sign sucks."
And he told me, "You suck. You need a man."
"Your sign still sucks," i said. "Besides, it should either say, 'A lesbian' or 'lesbians' work at the courthouse. "
"Free speech," he replied.
"But it doesn't make any sense."
He started yelling at me through his bullhorn so i headed on to class to show my students a dvd about "Berkeley in the 60's." Maybe we should have just gone for a walk downtown.

Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook": "We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, an indescriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker" (136).

Someone in class suggested that we have non-reified utopia: Starbucks. It's a place where people can come in from the rain. A place where your students can find you. People go there to study. In my grad class. The class where we read Marx and Benjamin.

Yesterday i read that Taco Bell finally agreed to grant the Coalition of Immokalee Workers that extra penny per pound of tomatoes picked they've been asking for. For five years. A penny per pound. For a living wage.

Starbucks. Lesbian work at courthouse.

Godard, "We have to discover everything about everything. We must turn to life again. We must move into modern life with a virgin eye."

One of my cats will only sleep on my laptop, on top of the gas stove, or behind the microwave.

Engels, Selected Correspondence, "According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phase."

i visited my family in San Francisco last week and we went skiing in Tahoe. Every time i see that lake my experience is mediated by the beer commercials that were popular when i was a kid. i see the lake and the snow-capped mountains all around it, and i immediately think, "Head for the mountains. Head for Busch Beer." Then i think about the styrofoam cooler full of cans of Pabst my grandfather always kept in the van. Or on the boat. Or next to the TV chair.

Then i think, "Wow. What a huge lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains."