threnody for the new

"One of our specialties - we've been building and selling these for over fifteen years and demand is still as strong as ever. Equally popular in corporate boardrooms and private houses, these are admirable artifacts in their own right, built to the highest standards.

The shape of each tree is determined by the trunk - we use natural vines up to 80 years old - and no two are alike.

The best way to display them is on a simple plain wood or lacquered table with a spotlight on them. Perfection!"




Britney Spears shaved her head. i couldn't get out of bed today and my phone made the sound it makes when i receive a text message. Heather had texted me that Britney spears has shaved her head. This is interesting and it's not. Add renunciation to the list of actions no longer possible. Blame reification.

i have an office that i go to almost every day. Sometimes my students drop by, but usually they don't. A professor up the hall from me seems to be in his office most of the time. His door is always open and he usually has a student asking him earnest questions in the chair facing his desk. He's brought a lamp in and doesn't use the overhead flourescent light. i think he has a small couch. His office looks to be 4 or 5 times longer than mine. He has a spider plant hanging over his desk. You can see its flowers from the hall - a fact that exposes this plant as an unnaturally healthy spider plant. My spider plant rarely blooms and when it does the flowers, after a day or two, turn into rubbery green root toes. The flowers aren't supposed to last, so his plant doesn't make any sense. After a month or so of passing by this freakish plant every day, i began wanting to stop and ask him how, without a speck of natural light, he manages to keep such a healthy plant. The other day, when i passed by as usual, it became glaringly obvious that the plant is not real. He has a fake house plant in his office. Of course, without light and with all of those flowers, it had to be fake. This matters and it doesn't.

In class we read J.L. Austin and we discuss the performative utterance. A performative utterance calls into being that which it names. Austin, who my students often mistakenly cite as Jane Austen in their papers, coined this term performative. i don't think i'm being hysterical to suggest that this term has made entire academic disciplines possible. Judith Butler has used this term to expose sex as a descriptive fallacy. i have to be able to explain why reification is a bad thing but dispelling the fantasy of nature is a good thing. A fun thing. i start wondering if reification maybe takes away some of the pressure. Right, that's exactly what it does. The problem is like this, though: it sucks to be the one who gets reified so that the other one can have pleasure. This is the African child Dacus and i argue about. This is called making connections. He doesn't like it sometimes when i do this. i don't like it when he doesn't like it when i do this. This matters but we mostly pretend that it doesn't.