2009 and the Detournment of My Quotidienne

(pardon the SI reference, but there was this review of a memoir by Guy Debord's lover in The Nation, and it got me thinking about those cats and that lingo lately)

A lull in the flurry of Father Care and visit from Tricksy (Speed's SO), and I feel that blowing off a bit of serious writing on the Murdoch essay (which is getting entirely off the chain)to read some friends' blogs is just the ticket.

Yeh. So Princess at Flooded Lizard Kingdom wrote herself some New Year's Resolutions, and tagged a couple blogs reflecting on the spirit in which to think and write them. So, agreeing with her, as I often do, I got to thinking about mine. Late, I know, but things have been a tad busy here.

Some are making lists of intentions for their resolutions, some keeping themselves to the one. Having made lists called "To Do --> Ta Da," including master lists of Things To Accomplish This Year, or Things to Accomplish This Summer, including action items like "Meditate more," and "Recycle More" and "Fix Your Bloody iPod" (that one's from five months ago) ... You get the idea. I'm not making a list, and I'm not limiting to The One Resolution.

Rather. My deal right now is that I don't feel all that resolute, or resolved, or fixed like the North Star at all. I feel very drifty, very much unmoored, but not in an entirely bad way. I'm unsteady, and processing a relationship, and seeing some patterns, and getting ready to "let what does not matter truly slide." A Situationist sentiment if ever there was one.

(What. Is. Wrong. With. San Diego. Tonight??? It's terrible when football teams forget how to play football.) -- pardon --

I shall instead drift, maunder, detourn, announce some very general intentions -- because if you read this you probably know me, and if you know me, you know what my To Do list looks like. I would like to wander down to not so much what I will do or what I will stop doing in my life, and get down to what I really do not want anymore. Ever.

Emotional confusion so deep that I cannot articulate it, barely let myself feel it, and try to soldier on in spite of it thinking that I Can Be Strong Enough and Up My Game and then All Will Be Well. --- Dear PMRSC, this is the stupid thing you do. Of the stupidest things you do, this is the really big one, and a root cause of many others. Hence forth, Dear Woman, you/I shall Call a Foul a Foul from now on. Challenge the play, and the call, and point out that Creating Insecurity Where There Need Not Be Any is plain not cool.

Mistaking momentary good/kind/attentive/generous/reciprocal behavior for a desire to behave that way on a regular basis. (See above.)

Attempting to reciprocate said behavior/tone/emotional motif later and being ever so gently looked at as if I've grown a horn, broken a rule.

I shall remember that my friends are not insane, and that if they had seen/heard the actions behind this New Year's Refusal, they would have duly chastised the offender right quick.

Hence, I shall try to sniff out new and deepen old relationships in which I am steady enough to tell the truth, all the time, without hesitation. People with whom I can glow, because they know how to. People with whom I can be small and need some help, because they have been small and needed help. People who will Feel All the Way Right Now because there is no later anyway. Because, I don't have to shield myself from such people while attempting to know them intimately as humans. Which, I am writing to remind myself, is not possible. Those to whom telling the truth (be it gorgeous, silly, serious, or ugly) feels risky or wrong or stupid are people I do not need to know.

For instance, people who say that "the problem is that this matters to you," and when want to parse the meaning of "matter to." Pretty pedestrian phrase in my book.

No doubt by now, you have figured that much of the above is break-up related. It is. But it is also a Pattern with Enough Men to Be Worth Thinking Now. And it is a pattern shockingly similar to my relationship with my chosen profession.

Both those men and this profession hold out just enough positive reinforcement to keep me in the game. Both those men and this profession seem good and reasonable and talk in even tones and make very few sudden movements, even when saying the most ludicrous and soul-wrecking things. Both assume that I will (because I have) accept "working" below my full ability or evolution, and for far less "pay" than my talents and acumen are actually worth. Both claim a kind of passivity that is really a position of perfect control. Both claim a desire to critique or live outside of the usual hierarchies and yet reproduce them in the form and content of their activity or organization.

The academic world of Literature/Philosophy especially. Like a partly-engaged lover, these professions waste talent and can only continue to operate under the illusions/seductions candied out to graduate students. They are, however polite, abusive systems. They refuse the obligations of their own professed values. They are, by the way, quite. fine. with. that.

Harsh? No. The MLA and APA and ACLA have, for decades, bemoaned the recursive problem of needing graduate students to teach first level courses (because the profs are soooo bored with those ingorant kids), and knowing full and well that whopping lots of them are being told they're brilliant and the profession needs them ... to adjunct. And if you just publish a few peer reviewed articles, and maybe a book, and drive a couple hundred miles between schools, and refer to the trunk of your car as your office, get paid 1/3 of your full-time "colleagues," and live w/o health insurance for just long enough, and keep applying for full-time jobs, you might, someday, get one. What they do is burn up good teachers and scholars--and they can because there are so damn many of us. In short, newbies, if you are not in grad school in a top 20 school/department, for-get your professional aspirations. You are padding as far as they are concerned, the padding between them and the ground.

Fact is, kids, that universities CANNOT operate any other way at this point. There is nothing for it. The professors who teach or taught us, who went before us, who manage and defend the profession --- sold out a couple generations of intellectual and pedagogical talent. They did not stand up to this waste of good human time and acumen, and in fact, encouraged us to this impasse.

Hence, I shall not subject myself to that particular waiting game, either.

The feeling in me that says, "See Me, Just See Me" -- yeh, next I have that, I am out. Because living in a place where I spend a lot of energy refusing to feel that, I become a complete nut case.

Glowing, burning as much as I can, staying with people who let me and whom I can encourage to do so. Working in some place or way that feels that way too. That's 2009. That's where I'm going to go in 2009.

The books are there for themselves, now. They're not signs of my belonging/qualification. They are self-referentially existent and meant to better the conversations they will enter. They are now pure things, in the old Symbolist sense no one uses anymore because it's obligations are just too, like, real 'n' shit.

I am now a Writer of Independent Means, and I plan to enjoy that rare status/identity thoroughly.

I shall, in Fleur's words, "shit-can" the whole thing once those books are done and, like the 20's expat I would have been, hie mine self to Europe to drift and detourn my previous social identity, re-edit the Coming Soon trailer of my future so that making myself and other people more of their own good-glowy-rightness the new motif.

Any thing, or situation, or person/s that interfere with that will be promptly allowed to truly slide. It's time. Here (spirit willing) endeth the lesson.