Do Cats Have Being?

           

            I got up at 5:00 on Tuesday and, after yoga, had time for one more hour of studying before I had to leave to write my Continental Philosophy exam. I printed up the pages of my study documents, stapled them together and then headed for Trinity College.

It was raining a little more than a spray, but just enough to get me damp by the time I got to Hoskin and St George.

The porter’s office was just inside the main door and so with his directions I had no trouble finding Seeley Hall, where the exam room was already delineated. Then however I had to go back downstairs to ask the porter where the washroom was. I received a long set of directions that led me along two halls and down a stairway to a very hot pipe-lined basement where the men’s washroom happened to be.

When I got back to the first floor, I ran into Naama, who was lost because she hadn’t asked the porter for directions. I led her to the examination area, but there were no places to sit outside the room, so we sat on the landing between the first and second floor on a stage upon which were mounted several trophies behind a glass case.

Naama had gotten her feet wet while walking to Trinity, so she took her long boots off to set them beside the radiator for about ten minutes, then she put them back on and went out for a cigarette.

The exam room opened while she was gone. I sat at the very front with a large portrait of a young Queen Victoria on my upper right and one of Prince Albert on my upper left. They looked like they might be about the age they were when they first got married.

Unlike some examinations at U of T, we didn’t have to put our bags and coats at the front of the room, but they rather trusted us with our bags under our chairs and our jackets slung over the backs.

The TA that was officiating over our exam was an attractive and shapely young woman of East Indian descent in shiny black lycra tights. For the first few minutes of the exam I had a front seat to the professor flirting with her in whispers until I finally raised my hand to get their attention and told them, “I’m sorry, but I’m finding your whispering very distracting.” They nodded and shut up for the rest of the exam.

Exam essays are always weird to write. I always feel like my thoughts are infantile and yet I almost always do fine in the final result. I spent the first hour writing an essay on Levinas’s concept of the face. I talked about the fact that the face of the other can only affect us because we have a face. The face of the other arrives naked on our horizon and proves to us that we do not know ourselves by having a perspective of us that we can never have. The face arrives in a state of distress, but I don’t quite understand that unless it’s a reflection of the distress we feel on being exposed by the face of the other, so that’s what I wrote about. In the second hour I wrote on Derrida’s idea of our relationship to Being and how from the perspective of sensory experience we are closer to nothing more than Being, while from the point of view of thinking about Being there is nothing further away than Being. I started speculating on whether my cat is closer to Being because it doesn’t think about it, but I added that Derrida would say that cats don’t have being at all. I suggested that it is impossible to think about Being without becoming distanced from it. I’ll be interested in a couple of weeks to see what marks that my speculations earned or lost.

With about twenty minutes left I looked to my left and saw that Naama had finished her exam early and taken off. I was disappointed because we’d arranged to have coffee afterwards but it turned out that she’d forgot and had an appointment anyway.

With about ten minutes to go I had to stop because I’d written a phrase that looked like a conclusion and anything added after it would have seemed awkward.

I shook hands with Professor Gibbs, telling him that I enjoyed the course and his lectures, then I headed home. I was relieved to be done with studying for four and a half months.

I Can't Be Drunk, Because I'm Wearing A Suit!

           

            For the last week or so, until Sunday morning, the wifi network of the café across the street had not been accessible from my place. This has happened for similar periods in the past, and I assume that the problem is always rectified when they reset their modum. Or maybe their signal diminishes in strength as the month progresses and this marks the beginning of a new month. I’ll take note of this date and see if that theory is true.

            Once again I spent most of the day studying for Tuesday’s exam, rearranging the text into more manageable form. I find that Emmanuel Levinas, while a great thinker, was a lousy writer. He worded his text in an overly complicated manner and sometimes used synonymous adjectives twice in the same sentence.

            Early Monday afternoon I rode downtown to Hart House on campus to meet Naama so we could study together before Tuesday’s exam. She had suggested meeting in the cafeteria, but I found it noisy, and since she wasn’t there yet, I waited outside. A few minutes later I saw her coming across Hart House Circle past the Stewart Observatory. With her height and her slow walk she really cut a magnificent figure. Ennio Morricone’s “Theme from For A Few Dollars More” could have been her soundtrack.

            When we went inside, she could see like I did that the restaurant wasn’t very conducive to studying, so we each bought a coffee. I got the “West Coast Blend”, and said it was because it’s closer to what Starbucks offers; and she got the “Donut Shop Blend”, “Because I’ve always wanted to be a cop.” I asked, “Really?” She answered, no, that she’d never really wanted to be a cop. It was enough that she had been a soldier. I admitted that when I was ten I’d wanted to be a Mountie, but I’d also wanted to be a fireman and a priest. We walked around, looking for a suitable place to study together. There was one cozy little alcove nestled up into the curve of the old stone wall, but there was no outlet for my laptop and I didn’t have a battery. We finally found a large lounge like room that wasn’t too noisy, despite some students playing pool at one end.

            She told me that she was stressed a bit about something that had happened the night before while she was working as a bouncer at Hemingways. She’d had to physically remove a woman from the property, who was high on something and causing a disturbance. After words didn’t work, she’d finally had to put her hands on her, because she didn’t want the male bouncers to touch her, and when she did so, the woman said, “Don’t touch me! I’m a lawyer!” Naama told me that it’s amazing how many people are suddenly lawyers when they are about to get thrown out of a bar. Also, when Naama suggested that she was drunk, the woman said, “How can I be drunk? I’m wearing a suit! Look at how you’re dressed!” Bizarrely, woman had turned it into a class thing, but I think it would make our society very different if they developed drug or alcohol resistant suits so that if you wore one of them you could drink as much as you wanted without getting inebriated.

            We spent some time discussing the possible answers to the essay questions that had been posted for our exam. I had created and edited documents based on Levinas’s writings about the “Face” and those by Derrida about “Proximity”. Naama copied those to her laptop. I hadn’t really thought about the essay questions until our meeting. I had rather been just reading the texts over and over again in hopes of understanding it. It was probably a good thing though that Naama drew me down into the specifics of the exam.

            After going home I spent the rest of the day studying, but went to bed a little earlier than usual.

Beer

           

            On Saturday I woke up from too little sleep. The night before had been a rare night of lying awake with too much energy. So just before noon I went to sleep for an hour and a half and got up feeling fairly refreshed.

            I studied again for my exam, but once I’d run through my Derrida notes, I felt cooped up, so since I needed fruit and beer, I first headed over to the LCBO. There was a guy panhandling outside with an enormous belly that wasn’t the usual round shape of one that size, but rather more like a rounded pyramid sticking out sideways. It didn’t look like it was made of fat but either like some kind of growth or else that he had an object under his sweatshirt. On my way out I heard someone joke that he looked pregnant. I went to Freshco where I bought some ground beef, yogourt, Macintosh apples, a tomato and some bananas. They had 907 grams of Imperial margarine for $1.99 and I did a price match on some seedless grapes, which at No Frills were $3.28 a kilogram, so I got them at Freshco for almost half the Freshco price.

            I watched an episode of I Love Lucy in which, to help promote Ricky, Lucy pretended to be the “Maharincess” of a made up country called Franistan who came to New York just for a command performance from Ricky Ricardo. Afterwards, considering her ruse to be a success, she was about to leave the Waldorf when some foreign men in Middle Eastern dress burst into her room. They said they knew she was the real Maharincess of Franistan because she had the black and red hair that only royals of that country had. Lucy declared, “I’m not a Maharincess, I’m a henna rinsess!”

            My upstairs neighbour, David, knocked on my door for the first time in months to give me six cans of Budweiser. I checked the labels later and saw they were from the States. I think his sister buys it over there and brings it back. I doubt if Canadians who like beer would actually go to the United States to buy it other than because it’s cheaper there. Though it’s a myth that Canadian beer has more alcohol, some have observed that even Canadian versions of US beers have a fuller taste.

It’s weird that I hadn’t run into David in such a long time. I used to see him often in the hallway but then I didn’t see him at all, making me wonder if he was working a different shift. I think though that he might have been going through a rough time, because he told me his father died.

            One day a few months ago, I went out in the hall and saw that someone had pasted signs that read, “Smile You’re On Camera” all over the hallway walls and on any doors that weren’t apartment doors. It turned out that it had been David, and he’d put them up as a message to his third floor neighbour, who is also from Ethiopia, but who he resents because he’s always having parties in his place and he doesn’t trust the guy’s guests. He took down the disturbing signs later that day, after he’d calmed down, except for the one on the inside of the front door.

Maybe Baking Soda Can Defeat Terrorism (It seems to work on everything else.)

           

            On Friday I went to teach my yoga class at PARC, but no one showed up, for the second week in a row. The catch 22 is that no one wants to be the only student, but if everybody that hadn’t wanted to be the only student over the years had stayed, the class would be full by now.

            I spent most of the rest of the day studying for my exam and got a sore right wrist from moving my mouse to edit the document from which I was studying in order to organize it in such a way as to fit better in my brain.

            My brain was exhausted by evening, and what with planning on studying all day Saturday as well, I was looking forward to taking a break and going out to the Plastiscene reading series on Sunday. When I looked on their Facebook page though, I discovered that they’d had their April event on the 17^th. I guess since that was the third Sunday of the month, that makes sense, but I didn’t receive a notice. I guess I was too distracted by school to think about checking heir calendar earlier.

            I had to throw into the laundry hamper a pair of socks that I’d washed the day before because I stepped on the couch while wearing them, right into a spot where my cat Amarillo had left his stinky drool. Later on I washed the couch and then sprinkled it with baking soda in hopes that it would absorb some of the odour. Amarillo avoided the powdered surface for a few hours until he finally decided to try lying on the stuff anyway, but only for a while. For some reason he didn’t find it comfortable.

            I watched a couple of episodes of I Love Lucy. In the first one she asked Ricky to buy her a freezer after showing him an ad that claimed that it would pay for itself. Ricky said that as soon as the freezer paid for itself they’d get one. In the second show, Lucy did a TV commercial for a bottled vitamin concoction that was 23% alcohol. She was very good at first but after several takes in which she had to sample a spoonful of the product, she got more and more drunk.

Lucy the Fan Dancer

           

           My cat Amarillo has been limping a bit for the last few months. On Thursday morning though he could barely put any weight on his left front paw. With that mobility issue ‘it’s understandable that he doesn’t feel safe to go outside these days.    

            Besides doing laundry, my time was spent preparing for my Philosophy exam on Tuesday. From Levinas: “The face of the other talks back and challenges. Meaning comes from challenge …  Face to face we are disarmed. The I loses self-confidence. It is expelled from rest and sent into exile where it falls into doubt about the project of knowing.”

            I did some rough calculating based on the fact that we receive 25% of our mark from our participation in the tutorials. I only missed one tutorial, so it couldn’t be much less than that. Each of our essays was worth 25% also, so if I put the three together it comes out to 60%, which means I’ve already passed and so I don’t need to be stressed out about my final. I’ll just try to relax and study as much as I can and then relax and write my exam.

            I watched an episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy was organizing a charity sale but didn’t want to tell Ricky. But when he looked in her purse and found the money that she’d been given to rent the hall, she told him that she’d stolen it. Then he saw all of the items that she’d been collecting for the sale and he thought she’d stolen those too. When she found out that he thought she was a kleptomaniac, she took it over the top and pretended to be a bank robber. The story didn’t even resolve itself. It just got more and more ridiculous until she revealed that she’d stolen a baby elephant.

            I watched another show in which some old friends from Cuba came up to perform at his club. One of them was someone with whom Ricky used to dance, playing her father. His friends wanted him to dance with her that night because her partner couldn’t make it, but Ricky was reluctant. Lucy, thinking she was still a little girl, encouraged him to dance with her, until she, now a voluptuous young woman, walked into the room. Lucy suddenly didn’t want Ricky to dance with her and hired Fred Mertz to pose as a taxi driver and to get her lost while Lucy took her place. Unbeknownst to Lucy though, the young woman’s partner was actually able to show up after all. Lucy danced onto the floor looking very hot in a tight gown, but then the other dancer jumped in to dance with her in mock African garb and wearing black face. He scared the crap out of her and she spent the rest of the act trying to get away from him before fainting in Ricky’s arms.

There Was Honey at the Food Bank ... Except the Honey Was Me

           

            On Wednesday at 10:00 I went down to the food bank and took the exact place in line where I’d been the week before. Once we were inside, the guy three places ahead of me complained that the elderly gentleman behind him should be behind me. The receptionist kicked the old guy out because she said he’d been there, left and tried to take the same place in line that he’d had before.

            The receptionist knew my name so I just gave her my birth date. She mumbled something that I thought was a question, so I said, “Pardon me?” She smiled and said, “I know, it’s Christian Christian! I only look like I’m asleep!” She handed me number 15 and said, “There ya go, honey!”

            When I went to unlock my bike, Marlon was standing beside it. As I approached, he reached down and squeezed my back tire. That made me wonder if it was soft, so I squeezed it too. I told him that I’d spent nine hours at Bike Pirates and then had to explain why it took so long and also what is Bike Pirates. I’d had to move my brake system from pedal level to crossbar height and Bike Pirates is a do it yourself bike shop run by volunteers that teach you how to fix your bike.

            On my way home along Dunn Avenue, traffic was stopped by a crew that was picking up branches from the street underneath a towering tree clipping machine. I rode to the western sidewalk and got off my bike, just as a very tall man was passing on my left. He stopped when I started walking, and seeing him, I stopped and said, “Go ahead!” while at the same time indicating the same with my hand. He started to go, then stopped and backed up, grumbling, “Why did you stop beside me?” My impression was that he seemed to have a mental illness and so I just went ahead, walked to the other side of the rubble, got back onto the street and rode home. I recognized the tall man, as I’d observed him many times from my window. He quite often wears a baby blue suit with a long white vest, an outfit that’s quite striking and even disarming on one so tall, and looks like he’s ready to jam with Earth Wind and Fire.

            A few hours later, when I was locking my bike on the crooked, dwarf bike stand in front of the food bank, the vegetable lady came out from inside to have a cigarette. She said to me, “How are you honey?” I asked her how she was and she answered, “Horrible, but life is good!” There was an ironic statement if I ever heard one. “Horrible?” I repeated. She assured me, “”Just for a minute.”

That was the second woman from the food bank that day that’d referred to me as the same kind of food. I kind of like it, but I doubt it would be considered acceptable if I were to start calling women I don’t know, “sweetie”. There seems to be a gender bias at work. I guess it would seem pretty weird if guys started addressing me as “honey”.

I went around to the back to wait for my number to be called.

People were enjoying with warmer weather. A loud and very talkative woman with long grey hair and wearing a sparkling gold top, was holding court while sitting against the wall of the building on the other side of the driveway from the food bank. She told the four or five people who were listening that when she was twenty-one she learned that her worst enemy was a guy named Murphy, as in “Murphy’s Law”. At one point she called out, “There’s a strong man! You can help me move out of my place anytime!” I looked up and saw that she was addressing one of the people who live above the food bank. He was at that time coming down the fire escape from the roof, holding his bike high as he made his descent. He didn’t respond to her friendly shouts. I’ve yet to see any residents of the building interacting with or reacting at all to food bank customers. They seem to want to keep their emotional distance from this social inclemency that they’ve found themselves living above.

A sixty something man who seems to have Parkinson’s Disease always comes early to the food bank on Wednesdays and so he’s always one of the first ones to leave. I’ve never seen him without him wearing his bicycle helmet. He moves maneuvers slowly but competently against the involuntary countermotions of his body and hooks a bag of groceries each over the handlebars of his bike before riding off. This time before leaving though he went over to the talkative woman, called her by name and asked her for a cigarette, which she gave him. The big, friendly woman who had been standing and chatting with the woman in gold, commented, “Someone’s wearing some nice men’s cologne!” That set the gold-topped woman to talking about how she finds women’s perfume too heavy and actually prefers wearing men’s cologne. She suggested a brand, the name of which I didn’t catch; that she said has a light scent and that can be bought for a low price at a local store.

Once my number was called, there were better choices than lately on the first stack of shelves. It was a tough choice between the Frontera Hot Salsa and the package of gourmet Earl Grey tea, but I decided on the salsa. There were little bags containing three each of carrot muffins, and I chose one of those instead of a bag of chocolate; a little bag of ground anise. I once again skipped the pasta, rice and sauce shelves. I took a can each of lentils and refried beans; and I took two small cans of chicken breast chunks, one chipotle and the other barbecue. Sue wasn’t in this time, so my volunteer escorted me to the cold section. She gave me a half litre of 3.5% milk, which is what I use for coffee cream these days; four single servings of vanilla yogourt; and two packages of Eastern Chef Quick and Easy Meals. Both of them were chicken green curry with jasmine rice and the box is designed to evoke the kind of cardboard take-out boxes that were common in Chinese restaurants before Styrofoam became the norm. In the bread section I took a loaf of foccaccia and a loaf of sliced multigrain. I looked over the vegetable lady’s wares. She had onions, potatoes, cherry tomatoes, some ripe fruit and bags of chopped onions. I assume she’s the one that does the chopping, so I hope she has a machine. I guess if one were to use it right away, pre-chopped onions would be very convenient, but it seems like something that would go bad pretty quickly. I prefer to chop my own when I want them. She asked if I wanted anything, and once again I had to disappoint her.

On the way back up Dunn Avenue, the towering limb clipper was gone, and in its place was a dump truck full of very large logs. One doesn’t usually see that much lumber in the city. A tired looking young blonde woman in yellow overalls was putting the tree debris from the street into a dumpster container.

That night I watched an episode of I Love Lucy in which Ricky and Fred bet Lucy and Ethel that the husbands could handle living a pre-twentieth century lifestyle better than they could. Ricky allowed Lucy to compromise and use the electric stove though when he caught her trying to light a fire with wood in the electric oven.

Haircut

           

            On Tuesday morning I headed up Brock Avenue on my way to Bloor Street. I passed a school at College Street where behind a fence a group of small children were gathered in a circle and taking turns making ear piercing screams. I noticed also that every one of the kids was wearing a sun hat and wondered if that was a school policy.

            Riding east on Bloor, I was passed by a young man wearing a waterproof yellow jacket and inscribed in red on the back were the words, “Kellogg’s Surf Rescue”.  I’m sure the guy does good work, but I had no idea that eating cereal was a drowning hazard.

            I turned on Markham Street and was just locking my bike when I heard a familiar voice call out, “Good morning Christian!” It was Jane, one of the ladies from the Studio 1181 art group and she was just helping Kate, another member, out of her car. Usually I have to go around into the alley to knock on the door when I work there, but this time we’d arrived together.

            They never start right at 10:00. It’s a very relaxed set-up and they take their time while getting their stuff together and there are lots of unhurried conversations. I talked with Jane about cycling and she confessed that she rids on the sidewalk. I asked her how old she was and she told me, “I’m seventy-seven!” in a tome comparable to an athlete having just won a medal. She really doesn’t look that old. I told her that I think it’s legal for her at her age to ride a bike on the sidewalk. After a little research though, I think I found that I might be wrong about that. There’s nothing that I could find that allows seniors to ride their bikes on the sidewalk, though I suspect that the cops might not be very quick to ticket them.

            As usual the ladies took a long break about halfway through the session and as usual the model was invited to join them for coffee and whatever treats they had. This time it was ginger cookies but I didn’t have any. They were talking a lot about funerals and how disturbing the wailing is at Jewish funerals. I told them that I’d read about a culture in Central Asia in which, when someone dies there is a gathering during which only bad things are said about the deceased so that the departed’s spirit won’t feel inclined to linger on our plane.

            Another subject of conversation was various health problems of people they are close to, such as someone getting shingles in the eyes, people getting needles in their eyes, getting an infection from the needle and then requiring needles in their eyes as part of the treatment.

            There are usually two sessions in a row with this group, and I had been originally booked for the following Tuesday, but because of my April 26^th exam, I had to cancel. To make up for that I was given a booking for June 21^st.

            After work I headed down to Top Cuts at Dundas and Elizabeth to get my coiffure repaired. It had been looking pretty good up until a month before but then it started looking greasy and ragged. Amy fixed it up. I think she’s probably too talented for that company but I wonder if it’s because she’s Thai that she doesn’t try to move to a more upscale hairstyling franchise.

            I was on a roll for getting things done that day, so on the way home I stopped at the Australian Boot Company to get my Blundies conditioned. The guy gave them an oil treatment but told me not to let any dogs or cats lick them for a couple of hours.

            I felt tired very early that night. I think it must have been the hair cut.

Electric Warrior

           

            On Monday I read through my notes on Jacques Derrida’s “Proximity” and Emmanuel Levinas’s “Face” in hopes of understanding these concepts a little better in order to be able to write about them in the exam next week.

“Inquiry must be guided by what is sought. So the meaning of Being must already be available to us in some way.”

“Asking about Being is an entity's mode of Being; and as such it gets its essential character from what is inquired about.”

“Man's Being, is 'defined' as that living thing whose Being is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse.”

“The thinking of Being remains as thinking of man.”

“Before he speaks, man must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say.”

“Humanism is thinking and caring that man be human and not inhumane.”

“Man essentially occurs only in his essence where he is claimed by Being. Only from that claim has he found where his essence dwells. Only from this dwelling has he language.”

“Thinking does not overcome metaphysics by climbing still higher and transcending it somehow or other; thinking overcomes metaphysics by climbing back down into the nearness of nearest.”

“I can want to kill the other. Yet this power is the opposite of power. The triumph of this power is its defeat as power. At the very moment when my power to kill is realized, the other has escaped.”

I’ve been moving by a few songs every day through the Marc Bolan discography. He seemed to reach his peak with the T-Rex albums “Electric warrior” and “The Slider”. With “Tanx” he seemed to have already started to plagiarize himself but I kind of like “Easy Action”. I’m only halfway through “Zinc Alloy” but it’s an improvement over “Tanx”. It seems to me to be influenced by Bowie, but the Bowie that Bowie had already moved on from being.

            I watched an episode of I Love Lucy in which Ricky refers to Lucy as Lucille Esmeralda McGillicuddy. Esmeralda doesn’t sound very Scottish.

Slowly I Turned

           

            On Sunday I spent the whole day preparing for my philosophy exam. I finished gathering Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas on the face from “Meaning and Sense” and put them into a file with his thoughts on the same topic from “Is Ontology Fundamental?” I did the same thing with my lecture notes on the face. I then went through my lecture notes on Jacques Derrida and put those that refer to proximity into the file I’d made from his “The Ends of Man”. The next step would be to read both of these files over again and see if I have something to say about what they say about the Face and Proximity.

            The face is naked and therefore abstract, whatever that means.

            I watched a funny episode of I Love Lucy in which she did the old “Slowly I Turned” Vaudeville skit in combination with a ballet performance. Ricky was going to have a ballet act in his nightclub show as well as a burlesque comedy act. She wanted to audition for the ballet because she’d taken some ballet in high school but she decided she needed to brush up. She went to a ballet school and her ballet rehearsal in which she got herself tangled up in the barre was hilarious. She decided then that she would get a partner to do a burlesque comedy act, but the guy she hired came to her place and did “Slowly I Turned”, though she wasn’t prepared to be attacked every time she said the name “Martha”. She resigned herself to not being in the show, but Ethel called her that night to tell her that one of the dancers had taken sick and for her to come down. But Lucy misunderstood and came prepared to do “Slowly I Turned”. She began dancing, but Ricky was singing a song that repeated the name “Martha” and so whenever Lucy heard it she started attacking the other dancers. I didn’t remember Lucy doing this skit but it was done in Abbot and Costello but it was probably done best by the Three Stooges.

                                 

3D Printers in Toronto Libraries

           

            On Saturday at noon I went over to Bike Pirates because I’d noticed while riding the day before that my back wheel was precariously close to the left side of the frame of my bicycle. I was hoping that this would be a quick fix, but I suspected that it wouldn’t be just a matter of adjusting the wheel, but rather also the brakes. I was right. The wheel problem had a simple solution, but the brake problem took several different approaches before the solution was found.  At first we just tried loosening the nut, then moving the brakes to the center and then tightening them, but they kept snapping to the left. Then we tried adjusting the spring. Finally, my volunteer discovered that the problem was that the brake cable didn’t have enough slack, and so I had to remove the three zip ties that Dennis had had me put on. I was glad to be rid of those because they had cut my hands a few times while I was carrying my bike up or down the stairs. I had covered them over with electrical tape to soften their edge, but that had made them annoyingly lumpy. The brake line apparently needs a proper curve leading up to it, so we gave it that and then I secured it with a bit of yellow electrical tape. I was glad that the whole repair had taken only 45 minutes, so my study time wasn’t shot this time around. I donated five dollars on the way out. At the counter, someone was asking about a reflector for his bike and the guy behind the counter told him that he could make one for himself with the 3-D printer at the Fort York library. One can only use the machine after taking a short orientation course, but then one gets certification and can either design things to create or else download designs from a database. He said that he’d scanned his own face and made a chess piece that looked like his own head with a crown on it. It sounds pretty interesting, though I can’t think of any plastic crap I need to make right now. There are three Toronto libraries with 3D printers available to those who get certified: the aforementioned Fort York Library, the Toronto Reference Library, but the third one is questionable. It’s reputedly in a place called the Scarborough Town Centre, if such a place actually exists. I’m pretty sure that there is no electricity in Scarborough, so I don’t what this “3D printer” they supposedly have in this “center of the town” could possibly run on or even what materials such a "machine" would be made from.

            I finished making notes on Jacques Derrida’s idea of proximity. Man belongs to being and being belongs to man and I guess animals don’t have being, as opposed to existence, because one has to be able to think about one’s being to have it, or something like that.

            I also compiled notes on Emmanuel Levinas’s thoughts on the Face from his essay “Is Ontology Fundamental?” Maybe he’s saying that the Face is the part of the Other that you can’t kill. He also talks about the face in “Meaning and Sense”, so I still had to make notes on that.

            There was some kind of altercation across the street late that evening. I heard women shouting. I looked out and saw a cop standing over a young woman that was down on the sidewalk. He pulled her up rather roughly it seemed to me, by her clothes, but it seemed that she’d been a victim of somebody that ran away who she said she didn’t know. She and her girlfriend waited while one cop got in his car, put the siren on, made a u-turn and headed west on Queen. I went out to buy two cans of beer and the car was just returning when I was on my way home. I don’t know how it was all resolved or really what happened in the first place. Just another night in Parkdale.

            I made a salami and cheese sandwich and had it with a packaged organic tomato bisque. The soup wasn’t very good, which is often the case with prepared organic foods. I had half of some grape gelatin I’d made. But I made the mistake of having it with cream cheese because I’d had it in my mind that it might be a good combination. Maybe yogourt would have been better.

Tallulah

           

            On Friday I printed up both of my Continental Philosophy essays with my TA’s comments, plus my responses to his comments in the second paper, and headed to St George and Bloor to meet Sean. I stood outside of room 524, waiting for Sean, while a big, shaved headed janitor mopped the hallway and sang in another language. When he got to where I was standing, I asked him if he wanted me to move. He said, ”If you wouldn’t mind.”, so I stepped behind him onto the wet area.

            Sean arrived, announcing that he was sick again. He has been ill a lot since I met him at the beginning of January. I wonder if he brings it on himself by always having so much on the go. He strikes me as one of those people that stuffs twice as much life into each moment as everyone else and so I wouldn’t be surprised if he dies of old age at around 45.

            Once we were in the room, I told him that I was disappointed with my grade because my second essay was clearly better than my first and judging from a comparison of his comments on the two papers I would discern that he agreed with me. He took some time to bring up my two essays on his computer so he could discuss them with me. He told me first of all that my paper was one of the few of our papers that Professor Gibbs had actually read, and that he’d commented that the mark Sean had given me had been generous. At that point I threw out the window my chances of carrying my dispute past Sean. He also informed me that the criteria for marking the second essays had been much higher. I don’t understand or agree with that. It seems to me that the same standard should exist throughout the course so students know how to improve their work. As it is it’s like putting oil on the road for the second half of a marathon.

            Then we started talking specifically about my essay. He said that I had used both Darwin and Freud in my arguments against Nietzsche without citing them. That’s true. I wanted to cite them but I didn’t have time. It seemed necessary though to address Nietzsche’s claim that conscience is the result of breeding and to show that his idea that bad conscience results from an internalization of instinct couldn’t be right unless there’s also an internalized judge, which Freud accounts for with the superego. Sean said that my essay writing style was too literary for philosophy, which requires a simple approach. He added that when he first became an undergraduate he had taken on a double major of philosophy and English, and found that he was lousy at writing English essays and so he switched to just philosophy. He suggested that there is also an unkind tone to my writing and that when I argue with a philosopher like Kierkegaard or Nietzsche I seem to go at it like I have a grudge against them. I couldn’t really see how that was true, but what can one do when the person with whom one is debating has a black belt in argument?

            It was clear that my mark wasn’t going to get changed. Sean suggested that I talk to Professor Gibbs but it seemed to me that if he’d already read my paper and thought the mark had been generous, there wasn’t much point. I left feeling depressed.

            I went to teach my yoga class, but no one showed up. I was kind of glad for that and I went home half an hour early.

            I began to make notes on Jacques Derrida’s idea of “proximity” in preparation for my exam. Man as the entity that “is” is the closest thing to us and the farthest thing away from us or something like that, maybe.

            I watched two episodes of “I Love Lucy”. In the first, Lucy was trying to teach an elderly woman how to put on a “come hither” look. But when the old lady tried to awkwardly imitate Lucy, her facial gestures made her look like she was having a stroke. Also in this episode, Ricky actually spanks Lucy for wanting to meddle in other people’s lives. In the second show, Lucy was trying to pretend she was going insane to show Ricky that stifled dreams of being in show business could lead to mental illness. At one point Lucy pretended that she thought she was Tallulah Bankhead.

Ragtime Cowboy Joe

           

            I spent most of Thursday making two documents containing in one my second course essay corresponding with my TA’s comments on each point, and another that does the same thing with my first essay and Sean’s comments. Reading over Sean’s comments on my first essay convinced me even more that there is something wrong with his assessment of my second essay. At first I thought that 68% might have been a typo and that perhaps it should have been 78%, but I emailed him and he confirmed that 68% was my correct mark. Going over my first essay again, it’s clear to me that my second essay is better. Looking at his notes on my first essay, I read him at every point tearing it apart. There is nothing like those comments attached to my second essay. If one were to just read the comments for both essays and to guess which one got the lower mark, anyone would say it was the first essay. His comments clearly suggest that my second essay is better and yet the grade does not. This is the lowest mark I’ve ever gotten for an essay since my first essay in Academic Bridging eight years ago. Even the essay I wrote last year for the Knowledge and Reality course got a B and I had no idea what I was talking about in that paper. I am very upset.

            I responded to some of Sean’s comments in hopes that he simply misunderstood some of my points. I am scheduled to meet with him on Friday morning. If he’s automatically resistant to making a change in my mark, I don’t know if I have the debating chops to pin him down. He seems like someone with a black belt in argument. I can only hope that he’s open from the start to making changes.

            I watched an episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy got a job babysitting a child with behaviour problems who turned out to be twins. Their mother snuck the second boy in because it was hard enough getting a sitter for one brat let alone two. Just as they’d gotten Lucy all tied up and were about to set fire to her, their mother called, insisting on speaking to her. She was tied up at the hairdresser and couldn’t take the kids to a talent show they were performing in. She said if Lucy won first prize she could keep the $100. The amateur night was hosted by Ricky. He performed a novelty song that that had an interesting refrain: “I’m breaking my back, putting up a front for you.” Lucy won the $100 as she sang and danced to “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” with one of the boys’ frogs down her back.

            I finished preparing my argument, such as it is, for a higher mark, and tried to get back into the zone of studying for my exam. I still hadn’t figured out what I was studying though. 

La Danse Apache (pronounced "apash")

            

            On Wednesday I pumped up my back tire and used my new brakes for the first time while riding to the food bank. The front ones seemed to work okay as well, without sticking, but I guess I would need a longer ride to find out for sure. I was there in time to be part of a line-up of smokers. Of course, all fourteen people ahead of me weren’t smoking first hand but all of us were smoking second hand.

            The talkative and friendly thirty-something large woman who I see there almost every week surprised me when she started having a conversation in perhaps Polish with an elderly gentleman who was sitting by the door.

            I got number fifteen and went home.

            I checked online for my essay mark that was supposed to have been posted on Monday and saw that it was finally there. I got 68%, which is a C-plus for my essay on Nietzsche. This would be the first time I’d ever gotten a lower mark on a second essay. My first one, on Kierkegaard, received 72%. I think that my second essay is clearly better than the first and so I arranged to meet my TA on Friday to haggle the point. I have managed on previous occasions to argue myself up, but this means that I have to stop preparing for my April 26^th examination for a couple of days and to focus on my dispute with his assessment.

            When I got back to the food bank, at about 13:40, I discovered that they’d called my number just before I’d arrived, so I went inside and my number was called next.

            The only choices on the first stack of shelves were vanilla wafers, saltines, sesame snaps and some kind of Easter lollipops that weren’t even chocolate. I’d taken the sesame snaps before and found them to be extremely stale, with a strangely floral aftertaste. I took the saltines. There was lots of pasta and rice on the next stack of shelves, but I still didn’t need any of that. The same was true of the shelves with the canned beans. On the last shelf there was a box of Apple Jacks, but I really didn’t feel the inclination to eat mostly sugar for breakfast, so I passed on the kids’ cereal.

            In the cold section, Sue offered a choice between bottles of flavoured water or three little 114-milliliter cups of apple juice. Why is flavoured water even considered to be food? I took the juice. She also had some of that spicy ranch dip that I’d gotten last time and a few weeks before. I told her that I hadn’t even opened the second tub, but there was also cream cheese, so I took that, and she threw in a couple of single serve Danone yogourts. I didn’t need any bread this time so I walked straight to the vegetable lady, who hadn’t been there for a couple of weeks. There were potatoes, onions, tomatoes and sections of cabbage, but none of it appealed to me, since I already had potatoes and onions at home. She asked, “Don’t you want a few tomatoes?” I told her that they looked kind of soft. She held out a handful of the slightly wrinkled red things to show me and argued, “They’re really not, babe!” She seemed mildly disappointed in me when I turned her down. It was the least I’d ever walked away with from the food bank.

            I immediately rode down the street to No Frills to buy some marked down chicken, some milk, yogourt and a few bananas, hoping that the twenty dollars I had would cover it. It did.

            On the way home I stopped at the LCBO to buy a can of Creemore. I noticed that they’d uprooted one of the two bicycle stands, because I guess there are just too many places to lock a bike in Parkdale (he said sarcastically). There was a big bike with saddlebags against one side of the stand and so I went to the other side. I propped by bike against the stand and the other bike fell right over. It wasn’t even locked. I picked it up and leaned it against the corner of the building. Whoever owned it didn’t seemed to be inside the liquor store. I have on rare occasions in my life forgotten to lock my bike, so maybe that’s what happened with this one.

            I watched two episodes of I Love Lucy.

In the first, Lucy read Ricky’s mail that told him to report to Fort Dix. She thought it was a draft notice but it was just a formal military way of confirming that Ricky would be doing a show there. Lucy began knitting socks and preparing a going away party for him. Ricky interpreted that her behaviour indicated that she was pregnant and planned a shower for her. As guests for each surprise party arrived Lucy and Ricky kept on distracting one another and putting people in the closet until the closet was stuffed.

In the second show, Lucy found out that Ricky was looking for Apache dancers for his show. I was disappointed that they didn’t actually show a danse Apache in the episode.

            And speaking of violence, I heard a ruckus outside at about half an hour before midnight. I looked out and out in the middle of the street in front of the eastbound streetcar stop; a guy was punching another guy who wasn’t punching back. Then once the guy was down on the tracks, he kicked him in the head. Then he shouted, “You tried to steal my dog!” When the beaten guy cried, “I didn’t try to steal your dog!” one could tell from his voice that he was drunk, possibly down and out and maybe he had psychiatric problems. The guy who’d hit him might have been drunk, but if he was it was certainly not to the same degree as the beaten guy. He went back to the sidewalk where his dog and two friends were standing and then they walked away. The beaten drunk man was still sitting in a daze in the middle of the street. Some people came to talk to him and he continued to insist that he didn’t try to steal the man’s dog. He said he loved dogs and was just trying to help it. It was hard to know where this started, but the guy’s dog was safe and the violence was clearly unnecessary. What an asshole! And what kind of relationship does he have with his dog if someone could just come along and lead it away from him?

Sweet Child In Time

           

            On Tuesday I finished re-reading Emmanuel Levinas’s “Meaning and Sense” and then began to scan through Jacques Derrida’s “The Ends of Man” in order to start making notes from his references to proximity and the proper of man in preparation for my exam, when it was once again time to take my ride over to Bike Pirates.

            I decided to replace the old brake system that was level with the pedals to one that’s almost as high as the crossbar. First of all I had to clear out the hole where the brakes would be attached and hope that it was big enough. I would have been screwed if the hole had to be enlarged because at Bike Pirates they aren’t allowed to use power tools, I guess for insurance reasons.

Luckily the new system fit but the brakes were too long, so I had to dig through their bin of second hand brakes for a system that fit. Dennis, who’d been the one to suggest the new system, arrived and for the most part helped me, between smoke breaks about every fifteen minutes. Even though the day before I’d replaced the cable, for some reason I needed a new cable and Dennis had me prepare a new housing, which involved smoothing down each end of the casing so that it wouldn’t be so sharp that it could cut the cable that it would be housing. He got me a file and told be to file the ends. I worked for a long time and was making very slow progress. Thankfully, another guy that was working at the next stand, and who also volunteers there, had been watching me and how long it was taking. He told me that the file must have lost its roughness because it should only take about six swipes for me to file down each end. He brought me another file and he was right. I like it when people are observant and give a fuck at the same time.

Rerouting the cable wasn’t that difficult but it was around the time that the brakes needed to be balanced and fine tuned that Dennis abandoned me and went off to eat pasta and chat in the lounge area. I spent a lot of time waiting, but I finally got the attention of a volunteer to help with the adjustments. He started telling me though that the system I’d picked might not be the right one because it might have a tendency to stick. He dug out another brake system and suggested that I change. By this time though I’d already been there for three hours and despite his insistence that it wouldn’t take long, I knew otherwise. In my experience, five minutes of Bike Pirates time translates to about half an hour of real time. I wanted to make functional the brakes I’d installed so I could start adjusting my front brakes before closing time.

Dennis never came back to help me but finally another volunteer with whom he’d been chatting came to help. We finished with the back brakes by 20:30 and then because we were running short of time, my friendly volunteer forwent the usual DIY policy and instead mostly DIH. He discovered that my front brake cable was broken but he found a used one that was in good condition.

Again, changing the cable was not the big job, but rather the adjustment. The brake was sticking and he kept on tightening here and loosening there, as Child In Time and My Woman From Tokyo played over the sound system. Finally he asked me the name of the band. He looked to be in his thirties, so it was understandable that he wouldn’t be familiar with the music of Deep Purple. Child In Time is my favourite Deep Purple song. He did know some of the songs like “Highway Star” and “Space Truckin” though. He asked me if there was some connection between Deep Purple and Hawkwind. I said I didn’t think so. He asked if someone famous hadn’t been a member of Hawkwind. I only found out later that Lemmy had been in the band before forming Motorhead. I wouldn’t be surprised though if the Deep Purple album title “Machine Head” had influenced Lemmy as to what to name his band. At 20:45 a volunteer that was assisting a woman told her that she’d have to take her bike down and leave but my volunteer told him that their priority is to make sure that people get home safe, so she could stay until repairs that would achieve that goal were accomplished. We were already a half an hour past closing time and my volunteer couldn’t figure out how to get the brakes not to stick, so I had to leave.

            On Monday and Tuesday combined I’d spent eight hours at Bike Pirates, which really cut into the studying I needed to do for my exam.

            I had to eat dinner an hour later than usual.

            I watched an episode of I Love Lucy in which Ricky brought home a $30,000 fur coat that Lucy thought was for her. When Ricky was about to tell her that it was a rental for his nightclub show, she exclaimed, “You remembered our anniversary!” He was so embarrassed that he hadn’t remembered it that he let her think he’d bought her the coat. Then he had to try to figure out how to get it away from her. He arranged for Fred Mertz to pose as a burglar, but a real burglar showed up first, and was scared away by Fred’s arrival. Finally Lucy found out from Ethel that the coat wasn’t for her so she got revenge by buying a second hand fake fur coat of which she knew Ricky wouldn’t be able to tell the difference and then in front of Ricky she preceded to cut the coat into pieces while Ricky fainted. It also turned out that it wasn’t even their anniversary after all.

What Happens When Four Volunteers Help You Fix Your Bike?

           

            On Monday I spent a lot of the day re-reading Emmanuel Levinas’s “Meaning and Sense”. I downloaded the exam questions for April 26
            In the evening I took my vehicle to Bike Pirates to fix my front and back brakes. The first volunteer that helped me advised me to first of all clean my back brakes. Another volunteer came along and said that I should clean my bike. The bald guy with the handlebar moustache said I should take my brakes apart and clean them but he also advised me to change to a different brake system. He told me that low mounted systems are too exposed to dirt and salt to be practical. I said I’d change when this one can’t be fixed. When I tried to put my brakes back together the cable was too short, so they gave me another. At this point the guy that yelled at me last year started helping me. The moustached volunteer had advised me to turn my bike upside down to work on the breaks. The uptight guy told me that first of all I should never work on my bike upside down and that it wasn’t a “smart” way to work. He didn’t yell at me this time but he yelled at the guy at the stand next to mine, saying, “Put that tool down! Don’t EVER use that tool!” He chastised a young volunteer for calling to another volunteer across the room, telling him that he could walk over and speak to him. He seemed to be the one that knew what he was doing though, as even the moustached volunteer deferred to him. He spent some time trying to get my brakes to work and then gave up. It looked like I might have to change the brake system after all, but by them it was too late to start. I had been there for three hours and fourty minutes and nothing had really been resolved other than to resolve to return the next evening.

Babalu

         

            On Sunday I finished re-reading Jacques Derrida’s “The Ends of Man”. One must speak several languages at once. Easy for him to say. I also started re-reading Emmanuel Levinas’s “Is Ontology Fundamental?” but at the same time I was trying to find a version of that text that I could transfer from PDF to document format. II remembered that I’d downloaded a version of ABBYY Fine Reader, so I tried to run it, but a window opened with Russian text that asked me “Yes” or “No”. I clicked “no” and deleted the whole download, then started downloading a different version. I kept typing out the text for the Levinas essay and then pasting in whole paragraphs. After about a page and a half of typing and pasting I finally found a copy of the essay that I could paste into Word and then finished reading it. It is impossible to want to kill someone with whom one is relating.

            After that I turned to look out the window and saw that it was snowing. It’s been a funny beginning of the year for weather. February thought it was March, March thought it was April and now April thinks it’s January. I assume we’ll be having Christmas in May next like they do in Australia.

            I watched two episodes of Love Lucy from the first season.

In one, Lucy went on a radio quiz show to try to win a thousand dollars. She was told that a man would show up at the door that night and if she introduced him to Ricky as her first husband and kept up the ruse till midnight, she’d get the money. The problem was that a bum showed up at the door first and Lucy thought he was the guy from the quiz show. She had Ricky convinced that he was her first husband until Ethel revealed that he was a tramp and they kicked him out. Shortly after that the other guy came. Lucy won the thousand dollars but Ricky took the money because Lucy was three months behind on paying their rent and the other bills.

            The other show was a repeat of the lost pilot episode, except that instead of Pepito the clown they had Boffo the clown who wasn’t very talented and probably wasn’t even a clown. The only thing better about this version was Desi Arnaz performing Babalu. This really was one of the best shows ever on television because of the combination of his musical talent and Lucy’s comedic chops and both of their abilities to cross over into each other’s fields of expertise.

Chick Chicky Boom

            

            On Saturday I had to do laundry again! Honestly, I think we should all boycott clothes washing until they come up with a way of making garments and linen dirt-proof. That’d teach them! Who’s with me? If that works we can do the same thing with another annoying, time wasting activity: the taking of showers or baths alone.

            While my clothes were in the washer I went next door to the Salvation Army. I never find anything I need there. Pants that are wide enough for me are never long enough. I also don’t want curtains that are coloured on one side and white on the other.

            While my clothes were in the dryer I went to the supermarket to buy cat food. Between two checkout lines of equal length I chose the one with the cashier that I’ve known ever since I was running the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy back in the mid-90s. She used to work in the Country Style donut shop that was at the time across from the Gladstone. She had that job, plus working as a cashier at Price Chopper and she was always friendly and ready to chat. She was around during the whole time that my daughter was growing up. This was the first time though that I’d seen her for a few years and though she keeps her hair brown, she’s starting to look very old. She was making a lot of mistakes on the checkout computer even before she got to me. Again, just like old times, she was very friendly and it was good to see her, but she screwed up like crazy while checking out my items, as the line-up behind me got longer and longer. She pushed the wrong button at least twice. I only had a large back of cat food, a can of comet and a bag of grapes. I was price matching the grapes with the cheaper price being offered by No Frills. She did okay on the price match, but my total turned out to be a little high. $43.00 for cat food, grapes and Comet? I looked at the screen and asked, “Did you charge me twice for the cat food?” She checked and said, “Oh! I did, didn’t I?” Then she had to get one of the younger girls, more experienced with the modern system, to help her correct the mistake. Then she had to get the “swipe” from somebody to erase another mistake so I could pay the $23.00 that I actually owed.  I think I was in the line for twenty minutes. If her fumbling didn’t seem so sad it would have been funny and if I didn’t know her I might have been annoyed. I was late picking up my dry clothing, but luckily it wasn’t a busy day at the Laundromat, or else my clothes might have been removed by the asshole attendant that works there on Saturdays.

            I started re-reading Jacques Derrida’s “The Ends of Man” in preparation for my exam in two and a half weeks. I’ve got to also read the Emmanuel Levinas texts as well and formulate two essays to write on April 26^th.

            I cooked the turkey with black bean and salsa sausages that I got from the food bank and ate one of them with a Kaiser bun and mustard.

            I watched the fourth and fifth episodes of I Love Lucy. Lucy goes on a diet so she can fit into a costume to perform with Ricky. She manages to starve herself to the right size then ties up the younger dancer and stuffs her into a closet. The song she performs with Ricky is “Cuba Pete” which I was sure I’d heard before but couldn’t remember where. When I looked it up though I saw it was the song Jim Carrey did in The Mask. It’s funny, but Ricky and Lucy are better. Then Lucy, who’s been reading a murder mystery lets her imagination run away with her and thinks that Ricky is trying to kill her. I noticed that Lucy and Ricky were in the same bed in this episode. I guess maybe it was allowed because they were really married as opposed to Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke.

Lucy Miranda

           

            Friday was my last Continental Philosophy tutorial.

            Before we got started, I mentioned to Sean about Keagan’s comment during his lecture the day before about Zarathustra being the Ubermensch, and asked if Nietzsche had ever actually said that. Sean said that that is a very controversial claim. Zarathustra is a prophet while the Ubermensch is what’s to come. Someone suggested that it’s Nietzsche. Sean argued that Nietzsche would never claim to be the Ubermensche, but the student confirmed that he meant Zarathustra is Nietzsche. Sean didn’t argue with that.

            Sean began the tutorial with a short talk about Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger. Heidegger is talking about the “Life World”, which is a term that indicates the meaningful matrix of relationships into which we are stitched. Derrida is on board with this.

            The world is linguistic. Heidegger thinks that this is what gives us the potential to understand Being. Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger is that his focus on language is lopsided because of his focus on the spoken form. Derrida says that language is tied to the written form.

            Language is fragile and trembling. Language has a deferral of meaning filtered through it. It’s mediation between the speaker and that to which the speaker refers.

            Sean wrote “déferance” on the board but I think he might have meant “déférence”. He said it’s a combination of difference plus deferral.

            Nietzsche is not just an anti-metaphysician. When reading Heidegger, imagine Nietzsche’s laughter. Even though he was harsh he had a sense of humour. Heidegger has no sense of humour. At this point I started laughing at the idea of this somber philosopher with no sense of humour. Sean agreed that it’s actually quite funny. Sean said that is why we need to hold philosophy lightly.

            Derrida says that the truth is eventual. Any real democracy is always to come. We can’t overcome metaphysics because of language. Truth is a carrot on a stick that we will never catch.

            Although Heidegger is trying hard not to be theological, he really looks like he is.

            Sean quoted my old Philosophy of Sex professor, Ronnie de Souza, who says that we harbour a hankering for objects of unqualified epistemic virtue that prompts us to make bets on the truth. He calls this desire epistemic lust.

            The flashlight can’t illuminate itself. Language discloses but it’s a deferred process.

            Derrida does not take into account the fact that the spoken word preceded the written word. Sean mentioned hieroglyphics and it seemed to me that such a form of writing, unlike ours, does not correspond to the spoken language of the same culture. It reminded me of a science fiction story I’d read a couple of years before so I raised my hand to talk about it. In Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” and advanced alien race turns out to have two entirely unrelated languages for speaking and writing. Sean thinks though that hieroglyphics did represent the Egyptian language. It’s interesting though that the Egyptians thought that their written language was the language of the gods.

            Sean referred to the critical triumvirate of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. I found another reference that called them the “masters of suspicion”.

            The meaning of a text is never fixed with the meaning of that text.

            At this point Sean left the room and we did our TA assessments. I’ve been doing them online for the last five years or so and so it was strange and annoying to have to do them on paper. When we were done and they were all in an envelope, Sean returned and told us that we can all consider him on retainer for the rest of our lives. Long after the course, if we have questions we can feel free to email him. He said this is because philosophy is hard.

            Before I left I related a quote from Douglas Adams in which he talked about his experience of what makes a good teacher. He said that the best teachers are those that still remember not knowing what they know. I told Sean that I thought that he fell into that category.

            That afternoon I taught my yoga class at PARC. Only Anna showed up, late as usual. She told me that because she was raised a Brahmin in India she never really learned how to clean up after herself. I wonder if that was the problem for the guy across the hall from me who moved out a few weeks ago, leaving his place unbearably filthy.

            That night I watched the second and third episodes of “I Love Lucy”. Episode two was the first appearance of Fred and Ethel Mertz as Lucy and Ricky’s neighbours and best friends. Fred and Ethel were about to celebrate their eighteenth wedding anniversary and they wanted Lucy and Ricky to join them, but the wives had different ideas as to how to observe the occasion than their husbands did. Lucy and Ethel wanted to go to the Copa while Ricky and Fred wanted to take the girls to the fights. So there was a fight. The women declared they would get dates and go to the Copa without the men. The men decided to get dates so they could go to the Copa and keep an eye on their wives. Both the guys and the gals were having trouble finding someone. Ricky got the idea to call a woman at his club who knows everybody and to get her to arrange some dates for them. Lucy though had the same idea and when she found out that Ricky had already asked her to find them dates, Lucy told her to get the boys dates but for those dates to be Lucy and Ethel in disguise. Their disguises were pretty lame. They posed, dressed and talked like country bumpkins, but they were clearly recognizable to the viewer as Lucy and Ethel. I thought it would have been funnier if they’d gotten totally dolled up to the point of unrecognizability. Anyway, Ricky eventually saw through their disguise and the boys took them out to the Copa after all.

            In the third episode. There was the classic comedy scenario of the husband reading the paper at breakfast and totally ignoring the wife. Lucy kept trying various things, like getting dolled up instead of wearing curlers and pajamas, but Ricky didn’t notice. She told Ethel, “Since we said I do there are so many things that we don’t”. Finally she concluded that Ricky must be homesick for Cuba and so when Ricky came home one day he discovered that Lucy had transformed the apartment into a Cuban village. Ethel played a Cuban record by a female singer and Lucy came out looking like a redheaded Carmen Miranda and lip-syncing the song. At one point though the record sped up and Lucy had to mime it ridiculously fast and then it slowed down and Lucy tried to mimic that as well. Finally Ricky told her that the reason he was with her was because she was nothing like Cuba.

Delia

           

            Thursday was my last Continental Philosophy lecture, though Professor Gibbs wasn’t there. One of the TAs, Keagan, who gave the second lecture, took the podium again for this one.

            Naama arrived about five minutes before the start of class. She’d missed the last two lectures, so I said, “Hi stranger!” She explained that one of her colleagues threw out his back. I added, “So you had to go look for it!” I said, “I thought you worked in an office.” She explained that she also works in a bar in Yorkville. I tried to imagine how someone could throw their back out in a bar and was thinking about working as a bar tender and bending over to get stuff from under the bar. She corrected me that she doesn’t work behind the bar but rather as a bouncer. This was not a surprise to me. I asked if she makes use of her Israeli military training as a bouncer. She said that she’d actually gotten her certification in Kradmaga after she was discharged from the army. I had to get her to spell that out for me. It’s Krav Maga, which is Hebrew for “contact combat”. It was created by a Hungarian Jew named Imi Lichtenfeld as a way of defending Jews against fascists in the Jewish quarter of Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in the 1930s.

            She said that Krav Maga contrasts with the French system, which is based on flight over through around and under obstacles rather than fighting.

            At this point Keagan began the lecture.

            In the analytic of dasein, some form of humanism is present. Dasein is not a measure of Being as ontic Being. Presence is not derived from a relationship with dasein. This is a hermeneutic demand. Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation.

            Derrida demonstrates lingering humanism. At the end of the essay he relates back to ends which are understood the double sense of telos (aim, end, goal, means) and death. Ends and means implies an inescapable circularity. Another reiteration of the role of death in Heidegger. In the cycle of ends and means, the tools outlast us. There are two ends that are not easily identifiable with one another.

            The source of meaning is like a horizon. Not an experience but rather a pervading of all experience.

            Deconstruction is a technical term that is maybe overused. It is a type of critique. Derrida came up with the word “deconstruction” as a less violent sounding translation of Heidegger’s “destruktion”. Ontotheology is a term from Kant revived by Heidegger when it was stated that the destruction of of ontotheology is required in the analytic of dasein.

            Can something be destroyed by talking? Deconstruction occurs in the text. The object of hermeneutics is a text that is always mediated by language. Dogma is being brought into question. Language is always mediating engagement with deconstruction. One can observe and then go out and analyze.

            Some will say that a text deconstructs itself. Derrida is not deconstruction Heidegger because the objection is already there. There is no new meaning.

            There are other forms of objection. In positivist argumentation a refutation argues with facts. Deconstruction is not a refutation. Heidegger is not being refuted or rendered invalid by Derrida. A dialectical negation preserves the truth of what appears false and rescues the truth. For instance, in Marx’s statement that religion is the opiate of the masses he is saying that the expression of religion is false and not its underlying truth.

            Deconstruction does not resolve contradiction. There is contradiction in appearance and phenomenon. Contradiction is resolved by negating the falsehood. Sublation – relève – aufhebung – lifting the grain so the mice can’t get at it. What is true is preserved. Deconstruction does not sublate.

            Are history dialectical, social institutions and even nature? The laws of nature can be contradicted. What if man is to be preserved? The ends of man are not to be understood temporally.

            What occurs in Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger is a questioning of value. Heidegger valorizes presence as the use and interpretation of language. The deconstruction opposes text interpreting things as text. Heidegger says that speaking is a presence different from writing. Valorization is a value for Derrida. The issues of 1968 were about values. Historical context is a question of authority. Meaning is not guaranteed. Authorized is belonging to the authors but spoken language is not necessarily from an author.

            Concluding is reassembling.

            A strategic bet is a wager and a risk in which the outcome is not guaranteed.

            In the metaphor of the terrain, discourse is a set of true conditions. Psychoanalysis is a discourse and empirical sciences are discourses. Discourses are analogous concepts with worlds. Worlds are self-contained sets of truth conditions. Terrain is discourse. We can tear down and rebuild discourse. There are limitations to staying on the same terrain after tearing it down because we could end up rebuilding the same thing. Discourse here is the essence of humanity. Using the stones of the house and taking them out f context can be used to destroy the architecture; the metaphysical structure of philosophy. We end up sublating and repeating with the new edifice. Jargon is professional vocabulary. A specialized building up of what we’ve destroyed.

            Nietzsche says that we need a change of style. Not a new discovery; not new content; not new methodology; but something different. Derrida developed a new style of writing.

            Zarathustra questions, dismisses, goes out and burns his text, erases his steps and then laughs. Derrida says that laughter is important for deconstruction because it engages discourse without nonsense. Laughter is a tear in the fold of world as text. Laughter disrupts continuity. Laughter is a question.

            Back to Heidegger, the meaning of Being is to ask about. Asking about pervades the act of making meaning and is not a separate enterprise.

            At this point Keagan declared that Zarathustra is the ubermensch. I had never heard anyone say that before and I don’t recall reading it in Thus Spake Zarathustra. In a way it made sense but I wasn’t sure.

            Derrida says that evening is neither the end of day or the beginning of night.

            That was the end of our last lecture.

            Naama said something about someone talking so much without saying anything. She wasn’t impressed with Keagan’s lecture. For me it was kind of sleepy. He hesitated a lot and so I had to really work to pay attention. I indicated his claim that Zarathustra is the Superman. She said that the Superman is not the superior man. I said that as I understand it the goal of man, according to Nietzsche is to be on top of man. Naama commented that she’d always thought the goal of man was to be on top of woman.

            We walked across the park together. I suggested that we get together for coffee on the day of the exam, after it’s over. She said that we could probably do that but further suggested that we could maybe get together before to compare study notes.

            I went home for a while. I took a siesta for an hour and a half and then headed back downtown for my appointment with Andrew Lesk. I wanted to talk to him about my essay and once I was in his office I asked what I needed to do to move myself up to 85%. He thought that I meant on that essay and declared that it wasn’t going to happen. I explained that I meant on future essays, but he said he didn’t know what to tell me. He said he’d gone over my paper with a fine-toothed comb and provided me with extensive notes. I told him I found it hard to grab onto something from all of his comments and asked if he could condense it down to two or three main points. He told me I hadn’t had a very strong thesis. I pointed out that normally if one submits one’s thesis to an instructor, the main thing they will point out is whether or not the thesis is strong. He said he wasn’t going to guide me towards a thesis and I argued that to simply say a thesis isn’t strong is not directing the thesis. We got nowhere. I told him I enjoyed his course and found that his selections, except for a couple of the graphic stories were great and showed a wide range of diversity. I suggested a couple of stories and told him that he should use the quote from Alice Munro that there is no novel that couldn’t have been better as a short story. He liked that. We shook hands and I left, feeling like it had been a totally wasted trip.

            That night I watched a low budget porn film entitled, “Delia Tops Zenith’s Boyfriend”. It was the first time I’d seen Delia outside of still photographs. She’s pretty hot.