St. Monday and the Ignorants

Man alive, they are tearing up the library. We've got ambient plaster dust, bare-bulb lighting, scaffolding, big plastic tarps, and dudes with helmets. I was walking through looking for a copy of J. R. McTweedpants's The Erie Canal was the Internet of Its Day when it occurred to me that I, contrary to almost everyone in the piece, was really enjoying the remodelling. It's not just that I now fit in, wearing my own protective helmet as I have since I realized the dangers to which language and its inherent instability expose me. It's that, finally, work is being done at the library. And when I say work, I mean force times distance over time, as everybody knows.

I spend a lot of time hiding from my anxieties amongst the library's stacks, and I usually see a whole bunch of other people there: undergrads playing online poker on their new laptops, grad students surrounded by empty paper coffee cups and books with titles like "Suppressing the Ablist Opposition in James Robert McTweedpants: The Erie Canal was the Internet of Its Day and Corporeality," and usually that guy in the trenchcoat. To the naive or untrained eye, it might appear that most of these people are doing a lot of work. They're taking out books, looking at them, staring off into space, and looking at them some more. The fact is, however, that all of these books, however far they might be taken, always return to their homes on the shelves. Even the heaviest book taken out by the skimpiest sorority pledge results in zero work done, which is pretty mind-blowing when you think about it. If the book weighs fifteen pounds, and she takes it from the library to the sorority house (approximately .5 miles), and then returns it after say forty-five minutes, at which point a library rat returns it to the place from which the broad took it, then to figure out the work done you have a zero, in the numerator (the top part), and zero divided by anything is zero. No work.

These guys in there now, however, are doing work. They're taking sheetrock from Home Depot or something and nailing right into the library, where it will stay until the end of time. If I had a calculator I would tell you how much work they were doing, but the fact is that they are doing work for what is probably the first time inside that library, and I applaud them. Back to work for me.

Progress report: the Ignorants await the visitation of St. Monday with reverent slothfulness. Songs are written and more or less ready, but my planned recording studio (my office) has been co-opted by a group of undergraduates entering like every word of Shakespeare into a computer because Shakespeare was, like, the greatest author ever and he like invented the human. Like Harold Bloom said. On the brighter side, I'm slowly coming toward a focus for my project, which will center on 1930s literary radicalism (trying to limit it to poetics), the circulation of poets amongst the small press journals of the era, and the simultaneous development of what would be called (with little foresight) the New Criticism. I am currently running by Prof. McTweedpants, but other suggestions are welcome. At this point I'm amassing books, which is a nice tangible product of my work, which otherwise is on the ethereal side.

Speaking of school, however, I've had some discussion with colleagues (not the esteemed McTweedpants, PhD) regarding the "effects" of our education on us. My friend Jesus (that's not his real name, although I'd like to think that I'm friends with the real Jesus too, because he loved everybody and I'm not so bad) claims that he feels much "smarter" than he was when he entered the PhD program here at Southeastern. I actually thought (and continue to think) that one of the purposes of this part of our education is to get us to see the illusion of teleology, that we think we're progressing toward some kind of goal. Certainly, I would make slightly different decisions now than I would have in the fall of aught-three, largely due to what I've been through in the past two years; but whether these would be "better" or "worse" decisions is far beyond me to say. In some ways my decisions would be more "informed," but that quality of becoming informed also and necessarily implies the accommodation of my own thinking to the lines of thought already set up in the discipline/my field, etc. I fit in better, but valuable parts of my thinking are no longer available to me, which is too bad.

From the statistics department at St. Monday: the more raffles you enter, the worse your chance of ever having won a raffle. While this law has been verified by my own positivistic experience, the numbers validate its truth. Say you enter one raffle with 100 other people; your odds of winning are 1/100. You lose. You enter another raffle with 50, thinking that now your odds are much better. Of course you're wrong. Now your chances of having won a raffle are 1/100 * 1/50, or 1/5000. So then you enter a raffle with only ten people, thinking this time your luck must come around. But you're dumb: now your chances of having won a raffle are 1/100 * 1/50 * 1/10, or 1/50000. Helpful hints from those stats people. Right now they're busy testing Emerson's hypothesis that souls can never really touch their objects. There's like a 3/7 chance he's right.

Chicago has finally gotten around to considering a ban on smoking in public places, following the lead of the forward-thinking towns of New York and Boston, among others. I'm not one of those anti-government men; I like keeping the man off my back as much as possible because I chafe easily. If you want to coat your lungs with tar, I'll gladly pass the brush. (Of course you would use the brush to spread the tar.) But I'm pretty happy that this might go through. I like going to bars and concerts, but a man can only go through so much fabreeze. The main argument against the smoking ban, put forward by the orator Mike Ditka, is that it will prove fatal to businesses such as restaurants and bars; smokers will simply not go out anymore because if they can't get their smoke on they're gonna take their cancer-sticks and go home and screw you. The bars are the big thing, they say: people like to smoke and drink at the same time, and often smoking bans still allow for some smoking around the bar areas of restaurants. This argument is full of crap. Man, if you need to smoke while you drink, you're just a bad drinker. You want someone to pat you on the back so you can burp, too? If drinking isn't enough for you, then you're just not trying very hard.

I will say this, though: smoking is a pretty handy habit to have when you're standing in your buddy's courtyard waiting for him to get home. Just standing around reading looks pretty sketchy. Standing around smoking, however, is the mark of an upright citizen.

You can still read in bars, right?