Now that the introduction is out of the way...

My purpose with this blog is to add some discipline to the disorder that can often exist in the thoughts of a graduate student. I've deliberately chosen to take one class this semester so that I can do a lot of independent reading and writing. I've come to realize in the last semester at Georgetown that if I am going to use this time productively, I need order and discipline. Friends would say that is just because I am a Virgo (Virgo/Leo cusp, thank you very much) -- maybe, but I rather think it is the lasting effect of the kind of institutional discipline Foucault wrote about the school. In some ways I accept that I am a subject; CONTRAST is required --- we cannot fully comprehend or appreciate the good without the bad, or the shades between a gray scale without white and black as the bookends.

There are no rules with this site. It is a way to CONTAIN in order to flourish. If I am to write a thesis in this coming year, I need to realign my body to digest and produce. They don't really help you with that in Thesis Colloquium (which I am happy to say I have not registered for this term).

If there are no rules to this site, isn't that a Rule of its own? Okay, yes, the double-bind effect is at work here. Generally, I need a space to constrain my thoughts in order to produce. That is the only rule. Structure to unleash.

First topic of order...

I have a habit of collecting -- not shoes, jewelry, CDs, DVDs, clothes, etc. as might be expected (expected by who?) -- but a habit of collecting books and other misc. articles with words I mean to read, but don't always finish.

This penchant for collecting other people's writing is something I have been throwing about in my mind for a while now. There is a passage from Milan Kundera's Laughable Loves that beautifully articulates such a condition (one that applies to many other areas of life and occupies much of my writing/art/thoughts). It is, to me, a symptom of many today, a diatribe on the effect and translation of consumption practices to personality traits:

"Don Juan. He, after all, was a conqueror. Rather in capital letters. A Great Conqueror. But I ask you, how can you be a conqueror in a domain where no one refuses you, where everything is possible and everything is permitted? Don Juan's era has come to an end. Today, Don Juan's descendant no longer conquers, but only collects. The figure of the Great Collector has taken the place of the Great Conqueror...Don Juan bore on his shoulders a dramatic burden about which the Great Collector doesn't even have a suspicion, because in his world every burden has lost its weight. Boulders have become feathers. In the Conqueror's world, a single glance was as important as ten years of the most ardent love-making in the Collector's realm...Don Juan was a master, while the Collector is a slave."

Slave to writing/reading/writing again to read more...I must retire now. I'm tired of this.