Just got uninvited to tonight's event dinner. I know I offered to sit out if the table filled and the budget got tight, but I didn't think I'd find out the day of and after looking forward to it. Note: don't look forward to these things. Or if you do, don't offer to give up your place at the table so that everyone else can eat calamari with everyone else. That's the kind of stupid generosity people who eat with cats day to day think is a good idea until they're eating cold chicken breast over the sink on Friday night while the cat looks on.
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Well maybe I'll go to a party instead. Or a play. Or maybe I'll come home after the reading and catch the last three hours of daylight on the porch and watch the sun sink down behind the houses and take a book with me and try to read or try to pen something by hand though what I'll end up doing is marveling at the pot of tulips and the chimes--and the story of the chimes--and the cat who leaps like water and the light. Someone asked me yesterday if I'm "overwhelmed" in my poems, "intoxicated by everything going on," and I thought, yeah, that's my default state of mind: overwhelmed. It's chaotic and inarticulate and stubborn and emphatic and sometimes crippling, and everything I do is nearly undone by that dumb baby awe.
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Sick of my closet.
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postcard: Knox College
Essayist and fiction writer Sara Levine, of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will be giving a reading and talk entitled "On Liking Littleness: Essays the Size of Handkerchiefs, Novels the Length of Nosebleeds, Conclusions Detached from Tedious Arguments," on Thursday, May 4 at 4 p.m. in the Alumni Room, Old Main. The event is free and open to the public.
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"Philosophy travels on over the grave that gapes before our feet at every step. It lets the body fall into the abyss, but the soul floats on high and away. That the fear of death knows nothing of such separation of body and soul, that it roars out, "I, I, I," and will not hear of such separation of body and soul--what does philosophy care for that? Let mortal man crawl to hide himself like a worm in the crevices of the naked earth before the hissing missiles of blind, implacable deathe, let him feel ineluctably and violently what he never feels otherwise: that his "I" is only an "It" when it dies, and let him, therefore, with every cry yet in his throat cry out his "I" against blind, implacable death that threatens him with such unthinkable annihilation--philosophy smiles its smile upon his need and with extended finger points out to this creature, as its limbs quake in fear for its worldly existence, a world beyond, which it does not want to know about.... But though philosophy denies the dark presuppostion of all life, though it refuses to consider death as something but makes it into nothing, it evokes for its own sake the semblance of presuppositionlessness. Thus, now, all knowledge of the All has for its presupposition--nothing."
Franz Rosenzweig, as quoted and translated by Geoffrey Hartman in Saving the Text.
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