May you live in interesting times...

...or so runs an alleged Chinese curse. If curse it is, then I am indeed maladicted. It has been an interesting week or so, in the various possibilities of the word...

Anyway, Friday night, went out for a few drinks at a rather unneccessarily expensive bar down on 78th, a lounge called Evelyn or something. Had a couple of G&T's and a shot of tequila, the latter of which, let the record show, I did note beforehand as a bad idea...not half as bad for me as for my compadre Tim Yang, who wound up having to be put to bed after little more of the same. A rare medical condition called tequilaphobia, they say.

Sunday...well, they - or rather, I - do say that there's always something going on in New York, and this time there was rather too much of something. The guy who lives next to me in my dorm had what seems to have been a mental health episode. He was gibbering and crying loudly in his room and slamming his door. Unfortunately it wasn't the first time this has happened, and not entirely sure what to do, I ended up calling campus security. We managed to get him to calm down, then sat him down for a while and impressed upon him that this sort of behaviour ain't acceptable. Poor fella - he's not a happy guy, and while it's not for me to talk about his personal problems in my blog, let's just say I and the building superintendent heard all about them in detail. Fingers crossed not just for him, but for the general peace of the block. I wasn't the only one weirded out, it was most of my floor. Seems to have been quiet since then.

So on a different note, term started today, and I had a seminar this afternoon with the semi-legendary Donald Keene, author of myriad books on all aspects of Japanese lit. This was more or less why I came to Columbia (aside from the fact it was the only place that'd have me), and it's a real honour to be able to study with him. He's in remarkably good shape for 83, still mentally very alert, with a fine sense of humour and obviously an in-depth command of his stuff - he was able to talk about Basho from memory with no notes for nearly 90 minutes. I look forward to this seminar, mainly because it doesn't have a term paper or exam attached...

Finishing off the last dregs of the reading list Prof. Suzuki gave me for the winter, I've been wading through Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. I find most lit. theory stuff to be very heavy going and sometimes incomprehensible. I'm not alone - there is a general tendency in British academia to be very suspicious of theory, perhaps not coincidentally because much of it is produced by the French. Still, I can't help but feel that there's an element of intellectual masturbation about stuff like the following:

"Is Nietzsche's desire (as Derrida sees it) to place the castrating idea within history akin to Freud's rewriting of the primal "scene" into the child's primal "fantasy"? Is the Nietzschean text, in suggesting that in order to have (possess) the truth (woman) the philosopher must be the truth (woman), undoing Freud's incipient phallocentrism, which provides quite a different alternative: if the son (man) disavows sexual difference, he seeks to be the phallus for the mother (woman) and becomes "the lost object"..."

I know it's decontextualised, but I defy you to tell me what the hell that's about.

Oh, and I have a date on Saturday...