is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Thanks.
Thanks!
This is the first time in my 39 years that I've not spent Thanksgiving with my mother and sister. I decided back in September that I would save money and not travel back to California for this holiday, given how close it is to my longer stay over XmasEtAl. I think I will miss the food that gets made in the style of my tiny family gathering, as I will miss going to the Halliday and company extended orphanage Thanksgiving later in the evening. But I'm in New York!
Today when I opened up my laptop and awoke it from its sleep mode, it registered the day and time when I had last used it�. Tuesday at noon. It felt good to have gone a full 48 hours without even looking at the thing.
I think it must be due to Heidi that this house is wireless networked, and so I now thank her from my remote location on Marian�s bed (Marian has been working on location for next summer�s Miami Vice movie starring Colin Ferrell and Jamie Fox for like eight months or something, so I get to stay in her room instead of the guest room/office). Heidi has spent many many nights (sometimes for months in a row) in this house, and last night I talked to her on the phone for quite awhile, and she was jealous that I was calling from the pink and orange couch. We wish she were here, too!
It�s Marilyn, Linda and I. And Louie the aged and grizzled cat. And Peyton the aging dog. Peyton belongs to Teddy, Marian�s super-cute friend who returned from location early but had subletted his apartment through the end of November or something. He�s out of town for Thanksgiving but Peyton is here with the ladies.
Heidi is working for a big internet search engine and is currently deep into a project that is causing her to work almost all the time. Last night on the phone she said, �I work constantly and then I come home and I�m all alone in some weird suburb and I wonder who I am!?� And I said, �Wait. Did you say that or did I?�
But man, is it good to be in New York. Not only because I get to spend time with Linda and Marilyn, but because it feels good just to be somewhere. I felt it the minute I got to the train station in Quaker Bubble. I spent the hours of the train ride doing what I have been assiduously finding ways of putting off doing for months now: I began rereading my dissertation so that I can gauge, finally, whether I am going to rewrite it as a book.
It�s not so bad, the dissertation. But the interesting thing is that I am such a better writer now when it comes to the issues it deals with. And also my thinking on all its issues is much clearer, has been refined quite a bit, has changed on particular points, and wants to modify the overall argument to head it in a different direction. I suspect that the clearer thinking is directly related to the better writing. Also, though at the time I thought I had done a good job escaping the disease called �under the influence of Levinas,� I had not. Much of my writing is like the writing of lots of people who write about Levinas: it is under the spell of his forms and his terms and his difficult turns of phrase. So some sections read like a bad version of a writer who is already torturous to read. I think Levinas� writing is beautiful, and that its challenges to the rules of grammar, form, syntax are philosophically important, and are necessary to making the argument he makes. But I am not a Lithuanian-born Jew writing in French trying to overturn ontology. My job is different.
So it was simultaneously good to know that I could do better on so much of what I wrote in the dissertation and shocking to realize that I really hadn�t made all of the points and connections I needed to make in order to carry the burden of the argument I was making! I knew at the time I filed that if the thing were ever to become a book I would change many things in the structure of the work, but I thought I had really made the argument. It now seems to me that I did not get us all the way there. It is as if the work of writing a dissertation teaches you how to write a dissertation or book, and so you can�t know how to do it until you�ve finished. Hence revision.
But I also think that many people never feel like their dissertations are done, and they stretch out the time it takes to reach the final form indefinitely. I�m glad I didn�t do it that way. Because what has made me look at my writing and my argument and my thinking on all its issues differently is not relentless revision-at-the-time but just TIME. The revisions I made after the first and second round of comments from my committee were important and good. But now it has been two years since I even looked at the thing. I have taught many classes (ha. Well, I�ve taught 5. I�ve been lucky and spoiled, but also: BROKE) and worked through ideas in many new lights and written other, better, papers, on related topics. Time has helped to clarify my thoughts.
So I read the first two chapters on the train. Then I had dinner with Laura at Rice in Soho/Nolita, just around the corner from where I lived on Bowery and Spring back in 2001. Then I went back to Linda�s and she made me a hot toddy and we began watching the extras-reel dvd for the first season of Lost, which was fun. Marilyn showed up around 11 and I was sure that the TV-watching was over, because she hates television. However, as it turns out, she had been loaned the DVD set for the first season of Lost and was HOOKED. And she also brought cookies! Me love cookie!
Yesterday I woke up fairly late, took a long time doing nothing, and finally left the house around 1. I went back down to Soho and ate at Spring Street Natural, because I was in the mood for their yummy organic uncomplicated food, and also because it is easy to stay there for a long meal and get work done. I read most of the third chapter of my dissertation and ate a frittata-like thing with broccoli, red peppers and other yummy vegetables in it. It came with FRENCH FRIES. I love a health food restaurant that will give you French fries.
Then I did some window shopping. Except that it was less than 30 degrees outside and I had bare knees, so I went inside many of the stores and looked around. There are some good inexpensive stores in Soho sandwiched in with all the spendy ones, so I thought maybe I�d find some holiday gifts, but I did not. Nonetheless it felt very good to be out amongst the people on a crisply cold day looking at stuff. Later in the day things became very frenetic with the it-is-merely-hours-before-Thanksgiving-and-I-need-my-overpriced-Dean-and-Deluca-food-now-get-out-of-my-way crowd, so I walked up to Astor Wine and Spirits and bought wine for our meal, and then found some good chocolate for the pie crust and a few other ingredients I needed, and walked back up to Linda�s. (It�s like a 30 block walk from Soho via the East Village to Grammercy, so not too tiring but good exercise.) The wind was VERY COLD. I dropped off my purchases and went back out to a local caf� to finishing reading chapter 3 of the dissertation. Came back and baked the pie: pumpkin with chocolate crust, like last year. Linda and Marilyn got home from their grocery shopping and went back out to check out H&M.
I finished the pie and sat down in front of Linda�s huge television and watched the shit out of America�s Next Top Model. Then it was time for LOST. Linda had promised to make us Tortilla Soup, but she and M got home from H&M at 8:55 and there was something wrong with TiVo so we had to WATCH LOST RIGHT THEN instead of when we wanted to. I opened a bottle of wine. We made Tortilla soup later, and it was GOOD.
12:16 p.m. - November 24, 2005
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