Pleasures of the Trade

I had an unexpected visit from one of my former students yesterday. There are many things I dislike about working in an underdeveloped scholarly field -- two fields, actually -- in an underfunded school, but I forget about them all when I get to have a conversation with someone whom it has been a pleasure to teach. Thankfully, I get to have that sort of experience here on Live Journal on a regular basis. Face-to-face exchanges are even better, though. What I like best about them is seeing how my former students have become even more interesting since I had the pleasure of teaching them. That was certainly the case yesterday. Without having to worry about the pressures of a relationship mediated by my institutional responsibilities, I was able to delight in the easy flow of words. Given how stressful things have been lately on the work front, from one budget crisis after another to my personal struggle to get completely healthy, the talk couldn't have come at a better time.

Destined To Lose?

I'm pretty sure Arizona is going to lose today. You see, I really want them to win. I've rooted for them before. Back in 1997, when the Cats won it all, Kim was even happy for Lute alongside me after watching Miles Simon and company dethrone the other Wildcats. This is the first time, though, that I've been really invested in a particular group of players. Maybe it's because I see my former student Jack, a team manager, on the bench next to the coaches during games. Maybe it's because I've sat next to the player's families for four years running now during the Cal Bears' annual plastering in Tucson. Maybe it's just because I'm finally feeling like this place is a "home." Whatever the reason, though, I fear that I'm about to be disappointed.

Cassandra Bertsch

Did I call that, or did I call that?

As I said to Eric the other night, when you give Mustafa Shakur the ball, he's bound to do something dumb. Yes, I know he played better than on Thursday. But he still screwed up over and over when the Wildcats should have been screwing the nails in the Illinois coffin. Maybe things will be different for him next year. I bet you the other point guard, the one who doesn't start, would have made two or three fewer bad decisions. And that would have been enough, wouldn't it?

Oh, and the word "outcoached" did cross my mind on more than one occasion. Not for the whole game, mind you, just for the last four minutes of regulation and the end of O.T.

I have no one to root for now and no one to root against. Pitino? Roy Williams? I guess we'll see how much I enjoy watching basketball without caring who wins.

I suppose I'm pulling for an all-Kentucky final. At least that would make for a compelling narrative.

Oh, and can you believe that CBS's player of the game for Illinois wasn't Deron Williams? What game were they watching? Aside from those threes he hit, the defensive effort on Salim Stoudamire was as beautiful to behold as it was painful to contemplate.

Grrrrr.

A Climax of Commentary

I just received an awesome anonymous comment on my entry that links to my Tikkun review of Hardt and Negri's Multitude. Since it's unlikely that many people will ever see it there, I'll quote it in full:

"To be fair, much of the blame for this perception rests with the nature of Hardt and Negri’s co-authorship. Because the two men are separated by so many factors—age, national origin, institutional affiliation—they are always writing across a divide that renders the personal an afterthought"

The co-authorship is thematic in that while one writer might achieve heroic stature, and that so vertical as to approach transcendence, two writers colaborating have a lateral horizontal relation entirely within immanences (like Christo and Jeanne-Claude getting immanence and horizontality up where transcendence as aspiring verticality used to be: "horizontal but high immanence"). The "divide," and the width of the divide between H. & N., is also thematic, in that each thinker must become elastic in order to stretch across the divide while remaining capable of resuming his functional shape: elasticity does not have a pure platonic ideal form. A divide, as a discontinuity, offers a place for adventures in crossing or patching a divide---in behalf of a constructed continuity, rather than the continuity of the transcendental continuum that is reached by vertical ascent. As you experiment in integrating past and present, will you participate in vertical transcendences as in seeing God's plan for you, a divine continuity with divine ironies ("but God meant it unto good"), or continue to construct a self-developing self-organizing constructivist life answerable to no transcendental ideal? ("Tikkun" suggests diagonals, or at least the transcendental and the immanent answerable to each other, like kosher at the table, but stay out of the kitchen).

Neither Socrates nor Jesus seems to have written, and both transcended with some verticality. Even those individuals who wrote about them seem not to have collaborated in co-operative writing (however much using each other's texts), and with Jesus, they all became saints, most of whom seem to go toward Heaven one by vertical one. H & N. had to cooperate in order to elude vertical transcendence and to remain dwelling under house-arrest among immanences. Their philosophy would not permit them to negate transcendence, but to elude it. They had to enact a shift of love from verticals to horizontals, their hybrid love and love of hybridity. Your own emigrations from some states and immigrations into other states looks like horizontal adventures toward a place to dwell in the world with as few negations of prior places (department of birthplace security), and as few negations of healthy robust physical life as possible. H & N exaggerate immanences, and fail to elude transcendentals, so inescapable tensions between the horizontals and the verticals continue to construct diagonals with interior trembles. Meanwhile, you explore toward the sky, wondering what to teach your daughter about it, while thinking about people resisting pulls,that is, people like you...

I am both honored and humbled to have inspired such a beautifully written response. Let me underscore my profound gratitude to the person who composed it. I will ponder it for a long time.