ALL THESE THANKSGIVING PLANS, GONE TO SHIT. Yet, we press on. Short one Zulu Yankee but still three strong on the bi-family sibling front, with exterior-to-fam but interior-to-cam reinforcements from Michigan, Penn and Nevada confirmed. Way to mix metaphors...still, I try, I try. Anyhow, with the hyper-excitement and hyperventilation that's bound to ensue from multiple reunions, I'm thinking there'll be plenty of warmth left over to make up for any holiday season sisterly love absent - that's for you, Z Jr., never fear!

I'm reading Barthes for Klancher's class tomorrow. Klancher is godlike...if gods wore penny loafers, worn chinos, plaid shirts and had friendly bellies held in by stern belts. Being sadly lacking in gramps-figures, I'm saying right here I'd kill for a granddad like Klancher. Pockets perpetually stocked with mints, scraggly chin...'tis the stuff of a true Gramps. Wishful thinking aside, back to the godlike-ness: whoever can assign the Norton Anthology of T&C as a main text for a Fall 9 unit largely comprised of Sophomores (i.e. So-not-there-yet Sophomores) and proceed to pick a path through the Greats in a way that doesn't short-circuit our brain functions - even sparks moments of true connection with the writing, imagine that! - well, pretty much gets my vote. Case in point: he had the gumption to leave Barthes til after mid semester. Far as I can attest to there is no other way to tackle authorship, readership, spectatorship & criticism from antiquity to the present than to pick your way through the wreckage/mass chaos/debris of the Ancients vs Moderns battle, waving your impartiality flag hard as you can. So I'm sitting here, right, reading Barthes with the calm composure of someone who's been in the lion's den already (Schiller & Bourdieu, go figure), and getting my head shot to smithereens by the sheer awesomeness. In the words of Jake, dang, the big boys do talk sense.

"As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins [...] linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a 'subject', not a person, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it."

Wait for it, wait for it -

"We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favor of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the writer."

Game, set, match - liberal theory of 1968 (suck on that, classicists); because it's evident that he wouldn't want us to give the accolades to him, now would he? 

The funny thing is, so many people think that the likes of Barthes, Wilde, Eliot, Addison, Young, Wordsworth etc. were just talking about words - words in the valorized form, literary works of all kinds, texts; which is easily the largest insult to the boundaries (or lack thereof) of their theoretical scope. Because barriers between the visual and the verbal can hardly be demarcated; the history of text being visual is sometimes even visual in and of itself, vice versa  when it comes to the visual arts and their articulation in the field of the textual - and collectively they all exist in the realm of arbitrary symbols. Representations are but representations; the entirety of the 'wave' that their intra-significant ties draw them into lies parallel to that of the True - they are not it. So maybe some young upstart would do well to put that in his campaign manifesto under Laundry List of Things To Teach Our Young'uns in Our Blatantly Self-Exultant Age, along with keeping alcohol indoors and soft drugs underground (or in Baggies, to take a cue from Alex and his species).

The polls open at 7am tomorrow; I'm on shotgun-seat duty to make sure Lauren doesn't crash the GMC before the caffeine has time to kick in on the way to her personal crusade against McCain. Word is that the Obama crew's giving out free pizza to keep people in the queues. At least in the swing states. WORD. They'd better...'cause God knows I'll be one cranky Non-Resident Alien if I have to hold Lauren's coffee and do spasmodic food runs, Obama or Nobama.

xx