Aversions

I met the apartment handy man after I turned on the oven and then couldn't get it to turn off.  The technician from the gas company who came over to turn off the gas said that he had never before seen an oven that wouldn't turn off.  This technician also met the apartment handy man as he was leaving the apartment.  I was then berated for calling in someone who "doesn't know anything."

"Didn't I tell you I was coming over?" the handy man practically yelled at me.

While he was working on the oven he would periodically start screaming:  "HELLO?  HELLO? HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO?" Which made the "girls"come out of their rooms to see if he was hurt and to find that in fact he just needed a piece of tape, a paper clip . . .

"Thanks, sweetheart.  You're the best." 

Yeah, right. 

Of course, even though everyone, minus one person, in this apartment just moved in, one of us was certainly responsible for breaking the oven knob by running into it--maybe it was an accident.  The handy man's story of how one of the "girls" in the apartment broke the oven kept changing.  His final conclusion was that the "girls" (his term for the Chinese girls who don't know anything along with the American girl who probably also doesn't know anything but who can at least speak English well enough) tried forcing the knob to be turned in the wrong direction.

"You need to tell these girls how to turn on the oven," the handy man said to me as the "girls" shifted their eyes from him to me.

"They know how to turn on an oven.  And they speak English and know what you're saying."

Needless to say, he was standing by the assignment he gave to me.  He preceded to then show me how to use the entire stove.  When he showed me how all of the hot plates ignited he acted as if he was doing a magic show.  Showing a cave man fire.  

"Look--they all work!"  

"Congratulations!" I wanted to say. "You fixed something that wasn't broken to begin with!"

He then made me get down on my hands and knees and watch how the oven ignited--as if I hadn't discovered the "mysteries" of the oven when I was trying to get the stupid thing to turn off. 

He didn't make us pay for the repair of the oven--"It was only $35 and it took me 20 minutes to do it for you girls" (but, actually, it took over an hour).  However, we definitely paid a price by having to put up with such a brute.  The man wasn't capable of talking--only shouting.  He also wasn't capable of being anything but condescending to the "girls." 

On another note, on a different aversion:  I sparked a Wordsworth hate-fest in one of my classes (not "in" class, but on the internet--on a Black Board type forum).  In having to read the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, I wrote a response about how Wordsworth is an elitist who, in trying to use the language of "ordinary men" in his poetry, succeeds in arrogantly assuming a voice for women, Native Americans, and other horribly contrived characters  whom he exploits in order to make a point about powerful feelings in poetry.  I wanted to be intentionally polemical--a fellow student and I wanted to "shake things up" a bit to lessen the mental strain of talking about things like the Poet, Beauty, and Truth for three hour seminars (as if any of these things are exempt from politics).  Most people responded by saying that they agree with me.  A few said they agree, BUT we have to look at this from a New Historicist perspective--putting the work in its historical context. 

Of course I know Wordsworth wasn't thinking about what I am thinking about when I read his works.  Of course I took "historical context" into consideration.  I had to add an appendage to my original post: 

I was tuned into Wordsworth's Utilitarian language: quantifying pleasure, aiming for an "overabundance" of pleasure. I was tuned into the way he used the words "genus" and "species" and can understand that Wordsworth was interested in distinguishing the poet from the scientist and the way in which each handles "truth." I also can feel WW's anxiety about industrialization, people moving to the cities, becoming indolent and turning to the dreaded Gothic novel (often penned by women, I want to point out) for entertainment instead of to poetry for knowledge and pleasure. I realize that WW doesn't want to really discover and use the language of "ordinary men" as much as he wants to get away from an idea of poetic diction that is, what he considers, gaudy and ostentatious. I can understand how WW's Preface adds to a trajectory of criticism that is slowly shaping how different cultures at different times view and value art (and, of course, WW is personally left out from Marxist, deconstructionist, feminist, etc. discourse). I mean, do I really think that WW would utilize the current methodologies of cultural anthro to go out and conduct a compelling ethnography of the rustic people he is so fascinated by? Absolutely not.

I get all of this and I still do not like WW.

My real last name must truly be tied to the word "pugnacious."

Parliaments Are White People Cigarettes

Friends want to know:  is graduate school a continuation of undergraduate school?  The answer:  no.  No in terms of the amount of reading and writing one does.  The focus on theory and methodology.  And yes.  Yes in terms of people.  In terms of people who are burgeoning addicts/alcoholics.  Which is a vague, unhelpful answer to the question.  

At the English Department reception, everyone was smoking, talking about nothing, being alternately self-deprecating, ingratiating and self-congratulating, and drinking freely from bottomless cups of free wine.

Mingle, mingle.  Apparently academics thrive on conversation.  The lively ones eluded me.

"Have you started the readings for Literary Methods?  Have you read Poetics?"

"No."

"It's boring."

"I hate cats, but I am not a misogynist."

"My mother made me buy these shoes."

At one point the head of the department and I were discussing New York City.  He admitted that he had never visited the places where I briefly worked and lived (Harlem and the Bronx).  He stuck mainly to the Village.  When I started talking about the interesting things you find in the Bronx, he was more amenable to my enthusiasm since, recently, the NY Times published a piece about the Grand Concourse.    

If I ever was a famous author, people would probably enjoy my descriptions about them as much as people enjoy it when Jamaica Kincaid writes about people she knows.  However, this isn't truly about other people and how pompous or ugly I find them.  It is about me, as evident in my participation in the self-involved rigmarole of journaling.

I left the reception with a sore throat from secondhand smoke and a little damp from all of the white wine doused on me during an emphatic conversation about Tori Amos' decline since Scarlet's Walk.  I also left having perhaps cemented myself in the position of "Mama Hen," the one who will cluck about how everyone is destroying their health and who may herself acquire chronic stress from this choice of profession, but who will not develop any bad habits she doesn't already have (and which she keeps avidly concealed).   

I probably would take up smoking and binge drinking if I felt I needed to escape--if I was exceedingly overwhelmed by the dogmatism of hurtful ideologies.  Currently, I am exactly where I want to be.  Postcolonialism and gender studies are fields that challenge academia and want to transform epistemology.  If I was the age I am now but the year was 1950 or so, I would definitely be writing this with a cigarette in my hand.  I'd probably take up hard drugs.  (I say this after indeed having been on a binge--a binge of Mad Men).