Loose Cans

Well, I was supposed to be returning to Halls this morning bedraggled, bent double under the weight of an extraordinarily heavy bag (it logged in at 65lbs), and, which is most important, with Herr Pareles in tow. The first two of these were achieved with no loss of time, but this last, not so much. Owing to traffic snarls, misdirection, and a number of unforeseeable yet highly comical mishaps, he missed his flight to Amsterdam, from which point he was supposed to get on a puddle-jumper to Dublin. It is regrettable, and God willing he'll be able to get on standby today.

Otherwise Dublin is just the same as I left it: warming and wet. It is definitely a pleasant change from New York, which is presently buried in snow.

I have commenced a long-needed civic beautification project: putting things up on the walls. I pilfered from Casa Ashworth a deuce of MTA maps, one big subway one and one long Manhattan bus map. They go very well. Next, I must buy some big thick green plants. Blossoms are not mandatory. Just plant-ness. The referent of the sound-image of "plant" communicating the mental concept of "plant" and all that is pertinent thereunto. Pretty and green with a clay pot.

I shall not soon be taking all of my fucking laundry home again. I cannot communicate how heavy that bag was. Also it was helped in its back-breaking by a litre of Bushmills and a large bottle of Sake, plus a bottle of Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Imperial Stout, which I cannot believe I put in there. I mean, I remember thinking, It'd be such a shame to leave it behind, maybe I should bring it along. Then I thought, No, come on, I live in the Land of Guinness, what am I thinking that's ridiculous. But apparently somewhere between the first thought and the second, the bottle somehow managed to insinuate itself into my duffel unnoticed, nestling itself comfortably between my towel and a pair of socks. Because I honestly have no recollection of packing it.

I must go to frisbee now; hopefully people will show up; the turnout on thursdays is really pretty poor. Oh well. Home again. Familiar odours.

The best part is, I was in the middle of kvelling over her new piece, her Partite Americaine, which premiered to riotous ovation Saturday night at the Kemper Museum in Kansas City. It is quite an achievement, I must say. The music is Bach-style baroque (a cantata crossed with a partita, and steadfastly and impossibly faithful to the structure of both incompatible elements) infused with quintessential American tonality (or maybe atonality, I really can't tell the difference). But the big deal is the lyrics. Negro spirituals stripped of their usual melody. Reset the words to Bach-style melodies. This is to the end of highlighting the poetry of the lyrics, so often glossed over. "Making the stone stony." Without knowing it she is gaily surfing the delicious foam of the freshly-brewed cappuccino of the new artistic movement sweeping the country, the New Antiquity. Never mind that it does not, technically, exist yet. It will! As soon as Postmodernism has consumed itself (and it is easily argued that postmodernism, by definition, consumes itself), we will be adrift in a sea of meaninglessness. And the basic fact of the matter is that when it comes to the majority of 20th-century lit crit, the reader's only recourse is to internalize all the wee meta-narratives of structuralism, formalism, deconstructionism, feminism, marxism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, and so on (basically every word written since Althusser), and scrupulously ignore them all. The last conference of the MLA centered around the question of, Is theory dead? Has it expired and gone to meet its maker? Is it a stiff? ALLO, MISTER THUBERT THEORY!! WAKEY-WAKEY!! THONKTHONKTHONK. THIS IS YOUR NINE O'CLOCK ALARM CALL! Bereft of life, does it rest in peace? Has it snuffed it? Has it shuffled off its mortal coil and joined the choir invisible? Is it an ex-theory?

I am trying to say here that we have reached a point in criticism where the only path open to us is recursive. Deconstructionism was essentially the armaggedon of theory. All welcome the New Antiquity. My momma made a pretty piece and I liked it.

The other thing is, since for some reason, we, or at least my grandfather, seem to know every single person in Kansas City (we cannot even board a plane without running into someone we know from there), I was of course speaking with all kinds of people, some I knew, some I didn't. But they all of course had the same question: How's Ireland?

I am by now sick to death of that question. I understand why it's asked, obviously, but this does not deter me from bridling at its asking. Because I don't really think about being in Ireland any more. It doesn't register at this point. I once said, It's not so different, because it's really not, in the end, and was surprised to be reproached with, Of course it's different! It's totally different!

Oh, thought I, so you're an authority.

But really. It just doesn't pop up on the screen anymore. Ireland. I don't really live in Ireland. I live, as Stephen Dedalus realized when he was but a wee lad, in:

Room 1
Flat 7
House 90
Trinity Hall
Dartry Road
Rathmines
Co. Dublin
Leinster
Ireland
Europe
The world
The universe

So don't bloody ask me how's Ireland, unless you want me to say, "Wet, expensive and green" and walk away. If you want to stimulate conversation, ask me how school is. One astute individual did that and I cannot tell you how happy it made me. Because this interests me. I had a little epiphany the other day, when I was thinking about what it was exactly, this course of study. This was after I had given my very attentive mother an interminable lecture on the past hundred years in critical theory, and why her piece (which I of course had not yet heard, only heard about, which is and of itself is rather a commentary, not just on my own sciolism but on the ridiculousness of theory) is so brilliantly innovative. And I realized that the word for this thing I'm doing is Immersion. Think of a language immersion program. I speak only English literature. It's a language unto itself, with its own vocabulary and grammar. Textuality, metanarrative, langue and parole, signifier and signified, pharmakon and supplement and hymen, it goes on and on. And what we in this program are doing is learning to converse in English literature with ever-increasing levels of fluency, the same as if I were learning German. If nothing else, I now have a more focused idea of what the devil it is I'm doing out there.

On another note my left ear has been clogged for two hours now and it is driving me batty. I tried ear drops and flushing them with blazing hot water. Useless. Woe is me.

Also really the piece is quite extraordinary, not just the structural brilliance but for the music itself, which is just a joy. I'm not biased or anything though.