things no one told me a year ago (I'm a better person than you are)

One year down (classes only, assignments pending). Here's what I learned.

1. You can speak more intelligently about a book that you've only read the introduction and conclusion of than one that you read closely, all the way through.

2. Professors don't write how they talk.

3. Professors know the people whose books they assign like 85% of the time, and they're friends with those people about half the time-so read the acknowledgments and make sure your professor isn't in it before you rip a book to shreds in class. Similarly, before tearing into a historical conceit, such as the phrase "the rebirth of europe," be sure the person you're talking to hasn't written a book called "europe reborn."

4. No one reads everything that's assigned, but bragging about how much work you didn't do is no longer cool.

5. Beware of students who think that they're actually doing important work. They're insane. Make friends that share your vices. And your gripes.

6. Understatement opens doors--when you say something small confidently, be it in class, or especially in a paper, people who are smarter than you tend to read in whatever they wanted to hear, and then you get credit for other people's ideas.

7. Presentations: I hate them. The strategy I've adopted involves taking the 5-15 minutes as a way to steer the conversation the way I want it to go--it's the only time people, even the professor, have to sit quietly and listen to your opinions. And half the goal is entertainment, so the bolder the opinions, the better. And, if you've established the reputation of having an ironic, self-deprecating sense of humor, if you say something completely incorrect, it's usually attributed to that, and not idiocy.

8. You will learn the most about everything any time you can catch a professor on like their second glass of wine.

9. Papers: no one does groundbreaking research in their first couple of years of grad school, especially in work for classes. It will not be brilliant, and given all the readers know about everything, it may even be trite. Therefore, it absolutely must be entertaining. It's not what you write, it's how you write it.

10. notable quotations from some of my classes forthcoming.

I <3 NY?

It's a sunny, colder-than-expected April Saturday. In New York, these factors alone would have determined how my day would be spent--it would be the kind of day for walking, and seeing what the city had in store. On good days, this would lead to an experience with the city in the spirit of Woody Allen's Manhattan, where everyone you meet is interesting, everyone you see is worth commenting on, and the city itself, that marvelous backdrop, deserves a love song at the end for having provided such bounty.

I'm convinced that this is all weather dependent; I've never had a bad day in the city when it's 60 degrees and sunny. Add twenty degrees, and you're likely to get the New York of the 25th Hour--that is, where every variation of crazy and ignorant seems to overtake that city, that breeding ground for bitterness and insanity. On those days, you get yelled at by beggars, propositioned by vulgar puerto rican teenagers, and find yourself wondering, "where are their parents?" On those days, the subway stops being an opportunity to people-watch, and becomes a potential death-trap, because on those days the strain under which most people spend most of their time becomes painfully visible, and you find yourself realizing that it might take something quite insignificant to make them snap and shove you on the subway tracks. Or, without braving the subway, you find yourself looking up as you walk past buildings, only to see about 15 window air conditioning units--having installed one yourself, you know how easily one of them could just fall from their place and squish you.

I miss my 60 degree dates with the city, though. There's no going out to seek your fortune in Princeton, no running into long lost friends, no days up in the air. Today, I'm going to the library. Usually I miss New York, and all that living there entailed. Some days, though, the creeping, insular comforts of suburbia find their way into my assessment of my lifestyle, and on those days, I like living in a place where I can see foxes, deer, bunnies, and groundhogs without going out of my way, where I can leave my bike unlocked in front of my house, and where I can take the dog running without worrying about running into an off-leash pitbull. My impression of Philly has been that it's a smaller, cleaner, New York City--we'll see whether that holds up on days like today.

no, it's not new, but it's called the New School.

Someone asked me yesterday if I would send my (fictitious) children to the New School, which is where I got my BA. The answer is no, and here's why: The New School's heavy emphasis on deconstruction and post-modernism means that its students spend four years learning about what knowledge isn't, rather than what knowledge is. And, students like me (ones who think that the only thing more annoying than relativism is a gang of 18-year-olds convinced of its merits) develop the uncontrollable urge to roll their eyes at the mention of Foucault, et al. It's too much thoughtless counter-culture. My kids would probably go to Brown.

a story of two books; or, how I found profundity through pure superficiality

1.You were lying on a side-table at my father’s house, closed, no sleeve. I was 8; the height of that little table, near the front door, put your title at eye-level. “What’s this book?”
“You’re too young to read it, but it’s the story of your life.”

Stubborn, I took you with me, and barely made it through the first sentence before giving up. That was my little secret though, and you remained on my shelf for another decade, when I tried again. Dating an ostentatious intellectual can lead one to do things like carry around War and Peace, and eventually even read it. And it was my life, as it has been each time I’ve poured over the same pages (4 times in 7 years), carefully annotating what my older and wiser self has reflected on, but careful not to disrupt the little hearts and smiley-faces that first featured in the margins.


2. I bought you at half-price books in Houston, Tx, for between 2 and 5 dollars, I don’t remember. A friend of mine, the deep, cool, creative, smart one, had been carrying you around for days, and I wanted to be profound too. I didn’t read my life in you as I did with Tolstoy, but if there’s some lofty ideal for what life is like, if it’s possible to capture its music and poetry in a translated work of prose, and do it all in a story about sex and a dog, Monsieur Kundera, you have done it. I annotated you madly, quoted you in coffee houses.

A friend of mine, in turn, saw me carrying you around, and notes and all, I let her read my copy. Careless, she left you callously lying in the backseat of her convertible, which she left open through a storm. She talked about her ruined car; the real tragedy, though, I knew to be the destruction of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, complete with my seventeen-year old thoughts neatly penned in the margins, which inch-for-inch had been loved infinitely more than her car’s ugly upholstery (despite what her reputation might have had you believe--but that's a crass joke).

Kundera ususally says most things best.

"Man cannot do without feelings, but the moment they are considered values in themselves, criteria of truth, justifications for kinds of behavior, they become frightening. The noblest of national sentiments stand ready to justify the greatest of horrors, and man, his breast swelling with lyric fervor, commits atrocities in the sacred name of love."
-Milan Kundera, The Introduction to a Variation, NYTBook Review, 6.I.1985