Friday, July 23, 2004
(7:19 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: With Further Assessment
Confessions:I skipped last night's French class and will also skip the final class on Monday. The reason is two-fold: first, on Tuesday and then also on Wednesday night, I was woefully negligent and lazy in getting my work done. This stems from the second reason, being that the passages we were translating were terribly dull. I turned to reading Badiou instead, simply because I had not had substantial intellectual nourishment for a while and was starving for it. The confession, however, is not that I have skipped the class, which is my choice, and a reasonable choice at that, given that I fully intend to keep up with building French reading skills as much as possible. The confession is that it is killing me to think of not having done all my work and of skipping the class. The educational system has completely saturated me, such that even when I am explicitly taking a class for my own personal enrichment, with any potential academic "pay-off" to come much later, I beat myself up over playing fast and loose with the class itself in order to conform it better to my own needs, and as with everything that so torments me, I have talked to way too many people about it.
I'd also like to confess that I am not as warm or friendly a person as I could be. My job is helping me to improve on that, but I still don't know how to respond appropriately to flirtation.
Other than that, my only sin is that I am in the process of writing a freaking long post that may deter some people from reading Monica's (wonderful) post and a half. I do that a lot, and I really apologize if my prolific posting schedule sometimes deters co-bloggers from posting. I take full responsibility for those under-read posts, in the most Rumsfeldian sense of the word.
Further Assessment:
I was very pleased with participation last week. No one seemed to pick up on the question of whether or not to continue the feature, so I will chalk up the decreased participation to the ebb and flow of people's sins. I think it's kind of fun for this space to be available, although I am willing to change it entirely if there is a felt need.
Geoff and Anthony apparently discussed possible alternatives to the Friday Afternoon Confessional at the Ekklesia conference, and they wanted some sort of liturgical prayer instead. I assume it would be composed by me. Don't get me wrong: I am an excellent mimic and could probably write a parody of a liturgical prayer with such skill that the Vatican would be calling me up and asking me if they could use it. It is definitely a possibility. I have two other possible ideas, however, for injecting a little more Christianity into this site.
First, I could do a recurring feature on the proceedings of the Pontifical Standing Committee for Continental Philosophy in the Liturgy. The idea here is to take selected passages from our favorite European thinkers and reimagine them as having some part in the liturgy, either as readings or as part of a seasonal liturgical prayer. Such recontextualization has potential for being humorous and insightful. I have a few potential passages already lined up, so we'd be guaranteed a month and a half of the series before I'd have to explicitly decide whether it's worth the effort. This could take place on a day of the week other than Friday (probably Sunday).
Second, I could try my hand at writing a weekly homily on the readings for that Sunday. It would be embarrassing at first (plus, I don't read Greek or anything, so my interpretations would be utterly worthless and horrible), but I think it could be a potentially interesting exercise, given that I would be completely without any pressure to conform to the expectations of a congregation. I mean, half the people who come here are looking for a nice, tattooed ass, so I doubt they care that much about the finer points of biblical hermeneutics.
I would like to take this opportunity to say that there is no reason I should be the only one with a recurring series. If any of my co-bloggers have ideas for a series (of which Robb's infamous "CD-change posts" are the archetype and norm), then feel free to unceremoniously and presumptuously announce that you are going to start a series! And if you think that the topic for your proposed series will offend or annoy me -- all the more reason to start it! This web page operates according to the principles of the Derridean university without condition, and my first principle is an unrelenting freedom of speech, with the corollary being that we must make every effort so that, when the master returns, we will not be found to have buried that freedom in the ground.
