Wednesday, March 16, 2005
(5:32 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Money
Do you guys think that selling real estate would be a good way to work my way through a PhD, if that became necessary? Or would it be one of those things where I would repeatedly slap myself in the face every morning saying, "Come on, you can do this. You can do this"?(Though, again, take your time, New School and DePaul! And Mr. or Ms. "Accepted Outright to Vanderbilt" -- you probably got accepted a lot of other places. Do you really want to deal with the hot Tennessee summers? And the locust swarms in late fall -- your car insurance won't cover that, you know.)
UPDATE: I'm seriously not trying to suck up to any grad schools here, but I'm very pleased with myself that I finished a pretty good first draft of an intro to my translation. (Just yesterday, I was wallowing in self-loathing for not having finished enough. Bitch, PhD, had a comment today at Unfogged where she mentioned someone who "got through her dissertation in record time (and it was a good one) because she was completely free of neurosis." I'm starting to think that the non-neurotic academic is a rare thing indeed -- perhaps the woman Bitch mentions is in fact the only one.) Especially clever was the way I skillfully wove a summary of the contents of The Gift of Death into an argument that "Literature in Secret" ("my" section, which Derrida added much later) doesn't fit the pattern of transitions that Derrida established in the original text. If "my" section were ever published as a stand-alone thing, that introduction would be a valuable apologetic for such a move, with the added benefit that I actually believe what I wrote.
I'm also very excited to have read a poem in French just now. It is entitled "Au Lecteur" by Baudelaire. I will leave the title in French so that you can savor all the unique resonances that an English translation ("To the reader") could never possibly even begin to capture.
Oh, and Mike Schaefer and Josh Davis have both convinced me that real estate sales (or any sales) is not for me. Now I'm torn between video store management and starting a one-man custodial service. The latter is an idea that my mom has suggested several times. It would be brilliant to profit financially off of my anality about cleanliness, and if I did it because of my mom's idea, that would be a textbook Aufhebung -- if we believe Freud, she (unconsciously) inflicted the problem of anal retentiveness upon me, and then she helps me to turn the problem into an opportunity. It's like that one Chinese letter that doesn't really exist. Brilliant. (Languagehat calls it a "character," but in keeping with the Derridean spirit, I am going to side with Derrida, who asks in Of Grammatology why we won't admit that Chinese "characters" are just letters that function differently from phonetic letters.)
Okay, let's do this! The Scott McLemee Fan Club and Custodial Service starts ASAP.
