Pomposity

During your first day of “Intro to Philosophy,” the professor surveys the students’ motivations for enrolling.  A few students casually mention that the class is required for their Epistemology major, one guy likes its meeting time, and a tall brown-noser relates recommendations of the professor (omitting his grade inflation tendencies).  He assesses these reasons and concludes that they’re “good ones,” but wonders whether anyone else differs.  In the first row, a bespectacled man stands up and says, “I desire to learn truth, Sir.  I will settle for nothing less than truth.  Justice.  Passion.”

 

Assuming that the respondent isn’t being ironic, the students laugh at him.  Even the professor chuckles once he returns to his office.  No student has said anything similar in ages; the student, it seems, has overdosed on bad Congressional hearings.

 

When I worked at a call center as a college freshman, I fought brief attention spans.  Once people realized that I was soliciting donations, they excused themselves, or curtly hung up.  One evening, my calling card contained the name of a Judge in Southern Jersey, and I tried a different tactic: when he answered, I asked whether I could speak with the “honorable judge forthwith.”  It worked.  He chuckled at my diction and listened to me.

 

Pomposity can be used to your advantage.  It’s a risky last-resort tactic, but also a harmless and attention-grabbing one.  When someone won’t listen to you, it’s one thing to attack them, but another to drop “pusillanimous.”  There are many cinematic moments in which the protagonist’s pomposity induces cringing while setting up the rising action, like when Elle says that she prefers the innocent defendant in Legally Blonde, or when she uses legal mumbo jumbo to fight for custody of her friend’s dog.  Pomposity distinguishes us from the more modest.

 

A week ago, my parents were trying, unsuccessfully, to get a local official’s attention.  I agreed to write an e-mail for them, which began, “As a steward of this town’s hopes and aspirations, an official elected to represent this noble, exalted place, I am disappointed in you.”  I followed that opener with a Federalist Papers quotation.

 

He called the next day.

Focus

It would be neat to focus group blogs, but that would require deep coffers, and most feedback is immediate.  It’s easy to gauge “success,” as it’s usually defined by advertising dollars, by looking at traffic, commentary, and links.  You don’t need to bore your readers with canned questions.

 

So far, I’ve had a few insights:

 

1.  The shorter, the better – People aren’t interested in reading digressive opuses.  I don’t know why I needed a blog for that insight.  My own behavior at the supermarket billboard serves as a useful, though flawed, parallel.  Flawed, I say, because few people read billboards for the same reasons that they read blogs.

 

2.  People love stories – As a poetry reader, this insight surprised me.  You may be surprised to learn that I don’t like most stories.  They’re long-winded, superfluous, baggy, trite.  We’ve heard the ones about the stranger in town and the declining family.  I hate digging into a story while knowing that I have a long ways to go, and that my effort might go unrewarded.  (Obviously, my dislike probably doesn’t apply to case facts, which present a different and more interesting beast.)

 

3.  Where was I? – My second paragraph thoughts partially explain the first.

 

That’s it, folks.  If I don’t discontinue blogging, I’ll try to apply these insights.

Ars Poetica

At first, I felt pompous while writing this blog.  Now, I’m sinking into my seat and starting to see possibilities.  I envision a blog that will work through the year with the hope of connecting past and present, intention and intellect.  Excuse me if I sound like a buzz-speak generator, because I’m serious.  (There are, of course, serious buzz-speak generators.)

 

When I graduated with my English degree, I wanted to crawl into bed and forget about it.  Reading great authors and theorists had stimulated me, but I saw literary applications as profoundly limiting.  The English discipline’s protectionism invoked the same tired list of authors for any scholarly project, and I could handle only so many “Derrida on binaries” talks before I realized there weren’t more insights.  Instead, there would be further applications of foregone conclusions.  English academics work with values, and these values had tired me: the de-centered world, the difficulty of signification (sign/signifier), identity politics, capital, the mirror image.  I got sick of nodding as I read through essays, of thinking that their circular arguments were correct.

 

My desire to speak with someone as cynical as me was rebuffed by the fact that I was too young for that pompous stance – kids can’t write off disciplines – and a schedule of scanning and cold-calling.  I kept my feelings mostly to myself and office conversations that tapered off once I started intellectualizing.  The water cooler wasn’t regarded as casually when I hung around.

 

Interdisciplinary work was my other problem.  All too often, I mopped up an intellectual mess to find that another had been trailing behind me.  I turned toward Marx and realized that my philosophical grounding blew, that his labor definition didn’t jive with my economics glossary; and I looked at Hegel and noted that I hadn’t sipped enough no-chaser continental philosophy.  The maintenance of understood ideas was even tougher.  Things had been said already in similar words.  I had walked through that intellectual forest before.

 

“How can I improve?” I asked myself.  The answer was by retreating from the written word, by believing that language isn’t suitable for data-entry.  When you tell someone that obese people are more likely to suffer strokes than thin people, you can work through regression analysis and discuss the issue.  But when you present someone with a critical paper about Milton’s Paradise Regained and quote Hegel and Lacan in the footnotes, then they must debate you on the merits of that work and a few others; it’s hard to go through previous debates and quickly re-render your knowledge in light of the new piece.  Although you may have read one-hundred papers about that Miltonic topic, it’s tough to put that paper into the vast mosaic of previous Miltonic criticism.  You feel like a frustrated librarian, unable to differentiate the last two Marxist readings of a book.  Meanwhile, the next door sociology librarian, who always had whiter teeth than you and patronizes you with pictures of her boyfriend, happily sings as she puts the newest study of obesity on the shelf.  Hers is an ordered world frequented by suit-wearing economists and sociologists, while yours is basement duplex frequented by tweed-wearing literary monks.

 

This quasi-philosophical thought about framing questions, answers, and knowledge may be reserved to the world’s data-entry college graduates. (Unfortunately, I haven’t found a data-entry department of Miltonic insights, though it may have been outsourced.)  But it’s why this blog will try to live up to itself without tripping over itself, to categorize its feelings like it’s thinking about them, to turn to policy arguments and empiricism while registering the mushy English stuff.  It’s a tough world out there: filled with big, beautiful, redundant sentences.  Let’s try not to write them.

Chair Shortage

In Family Guy’s most sublime moment, Peter Griffin asks his long-lost African-American relative to describe heaven.  He frowns, shrugs, and says, “It’s all right, but there’s a shortage of chairs.”

 

My college roommate disliked that quote.  He thought that it was cryptic, evading him like broccoli stuck between his teeth.  I disagreed by emphasizing the inevitable heavenly logistics.  Where will everyone sit?  Where will the angels go?  Do you outsource or hire a management consultant if inefficiencies arise?  And what if there’s a chair shortage?  The relative’s quote demonstrates that the sublime and sacred co-exist with the menial and logistical.  When we plan a happily-ever-after honeymoon, ship holy items from Texas to Minnesota, or charge an invoice for an ethics seminar, we’re reminded of our logistical frailties.  Even the magical Willy Wonka had to provide his oompa loompas with 401k plans.  (I’m assuming that Mr. Wonka cared for their post-chocolate-factory retirements.)

 

Maturity acknowledges this fact.  Adults know that life is an endless list of insurance claims, warranty issues, PTA meetings, bank withdrawals, mortgage payments, sexy parties, town hall concerns, and tax forms.  College students are less aware of these things.  For many of them, life involves sublime searches, quests for “love” or “artistic greatness.”  Pick any transcendent rhetoric and you will find it in the young and restless: philosophy, music, romance, republics.  But many of these searches will be conducted without the boring details.  Sonatas, for all their beauty, are played by insured pianists on zoned properties;  philosophers, for all their genius, must network for publishing purposes.

 

I’m torn between both worlds, perhaps, because neither is accurate.  There are irresponsible adults who take out home equity loans in order to re-pay credit card debt and finance dreams, and there are college students who pay their student loans and leases.  But maturity, I think, navigates each excess by simultaneously imagining the mundane and sublime.  It sees the halos with the chairs, the seats with the paradise.  It is no shortage.

Pointless Story

My life in New York is best narrated as a series of meals: Vietnamese broth in Chinatown, falafel in the East Village, sandwiches by the Met, burritos in the Bronx.  One of my favorite eateries is Aura, a Thai Fusion restaurant on 9^th avenue between 35^th and 36^th.  Whenever I eat there, I order a standard dish called Lemongrass Chicken, which is spiced with cashews, pungent peppers, pickles, sticky rice, and a sauce so delicious it attracts beautiful women a la Axe deodorant.  For dessert, I order iced coffee.

 

Today, in order to catch an early bus, I started dining there at a broad daylight 5:10.  The only other customer was a fashionable girl engrossed in a book; and the waiter ushered me to an empty window table in front of her.  I didn’t understand his motivations, but I went along.  In New York, people always assume that a large crowd is around the corner.  Why shouldn’t we sit closely together?  I ordered my chicken and settled into The Wapshot Chronicles, my own book.

 

A few pages later, the waiter emerged from the kitchen with a plate of Lemongrass Chicken, walking toward me.  I put my book down.  We made eye contact.  He leaned forward. Suddenly, he rotated and put the plate on the girl’s table.  She had ordered the same thing!  Stuck with a fork in hand, I felt presumptuous, even clumsy, and the girl’s glare worsened my awkwardness.  My first impressions were correct: she wore a kimono-like green top with a pagoda sleeve; she had an aquiline, yet graceful, nose; she had curly blond hair; and, by her table, there was a modern poetry anthology.

 

A half-hour passed, yet nobody entered the restaurant.  When I received my lemongrass chicken, we ate in silence.  Her literary engrossment seemed absolute.  However, I thought about the situation.  Should I speak?  Initiating conversation didn’t feel creepy; she looked my age and I could frame, I thought, an innocuous literary question.  But thoughts held me back: the Chicago move; wisdom about city strangers; the sound of my own voice.  As I continued eating that succulent, delicious chicken, I felt increasingly juvenile, like the Wonder Years narrator or the student in Joyce’s “Araby.”  In a labyrinthine way, thoughts induced thought about why I hadn’t stopped thinking.  Two presumably literary people, the same place, two tables, and one Manhattan meal across from an old warehouse and a multi-level street parking lot.  That was it.  No, no meals and no warehouse.  Or no literature.

 

Finally, someone entered the place.  He looked at the menu and left.  The girl didn’t see beyond her anthology.

 

Outside, rain started.  I finished my meal, paid, tipped.  “Darn,” I thought as I left the restaurant and entered the torrent that had enveloped Manhattan, “I forgot my umbrella at home.”

Tips for Incoming Seniors

While staring at my hand today, I realized that old friends are incoming seniors at schools like the University of Southern California, Illinois, and Iowa.  Senior temptations to drink and throw sandbags into holes may be justified in this economy, but I can provide readers with additional pointers about enjoying their year:

 

1. Don’t be Afraid of Pomposity – In the real world, people can’t say “pusillanimous” unless they’re English professors, and even then they’re pushing it.  In college, however, people are willing to tolerate your sudden fondness for the thesaurus.  Use this opportunity to dig deep.  Do you have a monocle or a bandana?  How about a didgeridoo?  These are not only acceptable party props: they are essential college reminders because people will probably never use or be impressed by them again.

 

2. Buy a Strobe Light, Use It – It is magic.  It is primal.  It is a bulb that flashes many times per second.  I discovered it when I passed by 630 Bloomington during spring break and saw it again and again and again.  Music will never sound so good.  People will never look so choppy, so Cubist, so hip.

 

3. Avoid Shaving, or even Dressing – The workplace requires a professional look.  In such an environment, untrimmed facial hair will meet tacit yet surprisingly powerful resistance from higher-ups and co-workers.  I recommended that you look like Brian Wilson before the style is snatched from you forever with soap.  This advice also applies to dressing.  This is your chance to look like Kobe Bryant meets Williamsburg hipster.  Don’t lose it.

 

4. Lots of Facebook Pictures – I regret not taking more.  Make sure you run the full gamut of poses: in front of the bar, by the bar stool, near the stool in front of the bar.  Pick up your school’s campus life magazine for additional instructions.

 

5. Ask People Questions About Themselves – At your workplace, you won’t be able to remain as self-centered as you were when you bored your roommate with stories about your attractive girlfriend.  Effective small talk with bosses requires questions like: “How are the kids?”, “How was your vacation?”, and “Did you end up playing golf?”.  One day, when you earn that corner office, someone will ask you these same questions.  Then, finally, you will gloat about your attractive college girlfriend.  Just wait.

 

6. Avoid “Crutches” – As graduation arrives, many of your peers will slake their thirst for more school by considering random graduate degree programs, or even professional school.  Avoid this temptation above all the others.  Out in the real world, you will quickly learn whether medical school is right for you.  Currently, you are not qualified to make that judgment, unless you’ve had a few years of out-of-school experience (most people haven’t).  I sound patronizing, I know, but the real world will bring out feelings that you’ve never felt before.  What if you discover a passion for data-entry?  Another marine biology degree won’t help you.

 

7. Start Honing your Network – Some friends will comprise the professional network of a lifetime.  Others will become chronic disappointments, that “one guy” who can’t even remember your name after you invite him to your house and discuss his in-laws for four hours.  So discern now.  Sift through your facebook, or even your Linked In, and figure out which people will help you find work, and which people are destined to stay college memories.

Sigh.

Summer is listless and long.  In the brief interim between waking and working, I read books: Investment Banking for Dummies, Averno, The Wapshot Chronicles, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  I run through them with the enthusiasm of someone trying to appear busy.  I have no purpose, no plan.  On the bus, I drift from paragraphs about leverage to books set in Cambodia without glancing at the road.

 

School is on my mind.  It doesn’t let go.  Already the school bells in the distance clang, the smell of coffee and unwashed free-market fans wafts into our mid-Manhattan lobby.  When I sit at my workstation, I want to stand.  When I stand, I want a running start at the world’s chalkboards.  Questions multiply: will I love the material?  Will I use an outline?  Where will I eat for lunch?  And, yet, despite my anxieties, there is interest in the Chicago of my childhood and early adolescence.

 

I’ve spoken with classmates and I’m confident that I chose nicely.  More than many things, I wanted a school where I could find an esprit de corps of thought bubbles.  (Yes, I grimace as I say the word.  Life’s tough.)  As an undergraduate, nobody around me ever said, “I tried to publish this,” or “why don’t you read that?” and I loathed that intellectual isolation.  Whenever I talked about my future, people looked at me like my ambitions involved moon colonies.  Only a few of them did.

 

So it wasn’t that bad, but I wanted to find people aspiring toward our vocation as well as cultural literacy.  That I think I’ll find, even if I’ve already missed twenty minutes of Family Guy by looking for it.

?

I started blogging in order to work through my ideas, neuroses, and experiences during the school year.  Now that I’ve reached ten posts, I’d like to appraise my direction.

 

I don’t mean to sound self-congratulatory, but there’s a discrepancy between my traffic log and my comments.  Lurking is fine – I also rarely comment – but, if anyone wants to make suggestions, I’d love to hear them.  Of course, you may use a pseudonym or stay anonymous.  Do you want less artsy prose?  Book reviews?  Banana boats?  I love suggestions, partially since I’m confused about whether, or how, to continue blogging.

 

I look forward to reading any ideas.  If I’ve breached blog etiquette by asking, I apologize.  So sweet, so cold.

Economy of Motion

After leaving the highway, my bus passes through unlit New Jersey neighborhoods.  For miles there are no parks, no schools, no people.  Except for two yards where the last daylight pools, the sidewalks throb with darkness.

 

I think of the way paint drops dribble, as if they were perpetually suspended, partially awakened in mid-air, and soon against the pane I am leaning into sleep.

Condescending Anecdote

Yesterday, at lunch, a hobo asked me for a dollar.  He had a scraggly beard, long hair, a greasy flannel shirt, and sandals.  I hesitated at first; but then I gave him a crumpled bill.  Without so much as a “thanks” or eye contact, he ran away with it, leaving me standing alone by a Chinese restaurant.  The sun was heavy and awkward on my back; and I couldn’t make out the lunch menu.

 

I didn’t expect “thanks” from him, but its absence still bothered me.  Then my bother bothered me.  Since I hold strong views on neither philanthropy nor etiquette, I should have let his action slide, but I thought about my reaction.  Did his gratitude matter to me?  In many ways, it didn’t.  I acknowledged that he had important things to do, or that he didn’t want to see his one-time benefactor, or that he had psychological problems, or that his “thanks” would have been pointless in the sense that frosting a burnt cake is pointless.  And, yes, I realize that I’m a middle-class kid whose writings and expectations on this subject may be amazingly patronizing.  Yet, somehow, his curtness annoyed me.

 

In Katy Perry’s hit, “I Kissed a Girl,” she expresses a similar emotion: “No, I don’t even know your name.  It doesn’t matter.  You’re my experimental game; it’s human nature.”  Without too much navel-gazing, I think that her kiss and my hand-out are comparable: both are exchanges, both invite strangers, both are spur-of-the-moment, and both produce unclear emotions.  As an English student, I would have settled for a vivid description of that moment, a measly ten-syllables-per-line:

 

“Crouch’d on the pavement close by Belgrave Square

A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;

A babe was in her arms, and at her side

A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.” 

(Matthew Arnold, “West London”)

 

But that didn’t satisfy me.  I needed a thought process that went beyond Arnold.  That’s where I hope that contracts will enter, teaching me how to analyze my expectations and his.  Last night, I read the course description and it seemed like good stuff: enforceability, breach, nonlegal sanctions.  I’m excited.  I can see myself thinking deeply about how the hobo and I almost made a verbal contract, the unilateral and bilateral, the said, the written, and the implied.  Yes, that should salve some itch. 

 

The next time I see this man, as I probably will in our neighborhood of lunch menus, I wonder whether I’ll give him a dollar.  I wonder whether he’ll even ask.