l'œil rougeâtre

Il y avait de ces saisons où, malgré moi:
Succombant sans émotions aux charlataneries
Délicates de la jeunesse (un doux trépas).
J'en reste pétrifié, souvent, sur un portrait.

When I wrote

I sat down last night to begin writing a paper that has been running around in my head for some time now. It's a wonderful experience, to find oneself in the presence of that simulated alterity which springs out with the pen. There's a struggle, because our ability to delude our minds is much greater than our ability to trick a simple piece of paper (or in this case, a computer screen) into believing that our ideas are well-formed. And there is a bit of terror involved because the concept, once it leaves the comfortable womb, is no longer quite yours. It grows on it's own, rambling across the pages, taking sometimes unexpected turns which might better be attributed to muscle spasms than pure intent. The concept may remain friendly, but it often becomes a burdensome companion, which must be walked patiently to its end. Its incompetence is frustrating: it was so crystalline before it emerged!

Or maybe it's a phoenix, and as it burns itself out, it beckons other concepts to existence. Their incubation may be swift - they jump out a few days later and die on a post-it - or it may be long, paced, perhaps the work of decades. The latter bide their time (watching the seasons change) and they feed on the many deaths played out before them. It is never quite clear, with them, that they will care to emerge at all.

A day at the races

Actually, just a day running around downtown Boston, which is surprisingly rare for someone living in Cambridge. I'm a little past feeling like that's too bad. I usually just constate it now.

Fenway park is pretty cool. I was there with A. for this afternoon's game against the Angels. We wandered down into the sun and snagged some seats we had scoped out. It's funny, because it's a relatively normal thing to do, and I'm an adult, but I still felt a bit naughty for it. And therefore, it was better.

The big jolt of the day was realizing that because I turned my VA license into the MA Motor Vehicle Registration to get a local driver's license, I now don't have an ID for the next week and a half. It's like 1932 all over again (this is a clumsy reference to the Prohibition, whose exact dates evade me, the archaeologist)(it's all about culture history)(sort of).

And so I'll listen to Ramble On, because what can be more true to life than departure.
...but now it's time for me to go...

Shwag

While shwag wasn't one of the great alchemistic elements, I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement "Shwag is the center of the universe" (iff shwag can take any conceivable value, including the null).

Surprisingly, no one has ever noted this simple, transparent fact.

I got the munchies

lookin' to make some tracks

So I've sent my CV to a couple archaeologists at the DAI. It's part of my bid to not get to stuck in Israeli or even Near Eastern archaeology. Ultimately I'd like to hit honduras as well (maybe I'll talk some other time about my plans to excavate Port Royal on Roatan).

Floating in the backdrop, naturally, is my conviction that studying archaeology is studying the past is studying people. Which means major interfacing with philosophy, history, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and, while we're at it, Koi fish (which are awesome). The downside (koi fish aside) is that this all means either a lifetime commitment, or ineptitude. I favor the former.

And right now the most difficult, near-impossible, and therefore essential task is to figure out a way to reconcile the fact that the past did occur (just once), with the post-structural défi. I'm not sure my current idea (that we should extend the pragmatic epistemological approximation by which we live our day to day lives to our scholarship) will pan out. Or that it changes anything. The fact that the intellectual world is split by the positivistic/relativistic divide, and that the two sides don't talk to or acknowledge the other, makes any sort of dialectical solution to the problem improbable. It also speaks of the small, fickle, and self-important nature of the academic mind.
So I'll be working on that.

I knew there was a reason I felt conflicted about my leftist tendencies...

Here's why.