Part of the recent silence has been produced by the fact that everything I’ve been doing over the last however many days it’s been since I got back to Claremont (just checked; it’s eleven. I can’t decide if it seems like it’s been more or less than that) is either (a) bloody tedious or (b) various levels of confidential. Days have been like this:

6.00 am: get up, put in contacts, brush teeth

6.15 am: feed cats, make tea

6.20 am: sit down and either spend two and a half hours madly preparing for classes, or spend an hour madly preparing for classes and then go to the gym

9.00 am: hop in shower

10.00 am: arrive in office, meet with students, teach classes, attend job talks, interview candidates, go to meetings.

6.00 pm: either sit in office and actually attempt to get something done for an hour, or go to dinner with job candidate, or—miracle of miracles!—go have a drink with a friend

9.00 pm: arrive home exhausted and despite intentions to do some work so less needs to be done in the morning, instead check email

10.00 pm: look up to discover an hour has gone by and no work has gotten done; feed cats

10.15 pm: go to bed

Not a lot to report there, and what’s actually been interesting can’t be written about. The good news is that the sheer drudgery of it really didn’t bother me for the first week; everytime I’d get the slightest bit aggravated, I’d remember my utterly blissful two weeks in Paris, and find myself smiling like a fool. That, alas, wore off sometime last week. Now all I can think about is everything I ought to be getting done right now instead of writing this.

But hey, John McCain’s been talking on his cell phone nonstop for the last half-hour (or is that a cell faux?), so I oughta be able to blog.

So apparently what it takes to get me something to blog about is leaving town.  I’m traveling today, and am currently sitting in a Crown Room in Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport.  Sitting 100 feet due in front of me is John McCain.

For some reason, that has me very, very freaked out.

More once I’ve had a moment to collect my thoughts.

Also a beer.

I’ve honestly just been too busy even to contemplate blogging, much less to write anything. (Or even read anything; I’m about as out of touch with bloglandia as I’ve been anytime in the last five years.) I’m hoping to get caught up enough to produce something of value here soon.

I’m currently here, doing this. The return to the U.S. was only moderately painful (perhaps because mostly experienced in a state of denial and delirium). The return to Claremont promises to be a bit hairier (largely because I arrive Tuesday at 7.30 pm and teach for the first time on Wednesday at 1.15 pm). I’ll hope to have something of interest to discuss soon.

A bit belatedly, a post mostly serving to bookmark for myself Scott McLemee’s IHE column growing out of the MLA blogging panel, with a very interesting conversation (both in the column and in the comments) about gender, academic blogging, stardom, and anonymity.

I’ve been working up a storm, and the big blogging project I’ve mentioned several times is actually beginning to take some shape.  I’ll hope to post some bits from it for discussion as they become available.

Yes, I’ve drunk the koolaid.  But holy crap.  That’s all I’m sayin’.

An MLA moment I haven’t written about, as yet:  I had three and a half minutes between meetings, at one point, and so I grabbed the laptop and headed for the corridor in the conference center, where there was a nice strong free wifi signal.  Just as I was sitting down and getting myself set up, along came a guy in a very nice suit and a very nice open-collared shirt in a lovely shade of green.  Perhaps I looked a bit familiar for some reason, perhaps it was the usual conference name-tag scan, perhaps it was the sight of me yanking laptop out of messenger bag, but the guy in the lovely green shirt gave me a decided squint as he passed by.  I thought nothing of it for about thirty seconds, and then realized—I think that was Michael Bérubé.

I’m still not positive—I’ve never met the man in person.  And of course, I left Philadelphia before the big blogging panel, so I couldn’t confirm then.  Nor could I introduce myself, which is something I really wanted to do.  He did me a quite astonishing professional favor some years back, one utterly unnecessary, particularly given that he had no idea who I was.  It fell at a key moment in my career, when things were looking more than a little dark, and I’ve never gotten the chance to thank him in person, or to let him know how much it meant.

And now things have gone all explody over at Le Blogue Bérubé.  Once upon a time, at least, we both belonged to a fairly small cohort of academics with the same weird tendency to publish our random thoughts online.  Now he’s gone, and I’m just me again.  I can’t help but feel like I missed my moment.

File this under “things I really ought to have read a long time ago, but am just now getting to”:  I’ve spent the last few days slowly working my way through The Pleasure of the Text.  And I found myself quite astonished by how much there is in this deceptively tiny text, and how elusive it all is.

What I need now is to do a bit more reading on the question of pleasure, and particularly in relationship to cultural consumption.  In part I’m looking for critical responses to Barthes, but also for competing or complementary theories of pleasure.  And it’s specifically pleasure that I’m interested in, as distinct from desire.  As Barthes points out,

Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values:  Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc.  Its victorious rival is Desire:  we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure; Desire has an epistemic dignity, Pleasure does not. (Barthes 57)

Desire is permissible within criticism, and can even be acknowledged as having a revolutionary force, precisely because it operates around a lack—for desire to be desire, it cannot be satisfied.  Pleasure, by contrast, implies satisfaction, and thus, both politically and psychoanalytically, pleasure comes to be seen as regressive and infantile.  And, in fact, much of The Pleasure of the Text is at pains to distinguish between the confirming power of pleasure with respect to the status quo and the rupture produced by bliss.  On the other hand, Barthes also indicates that there is “an entire minor mythology [that] would have us believe that pleasure (and singularly the pleasure of the text) is a rightist notion” (Barthes 22), suggesting that pleasure—at least in the broader category that includes both plaisir and jouissance—is not so aligned with the conservative as we have been led to believe.

What I’m after is a critical theory of pleasure, and particularly the pleasure taken in the consumption of cultural texts.  I’m going to go reread some Freud, and I’m thinking I need to revisit Foucault and The History of Sexuality as well.  But what else should I be looking at?

This has been a weird month.  Weird enough that my last transatlantic flight seemed astonishingly easy.  Heck, weird enough that I can use a phrase like “my last transatlantic flight.” Ça suffit.

(Not incidentally, somewhere along the line this became a travel blog.  I’m not entirely thrilled with that, but it seems to be what I’m doing, so I may as well ride the wave for the moment.)

As I said somewhere buried in the comments on another post, the only difficult part of the trip from the MLA back to Paris was making sure that I didn’t sleep through the airport stop on the train.  Somehow I managed it, got off the train where I ought to have, got on the little air-train to the EWR terminal, checked in, found my gate, and stood around waiting until we boarded.  Got on the plane, ate a little, and… I don’t much remember the rest of the flight.  And I was actually pretty functional when I got off of it.  Which suggests to me that I actually slept, at least some, a pretty remarkable turn of events.

Here, however, is the major lesson learned from that particular crossing:  planning to meet up with someone at CDG requires more than simply “I’ll meet you outside the international arrivals area in terminal 2A.” You need contingency plans, if-then statements, worst case scenarios.  We had none of that, and managed to make it work, but only through sheer stubbornness, I think.

The story:  R. flew in from Prague on the morning of the 30th, and was set to arrive at CDG at 11.50 am.  My flight from EWR was expected to arrive at 11.20.  My best guess was that, by the time my plane took the world’s longest taxi, and then I made it through passport control, baggage claim, and customs, R. could have made it over from terminal 2B to meet me outside arrivals in 2A, so that was the plan.  The only contingency we added in, for good measure, was “if you’re not there, I’ll wait for you.”

More specificity would have been good.  For instance:  “if it turns out that my flight is significantly early, and yours is significantly late, rather than pointlessly waiting outside arrivals at 2A, I’ll make my way over to 2B and meet you there.” And, for that matter:  “if you emerge from arrivals in 2B and I’m not there, make your way over to 2A.  If for any reason we miss one another, make your way to the train station, and I’ll meet you outside the ticket office.”

But no.  All we had was “I’ll meet you outside arrivals in 2A.” And, of course, my flight was 40 minutes early, and I was the first person through passport control, and my suitcase was about the tenth to appear on the conveyor belt, so I was through customs and outside arrivals well before my flight was even set to land.  R.’s flight, by contrast, was slightly delayed, and then his baggage took forever to arrive.  When I emerged from customs and saw that his flight wasn’t going to land for half an hour yet, I contemplated just heading over to 2B and waiting for him there, but we hadn’t made any of those contingency plans.  There were no if-thens.  There was only one go to.  And the consequences of a failed deviation from the script—what if I go to 2B, and he doesn’t look for me, and I happen to be looking the wrong way, and he gets by me and goes to 2A, and I’m not there?—seemed worse than the tedium and anxiety of continuing to wait at 2A.

After an hour and 15 minutes, though, and after being repeatedly psyched out by every tall man with a shaved head and glasses (of whom there are more than you might expect), I finally decided to move toward 2B.  I would go slowly and deliberately.  I would scan the oncoming traffic relentlessly.  I would be vigilant in the extreme, and make absolutely certain that he could not get by me.  I would –

I took about twenty steps in that direction, rehearsing the improvisation (I know), and there he was.

I have almost never been happier to see him.

In any case, there were minor adventures getting on the train (ticket machines that hate my credit cards), minor adventures getting to a taxi (three flights of up, including two non-functional escalators and one very heavy rolly bag), minor adventures getting to the hotel (in which I managed to pull the name of the street our hotel is on completely out of my ass), but none of it mattered.  I was completely suffused with the ecstasy of having successfully made a connection that should in no way have worked.

And once we arrived at our hotel—a smallish, funky, thirties-inspired place with the most attentive staff ever, who I’m not sure realize yet that I’m never leaving again—well, what could be better?

Paris is great.  Life is great.  Thus far, 2007 is great.  I’ve resisted posting until now in no small part because of the way each post both requires a removal from the flow of things and marks the passage of time.  I’m working very, very hard on lingering in the moment and not allowing any anxiety about the ticking of the clock to creep in and undermine things.

Greetings from Paris! I’ll attempt to catch up on The Story Thus Far later today. For now, a warm welcome to 2007, and best wishes that it be a happy, healthy, and fruitful year for us all.