The Salt-Box

If you turn to the last page of the April issue of Wired, you’ll see that New Britain will not always be a relatively poor, school-challenged city. No! This month’s “Artifacts from the Future,” by Paul Davidson, shows a future Risk game (CNN World News Edition), in which the Hardware City has realized its manifest destiny to rule over all New England, and indeed some mid-Atlantic states:

One day, dominion shall be ours!  Take *that*, Newington and Plainville!

Apparently my (Connecticut-based) MacBook’s dictionary doesn’t recognize Rhode Island as a state:

My students have always explained that RI stands in approximately the same relation to CT as West Virginia does to Virginia, or Alabama to Georgia — I guess my MacBook agrees.

My PsychoSlut column this month is about HBO’s recent show, In Treatment:

About a decade ago, when starting as a graduate student in Emory’s Psychoanalytic Studies Program, I had a fierce, public argument with a good friend, Eddie Gamarra, about what the point of dream interpretation might be in psychoanalysis. We were arguing, in effect, over what mattered most: some original wish or dream-thought that could painstakingly be recovered (Eddie’s view), or the fact of dream-censorship itself, which retroactively creates the wish out of the raw materials of the dream (my own view). This debate raises a complex question about whether analysis points you toward a truth about yourself, one that the analyst knows or infers and tries to help you find, or whether the analyst simply (!) helps us realize the complex ways that we enmesh ourselves in self-deception, in the hopes that such a recognition may help us take up a more sustainable attitude — to exchange, as Freud said, hysterical misery for ordinary human unhappiness. Does analysis claim that there is a truth in your head, which might be excavated in order to disclose the real meaning about your life? Or does it claim that our minds are, more or less, set up to facilitate misrecognition, mistranslation, and other forms of petit and grand errors, and that it can simply be useful to track that process in action?

I have been thinking about this argument with Eddie a lot recently, usually while watching HBO’s recently-concluded series, In Treatment, which received a lot of press — largely on the strength of the brilliant Gabriel Byrne and the fact that the New York Times probably overrates the contemporary importance of psychoanalysts — but not so many viewers. The show, an American import of a runaway Israeli hit, aired five nights a week, recording a therapist (Paul) as he meets with a single patient, and then on Fridays showing his meeting with his own therapist.

As always, read the whole thing!

This morning I’m giving a presentation at the local Academic Computing Conference entitled “From Twitter to Wikis: Why Your Students Should Care about the New Web Tools.”

There are basically 3 parts to the presentation:

• First, I argue that too many people–not really tech people, but the sort of person who believes labels like “millenials” are meaningful–conflate things like Facebook/MySpace with genuinely new tools for managing information.  Claiming that today’s students take naturally to social software, and pointing to MySpace and FaceBook as your examples, is  equivalent to claiming that their crystal meth addiction prepares their palate to enjoy fine Bordeaux.
• Then, demos: del.icio.us, the Victorian timeline (which you can see in action here), wikified class notes, twitter
• Finally, two students have volunteered to be a part of this.  (One of ‘em is Alex, who did this presentation on a Twitter+Facebook poetry mashup yesterday as part of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day.  The other is a student who wasn’t familiar with any of these things before my various classes, but who has become a big convert to del.icio.us and to TAPoR.)

David Glenn poses the above question over at the Chronicle’s Footnoted blog. The closest I can come to answering is the story below, which I can justify because SUNY Press brought out a translation of Being and Time shortly after the events in question.

When I was an undergrad, I was casually involved for a while with a woman who was, more or less the presiding spirit of the English department, or at least those of us who worked on Honors theses, worked in the writing center, etc.  This was about the time of my first burst of enthusiasm for literary theory.

One evening, we were sitting around talking about what we might like to do in graduate school.  I said that, since I’d been reading a lot of Luce Irigaray, including untranslated bits of The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, that it might be fun to be really systematic about reading Heidegger.  Grad school seemed like a good opportunity to read Being and Time seriously.

She jumped off the couch, shrieking in protest, and, it must be said, derisive laughter.  Apparently it was almost a tradition in the department for theoretically-orientated male undergrads to, in effect, ditch girls for the siren song of Dasein.   (Yes, I just linked to the Wikipedia entry for a Heideggerian concept.  It’s been one of those weeks.)

And so I remained within the orbit of psychoanalytic theory, now and forever.

So, that’s my story: Being and Time would have, in this case, led to my being unequivocally dumped.