The Fordham Spire is the new skyscraper being built in Chicago (not to be confused with the new Trump Tower, whose management is currently being supervised by the guy who won the first The Apprentice). Its design reminds me of the mountain that Dr. Seuss's Grinch lives in, and I can't believe that the top floor isn't being reserved for some evil so-and-so. I can't imagine what this would actually look like when it's finished; in addition to its freaky corkscrew structure, it's going to be the tallest skyscraper in the US, and that's including the still-hypothetical New York Freedom Tower.
Through my Wikipedia meanderings, I was surprised to discover that the Bank of America Plaza is the 6th tallest building in the US, and the tallest of any city outside New York and Chicago. Maybe the humidity makes it look shorter than it is?
Beside me I have a plate of turkey sausage and toast that I made myself this morning, as well as a cup of coffee. This cup of coffee, incidentally, has been the only cup I've enjoyed in the past 10 days--I have virtually eliminated morning coffee from my life, after two to three years of not going a day without it. My new abstinence has retaught me a long-forgotten lesson: the morning sucks balls. But so far I'm feeling effectively *less* tired during the day than I used to, my digestive tract doesn't feel like a pair of windshield wipers set on "severe weather," and strangely, I can sleep in longer now that my nervous system isn't crying out for caffeine at 7 AM.
Friday night I was walking home from one of Ramiro's joint Off-Off/Big Dog Eat Child parties, and even though I am only one block west from Ramiro's, walking back felt like walking the creepy path to the covered bridge in that Washington Irving story about the guy with the thing and the ghost. Everything looks sinister in Hyde Park after midnight, including this Sox flag perched on a Honda Civic that was flapping loudly in the wind, and the solitary pumpkin sitting underneath a porch light that had low-budget John Carpenter written all over it. Why so scared? Mayhaps it's the 16 or so muggings, or "attacks" as the police call them, that have occured in or around the campus in the past two months. The attacker, who carries a blue steel gun ("Blue Steele!"), comes up to students and residents (mostly males) and demands their wallets or purses, sometimes in broad daylight or dusk. A few students have been pistol-whipped when they didn't take out their money right away. Now, nobody here has any illusions about living on the south side of Chicago, but the number of these muggings have been so unsettling that people have been changing their daily habits in ways I've never seen before. All of my friends part ways every night by saying, with real gravity, "be careful" or "walk safely." In fact, the whole experience is like being in a Harry Potter book, living at Hogwart's in the midst of some rash of magical disappearances or murders. Each Friday, we sit in Bartlett reading the school newspaper's crime report, saying things that might as well be like, "Oh dear, more Death-Eater attacks."
Supposedly they have arrested two suspects who have been identified by their victims (the two attackers turned out to be 17 and 20 years of age). But that doesn't stop me from still being really freaked out by an empty street after dark. Halfway home last night, I almost bolted when some scrawny white kid with a Clash shirt suddenly walked out of an alley in front of me. I wonder. Of course, as soon as I identified him as white, I couldn't help feeling relieved; and such is the nature of my knee-jerk racism compounded with living in this part of the city. I'm ashamed of my unfailing tendency to profile; and yet it seems with attacks like these, I'm not given a whole lot of reason not to profile. A few years ago the UCPD came under fire for arresting a black male suspected of stealing a bicycle; he turned out to be a graduate student. It was an embarrassing incident; but on the other hand, I think that most people could pretty well understand that their own mentality probably wasn't too far off from the UCPD's.
To complement this situation, the University has been in the news lately (try every local newspaper, every local news station, countless blogs, and MTV News dot com) for a dorm party whose theme was "straight-thuggin'" and "ghetto," for which white students dressed up in baggy clothing, bling, and in one case handcuffs. A group of black students caught wind of it, were offended, and since then the university has been bending over backwards, often ridiculously, to assure its minority students and the general public that Chicago is not a racist institution which enrolls mostly smart but racist white students. Most of us, including those students who held the party, would deny that we're at all racist. Yet most of us are still jumping out of our skins whenever we pass a young, black male on a dark street.
Anyway, a quote from Spivak for all my YWM homies languishing in theory classes:
Pre-registration for winter quarter is this week, which means I get the opportunity to daydream during class about taking other classes. So far this is what I'm asking for Christmas:
1. Shakespeare I: Comedies & Romances
2. Augustine's Confessions
3. Homer's The Iliad
4. Intermediate Playwriting
I am perfectly content, mind you, with spending the long, dark, winter months curled up in the Reg with a dead white man or three.
Friday: Final PLEASUREDOME!
Through my Wikipedia meanderings, I was surprised to discover that the Bank of America Plaza is the 6th tallest building in the US, and the tallest of any city outside New York and Chicago. Maybe the humidity makes it look shorter than it is?
Beside me I have a plate of turkey sausage and toast that I made myself this morning, as well as a cup of coffee. This cup of coffee, incidentally, has been the only cup I've enjoyed in the past 10 days--I have virtually eliminated morning coffee from my life, after two to three years of not going a day without it. My new abstinence has retaught me a long-forgotten lesson: the morning sucks balls. But so far I'm feeling effectively *less* tired during the day than I used to, my digestive tract doesn't feel like a pair of windshield wipers set on "severe weather," and strangely, I can sleep in longer now that my nervous system isn't crying out for caffeine at 7 AM.
Friday night I was walking home from one of Ramiro's joint Off-Off/Big Dog Eat Child parties, and even though I am only one block west from Ramiro's, walking back felt like walking the creepy path to the covered bridge in that Washington Irving story about the guy with the thing and the ghost. Everything looks sinister in Hyde Park after midnight, including this Sox flag perched on a Honda Civic that was flapping loudly in the wind, and the solitary pumpkin sitting underneath a porch light that had low-budget John Carpenter written all over it. Why so scared? Mayhaps it's the 16 or so muggings, or "attacks" as the police call them, that have occured in or around the campus in the past two months. The attacker, who carries a blue steel gun ("Blue Steele!"), comes up to students and residents (mostly males) and demands their wallets or purses, sometimes in broad daylight or dusk. A few students have been pistol-whipped when they didn't take out their money right away. Now, nobody here has any illusions about living on the south side of Chicago, but the number of these muggings have been so unsettling that people have been changing their daily habits in ways I've never seen before. All of my friends part ways every night by saying, with real gravity, "be careful" or "walk safely." In fact, the whole experience is like being in a Harry Potter book, living at Hogwart's in the midst of some rash of magical disappearances or murders. Each Friday, we sit in Bartlett reading the school newspaper's crime report, saying things that might as well be like, "Oh dear, more Death-Eater attacks."
Supposedly they have arrested two suspects who have been identified by their victims (the two attackers turned out to be 17 and 20 years of age). But that doesn't stop me from still being really freaked out by an empty street after dark. Halfway home last night, I almost bolted when some scrawny white kid with a Clash shirt suddenly walked out of an alley in front of me. I wonder. Of course, as soon as I identified him as white, I couldn't help feeling relieved; and such is the nature of my knee-jerk racism compounded with living in this part of the city. I'm ashamed of my unfailing tendency to profile; and yet it seems with attacks like these, I'm not given a whole lot of reason not to profile. A few years ago the UCPD came under fire for arresting a black male suspected of stealing a bicycle; he turned out to be a graduate student. It was an embarrassing incident; but on the other hand, I think that most people could pretty well understand that their own mentality probably wasn't too far off from the UCPD's.
To complement this situation, the University has been in the news lately (try every local newspaper, every local news station, countless blogs, and MTV News dot com) for a dorm party whose theme was "straight-thuggin'" and "ghetto," for which white students dressed up in baggy clothing, bling, and in one case handcuffs. A group of black students caught wind of it, were offended, and since then the university has been bending over backwards, often ridiculously, to assure its minority students and the general public that Chicago is not a racist institution which enrolls mostly smart but racist white students. Most of us, including those students who held the party, would deny that we're at all racist. Yet most of us are still jumping out of our skins whenever we pass a young, black male on a dark street.
Anyway, a quote from Spivak for all my YWM homies languishing in theory classes:
I will have in an undergraduate class, let's say, a young, white male student...who will say: "I am only a bourgeois white male, I can't speak." In that situation...I say to them: "Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an object script that you are silenced?" Then you begin to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very deterministic position-- since my skin colour is this, since my sex is this, I cannot speak....From this position, then, I say you will of course not speak in the same way about the Third World material, but if you make it your task to not only learn what is going on there ... but also at the same time through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will see that to have earned the right to criticize, and you will be heard.A good point. So how many NY Times editorials should I read until I earn the right to criticize?
Pre-registration for winter quarter is this week, which means I get the opportunity to daydream during class about taking other classes. So far this is what I'm asking for Christmas:
1. Shakespeare I: Comedies & Romances
2. Augustine's Confessions
3. Homer's The Iliad
4. Intermediate Playwriting
I am perfectly content, mind you, with spending the long, dark, winter months curled up in the Reg with a dead white man or three.
Friday: Final PLEASUREDOME!
6 Comments:
You're doing Confessions too? It will be a dark, difficult winter, I hear.
Also, I don't get the quote. So, if you were a black woman, you would be allowed to speak even without the requisite knowledge of the Third World?
Well, that is the reigning opinion nowadays, isn't it?
Still, I think Spivak would actually agree with you, because her bag is the subaltern, and nobody can, or rather should, speak for the subaltern, and a 1st world black or brown person would not be considered the subaltern.
When I told my Fundamentals advisor about my english class, he said "You're learning theory? Isn't that a bit treasonous?"
The subaltern, as in, like, vampires?
An Iliad class, eh? Sounds cool. Sometimes I wish I could take classes like that without having to wade through the intro/survey prereqs. At this point, I feel locked into upper-level finance and freshman-level bullshit.
Oh yeah, remember in 7th grade or so when we were at B&N and I was grabbing my first Iliad copy when the big-bad high schooler asked, "Isn't it past your bedtime?" I guess the frappuccino he was holding gave him Alpharetta street cred.
On that note, I think I'm going to go read at Starbucks instead of go to class.
God bless that bald-headed man.
Rita: No, the subaltern as in--wait, yes. Vampires.
John: I remember you reading the Iliad in 9th grade. And wearing that suh-weet minidisc player.
David: God bless his reflective pate indeed, because it had to endure an hour in the Stuart cafe of me choking out horrible junior paper ideas.
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