Just to Clarify.

Despite how much I talk about it, I would like to put you at ease and tell you that I am not one of those people who thinks that LA is the center of the solar system. Honestly, I don’t think LA even matters very much at all to anyone who isn’t in LA. I don’t hate the place either though. It would be a pretty cool town if the population was half what it is right now. And this is being said by a transplant and, yes, I get both the irony and hypocrisy of that. Sometimes honesty is hypocritical. Sometimes the way we feel is stupid. Or unfair. Or just dumb. No one you have ever heard of has ever effectively made the case that any moral imperative to be not a hypocrite is biological. That’s just my fancy way of saying that the way you feel and the way you are supposed to feel, are generated by completely separate and unconnected systems. Anybody schooled in Psychoanalytical literary theory would say that that’s wrong and what about all that stuff Freud said about cannibalism and castration?!

Well look, Freud was a weird dude.

Try to argue against that.

Man. I am rambling a lot.

I haven’t even been drinking.

Yet.

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Man is a Desiring Machine.

I am sitting here on hold with the state of California and I am going over some of my notes from last week’s Critical Theories of Literature class. The notes themselves are not terribly interesting unless you’re super into Psychoanalytic Criticism. However the bits scrawled in the margins are kind of fun (not all of the lecture is actually useful for studying later, but I like to keep ahold of the tangential bits that are interesting):

- A German saying I learned:

“Love is home-sickness”

- Something that Edgar Allan Poe apparently said:

“Man is a desiring machine.”

- Something my professor said:

“If I had had that experience than I would have an even stranger sense of myself that I do now …”

- You would not believe how much Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism deals with the notion of castration (male children are afraid their fathers with castrate them, female children believe they have already been castrated, fear of castration is sublimated into the unconscious, “The Uncanny” is just the return in disguise of the repressed “Castration Complex”, etc. etc. etc.) and so in the margin of my notes I apparently wrote: Do I really need shorthand for Castration?! And below that are a few attempts at inventing shorthand symbols.

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