Thoughts... 'cause that's what I do here...

Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest. ~Albert Einstein

Well, I am definitely striving, and I really feel like I have landed in the midst of the best and the brightest... I love my classes and new colleagues... everyone at GWU has been so wonderful and welcoming. I am getting involved with MEMSI - more brilliant people. I feel like every time I talk to someone - in class, at a MEMSI gathering, over lunch - I am blown away. It helps that they love so many of the same things I do... literature, material studies, theory... sometimes I just stop and savor the fabulous-ness of it all.

Ok, blissful gushing over ... on to what I am thinking about in terms of Renaissance Orientations:
I am still ruminating over that ideas that Sarah Ahmed explores in Queer Phenomenology, particularly the idea of objects and our perceptions of them being layered by what has come before - both for the object and the person perceiving. This idea of layering caused me to wonder about action and choice - how they fit into the process of perception and interaction, especially in regard to literature. I am really interested in the idea of literary genealogies... I am a voracious reader - I can't even count the number of books I have read. I know that what comes before layers over each new book~ I make connections, or I am thrown out of poorly researched narratives, because I have read contradictory facts before. This is concept is really interesting for me because I have so many layers underneath the theoretical works that I have read. I am wondering how these previous stories and poems, facts and fictions inflect the theory I read. This is kind of a reversal, for me at least - before this idea I always thought of theory as inflecting other literary text... this is really blowing my mind... How does a childhood obsession with fairytale influence my reading of Foucault? Blowing my mind...