Mark Phillips' Pages: Workbook: October 2020

Workbook: October, 2020

October 31, 2020: I'm told by third parties that the Dean of Students rates my story in this month's Forum the best undergraduate fiction he's ever seen.
October 30, 2020: I'm walking my friend's little brother home from school.
October 29, 2020: Let's nail this down.
October 28, 2020: Keith and I are definitively confused regarding the meaning of "abstraction".
October 27, 2020: I've been given a master key.
October 26, 2020: There was a professor named Michel I wish I'd worked with.
October 25, 2020: My encounter with these materials was distorted even further by my failure to learn French.
October 24, 2020: Thus our assimilation of "French Theory" was always ambivalent.
October 23, 2020: That we were actually what was already labeled "Poststructuralists" became clear to us only later.
October 22, 2020: I've learned only recently that Jameson had been a professor at UCSD at roughly the times I was first present there.
October 21, 2020: One day in twelfth grade beautiful Cynthia approached me to say, "You'd better start going to English class."
October 20, 2020: Then I no longer needed the lies.
October 19, 2020: I don't think I'd ever lied before.
October 18, 2020: I should underscore: I was never a loner.
October 17, 2020: Second summer home, a kid I'd hung with four or five years earlier wanted to talk philosophy.
October 16, 2020: She was so, so bitter to hear how much I liked her friend.
October 15, 2020: Not for the last time I completely failed to grasp just how lonely I was...
October 14, 2020: But I grieved for that friendship.
October 13, 2020: In her defense...
October 12, 2020: In pieces here I've often returned to "narcissism" as one root of the personalities of certain women I've described.
October 11, 2020: She's incapable of cottoning-on to the difference between Althusser's objectivist "problematic" and Kuhn's subjectivist "paradigm".
October 10, 2020: I grew up with the notion that food cravings are a language.
October 9, 2020: A text by Spinoza
October 8, 2020: Bath bombs.
October 7, 2020: I wanted a friend.
October 6, 2020: She's angry, because her heart is broke...
October 5, 2020: After 9/11 I invited her to a study group.
October 4, 2020: Crowded circle of Marin County liberals...
October 3, 2020: She wouldn't know history if it bit her on the ass.
October 2, 2020: Professor Falstaff loved bricolage.
October 1, 2020: Queen Bee on the dormroom floor, hive of drones attending.