Friday, September 13, 2002
 

I made it through my advising appointment without significant disaster. My advisor is a Romanticist, which I realize seems odd, but he's really into twentieth-century literature and theory, including existentialism. He agrees with me (unlike certain other theory professors, with whom I have disputed this before) that Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault were indeed heavily influenced by existentialism, though none of the above acknowledge it (Lacan, in fact, dismisses existentialism at large in one paragraph of "The Mirror Stage"-- though it seems telling to me that he felt compelled to include that one paragraph in a seven-page psychoanalytic essay). Anyway. We ate at an Indian restaurant off West End; I'm beginning to notice that I seem to exist on ethnic foods only these days. It was good, anyway, and a buffet is always nice. This guy is kind of spacy and, at one point, wandered out into the middle of West End on a Don't Walk light (which is not something one should do on this particular road). He was kind of caught up in defending Jane Austen (I had just stated that the only Austen I really liked was Northanger Abbey, the Austen novel that all Austen fans seem to hate).

One Item of Business: I'm going to a cocktail party tonight. What, praytell, am I supposed to wear? I take it that attire appropriate for the SAE house is not recommended . . . though, from what I'm hearing about last year's party, it does seem that the end results of the two party types (eg, everyone ends up royally trashed) are the same. There was a party for the profs last night, and, at the time I was in the English department, one of them was lying down on the futon in the DGS's office, coping with fatigue and a serious hangover. What a wild, wild life these intellectuals lead . . .

Elvisette philosophized at 2:23 PM