Tallulah

           

            On Friday I printed up both of my Continental Philosophy essays with my TA’s comments, plus my responses to his comments in the second paper, and headed to St George and Bloor to meet Sean. I stood outside of room 524, waiting for Sean, while a big, shaved headed janitor mopped the hallway and sang in another language. When he got to where I was standing, I asked him if he wanted me to move. He said, ”If you wouldn’t mind.”, so I stepped behind him onto the wet area.

            Sean arrived, announcing that he was sick again. He has been ill a lot since I met him at the beginning of January. I wonder if he brings it on himself by always having so much on the go. He strikes me as one of those people that stuffs twice as much life into each moment as everyone else and so I wouldn’t be surprised if he dies of old age at around 45.

            Once we were in the room, I told him that I was disappointed with my grade because my second essay was clearly better than my first and judging from a comparison of his comments on the two papers I would discern that he agreed with me. He took some time to bring up my two essays on his computer so he could discuss them with me. He told me first of all that my paper was one of the few of our papers that Professor Gibbs had actually read, and that he’d commented that the mark Sean had given me had been generous. At that point I threw out the window my chances of carrying my dispute past Sean. He also informed me that the criteria for marking the second essays had been much higher. I don’t understand or agree with that. It seems to me that the same standard should exist throughout the course so students know how to improve their work. As it is it’s like putting oil on the road for the second half of a marathon.

            Then we started talking specifically about my essay. He said that I had used both Darwin and Freud in my arguments against Nietzsche without citing them. That’s true. I wanted to cite them but I didn’t have time. It seemed necessary though to address Nietzsche’s claim that conscience is the result of breeding and to show that his idea that bad conscience results from an internalization of instinct couldn’t be right unless there’s also an internalized judge, which Freud accounts for with the superego. Sean said that my essay writing style was too literary for philosophy, which requires a simple approach. He added that when he first became an undergraduate he had taken on a double major of philosophy and English, and found that he was lousy at writing English essays and so he switched to just philosophy. He suggested that there is also an unkind tone to my writing and that when I argue with a philosopher like Kierkegaard or Nietzsche I seem to go at it like I have a grudge against them. I couldn’t really see how that was true, but what can one do when the person with whom one is debating has a black belt in argument?

            It was clear that my mark wasn’t going to get changed. Sean suggested that I talk to Professor Gibbs but it seemed to me that if he’d already read my paper and thought the mark had been generous, there wasn’t much point. I left feeling depressed.

            I went to teach my yoga class, but no one showed up. I was kind of glad for that and I went home half an hour early.

            I began to make notes on Jacques Derrida’s idea of “proximity” in preparation for my exam. Man as the entity that “is” is the closest thing to us and the farthest thing away from us or something like that, maybe.

            I watched two episodes of “I Love Lucy”. In the first, Lucy was trying to teach an elderly woman how to put on a “come hither” look. But when the old lady tried to awkwardly imitate Lucy, her facial gestures made her look like she was having a stroke. Also in this episode, Ricky actually spanks Lucy for wanting to meddle in other people’s lives. In the second show, Lucy was trying to pretend she was going insane to show Ricky that stifled dreams of being in show business could lead to mental illness. At one point Lucy pretended that she thought she was Tallulah Bankhead.