Meaning is impossible without ellipses

So says one of the film studies scholars we've been reading for Globalization of Mass Media. He's referring to the idea that, both in terms of the physical senses and in terms of narrative text, we require the ellision of a vast amount of material. There is simply too much to process, and it is only through the carving away of certain information that the rest reveals itself as meaningul. Interesting, I thought. God really is in the details, in the sense that both are too omnipresent for us to grab hold of. It makes me wonder, too, about people who exert selective hearing in order to construct the meaning they WANT to be there (isn't that all of us, after all?), and how depending on a.) your particular experience and b.) your mental ellisions, you will have your own personal semiotics over the course of your life, different from everyone else's.

As you can see by my ridiculous academic opening to my first blog entry, I am in grad school now. And I thought I'd start a new blog to hold what are sure to be all of my fantastically trenchant displays of intellectual superiority. Because I'm a grad student now, and I don't know if you know, but that means I'm smarter than you.

And the sad thing is that there are grad students who believe this, and they roam free, lurking in bars waiting to pounce on impressionable undergrads with arrogant windbagging about half-understood theoretical texts, giving all the rest of us who need the moral support of our equally coffee-ridden colleagues just to keep from dropping out every day a bad name. I have class with some of these people. They are predators and should have to sign a registry and announce their presence in neighborhoods.

But aside from the shiny thought-nuggets I'll be mining from my fertile brain, I hope this will be a kind of Jessie-in-Madison blog, for photos, new experiences, etc. I got sick of my old blog in many ways and wanted to start fresh. So, how can I properly sum up the last two months, which is how long I've been here. Hmm, well, to quote James: "Two words come to mind. Shit and show."

Stellar apartment, tornado sirens, darts, dinner parties, reading, reading, reading, new friends, mixed feelings, mid-life crisis. There, that about does it. In ever so many ways, I feel like a new person. I'm going to go off on an academic rant again, but it makes me think of the Tibetan idea of the "bardo," or the between-state after life and before death. They saw this nebulous non-state as a place where your actions would have consequences far more magnified than ones you were ever able to effect in waking life. So, when you made bad choices in life, you mildly screwed with your next life's potential, but in the bardo, you could make small corrections and go from reincarnating as a slug to reincarnating as a... well, something better than you were before. I forget all of the levels. The point is that it represents a moment when things move at this hyperspeed and when small alterations in your trajectory wildly affect your ultimate destination. I think the last two months have been a bit like this for me.

I moved to Wisconsin. Big deal. But I think that the differences in who I am now as opposed to two months ago are much greater in scale than those from any recent comparable period of time. I simultaneously reached new levels of: relationship structure, personal freedom, professional maturity, and intellectual process. And it's giving me a mid-life crisis. In a good way.

There will be more on this in future entries, I'm sure. All in good time. For now, I leave you with some photos.



This is the street running from campus (directly behind the photo) to the capitol. It's 10-ish blocks long and filled with delicious things like Urban Outfitters, used bookstores and Chipotle. The carts in the foreground are the various smoothie / ethnic food trucks that park there on Library Mall (so named because one of the libraries is right off to the left there). Note also the yellow leaves, as well as the date of this photo... SEPTEMBER 29.



Here's the lake terrace at the student union. Live music often at the stage, lots of local beer. Good times.



Here's another view of the capitol, as seen from my walk home. The building is more or less a symmetrical X, bounded by a traffic square. All around that square every saturday is a huge state farmer's market. Mmmmmm.