I found this note on 207th Street Sunday night, and reassembled it. Click for full-size images.

One of the worst lapses in this site's history. There are reasons. Poor ones, mostly.

Last week I saw one of the most impressive subway performance acts I've ever seen. Four or five young people looking like dancers came into the car on the A train and set up a small boom box playing music. At first I didn't look up from my New Yorker. Then after several seconds I saw out of the corner of my eye one of them jogging up near me and then kneeling down. After that another member of the troupe did the same, kneeling beside the first one, with their heads down. Okay, this was intriguing. A third member joined them. Then a very fit young man came running down the aisle and did a front flip over his three friends, his feet coming down thunderously right in front of a pole, which he used to reduce his considerable forward momentum. This, remember, all on a subway traveling at full speed and shaking back and forth quite a bit.

The next day I saw one of the least impressive acts ever. It was just a guy in a pretty nice Spider-Man costume, standing around and waving stiffly at no one in particular. I thought to myself that begging for attention in a subway station has to be the furthest thing in the world from what the real Spider-Man would be doing.

***

A little more than a year after I first attended a lecture of his, Slavoj Zizek has worked his way back into my life. Thanks to loans from Ethel I've had the chance to read some of his books and essays, and I've been amazed at the congruence of his speaking and writing styles, even though his speech seemed reasonably extemporaneous, and necessarily moreso when he answered questions. It's quite easy when reading his prose to imagine him speaking these dense, twisting, foreign word-laden sentences, and doing so makes the reading more fun.

After working my way through a significant portion of "The Plague of Fantasies," I've decided that reading Zizek is for me a lot like reading poetry. Much of the time I simply appreciate the flow of words and ideas, and then every few pages I actually get some insight out of it. More recently I came to realize that part of the reason I sometimes got so little out of it was that Zizek was using a lot of Lacanian philosophy/psychoanalysis terms that happen to also be common words, without always explaining that he was using them in their terminological sense. Unfortunately when I attempted to look up these terms, I often found that the definitions were just as cryptic as their uses. For example, this (excerpt from a) definition of "the (big) Other" from Words of Art:

"Lacan himself distinguished between the objet petit a, a simple object of desire, as in the case of a one individual desiring another [okay, pretty simple so far], and what he called the grand Autre (sometimes translated "the capital Other"), which he defined as the place of speech and therefore of desire operating within the symbolic." [wait, what?? Damnit!]

Another interesting bit of word choice. As you might guess Zizek talks a whole lot about fantasies in this book. But when he wants an adjective to describe something as of or pertaining to a fantasy, he uses 'phantasmic.' Apparently 'fantastic' has been too overwhelmed by its other connotations to be usable for this case.