Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

Well, not quite.

Last week had been one of panic, disappointment and most of all, deep denial.

Back in the good ol’ pre-breakdown days, that meant reading/studying/writing/playing music like a nut.

And, having some weird return to previous form, that meant the week consisted of writing like a complete nut. With a post-breakdown bonus: I was starting to remember bits and pieces of the cultural theory I’d come across in some of the classes I was less able to participate in.

But…there were still gaps; the things that came automatically, now seemed to have been lost in the bowels of my mind.

I’ve been working on 2 posts for the main blog, one of which is finished and not yet typed up (in fact, I suspect it might even account for my admin getting in touch with me…which is both sad and good) on me hating Melbourne. I was having a bad/near-panic attack, ok? So lay off. The second post was way more fun - about collections, and I needed to discuss certain consumption habits on lipstick for this.

I could find some of the relevant source material in my copy of Lindy Woodhead’s War Paint, but could not find where Estee Lauder claimed that a woman would purchase another lipstick despite having only used 40% of an existing tube. Next, I needed the name of the fellow who wrote the Surrealist Manifestos. Zilch. Mind was a blank. But I studied this stuff in such great detail! Hell, I did 2 subjects taught in French that discussed this extensively. How the hell had I managed to forget?! Wikipedia, despite having some facts wrong about the origin of the word ’surrealism’ (at least, I swear that is not what we learnt and surrealism came up in many other subjects I did, taught in English) put me out of my misery on that one.

However, that bastard Frederic Jameson, Marxist postmodern theorist extraordinaire, proved to be my academic death. My first serious boyfriend was a cinema studies tosser, and in his course reader was a short essay by Jameson - one I wanted to quote for this second post I was furiously writing. Problem was, I didn’t know the name of the essay/chapter, or from what larger work it came. An internet search proved fruitless. NMD offered some small relief - suggesting it may be from a book of essays on art, with ‘Van Gogh’ in the title. This was super-helpful given I’d found a bibliography of this theorist’s work. Or…not. I can’t seem to find it. The only way to get the quote would be to trawl through my uni notes and papers and find my modern drama essay where I quoted it in my introduction. That much I remembered. Christ, I reckon I’ll do it too.

The last nutcracker - trying to find the article about that political science professor who was denied tenure largely on the basis that he engaged in blogging, though that would have not been the official reason. I had to rely upon my colleagues at Blogcritics and our Yahoo group to help me with that one. Ah, sweet relief. I hate my brain when it fails me, which is often.