At the very same time I was undergoing the same treatment at Johns Hopkins.
yours in profane illumination,
Joanna
Also (on the eve [Eve] of the millennium):
Karl Marx, "Results of the Immediate Process of Production" Appendix to
Capital vol. 1, 1976 translated by Ben Fowkes. (discussion of formal and
real subsumption)
Susan Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The
Politics of Loitering," New German Critique, Fall 1986.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1999, translated by Howard Eiland
and Kevin McLaughlin, Prepared by Rolf Tiedemann.
Strolling through town yesterday I dropped into a bookstore where I sold a
load of books last month and thus had a credit. I was thinking of doing
some Christmas shopping. The first thing I saw was Benjamin's Arcades
Project. My gift buying intentions went out the window. It so happens that
I undertook a PhD program at Cornell in 1987 expressly to study at the
feet of Susan Buck-Morss and to read Benjamin's Passagenwerk, which at
that time, of course, was not yet translated. It took about a month and a
half for me to realize that the school I had enrolled in would not permit
me to pursue the scholarship for which its faculty had presumably admitted
me. One of the bizarre incidents that demonstrated this to me was the
German class where I was progressing quite satisfactorilly according to my
own assessment and purpose, which was reading German, but was "failing"
because the instructor's grading system emphasized one's precision at
translating English into grammatically correct German.
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island
(604) 947-2213
