B-I-N-G-O

I won a mildly embarrassingly large quantity of money last night playing bingo. After considering buying cokes for all of the 100 people in the room from the snack bar, where there were a variety of hot-links and nacho combinations available, I settled on offering Miss Polleen and her friend a diet pepsi each, and our immediate neighbors some chocolate bars. I never win things, but I was still feeling particularly guilty about this little victory. After all, this first-date bingo adventure was not really about the jackpot, but the tourism -- not that I am particularly interested in how lonely elderly women, or East Bay Transit workers, or even the occasional pimped-out middle-aged korean man, spend their Friday nights, but it is sure more exciting and original than exchanging chit-chat while nibbling on over-priced comfort food in a carefully lit garden. The flourescent lights and endless numbers did, however, make us a bit queasy, and we left early after I had agreed to market the bingo parlor by putting up some flyers at Berkeley. Shirl had, after all, given us a break on the buy-in and just generally been excited when we arrived. But precisely because upper-middle class Berkeley students from orange county are the untapped resource, the marketing goal, I only felt more sad and uncomfortable that I had won. Nobody else was playing bingo because he thought it might be a funny way to see where the line is on reasonable places to take a girl he just met.

Phatic

"Good morning, did the paper come yet?" Or how about, "Those boots are extraordinarily white"? Here goes the archive, for I hold out pretty scanty hope for communication. Not exactly a soap box. It's not that I am a luddite -- old world European production of the smokey coal, Dickens' orphan variety. In fact, I just went to a chocolate factory this past weekend and I have a saki production plant on my list. Factories and food. The issue is that this is totally uninteresting to national literature departments. We might have to invent some new words, ascribing them to an Arabic philologist from the 8th century to cover our neophyte American asses. And I am prepared not to understand everything that you send my way. Although I think that two educated people, even if one of those people builds models for the Smithsonian and the other one keeps piles of Renaissance dictionaries on the bed table, should be able have engaging and challenging conversation about their work.

I will keep a carpenter's pencil dangling behind my ear in anticipation. Part of the problem is one of legitimacy, which is certainly related to narrative authority and the question of genre, which is something that I am particularly interested in right now, but that doesn't solve the issue of wanting to both read prologues and build a fixed gear rear hub. The rules of the game make such a thing in need of explanation, and so this is a professional as well as disciplinary question.

In addition to the problem of interdisciplinary thought and vocabulary, I would like to discuss cheese, and also iron skillet maintenance. Interdisciplinarity need not be regulated by some sort of intellectual normalization. I hope to play catch up, because that is the only way to learn, and I am already too far behind to do anything else.

So let's go have a big bucket of moules et frites and celebrate not a j-o-b, but the beginning of (written) communication. It need not be merely phatic, but that would not be so terrible either.