Gradient

Despite the fact that it is unbearbly hot in the study lounge, which is from where I'm writing this, and I was given a lemon-flavored Brisk iced tea instead of the Mountain Dew I asked for, it's been a relatively uneventful day. Niketa's boyfriend, Tone (short for Antone), showed up at 10:30 this morning. I retrieved him from downstairs and we shared some laughs over the Fox television show "Boston Public." He'll be here till next Wednesday. Gray's friend left on Monday. Her mother will be here tonight but won't be staying with us. And I'm sure her boyfriend will be here this weekend. And to conclude the boyfriends parade, Kim's will be visiting next weekend. It's a good thing that I'm so easy going about things like this.

I got my Dostoyevsky paper back on Tuesday. The result: A-. That's a good thing. I have not been able to reach the A status that my Equiano paper garnered but it's always good to work through goals. I'm meeting with Jessica tomorrow morning to discuss the Hegel paper (B+) and the most recent one. I was sitting in the cafeteria yesterday and a Modernity classmate came up to me and said he really liked my presentation. He said he thought I was going to bash Conrad because of the way I began my presentation. I told him I saved the surprise for later. I later found out that the Sarah Lawrence reference was that all they do is sit around and bash dead white guys.

Speaking of DWGs, Charles Darwin was a late addition to the syllabus on Tuesday. We have to read Part I, Chapter III, of his Descent of Man. I haven't started Freud and haven't thought too much of any man's descent. It's been all about the slave narrative and I'm still trying to grasp something there. There is some good news to report on white privilege. Although the concept is still alive and well, it's yielding ample amounts of material.

I have sort of begun to really do some research for my paper, and I came across a quote the other day that I think I'm going to start with: "To ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its hegemony by naturalizing it." -- Coco Fusco,  writer and performance artist, and Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Program, School of the Arts, Columbia University I saw one of her performances a few years ago when I attended a gender conference at Chico St. I want to think a little more about the statement but I believe it's a good jumping-off point for me. It sets the tone for the remaining 29.8 pages. I can't wait to delve into it. But slavery comes first.