The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (69 page)

 

Peter Brandt also prefers not to assume his I but ineffectively subsumes it in a dialectic of desire to name things by way of action in the second person singular until plural through a haze of heat and sunlight when you take off at dawn racing down to the ocean first to the swanky part then back along the highway to the slum stretch of shore at Las Ondas trash filthy with the sordid motel where you make love till noon then off again along the freeway towards Malibu or maybe into the hills above the chaparral of a canyon or into the desert where the air is hot but soft on your skin and you make love again in the shade of a cactus in flower.

 

While Ali Nourennin plays with literality and other flawed reflections in the grammar of narrative which says the house must be broken into before the robbery can occur or that the introduction of the pistol indicates its later use. But the shot can precede the introduction of the pistol. In the beginning was the parting shot. In some languages moreover things do themselves: tout se passe comme si se hacia ma non si puo dire for es träumte mir. Ça parle. Who then, the Other or the metalanguage?

 

has been removed from the calendar.

 

They however seem to permutate their loves wholly within the department still undesegmented apparently unable to communicate outside the textimetable and moving incestuously around like a motet for prepared musical chairs bottom-shaped with liftable flaps for right-minded people to fight on, no two fantasies fratrisiding in exactly the same binary arrangement from one term to another which creates a certain amount of tension between Charles Catherine Bob Isabel Oliver Claire Maurice Helen Jeremy Hubert Vivien Olaf Chou and the rest who teach mass media cultural images audiovisual materialism or discourse analysis as subversion of society imperial linguistics and initiation to the black man in white women’s liberation shouting at faculty meetings where faculties never meet even on an imagined curve or even as an audiovisual illusion of a coherent structure diminishing in size

 

Yes well very briefly I simply want to remind the colleagues that this idiotic affair as Julian rightly calls it arose out of the question of recruitment, which is on the agenda. And the real protest is about this curriculum vitae which has been waved at us like a white flag but which none of us has seen, in other words as usual a candidate is being foisted upon us whom none of us knows anything about but with whom we shall have to work–and here we touch again on two other major problems, that of desegmentation and that of syllabus reform, both incidentally on every agenda since the beginning of the year if not longer and always put off under pretence of more urgent business until there is no quorum, which urgent business is also the ostensible excuse for a rapid pseudo-solution of problems at the end of every year before everyone goes off on their jamborees.

Aaaaaaaaw.

and for the rapid foisting of this or that candidate every time there is a vacancy

Hear hear

nor does there ever seem to be any rival candidature, as in other universities which get two or three hundred applications from all over the world for any one post, indeed by the time the post is legally advertised it has already been privately filled

      
:No, boo

       
:hear hear

I demand therefore that as from and including the present instance the whole department should be entitled, in a new, radical, democratic university such as this

      
:ha ha

      
:hear hear

was intended to be, the whole department should be consulted and entitled to examine in advance copies of any Curriculum Vitae.