literary aspirations

Found in a photocopier in the Political Science department at the University of Pennsylvania ca. 2005:

"Perhaps it was simply the evolutionary dominance of more quantitative approaches, reeking of nomothetic reasoning, intentionality, and equilibriums, wielding their calculus and parsimony like astringents in order to weed out and straight-jacket as many variables as possible, shrinking them down into their elements like germs at the bottom of a bathtub, rubbing out the residues of culture and methodological incompetence as if human character were a type-error to be corrected with shorter, crisper wording, algebra and binges of linguistic monotony. Certainly the discipline of politics had grown curt and paranoid, sucking in its lips as the taste of anything that resembled the raw, unspeakable nature of a gristling lust, preferring to severe such sentiment at the root, pretending that any such heathens delighting in the hedonistic antics of more literary pursuits were somehow so defiled with subjectivity that their theoretical barometers were rendered impotent, if not sterile, as is the fate of the more nihilistic spirals of pomo, critical theory, etc..."


"We'd dated briefly the year before. His was a lithe frame, toned through genetic luck, thick mane on top and sparsely populated with a few wiry tufts of hair from the waist down, and otherwise as smooth and as pale as an albino baby. His goatee appeared unattended, and his clothes draped his slimness the way they hang effortlessly on models in fashion magazines."


"Beowolf and the Canterbury tales were enough for a lifetime. If I was going to read any poetry that old it was going to be in Hindi, Urdu or Persian. Old English didn't float my boat. The idea of being sequestered in such a class alone gave me a feeling of literary eczema."