i dream of judy

Music: Tom Waits: Rain Dogs (1987)

After a rather impressive poetry reading at 12th Street Books last night, I cut out of the post-reading festivities to hit the sack early. Three weeks of traveling, playing, and driving have worn me out. No travels planned until May. I want to write, visit with friends, cook, and garden.

Anyhoo, last night was one of those dream-filled nights, visitations by one strange working-through after another, a stream of anxieties and hopes and a rumbling dull burn of indigestion. I dreamed of living on a farm in the valley of a mountainous place. I dreamed playing in an alternative rock band. I dreamed my dog got his head mysteriously stuck in his kennel.

Of the more memorable dreams: I am in the basement of some university building in a windowless room, a hanging light illuminates a large, brown table, around which are four uncomfortable, wooden chairs. I am with some faceless, nameless male friend and colleague. We are to receive Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek, who have come to Austin for some conference or another, but who wanted to spend some time with us.

After joking for some time with my faceless friend, there is a knock on the steel door (it resembles the door of a bank vault). It is Judy and Slavoj, who enter with large grins and gestures of goodwill. Everyone hugs, Slavoj produces a bottle of scotch. We sit at the table, joking, smiling, and Judy produces a copy of my book. "Do you mind if we talk about your work?" she asks. "No, lets," I say eagerly, ready for praise. Judy opens the book to one of many tabbed pages, reads a line, and asks: "what did you mean by this?" The questioning becomes gradually pointed, until she asks me to read a rather long passage near the end of the book. "Where did you get that?" she asks in an accusatory tone. I am flummoxed as I suddenly realize my passage is plagiarized. I wake up.

Of course, there are many obvious things to say about this dream, although none of them likely get at the "dream-thoughts." That would take the help of a trained analyst who knows me well. But at least on the surface, Freud tells us that dreams are often comprised of a collage of snippets, memories, and scripts from the previous day and week. For example, I was speaking with colleagues recently about individuals who might review my tenure file. Both Slavoj and Judy were mentioned as possible people to review my stuff. I think that would be really cool, but Slavoj is impossible to get and I'm not sure Judy would be a good choice because much of my work is best contextualized in terms of Communication Studies. It's not terribly necessary for me to have folks from "outside."

Perhaps another anxiety fueling the dream concerns a recent book review that Jen M. and John L. brought to my attention via bookforum. I found the review many weeks ago and didn't think much of it, as it appears in what I considered a rather obscure esoteric studies journal. Well, thanks to bookforum the review is not so obscure, and it's not a positive review. The author argues my book is ok as a rhetorical exercise, but is ultimately a failure ("partial success") because I don't engage current work in esoteric studies that would question my guiding assumptions. Much of this work was published after my book was written. Moreover, the author fails to specify why, exactly, I must address John Dee or Agrippa in a study focused on the twentieth century. The author also never specifies how work in esoteric studies on these figures challenges or contradicts my arguments about the Platonic and neo-Platonic character of modern occult rhetoric, which is Platonic in character. So, I've been a little pissy about that, you know, seeing someone get away with a bunch of unfair claims about my work without offering any evidence. I can take criticism, I just prefer that it be fair criticism.

I'm a sensitive boy. So I dream of Judy.

I'd also report my sex dream, but I think it says something embarrassing about the cleanliness of my condo and the mounds of laundry I've yet to work through.