Thursday, July 1, 2010

A

My A is Astral Phantasmagoria

Here's what happened: I decided to take a class called Contemporary American Drama, which has been excellent. I read a ton of plays I'd never read or seen before, and I learned about drama and theater.

Yesterday, I was finishing a paper about how Baudrillard's concept of simulation works as a framework for reading post-modern drama, and I complained to Rachel that I can never write a good conclusion.

"That's okay," she said. "It's because you've already said everything you want to say three times. And how long is your paper?"

"Twelve pages," I told her.

"Oh," she said, waving her hand, "then just don't even worry about it because you know your professor is going to be so tired of reading it by then."

So, just as I was ready to slap a period on the last sentence I'd written and call it a paper, I found a perfect quote from an article by Elizabeth Klaver in which she claims that Baudrillard's gap between the real and the sign for the real "produces astral phantasmagoria that radiates out of the desert" and allows us to see America in new ways in the theater.

Astral Phantasmagoria! OMG! It's Poe's spirits flying through the air searching for authenticity. I'm probably going to use that phrase a lot from now on.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just google it and guess who is the first hit on google.....YOU the savy mom! WOW! Odd thing is it has a date of June 11, 2010 as your publication date.....what spirits are at work here?

Mom

LH said...

I'm going to practice using this term privately for awhile, then just around the family, so that when I break it out in public, it sounds completely natural. Thx, Dear!

Rachel said...

I'm with Lee...I can't even pronounce it yet. Practice, practice, practice. Then I'm going to drop it on someone when they're least expecting it...and someone who won't know if I mispronounce it or not.

jdoc said...

It sounds inappropriate. I like that.