Then, about…oh…thirty five years ago or so, while visiting my then-girlfriend Italianate Playboy centerfold gorgeous marginally psychotic Medieval studies major at Cornell, I attended a departmental cocktail party in honor of Derrida and actually got to meet him. He was a beautiful but small man with a classic Gaelic face, silver hair and he smoked a cigar about as large as he was. I was alter-consciousnessed on a variety of entoxicants and at some point during the festivities I found myself face-to-face (by looking down – he came up to my neck) or, should I say, face-to-face with a cloud of cigar smoke enveloping Derrida’s head the way the camouflage cloud enveloped the Trollenberg in The Crawling Eye. Turning on my X-ray vision, I was able to make out the contours of his physiognomy. He had a great Leprechaun-like twinkle in his eye. “So,” he asked me with a smile, “what did you think of my little talk?” All my inhibitions being as dysfunctional as that wall of high-tension lines around Tokyo after the big G got through with them, I replied, “I didn’t understand a word of it. Why do you have to mangle the language like that?” He laughed very hard – probably because he was nauseated by all the adulation being heaped on him by a roomful of pipe-smoking, corduroy-wearing intellectual toadies who he knew damned well didn’t understand him either – and then winked at me and replied, “because women love it.”

True story.

Thank Derrida for dissemination, eh?

http://www.cwu.edu/~anthro/faculty/sheeran.html

Correct, then delete this comment (I won’t be offended, Florio’s always deleting my comments on your “sister” site).

Craig, if you were a primatology minor, this book is also an absolute must for ye. Go get it or I shall be forced to send you one….