Betsey Johnson meets the Pleasure Place

So the same woman who sold me my fancy Betsey Johnson dress also sold me a garter made of candy at the Pleasure Place. Relax, It's for Reb's pajama party at AWP! I mean I have to do better than that tie thing from over the summer. This got me thinking to the duality of the human nature, those sweet contrasts and conflicts, the opposites and unexpecteds. From fancy formal to funky fettish. How do we make sense of these rhythms. Today in class we read Paul Celan's Death Fugue and Alice Fulton's Everyone Knows the World is Ending. I asked my students how we make sense of "black milk" of the human mind, of death, of the Holocaust. How repetition moves us through a narrative. The way when we encounter the same thing, how it has evolved and changed. How do we explain something beyond our comprehension? I'm still grappling with these questions---though I wonder if a mystery is sometimes better left unsolved.