Dear Research Diary, (Tuesday October 12)

Today I presented in class on the first half of Christov-Bakargiev’s first chapter. I will continue this for next week but I feel as though the more I read the more I notice that I have already read the information. It seems almost pointless apart from the few things I have not come across which then stick out like sore thumbs. I suppose this is how it goes when you read the bibliography on your topic. I am getting a lot of useful information from this chapter but it takes the tediousness of re-reading the basic information and scouring for something new.

Other than this I have been reading Umberto Eco’s Misreadings and they are fun and enlightening. So far I have read the first two chapters which poke fun at intellectualism. Granita the first short story in the series is a sploof of Nobokov’s Lolita in which “Umberto Umberto” is a teenage boy who has a fetish for octogenarians; he adores their “volcanic wrinkles” and fragile bones. I mention this because even though it’s a fun reading, the book mentioned that Arte Povera did have an anti-intellectual current, not against intelligence obviously but against the pretentious attitudes of the art and literary world. This ironic stance to the “intellectual class” as well as the folkloric inclusion and regionalism shares a lot with the general public agenda at the moment. As mentioned, Pasolini’s obsession with the Borgate, regional dialects, and the life of poor people. Also Gramsci’s notion of Italian communism, how each nationality needed to construct its own appropriate form of Marxism, and of course his great despise of the Italian intellectuals who allied themselves with the bourgeoisie.