“Put on your wigs and your neon coats,” he says. He really just means that the class should brace themselves for what lies ahead. They are about to delve into the most recondite section of the syllabus, starting with Keller’s “Sublation and Signification,” moving on to Vigneron’s “Returning History to Oblivion,” then through Boisseau and Bock, Graf and Frankel, the audio-only films of Accardi, the sealed-room installations of Merritt-Meyer, and finally the Teflon Revolution, a three-day period of unrest in a upscale suburb in Missouri that Earnhardt believes “both erases and makes permanent the notion of ‘the smallest measurable unit of will’” (that’s Graf’s). He’s always both charged and exhausted by this stretch. So many questions, so few answers. Is that his motto or his epitaph? He pats his pockets to make sure he’s alive. It’s his motto. He goes home, sleeps, wakes, rereads his class notes, drives through town, sleeps, wakes, heads off to class. When he walks into the room, the first thing he sees is a young woman named Hannah, one of his better students, sitting in the front row, notebook already open, pen already poised, smiling because she has done what no one else has, which is to take his words at face value, which is also to remake them as pure irony, and there she sits, almost laughing now, in her wig and neon coat.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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