Sunday, March 30, 2008

Mini-Autobiography

There's a meme going around, which I've seen all over, but most recently at Flavia's. The meme asks for a 6-word autobiography, which strikes me as being as difficult an exercise as determining what one's only tattoo should be.

I've kicked around a couple of teaching-oriented possibilities:
I came, I saw, I taught.
I taught, I collected, I graded.

And I worked out a few body/gender things:
Lesbian critic in the hegemon's body.
I'm ambivalent about my own maleness.

And then for a few days I've been working on something about role-playing in life:
High performers are still just performing
Authenticity is just a great performance


And then I came upon this line, in Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which I guess makes it Carter's unwitting biography of me (written originally about a character with whom I have little in common):

His performance perfectly simulated an improvisation.

Which gets me to this image, from which my little icon comes:


By the way, performance theory and one's therapist are not good bedfellows.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I love it ... and I've always loved Maigritte too.

Andi said...

Carter, Magritte, and performance theory. A nice post - I'm actually looking for someone to speak at my school about art and body - interested? Know anyone who might be?

Anonymous said...

Love these! I worked on one several weeks ago. I don't remember it exactly, but it was something like, "Critters need love: babies AND wildlife"

Horace said...

Magritte is my absolute favorite, too, Andi: a visual philosopher.

Andi,drop me a line at my gmail address (delightandinstruct) and we can talk about visits and other names...

And Natalie, you should totally post one to Growing a Critter!