Cafe #11: TenRen's Tea Time

Location: Swanston Street, near Little Collins
Date: Sunday, 25 February, 2007, 10.20pm
Meal: $8.80 - excellent

This is a jelly tea establishment that also serves fake meat! It is difficult to find cafes open in the city at this time of night, though maybe I'm not looking in the right place. Starbuck's is open, and McDonald's and Subway and Chinese and Vietnamese restaraunts, and kebab/pizza joints. And bars. I passed over Max Brenner's as I passed by on my way out of Melbourne Central, which in hindsight was probably dumb. But fake curried meat is healthier than an overload of chocolate. And the place is a good find. And the cafe search brought me a lot of extra walking.

I have been hanging out with Ann. We took the train to St Kilda and ate steamed vegetable dim sims on the beach and had drinks (red wine for me) at a restaraunt/bar. I spent all of this morning trawling through job websites and sent off a few cover letters and resumes. I decided Sundays will be my day off - no uni work on Sundays at all.

Mmm, the food has just arrived and it looks beautiful. Just like meat in curry sauce. I still find that uncanny. In addition to a small white square heaping bowl of meat, I was also brought a bowl of rice and a three-dished tray of fried tofu skin, warm marinated lettuce and salad bits. Yum.

I had a bit of a meltdown on Friday. I was reading a very difficult article for my Semiotics and Poststructuralism class that I barely understood. Anne Freadman (so glad she's a lady, as she is proof that women can be just as abstractly smart as men) explaning the theory of C.S. Pierce on the system of signs. This theory is so difficult that it took Pierce 20 years of revising to sort it out. The theory has something to do with trichotomy in how signs are meaningful. Signs are either an icon, an index or a symbol and meaning is made from the interaction of those types of symbols (an icon is represention of something that may or may not exist - the example in the text is a centaur, which is mythical; an index points to or situates - the example is a weathercock - something that exists; and a symbol directly stands in for something that exists - a word is a symbol). At least I think, something like that. Also, signs are not just language, but also mathematical and Pearce's theory comes out of logic. That's about as much as I can attempt to explain.

Here is a lovely quote from the text: "The argument is a representamen which does not leave the interpretant to be determined as it may by the person to whom the symbol is addressed, but separately represents what is the interpreting representation that it is intended to determine. This interpreting representation is, of course, the conclusion."

Totally clear, right? Yeah, so while reading the Freadman articles I was feeling like maybe I'm not smart enough to ace this degree after all. I am reminding myself that I might understand the theory better in its original (ie reading Pierce himself) and as it relates to a theoretical tradition and if it seemed interesting enough or relevant for me to pursue. At the moment I can't figure out how theorising these exactitudes of something so difficult it can't be explained actually affects overall how we understand things. Though I suppose the question of whether the notation involved in language and mathematics are actually comparable systems could be interesting.

Pondering all this, I came up with a good definition for (postgraduate) study: A process whereby a student learns to figure out whether she is confused or the theorist she is reading is confused.

Kirsten was the lucky one to get my near-to-tears email. I am okay now. It is not good for me to be so much on my own. When I am alone all day and evening I can take myself too seriously.
Meanwhile I'm reading Saussure and next to Pierce he is a breath of fresh air - someone who writes to be clearly understood. I can really engage with Saussure as I cannot simply accept all of the the bases on which he builds his theories. For example, “language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms.” I don't think language has to do with values at all and I feel sure that its "terms" are determined by more than a momentary arrangement. If language is only momentary how can there be any continuous "value" (meaning)?

Also I feel that Saussure has maybe been instrumental in solidifying the structuralist binary thing, which I hate so much (I love Wikipedia - it's so much easier to read that and find out that I probably am actually into dialectics and am also probably post-structuralist than reading theory itself). Saussure writes that a meaning of a word is determined by its relation to its opposite. And once you start throwing the word "value" around indiscriminately, you can see how one might get man (good)/woman (bad) or dark (bad)/light (good) or white (good)/black (dark). My problem, though, is what happened to child, baby, hermaphrodite, trangendered or dawn, dusk, halflight or blue, green, red, pink and grey? Words are not in opposition to each other - they complement each other.

On Friday I went to uni. I meant to go to a seminar on communities using soundscape to promote environmentalism (or something like that) but I didn't time the trip correctly and arrived on campus too late. I did, however, get to the library and borrow a few books - Saussure, Lacan and a collection of writing about Weber and rationalism. Since I was already out and about, I got off the train at Carnegie,to see what Melbourne's Carnegie is like. It was alright. Cafes and shops and such, but not spirited like Balaclava. However, I did have a glass of white wine at an awesome cafe that I'd like to go back to. It was big and blueish with little pictures lining the wall eye-height - framed cards, sketches, paintings, collages, all sorts of interesting little bits and pieces. There were huge heavy wooden tables and a courtyard out back. The cafe is called Santucci's and it is on 94 Koornang Road. Maybe I'll take my journal there one day soon and write it up properly!