not the motorcycle diaries

Is it too late to change my thesis topic to reading all of Gramsci’s works in the original Italian? This should take me at least twelfty more years which naturally I would also be funded for, given the requirement of actually having to learn Italian properly (being able to sing the Avanti song doesn’t seem to count. THEY LIED TO ME IN YEAR TEN).

I mean, apart from not having to write The Chapter of Pain, it would mean getting down with “il senso comune”: the way that ideas of ‘common sense’ come to structure reality (e.g. ‘everybody knows that lip-sewing, baby-chucking and anything else that’s like that is part of Arab Muslim culture’ - Phillip Ruddock 2003). Not to mention “l’insufficienza della vita universitaria e la mediocrita scientifica e pedagogica (talvolta anche morale) degli insegnanti ufficiali” - the insufficiency of university (cultural) life and the scientific and pedagogic (sometimes also moral) mediocrity of teaching officials (Vol 1, page 13)*. Mediocrity, people! I though only Le Tigre talked about that these days.

Here he is. Sigh.

*Of course I am not procrastinating today by sitting at my desk with my high school Italian dictionary turning to random pages of Quaderni del Carcere and making whimsical translations. This would be SICK.