The Literary Guillotine – CLOSED
$$ Bookstores
204 Locust St
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
I bought A Thousand Plateaus a thousand days ago from The Literary Guillotine for a course I was taking in 2009. About eighty days after a thousand days ago, I chucked A Thousand Plateaus through an open door of the Santa Cruz Art Museum, never to see it again.
And three days ago, I get a letter from my Ph.D. examiner:
Please include citations from A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! And then I realized I still haven’t woken up from my nightmare. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOT DELEUZE AND GUATTARI!
The hangover of Deleuzian critical theory begins to wash from the shore again as I remember reading and re-reading A Thousand Plateaus from a thousand days ago.
How I’ve cited scores upon scores of sources for a research paper desperately hoping to avoid running into this schizophrenic telephone book of critical theory that I had bought and chucked to escape.
He/they/me/we wrote on Page 10 that “[e]very rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as” blah blah blah “constantly flees. There is a rupture” and rupture and rupture and rupture AND RUPTURE AND RUPTURE. “These lines always tie back to one another.”
You see Chris G. from Yelp, once you enter the ‘rhizome’, you will never leave the ‘rhizome’. The book of critical theory that you have despised so comes back to cling to you forever. Deleuze and Guattari really fucking miss you and want to burrow throughout your citations and demand credit.
This storage-sized bookstore in downtown Santa Cruz is a cauldron of spells of critical theory. It is stacked with course books upon course books for purchase. Do people ever read critical theory for shits and giggles? Any-who, somehow the things you don’t want to remember, the places you never want to re-visit in your mind again, the books you don’t want to miss become part of your life again.
I didn’t choose Deleuze and Guattari, but somehow my most hated book became the most crucial one to write about.
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2/14/2013