Dreamy morning
Semiotics Department Accuses University Administration of Anti-Semiotism
PROVIDENCE, RI - After years of budget cuts and downsizing, Brown University’s Semiotics Department lashed out at school administrators Monday, accusing them of “blatant anti-semiotism”… “It deeply saddens me that in the year 2001, there are still people out there who discriminate against a group of people just because they engage in the study of signs and symbols, especially as elements of language or other systems of communication.”
-From The Onion: Best of Yesterday’s News 2006 daily desk calendar entry for Friday, September 8
I’m very excited this morning because I spoke Italian in my dreams for the first time in, like, forever. I was back at Bologna, auditing a semiotics course, eagerly gathering around to discuss the subject in a small group of foreign students. The facilitator addressed us in Italian and asked us to introduce ourselves. I started in English and then took a deep breath and launched into this amazingly uninhibited description of myself and my hometown in Italian. The interlocutor seemed genuinely interested in my exotic Midwestern roots, asked me questions, kept me talking. A guy in my group was some kind of brilliant artist who was, however, illiterate.
I left our small discussion group and walked around the periphery of the classroom, a large sanctuary with stone columns and dark wooden pews. A fellow student(?) walked beside me, and one of us - I can’t remember if it was me or if I played it totally cool - stifled a squeal and nearly hyperventilated when we thought we glimpsed Professor Eco in a front pew.
Then suddenly I was omnisciently watching the brilliant but illiterate artist dude as he went to enroll in a small-town American kindergarten and faced the derision and disgust of his potential classmates’ parents. “Who does he think he is, coming to kindergarten when he has a [fine arts] PhD?” sneered one mom to another.
And then the alarm went off.