i am sitting in bed with a gigantic bag of gummi bears in my lap which is my dinner and gaps are appearing all over my bookshelves and the heaps of books on my bed is rising rapidly so so much for rearranging books on friday. panic is great and writing is little. too many ideas can't focus. should have consulted with nohrnberg and milbank earlier about focus instead of just thinking, okay, i'll write 20 pages this weekend. next semester i have to be more organised. i must get it all written by march and then leave a month to revise.

i don't understand all these logicians. so the short of it is, according to quine if i'm getting it right, if you identify an object with itself tt's trivial, cos of course anything is identical to itself, but if you identify it with something else that's false. except when you consider a third case which joins two different terms but is still true, because the two terms are names of the same object, which don't have to mean that what is ture of the objects will be true of the names themselves. yen says tt means language is so weird that we need to give things different names and if we don't have different names we won't need the notion of identity. su-lin gave me a lecture on abitrariness of naming (apparently choonping gave her a lecture on saussurean linguistics recently) which i suppose i know something about from linguistics 101 and hist of engl language, names of things not having to do with intrinsic value or nature of thing named etc etc, rose by any other name and all the rest.

but then it must work the other way round in literature. we want well-named characters. i don't just mean restoration comedies and the sort of "archer and aimwell" type names (at this moment i suddenly remember von and his essay on purefoy and foiegras and have fallen off the bed laughing) but even how names have resonances and connotations and we expect the author to name characters precisely based on their qualities. the baddies are malfoys, and learned professor is minerva, herbology professor is professor sprout and hagrid is a big friendly giant name. remus lupin has to do with romulus and remus and to do with lupus. sirius black is the dogstar and the black dog. and if the books had been written exactly the same way but she had named harry malfoy and vice versa we wouldn't have been happy. it wouldn't have sounded right. for that matter is vaughn and yih hann just two names for the same person or is he really rather different when he is vaughn and when he is yih hann and for that matter von isn't the same as vaughn. (sorry darling didn't really mean to use you as an eg just that i was just talking about you to yen.) which has to do with chamber of secrets and tom riddle and voldemort being the same person or are they really not quite the same? dobby, questioned by harry, denied that the chamber's horrors have anything to do with the dark lord. at the end, asked again why he had said such a thing, he tells harry that it was a clue, that the dark lord, before he changed his name, may be freely named. it belongs to the kind of story that has to do with drawing an equation between two people as one, here, over time, but in other stories, the ones of the oedipus or antiochus variety, how can this be true, and that too? answer: it can be if they're the same person. hm.