There's something in the air ...

Today I mailed a package to the 2007 Cornell TASPers. The following were included:

One (1) tin of Anti-Establish Mints (motto: Liberté, Egalité, Minty Freshness)
One (1) package of Nihilist Chewing Gum (motto: We don't believe in flavor)
One (1) Nunchuck (http://www.accoutrements.com/products/11580.html)
One (1) package of eleven (11) fake mustaches.
Assorted strange articles, including:

• Excerpts from The Universal Panacea in the Nick of Time, by Nelson Dwight Sickels
  
• "Beating the Bra Burners," Phyllis Schlafly
  
• Excerpts from The Areas of My Expertise, by John Hodgman

One (1) approximately 8.5"x11" photograph of Paul Wolfowitz, from the 9 April 2007 issue of the New Yorker.
One (1) top-secret enclosure from Laura and Levent.
And the following letter:

July 19, 2007

Cornell TASPers
217 West Avenue
Ithaca, NY 14850

Most esteemed Cornell TASPers of the 2007 Vintage—already fine examples of the varietal: fragrant, ripely flavored, full bodied, and long on the palate, tasting of pink grapefruit, pear, and baked bread, with just a whiff of coriander—,

We write to inform you of a singular opportunity: You, too, can be just like the honorable Mr. Wolfowitz. To be plain—you may already be acquainted with the eschewal of hygiene and ethics that characterizes one of our most infamous co-TASP-alumni, but there is more—oh, so very much more—to the life upon which you now embark.

As you languish now in the lushly furnished quarters you most likely consider “yours,” we ask merely that you pause to consider those who came before, those who diligently bowed their heads over thousand page reading packets, and those who stained said reading packets with flecks of partially-chewed Fig Newton during 3:00 am eating contests, and to realize that the implied diametric opposition of these circumstances is deceptive, that there is no perfect student in the Platonic sense—though erudition may creep, engendering the clarion realization of the separation between linguistic signs and plastic elements; equivalence of resemblance and affirmation—no laggard counterpart, that identity is fluid, and that you need to exhaustively reread this run-on sentence to discover that which unifies it, that which, by virtue of its presence is truth, consistent with the concept of the metaphysics of presence

—but that is just our interpretation.

Consider, you TASPers bright, the following scene: it is some time in that lost decade called the seventies, and as some now forgotten CBTA member ambled down the second floor hallway, he couldn’t help but notice a door ajar, and there, bald-pated, bespectacled, grinning slightly, the notes for the third volume of The History of Sexuality open beside his typewriter, lay Michel Foucault, masturbating.

It really happened—maybe on your bed.

Yes, consider the number of times the phrase “self-interest” can be used in a sentence, the relative benefits of tiki-torches, all of the iterations of the science v. religion debate, the unquenchable need for mixed-sex sleepovers, the potpourri of tofu products readily available, the gradations in meaning of the snap, the overflowing cornucopia of reasons stay awake past four am, the abundance, in your own midst, of those who enjoy—nay, covet—steamy romps amid the bedcovers, or on the floor, around the house, at all hours—those who have screamed in the night, the merits of abstruse post-post modern (or simply post-modern, depending on whom you ask) literature, and the mélange of reasons to adore and loathe (actually, just loathe) Ayn Rand, not to mention the ontological facticity of any forays into the kitchen under constant threat of ambush by Drosophila melanogaster, the glut of justifications for enacting the gesture meaning "point of fact" when—and here we place our collective hands palm-down on our collective heads—one is, in point of fact, simply circumventing the line in debate, and, finally, the electric, odically haunting hours known as le fin du TASP.

Consider these things, and many others, and then, in a few weeks, when you’re at home, the pile of TASP readings rising mountainously on your desk, a wrinkle of discontent marring your brow, the quiet ache of nostalgia murmuring in your soul, consider what it means to have spent a summer as you did. Realize that its value lies not only in the fleeting moments that have fallen to the dust, but in every day, every book, every conversation of your future.

If you don’t, and believe us, we’ll know if you don’t, we’re gonna hunt you down, rip open your chest cavities, tear out your still-beating hearts, and eat them. Raw.

In the spirit of L.L.,

Sarah Howland and Daniel Briggs, et al.
Cornell TASP 2006