Saturday, April 16, 2005

Dreams of Chomsky

Yesterday's brief chat with Attila Richard Lukacs appears to have influenced an odd dream I had last night, where Noam Chomsky gave a speech and was sitting answering questions from an audience. It was also at a movie theatre and Chomsky had talked about some foreign film he admired; one of the questioners -- a former friend of mine from high school, blustery, intense, and not particularly articulate, who had once attended an event at SFU with me, wherein two people debated whether God was real, and also participated in the Q&A -- tried to accuse Chomsky of political inconsistencies as revealed by his tastes in film. The question was ridiculous and barely coherent, in fact, but it was delivered with such passion and such a conviction of the speaker's rightness that the whole audience cheered, and Chomsky, uncharacteristically, blushed and couldn't respond. I was sitting in the second row, very close to Chomsky, so I gave him a little covert thumbs-up-it's-okay signal and he grinned. I believe a child of his (but not a grown one, as I imagine his children are) was in attendance on the table next to him. I think the child was drawing pictures...

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