Today as I walked home there was a protest going on at lower sproul; women singing/lamenting “will shall overcome some dayayyyayyyayyy” and by the time my feet paused for a moment at Telegraph for the red light, a man hammering “BUSH STEP DOWN. BUSH STEP DOWN” into my head, trying and failing to get people to chant with him. Flyers for an asian sorority and a prelaw fraternity and Bush’s crimes against humanity. And I have never heard of “the infinity point” before–I have just looked up “chordal law” and was unable to find anything comprehensible to me–it is supposed to be something about if you have points P and Q on a curve C with degree 3 and connect P and Q with a straight line that line will always intersect with a third point on the curve (and any straight line will always “hit” exactly three or one points), and there was a drawing of F(x,y)=y2-x3+x, also written y2=x3-x which is of course x(x-1)(x+1) so 3 roots: -1, 0, 1, and on the left there’s this round blob and on the right and completely unattached to aforementioned blob there’s this curve opening to the right, spreading upwards and downwards symmetrically to infinity which is all very well and good; and you can draw straight lines through and see that they hit the curve 3 times and that is all very well and good and I can accept that; and if you draw a straight line that’s “tangent” to the round blobby part it seems to hit the curve only twice total, but actually at the point that it’s “tangent” to the blobby part that point has a multiplicity of 2 so you see it actually does hit the curve “three” times (and is like P*P) and all that is very fine and well and I can accept even that, but then when you draw a vertical line you just have to happen to know that the third point is infinity. Just like how two parallel lines interect at the infinity point. And that is where he lost most of us. Because I have never even HEARD of projective geometry. And he tried to explain it to us and I get what he’s saying intuitively, because he said “I am standing here on this world, and infinity, the farthest I can see, is a horizon, and the horizon looks like a line. And if I was in a 2d world and I was standing on a line, I could look to either side and infinity would look like a point, except it’s just one point that’s the same on both sides and that point is infinity.” And that is all very well and good because I can understand that the horizon looks like a line, but in the end I still don’t know how to do the homework due in two days which isn’t about the chordal law which was just the most beautiful example that he wanted to show us. Of something. Binary operations. And Caddy sends checks that Jason steals and Mother burns fake checks that Jason makes because Caddy is completely tainted, “We don’t even know your name in this house,” he says; Lorraine is “a good honest whore;” the money orders are different from the checks and Caddy tries to send them to Quentin(girl) herself but Jason swindles those away anyway; and that one anamolous paragraph on page 246 that I pointed out that’s one giant runon sentence complete with (and she says) (and I says) Quentin(boy)-section-style, and how it starts with the father and the sideboard and the sounds in the house at night and how that is one of the few places he shows emotion; and when he says “I can’t even look at water” does that mean he hates his brother for his weakness, his waste, or is that him feeling emotion and what does it all mean? I have a grasp on this stuff and I like “close reading” and I know how to do it if I don’t think about if certain kinds of connections are allowed. And really it’s all very bewildering just the same.