“red attends reality; blue, the ideal; and violet, logically enough, the debased ideal.” —Charles A. Riley, Color Codes

still makes me lol when I think of the time I tried to explain this to someone and she looked at me with speechless bafflement and/or concern.

Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.

A week later, on March 24, the President hosted his first state dinner, for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada. He complained to Haldeman about it the next morning: "We've got to speed up these dinners. They take forever. So why don't we just leave out the soup course?" "Well...," Haldeman began. Nixon cut him off: "Men don't really like soup." On a hunch, the chief of staff called the President's valet, Manolo Sanchez, and asked: "Was there anything wrong with the President's suit after that dinner last night?" "Yes. He spilled soup down the vest." The action memo went out: No more soup, ever.