Our semiweekly MAPH lectures have their own subtle politics, as I'm coming to learn. There are about 100 of us packed into a lecture hall, and though only four or five of us end up asking Profs Jay and Candace (sometimes referred to, à la Bennifer, simply as "Jandace") any questions, our individual seating preference express plenty.

I usually sit in the middle left section as you face the lectern. Like most of the left section, the middle-left section is populated by the late, the half-interested. The people who, on a hot day, don't care who they sit by as long as they're near the only set of windows in the room.

The back of the room is even less interested — or rather, more interested in seeming less interested. The preceptors sit back there for propriety's sake, but I can't make too many generalizations about the actual students back there. I'm still trying to figure out if there's a difference between the back and the greater middle-right section. I'm also toying with the theory that, except for the back and front sections, the only other major split is left-right, with minor pockets of variation.

The front is exactly what you'd expect: the quiet studious. They're too close to ask Jandace any questions, because they're right there. Only the people on the very ends of the front few rows seem sufficiently removed to gather up their courage.

Today I sat in the lesser middle-right section, which is ideologically aligned with the front section. The area where I was seemed lousy with writers and other would-be literati, etc. In short: most of the people I like in the program. It's also much more vocal than the front; I'd say that the majority of questions come from the lesser middle-right, with the more relaxed denizens of the greater middle-right picking up the slack.

There is something psychological about sitting in these different areas, I think. With everyone around me furiously taking notes, I felt like the laziest guy in the class. Whereas back in the middle-left I was usually taking more notes than anyone around me. Everyone was following along in their reading, too.

We're still studying Marx, and Candace opined that just because we can imagine something doesn't mean we can theorize about it. As in: we can anticipate communism but we can't make any theories about how it would actually work? Well, something like that. Candace's example was unicorns; presumably we can theorize about horses though.

It all sounded like nonsense. Someone made the astute point that there's a lot of theoretical work basing itself on imagined worlds like the Matrix. And as far as I can tell, plenty of people have been using Serenity the same way: after I see that movie with Jinx(!) tonight(!), I can finally read articles like this one.