Oh, November

Quoth the ever-optimistic Joseph Addison (clearly a fan of the month): the gloomy months of November, when the people of England hang and drown themselves.

How cheery.

It is also a month that brings with it all kinds of other goodies, including midterms, Guy Fawkes Night, endless essays, NaNoWriMo, hand-turkeys (see below), and all those various holiday festivities celebrating the commencement of the usurping of America. Not to mention the ensuing familial hilarity that comes along with all that pumpkin pie! Thank goodness for colonization, huh?

November is also National Pomegranate Month. Wouldn't want anyone to miss out on that.

November is also the centre of the quarter. And I am writing a paper right now about centres. And epiphanies. And gnomons. Gnomon is an exceptionally fun word to say.

You know, I think it is a true testament to the power of James Joyce that I actually enjoy writing papers on his stuff even though it is painstaking and my notes for this paper look a little like a modernist novel themselves, and I don't really have anything much to say here because it is midterm season and my brain is otherwise preoccupied, but I needed a break.

Gnomons (from the Greek for "interpreter") can be two things.

This:


or

this (it's the thing that casts a shadow on a sundial):


Pretty nifty, no?

I mean, they'd be a whole lot niftier if I didn't have to write a paper about them, but whatever. It all relates to Joyce's "A Painful Case," for which Addison's quote would actually make a very apt epigraph. It's a bummer of a story. But it's brilliant. Totally brilliant.

Anyway, it's full of gnomons and stuff. At least, I'm making a painful case (heeheehee) that it's full of gnomons and that the piece that is missing is the centre and that you can only get to the centre through the epiphany and the epiphany is here is the realization of all that poor James Duffy lacks.

Phew. So I think what I'm saying is that nothing equals everything and everything is that cavity in the heart filled with what is missing.

Something like that.

In any case (painful or otherwise), It would appear that during the schoolyear I seem to only update poor Blog when I have papers due or a midterm tomorrow (crap!), or am otherwise avoiding unpleasant tasks.

So back to it, I guess.

May your Novembers be full of pomegranates and gnomons.

Cheers!

Why I hate feminism

Much as the theory that this world and everything in it is one massive, woman-oppressing penis amuses me, I want to seriously defenestrate this bullcrap (oh, and by the way, go me, using my GRE vocab words in practical application and all!).

Here I am, just trying to make some kind of progress into this ever-multiplying pile of reading, and I come to an essay called "The Laugh of the Medusa," by Helene Cixous, which includes some true gems, like:

Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women--female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.

and

Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric tradition. It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism.

AND

Though masculine sexuality gravitates around the penis, engendering that centralized body...under the dictatorship of its parts, woman does not bring about the same regionalization which serves the couple head/genitals...Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide...She alone dares and wishes to know from within.

And then she starts in on Freud. Ha. They're about right for each other.

Boy does this essay just make me proud to be a female and how we are clearly the superior gender because we have emotions and no man does. Cixous...she just inspires me. I tell ya. She really incites my heart with hatred for the male oppressor and makes me want to go reclaim my repressed libido and have it all overflow in a storm of brilliant writings that come straight from the soul and unrivaled reproductive organs because clearly only women know anything and all that we know we have had to learn in secret, on the down-low, lest any male come along and bind our creativity and minds within the soul-crushing manacles of the phallus!

Maybe I am just really ignorant. I have never taken a gender studies class and I never intend too. But like all other forms of prejudice, isn't writing an essay like this only perpetuating sexism? I always wonder, when people call attention to these sorts of things under the moniker of "activism," doesn't it only widen the aperture? It's easy to say, oh yeah, I believe in such and such and I'm gonna go fight for equality, but by even doing that there are all kinds of judgment and anger that arise around the issue and then even more negative energy gets pulled around the distinctions and prejudices that people claim to be trying to get rid of in the first place.

But, enough of that. I should get back to my reading, even if the syntax of our language is actually modeled after the phallus, like Cixous argues our male forefathers purposely did in order to wholly stamp out any kind or form of feminine intellect from literature. No matter, though. I just really wanted to complain about this stupid essay and how having to read it has been a total waste of my time. I could probably learn more about female behavior, or really, the predatory nature of mammals in general, by watching an episode of America's Next Top Model. It's the short-girl season. They have to be 5'7'' or less.

I wonder what Cixous would have to say about that. And Tyra. And Tyra's inspirational speeches.

Now that's an essay I would read.

Yet more shameless procrastination

It's about this time that it sets in. 6 o'clock, the night is still young, there are a good 5 or 6 hours of general mental acuity left in the day in which productivity should be at a maximum and alas, all I really want to do is sit and watch hours and hours of True Life or whatever other inane crap happens to be on MTV at this moment.

When did I become such a slacker?

I sometimes think it would be a grand thing to give up this generally-ridiculous thing of academia and just sit under a tree that has a good sun to shade ratio and write poems all day long.

I mean, really, look at this work I have to do. Caesar was a brilliant orator and all, but he was also pretty much just another whack-job politician and as much as I love Eliot, he was really kind of a pretentious jackass, and sometimes when I readeth Renaissance literature I thinketh to myself how annoying it can becometh when everything has that "eth" tacked on to its endeth. And sometimes it's just like, shit, why can't life and the world just bow down to language and say to me, fine, kid, we finally realize the error of our ways and you were right all along and poetry is clearly the only worthy pursuit of your time, so just go for it and no worries about what you are going to do with the rest of your life or how you will ever make any money! You just keep cranking out that verse and the world will be better because of it!

I think poetry is just sort of the angry, acne-ridden teenager of the academic world who is like sooooo totally misunderstood. And maybe it's not poetry that has to grow up and out of its darkness, but rather everyone else around it, so that they can fondly look back and remember their own turbulent adolescent times and then they all might finally get it. And maybe they still won't like it, but at least they'll have a little empathy in their hearts for it. Right?

On a just-slightly unrelated note, Toaster Strudels are really not that great. I know that I shouldn't give in to advertising so easily, but I was watching the commercial and I thought to myself, gee would it be great to have some steaming, flaky, strawberry frosted goodness in my life. So I caved and bought them. And yeah. No. If you took one of those carnival hammer games and called it The Great Scale of Breakfast Pastry Greatness and you put a Toaster Strudel on it, the thing wouldn't even get off the ground. Pop Tarts, on the other hand, gross (yet still oddly delicious) as they are, would at least cause the thing to budge.

Curse you, Toaster Strudels. So disappointing.

So you know what? I think that all the poetry- and literature-haters of the world should just go off somewhere and stuff themselves full of Toaster Strudels.

They deserve each other.

You can do it!

I am sitting in the library, making a dismal attempt at composing a quasi-intelligible paper at some point before 9 o'clock tomorrow morning when it's due, and T.S. Eliot and his little group of pretentious poet cronies (Aristotle and Sidney and Shelley) are giving me one massive, literary theoryish headache and oh boy I am out of practice or something with this paper-writing business because it just isn't happening.

Anyway. I've instead taken to entertaining myself by reading all the profound little inscriptions that people have composed on these desks and walls because it is much more interesting than trying to force out coherent ideas about all these essays that are about a bunch of crap I don't particularly care about in this moment. So, verbatim from around me, the thoughts of UCD students through the ages (or at least since the last time they painted this wall):

-Fuck all woman! Why won't this bitch love me???
-Haha shes probably not even all u think she is!

-Eff Ochem!

-The girl sitting across from me is totally giving me a boner

-fuck life

-someone needs to fire God

-Where are all the books?

-Who needs sleep?
-well your never gonna get it
-your grammar sucks!
-your face sucks!

-and the spider man is always hungry
-dude The Cure is full of friggin emos

-the arts of ?

-I really want Mexican food right now

-Oh baby!

-If it was a matter of life or death, would you rather do George Bush or Stalin?
-Bush for sure. Stalin's mustache would tickle too much.

-you can do it!
-lol...

Lucky for me, the you can do it! happens to be the one in my immediate line of vision.

The profound conclusion of this post? People are weird creatures. But I think we kinda already knew that. So maybe not so much profound as simply reiterative. Or something.

Alrighty, then. Back to paper-writing. Urgh.

I like to imagine that Latin lingers still
in the mouth of the quiet doe,
that the old and complete language
is in both of us as her brown fur
falls away into
the soily carpet of the earth

I imagine she will say: pax tecum,
pax tecum, neptis

as near as my sister’s blood to mine and
as distant as to the tufted deer-tail,
the wisdom of that language,
the knowing of this life and all its
wild discontents
is clamped in the jaws
of the wise grandmother
she has held the knowing inside of her
for the longest of time

these mothers, the deer mothers
(my father always said to me: child,
the deer is the rare signal of
summative goodness
in the earth),
well they nudge softly their smaller selves,
their spindly-legged child animals,
through the deep tempests and out into repose

I imagine that above where she lies
this still continues—
that the mother bird drops
a worm into the throat of her
chick, to nourish it,
that she then urges flight to erupt
from the unpracticed wings,
that everywhere there is mothering
and building

you dear, you built two men from nothing
and their dears each built two daughters
and I, the youngest of this fledgling
daughter-crop, I stand beside my sister, now,
with your matter inside both of us,
and I think about when I saw you,
your hair brown and soft and unteased
and I wonder now:
like the young one whose fur has
not yet feathered
takes the worm from its mother,
who will fill the throat of my history,
with all its holes?

I am restless within
this absence
I wish a great calm
for you now
for both of us, now,
in the nature of these things

quies quies quies

for Grandma Eleanor, 1920-2009

Real-life interruptus

I generally try to not get too into my personal life here... I mean, yeah, I yak about myself a lot, but there's a pretty big difference between knowing about things like my disdain for children and lettuce, and digging deep into my personal issues. This blog thing, after all, is more to me about ideas and entertaining and maybe a little bit of commentary (social or otherwise) than it should be about my life. That being said, though, I do author this thing, and so today I make an exception to the regular distance. So I have a bit of a request (and in return, I'll try to get back to the usual snark soon enough).

My grandmother is currently very, very ill.

So, if you pray, it would be nice if you could maybe direct some of that to her. And if you aren't particularly into that mode of spiritual reflection, maybe just give a few moments of your thoughts for her.

It'd be much appreciated.

You know, my experience with death is (thankfully) pretty limited. At least in the bodily sense of the word. I'm not sure, however, how you might characterize things like spiritual death or the death of parts of a still-living person or the death of the protective ignorance of childhood. Because I think we all know those sorts of death to some extent, but the line still gets a little blurred with it all.

But in any case, it's easier to talk about death abstractly or to research it and read about it and like so many things in this world, I can always comprehend the theory and the ideas but ultimately, the true understanding of a concept is very dissimilar to becoming immersed in it personally.

But no matter what, there is always one constant: good ol' poetry.

And good ol' Walt Whitman knew his shit when it came to death (and life...and sex [of course, ha!]).

From Song of Myself, 6

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for
      nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and
      women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
      soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not
      wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

So anyway, like I said, whatever spiritual modality you happen to operate within, your general procedure for this sort of thing would be appreciated, whether it be prayer or incense-burning or rain dance or ritual animal sacrifice or whatever. And if you don't have a particular thing and you consider yourself to work simply in the human modality, just keep my grandmother in your thoughts. And while you're at it, give a few moments for your own grandparents.

They are, after all, a critical part of all our histories, in whatever way or to whatever degree we might have known (or not known) them.

We are built from their substances.

"To feel inspired, to fathom the power, to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain, to swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human"

So...what did we learn on Numb3rs this week?

Parts of the Milky Way have shown traces of ethyl formate. As do raspberries. The implications of that fact? Our galaxy could potentially taste like delectable red fruity goodness. Which I think is pretty spectacular.

And, you know, learning that came with a kind of intense joy because I feel like that's just the sort of particularly-whimsical thing that makes the universe awesome sometimes, despite all the crap that comes along with it. And to only add to the fascinating nature of nature, raspberries also show accordance with the Fibonacci sequence. As does this Tool song, should your mathematical inclinations tend more towards rock 'n' roll than towards fruit.

So then I went to the grocery store, and whaddaya know? Raspberries were on sale!

And not only do I love raspberries, but I also love a good sale, so, the fates, I think, are all working together these days. Harmonious for once. Putting their discord aside for a few brief moments to allow for things like imaginings of fruity atmospheres.


I'm reaching up and reaching out,
I'm reaching for the random or whatever will bewilder me.
And following our will and wind we may just go where no one's been.