There is absolutely no point to this post other than for me to gratuitously complain about my stack of papers-to-be-written that somehow keeps replenishing itself and never, ever seems to get smaller.
complain.
complain!
com plain
comp lain?
com p(l)ain
come for the pain of the plain plan
comatose pain
com tose pain
combed toes pained
combed to espained
come to espaine
co met spain
comet spain
comet's pain
comet's plain
come, plain!
co me plain
complain
complaining
complaint
complaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
Boy do I need to get a life.
And you know, the bummingest bummer of it all is that it gets you nowhere, this complaining thing. It just makes me want to regress to some kind of child-state where I cry my eyes out and pound my fists on the floor and wail "I. DON'T. WANNA." Bonus points for doing it in the middle of a supermarket aisle.
Because I really don't wanna.
How I've survived my education this long really kind of baffles me. I resist it so much and yet it all somehow always manages to get done.
Oh, quarter system! How I loathe thee.
Oh, literature! How I loathe thee.
Oh, world! How I mostly loathe thee but can't really because you do contain things like coffee and Matt Damon and crossword puzzles and idiotic television shows.
Oh, exclamation points! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Exclamation points kind of look like baseball bats. Or those party horn thingies that extend when you blow into them and make obnoxious noises.
I could use one of those right now.
Oh oh oh.
It's like a song.
Music is great. Except when Pandora decided to start limiting listening time to 40 hours a month. That really put a dent in everything. It also made me realize that I spend way too much time on the computer.
Maybe if I had to write less papers I would spend less time on the internet trying to find ways to avoid working on them.
People think technology is destroying the world? No. It's not technology. It's analysis of Caesarian Latin. It's critiques of Flann O'Brien. It's comparisons of the contemporary and the Renaissance. It's analysis of literary theory written by a bunch of whack job academics. That's what's doing it. It's probably what is actually destroying the ozone layer, too, for all we know. It's not like you can really trust Al Gore, anyway.
On a different note (hee hee. note? music? music note? boy I'm losing it...), I'm really into this French guy named Bense. I mean, I'm into his music. Not him. I don't really know him. But maybe if I did I would be into him. Who knows? I've also recently been really digging French punk. I mean, I never much pegged French as a legit punk sort of language. Nasalized vowels don't exactly scream counter-culture in my mind, but it's really been growing on me. And I guess hatred of authority and teenage angst are universal enough themes that it works. Check out Guerilla Poubelle and Paris Violence.
Yep.
Urrrrrggghhhhhh. I don't want to work. I'm tired of work. Bleh.
Four more papers and then finals and then it's over. And then we can just start again in January. Oh, vicious cycles. How I loathe thee.
Seems to be the theme of the day, eh? Loathing and anathemas and blehness. And French music. Makes me want a baguette. Or some kind of funny-smelling cheese. How stereotypical. I mean, there is other stuff in France. But it kind of seems like it's either that or the Eiffel Tower which is just France's phallus like our Washington Monument is and I have neither the desire nor the energy to get into feminist interpretations of world landmarks at the moment.
Okay okay okay enough of this. Time to work.
Well, Tetris and then work.
Or maybe just Tetris and the contemplation of work.
Good plan.
Glad we got this all worked out.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Some pre-Thanksgiving cheer
I feel like I'm in that holiday M&Ms commercial where Red and Yellow run into Santa Claus and Red is like, "He does exist!" and Santa Claus is like, "They do exist!" and then Santa and Red both faint.
I mean, I didn't just discover Santa Claus or anything, but I have emerged out of two weeks of paper-writing hell and today I really started realizing that there are people everywhere. I mean everywhere. And they are all existing, too. Crazy, right? I might be a little delusional. What else is new? But stress tends to breed obliviousness. In any case, there are now two glorious days off in which to overeat and watch too much television and generally enjoy the whole fact of existence, because you sometimes have to deal with it whether you like it or not so I guess you might as well just try to like it. Unless you are not existing, in which case you'd be dead, in which case I guess you don't have to worry much about the existing thing at all.
But I kind of wanted to talk about the other side of the death coin now, or, birth. Because Beckett said that upon our birth we inherit the fate of death. So it's all related. And the other day at work I read an absolutely horrifying essay. I mean, the writing wasn't horrifying (it was actually pretty good), but the subject matter...oh, the subject matter...
I guess I have just been wandering through my entire life completely ignorant about the biological mechanism that is breastfeeding. All I can say is thank god I plan on never, ever spawning because this paper gave a disturbingly descriptive account of just exactly how it all works and all I can really say is that there are just some actions that should never, ever have to go hand in hand with such descriptive phrases as suckling or expelling liquid or lactation propulsion or biting.
Yes. Apparently, those things BITE. As in bite. With their little pointy teeth.
Because as if already having to incubate the creature inside of you for 9 months isn't enough, you also get to push the thing out, and then, to top it all off, after they have thoroughly destroyed your body, caused tearing, bleeding, weight gain, stretchmarks, and potential future incontinence for the rest of your life, you then have to sit there while the thing nibbles at you. Because clearly, destroying the bottom half just isn't quite enough for those little soul-sucking demons.
I think the problem of all this was also kind of exacerbated by the fact that I just read this Seamus Heaney poem, "Act of Union," for Irish Lit and it's very disturbing and it's...well, have Section II and see for yourself:
And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
and stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again
Because if that doesn't just spurn warm fuzzies in the hearts of all, I don't know what can.
Oh, and also, if your lactation propulsion is not expelling itself copiously enough as a result of suckling, you are encouraged to take drugs in order to get it all going. Drugs that can eventually cause a whole entire range of super fun things like depression and insomnia and permanent muscle rigidity.
So three cheers for procreation!
Anyway, I'm sure that is all more information than anyone really wanted to know, but I just thought I'd share the good times because I felt a little bit sick when I was reading this paper and I think I might have a tinge of parturiphobia or something because just the thought of childbirth makes my viscera wriggle a little bit inside me.
But then someone came in with a paper on how Twitter is slowly destroying mankind and the world sort of seemed right again.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I mean, I didn't just discover Santa Claus or anything, but I have emerged out of two weeks of paper-writing hell and today I really started realizing that there are people everywhere. I mean everywhere. And they are all existing, too. Crazy, right? I might be a little delusional. What else is new? But stress tends to breed obliviousness. In any case, there are now two glorious days off in which to overeat and watch too much television and generally enjoy the whole fact of existence, because you sometimes have to deal with it whether you like it or not so I guess you might as well just try to like it. Unless you are not existing, in which case you'd be dead, in which case I guess you don't have to worry much about the existing thing at all.
But I kind of wanted to talk about the other side of the death coin now, or, birth. Because Beckett said that upon our birth we inherit the fate of death. So it's all related. And the other day at work I read an absolutely horrifying essay. I mean, the writing wasn't horrifying (it was actually pretty good), but the subject matter...oh, the subject matter...
I guess I have just been wandering through my entire life completely ignorant about the biological mechanism that is breastfeeding. All I can say is thank god I plan on never, ever spawning because this paper gave a disturbingly descriptive account of just exactly how it all works and all I can really say is that there are just some actions that should never, ever have to go hand in hand with such descriptive phrases as suckling or expelling liquid or lactation propulsion or biting.
Yes. Apparently, those things BITE. As in bite. With their little pointy teeth.
Because as if already having to incubate the creature inside of you for 9 months isn't enough, you also get to push the thing out, and then, to top it all off, after they have thoroughly destroyed your body, caused tearing, bleeding, weight gain, stretchmarks, and potential future incontinence for the rest of your life, you then have to sit there while the thing nibbles at you. Because clearly, destroying the bottom half just isn't quite enough for those little soul-sucking demons.
I think the problem of all this was also kind of exacerbated by the fact that I just read this Seamus Heaney poem, "Act of Union," for Irish Lit and it's very disturbing and it's...well, have Section II and see for yourself:
And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
and stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again
Because if that doesn't just spurn warm fuzzies in the hearts of all, I don't know what can.
Oh, and also, if your lactation propulsion is not expelling itself copiously enough as a result of suckling, you are encouraged to take drugs in order to get it all going. Drugs that can eventually cause a whole entire range of super fun things like depression and insomnia and permanent muscle rigidity.
So three cheers for procreation!
Anyway, I'm sure that is all more information than anyone really wanted to know, but I just thought I'd share the good times because I felt a little bit sick when I was reading this paper and I think I might have a tinge of parturiphobia or something because just the thought of childbirth makes my viscera wriggle a little bit inside me.
But then someone came in with a paper on how Twitter is slowly destroying mankind and the world sort of seemed right again.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Read this book II
I just finished a most brilliant of brilliant books and have decided to henceforth adopt all of its theories as my own new world views.
It's called The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien, and I think it's particularly pertinent in this age of angry angry world (with a steaming side of discontent). Actually, it's such a bizarre and amazing piece of fiction I'm not sure it really can be pertinent to anything at all, except maybe the state of our souls. In any case, it's kind of better than anything you encounter on a day-to-day basis within this spherical conundrum called Earth (and actually, if you read the book, it proves quite effectively that the world is actually sausage-shaped).
It's especially apt for anyone who lives in Davis, because it has to do with bicycles and hell. And by that I mean it reminds me of Davis because of the bicycles, not because of hell. Davis is far too charming to be hell. If, however, you are particularly interested in hell, I think it best to point you to good ol' Father Arnall's sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the gist of which I suppose is his idea that "Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points. There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften in the least the pains of hell."
But who really wants to talk about hell? Eternal damnation can be such a drag...
So the book introduces this idea of the "Atomic Theory," the gist of which is described:
Ask a blacksmith for the true answer and he will tell you that the bar will dissipate itself away by degrees if you perservere with the hard wallops. Some of the atoms of the bar will go into the hammer and teh other half into the table or the stone or the particular article that is underneath the bottom of the bar...
The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.
And when I read this my entire world finally made sense. Everyone in Davis is a cyborg! I have successfully unraveled this perplexing mystery! Chalk Lady and annoying people and everyone else...they are like that because they are half-bicycle. Oh, Clarity! How thou bringst the sweet breath of knowledge to the life-organs!
In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker that Darth Vader has become "more machine now, than man," and holy cow George Lucas is like a genius or something with some serious psychic abilities (communing with Force ghosts, I guess), because the longer I exist the more probable it seems that we are all half-machine! And if not internally, then still we are incessantly controlled externally by the great turning cogs of bureaucracy.
I also find "Atomic Theory" to be quite an apt name for the whackness of atomic exchange in general. In fact, I think it's quite representative of the whackness of all of nuclear research (as it applies to war, anyway. Because I get that it has plenty of other potential applications, but when the government is involved then it is surely being cultivated for violence because that's just how things seem to work in this ridiculous world). My inclination is to believe a bit in karma when it comes to these things. The obliteration of life through nuclear warfare will bring with it a slow and painful retaliation. In fact, it's already started for poor Los Alamos: example A and example B and though I don't have a C yet, I'm thinking it's probable enough to think that it could be the taint that war will inevitably leave on all our souls. After all, if you birth a monster you have to be prepared to feel all the possible implications of its terror.
But I really, really do digress.
In short: the book is bloody amazing, nuclear warfare is sucky, and folks, be careful out there on those bicycles.
And thank you, Flann O'Brien, for bringing some clarity to my life. I needed it.
It's called The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien, and I think it's particularly pertinent in this age of angry angry world (with a steaming side of discontent). Actually, it's such a bizarre and amazing piece of fiction I'm not sure it really can be pertinent to anything at all, except maybe the state of our souls. In any case, it's kind of better than anything you encounter on a day-to-day basis within this spherical conundrum called Earth (and actually, if you read the book, it proves quite effectively that the world is actually sausage-shaped).
It's especially apt for anyone who lives in Davis, because it has to do with bicycles and hell. And by that I mean it reminds me of Davis because of the bicycles, not because of hell. Davis is far too charming to be hell. If, however, you are particularly interested in hell, I think it best to point you to good ol' Father Arnall's sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the gist of which I suppose is his idea that "Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points. There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften in the least the pains of hell."
But who really wants to talk about hell? Eternal damnation can be such a drag...
So the book introduces this idea of the "Atomic Theory," the gist of which is described:
Ask a blacksmith for the true answer and he will tell you that the bar will dissipate itself away by degrees if you perservere with the hard wallops. Some of the atoms of the bar will go into the hammer and teh other half into the table or the stone or the particular article that is underneath the bottom of the bar...
The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.
And when I read this my entire world finally made sense. Everyone in Davis is a cyborg! I have successfully unraveled this perplexing mystery! Chalk Lady and annoying people and everyone else...they are like that because they are half-bicycle. Oh, Clarity! How thou bringst the sweet breath of knowledge to the life-organs!
In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker that Darth Vader has become "more machine now, than man," and holy cow George Lucas is like a genius or something with some serious psychic abilities (communing with Force ghosts, I guess), because the longer I exist the more probable it seems that we are all half-machine! And if not internally, then still we are incessantly controlled externally by the great turning cogs of bureaucracy.
I also find "Atomic Theory" to be quite an apt name for the whackness of atomic exchange in general. In fact, I think it's quite representative of the whackness of all of nuclear research (as it applies to war, anyway. Because I get that it has plenty of other potential applications, but when the government is involved then it is surely being cultivated for violence because that's just how things seem to work in this ridiculous world). My inclination is to believe a bit in karma when it comes to these things. The obliteration of life through nuclear warfare will bring with it a slow and painful retaliation. In fact, it's already started for poor Los Alamos: example A and example B and though I don't have a C yet, I'm thinking it's probable enough to think that it could be the taint that war will inevitably leave on all our souls. After all, if you birth a monster you have to be prepared to feel all the possible implications of its terror.
But I really, really do digress.
In short: the book is bloody amazing, nuclear warfare is sucky, and folks, be careful out there on those bicycles.
And thank you, Flann O'Brien, for bringing some clarity to my life. I needed it.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
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!
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!
Sunday, October 25, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
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.
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.
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