Somnambulist

The moontree lassos itself : 3

2008-10-03T16:11:00.003-06:00

5.17.2008

Hiked up north side of Sykes Creek Valley early this morning. Lighting on the oak leaves perfect—green and weightless—felt like I was in Tolkien’s Old Forest (minus menacing sentient trees), or the realm of the Forest Spirit in Princess Mononoke. Life imitates art, apparently.

I ask it all, “why?” And in the river turning stones, grumbling with great unknowable age below the redwoods, I hear (imagine?) a great, whiskery “Yes.” It is impossible to live without affirmation.

If, as the Internet has suggested, the crowning achievement of hiking alone in wilderness areas is a heightened, ultimately humbling awareness of your vulnerability, then the redwood next to my tent that starts to creak vociferously every time a stray wind comes through the glade is doing wonders for my self-actualization.

Thought (am having a decidedly metaphysical day): the creaking pine is the hinge upon which time’s door remains closed.

3:00 PM. Can’t think straight—head’s a muddle, aching since 2:30 this afternoon after brewing a cup of instant coffee on the Whisperlite. Too much reading (all of The Things They Carried today). Head is overstuffed w/ words—grey moldy cushioning erupting from the seams. Have the drinking and smoking blackened the depths of my brains? No more effulgent, bright glow, just ember-red afterburners, barely visible at work beneath layers of physiological grime.

Strange. Thinking of Mom’s doodlings (kind of like helixes) whenever she’s on the phone. My doodles (when I do draw, which isn’t often, except when bored in class) are angular and linear, like ricks of hay or yucca spines. Sometimes they look like a rain-ruffled crow seen from far away.

Sudsed myself down nekkid in Redwood Creek. Got soap in my right eye (hurts like a mother) , in addition to my lower back being assaulted while bathing by mosquitoes, biting flies, and tiny enchanted forest ghosts angered by my intrusion into their grotto of giant sacrosanct trees. Both my shoulders already have been bit raw—something I noticed after waking up from a mid-afternoon nap earlier today. I look like a plague victim.

Have smushed TWO freak-ass, mutant-growth, Nevada-radioactive, gigantic brown spiders IN MY TENT NEXT TO MY HEAD DISCOVERED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT AFTER FUMBLING FOR A FLASHLIGHT TO GO OUTSIDE AND PEE. Suspect they were trying to lay eggs in my ear canal. Makes me think about the fact that I sleep next to the furnace room in the house back in Reno, where there’s probably whole nest of the things getting ready to burst and swarm while I’m asleep, currently hidden in some rotted out rafted.

Tonight, the wind arrives from down valley, harried & staying only a few seconds. From above, it sounds like distant Interstate traffic.

No progress yet re: women.

Sharpness and clarity of vision out here, feeling like invisible flames spurting from tree branches I pass underneath are licking away the strata of corrosive decay, moral uncertainty, and solipsism that have characterized recent months. Sharpness and clarity. So clear & sharp that it cuts.

“You’ve gotta hope that there’s someone for you
as strange as you are.
Who can cope with the things that you do
Without trying too hard.”
-Jon Brion

I probably need someone completely new. Someone a little crazy, overbearing, and obsessive. Who paints cat-shaped color fields and smokes pot and rides her bike and knows how to piss off Congress, who’s slender and frizzy-haired and can backpack Mongolia and brood attractively and likes terrible science fiction. But most of all who knows who to care, sacrifice, and who’s mature enough to recognize the overriding importance of balance, temperance, and judgment. Most of the time. In short, I guess I’m looking for the girl I’ve dreamt about since I was 15, and then give myself over to her completely, tail tucked between my legs.

The sound fro a distant rise comes into the tent. I should be frightened—why is there music playing ten miles from civilization—but instead I’m captivated. It’s 1:04 AM. I’ve just woken up and my eyes feel heavy. It’s the sound of a girl singing, fragile and quiet and cradled by the breeze. I must be imagining things.

Now the wind from downvalley finally comes into the redwood grove with a kind of nervous energy that reminds me of someone arriving late to a party and promptly guzzling a half-bottle of champagne to catch up.

The moontree lassos itself : 2

2008-09-28T05:10:00.005-06:00

(now w/ my some of my fotos!)

5.16.2008
I am become a demigod! Observe my glistening, toned figure! (at least 6 tribes of mosquitos and black tribes slain today—am quickly becoming a fearsome figure in insect mythology)

~3 pm: Lying in hot, humid tent after hike. Just took nap. Seem to have thrown out the left side of my trapezium. Poor pack fit? Can barely roll myself up to a sit from a lying down position. Feel a bit like Gregor Samsa. Legs slow to move now & creaky. Like Thor has taken a meat sledge to my thighs and hamstrings. Thought: If I ever hike the AT, my trail name should prolly be “Meat Hammer.” maybe “Giggle Fox.”

Couldn’t sleep at all most of last night—woke up at 11:30 PM after an hour or so of rest, drowning in my own sweat. Have been sweating, in fact, all day. Middle California is impossibly sweaty.

Latest map for the REST OF MY LIFE (like I haven’t been here before) involves doing the AT/CT/PCT a year from now, then joining the Peace Corps/Americorps. Is there a trans-state trail in Oregon/Washington? I wonder. Find girl who is smarter, wittier, and in better shape than I am and dote endlessly on her.

Bear-like, hirsute man @ campsite next door w/ goatee def. should not have taken off his shirt earlier this afternoon.

Tried zazen in tent a few minutes ago, but couldn’t get my jellified legs into position w/out screaming like Julia Roberts @ a shoe sale. But in pain, not delight.

Have to go lay a deuce, but the pot toilet here at Sykes Creek scares the beejesus out of me. Here’s why: (a) It looks like a charcoal grill. (b) Is completely exposed/visible from trail/all of Sykes Creek/America, approximately ten feet above the creek in a clearcut area. (c) No privacy walls *or* paper. I’m afraid someone’s going to light some superheated gas/bed of coals beneath my naked ass & send me cannonballing into the Big Sur River a couple thousand feet below. Or such stuff are nightmares made. So I need to extend thanks to Ben Donatelle for teaching me the simple beauty & functionality of a smooth, palm-sized river stone and a strong stick in the middle of the woods for a delightful sylvan toilette.

5 pm: Asshole walking by my camp stops, says, “Wow… I just hiked ten miles only to find a Cubs fan at the end of it.”

“I’m a humanist. I’d rather kill a human than a snake.” –Cactus Ed

Lying in tent still, unwilling to cook dinner. Too exhausted. Hard even to read—feel as exhausted as an old blacktop highway.

“I see now my basic rule of thumb in writing has always been to write about things as if I didn’t know them—and this would include things that I did know, or thought I knew about.” –Murakami, 133

My chest is breaking into an uncomfortable sweat as I lay in the hellish blue light of the tent tent and try to sleep. No luck. I decide to bathe. I fetch the small green bottle of Campsuds from my backpack. I slip on my tennis shoes, leaving them unlaced. Then I wade into Sykes Creek, shallow and shadowed and clear. The sun casts vines of light onto the rocks below. Here’s California in May: a honeyed afternoon light that cloys to your skin and won’t rob off, nor would you want it to. It catches dust motes & waterstriders & mosquitos in its fine net of golden fire, suspending them in air. Everything from my ankles down is freezing. One of my shoelaces lazily lassoes a rock as it’s caught by the current and heads towards the Pacific. I suds up my hair, rubbing vigorously & watching bluebell blossoms & clumps of pine needles fall into the water. Artifacts from the hike. A crown? And then some mosquito carcasses come falling out, and I feel like a malarial version of Puck. Everything from my ankles on up is sweaty & burning. I catch a nasty whiff of my own BO—that Precambrian, vaguely avuncular odor that haunts YMCAs nationwide. Everything in mid-stream is liquid gold. Siamo amici, caro fiume. Per sempre.

“Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already quietly lost…And as we live our lives we discover—drawing towards us the thin threads attached to each—what has been lost. I closed my eyes & tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the way that their lives are fleeting.” -Murakami, 207

screenplay idea: robert downey jr. fending off cocaine-crazed dingos with a billiards cue.

snarly snarl snarl snark snack

early 20s: a vague sensation that there's something worth dedicating myself to, but unable to figure out exactly what it is, or maybe (ugh) already had it and lost it. meaning is: phosphorous fire through frosted glass. No commensurability for loss. General lack of meaning re: existence. Questioning, but reminiscing parents' values. Am strangely nostalgic for weirdest things: King Soopers donuts at church growing up, mom's same old crummy/delicious rice & fish dinners. Thinking about past loss like looking into the white fanged heart of a moon-eating sun. Emotional paralysis that's strangely pleasurable because it seemingly lifts any personal responsibility on my part. What would Camus say? Probably that I should've gotten over Camus when I was 18. But: can't *not* think about sarah, but thinking about sarah is impossible to even think about.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her. That time I had to pull the car over on I-70 w/ Gillian Welch on the radio ten minutes after dropping her off to lose her to Paris, pressing my forehead into the steering wheel and losing my mind at an incredible accelerating tempo. Hot tears and my stomach in a vice and the sharp warm auguring of my organs by the fresh cut of a new loss. And in that loss, love showing its incomprehensible face. Little comfort. A warm June Colorado day and a nervous-looking security guard pulling off onto the shoulder, "hey, can I be of service?"
Which is why I have to lie knotted up in the comforter most mornings and try to asphyxiate myself in the mossy warm stench of my bedclothes.
I want my old heart back.
Getting dark now. Radiohead weather outside--ropes of wind flogging the tent walls i the dark and quiet, menacing oakleaves talking to one another in radio crackles.

The moontree lassos itself : 1

2008-09-20T22:53:00.004-06:00

The following posts are transcribed, with some edits, from a journal kept on a backpacking trip in the Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur, California in mid-May, 2008, just a month before the entire area got the shit brûléed out of it by one of the largest wildfires of the summer. This was the trip that finally got me interested in backpacking and general, beard-sporting, retro outdoorsmanship/running again, by circuitous way of a long talk with my father about canyons, women, Transcendentalism, and religion. You know, manly shit. Like most things I do. Beyond the usual backpacking gear, I brought with me on this trip a warmish 6 of Budweiser, purloined from my cowboy roommate’s stash, but which didn’t last beyond the first night, where I carcamped near the town of Big Sur before hiking in early the next morning. Also carried in my backpack where two books brought along for the first pleasure reading in months: Haruki Murakami’s novel Sputnik Sweatheart, and Tim O’Brien’s often-anthologized collection of Vietnam short stories, The Things They Carried.) What follows is mostly in telegraphic fragments and short sentences, as that’s how I tend to record things when I’m by myself, hoping to later cobble them together into something larger and more seamless. Images are not my own, as my I'm-too-cheap-to-give-yahoo-money flickr account has been totally maxed out this month. Whatevs.

5.15.08
Things seen on the road (five hour drive from Reno to the town of Big Sur) this afternoon:
-“Lightfigher Blvd.”
-Large building’s skeleton in Sacramento—a high-rise—one floor covered in a green, ribbed tarp—pale & bulbous against the high blue haze of a California sky. Summer is infecting everything—a different quality of light.
-Death Cab’s “Title & Registration,” it turns out, is prescient. Determines me to make some sense of Sarah while I’m out here—can feel some of the loamy marsh of my brain’s sorry current state beginning to bilge.

Other things seen since the road:
-Out on the beach at the State Park at Big Sur, feeding a wary beach raven some Bold Party Chex Mix, which hopefully are not lacerating the poor bird’s unprepared GI tract. Cute slender girl in a pink t-shirt, barefoot, holding her tennis shoes by their tied-together laces approaches: “you’re ruining wilderness”
“It’s not exactly wilderness.” (I point to California 1, way behind the beach, the sound of traffic, etc.)
“What?” (removes iPod earbuds)
“Forget it.”
-To my left, a middle-aged asian woman in a HUGE sunhat and a long skirt with floral patterns, getting pummeled by the stiff breeze coming in off the surf. She was picking her way across the shore a few minutes go, seemingly searching intently for something. Now she’s doing calisthenics. (Californisthetics?)
-A few degrees below the sea horizon, two ominous sets of black fins.

New development: am apparently camping next to the Swedish Bikini Team. Just came back from the beach to find three nubile, impossibly tan, suspiciously clean San Diego blondes setting up their camp approximately three feet from my own. Am sweating from pores I didn’t even know existed. Overheard:
“Victoria, where would you like your sports bras?”
Was unaware that this backpacking trip was in actuality a descent into my imagination’s sordid equivalent of Chris Isaak’s video for “Wicked Game.” Christ, they’re giggling. They won't stop giggling.

“at night, scruffy bears hang around your cabin.” –Murakami, 5

the sea’s sound a slow crumpling of tinfoil
(or is that the noise of distant traffic?)
(Swedish Bikini Team continues to giggle while erecting tent. Jesus.)

“No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.” –Kerouac, quoted in Murakami, 5.

Just before sundown, while drinking the last of the Budweiser, am accosted by woodland creature. Squirrel? Ground squirrel? Pygmy sea marmot? Can’t tell in this poor light, although the moon’s supposed to rise in an hour or so.

Rooms improved by cut
flowers in black vases.

If you want to write, the best thing you can do, I think, is to not write and ride through some time and experience first. And then go hungry for a while. Stop eating, feel your gut begin to rot and fall apart.

When will I have spent enough time outdoors to tell individual ravens apart, I wonder?

Note: that pipe tobacco when consumed with rolling papers does not lead to a good experience has been duly noted. Blech.

Written on the campsite’s picnic table: “death is the Mother of beauty,” scrawled next to a pentagram. Keats meets Slayer, I guess. Also written on the table: “Ron’s back always hurts” and then a particularly morose, almost frantic-looking frowney face. Took out Bic and added: “Cameron empathizes with Ron.” My back always already hurts.

Scene in a novel featuring a disaffected father gradually losing touch with reality as his brain literally shrinks inside his skull:
“Look, Paula drew you a picture in church today!”
“Is that supposed to be me?”
“Of course! Look, it’s us camping.”
“Oh.”
“What?”
“I don’t see it.”
“What?”
(Paula starts to cry. Mother looks confused. Father stares blankly at drapes.)
“How is that supposed to be me? That looks nothing like me.”

“If it’s something a single book can explain, it’s not worth having explained.” –Murakami, 52

"I had no intention of shooting the elephant": (Post)colonialism, Ecocriticism, and the Politics of the Monstrous Beast

2008-08-23T17:25:00.003-06:00

any feedback is welcomed.

In November, 2007, the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) cheerily revealed the Games’ official mascots at a press conference. Designed to represent the “people, geography, and spirit of British Columbia and Canada” and “personify the values and essence of the 2010 Winter Games.” Designed by a Vancouver-based firm, Meomi Design, the three “critters”—Sumi, an “animal spirit,” Quatchi, a sasquatch, and Miga, a snowboarding sea bear—are loosely inspired by the island’s First Nations traditions.
The brightly-colored, anime-influenced mascots raise a litany of questions. Does the fact that the VANOC expects to make at least $45 million Canadian dollars from merchandizing authorize its use of native beliefs in the characters’ design, particularly when First Nations constituents can expect to receive no compensation from the sale of plush dolls and lanyards emblazoned with their cultural symbols? Who “owns” mythology, particularly in the case of creatures like Sasquatch whose image has traveled across regional and national boundaries and been reformed through decades of global dissemination? And is Sumi’s characterization as a “guardian spirit” who “works hard to protect the land, water and creatures of his homeland” problematic? Especially considering Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound as the site of a memorable environmental flashpoint in the early 1990s, where controversy erupted over attempted logging of old-growth stands of forest—an event in which the land rights of First Nations coastal tribes were, by many accounts, completely ignored?

Vancouver’s contentious foray into the realm of monsters—even cute ones—is, my project argues, yet another iteration of political uses and misapprehensions of what I call the “hyperbolic animal” in postcolonial settings. From Blake’s Tyger to Kipling’s Shere Khan to Jules Verne’s mastodons and hominids in Journey to the Center of the Earth, monstrous animals have been an integral part of how both indigenous writers and explorers encounter, map, and—most critically—represent and produce spaces.

I am motivated by what possible insights an ecocritical study of the hyperbolic animal (or animals entangled in aesthetic modes of the grotesque and sublime) in colonial and postcolonial contexts might offer. As my project is situated at the crossroads of postcolonialism, animal studies, and ecocriticism, I follow Elizabeth Deloughrey and Cara Cilano’s important contention that critics working at this conjunction must foreground the historicism of “modified” landscapes and creatures, thereby refusing colonial discourses of the “natural” or “authentic” environment, as these constructions can be revealed as colonial fantasies of “the garden of Eden, or a myth of the hyperfecundity of the tropics” (79). How might the “unnatural” bodies of mythic or cryptozoological beasts complicate gendered and racialized notions of authenticity? I also respond warmly to Susie O’Brien’s perspective that Western ecocritical inquiry must tread carefully as it examines postcolonial and global literatures, as it must do so “without replicating the consumptive drive of empire” where “the world’s texts are rendered open to the Anglo-American critic’s piercing ecocritical view” (77). I agree wholeheartedly with O’Brien that critics of global literature should attempt to highlight “inassimilatable” or culturally resistant aspects of a text. I wonder if we can productively read the mythic beast, particularly in the case of Amitav Ghosh’s tiger in The Hungry Tide, as a metonym for the boundaries of linguistic assimilation, as well as anthropological and zoological understanding.

My project will explore the idea that monstrous beasts are not simply embodiments of anxieties over humanity’s place in nature. The enduring presence of the monstrous beast in colonial and postcolonial literatures also provides insight into how representations of nature can be refracted to abet, or in some cases challenge, imperialist meaning-making. My project thus argues that encounters with eco-monsters, from Melville’s great whale to Amitav Ghosh’s man-eating tigers in The Hungry Tide, are not simply run-ins with sublime nature “red in tooth and claw”; they are also encounters with language and competing epistemologies.

I hope, however, that my readings will also shed light on larger questions. What do thrilling accounts of half-glimpsed or half-known animals uncover about larger cultural attitudes towards the non-human? How do explorer’s accounts (whether fictional or not) of monsters witnessed in the hinterlands of Empire reflect or challenge colonial ways of organizing experience and engaging with nature and other cultures? Can these beasts’ modern popularity be tentatively read in service of a strange form of environmental advocacy? How is masculinity (de)constructed in hunting tales that feature monstrous beasts? Or, as in Eric L. Gansworth’s recent collection of Sasquatch poetry, Breathing the Monster Alive and some of Nalo Hopkinson’s short fiction suggest, how might these potent and resilient myths of megafauna provide avenues to reconstitute identity, rethink the body, and reappropriate indigenous culture? What light might explicitly anthropomorphic “monsters”—the speaking beasts in Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Barbara Gowdy’s recent econovel The White Bone—shed on cultural dynamics and assumptions?

More broadly, I investigate the idea that the stories we tell about beasts dramatize and throw into sharp relief some recalcitrant antinomies in (post)colonial thought: the troublesome distinctions between human and animal; myth and reason; ecological ideologies of conservation, stewardship, and dominion; and savagery and civilization.

Possible Primary Texts (novels, unless otherwise noted)

American
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan of the Apes. (1914)
Gloss, Molly. Wild Life. (2000)
King Kong. Dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. Perf. Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong. (film, 1932)
London, Jack. The Sea-Wolf. (1904)
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. (1851)
Pyle, Robert Michael. Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide. (nonfiction, 1995)
Zelazny, Roger. The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories. (short fiction, 1974)

British
Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book. (1894)
Orwell, George. “Shooting an Elephant.” (essay, 1936)
Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr. Moreau. (1896)

Canadian
Gowdy, Barbara. The White Bone. (2000)
Hopkinson, Nalo. Skin Folk. (short fiction, 2001, esp. “Riding the Red” and “Slow Cold Chick”)
Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. (2001)
Ondaatje, Michael. The Dainty Monsters. (poetry, 1967)

French
Heuvalmans, Bernard. In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents. (nonfiction [supposedly], 1967)
Verne, Jules. Journey to the Center of the Earth. (1864)
Verne, Jules. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. (1870)

Indian
Devi, Mahasweta. “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha.” In Imaginary Maps (trans. Gayatri Spivak). (1994)
Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. (2005)
Narayan, R. K. A Tiger for Malgudi. (1983)

Italian
Messner, Reinholt. My Quest for the Yeti. (nonfiction, 2001)

Maori
Ihimaera, Witi. The Whale Rider. (1987)

Tuscorora (Native American)
Gansworth, Eric. Breathing the Monster Alive. (multi-generic work, 2006)

...and I'll spare you the tediousness of reading my annotations of secondary and theoretical texts. Suffice it to say that they, through and through, deal with animal representation, the grotesque, culture-power relations, and critics from (duh) postcolonialism/ecocriticism champing at the bit and getting fussy with one another.

Pavement - Space Ghost

2008-08-15T20:35:00.001-06:00

(because i'd forgotten about this)

Sebadoh-Skull

2008-08-15T20:17:00.001-06:00

thanks to elizabeth (bereft of an impossibly cute name, but towards which end yam-bear and i are fervently knocking our skulls together) for reminding me how pure and tingly this band is.

sick morning

2008-06-25T14:09:00.001-06:00

Four Poems for Robin
by Gary Snyder

Siwashing It Out Once in Suislaw Forest

I slept under rhododendron
All night blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck in my pack
Hands deep in my pockets
Barely able to sleep.
I remembered when we were in school
Sleeping together in a big warm bed
We were the youngest lovers
When we broke up we were still nineteen
Now our friends are married
You teach school back east
I dont mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.

A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji

Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.

An Autumn Morning in Shokoku-ji

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.

December at Yase

You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
"Again someday, maybe ten years."

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I've always known
where you were--
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.

I didn't.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.

2008-06-25T14:06:00.001-06:00

hiatus

2008-05-24T16:27:00.003-06:00

a blog, like a shark, must keep moving forward or else it dies. while this particular forum has been jovially swimming along for nigh three years here, somnambulist's fins aren't moving water with the same vigor of yore. i'm stalling somewhat. a certain lack of cohesion is missing. as such, i'm taking a hiatus from somnambulist and working on something new this summer. we'll see how it goes.

cry not for me, argentina. someday i'll return. with more ranch-bbq flavor than ever.

the message Dave S. sent me prior to my leaving for California this morning

2008-05-15T10:49:00.002-06:00

Yeee Haw! Remember to tape those hot spots as soon as you find them. To be sure, only weak folk get sick from the water. Unbuckle your pack at stream crossings, buckle your seatbelt. . . You know, since I'm old as dirt, I'm sure your looking fore sage advice. Don't cut the switchbacks. Camp on durable surfaces. If you see a bear, bait it with peanut butter and pounce from above. Bite its nose first and tickle its hind quarter. If you decide to return to the Pleistocene, bite, jab, and take it out quick--get your coals hot early in the day. The cinnamon bears taste the best. Though, I do like the clear ones that taste like pineapple.

Peace, Dave

Back Wednesday. Assuming I'm not inside a cinnamon bear's gullet.

fait accompli

2008-05-13T15:46:00.004-06:00

the ghosh paper is more finished than the hot sausage slices dpo used to char beyond recognition in the skillet when i lived with him. see a couple entries below if you must subject yourself to it.

now i've just got 43 student papers to fail until i disappear into the California coastal woodz over the weekend. and until i more or less accept the stereotype by bringing my Bill McKibben-annotated Walden and a long-stemmed tobacco pipe with me for pensive evenings. and also teva sandals. more specifically, i'm going here:

interlude

2008-05-12T03:30:00.003-06:00

"One of her mother's best paintings was called 'A Cat Can Look at a King,' and when Lou at age six asked what that meant (the picture showed a cat with huge, piercing eyes sitting in a tree) Jan said it was an old proverb to remind you never to stand in awe of anybody--no matter how rich or powerful." -from Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia Emerging.

20 pages into the Ghosh paper and still no end in sight. At least the radio's got my Jackson Browne jamz on. "Runnin on emptttyyyyyyyyy....!"

I'm also craving a strawberry Orange Julius. Not sure what's up with that. Who wants to go to the mall?

Chemistry Safety 6

2008-05-10T01:02:00.001-06:00

"I have never known birds of different species to flock together. The very concept is unimaginable."

2008-05-07T13:20:00.003-06:00

"Japan Fights Crowds of Crows"
from the NYT

Blackouts are just one of the problems caused by an explosion in Japan’s population of crows, which have grown so numerous that they seem to compete with humans for space in this crowded nation. Communities are scrambling to find ways to relocate or reduce their crow populations, as ever larger flocks of loud, ominous birds have taken over parks and nature reserves, frightening away residents.
It is a scourge straight out of Hitchcock, and the crows here look and act the part. With wing spans up to a yard and intimidating black beaks and sharp claws, Japan’s crows are bigger, more aggressive and downright scarier than those usually seen in North America.
Attacks, though rare, do happen. Hungry crows have bloodied the faces of children while trying to steal candy from their hands. Crows have even carried away baby prairie dogs and ducklings from Tokyo zoos, city officials said.
While no one knows the precise number of crows in Japan, bird experts and government officials in cities across the nation say populations have increased enormously since the 1990s. Tokyo says the number of crows it has counted in large parks rose to 36,400 in 2001 from 7,000 in the late 1980s, prompting a trapping plan that cut the numbers to 18,200 last year. However, ornithologists say that the actual number in Tokyo is closer to 150,000 birds, and that some crows may have moved to different areas to avoid the traps.
Behind the rise, experts and officials say, has been the growing abundance of garbage, a product of Japan’s embrace of more wasteful Western lifestyles. This has created an orgy of eating for crows, which are scavengers. Some steps taken to reduce crows include putting garbage into yellow plastic bags, a color the birds supposedly cannot see through, and covering trash with fine-mesh netting, to prevent large beaks from reaching the goodies within.
Still, the crows have proven clever at foiling human efforts to control them. In Kagoshima, they are even trying to outsmart the Crow Patrol. The birds have begun building dummy nests as decoys to draw patrol members away from their real nests. -Martin Fackler

I can't wait until the crows grow powerful enough to replace Emperor Akhito with Kkrat, the Great Bird Lord. And is it really any surprise that they're attacking babies, considering that we make them do stuff like this?:

hopelessly devoted to...

2008-04-29T16:23:00.003-06:00

M83's new music video for "Graveyard Girl."

the only way I can figure out this video is that it's exactly what it looks like: a couple of nerdy French guys disinterring 1983 in America and reveling in its loamy bones. but it's more than just cheap kitsch or ironic savaging--there's a weird poignancy and downright earnestness to the video that is undeniably appealing. It's almost enough to make me start combing Reno's Goodwill for a robin's egg blue denim jacket.

and the part with the dog's head in space should be turned into a t-shirt. i'm picturing a line-drawn, smudged-charcoal kind of take on it.

Red Hot Summer Special – Marxism, Aesthetics, and Modernity in 2008

2008-04-28T16:38:00.004-06:00

Finally got a pseudo-list together for this summer's reading group and I'm about to whizz myself with excitement.

Week of May 25th: The Ghosts- Marx and the Aesthetic Experience
Baxandall, et al. – from Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, eds. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski (rev. ed, 2006)
Leon Trotsky – from Literature and Revolution (1924)
Slavoj Zizek – from The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Week of June 1st: Marx and Modernity
Louis Althusser - “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970)
Raymond Williams - from Marxism and Literature (1977)
Fredric Jameson - from The Political Unconscious (1981)

Week of June 8th: Classing up the Aesthete
Theodor Adorno – from Aesthetic Theory (1970)
Jacques Ranciere – from The Politics of Aesthetics (rev. ed., 2006)
Terry Eagleton – from The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1991)

Week of June 15th: New Radicalisms
Cedric Robinson – from Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (2000)
JK Gibson-Graham – from The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (2006)

Week of June 22nd: Marx Goes Global
Franz Fanon - “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” from The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
Aimé Césaire – from Discourse on Colonialism (rev. ed., 2001)
Fredric Jameson - “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (Autumn, 1986): 65-88.

Week of June 29th: Rethinking the Popular
Walter Benjamin - “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)
Richard Hoggart – from The Uses of Literacy (1957)
Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson – from Resistance through Ritual: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1976)
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. - from Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988)

Zach Galifianakis interviews Michael Cera

2008-04-26T21:55:00.001-06:00

"oh, God. Too much fun!"

Me and You and Everyone We Know - Fish Scene

2008-04-24T00:36:00.001-06:00

We're not worthy! We're not worthy!

2008-04-23T16:42:00.004-06:00

All Tomorrow's Parties just released the lineup for the upcoming New York show, curated by My Bloody Valentine. Here's what's on deck for Sept. 19-21, as My Bloody Valentine plays in the United States for the first time in 16 (holy shit! 16!) years:

My Bloody Valentine
Built to Spill performing Perfect From Now On
Meat Puppets performing Meat Puppets II
Thurston Moore performing Psychic Hearts
Tortoise performing Millions Now Living Will Never Die
Shellac
Mogwai
Polvo
Fuck Buttons
Autolux
The Drones
Low
Wooden Shjips
Edan with Dagha
Thee Silver Mount Zion Orchestra

*goes into shock*

via Pitchfork (who else)

i totally got a chili pepper. although not nearly as many as santesso.

2008-04-23T03:44:00.004-06:00

w00t

Although, given, I also got a "5" on "Easiness," which I guess means I'm, like, a total skankbag.

Some Untimely Thoughts on Spectres, History, and the Nature of Postcolonialism

2008-04-23T00:24:00.003-06:00

(palm oil monoculture backing up to rainforest, Malaysia, 2004)

In the introductory article ("Against Authenticity: Global Knowledges and Postcolonial Ecocriticism) from the 2007 special cluster in ISLE on "postcolonialism and ecocriticism," Cara Cilano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey offer a strong warning. They caution against a possible ecocritical tendency to parallel "excluded, exploited, and oppressed" people with similarly treated nature. Such a move "renders the two equivalent, thus dehistoricizing through natural and universal metaphors" (75). Indeed, much of the tension between the two critical camps stems from the fraught terrain of what is "authentic"—an idea that fueled the first, anti-theoretical treatises of ecocriticism in the 1980s, which considered itself "grounded" in the more-than-human world in a way that "anthropocentric" social constructivism wasn't. Thus, much of the initial movement's work was in preserving, celebrating, and setting aside nature out of respect for its intrinsic value. Since, ecocriticism has turned gradually in new directions and become more open to the idea that nature has, too, a history of cultural modification and political uses as a text. Given this move—evident in the lineage of ecofeminism through environmental justice and into work being done in "postcolonial ecocriticism"—how might we, or even should we, reconcile the extreme concern for the more-than-human world of traditional ecocriticism with the redemptive and transformative politics of much postcolonial thought? I think one way into the dilemma might be through a Marxist approach to place and history, especially as Derrida articulates Marx's (and Marxism's) "hauntological" presence (lol!) and the self-critical, rhizomatic, and self-reformative impulse at heart of these theories:

I know of few texts in the philosophical tradition, perhaps none, whose lesson seemed more urgent today, provided that one take into account what Marx and Engels themselves say about their own possible aging and their intrinsically irreducible historicity. What other thinker has ever issued similar warning in such an explicit fashion? Who has ever called for the transformation to come of his own theses?" (Spectres of Marx 13)

And how might we, as ecocritics and postcolonialists (or postcolonial ecocritics, or environmentally-concerned postcolonial scholars, or green historians, or Pocogreenocriticalists, or whatever), think about our inheritance of this radical critique? It provides a hermaneutics of skepticism towards the rhetorical smokscreens of power that have led to both cultural sorrow in postcolonial contexts and environmental destruction. "Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task," Derrida writes in Specters of Marx. This probably more refers to a position one takes than to the exact kind of work that such a position presupposes or calls for. The fact that we are heirs does not mean that we assume property (or ownership) of the work of the past, but rather that we are put into a position of responsibility for its continued use, renewal, and relevance. In order for an inheritance to become meaningful to us, we need to find out what it still holds for us in our current time. Inheritance asks for an active participation and for a necessary transformation.

This, I think, is also a key distinction between the first-wave, wilderness/preservation-oriented ecocriticism versus the transformative second-wave of environmental justice and urban nature ecocriticism. Derrida writes, "This inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as will be necessary. Such a reaffirmation would be both faithful to something that resonates in Marx's appeal ... and in conformity with the concept of inheritance in general (Ibid.)" We are thus inheritors of the more-than-human world, and are responsibile for its current condition, not to any sort of Edenic or prelapsarian condition. To quote Marx specifically here: in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," he notes that "men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past" (595). It is this notion of the inheritance of Marxism—the past's "haunting," simultaneous presence and nonpresence that calls for transformative de- and (possible) re-construction—that I think is a useful frame to draw together postcolonialism and ecocriticism. Through it, both can examine (and examine *how* they examine) the perpetuation of capitalist social, racial, sexual, and gender structures in both environmentally adverse and culturally unjust contexts. I continue to think that Marx is more pressing (and I refer here to the progenitor's work specifically, in addition to Marxism as a snowballed discourse and "dirty word" that supposedly "died" in 1989) now than ever.

Il Pappa e i gatti bellissimi: un racconto

2008-04-20T23:08:00.006-06:00

Why I refuse to completely sever links with the Catholic church:

Their names are Shadow, Butch, Misty, Rusty, Sparky, Sunshine, Esther, Marty and Spunky. They are cats, some former strays, some tiger-striped. But to Jan Fredericks of Wayne, N.J., they are family, they are God’s creatures and deserving of compassion.

And in Pope Benedict XVI, Ms. Fredericks, the chairwoman of the fledgling American branch of Catholic Concern for Animals, believes that she has found a kindred spirit: Along with an enormous entourage and a message of peace, the Pope brought with him to the United States a lifelong love of cats.

Benedict’s kindness toward the strays of Rome is already the stuff of Vatican legend. His house in Germany, its garden guarded by a cat statue, was filled with cats when Benedict lived there full time before he was posted to the Vatican in 1982.

And Benedict is, without a doubt, the first pope to have had an authorized biography of him written by a cat — Chico, a ginger tabby who lives across the road from Benedict’s old house in Germany.

Speaking of cats and writing: what is the difference between a cat and a comma?
One has the paws before the claws and the other has the clause before the pause! (HILARIOUS!)

From a piece by Andy Newman in today's New York Times

And, yes, you can indeed purchase "Joseph and Chico: The Life of Pope Benedict XVI as Told by a Cat" on Amazon.

Fugazi - Turnover - (Live 1991)

2008-04-19T21:44:00.001-06:00

For Jef(f) and that time when we were sophomores and put on Adidas Moves cologne before going to St. Mary's

2008-04-17T02:14:00.002-06:00

I apologize for this unwelcome burst of nostalgia.

Living off the grid in New Mexico

2008-04-16T15:56:00.002-06:00

In March, Smithsonian Magazine interviewed journalist-rancher-goat protector Doug Fine:

Can the average working person live off the grid?
Yes. Anybody can live an almost totally oil-free lifestyle. If your vehicle has a diesel engine, you can convert it to run on waste vegetable oil from restaurants. That's what I did for my ROAT, my Ridiculously Oversized American Truck. Solar power is totally feasible. Growing your own food takes an hour or two a day. But I would suggest that if one doesn't have an hour or two to work on one's life, one might be too busy.

How environmentally conscious were you growing up?
I started out in the suburbs of New York, where I didn't see a real tomato until I was in college. I thought tomatoes were supposed to be orange baseballs, like you see them in the supermarket. The way I live now is an absolutely drastic change. But when people visit me here at the Funky Butte Ranch, they're not saying, 'Wow, what a wacko.' They're saying, 'How can I do this?'

Doug's also contributed to NPR on numerous occasions and regularly updates his blog, Dispatches from the Funky Butte Ranch.

guess what comes out on DVD tomorrow?

2008-04-15T00:50:00.003-06:00

also: Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson in a commercial together? chilling like gelato on a couch? For the erf? watch it here

two consumed at the kitchen table.

2008-04-12T22:28:00.003-06:00

The perfect, troubled weather of an evening involves:

In another place, not here, a woman might touch
something between beauty and nowhere, back there
and here, might pass hand over hand her own
trembling life, but I have tried to imagine a sea not
bleeding, a girl’s glance full as a verse, a woman
growing old and never crying to a radio hissing of a
black boy’s murder. I have tried to keep my throat
gurgling like a bird’s. I have listened to the hard
gossip of race that inhabits this road. Even in this I
have tried to hum mud and feathers and sit peacefully
in this foliage of bones and rain. I have chewed a few
votive leaves here, their taste already disenchanting
my mothers. I have tried to write this thing calmly
even as its lines burn to a close. I have come to know
something simple. Each sentence realized or
dreamed jumps like a pulse with history and takes a
side. What I say in any language is told in faultless
knowledge of skin, in drunkenness and weeping,
told as a woman without matches and tinder, not in
words and in words and in words learned by heart,
told in secret and not in secret, and listen, does not
burn out or waste and is plenty and pitiless and loves.
-Dionne Brand, from “No Language is Neutral”

and

while Jens works on economics equations, nurses an intense sunburn, and Gareth and Christin watch some crazy Pushkin remake on DVD with Ralph Fiennes in the next room.

Death Cab For Cutie - "I Will Possess Your Heart"

2008-04-12T16:02:00.003-06:00

From the forthcoming Narrow Stairs album.

Also: holy shit. Ian Curtis-style Instrumentation? For 4+ minutes? Incredibile.

From now on, I do all of my writing in a snow-cave.

"How I wish you could see the potential, the potential of you and me
It's like a book elegantly bound but
In a language you can't read
Just yet"
(nobody does heart-on-sleeve like ben gibbard)

Logan (aka James Howlett)

2008-04-12T00:18:00.007-06:00

Four very crappy photos from last weekend's spectacular, trip to Logan, Utah for the 4th Annual Intermountain Graduate Conference.

(Something)

2008-04-10T22:39:00.005-06:00

I'm here to see Mount Eerie—formerly the Microphones, also known as Phil Elverum—perform at the Department of Safety, a converted fire station in the middle of sleepy downtown Anacortes that can't help but remind me of my old sleepy Eastside suburb and its own all-ages venue, also a decommissioned fire station.

But I'm really here for more convoluted, maybe embarrassing reasons. I'm here because the Microphones' 2001 album, The Glow Pt. 2, is being reissued this April by K Records, and I've been kind of obsessed with the album for the better part of my adult life. I'm here to try to understand where The Glow Pt. 2 comes from. I'm here because the opening lyrics of the album's third song, "The Moon"—"I drove up to the city at night/And found the place where you grew up"—have been stuck in my head for years, and I've decided to take the words as instructions: Anacortes is where Elverum grew up. I'm here because I hoped the moon over Anacortes might sing to me, might reveal some mystery. The moon, however, is not cooperating.

-From "After the Glow" by Eric Grandy in this week's issue of The Stranger

Also of note: Feist's recent performance on Later... With Jools Holland via, somewhat regrettably, Pitchfork Forkcast :*-(

An elegant pause — or merely a pretentious comma?

2008-04-09T15:44:00.006-06:00

In Friday's edition of The Guardian, Jon Henley digs into the apparent demise of the semicolon in France. A fate that, apparently, has been precipitated by the corrosive influence of la langue anglaise:

In the red corner, desiring nothing less than the consignment of the semicolon to the dustbin of grammatical history, are a pair of treacherous French writers and (of course) those perfidious Anglo-Saxons, for whose short, punchy, uncomplicated sentences, it is widely rumoured, the rare subtlety and infinite elegance of a good semicolon are surplus to requirements. The point-virgule, says legendary writer, cartoonist and satirist François Cavanna, is merely "a parasite, a timid, fainthearted, insipid thing, denoting merely uncertainty, a lack of audacity, a fuzziness of thought.

and:

In the blue corner are an array of linguistic patriots who cite Hugo, Flaubert, De Maupassant, Proust and Voltaire as examples of illustrious French writers whose respective oeuvres would be but pale shadows of themselves without the essential point-virgule, and who argue that - in the words of one contributor to a splendidly passionate blog on the topic hosted recently by the leftwing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur - "the beauty of the semicolon, and its glory, lies in the support lent by this particular punctuation mark to the expression of a complex thought.

One caveat: I maintain dim, but happy memories from the high school French regimen that Jesuit education forced upon my pubescent soul. Most of these memories involve Brian Davenport getting demerits/screamed at by Madame Crocker for wearing disgusting, out-of-dress-code khakis or punching other pupils in the back of the head. Or writing J'AI UN BONHEUR on the whiteboard prior to class. I remember little, if any, of French's grammatical tenets, and I definitely don't retain the reading knowledge to chortle appreciatively over Proust's erudite, edgy use of the semicolon.

However, I've suffered through many a semicolon usage-mangling while grading student papers. For some reason, college freshmen love the semicolon almost as much as they love talking about how they can't "relate" to class readings. (Or at least readings that don't use iPhone modification/Lindsay Lohan/pot legalization/Yung Joc as their leitmotifs.)

Henley cites a common worry among French intellectuals that the disappearance of the point-virgule is due to the anglicization of the language-at-large (e.g. "Je voudrais conduire un motor caravan!"). English's journalistic "punchiness" and preference for short, compact sentences is apparently at odds with the long, recondite phrases that characterize good French:

Michel Volkovitch, author, poet and translator, is another ardent defender. "The point-virgule is precious when the subject matter is complex," he says. "For constructing a piece properly, distinguishing themes, sections and sub-sections - in short, for dissipating any haziness or imprecision of thought. It puts things in order, it clarifies. But it's precious, too, for adding a little softness, a little lightness; it can stop a sentence from touching the ground, from grinding to a halt; keeps it suspended, awake. It is a most upmarket punctuation mark."

While I can't speak for French, I'd argue that the semicolon's usefulness in English is remarkably more germane than how Volkovitch views it. When used in service of artifice, I tend to find the semicolon a trifle flashy, as its vertically-aligned, bizarre shape muddles up the reading process. Sometimes this break can be an excellent refresher in the middle of a particularly dense sentence. But, for the most part, I tend to think of the semicolon as the Fran Drescher of punctuation--ostentatious, showy, grainy-voiced, and best taken in very, very small doses. It certainly is nowhere near as graceful, for example, as the em-dash (see previous sentence), a clean, quintessentially modern mark that brings Anderson Cooper to mind.

However, the semicolon becomes preeminently useful in indexing, or in long litanies that involve lots of "ands." I'm still not quite sure what to make of the article's characterization of modern English as dependent upon short, complete utterances. This may be true to some extent in journalism, but hasn't that always been the case? What about literature? Have we effectively Hemingway'd and Hempel'd our entire language? This I doubt very much, especially considering the monstrous, baggy, wonderful sentences that people like Rushdie continue to string together.

Also: apparently, both the colon and semicolon are "middle-class," which makes them objectionable to some literati. Who knew there was such a thing as bourgeois punctuation?

On other notes:

1) I'm sick and running on dayquil, oranges, and ramen.
2) I found this picture, primarily for the benefit of Will Weston and Geof(f):

Impossible is the Opposite of Possible

2008-04-05T21:59:00.001-06:00

What We Talk About When We Talk About The Town Northwest of Denver

2008-03-31T14:46:00.006-06:00

In yesterday's New York Times Magazine (the Spring Travel issue), Florence Williams pens a boho-upper-cruster guide to Boulder . Writing for White People Everywhere she, unsurprisingly, rhetorically homogenizes the town even more than usual:

"The town is rigorously conformist in its alternative way — if you wear river sandals and sport a Timbuk2 messenger bag while sipping a doppio espresso out of a nontoxic cup, you’ll feel right at home. Boulder can veer dangerously close to preciousness. Inspired by the animal rights movement, the city has officially designated pet owners as "guardians.” If an eating establishment uses organic produce or composts its waste, it practically screams the fact, desperate to be heard above all the other eco cacophony. The menu at the Sunflower restaurant, for example, catalogs its lengthy cred right on the cover: it uses certified organic ingredients that are free of synthetic chemicals, fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides; it serves nothing with preservatives, chemical additives, artificial ingredients, growth hormones or antibiotics; it uses only nonirradiated herbs and spices, Celtic salt and filtered water; and it offers organic biodynamic wine."

Dear Ms. Williams: I'm glad you enjoyed your posh trip to Colorado--sipping the expensive goods at Boulder Tea House, coasting down the Boulder Creek Path with your hottie granola bike stud friend, Ryan Van Duzer, and guzzling down an expensive-ass bottle of Pinor Noir at L’Atelier. However, I was hoping that, since you live in Montana and write for Outside (which is the only publication in the world that I hate more than Danielle Steele's ouevre), you might have had the decency not to refer to the town in your article as both "The People's Republic of Boulder" and "The Gore-Tex Vortex." Peroxide blonde Republican housewives from Highlands Ranch use these as pejoratives, often while screeching, harpy-like, into their Bluetooth headseats about how illegal immigration is ruining Douglas County.

But I forgive you, Ms. Williams, for including this gem:

"Then, at Eben G. Fine Park, we come upon what appears to be a uniquely un-Boulder scene: young children pounding each other with foam swords and bludgeons. I investigate. On closer inspection, the kids are wearing elaborate costumes and speaking in medieval English. Turns out they’re part of a 'quest-based' summer camp called Renaissance Adventures."

What do you guys think? What other "un-Boulder scenes" that do, in fact, comprise an essential element of Boulder life do you think Ms. Williams should have included in her Conde Nast-style diptych of the town? Here are a few that came to my mind:

Read the whole article ("Twenty-Five Square Miles Surrounded by Reality") here.

2008-03-27T00:36:00.001-06:00

Wine Cobras and Sea Bears

2008-03-26T00:41:00.010-06:00

After mulling it over the past week or so, I decided against the tattoo. Main reason being that I really can't afford it. I might still get it if I decide to go onto more grad school in the humanities (and the fact that I'm even considering that is probably indicative of how few functioning neurons I have left rattling around up there).

I spent most of my savings on the spring break trip to California, anyway. Chris "Short Stack" Rankin, JB, and the Wheeler brothers whirled into town Saturday afternoon and we spent the next three days camping/in hostels across northern California. Highlights:

* the de Young museum's exterior is absolutely gorgeous.
* returning to Reno sunburned and smelling like campfire smoke, moss, San Francisco, ocean salt, and Pre-Cambrian body odor. German roommates looked at me like I was Cthulu himself, freshly risen from the depths.
* driving across the rolling green and saffron hills at dusk, just before reaching Bodega Head and the Pacific, listening to You, You're a History in Rust. Those hills are endless and beautiful and positively covered with sheep who look like they've OD'd on Zoloft. "We're never going to get there--it's like we're driving on a Mobius strip!"

* kitschy tourist stuff in San Francisco (the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, Chris getting really into the sea lions/hip hop mimes at Fisherman's Wharf, getting lost and buying a new Crass record in Amoeba music, giving a painful chunk of my March paycheck to City Lights bookstore).
* the hostel at Marin--starwatching out on the green, listening to a massive frog orgy down on the muddy basketball court below. In the morning, a wall of fog hung over the trees and it was like being whisked off to the Shire (po-ta-toes!).
* Absolutely fascinated with was how paint/wood coatings/tree bark discolors and peels off of telephone poles, doors, etc. in San Francisco. Maybe something to do with the humidity and weather patterns in the Bay Area. Combined with moss and the occasional bird's nest, it's captivating and kind of makes me wish I did a lot of drugs/was good at action painting.

* a big, sweet-smelling pile of thanks to Captain Will for advising breakfast at It's Tops!, which--as its somewhat sketchy-looking banner indicates--really does have some amazing pancakes. I promise that one day very soon your sticky, nightmare-inducing living room floor and my nervous sleeping bag will become intimate friends. Also hope your Amtrak trip was successful (I hear the trick is to be as drunk as possible, all the time).
* the threat of earthquakes.
* feeding starlings bits of very expensive bread outside the Oakville Grocery in Napa.
* the beach at Bodega Dunes at night, my ankles getting attacked by the surf when I wasn't paying attention. It was straight out of a Kate Beckinsale romantic comedy, especially when Chris was all, "ahhh!!! watch out!!" and I was all, "What?!" and then BAMMWHOOOSH!. Never turn your back to the ocean. It hungers for human flesh.

* No sign of the wayward Philip K. Dick android, but it's probably holed up somewhere in the Tenderloin, feverishly writing novels with the blinds drawn and sawing off the barrel of a shotgun.
* Drinking prodigious amounts of mediocre-to-good wine, then screaming at the ocean. And yes, I'm aware of the uncomfortable echoes of Garden State there.
* Ramen at the Japan Center, and Chris getting sick from eating too much Japanese candy.
* Easter Sunday morning at a coffeehouse in Sonoma County, watching a very leathery old bearded man play guitar, lisping his way through 19th century ballads out on a patio, surrounded by bright flowers.

getting (inkstinctively) inked

2008-03-16T01:04:00.009-06:00

Hey folks--am looking for feedback on the idea I've been tossing around a long time for a tattoo. I'm thinking about getting it done over Spring Break by Gordon at Braindrops in San Francisco (thank you, tax refund!).

Here's the scoop: the pictures of foxes below are taken from medieval bestiaries. I'd like something similar done in black ink, probably either on top or underneath my bicep. I'd like the fox to have a book clamped in its jaws. Implication being: humans are beasts that ingest, consume, and are sustained by text. Implication also being: I miss my Colorado foxes. Underneath the fox I'd like some J.J. Audubon-engraving-style text that reads "et in Arcadia ego." The Latin phrase is most famous from its appearance in a paintings by Poussin (and later Guercino, as in a couple entries below this one), and loosely translated means, "I, too, was in Arcadia." I got the idea from ecocritic Glen Love's awesome article about the real roots of the pastoral (that, in its original, Greek formulation, the pastoral includes a profound awareness of mortality and re-inscribes a continuum, rather than a separation, between human and animal in this awareness). Unfortunately, "et in Arcadia ego" has also been co-opted into Da Vinci-code-style conspiracy theories about the tomb of Christ, but I'm willing to overlook that for its more immediate, literary and artistic baggage. Although, in a way, it doesn't get more ironic than a Dan Brown tattoo.

fig. 1

fig. 2

The other idea is copping Jimmy LaValle's Album Leaf tattoo, but as someone who tries endlessly to indoctrinate students into the anti-plagiarism camp of the Ivory Tower, that seems hypocritical on my part.

So what's the word? Which fox is the bees' knees? Which one looks stupid? Are there cooler line drawings of foxes people are familiar with? Is this idea, in general, a stupid idea? Am I going to regret this for the rest of my miserable, short life? Should I get a tattoo of the Popeish guy in fig. 2 instead? Should I get a giant mural of the Hindenburg doing battle with an armored polar bear from The Golden Campus across my back instead? Or, better yet, should I drive to San Francisco and draw a picture of a Kansas City Royals logo going up in flames on Will Weston's beautiful, youthful forehead while he's sleeping, instead?

First stabs: Ondaatje's Running in the Family and Historiographical Aesthetics

2008-03-08T19:43:00.005-07:00

“and then they looked out at the palisade of cactuses stabbing the purple throat of the sky; they realized that they were thousands of miles from any scenery they understood” –Forster, Passage to India, 181.

"The picturesque represents a point of view that frames the world and turns nature into a series of living tableaux. It begins as an appreciation of natural beauty, but it ends by turning people into figures in a landscape or figures in a painting. Coinciding with a discovery of the natural world, anticipating an imaginative projection of self into the landscape through an act of transport or identification, it assumes an attitude that seems to depend on distance and separation. (414)

C.A. & Co.
Workers Plucking Tea Leaves, 19th C

This separation of self from scene allows the "picturesque eye" to appreciate the "wild and rough parts of nature" (Gilpin 212)-the ruins, hovels, and beggars-aesthetically, because it distances itself physically and emotionally from the moral prospect inherent in the landscape (see Copley 151,153; Ross 19, 34). It aims for an idealized version of the countryside-romanticized, sanitized, feminized-rather than the brutish, poverty-filled reality of rural life.6 As Elizabeth Helsinger notes, this perspective invites the viewer of the landscape to reshape the land, if only visually, which implies a right to possess the land. The viewer then was usually male, of the middle or upper class-the traditional landowner-not "women, children, the laboring classes, or the native inhabitants of the lands to which Britain was extending her empire" (18). Such a view emphasizes the general rather than the particular since, as Gilpin puts it in Forest Scenery, "Distance, no doubt, hides many defects; and many an object may appear well in a remove, which brought nearer, would disgust the eye" (232). Thus the picturesque perspective was one that maintained the status quo, and separated people according to class, gender, and racial hierarchies.

from "Seeing Colonial America and Writing Home About It: Charlotte Lennox's Euphemia, Epistolary, and the Feminine Picturesque," Susan Kubica Howard. Studies in the Novel. Denton: Fall 2005. Vol. 37, Iss. 3; pg. 273.

Recommended - Grief and Ritual

2008-03-06T00:28:00.004-07:00

Bon Iver's video for "The Wolves (Act I and II)", from the album For Emma, Forever Ago.

"This is by any description, a project that almost never happened. Rushing to get to Wisconsin for fresh snows and still frozen air, Director Matt Amato arrived in Eau Claire, hometown of Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, in late January. In the midst of warming up after a long journey and excitedly telling Justin about all the projects he had on the horizon, Matt received a phone call. One of his best friends had suddenly and tragically passed away. All logic and reason were thrown out. Nobody knew what to do. Matt didn't know whether to stay or go, or how he would even manage to get back to the airport in his state of shock. Justin just tried to stay calm. Between a flurry of phone calls and attempting to contact some of Matt's family to accompany him home, night fell. Almost by default, Matt remained in Eau Claire in the company of his newest acquaintance. Something about it was safe, and that was enough. The next morning, Matt read the lyrics to "The Wolves" and felt as if those were the exact words he needed to hear from his departed friend. That pretty much sealed it. Matt would stay and work, even as the thought of making a video became the last thing on their minds. They built a bonfire and just let it burn all day and into the night, and Matt filmed."

Guercino - Et in Arcadia Ego (1618-1620)

"Someday my pain, someday my pain / Will mark you / Harness your blame, harness your blame / And walk through"

Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K): Gumby in Robot Rumpus

2008-03-04T19:20:00.001-07:00

"Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference"

2008-03-02T21:52:00.002-07:00

The Guardian interviews the (in)famous James Lovelock (the Gaia Hypothesis guy) about climate change. He spouts some fatalistic, perhaps hasty conclusions and talks about how much he hates windmills:

On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."

______________________

While I'm not nearly as much of a crank as Lovelock (at least, not yet, although my English 102 teaching is rapidly pushing me that way), I'm starting to find myself closer to this kind of darkly pragmatic, sad sack view of climate change.

Buying chic, $15 dollar recycled grocery shopping bags at the San Francisco MOMA store is not going to ameliorate the crisis. Moby (sorry Postma) cannot save the planet, although he seems more likely to than most people.

Also see What White People Like's take on veganism/vegetarianism.

Consuming different does not make you a better person. Consuming less, showering less often, riding your bike, and dumpster diving might.

"I, for one, welcome our new telepathic parrot overlords"

2008-02-22T00:23:00.003-07:00

Mary Kay Deverich over on the Southern Rockies Nature Blog, run by a gaggle of CSU-Pueblo students (go.. uh... shitty, steel-working Rams!), discusses the wounds caused by fire ants:

"After being stung for the first of many times to come, I did a lot of research. Mostly to find out how to make the hurt go away. What I found out astounded me.

When a fire ant mound is disturbed, multiple fire ants will crawl onto the trespasser. They won't sting until a pheromone signal is sent, then they all sting at the same time, injecting a venom into the victim. Pustules will form on the stung areas and last for days. In my case, as long as two weeks.

If you are planning on treating a mound of fire ants with a bait poison like Amdro, notify your neighbors so you can coordinate your efforts. If only one person tries to poison the fire ants, they simply pack up and move next door.

(AAF4lyfe)

Experiments on colonies included trying to drown them. The fire ants clustered into a ball and kept the ball turning on top of the water so not one single fire ant would have to die. They all took a turn at being submerged.

Another experiment pitted the tiny fire ants against aggressive but much larger ants. The fire ants won the battles.

Fire ants can be, and have been, fatal to small animals including human babies. They have also been known to kill elderly people.

The real reason dinosaurs are extinct is because fire ants ate them."

so cool.

also, new internet haunt:

Reading the Small Intestines of Stoats

2008-02-19T04:32:00.004-07:00

To: Professionalization Portfolio Committee, UNR
From: CJT
Date: February 9, 2008
Subject: Portfolio Contents and Specific Feedback Requests

Attempting to predict my educational future at this point in my life feels a bit like augury, knowing how frustratingly capricious I can be about what I want to do with my life. Sometimes, usually in the dead of night, I still entertain the idea of becoming an anesthesiologist in Finland, or a celebrity chef, or going back and getting another bachelor’s degree in paleontology, so I could dig up freakish things from the Mesozoic in central Utah while a cold six chills in my paleontologist's requisite pickup trick next to a farting Bassett Hound. These things torment the very fibers of my fantasy-prone soul, while simultaneously keeping me from trying to drink the Clorox underneath my sink when I actually think about the pale, imitative spectre my life has degenerated into.

So nothing enclosed here is, in any way, definite. I’ve taken the liberty of including tentative writing for two career routes in this portfolio: applying for a Fulbright fellowship to teach English in South Korea and getting my J. D. in some form of public interest law. Going abroad to garner some cross-cultural experience would be a welcome international respite and a rare opportunity before plunging into law school.

I feel like I could ostensibly succeed in a literature PhD program. I’ve grown up as a writer, critic, human being, and reader during my brief tenure at UNR. For the first time, I’m writing prose that I wouldn’t mind seeing published or reading at a conference. I can read a recent article in Critical Inquiry without reaching for the Aleve. Foucault doesn't make me want to mail anthrax to Tipper Gore anymore, which I guess means I'm starting to understand him better. However, I don’t feel as though I have the kind of vocational zealousness required to grind through another five to seven lackluster years of coursework, teaching, and writing, only to emerge into the tepid job market that has characterized the humanities in recent years. It'd be pouring money, blood, sweat, and little girl frozen tears into an enterprise that would ultimately be worth even less than this:

A mere semester of graduate school in literary criticism and theory has seen my taste in beer decline from a respectable Friday-night-Trippel-occasional-maw-cramming-with-PBR-with-the-gang into a 2-Hamms-a-day regimen. This self-medication is due to both financial constraints and to keep me from killing the students in my robots class who think Freud is "retarded."

It has made ingrained daily pilgrimage quadrangle (TA cubicle-home office-bathroom-kitchen) so firmly into the carpet of my apartment that there are vaccuum-cleaner-wake-like tracks starting to form. I don't even notice I'm in fucking *Reno* most of the time. Graduate school has disconnected me from time and space. I'm a motherfucking academic cosmonaut, hovering balefully somewhere in the upper troposphere, looking down at all the fun and meaningful times I used to have with my girlfriend, cat, parents, and friends.

I can now determine what time of day it is based on the pedestrian traffic flow down in the Nuclear Fallout Shelter, Brutalist architecture-inspired stacks at Gretchell Library.

And all I get out of it are vagaries like a "reading knowledge of literary theory" and "critical thinking skills."

I’ve begun to think that these "skills" need some tempering in real experience. I still remain, for better or worse, a white, liberal college kid from an upper-middle class suburban neighborhood in the Southwest. I don’t even have any tattoos. I've never bought a pound of blow. I've never had a gun put into my mouth. I don't have time for onanism anymore. I haven't been skiing or spiked a tree or monkeywrenched a Bulldozer in years. While literary scholarship can be a worthwhile and tremendously valuable form of activism, I think environmental/human rights law would afford me the opportunity to actually shape the world around me, instead of encountering self-referential, pretentious versions of that world in print and talking about *those* all day long.

Enclosed please find tentative application materials for a Fulbright fellowship and the law schools of Fordham University, the University of Colorado, and the University of Washington. One thing you’re probably already aware of: most law school admissions committees require significantly less paperwork than PhD/MA programs—basically just an LSAT score, letters of recommendation, and personal essays (the prompts for which are school-specific, and which I’ve included). The personal statements for UW and CU are relatively similar, and take a drier, theoretical approach to their prompts. The Fordham essay draws more on the quirks and particulars of my family and educational history (as Fordham’s a Jesuit school, I thought this was appropriate). I am very curious as to which one of these tacks you think is more effective, and would be favored by a law school admissions committee. Assuming I do well on the LSAT (which, hopefully, I will), my GPA, extracurricular activities, academic honors, and graduate degree seem like they would open up doors at top-tier law schools, but I remain cautious about that idea, since I know I’d be going up against the crème de la crème of Ivy League blue blood/international/hideously accomplished upper-crusters. For the record, here’s a tentative list of law schools I’ll be applying to the fall after next: CU, UW, Fordham, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, University of Denver, University of Seattle, Wisconsin, Lewis and Clark, Georgetown, Santa Clara, and Oregon.

I’ve also included the requisite prompt for the Fulbright materials, for your consideration. As I’ll be applying for the fellowship in the fall, I welcome your honesty and candor on my proposal. Please, tear it apart.

"Guten tag!" "Wie geht's?" "Nicht so gut."

2008-02-16T04:30:00.004-07:00

Moving into a sweet, sweet house northwest of UNR with two german graduate students (both *really* into IKEA, vaccuuming, and bottled beer--postma, you're probably somehow related to these people). I'll post pictures once I get dug in over there. Coolest thing about the Haus: it has a bulky, Reagan-era intercom system. I hope it drowns everything you try to say into it in angry spurts of static.

"JENS FDSSDDSZZFHJFDS HEY CANYOU ZZZZTTT MICROWA ZZZZMMMMFFDS BEANBURRITO PLEAZZSDASS? ARE YOU UP THERE???! HEY!! ZZZZMMMMSFSA"

There's also a woodburning fireplace and a chicken coop (!) in the backyard. And we all know what "chicken coop" really means. That's right: impromptu meth lab/tiny discotheque.

Liz, I can burn you Jose Gonzales, but I seem to have misplaced your Superior addy. Can you electronic mail/fb message me that shit? Kthxbai!

Jose Gonzalez - Hints

2008-02-13T01:47:00.001-07:00

fuck nevada. moving to sweden and living off of social welfare and forcing boyce to build me something bauhaus-y on a cold coast

five beer cans on the desk

2008-02-04T00:31:00.000-07:00

"I'd wander in and out of rooms thinking there must be more. I could see Shane was doing the same. We'd go out partying at night, or sometimes wander about town making purchase to give evidence of our life together, but every day there were walls to return to, and little rooms, and silence neither of us understood. There were certain spaces in Shane I hadn't fathomed. There were places in me that he couldn't know."
-Patricia Grace, Baby No-Eyes, 23

he lives inside someone he does not recognize
when he catches his reflection on accident

fucking worthless emo shit. psychological e. bola. i'm going to go put battlestar galactica back on. And procrastinate on work that's piling up in hungry, paper-toothed droves on the desk.

2008-01-13T23:07:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen it yet, Darren Garnick over on Slate attempted to get his 5-month-old daughter photographer with *every* single one of the 2008 prezcans. Except Mike Gravel, because he's "way too creepy."

This one's my favorite, because it looks like McCain's face is literally... like... *coming* off of its decrepit, 70-year-old underskeleton.

And because of the black (?) guy in the background, who looks like he's got a gun.

2008-01-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

W000t!!

2008-01-04T10:16:00.000-07:00

Happy 2006!!!

2008-01-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

> Am reading Callum Roberts's The Unnatural History of the Sea. Am tremendously emo'd out by overfishing as result. Didja know that sharks, in previous centuries, were also called "Requiems"?

From Chapter 18: "The idea of shifting baselines is familiar to us all and does not just relate to the natural environment. It helps explain why people tolerate the slow crawl of urban sprawl and loss of green space, why they fail to notice increasing noise pollution, and why they put up with longer and longer commutes to work. Changes creep up on us, unnoticed by younger generations who have never known anything different. The young write off old people who rue the losses they have witnessed as either backward or dewy-eyed romantics. But what about the losses that none alive today have seen? In most parts of the world, human impacts on the sea extend back for hundreds of years, sometimes more than a thousand. Nobody alive today has seen the heyday of cod or herring. None has watched sporting groups of sperm whales five hundred strong, or seen alewife run so thick up rivers there seemed more fish than water. The greater part of the decline of many exploited populations happened before anybody alive today was born."

>Waffles has become a pillowhog. He used to sleep down at the foot of the bed, but in the past few months His Furryness has migrated incrementally upward. I woke up at 3:12 this morning and he was sleeping on top of my grill, purring. Picture being asphyxiated by a mink stole.

2 Brief Pre-Yule Notes

2007-12-21T21:39:00.000-07:00

.1. While driving through the Great White Mormon Homeland in a snowstorm a couple days ago, discovered The Most Serene Republic. S. had already heard them (+24 cred pts.), but I hadn't. Where the hell have I been the past year? Apparently occasionally skimming The Website That Must Not Be Named (*cough* pitchfork *cough*) over my morning bowl of Puffins isn't enough. Since I apparently I have to hear about the latest, greatest incarnation of highly orchestrated Canuck indie rock from some radio station in motherfucking Salt Lake City.

.2. Michiko Kakutani's book reviews for the Times make me want to drive to New York, hunt her down among all the other tweed-sporting, pinky-extended Literature people, pin her to the ground with my knees, and throw up *into* her mouth.

The immortally-tenured capo of the book reviewing dept. at the Times can make or break a book. First-time novelists jolt awoke at ungodly hours of the morning, the sheets soaked in sweat, "Michiko" on their wan lips.

I find many things about Kakutani distasteful: her bipolar "love 'em or leave 'em" treatment of books, her prissiness and condescension, her self-stylization as a canon reformer and Great Pisser-offer of White Literary Guys, her use of cloying, tight-ass clauses like "the reader will surely appreciate" instead of saying what *she* thinks. Unfortunately, every so often, she tries to be funny, which results in writing as nostril-curdling as the scent I occasionally pick up from my toenail clippings just before I toss them into the bathroom trash can. (OMG Michiko! Austin Powers is, like, too funny!)

A lot of this vitriol stems from the tongue-lashing she gave The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Which is a book that I would possibly take a bullet for. But Kakutami hatez eet. The plumage of her writing puffs itself up into vapid didacticism in the review's conclusion:

"[F]or readers it's a Pyrrhic victory: for most of us, art is supposed to do something more than simply mirror the confusions of the world. Worse, ''Wind-Up Bird'' often seems so messy that its refusal of closure feels less like an artistic choice than simple laziness, a reluctance on the part of the author to run his manuscript through the typewriter (or computer) one last time."

Blech.

And I'm not alone in my Kakutami-loathing. Read Ben Yagoda's more even-handed treatment of the critic in Slate. But the dude also went to Yale with her, so he has to be nice. But I think I'm at the point where the only thing I hate more than MK is this:

oh, and btw, while snouting around on the internet, i found sweet pictures of Murakami. Although I can't figure out exactly what he's doing in the first one. Praying? Toking out of a one-hitter? Playing some secret, really cool game with his thumbs that he made up? Writing? I have no idea. The curiosity is destroying my innards.

from the bestshowontelevision

2007-12-15T16:20:00.001-07:00

The Carpenters - Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft

2007-12-06T13:13:00.001-07:00

i'm just waiting for soulja boy tellem to start using nasa stock footage in the videos for his hot jamz

Obligatory wet blanket, meadow muffin-ideology entry with love from C

2007-12-05T03:43:00.000-07:00

As we stood in line at the grocery store with our bread, lettuce, and chocolate chip cookies, this is what my husband told me that made me turn away so quickly I was left dizzy:
His friend Chuck, a federal government biologist, was flying over the Arctic Ocean for the annual bowhead whale count While scanning for whales, he saw polar bears, but in ways never before recorded. He saw females with cubs swimming in the sea with no ice pack in sight He saw a drowned polar bear floating in a sharp blue sea, then another drowned bear, and another, no ice or land, just open water for more than 50 miles in every direction . . .

Three years after that day in the grocery store, everyone knows that polar bears are drowning. So, when my husband tells me that, on his last flyover, Chuck saw dozens of polar bears stranded on a single drifting iceberg, I’m not surprised. When he says there was no ice pack or land in sight, and the bears would all most likely drown, I feel once more that abiding dismay, that upwelling of anxiety, and say to him:
“I don’t know what to do with that information.”
“Yes,” he replies, “lots of people feel that way.”

Already some areas in the Arctic are warning ten times faster than the rest of the planet
Already Artic sea ice forms later in fall, depriving coastal villages of the natural barrier from fierce storms, which now erode their shores and flood their houses. Of 213 Alaska Native villages, 184 face flooding and erosion.
Already the sea surges and rises, and the villages of Point Hope, Kivalina, St. Michale, and Shishmaref have begun plans to move their villages inland—refugees of global warming.
Already the ice breaks up weeks earlier in spring, constricting the time villagers have to hunt walrus and oogruk. Constricting hunting for polar bears, too; the earlier the breakup, the poorer the condition of the polar bears. Declining conditions are most pronounced in their southern range: the bears are becoming thinner; females are giving birth to fewer young; cubs are taking longer to wean; fewer cubs are surviving to adulthood. In Hudson’s Bay, for every week that the ice breaks up earlier, polar bears come ashore 20 pounds lighter. Within a decade, females could become so small that they won’t be able to bear young.
The polar bears shrink as their ice shrinks . . .

Writer and teacher Carol Bly says she most admires writers who can speak of beauty and horror together; who can describe a shimmering landscape, and then have some dark thing happen in that landscape; who can write of Eden, and the fall of Adam and Eve.
It’s an old story, beauty and horror, and we’re drawn to it, drawn to just a handful of tales, told again and again with different details, same endings. Stories of forgiveness, rediscovery, redemption; of joy, wonder, light emanating—surprise!—from dark, sorrow, despair.
Would I have remembered what my husband had told me if the Arctic ice held no allure? If the polar bears had just been beautiful, and also not doomed? If his friend had seen their shimmering whiteness against the glazed blue of multi-year ice, and not small cubs swimming with no ice in sight, not the body of a white bear, face down, in an azure sea?
Would it have mattered?...

Global.
Warming.
I can’t make sense of it. I can’t read about it. I can’t talk about it. It’s too big. What—large, stronger, more frequent hurricanes in the south, more rampant fires in the north? Another shelf of the Antarctic fallen off, adrift, melting? Animal populations shifting northward, northern species like polar bears and lynx running out of room? What can I do about al that? Here—I’ll recycle newspapers. I’ll pick up litter in the park. I’ll bring my own coffee cup to the latte stand. I’ll even think about driving a small car, or a hybrid. Promise. OK? Good enough?
Face down. An azure sea. No. Not good enough. None of this. None of the two thousand things I can think of to do is enough.

-From Marybeth Holeman's "What Happens When Polar Bears Leave" in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 14.2 (Summer 2007): 183-194

The class they're actually paying me to teach in the spring

2007-12-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

ENGLISH 102: Composition II - Robots!

“Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease.”
-Karel Capek

Description and Objectives
In 2005, Daniel Wilson, a Robotics PhD from Carnegie Mellon, published a firmly tongue-in-cheek book entitled How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion. This course may not adequately prepare you for the event of a robot uprising. However, it will encourage you to view the cultural and scientific implications of artificial intelligence, automation, and to ask the question, “what happens when we can no longer dintinguish between what is human and what is machine?” We will examine a wide range of literary, economic, historical, cultural, and scientific texts that use robots as their touchstones. Examples include Philip K. Dick’s cyborg noir Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the modernist roots of the machine aesthetic in Futurism, Honda’s groundbreaking work with ASIMO (the closest we’ve yet come to a human-like robot), and Donna Haraway’s theories about gender and cyborgs.

This course will build upon the critical thinking and writing-as-process models introduced in English 101. It will also incorporate library research methodology, evaluating sources, specific citation styles, and critical inquiry. You’ll design individual projects that will guide your progress and research throughout the semester, and culminate in a ten-page argumentative essay. Most of all, it will encourage you in a decidedly unrobotic fashion to think for yourself and ask difficult questions that are explored through your own research and writing.

Required Materials and Texts
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. New York: Del Ray, 1996.
The Curious Researcher by Bruce Ballenger. 5th ed. New York: Pearson, 2007.
Other assorted readings will be available on e-reserve.
A notebook
We’ll also be watching Blade Runner (1982), dir. Ridley Scott.

What Would Georgia O'Keefe Think?

2007-11-27T01:58:00.000-07:00

"New Mexico Alien Ad Stirs Controversy"

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Instead of highlighting New Mexico's picturesque desert landscapes, art galleries or centuries-old culture, a new tourism campaign features drooling, grotesque office workers from outer space chatting about their personal lives.

The 30-second TV spots — which lead in roundabout fashion to the tag line that New Mexico may be "the best place in the Universe" — are provocative, funny and bold.

But to increasingly vocal critics, the state-financed ad campaign is a possible threat to the well-being of the state's $5.1 billion tourism industry. In other words, while the ads may yield a chuckle or two, the joke is on New Mexico.

Critics say the less-than-cuddly, reptilian spacemen may be more apt to baffle or frighten away a tourist than reel one in.

"New Mexico has a lot to offer — we don't need to bring our standards down," said Ken Mompellier, head of the convention and visitors bureau in Las Cruces, the state's fast-growing second-largest city, which has refused to use the alien ads to bolster local tourism pitches, as it normally would.

"My first question would be: What does this campaign show of the things that we are known for?" Mompellier asked. "I look at this campaign and I don't see the fit. And the things I'm hearing from people, some of it is very negative."

Dale Lockett, president of the state's largest convention and visitors bureau in Albuquerque, addressed the issue in a speech at a statewide conference in October.

Lockett told the creators of the ads, Santa Monica, Calif.-based M&C Saatchi, that their handiwork, while innovative, appeals to the wrong audience. Why, Lockett wondered, was the state targeting its centerpiece ad campaign to a younger crowd when baby boomers have time and money to travel?

Rival neighboring states like Utah (with its "Life Elevated" campaign) and Colorado ("Let's Talk Colorado") appeal more directly to older, richer boomers in their tourism campaigns.

_______

What is "Let's Talk Colorado" supposed to mean, anyway? I'm picturing a lot of white people in crocs in some microbrewery bitching about I-25 underpass floodings. That, or an extended discussion involving this guy:

Three words: C.G.I.

2007-11-20T06:02:00.000-07:00

"Eventually, Beowulf shows up (you know it’s him because he never stops yelling, “I am BEOWULF!”) and things get homoerotic: “There have been many brave men who have come to taste my lord’s mead.” A bit of sensual chain-mail unbuckling later, and Beowulf is naked—I mean fully nude, for no reason, in front of the queen—and fights Grendel with his bare hands. John Malkovich contributes a sarcastic slow clap. Then Angelina Jolie’s golden boobz come out of a lake. Then Beowulf bones her. Somewhere, your college English professor gnaws his own face off, and Robert Zemeckis unwraps a single, sticky, delicious prune."

From The Stranger's review of Beowulf.

robogoat

2007-11-14T12:41:00.000-07:00

Via Pink Tentacle

Robot goat feeds on gambler misfortune

Unlucky gamblers at the Edogawa Kyotei boat race course in Tokyo have a new way to ease their frustrations after botching a bet — they can feed their losing tickets to a robotic goat. Edogawa Kyotei enlisted the help of the ticket-munching robo-goat at the end of last month in an effort to reduce litter inside the facility. The 1.6-meter tall Rocky Mountain goat, which has a thick coat of white fur and ticket-detecting sensors in its mouth, devours about 500 tickets per day — many of which would otherwise end up on the floor. The goatkeeper says, “It eats up your frustrations so that you will have better luck with the next race.”

***

If only they had a giant grizzly bear robot at the Cal-Neva downtown that ate actual gamblers.

back pages

2007-11-09T21:29:00.000-07:00

From "Winter" in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

"I lay a cheery log fire and settle in. I'm getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully cruel. I never cease to marvel at the newspapers. In my life I've see one million pictures of a duck that has adopted a kitten, or a cat that has adopted a duckling, or a sow and a puppy, a mare and a muskrat. And for the one millionth time I'm fascinated. I wish I lived near them, in Corpus Christi or Damariscotta; I wish I had the wonderful pair before me, mooning about the yard . . . I wait for the annual aerial photograph of an enterprising fellow who has stamped in the snow a giant Valentine for his girl. Here's the annual chickadee-trying-to-drink-from-a-frozen-birdbath picture, captioned, 'Sorry, Wait Till Spring,' and the shot of an utterly bundled child crying piteously on a sled at the top of a snowy hill, labeled, 'Needs a Push.' How can an old world be so innocent?

"Finally, I see tonight a picture of a friendly member of the Forest Service in Wisconsin, who is freeing a duck frozen onto the ice by chopping out its feet with a hand ax. It calls to mind the spare, cruel story Thomas McGonigle told me about herring gulls frozen on ice off Long Island. When his father was young, he used to walk out on Great South Bay, which had frozen over, and frozen the gulls to it. Some of the gulls were already dead. He would take a hunk of driftwood and brain the living gulls; then, with a steel knife he hacked them free below the body and rammed them into a burlap sack. The family ate herring gull all winter, close around a lighted table in a steamy room. And out on the Bay, the ice was studded with paired, red stumps."
-Annie Dillard

in bocca al lupo

2007-11-01T04:28:00.000-06:00

So. This past Sunday evening. I caught a student plagiarizing from an IGN review of a She Wants Revenge album while working my way blearily through a huge, forlorn stack of papers.

Some background: I’ve mentioned plagiarism three times in my class. Once, on the first day when I handed out the syllabus and read my academic dishonesty policy aloud. I also brought it up briefly when we talked about how to effectively paraphrase something, and what paraphrasing means (in the third or fourth week of school). And, about a month and a half ago in mid-September, I spent an entire class period discussing plagiarism, how it can ruin your academic career/life and drive you to drink Skoal. I also mentioned how it was one of my main pet peeves--second only to people who get drunk and barge their way up to the stage at concerts to dance and yell/fist pump at Colin Meloy, and bad Jar Jar Binks imitations. After the discussion (read: jeremiad), I asked my students if they understood the definition and consequences of plagiarism. They dutifully chirruped a unanimous “Yes.” Case closed. And I’ve emphasized over and over again that I understand that Things in College Happen (your roommate gets mono and you have to boil everything in your dorm room, you lose your dog grooming job at Petsmart, your significant other cheats on you with some creepster at a warehouse rave, Will Weston steals your wallet and uses its contents to make a pastiche poem about baseball that obviously rips off Walt Whitman). And that, should a Thing happen that interferes with a paper in my class, you should tell me about it in lieu of copying something off the Internet because you’re too frazzled and time-bankrupt to come up with something of your own, regardless of how undeniably shitty it is. And while I might have to grade your assignment as being late, a B for a completion grade on a memoir looks better than failing a class and a Treasure Island-ish Black Dot on your transcript.
So it was hard not to take this case of plagiarism (which was egregious, obvious in its attempt to deceive, and ludicrously easy to spot—teachers know how to use the Google just as well as yon chilluns do) extremely personally. In a way, it was a violation of the trust I thought I’d established with my students—a trust that I hope is still in place with the rest of my class.

Dealing with this student, who caught me in the hallway the day after I handed him the letter detailing the charges, pleaded mightily for his grade, and started crying, has really thrown me for an ominous loop this week. I can't sleep, my eyelid twitch has come back, and I’ve noticed a rapid decline in my ability to think clearly about anything at all. I haven't even been huffing anything of late. While I know that the student made a choice and is being flogged by the institutional cat o' nine tails accordingly (vis-à-vis Foucault), it’s hard for me not to feel like I’ve wrecked the shit out of someone’s burgeoning, fluttering, freshmanian life. And yeah, I realize that college isn’t for everyone. But still.

Faking this teachery shit is ridiculous.

And who's She Wants Revenge, anyway? And what's dark-wave? Where're Chris Rankin and his flaxen, musical mustache when I need them most?

immanence and eminence

2007-10-27T19:50:00.000-06:00

"We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. [...] A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss." -Gilles Deleuze

10.30.07

a bug poem I heard earlier

2007-10-16T03:42:00.000-06:00

Vacuuming Spiders

I admire their geometrical patience,
the tidy way they wrap up leftovers,
their willingness to be the earth's
most diligent consumers of small bitternesses.

Sometimes at night I hear them
casting silk threads, clicking their spinnerets,
plucking their webs like blind Irish harpists.
I can almost taste the fruit of the fly
like sucking the pulp from a grape.

But when their webs on the ceiling
begin to converge, and the floor
glitters with shards of insect wings
I drag out the vacuum
and poke its terrible snout under the sofa,
behind the radio—everywhere,

for this is the home of a human being
and I must act like one
or the whole picture goes haywire.

Poem: "Vacuuming Spiders" by Charles Goodrich (this guy:

, who I had the pleasure to hear read earlier today and who makes me want to move to Oregon right now to live in a wooly, buggy, irised, wet climate instead of this one, which dries out my very eyeballs)
from his excellent book Insects of South Corvallis.

breakdowns/weird fishes

2007-10-14T01:05:00.001-06:00

*Went flyfishing with Dave, Kyhl, and Seth up at Frenchman Reservoir in California for the second Saturday in a row. Last time we left around two in the afternoon and ended up spending a good hour or two drinking yellowbelly cans of Coors and waiting hungry trout to emerge from the black still deep center of the lake and make their way to the shallows to look for tasty-looking bugs. They didn't start hitting until sunset. So this time we left around 3:30 and made it up to Frenchman just a bit before the sun started to perfunctorily sink behind the Sierra foothills.
Fish eyes are creepy looking.
I haven't caught anything either time (Dave and Kyhl each have reeled in a rainbow trout both times we've gone), but that hasn't really mattered. Grad school so far has reminded me of that patch of canyon quicksand Postma found when we were backpacking the Paria River in southern Utah a couple years ago: thick, suffocating, grainy, and skin-flayingly difficult to extricate yourself from. But once you're out, you giggle like you're being fed nitrous in a dentist's chair and roll around porcinely in the warm dirt, pleased with yourself for having pulled yourself out of a situation that you willingly threw yourself into in the first place. It was nice to pass a warm, October afternoon free from grading student papers and reading existential-tailspin-inducing, paper-bag-hyperventilating poststructuralist theory.

*There's a big field behind the apartment complex where Sarah and I live. They're apparently going to build a retail/casino complex on it in a couple years, but right now it's just a big patch of dirt, empty cigarette packs, and depressed-looking sagebrush. Up until a couple weeks ago, a bunch of construction-related trash and other detritus had littered the field--railroad ties, a couple stained couch cushions, brightly colored bins, and Coke bottles. In the middle of the field, the kids in our apartment complex have started building a fort out of the trash.

*Also, directly in front of our apartment, a sprinkler head broke the week before last. Every night around three in the morning, and again around ten AM, a titanic geyser of water spurts into the sky, cresting at a height just above the rooftops. It's actually quite magnificent, but Roxie refuses to go down the stairs when it's going (who would've thought we'd adopted a hydrophobic border collie mix?). I can't help but wonder if the huge torrent of water that runs down the sidewalk towards the building is eroding the foundations of the building and we're slowly sinking into the state of Nevada.

*"In Rainbows" is just as cardiac arrest good as one might expect, but favorites are "Nude," "All I Need," and "Reckoner."

* "Therefore, bow your back and fish when you can. When you get to the water you will be renewed. Leave as much behind as possible. Those motives to screw your boss or employees, cheat on your spouse, rob the state, or humiliate your companions will not serve you will if you expect to be restored in the eyes of God, fish, and the river, which will reward you with hollow waste if you don't behave. You may be cursed. You may be shriven. You may be drowned. At the very least, you may snap off your fly in the bushes.
We like to think of the idea of the selective trout; it serves our anthropocentricity to believe that we are in a duel of wits with a fish, a sporting proposition. We would do well to understand that trout and other game fish are entirely lacking in sporting instincts. They would prefer to dine unmolested and without being eaten themselves . . .
The base of difficulty from the angler's point of view is the quantity of food items appearing before the trout. If he can key in and fill up, the angler may have a problem . . . In this, the trout is like the interstate motorist who, having engaged the cruise control, sleepily notes at the mouth of an obscure off-ramp a sign that reads FREE BEER. Most motorists would conclude somewhat abstractly that there must be a catch. The paranoid motorists would conclude that it's an ambush. A few motorists, the dumb ones, might disengage the cruise control and pull off."
-Thomas McGuane, "The Longest Silence"

Further Forays into the Icy, Rich Coffers of Icelandic Music

2007-10-07T03:44:00.000-06:00

Seabear --it's not cold in seabearia!

The Noi Albinoi Soundtrack (by Slowblow)

Slowblow

Mr. Silla & Mongoose

And Kitchen Motors Records, which apparently is defunct or something.

And I don't understand why there are so many terrible americana folk-rock bands from Iceland on myself. They don't even have a pedal steel amongst the lot of them.

Oh!
and this guy, who looks like a viking and who I want to drink a whole bottle of wild turkey with and then go hold hands with next to jef's bedside and watch jef sleep with

Gently furious nostalgia

2007-09-30T23:43:00.000-06:00

From The Hobgoblin of Little Minds:

"Once, when I was about 8 or so, Rich called me behind the high counter in the shop. He had a miniature workshop back there with all kinds of dies to stamp patterns into the leather, knives, bottles of leather stain, needles and waxed thread, awls, and punches. He pushed aside some scraps of leather that he saved and would someday make into something small, like a little leather ring fastened with a single brass rivet. Hiding behind the scraps was a paperback book, which he handed to me. It was small but fat, with pages that were wrinkled from many fond readings and swollen with moisture. It smelled of leather and moldy paper. The Wind in the Willows it said in ornate script on the cover. The ink line drawings inside–pictures of Toad, Mole, good ol’ Ratty, and Badger–pulled me in an made me wish that I could live forever in that neat little world where well-tended fires and tea with lots of toasted bread and dripping butter were inside every snug little cottage.

A couple of years later, when I read The Hobbit for the first time, I felt the same sense of nostalgic homesickness for a home that I had never known. The Water Rat’s messy but comfortable little place appealed to me much more than Toad’s ostentatious brick pile, and Badger’s meandering tunnels filled me with excited joy, much the same say Bag End made me long for a house with round doors and windows. The world of the animals, even keeping in mind Toad’s crazy escapade in gaol, seemed both safe and exciting, exhilarating and soothing. At times I longed so wistfully for animals who could talk to me that I felt ill with disappointment. I wanted a perfect little house on the bank of a river–or more properly, The River–a small boat to mess about in, and an ever-changing but never-changing view of flowing water outside my windows.

I read the book, which now, upon my second reading seems far too richly complex to be cast aside as “children’s literature,” and handed it back reluctantly. I was not so much reluctant to give up the book but reluctant to give up the world in that book. Already I was learning from watching my parents that the world was not a nice place for families and little kids and dogs and kittens, but it was a cold, unfair, heartless place sadly deficient in friendly Badgers and comforting, steaming cups of tea.

A year later after we moved away to Oceanside, a group of older boys whose dads were at Pendleton beat me up because of the little leather ring I wore on my right hand. “Fag,” they called me and punched me in the stomach. A few weeks later, the same boys stole my bicycle. I didn’t have Toad’s friends to help me battle against the weasels and stoats who had stolen my things. I didn’t really have any friends at all but my books, with their comforting lies and imaginary worlds transporting me briefly away from sad, angry parents, unfriendly new schools, and poverty.

Rereading the book now leaves a bittersweet taste in my mouth. I can still feel the longing for that world, can still sense the magic in Grahame’s words–a magic my own words are miserably unable to replicate. Like all old emotions recollected decades later, they have a light layer of parlor dust on them, so light the slightest breath will blow it away. The colors have faded and mellowed, but inside the goofy little hippie kid displays a gap-toothed smile and settles in with his old friends Mole, Water Rat, Toad, and Badger."

Pen(ning) in the Wild

2007-09-21T01:34:00.000-06:00

From Men's Journal's recent article "The Cult of Chris McCandless," talking about Into The Wild's recent Hollywood treatment by Sean Penn, and its inevitable pratfalls:

"Woven through with the timeless themes of self-invention, risk, and our complex relationship to the natural world, the enigma of Chris McCandless is once again being debated, more vociferously than ever. Was his death a Shakespearean tragedy or a pitch-black comedy of errors? What impact has the tale and its renown had on our perception of Alaska? And perhaps most tantalizingly: Did Krakauer, and now Penn, get key parts of the story wrong?

From almost the moment he was found, the meaning of Chris McCandless's life and lonely death has been fiercely argued. The debate falls into two camps: Krakauer's visionary seeker, the tragic hero who dared to live the unmediated life he had dreamed of and died trying; or, as many Alaskans see it, the unprepared fool, a greenhorn who had fundamentally misjudged the wilderness he'd wanted so desperately to commune with. If the cult that has grown up around McCandless is any indication, we want the romantic portrait to be true: that he made a series of small mistakes that compounded in disaster. But the truth doesn't always conform to
Hollywood's ideals..."

My favorite line in the article:

As he steered into the rushing water, Keith had shouted to me over the straining engine, "You know what the state motto of Alaska is? 'Hold my beer and watch this!'"

From the inbox this morning

2007-09-12T11:10:00.000-06:00

"University Police would like to inform you that two bear sightings on campus have been reported during the early morning hours of September 12, 2007. The last report was that a bear was seen near the Texaco gasoline station on Virginia at approximately 6:40 AM.

If you see one of these animals, please DO NOT APPROACH THE BEARS. CALL 911. Other safety tips include:

- Don’t try to get a “closer look”;
- Do not corner one of these bears;
- If there are 2 or more of you, stand close together to appear more imposing;
- Make loud noises, such as shouting;
- Try to avoid eye contact, as some bears find this threatening behavior;
- Don’t turn your back or run."

More faults than the state of California

2007-09-10T23:19:00.000-06:00

"Why is she not encouraged to think and penetrate through externals to principles? She should be seen, after the first dreamlike years of unconscious childhood are passed, meekly and reverently questioning the opinions of others, calmly contemplating beauty in all its forms, studying the harmony of life, as well as outward nature, deciding nothing, learning all things, gradually forming her own ideal, which, like that represented in the sculptured figures of the old Persian sovereigns, should cheeringly and protectively hover over her. Society would attract her, and then gracefully mingling in it, she should still be herself, and there find her relaxing, not her home. She should feel that our highest hours are always our lonely ones, and nothing is good that does not prepare us for these. Beautiful and graceful forms should come before her as revelations of divine beauty, but no charm of outward grace should tempt her to recede one hair’s breadth from her uncompromising demand for the nobles nature in her chosen companion, guided in her demands by what she finds within herself, seeking an answering note to her own inner melody, but not sweetly lulling herself into the belief that she has found in him the full-toned harmony of the celestial choirs . . . Let her see that the best our most sympathizing friend can do for us is, to throw a genial atmosphere around us, and strew our path with golden opportunities; but our path can never be another’s, and we must always walk alone.”
-Sophia Ripley, “Woman.” January 1841. In Transcendentalism: A Reader. Ed. Joel Myerson. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 317.

Take that, Ralph Waldo Emerson! Like I imagine a lot of other readers who’ve come across (in my case, been drowning in) the “high priests” of Transcendentalism, I’ve been more than a little discomforted by their metaphysical machismo. In seminar last Tuesday, a common point of agreement was that Fuller and S. Ripley, as well as Lydia(n) Emerson, were progressive in that they took the extreme philosophy of self-dependence (read: solipsism) of the male Transcendentalists to the next logical conclusion of mutual reciprocity and even interdependence. And addressing stuff like, you know, slavery.

As the title of the course is “The Legacy of Transcendentalism,” I’ve been thinking a lot about what all this stuff means in the context of America today, and what exactly the baggage (both negative and positive) of the movement is. It’s easy to see how Emerson’s “The American Scholar” and Thoreau’s spiritual inquiry into absolute self-reliance have perhaps been extended into the rugged individualism mythos (implicitly masculine) that still reigns supreme in some circles today, particularly libertarian conservative ones. That the only true virtue is being able to discover universal truths through one’s own effort and intuition, not through the mediating forces of social institutions such as church, state, and school. The American Dream itself isn’t much more than an uneasy, paradoxical marriage of New Englander Transcendental thought and robust Adam Smith capitalist ideology.

Still, Emerson bugs the heck out of me. I recognize just how important his thought is in terms of valuing Nature as the seat of the soul’s reflection, and how resonant his calls are for a true American literature were in his day. He’s also about, say, 4,500 times more articulate than even the most eloquent spokespeople amongst us today (the talking Parkay container excepted). Still, I can see how Muir and Beston and Dillard and (especially) Barry Lopez radically revised Emerson's ideas away from Nature only being interpreted in terms of its use value. Emerson’s Nature, as I read it, is mostly a catalogue of how Nature is used transparently to arrive at Transcendental truths (whatever they may be), rather than visualizing Nature as something with self-evident value, to be equated on equal terms with humanity. Something with its own subjecthood that demands living with rather than living over.

I’ve started reading Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, which chronicles a couple years he spent living in self-imposed isolation in a Lilliputian beach house on the shore of Cape Cod in the early 1920s. While some aspects of the book are just as distressing as Emerson’s (it continues the idea that nature and culture are separate, indivisible ideas, for one thing. Oh, and he’s apparently part of the Ed Abbey school of keeping women out of the wilderness), I’m heartened by how, in a distinctly modernist way, he resists the urge to symbolize (and in the process anthropomorphize) nature. Instead he sees it distinctly on its own terms, and the book is starting to read to me like an imagist poem, without hardly any metaphysical baggage. Things don’t mean, to Besson. They just be. In a liminal space (quite literally the Outermost) removed from other human beings, in a position of absolute periphery, Besson allows space for the unknowable, the miraculous rituals of human and animal death and revival. Keats’s negative capability. Poetic consciousness. Regrounding himself in this knowledge of the unknowable, the insight of the insightlessness, Besson is able to cure the shiftlessness and alienation of industrial modernism and his personal trauma brought on by his experiences in WWI.

The book also has funny bits about animals in it, if you’re into that.

e.g. this picture (from birdfunny): "I'll have you know this a public restaurant and if I want to eat here there's not a damn thing you can do about it!"

Of course, there are a few practical complications. Not everyone in the world (far from it) has the ability to retire to the world’s most solitary spaces to find comfort like Besson, and I already mentioned a possible, urgent ecofeminism complaint. And I think there’s something to be said for the idea of nature and culture and community in symbiosis—see Bill McKibben and Rachel Carson, for starters. But as far as the 70s aphorism that the “personal is the political,” and if we take self-knowledge and awakening as a necessary step in the larger goal of positive global change, it wouldn’t hurt for everyone to have a Bessonian experience.

With that said, somebody buy me a beach hut on the coast of Maine so I can look like Castaway Hanks and babble incoherently, red-eyed, saltwater-drunk-crazed about a connection between Yonnic symbols, talking bivalves, and phosphorescent algae.

Friday/Animals

2007-09-07T21:02:00.000-06:00

It's a bay bay!

have a good weekende

I guess I'm kind of out of the loop...

2007-09-06T19:54:00.000-06:00

and for anyone else who is, too, here's the trailer for the new Wes Anderson film, The Darjeeling Limited, which comes out this month.

Dammit, Jef

2007-09-04T07:33:00.000-06:00

The chupacabras escaped.

And somebody buy me one of those "2007: summer of the chupacabra" t-shirts mentioned at the bottom of the article.

Hipster Olympics

2007-08-29T02:14:00.001-06:00

Pedagogical Emulation

2007-08-27T22:30:00.001-06:00

In the core writing orientation, one facilitator asked us to list personality traits and the classroom manners of our most inspiring, eloquent teachers. Then we were supposed to try to figure out how to best model ourselves after them.

In lieu of that, I think I'm just going to model my teacherly persona on this guy. Will Weston can be the snow miser, since I think he actually already has the top hat and faux icicle pinstripe ensemble. Plus I can't imagine anyone else best described--as Mrs. Claus puts it--as a "big ham."

When The Mayan Apocalypse Comes, It Will Be Wearing Tube Socks

2007-08-25T12:20:00.000-06:00

Dear long-patient apostles:

Hello from Sleezy, Breezy Reno, Nevada! I know it's been nigh on a month since my last tidings. I apologize: we just got the Information Superhighway installed in our apartment about a week ago, and even then I couldn't connect to it until more recently because we needed a spare ethernet cable to hook up the wifi. Going through three weeks without internet is quite an awakening: psychologically salubrious, as well as forcing me out of the darkened hampster cage of an apartment into the bright, neon, trash- and sagebrush-cluttered world of northern Nevada.

I'm starting a new feature on this thing called, following the lead of a new professor, "How Many Renos?" HMRs? is an attempt to catalogue and rate the staggering, bewildering things that one happens upon/sees/eats in this town that one could not conceivably happen upon/see/eat, then throw back up in any other place in the world. Where else in the world can you watch someone with meth mouth compete in and win the Great Nugget Cook-out competition in downtown Sparks? Where else can one break into a fit of giggling at the "Laub Laub Law" billboards all around town, aghast in their familiarity to Arrested Development? The giant bronze statue of a pregnant tiger, rearing up its haunces inside Circus Circus?

So, yeah. Anytime I see anything like that, I'll try to write it down. And rate it, on a scale from 1-5 Renos.

I hope everyone's doing great. I miss you terribly and will write again soon--I got a nasty splinter in my thumb yesterday while scrambling up an embankment on the east shore of Lake Tahoe that is making typing agonizing. I also filleted my big toe on a pointy rock while swimming in the lake and had a sickening moment where I remembered that sharks can smell a dissolved drop of blood from hundreds of miles away in the water. Lake Tahoe is very, very deep, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of freakish, google-eyed, incandescent Lake Shark cruising around its inky depths, sniffing for tourist blood and waiting to surface.

Border Collie Attacks Pumpkin

2007-07-27T02:01:00.001-06:00

This is the kind of dog I adopted?

Against the Wind, Pt. 1

2007-07-24T00:04:00.000-06:00

About a week or so ago, while sputtering around a gonad-meltingly Boulder in my car, I flew off the handle. I like to complain in the car, so this wasn't really a big surprise. Sarah and I were idling at the stoplight at Folsom and Valmont when a tanned guy wearing New Balances, a mesh hat, a heart rate monitor, a fuel belt, an iPod, and a microfiber t-shirt jogged across the crosswalk, passing in front of the windshield. He was going extremely slow. There are billions of this guy across Boulder, south suburban Denver where I grew up, and other predominantly white, upper-middle class, Dharma and Greg-loving communities throughout the urban United States. It's difficult to explain *why* exactly guys like him irritate me so much, and when I tried to articulate it, Sarah looked at me like I'd eaten bad fish. So, after mulling the matter over further, I'm going to try to explain why the running/triathlon industry (one in which I have been encamped to various degrees over the past eight years) has effectively, and perhaps unknowingly or even unwilling, flown in the face of the birdshit-crazy, liberating Zen koan that was previously American distance running. I'm talking 'bout the running boom that was set off and spurred vigorously on by Frank Shorter and Steve Prefontaine, that swept America with a Nike waffle-soled vengeance in the seventies and eighties.

Two caveats: I know that this is largely an exercise in waddling gleefully about in the sallow mud of hypocracy. I myself have purchased breathable, mesh-paneled running shorts at REI costing more than the GDP of Sub-Sarahan African nations, to mention nothing of the small fortune my father and I have effectively poured into the coffers of Clif Bar, Inc. The peanut butter ones are the best.
Also: I am all too aware that this sort of nostalgia-freighted philosophizing is overly simplistic and reductive in its machinations--the glimmering, dustily pastoral landscape of tight, soft cotton t-shirts, knee socks with chartreuse racing stripes, handlebar moustaches, and Miller Lite is largely one of my own fashioning.

One of my favorite scenes in Rocky IV is a kind of strange, dual-narrative training montage. It switches between shots of Stallone in self-imposed exile somewhere in the wooly armpit of Siberia, fulfilling the American dream of Protestant self-improvement as he works his body into a sinewy boxing beast in the snowy wastes. As you probably remember, this narrative is interwoven with shots of Ivan Drago, Rocky's Soviet nemesis, a superhuman killing machine that's almost seven feet tall, takes shots of anabolic steroids, trains with the help of biofeedback machines that look like leftovers from a Star Trek movie set, and who killed the shit out of Apollo Creed in the film's opening salvo (pun intended). The climax of the montage, of course, is when Rocky finishes climbing a huge snowy peak and screams "DRAGO!!!!" out acrost the icy expanse as the camera quickly zooms out into the clouds. The dichotomy is an admirably simple piece of Cold War propoganda: Russians are unfeeling, cold, scientific, conniving, cheating boobs, while Americans are self-reliant, wilderness-conquering, scrappy, lovable, not-aging-particularly-well underdogs.

The irony that I'm attempting to exploit here is that I feel that the running industry has effectively tapped *both* sides of the Drago/Rocky equation. This may sound like insanity, but hear me out.

As a long-time peruser, if not outright reader, of Runner's World, Outside, and other ostensibly health- and outdoor-focused magazines, one thing that has always struck me is the staggering amount of plastic shit that is apparently necessary for one to enjoy oneself outdoors and increase one's cardiovascular fitness. GPS fitness monitors, $250 sunglasses, anti-nipple chafing creme, little fleshy band-aid things that pry open one's nostrils, neoprene running shoes with computer chips in them. Human beings, like other animals, probably at one point were excellent runners, hikers, climbers, and stream-forgers, given our hunter-gatherer background. I have a hard time imagining a Neanderthal's back giving out in the middle of a hunt because he didn't have trekking poles to support his lumbar region. This is the Drago rearing his ugly, vodka-soaked, albino head. Now, I'm no neo-Luddite; cool technological crap appeals dramatically to me. I have nocturnal emissions over the prospect of an iPhone price cut. But running, to my personal curmudgeonly tastes, always has had a privileged position in the annals of capitalism. All one needs to run, supposedly, is a halfway decent pair of shoes, a road, and a pair of uncomfortably short shorts with built-in underwear. Good shoes--the only really critical equipment--can be bought (usually no more than twice or three times a year, depending on mileage) on sale for less than sixty or seventy bucks, and the shorts are way less than that and can be worn multiple days in a row between launderings. There is something unabashedly revolutionary in running (as I imagine it once existed, perhaps foolishly) in just how cheap it is as a form of masochistic entertainment. Almost every other sport or hobby--especially equipment-intense pastimes like golf, hunting, tennis, and paintbull--requires a significant financial investment in its operation, and a specific locale in which to enjoy it. And that's to say nothing of cycling. The fact that people have been sufficiently duped (and this is why my readings of Runners World and Outside have always been a little skeptical, given the page space dedicated to "gear reviews") into the axiom that Running Requires Stuff is tremendously saddening to me. Nowhere is this malady more pronounced and meloncholic than in those Life is Good shirts, tote bags, shorts, climbing pants, whatever that they sell at REI. They all have a logo that kind of looks like this:

These products have always struck me as being nothing less than as ridiculous and superfluous as what I imagine to be lying wrinkled in the bottom of Pauly Shore's hamper. A consumer purchases a Life is Good shirt with the sunny intention of proclaiming a certain laid-backness, easy-goingness, and mid-thirties hipness to the world. However, these shirts (and yes, I've seen my fair share of them on other runners along the Boulder Creek Path the past three years) instead broadcast a kind of paranoiac desperation; an infantile will to unfounded optimism, and piecemeal denial of the ghastly problems facing the world-at-large. They remind me of Youth Group at the Presbyterian church I attended growing up, which is way off the chart on the Creepy Scale. This sort of "buying into" the euphoric benefits of the Outdoor Life, a part of which is distance running, represents the same cultural appropriation of once-pure running ethos I mentioned above. Life is indeed good, especially if one enjoys the unique freedoms and populist mysticism of a late evening run through a deserted golf course while its sprinklers are on. However, to imply that Life is only Good if certain microwicking fibers are coating your slick, pilates-at-7:30-working-for-wells-fargo-branch-manager-chocolate martinis-with-the-girls-on-friday-nights-chocolate-lab-named-Vanessa-owning body, or other scientific necessities are jangling amongst your shoelaces, is to deny the simple beauty of the running gait.

On the Rocky side of things, we fare slightly better, but more on that tomorrow, where I will tackle the arduously intellectual fodder of:
-Joggers with breast implants
-Joggers with calf implants
-The rapidly shrinking beer tent at the end of races and what this glumly portends
-The vehemently passive-aggressive chumminess of Races in general
-Running and beer in general

star wars and the postcolonial tongue

2007-07-17T18:05:00.000-06:00

Via Slog

"Chewbacca frustrates us. He has one foot in the human world and another foot in the animal kingdom. The hairy thing can think, reason, fly a space ship, but it makes noises like a dumb animal. The thinking thing can not express itself. The thoughts in its human mind have no way of becoming words in its animal mouth. What for it starts as an idea ends as a groan, a grunt, a growl. Han Solo can understand these animal sounds, but not as words. He feels what Chewbacca is saying. He feels Chewie’s meaning in the way the owner of a dog feels the meaning of his/her dog’s bark.

The Nigerian novelist Achebe once described the relationship between the colonizer and the colonial subject as identical to the one that exists between a horse rider and his horse: the horse rider talks to its horse with no expectation of the horse talking back to him. The relationship between Han Solo and Chewbecca is not as severe as the colonial one, but it’s certainly not the ideal democratic relationship. Without free speech there can be no real freedom. The one that speaks will always have power over the one that can not speak.

In sum, Chewbacca is the ideal slave. It has the capacity to do human work, and yet lacks the essential democratic tool—language. Without speech it will always be a beast of burden."

(this image posted solely for W.W., who has probably had wild, wonderful, wooly dreams about a Wookie throwing out the first pitch at a game 7 Royals/A's Am League championship series--sidenote: is this pairing even possible? Not the wookie--the Royals/A's. I don't know how baseball playoff seeding works.)

I remember seeing something not too long ago from some East Coastish cultural studies professor online about Star Trek: DS9 and postcolonialism, too. I guess when the colonizer's no longer able to physically occupy/dominate/denigrate/speak for the colonized, they do it vicariously, albiet subconsciously, through pop media.

With that in mind, I'm thinking about writing a paper on post-apocalyptic mid-career Kevin Costner films (e.g. Waterworld, The Postman) and how they elucidate a post-deconstruction/indifference theory breakdown of subject-object dichotomous hegemonies.

Sarah brought me back a tin whistle and a bookshelf gargoyle from England! I'm scaring the shit out of my cat between the two of them.

Shark Attack 3: Megalodon

2007-07-09T11:00:00.001-06:00

"What? What?!"

Talking Dogs

2007-07-04T13:53:00.001-06:00

Happy 4th of jewleye

Bill McKibben - Downsides to Economic Growth

2007-07-01T00:31:00.001-06:00

Since it's been almost ten years

2007-06-30T22:12:00.001-06:00

and I for the life of me *cannot* get it out of my head.

The horrifying, sublime, lightless depths of google image search

2007-06-26T01:17:00.000-06:00

Taking a cue from Kate Mills, I thought I'd post a litany of animals that, for various legal and/or practical reasons, I've always wanted as pets, but have been not allowed to acquire (and yes, that's David Lee Roth near the bottom. Everyone knows that Man is the Most Dangerous Game, which means that Roth's post-human status as preeminant Supreme Emperor Elect of Rock makes him the Most Dangerous Game: Extreme Makeover Edition, thus the coolest pet one could imagine):

A sea otter, because he eatsum on he's belly.

Only if they came as a set and would chase one another around the house.

(the red elk, not ashitaka, who is riding the red elk) and for that matter...

(once again, referring to the animal below, voiced by Gillian Anderson, who is a mega-babe. Actually, let me go ahead and put a picture of Scully in here, although she's way too intelligent, critical, aloof, and independent to be kept as any kind of animal companion. Although all of those modifiers make her sound like a cat)

Remember that one X-Files episode during the second season when Scully is abducted by a bunch of cannibals and almost ended up as the town stew? I'm going to write my thesis about how that represents a combination of Kierkegaardian sickness-unto-death and Irigaray's feminist Continental philosophy. That episode rules. Anyway, on with the list.

This here's a nine-tailed fox from Japanese folklore. Wikipedia "Kitsune" and learn yourself something good.
~~~

And those I would rather take a bullet to the scrotum than have as pets, even if granted the legal/ethical latitude to do so:

This photo (I'm *praying* this is photoshopped. Like... going through my underwear drawer looking for the rosary I think is stuffed in there.) is almost too scary for me to keep it up on the web--Sarah's heart's going to erupt into vibrant green flames of fear when/if she sees this.

Not pictured: the middle-aged, shirtless, eternally gym-shorted, curly-haired drunk guy who hangs out near the entrance of my apartment building, smoking capris and drunkenly hitting on me whenever I go out for a run. I'm not making this up.
Example, last night when I went out for a six-mile jaunt down the Boulder Creek Path around ten at night and there he was, seemingly waiting for me, lounging in the door frame, causing me to awkwardly skirt around and step over his legs, slurring.:
Guy: Nice shorts. Are you going dancing?
Me: Uh.
Guy: Those look like dancing shorts. Do you like to dance? Go to clubs? Do you ever go to clubs?
Me: Well, actually I'm going for a run.
Guy: Oh.
Me: Yeah.
Guy: I like to run in the mornings.
Me: Yeah?
Guy: In the woods. Morning wood.
Me (freaked): Well, I'm going to go for a run.
Guy: Right, well done! (grunts and starts to do pull-ups on the door lintel, watching me the entire time as I hurriedly run away.
I told Sarah I hadn't been hit on by a girl the entire time she's been in France, which is true. I think that's partly because I'm scared of girls who aren't Sarah. However, this guy continues to haunt my dreams, causing me to awake at three in the morning, cold sweat pouring across the goose bubbley skin of my thighs. To use an image from my childhood to illustrate the uncanny degree of terror he strikes into the red, timid depths of my ventricles and arteries, this is just how creepy he is:

I wish he was a hallucination and I could just spirit him away with a hand gesture. Maybe I could write Criss Angel an e-mail to ask for how to magically banish him. But, as I can't, let's just say I keep the blinds closed and the deadbolt secure. I don't think he knows where I live, but I can't be sure. I think he watches me go down the hall from the door, using a periscope.
Point being: no way is that guy in the running for Cameron's 2007 Platonic-template-pet-award-nomination. Not even if he gave me a sea otter as a gift. One that could bark my name, clap its flippers, stretch them out, and say, "I wwrrrrrrrruuuuvums you deees much!" in his adorable, whiskery voice and cuddle with Waffles.

Tony Parker loupe son dunk

2007-06-24T12:25:00.001-06:00

fionn regan - snowy atlas mountains

2007-06-21T12:38:00.001-06:00

Sufjan Stevens - The Lakes of Canada

2007-06-20T13:15:00.001-06:00

Thanks to Sierra for inadvertently showing me this.

What it means to be liberated

2007-06-19T20:19:00.000-06:00

Screw it--I go solo. I hit the Steve Perry notes, I do the Steve Perry vibrato. I can do these things because I'm an extraordinary singer.
"Can I sing or what?" I yell.
"What?" he yells.
The windows are open, too.
"I said, 'Can I sing or what?'"
He shakes his head.
"What do you mean?" I yell. "I can sing, goddammit."
He rolls up the window.
"What did you say? I didn't hear you before," he says.
"I said, can I sing or what?"
"No." He smiles. "You can't sing at all."
I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant--children so seldom know what is good for them--I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time--Big Country, Haircut One Hundred, Loverboy--and he is lucky for it . . . He is mine, and you cannot stop me, cannot stop us. You cannot stop us from singing, and you cannot stop us from making fart sounds, from putting our hands out the window to test the aerodynamics of different hand formations, from wiping the contents of our noses under the front of our seats. You cannot stop me from having Toph, who is eight, steer, on a straightaway, while I take off my sweatshirt because it's gotten really fucking hot. You cannot stop us from throwing our beef jerky wrappers on the floor, or leaving our unfolded laundry in the trunk for, fuck, eight days now, because we have been busy. You cannot stop Toph from leaving a half-full cardboard orange juice container under the seat, where it will rot and ferment and make the smell in the car intolerable, with that smell's provenance remaining elusive for weeks, until finally it is found and Toph is buried to his neck in the backyard and covered in honey--or should have been--for his role in the debacle.

-Dave Eggers, A.H.W.O.S.G

Jon Brion - "Here We Go" / Two new fragments I'm working with

2007-06-17T01:15:00.001-06:00

where I'm at right now.

___________________

Among the matronly Macchiavellis that wandered the hallways of Chateau St. Borgeaux, lilting and marriage-arranging in dusty sunlit corners, plotting and cogitating in lacy pairs or trios, my Aunt Penelope was the shrewdest, the most thick-lipped. Long blue ribbons trailed behind her pinafore as she scuffed her velvet-soled slippers along the Persian runners. She lighted at the dinner table like a Martian sparrow, eyes trained on her, dressed in thick, embroidered fabric the deepest shades and pitches of blue. Penelope delicately picking at the bones of a game hen on her dinner china, declining the pink oily folds of a wild boar, the white curves of a porpoise’s flank. Penelope eating greens instead, sipping at well water, smiling with discolored teeth as, with the jagged crescent of a fingernail on her pinky, she dislodged wet bits of spinach from her white dentures.

The sharp, dusty smells of cat urine and yesterday’s newspapers hanging on the cracked alley asphalt. The sputtering oxblood light from the votives crammed into corners at St. Pete’s up the street, the hushed panic or dutiful monotone of people hovering above them, working their fingertips through the beaded labyrinths of rosaries.
His sister, with seamy dark pockets beneath her green eyes, standing at the foot of the apartment stairs. “I can’t sleep again.” And then the warm pungency of microwaved half-and-half, the two of them basking on the couch cushions like chameleons in the blue-green flickering puddles of light coming from the vacuum cleaner infomercials, until their eyelids closed like guillotines in slow motion.

Newz

2007-06-12T22:55:00.000-06:00

-Chinua Achebe finally gets recognized for his singular achievement by the Man Booker International Prize (read the article in The Guardian here)
-Somebody buy me and Sarah a vacation to go to Middle Earth
-Stephen Colbert was on fire last night
-Going drunkcamping the next couple days

Butterflies are passive-aggressive, unlike some grumpety grump scholars

2007-06-12T00:38:00.000-06:00

“It is instructive to think that there is not a single person in this room, or for that matter in any room in the world, who, at some nicely chosen point in historical space-time would not be put to death there and then, here and now, by a commonsensical majority in righteous rage. The color of one’s creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in time or space with a fatal objection from a mob that hates that particular tone. And the more brilliant, the more unusual the man, the nearer he is to the stake. Stranger always rhymes with danger. The meek prophet, the enchanter in his cave, the indignant artist, the nonconforming little schoolboy, all share in the same sacred danger. And this being so, let us bless them, let us bless the freak; for in the natural evolution of things, the ape would perhaps never have become man had not the ape appeared in the family. Anybody whose mind is proud enough not to breed true, secretly carries a bomb at the back of his brain; and so I suggest, just for the fun of the thing, taking that private bomb and carefully dropping it upon the model city of commonsense. In the brilliant light of the ensuing explosion many curious things will appear; our rarer senses will supplant for a brief spell the dominant vulgarian that squeezes Sinbad’s neck in the catch-as-catch-can match between the adopted self and the inner one. I am triumphantly mixing metaphors because that is exactly for what they are intended for when they follow the course of their secret connections—which from a writer’s point is the first positive result of the defeat of the commonsense.”

“To some of you it may seem that under the present highly irritating world conditions it is rather a waste of energy to study literature, and especially to study structure and style. I suggest that to a certain type of temperament—and we all have different temperaments—the study of style may always seem a waste of energy under any circumstances. But apart from this it seems to me that in every mind, be in inclined towards the artistic or the practical, there is always a receptive cell for things that transcend the awful troubles of everyday life.
The novels we have imbibed will not teach you anything that you can apply to any obvious problems of life. They will not help in the business office or in the army camp or in the kitchen or in the nursery. In fact, the knowledge I have been trying to share with you is pure luxury. It will not help you to understand the social economy of France or the secrets of a woman’s heart or of a young man’s heart. But if may help you, if you have followed my instructions, to feel the pure satisfaction which an inspired and precise work of art gives; and this sense of satisfaction in its turn goes to build up a sense of more genuine mental comfort, the kind of comfort one feels when one realizes that for all its blunders and boners the inner texture of life is also a matter of inspiration and precision.”
-Both from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature

In this impromptu response to Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, which I recommend with some degree of hesitancy, I’ll try not too make too much of the fact that he uses the word “boner” in that last quote. I’ve spent the past couple days eagerly slipping my fangs into Nabokov’s thoughts on what theorizes as the preeminent novels produced by Western Civilization. Some I’ve read recently (Kafka, Dickens) and some have kept at bay, fearing their decidedly non-summer-beach-read status (Proust, Ulysses, and, because Sarah would call me a gross hypocrite [but be secretly delighted], Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park). I read Nabokov’s lectures all the way through, even dutifully paging though his manic structural analysis (with helpful geographical illustrations! Want to see a hand drawn map of Dublin tracing the protagonists’ physical movements that looks like a drunk “Family Circus” cartoon? Just turn to his exhaustive lecture on “Ulysses”). As when I read Lolita for the first time a couple years ago, I was again enthralled Nabokov’s uncompromisingly forceful, humorous, strong-willed—dare I say “fussy”?—and often polemical style and syntax. Nabokov must've eaten a hundred pages of the OED with his vodka tonic every morning. This is someone who is clearly enraptured with the aesthetic possibilities of concrete, specific prose and is a rhetorical wunderkind.

Here (both quotes taken from the book's last two essays) and throughout the lectures, Nabokov gaily lauds the complexities of the self-contained “scientific object” approach to the novel. Nabokov’s always been polarizing—is it any surprise for a guy who tackled glorified kiddie porn as the ultimate aesthetic challenge, even today continuing to enrage prissy white people all over the Midwest?—and I found myself admiring some of his assertions that fiction has no real “usefulness” other than in itself. SIDENOTE: Paul Auster came to a similar conclusion, in a dramatically more laconic fashion, in this article from The Guardian Observer not to long ago. Back to Nabokov: One of his favorite responses a student of his ever gave when confronted with a course questionnaire that read, “Why’d you take my class?” was simply, and wonderfully, “Because I like stories.” As J. DeShell put it once, "Fiction is."
Still, I can’t let him go totally unscathed. Certain assertions he makes—that women writers should be taken about as seriously as the Boston Celtics' 2008 playoff hopes (he finds Austen interesting and her prose “dimply,” but she falls far short of his glowing, impassioned esteem for Proust), for example. As someone who somehow emerged, like Dante into the stars after climbing Satan’s legs (badly in need of Nair), from Intro. to Literary Theory, my hackles also rose a bit when he, at several points, slammed literary critics who view literature simply as a tool for a historical or cultural exploration, or, even worse, as an instrument to promote a particular socio-cultural agenda. (E.g. the basis of the "culture wars" in the academies over the past twenty/thirty years, which always makes me think of Professor Burger throwing a pie with a photo of J.R.R. Tolkien pinned to it at DeShell and giggling.) You can see his New Criticism roots showing throughout the book, and in 2007 they look more than a little grey. Literature is necessarily a projection of culture, and I refuse to believe that it cannot offer us an interesting porthole into the accouterments and knick-knacks, even beliefs, of that culture. I'm not going to go a Hayden White "history is only narrative" binge, but I'm not too far from that point in my thinking. Sorry Vlad, but literature is not hermetically sealed off from the culture that “writes” its influence onto the author him/herself. OR another culture the writer possibly appropriates to reinvent/retranslate into his/her cultural terms

While I do necessarily concur with the ideal that a fine piece of fiction should be spine-tingling and an expertly constructed system-unto-itself, no high-rise is without its under girding and, beneath that, even deeper foundations. Just ask Lacan (who, along with Freud, Nabokov viciously denigrates in this book, calling the latter at one point the "Viennese Witch"). To ignore them for the sake of sheer aesthetic, structural appreciation of the artwork (and foolishly identifying with the author-as-God principle) is to depreciate, in a way, the bearing narratives—particularly well-wrought narratives—can have on our lives. We tell ourselves stories to live, but living does not always entail escapism and the “Oh I see. I like what you’ve done here, Mr. Dickens” kind of reading Nabokov ideologically propagates. As Anne Garrèta put it in her article “Bookselves” from a recent issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly:
“A thought experiment—Descartes or Dark City? An evil genius, every night while you sleep, rearranges your bookshelves according to rules and algorithms as particular as those of Descartes’ own evil genius’s arithmetic . . . do you go mad? Do you become a skeptic? Do you adapt and become thoroughly postmodern?
We are caught between ways of finding things in the world and ways of finding things in our minds, between functionality and memorability, use and value (notwithstanding simple sloppiness).
-Could we order the outside world, the world of objectivity (real books) following patterns residing in our minds, the patterns according to which phantom books reside in our minds?
-You’d be out of your mind
-Could we escape our misery by simply swallowing a computer and turning our minds into subsets of the Library of Congress Catalog?
-You’d be out of a mind.”

Despite Nabokov's dry assertion in the second quote, novels, and some poetry, can help us function in the world because, with effort, we can open up the clockwork of their narratives--underpinning tidal forces and systems of relationships that explain/explore a kind of reality. Without narratives, life is meaningless--just ask anybody who tries to sell you on their mass religion. By this virtue, it's not a big surprise that stories are those about stories (what we nervously call meta-fiction, or even meta-meta-fiction), have been so in vogue the past few years, perhaps most deeply plumbed by way of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Good metafiction (although what I'm about to say is by no means limited to just metafiction) can explore the deepest workings of how we can (dis)order the universe that seductively floats in front of our corneas every day, the protean matter for ourselves and our stories. It can also be self-aggrandizing, obnoxious, self-righteous, and more boring to read than watching my arthritic neighbor across the hall vaccuum his berber carpet, a time-laborious task he wheezingly accomplishes three times a day. I know. Nothing can stop the sound.

By effectively setting off books as closed systems, as self-sufficient orphans from their cultural and biographical progenitors, Nabokov engages in a mode of thinking that perhaps resonates with his infatuation with butterflies—I imagine him pinned thousands of them to little blue mats and poring over them with bifocals while smoking a long-stemmed pipe. To use an ecological metaphor, Nabokov “robs” books (as he did butterflies) from the vast, sublime web of interweaving relationships to which they are an integral part—the culture(s) in which the author participate(d), the individual reader’s response, the author’s biography, the economics and distribution of the book, its intertextuality and “anxiety” (as Harold Bloom might say) of its relationship with its artistic influences, and its critical reception. These are but a few of the endless "parts" to the play in which a novel functions. While I agree that literature and its study should always keep the text in mind first, and not lose sight of the spine-jolting “enchantment” a rigidly structured and deeply constructed novel can offer—when reading, I always seem to end up meeting the book on its own terms, not my own—to do only this is to slam the metaphorically portcullis on other interpretive avenues, other ways of approaching meaning within and without the text. And (hopefully) enriching our understanding of it.
If it sounds like I think Nabokov's elitist, it's probably the case. Because I do. Like Augie March, I tend to distrust anybody who says that there's only one "right" way, or even a "best" way, to read a book and who starts banging their shoe against a desk to attract followers. There are only different interpretations, some perhaps more interesting because they are well substantiated, and to sphincter off possible meaning is to place a velvet cloth over the violent, infinite illumination of a text that opens itself up to many different approaches. To mute somewhat my own Nabokov-like bitching, I have to say that I absolutely love the first quote that you read probably something like 30 minutes ago now--there's nothing better than anybody who takes freaks under his/her wings and rebaptises them as potential geniuses. But every English major knows that.

-CJT, who is bored at home on a Monday night, listening to Jesus and Mary Chain and morosely eating granola bar after granola bar

Jim James - Steam Engine

2007-06-09T03:12:00.001-06:00

Brothers On a Hotel Bed

2007-06-09T03:09:00.001-06:00

Williamsburg's dead.

2007-06-02T14:07:00.000-06:00

Cred

yowza

2007-06-01T09:54:00.000-06:00

Friends,

You are receiving this message because you're currently enrolled in English 723 this coming fall. We're very much looking forward to this course, and we're glad you'd like to join us for what promises to be a challenging and rewarding experience. We've now settled on required texts, which you'll find listed below in the order they are likely to appear in the course. There will be additional primary text readings on electronic reserve, and we'll be reading some related literary criticism each week (also on electronic reserve).

Reading List (in likely order of appearance):

Myerson, Joel, ed. Transcendentalism. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Poems. New York: Library of America, 1996.

Thoreau, Henry David. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. 1849. New York:

Penguin, 1998.

---. Walden. 1854. Intro. and annotations by Bill McKibben. Boston: Beacon, 1997.

Cooper, Susan Fenimore. Rural Hours. 1850. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2005.

Fuller, Margaret. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. 1844. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.

Muir, John. My First Summer in the Sierra. 1911. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Austin, Mary. The Land of Little Rain. 1903. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Finch, Robert, and John Elder, eds. The Norton Book of Nature Writing. College Edition.

New York: Norton, 2002.

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire. 1968. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 1974. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.

Matthiessen, Peter. The Snow Leopard. 1978. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge. New York: Pantheon, 1991.

Tallmadge, John. The Cincinnati Arch. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004.

Night Letter to the Reader

2007-05-30T10:31:00.000-06:00

I get up from the tangled bed and go outside,
a bird leaving its nest,
a snail taking a holiday from its shell,

but only to stand on the lawn,
an ordinary insomniac
amid the growth systems of garden and woods.

If I were younger, I might be thinking
about something I heard at a party,
about an unusual car,

or the press of Saturday night,
but as it is, I am simply conscious,
an animal in pajamas,

sensing only the pale humidity
of the night and the slight zephyrs
that stir the tops of the trees.

The dog has followed me out
and stands a little ahead,
her nose lifted as if she were inhaling

the tall white flowers,
visible tonight in the darkened garden,
and there was something else I wanted to tell you,

something about the warm orange light
in the windows of the house,
but now I am wondering if you are even listening

and why I bother to tell you these things
that will never make a difference,
flecks of ash, tiny chips of ice.

But this is all I want to do-
tell you that up in the woods
a few night birds were calling,

the grass was cold and wet on my bare feet,
and that at one point, the moon,
looking like the top of Shakespeare's

famous forehead,
appeared, quite unexpectedly,
illuminating a band of moving clouds.

-Billy Collins, who is way more interesting that people give him credit for.

Lucy Lawless comes on strong to your father-in-law amidst a heated game of shuffleboard

2007-05-26T18:51:00.000-06:00

Yet another strange trip to Oklahoma draws to a fitful close. I haven't been back here in four years and am reeling more than a little bit from

-the humidity. Every physical movement takes more effort here to cut swaths through the thick veil of moisture that hangs malevolently in the air.
-the surreality of my cousin Ross dancing to the saccharine beat of Boyz II Men's "A Song for Momma" with my Aunt Connie at his own wedding. He really got into it.
-the fact that Ross is actually *married*. This is a guy I used to eat Beans and Wieners and play Goldeneye with not so long ago.
-that I'd forgotten my grandmother's backyard is crammed full of birds. Cardinals, scissor-tailed flycatchers, red-headed wrens, mourning doves, blue jays, robins, those tiny grey birds that spazz out and cheep confrontationally at cracks in the sidewalk, fat white dirty birds with their drunk heads boobing up and down, crows, mockingbirds that remind me of Dpo in their jaunty mimicry and drunken, knowing wheedling about from branch to branch, magpies, seagulls (!!), everything.
-listening to the mountain goats and reading saul bellow, but somehow making no progress at all, for the last 72 hours straight. "She told me how you died at last, at last/ That morning at the racetrack was one thing I remembered / I turned it over in my mind / Like a living Chinese fingertrap / Seaweed and Indiana sawgrass / Pale green things, pale green things"
-the bewildering things coming from my grandmother's mouth. "I just got salad dressing all over the museum." "Kids shouldn't be allowed to watch anything on television with talking animals. Talking animals are immoral and frightening for children." "Can you guys help me fix my state quarter collection?"
-weddings are weird, in general. At least they didn't throw a bunch of pigeon-slaying rice at the bride/groom.
-Oklahoma in general. There's a guy outside my hotel window who's been fishing for carp in a university pond for the last ten hours straight, leisurely working his way through several packs of Merits.
-the thought of tomorrow's drive back up across Kansas and eastern Colorado. 700 miles of wheat and dirty white minivans from Iowa blowing past us in the left lane, going thirty miles an hour over the speed limit.

-Liz for getting me hooked on lolcats and other memes.

On another note, a track ("Our Life Is Not A Movie Or A Maybe") is available over at Pitchfork, and it'll tear you up and remind you of just how frighteningly good of a band they are. Or, as Stephen Deusner says of Will Sheff, OR's frontman, and Black Sheep Boy, "As Pauline Kael once wrote of Gene Wilder, Sheff "taps a private madness," as if the pain and heartbreak around him-- the runaway sons, abused daughters, lost friends, damaged lovers, and doomed relationships that comprise the world of the album-- push him to caterwauling arias, his hysteria barely bottled by the demands of his carefully constructed songs. But, like Wilder, Sheff never overplays his hand and always maintains control, which, also like Wilder, makes him at once heartbreaking and somewhat humorous-- more self-aware than Conor Oberst, more serious than Colin Meloy, more legible than Jeff Mangum."

Today's Wikipedia Minutiae - Birds Count

2007-05-20T21:14:00.000-06:00

First of all, I'd just like to point out that the CU class of 2007 got hosed as far as a keynote graduation speaker goes. Check out this brain-freeze-inducing rhetoric David Foster Wallace meted out to the grads to Kenyon a couple years ago:
CLICK ME

____

Anyway.

From the article on "bird intelligence":

Counting

Counting has been considered an ability that shows intelligence. Early bird photographers used hides to take pictures of birds at nest. They noticed that some species are alarmed by human presence and wait for the human to leave the hide before approaching. Some photographers tried a technique to fool the birds by having two people enter the hide and having only one leave it. Many birds failed to see the trick and returned to their nests assuming that the human had left. However, crows were found to be able to keep count and a figure of 7 was found to be the limit of their counting ability.

Cormorants used by Chinese fishermen that were given every eighth fish as a reward were found to be able to keep count up to eight.

In the 1970s, on the Li River, Pamela Egremont observed fishermen who allowed the birds to eat every eighth fish they caught. Writing in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, she reported that, once their quota of seven fish was filled, the birds "stubbornly refuse to move again until their neck ring is loosened. They ignore an order to dive and even resist a rough push or a knock, sitting glum and motionless on their perches." Meanwhile, other birds that had not filled their quotas continued to catch fish as usual. "One is forced to conclude that these highly intelligent birds can count up to seven," she wrote.

—Hoh, E. H.^[3]

Many birds are also able to detect changes in the number of eggs in their nest and brood parasitic cuckoos are often known to remove one of the host eggs before laying their own.

Saul Bellow tortures serial modifiers

2007-05-20T01:15:00.000-06:00

UPDATE:

-Manu Ohhhhh-No-bili and "I'm not *really* touching you, but does this bother you? does this bother you?" Bruce Bowen have effectively put an end to my beloved Phoenix Suns' championship hopes, who were eliminated late last night.

This kind of expresses how I feel.

I don't really plan on watching the NBA until the Finals. The only redeeming aspects of the Western Conference Finals are going to be the camera close-ups on the respective grotesqueries of the crowds in San Antonio and SLC, and the undeniable aesthetic puzzle of Andrei Kirilenko's hair: is it a faux-hawk? A physical manifestation of his innate rangy, lanky goofiness? An emaciated hare with its jaws clamped to his head? I really don't know. But I *did* find this picture, which more or less sums up just how ill AK-47 is:

Maybe the Suns could trade Raja Bell for him.

-Finished Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore and A.M. Homes's This Book Will Save Your Life. Both are spectacular, despite what the ever-prissy New York Times has to say about the latter. Am currently reading Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, mostly because I'm gullible enough to succumb to the lyrics of a Fionn Regan song. Am totally amazed. Bellow makes up sentences the way D. Wade drives to the rim, without any of the mechanical smugness. There are serious and mindful echoes of Joyce running amok throughout Augue, with more than a whiff of Dos Passos and some Steinbeck. There's a gleeful flippant humor, and this nearly made me throw up all over my La-Z-Boy:

"The meals were of an amazing character altogether and of huge quantity--Anna was a strong believer in eating. Bowls of macarone without salt or pepper or butter or sauce, brain stews and lung stews, calves'-foot jelly with bits of calves' hair and sliced egg, cold pickled fish, crumb-stuffed tripes, canned corn chowder, and big bottles of orange pop"

The language is immaculate and descriptive and (in this case) nauseating. Bellow blows air into his sentences' lungs until they threaten to burst and rain down goopey messy clauses on everyone. This is a book that is impossible to read quickly. Unlike some of GGM's stuff, the description doesn't overwhelm or overinflate character into characterization, and Bellow certainly isn't a magical realist. He might be a hyper-realist. Sticking with the gastronomical focus, I imagine he wrote this book on a steady diet of Dubliners, the Torah, and dime-store bourbon. Highly recommended.

-Music (re)discoveries: Mice Parade's "Tales of Las Negras"; Dr. Dog; Besnard Lakes; Smashing Pumpkins' "Siamese Dream"; Smog's "Red Apples Fall"; and Utada Hikaru's "Passion" for some kickin' J-pop

-Speaking of all things Japanese, I'm not sure what this website (Pink Tentacle) is all about, but I like it. It talks about robots an awful lot. From a couple days ago: "On May 18, buildup Co., Ltd. unveiled the Tamanoi Vinegar Robot, the world’s first robot designed to make presentations about vinegar. The robot is scheduled to go to work at the Tamanoi Vinegar Corporation’s Osaka office in July. Relying on pre-programmed speech and gestures to communicate its knowledge of vinegar, the robot features a system of pneumatic servos that control 24 points of articulation in the upper half of its body."

I'm also one disc away from finishing Neon Genesis Evangelion and remain thoroughly confused as to what the fuck is going on, and after perusing Wikipedia's vast unameliorated pool of knowledge on the subject, I'm even more lost. I'm beginning to suspect that all the Christian/Kabbalistic/meta-biologic symbolism and ruminations are partly just, as Prof. Burger would say, "the author foolin' around." Still, the last two episodes of the series might have been the most nervy and expert example of postmodern identity horror I've been forced to watch. And it's a cartoon!! What is perhaps most staggering about NGE is just how much money it's made, considering its rather imposing psychological/spiritual/philosophical/eschetological baggage. Dragonball Z, this isn't. And yet peops is nuts about this shit:

Pictured: my dissertation topic.

Roadtrip?

2007-05-15T20:02:00.000-06:00

who wants to go to Mexico?!

VAMPIRE (1968) 「バンパイヤ」パイロット版

2007-05-12T13:21:00.001-06:00

Osamu Tezuka stuffs his animated maw with the man-flesh of a bearded Japanese man.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force - Hand Banana - Full Epsiode

2007-05-10T01:45:00.001-06:00

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SARAH!!!!!

2007-05-02T22:39:00.000-06:00

She's going to be a famous poetess, I just know it. But not an egocentric, gibberish-spouting freaksack like Gertrude Stein. Happy birthday!

In other news, the newest Wilco album, Sky Blue Sky, is available for streaming on their website HERE. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot it ain't, at least upon my first listening. But it still sounds pretty good--Jeff's voice is now as cracked and weathered as a swingset in the Northwest Territories, which is a great thing, and his lyrics are still as weirdly provocative and often epiphanic (e.g. "How can I warn you when my tongue turns to dust / Like we’ve discussed / It doesn’t mean that I don’t care /It means I’m partially there"). Still, some of Jeff's wordplay is honestly pretty shitty when it veers from alliterated, original abstractions into cliched abstractions as in "Shake it Off'": "It definitely starts to spoil my heart / Somewhere there’s a war / Sometimes there is art." Throw another line with "heart" at the end of it, and you've got yourself an Ashley Simpson-meets-dumb-Basquiat kind of song.

"Impossible Germany" channels--dare I say it--a few surprising musical influences as bedfellows, from Allman Bros. harmony guitar solo noodling to the jetlagged lyrics that somehow manage to work (How often do you hear the word "Germany" in a song?) to a relaxed backing track that, at times, sounds like a take on Midlake's take on Fleetwood Mac.

Other songs have Wilco returning to its dusty, alt.country roots, although it's bittersweet homecoming without the harmony and hyperdouche-personality of Jay Bennett. The title track, "Sky Blue Sky," is particularly good, floating on top of some great pedal steel, with Jeff's voice managing to break through the mix just enough to be affecting. "Please be Patient" is good along similar lines, and "Hate it Here" is an ode to anyone whose ever been trapped in the domestic cage of their own home, forced to endlessly fold shirts and wait for their wife or whoever to return. Did Tweedy's wife split for Reno for a weekend or something?

The aforementioned "Shake it Off" also takes a page from the 70s FM psychotropic gold book, of which the Decemberists have also been rifling through with urgency of late. It's like everyone dusted off their ELO records all of a sudden.

Still, it's not bad at all.