career change?

Having not passed my oral exam and now my written exam on the first try, I am considering a career change. While I should probably hunker down and fight through these "hiccups," these two events seem like symptoms of a deeper and underlying ambivalence about becoming an academic. So, I have spent this morning looking at Library Science programs. A career change could be on the horizon.

SNL

I just want to register for all posterity how awful Annette Bening's performance on SNL was last night. She is a terrific actress. Why couldn't she take her eyes off the cue cards? Mr. Sorkin, I smell a plot device for a future episode of Studio 60.

Ahhh!!!!

Update 2: I am done. Here I am at the finish line.

Update: Only three hours left to go until the deadline. I have to write a short conclusion then revise and copyedit (which is like trying to pan for gold with a hoola-hoop for me. Just holding my breath as of now.

Since there isn't a proper font to convey how screwed I feel right now. I will use the standard courier font often employed here. I have roughly 15 hours until my written exam is due. I am still one novel short. I have to write over half of a question I mistakenly thought I was further along on than I am. 15 hours and counting!

Why can't I be a cat?

Chronicles of Agony

If you want to read a gripping, suspenseful chronicle of agony, of mental fight and competition, I suggest you read the 540+ reviews posted to Amazon for the Nintendo's new console, the Wii (whee!). There are moments of anguish and ectasy. People have perverted the genre of the online review and made it into a chronicle of commercial suffering!

A First Look at Second Life : Dory Devlin : Yahoo! Tech

A First Look at Second Life : Dory Devlin : Yahoo! Tech

I am fascinated by these emerging online economies. I can't wait till we have the first bona fide Victorian-style bubble and crash, virtually.

cafes today

When out of doors for a cup of coffee I usually head down the alley (as everything that is on Main Street is called) to Cafe Express, which has undergone a name change recently to Brother's K Coffeehouse. Not only did I go to Cafe Express, I also went to Peet's later in the day to meet up with a colleague for coffee (who forgot about me in a prospectus induced fury, literally). Now I generally like Peets on Chicago. They have a pew which reminds me of the many, many nights spent at my favorite (now defunct) coffeeshop in Denver, St. Mark's. Usually every Friday and Saturday night of my first two years of school, I would ride the B bus (Broadyway and Baseline stop) downtown, get off at Market street station then walk two blocks to St. Mark's. Pews lined both walls. There is nothing like drinking coffee out of an old pew. You can scoot your ass around (which I do frequently when I am reading under the influence of caffeine). They are great for socializing. In any case, the bad thing about the pew at Peets is that people feel compelled to flop themselves into it when they sit. I find myself being banged around on account of such people. There is one young Italian man who is particularly obnoxious who showed up today. I could only stand sitting down the way from him for a few minutes until I abandoned my spot for the chair opposite me. So much for the sociablity of pews!

Retro: Truman Capote Writes - Google Video

Retro: Truman Capote Writes - Google Video

Watched Capote last night for the first time. This is a very interesting interview with Truman Capote from 1966.

Very awesome!

rationale

Update as of 3pm: I have received my final approval from C. Lane. It was terrible that his was the one I had to wait the longest for. But it finally came!

I just sent off the final draft of my rationale to my advisors. I finally had to just hold my breath and punch send. Then I did something that I always think will prove to be more gratifying than it is. I added up the "editing time" recorded by Word for each of my drafts. The total, once divided by 60, was 13 hours. Like I said, I always expect that the resulting number will actually be able to quantify what feels like an enormous amount of time and energy put into this document. But 13 hours? That just doesn't seem that impressive does it? Well, maybe Word is lying to me.

wi-fi bandit

So, I come to Starbucks ever so often when I really need to get work done. It is like my psychological WarCabinet room, where my impulses go underground and shit gets done. Needless to say, that with my rationale due tomorrow, I've been here the last two days. Also contributing to this is that I refuse to go to the same coffee shop twice in a day. Don't ask why. In any case, I'm not getting much done because I realized that I could steal wi-fi from Cafe Express just half way down the block. Granted the signal is very spotty but I feel so dirty doing it. The good kind of dirty that is!

fun signs

fanfic update

I recently posted an update to my Harry Potter fanfiction. In other news, I am struggling with rewrites of my rationale that is due in a week. For some reason my thoughts feel like a bog that I want to avoid at all costs. The whole thing is making me feel quite dejected.

"Casting his shadow, weaving his spell"

Ever since I first saw Man Ray's photos of wooden artist dolls, I've been kind of obsessed with them. In high school, I purchased one and it has been a fixture of my domicile since. But I have always wanted to dress it, particularly as a monk or wizard. So at last my vision has been fulfilled with the help of my wife and our crappy little sewing machine. Here are last is my wizard/monk/jedi knight/what-have-you. Oh, and the quote from the title is from the excellent Black Sabbath song, aptly titled, "The Wizard."

film to the stars

I am quite excited as casting news is finally rolling in about the upcoming film adaptation of the Dark Materials trilogy. Hopefully there will be some exciting otherwordly goodness to feast our eyes on sometime next year!

I have posted some videos on Youtube, including one of me on a Segway. I quite like it.

fanfic

Ever so often, I like to descend into the literary cesspool that is fanfiction writing. Here is the first bit of a Harry Potter fanfic. I'm not expecting too much feedback as there seem to be new stories posted every minute. There are over 250,000 HP fanfics on the fanfiction.net site alone. This is quite staggering!

PS. I apologize for the grotesque portrait of me as Harry Potter. Sometimes I get carried with Photoshop.

Secrets of Lost revealed...Station 7

An inside joke. Don't ask.

paper writing

One of the unforeseen benefits of not passing my oral exam the first time around was that writing my first of two final papers seemed like an escape from the gaping jaws of madness of preparing for the do-over. Now on my second paper, I am floundering, taking refuge in a constant flight of reading and note-taking. Not that this isn't productive activity. The problem is that the more material accumulated the greater the strain to assimilate all of the parts. So, I am trying to focus my mental energy, decide on what is necessary and superfluous. One cheering thing is that page minimum is only 14 pages. I keep thinking, "If I can write four pages on Lefebvre, that means I'll only have 10 more to go!" Everything is psychological warfare in grad school.

Tatum on Youtube

I am kind of addicted to Youtube. You can find this video and another one of Tatum there.

"I would prefer not to"

I just emailed my first of two final papers. This means that I have one more final paper to write then I'll be done writing seminar papers. I added up that through the course of 4.5 of graduate courses, I've written at least 24 of these papers. The frigthening thing is that I wrote this paper will relatively little difficulty. In other news, I've been tweaking the look of my blogs. Mainly just inserting new graphics and new colors (or lack of color).

exam passed

I am pleased to report that I passed my oral exam. This is a great relief.

Anti-Freeze

The coffee shop where I spend most of my coffee shop-time at installed countertops along the windows that face Main St recently. At first I felt ambivalent about this development. Now I like it. The countertop allows one to spread out a bit more. I say this as set-up for what follows.

I was studying for my oral exam "do-over" tomorrow when a taxi cab pulled up alongside the coffee shop. The little Hobbit gentleman named George who comes in ever so often got out of the cab and began plodding his way inside. Meanwhile the taxi cab starts steaming and a river of bright green, highly toxic anti-freeze is streaming from underneath the car. Obviously the radiator is busted. I watch in horror as the rills of green death stream towards the gutter, towards the storm drain, and towards the water supply. I become increasingly agitated as I imagine any one of the countless dogs that bounce along with their owners dipping an unsuspecting paw in the glop. I pictured people tracking it home and toxifying their homes. Yet I am utterly paralyzed.

The irony is that I have been wearing an old boy scout t-shirt. Now despite all the bad things about Scouting (let me count the ways), it is meant to prepare you for moments like this (see the Oath and Motto to understand this little guilt-making machine). Again, I just sat there, agitated, disturbed but passive.

The driver pushed his car over and the useless junk store owner across the street dug out a watering can. They were trying to add water to the radiator (but of course it was just passing right through and onto the street). The anti-freeze was beginning to evaporate. I shrugged off my desire to leave immediately and began studying again.

The prelude to this story occurred when I first arrived. A woman (who is always toting around a musical instrument of some description) yelled at the guy cleaning the windows for spraying window cleaner "around people who are eating."

Avoidance

I've really been avoiding studying for my exam "do-over." I recently watched "The Satanic Rites of Dracula," a cheap Hammer Studios horror film that I picked up at Walgreen a while back. The draw however was Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (who starred in many Hammer horror films). It was actually quite entertaining! I bring this up because I found myself reading the message boards on IMDB about the film. I suddenly realized that I was finding every way possible to avoid studying.

oral exam

The oral exam (which always makes me think of a dentist appointment) for which I have been preparing for the better part of year did not go so well today. My committee politely asked me to do it over again. I wanted to say "No." Instead I smiled and and nodded.

Review of The Proposition.

I found myself wishing that I was the group of chatty 50-something yuppies (this coming from a 20-something embryonic yuppie) sitting behind me who didn't know who Alex and AJ nor Raven Simone were during the pre-film slideshow and probably don't know who Nick Cave is or that he sings his way through the soundtrack of the movie he wrote. Just knowing that Mr. Cave has released albums with titles like Murder Ballads made the whole get up that is The Proposition seem too...gotten up. This movie veers between a kind of post-modern realism (viscous blood and sweat stained blouses abound) with an equally post-modern sense of what constitutes myth (but what Jameson just called the post-modern's propensity to surface). This movie just has no real sense of time or place. Two things that drove me crazy was the inconsistent characterization of the captain and the botched reference to Origin of Species (it wasn't until Descent of Man some 10 years after OofS that Darwin dared advance his theories of human evolution). If you like your violence crunchy and slurpy then you might not mind this film. And if you have been in a cave that isn't named Nick, then you might feel a bit more unbiased than I did.

the world's awake

One of the brilliant things about living in a place where spring actually announces itself in all of its ambivalence is that when the sun finally does cut through the April showers the world really seems to come alive. I have seen more people today walking around on the streets. People are just strolling about, taking the world in. It is a very infectious thing to watch. Unfortunately, I am on the wrong side of life, sitting in the cafe. The even crueler irony is that I am taking notes on Blake and Wordsworth. These poets both demand having some kind of sensuous contact with the world. So, I must stay in-doors for now and just let the infant world throb in its spring time joy.

funny cover

Slate has a nice photo gallery of literary classics given pulp covers in the 1950s. Being a Victorianist, my favorite, of course, is the cover for Jane Eyre. Who knew that Rochester was really Johnny Cash? Rochester--he walked the line.

u-plate

I made a really good playlist recently. The consequence of this action has been that I am staying up late again playing the first two levels of this puzzle game called Cubis over and over. Some highlights of this list include: Once Bitten Twice Shy by Ian Hunter (this is the original that Great White covered) who was once part of the great Mott the Hoople; Shake Appeal by Iggy and the Stooges (this song really makes you want to...shake); Killing of a Flash Boy by Suede ("All the white kids shuffle to the heavy metal stutter"; is there a better first line that that? what about the line, "Shaking obscene like killing machines here we go"); Baby Boomerang by TRex ("New York witch in the dungeon of the day / I'm trying to write my novel / And all you do is play/ Baby Boomerang") and the White Stripe's cover of Stop Breaking Down (the Rolling Stone's version from Exile on Main Street is pretty great too). So piping music directly into my brain is keep me up-late at nights.

da vinci code

I'm usually not one to go in for the "conspiracy theory" style of cultural criticism. So the point I want to make isn't really of the "conspiracy" variety. Nonetheless I was reading this morning about the critical backlash against the Da Vinci Code now that it has been screened at Cannes. Now I was tempted to think that this is just the standard fare of critical cultural elitism attacking a low-brow book being made into a positively surley browed movie. A critic on the BBC points out how the movie is cloaked in armor due the popularity of the books (videogame culture has a great term for this phenomenon: "fanboy"). Certainly the movie would seem to occasion a kind of critical muscle flexing, allowing critics to vent their anger at the culture industry against a product whose revenues won't really suffer because of it (and of course there is no escape from this perverse loop). But then I as I thought about it I think these negative reviews are actually something much more savvy. In a way they are a rearguard action against the film's protestors. It is as if these critics as saying, "This is just a cheap piece of lowbrow entertainment with no serious message. You are allowed to go enjoy it without any concern regarding the content." So, really these critics are forming a protective armor of their own around the movie. Well, I at least feel relieved that I can go enjoy the film without any higher imperatives bearing down on me.

satire

I cut my teeth as a literature reading junior on William S. Burroughs. Burroughs was, among other things, a great writer of satire. His satire always creeped up in these oblique quasi-parable/allegories. In any case, my writing notebook has been laying on my floor for the last few weeks by my chair. I was reading Society of the Spectacle last night when I picked the notebook up and wrote down what amounted to "Homeless people are so ethical today." The gag of what I wrote was that the story had nothing to do with homeless people in the conventional sense at all. Rather it was a satire about a family who would rather be homeless than live in the house built for them by "illegial aliens." I really wanted to write something about this email forward my wife received from her friend who sends (from our perspective, well maybe from any perspective) questionable email forwards. I've also been turning over the beer story in my mind. But more on that some other time. I may put the story up here since it is not that long. By the end of writing it, however, I felt very ambivalent about it. You see (always beware a sentence beginning with "you see") the point would seem to be that this family's act of "resistance" was harmful, even ridiculous. I tried to show how these people so clearly misperceived their situation. But what situation? I found this hard to define. This reading would represent the kind of entropic movement that most satire (I think) exhibits. But in another way what the story (which of course you can't read right now) laments is how far fetched it is that anyone would actually go to such lengths to resist something. Well, these are just things that are on my mind when I should be doing things like, oh, studying for oral exams and so on...

laffy taffy

I'm feeling quite bad about myself at the moment. I've stayed up too late wasting time. Tonight was the first Italian class taken in preparation for the summer trip to Italy. This has made my day into a 12 hour learning extravaganza. I know that I am going to be tired tomorrow. I called and cancelled my doctors appointment in the morning because the thought or huffing up and down Chicago Ave. all day fills me with horror. Meanwhile, there is a backlog of reading piling up for Friday. Least of this reading includes the gazillion poems that I am supposed to have read in order to teach them. Also, my prof for Afterlife of Marxism suggested an extra session for grad students (even though it became an open invitation) for which we are supposed to read Society of the Spectacle. Now this little treatise is quite complicated because it is so enigmatic. It deals with the organization of the economy and society into images that produce or incite desire. There is a somewhat well known French philosopher coming to campus. This requires reading as well. There is no worse feeling that staring dumbly at the people sitting around you at a talk hoping they have hung on to a thread of the paper long enough to say something. All of these pressures have to do with the pressure I am putting on myself to "professionalize." This basically refers to the process of turning your will into laffy taffy (not the rump shaking kind though). There are stupid jokes involved in this process. Basically it means running around campus and sitting in ill lit corners of the university frantically reading materials that are too dense to be read with your back up against the wall (this reminds me of an article in the Times I saw about Airbus' plans for standing room only seats on planes: instead of groundlings of the old theatres I guess they'll have to be called "airlings." Why don't they just develop enormous ziplock bags and sling shots and just hurl people across time and space?). Oh and I'm supposed to be studying for oral exams. Right now I'm racing through Woman in White by Collins. Its a lovely novel (fortunately I read it before). But now that I've learned my committee is going to be comprised of two profs I barely know and one who has a disarming propensity to be simultaneously hot and cold. Needless to say, I'm a bit concerned. Everyone says that I will do fine on the exams. Surely I will. I have experience since January, however, a recurrent feeling that I cannot retain information in my brain. It is as if some thrifty shop mechanic went into my skull with a diamond bladed grinder and just made my brain resemble the chicago bean. (Note: I realize that link is a bit overkill in so far as it is meant to show/reveal what the bean is, but I digress...). BAsically, my complaint boils down to the genre of the "grad student's lament." There is nothing new to this. Only now it is my turn to be jostled down the gauntlet of self-doubt, inscrutable demands, and pressure.

Multitude

I often find myself overwhelmed by the sheer multitudes of people I encounter whilst scanning the internet. I particularly find flickr unnerving. How does one account for the multiplicity and plurality of bodies and moments and places? I guess this is a case of digital voyeurism gone bad (Zizek says that no real encounters can take place in cyberspace, hence the slogan that appears on my cell phone "No sex please we're digital"). After all what could be more unsettling than to think that you are leisurely peering into the intimate recesses of some stranger's existence only to find yourself confronting the meaningless facticity of your own life?

Paradise unread

I should be reading Paradise Lost right now. Instead I am distracting myself on the computer. I have been trying to break this habit of late. I have been mostly successful. It is astonishing how much interest one can take in the flat surface of the internet. I never really learn anything interesting online. The internet really is a non-event. A perpetual revolution of the same. Yet I still stare away. Back in the pre-Internet days I used to spend many hours reading my CD-ROM Encarta encyclopedia (of course I used to spend many hours reading, writing, and making mix tape covers, ie I used my time creatively). Then, at least, I learned something. The internet is sometimes just too hyperactive for my already hyperactive state of mind. In any case, I have been listening to an excellent album, Suicide's 1977 eponymous debut. I have known about this album since high school. At that time I purchased the excellently titled album, Some Girls Wander by Mistake, a collection of early singles and B-sides by the Sisters of Mercy. Andrew Eldritch mentions in the liner notes being enamoured with Suicide. Now, Denver had/has a great record store downtown called Waxtrax (many a weekend pilgrimage on the 0 bus that shot down Broadway were made to Waxtrax in those days. During the summer, I would ride with mom to her job, pick up the bus and spend the day downtown, going into thrift stores, sitting at the Market (back in those days the cafe was split into two halves, one smoking and the other non-smoking), walking around alleyways; quite fantastic days those were). You just couldn't find Suicide albums back then (or at least I couldn't and that was before Amazon etc. I often feel that pop culture became too hyper-intense with the internet, no longer does one have the thrill of the collector upon the experience "stumbling" upon something, even though I have the nifty "Stumble-Upon" plug-in installed on my computer). In any case, Mute re-released the album in 2000 (who has populated by collection of CDs with everything from Throbbing Gristle to Einsturzende Neubauten (yes, I was an industrial-head back in the day). Anyhoo, the Suicide album is very nice, a kind of affect-less sublime sort of affair (work out the paradox).

The limit

I know that I have reached my limit when I begin dreaming up projects, particularly when I am reading. I spent a good part of last night reading Paradise Lost thinking about an idea for a website called "Learninglists." See, in another class (ie not the Milton one), we are reading bits from Deleuze's Cinema I and II. Deleuze has interesting things to say about Westerns, particularly how they take place in a milieu and how they involve binomials: structures of anticipating the other and so on. I've also been quite obsessed with Joss Wheedon's amazing (now defunct, damn you Fox!) TV show, Firefly which has much to do with Westerns. So, I have the thought: I would like to learn about Westerns. But how? You see reading a book about it would be fine, but books are often argumentative (presenting a certain position in relation to other positions) rather than pedagogical (presenting how one arrives at certain positions and why). I want a list of 5-10 excellent Westerns that exhibit some kind of formal or thematic development and ruminate on them. Where does one find such a list? Enter my idea. A website with various "tutorials" or "learning exercises" in form of lists of whatever (books, movies, and so on) with accompanying commentary, pointing out key features, posing questions and so on.

I also find that when I have hit my intake threshold for information, I begin to daydream about writing. Of course, I often find when I read new theory (Deleuze) I work through it by imagining it in terms of characters and stories (this probably makes me a better creative writer than critic). In any case, I have often thought that since I cannot complete my "Cora" novel, also known as "Hudson" I should just start scanning every scrap of paper that has gone into making it over the last 5-6 years and just put on-line. I don't know what good this would do other than constitute an archive of failure. I also think about my "zeppelin" story that I have been ruminating over for a few years now. Unfortunatley, the more pressing task at hand is to interpolate Bleak House, read Paradise Lost and Mille Plateaux, and not lose my mind...

Vanitas Vanitatum

I have expended much paranoid energy on my preparation for the oral exams at the end of May. I constantly, restlessly, examine myself. Endlessly, I wonder if I am preparing the right material, thinking the right thoughts. What makes academic work so painful and frustrating though, is the way it is always motivated by a negation of the negation. You come to realize that the moments of harrowing despair and desolation, far from proving that you are doing it wrong, actually means you are doing it right. Alas, you cannot outwit the cunning of reason. Oh, vanitas vanitatum!

The dilapidated wreck of the future...

The name of my blog (or my name as a blogger which ever it may be) contains an irony that I feel requires thinking about at this current moment. In the west (including the midwest) one often sees dilapitated wrecks of houses and barns and other outlier structures of old homesteads and settlements being reclaimed by time. These "prairiebuildings" patiently await their destruction, outscaling the human time in which they were built. I always wonder why these buildings aren't torn down, why not circumvent this painful, protracted disintegration. Leaving them up seems like such an odd capitulation to the forces of nature in light of the savage energies of civilzation that have gone into to denying these very forces. These prairiebuildings were built in the process of "prairiebuilding," rendering the radical changes and alterations to the landscape, a great leap forward from one state into another. And yet through the destruction of those same buildings, another kind of "prairiebuilding" begins, a clearing and renewal that no one person's eyes can witness and of which I only catch fractions as a bystander swerving by in a strand of time.

I opened up my blog tonight to write about, as I never do, thoughts of a personal nature about the deconstituted, unconstructed state of my own (inner) life right now. I feel plagued by the question: How do I begin to build the person that I will become? Where does one find the resources within oneself to create what does not yet exist? The title of my blog seized me in that midst of these reflections. I am both inert and decaying and yet full of potential energy that is already undone in that inertia towards which it seems destined. The attraction that I feel to this ambivalent "word" surely indicates this. I feel that in a moment I have been built, torn down, and reclaimed by some other emerging process. Imploding, effacing, yet with premeditated spontaneity. Underlying all of this is that same paradoxical disavowal that leaves a building to sit and fold in on itself. I am negligent and progressive and destructive and creative all at once.

How to clear a space and build in that space without the blank behind the space taking revenge on that clearing with undoing. That is my dilemma.