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.