Hollow-een

Why dress up as something I'm not for Halloween when I already dress up everyday?

Walden Two

Huzzah!


Also, I guess the Merkin Election is on Tuesday. Interesting Stuff!

Modernism I: The Spatialization of Time I

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.

--Revelation 8:1

Weekly Wikipedia Find: "The Move"

Like all great things not limited to Ziggy and Horseface, this factoid comes to our attention because of The Wire Season 2.

Of all the things to secretly move in the middle of the night, a football team?

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Seven: Cloaca
Week Forty-Six: Ship of fools
Week Forty-Five: Slattery Report
Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

The Unexplained

What is this unusual thumb pain? Where does it come from? There is no discoloration. The nail is not too short or too long. There is nothing, however small, lodged beneath the nail. I had that before. This is something else. Something else entirely.

And how do I get all these little scratches and scrapes and scars on my hands? They have to come from somewhere.

Audience Demographics

Yesterday, we had "the talk."

But let's follow up, see how we're doing one day later.

Specifically, there was mentioned on having a certain audience. Some of us would rather play to certain audiences. And this can be different from person to person. This reminds of something from "the dread" years a.k.a. high school.

So there's a bunch of us sitting in class. It's a small glass. And all guys. This is not technically true. As this class is actually two courses, and segregated as such. But this class, I speak of was this second year version of the other half of the class. Just the other half outnumbered this half by at least four hundred percent but not more. None of this is really important.

So we're talking to our teacher, maybe, or watching a video, or a teacher is trying to get us to be quiet and get back to work, or watching that video, but we're a bunch of guys and are belligerent as such. Now, we're seated in about two rows and I'm at the end of the row, farthest away from everything.

So with all this talk, or video or whatever, there is the opportunity to make light of, to take advantage of the material, to comic, often hi-larious (patent pending), effect.

But me, being me, am telling jokes, perhaps subtly, but definitely conversationally to the guy next to me.

And this guy, being this guy, is retelling the jokes, loudly and to everyone else in the class, literally word for word, and getting laughs from all.

Now I would call this guy my friend, but I was proud of who I was, and I did not envy him.

How to Tell Only Fifty Percent of Your Jokes

How to Tell Only 50% of Your Jokes?

You have a set-up line designed to elicit a response. Like a knock, knock. Only not so obvious. This way there's no certainty you'll ever get your desired response. I do this all time. And am mostly disappointed.

Example 1: If I say "I think I fell down a hill," I don't want you to respond with "You fell down a hill?" Your response should be "You think?"

This method is mired in disappointment, though, and is only for the brave at heart. There will be rejection. There will be discarded punchlines. Do not fret, you will have to let them go. They belong to the ether, and the ether will reward you some other way.

Besides, they might not have elicited the laughs you might have thought. Which is kind of the point. I would rather tell the joke that makes the a couple of people in the room laugh than the one that makes the whole room laugh. That way I know who are the good people.

Example 2: If I say something gay, the response I'm looking for is along the lines of "your gay." This way I can tell my gay joke. Don't be all awkward and not respond at all.

Stories of a Prostitute

NOTE: I wrote this about 8 months ago when I watched Monster's Ball for the second time in my life. I feel my rough outline requires no further addendum.


One of the most realistic depictions of what I imagine an encounter with a prostitute to be like is from the film Monster's Ball

quick, dull, sad, quiet, unerotic, rote


END NOTE: Kind of like my experience with strip clubs: boring, unerotic, rote

Top Five X: James Bond Films

1. From Russia With Love
2. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
3. Casino Royale (2006)
4. The Spy Who Loved Me
5. Goldfinger

Unseen: Casino Royale (1967)

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Cloaca

Birds. How do they do it? Sex. Bird sex. The cloacal kiss. It's how. What's a cloaca? A sewer organ. Shittin' and pissin' and fuckin' all in one. The cloacal kiss is the touching of cloacas together, however fleeting, to pass precious fluids.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Six: Ship of fools
Week Forty-Five: Slattery Report
Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Our Worlds at Word

A letter to "Henry Flowers" Leopold Bloom:

I am sorry you did not like my last letter. Why did you enclose the stamps? I am awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that. I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word.

--James Joyce, Ulysses

My oath to postmodernism:

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

--Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita

We knew the world would not be the same.

--J. Robert Oppenheimer

We knew the word would not be the same.

My Best of the Year in Film: 1956

The Year: 1956

The Film: The Searchers

Directed by John Ford. Written by Frank S. Nugent based on a book by Alan Le May.

Starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, and Henry Brandon as Scar.

When we usually think of revisionist westerns, we usually think of the darker, cynicism of New Hollywood-era (1970s) westerns or the complete deconstructionism of 1992's Unforgiven. But The Searchers is as much a revisionist western as any of those films. John Wayne, here as our "hero" Ethan Edwards, is a harsh and violent man. As just one example of his unerring cruelty and capability for evil vengeance: "By what you preach... none. But, what that Comanche believes--ain't got no eyes... can't enter the spirit land... has to wander forever between the winds. You get it, Reverend." To shoot out the eyes of a dead man to spite his beliefs, not your own, is the harshest you get with this man, this very unlikable protagonist. The Searchers has a bit of a reputation as a racist film. And it's hard to argue with that. It certainly is a product of its time. But it's also a film focused so intensely on Ethan. This is Ethan's viewpoint; Ethan is a racist; the film's narrative is focalized through Ethan. It's important to not falling into intentional fallacy by assuming we know what (sorry to assume some auteur theory with these terms) the authorial intent was. We must not assume that the apparent message is something that the filmmakers agree with. There is also cynicism and the inherent message to consider.

I'd also like to address a bit of beautiful symbolism the film uses. Now this was an era where films were transitioning to widescreen aspects, and not all films were yet using these. The Searchers uses a process called Vistavision. The film begins and end with the framing from inside the homestead. That is the doorway seen from the inside looking out effectively darkens the sides of the frame, referencing a standard fullscreen aspect ratio. As the camera leaves this homestead doorway, it opens up the frame but also metaphorically, in reverse at the end, the framing kept the bad world out. And the bad world arrives with John Wayne and at the end when again the bad world is made separate, John Wayne must remain outside the homestead. His evils will forever separate him from the civility of the new era, as the frontier, and the west come to an end.

Book Covers: Inside the Abyss

I'm an impulse buyer at times. I've come to realize that and accept that. It's a situational affliction. That's a great deal. Or that looks real good. One of these days, I could just see myself falling. Into. Addiction. The fix. It would just be too much.

The part of the side I see myself like this is in bookstores. So I just happened to go to the bookstore recently to buy a birthday present for a cousin. I knew exactly what to buy and where to find it. I went straight to it.

But I was already inside the abyss. What harm could it be to just look around a little?

What struck my eye that day was I Love Dollars by Wen Zhu. It was not so much because of an author I had heard of (I hadn't) or praise from sources I respected (I didn't), but the cover, the cover, the cover.


Of course, I shouldn't give the cover all the credit, I was after all also intrigued by the synopsis of "a hilarious send-up of China's love affair with capitalism." It goes on to namedrop both Franz Kafka and Larry David, in describing the story collection as a synthesis of "slangy swagger" with "the inanities of everyday life in contemporary China."

But that wasn't the first thing to strike my eye.

I saw those gorgeous James Bond hardcovers:

And there are these new edition series of adventure books:

I'm reminded by all of this, that the Penguin Blog is a great interwebian destination, often detailing the beautiful process that goes into their covers.

The Last Time I Fell in Love II

In a dive club, the music loud, the people crowding, communication is a hurdle. She says something. "Yeah," I say in response. There is a disconnect. "You didn't hear what I just said, did you?"

You got me. "But you responded anyways." She calls my bullshit and that was the last time I fell in love.

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Ship of fools

I wish Wikipedia would make a list of for all of their long-been-a-fixtures for Western literature and art. It would make things a lot easier on me. Because here I am, sitting in my ship, being ignorant like some kind of... some kind... some kind of foolish person. Like an ass, or an idiot, or an imbecile. Or a mooncalf, or a moron, or a nincompoop. A ninny or a nitwit. A simpleton or a softhead. Like one of those things, but of a term that more accurately would describe me as a silly or stupid person lacking in judgment or sense. Whatever that term may be. And in this ship are like-minded individuals, and we are all ignorant of our direction. Foolish as we are.

Foucault would be able to see the symbolism in such a symbol. Ship of fools he could call it. If he weren't so busy and would just return my calls already. I didn't mean to hurt you, baby, I swear I love you, I just love you so much.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Five: Slattery Report
Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Words Are Our Friends: Bipartisan

Bipartisan is a loaded word. We say it like it's a good thing, that it's a neutral concept. But that's a falsehood. The word is supposed to be the ultimate word in non-biased democracy. The word, however, is neither non-biased or democratic. Bi means two, twice, or both, or derivatives thereof, I think we can agree upon. There are two sides. It is a word that admits defeat in democracy. There are two sides. It is a two-party system.

"Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate."
"Go ahead, throw your vote away."

Third parties are often little more than a joke in today's politics. More so in the United States than in Canada, third parties are little more than wild cards, acting as spoilers by stealing votes from other parties on the same side of the political spectrum. When they actually garner enough support to garner a role of representation, they lapse into political alliances with those same like-minded parties. In the language of politics, bipartisanship is a lie. In the politics of language, bipartisan is a political, biased word.

Today in Comparisons II

John Milton's Paradise Lost is to justify the way of God to man
as Aeschylus' Oresteia (Agamemnon, Choephori, The Eumenides) is to justify the ways of gods to man.

The Kicker

"Sorry, you must have me confused with someone you can relate to emotionally."

I have this recurring notion that we all experience colours differently. Their actual names mean very little, being nothing more than signifiers. But when that lights hit our rods and cones, are all of our brains processing it the same way? Does my green look like your purple?

The word bothered him

He began then, bewilderingly, to talk about something called entropy. The word bothered him as much as "Trystero" bothered Oedipa. But it was too technical for her. She did gather that there were two distinct kinds of entropy. One having to do with heat-engines, the other to do with communication. The equation for one, back in the '30's, had looked very like the equation for the other. It was a coincidence. The two fields were entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwell's Demon. As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where.

--Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Slattery Report

The Slattery Report or the "Problem of Alaskan Development" was the proposal that following the Night of Broken Glass incident at a German pogrom just prior to the outbreak of World War II, Alaska, then a territory and not yet a state, be used as a Jewish refugee haven, but faced opposition from American Jews. Instead, Alaska remained an Okie backwater from the dustbowl migrations.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Four: Isolationism
Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Making Our Own Maxims II

Violence Changes a Man

But Revenge Ruins One

Also, file under book titles.

Album Listen List: September 2008

I listened to nothing new in the month of September. I got nothing. Nothing! Nothing, I tells ya.

Try better next time.

Go to sleep, everything is alright.

I'm finding it increasingly harder--harder and harder--to differentiate between reality and dreams. It's troubling in a non-crazy way. I swear, completely non-crazy. It just makes memory recall, a bitch. It must be the stress of my day-to-day life. Not stress, like stress, but stress as a static fluidity to my schedule. First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a train going in and out of tunnels. Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop. The constant media inputs do not help. They make all the dreams that much worse. It's like a repeat of my day. But the realization of this only comes at the dawn. Like two different versions of the same thing, a troubling rashomon of my past. There are the events as they really happened; there are the events as I remember them, and; there are the events as I dream them. The first two are to be expected. The object and the subject of everyday occurrence that all experience. But in the third--a terrifying simulacra exists. This unreal representation is standard discourse to start, the seams are visible, I can see the strings, but as I move farther away, I fall into this artifice of eternity. The line between the mirror and mirrored becomes increasingly blurred as certain details of the simulacrum attach themselves to eidetic. And frequently, as a result, I find myself asking, Did this really happen? or, Did I dream it? It's usually just the small things. I try not to fret the small things. But what if everything is small. And what if I like the dream version better? Its too bad all these things can only happen in my dreams, only in dreams, in beautiful dreams.

Film Watch List: September 2008

*film has been seen previously/rewatching
†watched in theatre

in viewing order
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Across the Universe (2007)
The Boys from Brazil (1978)
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944)
Enchanted (2007)
Out of the Past (1947)
The Naked Spur (1953)
The Desperate Hours (1955)
30 Days of Night (2007)
Sophie's Choice (1982)
The Black Dahlia (2006)
Paper Moon (1973)
The Nines (2007)
Rocket Science (2007)
Written on the Wind (1956)
Skidoo (1968)
We Own the Night (2007)
Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)
Lust, Caution (2007)
Short Cuts (1993)
Battlestar Galactica: Razor (2007)
Burn After Reading (2008)†

Stats
Films watched: 23
Films previously seen: 0
Films watched in theatres: 1
Films made for direct-to-DVD: 1

Average # of films watched per day: 0.77

By Decade
1930s: 0
1940s: 3
1950s: 3
1960s: 1
1970s: 2
1980s: 1
1990s: 1
2000s: 12

Conclusion: Films like Shadow of a Doubt and Miracle of Morgan's Creek can be propelled from 'good' to 'great' by the addition of some psychosexual intrigue. In Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow, this is the raging sexual tension between our young teenage heroine and her possibly-a-murderer uncle. In Preston Sturges' Miracle, this is exemplified when our heroine, in the night where she has a pregnancy-resulting, amnesiac one night stand, bumps her head on phallic mirror ball. Did I mention this was the 1940s?

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Isolationism

It turns out there already is such a thing as isolationism. Damn you, complete world knowledge! Isn't there anything that escapes your neon claws?

Now if someone would just take this military/political policy and apply its basic principles to literary/social theory, then we'd be rolling.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Forty-Three: Foxy
Week Forty-Two: Young Woman with Unicorn
Week Forty-One: Cosmicism
Week Forty: Prisoner's dilemma
Week Thirty-Nine: Demimonde
Week Thirty-Eight: Haemophilia in European royalty
Week Thirty-Seven: Library of America
Week Thirty-Six: Honeypot
Week Thirty-Five: Glasgow smile
Week Thirty-Four: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Week Thirty-Three: Mono no aware
Week Thirty-Two: Royal intermarriage
Week Thirty-One: Amputee fetishism
Week Thirty: Turtles all the way down
Week Twenty-Nine: The Diogenes Club
Week Twenty-Eight: E pur si muove!
Week Twenty-Seven: Unico
Week Twenty-Six: Panopticon
Week Twenty-Five: Legendary
Week Twenty-Four: Ostern
Week Twenty-Three: Kilroy was here
Week Twenty-Two: Jack Parsons
Week Twenty-One: The Wold Newton Universe
Week Twenty: Anonymous
Week Nineteen: Monty Hall problem
Week Eighteen: Brown Booby
Week Seventeen: Dieter Dengler
Week Sixteen: New Jerusalem
Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion