Facebook made a point of notifying me about this:
Your friends completely changed opinion about you. Your friend didn't think you're the winner in 'who is funnier'. Getting to know people better either causes confirmation or a change of opinion. What do you think?
Really, Facebook? Really? Apart from the really shotty syntax, this isn't the sort of thing I want Facebook to let me know.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Nerd-Girl Triumphs!
While I am woefully behind on the paper, I found something today that may help my case (or suggest that I have put far more effort into this than I actually have...and did not also just change my mind enough to require extensive additional work. balls.) F.O. Matthiessen wrote the definitive study of the five major writers of the American Renaissance in 1941. He shaped how we look at Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman for a great many years. Even though he was gay, he could not discuss the strong homoerotic veins running though either Herman Melville or Walt Whitman's works. When I was researching Melville, I found a passage that belied his silence:
Matthiessen cannot discuss how Melville manipulates and deconstructs heterosexual language (matrimonial signifiers mostly) because there is no language of egalitarian male relationships. In the 1850s, we don't have a word for homosexual, all we have is sodomy--an act of power. So he takes from a traditional male-female bond to describe how Ishmael and Queequeg relate. Because he had as yet no [other] vocabulary to express it. Is that what Matthiessen coded into his reading? I have no idea--it's just what I read.
When opening his discussion of Whitman he says another curious thing: "Whitman's excitement carries weight because he realized that man cannot use words so unless he has experienced the facts they express, unless he has grasped them with his senses" (518). So Whitman, we can assume Matthiessen is suggesting, knew exactly how it was to receive oral sex in the woods(25). To sing no songs today but those of manly attachments (92). To "wander hand in hand" with another man (99).
No wonder a woman had to wait for him...
A curious mixture resulted from Melville’s effort to formulate his thoughts, since they were still so new to him that he had as yet no vocabulary to express them that was not at second-hand” (123)
Matthiessen cannot discuss how Melville manipulates and deconstructs heterosexual language (matrimonial signifiers mostly) because there is no language of egalitarian male relationships. In the 1850s, we don't have a word for homosexual, all we have is sodomy--an act of power. So he takes from a traditional male-female bond to describe how Ishmael and Queequeg relate. Because he had as yet no [other] vocabulary to express it. Is that what Matthiessen coded into his reading? I have no idea--it's just what I read.
When opening his discussion of Whitman he says another curious thing: "Whitman's excitement carries weight because he realized that man cannot use words so unless he has experienced the facts they express, unless he has grasped them with his senses" (518). So Whitman, we can assume Matthiessen is suggesting, knew exactly how it was to receive oral sex in the woods(25). To sing no songs today but those of manly attachments (92). To "wander hand in hand" with another man (99).
No wonder a woman had to wait for him...
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Oh for fuck's sake...
Tonight was my presentation and despite running over (only by five minutes this time), I probably did an ok job of it. Zach and I were fairly prepared, the presentation did not include any obvious typos, the fonts and pictures showed up properly and all the links worked.
But I did fuck up. Somewhere between the Structuralists and Reader-response, the two girls who sit in the very center of the back row (or two rows in the arena style class) started furiously scribbling notes to each other. Completely distracted and made exceedingly nervous by this, I lost my place in my notes and brain. I royally screwed up my Reader-response slide and lost about a minute and a half (in the 15 minutes I had) in the process. I could have done one of two things:
1. call them out in the middle of the presentation, regain myself and go on.
2. get completely flustered and fumble until Critical Race Studies and actively avoid looking straight on for the rest of the presentation.
I picked 2. Maybe I should have called them out. But they seem (at least one of them) to be that sort of girl and I just don't want to make enemies...knowingly. I seem to have annoyed one of them already but I'm not sure how. I'm not inclined to try and figure it out either. Any time she deigns to speak to me, it's as an accusation. It's as if that's the only way she knows to phrase a response. It's exceedingly unnerving and she's really good at it. Sometimes, I really wish there were fewer women in my life. At least fewer of this particular kind. The royal Cunt.
Now I can't sleep because I just keep replaying that part of the presentation. I have a feeling that when it comes to it, that's where I'm losing points.
But I did fuck up. Somewhere between the Structuralists and Reader-response, the two girls who sit in the very center of the back row (or two rows in the arena style class) started furiously scribbling notes to each other. Completely distracted and made exceedingly nervous by this, I lost my place in my notes and brain. I royally screwed up my Reader-response slide and lost about a minute and a half (in the 15 minutes I had) in the process. I could have done one of two things:
1. call them out in the middle of the presentation, regain myself and go on.
2. get completely flustered and fumble until Critical Race Studies and actively avoid looking straight on for the rest of the presentation.
I picked 2. Maybe I should have called them out. But they seem (at least one of them) to be that sort of girl and I just don't want to make enemies...knowingly. I seem to have annoyed one of them already but I'm not sure how. I'm not inclined to try and figure it out either. Any time she deigns to speak to me, it's as an accusation. It's as if that's the only way she knows to phrase a response. It's exceedingly unnerving and she's really good at it. Sometimes, I really wish there were fewer women in my life. At least fewer of this particular kind. The royal Cunt.
Now I can't sleep because I just keep replaying that part of the presentation. I have a feeling that when it comes to it, that's where I'm losing points.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Mistakes were made
I should be frantically putting together a presentation on Critical Theory and Literary Criticism but am clearly not. Really, the biggest challenge with an assignment like this is editing the thing down to the time limit. One time, I gave a presentation on Charles Stewart Parnell that was supposed to be 20 minutes and lasted for 55. There's a stopwatch this time.
Earlier today, on the way to the store I was listening to the end ofThis American Life. The show this week riffed off the phrase "mistakes were made" and focused on people who, after fucking up royally, made performative apologies without actually saying "I'm sorry." An e-mail I got from Walt early this year and subsequently deleted (but not before drafting a response I never got around to sending) comes to mind.
At the very end, Ira Glass talked about discussing the show's topic with a colleague at NPR (one of the writers for Market Place whose name escapes me) and the writer mentioned a poem by William Carlos Williams. When he read it on air, I mouthed along because I've had this poem quasi-memorized for a couple years now. He noted that when he first read it in grade school his teacher told him it was an actual note Williams left his wife one day. Lou taught us that Williams had affairs and the plums in the icebox aren't plums at all. But he isn't sorry either way...
THIS IS JUST TO SAY
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
-William Carlos Williams
The writer, after all these years, is still infuriated by the line "you were probably/saving/for breakfast". He knew they were being saved. He knew her. And to him the "Forgive me" isn't so much mea culpa as it is a demand. I love this poem. I loved it when Lou first read it, the way he read every poem, slow and lingering. Lou, I think, had experience with plums. It's devious and beautiful in how it much it asks and how little is has to say. After the poem, a series of regular AL contributors read their own. Some were better than others. Some more in keeping with Williams winking simplicity. Others, well just one really, were too malicious to be really good.
Lately, this poem reminds me of Jason. That might not be fair because I do feel bad about how things ended. They again, look at that last sentence. How things ended? Mistakes were made. Maybe I didn't give him the benefit of the doubt. Lord knows I haven't given anyone much lately. I guess in watching other people wind up with someone just because they couldn't stand to be alone, I decided the opposite of that is probably better. I can't always stand to be alone either. When things start going inexplicably down the tube it's nice to able to just call someone whose job it is to help make it better. That's nice. But at what cost? I don't have time to really care about someone else. I don't even have time not to find unforgivable fault in them. I can't find fault in the plums though. The plums are always sweet. It's what comes after plums or the things you have to do to get to plums that seems to be most problematic lately. I don't know if I want the plums that badly. However sweet they taste.
Earlier today, on the way to the store I was listening to the end ofThis American Life. The show this week riffed off the phrase "mistakes were made" and focused on people who, after fucking up royally, made performative apologies without actually saying "I'm sorry." An e-mail I got from Walt early this year and subsequently deleted (but not before drafting a response I never got around to sending) comes to mind.
At the very end, Ira Glass talked about discussing the show's topic with a colleague at NPR (one of the writers for Market Place whose name escapes me) and the writer mentioned a poem by William Carlos Williams. When he read it on air, I mouthed along because I've had this poem quasi-memorized for a couple years now. He noted that when he first read it in grade school his teacher told him it was an actual note Williams left his wife one day. Lou taught us that Williams had affairs and the plums in the icebox aren't plums at all. But he isn't sorry either way...
THIS IS JUST TO SAY
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
-William Carlos Williams
The writer, after all these years, is still infuriated by the line "you were probably/saving/for breakfast". He knew they were being saved. He knew her. And to him the "Forgive me" isn't so much mea culpa as it is a demand. I love this poem. I loved it when Lou first read it, the way he read every poem, slow and lingering. Lou, I think, had experience with plums. It's devious and beautiful in how it much it asks and how little is has to say. After the poem, a series of regular AL contributors read their own. Some were better than others. Some more in keeping with Williams winking simplicity. Others, well just one really, were too malicious to be really good.
Lately, this poem reminds me of Jason. That might not be fair because I do feel bad about how things ended. They again, look at that last sentence. How things ended? Mistakes were made. Maybe I didn't give him the benefit of the doubt. Lord knows I haven't given anyone much lately. I guess in watching other people wind up with someone just because they couldn't stand to be alone, I decided the opposite of that is probably better. I can't always stand to be alone either. When things start going inexplicably down the tube it's nice to able to just call someone whose job it is to help make it better. That's nice. But at what cost? I don't have time to really care about someone else. I don't even have time not to find unforgivable fault in them. I can't find fault in the plums though. The plums are always sweet. It's what comes after plums or the things you have to do to get to plums that seems to be most problematic lately. I don't know if I want the plums that badly. However sweet they taste.
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