Haraway Rocks!

I have been meditating over this reading I have to do for class this weekend. Donna Haraway is at once so completely confusing and so amazing! I have never been so absorbed in theory in quite some time.

Here are some points that stopped me for a while and that I wanted to share:

Weeding out science (186) - "We unmasked the doctrines of objectivity because they threatened our budding sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our 'embodied' accounts of the truth, and we ended up with one more excuse for not learning any post-Newtonian physics and one more reason to drop the old feminist self-help practices of repairing our own cars" (186)

I think what H is saying here is that even objectivism became too subjective because post-structuralism and postmodernism showed us that "objectivism" is a ruse. So we reverted backwards (?) instead of learning something fundamental about this. If we can't escape a location/rooted ideology, where are we if we wish to question this and other past positions?
"Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything. Here, we, as feminists, find ourselves perversely conjoined with the discourse of many practicing scientists, who, when all is said and one, mostly believe they are describing and discovering things by means of all their constructing and arguing" (187).

VERY IMPORTANT PARAGRAPH - 187 - "We need the power of modern critical theories of how meaning and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future" (187). ----

I think here H is talking about how we need the multiplicity within the "local knowledges" in order to recognize the plural in the world at large. We are not looking for some grand key to unlock it, we are looking for the maze (path)? We are already in the room.

I can't wait to talk about these topics in class so I needed to share them now. Yes to education!

I know I haven't posted in a while. Things should be getting less crazy soon.

I just sort of reconnected with a friend the other day. I found this poem that she sent me when she was in this uber-cool feminist's class, Jane Gallop. I hope she doesn't mind me posting this.

Enjoy!

"To Michael's Hunger"

My day is chaos:
I had to skip lunch,
all I have to eat is cheese,
and that won't suffice until dinner.
Do I have take-out menus?
Maybe I should just drink.

It's 2:00, is it okay to drink
away my thoughts of chaos?
Or should I just eat this menu?
Why would anyone schedule lunch
so early and make dinner
so late? So here's to cheese!

No fromage and crackers, just cheese
and wine--the acceptable drink
for any time before or after dinner,
and is this really chaos
or the absence of lunch?
I don't like anything on this menu.

Is there sanity on one of these menus?
Hot guys, prozac, and cheese--
that would have been a great lunch
followed by a pretty stout drink.
I could have forgotten about the chaos
and even had the same thing for dinner.

What should I do for dinner?
I'll order from this menu--
food to fight the chaos--
French fries and burgers with cheese
and an espresso to drink.
That should make me forget lunch.

Tomorrow I should remember lunch,
and have a light healthy dinner,
then I can go out for a drink,
somewhere with a good cocktail menu.
I should throw away this cheese
and ignore my thoughts of chaos.

I should not drink my lunch
or have chaos for dinner
and not eat menus or old cheese.

Tropic Thunder and District 9

Yesterday while I was waiting for my brother to get to his apartment, I decided to see District 9 at the local AMC. Well, I thought I would be in for a wonderful treat because I was overwhelmed by all of the great acclaim and reviews that I had been hearing from multiple sources about the film. I love science fiction and genre-bending film/fiction, so I was pretty stoked to see the film. 40 minutes into the movie, I was less excited and more vomiticious. I was mired in motion sickness because of the jumpy camera. On the verge of illness, I abandoned any pretense of watching the rest of the movie (I already had closed my eyes for about three minutes and that didn’t help).

This rather painful and awkward experience was later counteracted when I finally watched Tropic Thunder, a movie that I had promised F I would watch almost a week ago and never got around to doing. F was right – hilarious. My belly laughter would have been quite amusing to anyone else watching the movie with me. I especially liked the acting of Robert Downey, Jr., who by far stole the show. Tom Cruise’s character was quite interesting. Like G.I. Joe, I was shocked by the sheer amount of cameos in the film. Totally not impressed by Jack Black or Ben Stiller. I think I will probably avoid such satirical films for a while (satire and I don’t always get along), but I am happy that I finally watched the movie. I love how it opened up with fake movie trailers (something I mentioned in a previous blog).

Hopefully one day, I will be able to rent District 9 and not throw up because I will be able to pause the DVD.

Apathy and Motivation?

I’m stuck. I don’t know what to write about. So many things are wrong (I think).

I just watched Julie and Julia, which I thought was fabulous. In it, I love how Julie Powell creates/finds the motivation for her blog. I also like how my friend’s blogs have clear purposes.

I think the Gemini in me is keeping me from finding something and sticking with a particular topic. I have been sort of fueling this blog with some of my interpretation of Byatt’s lamination. I sort of wanted this blog to act out some of those idea(l)(s) because I find myself adrift so much. I’m not very religious and my existentialism often gets criticized so many others for lameness that I keep it to myself.

I wanted this past summer to be about getting more professional, about working on getting published and being more academic. In the end, this was one of the laziest summers I have had, and all I feel like doing lately is crying because I miss my friends, I feel alienated from my brother, and my house is such a wreck that I have no place of solace. I got into a somewhat huge argument/fight with my brother earlier, and I am just so frustrated by everything.

And then on top of that, I just don’t know what to do in terms of my reading and writing. I want to read, but I don’t know where my books are. I start school in a week and feel no motivation to start new projects. I think my writing is suffering because I can’t conceive of what to do to sustain a coherent argument for 30 pages.

I think the two seasons of Six Feet Under that I am working my way through are making me a little paranoid, too. I need something a bit more light hearted I think. This show is just so heavy. I look forward to watching Tropic Thunder, which Fink has adamantly demanded that I watch as soon as possible. So maybe in a day or two I can finally see it.

snippets from various artists

So, I have been extremely lazy lately and haven’t really been blogging at all. I really need to step up my game (something a friend told me the other day). So here is a short post.

Everyone (i.e., like two people) has been sending me information about these random new artists they have been discovering, so here is some information about some new artists. Yeah!

I went to the White Linen Festival in New Orleans last weekend, and I was surprised to see a couple new artists that I liked. We barely went into the galleries because we were busy drinking and walking around. This is who I discovered: Raine Bledsoe and Doyle Gertjejansen.

Bledsoe’s work was really interesting. He/She (ambiguously gendered name, right?) worked in mixed media. I snagged this picture from a Shreveport blog. It’s of a twig person surrounded by pages from an old book. I got to see this piece in one of the galleries. Another interesting piece of was of tree made out of lines of poetry that were cut up into a tree’s shape.



The other really neat artist that I discovered was Gertjejansen. His work was very colorful, and he painted on some really large canvases, which looked really nice. I couldn’t save any painting from his site, but here is the link to check out.

The third artist, who I did managed to get a picture of/from, is Julia Blackmon. I like how her work is about domestication, but also the revelry that kids feel when they sort of break the rules. Interesting stuff.