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.

Heigh Ho

My friend Sam posted this awesome video about Disney the other day which highlighted Disney's perpetual remaking of Snow White. The video was interesting, but what was really surprising was reading this blog about cartoon songs that labelled "Heigh Ho" as the best cartoon song. I don't know how I feel about that, or for that matter, how I feel about a number of the other songs that were ranked on the top ten. Certainly not ones that I would choose. Nonetheless, I am happy that the reinforcement of "off to work we go" is something that has bombarded me in the past two days. I have been extremely lazy yesterday and today (and I continue to be bad today because I have a party and a concert to go to in just a bit). All of this just to say, in a week from right now, I will be done. A Master. Have a Master's Degree. Done. Finito. Ah, the bliss. The next blog will come then, but until then, maybe you can contemplate this passage I just dissected for my MA Project.

“Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the world’s waters, when Love, who seems so tiny a pebble, slips in. Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores. No doubt the disturbance is really the spirit of the generations, welcoming the new generation, and chafing against the ultimate Fate, who holds all the seas in the palm of her hand. But Love cannot understand this. He cannot comprehend another’s infinity; he is conscious only of his own—flying sunbeam, falling rose, pebble that asks for one quiet plunge below the fretting interplay of space and time. He knows that he will survive at the end of things, and be gathered by Fate as a jewel from the slime, and be handed with admiration rounding the assembly of the god. ‘Men did produce this,” they will say, and saying, they will give men immortality.” (127)

It is from Forster's Howards End

Movie of the Month: Adventureland

Those of you that know my mantra--"I laughed, I cried, I lived"--for the post-movies reaction will probably not be surprised that I felt it last night when I saw Adventureland. The film was particularly apt for myself and my friend last night since we are both graduating in May and have summer jobs and plans for the fall but still find ourselves in this "existential" or rather mental confluence of emotions and desires. The film, by the director of Superbad, features James (Jesse Eisenberg) pursuing an unplanned summer job at Adventureland, an odd amusement park, in his home town of Pittsburgh. Needless to say, hijinks and romance ensue.

The reason I wanted to feature this as a movie of the month was more than just to draw your attention to. I see it continuing in a long tradition of films that sort of examine life in school and post-school. Of course, The Breakfast Club is an iconic film about high school and teenage life, and I would add that films like Fame and Center Stage offer similar versions for those artistically inclined. And of course, there are the gap movies about life in senior year and movements towards college like The Perfect Score and Can't Hardly Wait. Likewise, films like Real Genius might offer a sort of "life in college" view just like TV shows like Felicity and Greek attempt to show us different views of life.

My current stage of post-college, graduate school life, however, draws me towards films where academics and college graduates find themselves hurtled into the real world where things are so unsafe and unstable. My mind floats toward of film like Reality Bites, and I see Adventureland hovering into this genre of school angst, post-graduation anxiety about how life may or may not fit into the real world.

Anyways, I totally recommend the film, and I hope many people get a chance to see. It had the right percentage of comedy, drama/sadness, and intellectual push to make it a good movie. I was happy to see all of the actors in the film because they did such a good job. Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, who plays a girl at the park, have these brilliant expressions throughout the movie that convey these moments of desire and anguish. The film also had some great input by characters like Martin Starr, Ryan Reynolds, Kristen Wigg, and Bill Hader. Not to mention that fact that since the show is set in 1987 there was some pretty awesome music. Rock me, Amadeus. Amadeus.

The Beatles

I had to share this snippet of an article I found on Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/03/uk-university-offers-mast_n_171656.html

The Liverpool Hope University is now offering a Master's Degree in "The Beatles, Popular Music, and Society."

This is quite possibly one of the neatest things ever and, of course, yet another reason why the liberal arts rock (and roll)! Literally.

More from the article:
"There have been over 8,000 books about the Beatles but there has never been serious academic study and that is what we are going to address," said Mike Brocken, who is directing the program at the university, which is in the band's hometown in northwestern England. Brocken said students would be expected to study the Beatles' songs, stardom, hometown and cultural impact through four 12-week courses and a dissertation. Brocken said studying the band was really a way of examining society as a whole. "If popular music is about anything, it's about people," he said. "If we look at popular culture, it simply provides us with a very complex mirror of ourselves."

My Freshmen Dorm

May you rest in peace Boozman....