Random Genius

My friend over at To Someone Likeminded posted this link on her blog the other day to Random Sentences from the Virtual Academic Lab.

Well, here was my FB responses:

Post #1: This is amazing. I can't stop creating sentences. I see a blog post coming soon.

Post #2 (seconds later): This kind of saddens me after being amazed briefly. Is this saying that all we really do is Mad Libs when we create new thoughts. That our work is nothing more than jest or game. ???

Well, I am still mulling over this idea. I do think that it is a neat site and generator of thoughtful discussion. But is it? I am still questioning all of this.

Can productive thought be produced by the random generator / mad-lib-esque-ness of the virtual world?

The epistemology of praxis invests itself in the systemization of the public sphere.
The emergence of normative value(s) may be parsed as the authentication of print culture.
The culture of consumption functions as the conceptual frame for the historicization of pedagogical institutions.
The fiction of the natural invests itself in the fantasy of agency.
The poetics of post-capitalist hegemony may be parsed as the systemization of power/knowledge.

You get the point.

I am trying to think about this more and more through the lens of Elizabeth Grosz's work, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, which I am reviewing for class. I wonder if there is this sense that the virtual allows us understand things more clearly, or blatantly. But one thing she returns to again and again is that we somehow tie the virtual with the technological, and we need to reconsider and (re-)understand how the virtual is part of the everyday. We occupy a virtual space in real space. It is not just something that is created in the world of the Internet.

I send you out into the ether.

Echoes and Reflections

I am halfway through Byatt’s new book, The Children’s Book, and I love it. I stayed up late last night to get through some more chapters. Now, I want to stop reading it to delay the pleasure of having more of it left to read. So, to sort of fulfill that desire and to start thinking more critically about her new book – which I am finding an interesting sort of departure from her other material – I was stroke by this strand of the novel that corresponded to this movie I have recently been obsessed with, Reds. Also, how this one character Charles/Karl talks about the poor makes me think about my own relationship to the visible homeless, poor, and destitute of the streets. (Which is just so uncanny and weird. It is like all of these things in life start to echo one another. Being accosted byesperate, homeless woman and discussing it with friends. Watching Reds. Reading about socialism and current politics and how this is echoed in the Up Series. Talking with LT about the homeless in NOLA.) Anyways, here is some passages:

“[Charles’s/Karl’s] own essay had been a rather perverse, but certainly clever, demolition of the dream of the good life in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and the kind of communities associated with it, who wore hand-printed skirts and ate vegetables. He wrote that the dream of Heave had always worried him because it was so boring – there was nothing to do – and the dreams of Heaven on Earth, going back to the land, living in vegetable gardens and little plots of flowers, with no machines to be seen anywhere, struck him as a sleepy refusal to look at real problems and make real plans about what to do. He quoted Morris against himself

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?

He was indeed, wrote Charles/Karl censoriously, ‘the idle singer of an empty day’ (174).

Just a couple pages earlier, Charles/Karl said to his tutor, “What I can’t see – what I really can’t see – is why everyone doesn’t ask themselves that, all the time [why are the poor poor?]. How can these people bear to go to church and then go about in the streets and see what is there for everyone to see – and get told what the Bible says about the poor – and go on riding in carriages, and choosing neckties and hats – and eating huge beefsteaks – I can’t see it” (170). Charles/Karl is rejecting the life of his banker father who is manipulating the poor and Africans through the gold trade. Charles’s/Karl’s rebellion comes through his involvement in the anarchist movement. He eventually meets Emma Goldman in Paris, etc. I haven’t quite got to a part where we will see where he ends up, but his is one of the more interesting threads of the novel because of the fact that it seems so much like a surplus for the other narratives. In many ways, his story is there for comparative reasons. But maybe it is the story we are supposed to learn so much more from. Not sure? However, maybe I should reveal some of my stupidity. Um, I had totally never though of Heaven as Utopia. Okay. Yeah, a little crazy. But I just didn’t think of it in that terminology before. And when Byatt writes about his essay and the discussion of Heaven – I was so piqued. I also find myself a little reactionary to the passage because I know so many people that I are trying to live “off the grid,” and I’ve seen so many things documentaries about these types of people (another echo – Into the Wild, Grizzly Man).

What I think is so interesting is that Charles/Karl discusses something that I have issue with in this whole agrarian throwback movement and its nostalgic overtones. By ignoring progress and the current world and reverting back to medieval, pre-Industrial life, is that really solving anything? Certainly you might escape the ills of contemporary society, but isn’t it naïve to think that you are really escaping anything. I mean these societies, communes, trailers, houses, farms are just as utopic (? Utopia-like) as Shaker communities, Edward Carpenter’s pastoral visions, or Lawrence’s Rananim. And yet, I feel that I have no real right to bitch about some of this stuff because it is not like I am living in this type of community nor am I walking the street trying to save lives. I certainly talk the talk of activism and civil liberties and working for gender equality, etc., but when it comes to walking the walk, I think my lungs are still expanding. I take a couple steps on the path but never really get too far. Am I thus guilty because I am okay with my own bourgeois status?

Right, maybe, I don’t know? It is extremely unclear to me where Byatt stands on this issue, but her characters run the gamut of positions. Whereas Charles/Karl reacts to violently against this, it is clear that one of this foils, Tom, needs this type of ignorance to avoid the pain of society – although his pain is more social and not classed or technologically related. I think in the context of the book I am poised in the middle of her discourse concerning this topic so I am interested to see where this thread continues. As of now, Charles/Karl has just met Emma Goldman and some more Russian and German anarchists in Paris. Now that he is back in England, I don’t know what he will become or use this experience, but I can’t wait to find out.

Byatt, A. S. The Children’s Book. London: Chatto & Windus, 2009.

bourgeois, n.1 and a.

bourgeois, n.1 and a.
A. n.

1. orig. A (French) citizen or freeman of a city or burgh, as distinguished from a peasant on the one hand, and a gentleman on the other; now often taken as the type of the mercantile or shopkeeping middle class of any country. Also fem. bourgeoise, a Frenchwoman of the middle class.
2. Used disparagingly. a. In communist or socialist writings: a capitalist; anyone judged to be an exploiter of the proletariat.
2. Resembling the middle classes in appearance, way of thinking, etc. Also used disparagingly: selfishly materialistic or conventionally respectable and unimaginative; = PHILISTINE a. 2. (See also quot. 1960.)


I have been feeling incredibly bourgeois lately. I have just spent the past 10 and 1/2 days at home doing absolutely whatever I want. Within reason and morality though. It has just been one helluva week, as they say. I sit, perhaps at the pinnacle of the feeling of bourgeois-ness, at the computer reflecting on this most awesome Better Than Ezra concert that I just attended with some dear friends. It was quite amazing. All week though has sort of reflected this amazing-ness feeling. I have been reading (although very little of stuff of true merit, if there is such a thing), watching TV, listening to some awesome music (I finally got Glen's cover of "Into the Mystic," and I discovered a most cool new band), and I swam for five hours on Friday past.

Laziness, exploitation of the proletariat...well maybe, but it just seems that I have been feeling very "free" of things lately. I have been becoming more laid back and open to fun and a little chaos. I think I can almost say with some authority, yet again if there is such a thing) that Disney's UP is the greatest Pixar film. As Laura and I enjoyed a great post-movie analysis discussion I realized that the mundane, the everyday is amazing. It is worth living for. So I guess I also look back on this past week knowing that in many ways it exemplifies so much good-ness. If possible, I wish I could have spent even more time with those whom I love because there is never enough time to go around really. And on that note, I will finish this as I plan to stay up for the next three hours before flying to Tulsa. I have much to plan. The next two months will be far from ordinary as I finish up one chapter of my life to start another. I look forward to seeing the everyday of this summer!

Some Whitman

My friend's blog (To Someone Likeminded) featured a number of Walt Whitman snippets for some enjoyment in the last month, and I thought about giving to Whitman to my readers since I really liked having some shared with me. I found this really neat, short poem of his.

"A Noiseless Spider" by Whitman (from poetry.com)

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

I hope you enjoy!

[For some self-analysis, however, I must add that I really love the idea of a spider "tirelessly"
sending out its spool of web--a part of its own being, a creation that it makes--and how the soul
attempts to "connect" them.  I have been thinking about "only connect" lately since I have been
rereading Babel Tower for my Master's Project, and this little poem just fits so nice with that
idea of lose fragments, floating free, waiting to be connected.]

Bannings Classes

I know I have been posting a lot lately, so if you are sick of hearing from me, I'm sorry. [I have been using blogging as a coping mechanism, I think.] Anyways, aside from that, I am truly outraged at some news that I just read on feministing. I was saddened to hear that Georgia republicans want to ban the liberal arts. I don't want to copy the whole blog entry, but you have to read this quoted part:

"This is not considered higher education," [State Rep. Charlice] Byrd said. "If legislators are going to dole out the dollars, we should have a say-so in where they go."

Byrd and her supporters, including state Rep. Calvin Hill, R-Canton, said they will team with the Christian Coalition and other religious groups to pressure fellow lawmakers and the University System Board of Regents to eliminate the jobs.

"Our job is to educate our people in sciences, business, math," said Hill, a vice chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee. He said professors aren't going to meet those needs "by teaching a class in queer theory."

To see the whole post, click here.

It's bad enough that people are losing jobs across the nation, but now Republicans want to eliminated entire academic fields in college classrooms. Disgusting! What does this mean for people who don't "business, math, and sciences"? Are our subject no less valuable? Maybe we need subjects like history and English because they teach acceptance and difference.

Ugh!

Feeling Honored

Oh my! I just found out I am quoted on the Scholars' website. I don't think there is any higher honor that I could feel at this moment.

"...it wasn't until exploring the "rise and fall" of English in my graduate school department that I realized how vital an education I received at Scholars'. Scholars' overall approach to the Text and Traditions program is actually amazing. My experience in T and T was one that placed emphasis on all disciplines and did not curtail any particular agenda. Likewise, by dividing class into lecture and seminar, having a Fulbright Scholar in T and T to cover art in the Ancient World, and a push for intense research in the final sections of the class, T and T truly did prepare me for graduate school and my goal in exploring textuality as it is conceived in the 20th century. The unique system of voting on classes and controlling the variety of electives that one takes is almost unheard of in other institutions. To be able to tell a professor that you are interested in the connection between psychoanalysis and 20th century feminist fiction and see both a classroom and intensive academic research and theoretical training come out of it is something that none of my graduate classmates are able to claim that they have experienced. Scholars' is great place, a sacred place for the communion between mind and knowledge and between experience and thought. Without my time at Scholars' I would not have been prepared for graduate school. Without Scholars' I would not have been prepared for life."

M. Griffin

University of Tulsa
Master's Candidate

I don't think words could express how extremely proud I am in this moment. Those of you that were there will remember the day I broke down crying when a certain director-who-shall-remain-nameless told me that this director would prefer for me not to participate in the Scholars' Day functions. I promptly attempted to embarrass Scholars' by wearing my pajamas for a mock T and T class. Well, I guess the joke was on me because no one really noticed.

I am happy to see what has been going on with Scholars'. It is so good that Davina has been hired because having a stable director is really beneficial for the college. It's also great that programs are expanding, funding is being put in somewhat decent places, and people seem to be staying in Scholars' rather than transferring out. (Retention was a huge problem the years I was there. My class started in the 50s and ended up with 12.) I may have had problems with certain administrations both past and present, but I really do stand by what I said above and by so much more. Scholars' truly was this magical place for me, and I hope to return in an official capacity one day.

Tagging, But Not the Kind You Think

One of my grad school friends tagged me on her blog, Nothing Elegant. I hardly ever see her anymore so I figured I would do this as a way of playing catch-up with her. I decided not to delete a question.



Step 1: respond and rework—answer the questions on your own blog, replace one question that you dislike with a question of your own invention, add one more question of your own. Step 2: tag—eight other un-tagged people.



1) What are you wearing right now? Long johns, boxers, black pants, undershirt, t-shirt, flannel button-up.



2) What's the last thing I read/ are currentlyreading? Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and Genre by John Frow. I am about to start A Room with a View by E. M. Forster and Beloved by Toni Morrison.



3) Do you nap a lot? Of course, I am grad school. I just told a co-worker that I slept from 3-10 to Tuesday. Quite random. But that might not qualify as a nap. I do usually nap at least twice a week though.



4) Who was the last person you hugged? My dear friend Beamish. And maybe hugged through my words, my boss Hall.



5) What's your current obsession/addiction? TV, as usual. Expect a blog entry in the coming weeks on my new found show, Upstairs, Downstairs.



6) What was the last thing you said out loud? "Yeah. No. I don't think so." (My boss just told me I should text this guy to see about a date for Valentine's Day.)



7) What websites do you always visit when you go online? E-mail, EW.com, tvguide.com, abc. com/cw.com (to catch up on missed shows), Current Sauce webpage (my undergrad newspaper), NY Times Book section, facebook...



8) What was the last item you bought? A subway sandwich.



9) What is your most challenging goal? To get healthier and lose weight.



10) If you could have a house totally paid for, fully furnished- anywhere in the world, where would it be? Southwest or Northeast England.



11) Favorite Vacation spot? D. C., New Orleans, or London.



12) Say something to the person who tagged you: T, I feel like we never see each other. I totally planned on getting together for lunch last semester, but I just never got around to it. I kinda got swamped towards the end because the paper for Laird's Directed Study was due the week after the break, and then, things just got out of hand. I would like to know how things are going with you though. Maybe soon karma will bring us together--kinda like this post.



13) Name one thing you just can't resist no matter how bad it is for you: food.



14) You are on the Oregon Trail. How are things going? I am probably not doing to well since I am not that fond of camping, and I've also never played that game in school.



15) If you woke up tomorrow and were a boy, what is the first thing you would do and why? I wouldn't really freak out because I'm a boy already. Hehe.



16) Name one thing you can not live with out: I'm not sure. I would like to be sarcastic and say something like oxygen. I've been thinking a lot about this though, and I kinda think that I could probably renounce quite a bit of things.



17) Has a celebrity's haircut ever influence you on your own hairstyle? Maybe, but not one that would be worth noting, I'm sure.



18) What is your favorite characteristic or quality about yourself [not appearance-related]: ??? Um, I think I can be quite clever. I like to make people laugh. But I also like to have great conversations, too. So, I would lean more towards my speaking skills.



19) What brought you to blogland? I've always been a very unsuccessful journal writer. Blogging just sort of interests me. You can be/write what you want. And I thought it would be an interesting way to act out Laminations of my own. Byatt is my favorite author. (I kind of envision Frederica working for the Huffington Post if she were a real person.)



20) New Question: What attracts you most to another person? Their intellect and usually their appearance.



21) New Question II: If you had to choose between a goose who laid golden eggs for Easter or fizzy lifting drink, what would you choose? The goose. (I want it now!)

Old Notes

I was going through some old notes for Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook when I came across this recycled phrase on my notepad that never found its way into my paper: “Why can’t we say something like this—we are people, because of the accident of how we were situated in history, who were so powerfully part—but only in our imaginations, and that’s the point—with the great dream, that now we have to admit that the great dream has faded and the truth is something else—that we’ll never be any use” (51). This line comes from Anna who is debating with Molly over issues such as gender equality and the fall of the Communist Party in the late 1950s. The book, of course, deals heavily with these issues, and yet, so many of its queries and commentary on 1950s British society could apply to so many other countries and times. How effective is a philosophy like socialism when it counteracts its positive impact by its very underpinnings and workings? This is something Anna has to come to terms with throughout novel as she evaluates how effective her work has been for the CP.

I like this quote a lot though, even though it never found its way into my paper. I guess one reason why was because this quote didn't really impact the second-wave feminist reading of the text that I was going for. However, I think one reason I copied it out was because I was reading this novel during the election season last year. I always think about my own reason for existence and the effective-ness my life has had on people around me. And it seems that at least in this renunciation made by Anna to Molly that they both have to admit their own redundancy, something that people struggle with all that time I think. How much of our life is accident or chance and how much "written"/fated? And is that what truly distinguishes humans from so many other species and even intra-species--that we are nothing more than accidents who think more of themselves. Just some thoughts to ponder...

Winter Woes

So, it is official. I have literally not left my apartment or showered since Sunday night so about 60ish hours, give or take. This winter weather has got me all. Well, technically, I feel like I haven't really done much of anything since last Thursday. Besides a meeting I had on Friday, and an awful attempt at jogging with Hall on Saturday and viewing Big Love on Sunday at J's, I haven't done anything of much consequence, as I told a friend of mine over the phone. I guess I never realized how important getting out of your apartment can be. Besides all of that complaining, I have been rather productive. I read The Real Charlotte by Sommerville and Ross (it is like a fin-de-siecle Jane Austen novel), Dusty Answers by Rosamund Lehmann, and The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble. The latter two were for thesis research, and I found them slightly less than entertaining. I really plan on giving Drabble another chance. I plan on reading The Needle's Eye sometime soon for thesis research, as well as a book by Iris Murdoch and one by Muriel Spark.

I have also been feeling very, very nostalgic lately. I know I told a couple of you this, but they recently tore down my old dorm, Boozman Hall. It brought up a bunch of memories, and I have been haunting the alumni page on Facebook and such. I posted some photos and wrote a little snippet about my time there. My mom and I have dreams of me returning to teach there one day and settling on the lake. It was just such a good place for me. I really loved my time there. All of this winter weather has me thinking about how much I would have loved to have been in my old house, snowed in for three days, enjoying time with my old roommates. It is kinda lonely living alone, and I guess it stands out so much more for me now that I haven't been out and have no one to spend those weird times together. Like that last hour right before you go to sleep or the early morning stumble from the bathroom to the kitchen. No one to gripe with between classes and no one sneaking into my room for a late night talk.

I can't even really bring myself to finish this post, nor do I even know why I am posting something like this. I haven't really posted something this personal before. I guess I was just feeling like sharing.

Writing / Blog Discovery

I found this really awesome blog that I wanted to share with everyone. It is called "The One-Minute Writer." (http://oneminutewriter.blogspot.com/2009/01/todays-writing-prompt-time.html) I thought it was quite serendipitous that today's entry was "Teach: What information would you like to teach to others?"

Here is my 60 second writing:

I think it is interesting that the one thing that Beamish wished for was world peace. How can you teach world peace? It seems that so many people like to teach hatred and live by fear that to teach others to love one another. And yet, as I write that last sentence, I already know examples that contradict that and know people who want to love and to create love. To change the world and teach others to live not in fear but rather in

--

So that was about how far I got with just 60 seconds. This blog seems like a really great thing for those of us that do teach writing to use as an activity in class. To get students to think about writing. I can already see from what I wrote that I did not even necessarily write about my ideas. But the restriction of just having 60 seconds to write makes me want to write more. Perhaps five is more reasonable, but I have always found that with the free-writing exercise things go too far astray.

I hope others enjoy this blog and maybe even use it.

Also, I think it would be cool to know how some of you would answer this questions, too? What would you want to teach others? I immediately wrote about what Beamish wished for, but I guess I wouldn't even really want to teach people that. It is was just what was on my mine. I guess what I would teach is a motto I drilled into my 3 year old cousin several years ago, "Difference is good."

Theme Songs

So, the other week I was hanging out with some dear friends when I was posed a questions somewhere along the lines of: Would you rather always hear a theme song running through your head when you walk or have spotlights on you that reflect your mood? Being the person I am, of course, I opted for the theme song, and as of late, I have been thinking about music quite a bit. So then the real dilemma started—which theme song? I mean there are so many to choose from and I love TV so finding one was going to be hard. I mean thinking about this really got me. Of course, we mentioned quite a few that I would say make the complete nexus of my themes songs—at least for this moment. But of course…before then, there are the iconic ER and Law and Order non-verbal themes that are quite popular, and oddly enough I happen to have both of them on my ipod. And there is also the Friends theme, which I would be hesitant to necessarily claim as my own since I never really liked the show all that much.

Anyways, so I think I’ve sort of put it down to three show theme songs that I love and I think represent me in this present. However, I would also think that I wouldn’t necessarily like to hear them every time I walk. But I do think that they are good for you to check out and take a look at. I’ve mentioned and dissected some lyrics and imbedded some videos.

Felicity. So, I discovered this show through Netflix, and I vaguely remember seeing an episode when it was on air on the WB. It has now become one of my top 5 shows and is one of the few shows that I actually own. I’ve worked my way through the show 2 and half times…currently working on Season Three. The show also introduced me to quite a b it of some beautiful songs, and thus, I honor it as one of my own themes.



Written by JJAbrams
Can you become. Can you become. A new version of you. New wallpaper. New shoe leather. A new way home. I don't remember. New version of you. I need a new version of me. New version of you. I need a new version of me.

Short and simple and sweet. I like it because it attests to the fact that I am everchanging and evolving. I also like the ethereal quality of the first two seasons. Very "aural." I feel as if I'm in a cool trance a little bit. When it switches over in the 3rd and 4th season, I love the scenes they show because they come from some of my fav episode. And, I actually really like the Twilight Zone episode, which apparently everyone hated.

Of course then there is the iconic, Golden Girls, which I think is actually one of the first songs that I ever learned besides those nursery rhymes. When my cousins used to babysit me, and I was 5 years old, I remember sitting in my uncle’s recliner and watching the show with them. Not to mention the countless nights in high school that my family spent watching it right before Designing Women came on.



Thank you for being a friend / Traveled down the road and back again / Your heart is true your a pal and a confidant. / And if you through a party / Invited everyone you ever knew You would see the biggest gift would be from me / And the card attached would say thank you for being a friend.

And now, Cheers. Perhaps a little weird since I’ve maybe only seen three full episode, which at the time Iliked. I don’t really know if I would like the show, but I came across the theme song on an info website recently and I totally loved the lyrics.



Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got. Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot. Wouldn't you like to get away? Sometimes you want to go Where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came. You wanna be where you can see, our troubles are all the same You wanna be where everybody knows Your name. You wanna go where people know, people are all the same, You wanna go where everybody knows your name.

I think this song really fits with my life right now. It’s all about my friends and all about comfort. I couldn’t have made it these past couple years without them. Shoulders to cry on, friends to laugh when, women to dance with. Ah, good times. I also really love the color and the mix of the old and new in the theme.

So, what are your theme songs?

Response to The Waves by Virignia Woolf

"It was a pretty boring day," said Michael. "There was lots of self-reflection and sleeping. Northing actually. Just voids of time spent doing things. Things over and again. Things done before, things done now, things to do later. Abstractness personified. Personality erased and abased. Tons of thinking about life and experiences. Lies to the self and to others. I can't believe I told my mom that I was having a good day. It was more of an average day. I did this and that. Nothing special. Nothing every really that special when it is all just the routine. Can anything ever stand out from a routine."


"Get up, sit down, move around. Actions repeated over and over again with little to no concious deliberation. Sadness, happiness, interest, and boredom all on this mathematical wave expansion table that the computer in the brain moves around and around on the x-y axis grid of my conciousness. Feel this, feel that. Cold, hot, anger...where does all of it come from? Why does looking at the window produce this feeling of loneliness and sterility inside? I can't create the world around me. I can't create anything material, just words on the page, words on the screen, words in my head, words in conversation. The condensed nature of my production swings laboriously over and around my thoughts."

Web Art from the Cabinet

Everyone should check out this awesome web-art feature on the Cabinet's website. It's called "There There" by Jackie Goss. It's very informative, and the graphics are kinda awesome.

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/art/webart/jackie_goss/index.php

I hope you enjoy and feel free to post your favorite factoids. Mine happens to be: "In a map of 1900 you see the Philippines tucked under California" or maybe "Henry Garnett, chief cartographer and pizza lover, chooses 'souvenir'--a font he recognizes from Pizza Hot menus."

I never really think about space or place really all that much outsides of wanting to find places to go out for vacation. But in reading this, I remember a really interesting West Wing episode where some people tried to convince Leo or Sam that the United States should back this organization that wanted to redraw the map of the world. We very rarely think about the world at large in a geographical sense...or so I think. Although of course as of late we have been obssessed with ecological issues. Look at films like Wall-E or The Happening.


There really is such a large space out there, but it is seriously dwindling each day. We are not only losing space and resources at an alarming rate, but we are increasingly destroying the Earth with our horrible habits. How many times have we kept the lights on too long? Wasted food? Or abused our access to gas and water? In ecofem, I remember reading an article about how women in some countries walk five hours a day to reach available water sources.

One Of The Places Where I Want To Live...

I was perusing the NY Times site, and I often like to look at the pictures that accompany ads. I was so excited when I came across this one, and I was even more excited to see that this house was actually in Rhode Island, a place that I have always dreamed about moving to. And by dream, I mean think about a lot and know that it probably won't happen. However, if I had enough money, I would totally buy this place (after Mt. St. Michael, Mt. St. Michel, and the Biltmore...although I technically think this house would be the cheapest).

The house is named Clingstone, and it sits in Narrangensett Bay of RI. It was built by the Mr. J. S. Lovering Walton and Mr. William Trost Richards in 1895. It was eventually purchased by Henry Wood, a distant family relative in 1961 for only $3,600 dollars. Since then, Wood has made the house practically a completely green house with solar power, seawater composts for water, collecting basin for purifying rain water, etc. So yeah, that makes the house completely great...but I want it because it looks so beautiful. I can just see myself sitting at a window typing on an old school typewriter thinking of my youth traveling abroad.....

Sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/garden/07clingstone.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

Getting Started

So, I don't really think that this blog is going to have much of a theme or a purpose to be honest. I think it is just going to be a reflection of a lot of my thoughts and ideas concerning identity, sexuality, literature, culture as it appears within my life, reading, and general viewing space.

For those of you who know me, this will also just be a general doorway or window view into my life if you happen to be far away and we don't get to see each other everyday or even if you happen to be in the same city and want to hear more about what I have to say. Not that I generally think what I have to say is all that important, but I do think it could quite possibly be significant. One day.

Introducing the name and the idea behind the blog--

A. S. Byatt, general genius and amazing contemporary writer from Britain, has this awesome quartet of novels that I think generally defines some of my ideals and aspirations. I want to be someone who went to Oxford, acted in a famous play, taught college classes on the Modern Post-War British Novel, loved numerous interesting men, and perpetuated intellectual television culture. What else to say, a fantasy. Anyways, generally amazing and insightful into so many interesting facets of contemporary life, Byatt espouses this particularly interesting theory of life as lamination. Understanding that humans are all fragmented creatures--divided between our desires and what we actually are, our sexual selves and our intellectual tendencies--Frederica Potter, one of the Quartet's central characters theorizes this idea of lamination, of living life laminated (see Appendix I).

So, this blog will hopefully be a realization of Byatt/Frederica's theory.

However, I would also just give a general warning to those interested in reading this blog that I am generally suspect of journaling and blogging. I hope to write in this space continually though to keep those of you out there interested entertained and fulfilled by reading my rants and thoughts. And maybe every once in a while we will have guest writers and creative entries. Who knows?

Appendix I: Frederica Potter’s qua A. S. Byatt’s Theory of Lamination

Byatt, A. S. The Virgin in the Garden. New York: Vintage, 1978.

Frederica is thinking about Freud, Racine, and Alexander after a sexual encounter with a stranger: “But, if you kept them separate. If you kept them separate, in many ways you saw them more truly. […] One could let all of these facts and things lie alongside each other like laminations, not like growing cells. This laminated knowledge produced a powerful sense of freedom, truthfulness and even selflessness, since the earlier organic and sexual linking by analogy was undoubtedly selfish. It was she […] who had linked these creatures to each other out of her own necessity. The whole problem of selfishness and selflessness was odd, since seeing things either separate or linked felt like an exercise of power, which she had been most ambiguously, by her father, taught to eschew theoretically and pursue in practice. She sensed that the idea of lamination could provide both a model of conduct and an aesthetic that might suit herself and prove fruitful. It would, she decided, as in the event it did, take years to work out the implications” (209-210, italics mine).

Byatt, A. S. Babel Tower. New York: Vintage, 1996.

“And she, Frederica, had a vision of being able to be all the things she was: languages, sex, friendship, thought, just as long as these were kept scrupulously separate, laminated, like geological strata, not seeping and flowing into each other like organic cells boiling to join and divide and join in a seething Oneness. Things were best cool, and clear, and fragmented, if fragmented was what they were. ‘Only connect,’ the ‘new paradisal unit’ of ‘Oneness,’ these were myths of desire, the desire and pursuit of the Whole. And if one accepts fragments, layers, tesserae of mosaic, particles. There is an art form in that, too. Things juxtaposed but divided, not yearning for fusion” (315).

“Frederica is an intellectual, driven by curiosity, by a pleasure in coherence, by making connections. Frederica is an intellectual at large in a world where most intellectuals are proclaiming the death of coherence, the illusory nature of orders, which are perceived to be man-made, provisional and unstable. Frederica is a woman whose life appears to be flying apart into unrelated fragments […]” (380, italics mine).

Byatt, A. S. A Whistling Woman. New York: Vintage, 2002.

“Frederica had an image of her several selves, the child, the woman, the mother, the lover, the solitary, tangled like coiling snakes in a clay pot, turmoiling” (17).

“She had had the word, Laminations, before the object. It referred to her attempts to live her life in separated strata, which did not run into each other. Sex, literature, the kitchen, teaching, the newspaper, objets trouvés. She did not put Leo into Laminations, not because he was not part of her fragmentary life, but because he was not fragmented” (41).

“Alice, he said, is the Victorian child putting together the wild world of grown-up rules and hidden intentions and violent feelings and incomprehensible conventions. She is an English empiricist, said Frederica. She doesn’t get baffled or deceived or disconcerted. She is sure she exists, however, she is stretched or shrunk or told she is a Serpent” (141).