Zizek!

I found Zizek! online. Astra Taylor's quirky documentary follows the philosopher around his daily routine as he expounds upon the many facets of his own philosophy as well as his reaction to politics and Lacan among other things. I fell in love with this bit at the end. This film isn't exactly for people who are unfamiliar with Zizek or, for that matter, postmodernism and psychoanalysis. While the film does provide cursory explanations, I think it best to approach the film with some knowledge of the topics, and for that reason, I think Taylor's documentary often anticipates an educated, engaged audience. Well, I certainly wanted to read some more Zizek after watching the film. Hope you enjoy the clip!

Some friends are mine are super cool because they said they would watch some random episodes of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer that I pick out – well, not completely random but my favorite ones. Buffy got me through a lot of rough times. I know that some of my friends joke that I could reference Buffy in every single Text and Traditions class at Scholars’, but I guess they are the lucky ones (not me) since I choose not to actually do that. I am pretty sure I would have been groaned out of seminar if I would have tried.

Well, I have assembled five clips from five different episodes that I just think are so great. So, in no particular order:

1) “Selfless” (Season Seven, Episode Seven??) – Creepy number coincidence, or just numerological karma. This is a great episode about Anya and has quite the hidden gem, a flashback to the musical episode. “I’ll Be Mrs.”—Anya’s solo song—has been missing from my iTunes library for several years until I discovered it on some obscure web page. It wasn’t released with the original soundtrack, most likely because it wasn’t filmed or written yet (don’t know?) but is quite the cute song. I also think this episode is great because of its exploration of Anya that draws on comedy and tragedy, as well as some demon flashbacks.



2) “Once More, With Feeling” (Season Six, Episode Six) – Numerical coincidence again? Surely not, well, since I referenced this episode above, I knew it would be on the favorites list. Loving musicals, loving Whedon, and loving a love song ridden with gay subtext. Definitely three things this episode brings out in me. I also love it because of the moving moment at the end where (spoiler alert) Buffy reveals that she had been in heaven and not hell. It’s also just great because who wouldn’t love this quirky cast getting together and singing some great shit.



3) “The Body” (Season Five, Episode ??) – Great! Genius! I don’t really like this video I was able to find, but it will have to do.



4) “Potential” (Season Seven, Episode ??) – This episode might not be on a fan favorite list because of Dawn (which so many people seem to hate but I kinda like). I think the storyline for this episode is just great. Like my interest in “Selfless,” “Potential” takes up a somewhat-minor character, at least one who wasn’t on the show from the very beginning and highlights them as an important thread of the Buffy narrative. (See also: “Storyteller” from Season Seven about Andrew and “Superstar” from Season Four about Jonathan.)



5) “Restless” (Season Four, Episode Twenty-??) – Sheer postmodern narrative. And also a most awesome text to study semiology. I think season four might be the most underrated season of Buffy, which is just unfortunate. This final episode of the season is so amazing because of how it breaks so many traditional TV narratives. It’s a final episode, it’s a coded beginning, it’s a dream, or a magical reality?

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!

Going Out on a Friday Night

... Well it's not quite like this. But wouldn't it be awesome if it could be. At least, sometimes.

Moving Home

“To sum up, what we have discovered through the study of motility, is a new meaning of the word ‘meaning.’ The great strength of intellectualist psychology and idealist philosophy comes from their having no difficulty in showing that perception and thought have an intrinsic significance and cannot be explained in terms of the external association of fortuitously agglomerated contents. The Cogito was the coming to self-awareness of this inner core. But all meaning was ipso facto conceived as an act of thought, as the work of a pure I, and although rationalism easily refuted empiricism, it was itself unable to account for the variety of experience, for the element of senselessness in it, for the contingency of contents. Bodily experience forces us to acknowledge an imposition of meaning which is not the work of a universal constituting consciousness, a meaning which clings to certain contents. My body is that meaningful core which behaves like a general function, and which nevertheless exists, and is susceptible to disease. In it we learn to know that union of essence and existence which we shall find again in perception generally, and which we shall then have to describe more fully.”

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 1958. 170.

Synecdoche, New York

Okay. So ultimate theatre/reading experience in the form of a film? Maybe. Trip into madness – definitely? I recently watched the film Synecdoche, New York, and I have still—after about ten days—been digesting it and thinking about it. I have already told several people about my experience of watching it, which was basically sheer laughter. I felt like I was experiencing hysteria, or possibly some other form of neurosis, as I was watching the film. Having said that, you might think I thought it was awful, but in fact, I thoroughly enjoyed the “film” in that it provided a very nice phenomenological experience. In fact, it was in many ways a wonderful cap to the past two years of my academic career.

One of the reasons I decided to finally rent the movie was because of this article by Hermione Hoby from Guardian about Synecdoche, New York the film as the postmodern novel. I was intrigued by the title, and Hoby’s analysis of it is all the more intriguing. She starts by stating that: “A few days ago I airily declared to a colleague that cinema never really did it for me, not as much as fiction, in any case. I'd always rather read a novel than watch a film. That snooty belief in the superiority of the written word has been as happily shaken up as my boggled brain itself since I emerged from a screening of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.” She goes on to talk about a Q & A after the screening in which many people asserted that Kaufmann was influenced by such-and-such novel only to be told no. Hoby continues, “Likewise, these perceived novelistic borrowings are most likely just that - perceived: any good piece of art probably reminds a million people of a million different things.” And I had the same sort of response. The fact that this so psychological and cerebral lends itself to this extreme multivalency in which the film radiates and reverberated everywhere.

For another review/resource to talk about the film, I checked out my friend’s blog and his entry on the film from a while ago. I think what he was to say is quite true: “Unfortunately, and I know how elitist this sounds, most people don't like movies because they don't respect them as a living, breathing thing, and Synecdoche, New York is nothing if not that.” The film is that—“a living, breathing thing.” Its essence smacks you in the face when you watch, and my own reaction to the film echoes his reading of the film. “When I recommend it, I'm recommending it not as a film, but as an experience that no two people will receive in the same way. It's kind of a miracle that it exists at all, and if you like movies, you should see it.” I sort of felt the same way when I read Ulysses…that this book was all about experience and that trying to control that experience or mold it into someone else’s reading would be detrimental because the whole point is to have that original, untainted (if there can be such a thing) experience.

Here’s a trailer for the film:

extending the meaning of birth control

I recently saw the new film Angels and Demons at the movie theatre, and it has me thinking about all of these issues that I have with the Catholic church. Well, I guess one of my biggest ones happens to be their stance on birth control. And if you couple that with an odd conversation at Tulsa Studies you will sort of get the idea for this post. Hall announced to me that she and her husband discovered an interesting fact about Oklahoma -- that is has the highest rate of ED. Well, this got me thinking about sex and birth control and then the Catholics. And of course with this issue, a double standard presented itself in my mind because of recent cultural developments of the past decade.

With the advent of Viagra in the 1998, men with erectile dysfunction are able to have sex. If the end result of sex according to the Church is to conceive, then couldn't Viagra be seen as a form of birth control? It is altering the potential outcome of a heterosexual couple's chance of having a baby. "Pfizer, leaving nothing to chance, has even requested and received the Vatican's unofficial blessing for Viagra (according to this article in TIME)." I just think this is interesting because the Vatican condemns IVF and stem cell research. According to this article at Catholic Insight, "IVF violates the rights of the child: it deprives him of his filial relationship with his parental origins and can hinder the maturing of his personality. It objectively deprives conjugal fruitfulness of its unity and integrity, it brings about and manifests a rupture between genetic parenthood, gestational parenthood, and responsibility for upbringing. This threat to the unity and stability of the family is a source of dissension, disorder, and injustice in the whole of social life." (Notice the gender at work here, too. Deprives "him" of "his" rights.)

While Viagra is not producing the same consequences that IVF apparently creates, it does in a way manifest a "rupture" in that without Viagra it would be difficult for the man to ejaculate. Or at least that is how my simple understanding of ED works. Any thoughts?

A Bit of Obssession

Beyond the future of the project, Roland was worried about his own future. He would have been in a panic if he had allowed himself to think, but the dreamy days, the pearly light alternating with the hot blue, and something else, made it possible to leave thinking in abeyance. Things did not look good. He had simply walked out on Blackadder. He had done the same to Val, who was, he considered, unforgiving and dependent in equal proportion—he would have to go back to be berated, and then how could he leave, where would he go, how should he live?


Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture that mistrusted love, ‘in love,’ romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared.
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed.
One night they fell asleep, side by side, on Maud’s bed, where they had been sharing a glass of Calvados. He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
They did not speak of this, but silently negotiated another such night. It was important to both of them that the touching should not proceed to any kind of fierceness or deliberate embrace. They felt that in some way this stately peacefulness of unacknowledged contact gave back their sense of their separate lives inside their separate skins. Speech, the kind of speech they knew, would have undone it. On days when the sea-mist closed them in a sudden milk-white cocoon with no perspectives they lay lazily together all day behind heavy white lace curtains on the white bed, not stirring, not speaking.
Neither was quite sure how much, or what, all this meant to the other.
Neither dared ask.


Roland has learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his ‘self’ as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion. Nor did he desire to know who Maud essentially was. But he wondered, much of the time, what their mute pleasure in each other might lead to, anything or nothing, would it just go, as it had just come, or would it change, could it change?

Byatt, A. S. Possession. New York: Vintage, 1990. 458-459. [American Edition]

A Bit from Barnes

She also knew that it had been this very gentleness, this lack of ego – which had been one of his attractions. She had thought … what, exactly? She thought (now) that she had thought (then) that here was someone who wouldn’t seek to impose himself on her (well, true), who would let her be herself. Had she indeed thought that, or was this a later version? Either way, it was false. ‘Be herself’ – that’s what people said, but they didn’t mean it. They meant – she mean – ‘become herself,’ whatever that was, and however that might be attained. The truth was, Martha – wasn’t it – that you were expecting Paul’s mere presence to act as a growth hormone to the heart? Just sit over there on the sofa, Paul, and beam your love at me; then I’ll turn into the mature, ripened person I’ve always wanted to be. Could you get more egotistical, and more naïve? Or, for that matter, more passive? Who said human beings became ripe anyway? Maybe they just became old.

Barnes, Julian. England, England. New York: Vintage, 1998. 210-211.