elm rock city

the inevitable conclusion

2007-06-06T20:08:00.000-04:00

First, a confession: I don't like to read other people's blogs.

For many people, the bookmarks on their browsers (for Mozilla users, the tabs under the search box) are indicative of their priorities and paranoias. For me, the lineup parallels my "real" life mental activities: google and wikipedia (ego), gmail (communication), NYC subway map and weather (forethought), thesaurus (super-ego), thefacebook (belief in other minds), ebay (id), and this blog (self-justification). My homepage is the New York Times (delusional phobia), so that I seem conscientious when I open my computer in public places. None of my tabs, however, are blogs--not even my friends' blogs, which I do usually get around to reading eventually.

Like any buzzword (is "blog" even a buzzword anymore? Writing that phrase makes me feel like a forty-something columnist for Entertainment Weekly), the meaning of the term shifts: Blogs can be rambling diaries with lengthy entries, they can be collective endeavors, they can harp on a single issue or idea, and they can distill information. The only real qualifier for the medium is the need for a loose motif, either topical or tonal (sounds like I'm describing anti-itch creams). At their best, then, blogs present something that is both additive and coherent, offering a unique perspective, an original concept, or a novel way of organizing/filtering others' perspectives and ideas. ERC, of course, did none of these things (but hey, she did post some funny stuff about her family!).

Setting definitions aside, I'll admit that it seems narcissistic to keep a blog without maintaining an interest in others; if the computer is an analogy for the mind, and the browser corresponds to consciousness (the thoughts whose navigation we control), then my blog-solipsism would seem to translate into utter self-absorption--disinterest in the minds of others paired with an obsession with the workings of my own.

The reasons for writing a blog, however, are different from the reasons for reading one. A few months ago, an anonymous Yalie sent me a letter, asking me why I started ERC (i.e., asking me why I would openly expose my idiocy and megalomania to the ridicule of my ever-judgmental classmates and peers). I responded:

"Putting one's writing on the internet, like the construction of any online presence, is a product of two objectives: A localized, medium-specific utility (for example, the use of thefacebook as an address book or means of tracking birthdays) and a desire for self-representation (the use of thefacebook as a means of manipulating words and images to form a coherent portrayal of the self--an avatar, if you will). Depending on how much Freud you've read, you could attribute different purposes to the latter objective.

I suppose I blog for the same reasons. As someone who wishes to become a writer, having a blog is an impetus to practice my craft on a regular basis and a vehicle for me to hammer out the theoretical ideas that plague my academic work. You could argue that I could keep a diary instead, but writing with an awareness of audience is an entirely different animal. And, as with thefacebook, blogging is a means of self-representation. Obviously, the nature and content of my posts--the self-deprecation, the literary theory, the occasional pictures of myself--reveal both my insecurities and the aspects of my character I wish to project to the public..."

This probably seemed like an affected response, but, in retrospect, it's true: I wrote because I wanted to write, and I wanted other people to read what I was writing. It's pretty simple. And, over the course of my year at Yale, I tried to develop a style and a voice. Strains of thought emerged, sputtered, and evolved: theories of artistic and literary pleasure, a preoccupation with defending the value of postmodernism, an aversion to essentialism, and some ideas of ways to encourage people to read (check out this cool website that serializes books--looks like someone out there in internet-land was listening!) and to enjoy art.

So while I don't think ERC deserves a tab on anyone's browser (unless montages are an integral component of the way you perceive the world), I do think it was an educational (for me) and entertaining (for me) tool of procrastination. But now that college has ended, and I've left the Elm City for good, I'll also be leaving this strange little bundle of my neuroses and interests behind, a time capsule of my final year at a place where I learned a great deal.

My friend Adam likes to remind me of the first time we met, at Yale's freshman orientation, when I complained incessantly about having to study poetry to fulfill the requirements for the English major. While the story is embarrassing, having someone--or something--around who reminds you of how you've changed is also affirming, like a yardstick that shows how far you've come, and how much farther you can grow.

And even if that yardstick is a blog that no one reads anymore, it's still there.

erc commencement issue

2007-05-30T22:07:00.000-04:00

Of all of the rites and transitions I've undergone in my young life, graduating from Yale has been the most anti-climactic and the least affecting. I'm serious: I felt more changed after buying my first (unnecessary) training bra and going on my first date (a group outing to see Speed 2: Cruise Control). I felt more nostalgic when I left my first job, as a line cook at Bagel Nosh; I still experience fond recollections when I catch a whiff of fresh lox cream cheese.

It may be because the ceremony is stretched out over the span of several days, and because the events reeked of institutional self-glorification and money-mongering (see: Yale secretly sending advertisements for the 3 hour long commencement musical to my parents, leading my father to "surprise" us after dinner with pricey tickets) rather than a celebration of the students. When it comes down to it, erc loved Yale--the campus, the teachers, the classes--but she doesn't feel the need to celebrate that love by marching around the Yale Corporation Board for four hours and sitting through 500 allusions to Yale's "awesome relationship with China." By the time it was over, I felt like I had to graduate from graduation.

Yes, I've already used that line that many times.

Perhaps the highlight of the festivities is the Class Day Speech, which is given by a "famous" Yale alumnus who gets paid next to nil for flying to Crack Haven to "inspire" a crowd of over privileged kids wearing stupid hats (the bottom picture is of erc in her hat, a Salvation Army-enabled concoction). Regardless, you can see why Yale's repertoire is less than star-studded--vs, say, Harvard's tag-team of Bill Gates/Clinton.

This year, the speaker was Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and an all-purposes political pundit (it's safe to assume that 90% of the senior class has read that wiki entry I linked). The guy's on television, so he speaks articulately and eloquently; he opened by alluding to a Yale student's criticism of his selection as a speaker in the Daily News--a move swiped from Matthew Fox's speech at Columbia! Everyone seemed pretty impressed by his bland land-of-opportunity rhetoric, but the speech was pretty insubstantial. Apparently, this country's "open borders" can be analogized to keeping an open mind after graduation. Also, taxi drivers can teach you things, and America rocks and will keep on winning at everything.

I may or may not blog my cliche high school valedictory address, recently rediscovered with the recovery of files from my childhood computer, for your reading pleasure. Until then, here are some words of advice for future sons and daughters of Eli:

1. Don't shop astronomy courses when you're desperately seeking a group IV, even if they have cool names like "Planets and Stars." They involve HUGE numbers. Plus the tiny ones that look like apostrophes.
2. Don't live in my apartment building/tenement, unless you enjoy water heaters from the 19th century, neighborhood halfway houses, and a basement dweller who blasts the theme from Star Wars at 4 am.
3. Don't trust the doctors at DUH. They want to harvest your organs for the Yale Sustainable Food Project.
4. Don't trust your Teaching Assistants. They want to use you as a paradigm of a student who they "reformed from a C- to a B paper."
5. Did you consider Stanford? It's not in New Haven...

new web ideas

2007-05-27T08:18:00.000-04:00

Riffing off of the overrated, largely unfunny website Overheard in New York, my hilarious friend Joe has devised a couple of permutations--Overheard in American Apparel, Overheard in Book Trader (the self-parodic art student-heavy cafe I work/live in)--over the years.

(Example--actually overheard in Book Trader yesterday)
Surly female employee: Isn't it funny that Joey from nsync's last name was Fatone? Because he really was the Fat one?

On that note, erc is already late for her Baccalaureawhocares ceremony, during which she is sure to "overhear" very little, as Yale students these days seem to be incapable of insights beyond "Oh my god, I'm totally afraid to graduate, everyone is so stupid everywhere else!"

new gem on the internets

2007-05-24T10:25:00.000-04:00

In a sea of long-winded mp3 blogs and grammatically unsavory foodie diaries, here's a brilliant concept: Every few days, this guy responds to a missed connection posting on craigslist (readers will remember erc's encounter with the website), using the same four words as a means of provocation.

Responses range from the polite to the indignant to the ebonic, but they are almost always misspelled, and always hilarious.

What other phrases come to mind? How about, "I know her--she's a dude, bro."

critics at large

2007-05-22T14:16:00.000-04:00

A little less than a month ago, Michael Connelly--an author of mass market detective mysteries, the likes of which you'll find sandwiched between the 99 cent birthday cards and the frozen food section in your local Safeway--wrote a piece for the L.A. Times lamenting the recession of book reviews in prominent newspapers and magazines. Connelly contends that the publications' decision to print fewer reviews is masochistic, claiming that it contributes to the growing threat of obscurity that print media faces today. "The publishing industry has always relied on reviews and on the commentary of great critics in newspapers to champion the new voices of literature as well as regional and genre writing," he writes. "The reading public has gone to these venues to make discoveries. Now where will new voices be discovered?"

A few weeks later, the Times printed another piece about the "war of words" between established book reviewers and bloggers, a critical fracas arising from verbal blows between Michael Dirda, a "Pulitzer-Prize winning book critic" for the Washington Post and lit-blogger Edward Champion (with a name like that, one can only assume that he's also a lit-porn star). "If you were an author," remarked Dirda, "would you want your book reviewed in the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books, or on a web site written by someone who uses the moniker NovelGobbler or Biogafriend?"

Finally, a couple of days ago, The Times--seriously, someone at this newspaper must have been moved from the Colin Farrell beat to this story--printed a horrible op-ed by RIchard Schickel, who is, in addition to being a professional critic, a professional a-hole: In an elitist tone, his article whines about the democratization of book reviewing (readers may remember erc whining about the democratization of television), claiming that the shift from printing critical analysis by writers with theoretical backgrounds to the academic "wasteland" of the blogosphere will engender the elimination of standards, and the death of intellectual literary reviewing. "We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance. We need to see their credential," he writes.

The principal trait shared by Connelly, Dirda, and Schickel, besides self-importance and an obvious hatred of this gosh-darn-newfangled technology, is a sense of paranoia--a fear of the effects that the changing shape of media will have on their work's relevance. Attributing the demise of reading to the rise of online media and blogging invokes a false relationship of causality: People will continue to write, and people will continue to read, but the way we write and read and think about books will change.

In evolutionary terms, those who adapt to this transformation (novelists who--like Connelly--take advantage of podcasts, web-based publicity, book clubs, etc) will benefit, and those critics who refuse to justify or modify their contributions to literary culture will face the big cut. Good, in-depth book reviews, ones that are additive rather than merely derivative, will still find an audience--erc, for example, regularly reads print content for the new york review of books, etc., only online. The only reviews that will be "replaced" by blogs will be those that fail to contribute anything that isn't offered by concise, smart blog posts.

As my friend Matt pointed out, Schickel's piece does touch on a legitimate problem that faces the democratization of publishing, an issue that I've taken to calling "the right to review." Possessing this right, however, seems to transcend categorical differences; a reviewer for salon.com probably offers more insight than a reporter for my home state's newspaper, the Arizona Republic. The dichotomy of standards, then, is not between diverse media, but between intelligent and unintelligent criticism. While I worried that youtube was lowering the standards for television, permitting unintelligent programming to filter into our brains, I don't think that book-blogging poses the same threat; because reading requires more cognitive effort than drooling in front of a fuzzy television screen, most people won't wend through bad criticism simply because it's online.

So when it comes to reviewing, the strongest--the most clearly written, the most interesting, and, in some cases, the more web-friendly--will survive unscathed. But the real winner is, of course, the reader, who emerges with a greater diversity of options, and a broader gateway to new and different types of fiction. In the evolutionary analogy, I guess erc is Darwin, the reader is DNA, and Richard Schickel is a dodo bird.

pure brilliance

2007-05-19T22:40:00.000-04:00

Matt: Remember when there used to be Magic Eye kiosks in the mall?
Mina: (laughs)
Matt: That's what I want to commission for my apartment: A portrait of myself, but done as a Magic Eye.

What would the Times' "Vows" Say?

2007-05-18T09:22:00.000-04:00

Foreign Policy's list of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals is several months old--RIP Baudrillard--but it's still worth a look. Skepticism aside (Fukuyama over Zizek? Posner over Kristeva?), the most troubling aspect of the catalogue is, of course, the dearth of female names. Granted, some of these academics are probably women whose multi-syllabic, vowel-heavy names I can't identify as feminine. But still.

ERC has devised an innovative idea that will reignite a female intellectual renaissance: The return of the Boston Marriage, which is defined as follows:

"a marriage-like relationship between two women—"New Women" in the language of the time, women who were independent, not married, self-supporting (which sometimes meant living off inherited wealth or making a living as writers or other professional, educated careers)."

My first recommendation is that Martha Nussbaum and Elaine Scarry shack up. Barbara Johnson would provide a feasible, albeit less photogenic, alternative.

on the appeal of the academic novel

2007-05-18T01:51:00.000-04:00

While riding the train back to New Haven yesterday, I finished Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the second book I’ve read for pleasure as a quasi-college graduate (stay tuned--the Kimes family descends for commencement in two weeks). After reading American Pastoral, Goodbye Columbus, etc., I admit I think Roth is a phenomenal author—undoubtedly, one of the best living novelists—but this novel left me feeling intensely uneasy, and I’ve been wrestling with attempts to explain my dissatisfaction.

The simplest answer would be alienation. At its most basic level, The Human Stain is about an older professor (a classicist, no less) who has an affair with a younger woman; with the exception of Coetzee’s Disgrace, I’ve historically found myself drawn to, yet repelled, by the trope, which practically demands its own shelf at Borders. Contemporary fiction abounds with ambiguously named northeastern liberal arts universities teeming with professor-protagonists (professagonists?) who pursue adulterous or unorthodox affairs, which generally lead to disaster/self-discovery/awkward sex. As a younger, educated, female reader, I can’t help but find myself distanced from such narratives, which tend to demonize female academics, vaunting women who are, for lack of a better idiom, “in touch with nature”—females who have chosen raw sexuality, motherhood, or physical labor over the artifice and faux-masculinity of academia.

In The Human Stain, for example, we have Delphine Roux: a petite, brunette, young feminist scholar with an affinity for French post-structuralist theory (obviously, that hits a little too close to home), whose hated of the professagonist is motivated by sexual desire—Delphine really just wants a man to love her, you know? And on the other side of the campus, we have Faunia Farley, a veritable milkmaid.

Gender-based indignation would justify literary estrangement, to be sure, and a deep distrust of the male pen, but it’s not only males who craft such professagonistic (seriously, the ny review of books should credit the invention of this word to erc) narratives: Zadie Smith, for example, offers a similar plotline in On Beauty, even the unnatural academic/natural mother binary. Which leads me to consider the possibility that it wasn’t alienation that generated my unease upon reading The Human Stain, but identification—identification with a sentiment, rather than a character.

So what is this sentiment--the source of my love-hate relationship with the genre?

The Human Stain purports to be a novel about the pervasiveness of impurity—a “stain” that bleeds across class, gender, and sexual boundaries. The story of the male professor and the female janitor is sandwiched between Roth’s ill-fitting moralizing about the Clinton scandal; their fate isn’t an allegory, however, but an indictment, a narrative finger pointed at those who don’t believe in fallibility, who refuse to accept the universality of sin.

But this isn’t a novel about sin and forgiveness; it’s a novel about desperation, about the ever-widening gap between the natural and the artificial. It’s about a protagonist whose life is entirely constructed—who has spent his entire adult life pretending to be a different race--and, subsequently, desperately craves an experience that exists beyond the realm of representation, a relation that “just is.” This, I think, is the sentiment we relate to--the fear that the ivory tower shields us from other spheres of experience; that simulacra and cybernetics and semiotics, by destroying our faith in “the human condition," have segregated us from our humanity. The portrayal of this longing is I think, the reason why, as a “student,” I’m simultaneously repulsed and attracted to the existential crises of these “professagonists”: When reading a Robert Frost poem, one can derive great fulfillment from parsing the philosophical questions, but such analysis is inevitably accompanied by the fear that the recognition of the referent—the beauty of what “just is”—is lost in translation.

promising light

2007-05-15T15:09:00.000-04:00

Out here in Northern Virginia, or, as my dad would call it, the "sticks," the environment just isn't conducive to blogging. The internet blows--who would have thought that suburban families could learn how to secure their wireless?--my parents' imac isn't compatible with blogger, and my mom keeps distracting me with plates of freshly cut fruit.

Plus, I miss my normal font. I can't think with all dem serifs!

That said, in the tradition of Laurence Sterne, I will promise some "chapters" that I'm obviously not going to deliver on:

1. More wince-inducing images gleaned from erc's formerly untouched crypt of junior high photographs.
2. Some thoughts on the last two novels I read--The Master and Margarita and The Human Stain--and literary pleasure.
3. Some thoughts on online vs. paper book reviews, and a conversation I had with frequent-erc-commenter Matt about who has the "right to review."
4. A post about American Idol, which is basically all my parents and I discuss.

Keep on truckin,' readers. For now, I'll leave you with the most disgusting picture of all time.

anthropology

2007-05-12T00:53:00.000-04:00

Flipping through the catalog I received in the mail yesterday, came across:

Think her outfit's from Anthropologie, too?

death becomes her

2007-05-10T09:43:00.000-04:00

I'll be the first to say it: this blog has been disappointing lately. Between the throw-away links to funny science articles, the admittedly lame regular installment idea, and the fact that I'm clearly investing more thought and effort into post titles than the posts themselves (some people procrastinate with youtube; erc puns), the thought-provoking posts in erc are growing few and far between.

In many ways, the Tristram Shandy comparison is inevitable. Like Laurence Sterne, erc promised to tell the story of elm rock city and digressed immediately; the "New Haven" gimmick has served as skeletal structure upon which I've hung my fully-fleshed opinions and ruminations. Like the novel, it's hard to tell where the narrator ends and the blog begins (this is what happens, naturally, when one uses the same acronymic moniker to refer to both herself and her body of work). Also like Tristram Shandy, erc was conceived with a morbid awareness of its own impending demise. In 20 days, I shall graduate, move to New York to begin my new job, and leave this fine city forever.

All great things, readers, must come to an end.

While the utter abandonment of erc isn't set in stone (as some have suggested, a simple name change might be in order), consider this as a turning point--a wake up call of sorts, like the beginning of the last trio of volumes in Sterne's book, when Tristram, confronted with his corporeal frailty and impending demise, flees through Europe. Time is precious, too precious to be wasted with links to funny animal stories (the title of that last one is a gem) and posts on topics appropriated from my studies. I fully intend to spend my final days at Yale squirreled away in my room with the shades drawn, blogging about new material like there's no tomorrow.

That said, time to finish reviewing Tristram Shandy for my last final exam.

bliss

2007-05-05T11:53:00.000-04:00

There are very few experiences as pleasurable as playing an album you haven't listened to since high school (when you used to keep it on constant rotation in your minivan's 6-deck CD player) and discovering that you still know all of the lyrics.

fowl play

2007-05-04T13:54:00.000-04:00

People often ask me if I have any long term goals in journalism. I'm generally too lazy, or fearful rather, to put a great deal of thought into this question (Write for The New Yorker? Win a Pulitzer? Break a government scandal?), so I usually evade the question by muttering something about editing Cat Fancy or landing the Lindsay Lohan beat at Star.

From now on, when anyone asks me what sort of material I want to write and what level of journalistic proficiency I hope to achieve, I shall point them to this impeccable piece in the NY Times, "In Ducks, War of the Sexes Plays Out in Evolution of Genitalia." Because brilliant reporting is about securing brilliant quotes, like:

Gazing at the enormous organs, she asked herself a question that apparently no one had asked before.
“So what does the female look like?” she said. “Obviously you can’t have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a garage to park the car.”

For once, erc isn't being sarcastic--this is the greatest Times piece I've ever read. Although a word of advice to my readers: Unless you want to vomit, don't google image search for pictures of a "duck phallus" after reading the article. Not that I, um, looked for them.

abridge too far

2007-04-30T09:59:00.000-04:00

Some things can afford to be cut down a bit:
1. The price of cereal at Gourmet Heaven.
2. The 'tudes of the women who work in the law school cafeteria.
3. Franzen's The Corrections, The Land Before Time franchise, any rap CD with skits, Anne Hathaway's career (ERC finds her toothy and smarmy).

Classics of the Western canon? Not so much--at least, not in the eyes of the "indignant literary purists" cited in this Times UK article, which describes a recent line of "Compact Editions" released by a UK publisher called the Orion Group. The heavily abridged books, which rewrite novels like Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, and David Copperfield, promise to eliminate the excessive "padding" one encounters in canonical texts. "You're not supposed to say this," said the publisher, "but I think that one of the reasons Jane Austen always does so well in reader polls is that her books aren't that long."

At first, I thought I had come across a decidedly un-funny British version of the Onion. I mean, really? The editor, who is quoted as saying things like "We realized that life is too short to read all the books you want to and we were never going to read these," begs to be portrayed by Hugh Grant (screenwriter's notes: foppish womanizer, devilish grin), with the role of the independent bookseller--"It's completely ridiculous--a daft idea!"--going to a foxily taciturn Colin Firth. But people seem to have warmed up to the idea, at least in the "comments" section that follows the article (Reading the comments sections of online media is often more enjoyable than reading the articles, as they often devolve into incoherent conflict or sexual intrigue).

"If one really loves literature and wish to see it thrive, then it would seem to me one would be overjoyed to see people reading the classics--even if it's an abridged version. I'd much rather see someone read an abridged version of Moby Dick, than watch a few weeks of Survivor." -Dar, Macomb, IL

It goes without saying that this is an overtly silly concept; because the meaning, or value, of literature inheres in both its content and its form, making severe changes to the latter while conserving most of the former is still tantamount to complete artistic revision. More interesting, I think, is asking what even positing the idea says about why we read, or about contemporary culture's attitude towards literature. Severely abridging "difficult" texts serves two purposes:

1. It makes such works accessible to groups that lack the necessary education or time to comprehend them.
2. It thrusts our experience of literature into the material realm, fully implicating books as objects of commercial exchange.

The second justification, or the commercialization of of "having read," speaks to a larger phenomenon in consumer culture that's more difficult to address. If people view War and Peace and Crime and Punishment as notches on their literary bedposts, then more power to them, so long as they've actually read the texts rather than the Great Illustrated Classics. Fetishizing books as titles, after all, will most likely translate into an inability to speak intelligently about the ideas they convey.

The first justification--which addresses a dilemma that's similar to the "incommensurability" problem of public art that I discussed earlier--raises a question that deserves consideration, but poses a flawed solution. While it's a worthy cause to facilitate the dissemination of high culture to the lowly masses, such works should not be abridged and revised--essentially, lowered--to meet the public; the general reader should be hoisted to their level. Widespread structural changes (i.e., better public education) aside, a feasible way of promoting such cultural uplifting is, as with the the "better wall text" I advocated for public sculpture, the improvement and aestheticization of "packaging"--materials that are auxiliary to the texts. Although the practice is relatively rare, newspapers still publish serials of contemporary fiction; why can't publishers print segmented versions of the classics (if they want to alleviate the aesthetic concerns raised by the second justification, or eliminate the stigma of reading an "easy" version, imprints could bury the segmented/explicated nature of the text in the interior)? And shouldn't there be a way of deftly inserting explanatory material without resorting to pages and pages of academic footnotes?

I'm interested in hearing plausible solutions and suggestions for this...

TIWMANH vol. 2

2007-04-28T10:57:00.000-04:00

THINGS I WON'T MISS ABOUT NEW HAVEN: YALE EDITION

SPRING FLING: As ivygate points out, Yale and its brethren--Brown notwithstanding--regularly churn out stunningly awful line-ups for their Spring Flings. For those of you who don't know, SF is a sort of nerdish simulacrum of an actual music festival, in which elite Northeastern schools hire bands to perform for the students. At Yale, this means everyone collectively plays "normal" for a day--the pale, scrawny student body breaks out their abercrombie cargo shorts, drinks forties, barbecues--before returning to their pitch-dark hovels in SML for the rest of reading period. And by "everyone," I mean me, of course.

Anyways, this year, the Yale College Council hired T.I., Sister Hazel, and the Format. I guess T.I. is kind of a big deal--the only song I've heard of is the one where he grunts, "WHACHOO KNOW BOUT BLAH BLAH" over and over--but, needless to say, the one-hit-wonder-ness and obscurity of the other two acts has caused a bit of an uproar. I'll defend the Format--they only cost the YCC about three g's, and they're from erc's hometown--but paying $17,500 for Sister Hazel is humiliating, to say the least.

With $17,500, the YCC could have paid 100 masseuses to walk around Spring Fling for an hour, giving deep tissue massages. They could have bought 250 kegs, or 4500 pints of Ben and Jerry's. They could have given the Flower Lady a semester's worth of a Yale education. The only way I'll feel okay about this is if T.I.--who appears to be some sort of thug--jumps onstage at the end of Sister Hazel's set (how can you play a "set" if you're a one-hit wonder?) and busts a cap on them. Then busts a cap on the YCC. Basically, I just want to see some caps busted, then I want to return to my hovel.

Maya & Me

2007-04-24T09:39:00.000-04:00

A couple years ago, I was standing on the corner of York and Elm when a crazy guy (the tall, lumbering fellow with the beard and the broken glasses) approached me and told me that I "reminded him of Maya Lin."

Obviously, the first thing I did when I returned home that afternoon was to google image search Maya Lin, who, of course, looks nothing like me. I chalked it up to white people thinking all asians look alike and homeless people being starved for conversation and forgot about the affair.

I recalled the experience yesterday, when a class of mine screened Maya Lin: A Clear and Strong Vision, a short documentary about the controversy surrounding the design and reception of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Very interesting subject matter--the piece raises questions related to the accountability of public art, the purpose of a memorial, the ability of artistic innovation to reform its audience, the profits of a conflict-based discourse--with a very strange leading lady. Essentially, Maya Lin seems totally nuts: She wears wacky outfits and floppy hats, her hair is constantly flying in various directions, she speaks in an absurdly low voice, her face twitches a lot, and she smiles at the wrong moments.

So it all comes full circle: In saying that I "reminded" him of Maya Lin, the homeless man was pointing to our shared awkward demeanor/physical comportment rather than some race-based similarity. In retrospect, I wish I had responded by telling him he looks like Bruce Vilanch of Hollywood Squares infamy rather than pretending I didn't have any spare change.

problem solvin'

2007-04-23T19:16:00.000-04:00

Seriously, Betty T.?

Weapons to go offstage: Trachtenberg cites Virginia Tech Attack (Yale Daily News)

enemies of the people

2007-04-19T09:09:00.000-04:00

Somewhere in Chicago, a public sculpture installment--composed of sixteen "waves" of concrete, each weighing over a thousand pounds--will be displaced to "make room for new landscaping. This short Tribune piece describes the city council's struggle to find new homes for the waves, which cost a hefty $400,000 collectively. The Des Plaines aldermen, some of whom "oppose the waves as public art" and are loathe to stomach the financial loss, are even more hesitant to stomach placing the sculptures in their own backyards. One volunteers that he has a summer home.

As a liberal, philosophically-inclined sort, it's safe to say that my knee-jerk reaction is to immediately defend the freedom of artistic expression and the importance of proliferating culture. But the pervasiveness and contentious nature of the issue demands more attention.

While "The Malignant Object: Thoughts on Public Sculpture," by Douglas Stalker and Clark Glymour, was printed in Art and Society in the 80's, the article poses a pragmatic, self-reflexively "philistine" argument that's so simple, it's timeless: Public art is for the people, but the people don't like public art, so public art should be suppressed." The "people's" distaste, argue Stalker and Glymour, is quantifiable; we frequently come across petitions, assemblies, litigations, etc. that oppose such works. "Claes' Oldenburg 's 'Lipstick' was so thoroughly defaced at Yale," they recall, "the sculptor retrieved it." The trend continues: The Des Plaines aldermen can't even dump such art on people for free.

Glymour and Stalker examine the possible defenses for public sculptures--moral and artistic worth, instructive value, the stimulation of intellectual discourse, economic value, and the eventual development of tolerance--and attempt to debunk each of them. The "intellectual lessons" conveyed by such art, they write, are not only trivial in comparison to real moral/social/academic ideas, but also rarely transmitted to the masses. After all, only a "small coterie of aesthetes" walks away from a Richard Serra installment thinking "Wow--his engagement with material! His creation and manipulation of space!"

I can't really speak to whether or not public art is economically valuable, and tolerance is indeed a lame defense, but the question of whether or not such works a. present intellectually compelling ideas and b. successfully communicate them is an interesting one. As an example, Glymour and Stalker point to Oldenberg's "Batcolumn," which consists of a column of glass boxes filled with mundane objects. According to the authors, the message--the idea that the frivolous underlies the self-important--is not only lost to most spectators, but also a "patently trivial thought...would not a small sign have been in better taste?"

This part of their argument rings completely and obviously false to me; asking whether or not a "small sign" would suffice is tantamount to asking why and whether we need art at all. The more compelling claim, I believe, is the problematic idea that the people fails to apprehend the meaning of public art; as someone who, despite having taken courses in the history and philosophy of art, still struggles to comprehend much of what she sees while walking to class, this strikes me as a pressing question.

If Glymour and Stalker are right on this count (and I think they are), the most patent explanation is that public art's inscrutability arises in a lack of public education. The majority of passerby don't understand such pieces because there is a dearth of instructive, lucid, and accessible information about their meaning: When was the last time you saw high-quality wall-text outdoors? If governments and institutions are willing to spend $400,000 on public art, they can spare another chunk of change on expository material that's both aesthetically pleasing and intellectually approachable. And the media, when covering such issues in papers like the Tribune, should deign to attribute the works and give some indication of their meaning.

google omniscience

2007-04-18T13:09:00.000-04:00

Just checked my gmail account and noticed that the sidebar provided me with a disturbingly accurate collection of advertisements:

Are You a Happy Person?
This free PhD Certified Test will show how happy you really are!
www.chatterbean.com

Feminism Ringtone
Send this ringtone to your phone right now!
RingRingMobile.com

Free Minority Scholarship
Free Scholarships for any Minority It Only take a Minute to Register!
www.Scholarships4all.net

Need to Create a Blog?
An innovative new way to put your blog, and more, online.
www.squarespace.com

While I'm perfectly aware that sponsored links are calibrated to my email content...Jesus Christ. Google knows me better than I know myself.

p.s. pretty excited about all of the google hits I'm going to score for using "jesus christ"

Constancy is for the weak

2007-04-17T19:15:00.000-04:00

Although my readers rarely chime in with constructive criticism (when this does begin to happen, prepare for erc to wield her "delete comment" key with the force of a thousand mouse-clicks), someone once mentioned to me that it might be nice if I devised some sort of regular installment. While the only regularity I've established thus far is a smattering of quasi-funny conversations with Mom and a detestable penchant for linking my own posts, this actually seems like a good habit to pick up. The guys over at Yesterday's Salad do a great job, bringing you titillating columns like Word of the Day and Who Should Write Superman?

So, with the intention of finally fulfilling this blog's hastily chosen name, I bring you the first regular feature at erc: THINGS I WON'T MISS ABOUT NEW HAVEN. It's timely (I'm graduating in one month), relevant (according to sitemeter, most of my readers live in the Elm City), and, of course, a pleasant outlet for my favorite pastime--things have gotten a little too mushy here at erc (see last post).

Without further ado:
1. The stupid weather: Much like the zombie schizophrenics who lumber up and down Elm Street, New Haven weather is simultaneously unpredictable and unpleasant, often changing from sixty degrees and sunny to forty and freezing in the course of a miserable morning.
2. Arriving at Union Station: Even typing the words "final stop" gives me the chills.
3. Koffee Too?: As much as I support local business, this place smells like moldy diapers.
4. Yale Post Office Workers: Speaking of diapers, the surly Star Jones look-a-like who runs the package counter recently taped a picture of her baby, lying in a disturbing playboy-type pose on a blanket, so that it faces away from her and towards the line, thus compelling me to stare at it for five minutes.
5. The jocky guy in the Davenport gym who changes the channel while I'm watching Jeopardy: The next time you climb onto the treadmill for your ten minute jog and flip to Laguna Beach, I'm going to rip your UnderArmour t-shirt off your back and strangle you with it.

on compatibility

2007-04-12T19:29:00.000-04:00

A couple days ago, while a very charming philosophy professor of mine was lecturing about fictional constructs of the self, he alluded to the age-old superpower question: If given the choice, would you choose the power of flight or invisibility? Your selection, he added, is not only revealing of his or her temperament/motivations, but an indicator of whom you're compatible with; ultimately, people who choose the same superpower shouldn't be together.

While I won't divulge whether or not my own relationships have demonstrated such a harmony of differences (erc never blogs about her personal life!), the ideas evoked by such an edict are far more complex than simply saying "opposites attract." Everyone knows that a relationship necessitates some form of variety in order to sustain itself--internal variety between partners, not blindfolding your significant other to "spice things up"--but what this variety entails is complicated. As in, I could never be with someone whose values were completely different from my own (fascists, homophobes need not apply), but I could potentially see myself with someone with different skills and interests (math? good health?) from my own, or at least variant tastes. And, according to my professor and armchair psychologists everywhere, I should be looking for this--the invisible woman marries mister fantastic, after all.

While Nick Hornby books and Yale philosophy professors have taught me that compatibility doesn't reside in homogeneous tastes, I still consistently find myself fetishizing similarity (I think this is a common practice, although I may be projecting). If I meet someone at a bar, and he tells me that he's training for a marathon, or developing a new, low-cost agricultural system for third world countries, or that he's a neurosurgeon, I'll think, "Ah--what an interesting person." But if I meet someone at a bar, and he tells me that he loves Guided by Voices and Donald Barthelme, I'll think, "Ah--my next boyfriend."

Pretty screwed up?

I was thinking about this while reading the following passage in Austen's Sense and Sensibility, which occurs when Willoughby (the dashing, rich young neighbor) begin to court Marianne (the sister who is guided by her "senses"):

"They speedily discovered that their enjoyment of dancing and music was mutual, and that it arose from a general conformity of judgment in all that related to either. Encouraged by this to a further examination of his opinions, she proceeded to question him on the subject of books; her favourite authors were brought forward and dwelt upon with so rapturous a delight, that any young man of five and twenty must have been insensible indeed, not to become an immediate convert to the excellence of such works, however disregarded before. Their taste was strikingly alike...He acquiesced in all her decisions."

Spoiler Alert: Willoughby, who turns out to be a complete cad, goes on to totally ditch Marianne for a wealthier woman, essentially performing the 18th century equivalent of blocking her screen name and defriending her on the facebook.

This account seems to corroborate the superficiality of similarity, or like-minded tastes, as a basis for real romance. But Austen's critique is more complex; she isn't arguing that love cannot blossom from shared preferences, but rather that love, or true human connection, can't form when shared preferences are derived from artifice. The characters' coinciding tastes result from their respective failure to conceive of other people; Marianne's method of examination implicates her desire to transpose her own beliefs and fantasies onto her partner without seeking his true qualities, and Willoughby's passive acquiescence/mimicry reveals his lack of self-knowledge, or his willingness to mirror Marianne's character. Using a device she often employs, Austen applies the general--"any man of five and twenty"--as a means of imputing the specific--Willoughby--as a figure who feigns an interest in books that were "disregarded before."

While I'm hardly a trustworthy peddler of romantic advice, I think Austen's got it right. It may be true that, as a girl who would choose invisibility (obviously) I should seek fly-boys--partners who would bring a different perspective to the table, and who might prove more complementary and less competitive. Ultimately, however, it's more important to view potential mates as individual entities rather than consider them relationally. Instead of looking for someone who likes the same things as I do, or someone who likes different things from me, I should choose some who is perfectly confident in declaring what he likes: Self-knowledge makes for the best company.

...then I guess I gonna sell it!

2007-04-08T11:38:00.000-04:00

Okay, so it's a bit hypocritical of me to post a youtube video after hating on the website a few months ago, but this is too hilarious not to share with the world (re: my smattering of readers).

Basically, I posed a strikingly similar argument to my parents when I was her age. Only I was asking for the complete Dragonriders of Pern series, not an pregnancy, and arguing that I was making too many visits to the public library to borrow the science fiction books, not sleeping with 3 dudes.

interesting ethical dilemma

2007-04-07T21:07:00.000-04:00

After my Italian class on Friday morning, I stopped by Durfee's Convenience Shoppe, hoping to supplement the sparse contents of my pantry--gum, diet coke, oatmeal--with some of the other comestibles I masticate on a regular basis --cheese, cereal, wheat-thins. They say grocery lists are revealing of people's personalities and lifestyles (cue stereotypical images of single, depressed women hunched over pints of Haagen-Daz). Mine only betrays my lazy reluctance to purchase food that needs to be prepared or cooked.

Anyways, I walked into Le Shoppe, and the lights were turned off. The doors (there are two entrances--one on Old Campus and one on Elm Street) were both mysteriously open, but no one was manning the register, save a hastily written sign with "GOOD FRIDAY--CLOSED" scrawled on it. As I walked around looking for an employee to ring up my selections, other students began entering Durfee's. Eventually, there were about eight of us milling around the aisles, giving each other quizzical stares.

Moments like this--social situations that deviate from normalcy, like an excessively long line at the DMV or a black-out at work--can stimulate three different responses: genial bonding between strangers, awkward hostility/suspicion, or intellectual collaboration. At Yale, a breeding ground for sociopathic geniuses and toolish morons, one generally expects some sort of mixture of the latter two effects.

A hypothetical for my readers: It's noon, you're hungry, and you're in an empty retail shoppe that's fully stocked with delicious wheat-thins and tantalizingly mild cracker barrel cheese. The other patrons are discussing whether or not the security cameras are on, and, let's face it, you're suddenly thinking like a kid who just won the Nickelodeon Super Toy Run sweepstakes--does one go straight to the expensive organic aisle? shoot for bulkier items?--as you listen to your peers. WHAT WOULD SHELLY KAGAN DO?

star struck out

2007-04-03T22:51:00.000-04:00

While I was perched in my usual roost at the Book Trader counter yesterday afternoon, Peter Gallagher--aka Sandy Cohen from the O.C.--walked into the cafe and into my life. Needless to say, it was the highlight of my day, if not my senior year at Yale.

I always imagined that, if I met a celebrity whose work I had admired as much as P.G.'s (and by "work," I mean seasons 1-3 of the O.C.), I would somehow FORCE myself to hatch an interaction with him or her. At the very least, I'd like to ask Sandy, er, Peter, the following questions:

1. How do they* get so big?
2. Didn't you ever want to slap Seth in his smarmy, Garden-State soundtrack listening-head?
3. Didn't you ever want to slap Kirstin in her Botoxed, vodka-chugging face?
4. Would Sandy consider giving a master's tea?
5. What does it feel like to be the moral compass for our generation?

*the Eyebrows, of course

The fact that my fantasies completely ignored the prolific acting career of P.G. is a testament to the strength of the well-known essay I was reading that fateful afternoon in Book Trader, Kendall Walton's "Fearing Fictions" (and you thought this was going to be a fluff post, reader!). Walton's essay--which seems more like a psychological study than a philosophical one--attempts the unravel why works of fiction can elicit emotional responses. The fact that representations produce literal reactions (fear, sympathy, butterflies in the stomach) generates a paradox; while most (re: everyone but celebrity stalkers and live-action-role-playing gamers) readers/viewers are aware of the fictional nature of what they are reading/watching, they still respond in a very real manner. Why does this happen?

Walton rejects several potential explanations: the idea that we "half-believe" what in what we see (after all, our heartbeat doesn't "half-increase" when we watch The Exorcist), the possibility that we suspend our disbelief (non-delusional subjects notwithstanding, we are completely aware of fictionality), the prospect that we are motivated by a "gut" belief as opposed to an intellectual one (our response, while motivated in part by physical indicators, does involve cogitation), the theory that we experience fleeting, momentary shifts from reality (nope--the emotional response is usually drawn out).

Walton's solution to the paradox (if you have access to the Journal of Philosophy, it's in the Jan. 1978 issue) subverts the typical conception of the subject/object relation; rather than converting fictional representations into reality (believing what we see is true), he argues, we convert ourselves into part of the fictional experience, merging with the work to form a "larger world." This act, writes Walton, is partly involuntary and partly willful; our comprehension of the principles of "make-believe" and our material response (butterflies et. al) are implicit factors, but our willingness to play along, to "impersonate" our own real emotional states," is a conscious decision.

So when I see Sandy, the ultimate television dilf, giving sage advice to the misguided youths of the O.C, acting the perfect husband, and demonstrating impeccable legal ethics on the silver screen, my heart flutters; despite my awareness of his fictionality, I experience an internally tangible response, I obey the principles of make-believe, and I impersonate myself in l-u-v. But what the hell happens when Peter Gallagher strides into MY WORLD, collapsing the fictional and the literal into each other? Is my reaction--which feels the same as when I watch him on TV--real, half-real, or make-believe?

And, more importantly, why didn't I take a camera phone picture of him?

poetic justice

2007-03-31T10:17:00.000-04:00

It's been one week since I posted on this blog, and, as BNL so adeptly put it, "You have a drumstrick and your brain stops tickin.'" (The drumstick in this analogy is the sense of complacency I've settled into after finding a job, an apartment, and a lazy disdain for things like getting out of bed, doing reading responses, arriving to lectures on time, wearing shoes that I have to bend over and tie, etc.)

Fortunately, there are still articles out there that grease the hands of my mental grandfather clock, like this thought-provoking piece in the New York Review of Books by everyone's favorite Norton Anthology editor, Stephen Greenblatt (lately, it seems like the Bard's the word--April's Harper's cover promises to tell us "How Shakespeare conquered the world"). He opens his piece with a too-good-to-be-true anecdote featuring former Prez Bill Clinton, who, according to Greenblatt, recites lengthy soliloquies from Macbeth and drops intelligent commentary on Shakespearean drama without batting an eyelash (cinematically speaking, he's either characterizing Clinton as an impassioned English teacher at an inner city high school or a devious super villain).

But Greenblatt is, of course, more concerned with the intentions and ideas of another Bill. Demonstrating his admirable grasp of the canon, the New Historicist turns to Shakespeare's work and elicits myriad examples of villains who have willfully sought power, heroes who have wrestled with its consequences, and intelligentsia who have shied away from it. As an astute critic of Shakespeare, Greenblatt transcends high-school aphorisms (power...corrupts) and penetrates the author's deeply nuanced viewpoint--often, his deliberate unwillingness to express a single-minded attitude at all--towards issues like the sanctity of kingship, the utility of democracy and elections, and the plausibility of an ethically-sound system of governance.

This purposeful ambiguity, according to Greenblatt, is intended to encourage a context-bound assessment of morality. He writes:

"The conclusion towards which these stories tend is not the cynical abandonment of all hope for decency in public life, but rather a deep skepticism about any attempt to formulate and obey an abstract moral law, independent of actual social, political, and psychological circumstances."

Greenblatt supports this stance, which is firmly entrenched in New Historicism, with beautiful examples such as the story of Brutus, the righteous protagonist in Julius Caesar who participates in the assassination of the titular dictator, his close friend. Brutus' failure, writes Greenblatt, isn't that he was coerced into believing the act was morally justified, but rather than he believes he's ethically autonomous; the Roman senator fails to apprehend the social influences and consequences that precede and follow his deed, waves of events and relations that ripple far beyond his self-contained conception of good and evil (are you listening, George W?). Whether or not one has this awareness, according to Greenblatt, is the true determinant of the relationship--positive or negative--between morality and power.

Therefore, New Historical critics are the ideal inheritors of the throne.

Like any good critical essay, "Shakespeare and the Uses of Power" presents a moderately specific question--how does the Bard approach the issue?--that evokes Big Questions about the relations between ethics, political power, and literature. The article stimulated a quasi-interesting discussion about the first two terms on The New Republic's blog, but it's the association between 1 and 3--ethics and literature--that has occupied my interest as of late, especially after reading an infuriating (this is how I know I've officially become a nerd--I call academic essays "infuriating") piece by Richard Posner, "Against Ethical Criticism."

Rather than delving into all of the unsubstantiated points in Posner's piece (which is intended to argue against the inclusion of literary criticism of law), I'll boil his argument to its core argument: Literature cannot be morally instructive, because writers and their characters are hardly moral paradigms, fiction doesn't spur us to do anything, and Martha Nussbaum's cognitivist approach--the idea that identification may induce us to sympathize with individuals in different situations--is both weak and ethically culpable (we identify with evil and corrupt characters). Tonal, stylistic, and logical problems aside, I think I find arguments like Posner's infuriating because they pose needless ultimatums (Is literature THE correct means of ethical instruction?). Similarly, I find essays like Greenblatt's piece enlightening because they debunk such totalizing queries.

Is literature the perfect, self-constitutive vessel for a moral education? No. Can fiction demonstrate and transmit shaky notions of right and wrong? Of course. But does this mean the medium is totally incapable of conveying such lessons? The sympathetic imagination, which is most readily activated by fiction, is completely fallible, corruptible, and not always strong enough to spur literal action, but so is any cognitive process that drives judgment and alignment. If nothing else, we can depart from a work of literature having learned, as Greenblatt demonstrates, the loss of ethical autonomy that accompanies the acquisition of power; what we choose to do with this knowledge lies in our hands.

lights, camera, humiliation

2007-03-24T20:31:00.000-04:00

Although I'm usually wary of devising rubrics that divide people into distinct "types" (partly because it makes me feel like a quiz in Teen magazine, partly because I'm far too self-conscious of which camp I fall into), my recent sojourn homeward has spurred me to develop the following schema.

There are, I believe, two types of Suburban Families*:

Since most of my family's habits fall into the latter group, I've always assumed we were a Suburban Family of the classier class. While rifling through the meager remnants of my childhood that my mother saved, however, I came across a skeleton in our (literal) closet that swung us over to the wrong side of the tracks. A particularly glamorous skeleton....

No, that's not a capuchin monkey--that's little erc!! What the hell were my parents thinking?! I seemed to have repressed the memory of partaking in the sordid deed, but taking glamour shots--or school pictures that use "laser effects" backgrounds--is the defining characteristic of the first kind of family. Especially glamour shots as bad as this one, where I seem to be auditioning for a role as Christina Ricci's understudy in Black Snake Moan.

*As of late, I've noticed an alarming tendency in my writing to use Capitalization as a lazy invocation of Quirkiness. Note to self: Salman Rushdie called, he wants his stylistic devices back.

I <3 Mom

2007-03-22T22:04:00.000-04:00

Before the clock hits midnight, here's a special 60th birthday shout out to erc's Mom*, in a poetic form that hearkens back to my crappy birthday presents of yore:

S ome moms just don't
U nderstand when their daughters
N eed solitude, chewing gum, and hours of uninterrupted

M acBook time. Omma, even though
I know you detest the aforementioned habits, I
N ever take your tolerance for granted.

K eep on rocking
I n a free world, you, my beloved
M other, who was born in an
E ast Asian country now run by a totalitarian regime.
S ixty years have gone by, 21 of which I have loved you.

*May she never, ever find this blog.

paradise lost

2007-03-21T10:31:00.000-04:00

If my life was a romantic comedy (ha!), then these few days would constitute one of those scenes where the "city-gal" heroine, clad in all black and chain-smoking like a fiend (pictured: a strung-out Demi Moore as a depressed writer in Now and Then) returns to the home of her youth.

For erc, however, this home has already been stripped of sentimental value, as my parents essentially THREW MY CHILDHOOD AWAY when they discarded and donated half of our family's "clutter" before moving to Korea. Gone forever: at least half of my Berenstain Bears book collection, a box of unusual-looking rocks that I saved, a letter I wrote to myself when I was 11, the words "Read at age 18!" scrawled across the seal in childish script (to be fair, I opened it when I was 13). The few items of memorabilia that remain, scattered around their big, vacuous new home like stale bread crumbs, are those that have been deemed worth saving by my parents.

Their judgment bewilders me.

the disquieted american

2007-03-17T14:04:00.000-04:00

I have a clear, vividly embarrassing memory of visiting the National Gallery of Art when I was 11 or 12. I don't remember if I was on a field trip (Isn't it strange how the quality of elementary school field trips depends on one's home state? I was lucky to grow up outside of D.C.), but I do remember searching for the least representational, most abstract painting I could find--I think it may have been a Rothko--and sitting in front of it for a while, furrowing my brows and trying to appear pensive.

In retrospect, this awkward performance betrays two desires:

1. A genuine wish to unlock the meaning of a work of art that I had been told was complex and interesting.
2. A genuine wish for passerby to think to themselves, "How bright and sensitive she must be to appreciate such difficult art! How unlike her female peers, who, despite their more advanced physical maturation, lack this girl's emotional depth!

Over a decade later, I still recognize the same motivations--minus my ardent jealousy of my classmates and their training bras--when I visit or tour cultural sites. It's inevitable: I arrive at any museum/gallery/landmark burdened with at least ten different prescriptions' worth of anxieties, including my desire to think historically, my desire to think theoretically, my consciousness of the viewers around me (as in, I don't want to act like the dumb tourists taking cheesy pictures), and my self-consciousness of my own overdetermined response. And then there's the lingering fear that I'm simply thinking too damn hard instead of just enjoying the experience, like John and Jane Doe from Iowa, who are talking too loudly, wearing the souvenir t-shirts they bought yesterday, and taking pictures of each other replicating the sexual poses in statues and paintings.

Since arriving in Italy, I've seen the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, the Forum, the Piazza Navona, the Fountain of Trevi, St. Peter's Basilica, and the Vatican. I've gazed at the Pieta (small and gleaming) and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (small and dark). After studying the relevant art historical periods at Yale, I feel intellectually prepared for these sights; such knowledge, however, only plays a small role in my ability to withdraw inspiration from them. I've found a greater sense of awe in basic things like sheer size (the piazza in front of St. Peter's Basilica, which is pictured, could fit a cozy neighborhood), intricate detail and workmanship, mandated silence or darkness, and a communal sense of wonder.

It's difficult to say if education and maturation have made erc a better tourist. A snobbier one, certainly. But while I'm no longer conscious of how others perceive me, I've grown regrettably self-conscious of my own perception. And also deeply resentful of John and Jane Doe's seemingly unadulterated spectatorial pleasure.

blogissimo

2007-03-14T15:31:00.000-04:00

After going through 48 hours of withdrawal (quivering fingers, overly alert eyesight), erc has finally found internet access in Italy. Grazie a dio!

In brief, Rome is "totally awesome." Italians are attractive and sort of lazy-looking. Everyone stands around the piazzas all night, checking each other out and smoking cigarettes.

I promise more poignant, intensely xenophobic posts soon, but for now, I leave you with this picture of Chad and I in front of Piazza ______ .

buy the book

2007-03-10T15:13:00.000-05:00

I was intrigued by the aldaily blurb for this short Chronicle piece, "Trading Up With Gilgamesh":

"Who says academics 'can't write?' David Damrosch argues that a clear prose style is perfectly consistent with the highest levels of academic thought and expression..."

Marrying readability and erudition? Sounds like the principal (and most often failed) objective of erc's academic/blogging career! I'm reminded of one of the evaluations of my senior thesis:

"...it's not surprising that the language of the essay often mimics the abstractions that characterize post-structuralist writing. I would have liked...a more sparing use of semicolons."

Anyways, Damrosch--a former Yalie--recently finished a history of the Epic of Gilgamesh, not a rambling 35-page dissertation on unintelligible poetry. "Trading Up with Gilgamesh" begins with an exploration of the tenuous relationship between academia and commercial publishing. Damrosch insists that scholars desperately want to convey their ideas to the public (and make ton$ of dollar$), but are often unwilling to sacrifice the esoteric language that often accompanies detailed academic analysis in order to "start turning out sound bites in prose."

Like any good contemporary theorist, Damrosch's prose corresponds to his argument (uh oh, here comes another semi-colon); his writing is clear and entertaining, but never cliche. The article begins by describing the germ of his book's concept, or his frustration with "the rhetoric of a 'clash of civilizations'" proffered by the right and parroted by the press before the war in Iraq. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Damrosch points out, demonstrates the common background of Western and Islamic cultures, as its influences can be seen "in Homer, the Bible, and The Thousand and One Nights."

The article then transitions into Damrosch's struggle to find a publisher who would assist him in communicating his undeniably arcane subject matter in a lucid, interesting manner. In telling the story of his pursuit of the "perfect publisher," he situates himself as a sort of intellectual Goldilocks--the first press was too "hard-core" academic, the second was too commercial, and the third, Henry Holt, was "just right."

For some reason, I found this article to be strangely off-putting. The first time I read it, I couldn't ascertain the source of my discomfort; upon re-reading it, I realized that I felt betrayed by the structure of the narrative--the abstract beginning and specific ending. There's nothing unusual or wrong about an academic writing an article that endorses his or her trade book, but the offhand allusions that began cropping up halfway through the article--the subject matter, the names of the publisher and editor--simply took me off guard. It's like watching a guest on a late night talk show who begins by discussing politics and ends by yelling, "Yo, my album drops this week." Also, I realized that the piece was linked under "Essays and opinions," not "New Books."

Which isn't to say that this isn't a good piece (it's interesting and will take you about five minutes to read), but rather that I shouldn't form preconceptions about things based on blurbs.

the first actual post about the elm city ever

2007-03-08T14:02:00.000-05:00

With spring break around the corner, Yale students--as a second semester senior, I can't tell the difference between 99% of my classmates and New Haven middle-schoolers--have begun to trickle out of the city. It's like watching a gross case of acne finally clear up (to continue the pre-teen allusions).

I always feel lame and self-centered when I describe the city as "emptying" as vacation nears (we students are, of course, only a small sector of the large-ish Elm City, home of the pizza, the hamburger, the erector set, and--GET THIS--Starter jackets). I'm similarly irritated when people talk about New York being "filled with Yalies." It's like, yeah, if by New York you mean a handful of Murray Hill apartment buildings.

Nevertheless, the 3-4 blocks I walk through every day are growing desolate. The absence of upsetting conversation with other Yale students ("So I had my second interview with Goldman. I was like, 'I'm kind a big deal.'") has only stressed the piquancy of my multifarious interactions with New Havenites.

ERC: Medium coffee, please.
Starbucks Employee: You mean, "grande."
ERC: Oh. Sorry.
Starbucks Employee: Hey, great hair.
ERC: Thanks.
Starbucks Employee: How do you make it look unwashed like that?
ERC: ....

detours

2007-03-06T09:40:00.000-05:00

I have a sitemeter installed on this blog that tells me things like how long visitors are looking at the site and how they find it. Creepily, this enables me to see people's search fields for google. It's usually some combination of my full name and a derogatory word, but the misguided ones are funny--a guy looking for "steve nicks t-shirts" lands on one of my first entries--and the horribly misguided ones are even funnier, as when some perv looking for "junior high hotties" landed on this entry about my awkward middle school days.

At first, I was like, "Ha ha, fool! No kiddie-p**n for you!" Then I realized that lil 'erc is showing a lot of not-yet-needing-to-be-shaven leg in that picture, and freaked out a little at the thought of some perv staring at my 6th grade track picture. Then I saw--thanks to sitemeter--that the guy had immediately exited the site upon entry.

I'm not going to lie--I felt a little indignant on behalf of my 6th grade self.

keeping your (avant) garde up

2007-03-05T20:32:00.000-05:00

It's Monday night, I'm in the periodicals room of SML, and there are four days, one mid-term exam, and six pages standing between me and spring break. The six pages are (allegedly) my thoughts on Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried's theories of minimalism, kitsch, and the autonomy of art; I figured I'd procrasti-blog before I got past the title stage (am I the only college student who invests time and energy into titling their essays?).

The Greenberg piece in question is called Avant Garde and Kitsch; I've studied very little history of art at Yale, but I've gotten the impression that it's one of the most important art-critical essays from the last century (My professor: "This is one of the most important critical essays of the last century.") Greenberg, whose prose is quite lucid and enjoyable, examines the advent of the avant-garde in the 1930's--a movement away from the bourgeois spurred by the development of a "consciousness of history," which revealed the constructed nature of societal values--then raises the red alert for the "future of culture." The culprit? Kitsch.

Briefly, Greenberg defines kitsch as popular, commercial art that targets the culture-starved masses; kitsch is pre-digested for our consumption. Kitsch already depicts the effects of artistic processes; the avant garde portrays these processes, then forces us to work at discerning their meaning and value.

Art History 101 aside, this is fascinating to me in lieu of my obsession with identifying and excavating the sources of my literary pleasure. My friend Kate once said that the reason we tolerate and/or enjoy white chocolate candy bars is because they're an acquired taste. I don't know if I agree with this re: white chocolate, which I remember finding delicious from the beginning, but her theory makes sense to me; there are a number of pleasures that are heightened by the manner in which they require the conscious investment of work: bitter vegetables like asparagus, reading in translation, walking thirty city blocks to a restaurant, Gertrude Stein. Part of the reason we derive gratification from such experiences is because we're trained to appreciate them; the other part, I think, is our self-reflexive perception of our own mental development. I like abstract art because I've learned to recognize its value. I also like it because this recognition makes me aware of my own growth.

This self-reflexiveness, I feel, is also the source of my disagreement with Greenberg's belief that avant-garde art is autonomous from socio-political influence (as opposed to kitsch, which is easily manipulable for such purposes). Admittedly, I always approach this issue with a bias, having written my senior essay on, um, the political utility of postmodern literature. But consider this: If avant-garde art makes its beholders work to apprehend its significance, and they are--or can be--aware of this change in apprehension (e.g., the aforementioned self-reflexive pleasure), then we can apply this perspectival shift towards the world around us. Recognizing our conscious efforts towards enjoying asparagus may not augment our abilities to critically read the signs that compose social, cultural, and political messages, but there is (and should be) experimental art that does this work--by making us work.

strip tease

2007-03-03T00:48:00.000-05:00

My first cartoon was published in the Yale Herald today! The comic strip is called "Funny Bunches of Notes," by Mina Krimez. While I rarely ask anyone to check out my articles (erc's mom, of course, regularly receives carefully organized clips in plastic slip covers in the mail), I basically ran around campus waving the insert in my friends' faces. I've chosen to believe that the most common reaction--"How long did this thing take?"--was a favorable response to the nuanced artistic detail rather than a critique of my excessive free time.

Anyways, here it is; click on the picture to enlarge the image. If you've never had the pleasure of grinding for its booty cam, Toad's Place is our local dance club/cesspool, or, as my friend once aptly said, "the devil's playground."

memorandummmbop

2007-02-28T10:08:00.000-05:00

Important Hanson update:

Subject: Hanson
Date: 2/28/2007
Time: 10:09 AM
From: Davenport Dean's Secretary
To: "All Students- Davenport"
--------------------------------
Due to the huge demand to see the band, Hanson, all non-Branford students will be let into this event after 3:45 depending upon the capacity of the Branford Common Room. Branford students will have first preference.

aimmmbop

2007-02-27T19:57:00.000-05:00

Anonymous (2:49:57 PM): HANSON IS GIVING A MASTER TEA at 330 in branford, friday

minafosho (7:50:08 PM): shut up

minafosho (7:50:15 PM): I want to go

Anonymous (2:51:28 PM): of course we're going, duh

minafosho (7:51:59 PM): they're still single. no the youngest one is married

Anonymous (2:52:10 PM): zack?

Anonymous (2:52:28 PM): zach - youngest - taylor - def married - isaac oldest ??

minafosho (7:52:39 PM): wait, they're all married now.

Anonymous (2:53:37 PM): really?

Anonymous (2:53:39 PM): are you sure?

minafosho (7:53:43 PM): yeah, I just looked on wikipedia. the middle one is still cute

Anonymous (2:54:20 PM): i know. im sure he messes around

Anonymous (2:54:41 PM): he married his wife cause she was preggers already

Anonymous (2:54:50 PM): that makes for an unhappy marriage sometimes...

minafosho (7:54:45 PM): how do you know this?
minafosho (7:54:49 PM): I'm posting this conversation

Anonymous (2:56:05 PM): oh i would have made my responses better

Anonymous (2:56:30 PM): you should really have IM convos with my sister, that would be great fodder

minafosho (7:56:29 PM): oh?

Anonymous (2:56:43 PM): Anonymous's sister (4:57:18 PM): i just took a poop that made my butthole sting

minafosho (7:56:54 PM): yeah posting that

new ambition

2007-02-26T01:12:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, I decided to abandon my goal of being a writer and pursue a new career path: cartoonistry. Not sure if that's actually a word, but who cares--cartoonists don't have to use good grammar!

Here is a sampling of my work: a self portrait. I think I look like a mixture of Mr. DeMartino, the super-angry teacher in Daria, and Rogue from the X-Men, which is pretty accurate to my personality. I wish I hadn't drawn myself smiling.

misanthropy part deux

2007-02-22T12:26:00.000-05:00

Random thought #1: Am I the only person in the age 18-30 demographic who thought the whole Dick in a Box thing only deserved a few seconds of polite laughter*?

Random thought #2: It's telling that there are 12 posts on this blog tagged haterade, 15 for literary theory, and 1 for sex.

Random thought #3: #1 and #2 are probably related.

*Side note: I thought Lazy Sunday was muy comico. ERC isn't totally humorless.

paper or plastic

2007-02-21T20:42:00.000-05:00

Ten minutes ago on the way from section to the libs, my friend Gabe and I stopped in Durfee's Convenience Shoppe to pick up some snacks (gummy worms, diet coke, vitamin water, gum). We also left with:

Durfee's Employee #1: So that boy came in again and complained.
Durfee's Employee #2: Asking for what now?
#1: He was all complaining that we don't stock magnums. Said he's been having to use plastic bags.
#2: Day-um.

beautiful minds

2007-02-18T10:07:00.000-05:00

I've been waiting to post a link to a fascinating New Yorker profile of a pair of married philosophers in last week's (2/12) issue, but it doesn't look like it's going to appear online. Sucks. Nevertheless, I urge you to go find a copy somewhere (where does one find hard copies of magazines without personal subscriptions these days? The library? At Yale, we students can get our delicate, unlabored little hands on The New Yorker, The New Republic, the Chronicle of Higher Ed, etc in the Hall of Graduate Studies).

Larisa MacFarquhar's article, "Two Heads," tells the story of Paul and Pat Churchland, a Canadian husband-wife team in UCSD's philosophy department who take a unique approach to the philosophy of the mind. The Churchlands, she writes, are eliminative materialists, which basically means that they want to study consciousness in concrete terms. This approach would better be conceptualized as a "philosophy of the brain" than of the mind; its intent is to ultimately discard concepts like "memory," "belief," and "emotion," in favor of the most specific, scientifically accurate terminology possible. Consider (I'm hand transcribing this, so you better read it) the Churchlands' suppression of their desire to raise their kids according to their principles:

"Then, one evening when Mark (his son) was three or four, he and Paul were sitting by the fire...and Paul was teaching him to look at the flames like a physicist. He told him how the different colors in the fire indicated different temperatures, and how the wood turned into flame and what that meant about the conversion of energy. The boy was fascinated; but then it occurred to Paul that if he were to sit in front of a fire with a friend his age, they would barely be able to talk to each other."

In the same way that this anecdote is more of a commentary on sociology than philosophy, so too are the couple's views on consciousness ostensibly outside of the discipline. Pat admits that "she hasn't gotten around to giving a paper to a philosophy department in five years," and couple is well-aware that they're not welcomed with by the field with open arms (minds?).

MacFarquhar does point out, however, that the Churchlands are concerned with "one area of traditional philosophy"--ethics. This is a natural upshot of any study of the relationship between ideological conceptions of morality and their basis in corporeality, and she touches on one of the few things that fascinated me in Cog Sci 210: Brain and Thought, which is the judgmental activity of the prefrontal cortex. In brief, people with damage to their pfc's have difficulty making value judgments (and, subsequently, fail to become morally socialized); this has obvious implications for the judiciary process, amongst other things.

Ultimately, the profile (which does a nice job of avoiding the icky sentimentality of most old-people-couple portraits) portrays the duo as quite alienated from the world of metaphysics, coloring them as thinkers who ought to be called scientists rather than philosophers. The Churchlands might argue, however, that philosophy itself--at its basest level, the study of knowledge--ought to be perceived differently, a shifting signifier that will come into focus as our thoughts are broken down into their physical components, our identities leveled by the great equalizer of science.

Happy (day after) Valentine's Day!

2007-02-15T15:17:00.000-05:00

To boost your spirits in this wintry weather, a list of phenomena, observations, and generally horrible things that validate my misanthropy:

1. The Most E-mailed article list for the NY Times website. Now that "Shamu" has stopped bubbling to the top like a festering sore, it's gotten a little less embarrassing. But it's disheartening that Times readers--a slightly higher echelon of humanity, one would hope--consistently feel the need to share any article with "love," "sex," or "children" in the headline.

2. The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, as picked by readers. The academic list begins with Joyce, Fitzgerald, Nabokov. The popular vote instilled four Ayn Rand books and three L. Ron Hubbard novels in the top ten. This is why we need a philosopher king, people. Or at least a philosopher's electoral college...

3. Watching Wheel of Fortune at the gym. Although it's admittedly self-affirming to watch overweight, Midwestern Americans pay for an exorbitant amount of vowels.

4. Sudoku becomes more popular than crossword puzzles. It's like the equivalent of Hugh Grant cheating on Elizabeth Hurley with a tranny hooker.

5. ERC spends another Valentine's Day as a single lady. The causal relationship between #5 and her cynicism is ambiguous, sort of like the chicken and the egg.

This is what it feels like...when doves cry.

dissonant sib-ilance

2007-02-12T00:04:00.000-05:00

I've never dated an identical twin, but I imagine it must be pretty creepy. People always ask my brother and me if we're twins (as our features have respectively gelled and sharpened over the years, the question has decreased in frequency). It's mostly positive for us--a phenomenon that boosts our familial pride and alleviates our fears that strangers at bars think we're dating.

There's something inexplicably off-putting about meeting siblings who bear a strong resemblance to each other. It's a weird feeling that's especially amplified in the university setting, most likely due to the combination of enforced intimacy and the sudden detachment from the outside world (as in, you probably won't meet your best friend's teenage brother until graduation, unless he shows up for a weekend, in which case you should force him to binge drink and try to trick a peer into hooking up with him). It's also hard to articulate why it's so odd; we love the idea of siblings who look alike, but it's faintly alienating in practice, like a conversation with a Canadian, or dried pineapple rings.

In Violence and the Sacred, French anthropologist Rene Girard has some funny ideas about why this happens (I'm reading this book for an English course, and I can't stop giggling as I flip through it in the library; anthropology is so hilarious and silly to me). In one of the chapters, Girard attempts to apply his sacrificial theory to ancient Greek tragedy and comes to the conclusion that violence--impure violence, as opposed to the "purifying" violence of sacrifice--is an inevitable product of undifferentiation, a chaotic state that results when hierarchies collapse. In tragedy, this is often symbolized in the conflict between brothers: Consider the section he excerpts from Malinowski's The Father in Primitive Psychology.

"I was then told by my confidential informants that I had committed a breach of custom, that I had perpetrated what is called "taputaki migila," a technical expression referring only to this act, which might be translated: "to-defile-by-comparing-to-a-kinsman-his-face."

This is, in many ways, a conception of the tragedy and the breakdown of boundaries that is antithetical to Nietzsche's view of the form as a positive, productive marriage of the Apollonian and the Dionysian that enables us to overcome the real root of suffering, which is individuation (While Girard doesn't discuss Nietzche's theory, he does flippantly accuse him of being a Hellenophile).

Besides being totally hilarious, the idea of taputaki migila--the negative connotations of inter-sibling resemblance--does, in a bizarre, twisted way, begin to explain why the experience makes us uneasy. While noting intense physical similarities between people doesn't drive people to murder them or sacrifice a goat, it does draw their individuality into question. Or, in the case of twins, causes one to constantly worry if they're pulling an old school switcheroo.

craigslist exposed

2007-02-06T09:25:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted a craigslisting in a while (asian fetishist, where have you gone?!), so here's a savory new bit for your voyeuristic cravings:

for the tall, chubby girl who jogs on Dwight and Howe - m4w - 28

Reply to: pers-273833652@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-02-05, 2:52PM EST

Hey, saw you jogging last Saturday for the first time in a while. Every time I see you I think how different you are from, well from just about any girl I've ever dated. And I wonder if you have as much trouble with the opposite sex as I do. Maybe we could have dinner sometime and find out? Just a warning though, I'm not short, but you do have at least a couple inches on me. ;)

*******

After getting over the initial fear that this might be erc (what...I jog), I was struck by the hostile subtext of the post. I mean, this guy is seriously self-conscious, even for a Yale student. All of the "maybe's" and awkward smile-wink emoticon thingies in the world can't hide that much insecurity, buddy.

Personally, I prefer to type in lower case, excise pronouns, and sign with a single initial. Like this:
hey, if want to grab beers, am down. talk soon, m.

phat beatz

2007-02-04T12:53:00.000-05:00

Until recently, I forgot that I wrote this piece for FSB; it appears in the February issue as a two page spread (the layout includes lyrical excerpts from some of the more brilliant numbers).

Briefly, it's about a 23 year old Russian immigrant who wants to make a million bucks by crafting antiquated jingles (my original lead, or introduction, was structured as a knock knock joke). Anyways, the dude has converted this into more than fifty thou thus far. Check out his website--you won't regret it.

sometimes, it's more than I can bear

2007-02-01T09:49:00.000-05:00

From: Dean's Secretary

To: "All Students-Davenport"

Dear D'Porter's:

R*** is in search of a homemade Heavy Metal "zine" from Columbus, Ohio that was mistakenly taken this afternoon in the Dining Hall. It is called "Thunder Theft." It is just regular, photo-copied pages stapled in the middle. The cover is a montage with skeletons, dragons, etc. Although inexpensive-looking, it is difficult to replace. Please contact R** at R****@yale.edu. Thanks!

A not so novel idea

2007-01-29T22:06:00.000-05:00

While rummaging through back issues of the Virginia Quarterly Review (interesting how I'll spend two hours doing such things, then whine about having to write a 200 word reading response), I came across an excellent piece by Brock Clarke called "The Novel is Dead, Long Live the Novel" that critiques the media's prophecy of the "Rise of non-fiction" and the "Failure of the Novel." Having spent a summer interning in publishing, I can attest to the commercial veracity of this appraisal; philosophically, it brings up Big Questions about genre, politics, and the value/efficacy of artistic media that are worth considering.

"One pictures the lamest booth at the fair, with novels struggling to raise the big hammer, to hit the lever, to ring the bell, while the muscular nonfiction books stand to the side in their strongman singlets, holding their already-won stuffed animals, flexing, asking the tube-topped girls passing by if they’d like to feel their biceps."

Clarke--who is, naturally, a fiction writer--structures his analysis around a discussion of two novels, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities (which I read in high school) and Heidi Julavitz' The Effect of Living Backwards (which I'd like to read now). Clarke's evaluation of the former is hardly favorable: After mocking Wolfe's self-importance in a 1989 "literary manifesto" he wrote about the Death of the Novel, "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast," he goes on to question the claims of verisimilitude that Wolfe ascribes to his own literary style, the "big, realistic novel."

Verisimilitude, a concept as context-bound as ever, is now complicated by new phenomena--globalization, the spread of information, postmodernism, etc. As Clarke writes, "We want literature to capture our troubled times." The valuation he's drawing into question isn't an aesthetic problem in the formal sense, but in the realm of social determination; the point of contention is relevance.

In claiming to write a big, realistic novel that takes advantage of the rhetorical facilities he perfected as a reporter, Wolfe promises a book that is more than a house of words: Like a piece of literary journalism, The Bonfire of the Vanities hopes to impress upon us the prescient concerns of its time and place--bloated, moneyed 1980's New York--and assert its value as a socially relevant work. This hope, argues Clarke, is irrevocably hampered by the text's flat characterization, empty symbols, unrealistic dialogue, etc.

"My point here is not that every journalist is doomed to write bad novels, or that fiction is superior to nonfiction, or that realism is inferior to whatever we choose to label its opposite, but that if one is going to write a novel, then one had best emphasize and pursue its virtues as fiction and not try to make the novel more like nonfiction."

His counter-example is The Effect of Living Backwards, a compressed, surreal work about (but not claiming to encapsulate) hijacking and airplanes and sisters that poses "a complete antithesis" to Wolfe's sprawling, "realistic" saga. Julavitz, according to Clarke, absconds thematic authority, instead opting to place a thin cross-section of humanity under her authorial lens, producing an indirect gaze that--paradoxically--evokes the Big Questions in a way that Wolfe fails to do with his reportorial approach.

"Wolfe means that fiction best approaches its big subjects directly, head-on, which—to use Wolfe’s rhetoric—is the only effective, honorable way of wrestling the beast. It might be true that nonfiction profits by approaching its subjects directly, but it is not true of fiction..."

Clarke's assessment of what fiction can do locates its efficacy in the very properties of genre: Art and society exist dialectically (as in, they have the ability to mutually determine each other), and literary works that are aware of their formal properties can demonstrate this relation. Aesthetic representation, then, is not only, per Kant's estimation, an "ontological vacation place" in which existential interests do not interfere, and its value transcends the detachment of the arts from the causal order of life. If non-fiction is like an enormous, detailed mural, venturing to simultaneously display all of the intricacies and relations of a varied situation, then a novel can endeavor to act as a simple portrait, whose focus on the complexities of a singular existence draws attention to the looming absence of all that cannot be represented.

Risky Business

2007-01-26T21:56:00.000-05:00

A few nights ago, a group of friends and I decided to road trip (re: drive 45 minutes north of Yale) to North America's largest Casino/hotel/parking garage, Foxwoods Casino in Ledyards, Connecticut. Of all the "firsts" I've experienced at Yale, this was perhaps the most ironic, as I went to high school in Arizona. Let me put it this way: Connecticut is to country home as Arizona is to Indian Casino. Connecticut is to apple pie as Arizona is to fry bread they serve at Indian Casinos. Connecticut is to preppy, WASPy mother as Arizona is to wrinkly, sullen Grandma who goes to Indian Casinos and stuffs poker chips into her fanny pack.

Anyways, the closest I came to visiting one in Arizona (before they hiked the legal age from 18 to 21) was my junior prom, when my then-boyfriend took me to the dog tracks. So I was thrilled to experience Foxwoods, and to hopefully witness some sort of Oceans 11-type heist.

In many ways, a Casino is like a mash-up of the nice parts of a retirement home and the crappy bits of Disneyland. Everything is strategically designed to trigger your slot finger: You receive free drinks if you sit down and gamble, there's a lot to see but very little to do outside of gambling, and, to get anywhere, you have to walk through the gambling centers. I also learned:

1. People who patronize Casino's are mad weird. This is a photograph covertly snapped in a Foxwoods bar called Atrium, conveniently located at the epicenter of multiple Gambling Centers (the website: "Atrium wants you to find it"). Outside of the anomalistic group of condescending Yale students, Casino Patrons are either creepy thirty-somethings determined to enjoy the Nightlife, Japanese businessmen, and withered elderly people slumped over penny slots.2. Horseplay is not encouraged. Here, my friend Andrew and I are making fox symbols with our hands, evoking the name of the Casino and preparing for the evening. Um, I don't remember why the shoes are there. Anyways, Casino Employees do not smile on rambunctious youth, as I was asked for my ID at every venture possible--even leaving one of the Gambling Centers. Also, for Employees of a Casino that proudly displays a giant faux-ice sculpture of a half-naked Indian crouching with his bow and arrow whose loin cloth lights up in different colors, you'd think the would be more tolerant of being called Squaws.

3. Losing sucks. It turns out that erc's "Yale-smarts" have no effect whatsoever on the random output of a computerized machine. Actually, I spent 2/3 of my change trying to figure out how the game worked.

scurrrcrows

2007-01-23T21:11:00.000-05:00

A nice piece in The Chronicle by Robert Soloman about the misrepresentation of the word "existentialism" in popular and contemporary culture, centered around a review of a new book on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Camus called Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. Sounds like the subtitle to my life story! (ha ha...sigh).

Uh anyways, Solomon agrees with the author's evaluation of pessimism as an "appropriate and realistic philosophy," but disputes his conflation of the term with existentialism. He admits that the assertion of the meaninglessness of human life and the "death of God" (Kierkegaard was, of course, a Christian) provokes anxiety, then adds that such notions are not necessarily nihilistic: The recognition of indeterminacy permits the valuation of subjective positions, an outlook that produces a more situated,* and, inherently just, conception of human experience.

Having read very few existential texts but a healthy amount of postmodernist criticism (and opposition), it's interesting to observe the manner in which both terms (the former being a precursor to the other) are so often exploited as straw men; existentialism is misrepresented as pessimism, postmodernism is portrayed as a product of the descent of traditional values and the rise of consumerism, deconstruction is written off as destruction, and multiculturalism is conflated with relativism. Which leads to the Big Question: Why are philosophical systems that privilege individual agency so often treated as scarecrows by the media?

*I know it's kind of obnoxious that I linked my own posts here, but they're revealing of my biases.

Yale Post Office: Hating Yale students Since 1701

2007-01-22T23:04:00.000-05:00

Being a Yale student in the post office is like being Britney Spears in a town populated by Kevin Federline's posse. Except for the mustachioed employee who always whispers to me, "I didn't know Ashlee Simpson was coming in today." I think that makes him Paris Hilton in this analogy.

Yale Post Office, 1/22:
Me: Hi. (places package slip on the table)
Surly Postal Worker: You gonna sign that or what?
Me: Whoops, sorry.
SPW (shakes head and waddles away): Linda, did you watch Raymond last night?
(loud laughter, muted discussion for seven minutes)
Me: Hello?
SPW: (loud whisper) JESUS.

my fair zadie

2007-01-20T18:38:00.000-05:00

I wanted to dislike Zadie Smith’s piece in the Guardian, “Fail Better.” She begins with a device I loathe—a parable of a hypothetical character--then endows him with qualities of her literary peers, a tactic that forewarns a lack of self-reflexive criticism. She takes a pot shot at lit theory—“those elegant blueprints for novels not yet built”—suggesting that theorists perceive such works as “houses of words” (echoing, perhaps unwittingly, Jameson’s critique of the “prison house of language”). The subtitle alludes to things like “duty” and the “self,” which promised to irritate my aversions to humanist backlash.

But the piece is really…good.

The moralizing tale that opens the story is an account of an over-intellectualized wannabe writer (“Clive”) who, in pursuit of his first novel, betrays his "self," or his ideas and intentions. Writing fiction, it turns out, is, well, hard: The conveyance of one’s mental notions (ideas) and experiences (material perceptions) necessitates a technical skill that Clive doesn’t have. Fumbling for a solution, he patches the suture between the grandiose concepts of his “platonic novel” and his literal abilities with theoretical pretenses—things like heavy handed symbolism. Nevertheless, the novel succeeds, Clive is “satisfied and vindicated,” and Smith implicates all players in the economy of artistic production—writer, publisher, and reader—as participants in the hypocrisy of literary success.

A bit tangentially, she then proffers her own definition of authentically good fiction: “the refinement of a consciousness.” This concept emerges from a critique of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that bastion of New Criticism that called for the segregation of personality/intention and literary value, locating the latter in one’s expression of literary ancestry.

Smith, while acknowledging the influence of culture and history upon the text, argues that the writer, too, inflicts his or her influence upon the “tradition.” For her, the tradition and the individual talent are dialectical; “the self,” she writes, “is like platinum—it leaves traces all over the place.”

In Zadie's eyes, “literary failure” isn’t produced by inauthenticity in the representational sense, or even in the ascription of genre—in lieu of contemporary culture’s obsession with the bounds between biography and fiction and non-fiction, this poses a fascinating challenge to the significance of such labels—but rather in writing that betrays the self. The “duty” she alludes to isn’t the need to entertain, to mimeograph reality, or to present complex or political ideas, but to “express accurately (the writer’s) way of being in the world.” Thus, the 8^th grader who writes a shitty, emo poem about his feelings and posts it on myspace fails better than, say, the Houellebecqs of the world.

Which is not to say that literary valuations exist on a “free to be you and me” spectrum of textual relativism: Smith argues that the determination of this authenticity—the ability of the writer to earnestly convey his perceptions and thoughts, others’ existences, his own subjective truth—necessitates a reader attuned to ideational theatrics and true verbal brilliance. Herein, I believe, exists the transformative power of great literature: The earnest conveyance of a singular existence can fire up the sympathetic imagination, transmitting ideas and beliefs more successfully than any other form of representation. Now that's communication.

glorious

2007-01-16T23:29:00.000-05:00

It's a rare romance story that brings a tear to my eye, but this "Vows" in the Times, about a neurotic misanthrope with a double chin who lands a Carrie Fisher look-a-like, was truly fantastic. A sampling of quotes and descriptions that characterize the rosy-cheeked groom:

“I don’t like human beings,” he said, only half in jest. “I’m bothered by real and perceived slights, and I hold grudges for billions of years.”

Over their first summer break he sent her newsletters and mix tapes. But she didn’t get the message.

He gave her the silent treatment, for the next four years.
Mr. Mandel’s response was to write “a ‘Seinfeld’ episode about her,” he said. “It’s the modern equivalent of a Shakespeare sonnet.” He explained that in the episode, called “Bizarro Jerry,” Jerry Seinfeld dates a woman with “man hands.”

Essentially this man is me, give or take a few hundred pounds. Which means there is hope for erc yet...

bonding time with mom

2007-01-11T21:04:00.000-05:00

The other day, my mom decided that she and I should spend some quality female time together while the manlier half of erc's family went kayaking. Since I have refused to kayak since 1997 (when my feeble arms cramped, the tour guide had to hitch my boat to his with a bungee cord and drag me for miles like a carcass), I gladly obliged to some Q.T with Mom.

Our day began with a trip to an outdoor shopping center: Imagine the most depressing strip mall on earth, then substitute the 99-cent acrylic nails with ugly puka shell jewelry and tacky wooden souvenirs. While Mom wandered amidst the other visor-bedecked ladiez, I looked for a crossword puzzle, coffee, and a shady tree. The stoner guy making the coffee told me that I was "way tense," "clearly from the mainland," "wearing a "manly shirt," and needed to "find a dank beach to chill at."
As you can see, the two girls behind me are staying thirty feet away so as not to catch my "mainland" vibes. That shirt does look kind of manly.

After Mom found me, the next gals-only stop was the Wailea Mall, sort of a deserted luxury mecca for bored tourists. After half-heartedly looking for a business suit for my upcoming Professional Life and disagreeing over the cut and color (apparently cocaine-white linen screams "Mexican druglord" to everyone but me), we sat down to do a little catching up. Readers with Asian mothers know what "catching up" really means:

Mom: You need to do some teeth whitening. Maybe the white strips? So yellow, because you drink so much coffee. You need to drink less coffee, and less soda, too. How many cups? You need to get it fixed before your interviews. Unless--(laughs cruelly)--the interview is at Starbucks.

Mom: You know, people looking at you can tell you don't put time, money into your hair. (Pause). That's good, boys like women who are cheap like you.

Mom: Be more careful in the sun. Are you wearing sunscreen right now? Although...all of those freckles on your face are not so bad. Actually, you look very nice now, but--(Taps the bridge of her nose)--just let me know if want to get this fixed.
erc: WHAT?
Mom: You know, the bump (taps nose again, then whispers). We don't have to tell anyone.

erc on break

2007-01-10T03:39:00.000-05:00

Friend (5:40:57 PM): have you been all around hawaii?

minafosho (5:40:36 PM): no, Im a lazy slob

minafosho (5:40:43 PM): every day I get up, eat breakfast, work out, lie on the beach until 2 or 3

minafosho (5:40:54 PM): then sit at the computer and read articles online for three hours

minafosho (5:40:55 PM): then eat more

minafosho (5:40:57 PM): then watch a movie

minafosho (5:40:58 PM): then go to bed

Friend (5:42:12 PM): dude, that's pretty much my MO too

Friend (5:42:26 PM): mix in some arguing with parents, random household tasks, and spending on things i dont need, like things from cvs

minafosho (5:42:16 PM): yeah, me too.

minafosho (5:42:35 PM): ooo mrs doubtfire is on
minafosho (5:42:35 PM): gtg

An Inside Job

2007-01-08T21:15:00.000-05:00

Here's a sorta fun New Republic article by Christopher Orr about movies that "send mixed messages" by broadcasting contradictory themes; the two self-negating films he discusses are Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly (which I saw) and Robert Altman's A Praire Home Companion (which I didn't see). While Orr points out that A Scanner Darkly was conceptualized as a "stern moral lesson" on the evils of drug use from former addict Philip Dick, he argues that the D.A.R.E bulletin, or the film's overt content, is undermined by its form--the implicit playfulness of the actor's performances and the "giddy, trippy feel" of the animation. I skipped the part about Prairie Home, but I'll assume that Orr contends that the "mixed message" is casting Lindsay "Ho"han in a wholesome family film.

To be honest, I'm unconvinced that an animated film could truly convey the proper tone of any serious issue, or at really convince me of anything (except for Waking Life, which convinced me that armchair existentialism sucks). But then again, I know next to nothing about "serious" animated films, other than the fact that The Chipmunk Adventure was seriously epic. Please, no one leave comments about "really high quality" anime.

So what sort of work do "mixed messages" do? Louis Althusser has one answer: In his response to Andre Daspre's La Nouvelle Critique, where Daspre accuses him of depreciating art by including it in his definition of ideology (for Althusser, ideology encompasses the very mediated relations that constitute our subjectivity, both imagined and real), he responds with a counter-example not unlike Orr's critique:

"Balzac and Solzhenitsyn give us a 'view' of the ideology to which their work alludes and with which it is constantly fed, a view which presupposes a retreat, an internal distantiation from the very ideology from which their novels emerged. They make us 'perceive' (but not know) in some sense from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which they are held."

So for Althusser, it is the discrepancies between form and content, what Marcherey calls "decenteredness," that makes ideology visible. This follows the Freudian model: Just as transference, displacement, condensation, etc. are the true objects of Freudian dream analysis, so too are mixed messages--those "internal dissonances" that Marcherey imbues with significance--the objects of artistic analysis that often prove the most compelling, or serve the greatest political purpose.

But while it's easy to identify the subversive intent of the device in, say, Balzac's satire, identifying internal distantiation (what a word!) in films such as Natural Born Killers (Ridley Scott's hypocritical criticism of the bloodthirsty spectator culture in the ultra-violent Gladiator also comes to mind) raises the question: For modern-day directors, is such conceptual dissonance satirical or simply accidental?

Not Yo Family

2007-01-08T04:07:00.000-05:00

Just days into vacation, the intensity and proximity is beginning to wear on my family; as of late, small instances of bickering have exploded into full-scale battle royales, mainly triggered by an unnamed sibling who reads this blog. Most of these clashes have arisen in front of the refrigerator: While everyone has learned the brutal consequences of stealing from erc's stash of diet coke/gum, it seems that all members of the family share a special affinity for the same product--Yoplait Light Yogurt.

Tonight, after dinner, we headed to Safeway with a grocery list of staples. But it was clear from the beginning that everyone had the same thing on their mind:
After we split our separate ways, we were all "surprised" to find each other in the dairy aisle. We crowded around the Yoplait section and things turned ugly:

Mom: Hands off the Boston creme pie! And the Vanilla! And the Berries n' cream!
Isaac (dumps fifteen yoplaits into basket): Whatever, Key Lime Pie is the best anyways.
Dad (disgusted): Ugh, I think you've had enough. Hey, is that Apple Turnover??
Isaac: I'LL EAT THEM ALL TONIGHT.
Mom (slaps away the hand of passing little girl): I"LL EAT ALL MINE TONIGHT, TOO.

Embarrassed that my family wasn't more (or should I say less) "cultured," I hung back and played it cool. As soon as we got home, though, I ripped open a pair of Boston creme pie Yoplaits and dumped them into a bowl, only to be caught by Mom, ever eager for a photo op.Damn, I didn't even have the composure to throw my gum away first.

pool partay

2007-01-07T02:44:00.000-05:00

This afternoon, I swam laps for the first time in over five years. Actually, it was the first time in as long that I have waded into a swimming pool beyond chest level; putting my head underwater felt wonderful, but I was too afraid to open my eyes. Swimming in a bikini is difficult.

Since I've been out of the pool-loop (see what I did there?) for so long, I experimented with all of the ways I used to swim: the backstroke, the freestyle crawl, the breast stroke, the side stroke. I must have looked like a blind, mentally disabled puppy that had been thrown into the water. The only other people in the entire complex were a Japanese mother and her six year old son, who was wearing tight blue leggings and had a matching flotation device strapped to his back. We raced across the shallow end, and I won handily.

Four haikus about my favorite actress

2007-01-05T22:15:00.000-05:00

Your luminescence
Has driven many a man
To Depp-ths of remorse.

In that new flick by
Phillip Dick, your voice led me to
Rent Heathers that night.

I watched Beetle-Juice
As a Girl, Interrupted
When Mom changed channels.

Oh Lelaina, Pierce
Through my heart, the only thing
You truly did steal.

How Richard Rorty learned to Stop Worrying and Love Harold Bloom

2007-01-04T00:13:00.000-05:00

So back to Rorty's "The Inspirational Value of Great Literature." My recent posts on what makes great novels great--perhaps summarized as "The Technical Value of Great Literature"--have gotten me thinking not only about literary value, but also literary pleasure, which has gotten me thinking about Richard Rorty again. Looking back on the essay, which targets many of the theoretical positions I've inhabited, has crystallized a question I've asked myself: Have my studies of literature inhibited, affected, or enhanced the pleasure I take in reading?

Rorty begins the piece by taking a jab at Jameson's Postmodernism, which he accuses of being--gasp--"unromantic." The postmodern perspective, he argues, assumes a smarmy air of "knowingness"--a theoretical 'tude that precludes the ability to enjoy reading. Citing Bloom, Rorty claims that contemporary critics (re: post-structuralists) have sullied the humanities, mutating the study of literature into a lowly social science. He compares the dilemma to one he feels has already stagnated philosophy, a field that has, he believes, become culturally irrelevant, "derived of romance and inspiration" because of the analytic tradition.

Rorty offers a detailed lamentation of what he claims has been lost. Inspiration via reading, he states, is garned through the realization of of "someting greater to hold onto," "something more to this life" that cannot be manufactured mechanically or similarly excavated, something that necessitates individual genius (are we starting to see why he gets along with Bloom?) to write or understand. More succintly: sublimity through humanism = a good read.

For a philosopher, Rorty makes some pretty illogical equations; to locate literary value within the ability to inspire is one thing, but his claim that inspiration necessitates hopefulness belies a more problematic conflation of hopefulness and willful ignorance. By Rorty's reasoning, it is impossible to derive inspiration from a text when one's "righteous indignation and social hope" have led him or her to constantly hunt for the cultural machinery that has fabricated its ideology. The notion reminds me of a photograph we saw in Brain and Thought, of a mouse whose mutated, oversized cortex bulged out of its skull and impeded its ability to survive.

Which brings me back to my initial question, which leads to a conflict that has plagued the focus of my studies at Yale. After focusing my academic work on postcolonialism, postmodernism, the dangers of identification and the cultivation of resistant reading, I've found that--while I do derive pleasure from Rushdie, Naipaul, Kincaid, et al--my favorite novels are those produced on the wrong side of the ocean. And herein lies the hole in the sheet Rorty is casting over the post-structuralists: A reading that induces inspiration--wonder, pleasure, catharsis--can coexist with a critique of the structures that have shaped the text.

The romantic magic whose depletion Rorty bemoans, then, does not evaporate when the author's context is examined and when his or her words are deconstructed--it is aroused in their reception. Sublimation is not, as perhaps Bloom would wish, achieved in the deification of the genius; it occurs when the genius' words induce the reader to reflect on the process of reading, to consider his or her dis/identification with ideas, language, tropes, and to see the world in a different light.

the top shelf gets a little heavier

2007-01-03T14:19:00.000-05:00

After three nights of sleeping on my grandparents' couch and twelve hours spent in airplanes and terminals, I finished Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men. It is a revelation, and I feel oddly disinclined to wonder why; I'm reminded of Rorty's words in The Inspirational Value of Great Literature (an essay that I have repeatedly critiqued in my own writing, and a piece that merits your reading and its own post).

"If it is to have inspirational value, a work must be allowed to recontexualize much of what you previously thought you knew; it cannot, at least at first, be itself recontextualized by what you already believe. just as you cannot be swept off your feet by another human being at the same time that you recognize him or her as a good specimen of a certain type, so you cannot simultaneously be inspired by a work and be knowing about it. Later on-when first love has been replaced by marriage-you may acquire the ability to be both at once. But the really good marriages, the inspired marriages, are those which began in wild, unreflective infatuation."

So I will limit my analysis to a hefty admission of inspiration and a small dose of reflection. Reading a novel like this is like wending through a museum when you only have an hour: You race to see the masterpieces, but you're paralyzed by the things you pass along the way. You're awestruck by works you've only seen imitated before, astonished by feats you've never imagined.

on beauty

2007-01-01T19:40:00.000-05:00

The prettiest [girls] are almost always the most boring, and that is why some people feel there is no God.
-Woody Allen

I have an alternate theory about the correlation between attractiveness and intellect (when used in the same way, is there a semantic difference between "intellect" and "intelligence?"). I am convinced that one's most influential years, intellectually, transpire in junior high. Junior high hotties grow up to be Danielle Steele enthusiasts and Nascar fans; awkward-looking middle schoolers grow up to be awkward-acting nerds.

Unrelatedly, a picture of erc at the tender age of 13, not yet a girl, not yet a woman:

Yes, I was at the cusp of my teenage years--my resemblance to an eight year old belies the countless hours of reading science fiction I already had tucked under my belt. I wish I could travel back in time and tell little erc to stop wearing those Fila socks to school.

fotojournalism

2006-12-31T20:39:00.000-05:00

Even at the Seattle Aquarium, where the mysterious world beneath the sea is exposed to us, where marine habitats glow in dim luminescence, where alien-like creatures swim, slither and waddle behind murky panes of glass, not everything is as it seems.

Not pictured: the line of irritated mothers and screaming children shooting hateful looks as they waited for me to finish channeling my inner-octopus (re: generic super-excited) face.

Not pictured: a small girl, most likely separated from her mother, trying to get the attention of these surly, disgruntled teenage volunteers.

Not pictured: The other children at the arts and crafts table, who were complaining that I was hoarding the only working gluestick. Also not pictured: my fish-hat, which obviously turned out way better than theirs.

Happy New Year's,
erc

fighting the man (which man?)

2006-12-30T13:10:00.000-05:00

Regular readers will note that the last few days have been particularly fruitful ones for this blog, in terms of quantity (apparently, no one wants to comment when I brag about my mad crossword skillz). This is, of course, in no way correlative to the dearth of e.r.c.'s social life; my days at my grandparents' house are filled with activities, including, but not limited to: reading back issues of Good Housekeeping, playing electronic yahtzee, watching Man Vs. Wild, eating saltine crackers, spending hours deciding whether or not its worth my effort to put on pants. It usually isn't.

I was meaning to post an article by Walter Benn Michaels several days ago, but, like most Chronicle of Higher Ed. pieces, the original article was only temporarily available to non-subscribers. Fortunately, you can read "Why Identity Politics Distracts from Economic Inequalities" here.

If you click on that wikipedia link, you'll see that WBM is an academic of the Todd Gitlin variety, convinced that identity politics have supplanted the greater problems plaguing this country--namely, class inequality. This is the anti-theory stance he repeatedly assumes, and one that he advocates in the Chronicle piece; Benn Michaels attempts to justify the article by grounding it in Princeton's recent decision to "build up its African American Studies program." While he agrees that department-building does attract some students of color and talented faculty, he argues that it fails to address the real causes underlying the racial disparity in America's top universities.

But there's a more-important sense in which even African-American studies is a kind of blackface, a performance not only of blackness but of race itself. Asian-Americans are overrepresented in elite colleges like Princeton; African-American students are underrepresented. But no one's as underrepresented in those colleges as poor people.

His numbers--less than 16% of Princeton's class of 2009 came from family incomes of less than $50,000--drive an argument for need-based (rather than blind) admissions process. He adds, albeit unconvincingly, that ethnic studies programs are still necessary, as they have the potential to remind us of the "limitations" of race.

Huh?

I agree with Benn Michaels on one count--I think admissions needs to grant more privileges to the financially disadvantaged (a piece I wrote last year). But, while I do agree that class is a significant issue in higher education that needs to be reconsidered and prioritized, I take issue with his insinuation that considering race (building departmental programs, promoting affirmative action) detracts from the fight against the financial inequality that plagues such institutions. His causal logic is inherently flawed, especially in a context (this nation and its education system) where race and class have been and continue to be so inextricably connected.

Benn Michaels claims that he wants to forge allegicances between the issues of class and race; this ambition reflects the situated diagramming I posted about last week. But his repeated valuation--his insistence that class supercedes race, and that both terms are inherently competitive--suggests a hierarchy rather than an coalition.

His argument reminds me of the brand of reductionist Marxism that Moyra Haslett critiques in Marxist Literary and Cultural Theories (my stocking stuffer--thanks, Mom!). While, like Benn Michaels, Haslett bemoans "the disappearance of class as an issue from contemporary commentaries," she admits that "one of the most significant problems with Marxist theories has been their insistence on the primacy of socio-economic class at the expense of other forms of social division." Marxist theory urges us to consider the way in which the ideological is determined by the economic, but it reminds us that the terms are far from mutually exclusive. Benn Michaels should, I think, consider this relation.

first new year's resolutions

2006-12-29T15:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I asked myself: "Is the NY Times Thursday crossword getting ridiculously easy? Or am I just getting ridiculously smart?"

Then today's puzzle owned me.

1. New Year's Resolution #1: Strive for (or at least project) a greater degree of humility.
2. New Year's Resolution #2: Master Friday crossword.

Generation Y-r-u-famous?

2006-12-29T12:30:00.000-05:00

I don't like change. When I was ten, I was loathe to trade in our family's Mac Performa for a PC (mostly because I was afraid I wouldn't get to play Odell Down Under anymore). When I was 13, I wisely refused to abandon my Lee flared jeans (which I had to beg my mother to buy) when Jnco's came into vogue. I wore the same hairstyle--a pair of braided pigtails, trailing down my back like the twin ropes of a swing--from ages three to eleven. I ate the same lunch--a grilled cheese sandwich and a choco pie--throughout elementary school. Today, I own five black v-neck sweaters, seven tubes of the same reddish-lipstick, and four pairs of black flats.

I suspected this resistance to novelty might explain my irrational distaste for youtube, but then I thought about my enthusiasm for other forms of artistic democratization--music sharing networks, graffiti, blogging--and reassessed my hostility. Sure, I don't love watching video (or television programs) in blurry definition, but I did watch sixteen episodes of The Office on my computer in three days.

The Office, however, is a genius show, manufactured by the brilliant Ricky Gervais and a talented cast. With youtube, any schmo can become a star--Lonelygirl15 has a longer wikipedia entry than James Baldwin (although wikipedia itself is a product of the people, albeit one to whom I have sworn undying allegiance).

Herein lies the source of my stubborn antipathy. Even when music (filesharing), writing (blogs), dance (public performance), and the visual arts (graffiti) are democratized--when the middle man is removed, creation, production, and publication are compressed, and the arts acquire a sense of rawness and immediacy--they still necessitate some combination of talent and innovation in order to sustain an audience. No one is willing to sit through comically bad music, read awful writing, or look at crappy artwork for that long. But with video, that last, most current, most exploitable medium, millions are mesmerized and amused by crap that would draw blank stares if aired on the television. Low definition, it seems, breeds low standards.

If Generation X grew up on The Real World, where cast members were pre-selected for charisma and their daily existence was edited and moulded into compelling art, Generation Y is growing up youtube--unfiltered, uninventive, unimaginative.

vital humours

2006-12-28T21:52:00.000-05:00

Things that other people seem to find really funny, but I generally do not:
1. Will Ferrell--especially Anchorman
2. Quoting popular movies--especially Anchorman
3. Engrish (or, for that matter, jokes that rely on Asian stereotypes, except for those that expose Asian/Black dynamics or Asian women talking about their mothers)
4. Dane Cook
5. Jokes about the difference between men and women
6. The film Thank You for Smoking, which was boring and uninspired

Things that I find really funny, but other people generally do not:
1. The long clues in crossword puzzles that comprise the overarching theme and are usually double entendres
2. Puns in conversation
3. Bitchy waitresses, bored clerks, bickering siblings
4. Poorly-timed photographs
5. Products that replace the letter "c" with "k," or substitute "ex" with "X"
6. Ruining the ending for others

group think

2006-12-27T16:50:00.000-05:00

Many people have alerted me to this piece in the Dec/Jan New Yorker, which is about "rap's new drug obsession"--cocaine. Critic Sasha Frere-Jones justifies the creation of the genre by insisting that its existence is more than topical. Rapping about dealing coke, he claims, forces lyrical experimentation, compelling hip hop artistes like Clipse and Young Jeezy to write "complex poetry: songs that simultaneously broadcast and hide their meaning." So double meaning and allegory assume a sense of urgency when underwritten by illegality: Therein lies the real connection to a poetic tradition.

Musical genres are funny things. I've never felt comfortable answering the question, "What sort of music do you like?" The category "indie rock" feels simultaneously pretentious and prosaic, so I usually try to veer into the overly specific ("ugly-bearded-weirdo-singer-songwriters).

Allmusic.com has some interesting lists of genres. Here are my five favorites:

1. Quiet Storm: "Urbane sophistication and subdued soulfulness"; pants-dropping R&B
2. Truck-driving Country: "hard-driving" honky tonk from the '70's
3. Happy hardcore: post-rave music for drugged-out clubgoers
4. Songster: a blues tradition that evolved in the South after slavery
5. Madchester: psychedelic 80's brit rock

On a related note, I thought of two new band names I would consider if I sang or played an instrument. "Dr. Mina and the Free Radicals" and "Literary Allusion."

A Christmas Story

2006-12-26T00:37:00.000-05:00

12/26/2006

9:00 am: Wake up. Forgot to take contact lenses out. Day already ruined.
11:30 am: Take a walk with Dad (pictured) around Seward Park, which abuts Lake Washington. We pass a group of eight people playing flag football, and Dad insists that, with my "throwing arm," I could have started a girls' team in junior high. He is dead serious.
12:00 pm: Dad asks if I have a boyfriend. Reply, "No." Long pause. "Good," he says.
1:30 pm: Back at the house, we learn that we will eat dinner at 4 pm. "Really?" says Isaac.
3:30 pm: Christmas dinner is served. 5 out of 8 dishes involve mayonnaise.
5:00 pm: Nap while lying in a fetal position by the heater.
7:30 pm: Finish Muriel Spark anthology, read first 100 pages of The Year of Magical Thinking.
9:35 pm: Mom, Dad, and Isaac are laughing hysterically at a gameshow called "Deal or No Deal." Watch distractedly for a few minutes; it is retarded.
9:55 pm: Mom screams, "NO DEAL!"

home for christmas

2006-12-23T17:04:00.000-05:00

Grocery shopping in middle America.

Grandma: (ticking off a list) Let's see...cole slaw, canned fruit, saltines, white bread--
Mom: (interrupting) Is there an organic aisle?
Grandma: (shudders) Mina, dear, is there any favorite food that you'd like me to buy for YOU?
Me: Um...diet coke?
Mom: Look! Shiitake mushrooms!

ladykillerz

2006-12-23T01:01:00.000-05:00

On the plane trip from New Haven to Seattle (or rather, Hartford to Chicago to Seattle), I read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time. Dorian Gray, in addition to meeting both qualifiers I set up in the last post--engrossing ideas, beautiful language--forges an interesting relation to The Elementary Particles, written almost exactly a century later. In the web of readings I posited last week, this fiber of connectivity would be the shared trope of the libertine.

In Houellebecq’s novel, Bruno, his middle-aged, modern incarnation of the figure (oh, how far we have fallen from Wilde’s aesthete and Donne’s wordsmith to Houellebecq’s paunchy, sex-obsessed loser) is only able to self-actualize by transcending materialism; Bruno's bildungsroman is structured as a romance narrative, albeit one that is enabled in strip clubs and orgies.

Nearly a century earlier, Dorian’s (Bruno's philandering forerunner) acquisition of subjecthood—his progression from a flat, impressionable pretty boy into a nuanced character—proceeds in the opposite manner; Dorian strives to dwell in materialism rather than rise above it—to supplant his awareness of his metaphysical decay with an attempt at a fully sensory existence.

He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal (106-7).

From Wilde to Houellebecq, then, we see the evolution of the modern libertine. But both authors are situated at different intellectual moments; for Dorian, the material can never truly escape the metaphysical, even if it is painted over, tucked away in the attic, and obscured behind a sumptuous tapestry. For the 21st century degenerate, however, materialism is both totalizing and meaningless; while his wish to fully reduce everything to its elementary particles (Lord Henry's assertion that "life is a question of nerves, and fibers" 171) has been achieved by science, he is inexorably aware of the limitations of corporeal pleasure (in Houellebecq's novel, violence is the next frontier beyond sexual bounds, but this too is marked off).

What does the libertine do, then, when both the sensual and metaphorical worlds are bounded from each other—when sexuality loses its significance, and meaning is impossible to attain elsewhere? Materialists of both centuries are confounded by the impossibility, and by the same fear:

'Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it.'
'Why?' said the younger man, wearily.
'Because,' said Lord Henry passing beneath his nostrils the gilt trellis of an open vinaigrette box, 'one can survive everything nowadays except that.' (168)

value rubric

2006-12-20T10:45:00.000-05:00

I've never been intimidated when people ask me to name my favorite novel. Granted, I can't limit my answer to just one, but there's definitely an elite faction of novels in e.r.c's library, which includes Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, Coetzee's Disgrace, Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. And then there's the upper echelon--the "top shelf"--where Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Pamuk, Roth, Bellow, Kundera, Barthelme, etc. sit, perhaps discontentedly.

I've usually tried to whittle the qualifying difference between the A and B Team down to a simple pair of values: the quality of the prose and the quality of the ideas. I read Graham Greene and I'm overwhelmed: stunned by the mastery of his prose and and inwardly moved by the ideas the works convey.

With this prose/idea rubric in mind, I've been thinking about the last two books I read, A.S. Byatt's Possession and Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles. Both belong on the upper shelf; both fail to uphold both of the characteristics I attribute to great fiction. Possession, which won the Booker Prize in 2006, tells the story of a pair of scholars who uncover a long-hidden relationship between their respective figures of study; in the arduous process of literary excavation, the male-poet-expert and the lady-poetess-expert fall in love. Academia has never looked so sort-of-sexy.

Byatt's elaborate, Tolkien-esque fabrication of the poets' verses and letters (the novel is stuffed with carefully constructed, chronologically accurate excerpts) is admirable. One can easily get lost in the lush, beautiful language, which--paired with a tolerable literary-mystery and love story--propels the plot forward at a breakneak pace. But while the back cover declares that the novel is one of "ideas," I found a surprising dearth of conceptual intrigue. Both scholars in the novel claim to be more motivated by text rather than biography, but there's not a lot of textual analysis, and a whole lot of biographical unraveling.

The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq's (am I spelling this right?) detached, ostensibly nihilistic (apparently the New York Times called the novel "repugnant", intermittently lurid tale of a pair of French brothers with antithetical social disorders has the opposite problem: it is a novel of ideas, but not a work of enchanting prose.

These ideas, though, are fascinating. Houellebecq is obsessed with the question: How does the post-materialist man handle day to day existence? Once war has been conquered by religion, and religion has been conquered by science, and science by unknowability, humanity is left floundering in a post-structuralist pool of uncertainty, where it is unable to reconcile its physical needs (sex, existence) with its metaphysical ones (love, philosophy).

But, as with Byatt, Houellebecq attempts to anchor the novel with a device that carries no real weight; this device is, per the novel's title, the scientist brother's (Michel) studies, which culminate in a post-humous retrospective on his discovery of the "elixir of life"--man's ability to reproduce asexually, rupturing the connection between sex and selfhood. The theoretical implications of this idea, when tied with the physical/metaphysical conflicts that drive the plot, are truly compelling. Claiming, however, that Michel discovered that love "was possible" (252) feels contrived and irreconciliable with the shallow scientific claims of the novel.

it's a funny situation

2006-12-17T21:58:00.000-05:00

This semester, one of my final term papers referenced an excerpt from Donna Haraway's 1991 book, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (click on the link, there's a great chart on wiki). Since reading this stuff, I've been obsessing about information science--specifically, the possibilities yielded by attempting to diagram different critiques of the same text.

Stan linked me to the site of a Yale Professor Emeritus, Edward Tufte, who has written a great deal about the visual presentation of information and statistics. Tufte's stuff is primarily concerned with how the aesthetics of mapping information facilitate the interaction between the creator of the diagram and its audience; I'm more interested in the relationships between the positions that are mapped--in the case of literary analysis, the disparate "readings."

Haraway comes up with a wacky little drawing of a "bush," which, she claims, yields a de-centered presentation of readings that offers "a diagrammatic model for indicating how feminist theory and the critical study of colonial discourse interact each other" (111). Or, in simpler terms, how different readings of the same text are connected/different. While her description supports her non-hierarchal theory of situated interpretations, the literal map of the "bush," like the physical referent it signifies, implies a root--an overarching starting point that she calls "experience"--which branches into multiple binaries. By virtue of this totalizing concept and the hierarchical structure it connotes, the "representational technology" (112) of her paradigm fails to to disrupt the system of reading she's trying to unravel (i.e., a linear anthology, or a structure that overtly attributes "correctness" to some readings). The bush implies fixed situations, a universal origin, and unidirectional affinities and differences; essentialism is an intrinsic attribute of each of these tropes.

I know very little about informatics/diagramming, but it seems to me that a practical paradigm of situated readings that better adheres to the theory's epistemological standpoint is a web of positions--a diagram that refutes order, origins, and binaries in favor of plurality and relational meaning. Such a diagram better reflects Haraway's desire to represent "an open, branching discourse with a high liklihood of reflexivity about its own interpretative and productive technology" (112). The utility of a web is derived from examining the fibers that stretch between its points--the affiliations and experiences shared by variant positions--and in investigating the nature and magnitude of the spaces between them, or the different perspectives produced by disparate contexts.

In using such a model, affinities and differences are recognized--not perceived as impenetrable. This poses, I think, a practical paradigm that addresses Stanley Fish's attitude towards tolerance, which I discussed earlier.

In laymen's terms, here's what I mean. My family is about to spend three weeks together (a biannual phenomenon). Naturally, this leads to a great deal of conflict; we all have very disparate tastes, dislikes. Consider, however, the web of situated positions I've created: You might notice that several Kimes's share affiliations--my brother and I both enjoy The Office, my parents like frappucinos.

Exploiting such differences--while either addressing or avoiding placing pressure on differences--can lead to a mutually favorable situation. Feminists and postcolonialists can construct coalitions from such bonds; my family can stave off fighting for a day or two if there's enough white wine to go around...

parents' visit part deux

2006-12-13T01:24:00.000-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, my parents flew up to New Haven for their second visit of the year; since they've moved back to the States (yes, writing "the States" makes me feel like a huge tool), my mom has taken to phoning me several times each week, often with "reasons" such as:

12/10 (5:45 pm) she wants to know if she should bring zip loc bags, or
12/10 (7:30 pm) sweat pants, or
12/10 (8:45 pm) canned goods. Yes, she knows I'm not a hobo. No, she won't call again.
12/10 (9:30 pm) am I sure I don't need zip loc bags?
12/10 (10:25 pm) forgot to say "good night!"
12/10 (10:45 pm) last question--what should she wear to the ceremony? oh right, we already talked about this.

The "ceremony" was my phi beta kappa induction which was, to say the least, hilarious. The highlight was probably learning the PBK handshake, which basically involves making the "trekkie" symbol and awkwardly forking another member's hand with your own. We also learned that Skull and Bones may have been started by kids who didn't get into PBK. Sweet: Instead of getting $20,000 and a lamborghini after graduation, I have the satisfaction of a vaguely sexual handshake and a swell GPA.

My mom loves taking pictures at inappropriate times (see: countless images of our family in parking lots, gift shops, waiting in line for national landmarks, etc) and has no qualms about asking random strangers to indulge her. To deter this habit, I've begun making my SUPER EXCITED face in every picture she asks people to take of us. At the ceremony, at Battell:

Unfortunately, this scheme has fireballed:

12/13 (7:30 pm) dad and her got home safe, don't worry!
12/13 (8:00 pm) could I email her the pictures?
12/13 (8:12 pm) thanks!
12/13 (8:15 pm) is glad that I'm "finally smiling" in pictures

In addition to the ceremony, we also dined at Roomba (3 stars/5) and Union League (4.5/5), and visited the newly restored Yale Art Gallery, gushingly reviewed a few days ago (apparently, Kahn is up there with Obama for the Times). While the review is a bit mawkish--"Everything here feels warmly alive"--the writer is right: the combination of artificial and natural lighting in the museum is amazing. For me, highlights included the print exhibit on the top floor (featuring some lovely, playful Jane Hammond and Kiki Smith works) and the Anselm Kiefer, Manet, and Gerhard Richter pieces. The modern and early european collections are pretty incredible.

Man, I'm lucky to be here.

my favorite NY times headline ever

2006-12-11T19:56:00.000-05:00

"Turtles: Slow, but Built to Last."

2006 winds to a close

2006-12-10T11:34:00.000-05:00

The New York Times Magazine releases their "Sixth Annual Year in Ideas," a list of 74 literal and conceptual novelties that arose in 2006. Some of the pieces are a bit obvious--"living with guys makes women more likely to eat bagel bites and Easy Mac"--but some are quite interesting. My favorites:

1. Negativity Friendship. Apparently, bonds are more likely to be forged over a tall glass of haterade. This might fall under the "obvious" category, but it still confirms the universality of something I've long observed in my own relationships. There are, I think, gradations within this category for different subsects of humanity. Intellectuals unite over disliking ignorant or equally pretentious people; stupid people connect via their hatred for authority figures and inanimate objects; supervillains collaborate to fight x-men, kids enjoy foiling cereal-loving leprechauns together, etc.

2. Misery Chic. The Times calls celebrities out on their Africaphilia, insinuating that many of their chariable acts may be more performative than helpful. Adopting children from Namibia, a visually demonstrative act (the contrasting skin tones are a publicist's dream!) is like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound.

3. Olfactory Cuisine. Chefs are manufacturing scents in order to enhance a dining experience. Whatever, man, I've been arguing for years that Subway has special vents installed outside of the store that pump out the weird artificial bread smell. I also contend that, if the UN could somehow figure out a way to emit the smell of Cinnabon in areas ravaged by conflict and genocide, world peace would ensue.

4. Reverse graffiti. The masses embrace Keat's theory of negative capability; the government tricks artists into doing their dirty work.

On a related note, dictionary.com has opened the polls (until Friday) for voters to select the word of the year. The website has also released the list of the "most looked up words" of 2006, which range from the ironic/depressing ("naive") to the surprising ("quixotic").

When I was young, my father told me (while driving me to soccer practice) that his favorite word was "morbid." In response, I told him that mine was "delightful" (we had just passed a billboard advertising Sunny D). This year, I'll be casting my vote for "dictionary.com."

e.r.c goes m.i.a.

2006-12-04T20:36:00.000-05:00

Dear peers, readers, Mom:

If you're looking for me between now and Friday afternoon, when my senior essay is due, you can find me here:

That would be the 7th floor of SML, in a frigid cubicle.

If you're wondering to yourself, "How did that cracked-out looking hobo woman wearing five layers of clothing, surrounded by empty coffee cups and gum wrappers, get into the stacks?," you've found me.

<3 elmrockcity
p.s. please send gum, diet coke

SORRY THIS LINE IS CLOSED

2006-11-30T14:23:00.000-05:00

Nothing makes me feel more murderous than waiting in line at the post office.

hodge podge

2006-11-29T15:48:00.000-05:00

My inability to lay down new AMPA receptors and initiate long term potentiation in my hippocampus is rapidly diminishing; prefrontal cortex refuses to hold any working memory (or inhibit distraction), and I seem to suffering from a minor bout of anterograde amnesia.

Studying for the last Brain and Thought exam is sapping my will to live.

While cramming today, Jamie and I had a brief discussion about amnesia; more specifically, whether we would rather have retrograde amnesia (the loss of memories of all events before the brain damage) or anterograde amnesia (the inability to form new memories, e.g. Memento). I came to the following conclusion: I'd prefer to suffer from retrograde amnesia now, and forge a new identity, but I would opt for the anterograde form of the illness once I'm very old.

While this naturally invites obvious questions about the nature of identity, it's important to remember that, in both cases of amnesia, nondeclarative memory--the unconscious procedures that guide existence--is retained, as is prefrontal cortical function, which guides our affective behavior.

I've been meaning to post about this piece (per usual, thanks Matt), which discusses similarities between Ian McEwan's Atonement and a 1977 memoir published by Lucilla Andrews, a WWII nurse and romance author. I didn't love Atonement; the tightly-wound eroticism of the beginning reminded me of Austen (as I've said, porn for nerdy pre-teen girls), but I completely lost interest in the latter half. Still, dude can write.

The Times presents a nice little pictogram of the similarities between passages from each novel (McEwan has admitted to borrowing information from Andrews' memoir, for "research" purposes); the resemblances seem to be mainly technical details, which McEwan plucked from Andrews' text in order to ensure the historical accuracy of his descriptions of nursing and illness.

The current fascination with plagiarism (sup, Kaavya) and authenticity in literature (James Frye et al) ought to spawn a good deal of scholarship over the determinants of originality, accuracy, and intellectual property. Such characteristics are both genre-specific and inherently ambiguous: reiterating concepts/facts in theory or research is different from replicating them in poetry and fiction; copying language and stylistic devices is more suspect in the latter than it is in the former. In McEwan's case, for example, one's immediate reaction is to disavow such theft as superficial: we don't admire "high" literature for its accuracy to history or its factual content, we admire it for its prose and ideas.

While, like everyone else, I'm not very impressed by this latest literary scandal, I'm irritated by reactions like Lev Grossman's (who wrote an irksome piece about the next great American novelist this summer) in Time; focusing on a comparison between McEwan's "greatness" and the pettiness of the faux pas is an injustice to the question of literary ethics, and does nothing to address the nuances of intention and authorship.

Gifts pt. II

2006-11-24T13:06:00.000-05:00

If you're wondering what elmrockcity wants for Christmas, here's a hint (a longer wishlist is forthcoming, and will most likely include a handheld parmesan grater). Along with JM Coetzee and Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes is one of my all time favorite contemporary writers; very few authors, I think, are so deft at marrying formal innovation and readability.

Here's a fairly inconsequential piece about him.

And, on a related note, here's the Times' 100 Notable Books of 2006. I'm thrilled to graduate and finally read some.

the gifts that time forgot

2006-11-23T21:51:00.000-05:00

As part of my current obsession with evaluating my true likes and dislikes (latest realization: I don't like swimming, donuts), I've started to reassess the pleasure I derive from receiving gifts. Growing up, I would hear my ass-kissing peers say things like, "Giving presents is just as fun as receiving them!" and mentally sneer, knowing that it probably meant their parents were giving them educational video games or make-a-dreamweaver arts and crafts kits.

Suddenly, however, I buy it (metaphorically and literally). Giving gifts really is better; it may be because I'm picky, or because there's too much emotional pressure to convey gratitude without causing awkwardness, or, to get all Marxist, because I've come to a point where I recognize the greater worth of maximizing social relations.

It also might be that, the older you get, the less people care about giving you good stuff. Over the years, I presented my parents with some real crapola: mugs/t-shirts that declared them the "World's Best ___," handmade drawings, books of coupons for "ONE CAR WASH" or "48 HUGS!" But I always bought into their expressions of delight, their promises to save them forever.

Until now.

This evening, before heading out into the cold night, I went into my parents' closet to look for a scarf:

Suddenly, I came across this very special pillow that my brother and I made for them, with a photograph of us and Grandma! LYING IN THE BOTTOM OF THE CLOSET.

Is that a YALE MOM hat sitting in the corner, never worn?!!!

Are those the Monopoly-themed pajama pants I bought for my dad one Christmas??!

And, finally, I was especially shocked/dismayed to learn that my mother had not been wearing this faux-velvet, plush crown, clearly intended for the world's best mom to declare, "I Rule!" (see front of hat).

Yes, I'm aware that I look like the guy from A Clockwork Orange in this picture.

intolerance for tolerance for intolerance for...

2006-11-21T19:57:00.000-05:00

After a few days of academic detox (re: puttering around my parents' house in my dad's oversized sweater with a Flock of Seagulls' do), I finally decided to get back to work, laying down a solid 8 pages on the Senior Essay. Similarly, I decided to resume blogging about things other than pictures of myself from grade school and pasted aim conversations...

Loyal readers (I see you, Mom) may recall my discussion of Martin Amis (and Ian Buruma's) scathe of postmodernism--or, at least, its political utility. About a week ago, Matt (jkelsofan) emailed me a Stanley Fish piece from the Chronicle Review about a new book by Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, that touches on many of the same issues. Because Fish's argument is so well articulated and compelling--there are some problems, which I'll discuss later--I feel the need to summarize his, and Brown's, points about tolerance, liberal pluralism, and pomo.

He begins with a discussion over the fatwah--a phrase I'm still trying to work into every day conversation, as in, I wish I could issue a fatwah against [insert TA name]--against Salman Rushdie. The issue introduces the question of the difference of values; namely, the difference of values in terms of free speech.

Ignored was the possibility that what appeared to be an entirely negative and unprincipled act might be the product of an alternative set of principles — preferring community to individual rights, positive morality to respect for all points of view, truth to tolerance, the sanctity of God to the sanctity of choice.

Principles, Fish suggests, are always context-bound; as the forerunners of Western values, he throws Locke, Kant, Rawls onto the table. By placing tolerance--the acceptance of difference--in the latter half of the aforementioned East/West value binaries, Fish questions its objectivity. Tolerance is preached as a liberal value, but what, asks Wendy Brown, does it mean?

Fish agrees with Brown's critique of the a priori conception of tolerance, which, like any value, is structured by social mores. The naturalization of differences produces a self contradiction:

...it does more than that: It legitimizes, and even demands, the exercise of intolerance, when the objects of intolerance are persons who, because of their overattachment to culture, are deemed incapable of being tolerant. Live and let live won't work, we are often told, if the other guy is determined to kill you because he believes that his religion or his ethnic history commands him to.

The problem of tolerance, then, isn't that--like Amis suggested--it legitimizes moral injustice and human rights abuses, writing them off as "difference" (I don't think this is, as Jamie wrote in his comment on the post, an issue that extends very far beyond academia). The problem is what the liberal West does under the banner of pluralism when we conflate divergence with impenetrability--when it "cannot itself tolerate persons or practices that do not respect the boundaries and distinctions...it presuppose." Such as, in the case of indignance over the fatwah, free speech.

Fish and Brown differ over the solubility of the tolerance/intolerance binary that she deconstructs. This is where Fish's argument gets trickier to read (you can tell he's getting worked up over the meta-levels of the problem). Do systems of values always entail either 1) a belief in their specificity--free to be you and me--or 2) a sense of universalism--free to be me? Fish sees an insolubility:

The fact that her analysis does not (and in my view could not) deliver a program for improving the world (or even a set of reasons for rejecting liberal tolerance) makes it no different from any other effort (always doomed) to derive a politics from the discourses of postmodernism, anti-essentialism, and anti-foundationalism.

He pinpoints the inescapable problem of post-structuralism: anything beyond inrreconciliable difference--nothing more than awareness, which he dubs "the theory mistake"--requires an essential subject--some valuation. You can either preach tolerance, which surreptitiously discounts the "non-tolerant," or preach intolerance, which overtly discounts others, but, inevitably, you're always preaching something.

This is, I think, where he errs: If viewed as a totalizing system, postmodernism is, as Fish says, insoluble with political action (which requires some totalization, the acceptance of at least one value (i.e., murder is bad). However, postmodernism is not without utility: The awareness of difference, or situated knowledge, increases the efficacy of political action. For example, the case of anti-feminism outside of the West: countering such a system necessitates a universal value (gender equality) but is best achieved with localized mechanisms (such as alternate interpretations of the Koran). Because of its serviceability as a lens, or tool, we should remember not to throw postmodern thinking out with liberal pluralist or Theoretical bathwater.

And now, back to pictures of myself in elementary school.

Parents House Edition #2: A story that will make you pity me

2006-11-21T00:07:00.000-05:00

When my mom wouldn't buy me $110 Doc Marten sandals in 7th grade, I bought the cheap Payless kind and tried to hot glue yellow thread around the sole.

aim brilliance

2006-11-20T23:17:00.001-05:00

minafosho: a figure who is often conflated with demeter
minafosho: so the 2001 edition is wrong
minafosho: publisher's error
minafosho: are you wikipediaing
Jkelsofan: good catch
Jkelsofan: nope, though that's often what that pause means
minafosho: yeah for me it is
minafosho: pause = dictionary/wikipedia/google
Jkelsofan: right
Jkelsofan: don't want to fuck up a smart joke
minafosho: truth

******************

minafosho: you know the "nerdy laugh"
minafosho: like, ehugh ehugh ehugh
Jkelsofan: yeah
minafosho: I can't type it on aim
minafosho: it's sort of a snort/laugh
Jkelsofan: yeah, I know what you mean
Jkelsofan: hnyhh
Jkelsofan: hynnh
Jkelsofan: eh
minafosho: too difficult

Parents House Edition #1: Me as a baby

2006-11-20T11:45:00.000-05:00

Gross, lose some weight.

sunday morning "musings"

2006-11-19T10:46:00.000-05:00

Being home is wonderful; there's coffee whenever I want it, a bathroom that's not molding, and the pitter-pattering of my parents walking around, picking things up after me. While skimming the first draft of my senior essay this morning (after destroying the wapo crossword), I noticed that I used the word "ideology" eleven times. This is obviously problematic, and it reminded me of my 10th grade English teacher, who had a list of "dead words" that we were not supposed to use.

It's kind of like how most Yale professors hate the word hegemony. Oh, the sweet, sweet irony.

Here's my "dead word" graveyard:
1. Musings. Shut up.
2. "Hot," when used to describe anything other than a spicy burrito.
3. "Siiick," when used to describe anything other than me after eating a spicy burrito.
4. "Deconstruct;" Unless you're referring to ripped clothing or an absestos-soaked building, do NOT use this word in class unless you understand it, for the love of Derrida.
5. "Party" as a verb.
6. OH MY GOD; I CAN'T WRITE BECAUSE MY PARENTS COME IN EVERY FIVE SECONDS.

Stimulus for comments: Do people agree with me that any rap song that features a siren is instantly siiiiick?

THE GAME

2006-11-19T00:16:00.000-05:00

...is an over-rated rapper. In other news, Yale apparently won the GAME against Harvard this year. According to the nasal girl who sat behind me on my flight home that night, the Sons of Eli "rushed the field"--Yale students are so CRAZY!
So, Yale's five-year streak of getting whooped is broken. And my four year streak of not actually attending the game stays alive.

boom

2006-11-16T00:34:00.000-05:00

I just did a victory lap around my computer: page twenty of my senior essay is finished.

Around page 18, I paused and read Benjamin's "On the Concept of History/Theses on the Philosophy of History," which I haven't read in a while. If you've never glanced at it, take a look--it's pretty incredible.

XVI

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.

p.s. Re: my Dowd-rant, it's LEGIT with Benjamin does it, okay?

clipz

2006-11-15T10:44:00.000-05:00

Here is the latest piece of mine to spring up at FSB, about a hairdresser who made her fortune by retrofitting RV's into hair salons and parking in places like Google and ebay. It was printed in the beginning of the Nov. issue.

As with most of these itsy-bitsy clips, I'm more proud of coming up with a viable idea (this emerged, I think, from reading local business journals) then the content itself. I'm surprised and pleased, however, that so many puns have consistently made it through drafts..

Here's another one, about "off-beat schools" that entrepreneurs might be interested in attending. Again, very little content, but a ridiculous amount of googling and research.

back in the valley

2006-11-14T23:57:00.000-05:00

This year, I decided to vote in Connecticut instead of Arizona, the state I attended high school in. Jim Pederson vs. Jon Kyl--who is full of shit--ended up being closer than I anticipated. Tonight, R. JD Hayworth just conceded to D. Harry Mitchell, the candidate my brother was endorsing. Janet Napolitano won handily.

Here's how the other issues panned out:

-Immigrants got the shaft. Prop. 100, "No Bail for Illegal Immigrants," was soundly defeated, English was readily voted the "official state language," and Prop. 300--"Limit Education Services for Illegal Immigrants"--passed. All of these issues won with over 70% of the vote.

-Smoking was banned in restaurants and bars. Whatever.

-Voters decided not to set aside state trust lands, which are used to fund public schools. Both initiatives came in with a less than 5 point difference. Interestingly enough, Arizona is consistently voted as having one of the worst public education systems in the country; last year, we came in at #50--behind Mississippi.

-A ban on same sex marriage was defeated, by less than 3 points. Just when things were looking down...

-And, perhaps most importantly, Prop.204--a ban on small cages for pigs and calves--passed. Somewhere, the abusive owner of a pot-bellied pig just shed a tear.

sunday morning haterade

2006-11-12T10:33:00.000-05:00

This rant isn't exactly breaking new stewing-ground, but I feel compelled to add my name to the register of haters: I hate Maureen Dowd.

I don't hate her points--many of which, while basic, are sound--but I detest her prose style. It's everything I don't want to do as a writer: she's overbearing, solipsistic, indulgent. For example, this recent Times column on the fall of Donald Rumsfeld and the role of the first Pres. Bush in the administration brings nothing new to the table, other than a family-sized helping of shlock. Her pieces are one-note sputterances, buried beneath mounts of colloquialisms and faulty analogies:

Mr. Gates, already on Mr. Baker’s “How Do We Get Sonny Out of Deep Doo Doo in Iraq?” study group, left his job protecting 41’s papers at Texas A&M to return to Washington and pry the fingers of Poppy’s old nemesis, Rummy, off the Pentagon.

Dowd-advocates might argue that she brings the verbal playfulness and wit of entertainment or arts writing to politics, making issues more accessible to the public. I think this is a discredit to good features journalism. A deft pun, sprightly figurative language, or a clever analogy is like a flash of cleavage or a hint of upper leg: a journalist should only reveal her goods with caution and discrimination. Dowd's heavy-handed style lets it all hang out. Rather than being pleasantly surprised by instances of literary or humorous prose, her reader is left wading through the text in search of the argument.

And then, of course, there's the problem of her flawed, one-dimensional feminism, as evidenced in yesterday's piece on the wave of "female influence" that's accompanied the Democratic victory:

Nancy Pelosi, who will be the first female speaker, softened her voice and look as she cracked the whip on her undisciplined party, taking care not to sound shrill. When she needs to, though, she says she can use her “mother-of-five voice."

Rather than trumpeting Obama's appearance on The View or taking sly sexual jabs at "flaccid" George W. Bush, perhaps Dowd should consider the anti-feminist, heteronormative subtext of such statements.

doing the ill na na

2006-11-05T01:35:00.000-05:00

Forgoing a planned trip to NY last evening, I instead watched the movie Take the Lead with my friends Adam and Carina. Overall, an excellent decision; the dancing was enjoyable, the post-and-concurrent film analysis was stimulating, and Antonio Banderas--perfectly cast as the Spanish dance instructor with a heart of gold and a penchance for la salsa--was magnifico.

In a fem-theory class I took, we read a popular piece from the 80's by the critic Jane Radway about the ideological implications of Midwestern ladeez' penchants for reading romance novels. In a slightly condescending tone (who could blame her--most of her subjects had two first names and Christian Coalition memberships), Radway points out the ways in which readers' responses are structured by their stringent expectations (a strong hero, a feisty protagonist, a fair amount of explicit sex). Failure to adhere to these plot expectations produces an unsatisfactory reading; the often inevitable sense of identification with a character, however compels the readers to finish the books anyways. Basically, once you feels a connection to the bodice-ripping orphan, you have to close the narrative loop--if only to find out that she/you ends up losing her flower to the hunky Scottish warlord.

I feel the same way about Urban Dance movies. For me--and Adam and Carina, if I may presume to say--there are a few expectations that facilitate our satisfaction:

1. At least one strong romantic relationship that is somehow consummated in the film. This doesn't have to mean sex--although who could forget the scene in the amazing Save the Last Dance--but I can't feel good about a film that lacks some sort of fulfillment. For example, when Aaliyah (RIP) and Jet Li don't even make out in Romeo Must Die, I'm sure I wasn't the only audience member who left feeling frustrated (and, as an Asian, spurned by the Hollywood asian-hate machine).

2. New Vocab: See this post's title (from Take the Lead); Antonio Banderas is also told that he is "getting his flirt on." I also learned tonight that "punk-ass" is a versatile verb; it can mean anything from screwing yourself over to screwing others.

3. A dope montage--usually set to a rap song that came out the week of the movie's release--can make or break an Urban Dance movie. This usually means juxtaposing snooty ballroom dancing scenes with hot breakdancing sequences in the ghetto. There are two types of montages: the upbeat ones where the various characters dance together in different settings (the streets, the basketball court, the hallway) and the redemptive ones where the characters dance alone or sit alone thinking on rooftops.

4. A dose of the nitty-gritty: the "real" subplots shouldn't overwhelm the romance, but, since it is an UD movie, the U part needs to represent--this may involve the jarring sacrifice of less attractive comic relief characters (see: Step Up) or the presence of a deadbeat dad. Or street basketball, which always signifies danger.

5. A happy ending that usually sends the heroes to Julliard, college, or to a performing arts school. See plot diagram (will enlarge).

Unlike Radway's romance readers, however, I don't usually feel compelled to finish a film if I'm unsatisfied (fortunately, when it comes to UD movies, I'm almost always sat-is-fied). Perhaps it's due to a lack of identification: when watching Take the Lead, I was terribly perturbed at the end when all of the main characters broke the rules in the big competition. So annoyed, in fact, that I couldn't fully enjoy the erotic hip hop tango sequence at the end, nor the BIG kiss between America's Next Top Model's Yaya and a hero named Rock.

Whether this is due to a lack of heartlessness, an incessant sense of obedience, or displaced identification onto the snooty, square white characters, I can't--and don't really want to--determine.

durfees part II

2006-10-31T17:39:00.000-05:00

11:25 a.m (after I purchase coffee)

Friendly new Durfees' employee: "Thanks, sugah...come again and GET some!"

The only other thing she could have possibly said was "Come again, son," which means she confused me for a boy. Admittedly, a more plausible alternative.

update on the asian fetishist

2006-10-30T10:07:00.000-05:00

The treasure I unearthed on craigslist a couple weeks ago has reappeared--several times:

Seeking the Exotic and the Polyglot - 25 (October 17): About me, I'm a grad. student at Yale. I'm 25, 5'7", longish brown hair, green eyes, athletic. My hobbies include travel, foreign language and culture study, martial arts, cooking, reading, horror movies, video games, being verbose and having terrible taste in music.

Horror Movie Fans (oops...) - 25 (October 23): About me, I'm a grad student, 25, 5'7", longish brown hair, green eyes and athletic. Interests include martial arts, cooking, eating, travel, foreign language, video games, bad music and of course, horror movies.

'Av a Spot of Tea, Guvna? - 25 (October 29): I'm a grad student, 25, 5'7", longish brown hair, green eyes and athletic. Besides drinking tea and being pretentious, my hobbies include martial arts, travel, foreign language, cooking and music.

Please note the SUBTLE differences in each post; I also highly encourage you to view the second, as it is particularly humorous. Cue: montage of each version of grad student, talking to a camera while James Blunt plays in the background.

I was a bit surprised to see that the tenth most e-mailed article on the Times website this morning was about a retired professor who just completed a translation of the Aeneid. It's a pleasant piece, so I felt compelled to link it. Ruining the ending:

Virgil worked on “The Aeneid” for 10 years, and Mr. Fagles took almost as long. When he was done with it, he said, he went through a period of mourning, having lost what had become in effect a daily companion. And he still can’t decide which of the epics is his favorite.
“Some days are very Iliadic,” he said. “You’re in a war. And some days it’s all about getting home; you’re like Odysseus. It all depends on what side of the bed you get up on.”

Lists

2006-10-28T19:33:00.000-04:00

Top 5 Names I wouldn't mind naming a female child, if I had one:

1. Rose
2. May
3. Sophie
4. Zoe
5. June ("Junebug")

Ten things I would like to do before turning Twenty-five:
1. Quit chewing a pack of pink Orbit bubblegum a day.
2. Successfully sustain a houseplant.
3. Read Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, and Anna Karenina.
4. Publish articles that are longer than 500 words in magazines I admire.
5. Learn how to cook fish without killing myself.
6. Fall in love and prolong the state for more than eight months.
7. Feel proprietary towards New York.
8. Take a trip somewhere with my father.
9. Purchase a fur coat.
10. Develop a habit of eating alone in fine restaurants.

4 Celebrities I vaguely resemble:
1. Winnie from the Wonder Years
2. Keanu Reeves
3. Michelle Branch
4. Phoebe Cates

elm rock stalker

2006-10-23T17:40:00.000-04:00

As I sat in Book Trader today, trying to ignore the rhythmic grunts of the homeless man sitting next to me, it occurred to me that New Haven is FULL of celebrity look-a-likes. So, in the tradition of Gawker Stalker, I'm going to start publishing Elm Rock Stalker.

If you click on the picture, it will enlarge:

2006-10-23T16:46:00.000-04:00

How did I miss this provocative Time cover, for Joe Klein's cover story on the possibility that Barack Obama might run in 2008?

My attention was to drawn to the piece by an AP article today, coverage of Obama's Sunday appearance on Meet the Press.

''Given the responses that I've been getting over the last several months, I have thought about the possibility'' although not with the seriousness or depth required, he said. ''My main focus right now is in the '06. ... After November 7, I'll sit down, I'll sit down and consider, and if at some point I change my mind, I will make a public announcement and everybody will be able to go at me.''

I mentioned Obama in my post last week about the political viability (and problematic nature) of promoting candidates' marketable qualities--character, physical appearance, etc. The Time article isn't incredible, but there are interesting bits about Obama's "strategic" characteristics--his bipartisanship, his cross-racial appeal, his burgeoning cult of personality. Klein's analysis is particularly fascinating when he attempts to unpack the rationale for Obama's intense popularity.

In terms of "Obama as text" (sorry, sorry), I'm talking about Klein's reader-based criticism: analyzing the figure not by his own actions, but by the response. Might B.O be facing the "death of the author" dilemma--is his intention supplanted by its interpretation? Kind of a stretch, but check it:

"He's working a very dangerous high-wire act," Shelby Steele told me. "He's got to keep on pleasing white folks without offending black folks, and vice versa." Indeed, Obama faces a minefield on issues like the racial gerrymandering of congressional districts and affirmative action. "You're asking him to take policy risks? Just being who he is is taking an enormous risk."

Sun Min and Peter Take New Haven

2006-10-22T19:29:00.000-04:00

This weekend, my parents visited me at Yale for the first time since 2003. Unless you're into the freezing cold tailgating thing or the single sex group-singing thing--perhaps the two activities most remote from my idea of fun, outside of burning in hell--there's really nothing to do with the 'rents, aside from making a shitload of dinner reservations. We had lunch at Scoozi, dinner at Central Steakhouse, and Sunday brunch at this ridiculous historical reenactment-type restaurant called Colonial Tymes (yes, Tymes), in Hamden. I would rate the restaurants as a 7, 7.5, and 10.

Anyways, while we were in Hamden, my parents took me to the Hamden Goodwill, where I was hoping to find some furniture for our bare living room. As soon as I walked in, I spotted the perfect chair--red chenille upholstery, dark antique wood, twenty-five bucks--and asked my mom to sit on it while I browsed. Fifteen minutes later, my father walked over and told me that he was sorry, but another woman bought the chair. "Mom fought her for it," he said. "I tried to stop her from making a scene."

"That big, BIG black woman," said my mom, "thought she could get whatever she wanted. She said, 'I come here every day, and that chair is MINE.' I said, 'I don't think so, lady!'"

Thus illustrating the only ostensible personality traits I've inherited from my mother: self-righteous indignance, unwarrantable aggression, and a deep suspicion the motivations of fat people.

Now that my mother and father live in the United States (they moved back from Korea in September), they have no qualms about calling me every day. It's strange: I really do love my parents, and I don't mind sitting and chatting with them in person, but I have zero tolerance for speaking with them on the phone.

(10/20 12:47 p.m: I am absent-mindedly flipping through an old issue of Entertainment Weekly. Ring)
Me: (sees "Mom Cell" on caller ID, shudders) Hello?
Mom: Hi! We're coming tomorrow?
Me: Mom, I'd love to talk, but I'm in the library. Studying. Big books.
Mom: Oh my god! I'm sorry! Go study!
Me: (indignant tone) I was trying to. Bye.

(10/20 6:00 p.m.: I am looking at gaucho hats on ebay. Ring)
Me: Yes?
Mom: Out of the library?
Me: No, mom, I'm studying. I have tests. Essays. Lots.
Mom: Ah, sorry, will call later!

(10/21 11:a.m.: I am staring at a crack in our ceiling. Ring)
Me: Mom, I'm busy. Studying. Worksheet. Syllabus. Distribution requirement.
Mom: You're SO BUSY! Do you have to study so much?
Me: Well I do go to YALE. WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

And....this is a good news story.

airing out my grievances

2006-10-18T09:51:00.000-04:00

While walking into Durfee's Convenience Shoppe (that is exactly how Yale spells it) yesterday morning, I was deterred by two new additions. Please keep in mind that this criticism is by no means directed at the shoppe's employees--who, contrary to popular belief, I have always found to be quite affable--but rather at the unseen hand of Yale middle management, no doubt responsible for these heinous accruals.

1. The appearance of a Purell hand sanitizer outside the entrance. To a convenience store? Really? This extraneity--no doubt paid for with pennies plucked from my unanticipated contribution to the Senior Activity Fund--can only mean one thing: Durfee's is legitimizing my petty theft of candy.

2. The sale of an $8 bag of dried, organic pineapple rings. Look like anuses (anni?). Enough said.

3. The new sign placed on a post outside, which reads:

con‧ven‧ience [kuhn-veen-yuhns] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun

1. the quality of being convenient; suitability.

2. anything that saves or simplifies work, adds to one's ease or comfort, etc., as an appliance, utensil, or the like.

3. a convenient situation or time: at your convenience.

4. advantage or accommodation: a shelter for the convenience of travelers.

5. Chiefly British. water closet (def. 1).

I hate it when advertisers, copywriters, idiot HR people making powerpoint presentations, etc. use "the dictionary definition" as a resource. And I can just imagine some shrill manager hanging up that sign, pointing at the definition and reading it aloud to the cashiers, then crossing his arms, smugly pleased with his idea and his access to a dictionary.

Democratic Dreamboats

2006-10-15T13:34:00.000-04:00

I'm writing this from Jonny Dach's apartment, above Cafe Adulis on College St. Right now, it's the unofficial headquarters of The New Journal as we trudge through production before Volume 39, Issue 2 debuts next Friday. It's been a busy week--I've been pulling all nighters working on my article, which is longer than a hillbilly's rattail--and now its a busy weekend, as production demands my presence from noon 'til night.

I had enough free time, however, to spend a few minutes reading this WaPo article, courtesy of my friend Stan. The piece appeared in Saturday's Politics section, but it may as well be a Modern Romance column in the Times: We're given an in-depth examination of the new crop of H-O-T-T-I-E-S on the left, and told how it's going to pan out into a Dem-packed congress this fall.

Maybe Democractic candidate Michael Arcuri is running strong in this Republican House district because he pledges to expand health coverage, balance the budget and raise minimum wage.

Or maybe its his piercing Italian eyes and runner's physique.

Great writing. Picture at the top of this post is Maryland gubernatorial hopeful Martin O' Malley, the current Mayor of Baltimore (that's him and his wife, doing their best JFK and Jackie O impersonation). He's an awesome guy--I met him three years ago, when I was teaching in an inner city Baltimore school--and, as you can see, a stone fox. This is a big season for governor's races, and Maryland's is no exception. In the last Gallup poll, O' Malley was beating incumbent Robert Erlich by a little over ten points. If it comes down to the wire, might Martin's baby blue eyes, chiseled cheekbones, and the sleeveless muscle tees he wears while playing in his rock band nudge him to victory? Is that very question problematic?

Arcuri's theory is that voters have an immediate, visceral reaction to candidates that, if powerful enough, can trump ideology or party affiliation. "How do you get around the status quo? You look for younger, energetic faces," he said. But while people may decide in an instant whether or not they are able to vote for him, he said, "then they have to know you can do the job."

Stan sent me this article because it's something we discussed a lot over the summer; the question stemmed from a debate over the rationale for Barack Obama's immense popularity. I sent him a Joe Klein article about Jon Tester (D-Montana) for the Nation web feed; Klein's language, while couched in a more sophisticated argument, uses an eerily similar rhetoric. (Side note: The Klein article was bumped off the feed because, apparently, Katrina van den Heuval hates his ass)

Tester, who is the Democratic candidate for the US Senate from Montana, has the most distinctive hand wave in American politics, a thumb-and-pinkie hook-'em-horns waggle. Indeed, Tester's physical presence--he's a big old farm boy with a flattop crew cut--is a political statement that stands close to the heart of the national Democratic congressional campaign of 2006.

Leftist academics like Stan (joke) are wary of this tactic: drawing voter's attention to qualities like physical appeal, character traits, or colloquial hand waves rather than issue stances seems so...Republican. My first instinct, however, was to applaud these appeals to the lowbrow. Call me a cynic, but I'm reminded of my mother, a fence-sitter during the 2004 election, phoning me and saying, "Honey, that John Kerry isn't so bad...I just heard on the radio that he windsurfs."

The issue parallels, I think, a famous debate between Peggy Kamuf, a French deconstructivist, and American Nancy Miller over the role, purpose, and theoretical stance that feminism should take in an age where post-structuralism had done away with the subject. Kamuf, coming from Theory's corner in the conceptual boxing ring, speaks against the danger of institutionalization--against embracing an essential female subject/genre for pragmatic purposes. On the side of Practice we have Miller, who argues that feminists' political demands outweigh epistemological concerns. In shorthand, she says that you can't play with Theory if you don't have the power to do so.

While I tend to agree with Kamuf--or at least, my senior essay will--I realize that, although the Democratic party hardly aligns with marginalized groups like Feminist, Queer, and Postcolonialist critics, condoning the usage of physical/character appeals over the issues enacts a similarly strategic operation. Lately, I feel like every problem I come across boils down to this binary: Theory vs. Practice. I suppose the correct move, then, would be to prove that the two aren't mutually exclusive...