Week 41 (6)
Don’t
mind me.
Saturday, 15:37
Yeah, I know. Lackluster, lately. Going through one of those existential what-do- I-think-I’m-doing kick-at-the-cat drink-beer-before-noon pick-a-fight-in-the- Home-Depot glare-sullenly feel-shitty-about-whacking-off-over-pictures-of- girls-who-have-trouble-remembering-the-last-president-named-Bush why- preach-at-the-choir hollowed-out-and-rotten Sunday-afternoon-fireworks- over-Cinderella’s-castle-on-Wonderful-World-of-Disney why-not-steal-an- image-from-Donna-Tartt who-gives-a-fuck why-aren’t-you-doing- something-useful fuck-you no-fuck-you I-could-do-better-than-that well-why- aren’t-you bouts of simmering, seething self-loathing.
It’ll pass. Back in a bit.
Hurried
thoughts scribbled on the back of an envelope while seeing the Bally’s
Total Fitness commercial featuring “A Little Bit” by Jessica
Simpson.
Thursday, 22:43
It’s odd, seeing someone attempt to pull off the Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera thing, and failing utterly. Makes you realize there’s actually a thing there to be pulled off.
Not, mind, that I’m in any way condoning the bizarre seemingly half-unconscious look-but-don’t-touch-well-maybe virginal sexpot thing that they do do, all too well. (Though Aguilera’s reportedly been straining at the bit. And would somebody please reveal what’s actually on that “personal” video stolen from Spears and her boy-band beard?)
—And then, of course, I have to ask myself: how do I know all this shit?
On
a somewhat snarky note.
Wednesday, 22:37
Three episodes into the new Star Trek series, and I find the character of T’Pol unexpectedly sympathetic. Not because she is a hyper-competent emotionless hottie in a catsuit, no; it’s pathetically obvious they’re trying to meld the appeals of Leonard Nimoy and Jeri Ryan—which, come to think of it, might have had an intellectual appeal on paper, but lacks a certain something in practice. And anyway, Jolene Blalock isn’t really what I’d consider a hottie, what with that pouty-lipped squinty-eyed thing she’s got going on.
No, I find T’Pol sympathetic (unexpectedly) because she’s quite obviously the only sane, rational person trapped in a ship full of childlike idiots so drunk on sensawunda that they can’t be bothered to take the basic precautions known even to primitive 20th c. astronauts.
And anyway, the theme song blows.
(“Split you in two”? With a phase pistol? Did they think that was subtle?)
Social
engineering.
Wednesday, 22:29
No. It didn’t work. Just as well, really.
Oddly enough, even as the overall number of readers appears to be increasing (um, dramatically; my goodness), the number of “Clix” is decreasing—from 49 the first week, to 18, to, well, 6. Thus far. This week.
It’s just odd. That’s all I’m saying.
(You know what? You’re right. This is gauche. Sorry. It’s just that this is, like, the second month I’m doing this. Still figuring it all out. The etiquette and all. Terribly sorry. I already apologized, didn’t I. Sorry. For apologizing again, that is. I wasn’t apologizing again for the thing I was apologizing for.
(Hey—how ’bout that Buffy?)
Alternative
titles.
Tuesday, 18:42
Had I been aware that How to Travel with a Salmon was in a big box down in the basement (along with my Doctor Eszterhazy and my Hutton, all of which I’d thought were safe up here in my office, ack!); had I not been reading Susan Sontag at the time; had this journal had an (ostensible) focus other than pornography and erotica, consumption and production thereof; were I not still equally enamored of “Long Story, Short Pier,” then—well. Then I might have named the resulting, purely hypothetical blog “Diario minimo.”
But I hadn’t; I had; it does (ostensibly); I am. So it isn’t.
Courting
irrelevancy.
Monday, 19:11
So of course I love it. Or at least, the sound of it: a review of a collection of critical essays on Clinton/Lewinsky/Starr, et al., and the collective reaction to same. (Ever notice how it’s “Clinton,” or “Starr,” but always “Monica”? And “Linda Tripp,” not just “Tripp.” —I’m just saying.)
Sounds intriguing and frustrating by turns; I can attest that at least a couple of the authors have had worthwhile and meaningful things to say in the past. And certainly, if you want a core sample of the state of the Zeitgeist in re: sex, relationships, sexual expression, repression, hypocrisy, and moralizing (to say nothing of classism—hey. Wait a goldurn minute. Typing this up at the Day Job as I am, I’m using MS Word rather than my beloved Tex Edit; the spell-as-you-go thingie is on, and I’m noting a squiggly red line under the word “classism.” A perfectly good word according to Webster’s Ninth, to say nothing of just about everybody since the middle of the century before last. So. Does anyone at MS want to explain why, exactly, “classism” isn’t in Word’s dictionary? Or “classist”?)—
Where was I?
Oh. Right. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single incident that affords a richer, more fascinating anschauung than Monicagate, and all it entails. No. Really. You would. Read the hilarious description of a TV news anchor attempting to summarize a portion of the Starr Report detailing a blow job, say, or the brief survey of typical terms used to describe Lewinsky herself—or even what the essayists appear to be saying about themselves and their own attitudes, without entirely meaning it. Inadvertency being as important as advertency, after all.
By way of a post scriptum: Chas. Taylor (author of the aforementioned review) does go out of his way to mock the woolly-headed idealism of (some of) the essayists (what else, pray tell, does one expect from the hallowed groves? Woolly-headed, impractical idealism is precisely what one should seek from academia, where ideas are teased, broken, recombined, bent all out of shape, and above all played with, before being sent out into the real world; it’s for precisely this reason [among, um, others] that academia is so important) and the impenetrable nature of their prose (and even an infrequent reader can tell where I stand on the issue of clarity in writing; it’s overrated, and proclaiming its inherent superiority is rather like asserting that plainsong is inherently better than the fugue. Or so I tell myself), but—given the sentence he picks on:
That identification is structured by what might be called, for lack of a better phrase, the allegorical force of presidential heterosexuality: the supposedly paradigmatic triangulation of personal and, consequentially, constitutional relations (or in this case, betrayals) among the president, the First Lady, and the Other Woman/the people.
—well. Either this collection is exemplary for the clarity of its prose, or Taylor didn’t try very hard. (Even a random generator can do better. Or worse. Or whatever.) And by the way—”presidentialism” is a perfectly acceptable neologism (not good; not bad—acceptable): “ism,” of course, is the suffix meaning “act: practice: process: manner of action or behavior characteristic of a (specified) person or thing; state: condition: property...” What else you gonna do to talk about what was being talked about? Pretend we speak German, coin a new compound noun: thosequalitiesnecessarytobeconsideredpresidentialik? And “normativity” is—in theory—supposed to sit oddly on the page, and irritate you into thinking about what the word is trying to say, rather than lulling you into complacently glossing it, like sneaky old “normalcy.” Same reasoning behind the god-awful use of slashes (excuse me, virgules) and belabored, poker-faced puns. —Dry though it may be, there’s frequently a sense of humor lurking in most modern? contemporary? current criticism; would that it were more sophisticated than that of a pimply undergraduate who thinks Piers Anthony is the height of wit.
I mean, I’m as much in favor of kicking a ponderous bloviator in the tush as the next fella, but come on—pick on ’em for what they really fuck up. Don’t go for the easy targets and empty crowd-pleasers.
“Now, George was a good straight boy to begin with, but there was bad blood in him someway he got into the magic bullets and that leads straight to Devil’s work, just like marywanna leads to heroin You think you can take them bullets or leave ’em, do you? Just save a few for your bad days.
“Well, now we all have those bad days when you can’t hit for shit...”
nicholas urfé
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