Last week was thanksgiving break.  Since my car stopped working shortly the holiday, it was my privilege to remain here in c-u the whole while.  Which was nice, actually.  I very cruelly neglected my students and was able to make actual progress on the actual dissertation, for the first time in a few weeks.

But now the piper arrives, hungry hungry for payment, and (since I didn’t grade my huge batch of papers over break) I’ve now agreed to meet with my rhet students this week, returning their papers to them and discussing their next writing effort.

These meetings should be productive, but the meeting/grading grind is likely to be again just a little brutal. 

Thanksgiving was neat, and the 1st since 1993 that I’ve not spent it with my family.  In fact I stayed in my house writing all day, and venturing forth at around 7pm.  Really I was quite glad to have avoided the drive to Chicago, and to have found some precious time to work on the diss, and to have avoided stabbing my father with a carving fork during a discussion the recent elections.  In any case I made my way through the very frozen very quiet city (no cars even driving about) and across the park to the Colonial pantry.  Here I bought a large Red Barron frozen pizza.  Kind of enjoying the ritual abjection of the scene, I told the clean-cut clerk that this was to be my thanksgiving dinner, prompting a strange look of pity from the mother and daughter team that that was behind me in line (but just what were *they* doing in the Colonial Pantry at 7pm on thanksgiving . . . ?).

Some miscellaneous notes before I return to grading and turn off my fast-fading laptop:

1)  The new TMBG album is surprisingly not so good.  I’m not quite sure how this could happen.  Just a little boring.  Note that if you have questions on aesthetic value and tmbg they can probably be answered over at the at the tmbg wiki.  You can for instance discover the relative artistic value of the entire (non-dial-a-song) TMBG canon.  As assessed by a group of lunatics willing to rank The Ballad of Timothy McSweeney (#40) above Dead (#92).  I’m simply aghast.

2)  Also a little disappointing is the B. Wilson _Smile_, at least relative to its claim to be the album of the millennium (it seems like a lot of what’s on it can be found on other albums anyhow).  But perhaps this album is beginnig to grow on me.

3) The actual album that you must buy or have bought is Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender.  Just brilliant, if you can adjust to her rather (erm) bracing voice.  And I must confess to much repeated listening to Ladytron’s Light and Magic.  I’m not sure if this is good per se, but I find it most trigger-tripping. A powerful cylon menace will rock you from this album.  I guess there is a new version of it too, with extra tracks and such.

Ok then.  No more time.  My power gauge dwindles and a paper on Global Warming is shooting me a come-hither look and gesturing with arms of steel.

Which reminds me of one more thing which must be shown.  As JBOT assures us, we are never safe from robots. They follow us now, and hide themselves, even in the most sacred of spaces. 

Sorry.  Some links cannot be resisted.

How can something so plainly Wrong be so damn irresistable?

And it’s *snowing* outside?  Erg.

So, light posting this week, I think.  The campus has emptied-out for thanksgiving break, and I’ve been taking these first few days to sneak in a little work on my own dissertation, although probably beginning today I’ll also need to get going on my teaching work for next week.  I’ve to return a huge stack of papers right after break.

Since I’ve been mostly just working the last few days, fixing up this (horrible) chapter to give it to my adviser, there’s not much interesting social news to report.  In fact I’ve been kind of enjoying a little quiet isolation.

There is however one piece of not so very great news: the car is, apparently, dead.

Ok, not dead so much as ‘irreparable,’ which is almost as bad.  Apparently my beloved red hatchback is burning oil and has bad compression in a cylinder or two, and can’t be fixed short of an engine overhaul or replacement for  $2000+ (more than the value of the car).

But the good news is that, actually, the car still works.  The engine likes to stall when it’s cold (it’s easy to restart when this happens), and now it likes also to stall when it’s really hot (and when this happens you need to wait a few minutes or sometimes an hour or more to start it again).  So it still seems to work for short trips, sort of.  Especially if you drive the speed limit, keep the heater on, and don’t accelerate too hard.  The most delicate sort of freedom!

So, until the thing falls apart completely, it may still be serviceable for picking up groceries and such.  For cheap thrills it’s possible to drive up to North Prospect (where I picked up the new tmbg and Brian Wilson’s _Smile_ last night), and contemplate the possibility of stalling out on the overpass above I-74. which I always imagine would be so very much fun.

Anyway, so I’ve been thinking about whether I could do without a car, if/when it might be necessary to do so.  Probably the answer is yes.  As long as my landlord lets me stick a washer/dryer in the basement, the only need for a car would be to pick-up groceries.  Schnuck’s and County Market are only about a 20 minute walk away, however.  Not so bad really.  Jerry’s IGA promises to deliver groceries (but only to the “house-bound”?) for an $8 delivery fee. 

And I noticed too that the Prarieland Community Supported Agriculture collective distributes shares of groceries just a block or so away from my house.  I’m always sort of fascinated by the prospect of buying a share of  produce from the organic farm that grows stuff for the PCSA.  The idea is that I’d give them $405 for my 33 week share, and then each week I could pick-up my portion of groceries, fresh from the farm, and just down the street.  The food you get depends on what’s in season.  A week of August produce would look like this, while one from October might look like this.  These look pretty good, don’t you think? 

On the other hand, it’s not quite cheap, and I should perhaps be realistic about my ability and willingness to consistently cook up and use all this interesting produce.  I can see myself ordering all this and then still surviving on delivery or bar food, which would not be good.

Further assisting carless survival might be the new downtown bakery slated to open soon.  This will hopefully be an improvement over the weird Persimmon grocery, where I swear they will try to make you pay eight dollars (or, ok $7.50+tax) for a loaf of bread.

. . .of soldiers.

then they came for Johannes Gutenberg. . .

And at last, they came for Neil Armstrong . . .

I like wikipedia.  I tell my students to go ahead and use it as a place to gather information.  Always evolving, and with 400,000 articles in the English edition alone, Wikipedia is a user-editable universal encyclopedia, that recalls H.G. Wells’s vision of a World Brain.  But it does have its limitations. 

But sometimes these limitations are the best part.  Errors in the Wikipedia are supposed to be corrected by an evolutionary process — an asymptotic progress towards Truth, in which errors, imperfections, and biases are gradually erased in a great collaboration moving towards towards the Way Things Are.

But this plan is fallible.  Incompetence and human entropy pollute the system and are not removable.  And sometimes this entropy enters the system in a concerted effort by a group of people to to maintain the truth of something more than a little less than true.

Why such a diligent and concerted defense of falsehood?  It’s a joke.  But maybe all encyclopedias should contain a few such deliberate falsehoods.  Some obvious, some less so.  Note the Wikipedia article on “Fanon.”  No, not him; rather:

Fanon is a fact or ongoing situation in fan fiction stories related to a television program, book, movie, or video game that has been used so much by fan writers that it has been more or less established as having happened in the fictional world, but it has not actually been established as having happened on the show, book or movie itself. Fanon is a portmanteau word of fan and canon.

The examples of such “Fanon” are, I guess,  interesting.  For example:

Star Trek: Mr. Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet. This has been suggested by non-canon novels and comic books, but has never been established in any television series or movies. To the contrary, Star Trek: Enterprise has established that the first Vulcan in Starfleet is Commander T’Pol. . . .

James Bond:
There are only nine 00 agents (001-009). In fact, Ian Fleming mentions a 0010 in his novel, Moonraker and a later book by Raymond Benson mentions a 0012. On a related note, some fanon states that M is in fact the original 001, the first 00-agent; nothing in Fleming supports this. . . .

The coolest bit of Fanon on Wikipedia, surely, is the following:

Knight Rider:
KITT, the car on Knight Rider, is actually built around a Cylon brain that crash-landed on earth at the end of Galactica 1980.

Now, “Galactica 1980″ was an obscure made for tv movie that was a sequel to the TV and film verisions of “Battlestar Galactica” of the 70’s.  The Galactica premise is that a huge battleship is lost in space searching for a long-ago lost Earth, in a hostile universe populated especially by the evil Cylon Empire.  Galactica 1980 extends the Galactica story past the end of the original series (canceled in 1979), allowing the beleaguered Galactica to at last find Earth, its long-lost home, and presumed place of refuge.

It turns out, however, that the Galactica has somehow ended up returning to the Earth of *1980.*  Which is to say that it returns to a technologically primitive earth that cannot offer the Galactica even the slightest protection against the Cylon empire which has been hunting the starship.  In fact, the Galactica will only bring destruction and enslavement to its own planet of origin. 

So the Galactica now speeds away from Earth, hoping to lure the pursing Cylons away from the imperiled homeworld.  They leave behind only a few people and fragments on the earth–charged with igniting a technological revolution on earth of secret origin, that will bring the planet a sliver of hope against the Cylons, should the Earth be fortunate enough to escape in a long period of obscurity the hostile predations of Galactica’s foes.

Only in light of this does _Knight Rider_ make sense — its post-apocalyptic wasteland opening; the secretive Knight Corporation; KITT’s unconcealable edge of menace, underneath his friendly  reprogramming; Michael Knight himself, at the center of a show that was a weekly “Shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist.”

After reading the “Fanon” entry that describes Kitt as reconditioned Cylon, I did a Google search for these terms, and found nothing.  I checked the Kinght Rider and Battlestar Galactica fan sites for evidence of such a story–nothing there, either.  It appears that this story which appears in the “Fanon” section of wikipedia is one which doesn’t in fact exist–except as a story of a story.

So Tuesday night John M . shows up around 930 to pick me up and head out for the Luna show.  However he gives me money for the ticket I’d picked up for him, and tells me that he probably won’t be able to stay too long at the show.  Why not?  “Well, I think my wife just went into labor.”

It later turned out that this was in fact true.  And that John had driven all the way over from Urbana to pick me up and take me to the show.  And he mentioned that Kara offered her apologies for taking him away from the show! 

Well, I did let him cart me over to the Highdive, which I kind of felt guilty about, although it was on the way.  But I guess he made it back in plenty of time, and the news is that John and Kara are now parents to a young fella who’s name remains tba.  So many congratulations to the super-cool and frighteningly polite new parents.

In consequence of all this, I was stuck at the show semi-alone, which actually is kind of a fun way to be at a show.  I chatted with ex-students, flirted w/a librarian, and finally caught a ride home with one of my favorite new grad students in the program.  (Luna was good, but seemed somehow a little discouraged). 

Since I promised my fiction students I’d return their papers on Wednesday, I’d spent the day out grading papers.  And I decided to leave my house around 1 or so and walk (my car is still out of commission, perhaps w/a bad intake valve or two), up Prospect to Steak ‘n Shake to grade some more.  Prospect avenue was lovely in the dark.  On the road to Steak ‘n Shake, I saw:

1) A purple Cadillac with big gold rims being pushed by another car around the back streets.
2) Four police cars with light flashing parked randomly in front of the gas station.
3)  A blue Heron, standing in the retaining ppond across from Lowe’s
4) A cat, near said pond, about eight feet from an apparently oblivious rabbit, towards which it was silently creeping.  As I approached, the cat freaked-out and ran and ran far away from me, up towards Payless Shoes.

So, a nice walk.  In SnS, I sat near a booth in which a beautiful woman explained to her dubious companion about the approaching end of the world and the microchips that would soon be implanted on people’s foreheads, and which would be the mark of the beast.

So everyone knows that Luna’s in town tonight, yes?

I have to grade a huge stack of papers today, but will manage to make it to the show none-the-less.    Tickets aren’t cheap ($15, I think), but it’s L.’s last tour, so attendance is recommended.  9pm at the Higdive.  See you there.

So, you want to see pictures of the *real* Iraq — the ones that maistream media is keeping from you.  Ok, then.   

But do you mean  these?
Or these?

[But don’t click on that second link without a lot of bandwith and a strong stomach].

I wonder whether this could still get interesting.

I’ve had perhaps just a little too much fun this weekend.  Out and about at the Esquire Friday night, and then spent yesterday grading with sarah in the afternoon, then viewing _The Grudge_ with Dana and Christina, finally kicking back at Sanjay’s birthday/Diwali party, before being carted home once again by the kindly rachel s.  But ok, about the movie…

The Grudge, I’ve decided is recommendable.  Takishi Shimizu directs this Americanized remake of his own Ju-On (which I missed when it was briefly at the New Art a few weeks ago).
Critical opinion on the film  is interestingly divided, and if you decide to see it, you might well decide that there’s not much there but a lot of Boo!-saying.  But I think I’d disagree.

As we left the film Dana asked why it was set in Japan, to which I lamely asked: “Well, why it shouldn’t it have been?”  And as we drove home, we mostly discussed various plot issues, and I found myself sort of defending the film from Christina’s questions about its plot.  My line was that the nature and capabilities of the Grudge couldn’t/shouldn’t have been spelled-out too specifically.

The film thematizes unintelligibility, which is one reason it’s interesting that this remake focuses on Americans in Japan.  As I watched the film, I kept being remained of the excellent _Lost in Translation_, where a kind of pleasure in keeping a kind of loose grasp on things and ideas and people is described.  But _The Grudge_ find  in such looseness a kind of helplessness in the face of people and realities that threaten to grasp one with a kind of deadly fixity.  Sexual obsession, childlike neediness, obsessional rage, and finally death here countervail the pleasurable dream-state of LIT.  (jeeze does Ebert miss the point on this one).

The film plays with this, as the Americans repeatedly struggle to communicate with people around them, or simply to obtain food or move about the city.  This gets racialized when a hapless white American professor doesn’t notice he’s being stalked by a person whom he fails to recognize among in sea of Asians who to him are apparently as indistinguishable as they are “inscrutable.”

Like LIT then, The Grudge is always in danger of slipping into essentialized or even racist descriptions.  When Detective Nakagawa tells S. Michelle Gellar about Japanese beliefs about the dead, the film veers close to an easy kind of exoticism, which also appears early in the film when Gellar’s character peers over a wall into a Shinto cemetery to watch the natives burn incense to help keep in touch w/their ancestors.

The Grudge seemed a little flat to me at first, but is better on reflection.  I like how cramped and compact the evil house is — how you can never even see the house a whole.  And how the wide modern spaces of the City contrast with the convoluted neighborhood.  How the evil ghosts are so pointedly figures of the bitterly powerless.  The surly child or sullen girl, who’s look expresses a desire to devour and destroy that can be ignored only on  the assumption of this person’s powerlessness.  Of the wife, son, and dad who die in the house to inaugurate its evil ways, only the wife and son come back as grudgers.  Their scariness depends on their hostile helplessness.  The dynamic is familiar. 

Which brings us back maybe to the question of racial and cultural suspicion, which always lingers in this film (when first trying to find the evil house, Gellar approaches a Japanese mother and her child.  The mother politely answer’s G.’s question, but gently pulls her kid away from Gellar when G tries to be friendly).  In this context of hostility and and incomensurability, it’s hard not to read the film’s abiding preoccupation with eye-shape in terms that are at least partly racial. 

At the moment before the Grudge ghosts kill, and at other more random intervals, the eyes of the ghost become suddenly preternaturally wide.  This is automatically scary.  Normally one’s eyes narrow before attacking someone, and the reverse is horrifying in a Bataille kind of obscene way, race or no race.  But here eye shape is racialized, too.  Like anime-style animation, that draws figures in a way influenced by American post WWII cartoons, and that produces characters with weird more Caucasian-than-Caucasian eye-shapes, the Grudge presents its white victims with a last vision of a face that like Anime after WWII, offers back a spectacle of weird reflected whiteness to those it’s about to consume. 

So this then, is my answer to Dana about _The Grudge_ being set in Japan.

[p.s. reminds me of the BBC news report I heard a few days ago about Japanese nationalism.  The BBC announcer actually referred to the post-WWII provision in the Japanese constitution prohibiting a standing army as an act of “castration.”]

I don’t know what else to say about GW Bush.  We have a lot of work to do here.

I know many of us feel the same way.

[note:  no, I am not the person pictured about, except perhaps in spirit.]

Speaking of stealing elections, it’s notable that some of the most damning evidence of election malfeasance (voter imtimidation in Ohio) has come from Suicidegirls.com.   

I had been dimly aware of Suicidegirls via a Slashdot story or two; but my first actual visit to it was (I swear!) through a link from Eschaton a couple weeks ago. 

Wow.  On at least two counts.  First, you should take a look at the charges and documents posted on Suicidegirls.  They constitute the strongest evidence I’ve seen of a deliberate Republican campaign to suppress voter turnout among African Americans in Ohio.  Note too Atrios’s comments about registered mail.

But ok.  And also.  Count number two.  Damn!  There are a fair number of pretty…..erm…remarkable “suicide girls” at that site.  And the whole concept is imho interesting.

The idea, obvious in retrospect, is to combine a Livejournal-type community with porn.  Brilliant, eh?  The site contains ohidontknowjillions of journals and interest-based discussion groups, etc.

But at core of the site are a bunch of “suicide girls” who run sg-blogs and also post sets of pics of themselves, in various states of undress.  There’s somewhere under 500 such women now posting there.  The ethos there is .alt.  They solicit new SG’s:

BECOME A SUICIDEGIRL

So you want to be a SuicideGirl, huh?

SuicideGirls are unique, strong, sexy and confident women. Is this you? Well fill out this application and you just might have a shot at it, although we ain’t promising you anything.

And the suicide girls correspondingly sport the trappings and attitudes of irreverent and  revolutionary gothic librarians — a kind of packaging that I think we all must admit is difficult to resist.  Right?  Ummm.  Anyone?  Well, ok then.  Whatever.

The idea of SG is that such grrrl-based porn escapes the Hefner ethos by situating the sexual voyeurism in an interactive-type environment.  You can converse with the women you’re admiring.  You can befriend them.  And you can (perhaps) become one, if you’re a woman.  And suicide girls can talk with and admire one-another, sometimes in communities open to them only.  And suicide girls earn money for the picture sets they post.

Liberation, I guess.  But still I’m not so sure.  After-all, not just anyone can be a SG.  You must apply and you must be a woman, of a certain age, and a certain attractiveness (in the eyes of the SG administrators).  And you need to express the properly improper attitude that fits the SG brand.  And you possess the proper body modifications, which in the context of the SG application process can seem suddenly like the obligatory “flair” we remember from Office Space (tho more painful to put on…).  In the end, one wonders whether the SG porn model differ too substantially from the old one?  Or was the old one ok too?

It’s interesting, and the questions about looking at SG-type images seem to quickly resolve themselves into the Reformation-era questions about image-worship that I regularly study:    Which kinds of image-appreciation are legitimate, and which kinds are not?  Does setting-up and worshiping an image of God freeze and erase him?  Or do we have access to one-another only through representations anyway?  Or are Idols of the Marketplace produced when money finds its way into relationships that should be unclouded by such?  Or perhaps it has something to do with the possibility of iterability itself?  As so many Elizabethan sonneteers persistantly wondered: how similar or different are spiritual adoration and sexual regard?

Maybe it’s best to consider the issue in more utilitarian terms, or in terms of violence and subordination ala MacKinnon, etc.  But I’m not sure how far these take us either.

Ok.  Too much time wasted already, and this surely isn’t the place for a detailed working out my personal theory of pornography and representation.  All I’m saying finally is that SG is a website interesting for both good and fun-but-maybe-marginally-evil reasons.  Perhaps somebody here can capably sort this out for me.

[ok, and p.s.–what’s with the whole “suicide” thing anyhow?  I suppose I can guess what Catherine MacKinnon might say.  Is it odd that self-destructive behavior is so widely seen as attractive]?