TheRedLineReview

2006-08-18T22:19:00.000-05:00

hi?

2006-08-13T18:46:00.000-05:00

Let's send the kids O-U-T-S-I-D-E so we can fuck.

2006-06-29T15:29:00.000-05:00

This post is a gift.

Since no one reads or posts on The RLR anymore, you've stumbled on this page quite unsystematically, I would wager. Perhaps you're unusually bored, and decided, on a whim, to navigate your browser to this very spot. Or perhaps the good people at google directed you here. Either way, consider yourself lucky.

Because you're about to read this.

Enjoy.

See you on Monday!

2006-05-18T17:31:00.000-05:00

What do these acts have in common?

Mt. Eerie/Microphones
Broken Social Scene
Mission of Burma
Teenage Fanclub(!)
Dinosaur Jr.
Boredoms
The Fiery Furnaces
Spoon
Sleater-Kinney
Lightning Bolt
Destroyer
The Decemberists
Clinic
The New Pornographers
The Shins

u know that song...

2006-05-06T17:29:00.000-05:00

... "rock lobster" by the b-52's? why do i like it so much? that, and "monster mash" by bobby "boris" pickett. i feel like i'm becoming some kind of goth-lite weirdo or something.

an interesting twist...

2006-04-20T13:35:00.000-05:00

61 caught on fire and BURNED DOWN late this tuesday night. well, maybe not burned down, but at least burned inside and out, thoroughly. when i harkened upon the site in the inferno's aftermath, it was filled with charred deli goods and mangled steel, littered with shattered glass and crumbled cement, coated with a thick carpet of dark gray ash and black soot.

some questions:
who?
why?
how?
what does it mean?

The RLR gets back to its bread and butter.

2006-04-10T08:51:00.000-05:00

Misunderstandings.

2006-03-31T12:30:00.000-05:00

K: Why do I keep getting these sperm emails?
Me: Spam emails, dear, it's 'spam.'
K: No, I meant 'sperm'--they're all about increasing my sperm count.
Me: Oh. Heehee. Sorry.

---

(In a shop)
Me (pointing behind counter to pharmacy-type goods): Do you have any dental floss back there?
(Clerk turns around and picks up band-aids, hands them to me)
Me: Uh, those are band-aids.
Clerk: Oh, you wanted floss, for your teeth.
Me: Yes.
Clerk: No, we don't have that.

All about me.

2006-03-14T08:18:00.000-05:00

A new demo: Twentieth Century.

Myspace page finally up!

That is all.

Ros, bring the chorus for us

2006-03-09T05:00:00.000-05:00

I'm not posting this to toot my own horn (really, I'm not), but the contest shaping up here is pretty funny right now. Favorites are Sigur Ros feat. Paul Barman and, of course, Dan Bejar.

Not Fishscale, but close.

2006-03-06T13:15:00.000-05:00

I love the internet. Listen.

Glimpses of the other lives

2006-03-03T22:38:00.000-05:00

So what to make of Paul Graham and his essays? His brand of thinking can be dismissed as a mixture of libertarianism/entrepreneurial-speak/pragmatism, but there's more there, I think. Cynical* moments have me recoiling when he begins to sound like he's in full motivational speaking mode, but other times, there are great insights that could inform a most devoted humanist.

A good place to start is this essay meant for a high school assembly audience, but there are other good pieces on the essay form itself, wealth (this one particularly hard to deal with, for me), and on writing.

*Cynical: I found an Oscar Wilde quote on cynicism that I like a lot in Said's Representations of the Intellectual: "cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing." Unrelated to anything, but pretty true, huh.

My computer is still not fixed but hopefully it will be soon and this place will be less dormant.

"WTF is going on? Thx all. Peace"?

2006-02-28T19:12:00.000-05:00

Please:
1. Click here.
2. Click on "Comments"
3. Read comments #6 and 7, the ones by "David" (note: it's not me)
4. Click on David's "Homepage" link.

That couldn't be...could it?

I was a dominant theme in a number of places.

2006-02-26T18:27:00.000-05:00

Destroyer - European Oils
Destroyer - Painter in Your Pocket
[Links updated!]

Since I'm in the middle of an ongoing, off and on, and seemingly irresolvable dispute with my partner over the merits of Destroyer, I figured I'd try to map out my defense in this recently near-dormant forum. I've been sort of obsessed with Destroyer over the past couple of months, and this obsession couldn't have come at a better time, for he's just (as in, last week) released a new album, and it's binoculars (see two songs above).

The thing about Dan Bejar (Yes, Destroyer is a band. And yes, Destroyer is Dan Bejar. Both are true.) is that his voice is difficult to love at first, it is true. This is my dear girlfriend's main objection, and I find it difficult to dispute. I know the trouble with voices that trigger an almost visceral reaction of wtf-ness in the listener. I myself have similar objections with the Decemberists' Colin Meloy, who K has no problem with at all. But, I maintain, like cigarettes, whisky, and camel meat (I'm told), Bejar's voice, if you keep listening, and keep listening, and keep listening, will eventually bloom in your ears with untold subtleties and you - will - love - it.

It's the words that are the real reward for the Destroyer listener, though. Not the overall meaning of the songs, but the smaller meanings--the lines, the couplets, the turns of phrase, the allusions, the self-references, the swearing. And also, what might be called the texture of the language--the sound of the words. Mr John Darnielle, from Mountain Goats, USA, sez that, on the new album, "With practically every exaggerated phrase, Bejar invokes poetic traditions unknown to all but the most sunken-eyed MFA students; everybody will claim they know what he's talking about, and almost everyone will be lying." Well fuck him for the hipster throw-down at the end there, but I think I agree with what he's saying, even though I don't claim to know what he's talking about. What he's talking about is not important. But I think I pick up the echoes of these "poetic traditions" even if I don't know the actual traditions. What's clear is that Bejar writes from a place that's pretty far away from basically all other pop songwriters I listen to. Destroyer songs have their own logic, and it's very possible to listen to a bunch of them in a row and feel like you never want to listen to anyone else.

Well, this is pretty muddled, but whatever. Listen to the songs.

Update:
Shit, I didn't see this 'til tonight.

not fair

2006-02-20T22:02:00.000-05:00

manhattan vs miami beach.

to top it all off, nobody blogs anymore. jeez.

three haiku

2006-02-09T09:44:00.000-05:00

Your storefront is dark,
locked up, shut down, overnight.
61! My life!

Steam table empty,
the karaoke silenced,
61! Come back!

D.O.H. haters
killed your spirit, killed my joy.
61! Why? Why?

what britney's better half is up to these days...

2006-02-01T20:54:00.003-05:00

for a supremely entertaining treat, watch k-fed rock out to his new song about big asses: here.

why oh why

2006-02-01T20:54:00.000-05:00

did i have to discover this site?

i like the makeover ones where you can change the eye color to, like, fluorescent yellow. also, the group dress-up ones are great fun, like tobey & kirsten, or just 'friends'.

but the outfits are all pretty hideous...

Albums of 2005

2006-01-25T07:13:00.000-05:00

(Frontrunner for Album of 2006)

I figure if the Voice still hasn't published Pazz & Jop, it's not too late for my list.

1. Spoon – Gimme Fiction
My favorite band; their best album yet. They sound exactly how I want a band to sound.
2. M.I.A. – Arular
Over-hyped? Yes. Still tremendously exciting and synapse-tickling? Yes.
3. Antony and the Johnsons – I am a Bird Now
Because of the songs and the voice, my god, the voice.
4. Fiona Apple – Extraordinary Machine
Stupid music-industry non-story of the year distracts from talented artist who knows what she wants—and what she wants is great!
5. Okkervil River – Black Sheep Boy
Ohohoho I love this album. Latest addition to the list. “For Real” would be song of the year, if not for “Since U Been Gone”.
6. Kanye West – Late Registration
Amazing what professionalism and quality control can do for the hip-hop album. And “Gold Digger” makes me laugh more than cringe.
7. The Fiery Furnaces – EP
This band's b-sides > most bands’ best songs.
8. The New Pornographers – Twin Cinema
Don’t let previous-albums-induced high standards take away from another killer power-pop record.
9. LCD Soundsystem – S/T
Remember this? At its best, it’s still really fucking good.
10. Franz Ferdinand – You Could Have It So Much Better
Haters never prosper; don’t you want to have a good time?

What's with the posting from the future, diddy?

2006-01-21T17:55:00.000-05:00

the rlr "hearts" posts about "animals"

2006-01-20T17:55:00.000-05:00

just makin' "friends":

The saddest music in the world.

2006-01-13T19:58:00.000-05:00

From yesterday's Guardian:

So far 15 confirmed cases of the lethal H5N1 strain of the disease have been detected in Turkey - most in the east of the country, where the virus appeared two weeks ago. The majority of victims have been children, who appear to have got the disease after playing with sick chickens.

"I came home from school and my chicken was ill. It had gone blind. I felt sorry for it and gave it a hug," Summeye Mamuk, eight, said yesterday. Summeye is one of four children confirmed as having H5N1 on the paediatric ward of the university hospital in Van, the eastern town badly affected by the outbreak.

me again

2006-01-10T22:44:00.000-05:00

wabbits

i know i'm obsessed, but...

2005-12-22T15:24:00.000-05:00

here is a good article about you-know-what.

"bitter winter" sits interestingly with the recent email sent to nyu grad students by the grad school dean:

"December 20, 2005
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS & SCIENCE COMMUNITY
From Catharine R. Stimpson, Dean
Each culture celebrates the renewal of the seasons, the regeneration of the cycles of time, and the presence of the sacred in its own ways. At New York University, a multi-cultural community of inquiry in the midst of a multi-cultural metropolis, we are now in the middle of a rich, significant cluster of relevant holidays, celebrations, and rituals. To all of you, my very best wishes and hopes for your happiness."

such poetic, culturally-sensitive disingenuity!

...

2005-12-07T12:14:00.000-05:00

whoa

i'm losing my mind/please let me whine

2005-12-07T11:32:00.000-05:00

things fall apart.

**

this morning, i wake up early to go to the schomburg center on 135th to do research for a paper. it's like 10 degrees outside. so i buy a bagel on the way to the train but can't even eat it on the way over there bc my hands are so cold. then i get onto the train and realize that i can't even eat on the train, as per the worst new law ever. can't even finish my coffee on the fucking train. am already pissed off, hungry. get to schomburg, bagel in hand, go into the building. can't eat in there either. the lady at the front tells me that the library isn't open until noon - it is 10:30. i have fucked up and forgot that it only opens at 10 on saturday. i ask if i can wait in the main lobby. she says, "you can wait there, but you can't sit there". this even though there are chairs there. i think, "fucking bitch". i say, "okay, can i wait (sit) right here in the entrance?" she says "no". i tell her it's freezing outside, that there is no place for me to go to wait until noon since all those amenities like coffee shops are missing from this not-yet-gentrified neighborhood. she suggests i go sit in a soul-food buffet joint with the biggest, smelliest deli-style steam table you've ever seen, four blocks away. i am so pissed off i walk out of schomburg and get right back on the train downtown. now here i sit at home.

i have three papers due in about one week. each should be about 25 pages long. i have not started any of them - one of them i haven't even thought of a topic for. i need to put in about 20 hours at schomburg this week if i stand any chance of finishing my research paper before february, but instead here i sit in my bedroom slippers, surfing the internet. i mean, there is such a thing as procrastination, but there is also such a thing of actual denial, and i'm afraid my movement in the direction of the latter might mean i am on the verge of flunking out of school.

**

yesterday at approximately 6:25 pm: i find myself, as if in some sort of fucked-up dream, standing in the middle of the crowded first floor of the comp usa on 5th and 37th, screaming at the top of my lungs. everyone stops what they are doing - employees, customers, all - to stare at me. i am ready to murder laura at the tech desk, elroy who misdiagnosed my laptop over the weekend and almost cost me $500+ in doing so, ruby rayes who told me i could get all my money refunded and that i just had to stop by and show my credit card to do so. my african literature class is about to begin in an advertising agency in the manhattan mall in five minutes; i cannot be late once again. laura has sent me to the commercial sales desk because neither she nor anyone else at the store has any idea what is going on. i have just stood in front of said desk for ten minutes and everybody there and around it has pretended i am invisible. so, i scream. i am going to be late for class, nobody is paying attention to me, i hate comp usa and feel faint at the prospect of having to return one more time, i have already wasted 40 minutes here, i scream and everybody's eyes widen. the security guard moves towards me...

**

my adviser is apparently losing his short-term memory, judging by his new propensity for repeating entire conversations i have already had with him twice, and sending me emails that reproduce almost exactly notes that he has sent me just days before. this frightens me for many reasons, not least because he is supposed to be working with me closely over the next few months to develop a book list for the exams in may that will decide whether i will continue in grad school.

**

last night, after class: i rush down to the knitting factory to see the former unicorns, whose new band is called 'the islands'. the islands are four white kids and two east asian kids. the white kids and one asian kid are dressed like, well, normal hipsters. the other asian kid is dressed like a nerd to the extent that he looks like a clown - bad haircut, thick glasses (not hipster), pants hiked, shirt buttoned up to the top. he plays the violin and dances manically around the stage like a mentally handicapped person. he is the stereotypical east asian nerd who the whole class makes fun of in fifth grade. it has to be an act, but i ask "why?" the normal-looking asian kid has clearly been assigned to seem like a fool even if he doesn't look like one, he plays the recorder and the viola while everyone else is just a normal rock star with a guitar. after about the third song one of the white kids in the band says, "give it up for the chow brothers. they're not really brothers, but they have good spirit. we love them, anyway." the asian kids look embarrassed. i cringe. everyone cheers. some dumb-ass white girl with her midriff showing (again, it is like ten degrees outside) yells, from the audience, "you're fucking sexy" to the nerdy asian violinist. this goes on until we walk out of the show. i leave thinking that i am indeed leaving a fifth-grade classroom. the music wasn't even good. i think about how many people who listen to indie rock are at about the same maturity level of frat boys at a big 10 school.

**

nyu tells me that i am going to lose my income for the next semester, possibly the next year after that. i am on strike and this is how i am repayed for the 40-odd hours i have spent walking around in circles yelling and banging on a bucket in the frigid outdoors in front of the library. people in my department write me emails accusing my friends who are leading the union struggle of white privilege. said union leaders are working their assess off to get the other fuckers, who defend their "right" to scab, a contract. i attempt to bring these sides together to resolve some tensions and the whole thing blows up in everyone's faces - everyone is pissed off with each other. people stop speaking to each other.

**

the end. now excuse me, that was cathartic.

Snow Pea Shoots

2005-11-28T01:10:00.000-05:00

Although I only recently moved to Brooklyn and I don't even know how much longer I'll be in Nyc, it's become clearer that all I really want to do is live in Chinatown.

The most amazing roast pork: 1/2 pound for 3 dollars.
and...
Snow pea shoots: kind of like other dark greens (spinach, br. rabe), but less bitter, much more tender -- sold on every corner.

I'm sure there are what I can only imagine to be enormous rats at night, given the meat market, fish market, and restaurant garbage along the curb during the day. And it's hard to find listings for Chinatown apartments because they inevitably show up under neighborhood categories like the Lower East Side. But, when I feel like Red Peter from Kafka's "A Report to an Academy" (which is increasingly often), I really think this is the place for me.

It's odd suddenly feeling like you're thrown into a version of an east Asian capital city -- even if it is still distinctly New York --; (can you follow an emdash with a semi-colon?) you can't really walk at a decent pace there on the weekends for the tourists and the city's dim-sum-ers, but it's not the same as walking through crowded midtown on a weekday.

It's more like living where it's so real (I know 'real' is so inadequate, corny, and meaningless as in 'keep it real'; yet...): nobody has the time to give a shit about you and you don't give a shit about them, but inside, you kind of do give a shit about them and they give a shit about you because it's all so baldly, unaffectedly real.

Woohoo!

2005-11-23T09:21:00.000-05:00

About time, too.

kill all rats

2005-11-16T20:34:00.000-05:00

i'm on a blog roll.
no really, i just had to share the disturbing turn of events on the picket line that i was witness to this morning:
so we strikers are all in front of the nyu library, gathered around a few faculty members supportive of the union to hear them speak on our behalf. they aren't miked so everyone is trying to be silent so the sound carries. then, from washington square park just across the street the sound of another protest starts up, so i look over to see what it is. there, i observe people milling about a giant inflated rat, much like our own union rat that we are all gathered around (see below). i think, hmm, maybe sympathizers to our cause? then i see a line of about 10 people come out of the park towards us carrying signs and chanting. one of them is dressed as a giant furry rat. i furrow my brow, squint to see better. who are these people? the procession comes closer, and as they notice the silence on our picket line as we strain to hear our speakers, they get louder. finally, details emerge. i see that their signs say "we're new yorkers too". i hear them yell, over and over, "rats never hurt nobody, rats never hurt nobody!" they stop directly across from us and intensify their screaming. it is as if they are directing it at us. i feel faint. they are not our supporters. they are supporters of rats.
yes, the polite decorum of the session of faculty speeches on our picket line had been disrupted by defenders of the lives of the rats of washington square park. the battle cries of those against the extermination of workers' rights had been overpowered by the call to arms of those against the extermination of the most vile, filthy creatures breeding and spreading disease/fear/despair in this city. the scornful expression on their faces seemed to say, "a pox on your trivial struggle. how can you fight union-busting in the face of rodent injustice?"
good grief.
rats never hurt nobody?
on top of it all, i had a nightmare about rats in my apartment last nite. a bad one.
how does everything seem so insane sometimes?

(i want) "a stress-free life"

2005-11-15T14:57:00.000-05:00

i'm sorry if this post doesn't quite meet the rigorous intellectual standards of the rlr, but this is amazing.

2005-11-09T19:46:00.000-05:00

I have no mind.

2005-11-08T13:56:00.000-05:00

The Futureheads - Robot
The Futureheads - Stupid and Shallow

This is the first of an expected multipart series of posts on new music I've gotten. "New" here is used with a certain amount of license, as I got a lot of this stuff as early as this summer. Due to some unfortunate computer fuck-ups (now taken care of), the only way I could listen to music for a long time was on my ipod-with-a-broken-screen. That means the only way I can listen to my new music is by waiting for it to come up on the blind shuffle. So it's taken a while to figure out what's really good and what really isn't.

Anyway, I downloaded the Futureheads album when I was in D.C. this summer, with access to Bit Torrent. I only knew the 'Hounds of Love' cover previously (which is still fucking amazing), and at first the whole album didn't really turn me on. But after a while, I can honestly say that I love this record. Yes, this is yet another band that is described as 'angular', 'dancey', and 'post-punk'. At bottom, the best thing about the Futureheads' music is that it makes it sound like the most fun thing in the world would be to be a Futurehead. Everyone sings all the time. Every song has like eight hooks. They have a song about being a robot!

Also: Willy, Paul, and Nish (from NJ) do a podcast called Podflix. It's ostensibly a radio show where three netflix users talk about dvds on netflix. But it's pretty much just a bunch of guys talking about movies in between bullshitting for an hour. Check it out.

I'm the world's greatest detective...yet I can't find any evidence to save Lois from the death house!

2005-10-31T17:19:00.000-05:00

I keep on meaning to make real posts here, but I never quite go through with it.

In the meantime: Superman is a Dick.

boycott american apparel

2005-10-29T19:35:00.000-05:00

my search for a halloween costume has led me to some shocking discoveries:

see here and here and here

he is a sick man. it's just not funny anymore when someone blames women for domestic violence and thinks worker empowerment revolves around his penis. this whole trend of fake haha misogyny (vice magazine for example)... why?

I have a video Ipod . . . in my MIND

2005-10-20T17:18:00.000-05:00

Rowdy Roddy GameShowHost: Hello and welcome back to Number Stumpers! You know how the game works--we take phone numbers and the contestants have to come up with a word that the number can spell using the letters on the keypad. Now for the final part of today's game, the speed round.

Contestants, are you ready?

Contestants: (en masse) Yes.

RRGSH: OK. Here's our first number. 727-6886

buzzing noise

Contestant #1: Scrotum?

RRGSH: That is correct! We also would have accepted "papotto".

English Department.

2005-10-16T18:09:00.000-05:00

From Tom Phillips's review of Graham Rawle's Woman's World, in yesterday's Guardian:

For five years Rawle, Stakhanovite of the scissors and paste, has laboured 17 hours a day, seven days a week, assembling 40,000 fragments of text from women's magazines to produce a tale that moves with the pace of a thriller, with as many cliffhanging chapter endings and swerves of story. But there's the added excitement of a typographical rollercoaster: each page features nearly 100 variations as we lurch from sedate Times Roman to the fullblown exclamations of advertisers' fancy capitals.

A peek.

Me in honey.

2005-10-08T05:01:00.000-05:00

Check me out.

tee hee

2005-10-05T23:09:00.000-05:00

One Art: Looking Down

2005-10-02T21:47:00.000-05:00

Riders of the subway are well-practiced in making themselves invisible in that crowded space, experienced in averting eye contact through a glazed mid-distance gaze (if sitting, to the opposite wall of the subway, just above or in between others' faces). The art of losing isn't hard to master: the art of indifference isn't too hard either.

Most look downward quicker than an otherwise achieving student caught doing wrong and being told of their teacher's "disappointment" (and how much more that stings than anger), when performers or people asking for change come down the aisle. And most performers recognize and honor the physical shorthand of sudden limp neck in passengers: lowered heads, to the relief of their owners, can be passed by.

Except for the deep-voiced man, frequently seen on the 1/2/3 lines, who works for a homeless coalition and sells nonprofit sandwiches and chips:

"Even if you can't help out, we ask that you please don't look down at others less fortunate than you."

Please don't look down at others: how embarrassing for all of us, that in one phrasing our cover is blown and in such an obvious way. We look down because we look down; or to flip the equation, simply the act of looking down implicates us in a kind of looking down (upon others). Is it possible to stiffen our postures, pull our heads up to meet the solicitor's eyes? I know I probably could not, but rarely have I been so alerted to the cooperation between body and apathy, vision and elision.

Anyway, all of this was triggered by a few lines of a Geoffrey Hill poem mentioned in an essay I read:

"I have learned one thing: not to look down
So much upon the damned." (from "Ovid in the Third Reich")

Even if I'm tempted to keep turning to the subway floor for cool immunity when these people appear, maybe I've learned one thing: though they may look (Write it!) like disaster, don't look down.

yeah!

2005-09-21T12:21:00.000-05:00

so. clap your hands say yeah is my favorite new band.

listen, ici.

Which one are you?

2005-09-15T18:00:00.000-05:00

I've been reading for a paper I want to (eventually) write and came across an interesting , and I'm sure, well-trodden passage. It's not really relevant to the project I have in mind, but it proposes a way to categorize writers, which I found to be an interesting way to also consider different academic motivations/methodologies. Here's Orwell in "Why I Write":

I think there are four great motives for writing...

(1) Sheer Egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death... Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money. ...

(2) Esthetic Ambition. Perception of beauty in the external world... Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. ...

(3) Historical Impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(4) Political Purpose... Desire to push the world in a different direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

No need in pointing out that these categories more often coexist as alloys in individuals, less in their unadulterated, pure states. Despite Orwell's simplicity, these writerly motivations
transpose well onto scholarly methodologies, I think. I have found myself often having to temper my unbudging committment to (2) with a little (3), because historical utility seems to be the spirit of the times in literary study. Pop music seems different: most people don't have to feel embarrassed about wholeheartedly embracing (2).

Institutional Practice of Mystery!

2005-09-14T17:29:00.000-05:00

This is from one of the texts I've been given to read for my training to be a "writing and learning mentor" at my school this year. I'm curious what some fellow academaticians think about it. Let the theoretical discussion and wiseassery begin!

---
In related work, both Ivanic and Lillis examine the "language" of disciplines and suggest that the discourse of writing is often "hidden" yet taken as being "given". That is, it is assumed that any students entering higher education ought to understand what is meant by words such as "argue", "critical analysis", "be explicit" and more broadly what they are expected to do in, for example, an essay. In reality, it would seem that even students who are quite successful writers struggle to understand what sort of writing is being requested of them. Lillis refers to this as the "institutional practice of mystery" arguing that academics who have been "socialized" into essayist literacy are familiar with it but that students--particularly those from "non-traditional" backgrounds--are often very unsure about conventions and how to go about developing an academic voice. I would go further still and suggest that even "professional" writers who move between disciplines or who become students again can find writing conventions mysterious and difficult to embrace or own.
Lea and Street (2000) who did much of their work with tutors, arrived at a similar position from the perspective of academics. In their study, lecturers described the characteristics of good essay writing by relying on descriptive terms which are often still unclear to students:

"I need my students to have an introduction which sets the scene and a main body which covers a number of issues highlighted in the introduction and introduces economic theory, application and analysis. Students need to be critical, to evaluate, to try and reach some sort of synthesis and then to simply summarize and conclude. You need a good solid introduction leading into your main body, and each part of your main body will be crafted and it will link with the next. It will have a professional feel about it and will not describe but will critically analyse, and then it will lead into a summary and conclusion." (Lea and Street 2000)

When pressed, the lecturer was unable to elucidate further on terms such as "critically analyse" and "synthesis". Another lecturer struggled even to describe the features or process of strong academic writing: "I know a good essay when I see it but I cannot describe how to write it". (Lea and Street, 2000) This work suggests that even once we are alert to certain contexts, there still exists a metalanguage associated with writing which can be impenetrable, yet is often taken for granted and treated as if it were transparent.
---

Uh-oh.

2005-09-13T15:33:00.000-05:00

Do you think this messes up my chances of publication?

From Tuesday's Fond du Lac Reporter:
Local residents who attended Monday night’s informational meeting about sex offenders said knowledge is the best way for them to protect their children and community from offenders.

Jennifer Stadler said she attended the meeting to simply get more information on how to better protect her daughter, who attends Chegwin Elementary School.

Stadler lives on Marquette Street with her three daughters, only a block from convicted sex offender Philip Roth. Roth’s purchase of a home within a few blocks of two schools and a park spurred a number of community residents into action.

Neighborhood members collected the signatures of residents who wanted him removed from the neighborhood. The petition was on site to be signed and will be presented today to members of the Wisconsin state Senate.

What, me worry?

2005-09-08T18:37:00.000-05:00

He's so visibly annoyed.

"You said there was a yard sale, come by, so I come down here. Where's all the $1 tupperware? Where are the cheap lamps without lampshades?"

hurricanes/horses

2005-09-07T22:01:00.000-05:00

so i did the kitchen wall:
and i started to do the bathroom wall in the same theme. unfortunately, that happened when i was drunk and a little out of my mind last friday nite, so things didn't go ideally. but it's salvagable. and i've discovered that i can replicate the tiger of the original photo onto my own wall using a projector and then penciling the enlarged image directly onto the surface.

so other than being obsessed with painting my apartment, i have managed to see 'grizzly man'. there were aspects of the movie that could have been annoying, like the bear dude's blabbering, or herzog making what i guess where supposed to be profound metaphorical judgments, but the very beary footage itself was really neat. in a way it was sort of the opposite of 'march of the penguins' in which the morgan freeman narration about the penguin reproductive cycle is informative but sometimes gratingly borderline pedantic. this time we got elliptical insights into the bears and the bear man tim through little gestures by his surviving friends during awkward interviews in the herzog footage, and little visual ommissions in the bear man's own footage. no structuring narrative, but sometimes maybe to the point of fault. does the beauty lie in the picture itself (of the penguin diving, the bear running) - worth a thousand words ?- or in knowing the context of the picture (the momma pengies need to store fish to barf up for their babies, why are the bears galloping so?)??

anyway. it's really awesome how michael brown was so well-trained for his job. sometimes everything is just crazy.

grimy new york

2005-09-01T08:16:00.000-05:00

back on american shores, after braving chaos at jfk as everyone and their mother was returning from the dominican republic and clogging the immigration *queue*, i am missing brit-speak. and, am listening to this *brilliant* lady sovereign track and noticing how new york is more grimy and gritty than the london of grime's origin, at least in the nasty, ratty, sweaty, smelly, trashy summer.

other things. 'hollaback girl' is like the best song ever, *innit*? does someone care to explain to me the vice magazine empire, as in why do they own that pub in london, and why does everyone love it all? dave, did you know that the crazy-looking girl in the sweatshirt and braces sitting next to me at the weird dinner has "fuck off" tattooed on her neck in bold letters? i saw the image at the top of this post on a wall in paris and am trying to paint this on my kitchen wall- although the tigers were originally the main attraction, they seem a bit technically, uh, advanced, so am working on the background for now. my air-conditioning is broken. etc.

My stomach of love.

2005-08-30T07:18:00.000-05:00

Items I have consumed this past bank holiday weekend while suffering through a stomach virus:

Food:

Toast
Toast with butter and honey
Toast with yellow cheese (has anyone heard of this 'yellow cheese is good for your stomach' maxim? Me neither.)
Ryvita crackers with yellow cheese
Grilled (yellow) cheese (BIG mistake)
Strained chicken soup
Strained chicken soup, with toast dipped in
Boiled white rice
Earl Grey tea
One 240 ml bottle of Pepto-Bismol
Sixteen 500 mg tablets of Paracetemol (for fever)

Entertainment:

Three episodes of Ken Burns's Baseball documentary
About half of Carlito's Way
The Great Escape
You've Got Mail
The Parent Trap
Bringing Up Baby
The second half of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?
Fever-dreams!

Introducing...

2005-08-24T20:14:00.000-05:00

Lidia Stone. Everywhere you turn there is a drum and something noise duo. But when a keyboard overloads an amp, you begin to hear the throbbing sine wave over the drone, that static in your ears marking each deafening ebb and flow. Only then, with that thick curtain of noise first, does the double double double beat of the thundering drum have something to break up, to chop up like Martin Yan.

Got Myself A Jobby Job

2005-08-23T18:02:00.000-05:00

Business casual, I can do that; not happily, but I know crotchety shirts like this will come in handy. Better this uncontested acceptance of old man clothes is traced to aging and not an embarrassing instance of Stockholm Syndrome, anyway. Maybe an earlier, more limber self would've resisted a regime (probably not); from the Employee Handbook, a three-ring binder full of legalese, larger and longer than you would imagine:

"Employees at ____ are required to dress in a professional manner every day. The following list includes but is not limited to examples of what is not acceptable at ____:

- undershirts
- torn jeans
- shorts
- thongs or flip-flops
- sweatpants."

How strange that torn jeans maintain some subversive edge; especially since I've seen the usual suspects -- IT -- in unsavory jeans, only not ripped. Thongs and flip-flops are partners in crime on this list, I am guessing, not because they both occupy a similar level of imagined inappropriateness but because thongs referred to flip flops with the Y-shaped strap before they ever conjured whale-tails visible above waistlines. There is apparently something very inefficient about flesh pressed up against a tight piece of fabric, it seems; something quite wrong with the effect tight butcher's twine has on a lumpy roast, when it's on people.

Ridiculous or not, and hampering productivity or almost prompting copyroom sex, dress code standards don't approach the sheer oddness of the rules in place for how one navigates the office. My floor is a large square and within, a smaller square made of a network of cubicles.

Not seen in the cubicles here, but there are paths, at my office, through this carved up mess of those gray cloth "acoustical panels." It isn't a solid, unpenetrable mass of cubicles where I work; there are roads, I mean to say, one can take to get to the other side of the office -- where the fast printer, the fax, and the copier are. Nevertheless, the Employee Handbook and two coworkers have reminded me that,

"In order to reduce traffic through individual work areas, please use only the main corridors to cross the floor."

These main corridors or walkways outline the perimeter of the floor, along the outer square. This means, then, that to get directly across the room, one must follow a route circumscribing the whole office. Absurd, and not just a little: it takes 50-60 steps to the copier along the outer path; 20-30 or so directly across, past others' work areas (I tested early one morning before anybody got there). The inner veins are only to be used, however, to get to your immediate coworker to discuss sports, the weather, rent, or minor medical conditions.

To make this sojourn worth the effort, everybody prints or copies 20 documents at once, which means once you've made the journey to the other side of the room, you stand there, along the main corridor, waiting for a machine to free up; considering, while you're standing by this main thoroughfare, how sad you are that you won't see anyone in a thong and ripped sweatpants and a yellowing undershirt and a skullcap and mismatched socks; until you meet your parents for dinner after work.

Scenes from a Troubled Marriage

2005-08-16T17:27:00.000-05:00

I work hard all day. Let me enjoy my gin and tonic in peace.

You call this soup? I can't eat this shit.

I'm going to the Olive Garden.

[Four drinks later, at home.] ...

I'm sorry baby, you know I love you.

Break, Blow, Burn

2005-08-15T17:55:00.002-05:00

I flicked through most of Camille Paglia's now almost six-months old Break, Blow, Burn : Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems at the bookstore. It's a strange genre, this crossover lit crit for non-academic audiences. Reminiscent of Harold Bloom's recent output, such canonical-works-explained are, I have little doubt, the brew of well-intentioned hops. I wouldn't know how to effectively interest people in poetry -- to convince others to buy these books (and to then read further into poetry) instead of Freakonomics -- and I'm glad that prominent academics have always been giving it a try.

But Paglia's book certainly isn't what the cover would have you expect. (And the cover, I think, always has something to say: check out the author with the giant name managing to overshadow his sizable topic here). From her prominent and prominently placed name, the book's selling point it would seem, I expected vividly personal criticism, the author's idiosyncratic yet recognizably authoritative reading style coloring her essays on poetry starting with Shakespeare and continuing through modern works like Paul Blackburn's always fun "The Once-Over" and ahem, the 'poetry' of Joni Mitchell. Then again, perhaps the misleading cover is simply the bastard of poor design, and read in order, we have the unintentional S&M imperatives, "Break Camille / Blow Paglia" and contrary to the main purpose of this appreciationist book, something like "Burn.. forty-three of the world's best poems."

Because the main purpose of Paglia's forty three readings is now fairly orthodox close readings, reliable and concise line-by-line performances of explication de texte, appropriate for introductory undergraduate lectures, I think -- nothing to do with her previous work, really. As she has said in an NPR interview for the book (and consistent with the book's Introduction which warns us that her old-school methodology will clear the table of theory and recent critical approaches),

Poetry to me is close to incantation, and I think that the way literature has been taught in this era of post-structuralism and post-modernism is exactly the opposite of that. There's a kind of mechanized cynicism stripping away everything which is most lovely and suggestive about the fine arts. ...our universities, from the '70s on, became citadels of deconstruction, as if to say that the very works that have been put in their custodianship--OK?--entrust them, were to be vandalized. So we have a nation of vandals in the humanities departments. And not only that, our NEA--OK?--for many years became a kind of victim of unfortunate, you know, political quarrels.

Nevertheless, even the best of us stray from our original goals -- today I left my apartment to buy mayonnaise but I forgot about it and came home with lots of other groceries; while Paglia voices her intent to disavow recent critical trends, her readings are informed by them. They are written in a candid, accessibly pedagogical style but they are decidedly reliant on those methodological protocols she assures us she will ignore as she returns to the visceral engagement with poetry of her adolescence. Her reading of Ozymandias (really one of the best forty-three poems in the world? Or even Shelley's best?) for instance, branches out into the Romantic period's Grand Tour/travel narrative mode -- but the best work on such contextual matters are relatively recent products (I think of Nigel Leask's two works, here and also here); surely not the work of deconstruction or some imagined coterie of French theorists, but certainly the work of recent historical criticism, which she also tells us she will bypass in revisiting the power of poetry. So, not surprisingly, no footnotes/endnotes here, and their utility in such a book is uncertain: but less ambiguous is that Paglia's readings have absorbed and benefited from the most well-known readings of canonical poems from diverse methodological inclinations, and no credit is given lest the book's public posture of universality and common sense criticism is challenged.

(And this raises further questions about how much of a real discontinuity exists between attending to a poem's formal features in a manner associated with New Criticism and then theory and political reading; if anything Paglia begins to show us how amenable close reading
is to contextual influences, and how futile it is these days to insist that one's critical positioning is either completely immersed in a formal system or positioned outside in history or theory. Most of the time, I would say, picking apart the formal craftsmanship of Ozymandias requires some mention of historical context because it can't not be mentioned in this case, and a good materialist reading of the sonnet usually needs to turn to the nuts and bolts of poetic language -- not just correspondence and other kinds of documents -- to make a convincing argument about a poem.)

Thus, Paglia's book actually doesn't do much more than make a big stew of various critical approaches (though it is disguised as a simple, obvious recipe for chicken soup for the soul); nor, in my mind, is it all that different from a well-edited Norton edition of a poet or a poem (with the editions' occasionally inadequate but often generous accounts of varying interpretative frameworks, give or take the editor's specific commitment). True, with Paglia's work you can find her survey-like readings all in one tidy book; but I bet a determined Googler can gain an understanding of the notes all introductions to a famous poem should hit, including those rather recent developments in scholarship.

So this got me thinking about how one goes about making the interpretation of poetry accessible; it's allusions and place in tradition, but also it's place in theory and contemporary criticism. Norton Editions of a specific long poem are especially useful to see what different methodologies can do -- and can't do -- with a poem or sections of it; less helpful are those Norton editions of a poet, because not forced to attend to one poem, they include contributions of differing readings for different poems. One particular format I enjoy -- because both monologism and dialogism are tossed out the window in favor of a little bit of chaos, some emotion, and always multilayered, multi-sourced debate -- is the roundtable. I'm sure the logistics of getting geographically disparate commentators into a single room are complicated, but there are mediums available: instant messanger, perhaps primarily considered as Solitaire's main competitor for the temp's attention, is one. How useful and interesting the roundtable can prove to be can be seen here.

Film review, part one.

2005-08-09T10:19:00.000-05:00

Broken Flowers: see it.

Homesick

2005-08-08T19:30:00.000-05:00

Though the RLR editorial board generally looks askance at music criticism and the genre's full futility, here we clear up a lyrical controversy. Cliche or thoughtless counterintuitive logic seems to intrude on an otherwise pretty Kings of Convenience song, "Homesick":

Homesick,
'cuz I no longer know
where home is.

At first blush, there is something off about the song's sense of causality. It hardly needs pointing out that one's homesickness is contingent on a strong notion of home, knowing where home is: one needs a home first, toward which longing can be directed; to be sick for. Homesickness, as we might imagine it, thus matches particularly well with the French verb manquer and the syntactical reorganization the verb requires, for both emphasize the central source from which homesickness originates and pulls. The object or site of remembrance takes priority over the subject: Tu me manques.

The state of homesickness is often suggestive of spatial remove, in constrast with a related kind of anxious remembering, the act of nostalgia which implies a temporal distance. In addition to their common reliance on the enduring nature of memory, however, nostalgia was originally synonymous with homesickness: "acute longing for familiar surroundings, especially regarded as a medical condition; homesickness." Such a definition allows, then, we can assume, that homesickness, like nostalgia, most likely involves some degree of idealization. One remembers familiarity, perhaps at the expense of home as it really is: when away at summer camp for the first time, one hardly remembers Dad's austerity or Mom's temper; rather, one extrapolates from frozen, quotidian happy moments -- what Virginia Woolf called moments of non-being-- a more or less complete picture of home. Homesickness and nostalgia also leave open the possibility that one's pang for a sense of familiarity need not be for home at all, but simply familiarity itself, imagined (deja vu) or real. One can be nowhere near home as long as the surroundings effect intimacy. And in fact, one can feel familiarity not only from the truly familiar, but by the comfort provided by one's mistaken sense of forgotten familiarity: thinking that someplace was once familiar and now forgotten when in fact it is -- and has always been -- entirely foreign:

"I would define nostalgia as an affection or desire, not for what one remembers, but for what one feels one has forgotten. ...Nostalgia in this sense is... well-known in a number of contexts. In a relatively bald form, for instance, it is often used by advertisers. (The television campaign that urged viewers to 'Come back to Jamaica' was clearly not aimed at native Jamaicans, nor even at those who had ever visited.) In a more complex form the implication of forgotten knowledge is typical not only of Virgil but of what we call "the classics" in general." Erik Gray, Nostalgia, the Classics, and the Intimations Ode: Wordsworth's Forgotten Education (Philological Quarterly: Spring 2001.Vol. 80.2)

A false forgotten familiarity -- that is to say, complete unfamiliarity -- merges into familiarity in homesickness and nostalgia; we might be reminded of Freud's discussion of the uncanny. Unheimlich, in literal translation denotes the opposite of heimlich; unheimlich is "unhomely," frightening, and novel, heimlich "homely." Yet as Freud comments, the uncanny absorbs both contradictory definitions: the uncanny is "the notion of the hidden and the dangerous" (unheimlich) but precisely so only because it is also familiar.

"German usage allows the familiar (das Heimliche, the' homely') to switch to its opposite, the uncanny (das Unheimliche, the 'unhomely') for this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed." The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock.

Homesickness, like nostalgia, then, might actually require not knowing where home is. Familiarity and unfamiliarity -- and home or some specter of it -- are closely related. Homesickness does not need to focus its desire on home so much as something, perhaps home, is felt to be missed: either because it has simply become strange and unfamiliar or because it seems forgotten, even if it was never experienced or remembered in the first place.

easily amused

2005-08-08T13:20:00.000-05:00

puzzlingly hypnotizing: the infinite cat project

also, is frank used as a verb, as in "franked letters only" on the side of a mailbox, on american shores?

Me and John Outside the Library: A play in two acts

2005-08-05T17:21:00.000-05:00

Act One
Midday outside the Library of Congress. It’s hotter than a goat’s ass in a pepper patch. Our Hero, a tall, skinny, bespectacled researcher, is having his post-lunch cigarette when John, a black man in his sixties with salt and pepper hair and beard, approaches him.

John: Excuse me suh, would you mind giving me one of your cigarettes?
Our Hero: I think I could do that.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of Parliament Lights. Pulls one out and hands it to the gentleman. John takes it, and stares at it intently.
John: Oh man, oh man, Ah was scared tah death you wouldn’t have a cigarette Ah like.
He tears off the extended filter.
John: Ah was gonna be a Georgia mule if you handed me a menthol. Man, oh man. Thank you very much.
Our Hero: Don’t worry about it.
Our Hero drops his cigarette to the ground and steps on it.
Our Hero: Well, I’m gonna head back in.
John: Take care now; thanks again.

Act Two
It is one week later. Our Hero is again standing outside the Library, smoking a cigarette, as has become his custom every day after lunch. Does he do this in the hope of meeting John again? Perhaps. Today is much like every day this summer, hotter than a butcher’s armpit. Our hero has just found some shade to stand in when he sees John walking toward him.

John (not recognizing him): Excuse me, suh, would you mind giving me one of your cigarettes?
Our Hero: Not at all, sir, not at all.
He reaches into has pocket and pulls out a pack of Parliament Lights. Pulls one out and hands it to the gentleman.
John: Man, oh man, it seems the deeper you go, the more complicated it gets. The deeper you go, the more complicated it gets.
Shaking his head at the wonder of it all.
Our Hero: Yeah, I think I know what you mean. I’m in the same place.
John: What you workin’ on in there?
Our Hero: I’m researching Philip Roth. He’s a novelist, and the Library has all of his papers.
John: A novelist, huh. What kind of novelist is he? Like, suspense?
Our Hero: No, he’s, uh, sort of a comic novelist.
John: A comic novelist, huh. Man, oh man, that must be tough.
Our Hero: Yeah, it is tough, but you know, it can be very interesting too.
John: (in a questioning tone, eyebrows raised): Ah do buhlieve it’s interesting!?
A pregnant pause.
Our Hero: It can be fun sometimes, actually.
John: Man, oh man, Ah’d give … Ah’d give the tip of mah left pinkie to be able to work on something like that!
Our hero drops his cigarette to the ground and steps on it.
Our Hero: Well, I think I’m gonna head back in.
John: Nice talking to you…what you say your name was?
Our Hero: Dave
John: The name’s John, pleased to meet you.
Our Hero: Nice talking to you, John.

With that, Our Hero walks back to the comfort and isolation of the heavily air-conditioned library. At the last moment before he exits the stage, his face registers something like an epiphany. He’s just remembered he has leftovers in the fridge, and won’t have to spend any money for dinner tonight. It began to rain.

The seed that with the sun's love becomes the rose.

2005-08-04T20:21:00.000-05:00

Once you find a good barber, you stick with him. What you can't hear is this: what, you don't like my tie? It looks like mouse droppings? Listen son, remember when you looked in the microscope in high school biology and saw those paramecia that you thought only lived in Tijuana tapwater? Well, I can wear that on a tie and nobody gives me shit. Nobody. You get from porn to college president with attention to detail and a killer coif.

funcionando?

2005-08-02T19:24:00.000-05:00

these are some gorillas. the photo post works

Test

2005-08-02T13:33:00.000-05:00

icular.

word

2005-08-02T12:40:00.000-05:00

pretty dope so far