(no subject)
1. Some thoughts about leaving New College, part one
The cool flames of autumn are passed. Now the
wiry fractals of winter make stained-glass designs
in black and white, clean as a void, and cold.
I long for the dirty lowlands of eternal summer:
the lovebugs plastered to every moving object,
the earth trying in vain to wash us away. Days
of riding bikes down flat roads slapped between
flat houses, picking fruit off of drooping trees,
the warm stench of fermentation under foot,
swatting at flies while reading our theory,
letting the sun bake away the unwanted parts,
the germs and awkward memories, the blemishes
and the possibilities of unchosen paths.
2.
Tonight I saw two movies back-to-back: Wicker Man, which was awesome (the old one, not the new one, which looks ridiculously bad) and Behind the Mask, which was mostly very funny in a pleasantly postmodern way, even if the end is predictable and drawn out. It starts with a journalism major following around a psycho killer, trying to get a story. The psycho gives them a killer interview (HA) and they just have to agree not to intervene. I wanted to send the DVD to Roy D'Andrade and anyone else who dares to claim that activist anthropology is a bad thing.
I also feel like mentioning that the combination of the two movies, with all their parallels and combined talk of archetypes and pagan imagery, really put me in mind of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, this book that was so important to me in high school. This woman, the would-be heroine, is raped, becomes a marked woman, and basically can never really be happy for the rest of her life: though in the end, she undergoes a kind of spiritual transformation and becomes a type of sacrifice too. Funny that this kind of archetype is still around, in the form of horror movie conventions. I wonder what that means about the female archetypes that our culture has around. This is something I want to find out more about.
On the way home I heard a crazy interview on the BBC with David Eagleman, neuroscientist, author of Sum, and consequent founder of Possibillianism. It was crazy to hear. The guy's whole stance is to not take a stance, to claim that the interesting part of the debate is all the stuff in the middle, between the opposed stances. This is a very popular thing to do in academia right now -- I know, I've been doing it -- and maybe even laughably so. I mean, is this to become the great defining movement of my academic generation? To extend relativism so far that it undermines our ability to make arguments at all? It just seems like a joke. At least anthropology beat everybody into that mess... maybe we'll beat them out of it, too. Or beat it out of them. Something like that.
The cool flames of autumn are passed. Now the
wiry fractals of winter make stained-glass designs
in black and white, clean as a void, and cold.
I long for the dirty lowlands of eternal summer:
the lovebugs plastered to every moving object,
the earth trying in vain to wash us away. Days
of riding bikes down flat roads slapped between
flat houses, picking fruit off of drooping trees,
the warm stench of fermentation under foot,
swatting at flies while reading our theory,
letting the sun bake away the unwanted parts,
the germs and awkward memories, the blemishes
and the possibilities of unchosen paths.
2.
Tonight I saw two movies back-to-back: Wicker Man, which was awesome (the old one, not the new one, which looks ridiculously bad) and Behind the Mask, which was mostly very funny in a pleasantly postmodern way, even if the end is predictable and drawn out. It starts with a journalism major following around a psycho killer, trying to get a story. The psycho gives them a killer interview (HA) and they just have to agree not to intervene. I wanted to send the DVD to Roy D'Andrade and anyone else who dares to claim that activist anthropology is a bad thing.
I also feel like mentioning that the combination of the two movies, with all their parallels and combined talk of archetypes and pagan imagery, really put me in mind of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, this book that was so important to me in high school. This woman, the would-be heroine, is raped, becomes a marked woman, and basically can never really be happy for the rest of her life: though in the end, she undergoes a kind of spiritual transformation and becomes a type of sacrifice too. Funny that this kind of archetype is still around, in the form of horror movie conventions. I wonder what that means about the female archetypes that our culture has around. This is something I want to find out more about.
On the way home I heard a crazy interview on the BBC with David Eagleman, neuroscientist, author of Sum, and consequent founder of Possibillianism. It was crazy to hear. The guy's whole stance is to not take a stance, to claim that the interesting part of the debate is all the stuff in the middle, between the opposed stances. This is a very popular thing to do in academia right now -- I know, I've been doing it -- and maybe even laughably so. I mean, is this to become the great defining movement of my academic generation? To extend relativism so far that it undermines our ability to make arguments at all? It just seems like a joke. At least anthropology beat everybody into that mess... maybe we'll beat them out of it, too. Or beat it out of them. Something like that.