before shaving equipment renders all parody uneccessary.

Elfriede Jelinek having already had her moment in the sun, fashion journalists turn to JSF & Kunkel for their next generation of inappropriate comparisons:

Maybe a better explanation for his decision to base his collection on high school life, and to give it a dark cast, is that a number of young novelists, like Benjamin Kunkel and Jonathan Safran Foer, have created an agitated, post-Holden Caulfield generation of characters.

Here, by the way, are the photos of fashion designer Marc Jacob’s “agitated, post-Holden Caulfield generation of characters.”

Note the “gold lamé evening pajamas with an organza hem.”

In bad news for proponents of the “inner life,” a study in the current The Journal of Neuroscience suggests that “the normal brain activity of daydreaming fuels the sequence of events leading to Alzheimer’s”:

Researchers at Washington University and the University of Pittsburgh used five imaging techniques to map the brains of 764 people. The subjects fell into three groups - people in their 20s, and older people with either early-stage dementia, or Alzheimer’s disease.

When they compared images, they found that parts of the brain involved in musing, daydreaming or recalling pleasant memories in young people were where evidence of Alzheimer’s disease appears.

According to evolutionary psychologists, people tend to seek out mates with features similar to their own. Likewise, cartoonists often seem compelled — without any explicit self-awareness — towards drawing characters who resemble themselves, as if their own face and body were humankind’s de facto template. The range of human features becomes a series of small deviations from the same starting point, which, when averaged, regress to self-portraiture.

Then again, this is only a theory, as suspicious as any theory emerging from the academic cess pool of evolutionary psychology. All the same, I recently found a rare picture of reclusive Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson on a photo gallery of famous cartoonists, and, well, look-what-we-have-here: Watterson’s an exact composite of Calvin’s Uncle Max and Calvin’s dad, down to the folds of their clothing’s fabric and the angles of their elbows:

[Have other examples of artists resembling their creations? Share them with me at cupofchicha at aol dot com.]

Related Reading: “And Then I Realized Why She Looked Familiar”

With “The Pinky,” my name for McDonalds’ latest TV ad campaign (see screen caps below), advertising’s fascination with the hipster lifestyle comes to its final vulgar climax. Co-opting youth culture’s propensity for sign language (e.g., the finger-figurations for signing peace, west-side, hang-ten, etc.), the campaign introduces viewers to a world where pretty twenty-somethings sashay down streets wagging pinkies at each other, inviting fellow in-the-know model-types to join them at McDonalds. “Now when I’ve got a craving for a fancy restaurant style chicken sandwich,” a female voice tells viewers, “I head to my favorite place for McDonalds’ all-new Premium Chicken sandwiches.”

Both campaign spots (introduced fifteen minutes apart in last week’s Veronica Mars broadcast) finish off with couples holding up their newly acquired chicken sandwiches — but, before the boy’s allowed to bite, the girl instructs her suitor in cutting-edge McDonalds-eating etiquette. McDonalds’ Premium Chicken sandwiches, much like a porcelain cup of tea, should give well-cultured hands erections-of-the-pinky, stiffening the littlest finger while curling in the others. The girl’s voice-over continues: “Juicy chicken breast, crispy or grilled, in my kind of flavors … It’s a five-star taste worthy of my two-finger salute.” And the boy, his fingers now correctly salutory, finally gets the go-ahead to eat.

The campaign, one presumes, is aiming to depict McDonalds’ newest offerings as simultaneously up-market (hence, the effete pinky) and affordable (hence, the street-credified — albeit imaginarily so — hand gesture). In that sense, the pinky functions like marketing’s beloved hipster: well-educated and artistically-inclined but also shaggy and of-the-people. Fortunately, the diminutive pinky can’t bear so much symbolic weight, and McDonalds’ idea of a slogan-ified finger only comes across as laughably — and proportionately— short-sighted.

Continue reading "And This Little Pinky Went to McDonalds"

Most Emotional Car Commercial Ever.

Continue reading "Tonight's Six Feet Under:"

I have no problems with D. Parvas’s disdain for “wasted youth” memoirs (Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Rolling Away: My Agony With Ecstasy), but I’ve a number of problems with Parvas’s plot-based prescription for the genre:

Yup. That’s all you gotta do for a book deal — pop some pills.

I could have sworn you had to actually do something impressive, like, say win a Nobel Prize (like physicist Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!) or at least have an extraordinary story to tell (like Jeannette Walls’ Glass Castle or Marjane Satrapi’s two-volume Persepolis)….

As one who reads for thoughts and language and rarely plot, I’d like to suggest that the boring and insignificant among us can sometimes write worthy memoirs, too. Edmund White’s Story of a Boy didn’t require Appalachia; Woolf’s diaries didn’t require Iran. More importantly: we deem A Bell Jar worthy reading despite its similarities in subject matter to Elizabeth Wurtzel’s much-loathed Prozac Nation.

By critiquing recent memoirs in terms of what their writers have or haven’t lived through, Parvas sets up the wrong axis for measuring autobiographies’ worth. If anything, Parvas’s preference for certain types (and amounts) of experience mirrors the same disinterest in the language and quality of a memoirist’s introspection that “wasted youth” memoirs 1) encourage and 2) are encouraged by.

Courtney Peldon has a penis on her nose.

(Updated: picture link now works.)

As reported in my right-hand column, 2004’s Rhodes Scholars have been announced … reminding me there’s nothing harder to relate to than success.

Wen Shi

Degree: Johns Hopkins University: B.S., Biology, 2004
Proposed Oxford Subject: D.Phil., Medicine
Career Aspirations: Physician-scientist



After emigrating from China to the U.S. in 1999, Wen Shi initially attended classes in English as a second language. By the time he graduated from high school in 2001, he had excelled in ten Advanced Placement exams, including AP English, and had won numerous awards in national and state math and science competitions. In his three years at Hopkins, Wen has finished his Bachelors degree with Phi Beta Kappa honors and has completed all core courses for Ph.D. candidates in Biology. Outside the classroom, Wen has taught other immigrants English, volunteered at Hopkins Hospital AIDS clinic and responded to medical emergencies on campus. Wen co-founded an organization through which Hopkins undergraduate and medical students teach sex education to incarcerated youth. As Vice President of Alpha Phi Omega Service Fraternity, he organized 3,800 student-hours of projects in 2002-2003. Wen received the President’s Student Service Award for his leadership in campus and community events. He facilitates diversity roundtables and serves on the Hopkins Diversity Leadership Council. Wen has also become a regular guest on Voice of America, telling his immigrant success story to a world audience. Since freshman year, Wen has conducted research at the Hopkins School of Medicine on the cardiac toxicity of cancer drugs, work that has earned him Howard Hughes and Woodrow Wilson Fellowships and a Goldwater Scholarship. He will pursue a career in academic medicine, “dedicating myself to the conquest of cancer.”

Continue reading "(I Do, However, Respond to My Own Medical Emergencies Occasionally.)"

Last night, I found myself at a bar, arguing with a writer I’d just been introduced to. Given our personalities, we were bound to find something to disagree on, but the topic that we disagreed on first was the work of Ben Marcus, a Brown MFA, currently teaching at Columbia, who’s known (or, in most circles, avoided) for his experimental, aka ‘difficult,’ fiction. The real worth of writing, the writer argued, needs to be judged on its ability to communicate, and Ben Marcus, simply, is opaque.

I asked him if he didn’t think Marcus’s work communicated a feeling of unease or disorientation.

Yes, he said, but what’s the worth in that?

(I was feeling aggressive — and aggression, being rare for me, gives me the impression of adventure. So, I pressed on:) If you admit that Marcus does communicate something, I’ve got to wonder if you care more about what’s being communicated than the success of communication — which is a different argument than the one that you were just making.

Maybe, yes, he’s communicating something, the writer said. But what I meant was that he doesn’t engage with the world. That’s what good fiction does.

The world? I laughed. What’s the world?

Talk about relativist, he said. Talk about abstract. The world is … what it isn’t is someone like DeLillo or David Foster Wallace or Ben Marcus going on about the difference between brown and white cardboard for ten pages.

Brown and white cardboard are still part of the world. Everything is part of the world, I said. And when I hear people use that word, I wonder if they’re claiming what they think matters most in the world is the world.

(The argument continued, and I went home later than I meant to.)

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I still don’t have bookshelves in my apartment. Right now, I’m sitting in my living room, looking at the twenty-three moving boxes that hold my books. In my world, there’s not much else besides cardboard.

Since I leave clothes on the floor, and rarely remember to wash dishes, and haven’t made a bed in years, my boyfriend’s made it clear he doesn’t want me unpacking 400-something books without a place to put them. But when he’s not looking, I slice the packing tape with a kitchen knife, hoping the box I’ve chosen randomly has the book I’m missing. Everyday, I think of a new book to miss. And, lately — since last week — I’ve been missing Derrida — the writer who, in college, more than any other writer, I counted as my own.

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The writer at the bar claimed I was being too abstract when I asked him what he meant when he said “the world.” But I think he’s got it backwards. Words and phrases like “communication” or “the world” are hopelessly abstract, and a question shouldn’t be called abstract for pointing that out and demanding definitions.

What Derrida’s texts encourage is a lack of complacency with abstractions, and the values hidden in them. Some may call poststructuralistm Anti-Humanist because it points out that words like “universal” and “human” are often political, cultural, and — to my mind — manipulative — undermining people’s right to disagreement by claiming a Truth that only the immoral or elitist among us could ever wish to reexamine.

Derrida’s texts may be difficult to follow — what can you say clearly when you’re interoggating the accepted clarity of abstract concepts? — but the questioning he inspires is also very simple. A playwright could turn him into a modern-day Socrates — disorienting his companions with simple questions that point out tautologies and find the fracture lines in arguments.

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I was never studious enough to become an academic. And, due to vanity or its opposite, I prefer critiquing my own thoughts to critiquing others’ (even if, in the long run, others’ thoughts might sharpen self-critique). So, I’m sure that I had classmates who read more Derrida than I did, and understood him better, too. But, like children pick favorite numbers and favorite colors — as if numbers and colors could inspire a natural alliegance — I picked Derrida as “my” contemporary thinker. The choice was only partly intellectual; it was largely autobiographical.

Continue reading "Presence vs. Derrida"

From BBC News:

Jacques Derrida, one of France’s most famous philosophers, has died at the age of 74.

Derrida, who suffered from cancer, died in a Paris hospital on Friday night.

… Derrida, who was born into a Jewish family in Algeria, published his ground-breaking work in the 1960s and went on to achieve enormous influence in academic circles, especially in America.

But in 1992, staff at Cambridge University in the UK protested against plans to award him an honorary degree, denouncing his writings as “absurd doctrines that deny the distinction between reality and fiction”.

Derrida also campaigned for the rights of immigrants in France, against apartheid in South Africa, and in support of dissidents in communist Czechoslovakia.

He was so influential that last year a film was made about his life - a biographical documentary.

At one point, wandering through Derrida’s library, one of the filmmakers asks him: “Have you read all the books in here?”

“No,” he replies impishly, “only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully”.

I’m surprised by how sad the news makes me. Too sad, actually, to write a proper post about it. I’ll try again later.

I couldn’t fall asleep last night.
Until 5 am, I was awake with nausea — sickened by a cigarette, I think (even though the air outside felt cold and cleansing when I smoked it).
I tried to stay in bed, which is what my boyfriend recommends when I complain about insomnia. But the air inside still smelled of the pasta I burned over the weekend (instead of watching the pot, I was writing a post — cut short by the smoke alarm — about how I hate being so irresponsible).

Continue reading "(While You Were Sleeping)"

… a very long poem. At least mine are, I hope. -Sherman Alexie
… a line drawing; every part is there to add to the whole and no unnecessary strokes are present. -Unattributed
… an iceberg: nine-tenths of its meaning is submerged. -Ernest Hemingway
… a stone thrown into a pond. -Ali Smith

… a wagon wheel: the spokes must be connected to the hub, or graceful movement is impossible. -Mary Gordon
… a knife—strongly made, well balanced, and with an absolute minimum of moving parts. -Michael Swanwick
… a sniper’s bullet. Fast and shocking. -Jeffery Deaver
… a slap in the face. It must immediately sting, make itself known at once, and it must leave a red mark for hours to come. -Martin Booth
… a commando operation. You have to get in quickly, set your charges, and get out, leaving the reader to be caught up in the blast. -Michael Chabon

… Quarter horse racing … Novels are like Thoroughbred racing. -Marian Bray
… a motorcycle - very exciting, very fast and dangerous, but I wouldn’t want to ride one across Europe. -Jonathan Carroll
… an airplane: it has many parts and flies only if it built with a careful eye on science and engineering. -James Wallace Harris
… a child’s kite, a small wonder, a brief, bright moment. - Sean O’Faolain

… a time-capsule. -Clive Barker
… a snapshot. -The Writers Bureau

… looking through a keyhole. A novel is a 360-degree panoramic window. -Matthew Klam
… lighting your way through a dark cave with a tiny birthday candle. -“Avi”
… being in a darkened room, [and] a novel is like being in a darkened field. -Dan Chaon
… a kiss in the dark from a stranger. -Stephen King
… a kick in the teeth in the dark from a stranger. -Cory Doctorow

… having an infatuation, while … a novel is like having a marriage. -Lan Samantha Chan
… engaging in a brief affair, [and] writing a novel is more like a marriage. -Sarah Edgson
… something you could do in a fit of passion … Writing a novel is more like a marriage. -Mary Morris
… a weekend guest, [and] a novel is like a divorced relative staying with you. -Lev Raphael

… screaming out loud. -Isabel Allende
… a dream; it follows its own rules. -Isabel Allende
… an arrow that has one shot … while a novel is like embroidering a tapestry. -Isabel Allende

… a tightly argued summation in a trial, whereas a novel is the whole case. -Michael Dorris
… a revelation, [and] a novel is an evolution. -Unattributed

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There is no technically convincing theory of the short story — it is technically a genre, not a form, but resists the definitions that usually cluster around both. There is the defining length (an unedifying fifty-page range), there is the short story’s lonely voice from a submerged population (Frank O’Connor’s famous hypothesis) and there are various “slices of life” ideas and notions of literary apprenticeship … All of these convey what happens sometimes — what happens a lot — but in lieu of a truly winning overriding theory, we should rely perhaps on simple descriptions, in which case the more the merrier. Let me throw some inot the pot. Many that I’ve heard — and used myself — are fashioned as metaphors comparing shorter and longer narratives, attempting to define the one through its relationship to the other. A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film. A short story is a weekend guest; a novel is a long-term boarder. A story is a brick; a novel is a brick wall. And my favorite, the assymetrical a short story is a flower; a novel is a job.

… Unlike novels or poems, but more akin to a play, the short story is also an end-oriented form, and in the best ones the endings shine a light back upon the story illuminating its meaning with both surprise and inevitability. If a story is not always, therapeutically, an axe for the frozen sea within us, then it is at least a pair of brutally sharpened ice skates.

— Lorrie Moore, Best American Short Stories 2004

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Patenting a simile for the short story may be every author’s birthright, but one would hope authors recognized the lack of originality behind, and resulting from, the impulse. Strangely, though, even the most original writers can lose their taste for novelty when writing about the craft of the short story. Even if their language remains lively, their metaphors wry, their voices charming and assertive, they end up offering facile, unadventurous, ideas. What is a short story? Something compact and pure, a poem by way of story, a universe in miniature, etc.

Continue reading "A Short Story is Like ..."

Planned, not yet abandoned:
-a response to William Boyd’s piece for the Guardian about the “renaissance” of the short story, compared to Lorrie Moore’s BASS 2004 introduction
-some thoughts about Toibin’s The Master, which I read over the weekend

Nearly abandoned:
-a discussion of reality TV and fake introspection
-a long response to The Reading Experience’s “merely literary” entry
-photos of tourism from my trip to Italy
-a critique of a certain computer program’s name
-a post about my blogging habits (where I store links, what I do with excess, how I organize my bookmarks, etc.), and a survey to learn more about others’ habits
-a post about the first Presidential debate
-a post about Wife Swap
-some thoughts about celebrity

Continue reading "Planned or abandoned posts:"

Spam, as a homonym, suggests metaphor. But the daily habit of removing spam from this site requires explicit metaphors — a way of talking about the still-new, but time-consuming, activity of spam removal. As to what metaphors best apply, I’m of two, or three, minds.

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Metaphor no. 1 should emphasize my semi-abondonment of, or vacation from, this site and the chores that pile up during an owner’s absence. Back when this was my home, not my get-away, I checked my comments ten to twenty times a day, and never let spam comments overflow like an abandoned house’s mailbox. So, perhaps in my first metaphor, I’m a daughter duly picking up her mother’s mail while the mother’s on an extended business trip; I come by once a week, and, spotting the overflowing mailbox, pessimistically conclude that absence creates, by way of cosmic instinct, a dumping ground. Has my mother, in her life, ever gotten this much mail?

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But I’m also resigned to my daily half-hour of spam-containment. I’m resigned because productivity rarely results from such easy monotomy.
Movable Type’s blacklist will never keep up with the infinite variations of underscores, dashes, and x’s around “poker,” “porn” and “pharmacy.” But I sweep away the new spam like I’d rake defoliation spread across a lawn; the internet’s as alive, and thoughtless, as nature. Metaphor no. 2, then, has me raking leaves, and the futility of the chore is what makes the chore feel honorable.

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Spam usually comes in groups: seventeen identical comments, then four comments, then twelve. Unfortunately, MT only shows the five most recent — so I blacklist one group, check again for the next group, blacklist it, and so on. It makes me a ferreter, and so, metaphor no. 3 concerns extraction: the obsessive, eager, and self-satisfied extraction of stray hairs with tweezers, or food bits with floss, or blackheads with paper mache-like strips. I tweeze the spam from cracks; I extract its black shapes; I compulsively groom my site like a primate in love. It would be dishonest to say I don’t enjoy this hunt for details, that it doesn’t mimic love or self-love.

Spam can be a nuisance or a challenge, but my attitude towards it is dependent on the metaphors I’ve chosen — how I map online activity to real-world movements, and, then, which match I find most exact or comforting.

Today, GalleyCat launches.

Dear Cup of Chicha,

Even when I’m not with you, I think about you. Everyday, I clip stories and articles I think you’d like — but then I judge how far behind I am in writing you by the number of clippings that I’ve saved. If I allowed myself to give them up — to not share every thought — I think I’d write to you more often … maybe even daily.

So, Cup: my absence is not a sign that I don’t love you, but a sign that I love you too much. I want everything for us, you know …

-your Nathalie

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Nathalie —

I got your letter. I don’t sympathize.

I don’t even follow.

I keep rereading it, trying to find something to hang onto, some word or phrasing that feels loving instead of aloof and self-involved.

It’s not a question of honesty. I don’t care if you wrote things you think are true. Something self-involved and selfish can still be true or honest. It’s a question of your not thinking what I’d need from your letter, and from you.

And, that line — “is not a sign … but a sign”: please, don’t insult me. An absence that’s loving is still absence.

Right now, I’m honestly glad for our time apart.

-C. of C.

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Nathalie —

I don’t want to write you. But I haven’t heard back from you and it’s been a week, and all I can do is get more and more angry, and occasionally wonder if you’re dead which makes me sad instead of mad, and I don’t know which I am right now — just, please, get in touch with me.

-Cup of C.

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Continue reading "Wherein the News is Broken Gently"

It’s too bad that, when it comes to writing fiction, I try to use words most people know. As Forthright’s Phronistery: Obscure Words and Vocabulary Resources proves, some of English’s most unusual words are not only helpful, but beautiful
…Maybe I should just become a poet.

Here, my favorite unusual words that begin with the letter “U”:

ucalegon:

neighbour whose house is on fire

ughten:

morning twilight

ullage:

quantity by which vessel is under full capacity

ullagone:

cry of lamentation; funeral lament

uloid:

like a scar

ulosis:

formation of a scar

ultracrepidate:

to criticize beyond sphere of one’s knowledge

umbel:

mass of flowers springing from a single center

umbiliciform:

shaped like a navel

unasinous:

being equally stupid

unbosom:

to pour out; to tell freely

underwit:

inferior wit; half-wit

ungual:

of or bearing a claw, hoof, or talon

unifilar:

having only one thread or wire

univocalic:

having only one vowel; written passage using only one vowel

unseel:

to unsew the eyes of

upspeak:

to begin to speak

uranophobia:

fear of heaven

usageaster:

self-appointed and conservative language usage expert

uvelloid:

resembling a small cluster of grapes

Lately, Gawker’s been developing a strange, rhetorical dependence on Naomi Cambell’s tantrums. Since August 10, the model’s scored eight posts (list of posts after the jump), and “SlapGate” has become the gossip blog’s perfunctory punch line.

Continue reading "punch lines: Gawker quaffs Campbell's Can of Whoop-Ass"

So, it looks like Lorrie Moore was the judge for this year’s (upcoming) Best American Short Stories. From The Capital Times, “Wisconsin’s Progressive Newspaper”:

Madison writer Lorrie Moore, an acknowledged modern master of the short story, contemplates its appeal in her introduction to “The Best American Short Stories” of 2004, due out next month. “A story’s very shortness ensures its largeness of accomplishment,” Moore writes, “its selfhood and purity. Having long lost its ability to pay an author’s rent (in that golden blip between Henry James and television, F. Scott Fitzgerald, for one, wrote stories to fund his novels), the short story has been freed of its commercial life to became serious art, by virtually its every practitioner. As a result, short or long, a story lies less. It sings and informs and blurts. It has nothing to lose.”

Lately, several aspiring writers have asked me my thoughts on MFA programs and whether they should enroll in one. I don’t know, I don’t know. At Iowa, I was a depressive, unproductive recluse — not a good representative for the average workshop experience. Also, I came to Iowa from Brown, where I wrote and studied experimental fiction (with people like Carole Maso and Robert Coover); even a two year program couldn’t mitigate the culture shock. (In a NY Times piece on Frank Conroy’s retirement, Conroy depicts Iowa as a place where writing is priviliged over theory. But that, too, is a theoretical position — and the one most popular among traditionalists.)

If Iowa was useful for me, it was useful as a series of checks on my writing instincts. It made writing even more slow and painful, because I suddenly was able to acknowledge the difference between myself and my readers (i.e., the associations I take for granted almost always have to be explained, or cut). But, I think I need to wait a couple more years — watching where my writing (and “career” - ha) goes — before I can make an informed assessment of my time at Iowa.

So, in lieu of a longer answer, I thought I’d pass along other peoples’ thoughts on an assortment of MFA programs — excerpted from a discussion currently taking place on Brown’s creative writing list serve.

Subject: Can you help me learn more about Writing Grad Programs here and abroad?
From: Anna Joy Springer
Date: 8/31/04

As an add-on to Daniel’s request about info on Brown, I’d like to ask all of you who went to other MA, MFA, and PhD programs to give a few insider scoops on your programs. I’m teaching a class (in a few weeks!) that will encourage students to research different programs, different avenues of publishing and agent-wooing, and all the sort of nuts and bolts stuff Senior creative writing majors are asking me during office hours. Since I only went to Brown and only researched a few schools before applying, I’d love to hear various takes on different programs - ie. what professors rocked your world, and vice-versa, what the internal politics of the department were like (if it’s possible to write about such things on a list like this), what sorts of financial aid the schools offered and to whom, what the community was like between writers and faculty, etc. Really, anything personal would be helpful to my students, who are totally mystified by what to do once undergrad workshops stop.
…Did your program help you professionally? Did it make you write more and more electrically? Did it help you find work in your field? Are you friends with any of the people you went to school with? Did it make you stop writing?
…Does anyone know anything about these PhD programs that are popping up here and there? Do PhD’s in creative writing have more weight on the job market, or are they more like extended residencies?
Are there any LIT PhD programs that encourage non-traditional (“creative”) writing in addition to academic writing, or support genre-crossing?
Oh, also - any good tips about residencies - ones that really support a particular type of writing or writer?

Continue reading "Thoughts on MFAs"

Including, “Dickheads,” “Anals of Congress,” “The New Pinochio Effect,” “Getting Behind Bush,” “Blue Balls,” “Rod Steward,” and some pun relating to “Hung Like a Donkey.”

RNC photo courtesy of Gawker

(I don’t like getting away from it all. I like my email, my feeds and bookmarks. I feel strung out without an IV drip of data. I go ADD-wol without screens.
But, that being said, there are advantages to time apart from my computers. Online offerings are usually introduced over time, like Chanukkah gifts’ slow dribble; but time away and Chanukkah becomes Christmas. Every website is a windfall.
Today, for instance: I calmed down my sense of information deprivation by watching the 30+ new movie trailers up at Apple. And, to calm down my need for useless productivity, I thought I’d take down thoughts on the latest trailers.)

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Taxi: The back of my high school yearbook was reserved for senior ads, the rich suburban teen’s equivalent to graffiti. Groups were aesthetically demarcated, their ads’ “look” determined by their social status. The most popular girls made collages of beach cleavage, group hugs, and baby photos; the popular boys, meanwhile, wore wife-beaters, crossed their fingers into “west side,” and kneeled in front of Beemers.
Taxi reminds me of those ads, partly because, in comparison to Taxi, they seem somewhat creative — and partly because Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah, posing for this photo, nail those ads’ gendered expressions. He’s struggling to keep his mouth open, because open mouths intimate the snarls and swearing he wants to pretend he’s capable of doing. On the other hand, she’s looking slightly to the camera’s right, pretending her fashion shoot’s a candid snapshot (“Oh, you caught me with my makeup on!”). The result is a photo that looks like a pantomime of amateurism, if only because the movie’s budget precludes the real thing.
As for the trailer: this is what it looks like to flunk Marketing 101. One question, multiple choice: make the trailer about Giselle in a tear-off suit, or Jimmy Fallon talking? Even a Women’s Studies major won’t dispute the correct answer.

First Daughter: I’m guessing Katie Holmes prepped for the role by watching West Wing repeats. The result: her eerie, age-inappropriate facsimile of Stockard Channing’s smile. As for Katie’s missing ribcage, I have no explanation.
But the real question is, does the remake of the trailer for Chasing Liberty improve on the original? Chasing Liberty starts with Mandy Moore primping for a date, just like a normal teenage girl, but then — oh, shit — the camera zooms out of her bedroom and she’s in the fuckin’ White House, man! First Daughter, on the other hand, starts with a V.O.. “Samantha McKenzie,” we’re instructed, “is America’s princess. She has fame, she has glamour, and she lives —” And only then does the camera zoom out of her bedroom to a framing of the White House. But, come on: by this point, she was either the first daughter or an Olsen Twin.
Since my computer is an elitist Mac, it refused to load the remainder of the trailer. But I can guess that there’s a secret service agent, the whining of “I just want to be normal!” and a romantically available male lead (in First Daughter, played — it looks unwillingly — by Buffy’s college ex). First Daughter, though, introduces one more trope: the black/latino roommate, who gets to go on Air Force One and live a life — this schoolyear, at least — of affirmative-action glamour.

Team America: World Police: Too bad the more accurate subtitle for this lampoon of American politics is wasted on the earnest Muppets-meets-Matrix fantasy flick, Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars.

Continue reading "trailer marks"

After the physical exertion of moving, my hands refuse to appeal the law of gravity. They can rest on keys like tired marionettes, and maybe play the board like boggle (sewer, serf, assert), but most posts today will have to be telepathic. (Post subjects might include: hating the bagpiper across the street from me; my boyfriend’s turtle and its vulgar voyeurism; how long before my unshowered hair solicits spare change on street corners.)

In Italy, I downgraded from Marlboro Mediums to Lights, since each drag of Italy’s Mediums was like sucking down a bowling ball of smoke.

Back in the States, though, I’m buying Mediums again. And, in NYC, Marlboro’s offering a 2-for-1 special on its Medium brand. The one catch: the 2-for-1 packs replace the classic red and white design with an apocalyptic horseman, bucking on a steed of death. I can usually avoid reading the Surgeon’s Warning, printed on a pack’s side; but I can’t avoid thoughts of blackened lungs and cancer when the pack’s front and back ghosts a violent horse over flames and brimstone.

A quick visual guide to Malrboro Medium’s cultural iconography:

Continue reading "Product Watch, Entry No. 1"

New Scientist, reporting today on recent synaesthesia research, suggests that the condition “may rely more on the plasticity of the brain than on any genetic predisposition,” introducing the possibility “that all of us are capable of having a synaesthetic experience.”

Reading the article (while still persuing the possibility of equating the desktop environment to mental [dis-]order), I was reminded of how unhappy I was when Mac OS X was introduced without 0S 9’s ability to color code folders. And I imagine synaesthetic Mac users were less happy still:

One man, JF, for instance, had always thought of days and months as having colours. Instruments in an orchestra and even his pay scale at work were also colour-coded in his mind.

Interestingly, each of these (mis-)associations has its own name; chromafacetia, for example, specificies the experience of associating persons or personalities with colors, while chromagraphemia describes the subjective coloring of graphemes (letters, numbers, punctuation).¹

Synesthesia, though, extends beyond the color-coding of sensations. “The word synesthesia,” Mixed Signals (a synesthesia website) reports, “is used to describe a number of different conditions, ranging from smelling sounds, in which two basic senses come into play, to something as abstract as perceiving sexes with graphemes.” The site’s list of synesthesia terms & types specifies only a portion of the possible combinations: geusopsia (sight —> syn taste), phonopsia (sight —> syn sound), phonobaria (weight/pressure —> syn sound), morphochronia (unit of time —> syn shape/movement/texture), and geusalgia (pain —> syn taste).

In a sense, the language of synesthesia expands the vocabulary available for literary analysis of metaphor. Though studies report that “no two synesthetes with the same form of synesthesia have a total — or even very partial — match-up of associations between stimuli and synesthetic responses” — a finding that implies synesthestic associations lack the descriptive quality of apt/artistic metaphor — “synesthetic metaphor” is a standard literary term for “language that transfers imagery from one sense to another.”² And its obvious parallals to the creative process — in particular, the “divergent thinking” psychologists claim creativity requires — have inspired a large range of artistic projects examining or recreating the physiological condition.

Continue reading "shades of thought: synesthestic inquiries"

Vacat(ion)ing
My relationship to travel is a lot like a manic-depressive’s relationship to life. Sometimes, alone on flights between Iowa and NYC or NYC and LA, I feel shock at my self’s ability to transcend geography, and the shock turns into self-important productivity. I fill my carry-on journals with story ideas and drawings and elaborate lists of life ambitions; and I feel a (fleeting) affinity with the terms used when discussing travel: direction, destination, “taking off,” flight.

But lately, when traveling, I think of Brian Fawcett’s short story “Soul Walker,” which explains the dreariness of airports and the discontent of travelers in terms of the soul’s velocity: while our bodies can travel at the speed at flight, our souls, unprepared by evolution for technology, follow by foot. And so, airports are the site of spiritual zombies, travelers whose souls haven’t yet caught up with them.

By that theory, my soul would have had to walk from Iowa to NYC in three days, and swim from NYC to Italy and back again within seventeen. By foot, it would probably now be approaching Ohio. And I imagine that, like a slow computer, it mindlessly carries out each command (assigned by impatient mouse-clicking) in order, passing me by in NYC on its way to Italy.

Home, Sweet Modem
“Soul Walker” argues that souls are inimical to technology, but if I felt my soul was left behind in Italy, it was, in part, because my laptop was left behind in New York City. The feelings that accompanied journal-writing before my first computer — privacy, relief, the heat of language, the calm of organized ideas — cohered and intensified once I had the ability to not only house my thoughts, but house my journals; a computer centralized my writing and a young feeling of selfhood.

Continue reading "homepages: travel journal, 8.22.04"

Sorry about the sporadic posting—I thought Nathalie was coming back to town earlier than she was, and I figured people would rather hear from the lady of the house. But I think I screwed up the dates. Anyway.

The latest entry on Impeccable Jones, my friend Pete’s blog, features some great links for Scrabble buffs like myself. For background: here in IC there’s not often a whole lot to do, so we spend a lot of time at bars. But I am a) not a big drinker, and b) have the attention span of a gnat, so I’ve developed some new habits and refreshed some old ones: namely, pool, poker, and Scrabble.

I’ve loved Scrabble ever since my dad and grandfather refused to let me play in their intensely competitive games. Poker, on the other hand, is a new thing for me. Fortuitously enough, the past year or so has brought two very fine books on both topics: Word Freak by Stephan Fatsis, and Positively Fifth Street by James McManus, and I lifted my semi-ban on non-fiction to read them within a week of each other.

The books are surprisingly similar. Both involve a reporter assigned to a story on a topic in which he has a certain but limited personal interest (although in McManus’s case, I suspect he downplayed his skills somewhat), with the reporter becoming obsessed with the world he’s entered and wanting to become a part of it. Fatsis joined a Scrabble league and spent a great deal of time trying to improve his national ranking; McManus used the money Harper’s paid him for the story to enter satellite tournaments to eventually land in the World Series of Poker.

Continue reading "some thoughts on obsessive hobbies [guest poster]"

I finally finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which probably only puts me about four years behind the rest of you. I read it compulsively all week, and I really enjoyed it, but I never fell head over heels for it. Other recent books I’ve read compulsively (In Cold Blood, The Quick & the Dead, The Wapshot Chronicle, to name a few) have not only enthralled me, they’ve filled me with a tingling creative desire, like a literary orgasm. When a book makes me actually crave the experience of sitting down to write, that’s when I know it’s Good. That never happened with Kav & Clay, and I say that as an enormous Mysteries of Pittsburgh fan. Reading Kav & Clay felt like watching a very good movie. Everything in the book fits together so neatly, in a way that makes films seem satisfying and literature seem contrived. Ergo, it came as little surprise yesterday when I discovered that the film adaptation (written by Chabon) is, in fact, in pre-production, starring Jude Law as Kavalier. Law is a fine actor, and easy on the eyes, but he sort of epitomizes the phrase Anglo-Saxon, and Kavalier is a dark, big-nosed Jewish guy from Prague.