|
|
||
|
the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
|
I think the jellybath is kind of creepy. Love letters in which the writer fantasizes about being murdered by the one he/she loves have kind of fallen out of fashion, darn it. That's the best kind. Terrible help desk tickets. Although I am heartily sick (yea, verily) of Queen's "Under Pressure" being used in commercials and movie trailers (wait---that's redundant, they are one and the same), the trailer for Adaptation sucked me in. I liked Being John Malkovich so I will probably be going to see this when it comes out. Plus I've read The Orchid Thief, so I feel all kinds of interested already. Why do trailers for movies universally suck? Y'all already know about my outlying minority opinion that movies themselves [just about] universally suck, but the trailer for even a good movie will make the movie seem like a piece of shit. They (the trailers) are too long, and they give too much away, and they are always cheesily put together according to the same formula. Similarly with back-of-the-box copy for video releases: never read it! It's so poorly written that I can be dead certain I want to see a particular film, but the box copy will invariably use words like "madcap," or "romp," or "hilarious," or "breathtaking" or any one of a number of other movie-critic clich�s, and I will change my mind about the whole seeing-a-movie enterprise. A list of bands that have the word "head" in their name. Yes, it's groan-inducing, but as both a Bartok fan and a Talking Heads fan, I liked the name Bartokking Heads. So many head bands! What would William James say? ("In the first place, the acts of attending, assenting, negating, making an effort, are felt as movements of something in the head...." Come on sing it with me! Follow the bouncing ball! God knows I've linked it nearly to death by now!) And, if he is correct and the self resides in the head, and then there are all these head bands, what does that do to my long-ago (two years, to the week!) caffeine-induced theory about Id bands and Ego bands? AEEEGGGHHAAAGH it's all coming together, a giant jigsaw puzzle synthesis of my Incredibly Wordy Life, I can't stop it, somebody throw a blanket over me and procure warm fluids for me to sip. Another good name for a band (especially a heavy metal band) would be Gr�t��t��s �ml��t. I feel as if I have had a whole lot of coffee and then followed it up with a beer or two---profoundly silly and flighty and lacking sufficient gravitas to attend to my daily tasks. Maybe this is me, well-rested. I have felt myself returning to my old sleep-troubles lately so last night I swallowed some kava kava with dinner. Kava kava doesn't usually affect me so profoundly but last night was an exception. I gave up the sleepy struggle soon enough and went to go "read" in bed (yeah, with my glasses on the nightstand and my book on the floor). So addled, in fact, that I didn't perform my usual before-bed checking routine and this morning I found out that the back door had been unlocked all night. We could have been stolen! My goofy state continued when I left the house. Someone in the building next door had thrown an unwinding cassette tape up on our garage roof, and there was a web of cassette tape stretched between the second-floor porches of next door and our garage, which is right where I have to walk to reach the alley and, secondarily, the bus stop, with the result being that I blundered into the mess of unspooled cassette tape like Harold Lloyd blundering into a sticky spiderweb, and I flailed about all slapstick and panicky for a while because I didn't even know what I had gotten myself tangled up in. DUH: I was looking at LT's box of Shredded Wheat this morning while I waited for my tea water to boil, and right under the "Ingredients" list for shredded wheat (which is: 100% wheat and some salt), there is the line "Contains wheat ingredients." YES INDEED THE WHOLE IS COMPOSED OF ITS PARTS. (I am large, I contain multitudes) (Shredded Wheat! The Walt Whitman cereal!) THE HUNDRED MILLIONTH THING THAT IS NEAT ABOUT THE HYPERTEXTUAL NATURE OF THIS HERE DIARY DOOHICKEY If you were reading this in a book, in print, you would treat my text as the main, central, important text. It would be all about the book you were holding in your hands. I might provide footnotes, to say something like "Hey, when I thought about shredded wheat containing wheat ingredients I thought about Walt Whitman and here's a footnote about Walt Whitman." But subconsciously (or even, I guess, consciously), we as readers place bibliographic material in a subordinate position. Even though every text, even print texts, are in one sense part of a larger conversation (bits of which leak out in things like footnotes and bibliographies), it's not explicit, and print texts invariably insist on the individuality of their authors. (Fiction is even worse in this respect, because it is entirely up to the reader to divine influences in a fiction author's writing...if you don't have the context, if you don't notice while you are reading that a passage or a style is influenced by another writer, you will probably never know.) But here! In the digital place! References and influences and discourses are all woven together in a network, and placed on a somewhat* equal footing, so you can read my words or go jump to Walt Whitman's and never come back, it's all the same out here. *I say "somewhat" because although I think that the priests of the High Church Of Hypertext would like to say that we read anarchically, and I know how they all tend to come in their pants when they get to use words like "decentralization" and "multilinearity" and so forth, I doubt that this sort of reading happens as much as they say. Hypertext or no hypertext, when I sit down to read a weblog I read that weblog, and I visit the links, and then I come back and keep on reading, without fail. The original weblog is the primary text to me. Of course that's why god or Microsoft made multiple browser windows possible, but that's a whole other reading-related issue. The end. Remember Derrida? (Neither do I, really, which is why I'm paraphrasing.) He (may have) said that writing affects memory, penetrates through memory, and hypnotizes memory. The cool thing about being able to make all these linky-links etc is that I can hypnotize the present as well. I hypnotize myself, I capture my own thought processes more immediately, I make the connections explicit rather than rely on the reader to do it.* I get to write the present and write the past simultaneously instead of inch by inch. (*Not that I don't love you and need you.) ---mimi smartypants is only renting a stairway to heaven. back/forward |
