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Brain in a Girl-Shaped Jar  Sometimes, I think that perhaps I may not be well suited to this whole "working for the Man" thing. Well, I couldn't take it any more. I ripped open one of my official transcripts to make sure Day Hall didn't fuck up and forget my transfer credits and/or refuse to admit I graduated. They didn't, remarkably. But now I need to order another transcript. And I had to, you know, look at my transcript. Man, I really stunk up that joint back in the day. Good thing the writing sample is the main criterion for admission to most programs. ### Speaking of stinking up the joint, and also of fulfilling one's dreams, I see that Lou Dobbs is leaving CNN to become a full-time bigoted asshole. Fuck. What a day. Someone (something?) has stolen my copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem so I can't explain to you what the Manson murders have to do with John Phillips and the evolution of the concept of consent in a society where no one understands that anyone else is real, where everyone is drifting through their own little dimensions that only sort of brush against each other, never really merging. I was going to pick up a new one. Copy of Didion, that is, not a dimension. ( Then my day got weirder ) # (A message from Brian: "Just a thought, folks. If you could, please consider including this link at the bottom of your blog entry, and ask folks to consider making a donation to the SJA: http://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/sja_ ""With the really intelligent people, it's almost a matter of inbreeding at this point," said John Phillips [of The Mamas and The Papas], whose would-be aristocratic airs defined the mood of the times." - Barney Hoskins, Waiting for the Sun: A Rock and Roll History of Los Angeles  , quoted in Forever Changes (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Andrew HultkransSo, um, yeah. About that. Actual insights on Phillips, Polanski, Manson, et hoc genus omni after I've reviewed my Didion. Since this has become an alternating book reviews and life drama blog of late, today you get.... life drama! It just seems inappropriate not to note that I spent a perfectly lovely fall Saturday in the emergency room, even though it turns out it was probably just a bleeding stomach ulcer. But I learned a lot of interesting things, like: 1. People who are detoxing from heroin and Xanax are easily agitated. 2. "Chest pains" gets you bumped to the front of the queue, ahead of "vomiting blood" (and rightfully so). 3. It's hard to sleep when the mattress keeps slipping off your little wheeled bed dealy. 4. A book of crossword puzzles helps. 5. Sometimes, people who don't have a book of crossword puzzles will get so bored that they will end up asking you for your number even though you were just talking to them about your devoted boyfriend who spent all the visiting hours sitting with you and trying to get the attention of a doctor so you could get discharged. Besides my crossword puzzles, I also read The Life of Pi which was maybe not such a good choice because I wasn't allowed any food and only IV fluids and then I was reading about a kid being wracked by hunger and thirst on a lifeboat, which you would think would give me a sense of perspective, but just the opposite. And I finished the 33 1/3 Forever Changes which was quite interesting and incidentally gave me some insights into Roman Polanski and John Phillips and also reminded me that I need to re-read "Slouching Towards Bethlehem". When I was in high school, I was very fond of a book entitled The Taking of Mariasburg  . I don't remember where I got it, and I never did track down any other books by the same author - which is how I missed out on The Grounding of Group 6 until I ran across people blogging about it.The Taking of Mariasburg was one of my favorites for many reasons - a self-confident teenage female lead and a lot of frank talk about sex being chief among them. But one thing that has followed me through the years was the discussion of common knowledge. The book revolves around the titular Mariasburg, a spot on the map wholly owned by the aforementioned female lead and set up by her as a town exclusively for teenagers. As the characters attempt to forge a community, they discover that each has assumptions about what "everyone knows" that do not, in fact, map well to what everyone actually does know. I was reminded of this when I went to study for the GRE and discovered that there weren't any words on the vocabulary study list that I didn't already know. Of course, I still can't remember how to get the area of a rhombus, so I didn't totally waste my money buying the review book. But this is always biting me in the ass, so I encourage everyone to remember that just because something seems obvious to you, that doesn't mean that it's obvious to every thinking person on earth. In which spirit: It's a bad idea to step between thirty-pound birds when they're fighting. Just so you know. Some books that suck suck from start to finish. Others start out ok, even quite good, and then commence to sucking partway through and burn up all the goodwill they had previously generated. Of the latter group, some of them become sucky gradually, almost imperceptibly; with others there is a thick bright line separating the part which is good from that which blows goats. And down the left-hand path of this taxonomical tree of sucktitude we find The River Why. The River Why is reasonably entertaining, intermittently witty, and no more than ordinarily problematic (for a book that farts around with philosophy) up until page 151 of the Bantam Trade PB edition. Then we encounter this line: "...it was no ordinary person up in that tree... No. It was a girl up in that tree." And from that point forward nothing at all goes right. Not just because I'm a dreadful hairy-legged feminist, either; leaving aside the gender issues (which are severe), the philosophy descends into religion, the characterization lurches towards caricature, the main character - while supposedly attaining transcendence - becomes so abominably self-centered that the Vietnam War is treated as an inconvenience that can be solved by getting a high draft number, and, for reasons utterly inexplicable to anyone who has spent time around nature (as both the main character and the author allegedly have) it is presented as a serious theory that non-human animals and even plants would like to be humans. This, even more than the idea that someone who is supposed to be your muse should just in the course of things take your name, strikes me as ridiculous (the author of course cheats by presenting this theory through the person of a dog; certain dogs probably do want to be humans if anyone does. Which is not saying much.) If there's one thing that non-human animals are damn good at, it's being non-human, and bravo for them I say. Of course, accepting this would mean accepting that the climax, in which the narrator seriously inconveniences a salmon, is in fact not a communion but a crock of shit. And that is in fact what it is. A crock of shit. Which is too bad, since as I said, it started well. My brother's court date was today. He has to write the cop an apology letter - which is bullshit - but he didn't get a fine, probation, or anything like that; in fact even the speeding ticket that was ostensibly the point of the whole exercise was dismissed. Of course he still has to pay for his lawyer and all. A couple of nights ago I dreamed I was a pirate sailing the Great Lakes, and instead of a parrot I had two turkey vultures that would projectile vomit on my enemies in the heat of battle. I was never much for the pirate thing but this dream kind of kicked ass actually. This may or may not have anything to do with my recent disappearance. You know, I wasn't aware that I was actually a fan of modern dance, but holy shit.... |
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