felis_ultharus: The Pardoner from the Canterbury Tales (Default)
Travel

I just wanted to note that I'm back from BC. It was a very quiet trip -- I spent most of my days there hanging out with [livejournal.com profile] node357, which was nice. He composed some new music while I was there, and showed me Psychonauts, which really does deserve its reputation ^_^

I also saw a couple of friends I hadn't seen in about fifteen years -- all thanks to the miracle of Facebook. I never did get to Vancouver this time, though, so that'll have to wait for Yule.

The best pleasure though -- aside from seeing [livejournal.com profile] node357 -- was that of seeing the place itself. Montreal is toxic and grey and cemented compared to that greenery and clean air that is BC. I like Montreal because most of my friends are here, but except for the Old Port, and some of the older stone houses and parks, I have to admit I consider this a very ugly and polluted city. Too much concrete, and too few growing things.

Airports continue to get more and more surreal -- they've always bothered me because the waiting areas between flights are really non-places that drift detached from anything in a bland emptiness where things get sold. In other words, they're Postmodernism incarnate.

The Pearson airport in Toronto has a particularly weird waiting area. There's a stall there that sells jewellery trees for little girls, in the shapes of princesses whose heads and arms have been replaced by necklace-and-ring-holding tentacles. My first thought was Jenova from FFVII, or something out of Lovecraft.

Not much else to report -- I did not defeat any ninja armies this time around. I wanted a good start on the major edit of my novel, but only got about one-quarter in. It's almost a third finished now.

Meme

"If there are one or more people on your friends list who make your world a better place just because they exist, and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal."

(I'm lucky in that this applies to probably most if not all of the people I've friended.)
felis_ultharus: The Pardoner from the Canterbury Tales (Default)
I finished Gentlemen of the Road yesterday. It was a brilliant novel. At first the pacing seemed odd -- too breathless -- until I discovered that (true to its 19th-century style) it was originally published in weekly instalments in a newspaper. Probably, also, it's that Chabon is used to writing 500-page novels, not 200-page ones.

It really does have all the hallmarks of a Victorian adventure story. It's meticulous in its portrayal of dress and historical details, but fully modern in its morals (modern in this case being 21st century, not 19th). There's a vaguely anachronistic mood hanging over it that's hard to pin down to any one thing, but just seems to be the characters' conception of the universe.

Also, I note that all the drawings are just slightly inaccurate. Knowing Chabon, this is probably intentional. He did write those missing-the-point footnotes to Kavalier and Clay, that miss the point exactly how actual footnotes would have.

Now I've on to much heavier fare -- Pink Blood, an examination by a Canadian journalist of a hundred homophobic/transphobic homicides in Canada over a ten-year period, and more than 300 violent acts over the same period.

Before I move on to the utter uselessness of the Canadian justice system when dealing with hate crimes, I'd like to point out that even Janoff -- for all his brilliance -- still uses that poorly-translated tagline of Michel Foucault's, the supposed, "The sodomite was a temporary aberration; the homosexual was a species."

Actually, Foucault said, "The sodomite was a relapsed heretic [relaps]" -- that is, someone who reverts to their original state, rather than adopts a temporary new one. So Queer Theory's been marching under a motto that's more apocrypha than canon.
felis_ultharus: The Pardoner from the Canterbury Tales (Default)
"Readers with an interest in Queer Theory might want to glance at the theoretic note on page 221 about the use of the word "gay" in these pages. For less academic types, who hear the term gay subject position and think "doggie style" -- go pour yourself a drink and we can get started."
-- David Nimmons, The Soul Beneath the Skin
I think I'm going to like this book ^_^

In other news, I finished Eleanor Rigby. I'll post more about this later.
felis_ultharus: The Pardoner from the Canterbury Tales (Default)
Essays for the University of LaPuta, Queer Tax Returns, and Sadomasochistic Housework )

Comics

Funny how an unhappy carton that sums up your own rotten mood can actually make you happy. My friend Sean put this one online at just the right moment for me. Been trying to turn it into an LJ icon, but it never comes out looking right:

felis_ultharus: The Pardoner from the Canterbury Tales (Default)
Conversation with Éric last night, who stopped by "just for a few minutes" to pick up a book:

Éric (translated loosely from French): My astrologer said since I'm a Taurus with Leo Rising and Mars in the first House in Leo and Moon in Aries I should be careful of being the kind of person who dominates social situations...
Me: (attempts to get word in edgewise for no less than 20 minutes)
Éric: But that's not really me at all. So I don't know why that is...
Me (after Éric finally takes a breath): You do occasionally have a tendency to dominate conversation...
Éric: Me? No. Really? I have a hard time speaking...


'Twas another 20 minutes before I got a chance to speak again. [livejournal.com profile] montrealais applauds me for getting him out of the house in a little over an hour and a half.

I'm adopting [livejournal.com profile] foi_nefaste's description of him -- Éric "means well."

Class was strange last Tuesday. A guy I respect greatly in spite of our differing views was giving his presentation on Green Grass, Running Water. And he was going heavily in Barthesian stuff.

Now, Green Grass, Running Water is all about how Native people haven't had the opportunity to write their own stories -- they've all been written by white people -- and it's a sort of first attempt to redress that. And Roland Barthes' stuff is all about how the author doesn't matter. Well, if the author doesn't matter, then Green Grass, Running Water could have been written by a white guy. Which would just be stupid. But there wasn't time to point that out, we were so rushed with three presentations.

This post-modernist/post-structuralist stuff tends to create doublethink, probably because there's no way to really apply it in the real world, or even in the quasi-real world of academia. It's why I prefer humanism -- I need a philosophy that a person can live, not one that only works when published in an academic journal.

The books for the course are good at least. I'm lost in the marvellous Famous Last Words. Not that far into it yet, but it has the best frame story of any book I've encountered yet. And I've never come across descriptions like Findley's. I've never encountered anything that vivid in prose.

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September 2011

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