felis_ultharus

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 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 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a stall there that sells jewellery trees for little girls, in the shapes of princesses whose heads and arms have been replaced by necklace-and-ring-holding tentacles.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.)

It's beginning to look like the game's going to be a no-go again. We just won't have enough players, so I thought I'd give everyone a head's up for Sunday. And next Sunday will probably be impossible :/

I'd still like to get together with people, though.

Editing is going slowly, because work has been insane. I had more hours of work this week than I've ever had at that job, and it looks the same for next week. We're testing around the clock -- last year at this time, it was so dead I was laid of for several months.

Our semi-new saleswoman works around the clock getting contracts. Our teachers are working 9 to 5, our filing cabinets are bursting with recent student tests, and everyone is frazzled. Summer has never been this busy before, from what I hear. I can only imagine what things are going to be like in September.

Otherwise, I read a short introduction/biography to Foucault today. Interesting. He's one of my least-favourite philosophers, but it helped me to find some redeeming qualities in him -- as a person, if not a philosopher.

I also discovered a few more reasons to dislike his ideas.

He was much more politically active than I thought, though, even as his ideas attacked real politicial commitment. I was also amused that he and Roland Barthes were on-again, off-again lovers -- there's a metaphor in that for the relationships of postmodernism and poststructuralism, I'm certain.

Gradually getting caught up in all my courses. Editing about 10 pages a day -- an excrutiatingly slow rate. I'm also writing a short story on the side, just to burn off some of the creative energy.

Fulke Greville (1554-1628) was a living warning to parents that if you name your child "Fulke," they shall turn to poetry.

Someone was questioning the dominant postmodern viewpoint in class, and for once it wasn't me. His name is Chris.

I've heard people talking about this guy -- mocking comments behind his back -- but he's one of the most intelligent students in the program (well-thought-out and well-read). He was unwilling, today, to automatically rule out the existence of a true self or of free will -- a cardinal sin these days.

Everyone started looking at each other, as if someone had broken wind. Even the professor looked uncomfortable. She accidentally described him as "stuck" in his beliefs, before quickly changing it to "focused on."

Well, now we're wading into the "appropriation of voice debate" in Canadian Lit this evening. This is going to be very interesting.

The question is, "Should writers have the moral and legal right to write about members of a minority they don't belong to?"

( cut for length, musings )

This week's disasters have begun to peter out. My presentation was a success last night, which is good because it counts for a whopping percentage of the mark. Everyone looked bored, but then everyone always looks bored at these things. I tried to make it less boring by talking more about Atwood and Jung than the Samurai Susanna, but I gave the second major presentation of the night, so everyone was just falling asleep.

After me there was a presentation on some of the work of Catherine MacKinnon. One of her usual bait-and-switch, non-sequitor arguments used to demonize pornography by association ("In the 19th century, there was a lot of abuse of women in psychiatric institutions by male doctors. Here's the proof it was going on. Now, isn't porn evil?").

We didn't have time for class discussion after three presentations, so I didn't have a chance to rip into her. For those of you who don't know, MacKinnon's crusade for censorship has played a major part in the persecution of queer bookstores by Canada Customs. If it weren't for hers and Andrea Dworkin's briefs to the Supreme Court, Little Sister's and other bookstores wouldn't have to face the tyranny of Canada's most backward public institution.

Anyway, I have my ticket now to Advent Children -- today's English Tests were right near the theatre, so I ran out and grabbed it. I've never been as excited about seeing a movie in theatres as I am this time, especially since so few theatres around the world will be playing it.

I present to the thermonuclear warhead of annoying, the postmodern mime (from Linda Hutcheon's book):

"The very walls of the traditional museum and the very definition of art come under fire in the performances of Albert Vidal, for instance. His "The Urban Man" is a kind of anthropological performance ritual in which Vidal spends five hours a day in a major public place in a city (Miami's Metro Zoo or the Place d'Youville in Quebec City) offering to passers-by an "exhibit" of postmodern man about his daily business."

What is "postmodern man's" daily business? Deconstructing his groceries? Turning office memos into historiographic metafiction? Informing his boyfriend/girlfriend that love is a bourgeois concept and a construction of language, and that the "I" in "I love you" is a signifier that cannot be tied to a signified beyond language?

Oh well, there are reasons to be happy. I finally polished off more than 8 pages yesterday on my writing, though I've hardly done any today. Plus there's Advent Children to look forward to. And there was a gorgeous gay guy sitting next to me this evening in the internet place, so that made me happy :)

As for work, wish me luck. I'm going to be leading the placement test tomorrow, from 9 am to 4:30 pm. I even have a one-member "team" to help me with the interviews.

I have not gotten far into Linda Hutcheon. I keep getting infuriated by this author. She's turned by philosophy into her bogeyman, constantly making claims about humanism which are not in the slightest true. I wonder where this stuff comes from.

Reading her vague-yet-vicious discussions of "liberal humanism" is like reading a long, scholarly essay on Spain's relations with its fellow Asian countries, particularly its near neighbours Laos and Japan. Not for the first time this year, I've wondered how someone so smart can be so stupid.

And if this is the best postmodernism can do, it's really depressing that it's taken over my field.

The constant talk in these books about "changing the system," "revolutionizing," "overthrowing," makes me wonder why they never mention what they want "the system" to change into, what the goals are of "revolution," what they want to be left over once it's all "overthrown." The purpose is never mentioned. I suppose purpose is "bourgeois" now, along with meaning, beauty, imagination, identity, readable books, happiness, love, and everything else that makes life worth living.

(I realize "bourgeois" is a standard French word, but has anyone ever seriously used that word in English without being "bourgeois" themselves?)

And is there any sight more depressing and funny at the same time than tenured professors, all echoing nearly-identical views, talking about revolution and bringing down the system. In English Lit, postmodernism is the system, and hearing about this is like hearing Maoist and Stalinist generals call their armies "the people's liberation armies."

(I hope I'm not irritating everyone by these constant rants, but if I don't rant somewhere, I think I'm going to have to punch a wall. I feel like everything I loved about books and literature and history is being ripped to shreds by a bunch of self-serving professors hungry to get published, and I'm not even sure I want to go on another semester.)

Today I moved on from the post-structuralists to the structuralists, especially Gérard Genette. I'm beginning to wonder what is it about France that produce all these rather extreme literary critics.

The structuralists seem somewhat more sane, though it may just be Genette. He has a tendency to try and squeeze square pegs into round holes. he has a tendency to believe, "The living bird is ... the labeled bones." But at least he believes that words can have meanings, and that the vision of the author matters.

Meanwhile, I'm still perplexed by the obsession of post-structuralists for meaningless writing. They seem certain that everyone will share their quasi-sexual obsession with dull and deliberately meaningless avant-garde experimental books. And I mean quasi-sexual. Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes both describe the experience of reading "words liberated from meaning" as a jouissance -- from the French jouir, "to come, to reach orgasm."

Apparently meaninglessness, confusion, and emptiness got them hot. I vaguely wonder if Roland Barthes is still alive, and if he uses videotapes of George W. Bush's press conferences as a sexual aide.

Edit: I've checked on Wikipedia. Apparently Roland Barthes died in 1980, run over by a laundry truck.

As gauche as it is to find humour in another human being's death, I have to admit I'm amused by a very famous post-structuralist's sudden and irreversible encounter with reality.

Readings into nearly-impenetrable-and-always-nonsensical postmodern linguistics continues. Bakhtin seems mildly more sane than most, though Julia Kristeva's re-interpretation of his work is just silly.

In their effort to do away with the possibility of originality in writing -- in their desperation to prove that creativity does not exist, and that writers just repeat one another's words -- these bizarre philosophers have created a paradox they never address: where do new words come from? If all language is just a paraphrase or a quotation of somebody else's works, if nothing is original, then new words should not exist. For every word in existance, there is a first person who used it.

For that matter, how can Kristeva make these arguments about no language being original, while inventing new words herself. And does she have to invent new words for things we already have words for? Isn't her jargon thick enough already?

Saussure seems to claim (at least in this book) that language is transcendent to the point where mere individuals cannot change or alter it, cannot create anything new. Then how does language change over time?

I suspect that most of these people are just failed writers, and 90% of their arguments are just sour grapes. Most critics have serious inferiority complexes when it comes to the writers they write about, and for some that turns into a desire to lash out. It's easiest to kill the author or declare them unoriginal than to admit that one lacks the creative spark oneself.

I'm not quite at the section on Roland Barthes yet, though I've taken a little of his stuff before. He's the one who declared the author dead -- apparently only the book exists, an its readers, and (naturally) its critics. All I'm saying is that if he wants to kill the author, he's in for a fight.

It depresses me that a child of ten could see the stupidity of all these arguments, if a child of ten could penetrate the insane layers of jargon. Perhaps that's the reason for the jargon. Why can't the best minds of English literature figure out what a child of ten could? Or am I answering my own question?

If the emperor had clothes, they've long since been deconstructed. Where are the critics who admit they're no longer there.

And more importantly, why am I in a subject which takes that vibrant heart of society -- the weavings of its words, its stories, its songs -- and sacrifices them on the bloody altar of Logic and Reason?

We had our first Canadian Lit course, yesterday, and had a bit of a surprise. Laura, the wonderful CanLit professor I had last year, has finally lost her voice permanently, and is now using a Stephen Hawking-style machine to communicate with the class.

Oddly, this isn't a bad thing. The only flaw of Laura's class is that she could hardly speak before, and when she spoke, it was so difficult to hear here that we missed half of what she said. She couldn't formulate her ideas properly.

She's gone in for highly creative course design again. The essays for her class are smaller, but we make three presentations instead of the usual one. There's also an oral lit part of the class -- when she was losing her voice, she started setting aside part of her courses to read portions of certain Canadian novels that were meant to be read aloud. This is one of the most enjoyable parts of the class, and it helps to appreciate a lot lit in a different way.

Even the Postmodern material is a little less painful this time around. She found a book that'll explain Saussure and Barthes in plain English to the newcomers, and it seems she's picking and choosing from the postmodern critics what she likes, rather than using it as a religion.

I think I'm going to like this course.

I should probably start making lists like laurange does. It seems to work for her.