Update

Wow, almost a month since I last posted a blog! Can you tell I’m in the middle of a dissertation? I don’t have much time, so I decided to update you with bullet points. BAM!

• I finished my chapter on William Blake and Alan Moore and am moving to a chapter on Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. This chapter argues that Jackson’s text figures hypertext (and New Media more generally) as disciplines of literary and institutional melancholy. Jackson’s text uses Mary Shelley as a character to show a lineage from literature to hypertext. Yet, it also can’t decide whether it is alive or dead. The whole text takes place in a graveyard where the reader has to “put” the Patchwork Girl together. On the other hand, the Patchwork Girl is also arguing that she is faster than the reader, that the reader can’t pin her down, that she can (in some respects) escape the reader. And Jackson, curiously enough, uses metaphors of life to describe this escape.
• I saw Smart People (2007), Oh Lucky Man! (1971), and Le Corbeau (1943). The first continues the great indie-film tradition of treating intellectuals as oedipal figures to be ridiculed. I liked most of the performances, but hated the script and can’t help but wonder why films today want to “school” the intellectual. The second is a pretty good follow-up to If…, but I didn’t enjoy it because I’ve grown tired of postmodern “everyman” tales. It did have a pretty good piece of graffiti about mid-way through the film, which read “revolution is the opiate of the intellectual.” The final one was a great bit of noir, with complicated characters. All of the characters were more than their noir cliches: the lead was a morally compromised physician who doesn’t catch the killer, the two femme fatales were too clingy and didn’t follow the classic mold, and the city itself seemed to grow less interested in catching the killer.
• I’m SICK of the primary season and of one candidate in particular, whom I won’t mention. The funny thing is that I’m having less political arguments with my conservative father than my Hillary-supporting mother. But Maureen Dowd has a great little bit on her in today’s New York Times. Here’s a little snippet. After relating Hillary to the “50 foot woman,” Dowd turns to Obama, who has been subjected to one pancake dinner after another.

But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites. That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.“Why” he pleaded, sounding a bit, dare we say, bitter, “can’t I just eat my waffle?”His subtext was obvious: Why can’t I just be president? Why do I have to keep eating these gooey waffles and answering these gotcha questions and debating this gonzo woman?

~ by tharmas on April 23, 2008.