Wow--Too many projects...

In a strange and self indulgent moment the author of this blog stops by to make the pointless observation that this blog has seemingly been left to die. I suppose part of the problem is the fact that I am writing far too many blogs (or not writing as the case may be).

Perhaps it is time to be more wasteful with my time and correct this horrendous slump. I think so.

Decisive moment immediately followed by uncertainty about what to do next...

A question? No. A story? Perhaps not. A project? Yeah, some drivel that no one should really read.

Currently, I am supposed to be working on an MA Thesis (supposed because my advisor wanted me to do a draft last spring and I haven't communicated with her since. I'm hoping that a complete draft and some serious groveling will elicit the needed feedback on a draft and her continued willingness to eventually sign off on the whole thing).

At any rate the subject is one that I feel like rambling on about. In Sandra Goldbacher's 1998 film The Governess identity becomes a discussion of authorship particularly female authorship, while at the same time vehemently denying and erasing the fixity of identity and the threat of essentializing that comes with that fixity.

I'm coming at all this firmly from within the ongoing conversation on female spectatorship that began with Laura Mulvey's 1972 article "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema" and (at least in my humble opinion continues today in discussions of female authorship in the cinema. Of course I concieved this project in 2003-04, so I really need to do another sweep of what's out there on this film and this idea, seeing as I last did so in the summer of 2004.

The "so what" of all this is, simply, the idea that it is crucial to recognize art that encourages us, even enables us to think about ourselves and our world in ways that move us toward a greater appreciation for and of the endless variety of existence.

You know you're a graduate student when you fear the end of the term

My partner keeps telling me to have no fear it's almost over. Sadly, that is what I am afraid of. Not that I mourn the end of the term in and of itself, I'm just a bit concerned by the fact that its end is supposed to correspond with the end of my work. I'd really like another month on these papers.

All the same, I have to get my work done. The real loomer right now is my thesis (and I apologize to anyone who might be reading this because I'm in freewrite mode this morning). Somehow I need to tie up all my loose ends. I thought that irony might be the key. What I have is a book with two competing models of femininity (and I think that they are compared ironically) we have two interpretations of morality (which I think also correspond to those models of foment) and I think they relate to each other ironically. Then I have a model of pleasure for one of them which I think is really interesting and I'm not sure where the irony is there. It's more of a paradox really, in that the model of pleasure is a self-shattering one that I draw from Leo Bersani's The Freudian Body.

So, what do I do with the discussion of the nature of evil, whether morality is learned or innate, and whether evil is the fault of the perpetrator or the one who does not exercise a power to prevent it. My advisor points out that there is a strong, and not atypical anti-catholic, anti-eastern line in the setting of Venice and the way that the state is portrayed. I should really read the paper that was written last year as I believe that it dealt with the implications of the state in the novel. How would this play in? Perhaps irony is not the central line that I need or at least not so strict an adherence to it. I could discuss it as a cross over into satire. Kind of a "here irony becomes more blatant as the critique moves into the realm of satire.

I think I begin to see my way a bit more brightly. Now if only I can get myself into my own text today...

But...I suppose I'm not really one to argue

While I would certainly beg to differ, I have seen far too much evidence to argue with this particular commentary on English Majors.

Tooth Paste for Dinner is, by the way a wonderful website to stop by and checkout now and then. Wonderfully ridiculous, and funny because it is so sadly true.

Here we are again...

How is it that I only seem to get around to blogging at the end of terms when papers are bearing down and my stress level is going through the roof? I think it must be the final proof that this blog is deeply and ultimately a self serving thing. I have no idea why anyone else would want to read it, and thus no idea why I am eating up server space somewhere with it. All the same...

Today I find myself with surprisingly little to do at work. Well, only surprising in so far as what I thought I was going to be spending around 5 hours working on has had to be rescheduled on short notice... Intraoffice communication has not been our strong point lately.

Moving on to less dangerous topics (not that I have anything all that dangerous to say) I find myself exactly one woeek from a deadline on a twenty page term paper with no idea what it is going to be about. Almost no idea. The tentative topic (aka the one I tell myself so I can sleep nights) is that it is about Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya and Bersani's theory's of sexuality and subjectivity. I have no idea what this is going to looke like.

Now for the Phenomenology of Embodiement and Ensoulment

Now that I've hashed on Marx just a bit I'll take a moment to jot a thought on what this other paper I'm supposed to write is actually about (I must admit that when I started this blog I really didn't intend to make it all about my papers but at least I get it out of my system and don't encourage my wife's homicidal tendencies with my constant obsessing about papers that for some reason I never explain to her in sufficient detail but instead just ramble about and use as pity ploys when I've convinced myself that the end is swiftly approaching). I love long sentences.
I'm trying to focus in on the persistence of a view of mind (or soul) and body that sees them as seperate, that sees the individual as an embodied soul or an ensouled body, through the middle English "Debate of Body and Soul" and Thomas Aquinas's commentary to Aristotle's De Anima. The real focus here is the difficulty of maintaining the model that Aristotle posits which presents the soul as the formal element of the individual and the body as potentiality (the soul could then also be though as actuality).

What makes the "Debate of Body and Soul" useful for opening up these issues is the problematic nature of the texts premise of a split between the Body and Soul for them to confront one another in debate at all. Resultantly what is portrayed is a surprisingly fleshly soul and a peculiarly soulful body.

Of course there is every likelihood that I may through all of this right out of the window in favor of simply trying to sort out what exactly is going on in the account that Aristotle and Aquinas are trying to give us. With an assist from Nussbaum et al I think I could probably pull off a paper doing some close readings of some of the more troublesome places in the literature.

Arundhati Roy and Marxist Post-Colonialism

The current project here is to attempt to come to terms with the function of ideology in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. I've got a couple of ideas of how I can come at this. One is to trace the presence of violence and its connections to various ideologies in the novel. One of the prime examples is the "History House" located in the "Heart of Darkness" with its accompanying spirit of Kari Saipu the pedophilic representative of colonialism.
A second question is whether or not there is any interface between the ideology and practices of colonial rule and the brutal punishment for the transgression of Ammu and Velutha against an Indian cultural imperative. The chief of police seems to play a strange double of Pontius Pilate. He at once represents an authority that seems to mimic the functioning of the former colonial system in its relation to the workers and especially untouchables, yet at the same time he is not entirely seperate from the demands for the traditional order voiced by Baby Kochamma and Mammachi.

Finaly, there is the ambigous relation between the narrator and Indian culture. The narrative at once mourns the prostitution of the art of the Kathakali dancers, and takes a very Western stance concerning the place of the individual in society, emphazing personal choice and freedom in the face of the condemnation and violent reprisals of the traditional cultural order.

Pacifism in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

Since I really ought to be working on my thesis, I have gotten sidetracked for the last hour contemplating the place of pacifism in Tolkien's work. The thought that originated this digression from feminist film theory was the realization that the Ring itself represents war as a concept. That is to say that, like war, even if wielded in the name of a worthy cause it ultimately brings ruin. This is a point reinforeced by the terms in which Gandalf, and later Galadriel, refuse to take the ring from Frodo. While Tolkien may or may not have been a pacifist himself, it is interesting to note that it is not the war waged by Aragorn and men of Minas Tirith and Rohan that claims vicotry over the evil of Sauron, it is the small act of Frodo, his destroying of a weapon, that ends Sauron. What struck me was the similarity between Frodo's act and the "Plowshares Actions" of the Catholic Worker Movement.

A line that I hadn't really thought of includes Tom Bombadil. Bombadill really is the only completely pacifist charachter in the story. Though I think that Frodo, in terms of his actions if not his ideology is also within the bounds of pacifism.

Hmmm....I may have to come back to this.

BBC NEWS | UK | Northern Ireland | Feeling OK? Have a 'pint'

BBC NEWS | UK | Northern Ireland | Feeling OK? Have a 'pint'

I knew it!! It makes sense to me anyway. There's nothing like moderation and variety in the diet to keep you healthy. A beer a day, especially good beer, has got to be good on some level.

So...Blogs...

Apart from ellipses, blogs seem to be my new thing. Despite html being a language that (like French) I can almost read, but really can't approximate, I am really enjoying playing with this. I just finished a paper on using blogs in the "First-Year" Composition course I've been teaching these last two semesters. The paper itself wasn't that great I feel, but it was a good experience as far as reflecting on my teaching and the educational use of blogs.

My highly informal findings were:

a)like anything in the classroom using a blog to teach writing needs to be done in a very controlled and deliberate way

b)Those who, despite my lack of guidance and ill disguised inexperience with the technology, used the blogs as I had hoped they would, did get a lot of good writing practice and flexed some metacognitive muscles that weren't apparent in their early posts

c)a subtext to "b" whether the blogs were responsible for improvement or not they did at least provide a place where the student could see their improvement

d)oh yeah, and those who used comments got to see what I meant by "audience" in a more real life way.