Asides

But I gotta say, the best and most inscrutable movie I’ve seen in a long, long time is about a Japanese family named the Katakuris. I’ll acknowledge up front that my vocabulary of Japanese film is so embarassingly atrophied (my particular and predictable favorites are Ran and Akira and Hana-bi and Tampopo and Iron Man Tetsuo) as to show me as a blinkered western bigot, which I don’t want or mean to be. That said, my best capsule description of The Happiness of the Katakuris would be as follows: it’s American Psycho meets The Sound of Music on amateur night in Japan. It defies genre and is, at times, so profoundly banal as to be absolutely and embarassingly hilarious. Hyper-violent, sexy, hallucinatory, funny karaoke clich

Via NPR from MTV: the same morons who distributed Ghettopoly reach new lows. Part of me wants to say that a generation who shops at such stores deserves what it gets. And part of me wants to point out that they have two 800 numbers (800 282 2200 and 800 959 8795) if you feel like offering them any feedback on their slack-jawed know-nothing consumerist asininity, and there’s also a web form for email feedback.

Partly via Metafilter and partly via Arete, more reasons to vote in November.

Addendum: via Curtiss’s excellent post, one more reason.

Some rhetoric and composition bloggers are making plans for a dinner out at CCCC in San Antonio on Wednesday 3/24. If you haven’t already heard about it and are interested, check out the post at Kairosnews; it’s already looking like a fun group.

No update on the dead wiki yet, but somebody made me a kind offer of alternative hosting elsewhere, so I’m looking into it, and hope to have something to tell you soon.

And I haven’t been writing much on class, mostly because I meet with my dissertators group to get feedback on the penultimate draft of the prospectus on Wednesday 2/18 (which, looking at my clock, is now today), and once I’m past that and have incorporated their revisions and put the thing behind me, it’ll be time to move it some.

“Baby, you make stalking seem so right.” Colon, close paren.

Me, I’m just wishing for somebody to give a shit, bitch bear to.

I finally finished the cat tree tonight. It took a lot longer than it should have, perhaps partly because it’s been a dissertation-procrastination strategy, but yeah, it’s done. I took pictures, too.
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Orkut is awfully white.

When my brother was nine or ten, we taped the Super Bowl. I think it was the 1986 game when Chicago’s Jim McMahon, Walter Payton, and William Perry absolutely mauled the Patriots down in Louisiana, and — of course — not nearly as entertaining a game as tonight’s was. But my favorite part was that David, still working with phonetic spelling issues, labeled the tape “Super Bowel”. As indeed it was, and as every football game is. There’s an MLA conference paper in there somewhere; something about high-end commercials, consumption, men’s butts, and Freud. (And, this year, erectile dysfunction.) But I’m not going to go there. I’ll just say that yes, I was rooting for the underdog southerner Carolina, and yes, I was as mystified by Justin’s breast-baring of Janet as anyone: what the hell was that?

Anyway. I’ve been quiet here lately, largely because I’m wading through various sets of instructions for setting up and configuring various open-source wikis. As I’ve said before, I’d certainly welcome any guidance folks more expert than me might offer: I mean, I was all proud of myself for getting Movable Type installed after several hours of struggle, so this wiki config stuff is pretty intimidating.

And the better recipe I found for Doro Wat today was a hit. Mmm, good spicy chicken. Hint: you can make a fraction of the berbere sauce and the niter kebbeh together and it’s still so, so delicious.

No, the above title isn’t the name of some dorky-ass emo band. A colleague of mine reports that she’ll soon (within the next couple weeks) be talking to a group of humanities and social sciences undergraduates at a rural teaching college about what it’s like to go to graduate school. These students have likely never encountered or worked with any graduate students at their institution (which, my colleague reports, gives very little emphasis to faculty research). She’s hoping for responses to any or all of the following questions:

1. What questions do you wish you’d asked before applying to or attending your graduate program? What questions are you glad you asked?
2. What surprised you the most (positively and/or negatively) about your graduate school experience?
3. What advice would you give to an undergraduate considering graduate study in your field?
4. What do you like and dislike most about graduate school?
5. If you had known as an undergraduate what you know now, what would you have done differently?
6. What other thoughts or advice might you offer?

I’ve already pointed her towards the “Run away! Run away very fast!” links over at Invisible Adjunct, and noted as well that my perspective is a little more hopeful than IA’s. I’m sure she’d be grateful for any additional feedback you might be willing to offer.

It’s late and I can’t sleep. I put on the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and sit in the living room with the lights off, listening, watching the snow fall past my apartment’s windows. There’s the faint rasp of Rudolf Serkin’s breath as he plays. The snow’s steady ongoing fall makes me feel as if it’s in here that’s moving rather than out there, as if I’m in the cabin of a ship, sailing the night.