Freckles & Doubt

Fortunately, Jawas appear to have left the house relatively unscathed. Possibly they were very small, discreet Jawas. I did, however, have an icky start to the day in discovering that the rubbish bin was a squirming, writhing mass of maggots (sorry, schedule5), causing me much swearing, splashing around of disinfectant and stomping around with my skirts kited up to my waist. The way the grubs ooze blindly off in all directions when you disturb them... eeeeuw. My skin is still crawling. Bloody hot weather.

Apart from the rot at the heart of society, another Baudrillardian moment, sigh. The local billboards in the last two days have vouchsafed us the headlines "SNAKES ON THE PLAIN" (presumably outbreaks of interest to herpetologists in the low-income suburb of Mitchell's Plain) and "SHAKES ON A PLANE" (engines on cut-price domestic airline flight burst into flame mid-air, causing trepidation in passengers). This worrying trend demonstrates The Triumph Of The Title in a sense quite apart from headline smartarsery. It doesn't matter what that completely ridiculous movie was actually like, its title is now embedded in our cultural zeitgeist. More than that, its meaning and currency are entirely in its label. The surface tells you everything you need to know about the content to the extent where it is the content. It remains to be seen whether 2009's claim to the Snakes slot is as transparently substanceless. It's called Lesbian Vampire Killers. I think its inherent ambiguity flaws it, personally.

I have a Really Nice Boss, TM. Yesterday, while I was fighting through board schedules, progression coding meetings, academics asking puzzled questions about same, orientation order deadlines, endless strings of students panicking about exclusion and a phone ringing more or less continuously, she sent a runner down to my office with a bar of chocolate and a can of Red Bull. I've never done more than cautiously sip a Red Bull and wrinkle up my nose: tastes like shit. On the other hand, about ten minutes after holding my nose and downing the whole thing, cue sudden alertness, a fit of hysterical giggling and an afternoon spent bouncing off the walls in maddened efficiency. That stuff works - pity about the taste. Also, this morning I seem to be hungover, which I somewhat resent given that I last tasted booze on Sunday.

This is a nicely balanced article about musicians who license their songs for advertising, and the pros and cons thereof. It's particularly apropos because I've been bugged for two weeks by Santana's "Smooth", which was recommended on one of grumpyolddog's lists as being "horny" (I have to concur), but which I'm vaguely associating with whatever the hell the current cinema ad is that uses it, thus wrecking the effect. On the upside, it is a testament to the failure of modern advertising that I remember the song but am completely unable to remember the brand, or even the nature of the product. As corporate sellouts go, it's peculiarly pointless.

Back to my board schedules, which are infesting the greater part of my weekend. Sigh. On the upside, I'm about halfway through rewatching Torchwood's first season, in preparation for Season 2. I'm remembering why I love the series so much. It's magnificently silly.

Outside it's windy and bucketing with rain, and I'm as happy as a duck in a puddle. Personally, I welcome our new wintry overlords. But I'm odd that way.

I have one thing to say this morning, which is that everyone should read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, on the grounds that it's essential subversive propaganda for the age of Bush, spreading via Creative Commons like a particularly lively meme. I just read it in a giant gollup - it moves fast and is a rather beguiling adolescent coming-of-age story as well as a call to arms and an indoctrination to hack.

I shall now head off to introduce oblivious third-year Humanities students to the joys of Internet sex, feeling, for some reason, extra subversive.

OK, this is officially ridiculous. Lunch with the visiting-from-exile starmadeshadow yesterday, which was lovely, except that in our post-luncheon wander around the bookshop I managed to somehow slip or turn my ankle on the (dead level, non-slippery, unboobytrapped) floor and wipe out spectacularly, describing a graceful 90^o forward arc to measure my length on the floor. I have a sprained left ankle, bizarrely bruised right toe and extremely battered knees, as well as a random assortment of other bruises at odd spots all over my front elevation, and am hobbling like a Pratchett crone. I feel very silly. I've also lost count of the number of times I've done this sort of thing; I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing that I seem to be evenly distributing the nadgered limbs (in order over the last fifteen years, left knee dislocation, left elbow break, right foot sprain, right wrist sprain, coccyx bruise, epic butt bruise, and now right knee bruising and left foot sprain. I'm seeing a pattern here. Still missing: right elbow, left wrist and, for a final encore, presumably the neck. I may have to put the whole thing to a catchy banjo backing and sing it).

I have no idea why I suddenly slip on a dead level floor: my current theory is an invisible iron bar, à la Wizard of Oz. Also, what's with the (generally very sweet) impulse of people to dash over and help you up the instant you hit the ground? I was in enough pain and shock that all I could do was lie there for a couple of minutes until my vision cleared and I was capable of coherent thought, but I was vaguely conscious that my gasps and vague mumblings were causing concern in the stratosphere directly above the circle of feet.

Good news from wolverine_nun: the small pneumatic child is doing a lot better, and the doctor is talking about releasing her from hospital early in the week. In a not unrelated effect, my washing line has suddenly become inutterably cute lately, and rather given over to uncharacteristic pink:



The whole helping-w-n-out-with-laundry thing would have been a lot more effective if it hadn't decided to rain buckets overnight.

In the Department of Random Linkery: Henry Jenkins, my favourite media guru, reproduces an anonymous student's thoughts on Anonymous. It's an interesting historical outline, suggesting that Anonymous wised up very fast about direct and illegal threats or attacks on scientology, and are morphing rapidly into a media awareness gadfly rather than a bunch of destructive hackers.

Last Night I Dreamed: as an unhappy child in a boarding school somewhere (presumably this comes from reading Libba Bray for two days) I climbed out the window, pursued by a cabal of nasty bullies, and went for a fly. Drifting around in the upper atmosphere I was pleased to see that the young African prince, also an unhappy school inmate, was out in his flying Cadillac: we presumably escaped together.

Internets! Did you miss me? I missed you! The Evil Landlord awoke on Saturday morning, decided that this random rebooting thing was interfering unacceptably with his lawful computer gaming, and wandered off with his computer under his arm to get it Seen To. We have consequently spent three quarters of the Easter weekend without even sulky intermittent teen tantrum access to teh internets. I survived this surprisingly well, all things considered.

Worst things about Easter:

1. It seems to inspire Sid the Sinus Headache to new and ever more vicious heights of pain. I woke up on Sunday with him sitting over my left eye, kicking things. Mostly me.
2. Consequently forgetting completely that I was supposed to spend the whole weekend updating my hapless Masters student's thesis on Tolkien. While I plead in extenuation that I didn't have internet access and thus couldn't read her increasingly plaintive reminder emails, basically I am a Bad Supervisor and probably deserved the headache. Someone suggested last night that it was proactive karma, on the same principles as reannual wine. They were right.

Best things about Easter:

1. 4-day weekend. I think I've actually caught up on sleep, for the first time in about three months.
2. Easter chocolates thereafter go on sale. Somewhere in my future is me biting the head off a giant dark chocolate bunny. A cheap giant dark chocolate bunny. (How cool is it that tacky kitch chocolate easter shapes are now in grown-up dark chocolate?) Pre-emptively, I'm going for a dental checkup this afternoon.

Which brings me to the weird topic of Easter symbolism. Bunnies and chicklets and eggses, o my! They make, basically, no sense. They're mad carryovers from the original pagan spring festival, which celebrates life and rebirth and baby creatures and, probably, when you get down to it, screwing. To slap the whole Christian crucified-Christ thing on top of it is extremely incongruous, even given the risen-from-death motif. I remember the Baptist preacher, way back in the days when I was a boring born-again¹ schoolgirl, trying desperately to claim that chocolate eggs represent the stone rolled away from Christ's tomb, and even back then I had an embryonic version of the response I now slap into the margins of undergrad essays in bright green ink, viz. "You're stretching the metaphor, read in CONTEXT!"

I actually rather like the way religions nick motifs from each other on an ongoing basis, suggesting that most human spiritual experience runs in well-worn grooves and Jung might have had a point, after all. All religion is postmodern. It's cobbled together from fragments of other religions which appealed to the cobblers as meaningful, powerful and likely to get people to do what the cobblers want. Of course, having engaged in pastiche with the enthusiasm of rutting bunnies, they then attempt to refigure the whole shaky collage (aka load of cobblers) as Absolute Meaning and Totalitarian Discourse, which by all the rules of postmodernism you're not allowed to have, which possibly explains absolutely everything I always hated about religion. It's conceptually inconsistent on the meta level as well as internally. *is pleased with own random insight*

Oh, yes, forgot to add. Best things about Easter:
3. Finished the book.

Last Night I Dreamed: I occupied a rather beautiful modern larney house, all glass and split levels, in a city somewhere, possibly New York, and was hosting a gathering in the giant studio to show off my husband's latest artworks to a select bunch of critics and fellow artists. Said husband was all angsty and paranoid about the arrangements. He may, for at least some moments of the dream, also have been David Bowie, so I guess that fixation isn't dying down as fast as I thought. Sigh.

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¹ Not, I have to admit, with any real degree of conviction.

The maddened billboard poet of the Village Voice is back! Yesterday's headline:
DOP LORRY DROPS OOM!
Note the characteristic short, punchy words, the mixture of English and Afrikaans for max colloquial effect, and the neat use of assonance. As usual, it's also suggestive and tantalising rather than informative about the actual story, which is probably a lot less interesting than its headline.

In other news, Facebook wants your soul! According to The Guardian, at any rate. Not only are freely handing over your intimate details to the marketing droids, you're handing them over to fascist, neoconservative marketing droids. I do rather take issue with the tone of the article, which has that peculiarly retro note of "online communication cannot possibly be real, computers will doom us all!", but the background details on the politics of the founders are interesting.

New Bowie album. 60s rock covers. Happy.

So, wolverine_nun is now a doc (yay!), causing a certain confusion in the ranks of stv's superhero powers of nicknaming. (I've been "The Doc" for years). I do like graduation ceremonies: these days there's a certain sausage machine component to the whole thing, having to shunt nearly 5000 students through in five days, ten ceremonies, but the ritual and emotional aspects get me every time. In a bizarre sort of way grad is akin to some of the pleasures of the SCA - this is public recognition framed in a 1000-year-old idiom, a secular ceremony with religious trappings denuded of all but their emotional symbolism. Grad ceremonies are one of the approximately four thousand random things that infallibly make me cry.

The ceremonies at my Cherished Institution are particularly layered, since this is, after all, the multi-cultural New South Africa, with its own unique take on the rituals of English history. We graduate each student individually, and the whole Oxbridge schtick - academic procession, mace-bearers, the singing of "Gaudeamus Igitur", the formal presentation of the candidates to the Vice-Chancellor to be capped and hooded - is leavened by the administration's cheerful and upfront deconstruction of its significance, coupled with their encouragement of more traditionally African outbreaks of joy at the successful graduation of your own particular grad. So, Oxbridge schtick with shouts, whistles, ululation and, in extreme cases, dancing in the aisles.

The vibe is good, but the weird conglomeration of traditions also serves to highlight the particular social context. Your average ululating parent is probably not the new black rich, but represents the lower class origin of an intelligent student who has quite possibly overcome huge educational and financial disadvantages to be here at all. Graduation is not just a student's individual success, it represents the raising of an entire family in the social stakes, the New South Africa actually, for once, visibly at work down the generations. I grok this. On a level quite apart from my general teacherly satisfaction at all these bright kids who done good, it makes me very happy and not a little weepy.

Of course, today was a bit out of my usual bailiwick, being a science grad and all, but it also warms the cockles of my basically geeky heart to see some of the science paraded here. The honorary doctorate was to someone who basically defined the ocean/atmosphere interrelations in the El Nino effect, and one of the fellowships was awarded to someone doing research in quark flavours. The simple fact of a professor being hauled up and ceremonially accorded medieval dignities for work in quarks labelled up, down, strange, charm and beauty makes me think that, in spite of everything, somewhere, something must be right with the world.

Obligatory postmodern comment, though: the emotional component to this celebration has to work bloody hard to transcend the tendency to relocate meaning into gosh-darned representation rather than the thing itself. The graduands were skewered on camera angles: no less than four photo ops were automatically activated from all four corners of the hall, photos for optional purchase later. This in addition to the cameras and digital cameras of the audience, and in some cases the graduands themselves. These days it ain't real unless it's a media representation. A commercialised media representation. But I think the ululation evades capture.

(Speaking of translocation of meaning into media representation: today's XKCD? Genius.)

Last Night I Dreamed: I was helping first_fallen to strap things onto the top of her father's truck with acres of rope, when he took off down an incredibly steep hill with us still clinging to the sides of the vehicle. Later, my mother gave me a giant cube of heavily-iced cake.

One of the media gurus at My Cherished Institution maintains that the tabloid newspapers are the only source of true journalism these days, being has how they actually keep reporters on their staff and expect them to do actual investigative reporting rather than downloading the whole thing from teh Internets. Be that as it may, the person who writes the billboard headlines for the noxious scandalrag The Sun is clearly on some kind of mind-expanding drug lately. You can tell from the exclamation marks. Even fairly straightforward stories are wildly sensationalised:
FLAMES EAT CAPE FAMILY!

And yesterday's gem:
COW FLIES ON EVIL WIND!

I am completely unable to come up with a story which could possibly generate that headline, although I have a sneaking sense of happiness that I should live in a world in which it is possible.

I have a new wok. This makes me happy, but confused: why should it be that stir-fry cooked in a wok, although containing precisely the same ingredients I always use, tastes much better than stir-fry cooked in any other form of pan? (And by "much better", of course I mean "closer to the Platonic ideal that is stir-fry cooked by stv.")

(Somewhere in the mists of time is an extended joke that was wandering around a select portion of my social circle, entailing a punchline about happy herds of wok, grazing the grass. I am totally unable to remember either the origin or the context, although I associate it vaguely with bumpycat.)

Woks aside, yesterday I read Iain Banks's Dead Air, in an enormous extended gollup while not actually moving from the couch. (a) It's, as usual, very good, and (b) my butt hurts. The book has a fascinating protagonist: a flawed, hyperactive, exhibitionist and occasionally weak and nasty person who's also an idealist of extreme political integrity. The writing style, which is about two thirds fragmented dialogue, works brilliantly to convey the multiplicity and frequent fast-moving confusion of the contemporary world. There was also pleasing serendipity in reading it on the same day as Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which if you squint a bit turns out to have a curiously similar theme. Autism is not only a perfectly logical development in response to a world whose complexities are so extreme as to defy anything but the most superficial and momentary assimilation, it's a perfect metaphor for such a world.

A Smart Bitches link to a blog describing anti-gay shenanigans at an erotica convention hosted in Texas has sparked a random musing attack. What is it about homosexuality which makes it so utterly anathema to fundamentalist Christianity? It's not just a "thou shalt not", it's a deep-seated, frothing, disproportionate response which suggests that somewhere, something is being very profoundly threatened.

• I mean, yes, it's us/them othering, a defensive terror against a perceived threat to a particular lifestyle, but surely gay relationships aren't the worst threat to Christian family values? Heterosexual divorce strikes more deeply at those values, as do heterosexual relationships which eschew marriage, because they both partake of and reject the ideal. Reactions against gay marriage make more sense in this context, but it doesn't explain the more general fulminations against homosexuality as a whole.
• It's not just the "sex is only for procreation" thing, because that should apply equally to non-procreative heterosexual sex, and really it doesn't: a lot of fundamentalist rhetoric only really has a problem with hetero sex when it's convenient to invoke it as a means of controlling women. Uninhibited hetero male sex is frowned at, not frothed at, and in fact is often condoned. The anti-gay thing is on a wholly different level.
• It also isn't the direct biblical prohibition bit, either, those have always been completely selectively applied in fundamentalist rhetoric. (I know whereof I speak, here. Baptist teenagerhood).
• Frustrated patriarchalism? My sense is that fundamentalist rhetoric is more directed at gays than lesbians, which is all terribly Victorian (you don't have to worry about the women because they don't enjoy sex anyway), but which also suggests a kind of outrage that actual men should have moved over into Eve's camp of transgression instead of upholding male order.

I dunno. All of the above? still doesn't really explain the profound level of unease. I am at a loss. Also, very tired after the Thursday Vampire Tut and four days of sinus headache. Also, my jaw aches, my throat hurts, my stomach twinges. Woe. Send new body, this one defunct.

Random distraction: animated Bayeux Tapestry. Not just for you SCA geeks, this is beautifully done.

Bunny Threat Level: gah.