"In the sweet mojave rain!"

Of all the contemporary Christmas songs I've heard, this is in my top 3, and the video is great fun. Merry Christmas from The Killers.

Finnish Licorice Pipe Guy: Eyes Only

A friend of mine is married to a Finnish gal and they speak Finnish at home. Why does this matter? Because he often passes along gems of Finnish youtube-culture, like this!



"Hey Ma, order me a case-a-them licorice pipes so I can fnd licorice pipe nirvana like this young Finn."

Terrence Malick's - Tree of Life

Elegía por Ciudad Juarez

Last Year at [.....................]

 "Sin embargo, de un momento en otro, en esta pesada noche de verano,

 los pajonales de la colina se han cubierto de gente que baila, que pasea

y que se baña en la pileta, como veraneantes instalados desde hace tiempo

en los Teques o en Marienbad."

-Bioy Casares, La invención de Morel

Borges wrote that "To classify [La invención de Morel] as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole." (7).  If anything will finally reveal one's poverty of thought, that they are merely an impostor among impostors, it will be any attempt to write about the perfect novel.  There was a critic that believed he had happened upon an original idea, one that had not yet been weighed down by volumes of criticism or, worse yet, a few books of that ugly beast we call "critical theory".  Still, he wasn't surprised to discover that two South American's (one, Chilean, the other, a pompous Uruguayan) had prefigured what he once thought to be "his ideas."  Their bibliography is an exact copy of the sacred combination of texts he'd hurriedly penned nine days ago in the University of Texas library.  How strange that someone else had read Ecographies of Television and thought to include it in a study on Bioy Casares's masterwork.  Returning to the novel he'd attempted to understand, hoping to salvage his work, the young critic read on page 52, "Di un paso: por arcadas de piedra, en ocho direcciones vi repetirse, como en espejos, ocho veces la misma cámara...".  Then, according to the librarian's report, he stood up and walked out of the library, repeating these words again and again, "los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres."

Broken Bells - The Ghost Inside OFFICIAL VIDEO (Protein Exclusive) from Protein® on Vimeo.

"[A]nd their numbers were great, even numberless as the sand upon the sea shore." -Moses 1:28

I've always dreamed of going to space. I think it would be incredible to float in darkness and gaze at the earth and distant stars in the complete silence of the vacuum of space. This is probably as close as I'll get. Check out this article for more great images.

The Imaginary MIT

Last night I dreamt that I was riding the red line "T" across the  Longfellow Bridge from Cambridge Mass. toward Boston.  After the train crosses the bridge over the Charles River it goes underground where I used to switch to the green line train which emerges on Commonwealth Ave in front of Boston University. In my dream the red line "T" suddenly became the green line and when it went above ground, in the place where Boston University usually was, somehow I was in front of MIT. It was snowing and I was wearing a warm coat, I wasn't terribly cold, but I felt lost and had the feeling that I'd missed my stop. I started wandering through the campus, which wasn't really the MIT campus at all, but a very very utopic, futuristic, version of MIT. A female professor then offered to show me around, but after taking me a few feet into the campus she told me to stop and look at the students on campus, then she asked me to look back at where we'd come from, "That is where you belong,"  she said, pointing away from the school, "the campus is not for you, you shouldn't be here." I looked at the students in front of me, I noticed how happy there were, it was gently snowing, they were singing. Then I woke up.

En las orillas del pacífico

I wish I could give you the Pacific and all that its name implies.

"El mar sus millares de olas, mece divino..." -Gabriela Mistral

"I am going to be a college professor."

My friend James Krause posted this on facebook, I had to share it with you, dear readers.

Sound Advice from K.G.

Shaunie and I watched the Rangers give the Yanks a sound spanking tonight (CLAAAAAW!). After the game, Craig Sager from TBS had a little piece and I decided to google some of his suits in order to show Shaunie how terrible they are. In the process, I found this funny blog: http://craigsagerssuits.tumblr.com/, from which I posted the following video:

The Magical World of Orson Welles

It's here...

It still needs a bit of tweaking and I'm getting fit on Friday but oh man, this bike is a dream. Saturday can't come soon enough.

...live...

Counting Sheep

This is the post wherein I complain about grad school and all its problems. Mostly, the fact that we are not being trained to do what it is we are supposed to do when we finish out PhD (if we finish out PhD). You've heard it from me before so I'll say one other thing and you can fill in the blanks. I think my quality of life has decreased every year that I've been in grad school, the passion is fading and I find myself less and less happy at the university. Not just this university, any university.

Dos poemas de José Emilio Pacheco

Memoria

No tomes muy en serio
lo que te dice la memoria.

A lo mejor no hubo esa tarde.
Quizá todo fue autoengaño.
La gran pasión
sólo existió en tu deseo.

Quién te dice que no te está contando ficciones
para alargar la prórroga del fin
y sugerir que todo esto
tuvo al menos algún sentido.

Alta traición

No amo mi Patria. Su fulgor abstracto
es inasible.
Pero (aunque suene mal) daría la vida
por diez lugares suyos, cierta gente,
puertos, bosques de pinos, fortalezas,
una ciudad deshecha, gris, monstruosa,
varias figuras de su historia,
montañas
(y tres o cuatro ríos).

The Way Home

As I opened my copy of Kafka's complete short stories, I realized that, though I am quite fond of the text, it had been quite some time since I last read from the book, a half year perhaps.  Turning the pages with no specific intent, I happened upon a gem called "The Way Home."  It seemed familiar to me, I'm sure I'd read it before. Yet, for a reason I ignore, the feeling of the story was unique this time around. I read it a second then a third time.  Upon completing my final reading a troublesome thought occurred to me, "I don't know that this story (what is a short story?) could be accurately described as Kafkaesque." Faced with this apparent paradox I wasted away the afternoon planning a trip that I will never take, to visit the world's oldest libraries.

    See what a persuasive force the air has after a thunderstorm! My merits become evident and
overpower me, though I don't put up any resistance, I grant you.
    I stride along and my tempo is the tempo of all my side of the street, of the whole street, of the whole quarter. Mine is the responsibility, and rightly so, for all the raps on doors or on the flat of a table, for all toasts drunk, for lovers in their beds, in the scaffolding of new buildings, pressed to each other against the house walls in dark alleys, or on the divans of a brothel.
    I weigh my past against my future, but find both of them admirable, cannot give either the
preference, and find nothing to grumble at save the injustice of providence that has so clearly
favored me.
    Only as I come into my room I feel a little meditative, without having met anything on the stairs worth meditating about. It doesn't help me much to open the window wide and hear music still playing in a garden.


-Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
Franz Fafka. The Complete Short Stories. New York: Shocken, 1971. 387.

Surfing

I was mindlessly flipping through the channels when I caught the tail end of this cool video/song. I hope you like it.

From the Archives: An Ever So Recently Unfinished Post

This post, previously titled "The OED: Stuff You Didn't Know Before," was mostly written in early April. I'm not sure why I finished it, but it seemed interesting enough to finish it today.

The first editor of the OED, Sir James Murray, circa 1880 in his "Scriptorium"

While preparing for my Brazilian Audio and Visual Culture class I looked up the word "anthropophagy" in the OED. In the definition I saw the following labels: (Cycl. Supp. s.v.). I went to the Guide to OED entries in order to figure out what they meant and I came across this interesting tid-bit:

"5. Erroneous, spurious, or ghost words

Occasionally ‘ghost’ words find their way into print and into dictionaries. Typically these are the result of misreadings of manuscripts or of typographical errors by printers. The Dictionary includes a number of these, labeled as ‘spurious’ entries, when the words have been used incorrectly in former editions of texts or have otherwise achieved some spurious existence."

Niiice! I'll have to think about this one more after I sleep, there is some potential to the notion of a ghost word. Tomorrow I am presenting on the chapter "Myth, Melopeia, and Mimesis: Black Orpheus, Orfeu, and Internationalization in Brazilian Pop Music" from this book. As the chapter title indicates, it examines the central role that the music from Vinicius de Moraes's Orpheus play and the subsequent film adaptations had in globalization Brazilian pop music.  So I thought it was rather serendipitous that one of the quotations in the OED that demonstrates the usage of the word "anthropophagy" reads, "1753 CHAMBERS Cycl. Supp. s.v., The Greek writers represent Anthropophagy as universal before Orpheus." How cool is that?! It seems as if there is some strange intertextual play between the the word, anthropophagy, the many incarnations of the Orpheus myth in 20th century Brazil, and Oswalde de Andrade's 1928 "Manifeste Anthropophage." Or maybe I'm just tired and it's much more random than it appears, probably the latter.

Things I Remember Close to 5AM While Chatting With an Old Friend

More on Nostalgia

I finally got around to purchasing a copy of Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins.  This is a desert island book and I plan to carry it with me whenever I travel.  Today, before I began writing, I read "Nostalgia" and I wanted to share with you, dear reader, in case you  are unfamiliar with the gentle poetry of Billy Collins.


Nostalgia


Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess. 

"A Passage That I Remembered After Discussing Lacan with Jesús" or "How to Be a Film Theorist"

The following is an excerpt from one of my favorite books on film criticism/theory, The Material Ghost: Film and its Medium by Gilberto Pérez.  The author sort of follows in the iconoclastic tradition of another well known movie critic, Guillermo Caín (Carbrera Infante's pseudonym), while moving beyond that tradition and forging some ideas of his own.  Pérez like Caín, writes clearly and explains his points well.  However, unlike Caín, Pérez is a theorist of sorts, and, therefore, delves deeper into film analysis than Caín ever did. Enjoy this pedazo:

By the way, The Material Ghost has an awesome looking book cover and the greenish/whitish parts (the title, the author's name and the skeleton) GLOW IN THE DARK!

In case you were wondering what footnote 33-34 say, not 33 is a credit to someone for pointing that fact out to Pérez. Note 34 is below.

Accordion Dreams

Please enjoy the beauty of the accordion as you listen to Ben Gibbard and Daniel Handler playing "Why I Cry."



Bonus video: Julieta Venegas

Sheeple or "Don't let your education get in the way of your learning."

I was reading some of the press on Mike Wilson's up-coming novel, Zombie, and he used this xkcd comic to illustrate a point about the characters in his book.  It reminded me of first year grad students who, after reading the following (a list comprising about half the readings for a Visual Studies course I'm requires to take) think that they have just taken the red pill and woken up from the "slavery of modernity" or something along those lines.  That attitude is tiresome.  Lately I've been thinking that rather than the enlightened one of Plato's allegory, we are more akin the slaves staring at shadows on the wall.


Michel Foucault, "Panopticism," in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: 
     Vintage Books, 1979), 195-228 [notes 316-17].
Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in
     Psychoanalytic Experience," in Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977),
     1-7.
Karl Marx, "The German Ideology: Part I" [selections], in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C.
     Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 149-65, 172-74.
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations (New
     York: Shocken Books, 1969), 217-51.
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other
     Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127-86.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader: Philosophy and
     Painting (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 121-60 [notes 388-91].
Judith Butler, "Critically Queer," in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York:
     Routledge, 1993), 223-42 [notes 281-84].
Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "Introduction: Rhizome," in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
     Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3-25 [notes 518-21].

In case you were wondering whether or not literary criticism is still relevant..

Whitley - More Than Life

This sounds like a bad Elliot Smith, but I like it.

From: Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America by Paul Grainge

Click on the pages to see them full size/read them

"What is man, that thou art mindful of him?"

"They all come and go like ghosts.  Faces, names, smiles...the funny things they said, or the sad things, the poignant ones."

The Twilight Zone (1/2 hr) - The Changing Of The Guard

Me and the Boy

Here we see, the American Boy in his natural habitat.  Learning the ins and outs of baseball with video game controller in his hand.  Note the look of pure joy on his face as he begins his initiation into manhood.  I love being a Dad.  The girls went through this too, just thought I'd throw that out there since there's been rumors going around that I'm a closet misogynist...and yes it is just a coincidence that Jillian is back there playing with the vacuum.  Heck, I vacuum more than anyone but the kids love to use the hose to suck up errant Cherios® or Sun Maid Raisins® (Ingredients: Grapes and Sun) that meet their doom on the way to the cavern that is Gordon's belly.

Juan Garrido Saves the Day

So I was struggling with a paper topic for my colonial class.  Two possible projects had been shot down by the profe and I was thinking, "Dang."  This morning I needed to poop, a not too uncommon occurrence (academic speak!).  Being one who rarely takes a grizz without something to nourish my synapses, I took Colonial Latin America. Mark A. Burkholder & Lyman L. Johnson eds. 5th ed. with me to the john.  On page 69 I read the heading "Black Participation in the Age of Conquest" and thought to myself, "Que guay," no, I didn't really think that, but I wanted to throw that in there.  So I read about Juan Garrido, a free black man that was with Cortés in México but who also participated in the conquests of Cuba and Puerto Rico.  I then did a google book search for Garrido in Cartas de Relación and Díaz del Castillo's book as well, no mention of Garrido.  So I'm on to something cool here.  A recent article I found talks about how the rather well known presence of free blacks and slaves in the conquest is fading (mostly tha part about free blacks).  So I'm going to do the ghost thing again and talk about how, although the Archive of the Indies does contain documents about Garrido (A letter he wrote to the king), many of the chronicles that are read, published and republished today fail to mention any presence or participation of free blacks.  Good stuff I think.  The Colonial era is hard for me because it's so much about history and documents, but I have to write about it in a more literary style.  Interestingly enough, my papers as of late have taken a historical turn.  That has to do more with the topics I choose than anything.  Still, I think that the inclusion of historical context is important and can't be left behind.  The formalists can eat it!

Microcuento

Parado ante los eternos hexágonos y el sin fin de libros, el joven bibliotecario se rindió.  Hundido en la atmósfera, esperó que la Biblioteca de Babel tuviera cimientos.

My Best Unamuno

Not only was Miguel de Unamuno a wicked awesome Spanish philosopher, he also knew how to pose well for pictures.  Check it out:

He always looks so cool, purposefully looking away form the camera.  I dig it.  So here's me, at the Getty Villa today, doing my best "Unamuno."  Not even close...maybe when I've aged some.

I want to go camping...

...so today I set up my new (purchased last fall in a closeout sale) tent to see how big it really is.  It's pretty dang big (nowhati'msayin'?).  Gift certificates plus a great sale equals a tent large enough for the family at a price that's easy on the stomach.

17x10 feet.  There's also a rain flap that goes on top but it is HUGE and I didn't want to bother to put it on.

I'm not sure what the little doggy door is for, other than doggys.

It has two little walls that we can put up, I don't think they are very well insulated though, sound probably goes right through.

This was taken while laying right against the wall thingy in the photo above, so without the walls up, it's pretty dang cavernous.

It even comes with a doormat. No reason to get all uncivilized just because we won't be showerin'.

A Day in the Park

UCI has a cool, circular campus, and at the center sits Aldrich Park.  I've seen early film footage and pictures of the campus before the trees grew much at all.  It looked like a rolling grass hill with distant buildings surrounding it.  Today the trees are much larger and the buildings hand behind layers of branches and leaves.  I enjoy sitting on the edge of the park at a certain bench and listening to the wind in the trees while I pretend to read.  Today I took some photos instead of pretending to read.

Dance Dance Revolución

¿The Ethics of Misspelling?

I miss the HBLL quite a bit, but I saw this and thought to myself, "Come on man!" Apparently Rulfo's title character has a French cousin.

The Etymological Imaginary

Photo: Julius Shulman

California:

"Name of an imaginary realm in "Las sergas de Esplandián" ("Exploits of Espladán"), a romance by Sp. writer Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo, published in 1510, which was said to have been influential among Sp. explorers of the New World and may have led them to misidentify Baja California as this land and mistake it for an island. Where Montalvo got the name and what it means, if anything, is a mystery. Californian is attested from 1785. The element Californium (1950) was named in reference to University of California, where it was discovered." - (http://www.etymonline.com)

Don Quijote de Orson Welles

"Wait Sir, don't let the devil deceive you, it's only a Vespa" - Sancho Panza

The Color of Yerba Mate

I really liked the color, that's all.

A Revelation of Sorts

My good friend and former colleague Matt Hill once said to me, "I don't have anything to say, why am I going to start a blog?"  I'm glad to say that a few years on, he has changed his mind.  Matt has a writing style that is fun to read (even when it's serious) and makes fine use of an expansive vocabulary while remaining accessible to even the non-academic reader (that's me).  Over at his blog, A Monkey for All Seasons, he just published a three part meditation on Porcus Sanctus, or for those of you that don't speak fake Latin, The Holy Pig.  In his powerful triplicity on pork, you find, among other anecdotes, one of my favorite stories, that of the "All Pork Christmas."  If you enjoy what you read, leave a comment, what with the economy and all, we don't see much of those around these parts anymore...saludos Mateo!!!

Guaransheed No More

Here's an interesting article from Bill Simmons about Rasheed Wallace. Simmons breaks down Sheed's stats, in an article that must have been a labor of love, he truly believes that Wallace is damaging the Celtics. I remember when I heard about the Sheed going to Boston I thought to myself, "Championship." But I was remembering the Rasheed of the Larry Brown days. If you read the article, you'll learn why that Rasheed Wallace was an über-sheed-mensch compared to the man you see on the court now. Of course, I loved the caption of this picture...it's true you know...