IVY-COVERED PROFESSORS, WITH IVY-COVERED…: Tell me your favorite novels set on college campuses? Read more

Cleared for this departure too. [clipped] –Celan Read more

OH HEY! Victor Morton, the Right-Wing Film Geek, was on a blog hiatus for quite a while. He’s back now!–or at least, he was in July, and I hope he’ll post more (instead of just Twittering!). But there are reviews of Up and a wide range of documentaries. Read more

UNLEASH THE POWER OF THE BLOG!: Hi y’all. I’m working on an article about how young adults are increasingly likely to call themselves pro-life, and increasingly likely to support gay marriage. There are a lot of narratives you could tell about how someone comes to hold either or both of these beliefs; I want to get some sense of which narratives people tell themselves. [ETA: Whoa, that phrasing is awful! “Which narratives people tell themselves” = how people explain, in... Read more

Unappeased,unattached, artless,what alters the universe came up slowlyraspingbehind me.–Paul Celan, “Heap of Seashells,” tr. Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin Read more

FAT LACES ON MY FEET WHEN CRACK FIRST HIT THE STREETS: Things I learned while surfing YouTube for the tv shows of my childhood, per this post about avant-garde cinema. Thing the first: The opening credits of Mysterious Cities of Gold actually made me want to Netflix the whole thing rather than run in fear. Second, through the wonders of YouTube, I next found Count Freaking Duckula!!!! …and thence to this selection of ’80s cartoon themesongs. I remember exactly one... Read more

WHO’LL STOP THE RAIN?: The second disc of “Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and ’30s” was bizarrely water-themed. It was also vastly less awesome than the first disc! Was this just me and my obsessions, or did the jesses really slacken on this disc? Anyway, there was one short movie so amazing that it was absolutely, three hundred percent, worth sitting through everything else on the disc. Skip to H2O if you want to know about the only awesome... Read more

Rob me, strip me,Virgin ruthless,Cleanse me of every love,Spare none. –“Little Seal-Skin,” Eliza Keary I dreamt about this poem last night (/this morning, as I’m mostly nocturnal). I would like to say that this was a classier dream than the one in which Blair and Serena switched bodies… but I fear it really wasn’t! Read more

AGAINST SAFEWORDS: I note that “safe, sane, and consensual” is an extraordinarily sincerist credo; its assumptions about our ability to know ourselves, and its assumption that self-knowledge and self-ownership form the core of morality, are basically my exact problems with the sincerist ideal. Not to mention that s/s/c = three things vocation isn’t. Read more

ANTI-IRONY CHARMS: Some rambling thoughts on “sincerism” and why it’s no fun. So a couple times here I’ve growled at sincerism, without ever telling you what it is! Which… is certainly not the sincerist way, so props for consistency, but I do think at some point I might explain myself. Here are some partial notes. Sincerism means–probably among other things–requiring a sincere, authentic, honest accounting of one’s thoughts and emotions. It opposes irony, misdirection, self-protection (which, to be fair, I... Read more