Q: Et tu, Jonathan? A: Read. Read some more. Buy Red Bull.
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| The Patient Etherized Q: Et tu, Jonathan? A: Read. Read some more. Buy Red Bull. |
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Friday, October 31, 2003 Interesting, very very interesting I used gendergenie to test the gender of my blog, and I entered every word I've written since I started this thing (about 35000 words -- holy shit I have too much free time). Apparently I write about 15% more "masculine" keywords than feminine keywords. Here are the results: Female Score: 60577 Male Score: 68112 Since I'm not sure about how the hell this algorithm works (nature.com has an explanation), I think it's still a good way to keep track of the words you use most frequently. Apparently I use "but" and "so" a lot (both feminine words), as well as "this" (209 instances -- masculine word). posted by Jon | 4:01:00 AM Conclusion: College only made me marginally stupider So I couldn't blog yesterday because Blogger was doing its retarded "You have half a cm of space to work with and haha you also can't see any of the important buttons!" So I said "F all y'all" to Blogger and went to bed, where I proceeded to sleep soundly for 12 straight hours. So yesterday was a very good day, as Ice Cube would sing. Well I don't have an AK, so I had to make due with seeing a movie and eating after the GREs. I woke up about five times before finally waking up at 10am. I did all the little things I don't do normally, like make sure I'm fed. Then I got this email, subject heading: "KUDOS: Jonathan Schroeder." It turned out that I won a prize for my thesis (another prize, woohoo!). I couldn't get that excited because I still had my GREs. After leaving ridiculously early for the Burlington Sq. building (near Sim Lim) I realized it was about five minutes away by taxi. I wandered inside the dingy shopping tower for a while, trying to distinguish between 175C, 175B, and 175A (the building I wanted). Eventually I found it and rode the elevator up to the seventh floor, a nondescript area of office space. There I went into the "Thomson ProMetric" testing center (sounds like a weight gain supplement more than an education testing center) where I proceeded to see nobody. However after saying "hello" and ringing the bell a few times, someone came out. She asked me if I wanted to take the test then and there, early, but I was worried my brain wouldn't function so I said I'd wait a few minutes. After filling out the necessary forms I had the great experience of watching TOEFL students trying to explain themselves in English. This snooty Indian woman came out and spoke with a stuck-up British accent to one small girl whose boyfriend/friend/husband was waiting for her: "He can't wait here for you. It's agains the rules," to which the girl said "Exxxcoossee mee, I don't understand." You can imagine the fun I had watching the nice non-English speaking girl and the snooty woman talk. Then I went into take the test, about twenty minutes early at 12:40. The center is set up like some sort of prison -- you have to pass through a surveillance room where you empty out your pockets and put your bag in a locker. They don't even allow you to use mechanical pencils or anything of your own. I then was ushered over to a computer where they gave me earplugs. Now I thought that they would give me those little tiny things you stick in your ears, not the huge headphone-looking-things that people in construction wear. But no, the construction worker supply company won out; it was even hideous and orange like construction workers are wont to wear. I felt like a cross between Holden Caulfield and Notorious B.I.G. (both had orange lumberjack caps), except not as angsty and not as dead (R.I.P. Biggie -- haha ok I'm being silly -- much respect). The two essay topics weren't terrible. The first one was the 45 minute "perspective section." I got fairly lucky and had a literature related option to choose. Basically the topic was to argue whether factual accounts or fictional accounts (novels, TV, film, faerie tales, etc.) are better at representing reality. Woohoo a chance for me to mention poststructuralism and deconstruction. You know I was on that like butter on toast, from the Mississippi down to the East Coast (condos in Queens, endo for weeks, sold out seats...just to hear Biggie Smalls speak...ahem). Plus I've found that reading Arts & Letters Daily helps my general knowledge for these essay topics. I was able to reference an article by Terry Eagleton about realism for my introduction. Hopefully it wasn't too bullshitty an essay, though I won't know for a few weeks. The second essay was an analysis piece. Boring so I will spare both of us by skipping the details. Basically just about whether a city should build a highway or not. BORING! NEXT! Breaktime, so my brain said. Thankfully enough, the computer said so too and I had a ten minute break. I had all my evil thoughts about possible ways to cheat as I surveyed the interior stall of one of the toilets. Hmm, where could I stash vocab words or math shit. Despite liking my evil thoughts, I know that it's not a test you can really cheat for per se, because how the hell can you cheat in the middle of a timed section unless you have some complicated way to hack into the computer or do other stuff like that? Then I thought I completely failed my math section, as I guessed (educatedly but a guess is pretty much a guess) on a bunch of math problems. My verbal section started off miserably enough too as I got far behind the pacing (1 question per minute) and I had to rush to finish the last 10 problems or so (of course I rushed too quickly and had 2 minutes to spare). Then I was supposed to have an experimental section that I wasn't supposed to know was experimental -- i.e. I would have to suffer through another math or verbal section. I was lucky enough to get only one verbal section because I would have had to waste a lot more concentration on two. However, for some reason the instructions to the section said "THIS SECTION WILL NOT BE SCORED. Follow the directions and learn how to use the calculator provided on the screen." So I got minorly confused, then did one question before deciding to quit the damn math section in order to see my scores. I wasn't going to help ETS just out of the goodness of my heart, not unless they decide in the future to charge me less than $150 per test I take with them. $150 f&%*ing dollars is a ripoff, particularly considering they've probably more than paid for the development of the software (the startup cost) and now don't have to pay anyone to grade the sections on the test. Convinced that I had just wasted said $150 though, I went to look at my scores. [PROCEED] I clicked, [ARE YOU SURE YOU DON'T WANT TO CANCEL?], I clicked, [YOU KNOW YOU DID REALLY SHITTY, YOU SURE?], I clicked... and there they were Verbal: 740, Percentile: 99 Math: 700, Percentile: (I forget, but not very high -- like 80) Woohoo!!!!! Hallelujah!!!! Praise the Lord!!! Those are the kinds of things I was thinking as I entered a state of shock, in which I: 1. Ran outside, kissed the woman in charge (no not the snooty one), and danced through the halls, asked the hot woman to hold the door for me, then rode down with her. (Ok fine I didn't kiss the woman but I should have) 2. Walked from Sim Lim all the way back to Centrepoint... in the rain. (This walk was not as long as the one I took the other day, from Taka to the National Library) 3. SMSed people I knew and tried to come down from the adrenaline high of the test, though I wasn't really able to until the next day -- oh wait today. Consider this the expurgation of my hyperactivity. 4. Vowed to not do work for the next few days, to enjoy my weekend and have fun without worrying about anything. I think this was a far harder test than the SATs (which I did better on by nearly 100 points) so I think this was definitely the bigger accomplishment. Conclusion: One big hurdle out of the way toward having a career. Conclusion 2: I'm only stupider at math than I was in high school, not verbal. I guess that makes sense since I took zero math classes during high school. However the math on the GRE is also harder than the SAT Is so I'm happy once again. As for the other prize, the Jonathan B. Rintels prize, I did a little googling and came up with this answer. I wonder if this is the same Rintels because if it is, that would be quite a coincidence (this from a Harvard obituary page of some sort: JONATHAN B. RINTELS, LL.B. '30, died March 6 in Singapore. An army veteran, he served from 1945 to 1951 as a judge in the American Military Government in Germany. Later he worked as an attorney in the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C., and as director of mobilization readiness in the Business and Defense Services Administration. He was a lifelong lover of poetry and a senior life master in the game of bridge. He leaves his wife, Dorothy (Marks), a daughter, Constance Schnoll, and three sons, David '59, Jonathan, and Peter. posted by Jon | 3:10:00 AM It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel tired. This is funny even if the dumbass who did it called the Japanese flag the Chinese flag. Click Click Click!!! posted by Jon | 2:05:00 AM Tuesday, October 28, 2003 "The percentage of post-copulatory cannibalisms were certainly nothing out of the ordinary," she said. Haha. And with that I better sleep. posted by Jon | 4:25:00 PM Monday, October 27, 2003 A joke that I've apparently been missing out on: Did you hear how high the grass has grown on Little's lawn this summer? Yes, he hadn't been able to use his mower. He didn't know how to pull the starter. Anyway, so I was pulling my new Monkey shirt out of its plastic wrapping and I spread it out on the kitchen counter to look at it. The usage tag is army camouflage colored, which I thought was interesting, so I went in for a closer look to see how it should be washed, where it's from, etc. It says: MADE IN HEAVEN and gives no location. Haha, sooo clever. posted by Jon | 4:47:00 PM Bought two books at Borders today: 1. Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. I was sort of excited (ok as excited as these things can make me) that Stanford University Press had released a new version because the old version from Continuum was A) old and B) covered with this hideous blaring orange design. Damn modernism -- I want a pretty cover. I've read the Culture Industry chapter before, but I'd like to have the time to actually read the whole thing. 2. Pragmatism: A Reader edited by Louis Menand. Since this is supposedly "America's" philosophy, I figured I'd read something about it. Plus because pragmatism rejects foolish ideas, I'm hoping that it doesn't read like Derrida's moaning cat. posted by Jon | 1:45:00 PM Another thing the world was desperately missing: a Curious George thong. I personally am eyeing the Curious George Good Meal T-Shirt. What does George like to do at the end of a long day? A good meal, a good pipe, and good sleep. Saw Kill Bill again today and I noticed how the movie is driven by music -- not much play between non-diegetic (heard only by the audience) and diegetic (heard by the audience and the characters in the movie) film sound though. If you concentrate on things like movie sounds you notice that switching back and forth causes the audience to titter a bit -- it happened a few times in Once Upon a Time in Mexico for example. (Ahem, Jon will no longer be excessively didactic and full of shit.) UPDATE! UPDATE! For the first 22 years of my life I had been but a lonely soul. I had not been found and I had felt a giant void somewhere in my lifeless corpse. I was clearly missing something. But what was it? And where might I find such a calling? But then, without looking for it, I discovered it, tucked away in a corner shop in Far East Plaza. 04-121A was the innocuous number adorning the narrow shop, and little did I know what lay in store for me. I felt like Tom Hanks' character in Big when he found the strange fortune telling machine. But my talisman did not lie in the confines of a carnival; no, far from it, mine lay amongst the Ah Bengs and Ah Lians that frequent the plaza that is known as Far and East. Yes, it was adorning a manequin (no, not the kind with obscenely large nipples and other bulging parts). It was a t-Shirt. No, not just a t-shirt. It was what I had been missing. A Monkey t-shirt. Not a Bathing Ape or Slurping Ape, which I hate, but an honest-to-goodness cute monkey. Almost as cute as Curious George... I have started my calling... to collect strange looking monkeys and wear them proudly across my chest. Hey, one could do worse than be a swinger like the monkeys. posted by Jon | 11:02:00 AM Sunday, October 26, 2003 Tips for stocking your nascent bar. 
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Clearly what's been missing in my life: A list of the 15 richest fictional characters, courtesy of Forbes Magazine! posted by Jon | 3:28:00 PM Sitting on my desk is a business card from a "Senior Public Diplomacy Advisor" from the Bureau of Nonproliferation. It must be a tough diplomatic assignment to convince other countries to stop building weapons or give up their weapons while also maintaining that it is permissable for the U.S. to keep its NBCs. Incidentally, the head of the program, John Stern Wolf, is a Dartmouth '70. Also, the guy that I met who works for the Bureau turned out to be one of the nicest people I've met, government official or otherwise. posted by Jon | 2:52:00 PM The Marlins can go suck it. Ahem, at least they did their job and won the World Series. I'm not sure where this recent obscenity kick has come from, but I'm riding it like the maelstrom that is my toilet flushing -- straight down the ol' John Crapper, as it were. My pinky has a hangnail on it and every time I hit the [Shift] key I irritate it. Hopefully no more capital letters for me for a while... posted by Jon | 2:11:00 PM UPDATE! UPDATE! unfortunately one of the nectarines I bought the other day was rotten, so it infected the other nectarines and a mean old putrefying process went down and I was displeased. And the Lord said unto me: "Don't buy the white flesh nectarines from Cold Storage!" posted by Jon | 4:02:00 AM Saturday, October 25, 2003 Pryor convictions, or Where's my damn sammich?  Quote of the day (from a Richard Pryor album): "People don't talk about nothin' real, like you talk about shit like jackin' off. A lot of people didn't jack off. I did! I used to jack off so much I knew pussy couldn't be as good as my hand." More Pryor on masturbating: "A lot of people never masturbated, especially girls right." Female voice: "Oh no no, I never ever touch myself. That vibrator is for my back." On black preachers: "Black preachers know God personally. They go, 'You know I first met God in 1929, outside of a little hotel in Baltimore. I was walking down the street eatin' a tuna fish sammich." Pryor: That's right, 1929 you'd eat anything you could get. 'And I heard this voice call unto me and the voice had power and majesty and the voice said 'Psst.' And I walked up to the voice and I said 'What?!' and the voice got magnificent and holy and resounded, and the voice said 'Give me somma that sammich.' And ever since that day I've been able to heal cuz I didn't get up off da sammich. I said 'If you're God make yo own damn sammich. I ain't messed with you -- don't mess with me. It's rough out here God.'" P.S. I finally figured out who sang that song "Can't take my eyes off of you," that has been repopularized by that very green Carlsberg commercial -- it's by Frankie Valli, though there have been countless covers. Downloading a cover by the Manic Street Preachers now. P.P.S. Friday night was fun -- went to a birthday party, got to play GT3 with someone other than myself, had wine. Probably more on the weekend later, when I'm bored from studying, which as of yet has not begun. Tonight we saw Marcel Marceau, which was pretty cool though I felt like I'm visually retarded since I couldn't always figure out what he was pantomiming. posted by Jon | 2:17:00 PM Friday, October 24, 2003 P.S. Nectarines are yummy. posted by Jon | 5:46:00 AM So I was registering for the GREs just now (taking them October 30th at 1pm) and I noticed this, right above the entry for Singapore: TO REGISTER: REGION 7 - MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA CALL: 31-320-239-530 (Thomson Prometric) FAX: 31-320-239-531 DAMMAM (MEN) TEST CENTER NUMBER: 8722 TESTS OFFERED: GMAT, GRE, TOEFL PERMANENT CENTER DAMMAM (WOMEN) TEST CENTER NUMBER: 8742 TESTS OFFERED: GMAT, GRE, TOEFL PERMANENT CENTER Separate testing centers for women and men? That's retarded, but hey, that's my opinion. posted by Jon | 5:45:00 AM Thursday, October 23, 2003 Huge and Overdue, like a gestating elephant I should give a long overdue summary of my "media escort" adventure on Tuesday. I'm trying to put up pictures of the fairly cool White House press badges I got [link], but I'll have to content myself with an Ofoto account for now. I was sort of dreading the day so I actually dreamed of not going. As it turned out, my dreaming of not going caused me to oversleep my alarm, and when I got a phone call at 1:57pm, I was royally fucked (it began at 2pm at the Regent Hotel). As I ran to get dressed, look presentable (no easy feat, it being me), get my passport and everything else necessary, I managed to leave in record time -- out the door in 15 minutes. I took a cab to the hotel, getting there at 2:25. As I was in the cab I received four phone calls from three different people, two to ask nicely where I was, and one from an Embassy person in Taiwan to scold me pretty severely. Me, trying to assume the persona of Smuggus Bastardus, responded by calling my elder her first name. "Judith? It is Judith, right? I'll be there in a few minutes." It's funny how some people can seem so mean to you at one moment and so nice when you get to know them. Well that's what happened with in this case of this very nice lady. Of course I was at fault, but we'll just glance a different way as I (yes, me, I'm in charge of the story) go on my merry way. We drove in one of those 13 seater vans to the Air Force Base in Paya Lebar. It's a pretty intimidating structure, rife with soldiers carrying machine guns and driving around in military jeeps. There we proceeded to wait for nearly two hours, during which the following happened: 1. Nancy, Aruna, and Preethi got lost within the base after being escorted to the bathroom. They ended up in a debriefing room for Marines or something like that. 2. "The Colonel," an American army err... colonel I suppose, went around the base and inspected the positions of all the vans for the press, during which time a constant stream of American (this guy didn't speak English) came out of his mouth: CP-2 covered. Check. No I said CP-2 not CP-1. Recon needs to step it up. Do a better job goshdarnit. Fall back to plan 2 if anything goes wrong. I felt like I was in fucking Full Metal Jacket, though at least Gomer Pyle wasn't in sight. I done Kubrick proud, son. 3. The press arrived in this 747, which taxi-ed within 50 yards of the buses where we were waiting. I noticed a few things about the press, particularly that there are many fat print reporters, most notably this guy, Mark Knoller from CBS News, and there are a lot of incredibly ripped guys who are usually photographers (I guess they have to carry their equipment around somehow -- or maybe make up for lack of "equipment" ahhhh such wit, such verve, such panache -- would that you could be me). We then went en masse in a five bus convoy to the hotel, where Nancy, Aruna, Preethi and I proceeded to... do very very little. I gave advice to a reporter from The Washington Times about where to buy computers on the ride back, but after that I did almost nil. I checked my email. Twice. I stole sodas from the Press Filing Center. Three times. I got to watch a press briefing session and see reporters from the Tribune, Post, and Financial Times pester a White House correspondent who was still in Bangkok at the APEC meeting. There was one photographer who was selling T-shirts of a caricatured George Bush waving a cowboy hat and riding a horse. I wish to God I had bought the shirts, if not for their present appeal, then at least for future camp value. But alas, after much hemming and hawing and saying I'd buy them later, I couldn't find the man. The highlight of the day was the incredible buffet at the restaurant in the hotel, Capers. I haven't eaten that well in a long long time. Not just smoked salmon, or the peking duck salad, or the char siew smoked garoupa (eh didn't know such a thing existed until then), or the scalloped potatoes, or the mutton korma, it was definitely the endive salad I was most appreciative for. I think endives are perhaps the last thing I'd expect getting in Singapore and they're a favorite food that my dad used to make, along with leeks one of my favorite weird vegetables. Oh, maybe the point of my going on this trip is not evident yet. You see, we were supposed to serve as bus escorts and give tours to people who wanted to take the guided bus tours around Singapore while they were stopping over for 15 hours while the President was in Shangri-La and Istana. Well, out of the 140 or so media members, one person wanted to go. The guy was nice -- had an interesting job as Bush's videographer -- though he seemed a bit tired and perhaps harrassed by the two bored Fulbrighters who talked incessantly for the journey. We drove in the van to Little India, Chijmes, Raffles Hotel, Boat and Clarke Quay and then back again, only stopping for a little while near Bugis to buy some fruit. Coming back was fairly funny, as Nancy hadn't moved in the 40 minutes we'd been gone. She was in the same seat, almost the same pose and posture, though this time reading something. We got to sit around for another 45 minutes and then left around 11pm. Conclusions about the day, some redundant, some dumb, others just plain [insert opinion here]: 1. Reporters are pushy. Example A: Knoller, with about five bags held up by various parts of his ample frame, was waiting for someone to get out of the aisle. Noticing that the person wasn't aware of him, he yelled loudly: "You're blocking the aisle. Get out of the way!" 2. I don't want to be a journalist, especially a TV journalist. The Filing Center looked like a thousand monkeys typing away at a thousand typewriters, except these monkeys had a penchant for tousled appearances and sweaty brows. Hmm, wait, most monkeys appear like that. I'll be damned...they were monkeys! Don't believe what you read next time in the New York Times. It could be by your favorite ape! posted by Jon | 3:48:00 PM Either/Or Elliott Smith died. That really sucks, even if it was about as predictable as Kurt Cobain when you think about it. Expect more obituaries to be written tomorrow. [more] [more] [more] Obit #1 [here] posted by Jon | 5:34:00 AM Monday, October 20, 2003  Exhibitionist The ULTIMATE personality test brought to you by Quizilla Damn retarded quiz. La la la la. I'm not going to see Bush in the end. Will most likely see many many stupid journalists (and tell them how to get prostitutes or something, if the embassy person's half-assed joke is to be believed). posted by Jon | 5:05:00 PM Sunday, October 19, 2003 I fell into a burning ring of fire, I went down, down, down, and the flames they grew higher -- Johnny Cash, "Ring of Fire" Was going to go see Kill Bill again today, but the paper lied to us. It lied I say! What, you say that the newspaper never lies? Well it said right there and then: 11:30PM, Shaw Cineplex, Bugis. But when we arrived, the theater was dark and the security guard claimed it was a misprint. So I'll just have to wait til a bit longer. I'm going to get a photo pass tomorrow at the American Embassy so that I can be a media escort for President Bush's visit to Singapore on Tuesday. It would be pretty cool to get to meet Bush, but I don't know if it'll happen. I'll update if I anything happens of course. [-o-] posted by Jon | 1:07:00 PM Saturday, October 18, 2003  OVER BLACK We hear labored breathing. BLACK FRAME QUOTE APPEARS: "Revenge is a dish best served cold" - Old Klingon Proverb - QUOTE FADES OUT WE STAY ON BLACK ...breathing continues... Then a MAN'S VOICE talks over the breathing; MAN'S VOICE (O.S.) Do you find me sadistic? [More of the SCRIPT HERE] And so begins Kill Bill, the best movie I've seen in a long time (I've seen a lot of bad movies lately, but this movie is easily best I've seen in a year or two): We Zoom quick out of her eyes to CU, a VENGEANCE THEME PLAYS LOUD ON THE SOUNDTRACK. (Whenever we hear this theme throughout the picture, we'll quickly learn what accompanies it is The Bride goin Krakatoa all over whoever's ass happens to be in front of her at that moment.)  For the largest collection of images of Kill Bill on the net, look [here]. If you want to see a movie purely for aesthetic purposes, this is the one to see. Not heavy on dialogue, it's more the visuals and the action that takes precedence. There's a really cool anime sequence (lots of homage to Japanese movies, especially kung fu and anime movies), some Spaghetti Western stuff thrown in, and really good music too. Typical alien, schmaltzy Tarantino songs taken from the early '70s plus the great dramatic ballads of the '60s westerns. Because it is such a visual movie, however, the actual "attractiveness" of the actors and actresses sort of loses importance. Uma Thurman does look older than in Pulp Fiction, but that's immaterial to this movie, contrary to what some people seem to think. "EVERYTHING TARANTINO" is a pretty good blog about, well, you get the idea. posted by Jon | 7:07:00 PM "Daniel Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and Amy Parker, one of his students, found that attractive professors consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching. The findings, they say, raise serious questions about the use of student evaluations as a valid measure of teaching quality." No shit sherlock. Next they're going to tell us that fat people are perceived as less attractive than skinny people. posted by Jon | 8:51:00 AM Friday, October 17, 2003 Exorcising the demons, or, Woe in Mudville Life is good. Wait, no it's not. I suffered an epileptic fit, had a heart attack, had an elephant shit on me, got lit on fire by Siegfriend & Roy, swam in a pit of 'pedes, got struck by lightning, was the object of affection at a Turkish prison circle jerk, got a new asshole torn in place of my heart, ate shit and liked it, got reamed by the U.S.S. New York, fell into the sewer system and got eaten by 32,059 flesh-eating rats and one crocodile, and ate a burger at BK. Just kidding, I would never eat a burger at BK. FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK [Best when viewed in a screen size that can adequately say I'M FUCKING PISSED OFF, preferably on a screen the size of JUPITER] An acrostic, composed on the occasion: For Unsung Craplicking Kuntshitfuckassbitchmotherfuckerpeniswhacker lossofcreativitymustalwaysswearatyouyoufuckingYankeesfansteam playersIhopeyoudieinhellandthenIdanceoveryourgraveformandcontent breakdownshtknmn@#9bbu3bsn,sx You Old Undulating sack of shit. I've never come so close to crying over a single baseball game in my whole life. I definitely would have cried if I had been watching at home. As it was I didn't want to scare the crap out of anyone in the house and I didn't want to break furniture. I didn't even want to write about the issue, but since I'm not exactly rolling in the money, I'm performing my own therapy, locked in my dark hovel with only one light on after curling up in bed to die for seven hours of sleep after the game. The Game. Let it be known that on the eighth day, God punished the Red Sox, and on the 3,509,309th day, he decided that for one small boy, Jon, it would start to rain torrentially just as the pieces of the Red Sox victory began to unravel. As the clouds choked the sun from the world, my heart shriveled up into a small ball, though unlike the rain, no moisture or sympathy can ever be coaxed out of the storm clouds that hover above me now. Oh, that's not true. I might break down into spontaneous tears every few days. My sickness came back to me, this time not in the form of the simple congestion, fevers, and sore throat, but in the mottled spots of disease that are ending any innocence that once existed in my heart. Needless to say, the Bronte-esque metaphysical landscape did nothing to cure my stress during the crucial innings of the game. Of course, my prediction that we had a 95% chance of losing after the eighth wasn't brilliant, but it did make me more resigned to life. More venting: JSchroed03 (10:01:59 PM): I feel like taking my dick and slapping every New Yorker in the face JSchroed03 (10:02:07 PM): then urinating on them and dancing on their scalps JSchroed03 (10:03:48 PM): thwack JSchroed03 (10:03:51 PM): Ouch my eye! JSchroed03 (10:03:53 PM): Thwack JSchroed03 (10:03:56 PM): oh my forehead JSchroed03 (10:04:45 PM): Pssssss JSchroed03 (10:04:48 PM): It burns! JSchroed03 (10:04:50 PM): It burns! Ok enough scatological satisfaction. Back onto the sorrow train. Next stop, Malaise, pop. 3,000,000. posted by Jon | 10:13:00 AM Thursday, October 16, 2003 Yay I'm feeling better... posted by Jon | 10:29:00 AM Tuesday, October 14, 2003 Elizabethan poetry through the strains of Instant Messenger: JSchroed03 (3:12:21 AM): On Gut JSchroed03 (3:12:27 AM): By Ben Jonson JSchroed03 (3:12:33 AM): Gut eats all day and lechers all the night; JSchroed03 (3:12:40 AM): So all his meat he tasteth over twice; JSchroed03 (3:12:46 AM): And, striving so to double his delight, JSchroed03 (3:12:53 AM): He makes himself a thoroughfare of vice. JSchroed03 (3:13:00 AM): Thus in his belly can he change a sin: JSchroed03 (3:13:06 AM): Lust it comes out, that gluttony went in. posted by Jon | 3:17:00 PM This is a work in progress, but I'd rather post it now than have it sitting around unfinished, sort of like the email I still haven't finished about grad school applications. Shit, I better finish that soon actually. While hallucinating slightly before going to bed last night, I came up with this theory (and since it's a literary theory, I think that hallucinations are probably the right way to think up of these crazy things). I was thinking about the experience of reading a poem by an author that's dead. It can be any poem, but I was thinking specifically about reading the numerous groups of love poems such as Shakespeare's sonnets to the dark-eyed lady, Wordsworth's Lucy poems, or Herrick's poems to Julia -- if you want you can jump on the escalator to even older poems, all the way to Catullus' poems to Lesbia or Sappho's poetry. Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis. soles occidere et redire possunt: nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, 5 nox est perpetua una dormienda. da mi basia+* mille, deinde* centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum, deinde usque* altera mille, deinde centum, dein, cum milia multa fecerimus, 10 conturbabimus* illa, ne sciamus*, aut ne quis malus invidere* possit, cum tantum* sciat esse basiorum. Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and let us total up all the rumors of the old men as the price of one penny. The sun can set and rise again: for us, when our brief light sets finally, 5 night is one perpetual sleeping. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then right on another thousand, then a hundred, then, when we have made many thousands, 10 we will mix them all up, lest we know or anyone casts an evil eye on us when he knows how many times we've kissed. -- Catullus, Carmina 5 When I read a poem like this one I simultaneously have two experiences: one is the so-called universalizing experience in which a reader responds to the poem by connecting its content to his or her own life in the contemporary world. The other exerience is the imaginative or historical one, in which the reader tries to imagine the historical setting of the poem, who such a character as Lesbia or as Catullus' persona in the poem might be. A conflict exists between the historical and universalizing experiences, and I was trying to work out the dialectic last night before I was going to sleep. I thought it was an interesting idea because I'd never really heard people talk about these experiences, though they reflect much more about what we do when we approach a poem. My suspicion is that the less we know about an historical situation, the more we have to read these poems in a universalizing light, or at least the less we can imagine the character that Shakespeare is representing getting it on with his female (or male) companion. Historical distance also seems to collapse the distance between author and authorial persona. When I read a line like "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" I think immediately of the picture of Shakespeare in the first folio:  and I picture a character like this speaking, a character like this acting out the words and actions described in the poem.
It makes sense to say that the older a poem is, the less likely one is know a significant amount about the historical setting of the poem. We then rely more on signals and imagery from popular culture to form our images of what we're reading. For Shakespeare, we think of engravings such as this one, or of movies like Shakespeare in Love or the other 86 TV, video, and movie productions of Shakespeare (my favorite and the weirdest one being "The Goddess Bunny channels Shakespeare" -- here's what's written about the Goddess Bunny: THE GODDESS BUNNY: THE ONLY TRULY GLAMOROUS STAR LEFT IN HOLLYWOOD. Also, the only transsexual/ex-quadriplegic/ex-hooker/drag queen, period). However, when one pulls in these imagery a process analogous to orientalism occurs -- knowing less about the actual culture and more about the devised images of the culture or historical period, the difference between the universal and the historical breaks down. You almost have to associate the poem with the author who is writing in a time you don't know very much about. Sure, you may know the history of the era, but that history is generally political or economic, not a social and cultural history, particularly not an individual biography of the person. Especially when the life of an author is shadowy, as it is with most writers before Shakespeare, it's hard to make a biographical reconstruction of the situation that may have led to the writing of the poem. And of course some theorists would say it's not even worth making that biographical assumption about the poem. But even as the New Critics sought to treat the artwork as an aesthetic object and ignore the issues of the author or the reader (to avoid committing the "affective fallacy" as Wimsatt and Beardsley famously put it), we instinctively make these conclusions when we read a work. posted by Jon | 12:00:00 AM Monday, October 13, 2003 Primate news, thanks to Jackie. posted by Jon | 3:07:00 PM Note to self: going out to many dirty, dingy bars over a three day period will inevitably lead to sickness, especially when you're in a new country where you haven't encountered the germs yet. Which is to say, I feel like ass. posted by Jon | 6:45:00 AM Sunday, October 12, 2003 Thoughts on Trance Listening to: Dagda -- Celtic Trance, or what Enya might sound like if she shut the hell up a little bit more and made good music. (Sidenote: Aruna says it sounds like day-spa music. On second thought, maybe it does. Oh well, it's good enough for now.) I think it's a little bit contradictory to make trance with an historical bent, since trance seems to be all about the here and now experience, but if I just stop analyzing things (something that trance urges you to do) I start to like Dagda a lot. On Saturday night I went to Phuture at Zouk which was fun enough though the music was a bit too experimental for my taste. Phuture, the hiphop club, was playing the whole breaks and beats type of music which never has caught my ear. So we went to the main part of the club and listened to some DJ from Detroit playing trance music. I think that trance as a form is losing some of its appeal for me. I guess all avant-garde forms of music eventually lose any revolutionary charge after they become identifiable and commercialized. Because forms like rap and techno and trance once started out as counterculture forms and now have moved into recognizable market niches. Just being able to recognize a DJ Tiesto set or your favorite trance track makes you much more likely to want to buy the item. So in that respect, maybe trance always only held an illusory appeal for me -- maybe it was just its seeming resistance to recognition that I liked. It will never achieve the mass appeal of pop music because it doesn't have words for the most part -- in that respect its actually closest to jazz or classical music, strangely enough -- but it certainly can lose its shroud of mystery. If trance only relies on the new and the present, it isn't really a postmodern form in some respects. It is certainly a wholly synthetic one, which is something that is only now possible due to its reliance on technology and electricity. But it doesn't pastiche old forms in the same way that hip-hop does (though I don't think hip-hop "pastiches" in the sense that it creates nothing new -- I actually think that the new forms, like Busta Rhymes' "Got Ya All in Check" remake of the Sugarhill Gang's song with similar lyrics, are interesting reworkings. There also seems a danger to trance and raves that it might just devolve into an empty hedonistic world for people who want to live apart from the world for a brief moment. It is likely that bans will be placed on these kinds of events if they become too popular or drug/pleasure-addled. --end of submission-- Quote of the day: "At a restaurant, the woman behind the counter let out a shriek because Escalona was going to drink the vinaigrette, thinking it was some sort of fruit juice: 'You're drinking the salad dressing!' Aracataca had arrived in Stockholm!" -- From an An Oral Biography of Gabriel García Márquez by Silvana Paternostro, excerpt in The Paris Review Apparently Bill Clinton's favorite book is The Sound and the Fury. Who knew? posted by Jon | 8:42:00 AM Saturday, October 11, 2003 Ah it's a Saturday, I woke up at 2:30. Here's a picture of me (and the hair color is about right too!): 
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3:29:00 AM
Friday, October 10, 2003 Damn I must be bored -- I just got all my hair chopped off and now it's dyed. Holy crap. posted by Jon | 10:48:00 AM Thursday, October 09, 2003 It's late, I'm blogging, the world thunders... or Tell me how to get into GRAD SCHOOL, 'cher! -- a work in progress Hi Professor Rza, Just wanted to say hi from Singapore. I actually just ran across your article in boundary 2 from a few years back so I thought I'd email you to see how things are going. I also have a few questions as I'm gearing up to apply to graduate school. I hope they're not too long or time-consuming, but I ended up expanding my thoughts a lot as I wrote. I've been trying to look at my list of grad schools (Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, UC-Irvine, Duke, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, sort of in that order) and make a list of professors I can work with, but I'm running into a few problems. So I just was wondering if you might have a few minutes to give a bit of advice. Basically I'm having trouble with creating some sort of coherent way of showing the areas I'm interested in. I *want* to study American or international contemporary literature, but I think that my American lit courses are a bit too diverse: two courses with you -- non-fiction, and the Dylan course -- as well as modern American Drama with Prof. Pease. My thesis was, despite being on Singaporean literature, essentially about the things I'm interested in right now in terms of contemporary literature: living in the city, the effects of capitalism on how we as city dwellers interact with the world, globalization's effects on people, a phenomenology of space and urban structures. The problem I've encountered is that very few academics I've found list this second idea -- globalization, diaspora or immigration literature -- as their interests. It may be one of the things that interests me a lot but it's still hard to find out who to contact. I'm also, as a result of these courses, a little leery about applying to graduate programs and saying I'm interested straight-up in postmodern American fiction or poetry, because while I've read some of those works privately, I didn't take much of those kinds of courses in college. In an ideal world, I'd like to maintain the interests that I came upon during my thesis but focus on the period of American literature from right after the Civil War until the beginning of the Cold War or so. Of course that period is very popular now among grad students, but what I'd really like to study is sort of the vernacular culture that occurs in the blurring between African-American and rural folk culture. This topic is more popular among African-American studies professors (I think that Robert Stepto writes about this area) but I think it could be expanded to cover a broader swathe of American culture. I'm also interested in 18th century British literature literature (stemming from a course and independent study/pres. scholarship with Prof Cosgrove and a romantic poets course with Prof. Heffernan) and this fits more closely into my major in Classics where I read a lot of Latin literature. To be continued... posted by Jon | 3:30:00 PM Wednesday, October 08, 2003 I'm beginning the long trek toward applications for graduate school. One email, one spread sheet done, a few applications started online. That's about all for now. posted by Jon | 6:44:00 AM Monday, October 06, 2003 I think for me there is a correlation between staying awake ridiculously late and blogging a lot. As you might have guessed, I've been sleeping at a normal time the last two days. posted by Jon | 8:31:00 PM Saturday, October 04, 2003 Maybe I should start blogging about real life soon, but until my 7am bedtime habit is kicked, here's what I think about at this time of the day: If Arnold can like Hitler, then "say hello to my little friend," Donte Hall After last Sunday's Chiefs-Ravens game, Donte Hall ran a kickoff back to win the game 17-10, thereby setting an NFL record with three kickoff return TDs in three consecutive weeks. Apparently after the game, as covered by Wednesday's USA Today, Hall was seen walking around the locker room Sunday with a Scarface poster. When asked why, Hall responded, "I love Scarface. He started out with nothing and worked his way to the top ... early in my career, things looked like they looked for him. I want to end up like him." Doesn't this sound eerily familiar to Arnold's 1975 quote, except even more damning? I like Bill Simmons' comments about this the best: (Um, Dante? You might want to skip the part where you try to snort a mountain of cocaine, shoot your best friend, get your sister killed, then get shot 248 times before falling headfirst into a water fountain. Try to skip that part. Just keep breaking those kicks and running like the wind.) Of course, he is only admiring a fictional character, not Hitler, but isn't it a bit disturbing that Hall has chosen Tony Montana as a figure to idolize? Also, I don't know if this is speculation, but Pacino's character has been popular for at least a decade amongst a lot of African-Americans. You can see Tupac doing a Scarface impression in the documentary Biggie and Tupac. If admiring a mobster-figure is implicitly condoned by certain members of the community, and it seems to be, then somehow these associations need to be changed (I guess, in order to make a broader point, I'll ignore the fact that Hall essentially forgot a lot of the plot). I also hope it doesn't sound too disingenuous for me to talk about these issues. I suppose the admiration for figures such as Tony Montana and characters from The Sopranos makes sense if you're from the inner city where the only road to success can seem to be through one-shot, make-it-or-not pipe dreams like sports and music. The documentary Hoop Dreams made the point best when it suggested that a better avenue for success would be for underprivileged, primarily black, children to pursue education, to gain discipline through studying, but unfortunately these changes have not happened. This example is anecdotal, but a friend of mine who worked in an inner city school for several years was repeatedly given death threats when she tried to tell her students not to come to class high. Besides these one-in-a-million chances, the other road seems to be through crime, an avenue that allows one to slip through the cracks of legality and dominant society and somehow emerge at the top. At least as it's perceived, many people in the inner city feel that they can't get ahead in the world through regular means, and there are certainly some signs that would reconfirm these stereotypes. Ironically, the chance to be a criminal kingpin as portrayed in the movies is also about as infinitesimally small as becoming the next Allen Iverson or Jay-Z. While I don't agree with anything that John McWhorter says, especially about rap music, I think that he raises one important point in this article: that the music has unfortunately continued to glorify the connection between "rap and the rap sheet," as he put it, quoting a (more knowledgeable) music critic. So how can anyone rectify this situation, in which the nation, or at least one community within it, breaks down into an anarchic mass of a very small number of over- and a very large number of underprivileged individuals? This is a breakdown of democracy. posted by Jon | 6:41:00 PM Friday, October 03, 2003 Mm, just finished a pint of Ben & Jerry's. The cool thing about Singapore B&J's is that the distributor's sticker is on the top: Imported by: UNILEVER SINGAPORE PTE LTD 320 JLN BOON LAY SINGAPORE 619525 TEL: 6265 0866 No more imagination about whether or not they're owned by a huge multinational corporation -- Singapore definitely gives us the head's up on that question. Ironic point: Unilever owns both SlimFast and Ben & Jerry's. Went out to Alleybar tonight, for the second time, and realized that it's not quite as good as my first impression had it. The drinks are a bit watered down, but the music remained awesome. Before going out we saw Turn Left, Turn Right, a Hong Kong romantic comedy (set in Taipei) that did not become hideously hackneyed until the last scene (nope I won't give it away for all you who are so desperate to see the movie :-). It was okay -- sappy and I liked it, dammit, but I'm not going to admit that too much. posted by Jon | 3:41:00 PM Sometimes, this is how I feel: 
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Thursday, October 02, 2003 I need to sleep at better hours. I'm about to collapse into a pile of my own filth. Also, I wish the Red Sox weren't playing between 4-7 in the morning for me. It's really going to fuck me over for later. And we're already losing 5-1 :( Posted something long and hopefully coherent to dartobserver today. I've been on a sports/politic bent, which really isn't helping my reading and GRE-prep work. I also looked for the Princeton Review guide to the GRE literature test today but couldn't find it. I know I own the book but I can't have it sent here so I had to buy the whole thing again. The book costs 12 bucks and the shipping is 17. Woe, I say, woe. posted by Jon | 6:10:00 PM |
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