auto da fe

Mr Cameron will show two of the coffins at a news conference in New York on Monday.

"It doesn't get bigger than this," he said in a press release.

"We've done our homework; we've made the case; and now it's time for the debate to begin."

Local residents said they were pleased with the attention the tomb has drawn.

"It will mean our house prices will go up because Christians will want to live here," one woman said.

Children of Men
In addition to working on my PhD, i work in a restaurant. i've waited tables at the same restaurant off and on since high school. We offer the oxymoronic casual fine dining fare, and so it is not unusual to see the president of the university a few tables away from a homeless woman a few tables away from some sorority girls a few tables away from some punks. Therefore, i was not suprised to see 5 senior tenured professors from my department lingering in the lobby last night, waiting for take-out.
Heads bent to each other in agreement rather than secrecy, a professor i work with was thusly cooly dismissed:

"X always seemed a bit flaky to me. How is she?"

"X? Obviously anorexic, but alright."

The Departed
Dacus sent me a text message a few minutes ago that read: "At unveiling of Jesus tomb." i responded: "Please explain. Is this a video game?" Dacus works for a men's magazine, so this seemed a likely option. He responded: "No. The Real Thing. Google it." So i google. Yep. According to the BBC this morning, James Cameron, director of the Titanic and The Terminator, has made a documentary which argues that this is the "real" tomb of JC. i send back a text reporting my findings. Yes, he's here, Dacus replies. And some other guy just compared the resurrection to a Michael Jackson video and Jesus' family to the Kennedys.

Little Miss Sunshine
i had no intention of watching the Oscars last night, but the television was on at work, so i sat down to see how my tastes stacked up against those of the academy. i hated the Departed. Its lazy lazy misogny, its boring boring attempts at shocking twists, its needless convolutions stacked upon needless convolutions. The night Dacus and i saw it we had made plans to join up with two of his friends, a very recently married couple, after the movie for drinks. This would be my first time meeting them. They'd seen The Departed the week before and liked it. This initial disjunct settled the whole evening into a tone of boring mutual condescent.

Dreamgirls
From Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning":

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A Voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

threnody for the new

"One of our specialties - we've been building and selling these for over fifteen years and demand is still as strong as ever. Equally popular in corporate boardrooms and private houses, these are admirable artifacts in their own right, built to the highest standards.

The shape of each tree is determined by the trunk - we use natural vines up to 80 years old - and no two are alike.

The best way to display them is on a simple plain wood or lacquered table with a spotlight on them. Perfection!"




Britney Spears shaved her head. i couldn't get out of bed today and my phone made the sound it makes when i receive a text message. Heather had texted me that Britney spears has shaved her head. This is interesting and it's not. Add renunciation to the list of actions no longer possible. Blame reification.

i have an office that i go to almost every day. Sometimes my students drop by, but usually they don't. A professor up the hall from me seems to be in his office most of the time. His door is always open and he usually has a student asking him earnest questions in the chair facing his desk. He's brought a lamp in and doesn't use the overhead flourescent light. i think he has a small couch. His office looks to be 4 or 5 times longer than mine. He has a spider plant hanging over his desk. You can see its flowers from the hall - a fact that exposes this plant as an unnaturally healthy spider plant. My spider plant rarely blooms and when it does the flowers, after a day or two, turn into rubbery green root toes. The flowers aren't supposed to last, so his plant doesn't make any sense. After a month or so of passing by this freakish plant every day, i began wanting to stop and ask him how, without a speck of natural light, he manages to keep such a healthy plant. The other day, when i passed by as usual, it became glaringly obvious that the plant is not real. He has a fake house plant in his office. Of course, without light and with all of those flowers, it had to be fake. This matters and it doesn't.

In class we read J.L. Austin and we discuss the performative utterance. A performative utterance calls into being that which it names. Austin, who my students often mistakenly cite as Jane Austen in their papers, coined this term performative. i don't think i'm being hysterical to suggest that this term has made entire academic disciplines possible. Judith Butler has used this term to expose sex as a descriptive fallacy. i have to be able to explain why reification is a bad thing but dispelling the fantasy of nature is a good thing. A fun thing. i start wondering if reification maybe takes away some of the pressure. Right, that's exactly what it does. The problem is like this, though: it sucks to be the one who gets reified so that the other one can have pleasure. This is the African child Dacus and i argue about. This is called making connections. He doesn't like it sometimes when i do this. i don't like it when he doesn't like it when i do this. This matters but we mostly pretend that it doesn't.

Critique of Everyday Life

I haven't been cooking much lately. The oven's thermostat was broken when I moved in, and the new unit promised by the landlord in October never arrived. The temperature on the one I have now simply keeps rising, regardless of where I set the gauge. My solitary alchemic saucepan returns everything I give it in the flavor of geranium-scented dishsoap, so I've been heating soymilk for coffee in the wok. The 3-tier hanging fruit basket is now in the study, freeing up precious desk space. Notecards, tealights, and dictionaries replaced sprouted garlic, spotty bananas, and split-seamed tomatoes. The spider plant from the bedroom took the fruit basket's place in the kitchen. That room seems to have better morning light, and I've promised this one, with its expectant white blossoms, that it's not going to die. This morning, inspecting its tips and roots, I told it I wasn't sure how long its yoda-toes were supposed to grow, as if it were one of the cats.

The only sources of heat are the fireplace and a single space heater in the bedroom, unless you count the oven, which I don't--an unreasonable anti-nostalgia for the ramshackle apartments of my adolescence. My place is too old to have central, and it was 25 degrees last week, but it always made me feel homeless when my mom did it, so i wait for the fire. Most nights and some mornings, I build a fire. I began with the fake wood from Publix, but as it's gotten colder, I've moved on to crumpled newspaper, small batons of plywood, pine fat lighter, and chunky oak logs from Ward's. The logs are always slightly damp, since we've not only been having cold weather, but tornado warnings, too.

A week ago I began re-organizing the books. The plan was to remove every book from the floor, which required three new bookshelves. This process produced room-eating piles: poetry, pre-war fiction, post-war fiction, biography, memoir, something I suppose could be listed as popular culture, Japanese textbooks, Japanese dictionaries and grammar manuals, Japanese fiction and poetry in translation, textbooks for the teacher of American literature, waves of theory. The rugs are clean. The couch is in a new place. The television my brother gave me six months ago is, against my better judgement, off the ground and on a shelf. I plugged it in the other day for the first time and discovered I have cable. The litter boxes are undetectable and I've laundered all of my blankets.

i threw out the pair of brown suede moccasin boots in the trunk of my car that had practically sprouted a new pair of shoes. I bought a carpety sage green coozie for the toilet seat. It looks ridiculous, but it's not as bad as the puffy plastic that's got so many tears it's starting to give me junkie-ass. I've driven out to the Waldo fleamarket one Sunday a month for the past year. i never found the little table for the kitchen window I thought I needed, so I'm eating breakfast off the ironing board that folds out of the wall. If I ever actually use it for ironing, my shirts will betray this tumbledown breakfasting with coffee creases and pleats.

Dylan's Self Portrait. Bowie's Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Joanna Newsom. Kafka. Jameson. Housekeeping.

A letter from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (Writing the History and Monitoring the Future of Generation X) found me a few days ago. I was randomly selected as a sixth grader to participate in their yearly surveys before my generation had a name. When I was in the sixth grade I lived almost exactly a mile south of where I live today. I rode my bike to school every day, which is something I still do. The letter says, "The purpose of this follow-up study is to examine how your years of schooling influenced your choice of a career and how satisfied you are with the way that things are going."