combing my hair

Hospitals

2008-06-26T07:26:00.002-04:00

Kathleen sits in one of the hard, blue chairs watching the man talking to two children about the layout of the waiting room as if they were adults. They watch him attentively as if he is their favorite cartoon. The kids, she thinks, can’t be more than four, possibly six, and their mother, who had been having trouble keeping them in their seats a moment ago, is nowhere to be found now.
The man explains how moving all of the chairs to the other side of the room would give people a more positive feeling when they enter. The children nod politely, not understanding. When he asks them if they practice feng shui, they stare blankly. Who leaves children unattended like this? She watches the man and suspects something more vile going on. Kathleen is an elementary school teacher and has heard the horror stories of kidnappings, child molesters, drug dealers. She begins taking mental notes of his physical characteristics – curly hair, tall, thin, unusually long arms.
The woman returns from what Kathleen thinks was the bathroom. Conner apologizes to her for taking her seat as he waves goodbye to the kids and walks to the water fountain. When he returns to the waiting area, he sits next to Kathleen, who has been scowling at the woman for being so careless.
“I overheard you talking to the children,” Kathleen says to him, hoping to insinuate that she was aware of his intentions.
A teacher had been arrested at her school a few years ago. She had never fully known what he had done, but rumors surfaced that it was sexual, that it had involved more than one child. It never made the news, which had made teachers angry that the school system seemed to have swept it under the media rug, and although it had never been confirmed that the teacher had been a child molester, Kathleen and others knew it to be true. In the teacher’s lounge, they now had a corkboard dedicated to those wanted for various crimes. Their sketched faces looked like they could be anyone. They could be anyone, Kathleen would think.
She stares at him and scowls. Conner turns his attention to this woman with chestnut brown hair next to him, who sits so straight in her chair as if she were waiting for a job interview.
“I love kids,” he says, “I hope to have some in the future,” a response that Kathleen had not expected. She lets her guard down and notices his not too hairy arms. Conner rubs his temples with his fingers and winces from the pain of the headache he has procured in the last twenty minutes.
She asks, “Headache?”
“No,” he says, “I’m psychic. I am reading your future.” He smiles a little and looks up at her. She tries not to smile at his sarcasm, and instead makes a small sound in between a laugh and a hiccup and then becomes embarrassed. He notices that her nose is crooked and long, an attribute that Conner thinks is the sexist thing he has ever seen.
She plays along with his joke. “If you're psychic then you could tell me if I’ll ever win a million dollars.”
“No,” he says, “but I could guess your name.”
“I’m game. Go for it.” She laughs.
Kathleen likes the possibility of seeing him again. This could be a sign, a test of some kind. If he could guess her name correctly, it could mean a connection of some sort that neither of them would have been aware of otherwise. She is surprised at how quickly he has become non-threatening, from murderer to friendly in only a few minutes. They stare into each other’s eyes and Conner explains he is absorbing her energy for the right answer when the loudspeaker announces that Kathleen is ready to be seen.
Conner is amazed at the timing, being saved by a loudspeaker system.
“Okay, you win,” she says.
Conner wants to proceed without seeming offensive. This has always been the hardest part for him – how to formulate the offer without sounding creepy or smug. He could simply ask her for a date, but it could seem forced and out of place, ending the chance of ever seeing the long, crooked nose again. There is an art to this that he has never perfected – something in between smooth like melted fudge and rough like a cock fight. The line that one walks at his point must be balanced on perfectly. He tilts his head to the side, forms a quizzical look on his face. “What do I win?”

Albanian Historical Gender Practices Fading

2008-06-25T14:42:00.004-04:00

My sweetie recently sent me a link to this article from the New York Times that outlines the disappearance of the "Pasha" in Albania. A pasha is a woman that becomes a sworn virgin and begins emulating the physical characteristics and social gender roles of a man in order to become the head of her household. They take on the historical male role physically and mentally, emulating their movements, shaving their long hair, and denying themselves of their own sexuality in order to be taken seriously in their metamorphosis by the rest of society.

The article explains this curious system much better than I can, but this is another example of gender roles governing our social constructions. After reading this article I initially believed that it was a medieval practice that, due to isolationism, had survived the evolution of thought concerning gender and sex over the years. And then I realized that this article was only a hyper example of the norm still found in even the most liberated countries like America. This might be because I spent last night watching the Tila Tequila pre-reunion (a blog-worthy subject in itself). In the Tila Tequila Reunion show, one can witness the conglomeration of every puerile piece of humanity that some pretend faded out when we developed opposable thumbs. In between the incessant cursing and gratuitous sexual fervor of a 7th grader, each member of the cast are these hyper-constructions of gender blazing on the television screen.
In a world closed off from society for so long, the pasha in Albania feel the need to look and act like men when taking on the traditional role of a man; This same practice of physically mirroring the gender norms of society is also seen within much of reality television.
This article does bring up several interesting questions to drink up with my coffee tonight:

1. Why, in even a liberal society that rejects many religious beliefs, do antiquated actions like gender emulation and sexual copycat-isms still happen so willingly. The fact that a young woman likes slugging beer and referring to women as pieces of meat like the most hyper masculine men do to only then state that she is very progressive in her thoughts on sexuality seems a bit of a paradox to me.

2. Why would women that socially "become" men in Albanian society also have to swear off sex, when traditionally, men are known throughout history for this basic instinct for procreation being one of the biggest motivating factors in every society?

Some pictures of two of the forty known pashas left in Albania

Eco-Porn

2008-06-23T01:05:00.004-04:00

Also known as "greenwashing," eco-pornography is defined as “a corporate advertisement that extols the company’s environmental record or policies" according to wordspy.com.

Eco-porn has become the compunctious hangover of the environmental movement's coming out party now that corporate America has found a new marketing scam to lure consumers into their stores

oil companies have taken eco-porn to a whole new level with the current demand to appear environmentally friendly even when the basis of their operations consist of literally reversing all natural processes. This picture from Exxon is the utopian visual image they present on their eco-porn section of their website:

Besides the lush peaches and angelic shine of refinery steel being merged into one, this image is followed by what I would call the centerfold of this corporation's eco-porn, and that is their protect tomorrow, today initiative which describes something resembling the green movement's own initiative. According to Exxon, they hope "to drive incidents with environmental impact to zero, and to operate in a manner that is not harmful to the environment."

But then the lexical problems begin, because long before "eco-porn" had been designated to represent the above contrived, quixotic marketing ploy, there was, and is, actual eco-pornography. The old epigram of "tree hugger" took a new turn a few years ago when websites like fuckforforest.com went up. There are several other organizations that use their sexuality and environmental convictions in a similiar way, but I think Fuck for Forest might have been the first.

The point is that there must be a distinction between the two for two reasons. First, the term eco-porn will fail to gain the cultural meaning it could if it remains so synonomous with the latter. And there is also the problem with the term itself. Eco-porn being a descriptive term for pornography produced using the Earth as setting, motivation, and sexual partner makes perfect sense, but the same term being used to describe the corporate ad that extols their environmental record simply doesn't make as much sense. "Ecopology" is a good lexical substitute, one that I came up with while pondering the ambiguous "eco-porn" term. Ecoporn fails to identify the relationship between the signifier and the signified, especially when most portmaneau words are born out of a clearly defined synthesis between two ideas.
Smoke and fog create smog, a very well-known portmanteau, but do ecology and pornography seem to be any basis for what ecoporn is describing?

Is this new term ecodiculous at all?

Today's Hair looks like a famous plant.

2008-03-28T15:16:00.001-04:00

Johnathan Viner's newest show via fecal face.

Facebook Can't Speak English

2008-03-28T13:26:00.005-04:00

We see it all of the time in society: Apostrophes running rampant, commas splicing sentences into useless fragments, and subject-verb agreement being thrown out of the door.
Well, Facebook has joined the long list of businesses that can't seem to hire a decent writer.

When you log into the social networking site, the first place you are taken is to what is called your "News Feed." This is where you are updated on friends of yours joining a group, changing their status, becoming friends with others, or sending invitations to invite you to do something fun with them.

Here's what my newsfeed said today concerning one of my friends:

Ian Holloway changed their profile picture.

If you don't see the problem, then I suppose we are all losing our language again. The correction would be his or her instead of their. Because the gentlemen mentioned in the above sentence is only one person, the plural word "their" makes absolutely no sense!

I have gathered a few other instances of bad grammar being found in society below for everyone:

Because my friend Ian was victim to this language atrocity, I beleive it is only right to have today's hair be a tribute to him.

New Books, Old Books

2008-03-27T11:08:00.003-04:00

I recently picked up The Book of Other People edited by Zadie Smith and it's becoming one of my favorites. Just published in January of 2008, it's a cornucopia of authors from what I can only call the 826 crowd. 826 being the address on Valencia street in San Francisco where the McSweeney's crowd first opened a writing workshop for youth. They have now sprung up all over America and the proceeds for this book will be going towards the 826 New York Chapter.
So the book started with only the instruction to "make somebody up" and write a story about him or her. Some authors were more non-traditional with stories about a pet or what you can only call a "thing," while others like Chris Ware create a realist comic strip story. The group of authors is wonderful :Dave Eggers, George Saunders, A.M. Holmes and Miranda July to name a few; you know... the cool crowd. There are other authors that are common names, but I had yet to explore for myself, like ZZ Packer, Toby Litt and Jonathan Lethem.
Oh, and as a bonus, Charles Burns does the cover art probably due to his recent affinities with The Believer.
I first fell in love with short fiction when I was in high school. I've always been wary of fiction novels because of the fear of investing time and money into a story that can leave you feeling as if you walked in a circle and come out of the experience the same. Short fiction is terse, but no so much. Longer than poetry and shorter than a novel, it becomes the perfect bowl, or bed, or chair in the Goldilock's house of literature. In short fiction, I believe the sentence structure and transitional aspects of story from paragraph to paragraph become amplified in importance and provide this magnifying lense on what makes literature so utterly beautiful.
As for old books, There are a mass amount that I think someone should take the time to meet again for the first time. On my mind this week is, of course, Faulkner. I began graduate school with no clear idea of what my thesis work would be. I knew it would have to cover short fiction in some way, but there were so many authors and aspects of their work to take pleasure in that a choice had to be made. I happened to take a Survey of American Lit class where we only read Faulkner. Comparative to now, I knew nothing about his work other than the required reading most of us faced back in high school or undergraduate American Lit classes. After reading 10 novels within a six month period, I was completely hooked. I have often hated the glorification of work to the point of worship, becuase when you finally see what all the hype is about most works just let you down. As for Faulkner, I do believe he is a literary genuis. His book, Go Down, Moses, which is either a book of short stories or a novel in short fiction chapter format (depending on which critic you are reading) is amazing and must be read if you haven't done so.
To summarize here would only butcher the tandem plots taking place within the novel, but I can say that I have never seen an author actually verbalize those feelings that we are unable to express due to the shackles of language. He does it almost perfectly over and over again using these 26 symbols we call an alphabet. It's worth a fucking explative.

So...there are two books worth seriously checking out; I mean, like, "underage abortion" seriously.

Today's hair is a bit non-traditional. Perhaps a pun is in order.

Real Mayo (squeezable)

2008-02-26T23:06:00.001-05:00

John Edwards, Medieval Feminist Lit Clit, Apple Corporate Hegemony, and 2008

2008-01-20T01:41:00.000-05:00

Quite a few developments in thought have been happening since the Christmas break has come to a close, a new year came into existence, and I, once again, had to lace up the ol' shoes, eat an egg, and begin research again towards my M.A. in English Lit.
I've decided it is much easier to use sub-headings after not posting in so long. Let's see how it works out:

The 2008 Presidential Election

Is it incredibly wrong of me to already feel completely over-saturated and gorged due to the talking heads on television ruining an election that has yet to take place? If anyone out there is thinking in their right minds and not completely interested in the downfall of America to the corporate whore sponsorship of our food, medicine and public schooling, then you are probably planning to vote for John Edwards.
The media has gotten together and played rock, paper, scissors with our democratic nominees and apparently Edwards lost. Debate after debate, Edwards is being ignored at an exponential rate. I found this video recently, which disturbed me for quite a few reasons.
First, It's becoming alarmingly clear that I will once again be voting for the lesser of two evils in this campaign, and second, Edwards has been the first candidate in a long time that has sworn off taking campaign contributions that will later affect the way in which he runs this country. Edwards eloquently points out that Clinton has taken more money from big business to fund her campaign than any other candidate, dem or rep, in history, but she was recently put into 2nd place by the one and only, Obama. Watch Obama struggle through his explanation here. He basically avoids the question by discussing a bill he proposed that would disclose monies taken from lobbyists, as if this would somehow revolutionize campaign financing in any way.

Apple

Being an ipod touch owner, I have found myself wasting a disgusting amount of time on it. This is the due to the fact that it is one of the best inventions I have ever owned in my life. Apple recently told ipod touch users that for a mere $20 they could have a few new apps like google earth and Apple Weather put onto their ipods. I couldn't beleive the price for this when I jailbroke my ipod the day I bought it and installs all of these for free. I have over 50 third party apps on my ipod ranging from Apple weather and iphysics to ebooks, playstation, istudy. I've even recently found an app that lets me access my computer's music library from anywhere with wifi or access other ipod touch music libraries to hear what they are listening to out there.
The ipod touch is truly brilliant and all of the applications are free and accessible from the internet. It's no longer a portable music player, I read books, watch movies, play chess, nintendo, and psx, while studying for the GRE on this thing.
I also found out that Apple has recently been charging 3 dollars per application to iphone users. These applications, and I will explain why this term makes no sense, range from ibeer to imilk. They produce a video in your ipod/iphone resembling a glass of liquid that you can then pretend to drink. Sounds fun! But they are not applications at all! To see the way they are being advertised, watch this. And to see why they are not applications at all, but merely pre-made videos that in no way respond to your movements, watch this.

Christine de Pisan

I recently read an excerpt from La Querelle de la Rose where one can see Pisan kicking the Lord Provost of Lisle's ass in respect to his opinions on the famous poem: Roman de la Rose. The literary debate began after Jean de Montreuil spoke of the Roman de la Rose as a masterpiece for men to understand and adhere to in becoming more gallant. The poem treats women as sexual objects and posits the view that women are naturally unable to be trusted or depended upon. For the 15th century, Christine, mind the pun, had some balls! This might be the earlist peice of feminist criticism out there. If there are any earlier, please reply.

I would write more, but tomorrow is another day. Today's hair is...you guessed it. A tribute to John Edwards.

Gay men give better haircuts

2007-12-10T20:04:00.001-05:00

faux literary criticism, a haircut, and a man who believes that a Christian god exists.
How Could I not post this?

Literary Analysis -- Hurston

2007-12-10T19:57:00.001-05:00

Six Degrees to John Edwards

2007-12-09T22:13:00.000-05:00

John Edwards has recently recruited Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins to join him on his campaign trail. This might be Edwards' attempt to use celebrity star power, similiar to the mighty "Oprackobama" that has recently taken liberals and soccer-moms by storm lately.
The complete story is here if anyone would like to read it.

Mentioned in the article above is Edwards' attempt to capitalize upon the famous "Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon" game, which cinephiles everywhere have been playing since Footloose popularized the hi-top, blinding white Reebok (circa 1980's foot bling).
I decided to play the game with the new political twist and below are my results:

1. I dated a woman named Sara who was a banquet coordinator at Pinehurst Country Club and Golf Course in Pinehurst, NC.
2. Sara met John Edwards (and according to her, his two spoiled brat kids who ran around trashing everything in sight) at a political function she had been the decorator for back in 2003.

TWO DEGREES!!!!

As for Kevin Bacon: Can anyone connect him to the guy that made the infamous "Chocolate Rain" video?

Today's Hair: Kevin Bacon with a Jack White (White Stripes) haircut.

Henry David "Thorough"

2007-12-08T03:43:00.000-05:00

My fiancee is taking an undergraduate English course on American Lit and was recently doing a presentation on "Walden." The Professor who teaches the class has been a mentor of mine for almost a decade; someone who I've looked up to and has always taken the time to give me the advice I needed.
I decided to visit her class and watch her presentation (because she is beautiful and because we often compete scholastically).
As I walked in the classroom, the professor told me to do an internet search for "conquered" on one of the in-class computers. He contintued to tell me that I might think it's pronounced con-QUERED (con-chord) but it is actually CON-quered (conkurd).
I had no idea what in the hell he was talkiing about.

I found out that while he was studying Thoreau at UNC-CH, he met a scholar attending a conference from Concord, MA and this man had been very blunt about the fact that Concord is pronounced conKURD and that Henry David Thoreau's last name was pronounced the exact same way that the word "thorough" is pronounced. He mentioned that Thoreau enjoyed his last name being pronounced similiarly to this adjective.
Although, my mentor prof admitted he had never seen this fact about Thoreau's name in print anywhere, the scholar he had spoken with so vehemently demanded the pronunciation that it was probably true.
Interesting. Can anyone verify?

Today's Hair: Nikki Giovanni with a 'fro

Scrabble dictionary needs revamping!

2007-12-08T02:14:00.000-05:00

After finishing a Scrabble game with my friends tonight, I began slowly boiling once again at the acceptable and unacceptable words found within the official Scrabble Dictionary.
For instance: "ZA" is an acceptable word because in the late 1980's a surfer with a cocaine nosedrip decided he was hungry and so shortened the word "pizza" to "Za."
While I (sardonically) respect the usage of the word, I am angered at how other words that are much more mainstream fail to meet the Scrabble dictionary criteria.
"taze" and "gat" have yet to be added just to name two off of the top of my head and both of these, "taze" in particular, have received a lot of media attention lately.
For a look at the infamous "Don't taze me, bro" incident, you can click the link.
I would agree more with the word "za" if other words that come from sub-culture jargon equally received attention in the Scrabble game. Hip-hop, which I am not a fan of, has given us "souf" and any number of words involving the letter z (realz, pleaz, nutz, skeezas, etc), which would make the game much more interesting. I wonder why a California-esque surfer word makes the cut and not one from an inner city sub-culture.
I sit on the descriptivist/prescriptivist fence. Language is a living thing and also very fun, which is why I find it amusing when people convert nouns to verbs, proper nouns become common (Q-tip), etc. On the other hand, incorrect grammar boils my blood for some reason.

French Kisses for Cinephiles

2007-12-06T23:32:00.000-05:00

French Kiss short movies

Feed a starving child by building your vocabulary? Or something more sinister?

2007-12-06T22:58:00.000-05:00

A University of Toronto Grad student named Mark Greenberg has started a Facebook application called "FREE RICE" which supports the United Nations World Food Program. It boasts that as you play the game, which consists of answering GRE/SAT related verbal questions, you will give 10 to 100 grains of rice to starving countries around the world with each correct answer. I haven't noticed any advertisements on the site, other than the google-made ads that come with his webspace. Could this application's invention solely be a conduit for advertising money? I despite the idea that something that comes off so pure to the Facebook user could be so vile, but it's happened before. Again, my suspicion is unwarranted at this point because I haven't had time to thoroughly look through the site.
My question is whether or not this is an adequate way to get young people involved in different socio-economic problems that our Earth faces? I sampled the game and you literally have an empty wooden bowl on the right of the screen that is filled with rice as you answer each verbal question correctly.
As of today it currently has 234 daily active users, and with an average playtime of about 15 minutes, this application would only give, roughly, 20 bags of rice to countries in need. My fear is that if advertising is involved in this application, then someone is making money off of a program that young people would naturally already support.
Besides the advertising, it's interesting to see how young college students can passively give to a cause by playing a game on their computer. There have been similiar passive campains such as the infamous AIDS awareness concert that U2 headlines that was found to only raise awareness but nothing else. I beleive that we are becoming too saturated with utopian causes to make the great impact we once could. At Fayetteville State University, the university where I attend graduate school, there are currently more users on this facebook application than those participating in "Democracy Matters," which is a non-partisan political club that raises awareness and actively participates in the political and social issues that students in N.C., and America in general, are affected by.
On a comical note, I wonder how many people have beaten themselves up over answering a question wrongly and seeing their wooden bowl stay as empty as it was before they began playing.
Any thoughts?