1. Had my first job interview in two months earlier this evening (20 min phone interview with four people on the other end). I am still speedy from it, and I'm increasingly recalling how nervous I was. Verily, I talked too much and too quickly. But I also made them laugh, so uh yeah. Next step for human resources in the digital age (or maybe they do this already in Cupertino): first round interviews via videocall.

2. Also got (and spent) my refund today. New external hard drive for data backup, haircut, pair of pants, shirt, and sundries I've been going without.

3a. Lostylostlost: This blog has some pics of the premiere in HI with the cast/crew (the blogger was an extra in LA X Pt II). Kinda sweet. Jeff Fahey seems far less butch than Frank Lapidus.

3b. I know nothing about backgammon, so much of this very involved bit of meta regarding Team Jacob/Team Esau means not quite as much to me as it might to you, dear reader. I played Pente in college, an ex was a Go player, and a kid for whom I was a nanny when I was 17 taught me mancala (which I have since forgotten), but otherwise I must shrug and solicit your feedback.

3c.This, which you'll likely have seen if you had as little to do today as I had, observes that Island Jack is the saddest bastard of them all, "like Job with vodka," and also has a fair paean to Terry O'Quinn in his ALL YOUR JACOBS ARE BELONG TO US aspect.

3c and a half. ( It wouldn't be eljay without some picspam )

POLITICS: I was surprised at how engrossing Obama's back and forth with the Republican caucus was. You'll have seen it, I'm hoping. I'm so dissociated from daily life these days that watching people try to work things out IRL (as opposed to long form television drama) becomes this kind of achey-breaky anxious activity. I had to get up and wash some dishes while it was playing. What struck me was just the patience with which he fielded all those greedy and blustery and mean questions: there was a hint of a move beyond or under or over or to the side of the ever-present state of automatic and panicky ideological conflict I'm seeing everywhere. I don't know what to think about it, but it's something along the lines of: whatever, strongbad, just pass the damn health care bill! I want to be able to talk to my mom about politics again! Judith Butler's comments on "uncritical exuberance" (way back on 5 Nov 2008) continue to be relevant:

...politics is less about the person and the impossible and beautiful promise he represents than it is about the concrete changes in policy that might begin, over time, and with difficulty, bring about conditions of greater justice.

Let's gitterdone, as it were. (Apparently they had a deal done before #MAfail. A deal that disappeared. WTF.)

MEDIA: I just discovered The Prophecy (1995), a corny, ridiculously condescending and earnest religious thriller in which the Angels are Vampires (Anne Rice-y Vampires no less), starring Christopher Walken, Viggo Mortensen, and Amanda Friggin Plummer. The gist: "The angel Gabriel comes to Earth to collect a soul which will end the stalemated war in Heaven, and only a former priest and a little girl can stop him." The little girl (and her whole subplot) I found to be kinda offensive, in the way Mormons are offensive in their wild fetishizing enthusiasm for Native American and Jewish culture. But if you stuck to the bad guys, what a delight! I can't believe haven't heard of it until now.

Ein Engel geht vorbei! Angels here are avian and ancient and bloodthirsty, which is so entertaining, in a scenery chewing kind of way. I kept wondering how Philip Pullman might regard this film.

Gabriel torching his fallen minion, wearing a puffy shirt. Highly recommended.

ETA: I also had no idea the film has a string of backbirth sequels and lame pretenders following behind, the most recent of which is Legion (a film I heartily wish had been well executed - how cool would that be done right??). *is ashamed of her enthusiasm*

TOMORROW IS GROUNDHOG DAY: Still no permanent gainful employment. I have a phone interview Weds for a job that pays half what I've been getting doing part-time accounting, and I'm lucky to get it. I'm in debt to everyone I know.

NICKED FROM GERRY CANAVAN: The pills are working. (I am trying to kick my hotlinking habit, so click and scroll to the end, you'll thank me.)

1. More on John From Cincinatti, the very weird Spinozist mystery play set among surfers. I said elsewhere that it got too insular too fast and its dialogic ambitions collapsed under that density. I would add that I resent its premise that good things happening to people must be have supernatural causes. If Deadwood was allegory for how it felt to live under Bush, it was an entirely man-made evil causing the misery. I wish the sense of the man-made good of which the characters were capable were stronger, and I think the whole narrative arc would have to be restructured in order to do that. John's corporate logo is a pretty entertaining Marxist pun, but the Christian LOGOS ultimately chews the scenery to bits and then the characters are just standing around amid the debris, being all allegorical. Anyway. I still love it.


Garret Dillahunt is so happy.

2. Still no jay oh bee, still cadging a few hours at the little nonprofit and hermitting the rest of the week (srsly I left the house once Tuesday-Thursday). I am trying hard to not care.

2a. Enjoyed the hell out of State of Play. Passes the Alison Bechdel test just barely, but still thoroughly entertaining.

3. Just found my bike light in the fridge.

Avatarded. Avatarded. Avatarded! Aaaand ... Avatarded.

Fascinating article on the politics of representation in Avatar and HTTs (Human Terrain Teams).

*dusts hands* Now. Where was I? Oh right. On to the anti-Avatar: the 2008 sf film Sleep Dealer, which won awards at Sundance last year, and which concerns the country-city problem expressed in representations of rivers in post-globalization terms (where the flow of time is also the flow of human energy). The science-fictional elements interestingly hover right at the border of the plausible, such that allegory and estrangement tax "extrapolative realism" at just the right rate. It would make a good double feature with Moon, I think. ( Refrigeration Device (prevents spoilage). )

Late to the step han free party, folks!

Were I wealthy, I'd set you up with one of these!

Snowy Owl calls are varied, but the alarm call is a barking, almost quacking krek-krek-krek-krek; the female also has a softer mewling pyee-pyee-pyee-pyee or prek-prek-prek. The song is a deep repeated gawh. They may also clap their beak in response to threats or annoyances. While called clapping, it is believed this sound may actually be a clicking of the tongue, not the beak.

Didn't need a jacket riding to and from Bookshop just now! Might find my way to the beach with my new KSR and a blanket. Last year I was bundled in two layers of wool.

1. Wasn't able to watch the blue moon rise because of the cloud cover, but it's thinning now like an old quilt and the little tour around my increasingly fractious neighborhood (a favorite parking area for downtown's NYE, with all its alcohol poisoning and date rape and general stabbiness) provided a brief view of a very full moon. The bowl of the sky! Might have to go back out later. I took a few crap photographs, with which I've fucked. You'll recognize the monterey pine and redwood, some of you.


Pokey tree silhouette


I forgot to take the flash off with this one.

2. Here follows my stated wish (hear me o external stimuli): that 2010 will not suck as much as the last month of 2009.

3. Have been applying for jobs and not getting calls back and racking up as many hours w/ the little nonprofit as they can afford (which are fewer than ten usually, and sometimes fewer than five). In the off-time I try to spend very little money, and have found myself watching ungodly amts of TV and film. I'm over here in Slothland, ppl, eating this piece of fruit upside down and very slowly.

4. In the "I watched it so you don't have to" file: John From Cincinnati. David Milch's flop after Deadwood, poor fella. Very weird Spinozist mystery play set among surfers in Imperial Beach, as intensely positive as DW was negative, and full of fial. Some moments of absurd expansiveness and joy, but when it aims for such and misses, it's just beyond bad. Worth your time, if you're a fan of Milch. (His female characters are often so shrill. What's up with that.) Also: Howard Hesseman!

5. They are setting off explosive mat'ls already and it's not yet 10.

6. Talked to SK earlier tonight, and we both agree to wish this decade well gone. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Says SK: "I wanna go back to a time of innocence, when semen stains on dress captivated a nation."

7. Uh, Happy New Year!

No, I did not pay any dollars to see it (what is it, $12 now? it's been so long). The flattening and greying out of the cam image perhaps allowed me to not notice the differences bt CGI and live action, which apparently bugged many bloggers who saw it in an IMAX theater. Y'all will likely have run across all the delightful snark out there (Braveheart Smurf being the most ecomical) (though Dances With Ewoks is equally accurate).

Most interesting review thus far is from Gerry Canavan, who treats it generically. SF vs Fantasy "made hyperbolically literal":

it’s a war in which blue-skinned, dragon-riding elves armed with bows and arrows attack spaceships owned by a version of the Company from Aliens—and the elves win precisely because within the genre of fantasy [spoiler]magic exists. [/spoiler]

Heh. Spoiler.

All this seems to be an intriguing edge to watch cut into post-Bush US society, emblematic (and usually indexical) as we are of *all* the atrocities of modernity (yah sorry, I just wrote that last phrase). Trawling around the comment cesspits earlier today (esp at I09), it seems that teabaggers are being shouted down at least as often as they're shouting. Your Mileage May Vary, however.

Makes me want to dig up statistics on current popular science media readership (any recommendations on that?). Where do people like my family (chock full of the film's target viewers) (and me, when I'm in full thrall to the film) get their science?* And if they are science-literate, what do they do with it? In the lay mind what exactly can be the difference between quantum theory and magic? Why not mind-melding with a biome? Because there *is* a forest moon of Endor out there, or, rather, there is another iteration of our history in which the English, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch *were* marched out of North and South America (with or without the help of a race-traitor). Not that we have any access to it whatever, just sayin.

Now that film theory courses are going to have to start watching James Cameron's Avatar (this century's Birth of a Nation! alternate histories ftw!), I wish even more heartily that it had been Kim Stanley Robinson's Avatar (actually, I just wish someone would commit the Mars Trilogy to film [never going to happen][where are those rich liberal media magnates when you need them?]). Anyway.

A slightly more dialectically involved version of the whole sf vs f narrative under discussion here (because every post needs a screencap):


You don't mind if I pee....



*Lower middle class, either Mormon or Jack Mormon, living in the sprawl of Utah's central valleys. I would ask them myself, but I'm still enough of a black sheep that they generally have their defenses raised by the time I heave into view.

If you're bound for a movie theater on Xmas Day, please consider The Messenger.

That is all.

Here's the challenge: write one of these.

I keep poaching content, so here's some non-friend-generated information, in handy list form:

1. Got a graduation present from my bosses at the little nonprofit: $200 gift card at a bike shop! You know I'm pleased. Began redeeming it today - got a new, very yellow helmet and a flashy for adornment (there's a dedicated flashy clip on the back). Fenders are on order.



Am going out in a little while for a night ride!

1a. But then I will come home to my old helmet, just hanging there on its hook, now obsolete. The sales guy said I should smash it up and put it in the trash, and I feel like it'll be a traumatic experience! Very different from my dissertation effigy burning. Poor helmet! *gulps*

2. Xmas plans: Pogonip in the afternoon, Rules of the Game in the evening. If anyone is interested, we can simulview and chat via IM. I know, pathetic!

3. Just now I caught myself before actually putting up a complaining post-it on the top dryer of our apt. bldg. laundry room, and just talked to the Dude Manager directly. He answered the door in his beer belly.

4. ETA: 4 is Sad Fugee Face:



5. Bike ride was shortish and good. Many garishly (and yet boringly) lit houses on the West Side. Jupiter is still bright. Ended at TJ's, wherein my checker still has a very bad headache from all the Xmas music. The woman in line recommended a quick packet of EmergenC and I concurred.

Via wolodomyr. And they're not so much dumb as they are absurd and discordantly serious. My favorites (extra-double favorite bolded):

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.
19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
23. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
25. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
26. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
29. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
30. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

Via M. Hupfre, Netflix's latest Criterion Collection additions to instant watch.

Haven't seen:

L'AVVENTURA - why I have not seen this: I am a jackass.
CRIA CUERVOS
EUROPA - why I have not seen this: Lars von Trier is a jackass.
FOR ALL MANKIND
GENERAL IDI AMIN DADA
I VITELLONI
MALA NOCHE
OVERLORD
SISTERS
WALKABOUT

Really ought to watch again:

CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS - I watched this at the university library media carrells my first year of college. What a luxury it was, to have a film all to oneself. I watched dozens of films that year (Taxi zum klo, uh, stands out in my memory).
THE HIDDEN FORTRESS - If I had a kid (who hadn't yet seen this), I'd be excited for her/him.
HIGH AND LOW - I know I've seen this and yet I have no memory of it.

Not on the list but still really ought to watch again:

THE RULES OF THE GAME

Of Note (still): CC films really ought to be searchable as such. 

Is very bright tonight. ( (Behind the cut, friend!) )

Go get lost here, ppl. It's the art of muralist Jean-Marc Paumier, whom you can read about here (in French).

I got a snap of his 2005 work citing Jacques Prévert ("Le désordre des êtres est dans l’ordre des choses") when I was living in the 11th in 2006.



Country Mouse was so happy to stumble on this and other street art.

See also this muralist's blog (in English) for some astounding.

By way of (not actually) responding to a meme tag, I offer the following:



Was listening to Radio Lab while mailing a very giant and very heavy box of books (xmas presents), the episode "Choice" that aired last year. The middle segment, on decision neuroscience, was particularly compelling, given that I am a recovering Mormon (which means I am recovering from the belief in free will, and mince around the edges of determinism, affrighted). It turns out making decisions is a LOT harder if you eliminate emotion, which I associate with determinism (for better or worse). No emotion, decision becomes agonizingly difficult. Fodder for further speculation and research, but I love the idea of Spock in the cereal aisle.

Elsewhere on the internets and earlier in the day, I'd found this flowchart(  (below the cut cos it's extensive!): )

1 - I think I'm late to the party w/r/t WNYC's Radio Lab. Currently enjoying their engaging special on the War of the Worlds, especially their situating Wells's staging of it in the mediascape of the late 30s (Edward R Murrow's voice, FDR's fireside chats). Makes me wish I'd become a media historian.

2 - My glasses are deteriorating. I can't get them to bend back into form (without the lenses popping out [this is what reading in bed on your side will do]). Busted out the pair previous to these, which are not wire and feel weird as they now perch on my face.

3 - Tonight was the first night-time biking in the rain of the season. It is now winter.

4 - Reading Philip K Dick's Simulacra. WWII-themed alternate history is one of my favorite micro-genres: time travel, Goebels, and the foetid, post-nuclear wasteland of Northern California redwood forests (in which H. neanderthalensis, thanks to all the radiation, reemerges). What's not to like?


(I'm reading this edition.)

A message to a psychoanalyst arrives, a message from the future and in the form of an NSA agent: you must fail with one of your patients, we can't tell you whom, but he has to not get better. It is of vital national importance. Which schlub will it be, the guy who's trying to flunk out of his state-mandated civics exams and emigrate to Mars? The hypochondriac, agoraphobic psi-musician who lives among the neanderthals? Or the hapless designer of simulacra, who quits his job right before his tiny firm gets a government contract to produce the next President of the UESA?

The Hebrew cover is particularly lovely.



5 - When is Lost coming back? I admit enthusiasm and admiration and impatient anticipation.

Off to campus to print the thing out on expensive paper.

In other news, I ran across this engaging rant on Cordy and the Bad Gotcha. Found while over at sartorias' multi-page discussion of What's Wrong With Whedon (most of which I heartily agree with [check out the mansplaining thread midway down for lulz]).

I like the little stories in the comments to the clip.

are on a play date. I knew this was going to be fun.

( just wasn't sure how. )


!

Here's how it went in my head:

where do I know that actor from
he's kinda hot
srsly where ftw
wait starbuck's dad
*vague shame*

And of course the question is: is Tory a cylon or not? ha-biddybiddy-ha. It's going to be fun because the temperature is set to FLORID.... The warehouse was at 4400 Blah de blah Street, people. Oh and let's not forget Inara's little eyelid flutter at the very end there.

Your friend, now delirious-from-lack-of-sleep, has

( GOT SOME VERY IMPORTANT NEWS! )

Google's splash image for today is making me v. happy.

...is still not done, even with last night's dream that I ran into the new dean of Graduate Studies (who also led my proseminar, so many eons ago) in a
hallway while holding the nearly completed diss, waved the pages at
him, and said in my best sing-song, neener-neener voice, "I'm gonna
finish the conclusion toda-ay!"

In other news, I got an awesome postcard today depicting the fiery apocalyptic death of the SLC Mormon temple by asteroid. Ça me réchauffe!

I always forget about wood s lot, and then I run across it while searching for something else. [I was on the hunt for references to "Gattungswesen" (species-being) in Marx.] The entry posted on my birthday had this photo, by Ray DeCarava, who apparently died the day before:



I find the photo consoling, as if the space between ran with friendly ghosts, with the familiar glances of the absent. Reminds me of the unexpectedly fresh wind that would blow up the staircase of the BNF metro stop.

And today's entry has this quote from Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques:

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among others, so man is not alone in the universe. When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; man may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists --Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations!-- in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.
- Tristes Tropiques of 1955

Getting some awesome birthday presents, such as a trumpet player practicing Norwegian Wood under the Soquel Street bridge near San Lorenzo Park this afternoon. A first edition of VDLA's L'amour supreme, the gift of which boggles my mind. My sister singing into my answering machine this morning. And then there's this:

NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers have found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen.

The traces of the star they found indicate that "the progenitor star appears to belong to the second or third generation of stars, rather than the first generation." We've come a long way since Edison's tasimeter.

Astronomers were in the right place at the right time to witness and capture this event thanks to the text message they received from NASA's Swift satellite: astronomer flash-mob ftw! I would love it if this somehow got worked into an episode of The Big Bang Theory.

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As their cores collapse into a black hole or neutron star, gas jets -- driven by processes not fully understood -- punch through the star and blast into space. There, they strike gas previously shed by the star and heat it, which generates short-lived afterglows in many wavelengths.

Research into gamma-ray bursts like this one "...brings us close to that magical point of first light," says Volker Bromm, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin. "We don't have to get much farther to catch the earliest stars."

The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope is also in the news, having just released a video of its first year of imaging gamma-ray activity. It's kind of beautiful, and mundane, and not at all what popular astronomy of the late 19th C imagined would be captured: the history of everything that has ever happened, somehow inscribed on the arriving light in a way yet to be deciphered (most certainly decipherable at some point).



Neato, huh? Anyway, back to GRB 090423.

The comment thread on Discover's 80beats blog raises an interesting question regarding the calculation of the event's age and location: what about inflation magnitude? Someone else on another blog asks a similar question: how are these calculations correct if that inflation rate "would put this object moving away from us at beyond the speed of light after it was 4 to 6 billion years old"? What is the speed of space, as it were?

This thread over at physicsforums.com gives something of an answer (that the question is nonsense, since "expansion of space" is a "property of a particular coordinate system" and not a force) (I don't understand it either). It has something to do with scalar systems, local vs global, the former being one in which we can look back 13 billion years and see this star's death, still within our cosmological horizon, the latter being one without horizon, one of eternal inflation. Apparently this question confuses laypeople and physicists alike, and I won't get close to untangling it in this post, but I found this particular partial answer quite consonant with the cosmological imaginary of Villiers's moment:

"...when when space does expand at this rate [at the speed of light], none of the force carriers from any particle will be able to reach another particle: no gravity, no light, no atoms, just lonely particles." ( Cut for dissertational blather )

It's going to be really weird to have a life that isn't consumed with this stuff. I imagine I will feel a little adrift! Yesterday the guy I've been trading chapters with asked if he could come to my filing party. Yes of course! I said. TBH such a thing hadn't entered my mind. I thought maybe I would try to get to Utah for Thxgvng, see my nephews and nieces. A filing party it will be, then. Except I have about three people I could invite, outside of my adviser and that guy. In the last five years I have become a tremendously isolated person. Maybe I'll shed that along with the dissertation-30. If I do have any kind of filing party, I will take all my diss-related recycling (old drafts, copies of articles I now have as PDFs), make a human form sitting in the lotus position and then burn it ritually. It will be the highlight — instead of cake, immolation. :D

16 days til I need to have the whole thing revised. A little less than a third left to revise. Yesterday I wrote some really fun sentences. ( Boring unless you know me! )

Sowana En Passante.

No one will understand.

Phantasmagorias of Spirit?

Pedantic!

La Machine à Foi.

Also pedantic! And too clever by half.

Aura and the Occulted Crowd in L'Eve future.

*shrugs*

EDIT (oh and apologies in advance for taking on the locutional style of the fuckin show): Just to be clear, it's not about the kiss, though that's sweet. It's about how her narration of dream-Charlie's remonstration peters out briefly, that turn aside, index finger brought to a briefly circumspect expression in and around the mouth:

"'And you, ...with the presence of mind to continue the fuckin round when I was too fuckin stupid? And you said you would ‘row, row, row’ and I said ‘row, row, row your boat’ and we had this … '"

This lingering moment of self-indulgence and self-congratulation opens the way for the booming big Moral of the Story ("Now!, Charlie says to me...."). That weird little moue, that's the punctum of the whole scene for me: if only it were the real Charlie acknowledging her superior sophistication in organizing the entertainment and distraction of a child in sore need of it, the moment seems to say. If only Charlie would say that IRL.

We smile, it's funny. Because it ain't Charlie, we smile to see her notice as she collects herself to recommence, and she appears comical/ridiculous thereby. Foible, is the word for what she performs in that pause. It's a means to experience her shame, the guts of her drunkenness and shame in all their outsizedness, homeopathically, as it were, in a little funny dose.

The other side of it, though (the pinch), is what it implies: if only this weren't a dream, if only it weren't all at base self-congratulation and -abnegation, if only there really were other people. Because if it really had been Charlie, if that really happened, then she could take seriously the exhortation to not fuckin only remember the middle of the fuckin dream. Take seriously the exhortation to trust that shame passes and there is good to be done and felt.

In a work that is at its most basic level about the wonder of meeting the other and finding him/her/it to be delightsome (so many scenes of delighted making of acquaintance - Charlie is especially good at this - so many radiant arrests of time at the moment of recognition), Jane is allegory for the fear of being met. And in her the show avers the basic instability and fragility of that wonder.

all_unnecessary would totally watch Joss Whedon's May 68 in Space (or whatever he'd call it).

Lots of protesting all over the state today. And tonight there's a group of students and staff occupying the UCSC Grad Student Commons. Me, I'm finding it to be ten pm already and I'm still at my fucking desk. Writing about crowds, and in particular Benjamin on the revolutionary crowd.

So I'm paying my dissertation filing fee and turning in forms either tomorrow or Monday, and I'm having second thoughts about the title that will appear on the forms. It's been Aura and the Automaton for quite a while now, and as I rewrite the introduction and think about the whole project, it's seeming to not quite express what I'm saying anymore. The CROWD is missing. So what about this: The Automaton of the Crowd. Bleah, awkward (though it does get the Poe/Baudelaire reference in there). The Crowded Automaton. Waiter, there's a mixed metaphor in my soup. The Crowd in the Machine?

Gah.

In other news, I found yet another candidate for epigraphy:

"Now then, my good friend, you are in possession of all you require to understand my point. We see how, in the organic world, as reflection grows darker and weaker, grace emerges ever more radiant and supreme. – But just as two intersecting lines, converging on one side of a point, reappear on the other after their passage through infinity, and just as our image, as we approach a concave mirror, vanishes to infinity only to reappear before our very eyes, so will grace, having likewise traversed the infinite, return to us once more, and so appear most purely in that bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, which is to say, either in the puppet or a god."

"That means," said I, somewhat amused, "that we would have to eat of the tree of knowledge a second time to fall back into the state of innocence."

"Of course," he answered, "and that is the final chapter in the history of the world."

Kleist, On the Puppet Theater

Can I get away with collect in the following translation?

To he who reads this diary and invents a machine that can reunite disaggregated presences, I will beseech: collect us, Faustine and me, let me enter the heaven of her consciousness. It will be an act of charity.

The Invention of Morel, 103, translation modified (New York: NYRB Classics, 2003

Al hombre que, basándose en este informe, invente una máquina capaz de reunir las presencias disgregadas, haré una súplica: búsquenos a Faustine y a mí, hágame entrar en el cielo de la conciencia de Faustine. Será un acto piadoso.

La invención de Morel, 91 (New York: Penguin, 1996)

Also: was made to have by my ucs a dream in which Larry Levis (aka My Boyfriend) chastised me for trying to deflect/placate during an awkward moment: "Don't turn to me like that!" We then went to the kitchen to deal with the deer carcass defrosting on the table.