Without question my favorite frozen pizza is the Home Run Inn brand. I first tasted one of these during my lost year in Charlottesville. This summer they became my special treat. This food has a state of exception clause for me; in emergencies, it will take over my life.
I don't know how to talk about food. Home Run Inn has a buttery, crispy crust that flakes as you bite into it. The cheese is a little thick--sometimes that's a no-go for me. I need to be in the mood. The sauce is savory but just that--it's the weakest part. Haven't had the toppings in a while, but they tend to be judiciously applied and taste just like what they're supposed to be. Not an easy task in frozen food.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
My Batventures
A few weeks ago, a bat appeared out of nowhere and promptly disappeared into nowhere.
Last night, a new bat or the same bat returned. Bats are hard to find. I started going room to room, shutting off entry points and inspecting for bats. I shut the windows in my living room as well. Then I started hearing noises. I had trapped the bat between the screen and the pane of one window. It was getting antsy and irritable.
I don't have a lot of up-close experience with bats, so I immediately turn to rumor. Many bats have rabies, particularly those that end up inside houses. I needed to get it out without letting it bite me. I tried attaching a garbage bag to the window, and slowly opening it, hoping the bat would crawl inside. The bat was too smart for this, and kept pushing at the edges. Then I tried setting up a towel wall that the bat could grab onto. He wasn't interested. I decided I just needed to grab the bat and carry him outside, which is what I did. I left just enough space for him to crawl out, then scooped him up in a towel and held tightly. The bat began to make a series of noises. I rushed him outside and dramatically opened the towel. My next-door neighbors applauded.
This experience gave me a new understanding of Batman. I grasped, in the abstract, that bats are scary, but now I know why. They're better flyers than birds, more agile. They have amazing fingers--when it was crawling around on my screen, it moved more like an insect than a mammal.
On a tip from a friend, I have been reading up on the symbolism of bats. If this bat means what I think it does, I need to make some major life changes.
Last night, a new bat or the same bat returned. Bats are hard to find. I started going room to room, shutting off entry points and inspecting for bats. I shut the windows in my living room as well. Then I started hearing noises. I had trapped the bat between the screen and the pane of one window. It was getting antsy and irritable.
I don't have a lot of up-close experience with bats, so I immediately turn to rumor. Many bats have rabies, particularly those that end up inside houses. I needed to get it out without letting it bite me. I tried attaching a garbage bag to the window, and slowly opening it, hoping the bat would crawl inside. The bat was too smart for this, and kept pushing at the edges. Then I tried setting up a towel wall that the bat could grab onto. He wasn't interested. I decided I just needed to grab the bat and carry him outside, which is what I did. I left just enough space for him to crawl out, then scooped him up in a towel and held tightly. The bat began to make a series of noises. I rushed him outside and dramatically opened the towel. My next-door neighbors applauded.
This experience gave me a new understanding of Batman. I grasped, in the abstract, that bats are scary, but now I know why. They're better flyers than birds, more agile. They have amazing fingers--when it was crawling around on my screen, it moved more like an insect than a mammal.
On a tip from a friend, I have been reading up on the symbolism of bats. If this bat means what I think it does, I need to make some major life changes.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Reading Lacan, Part III
In which I attempt to dispel all the things I think I know about Lacan.
Once upon a time I took a class called Marx, Politics, and Theology at UVA. The professor asked us to please forget everything we thought we knew about Marx. All semester long, however, we kept slipping into some truisms about what Marx really meant or what he was trying to accomplish. He kept calling us on it. I found this activity very useful, so I sometimes try to externalize the things I think I know, in hopes that I can discard them if they don't turn up in the writing itself.
1) Lacan talked about something called the Mirror Stage, in which an infant recognizes its reflection in the mirror and can for the first time imagine its whole body, instead of merely seeing the separate parts visible to the eye.
I don't really think I know the implications of this, except what I've read elsewhere by people who are riffing on it.
2) Lacan made a distinction between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic.
The Imaginary is connected to the Mirror stuff up above. The Real is reality, which we can't ever get to, because we constantly access it only through the veil of language or narrative--The Symbolic.
Again, I think this sounds pretty cool, but I don't really know what's at stake.
The big missing piece, the one I can't even put into a coherent sentence, is what Lacan thinks about Desire. I know it's an important word, one that will give his concepts some heft, but I don't know what he means by it.
So now, my goal is to try to ignore all this while I begin reading. Whenever I find myself trying to use these shards to build something, I pinch myself.
Once upon a time I took a class called Marx, Politics, and Theology at UVA. The professor asked us to please forget everything we thought we knew about Marx. All semester long, however, we kept slipping into some truisms about what Marx really meant or what he was trying to accomplish. He kept calling us on it. I found this activity very useful, so I sometimes try to externalize the things I think I know, in hopes that I can discard them if they don't turn up in the writing itself.
1) Lacan talked about something called the Mirror Stage, in which an infant recognizes its reflection in the mirror and can for the first time imagine its whole body, instead of merely seeing the separate parts visible to the eye.
I don't really think I know the implications of this, except what I've read elsewhere by people who are riffing on it.
2) Lacan made a distinction between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic.
The Imaginary is connected to the Mirror stuff up above. The Real is reality, which we can't ever get to, because we constantly access it only through the veil of language or narrative--The Symbolic.
Again, I think this sounds pretty cool, but I don't really know what's at stake.
The big missing piece, the one I can't even put into a coherent sentence, is what Lacan thinks about Desire. I know it's an important word, one that will give his concepts some heft, but I don't know what he means by it.
So now, my goal is to try to ignore all this while I begin reading. Whenever I find myself trying to use these shards to build something, I pinch myself.
Reading Lacan, part 2
More "pre-reading" exercises:
The other night I went to a party at Chad's house. We talked about aliens, conspiracy theories, and new religious movements. He posited that if someone was interested in one of these subjects, it was nearly guaranteed that this person would also be interested in the other two. I agreed, and offered up an explanation I borrowed from Elaine Showalter's Hystories: the reason is that recountings of alien abductions, religious experiences, and conspiratorial mania sound very similar. To her, all of these responses, as well as other historical phenomena like hysteria and PTSD were all responses to trauma.
Chad strenuously objected to this premise, because he felt it was bad psychoanalysis: it destroyed the historical context for hysteria. He felt that WWI PTSD is a wholly different experience from Victorian hysteria. I don't think it is, but I do think I did a poor job of explaining Showalter's book. What sounded to Chad like an ahistorical romp that attempted to tie together disparate pheonomena under one roof, sounds to me like a demonstration of how historical circumstances produce different explanations. In other words, alien abduction is different from shellshock, but trauma is trauma no matter the form.
I've found people who dismiss psychoanalysis because it seems to them completely ahistorical and unscientific, and I've seen people who portray it as the exact opposite: totally historical and of scientific merit. I'm looking for a middle ground. On the one hand, the concept of repression is individual desire folding under societal rule--cries out for context. However, we're never not in culture, so the concept of repression actually does look pretty universal to me--but the forms it takes will differ.
The other night I went to a party at Chad's house. We talked about aliens, conspiracy theories, and new religious movements. He posited that if someone was interested in one of these subjects, it was nearly guaranteed that this person would also be interested in the other two. I agreed, and offered up an explanation I borrowed from Elaine Showalter's Hystories: the reason is that recountings of alien abductions, religious experiences, and conspiratorial mania sound very similar. To her, all of these responses, as well as other historical phenomena like hysteria and PTSD were all responses to trauma.
Chad strenuously objected to this premise, because he felt it was bad psychoanalysis: it destroyed the historical context for hysteria. He felt that WWI PTSD is a wholly different experience from Victorian hysteria. I don't think it is, but I do think I did a poor job of explaining Showalter's book. What sounded to Chad like an ahistorical romp that attempted to tie together disparate pheonomena under one roof, sounds to me like a demonstration of how historical circumstances produce different explanations. In other words, alien abduction is different from shellshock, but trauma is trauma no matter the form.
I've found people who dismiss psychoanalysis because it seems to them completely ahistorical and unscientific, and I've seen people who portray it as the exact opposite: totally historical and of scientific merit. I'm looking for a middle ground. On the one hand, the concept of repression is individual desire folding under societal rule--cries out for context. However, we're never not in culture, so the concept of repression actually does look pretty universal to me--but the forms it takes will differ.
Trying to read Lacan again
I'm making another go of it with Lacan. I've become loosely familiar with the name from a variety of surrogates and followers: I've read some Zizek, Kittler, Dolar, and Butler. But my direct experience with Lacan is limited to browsing through my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Basically, I've decided that I can no longer trust these surrogates and I have to go directly to the source. So Ecrits is lying open on my coffeetable right now.
Why bother with this project? I could very easily go through my entire AM-STUD career without touching the Ecrits or the Seminars. Well, I think theory is important for generating frames through which we can understand the world as it is and critique it in order to fashion a different world. When I was an undergraduate, though, I tended to look at problems from an anthropological perspective, which has cultivated in me a healthy distrust of psychoanalytic theory.
Now I feel that:
IF you're committed to some kind of concept of social construction, THEN you need a bit of psychoanalytic theory.
So this project is ultimately about adding detail to the above statement.
Why bother with this project? I could very easily go through my entire AM-STUD career without touching the Ecrits or the Seminars. Well, I think theory is important for generating frames through which we can understand the world as it is and critique it in order to fashion a different world. When I was an undergraduate, though, I tended to look at problems from an anthropological perspective, which has cultivated in me a healthy distrust of psychoanalytic theory.
Now I feel that:
IF you're committed to some kind of concept of social construction, THEN you need a bit of psychoanalytic theory.
So this project is ultimately about adding detail to the above statement.
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