Entrekin

In which the best-laid plans of guy and sister completely go aglee.

I mean, we had great intentions. I got tickets to the Getty Villa for Friday. And the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was over at UCLA.

But what seems a good idea in theory…

My sister arrived Thursday night. We ordered pizza, put on Eddie Izzard, and then she crashed around 10 or so, which was really 1-ish for her.

Friday, we trekked up the PCH to the Getty Villa, which is a museum devoted to Greco-Roman art. It’s mostly statues, with some jewelry/metalwork. I’d thought it sounded like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters in Manhattan, which not only houses the largest collection of medieval art in the world but is also a recreation incorporating elements from five different French monasteries.

The Cloisters is awesome. Simply jaw-dropping. I’ve gone four or five times, and each time, I love it even more than the time previous. Not so much because I notice something new, but just because it’s better than I remember it. I think “It can’t possibly be as good as I thought,” and each time it’s better.

I’d thought the Getty Villa was similar; it sounded like a collection of Greco-Roman art housed in a building that was itself a recreation of a Greco-Roman structure. And it might have been close, but it wasn’t, not exactly. The best way I can describe it is, you go to the Cloisters and you can believe you’re back in the Middle Ages, but going to the Getty Villa does not approximate the feeling of Greco-Roman times. Never once could I have imagined turning a corner to bump into Homer.

We were home by three. At which point, we ordered food and watched some more movies.

On Saturday, we went to the beach. It was the single requirement my sister had. We figured we’d spend the afternoon, but we laid out for about an hour before we got annoyed by the sand and packed it in. We intended to check out the aforemention Festival of Books on Sunday, and we woke up early specifically to do so, and then we looked at each other and pretty much defaulted to “Fuck it. Let’s stick around and watch House.”

Which is pretty much precisely all we did.

After reading Tod Goldberg’s summing up his experience, I can’t say it sounds like we missed all that much.

I think the weekend was just what I needed, though; the past two years were a bit of a whirlwind of a ride, and I bookended my Los Angeles experience with my sister–I drove out here with her to arrive, and then spent the weekend before I left with her, too. Which gives it a nice symmetry. Now, tomorrow, I get my students’ final papers, which means I’ll spend the weekend grading, and then Monday is the killer normalizing grading session where I go to a classroom and spend the entire day reading paper after paper after paper.

But hey, then I’m done.

It’s been a wild, grand ride, but I can’t say I’m sad to see it end.

Now I get to figure how I’ll spend my summer vacation.

Tags: art, cloisters, getty villa, hollywood, la times festival of books, los angeles, museum

A New York State appeals court upheld a ruling that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was negligent in safeguarding the World Trade Center before the 1993 bombing.

In other news, a Los Angeles jury ruled that a driver who was carjacked in Compton was negligent for driving through that neighborhood, and that a rape victim was at fault for wearing nice shoes and “provocative clothing.”

Finally, tonight, a New York State jury ruled that the World Trade Center shouldn’t have been so tall, either, because then those two planes couldn’t have crashed into it.

Tags: bombing, carjacking, jury, los angeles, new york, rape, September 11th, world trade center

I’ve just slept for nearly 13 hours. And that even though I took the “non-drowsy” version of the Tylenol Cold I purchased yesterday while I shuffled my light-headed arse across campus. I swear there were a couple moments in class I had to lean on the board.

But I feel about 70% better now. Which is good, because much to do today. Mainly cleaning; my sister arrives tomorrow, for three/four days, give or take, depending on how you do the math. I haven’t seen her since Christmas, and even then she had so many obligations we didn’t get to spend nearly as much time together as I would have liked. This time it’s just me and her the whole weekend, and I’m happy about that.

So far, I’ve got tickets to the Getty Villa for Friday. And we’re going to hit the LA Times Book Fair over at UCLA on either Friday or Saturday. Whichever.

Probably.

We might just decide to spent the weekend at the beach.

But in the meantime, I’ve got to tidy up my apartment. And later this afternoon I get to be all manly and bust out my tools and fix the mirror on my car. But that’s after I clean it.

I don’t know why I tend to attract clutter in my life. I’ve always wished I didn’t, but I seem to have the gene for it. Anyone with any tips on how to reduce clutter?

Aroundabouts his junior year of high school, my brother got really into Christianity. I don’t know when he was ‘born again,’ (as if my mother didn’t do a good enough job the first time around) but I think it occurred at some point when I was in college.

Back then, I was premed and fairly set to be a doctor. I had studied biology, chemistry, and physics. My feelings toward religion, back then, could probably be best described as a backlash. Which meant that there was often some tension between my brother and me; we were both young and set enough in our respective ways to believe the other was wrong and it was our job to convince him of the truth. He would argue that Jesus is the only answer and belief in him as one, true savior the only way to ‘eternal life,’ while I would argue that was closed-minded. We would discuss creation versus evolution, historicity versus mythology, and when I say discuss, of course, I mean the sort of heated diatribes that might only occur between siblings.

During those conversations, my brother would become noticeably anxious. His voice would take on a higher timbre, like his throat had tightened. That’s what I remember most about them, actually.

That, and the Bible.

Whenever he needed it, he’d pull out the Bible. It must be so because the Bible says.

And how, I ask, does one argue then?

The past few weeks, I’ve been reading here and there about the kerfuffle with the Orange prize, and heated discussion from both sides. And I’ve noticed a term I don’t know if I’ve encountered before:

“Privilege.”

I had to look it up on Wikipedia, and I think I generally get the idea, which is that there are divisions in society, and one side holds some position of power/dominance, not necessarily over the other so much as, it seems, compared to. An example would be in terms of race: someone who is white has ‘privilege,’ compared to, say, someone who is black. Here’s an html of something called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, by Peggy McIntosh. McIntosh writes:

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize
male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have
come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in
each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible
weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank
checks.

And you know, that’s fine. If Peggy McIntosh feels that she hasn’t actually earned her assets, that she has cashed in, that’s on her.

I’d really like to know more about these maps, passports, and other miscellany. Especially that “blank check.” I never got a blank check, and totally for seriously, I could really use it right now (so if anyone has my blank check, send a note to willentrekin at yahoo dot com, so I can tell you where to send it. That’d be awesome). As for ‘unearned assets’ . . . I can understand McIntosh believing that, given her honorary degrees, but I’ve worked too damned hard to let her say anything in my life is unearned.

That document I linked to includes a list of 50 examples of what makes one privileged. Stuff like “I am treated neutrally when I move into a new neighborhood” and:

12. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket
and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find
someone who can cut my hair.

Because, of course, privilege is a function of shopping.

But there’s a more important point, which is that the idea of privilege seems to me to shift the ‘blame’ for any such favoritism away from the people who propagate it and toward the people who ‘benefit’ from it. In other words, it makes it sounds like the music of the shop is the customer’s fault. Nevermind the fact that, living in a society truly moving toward globalism, such distinctions are becoming quaint and outmoded. McIntosh’s ‘privilege’ cites white people as the benefactors, but last time I checked, Billboard charts are as likely to be populated by hiphop acts as, say, pop, or punk. In fact, here’s some hard evidence it’s bullshit. Top selling CDs and singles for 2007. CDs themselves are full of Nickelback, Hinder, and Rascall Flatts, but it notes that the year’s previous were Mariah Carey, 50 Cent, and The Game. The singles are a pretty eclectic lot (and, I’d wager, artists make more off those, anyway).

And I write about this because I think it’s wrong. I’m a white heterosexual male, each descriptor of which should create new benefits of ‘privilege,’ but they haven’t, at least so far in my experience. One point of feminism and other movements predicated toward equality has always seemed to be that generalities are bad and, very often, people can’t share the same experiences as others. I.e., that because I’m white, I can’t understand the perspective of someone who is black (I think this idea, too, is bullshit). But what I don’t get is that many ‘feminists’ seem quick to argue that the male experience, or, for McIntosh, the white experience, is universal. That all men, and especially all white men, must think and feel and behave the same way. That there are certain benefits to being white in society (n.b., is this global society? American society? Manhattan society?) shared by all white people.

And now the idea of privilege is even being applied to the body. Not only am I white, heterosexual, and male, but I’m also thin, and even that has privilege, too. Apparently, it’s now privilege not to take up two seats on an airplane. One I loved: “11. I don’t pay extra for my clothes because of my size.”

Because it’s, you know, privilege that smaller clothing requires less material to manufacture. Makes me want to state something very simple, which I would’ve thought was obvious, but is, apparently, not: I don’t have ‘privilege’ just because some people in the world are fat. Maybe I should be more ‘body positive,’ or then again maybe the so-called ‘fatosphere’ (and no, I’m not making that up) could, you know, lose some weight.

Reminds me of this bit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xd_zkMEgkI"]

The whole idea, in fact (and here’s where I bring it back to the Bible), reminds me of the way my brother used to argue. When his best argument is that it’s the Bible, it effectively shuts down discussion in much the same way that this idea of ‘privilege’ does. When engaged in any discussion about gender or race or class or identity, the moment I start to disagree is the moment someone says I ‘have privilege’ I can’t see through or, worse, ‘suffer from poor little white boy syndrome.’

Because the sad thing is that I’m not arguing that society isn’t messed up, that inequality doesn’t exist, that things must change, and for the better, and soon. The sad fact is that these sort of ideas shift the blame of the real problems to those who don’t really deserve it and often have nothing to do with it, which is made doubly worse because they’re the very people who could most effectively help ameliorate the problems in the first place. Feminists who truly believe in ‘male privilege’ should seek to work with, rather than against, the men they believe have that privilege in the first place.

Tags: christianity, fatosphere, feminism, male, privilege mcintosh, the bible, white

Just ending what was, technically, my last weekend in Hollywood. My sister is coming to town on Thursday, and then the following weekend I have lots of grading, and then the one following that I’ll pretty much be out of here.

Which is pretty cool, so far as I’m concerned.

In the meantime, my sinuses clogged, my throat closed up, and my voice dropped into the sort of croak you might expect from a deaf frog. It’s not a full-on croak, but rather one that’s vaguely heard croaking and is reproducing a close facsimile.

I spent most of the weekend cleaning and packing. In and out of the post office, and when I took breathers, I read The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

I don’t get it. It opened well; the first several dozen pages were awesome; Diaz caught a definite voice and rhythm, to merge into a brilliant, electric patois.

Until it shifted. My problem is mainly that the parts concerning Oscar are awesome, but there are other sections dealing with Oscar’s sister and mother that drag.

It reminded me most of Dracula. I loved the first section of Stoker’s novel, which purported to being Jonathan Harker’s diary, and then the rest of it became “epistolary,” which I put into quotes because it was written as a mess of letters from a dozen people to other people, but they all sounded exactly the same, which was suspiciously like Stoker.

Similar in Wao: the first bit crackles, but then the tones/voices change and the book collapses like a flan in a cupboard. Diaz’s writing lags, while at the same time taking on the dreaded voice so many creative writing programs seem to idolize.

I’ll be returning it tomorrow with nearly a hundred pages left unread.

In the meantime, I’ll be mainlining orange juice and freebasing Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold & Cough.

Tags: creative writing, dracula, junot diaz, stoker, the brief wondrous life of oscar wao

Back when I was in college, I once engaged in a technology deprivation experiment. We pledged to go the entire weekend going without technology, to varying degrees. Some people pledged to not even use their lights.

I’m unplugging this weekend.

Back next week. With lots of cool stuff. One post already in mind: how privilege is like the Bible.

Fun stuff.

Have a great weekend.

Because man, I am done.

Oh, grading, how I love thee.

Post-grading blog would be almost as fun as drunk blogging were I coherent enough to pull it off.

But I’m not.

Tags: grading

I’ve discovered I can use Twitter to do the little heads-ups, like, “Hey, I posted a picture,” or “Hey, here’s some book news.”

It’s not pretty; I don’t actually host this blog myself, yet, and WordPress.com doesn’t allow certain embeddings, like the flash/java required for the Twitter badge. But it allows the RSS feed, which you can see in the sidebar just to your left.

There’s a bit of a delay (between ten minutes and nearly an hour), but pretty soon a note will appear that I’m in class/teaching/grading today, but have posted the last of the fountain pictures at Imagery.

Now that it’s in the Twitter thing, though, I don’t think I’ll do any more heads-ups. Feels extraneous, after all.

Tags: class, fountain, imagery, photography, twitter, wordpress.com

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth debuts at #1 on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestsellers list.

I’ve read a number of people express surprise, I think mostly because it’s a short story collection (short story collections generally don’t perform nearly so well as novels). There are a couple of reasons I’m not really surprised, though, the first of which is that Lahiri has come further into consciousness, this past year, as a result of the mainstream success of The Namesake. True, it’s a movie that received some positive reviews and probably only had a decent-sized audience, at best, but it starred Kal Penn, who had a brilliant run on House, M.D. for a while (and will again in a few weeks, when the show returns to the air). Before that, Lahiri was known most well to literary readers, and I think that helped open her audience.

The second is: considering the list, there really isn’t much else out. A couple of bigger names (Grisham, for one), but The Appeal‘s been out for nearly a month already.

(the third is: why have I never heard of The Dresden Files? Anyone read any? Are they worth picking up? Sounds interesting)

Also last week, Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer for fiction. I ended up picking it up; I’m about 150 pages in, and so far, it’s not bad. I’m actually rather pleased with its selection; Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke was named as a finalist, but I didn’t like any of the excerpts I read.

Finally, really close to home for me, USC’s MPW program names Brighde Mullins as new director. Not too much in the way of thought for this one–once I got to the program, I kind of put my head down and trucked through my classes. We had interim, acting leadership, but it was largely academic, not professional writers. This saddened me, as that was the main reason I chose the program, and I’m glad it’s back under the leadership of a writer (Mullins is a poet and playwright).

And now I’m done the program, so her leading it really won’t affect me one way or the other. I wish both her and the program the best, though, and leave it with the hope that they continue to follow their strength, as a professional writing program, and avoid the pitfalls that so many “fine arts” programs seem to come with.

And last but not least (no, wait; maybe it is least), I realized I was doing nothing over at et cetera, because from this end, I’m submitting, which means there’s no news. And then I realized I didn’t want it to just be about me. So I’m opening it up to include literary news/reviews/interviews for highlight but about which I haven’t much to say (unlike the above three newspoints, obviously). The first new post concerns Jo Rowling taking the stand in the Harry Potter Lexicon case.

Tags: best seller, brief wondrous life of oscar wao, brighde mullins, copyright, denis johnson, director, dresden files, et cetera, harry dresden, harry potter, house, jhumpa lahiri, jim butcher, jo rowling, john grisham, junot diaz, kal penn, masters in professional writing, mfa, mpw university of southern california, playwright, poet, program, pulitzer, the appeal, the namesake, tree of smoke, unaccustomed earth, USC

Today being a day off, I decided I’d check out There Will Be Blood. I’d heard lots of good things about it all over the place. I know it was nominated for, like, every award known to man.

In retrospect, I should have gone in hedging my bets. I’ve never liked any of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies; I thought Punch-Drunk Love was meandering and tried too hard, while Magnolia was meandering and just a mess. I’ve never seen Boogie Nights. I also should have reconsidered Daniel Day-Lewis; I think I used to like him. I remember renting The Boxer back in the day solely because he was in it, and I know I’ve seen My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father, but for the life of me, looking back, I don’t think I actually really liked any of those movies. I’m sure he gave commanding performances, but I don’t really recall any of them. Well. Except for My Left Foot; I remember that chalk board thingy.

So I started watching There Will Be Blood.

Barely two minutes in, I started my personal running commentary. I wanted to Mystery Science Theater it. And then I figured, “Why not?”:

2:00– Okay, so we’ve got Daniel Day-Lewis in a hole.

2:30– with dynamite. Oh, dear. This can’t be good.

–I’m totally surprised he just made it out of the hole in time.

–But oh noes, he no can pull up his bukkit!!11!!

–And down the hole he falls. I knew that was going to happen.

–So what’s with these rocks he’s spitting on? There’s no real visual cue to tell us what’s going on.

–But he’s broken his leg? What is this, “My Right Foot (In the Desert)?”

–What’s with the swelling violins on the mountains? It sounds like the THX logo.

–Okay, cup of rocks…

–Oh! It’s silver and gold! He’s Yukon Cornelius!

–But I thought this movie was about oil?

–1902. Four years past. Which means that the director just telegraphed that aboslutely nothing of import to the story happened in half a decade.

–And he’s crankin’. And dude falls, which sends it down.

–Ten minutes in (10:12) and oil finally makes an appearance. I knew it was about oil!

–So easy way to cut this movie down from more than two hours is to lop off the first ten minutes. Start with the thingy falling. I think the point was that it was supposed to be a silver mine but ended up being an oil well, but in which case, it’s still kind of vague. Easier just to have Day-Lewis say so, later. “Oil? Wasn’t that supposed to be a silver mine?” “A-yuh. Lord works mysterious.”

–By the way: is this a silent movie? No dialog ten minutes in? Seriously? It’s not like the visuals are rich, or anything. So far it’s a couple of shots of a mountain and a dusty mine shaft. Woopdedoo.

–Oh, no, wait. Dude’s wearing a slicker, and Day-Lewis is too happy about the slick for it to have been a surprise. By the way: minute 11.

–Dude! Watch gettin’ oil on the expensive, high-def video camera! Seriously.

–And buckets of oil into a makeshift wading pool in the dirt. Except: there are no girls in this to go wild, yet. But seriously, whose first thought is to transfer oil from one hole in the ground to another?

–Okay, besides Daniel Day-Lewis.

–(does he hyphenate that, by the way? I’d hate to be getting his name wrong. I’ll check before I post this)

–Yeah, let’s baptize the kid’s forehead with oil. I’d like “Heavy-handed symbolic correlations between religion and capitalism for a thousand, Alex.”

–Why are they moving the oil? Can’t they just mine the fucking well? They’re wearing more of the stuff than is coming out of the hole.

–You know how you know your movie sucks? When a giant beam of wood falls down the oil well, but the audience doesn’t worry, because you haven’t set up any of the characters, yet, and even if the audience did care about any of the characters, it can’t worry because it has no idea who the damned beam just hit because of your stupid awkward camera work.

–And by ‘audience,’ I obviously mean: me.

–And then I think it’s Day-Lewis, but the next shot is of the baby, so it’s baby’s father who just baptized the infant with oil, anyway? And I’m thinking, well, yeah, but he’s a retarded father in the first place.

–And thirteen minutes in and the first word of dialog is “eeeeaaaeeaeaae.” Because the baby is the first character to make a damned sound.

–Woo! Words! “Ladies and gentleman.”

–Which we all know is throat-clearing. And it’s almost fifteen minutes in. And it’s voiceover.

–I say this with all sincerity: w. t. f. ?

–Fifteen-thirty-two. Danny boy is delivering some speech, sounds like to a prospective customer. Sounds like he’s trying to sell it. Only: he’s a sucky salesman, with no pitch whatsoever.

And given that sales and oil are correlated, verbally (pitch), and given that good salesmen are said to be ‘slick,’ this guy is full of major FAIL.

–Fifteen-40: “We’re wasting time.” Unnamed, unshown prospective customer says the first intelligent thing all movie. Provided, that ain’t sayin’ much, considering there’ve been about seventy words spoken so far.

–17:50. A lease? What are they talking about? What the hell’s he trying to sell? What the fuck is this movie about? Who wants what, and what are they willing to do to get it?

If you can’t answer those two questions, nearly twenty minutes in: major fail.

–18:02. “I’m not going to waste your time, and I’d certainly appreciate it if you wouldn’t waste time.”

You know what, DDL? So would I.

–If someone says “yes,” when you call “Mr. Plainview,” chances are they are, indeed, Mr. Plainview. Otherwise he’d probably say, “No, I’m Daniel Day-Lewis. I’m here to cobble some shoes.”

–21:41. “I’d like it better if you didn’t think I was stupid.” You know what? So would I.

–And a minute-long shot of an old car driving near some tracks, a building, a farm, and then stopping on some dust. Somebody explain why we couldn’t have skipped 59 of those seconds to get to the car stopping? Or even skipped the whole car all together? 25:56… this movie has four more minutes to convince me to watch more than half an hour.

–Oh, good, thirty seconds of dudes walking. I was worried it might speed up for a second there. Phew.

–Quail hunter my ass. Now he’s a liar?

–If you find oil, how do you buy land from a family who thought you were quail hunters?

–”Do you see that?” Well, sir, I see that you’re treating H.W. as audience by proxy. Which makes sense, but even still this fucking movie is incomprehensible.

–”I believe in plain speaking,” which is why I completely lied to you about being a quail hunter.

I believe in plain speaking, too; I can’t think of a single reason to continue watching this movie.

If anyone knows of one, leave a comment, and maybe you can convince to me watch the rest.

Tags: boogie nights, daniel day lewis, in the name of the father, magnolia, Movies, my left foot, mystery science theater, paul thomas anderson, punch-drunk love, the boxer, there will be blood