Penny Hero (dot) Net

Battlestar Galactica is the best thing I’ve seen since Firefly. Yeah sure, it has had it’s slow moments… entire episodes devoted to a few pointless plot twists that have little to do with the main story. But holy shit mother of gawd, that show is good. Probably should have been a movie trilogy instead of a tv series, but I’m glad it’s here in some form.

“If we are going to survive as a species, then we’d better get the hell out of here and we’d better start having babies”

Yes. Yes yes yes. I’d like to say something more substantial, but I’ve got a headache from not sleeping.

Reasons Gmail kicks other webmail services in the arse #237:

All your Amazon.com marketplace listing confirmations get stacked in one thread. weee!

Suck my pee pee, microsoft!

“Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.” (source)

I’m a student! a busy one! You don’t really expect me to enjoy having to STILL learn two ways of making shit work, do you?

*grumbles*

In Other News: in my first final, our instructor accidentally handed out exams for Eng211. That was a riot. we all wrote our names on them of course, and briefly panicked as none of the passages or questions were remotely familiar. About 1/4th of the class is actually IN 211 too, so they got a free peek. heh. Academic dishonesty anyone?

From Paul Graham’s essay on Why Nerds are Unpopular

Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.

I think it’s more complicated than that. In my case, my parents didn’t specifically promote the “get the right answers!” so much as “get good grades! make us happy!”. So in my case, it’s likely that my nerd was nurtured from being trained to please them. I’d argue that popular kids aim to please their friends, and some nerds aim to please their parents/teachers/authority figures.

And then there are nerds who become nerds because their parents are alcoholics, or abusive, or alienate them.

He’s only looking at a smallish subset of nerd… Other “sources” of nerd seem at least just as likely (I’d even argue that they are more likely… because in our generation, there were so very few nerd moms and dads.)

Thoughts?

Other quotes I’m also picking out as sortof bullshit:

“Adults don’t normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?

Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.”

Luckily, he goes on to discuss how they do it to “make themselves feel better”, and finally as a “mechanism of popularity”. He just poorly leads us through these points, giving all three equal weight instead of saying “while A and B seem the most obvious reasons, C’s the real doozie.” Yay for writing centers.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha:

“If it’s any consolation to the nerds, it’s nothing personal.”

Here’s something the readers of might appreciate:

As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.

*sniff sniff* It’s so true!

I’m not done reading this thing. I may have more… might even post something in one of my nerd-loving communities. :)

Here’s some fiction I wrote for my Eng465 class (The Uncanny Novella) and I wanted to share. The setting is real, except the house actually was not directly between us and the waves. The dinosaur house was the dead crumbling house 2 houses down.

I’ve had a few people ask me if this story is “real”. It’s not. Yeah, it’s set on the corner of Paradise Dr. and Paradise Ala-Kai where I used to live, but all characters really are fictious. These are nothing like my real mom and ex-stepdad, or our situation in Hawaii at all. The narrator also is not supposed to be me. But it was fun to write. and I hope it’s fun to read, especially for those of you who lived/live in Hawaii.

Anyway, enjoy. It’s been revised since I let a few people read it last night. I’ve also cross-posted this in my other log-ish journal .

Dinosaur House

There was a skeleton of a house across the street from ours. It was right on the ocean, although it did nothing to block us from any of the salt spray. It was massive and gray, rotting in the humid summer sunlight and the oppressive winter rains. Its history was a familiar one. Lots of people had tried and failed to build out here. There was another dinosaur house on Kaloli and 5th—also massive, but framed with heavy iron beams that were now red and disintegrating. “Plastic rusts in Hawaii,” my mom would sometimes complain. The dinosaur on 5th street might have become something more grotesque than just another way to shelter things. They’d let a big gnarled Ohia tree grow right in the middle of it, as if it was going to be an over sized conversation piece in the middle of their ballroom. A tree as a decorative caged animal. The tree now stood five or six feet higher than the highest beams in the metal skeleton, reaching out of it like a bony hand, or a long swaying neck.

The dinosaur house across the street was four stories high, and seemed to sway and creak in the wind. It was all plywood and two-by-fours, with no glass in its windows, and no finished walls. It was open like a broken ribcage, its roof acting like a sagging spinal column barely holding it together. My step-dad wanted it torn down. Wanted it cleaned up and hauled off. He called it an unnecessary eye-sore, a rude reminder, and wanted it to stop blocking his view, and to stop creaking and whining at night, as if it felt it was missing something by being all bones and plywood. “At least we’re not like that,” my mother would say, sunning herself topless on our back deck. My step-dad would startle himself awake with his own snoring in the hot-tub, and for an instant I would think of him drowning in his sleep.

My desire to go inside the dinosaur house grew the longer we lived near it. We rented down the street while our house was being built, and I walked to the work-site almost every day after school just to be near it. I sat in its tangled shadows, and watched them unravel and stretch on the ground around me. They seemed to scratch at the gaudy new paint of our unfinished house growing up beside it. Together, we watched with tingling anxiety as the men my parents hired boarded up the open walls, fleshed out the windows, filled it in, covered it up, plastered it into place. But even when the walls were finished, and the windows and the doors kept the humidity and rain from seeping through, I knew what kind of emptiness and rot would be growing underneath the thin paint, the stainless steel nails, and the white sheet-rock.

I wanted to go inside the empty, open dinosaur house. I wanted to watch rain fall into what would never be a cold and empty kitchen. Wanted to see it dripping from where a chandelier would never hang. I wanted to see the water run down the unfinished twisting staircases and soak the downstairs sitting room where a bar and a second living room would never be. I wanted to let it trickle from the treated wood into my stringy sun-bleached hair while I leaned against a wall, or lay on the floor of a bedroom that they would never make me live in. The day our house was finally finished, Alaska sent 25 foot waves to smash against the cliffs across the street. I could see the white explosions of water in the light of the moon. They towered over even the dinosaur house, and salty water sprayed against our windows, trying to break the glass. My parents were holding a housewarming party, their glowing Champaign glasses reflecting the calm white ceilings, diamond white teeth and empty glowing walls. The storm outside pounded and clawed at us—the empty gray skeleton was unable to move out of the way. In the darkness and the flash of the white ocean explosions, I didn’t hear the dinosaur house roaring—didn’t see it rocking violently. It buckled under the weight of my parent’s house’s gaze, and under the impulsive anger of the ocean. It collapsed suddenly, as if exhausted. As if it had been holding on to the same bitter hope I had been of seeing us and our vacation house shrivel away at the last minute. Instead, the dinosaur house crumbled and expired. I didn’t even see it slip away and it became nothing more than ancient bones occasionally breaking against the cliffs for the rest of my childhood.

I slept an hour later than I intended… but I had these really really funky dreams.

In one, I was in love with a zombie. Like, we’d been in love, and then he DIED. but somehow he came back to life and we decided to continue our relationship in secret. We went shopping at Fred Meyer’s before his body started to decay, and we talked often about how glad we were that we said “I love you” before he croaked. (lots of vivid memories of saying that, saying goodbye… and lots of saying it again as if we’d lose each other at any minute) I told him how lucky he was, that he had both a body and a soul that he could separate. His body was decaying, but the rest of him was very much alive. He could even leave his body if it got too gross… I, being completely alive, was stuck with the two merged. We laughed about how gross it was going to get when he started to rot, but I loved him so much. We kissed often, and I didn’t care about the taste.

In another dream, I met a real-life friend of mine for the first time. Remember vividly the walk to his place, the color of things… the people who went with me. He had a black and white cat. his apartment was very messy… something was rotting in the bathtub. ha ha. I remember the colors, and that there were like, 8 people with me… all aparently mutual friends that neither of us knew the other had.

In another, there were lots of animals. Rodents in cages, and 5 caterpillars came out of the bodies of dying butterflies in one cage, and I didn’t know what to do with them. The “owner” of the “store”, which was actually my bedroom or my apartment, wanted to give me a gold coccoon that was about to release a butterfly. I carried it around on this string as carefully as I could, but when I got home, someone had thrown away my cage full of the right kinds of leaves. The thing kept bouncing on things because I was too clumsy, and I was afraid I would kill the butterfly before I could get it into a cage with leaves.

I’m not sure which dream this cat was from, but I seem to remember the black and white cat in all of the dreams… running through my legs. In one, we’d locked the door for so long that she came to get me so I’d let her outside to pee. She ran through my legs and bolted out the door. I remember thinking how smart she was, and feeling confident that she could open the door to let herself back inside… after this, I think I went and made out with my zombie boyfriend… a piece of his leg came off in my hand…

In all of these, there were these odd themes of death and decay, but not in a negative way. And they all had things that I LOVE and long for very much. (cats, butterflies, zombie boyfriends) There was one more along these lines… about me hooking up with a real life person who in real life won’t have me. He said that he really was a closet “attention whore”… that dream merged with the zombie-boyfriend dream… I think maybe that was my subconscious playing a little joke… I’m bitter, so I want him dead, and was just kind of running with the idea. The zombie boyfriend didn’t look a thing like him though. But dreams about certain people usually recast them in different skins, or so I’m told.

Anyway. off to campus… rush rush rush.

To do RIGHT NOW:

• write paragraph for Ahern’s class
• DON’T PLAY GAMES
• read Wild Thorns until page 150
• brainstorm for creative assignment
• IF the above gets finished by 11pm, start CWL portal website.

Inevitability of Exploration

I find that what is significant about Angela Carter’s stories are not the consequences of exploring a “curiosity”, but the pattern of the necessity in exposing the hidden, subverting an undesirable but persistent situation, or of finally expressing long repressed desires. Exploring something out of “curiosity” seems to be a much too tame way of describing these apparently inevitable “spiritual ruptures,” as I will call them.

“The Bloody Chamber” is a story where several ruptures take place, all doing more than simply subverting the cliched use of flat characters in tales or reinventing a familiar folk story. They are accomplished through the complexity of the narrator’s sexuality, and through explicit exposition. Before her husband takes her to bed, the narrator browses his bookcase and thinks, “…and I think I knew, I knew by some tingling of the fingertips, even before I opened that slim volume with no title at all on the spine, what I should find inside it” (16). It’s not that she’s driven to expose her husband’s secret pedophiliac hoard out of some moral superiority–she already knows it is there, and possibly because she already knows, she must open it. I hesitate to call this “curiosity”; the pre-knowledge of its horror is explicit. The scene also acknowledges a perverseness in her character as well because of her pre-knowledge, and the development of her character as not naive, although innocent. After her husband leaves her, she feels “a certain queasy craving” (22) for him, which is disturbing considering the nature of their marriage. Revealing this underbelly of her own sexuality makes her more complex, less easily labeled “innocent victim” and more like an active participant (perhaps a hero), and subverts the usual use of stereotypical flat characters in folk tales–all of this adds to the inevitability of her investigation of the bloody chamber itself.

In “The Lady of the House of Love,” Carter constructs characters who are binary opposites of each other, which rhetorically contributes to the inevitability of the rupturing of the Countess’s situation. Compared to the sexually tormented and tarot-reading vampiress, the young british officer is a virgin, rational, and “rooted in change and time, is about to collide with the timeless Gothic eternity of vampires…whose cards always fall in the same pattern” (all from 97). Their opposite characterization borders on the cliche, if it weren’t for the depth added by the haunted vulnerability of the vampire, and the tragic knowledge that the officer’s innocence will end soon in the war, but this familiar construction makes their collision and the rupture inevitable.

If time and space permitted, I would explore more examples of the apparent inevitability of these explorations, and see if there is enough evidence to argue that her stories actually hinge on these kinds of constructions. Nothing in Carter’s stories appears to be accidental or driven merely by “curiosity”; all heros (especially women and virgins) seem to be active-participants, and either fated to complete the story (as with the virgin officer) or very conscious of their actions (as with the narrator in the “Bloody Chamber”)

What is interesting is that with these spiritual ruptures, Carter reinvents and re-integrates the “fairy story” quality of her tales. They become dark, moral, and spiritual fantasies appealing to readers’ deeply repressed emotions. A traditional folk tale might seem like a familiar, quaint and unthreatening fantasy; Carter inverts this and creates unfamiliar, threatening and dangerous stories but the end result is still a type of fantasy because they allow us to vicariously explore darker psychological depths than we are unlikely to be comfortable exploring outside of a fictional setting.

The Turn of the Screw: Tangled Layers of Displacement

The way Henry James subjects us to tangled layers of narrative displacement from the events in The Turn of the Screw is fascinating and disturbing because of how far it reaches into the story and how far it reaches outside its pages. Ironically, the effect of these displacements actually works to unravel and destroy the sense of safety and distance from this story as we read it and think about the implications of this carefully crafted illusion of distance.

There is no “first” layer from which to begin unraveling and examining the structure of this displacement, but we might start by looking at the character Douglas, who is the alleged first inheritor of the manuscript. His disinclination to immediately share the story is mixed with the narrator’s observation that he evidently “had something to produce” (3) suggesting that his hesitation has nothing to do with unwillingness, and more to do with the effect he intends to create. His unraveling of the story, cutting out voices seeking to jump ahead in his narrative with his reply of “that will come out” (8), resembles both a performance and the handling of something more sacred, which complicates our sense of the tale being factual.

We see Douglas through the eyes of the unnamed first narrator, who seems to highly regard writing and story-telling (connecting him with the story’s real author), as seen by his recognition of Douglas’s desire to speak, and his willingness to participate in the creation of the story by claiming to have a title (9)—of which we are never made privy to within the text.

Passing the manuscript to us adds complexity to this distance. We are told that these are an “exact transcript of my own made much later” (6). Then we finally turn another two pages, begin reading Mrs. Grose’s narration we are ready to have the rug pulled out from under us and to finally be shown the story everyone else in (and outside) the story had been making such a fuss about.

However, it’s clear that Mrs. Grose is an author and story-teller as well, emphasized by the attention to “beauty of the author’s hand” (9) in the frame. Grose—if we can suspend our disbelief in her existence for a moment—seems to consciously and strategically construct a chilling and powerful narrative. The chapter-breaks are no resting points in the narration at all but drive us forward with the very first sentence of the next chapter. Her decision to transcribe her conversations about her experiences rather than attempting to narrate the fantastic itself makes her account more literally believable, even as it amplifies our desire to see what she seems to avoid revealing and confuses our habitual drive to figure out what’s real. None of this suggests that this is a simple diary of events.

Finally, the unmentioned title of the manuscript and the published title of the actual book forms a bridge between author Henry James and the first narrator, and we can’t forget that Henry James is an actual physical person who we must believe has invented and written this entire novella. It is when we recognize this as a layer of displacement from the story like the others that we receive our biggest jolt as readers, because by extension, we are suddenly a part of the tapestry of this story, and perhaps not even a final part. (I sit at my desk now attempting to craft a convincing analysis inspired by this jolt.) All of this results in (and in my case, has already resulted in) a chilling and complicated experience of the uncanny as we attempt to unravel Henry James’ puzzle.

Did YOU know p2p downloading is legal in canada? (Google search results) this thread.

Canada is so smart. someone needs to kick the USofASS in the balls. What the shit.

In Other News: here I am NOT writing my analysis, doing my Japanese, or reading for philosophy. I’m also NOT SLEEPING so I can get up early to finish any of it in the morning either. wah. baaaad emily. Maybe I should skip philosphy tomorrow. hmmmm… *rubs hands together* why not. All I have to do is pass that class anyway. who cares if I miss 5 points for not showing up with my homework.