Fuck You, I'm a Robot

Since my Non-Western Lit class got canceled again today, I have been taking the time to look at grad programs.

WMU actually looks good, although half of their web pages are down, so I can't find much about funding or assistantships. Columbia in NY does too, but the application fee is twice that of most of the other schools (and I can't find anything about funding on their site either; pages aren't down, just no links). Sarah Lawrence looks fantastic, but...no funding? D: Columbia in Chicago has a two-year MFA in poetry but apparently not in fiction, but they do have a tuition waiver for the first year and possible grad student teaching positions. Indiana looks really amazing, but they only admit twelve students per year, holycrap. Art Institute of Chicago has an MFA in "Writing," which looks like it's largely focused on creative writing; Prof. Blake said that one of the girls I went to Poetry Collective with is going there and loves it, so there's that.

I'm looking at this thing right now; it's a NEOMFA, a program that's shared among four universities, all of which are less than an hour away from each other. Scheduling and driving seems like it would be a pain, but it'd mean being able to be in Kent with Seth, and it looks like a good program.

I need to get my shit together for actual graduation, too. Sigh.

We're doing Borges in Freed's class. Today, we discovered that everyone's copies of The Library of Babel and The Garden of Forking Paths are all translated slightly differently. None of us realized this until we'd all spent fifteen minutes arguing over whether Borges was suggesting that time was sentient or a figment of the imagination or both or neither.

drworm and I have been attempting to watch "Sapphire and Steel." We got through the first episode and have been watching bits of pieces of the second while doing other things. It's very strange and slow and low-budget and is kind of like watching a transcript of a dream someone had; there are some parts that make sense in a logical way, some parts that make sense in a magical/archetypical way, and some parts that would probably make sense if the viewer had information that they're not given. Strangely, the second episode that we've been half-watching already makes much more sense than the first episode we paid attention to. It's definitely not like anything else I've ever watched. ...Sammi said it reminded her of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

I desperately want to go to this, because it seems to offer an opportunity to party and drink heavily with middle-aged ladies who share at least one of my current major interests, and I've always had a better time drinking heavily with middle-aged ladies than I have with groups of people my own age. Perhaps another year.

Hah. Okay. So, my Algebra class starts tomorrow instead of three weeks from tomorrow like I had planned. The good thing about this is that it's 055, which means it's all stuff I learned in the eighth grade, because my dyscalculic brain can't handle anything more complex.

Wow, okay, I was sort of joking, but I just checked the Wikipedia article for dyscalculia, and lookit all my symptoms:

( DYSCALCULIA! )

ETA: I'm reminded of the stereotype of girls not being good at math. Do you think having dyscalculia is a valid condition? The result of gender-based social programming, or a shitty educational system in general? Does being verbally gifted necessarily mean being mathematically deficient? Discuss.

The class isn't very long, and there's homework, but I expect the homework won't be particularly difficult, since the syllabus lists things that I've already learned but haven't thought about for years--Order of Operations and such. Probably a refresher course, good for keeping the mind sharp during the summer but not too taxing.

I can't believe how many things I want to do right now and how many things I could do. I have novels and stories to beta-read and now a screenplay to co-write (co-adapt?) and short stories to finish and E-mails to send and vague ideas for pretentious fan essays that will just have to wait. And I'm almost done with the hardest thing I have to do for school this summer. It's due tomorrow anyway. And then I CAN LIVE AND DO THINGS.

\o/

Also, Adult Swim is tonight and Seth and I have a bunch of movies that need watched before we incur massive late fees at the video store. BAD US. Um, we watched Wonder Boys, which was unexpectedly funny, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which was an excellent postmodern parody of the noir genre, and then...well, we've been lying around watching movies and going out for walks and generally luxuriating in having the apartment to ourselves, since Sammi is gone for the next three weeks. Also, I have to clean the litterbox. :/ Because I am taking care of the cats now, you see.

I'm not going to be posting the text of my Snow Crash vs. VALIS paper because I don't think it's all that well-written, as far as my papers go, but here is the summary:

Snow Crash and VALIS are both about people who get infected by informational viruses that turn out to be religion, but in Snow Crash, the virus is bad, gods aren't real, and the way we see reality is determined by language, whereas in VALIS, the virus is good, the gods are real, and reality is an illusion created by us being language. This might be because Philip K. Dick was schizophrenic and Neal Stephenson most likely has the Asperger's.

ETA: Hooray for totally changing your mind about the point of your analysis 1 hour before the paper is due. Whatever.

Hopefully I can whip five pages of babbling into something that says that coherently, and I can do it before 5 PM.

Sammi decided that last night was a good night to break out some weird honey-infused bourbon and watch shows with four basic character types of female protagonists. I had no objection. I like Desperate Housewives quite a lot--Sammi only has the first season, so we've been watching that over and over. I seriously enjoy Bree, even though she's normally not the type of character I can sympathize with--yes, she's a supermom type and a Christian conservative, but she's also a gun nut and a cheerful control freak who is close to losing her shit because of her family. Makes her interesting. I still want to write a little MUNCLE crossover just so I can send her and Illya on a shooting range date. I have the Crossover Disease.

BUT I STILL MANAGED TO GET MY HOMEWORK DONE! And I got my grant forms in! Apparently I'm eligible for a $2,500 grant because of my drive-thru work at the Taco Bell. Who knew? If I get it (and that is a fairly big if), it will net me more money than I ever earned actually working there.

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CLASSES:

In ENG 201, We're reading McLuhan ("Media is the message" guy) and doing Baudrillard again, I am not kidding. This time around, there are four levels of simulacra. That is one more level than before. Even weirder, it's the same basic article from my last class, it's just a different translation. I don't even know what's going on.

NEW LEVELS OF SIMULACRA:
1) That which reflects reality
2) That which masks or misrepresents reality
3) That which masks absence of basic reality
4) That which bears no relation to reality

mindfudged you guys MMMMMMMINDFUDGED

*

We did Puritan and then Romantic stuff in Childrens' Poetry. One of the definitions someone gave for childrens' poetry yesterday was that "Kid's stuff is usually didactic or has a moral, and adult poems are just, like, images." (Which is sort of true; even that crazy hippie Shel Silverstein wrote his share of "Remember, kids, be a free spirit!" poems, which technically still have a moral. Oh, yeah, and the prof doesn't like Shel Silverstein. She thinks most of his poems are just nonsense that doesn't necessarily have a deeper meaning. Sammi, who's in the class along with me, shared my huge WTF moment.)
This didacticism, Alton says, is a leftover from Puritan poetry, when most poetry for the small ones specifically was aimed at saving them from Hell. (Which prompted an outburst of "But I don't believe that's right!" from some girl. I really fucking hate that shit, I'm sorry. There are some times and places where your opinion doesn't matter and nobody cares.)
Childrens' Romantic poetry was often less didactic and usually nature-based, because of the Romantic belief that children were innocent tabulae rasa who were at one with nature. Even up until the 1970s, pretty much any childrens' poetry anthology had at least one nature-based poem in it.
Also, I hadn't known that Blake's "The Tyger" was meant to be a childrens' poem. It was paired with "The Lamb" in a nifty two-volume book that was themed around the dichotomy of innocence and experience. We got into a discussion about whether "The Tyger" was meant to suggest that tygers were in some way Satanic before I broke it up by mentioning that the poem was much less intense and scary if you sung it to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" (which, by the way, is called "The Star" and was written by Jane Taylor and has five stanzas. Also, the familiar tune was written by Mozart years before she wrote the poem. The more you know!).

Clones, Dream Machines, and Butterflies: An Examination of Simulacra and Simulation in the Venture Brothers

( We're trapped in a cliché. Use your fake impossible magic to get us out of here. )


I'm actually surprised at how well this paper turned out. I worked on it all weekend (which was a fairly grueling task) and had to watch several episodes of the Venture Brothers over and over (which was not nearly as grueling).

The Venture Brothers is one of my favorite shows; silly as it may seem, it's one of the few things that makes me feel like I'm actually part of a generation instead of being a drifting pop-culture vulture. I know I have had no hand in its actual creation, and I'm only peripherally part of the active fandom, but it somehow feels like my show in a way that most movies and TV shows I like don't. I tend to reinterpret media, to ferret out themes and images and try to subvert them or question them; this isn't so much a conscious philosophical stance as it is an instinctive response to being presented with assumptions and points of view I don't identify with or agree with on the level on which I think they're being presented to me. Maybe it's because that's what the Venture Brothers does in the first place, but it's one of the few media artifacts where I can analyze it and feel like yes, that's what the creators intended all along, and it's just that I've just managed to find it.

The more I watched the episodes, the more examples of simulacra I found--I don't know if it's just my new Baudrillard goggles, or whether so many of the episodes really sync up that way, but it was fascinating. I kind of wish I'd had the time and space to mention more, but I think I got the most important and interesting ones.

I really wish my teachers would let me write stories instead of doing papers. It's not that I'm lazy, it's just that I generally feel like it's easier to express what I think about a given idea or book in narrative form instead of analytical form. (This is why I am a Creative Writing major instead of a Literature major.) I still have immense trouble streamlining everything into a nice linear outline when there are different angles that need to be dealt with from several different directions at the same time. My most successful papers have essentially followed characters through a whole, single narrative, and I can't always do that. I can't with this one--we're supposed to structure it around ideas instead of the narrative, which makes me have to leap back and forth from Part Two of the book to Part Three of the book, and it's making everything that I write a little disjointed.

Which is probably also why I write fanfiction, except that's always more personal--the best stuff I do is a way of working out my own personal issues by transplanting them onto convenient characters. In my defense, this tends to work mainly because I can match these things up--I can explore my own ideas about parenthood or feeling like an outcast through a character who is a parent and who was an outcast when they were younger, and I can explore my conflicts about being consciously social through characters who have different ways of dealing with people...it's recognition more than transplantation, really. Sometimes, I'll start writing something and it just won't come together until I actually realize that I'm writing about my own ideas or experiences. Then everything comes into focus and I can finish it.

My original stuff is less personal and tends to explore ideas that I just happen to be fascinated with. If I do write something personal, it's usually to annoy or communicate with one specific person, and I lie to everyone else and tell them that it was "just this cool idea I had, you know?"

I don't even know about my poetry. That shit is all over the place.

*

For those of you who write fanfiction--is working out your own issues via fanfic really that bad? Do you like being able to see into the author's mind when reading a fanfic, or does it take you out of the "universe" the fanfic is being written in?

I actually like being able to spot someone's real-life issues or opinions in a fanfic, even when I think those issues or opinions are annoying or bullshit. It's partially a voyeuristic frisson and partially just fascination at all the ways a generally monolithic source material can be interpreted and played with.

I watched Kill Bill Vol. 1 last night because it was on TV, because I only have Vol. 2 because I lost the first DVD. So I had this dream where I found out by messing around with Wikipedia that it was actually based on an old Japanese legend about a demon who owned a bunch of snakes that he sent out to do his evil bidding, and one of them fell in love with a sleeping man and asked some god of mercy or other to turn her into a woman, and then the demon found out and sent all his snakes to kill her at the wedding...yeah. It was a pretty awesome dream.

Which is amusing, because I decided last night that the reason it's partially animated and partially B&W and cut very weirdly in some places is that it's actually kind of a visual representation of an ongoing dream, or of a continuing daydream. Most of Tarantino's movies that I've seen have this surreal quality about them anyway, like they're taking place in a universe that's removed from reality by a layer of other movies, as opposed to movies which try to be more realistic, or at least suggest that they are based on basic reality. I don't even think it's one of those simulacra which try to hide the illusory nature of what it's trying to simulate in the first place, it's more highlighting the surreal and non-realistic nature of movies, or at least of that kind of over-the-top grindhouse movie, in the first place.

Not that I think this is necessarily on purpose. Things can be very clever and postmodern just through being very cleverly done and fun to watch. Stuff like Wayne’s World is very wink-wink-nudge-nudge postmodern, and I’m fairly sure Mike Myers was thinking more about how many jokes he could squeeze into a movie than about illustrating the artificially constructed nature of a narrative. Theory describes culture first, anyway, culture just starts to follow as theory trickles down.

*

We had a little class discussion in my Po-Mo seminar today about how what we learned had affected us. A lot of kids talked about how they kept thinking about The Matrix and wished they could just take the blue pill and pretend they'd never read Baudrillard. A lot of kids talked about how they totally looked at everything in a different light now and they were so glad they had taken the class! I told the prof that the class had given me the proper terms and a structured way to think about things I'd thought about but hadn't had the words for before the class. He changed the subject really quickly. I sometimes think I am not on the same page as everybody else, or perhaps we are using different translations.

Baudrillard once wore a gold lamé suit with mirrored lapels while reading his poetry in a Las Vegas bar.
How cool is that? How cool is that? I'm so fucking shallow. Simulations is blowing my fucking mind. Jean Baudrillard is so crazy and so classy and so totally right about shit. I don't have my copy with me right now or I'd bombard you with quotes. I need to get more books by this person. I need the Futurist's Manifesto too. I need to get this stuff from Amazon for cheap because I have a really bad habit of not returning books to the library ever.
My copy of Simulations is from a publishing company called Semiotext(e) and it is from the "Foreign Agents" series. FOREIGN AGENTS. There's a repeating clip of an Interpol document about naturalized citizens on the front cover. It makes me think of Naked Lunch. All agents defect sooner or later. Agents becoming their cover stories, and their "true" natures are...not true. Or were never true. Or are just as true as the "false" ones. Or the "false" ones are just as true as the true ones. ILLUSION.

ANYWAY SO THE POINT IS Baudrillard talks about three levels of simulacra, which I want to talk about now because I just figured out what he means by "precession."

LEVEL ONE: Counterfeits. This is basically simulacra for beginners, where you just need to start getting your head around the idea of "copying." A counterfeit depends upon the existence of the original for its existence. Counterfeit $20s only work because everyone knows what a real $20 looks like; realism in art only works because everyone knows what a real apple looks like, and a still life looks like an apple (with a banana and some flowers and maybe a dead bird or something). This is where you need to figure out that there are things that don't want to be things in themselves, that are deliberately trying to be like other things. It's so sad. Poor copy-things. If they were people, they would have low self-esteem.

Here is an example of a counterfeit:


LEVEL TWO: Industrial simulacra. Once you've gotten your head around the concept of a copy, it's time to make things that are copies of each other. These were invented by Henry Ford and made cool by Andy Warhol. Industrial simulacra are not copies of anything that already exists. They are only real because they are exact copies of each other--anything that deviates from the mold may be an object, but it's not a real copy, it's a deviation, a typo, an irregular. Like a Coke can that is blue and green instead of red and white. (Which may have gotten Warhol serious bank, but is less okay if it's being rejected from the factory for being overly colorized. Or if you're paying $1.25 for the privilege of drinking it and it turns out to taste like toothpaste because it doesn't follow the Coke recipe.) This is why off-brand things are sort of weird and why people get seriously upset if their Burger King burger is square and little kids throw fits if their Halloween costumes are not officially licensed--they want real copies.

Here is an example of an industrial simulacra:


LEVEL THREE: Simulation. First, you need to have recognized that Level 2 simulacra are real because they can be replicated. Good? Good. Now, check this: Reality itself can be replicated. This is where people get tripped up and start making references to the types of movies which think they are clever because they put their protagonists in a world which is actually just virtual reality. Yes, we know we're living in a world which is completely created by computers. That is not the point. The point is that we believe that that world, being a level 3 simulacra, is no more real or no less real than the "real" world. That an exact replica of, say, Stonehenge or the Grand Canyon or even a person is exactly equivalent to the "real thing." Is it? Maybe. I don't know. How can you even tell? Does it really matter? Who's keeping track? What feels more real? Which one has the brighter colors, the tastier food, the bouncier music?

Here is an example of a simulation:

Simulations, being less "real", have to try harder; to this end, they overcompensate and create hyperreality, in which they become more "real" than what is actually real. (My teacher liked to use the example of watermelon-flavored bubble gum for this: It's an imitation of watermelon flavor, and it tastes nothing like real watermelon, but the fake flavor when you finally bite into a piece of real watermelon after eating nothing but watermelon-flavored bubble gum, the real thing is kind of disappointing.) And that is where we are today.

Baudrillard points out that we are essentially living in a huge simulation--this is not because we are literally living inside of a computer program, but that society alters so much and bombards us with so many signs and signifiers and copies of things that we are incapable of confronting reality as reality, of being able to discern the difference between what is real and what is a simulacra. Things like movies and video games and Disneyland, which are deliberately presented to us as unreal copies of reality, are there mainly to help us pretend that there is anything left that is real, just as scandals like Watergate or the Lewinsky thing are presented to us as deviations from the norm so that we can pretend that there is a norm to deviate from. Which is why, as he put it, "The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the Matrix would have been able to produce."

Jean Baudrillard, on The Matrix: "The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the Matrix would have been able to produce."

Joseph Kane, on postmodernism: "The great thing about postmodernism is that it doesn't actually try to contradict any other theories, it just kicks them in the balls every once in a while."