Monthly Archive for September, 2005

open letter from my back muscles

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 30, 2005
in Correspondence and Vintage Imports
. 0 Comments

Dear Alfina,

We’re sorry we had to do this to you, but we tried to warn you, you know.  It’s really your own fault. What were you thinking, lugging thirty-some heavy books down from your fifth-floor office, over to the library circulation desk, and back up to your fifth-floor office yesterday?  Huh?  All that reaching and awkward gripping and trying not to accidentally fling Cleanth Brooks across the lawn?  It was a bad idea.  Now we have had to cause you pain.

You think we like this, but we promise, this hurts us more than it hurts you.  You get to lie around, reading, while we have to work hard all day, repeatedly spasming and sending surprising lightning bolts of unhappiness all over you.  And seriously, quit complaining that you have to miss your fancy department party where they serve lobster stuffed with tacos and tiny glasses of wine.  We knew you wanted an excuse to stay home and watch the game anyway.

You’re welcome, you lazy asshat.

Your Back Muscles

open letter to healthy food

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 29, 2005
in Correspondence, Food and Drink and Vintage Imports
. 0 Comments

What’s up, healthy food?

Look, I have been wanting to bring this up with you for some time, but I waited, hoping your behavior would change. Why must you be so stubborn?  You sit there on your high horse, flashing salad greens and soy; flaunting your protein, vitamins, and calcium at passers-by.  Stop being so full of yourself; we don’t appreciate the irony.

Healthy food, why can’t you be more like a cheeseburger?

V

on truth and lie in an extra-journalistic sense*

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 27, 2005
in Academia
. 18 Comments

Strap in, kids: it’s gonna be another long one.

When, a while back, I recommended fellow Tennessean Gas Guy’s blog, I had no idea it was so near its last days. If you’ve taken my advice and followed up on it, you know that the Gas Guy has finished blogging (at least under that particular moniker) and has outed himself as another academic and (gasp!) not a Tennessean after all.

The interesting bit is that there is a raging debate in the comments thread over at his place, pretty evenly divided between those who simply enjoyed reading his stuff and are happy to say so versus those who (I think illogically) take umbrage at the idea that they were somehow duped by what they read. (I’d be lying if I said I didn’t suspect them of merely being pissed that he’s actually a Yankee, but that’s a post for another day.)

People are going so far as to say that “writing is about truth” and that they only read non-fiction “because there is no higher purpose of fiction than entertaining the reader in exchange for a paycheck.”

All thinking people know this is nothing but complete and total bollocks. Seriously. Cry me a fucking river, chumps; you fell for the illusion of a representative medium: language. While fiction asks us to suspend our disbelief, non-fiction–more insidiously–tacitly assumes we are unquestioningly credulous. Your precious non-fiction is, however, far from objective. I’ll refrain from referring you to scholarly sources, so just reflect on it a while: objectivity itself is an illusion. Two people would never tell the same story the same way (unless of course it’s a story they agreed to tell the same way for some nefarious purpose, but dude, Vincent D’Onofrio would suss that shit out and don’t tell me he wouldn’t, but you catch my drift: nefarious purposes!).

I have waxed on before about the lie of language and of representation, and we’re all familiar with the Magritte painting. Here’s the real problem, though: why and how has blogging become the new “objective” medium? The new journalism? Don’t bother telling me about how it has trumped the “real” journalists on specific stories lately; that’s not what I’m on about. I don’t read the political blogs unless they’re written by friends (and all both of those are on the sidebar, so have at it). I am more interested in the “personal” or “humor” blogs. I would never assume that in telling a joke (or writing one) a person is swearing to tell the truth, nor do I take the diary-type blogs at face value. Most of us don’t use our real names or include pictures of ourselves, and those who do are likewise not bound to any oath of honesty. That pink typewriter? Totally isn’t even mine.

While what I am discussing is more related to the human desire to arrange elements of a narrative in the most beneficial fashion (adding, deleting, embellishing, re-ordering, emphasizing or de-emphasizing, even manufacturing at will), there is another sort of elephant in the room when it comes to writing. Let’s face it people; there is a pretty decent chance that I don’t actually live in Zembla. For that matter, I might not even be a twenty-seven year old female. On the internet, odds are I am an overweight man with a predilection for teenagers.

Caveat fucking lector.

*Title cribbed from a work I enthusiastically recommend on this issue: Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” There, I’ve done it; I’ve gone and recommended Nietzsche to you. I’m so, so sorry. Please forget about this.

mr. jarmusch, i have a project for you.

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 25, 2005
in Academia and Paedagogy
. 12 Comments

Classes start tomorrow, and I am set to be sweating, gesturing, and pontificating about Modern Fiction in front of a room full of perky young undergrads sometime in the a.m.   The night before a new term starts, I always lie awake at night, anxiously re-writing the first lecture over and over in my head, which necessitates at least a quart of strong coffee in the morning, which in turn renders my sweating and gesturing all the scarier.  I like this.

Today was spent wandering aisles filled with bright, sparkling technicolor pens, notebooks, highlighters, and post-its.  There is nothing like buying new school supplies, is there? Something about the coming of  Fall and New Books renders that box of one hundred plain manila file folders a pristinely beautiful thing.  I mean, they have those flappy tabs, and you can label them with anything you want!  I have bought a pack of post-its so large and in such fresh,
spring-like colors that they are practically guaranteed to finish my
dissertation for me.  This is what I was told, anyway.   Coffee and post-its.  Someone should make a movie about that.

the carpet, after vacuuming, turned out to be pink

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 24, 2005
in Cheese Sandwich and Vintage Imports
. 0 Comments

Sometimes it feels as if there is nothing sadder than an empty room, especially the kind of room that’s empty for having been vacated (not the kind of room that’s empty but waiting to be filled with “the future’s limitless possibilities,” or some optimistic sentimental horseshit like that).

When I left my last apartment, I had a moment of lingering and looking at the empty walls, but then I caught sight of the disgusting carpet and tacky linoleum and quickly returned to my senses.  It was still somewhat sad to go, though; living downtown certainly had its benefits:  chiefly the fact that I never had to weigh the respective costs of a taxi to and from downtown versus the inevitable parking ticket I’d receive if I drunkenly left my car overnight in a metered space. (Note to readers:  in Zembla, the parking ticket is only 75% of the cost of the two taxis!  What a world!).  Other benefits included living on the same block as a tattoo parlour, a piercing parlour, an art house movie theater, and our coolest neighborhood bar. You know, for all those times you want to watch a depressing independent film, wash your sorrows away with beer, and finish it off with some permanent alteration of your appearance. Ah, yes, those kinds of nights.

Yesterday I lingered a bit, looking around at the empty walls of my impossibly cool friend Z’s apartment as he was preparing to vacate it in favor of a continent where he’ll get to have Summer all over again–not to mention academic success, fame and fortune, and probably a nicer apartment.  We will all miss the hell out of him, but we rest easy knowing that we’ll have a couch to sleep on somewhere in Australia.  (Wait, it’s an eighteen-hour flight, you say? Why I can’t imagine anything pleasanter!  Yes, that really is a word!)

Incidentally, Z has said he plans on replacing us with new, Australian versions of ourselves. What will they be like, one has to wonder.  Tanner, perhaps, and certainly with strange-sounding vowels.  Will they convince him to take up an interest in cricket or Australian rules football?  More importantly, what the hell is Australian rules football?  Answer: A) a phrase in desperate need of a hyphen, B) cute boys in shorts, or  C) the key to understanding many of Tony T’s posts.  Any rate, I’m sure the Strayan-versions can set him straight.

Heads up, Australia!  This one’s a keeper.