French New Wave Cinema, Monty Python Style...

Seeing this at lunch helped me get though a long day of paper-writing. If you've ever watched a French New Wave film, you know exactly what the Pythons are getting at here...

Personal Classics - The Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I

As far as albums I love go, the Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I is definitely one that I wouldn't expect everyone to love. Looking at it now, a decade later, it may not seem as surprising as it did then, but anyone that remembers indie rock circa '99 knows that back then nobody made danceable music. Enter Emergency & I, where the Dismemberment Plan managed to bring the bootyshaking back into the equation, and do it so well that the album still sounds fresh and a little weird, even after the inundation of dance-rock over the past few years. Travis Morrison's vocals, paired with one of the best rhythm sections in recent memory, make the faster songs all energetic nerves and the slower ones modern paranoia. Writing this right now makes me realize that it's one of those albums that's hard to explain, so feel free to press play below and decide for yourself.

Personal favorites include "What Do You Want Me to Say?," "Spider in the Snow," "You Are Invited," and "Back and Forth." In light of my current research interests, however, "Memory Machine" may have my favorite lyrics...

Emergency & I - The Dismemberm...

Remembering the Disappeared

This last weekend I was at a conference at UT Austin presenting a paper on Arrested Development and One Hundred Years of Solitude, something I will post more on later. One presentation in particular had a strong impact on me- "Los recordatorios de los desaparecidos: Un nuevo género discursivo" by Celina Van Dembroucke, one of the grad students at UT Austin. She spoke about recordatorios, small newspaper ads in a paper called Página Doce in Argentina. (Before going any further, if you don't know about the Dirty War in Argentina, check out this wiki on it.) Basically, family and friends of the thousands of people who disappeared during the military dictatorship make small announcements that are published on the day of their disappearance. Celia had collected hundreds of them, and I think what impacted me most was the sheer weight of so many lives lost, and so many other directly affected. One after another, I saw the faces of the disappeared, and the messages from those who had lost them. I saw an ad for a whole family that the government tried to erase, but thirty years later I saw their faces and saw that someone remembers them and refuses to forget. It seems strange to think of such a thing happening at an academic conference, but I had to hold back tears and what had always been a terrible piece of history became uncomfortably real. Most of the recordatorios are like the ones I found and put here, but one in particular stood out to me- it had a picture of a young man, and said something along the lines of "Hey man, the years don't seem to get to you. Here I am getting gray hairs, and there you are, always with the same face." I don't know why, but the humor made it all the more touching, all the more real.

It served as a strong reminder that governments should never have the power to make anyone disappear, whether they be on the right or the left. People should never have to place recordatorios like these to remember people who the government though unfit to live. Above all, it was a reminder that we need to remember.

And, for those who may have never realized it, U2's last song on the album The Joshua Tree is about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who bravely protested the disappearances of their children.

Mothers Of The Disappeared - U...

Poetry night...

Bad poetry is the best.

It's that time of year again...

Constitution FAIL

House Minority Leader Jon Boehner proves once again that the people making our laws don't actually read the Constitution:



You can read the U.S. Constitution and its lack of the quoted phrases here.
The Declaration of Independence, which he seems to think is the preamble to the Constitution, can be read here.

Or, you can just watch Captain Kirk give the correct preamble here:

It's always funny when nerdiness and jokes meet...

I just read Mark Paglia's "Famous Authors Narrate the Funny Pages," and I thought I'd pass it on, because there's always a laugh to be found where literary nerdiness and pop culture jokes meet. Here, for example, is Borges narrating Doonesbury:

I awoke one day and regarded the morning news on my television, which I keep on a shelf in my library. The images were those of men, but men who had been replaced by floating feathers, cowboy hats, and giant cigarettes. Truly now, I knew that I had entered into the labyrinthine Fiefdom of Metonymy.

It's followed by Faulkner narrating Family Circus, among other gems. Head on over and enjoy...