The Literary Theory course by Paul Fry from Yale (on iTunesU) is also enjoyable. I’ve been listening to undergraduate literature courses and it’s actually quite pleasant. Half the time you’re sorta nodding and thinking, “Yep, yep, mm hm, that’s definitely a thing that’s true,” and the other half you’re sorta thinking, “Oh yeah, I guess that’s also true. Neat.”

Speaking of undergraduate courses, Tim Morton has put up a bunch of them on his blog. There are also some of his courses available on iTunesU. I turned the courses on his blog into iTunes playlists and set the options for each mp3 to “remember playback position,” which accomplishes pretty much the same thing as iTunesU or turning them into an audiobook.

Listening to literature courses is a lot easier to justify than listening to books about magic in regency England, but, like, whatever, man. Reading Susanna Clarke makes me want to read Ursula K Le Guin. I haven’t read her since grade 5 (or 6?), but now I sorta get the idea of magic as a metaphor for all the weird things that language does, and I want to think about that some more.

I also listened to 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami recently, but I didn’t really like it. I thought both the story and the (quite dramatized) readings were a bit overwrought. There are several scenes where a character cries, and cries and cries and cries, or she weeps, she wept for this, and she wept for that, she wept for all the blah blah blah, and all I can think is, gee, it’s nice that this character is going through this huge emotional catharsis, but, well, I’m just not feeling anything. I’ve felt much more powerful feelings from reading J.D. Salinger short stories where everything is very understated. (“A Girl I Knew” is still my favourite short story. Ever. It’s too bad that it is now pretty hard to find.)

The only other Murakami I’ve read is What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which is non-fiction, and I thought was much better. Every review of 1Q84 I’ve seen also seems to indicate that 1Q84 isn’t as good as Murakami’s other stuff, so I’m not going to write him off.

However, I’m running out of credits on Audible so I don’t know what I’m going to listen to next. I have to make it count.

For all those people, I hope you like the recipes, and I apologize for all the weird other stuff (jokes, boring academic stuff, whatever), which, as far as I can tell, doesn’t usually accompany a bunch of blog posts with baking recipes.

I haven’t posted a recipe in like a year and a half or something (I’m lazy and never try baking anything new anymore. This is also because I just like tonnes of sugar and have completely unrefined taste buds), but look at the tag cloud:

For those of you reading from the future, if my actual tag cloud looks much different–and I actually hope that it will–the above screenshot is from today, 2 April 2012.

I’m studying for my reading exams right now, and I’ve been finding it more and more helpful, for study purposes, to just write finished products of some sort. By “finished product” I basically mean “mini essay,” or really, “just about anything that is coherent and organized around something.” It doesn’t matter if a given finished product won’t ever see the light of day, but the act of writing—i.e., having to formulate your thoughts coherently and logically, putting those thoughts to paper or screen, and then reading back those thoughts to yourself—is obviously going to force your mind to organize and re-organize itself.

I recently came upon the term “Commonplace book” (Wikipedia link) and I think that’s probably about the best term to describe the method I’ve been using (or trying to use). Instead of using physical books like a Moleskin or something, I’ve been using an app called Scrivener. Scrivener is a word processor app that is excellent for organizing your writing if you intend to keep it in a traditional format (linear, mostly text-based one, etc.).

The app is designed for fiction writing, but it’s useful for any type of lengthy writing in which order and structure matter, but you’re not necessarily writing it start to finish or beginning to end. Sometimes it’s useful or easier to start in the middle. Scrivener lets you visualize your text as a whole, and move around sections of it in any way you see fit. You can have sections and subsections, and you can view the sections as nested folders or as index cards. This makes it easy to rearrange things after you’ve put your thoughts to the screen and you begin to start identifying possible structures or patterns.

That said, if you want fancy highlighting and formatting, bullet points or lots of visual play, it’s… not so good. In other words, it’s not very good for rough notes if you’re a visually inclined person who uses lots of colours and diagrams.

But this is actually a good thing. Well, for my purposes, at least. It forces me to take my rough notes in Microsoft Word, where I can play around with all sorts of fancy formatting. I can highlight things, add text boxes here and there, add arrows or shapes, and place things in weird visual relations to each other to help me understand difficult concepts. If I really need the extra freedom, I’ll sketch something on a piece of paper, take a photo of that, and then just stick the image into the Word document – a bit messy, granted, but it works. They’re just rough notes, after all.

Scrivener, then, becomes something of a “stage two” thing. (I originally started this paragraph by writing, “Scrivener, then, is for completed thoughts only,” but that’s not quite accurate.) I only use Scrivener after I’ve taken my initial notes. Admittedly, I didn’t always do this at first, so now I have a few notes that are a bit of a mess. My notes for Jameson’s The Political Unconscious are all over the place right now. The trick, for my use of Scrivener, is to argue something, or explain something in my own words and my own metaphors, even if it’s all pretty basic. And that means the trick is to just start writing.

An example of something I wrote this morning links Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the co-existence of discourses in the novel form with Roman Jakobson’s discussion of the co-existence of styles from different time periods (modern vs. archaic, etc.) in a synchronic verbal system. I’m probably never going to show this to anyone or anything like that, because it isn’t really all that insightful – I’m just pointing out pretty obvious links between some stuff I happened to read. Maybe I’ll come back to what I’ve written in a few months or years. I don’t know. I am hoping that in a few months I’ll have a pretty decent body of arguments that I can use for something. But what I’m really doing, as I’m writing these random things, is formulating and organizing various possible arguments that I will be able to at least partially reproduce later for my discourse and text analysis field exam.

Another advantage to this is I’ve found that I can actually speed up my overall exam reading speed if I take less rough notes in Microsoft Word, take a few more notes in the margins my books (admittedly this is harder to do if it’s a library book), and then immediately after I finish a reading I construct a few coherent paragraphs about what I just read and how it relates to various other things I’ve just read. In other words I write a mini-essay or two. Sometimes the mini-essay stands on its own, other times I try to slot it in somewhere, in relation to something else I’ve written.

This method forces me to be a bit more mentally disciplined while I’m reading. If I just take notes, it can be easy to jot things down without really understanding what I’ve written. It’s pretty easy, mentally, to identify an important concept in a text, identify where that concept is defined, and then basically write out the text’s own definition of the concept in my notes without fully understanding it. It’s pretty much impossible to use a concept I don’t fully understand in a mini-essay of some sort, or to explain the concept from a weird angle using my own metaphor if I don’t yet understand it.

I’m still debating how I’m going to use some of these in the future, since I am hoping that at some point they’ll be of use. Some of the things I write are just pure explanation and explication, but sometimes I’ll think, “Oh! This concept relates to this other thing that I actually want to write more about!” and so the written produce I then produce is actually (to my mind) worth keeping and integrating and eventually showing someone. But right now these snippets remain fairly unorganized.

This was my favourite exchange:

The Driver (Ryan Gosling) and Benicio (Kaden Leos) are watching cartoons while Irene (Carey Mulligan) gets ready.

The Driver:  Is he a bad guy?

Benicio: Yeah.

The Driver: How can you tell?

Benicio: Cuz. He… he’s a shark.

The Driver: There’s no good sharks?

Benicio: No. I mean, just look at him. Does he look like a good guy to you?

(The Driver doesn’t respond.)

Roger Ebert’s review of the movie has a pretty nice final line that sums things up well: “‘Drive’ looks like one kind of movie in the ads, and it is that kind of movie. It is also a rebuke to most of the movies it looks like. “

Anyone who owns a cat understands the phatic function of language. Like, you know when you can hear your cat on another floor meowing, so because no one else is home and because it’s slightly hilarious to “talk cat” you respond to them by also meowing, and then the cat responds back, and you go back and forth for a bit, and then the cat runs into the room to see you?

That’s always seemed to me that best example of the phatic function of language, since it’s basically the phatic function in its pure form. (Or at least the first bit of the exchange is.) That is, the exchange performs a social task, and in this case that task is the invocation of sociality as such (i.e., it is simply a point of contact with another being, a search for and then the acknowledgment itself that there is at least one other person). In other words, there is no messy semantic meaning getting in the way, as there often is in human phatic exchanges (e.g., “So, the weather is… alright…” – “Yeah, the weather is… good… and…. cloudy…” – “Yeah, clouds… they’re… something”).

Jakobson, in the Lingusitics and Poetics mentions talking birds (i.e., parrots) as using language (like, actual words) in a phatic manner, but I really like this specific domestic cat example, because I don’t think talking birds’ use of language is as purely phatic as Jakobson claims. (Jakobson: “The endeavor to start and sustain communication is typical of talking birds, thus the phatic function of language is the only one they share with human beings.”) My gut feeling also suggests that other animals use sounds (and other signs) more than just phatically. You could even argue that there actually is some semantic meaning with the cat example above, since different meows might indicate emotions and/or the presence of danger or urgency. Further, after the first bit the meow isn’t just saying “hey, is there anyone else here?” so much as it’s saying, “keep meowing so I can find you; I haven’t found you yet, but I’m coming.”

In short: this post is what happens when studying for comps slowly turns you into a crazy cat person.

I read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet awhile back, and it was excellent. And then everyone I talked to about it said, “Have you read Cloud Atlas?? Read Cloud Atlas next! Do it! Read Cloud Atlas!” (By “everyone” I mean four people. But I think four people is actually kind of a large number of people to unanimously have the same “oh-you-like-this-author? Read-this-next!” recommendation.)

And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, okay, whatever.” And then I didn’t read Cloud Atlas. Or I didn’t, until I did, just this week, and it was also really good (read: excellent), and now I’m blogging about it and reading Ghostwritten (which is also excellent so far).

So that’s my opinion, Internet.

Oh, also: word on the street is they’re making a Cloud Atlas movie. That’ll be somethin’.

Example:

…from Peter Stults at Behance Network.

1. Sharks that shoot guns.
2. Guns that shoot sharks (!).
3. Sharks that fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes and steal drugs and carry smaller sharks and
4.

BAD METAPHORS

1. A gun that cuts right to the truth.
2. A flower that smells like a different flower.
3. An iPod that tastes like 1,000 songs in your jar of honey.
4.

IDEAS FOR FAKE TWITTER ACCOUNTS

1. @ObamasDreams posts his increasingly disturbing nightmares about the apocalypse and talking carrots.
2. @TalkingCarrot muses about his life as a talking carrot.
3. @AngryBear posts variations of “RAWWRGH”
4. @Derrida posts sentences that are always cut off partway through.
5. @AngryCougarProtectingHerCubs posts variations of “RAAAAWRGHH!!! RT @AngryBear RAWWRGH”
6.

Aside from beginning my TA duties today (the onerous task of attending one lecture and picking a tutorial time), today I *really* begin studying for my “Discourse and Text Analysis” field exam. The exam reading list asks you to pick two out of five subcategory reading lists. I picked “Semiotics” and “Narrative.” Other possibilities included “Discourse Analysis,” “The Politics of Discourse,” and “Discourse and Gender.”

This means that all the things I’ve been wanting to read, even if they’re sorta kinda related to the reading list, will be put on hold. This includes a neat book I saw in Chapters or Indigo a few weeks back, when I was there buying Christmas presents: The Exegesis of Philip K Dick. I only flipped through it, but the passage I actually saw was talking about (and attempting to diagram!) the Word or Logos and its relation to other words. I thought that was interesting, especially when one considers the book’s title—we use more and more words (i.e., exegesis) in our attempt to access the Word, and of course that sort of helps, but then again it also doesn’t. That’s probably why Dick’s book clocks in at, like, 900 pages or something. (And the book is really only a selection of Dick’s notes on what he referred to as the “exegesis.”) The book reminded me of a great line from J. Hillis Miller. In a deconstructive reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland, Miller says that what Hopkins discovers in the poem is that “there is no word for the Word.” Instead, all you get are more and more words. Words words words—Exegesis if you’re Dick, and Différance if you’re Derrida, I guess.

Well, now I’m just making myself want to read Dick’s book, and I’m not even that familiar with his work (though Blade Runner is one of my favourite movies—does that count?). It’s just that while browsing through Dick’s book in Indigo/Chapters, I saw Dick’s scribbles and his visual attempts to represent different metaphysical concepts in really ugly scribbles and doodles and I immediately identified with him. And, and, and…

—anyways, if I can get through J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words today, I’ll be pleased. (He said performatively.)

• When a suicidal, divorced mathematician thinks life can’t get any worse, he stumbles upon a time machine, goes back in time, and watches his parents fall in love. Then he takes some pictures of dinosaurs. Then he goes to ancient Greece and sells an iPod in exchange for palace filled with gold.

• A young man helps an older lady cross a busy street. The two of them fall in love and open a bakery.

• A starving man finds a discarded stack of coupons behind the coupon factory, each for a free scoop of ice cream. Then he discovers why they were thrown out: nowhere on the coupons does it say “limit one per customer.”

• A bus driver gets promoted and gets to drive around in a shiny new bus. He also gets to yell at the other bus drivers, but he doesn’t, because he’s a pretty nice guy, and he’s just really happy all the time, because he and his wife have an awesome sex life.

• A kind-yet-awkward nerd defeats a murderer in a spelling bee.

• On Monday, a man buys a new boat. Excited, he is about to take it out on the water when he receives an anonymous message warning him that if he goes boating today, he will die. So he waits until Tuesday, then he has a pleasant ride on his new boat.

• A camp counselor hates his job, so he quits.