Life Update

On Friday I finally finished my summer class. I was lucky enough to get to take Literary Theory during a summer session so I could focus all my academic attention to what will probably end up being my favorite grad class. With the completion of this course, I'm merely twelve hours short of the required class load for a master's degree (which is the inspiration for the picture. I'll have one of these someday). Three of those twelve, however, are my master's thesis which is looming in the distance and causing me a considerable amount of anxiety.

I am not necessarily anxious because it's a massive paper or that I don't think I'll be able to do it, but there's this nagging sense of dread. For the first time in my graduate career, I'm allowed to do exactly what I want to do and that is frightening. It's okay to do only pretty good in courses like "19th C. Gender, Sex, and Empire" because that is not where my eventual focus will lie. It's not okay to have a mediocre thesis when the topic is completely up to me.

I think I'll be okay. I have a full book shelf of DeLillo's work and corresponding criticism to pour through and I'm excited that I have a few weeks before the Fall semester begins to get some more work done.

We had our first anniversary two weeks ago. After getting back from a lovely week in Searcy, we hopped on a Bolt Bus bound for the Big Apple (ooo, alliteration!). Since we moved to the northeast we've been to New York a few times and have yet to see a show. This time we were fortunate enough to see Spring Awakening and it was much better than I had anticipated. I've been loving the music since the recording was available and I couldn't imagine the book being better than the music, but the show was simply fantastic.

While in the city, we got to see Jordan--which is always lovely--and we tried to not look too touristy while we walked about. It was a wonderful trip with my wonderful wife.

Also, we've moved from Media, PA to Pottstown, PA and you should visit us. We're definitely on the fringes of Pennsyltucky but the apartment is fairly amazing and it's very close to Coventry, my wife's new employer. We're completely finished unpacking and have to hang a few more pictures in the bedroom then we're completely finished.

It's been a long last couple of weeks, but life is wonderful.

What have you been doing lately?

Blowing the dog whistle

In a recently published article in The Guardian, Melissa McEwan talks about McCain's strategy of dog whistling. The rhetorical technique involves dropping phrases that may seem strange to most people, but have significant meaning to a portion of the population. Bush used the phrase "wonder-working power" to invoke visions of God's miracles and Huckabee couldn't seem to stop with the veiled religious messages. Perhaps I've been oblivious to these tactics before, but McEwan's article calls to light the covert racism in the juxtaposition of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears with Obama in a recent McCain ad that the senior Senator from Arizona claims to be proud of.

Instead of picking vapid, relatively talentless male celebrities, the McCain team chose two females of fame who are associated with airheadedness and promiscuity. To most, that doesn't mean too much. To a select few, however, it calls to mind the black-man-as-hyper-sexual-deviant trope of so many Imperial art.

For a good portion of history (and many would argue that it currently happens) black men were 'othered' and views as sex crazed animals. Novels by Sam Selvon (namely The Lonely Londoners) have worked to bring this false stereotype to light and debunk the myth. Also, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe (I would advise you to not research his work while you are at work) does a fantastic job of pointing to the overt hyper-sexualization and fetishization of the black man. Despite all the work to rid our society of this insidious racism, McCain sees fit to try to scare white voters away from Obama because he's just a scary, over-sexualized black man.

Shame on you, John McCain.

Arbitrary List to Determine Your Literacy!

According to someone, the average American has read only 6 of the books listed below. If you are so inclined, copy the list, bold the ones you've read and italicize that ones you're currently reading or plan to in the future.

Personally, I feel the list is too Austen-heavy and lacks much modern/contemporary literature. I could go into a discussion of the canon, but that's for another day.

I've read only 16. There's a lot of work to be done.

h/t: And another thing...

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (NEVER!)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Terry Eagleton on Education

"There is always a risk that education may put you at odds with the tasteless, clueless philistines who run the world and whose lexicon stretches only to words like oil, golf, power and cheeseburger."
-Terry Eagleton

Seriously?

McCain Team - It's pretty obvious that the media has a bizarre fascination with Barack Obama. Some may even say it's a love affair. We want you to be the judge. We've compiled two videos of the more outrageous moments of this not so secret love affair. Follow this link to watch the two videos and vote on which one you think is better. Your vote will determine which video we put on the air. The media is in love with Barack Obama. If it wasn't so serious, it would be funny. Regards, The McCain Campaign Seriously, John McCain? Seriously.

Frantz Fanon on Selfhood

In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.

-Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks