(no subject)

In light of my Free Will Astrology post yesterday, what does it mean when
I dream that an abusive Evangelical family is trying to kidnap a laid-off
co-worker of mine?

(no subject)

And yet, narrative still has its own almost irrestistable momentum.
Narrative will out. Narrative still triumphs in the end.

"Where were you on 9/11? How did it change you?" the ads ask.

What if there's no story there? What if you were essentially unchanged? No
matter. Worse: impossible. The necessity of narrative warps the
experience. You'll dig up an anecdote, a moment, something. Something to
weave into the story. The story's the thing.

(decryptifying N.B.: This isn't about 9/11, this is about the storytelling
impulse, the drive to give everything a place in an overarching, um, well,
narrative. Despite what I just said about spectacle. Maybe narrative and
spectacle are more of a pushme-pullyou? Or, maybe, people are now telling
their own stories to themselves rather than relying on other people to
tell it for them -- and they are using spectacle to fuel those stories.
Or, anyway.)

in other news

Book version:

Pretty in Punk is still kicking my ass. The chapter I am reading
now is basically recapitulating my entire adolescent gender identity
formation before my eyes.

No Go the Bogeyman is also kicking my ass. Almost 400 pages, and we
finally get to her long-promised discussion of the banana joke, after
lullabyes, ogres, chimeras, Goya, Circe, and more. There is some dense and
thoughtful cultural analysis here. This woman, Marina Warner, she thinks
like I do but writes a lot better. She makes me feel less nutzo about the
patterns I see in cultural stuff.


Non-book version:

My potted Ursinia on the front porch seems to have a fungus or
something similar. Sad. This fungus seems to be colonizing the blossoms
and putting out small white mini-blooms on top of the natural orange
flowers the plant usually produces. Neat! Weird! Confusing!