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sitting on a gold mine of knowledge
2005-09-09
An exciting day. I fell down the subway stairs in a spectacular fashion, which was all the more spectacular because I was carrying a suitcase. The man behind me asked if I was OK and my reply was "My butt's not OK!" I'm smooth like that, baby. Am skipping out on Why I Am Not a Christian to read Afterglow, which is a transcript of an interview done with Pauline Kael right before she died, and this stupid book of articles on Jane Austen adaptations for film. I picked up the Kael on a mad dash to the mid-Manhattan library (which is right near Bryant Park but the people I saw were pretty uniformly non-fabulous) because I had a tip that there was a slashing review of "American Beauty" inside. The tip was untrue, but the book was worth the read although my American Beauty hate is unslaked. The Jane Austen book I picked up as a kind of test to see if I could still stomach academic writing. Most of the articles were either expansions on somebody's class reaction to a miniseries ("it was good!") or about the class structure and how in some films they show the servants, and in others they don't, etc. I could have written that. In my sleep! (And don't say "Oh, you never tried writing that," because I have. I wrote a paper on the sexual symbolism of "She-Ra" and got an A.) On one hand, it is nice to know that I could make money by writing stupid articles about blatantly obvious parts of popular films, on the other hand, it's all bullshit. Oh, and some of the articles mentioned "the gaze." Because scholarly articles involving females have to mention "the gaze." It's like a law. If anybody is reading this and cares, I will write a scholarly exposition of any subject you choose provided it's ridiculous enough. I could probably publish it if I was actually in school, not because I'm a great genius but because I saw a "Reality TV" book, and if somebody's writing about the nature footage on "Survivor"* ("the animal represents the "anima") and publishing it there's no reason I couldn't. * I didn't pick up the book, but I promise that it's duller than my theoretical "Survivor: Sand and Sexuality on Palau Tiga."
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