Sex, Hastily, Then Beignets

This culture (or Culture) blog delights me.

Through the Gates of Horn

I've never had a useful dream before.
Or, anyway, I've never had a practical dream.
Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed the entire plot of The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. Elias Howe dreamt the invention of the mechanical sewing machine. Prince woke up and was able to write out the entirety of "Little Red Corvette". Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed the poem Kubla Khan and, when he was transcribing it, was disturbed by a knock at the door which caused him to forget the rest of it.
Paul McCartney and "Yesterday," Dmitri Mendeleyev and the Periodic Table of Elements, Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory.
Me? "Don't forget your dongle!"
I had a pile of things prepared to take in to work today but I had neglected to put my USB flashdrive onto that pile and will absolutely need it. I woke with a start at four in the morning having just had an insistent nightmare in which I was made to feel like an idiot for forgetting a USB flashdrive. When I woke with a start, I got up and put the damned thing on the pile of stuff I need for work today.
You ask me, Morpheus is phoning it in. Where's my THIS?

From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Thee!

The Chase - Day Five

Call me Lazy-as-Shit.

It has been nearly a week and still no sign of the paper I’m supposed to complete by Tuesday. Morale runs low and even the distractions are wearing thin. Today, while ostensibly preparing a gloss on the Scylla and Charybdis named Nollan and Dolan, I drifted magnetically to the pile of magazines on the sofaback table.

After half of an article (about frogs), I grew so faint and insubstantial that it became necessary to take a thirty-five minute shower - though my hair was clean. Only Starbuck remains to give faith in my enterprise, and he at exorbitant prices and somewhat middling quality. I think he uses too much sugar in his mochas.

Internet internet everywhere, but ne’er a drop of research.

Spied an albatross dancing in the currents spun off by my desk here in the loft. Looked a bit like an outline, sketched on a yellowpad. Shot it.

Spent an hour or so composing monkey-grams to my friends. May have been a bit hasty with the albatross.

To Queequeg, in the guise of my wife: hell is an idea first born of a required essay due during finals week and repeated by the act of watching reality television.

To produce a mighty essay, you must choose a mighty theme. I have - unfortunately - chosen "art exactions in Culver City."

There, nailed to the mast, glinting in the sun, is the coin I would spend. Let us call this coin “Studying for my Comparative Legal Systems exam on Wednesday” and let us imagine that winning this coin (by filling the white paper marked “Local Goverment Essay” with six, double-spaced pages of text) is something I would like.

But the coin is nailed to the mast like Ulysses before the sirens, and I, working the oars but futilely above the slapping waves, have stuffed my ears with video games and Tivo and Springsteen albums.

(Here let us imagine an entire chapter about chowder)

But lo! A cry from the crow’s nest! A spouting, fragrant, introductory paragraph! Deploy the boats before he sounds!

Toward thee I roll, Great, Breeching, Snow-White Paper, scarred only superficially with the scrawlings of essays begun and deleted by others.

And I go down with the Leviathan, to the watery hell he keeps called “Westlaw” and “Lexis” and for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at Law School.

Like Satan, this paper will not sink until it has dragged a living part of my week along with it and helmeted itself with it. And even should I succeed in the coming days and hours by extruding something thick and oily like a paper onto the printed page and lashing it to my boat, it’ll probably only be eaten by the red-tipped, correctionist sharks that savage exams on the way back to grades.

God help me if the devious-cruising Rachel of Alcohol doesn’t pick up this surviving orphan and bring him back to Port.

Musings While Watching The Birds in bed with Chiara

“I wonder if it is supposed to be a sly play on words that the film The Birds is really almost entirely about women.
The awkward pauses, glances, and conversations between Tippi Hedren (the poor man’s Grace Kelly) and Suzanne Pleshette (the rich man’s Stockard Channing) chew the scenery in a way that the titular animals never do except in that final scene.

Jessica Tandy and Pleschette and Hedren spend their catty energy almost entirely on the attentions of hamburger-in-suit Rod Taylor. The women fight almost resignedly for this hunk of middle age while the passions of the (actual) birds rise to a fever pitch.

Bird attacks almost always follow conversations with or about Mitch, Taylor’s character, our great jutting jaw-and-chin. One is left to ponder whether this biblical plague visited upon the inhabitants of sleepy Bodega Bay is really little more than a manifestation of the prefeminist fear that a powered class of men felt when forced, for the first time, to truly face up to the power of femininity unbridled.

Women, it should be said, have often been associated with birds - in slang and in mythology – both to celebrate their otherworldliness (from the male perspective) and to denigrate it.

And, the only safe haven when the birds stage their first attack is in the Tides Restaurant, named for that mysterious and powerful force of nature that, like women are supposed to be, is ruled by the moon.

Inside we find, huddled and angry, the women of Bodega Bay, who see Tippi as the cause of it all. Is this because she is a liberated (though idle) woman? Or is it because – perhaps as in all Hitchcock films – the female lead is really a cipher for female sexuality, a subject feared as much by the women of Bodega Bay as by the men? Is it that Mitch, as the only male in the town of any import, is so jealously guarded as a source of lantern jaw and broad shouldering?

In the end, when our heroes beat that slow, sinister retreat, is Hitchcock suggesting a détente with the surging power of the feminine? Is it meant as a kind of terrible rebuke of feminism, that it can be figured as a scourge from which none will escape, run as they may?”

He wondered (aloud) as his hand wandered (allowed) up her skirt. She continued to watch the movie.