Google Referrals

Is everyone tired of google referral anecdotes? Well here’s another. The same IP address landed here on google searches for “cynthia fuck my ass now” and “hysterical blindness quotes.” Both searches within a few minutes of each other. I don’t know what’s more bizarre, that they did those two searches in short-attention-span succession, or that my blog came up in both searchs.

Evil Emails

Oh Shizzy you are so evil.

Evil Cats

You must check out this site. I can’t stop laughing.

via Erin.

You are Worthless. Click here to find out why.

So hackers have now turned to personal insults as a way to lure people into clicking on their delivered doom. I got one today that was seemingly sent by a Prof. I work for at MIT, and the text of the email was “you are a bad writer”. With the doomsday virus attached. Now that’s provocation. Personal attack on a writer’s writing from a Professor/superior. No more cutesy invitations like “i love you” or “here are my pictures”, hackers have moved from come-hither to fuck-you. I replied to the Prof, saying, “I hope this is a virus.” She was horrified and got all of MIT tech support on the line to figure out if the same message had been sent out to other colleagues, purportedly from her. The horror! But I reassured her that we’ve all been getting so many of these emails, all looking exactly alike except for the minor variations in the 3-4 line text of the email, that few people would think the email actually came from her.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Reading Flannery O’Connor makes me wanna eat biscuits with sausage gravy.

Check it Out

Wonderful boy Mike is dipping into the poetry arena and setting up his own site. Send him some hits. He moved away and I miss him. I secretly hope the big apple will spit him back out and send him slithering worm-like back to Boston.

On Writing

Jay is posting stuff on writing, and Orwell’s bit is my favorite–he’s talking about political writing but I’d say it describes a lot of annoying blogs:

“Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung , are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g. and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones…”

Tim Will You Marry Me?

Why I love Martin Freeman.

End of Summer

Shall I post my own eulogy for Jean Rouch? All I need say is that he’s all over my graduate thesis; he’s the weapon I used to bludgeon Werner Herzog’s documentaries.

Blisterless

This is not my real blog.

For the Love of Movies

So you love film and you decide you want to learn more about film and you go to grad school to study film and raise your taste level and you learn to see film differently, to think about film differently, to analyze everything, to move your experience of film from your emotions to your intellect, and you do, you learn to see every detail, to analyze as you watch, to constantly deconstruct, and you become a fearsome analytical beast, your brain a pulsating lethal weapon…

…and then you get burned out on all the thinking and analyzing and critiquing and your brain is fried and you see the lack of joy in what you do and you get tired of tearing everything apart in the name of understanding and you tell your brain to get lost, you abandon it, you find yourself gravitating to musicals and animation and Adam Sandler and sugary-pop movies and anything that does not tempt you to analyze…

…and you realize this was a necessary transformation, you have come full-circle, you had to go through the rigorious intellectualism of grad school to be able to more fully appreciate, viscerally, the movies you used to adore. You had to leave them behind, reject them, disdain them, so that you could come back to them knowing why you loved them so. You went from emotions to intellect and then back to emotions again. You go to a film festival with a friend who is currently embroiled in the rigor of grad school, and he likes the pompous structuralist film that humorously deconstructs the concept of naming, while you fall in love with the playful musical that is light and joyful and in love with movies.

And each of you hates the other’s favorite.

Mmmm

I could live off Bertucci’s rolls and whipped butter. And 9 months of the Harvard school year, I do.

Techno-Limited

This site needs a makeover. How do I change the banner? I wanna put a picture there.

The Art of Manipulation

They always say “show, don’t tell” when you’re writing fiction because the reader wants to do the work herself, she wants to feel smart, to make the connections and get the inferences all on her own. And of course it’s true. It’s a fact of the reading experience. It’s something I always have to adjust to because I’ve been trained in nonfiction writing, criticism, where you MUST tell, never show. You’re supposed to bridge the gap between showing and telling, to demystify. But writing creatively means creating the secrets rather than explicating them. The reader doesn’t want it all done for her, she wants to do it herself. 

And strangely, in that demand for the freedom to interpret, the reader makes herself my slave. It’s no less controlling and manipulative for me to set traps and lead the reader through a trail of secrets set by me, controlled by me, to lead her to a certain conclusion. In fact, I find it to be more controlling than criticism, which is up-front about its one-sided nature. It says “I am telling you this.” Fiction says “I am telling you this, but I want you to think you came up with it on your own.” It’s no less controlling, and even more manipulative because it adds deception and trickery.

And I realize this is not a new thought. It’s the basis of much of the avant-garde revolution. But now that I’m making the switch to fiction-writing, I’m feeling it, on my own, rather than being told by a critic. Just like my reader.

Fun With Paint Shop Pro

I also posted an (undoctored) photo of me and the new nephew over at my blogspot blog…if you want to be suffered with baby photos, go there.

More MBTA Art

I added a photo of my T-pass wall collage below. Scroll down. I forgot how easy it is to add photos when you have a digital camera.

Shhhh…

The apes are such morons they don’t realize I hear every word they say down there. Or perhaps it just doesn’t occur to them that I’m listening. Perhaps they think I have a life.

*Grin*

Kisses for Jay.

My New Drug

I didn’t think it was possible for them to improve on the classic Hostess chocolate cupcakes, but oh was I wrong. These are golden cake with pink icing and sprinkles. I’m a chocolate girl as a rule, but I’ve been converted. They’re kinda like a Twinkie with pink icing on top. I’d have taken a photo of the cakes too, but I inhaled them too quickly. Go buy some.

New Pet Peeve

Bloggers who use periods. Like. This. For. Emphasis. Over it.