Mavis will save us

Tumblrrrrr

2009-05-04T20:23:00.003-04:00

All future posts will be on my new tumblr account at http://maviswillsaveus.tumblr.com/. I put up this really cool random picture just to tempt you all over there. Also, the format is way prettier. See you there!

I take it back

2009-03-23T16:28:00.003-04:00

There is at least one Twitter in the world worth following. I doubt he is who he says he is, but who cares, it's the Internet.

(Thanks Andrew Sullivan!)

On a more personal note, I'm officially going to be working in Chicago next year. I'm going to be at a writing center in a high school there - not teaching, per se, but still helping to educate the Youth of Today.

Oh, and it's springtime. Lovely springtime!

myth in boots

2009-03-05T12:05:00.007-05:00

you might argue that U2’s video for their new single “get on your boots” is just a candy-colored pastiche of random imagery mostly ripped off from james rosenquist, set to a mediocre rock song… but you would be WRONG. because this video is the creation myth of the entire U2niverse.

first, a thousand-foot tall star baby named bono emerges, glistening, newborn, from the furthest reaches of the cosmos; struts jauntily (0:13). he asks: what is this crazy planet they call earth, with these skulls and neon and candy apples and hot women hiding red paint in their boots? and why can't they all just live in peace? the answer is apparently tanks&guns&consumerism but also MAGMA (2:19). ka-BOOM! thank god bono brought his cosmic glass-smashing stick so he can make that volcano simmer down and get on to the real business of the day, which is romancing that sexy six-legged woman-spider (3:08). ooh baby. because in the end, U2’s message is all about LOVE. because you’re the sweetest thing, mustachioed red army role-playing fantasy lady (1:23). me-OW.

U2 - Get On Your Boots - OFFICIAL PROMO
Uploaded by U2

ps. comments are back.

a song called steve

2009-02-28T21:24:00.007-05:00

someone pointed out to me once that while guys name their songs after girls all the time (ie. "Layla," "Gloria," "Celia"... etc,) "you never hear a song by a girl that's called, like, 'Steve.'"

Two Steves, one Apple... no songs :(

that was about a year i heard taylor swift's song "hey stephen" on fearless. it was almost like she'd overheard our conversation, and was smart enough to realize that being the first to rise to the challenge would totally GIVE HER THE EDGE over all those ditsy cheerleaders who are traipsing around trying to scoop her man.

"all those other girls, well, they're beautiful
but would they write a song for you?"

no, they wouldn't. and that's why after this line she GIGGLES. taylor knows that steve will choose her, the girl with substance and talent. the song's message is so empowering it's almost... feminist. (but let's not get ahead of ourselves.)

girls don't usually sing like this to guys. when a girl wants to sing about romantic longing, she usually confides in a third party; she doesn't start singing to the guy until after their relationship has begun. (if she just wants sex, of course, she can be direct from the beginning, à la "If U Seek Amy") which is why i think it's pretty cool that taylor (who's a serious christian) comes out and says something as direct as this:

"i can't help it if you look like an angel
i can't help it if i wanna kiss you in the rain"

she's assertive, but also romantic, two adjectives that our culture places at opposite poles (at least when they're applied to girls): being assertive means competing with boys, not pursuing them, and being romantic means playing passive and hard-to-get. which explains at the same time why no one before has written a song called "steve" ... and also why taylor swift is pretty cool.
(this sentiment might be a little outdated since fearless came out last november, but "hey stephen" is an album track so you can't complain you've heard it too many times on the radio or anything.)

yayyyyy taylor!

There are actually three people in this picture

2009-02-09T16:12:00.003-05:00

It's a composite picture of the members of Massive Attack, created to promote a concert series they curated last June in London.

iceland rebus

2009-01-25T18:37:00.014-05:00

bought a sweet

that's knit with ear flaps
swam in

's therapeutic mineral waters
watched

do his very best bruce willis impression in "taken"

have walked everywhere&am veryvery tired
tmrw: geysers&waterfalls
see you out in NATUUUURE

xxoo,
mavis

Don't Know Anything About Love.

2009-01-21T07:33:00.009-05:00

A number of my friends are in love. I am not. I try not to give them advice about their relationships. Events in my own life have made me doubt that I have very good judgment in this department, even when weighing in as an objective third party.

And besides,
Are the lessons from my experience even applicable to someone else's? Isn't every love unique? Isn't love purely subjective? And shouldn't each new love ideally be untainted by harmful expectations based on previous experience? What if... what if we just don't know anything
You don't know anything
I don't know anything
about love?

Would that be a bad thing?

a superficial judgment

2009-01-19T21:24:00.009-05:00

why does a blog whose bread and butter is calling women ten thousand times skinnier and prettier than you "fat" until you want to escape down a crack between your couch cushions with a bag of extra crunchy cheetos and NEVER BE HEARD FROM AGAIN prominently feature an ad for "dietribe," a show about... normal-looking women? you'd say it's consistent, since they're normal-looking women being encouraged to diet, except that they're there, on the front page, and no one is calling them whales or claiming to have clawed out their eyes at the sight of them.

guys, sexism is over! whoo!

but really. sorry about how this blog is becoming "the hater." but i'll have plenty positive to say when exams are over tomorrow and i get to head to ICELAND, land of soothing hot springs and vibrating hallucinogenic pop music. here's a foretaste of all the THINGS FROM ICELAND THAT I LOVE that will soon appear on this blog: bjork's hair. because the woman herself, and her music, are too awesome to be discussed during the purgatory that is exam period. but those BRAIDS. look upon them, mortals, and be ENSNARED.

radical prick

2009-01-02T22:43:00.008-05:00

lighten up, daily intel. responding to a letter to the editor isn't being "a weenie" if two out of three of the writer's complaints are really just (willful?) misreadings of your article and the third, actual misinformation. alex ross' silence about the first two speaks volumes more than his brief rebuttal to the last.

plus i agree with ross. "radical chic" struck me as mean-spirited and unfair; leonard bernstein may have ended up a kook but a casual listen to "west side story" is all it takes to figure out that he had more substance than wolfe gave him credit for. and you'd think that as a talented but out-of-touch geezer himself (sometime listen to him sneer "cohabitation" like a foreign word - it's like he's been in a coma since the seventies), tom would cut lenny a break this time around.

he's makin' a list and spellcheckin' it twice

2008-12-24T16:07:00.002-05:00

girl group on a field trip

2008-12-19T11:21:00.003-05:00

the flirtations perform "nothin' but a heartache" ... in the ruins of tintern abbey. full color, full bellbottoms. nice.

all i want for christmas...

2008-12-19T09:59:00.003-05:00

... is a pair of little white gogo boots. check out the backup dancers when they get to "shout" and ronnie spector really gets into it...

there's something deliciously unnerving about all that synchronized dancing. it holds everything taut so that when ronnie breaks out of her choreographed moves - with a hair toss, or a little prance around the stage - it's like the snap of a rubber band.
so good!

2008-11-19T21:24:00.003-05:00

i'm reading a memoir by an autistic animal scientist, temple grandin (she has designed one third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the united states), called Thinking In Pictures. her reliance on visual (as opposed to verbal) thinking is so pronounced that when she was younger, grandin was only able to understand abstract concepts when she could find visual symbols or equivalents for them in the outside world. for instance, she prepared for both her high school and her college graduations by finding a special door (one was in her dormitory, the other on the roof of the library) and "rehearsing" for the transition by moving through it. she says she never had a concept for what it meant to "get along with people" until she got trapped in the gap between two sliding glass doors while washing them and realized that the delicate movements it took for her to unjam a glass door without shattering it were equivalent to the tact and care that it took to maintain human relationships.

"Throughout my life, door and window symbols have enabled me to make progress and connections that are unheard of for some people with autism" (37).

now i don't know how much someone *needs* an abstract concept of human relationships to form and maintain them, and she doesn't really explain what results her discovery had in terms of specific friendships. but i'm struck by this idea she seems to have that a transition in her life could not occur until she'd found a preexisting material object or scene that could carry its meaning to term like a womb carries a child...

i also imagine the young temple grandin as a medieval knight on a series of heroic quests for these magical objects that can unfreeze her life, which each time has been stilled again by a wicked sorcerer.

now i want to ask all my friends if they have a symbol that causes progress in their lives...

life in the new economy

2008-11-16T14:07:00.001-05:00

there's a hole in my only pair of wearable pants

ahhhhhhhhhhhghghghghghhhh!

you're much too much, and too very, very

2008-11-13T18:45:00.005-05:00

after eight months i'm back at the gym. i had forgotten the odd way my joints creak under serious pressure. and the sharp pinch of lactic acid. there are anatomical charts on the walls of the weight room, and today i could pick out every color-coded muscle by its unique shade of pain. i came to consider the possibility that exercise could make me sick. a feverish, headachy feeling. being healthy shouldn't make you feel like you need a stiff drink.

this coupled with the fact that i don't actually work all that hard. i rarely push my muscles to the point where they give out from the strain, the way the grunting men around me seem to. i haven't made a single twisted face, or wheezed unattractively, or got red in the face. maybe part of the manliness of working out is that you stagger out of the gym afterwards, without stretching, and stoically mask the burning feeling that crawls underneath the skin of your arms the whole next day. manliness redefined: not heroism, a war of attrition.

i want to believe

2008-11-06T00:41:00.006-05:00

last night you gave yourself a pat on the back, whitey. remember? tears of joy and pride were dripping into your free starbucks latte, and somewhere in the background, faintly, 'we are the champions' was playing on the loudspeakers of a true american patriot. you ran out into the streets and chest-bumped your bros and shouted the sacred foreign-sounding name at each other like it was a new esperanto that would unite us all. this is what your mom must have felt like when she protested the war in vietnam. high five!!!

because we fixed it. america's youth, we have *fixed racism*, suck it, mom, all you did was bring some troops home. (oh that, yeah. um er. next election.) my generation's gonna get started on retooling america's political discourse. forget about wealth, let's redistribute condescension.

but we're not going to forget about race. cuz it still makes a difference in how people vote, way more than your age or your gender, and you and me, whitey, are way behind this progressive wave the rest of the country is riding. face facts: ours is the only racial group in this country that mostly voted for mccain - 55% - while 67% of latinos, 62% of asians, and 66% of everyone else (that ambiguous 'other' category) went for obama. (not to even mention the african-american vote. you know where that went.) it's honestly probably not that we white people are getting that much more progressive, but that more other races are showing up at the polls. (saxby chambliss knows 'his people' are outnumbered these days.) and if this kind of division persists until 2050, when we'll really be outnumbered, we'll make for one alienated and irrelevant minority.

roll up your sleeves, whitey. still got work to do.

i make you drool your pants... pretty baby

2008-11-03T00:39:00.004-05:00

i survived until 6 pm today on nothing but two cups of coffee and a biscotti.

use of caffeine as a food source is one of those things, like a nicotine buzz and brunch at your professor's house, that seem to be part of some quintessential college experience that i have heretofore missed out on.

around six thirty, made a mental note to feel super proud about this, then inhaled a plate of cheese fries with bacon and ranch dressing. nothing feels good like a return to form.

From Craigslist with Love: Ominous Job Listings, Episode 1

The posting:

"Become part of the team of a rapidly growing gossip site in search of a talented female writer to cover celebrity gossip and entertainment. Female writer should play well off lead female writer's personality."

"Our goal is to over-sexualize aesthetically pleasing celebrities that make men and women drool in their pants. Our voice is uncut and unrated. Censorships and social norms are dismantled and replaced with fantasy and addictive humor."

Read between the lines:

The "lead female writer" is actually a cranky gorilla named Lacey; you are in charge of patty-cake, banana supplies, and drafting a contingency plan in case someone leaves the cage door open again. Knowledge of sign language a plus. Bonnie, the PR girl who drafted this listing, will be your only ally in the office, which reeks of gorilla urine. Two years ago, she dropped out of West Virginia University, where she was majoring in Women's Studies. Bonnie knows that "censorship" is a non-count noun, but she left the "s" in there to stick it to the man.

faces

2008-09-25T19:36:00.000-04:00

nightmarish human leech creature@2:50

another beck post

2008-09-23T15:33:00.003-04:00

a professor showed us this video today in class and i am obsessed with it. wouldn't it be awesome if you could select little sections of space and just - zzzp! - fold them away for later?

i didn't start really listening to beck until... maybe this summer, even, when modern guilt came out. lame, considering he's been around since i was what, seven? i take much too long to decide i like things, and to get to know people. must be less tentative.

"I dried my tears & armed my fears
With ten thousand shields and spears,
Soon my Angel came again;
I was arm'd, he came in vain:
For the time of youth was fled
And grey hairs were on my head."

must drastically narrow thesis topic this week - off to firestone!

2008-09-14T14:14:00.002-04:00

it is NASTY hot in princeton.

i received some new inspiration today for how to make this blog less like my angsty livejournal in high school. which it was becoming, in parts. no more attempts at generalization+universal truth. just the facts, ma'am.

i'm helping my roommate type responses to the backlog of emails she's accumulated in the past few weeks. she has a problem with her hands - kind of like carpal tunnel, but inoperable - that kicks in off and on and makes it impossible for her to type. so she's writing out responses by hand, which i will type up. the little slips of paper are spread out over our makeshift coffee table (bedspread, two boxes, a flimsy board torn off an old piano).

also i am wearing a bikini top. as i said, nasty hot.

Disaffection! Nihilism! Ironic Distance!

2008-08-27T22:49:00.002-04:00

this article expressed resentments against generation X that i didn't even know were festering deep in my soul.

"You guys got all the cool traits! Disaffection! Nihilism! Cynicism! Ironic distance! People just keep calling us idealistic. There is nothing sexy about idealism. And you guys have been laying this trip on us forever. In 1997, the Times looked at Mentos and Hanson and called us "edgeless." They dragged out Generation X rep Douglas Coupland to call us all uncool for liking the Spice Girls. We were little kids! Sorry I wasn't an edgy 12-year-old, Doug! I wasn't into Built to Spill yet!"

http://www.radaronline.com/features/2008/05/generation_y_versus_generation_x_winona_ryder_of_montreal_ap.php

unemployed in summertime

2008-08-18T17:16:00.004-04:00

i have been reading too much.

i didn't realize when i started my thesis what a handicap it is to take a piece of criticism, rather than an original idea you had about a piece of literature, as your starting point... have to resist the temptation to vacuum up information indiscriminately, deluding myself that it's research when i'm really just putting off thinking about or creating anything of my own.

northern virginia is more tolerable now that i venture outside fairfax county. i'm sitting in this cool coffee place in clarendon that's like a grungier small world... full of college students in punkish army green, drinking shmancy coffees from kenya and paupa new guinea. got a clean bill of health from the doctor today; that tight feeling in my throat isn't strep, or mono. sweet! had been feeling vaguely guilty about being out and about as a possible virus bomb.

someone gave me this song two years ago, and i just refound it today. (it was mislabeled in itunes! horror.) it makes me wish i'd been unemployed this summer for more than a week. (i'm not 100% behind the video's weird variable-gravity animals etc., but imeem's sucking so youtube will have to do.)

“Looking up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

2008-08-07T14:23:00.001-04:00

I don’t like it when my face tenses up with that little smile that hugs your jawbone too tight in the corners to be an expression of pleasure. When it happens you’re always trying to find something to do with your hands, clasping them behind your neck then around my knee then folding them in your lap. You know how every part of you sits, weight of ankle on ankle, slight tilt of the hip; your body is a fuzz of pressures. Every word is whispered a thousand times before it can be spoken, and the possibilities multiply into a fog. You’re amorphous and immobile, human static.

“There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart?”

Most of my actions are controlled by habit or convention, programmed responses to external pressure. How many times a day do I actually will an action as opposed to submitting to it? How many of my actions (not just writing) have any roots in my heart at all?

A tree is a solid trunk that branches off at either end; all its possibilities come from itself, not from outside. Know what you need to do, and the rest is just white noise.

anthrax

2008-08-07T04:14:00.003-04:00

first things first: Kappa has a house now? shoddy journalism, NYT. shame.

Moreover, months of work uncovered no evidence that Dr. Ivins had traveled to Princeton, N.J., where investigators believe the letters were mailed. The closest connection was that a chapter house of Kappa Kappa Gamma, a sorority with which Dr. Ivins had a long and strange obsession, is located near the contaminated Princeton mailbox.

also, there's anthrax on some random mailbox in pton? and no one told me?
out of the loop, my friends.

i'm coming back from LA on saturday and i'm so exc-iiiii-ted
plans plans plans
whee

quake

2008-07-30T14:09:00.002-04:00

i lived through an earthquake yesterday. i didn't know, actually, until all the girls on hall poked their heads out of their doors to say "did you feel that?" ("feel what?") and i started getting concerned texts from the east coast. (i'm fine guys!)

another life milestone.

misogyny

2008-07-23T22:14:00.006-04:00

who talks about girls like that? have you ever talked to a girl before? you even have a sister. do you at least talk to your sister? then you'd know no one is impressed when you call the girls who bother to flirt with you fat or old, or insinuate that they're sluts.

ew

2008-07-23T12:53:00.002-04:00

came back after the staff meeting today to take a nap and immediately remembered why i never take morning naps here: they're widening a roadway right outside my window. from here i watched a steam shovel work ever so delicately on a beech at the edge of the deepening ditch: the shovel nuzzling the tree's neck, peeling away strips of grey bark, bending (the tree seemed caught unawares) the hard resistant body toward the ground, coaxing, pushing, until the the roots gave out and the tree tumbled onto the ground.

i jumped out of a plane last saturday. i'm going to crib a description from an email to cx: "skydiving was beautiful and not even that scary - just supremely disorienting. i gasped like a fish, because you feel like you shouldn't be able to breathe, even though you can. by the time i learned to inhale again he had opened the parachute and we were gliding. definitely a weird experience, but no where near as intense as i imagined."

also they gave me a free tee shirt (a steal at $189!)

she's got a cactus crown

2008-07-15T23:03:00.004-04:00

when a boy flirts with me i just flip out. i should admit it. i flip out and freeze out and drop off the face of the earth. i used to say to myself (the other fourteen times), well it's because he did this annoying thing, i just don't want to lead him on, i'll just lay low a couple days, etc. etc. but wow do i need to chill. wow.

i'm not sure how i feel about re-entering the blogging world. deleting my livejournal two (?) years ago was cathartic. and already i'm updating way more than is cool.

so let's pretend my blog has intellectual content. i like the new beck album. all the soft voices going "ahh" in the background of gamma ray. beck's voice going "ow." that's the final vowel sound in every line of the verses, and it sounds nice with whatever effect they've run the vocal through. he emphasizes it each time but then really goes to town on the second "arounnnnnnnd," and the last syllable stretches out and swings back like a boomerang. i guess it's conventional to like the single but i think gamma ray is my fave. maybe because of the video, which you should look up because i'm too lazy to post the link.

two more days left in the session - only one of my girls will be back for the next one, and she won't be mine anymore. i'll miss them a lot. i haven't written about them much, because of all these pesky confidentiality agreements they made me sign before i came here, but i pretty much wish i could adopt the whole hall.

sniff.

minifridge

2008-07-13T20:10:00.005-04:00

i'm sitting at my makeshift desk by the window - two bookshelves shoved together for a table; for a seat, the minifridge on loan from Tom, our dorm's resident priest. (comfy except every two minutes or so the thing revs up again and vibrates my butt.) kids are gone for the day - or until my mandatory class visit at 1 pm to watch them dissect rats. (ooh.)

i'm wondering: why does no one write pop secular ethics books? i mean, there are a lot of self-help books about how to make you feel better, but not that many about how to be a better person. why is it in our culture that only christians [and maybe peter singer] write comprehensible books on how to live an ethical life? i guess most novels carry implicit ideas of how to live a good life, but i mistrust my tendency to read them that way. they're art not an instruction manual... where do we atheists look for guidance? (TV?)

unrelated: in the dining hall today, a crowd of 5-year-old boys from soccer camp were lining up to go outside. i think the littluns must have chosen their own team name because as they fumbled their way into single file their instructors were shouting "i'm not going to tell you again! snakes of darkness, line up! line up!"

the moral is,
5-year-old boys = heaps of awesome.

"and now i'm in this... dream place"

2008-07-10T02:20:00.004-04:00

mm, testing out the new blog.
Los Angeles is not at all what i was expecting - everything tan and everywhere low, a sprawling PCP suburb, dry and timewarped, where somehow every car trip is twenty minutes, regardless of distance. where grass is always green when it never rains. all those associations of los angeles with artifice, sunset boulevard, mulholland drive, sense of dislocation, human beings in a desert.
this would be a really creepy place to live.