White Noise: 310 pages of my life I'm never getting back

White Noise by Don DeLillo is doublepluspostmodern, and not in a good way.

The whole book is about this dude, Jack (why are 75% of all protagonists named Jack?) who's an annoying college professor, insufferable poser, babydaddy, and a guy who generally has too much time on his hands to ponder... wait for it... DEATH.

(DEATH is like so scary, that's why we have to write it in BIG LETTERS.)

Now, DEATH is hardly an overwritten subject, especially in postmodernism's heyday, right? But DeLillo brings it to a whole new level of Oh My God, My Eyes Are Bleeding badness. Basically, good ol' Jack can't stop thinking about DEATH because it's the only thing that freaks him out in his comfy consumer culture.

Poor Jack, DEATH upsets him. Don't you feel sorry for him and can totally relate to his character? No? You'd rather just chuck a portable DVD player at his head? Wow, me too! We should hang out.

DeLillo's description of the overly media-saturated world was probably a big whoop in the eighties, but writing "Leaded, Unleaded, Superleaded" in the middle of a love scene between Jack and his legwarmer-clad wife strikes me as less deep and meaningful and more 'I need three more words for this chapter or my publisher will yell at me again.'

I'm pretty sure that this book got on the Honours reading list, and into academic acclaim in general, through a very clever the-king-has-no-clothes approach: the individual fakes awe and a deep understanding of the book because that's what the collective is expressing. Nobody wants to be the idiot who says he didn't get it.

And after three hundred or so pages of Jack whingeing about DEATH, I was sincerely hoping he'd fall into a giant meat grinder and... wait for it... DIE! But the freakin' dude just keeps on trucking. Yes, it's postmodern. It's also a shitty ending.

The only good thing about this book is that (despite that fact that I found it really, really lame) I get it, so I'm going to write an essay on it this week and not have any more American Lit work until the exams.

Next week we're starting on Black Boy, by Richard Wright. I'll probably write more about it once I've finished it, but let me say now that it's fantastic. One of the best books I've ever read; I can't wait for classes to start so I can gush about it to a begrudging audience of eight.

The only thing is that it's pretty depressing, and brings me to tears almost as much as the first season of Glee. I don't know why I start crying when perfectly good-sounding people break into show tunes. Maybe because it makes me ponder the ceaseless void of DEATH.

In a world ruled by evil flying elves....

So the first quarter's over, which means I actually have to start submitting work. Dun dun DUN. (That was an impending-doom sound, for the record!)

Moby Dick's going to be out of my hair soon, I'm submitting tomorrow morning. Seeing as I only figured out a couple of hours ago what my argument actually is, I'm very relieved to find that it actually has some sort of internal logic. At least I don't have to start from scratch.

Writing an essay for me is kind of like making an abstract painting. You just keep throwing paint on the canvas, and only after you're done, long after you've forgotten what the hell you were doing with all that red and silver and why you rented that horse-drawn carriage in the first place... you look at it again and realise whether it's Jackson Pollock or just, like, total crap.

I'm also debating whether to take part in Script Frenzy next month. It's a challenge to write a hundred-page play /screenplay / graphic novel / basically, scripted stuff! in the month of April. I'm tempted, but I'm afraid it might get in the way of my lying-around time.

By the way, Script Frenzy's homepage has a hilarious little gizmo called The Plot Machine, which randomly generates the seeds of a plot. It's even funnier when you read it in a deep, manly movie-trailer narrator's voice: "In a world ruled by evil flying elves... the worse debate team ever... must smuggle druids across the border."

...Hey, I might just use that exact plot!

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A spot of chicktea!

I really couldn't live with myself if I didn't post this picture:


From CuteOverload (Photo by Jerry Schexnayder)

I believe that sharing such fluffy cuteness is one of the noblest uses of the internet! True story. On the list of The Glories Of The Internet, "fluffy cuteness" is right below Engrish.com and right above My Immortal.

Speaking of chicks in teacups - well, not really, but anyway - the other day, I had an experience that made me realise the greatness of being a tutor. Not in the bestowing of knowledge, silly. See, since it's the end of the quarter, my tutlings had a test on how much (or rather, how little) they've read for their course. So on Wednesday I proceeded to sit in a room full of anxious people writing a tricky test... and I wasn't one of them.

I was almost giddy! Um, not in a sadistic way, but in a dodged-a-bullet kind of way. Like: HA! I don't have to worry and stress about this test! It's not my problem, woohoo! I'm above it all, I'm safe, I'm FREE!

Yeah... that probably means I'm not grown up enough to be a tutor. Oh well! At least I've got a really adorable pic of squishy cutey fluffy wuffy shnuggly chickies in-a-teacup! Aaaw!

And now I want to crash a cocktail party

An Incomplete Education, by Judy Jones and William Wilson, is definitely the best book buy (excuse the alliteration) I’ve ever made! An exclamation point is necessary! (And another one… but not a third. That would just be gushing.)

It is such an awesome collection of information. Every subject you could possibly want to know more on – Art History, Music, Philosophy, Psychology, Science… pretty much everything. And it’s written in a simple and lighthearted way. I haven’t put it down much since I got it.

And now, for some choice extracts...

In Political Science:

“What you need to know if you’re dating a Congolese: How to party down with someone who’s suffering from disease, malnutrition, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Try a little tenderness. If your date is a woman, she may have been gang-raped by rebel soldiers on her way to meet you, especially if you’ve arranged a rendezvous outside one of the squalid refugee camps where some of the two million or so internally displaced Congolese huddle in tents, waiting for supplies that never arrive. If your date’s a man, congratulations on having found a live one!”

In Science:

From the intro to Chaos Theory: “Chaotic behavior follows simple rules and recognizable patterns. What’s more, when you translate that behavior into mathematical models, then plot the models on your computer, you get the kind of visuals people used to have to drop acid to see.”

In the Lexicon:

The distinction between ‘anxious’ and ‘eager’: “Famous last stand of the language purists: You’re not anxious to spend a languorous evening with your oldest married friends, you’re eager to spend it. Unless, that is, you’ve been sleeping with one of them for the past three months. Then you are anxious.”

Word pronunciation: “Eight words where you have to choose between being unimpeachably correct (and risk sounding pretentious) or disarmingly casual (and risk sounding uneducated.)”

Seriously, best R300 I’ve ever spent. Naturally, like I’ve found the Literature section a bit shallow and over-simplified, I’m sure it’s not the holy grail on every subject. But it’s still really cool. Informative, funny and covering a huge range of great subjects, I’d totally recommend it to everyone, from happy nerds who really love learning, to people that are just tired of giving the ol’ vacant nod-and-smile at cocktail parties whenever Chaos Theory comes up.

"Rainbow" is not a dirty word.

COMING SOON: "A Queer Reading Of Everything! Part 1." My awesome sister Stas suggested I do this series of posts, since I habitually read absolutely everything as gayfully as possible. It's just a hobby. Some people do arts and crafts, I get my kick out of reading carefully chosen lines of (mostly, innocuously hetero) books, placing them out of context, and putting "if you know what I mean" [waggles eyebrows] at the end of them. It's great fun and takes up most weekends! Part One will be entitled "Moby Dick: It's Just Too Easy."

And now, for a rant about capitalist fuckheads:

Surely, as those who have the (collective) intelligence to own and operate a huge website dedicated to people listening to stuff, whoever's beneath the chicken suit that is Audible.com would be just clever enough to think, "Hey, for people to listen to stuff, it needs to be in a format their listening-to-stuff gadgets can recognise!"

Apparently not.

Because money makes people seriously, irreparably stupid. In this case, Audible have decided to make a very special audio format of their very own called .aa, in which ALL of their audio books are sold. No, they can't make it in standard mp3, because then it would be too 'shareable', there would be too many rainbows in the world, and the universe would implode.

What pisses me off is that I only stumble across this idiotic problem when I've given them my credit card details, downloaded their software (really, because my RAM wants more random programs slowing it down) and put their trial file on my mp3 player. It's not recognised.

I then look back and realise this bloody file is .aa, so I go "cool, I'll just use Format Factory."
Fail.
"I'll just download a program that converts it to mp3. Can't be that hard."
Fail.
"WTF?!"
Apparently, converting it straight-out is illegal, because of the whole sharing rainbows universe imploding thing.

So, I eventually find a teeny tiny paragraph in their help file that says meekly, "Oh by the way, our files aren't in mp3 format... but that's okay because iPods and R4000 smartphones can read our format!"

Next I go to the forums. Countless stories of people who PAID for audiobooks (they're not cheap either, any good stuff is roughly the same price as hardcopy) and can't get a refund because, deep in the bowels of their help files, Audible says this format isn't supported on all mp3 players.

Thank greatness I'm just using the 2 week free trial and I discovered this problem with my "complimentary" (yes, thank you for raising my blood pressure and wasting my night) book credit, which I'm using for Moby Dick. Alas, I do actually need to finish it before I can offer a complete queer reading.

Now, I'll admit that Charlie (my mp3 player) isn't the snazziest monkey in the tree. He's a JNC ipod-knockoff and despite the box he came in stating "MP4 PLAYER" he doesn't exactly... play mp4's. But he plays mp3's just fine! And you'll find him in pretty much every CNA and computer store in South Africa, so he's not exactly a rare model.

Suddenly, having an mp3 player and the money to buy an audiobook just isn't enough. You have to have a top-of-the-line gadget to play the damn thing. And that, right there, is capitalist imperialism at work. It's. Just. Not. Right.

Luckily, on the same forums I did find a (non-shady) way to get my mp3's. By burning the .aa files to an (emulated) CD and ripping them back to mp3 format from there. I still have to personally try this but it seems doable.

Yeah, doable. And really irritating, long-winded, troublesome and deeply unnecessary in a rational world, where (in my pseudo-anarchist opinion) it's perfectly okay to have a little friendly file-sharing. And one too many rainbows.

Spending money is good for your liver

Spending money makes me happy. So does tequila.

Being the health enthusiast I am [insert incredulous snort here] I decided to spare my liver, and just spent R300 on An Incomplete Education, which is a very, very big book with many little factoids on just about every interesting non-fiction subject ever. Besides, It's okay that I spent money, because I'm making money. I made R6 (hell yeah, you read right, SIX Rand!) from people clicking on my blog's ads yesterday. So don't be shy about clicking on them, because not only does the act induce orgasmic pleasure on its own (!) it also funds my addiction to awesome books!

So, the book looks way awesome. I plan to keep it in my handbag at cocktail parties and consult it for clever things to say. Actually, at 700 pages, I might need to keep it in my wheelbarrow. But that's okay, because I have a decorative wheelbarrow especially for cocktail parties.

Expect a review when my New Favourite Book arrives in about three weeks. Actually, you're better off expecting a review once I finish reading it. Ten years and three weeks, then.

That's the trouble with online retail therapy. The rush of clicking through your (mom's) credit card payment for something incomprehensibly awesome is quickly replaced by the stark sensation of empty-handedness.

... And that's when we head to TEQUILA!

Orangutans have SMS language too...

So I’m back at Wits, doing my Honours in English. Being Postgrad has opened up a whole new world! Well, technically that world consists of two new rooms. One being the Quiet Room – for reading heavy books with a serious look on your face, and perhaps smoking a pipe and mulling over unsolved murders. I wouldn’t know, I’ve only been in there once, to ask for the key for the Noisy Room.

The Noisy Room is where all the magical awesomeness of postgraduateness is at. There’s a kettle and a view of the dirty Joburg streets and rockstars rising from the dead and a whiteboard and ponies. And a really big table!

Being in this room was the first time that I actually liked being in the English department. I just kept thinking “This is weird… I’m not fetching an essay, so I’m not terrified… I’m not in pain, since I’m not in a lecture… I feel… Happy!”

The best part about the Noisy Room is it’s got other Noisy English Postgrads in it! And they’re all pretty awesome. Seeing as most of my varsity friends are Psychology kids (with a few Linguistics and Sociology majors thrown in for good measure) I’ve never really gotten anyone to stand still long enough to listen to me ramble about how deliciously emo Poe was or what a lame whiney man-spinster Matthew Arnold was (and how his poetry, despite rhyming, sucks eggs.)

Don’t know who Matthew Arnold is? Good. The rhyming just doesn’t make up for the sucking of eggs.

Luckily I don’t have to study him since I’m taking American Literature and Medieval Literature. For American, I’ve already gotten my first essay topic, which in classically vague polysyllabic English style is phrased thus:

“Thus, the ambivalence of existential existence is countered solely by the intangibility of the incorrigible, ludicrously indistinguishable qualms of the soul.” Discuss this arbitrary, abstract quote with close reference to at least something that someone has written at some point in time.Oh, and guess my favourite colour while you're at it.

Medieval Lit, on the other hand, is wonderful – until we slip into languages I don’t understand. Sure, I can breeze by some Latin phrases and guess what they mean. But Old and Middle English brings a whole new level of “HUH?!”

Lines like this frighten me:

Where ys 3oure witte where ys 3oure prouidence

Okay, is it just me, or does this language need to be renamed Old Orangutan SMS Language? What I’ve gleaned of the meaning is: “Where stuff stuff 3stuff where is stuff… 3.” But I’ve got a weird feeling there’s more to it than that.

So what I’ve learned this week: English Honours isn’t for pansies. Or anyone who feels like they need to understand what they’re reading. But it’s all good, as I’m really used to being clueless. May as well embrace it and avoid Getting A Job for another year!

(Oh, and speaking of being unemployed, have you noticed the ads on this page? They’re sexy, huh? Go ahead, click on one, I get a chappie every time you do!)