My head, on a silver charger.

against the day

In preparation for the dreaded dissertation, I’m reading the second-to-latest Pynchon novel, all 1,085 pages of Against the Day.  It starts a bit slowly, but so far, I think it has gotten better.  It imitates mid-century “fiction for lads” in a convincing but horrendously mannered way at first, then sort of just “slides” into a more characteristic style.

It’s a “steampunky” thing, and while that’s not exactly my usual nightly beat, it’s gratifying in the hands of someone who knows how to use it as a means instead of an end — no ad-nauseam descriptions of just how a steam-driven abacus might compute with the power of a mainframe, of the sort China Miéville is capable of inflicting on the unwary.  Even better, the book is riddled with great conspiracy theories, about the labor movement (which it unashamedly advocates for), about Tesla and the Tunguska Event, and many others.  Pynchon usually relies upon de novo conspiracies, and it’s great to see him start fiddling with real ones, too.  

What would be really timely in the late-information-age (can I say such a thing?) is an examination of Conspiracy in Art, that would include razor-sharp analyses of this book, of Foucault’s Pendulum, of all sorts of popular arcana, and finally, the relation between conspiracy — theories of which have usually neglected sheer human laziness and tendency not to systematize — with the new age in which Zuckerberg and the folks at Google know almost everything about us, sometimes before we even know it ourselves.  Perhaps I’ll dissertate on that.  Yes?

nicknaming your foetus: a guide for the perplexed.

I find myself at an age in which an increasing number of my friends - swiftly approaching a plurality - are gestating or raising offspring.  Not being in any such state of paternity myself, but at the same time noticing that each new couple that finds itself expecting has to be as careful to be original in nicknaming their foetus as a teenager with a prom dress, I’ve decided to take some of the spare time I’m not using to buy outrageously expensive bottles of formula to give you a little fund to draw upon if you are at a loss.  I’ve even categorized them for you so you can sort out names according to your preference.  Follow me.

The cutesy nickname

Most of the “already taken” names are from this category.  But do not despair, you are still left to choose among: tadpole, jellyfish, pea-pod, soybean, seedling, sporey, pinecone, acorn, and joey.

The sterile, clinical lexeme

Uncharted territory, you lovely young couple you: blasto, larva, homo informe, spawn, chrysalis, ovum/a, embryon, homunculus/a, zygote.

The crudely metaphorical route

You can always cop some jargon for something that grows into something larger from another discipline, like: venture capital, foundation, trust fund, bulb, root stalk, spark, prototype, meme, or even thesis.

How to use your new nickname:

It’s easy to put these in a sentence.  All you have to do is post a bunch of pictures of your pregnancy on Facebook - preferably ultrasound photos - and add a caption including your nickname.  Keep it consistent, folks: nine months may seem like a long time, but it is very easy to do this all over again.  Remember, you can always throw a diminutive onto the base nickname to make it cuter (Spawn —> Spawno). Here are some examples:

“Bulby at two months!”

“New ultrasound pix: Tadpole can wave now!”

“Proud Mommy.  She loves it when Homuncula kicks!”

“Ten weeks’ gestation: Spawny grows a pair.”

Happy parenting, and I hope I’ve helped … of course, if you name your child early, there’s no need to resort to these nicknames, but how fun is that?  Also, if you’ve chosen not to determine the gender of your child, you can use Latin neuters (homunculum) in a pinch …

ex hibernatio.

I’m sorry, innumerable fanbase, that I’ve been a lousy blogger since the middle of the Cruelest Month.  I guess I was, I don’t know, doing stuff.  

Anyway, the two posts down below should be sufficient evidence for some of the things I’m doing.  One, learning French (again).  I took a year of it at UD, loved it, but being a senior, couldn’t go on.  Now I’m doing the French Reading for Grad Students, which is kind of like French for Cheaters (“Now,” says the book to all the hapless non-traditional students and de-aestheticized students in ‘practical majors’, “all the tenses that you don’t recognize are from now on the passé simple”).  Finally, a class that is begging me to muddle through with minimal effort, and I want to know more.  I guess Aristotle had a point after all?

The other thing is watching opera on YouTube - some enterprising mortal put up the complete Berio ending to Turandot, satiating (if only for a moment) my excessive over-education on the topic of opera.  Check it, if you like the “opera cage fight” (ah, what phrasing!) below.

And then I’m playing a lot of chess and trying to learn the openings, but let’s not even go there.  The Geiger counter is registering dangerous levels of the nerdy isotope.

sore losers.

These “tea parties” today are ridiculous.  Absurd.  Obama is not a). taxing us without representation; b). quartering redcoats in our haylofts; c). insane and wearing an ermine-trimmed cape.  Ergo, he is not King George, and you are not a minuteman, even if you are down at the Mexican border with a high-powered rifle sniping at everything you can’t understand.  

Get over yourselves.  It’s not like we didn’t pay taxes under The Decider, so what is the big deal?  Is this all because the tax money is being used to help the country recover instead of de-stabilizing the civilian populations of our “enemies” overseas?

Or, as I suspect, are you just mad that your guy didn’t win?