According to this New York Times article, social interactive web sites ala MySpace are cropping up that are targeted at young girls with their simple communication tools. More specifically, most have in common the real-life obsession girls have with “dress-up.” Sites like Cartoon Doll Emporium feature a selection of dolls kids can personalize. “Belle of…
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Virtual Living, Redux
As I was taking a walk around the block in (what has been for days) the smoky and stifling air of North Central Florida, I realized two important things about my previous post. (1) In my catalogue of “vital stats” one might wish to know about another person passing in the streets, I thought only…
Virtual Living
I previously wrote on the idea of my life as a character, i.e. what if I had an author hovering above me, narrating my every thought, sensation, memory, or basically any quality not visibly or audibly expressed. I think of the novel as a technology for reconfiguring the presentation of the individual, and as such,…
I need c-o-f-f-e-e
I am completely “awed” by this video song performed in mummenschanz style: The Coffee Song with Mr. Sketch-it The Coffee Song was written by Ralph Covert, former indie bandmember of Bad Examples, and now children’s musician. He wrote and performed the song on the spot after he arrived at a musical event with a cup…
History and the Human
From the Preface of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1933): “The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian–ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art” “It is not by…
In a Blur
Yes, I can “see,” I wear contacts, but clearly this morning I was in a blur. I left my house, walking across the parking lot to cross the road, when I take a quick scan of myself and am stunned into laughter. Could it really be possible that I was walking outside in public like…
In Mourning
My glasses are no more. The same nerdy frames I’ve worn almost seven years. And then, on a night just like any other, they lie on the area rug next to the couch, mere feet away from lying atop the coffee table, the safe space. How they arrived in their flung state on the carpet–or…
On Being Human
One of the members of my dissertation circle is working out a thesis that reconceives of historical fiction in terms of space, or topos, identifying, for example, wild spaces (the typically sublime space of fairy tales) as unexamined settings for historical fiction. I became troubled as I commented on his work, not knowing when, if,…
More Plastic
And again I’m entirely fascinated, but this time impressed. Leave it to a non-American country to devise a progressive and politically engaged doll for children. The shopping doll–carrying a reusable cloth shopping bag–is part of Japan’s campaign on global warming. Yes, it’s a governmental tool for reinforcing an ideology via children’s toys, but, even if…
Pain and Pleasure
So I’ve finally encountered a term for the aspect of labor that I had in mind when I was proposing my dissertation topic: Gallagher calls it “somaeconomics,” the system of drives and desires that influence political economy. She uses this term to address debates about productive / unproductive labor and the pleasure / pain principle…