even my hair is trying to crown me
My Review of The Great Gatsby
On a scale of (heinous to deific), I give this movie a rating of: SPLENDIFEROUS
I read several reviews of the movie before I saw it, all of which found the movie tepid or viewed it with outright contempt. After seeing the movie, I think it is safe to refute all of their major claims:
1) The length of the movie. Yes, it is a long movie, as the critics were keen to point out, clocking in at 2 and 1/2 hours, approximately. But the time rushes by as you watch the movie (see comments 2-3).
2) The spectacle. The cinematography in this movie is stunning. The scenes are dynamic and yet consistently beautiful. Some critics said that the movie is “too much.” An aesthetic clusterfuck, if you will. And yet, I never saw a detail out of place. The pacing was snappy, and yet, not so hurried that I actually felt I was missing something.
3) The content. Critics rushed to call the movie vapid, purely spectacular, lacking the depth of the novel, etc. Though admittedly the explicit content of the movie might be construed as some kind of romantic melodrama, there were few, if any, scenes I watched in the movie that did not have one or more layers of subtext operating seamlessly and simultaneous to the explicit text. Race, class, gender are all made complicated by the unspoken nuances of Gatsby.
I don’t know what movie the critics saw; both myself and the person I went to see it with (who is almost as hard to please as I am) left the theatre agog and chattering about the movie’s multitudes of social commentary.
I really do not enjoy liking people.
I really do not enjoy the aftermath of a good date or some other less innocent romantic entanglement. I won’t call and I won’t wait.
I really do not enjoy kissing someone first (and never have).
I really do not enjoy the cognitive dissonance of thinking that I’m a delightful person while presuming that no one else will or should share that belief.
Jade Wallace, editor of the BUCWC.
Oh my god, I found an old video of me at a poetry reading. There may be a poem about hipsters contained herein. I can’t actually watch it, but I have to post it for old time’s sake nonetheless.
X_X
My “band,” The Leafy Greens, did a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole” the other day in front of a bunch of people at the St Catharines Poetry Slam. This is the evidence.
Some theories on why feminism is interpreted as misandry
Some people seem to think feminism (equality for women)= misandry (man-hating). Why? I don’t know for sure, but I’ve developed some theories.
1) The Gender Norms Theory: Women are, according to most constructions of femininity, expected to be passive, docile creatures whose minds are attuned to the needs of everyone, but most especially their male counterparts. When they shirk this role and all of the fuzzy maternal feelings that go along with it, they are interpreted as antagonistic, hostile, etc. It’s like if your mother said to you as a child “to hell with you little one, I need to live my own life”. You would assume she did not love you anymore, perhaps even felt disdainful towards you and the burden you had been on her. You might assume that she hated you. Men, I think, assume women hate them when women do not want to care for, nurture, and placate them because this is what women are expected to do and be like.While the women may just think “I want freedom” the men see this as “they do not love us anymore.” Hence, they assume, feminism=misandry
2) The Spoiled Child Theory: If we assume that men have historically had rights and privileges that women have not, then we can perhaps think of men analogously to spoiled children who get what they want. They might then interpret women, who are asserting their own rights even to the detriment of men’s special privileges, as taking favourite toys away from them. They see women as antagonizers who are hell-bent on making life worse for them. Women, of course, would prefer that everyone have privileges and rights, but this is not always possible. That they attempt to assert their rights even to the detriment of men’s privileges is interpreted as hateful by the men. Thus they figure, Feminism=misandry.
3) The Uninformed Person Theory: Most people have no clue what the fuck feminism is about and so just absorb all kinds of absurd, diluted, insipid, and other ill-informed conceptions of it from popular media etc. This is convoluted by the fact that the popular media often takes the most sensationalized examples of feminism and narrates them, because that makes for more saleable news. Ergo we get lots of stories of the most ridiculous and egregious of feminisms’ exploits (which tend to look like misandry). Ergo, they conclude, Feminism=misandry.
4) The Sometimes Feminism=Misandry Theory. Sometimes, for some people, it is. Oh well.
from “We thought it was the apocalypse”
After her father died, we looked behind every stone,
shone lanterns in the guts of every rotted tree,
but we could not find flowers to lay on his grave.
So against the falling sun at the close of the ninth day,
we gathered up the wings of dead white moths
and sewed them together to pass off as lilies.
Me covering “To a Friend on the Floor” by Walter Mitty and his Makeshift Orchestra
I just submitted a proposal for a presentation to the 12th Annual North American Conference for Critical Animal Studies. The would-be presentation consists of a critical analysis of PETA’s handling of the analogy in which the suffering of animals is compared to the suffering of black American slaves.(Spoiler: They do a terrible job).
And here I thought I was done with academia.
