the individual and sexism and racism

The "individual" is the victim of sexism/racism, which is formulated, however, as being structural, systemic.  The tendency to "blame the victim" means that society blames the victim; but in a situation where two individuals are involved, the male may "take all the blame out of all sense and reason" because he is aware of the existence of systemic inequality which gets articulated at the individual level.

Is to say that the "victim" ought to claim some responsibility to "blame the victim"?  I think that the man and the woman are both victims.  At least, in the individual case I am thinking of, it was so.  

My girlfriend was probably culturally biased to keeping her own voice in check, to being acted on, like a pin-up in a magazine something passive.........I don't understand it.

According to Ebert's review of "House of Sand and Fog," the film gives a 'literary' treatment of its characters to the degree that it does not apportion blame but feels sympathy for them all.  Perhaps it is the 'literary' way of thinking, then, that differs from a systemic way of apportioning guilt and shame.  What is the moral, ethical, or political status of such a 'literary' approach to events?

Rorty

According to Rorty in "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity," it's impossible to unify responsibility-to-the-social-world and responsibility-to-one's-self-as-"individual" at the level of theory.  In English departments today, though, it's often assumed that texts have political ramifications; so, for example, J. Boone (according to R. Felski) looks for the political subversiveness in modernist works of fiction.  But Rorty himself also reads such works as doing political work: that is, they provide redescriptions that allow us to identify our cruelties and develop empathy for the Other. 

Baker's autism

Nicholson Baker could be viewed as a political writer in his early writings.  Like Mark Haddon in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, he shows an absorption in small things as sufficing.  The American male scales back, or scales down, his enthusiasms and embraces the study of the grain of wood in the table, so to speak.  This obsession with small-scale surfaces and experiences is the opposite of a war-mongering spirit--although it may (?) dovetail with consumerism.

on 'Juno'

The film exemplifies in a new light my maxim: "Friendship is a queer institution."

Song lyrics in this regard are illustrative: "You're a part-time lover and a full-time friend," and other lyrics.  Also, her dad's spiel to her about "someone who loves you for who you are."  

In "sex lies and videotape," Grahams says: "...they say a man grows to love where he desires, a woman grows to desire where she loves."  For "love," read "be in friendship with, befriend."  (To be "in love with" means to "be in like with.")  When you start with love/friendship, you aren't responding to a culturally indoctrinated search-image, what the culture tacitly tells you is the stereotype of attractiveness in a man or woman.  So you start with "ugliness" (lyric: "two ugly people loving each other") and out of that grows desire.  

I used to think: 'Friendship is the better part of love.  There's nothing out there but friendship and biology.'  For biology, read 'cultural expectations, pressures, pre-determinations.'

What is 'queer' about friendship in these terms is not just that the desire that grows out of it is for a person who is not necessarily the cultural ideal of attractive masculinity/femininity (i.e., Paulie Bleeker in the movie is androgynous, with hairless legs and no ability to grow a mustache); what is 'queer' as well is that desire DOES grow out of it; there is no drawing a line of containment and demarcation between friendship and desire.  

When Juno has the trite Hollywood moment and asks the dad the question: "I'm losing my faith in humanity...I just need to know that it's possible that two people can stay happy together forever."

For me, the question this raises is the perception that one's faith in humanity is challenged BECAUSE the only acceptable way to secure happiness (the only viable way, rather) is through coupling off.  Because you cannot rely on the world at large, the world in general, to see you off.  For the sake of self-preservation, you need to fix on one and only one person who will mean the world to you in the sense that they will protect you and you can rely on them, and vice versa, and they will not desert you to the wolves of loneliness and want.

Why is it this way.

Three things, according to my dad: the selfish gene, capitalism, and self-preservation.  The selfish gene encourages the couple formation (in the interests of colonization of the future with one's own).  Capitalism encourages looking out for number one and competition with others, not being their keepers (that would be a socialist state).  Self-preservation encourages keeping to the couple unit if that is where safety and reliability is to be reliably found.

A ramification of all this is that, if I seek emotional support from a woman who is committed to a couple, she may not give it, she may block me out.  (This is Zizek: "..in this purely formal sense, love is evil.")  (Here, the fine line between friendship and romance/sex/commitment is a bad thing because it means that she is uncomfortable giving friendship because it is too close to blurring into something sexual or romantic.  If the seedbed of friendship simply IS romance, if things are queer in this degree, then, ironically, friendship becomes more rather than less treacherous, even as love/romance/sex becomes LESS treacherous and more humane.)  

I thought he was agreeing with me...

I was getting all excited because I thought he was agreeing with me--that the message had been received.  My father.

movies vs. books

We shouldn't have to choose between the two.  In academia, if I specialize in books, what i like about keeping movies as a sub-speciality into whose fields I can branch out for relief, is that in movies the characters are real people--they lead independent lives.  One seeks relief from the solipsism of the novel-world, in which all characters ultimately are figments in the head of the singular author, to the film world, which reminds us of the existence of real people even in the act of escapism in the throes of which we often turn to movies to help us satisfy.

on nude art

Presumably what is moving about an erect penis is its fragility, the brevity of its gravity-defiance, its shadow of flaccidity.  Similarly, breasts move by the optimism of their suspension.  There -- but by the grace of God -- go I (flaccid).  When Greek sculptors immortalized the beauty of the ripe body by casting it in stone, in a way they underlined, paradoxically, the fact of brevity in which beauty lives, the fragility that names it.  The triumph of beauty is not separable from its proclamation of vulnerability.  Even in the case of eighteen-year-olds, formidable tautness of flesh (armored beauty) is undermined by assurances that they are "children" after all, and hence vulnerable.  Attempts to instantiate in the flesh itself (as opposed to some speculative realm of platonic marble) Beauty as unalterably firm Form, such as we see in breast-implants, are doomed to desecrate the very shrine in which they would comprise the altar.  

seeking the eye

Just the other day I was traveling a short distance on foot through snow to reach my car when I felt that somewhere in my close vicinity an eye was peeled in my direction.  The peeled eye was blazing out at me, and all I had to do was locate it.  It was obvious to me that the peeled eye was my invitation into a plot; that if I could locate it, my day (and life) would take off, convert itself into movie terms, become readable as a journey with a point, a definite destination.  I might not show up at work, but my day, if I found the eye, was sure to be rewarding, a worthy candidate for the first day of the rest of my life, a red-letter day.  I sought madly in the snow (falling thickly now) for the legibility-granting eye, peered up at the rows of windows in a high-rise apartment building over my head, and the windows of an office-building across the street.  I scanned parked cars for the eye, but no bodies were discernible peering out behind snowed-over glass.  It was 6:42 a.m. on a Tuesday morning and I was apparently alone on this pre-dawn stretch of city-street.  Nobody was watching.  I began to clear my windshield of snow with yesterday's newspaper.  

narcissism

It has been a while since I last looked at a blog by someone other than myself.  Don't get me wrong: I don't obsessively re-read my own blog.  In fact, rereading myself causes me feelings of embarrassment and consternation.  It is unfair to expect people to be as interested in other bodies as they are in their own--other lives as they are in their own life.  One's investment in one's body/life is logical.  

the heroism of everyday human life

My favorite actors at this time are Mark Ruffalo, Paul Dano, and Patrick Wilson.  Among films that I watched in the past year that I really studied (i.e., wrote about), I list as favorites: L.I.E., Hard Candy, Little Children, and Me and You and Everyone We Know.

Tonight I read some more in Lois Lowry's The Giver.  Jonas (the protagonist) has a weird thing happen to him sometimes: he's looking at something and it changes.  That's the verb that's used, without further qualification: it "changes."  Turns out what is happening is he is suddenly shifting into seeing in color (in the future society in which the book is set, people have been genetically rigged to be color-blind).  Specifically, he's glimpsing the color red.  This shift (and then back again) occurs when he views: an apple, the faces of an assembled audience from the vantage of the stage, a girl's hair.  

The book is about the withholding of knowledge--for example, the knowledge of sex from children, the knowledge of death.  It occurred to me originally that perhaps what Jonas saw (the "change" that flickered in his field of vision) was (since he is supposed to be gifted, a "seer") the warp of decay, the buckling in matter.  Namely, that he had scouted out the presence (taboo) of death--like the poet.  When I had this idea I felt an immense emotional charge, a shuddering in my body, a cold spell.  I also had in my mind at the same time the bit of dialogue in Little Children, delivered by the old mother to the sex offender: "what makes us different from animals is that we know, we all know, that at any minute, the things we love, the people we love, can all be taken away from us...and yet we go on anyway..."  Words to that effect.  (And I also had in my mind, in this constellation of associated instances, Mark Ruffalo in a recent interview on Fresh Air talking about the removal of a benign brain tumor: how he wanted so badly to be good in In the Cut to prove to himself that he wasn't permanently debilitated, hadn't lost his touch--despite the cognitive dissociation he had felt in recovery.)  On my misreading, that moment in The Giver (like the old mother's words in Little Children) heroizes our everyday facing of mortality; suddenly, we become heroic, our scale is magnified to the near-mythic.  Thus the poet wishes to dwell on death to put his life in a heroic perspective, wishes to feel chosen--feels that the contemplation of death makes him special, and he feels charged with a mystical energy.  Having these thoughts, I felt emotionally overwhelmed, could have shed tears: indeed, I felt my emotional need(iness) at the moment and the wanting to share with another person my emotional life, the existential excesses of my embodied presence--by, for instance, reading poetry aloud to them (instead of to my parrot).

I think a "message" of the film Little Children is the message voiced by the mother about living with the awareness that what we love, the people we love, at any moment, can all be taken away from us..."  It is this formal awareness of brevity and fragility that Kate Winslet's character finally learns to adopt as a modus operandi of living.  And this from a filmmaker whose previous film, "In the Bedroom," was about parents suffering the tragic loss of their child, a young man.