To work again

I left Halifax on December 19th and I haven’t touched my thesis work since then.  Yes, it’s hard to work during the holidays, but there’s more involved in my non-productivity than that.  Going permanently back to my house in Northern Ontario has broken my work habits, and now I have to create new ones in accord with my new environment.

Plus, there’s a lot more stuff to distract me here.  My brother has an extensive dvd collection that he’s added to since last I was here and he’s also gotten a bunch more books.  I’ve just seen a boatload of movies, including the Children of Men (Holy shit!  See it!), and I managed to start and finish Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.  There’s an anthropologist in that one, by the way, although the stuff she does makes her sound more like a folklorist, but since she’s a Hungarian scholar practicing Soviet anthropology, I’m willing to suspend my disbelief pending more knowledge about Soviet anthro.  And there’s the PS2, with which I’ve already finished Ultimate Alliance despite getting it for Christmas, and I’ve just started Final Fantasy X-2.  The kitchen here also has more appliances and special spices and delicacies, so I can make ever more complex meals for the eating.

Which is to say that I’ve landed myself in Procrastination City.  On the pro side of the equation, Sudbury is a complete car town and I don’t know how to drive, so I can’t go watch a movie on a whim.  It’s also less — how can I put it? — less, umm, less than Halifax.  There, I said it.  There’s not as much to do in Northern Ontario.  I also don’t know as many people here, since everyone I knew has graduated and gone somewhere else.

That’s why I’ve been so quiet lately.  However, I was already blogging far less before moving.  That was mostly because I’d gotten serious about writing my thesis and can pretty much focus on only one thing at a time.  I wrote rather long posts in the early months of my old blog mostly because I had no other work to do or I was procrastinating on the work that I did have.  Now, though, I actually find myself procrastinating on blogging itself.
ToDoList.jpg
Look at my ScrapBook folder of stuff that I saved away to blog about later and you’ll see that I’ve posted about maybe less than half the stuff listed here.  That’s not even counting the drafts that I’ve been opening and listlessly poking at every now and then.

I can understand why Michael Bérubé is quitting blogging (Incidentally, his final post is also the first post of his that I’ve ever read).  Always Be Composing is a hard thing to do, and thinking about what to blog about takes away brainpower from other projects.  I wonder how s0metim3s (Link is now defunct) and N. Pepperrell can keep writing such long posts, although as residents of Oz they have their summer break now, the lucky bastards (“bastard” is friendly in Australian, right?).

Okay, sometime before the end of January I’ll finish and post the draft I have about various bits of media that I’ve been playing around with.  Scout’s honour.  And I will so totally blog about the new episode of Battlestar Galactica.

Not an egg thief

In the part of the Philippines that I’m originally from, it is held that hiccups are a sign that the afflicted has recently filched someone’s eggs.  Damn you eggs, I ate you fair and square!  Everything was legally paid for!

Unless this condition is some kind of commentary on how capitalist consumption is always essentially predicated on the theft of resources from somewhere else, such as the oil used to make the gas that fueled the truck that brought the eggs to market, in which case we’re all screwed.

Oh wait, my hiccups are gone now.  Yay, capitalism triumphs again!

No comment

“We Communists always oppose a one-party dictatorship, and don’t approve of the Nationalists having a one-party dictatorship. The CCP certainly doesn’t have a program to monopolise government because one party can only rule in its own interests and won’t act according to the Will of the People. Moreover, it goes against democratic politics.” Deng Xiaoping, 16th March 1941

Happy Feast of the Epiphany

The twelve days of Christmas officially end tomorrow, so take down those holiday decorations, people.  I didn’t get what I really wanted for Christmas, but hardly anyone ever does.

Anyway, during Christmastide I watched the latest round of the Ultimate Fighting tournament at some dude’s house.  I’m back in northern Ontario now and it’s interesting seeing how stuff is different here than in Halifax, especially the casual codeswitching.  There are quite a few francophones here and even a dialect of French peculiar to the region, so bilingualism in French and English is common among locals.  Many people from here switch back and forth between English and French quite easily, although I noticed that they do it intersententially instead of intrasententially (meaning that they switch the language of their sentences, but not within the sentence itself, i.e., no “Do you wanna coucher avec moi?”).  Still, this intersentential codeswitching happened at a gathering where the speakers couldn’t be sure that everyone spoke French, although they knew everyone spoke English, so the codeswitching would probably be different if the audience was entirely bilingual.

Still, one of the more peculiar parts of the evening (I guess besides the part where people gathered to watch savage beatings on tv) was in the waiting period before the fighting started, when one of the guys there invited everyone to watch Saddam Hussein’s hanging on his laptop.  From the excitement in the way he talked about it, the video sounded rather graphic.  I declined to see it, but most everyone else saw the recording.  Apparently the video quality was rather poor, especially with the shakiness of the cellphone camera.  “That was it?” seemed to be the prevailing sentiment among the viewers.  Still, I wonder what exactly they expected.  Perhaps an execution like on film, with a dramatic speech and bloody climax?  Maybe with the prisoner shouting “Freedom!” until his voice fades away?

The banal nature of the execution seems to be the kicker, added to by the very method used to capture the proceedings.  Surely the execution of the greatest monster of contemporary times (or so we have been told), surely that execution couldn’t have been so ordinary?  Shouldn’t there have been more of a spectacle befitting this most extraordinary death?  Shouldn’t a tumbril have at least been involved, or maybe a bulletproof Popemobile?  But a secret hanging recorded on a cameraphone?  Where’s the drama, the blood?  I can imagine it was a disappointing video to see.  I suppose the videos of various beheadings floating around will have to do until the next important execution.

Languages I wish I spoke better

It’s pretty much all languages besides English.  By order of my level of fluency:

  1. Tagalog (a.k.a. Filipino).  This one I have native fluency in, but my vocabulary is for crap.  Even in the Philippines, I mostly spoke in the dialect known as Taglish (Tagalog-English), and I’ve been losing little-used words.  Don’t get me wrong, I am perfectly comfortable in it, but it can be hard for me to avoid codeswitching in my speech (codeswitching is the technical term in linguistics for switching between languages inter- or intrasententially).
  2. Spanish.  This one I almost achieved fluency in after five weeks in Peru for an ethnographic field school.  I was so close I could feel it, and had I stayed just a bit longer in South America I think I could have gotten it.  Funny story,  I actually only took a year of Spanish back in undergrad (I think I got a B) and that was three years before the field school.  I’d half-assedly been reviewing my Spanish in preparation, but I was hoping to be able to get the help of other people in my group who were better speakers.  When I arrived at the airport, though, I couldn’t find the person I was supposed to meet and couldn’t remember the name or number of the hotel I was supposed to be staying in.  There was a taxi driver talking to me in Spanish trying to get me to take his cab, and out of desperation I managed to start producing sentences in Spanish.  I got the guy to take me to a decent hotel, then I managed to get a room and make a long-distance call back home to sort out the whole mess.  I hooked up with the rest of the field school the next day.  After that I was fine talking in Spanish for the rest of my time in Peru.
  3. French.  Canada is officially bilingual in French and English, and what that means for English-speaking children is that they must study French.  I resisted learning French, partly because I thought it was unfair to expect me to study it at the same level as my classmates when I’d never encountered it before (the educational system made no concessions to immigrant children in this regard), and partly because I’d begun taking up the attitudes of my Anglophone classmates regarding French (mainly, that it was stupid).  By the time I got to high school I started making an effort and actually got an A in French, despite me not knowing how to count past ten (by that level, you’re assumed to have already learned the basics, so you don’t get tested on them).  However, that was only for one year, the last year of mandatory French study, and after that I dropped French like a hot potato.  In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t, since there are all kinds of direct advantages to be enjoyed from French fluency, such as the greater number of scholarships one becomes eligible for and the greater number of job opportunities.  And I wouldn’t mind living in Montreal sometime, despite it being the dirties Canadian city I’ve ever seen (which is still rather clean compared to the Philippines).  I can still kind of get the gist of written French, though, and sometimes in Chinese restaurants I read the French side of the fortunes in my fortune cookies first just to see how much I still understand.
  4. Bahasa Indonesian.  I had this idea for doing ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia and Indonesia for my Masters and I bought myself a Teach Yourself Indonesian book in preparation (the proposed project turned out to be too big for a one year Masters program like mine).  I only got a quarter of the way in and I haven’t cracked the book in over a year, so all I can remember is yes, no, and counting to ten.  Still, I’m hoping to do fieldwork in Southeast Asia for my proposed PhD project, so the book could still be useful in the future.  I’ll have to start doing the exercises again sometime.
  5. German.  This one I’ve never studied at all, but I could have.  After reading Heidegger in my high school philosophy class, I suddenly got the hankering to study German and signed up for it.  However, I was the only one interested in a school of (I think) 5 000 students.  My school offered to have me bussed to another school for my German lessons, but I decided I didn’t like Heidegger enough to put up with this inconvenience.  Again, in retrospect I wish I’d stuck with it, since it’s never a bad thing to have more languages under one’s belt.

How to Do Theory

I was looking through Blackwell Publishing’s website for its series on anthropology – The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, The Anthropology of Media, The Anthropology of the State, and so on.  Then I came across this book by Wolfgang Iser, How to Do Theory:

This succinct introduction to modern theories of literature and the arts demonstrates how each theory is built and what it can accomplish.

  • Represents a wide variety of theories, including phenomenological theory, hermeneutical theory, gestalt theory, reception theory, semiotic theory, Marxist theory, deconstruction, anthropological theory, and feminist theory.
  • Uses classic literary texts, such as Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, Spenser’s The Shephearde’s Calender and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to illustrate his explanations.
  • Includes key statements by the major proponents of each theory.
  • Presents the different theories objectively, allowing students to decide which if any, they subscribe to.
  • Gives students a sense of the potential of theory.
  • Includes a glossary of technical terms.

The table of contents lists this:

8. Anthropological Theory
Basics of Generative Anthropology
An Anthropological View of Literature

Say what?  A lot of contemporary anthropological theory actually comes from outside anthropology (my work, for instance, draws quite a bit from Stuart Hall and Benedict Anderson, a smidgen more from Sasskia Sassen, and just a dash of Foucault), but specifically anthropological critiques tend to rely ultimately on familiarity with ethnographic literature.  Which is to say that an anthropological view of anything is in the end predicated on having a certain body of knowledge and not on specific analytical techniques, with the techniques used by anthropologists actually being quite diverse.

So what would a literary theorist tell readers to give them an idea of what an anthropological view of literature is?  Not only that, since the book is about How to Do Theory, what would the author tell readers to have them be able to conduct anthropological critiques of literature?  Suddenly I want to read chapter eight of this book.  Surely one chapter isn’t enough to list the anthropological knowledge even a third year undergrad should possess.

The imagined book

I mentioned on Rough Theory that I had read Francis Fukuyama, and I was specifically referring to his book The End of History and the Last Man.  However, I have to confess that I can remember absolutely nothing from the experience of reading it.  I know I read it since I have notes on it somewhere and one paper I wrote in undergrad cites it.  Evidently, I’ve read it in the past, but I can’t even remember what it was about.  Well, I know what it’s about because I’ve read reviews and it’s mentioned here and there in other articles and such, but I can’t pull out of my mind any knowledge of the book that specifically comes from my own reading.  I have a feeling I wasn’t impressed, otherwise reading the book would have made an actual impression on me.  What I remember from book reviews also leads me to conclude that I probably dumped the book from my long-term memory because I didn’t think it was that great.  I’m not too broken up about this situation, but it is rather curious.

Internet, do something!

I demand amusement.  Hop on one foot, punch yourself in the stomach, sing, do anything at all, but don’t let me get bored.  You know what’s more horrible than procrastinating and knowing even as you’re doing it that you’re steadily screwing yourself?  Trying to procrastinate and not having anything to do.  Woe and worry, sorrow and lamentation, fallen, fallen is Babylon the great.

Off to Youtube I go.

And for any new people who have just stumbled on this blog (all two of you): don’t worry, I don’t whine all the time, I’m just full of self-pity right now.  I promise to stop feeling sorry for myself sometime after I get my PhD.

Gone fishing

Actually, I’ve never gone fishing in my life.  Ever.  But I have been absent from this blog lately.

The biggest reason for my absence is that I’m actually writing up a storm right now on my thesis.   Well, perhaps a line a day isn’t really a tempest of writing, but compared to what I was doing before it’s a deluge.  Some days I write entire paragraphs, and on occasion whole pages.  I’m so close to finishing my first chapter I can almost taste it.  I even emailed what I had to my supervisor.  Mind you, this is the first actual piece of research-related writing I’ve ever given her.  Sure, she’s seen drafts, but now she’s gotten a glimpse of the real deal.  I can actually now imagine a finished thesis as a concrete object instead of some fantastic vision, an El Dorado never to be reached.  Frankly, it’s rather deflating to realize that the thing that intimidated me so much wasn’t so big in the first place.  I’ll have to revise my schedule for the holidays, but my work from now on is reduced to nothing more than bare numbers: a couple of hours a day, so many days a week, the time accumulating until the work is done.  No more existential crises from here on out.

Before, I could not imagine a time when I’d be done; now, such a thing seems more than possible: it seems a foregone conclusion.  Because of my writing, I won’t be posting as much.  I can only write so much in a day, after all.  But I’ll still be coming back.