Continuing the Honor Roll of Undead-Americans and Other Undead Role Models
Amelia Earhart
Buffy
Superman
Xena & Gabrielle
The Six Million Dollar Man
The Bionic Woman
Robocop
Note that I've expanded my definition of the Undead to include cyborgs, i.e. everyone with an artificial vital organ; actually, I'm including everyone who wears glasses or any other life-enhancing prosthesis, has no magazine subscriptions, and wears out-of-style clothes. You yourself my unwittingly be eligible for my Undead Honor Roll. I think the Undead Continuum can be roughly outlined as this:
|- LESS UNDEAD (MORE DEAD-DEAD) ---> MORE UNDEAD (MORE DEAD-BUT-LIVING) -|
|-Residual Floating Energy Presence ~ Bottle-genie ~ Patron Saint/ Spirit Guide/ Deified Dead Person ~ Poltergeist ~ Zombie ~ Vampire ~ Cyborg ~ Basic Standard Issue Geek ~ Librarian -|
Tuesday, October 01, 2002
Some Tiny Omissions from My Vocab List for the Modern Sensualist Have Been Noticed
- SEX
- 1. Sometimes understood to mean gender (see my notes on gender from a few days ago), but I think gender is performative/ learned/ constructed, something you play with (for ex. a butch is playing the masculine part, a femme is playing the feminine part, a futch is a femme who secretly plays team sports, a low femme is a femme who wears sensible shoes, etc.) Sex is more about your genital and hormonal make up- female, male, or intersex; 2. A conscious intimate act where all consenting participants experience orgasm (or some amount of pleasure); 3. A conscious consensual act where all participants are exposed to eachother's bodily fluids. The former is what people would rather talk about, the latter is what people avoid talking about until their life is threatened.
- LOVE
- 1. Trust and understanding. 2. Warm iced pecan cinnamon sweet rolls.
- LOVER - also see below "fuckbuddy"
- 1. Just a synonym for fuckbuddy; 2. a fuckbuddy who has had one working phone number for you for more than a year or through one move, especially if s/he helped you move; 3. anyone you think you've had sex with (usually in the #2 sense of sex).
- TOP/ BOTTOM
- 1. Roles people take in sexual acts, or in power-charged office situations, like a staff meeting. These roles range from pillow queen (bottom), to switch, to stone (top). The closer you are to the pillow queen end of things, the more likely you are to own knee pads but not play hockey. The closer you are to stone, the more likely you are to wear a full outfit of clothes to bed, every night, even when you are sleeping alone.
Monday, September 30, 2002
Looking for Dates at the Free Lizzy Borden Protest
Or, the 19th century Eileen Wournos as a Social Occasion
I am taking a sick day, which is good news for my blog and bad news for my landlord, on whom I now have time to concentrate my wrath about the lack of hot water in my apartment. But meanwhile, The Legend of Lizzy Borden (1975) is on Oxygen, and I'm enjoying seeing how - apparently - Lizzy's case brought out a lot of proto-feminists in the creaky old year of 1893, when suffrage was a distant pipe dream, and the first women's college - my alma mater Vassar - was just being established. Just like how the Lesbian Avengers would have parties to rally support for the lesbian "serial killer" Eileen Wournos, on death row in Florida, on the grounds that she was a mentally retarded prostitute and therefore could easily be telling the truth that all those men she killed in fact were trying to rape her... Never mind that Eileen truly is - how shall we say it - unbalanced - and was converted to Christianity and disavows her lesbian identity (it was her lesbian lover who turned her in)... It still makes for a good case to talk about prostitutes' rights, what constitutes consent, and how the media will convict someone before a court sees the legal process through. However, Eileen was convicted of all of her murders (12, I think), and she even confessed to them on the bad advice of her lesbian lover. Lizzy was acquitted, despite all the evidence.
So why doesn't the "she's just a nice good-natured innocent victim of the partriarchy" argument work anymore? I'll think about it and let you know. Meanwhile, I'll just stay with my imagined scene of big-hatted cameo-throated lesbians cruising eachother outside the Lizzy Borden trial.
Here is a link to a virtual tour of the Borden house and other Lizzy resources, including a newsletter with all the latest theories of her case.
Or, the 19th century Eileen Wournos as a Social Occasion
I am taking a sick day, which is good news for my blog and bad news for my landlord, on whom I now have time to concentrate my wrath about the lack of hot water in my apartment. But meanwhile, The Legend of Lizzy Borden (1975) is on Oxygen, and I'm enjoying seeing how - apparently - Lizzy's case brought out a lot of proto-feminists in the creaky old year of 1893, when suffrage was a distant pipe dream, and the first women's college - my alma mater Vassar - was just being established. Just like how the Lesbian Avengers would have parties to rally support for the lesbian "serial killer" Eileen Wournos, on death row in Florida, on the grounds that she was a mentally retarded prostitute and therefore could easily be telling the truth that all those men she killed in fact were trying to rape her... Never mind that Eileen truly is - how shall we say it - unbalanced - and was converted to Christianity and disavows her lesbian identity (it was her lesbian lover who turned her in)... It still makes for a good case to talk about prostitutes' rights, what constitutes consent, and how the media will convict someone before a court sees the legal process through. However, Eileen was convicted of all of her murders (12, I think), and she even confessed to them on the bad advice of her lesbian lover. Lizzy was acquitted, despite all the evidence.
So why doesn't the "she's just a nice good-natured innocent victim of the partriarchy" argument work anymore? I'll think about it and let you know. Meanwhile, I'll just stay with my imagined scene of big-hatted cameo-throated lesbians cruising eachother outside the Lizzy Borden trial.
Here is a link to a virtual tour of the Borden house and other Lizzy resources, including a newsletter with all the latest theories of her case.
Friday, September 27, 2002
"Come in! Come in! Fortunate favourite of the Queen-- or else not so fortunate." said Fenris to the turncoat Edmund.
There are only three coworkers in the office with my today after this gruelling long week of meetings. I left out on my desk the copy of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe that I'm reading, and I've so far had unsolicited conversations about Turkish Delight, about the masculine and anti-fertility-deity nature of the White Witch, and her origin as a Daughter of Lillith, and how Lucy and Edmund- who introduce Narnia to the world of man- do it through potentially erotic encounters with mystical beings of the opposite sex...
In case you haven't read it, I did manage to find an unpretty version of the LWW text on some Russian website (that has all the books of The Chronicles of Narnia, it seems). However, it is in some awful font with no text wrapping, so I recommend you cut and paste to a more readable format before attempting to read... or better yet, go buy the book and curl up with a lapcat and a cup of tea and read it in a sunbeam.
One of my coworkers hasn't read it, another has read it twice, and the other has read it twenty or more times over the course of his whole life.
Of all the many sites I have cruised today to find more information about the morphology of words invented in the text of Narnia, two have caught my attention the most. One is a compilation of descriptions of meals eaten in The Chronicles and the other is Wizard Words which tries to source terminology invented by J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books. Horrifying as it is, I haven't read the Harry Potter books, but I saw the movie and was fascinated by the use of Latin in the dialogue-- and now that I'm studying Latin it is interesting to learn how Rowling played with it to create mystical-sounding nonsense words.
The author of this Wizard Words site didn't hestitate to throw in a little political history to spice the mix, either:
Binns
------- Professor of History of Magic at Hogwarts
Leon Trotsky wrote that the Mensheviks, a Russian revolutionary faction, belonged in "the dustbin of history". The phrase has become a cliché. Dustbin is a British word for garbage can. This helps to convey the impression that Professor Binns is dry as dust, and the history he teaches is mostly rubbish.
There are only three coworkers in the office with my today after this gruelling long week of meetings. I left out on my desk the copy of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe that I'm reading, and I've so far had unsolicited conversations about Turkish Delight, about the masculine and anti-fertility-deity nature of the White Witch, and her origin as a Daughter of Lillith, and how Lucy and Edmund- who introduce Narnia to the world of man- do it through potentially erotic encounters with mystical beings of the opposite sex...
In case you haven't read it, I did manage to find an unpretty version of the LWW text on some Russian website (that has all the books of The Chronicles of Narnia, it seems). However, it is in some awful font with no text wrapping, so I recommend you cut and paste to a more readable format before attempting to read... or better yet, go buy the book and curl up with a lapcat and a cup of tea and read it in a sunbeam.
One of my coworkers hasn't read it, another has read it twice, and the other has read it twenty or more times over the course of his whole life.
Of all the many sites I have cruised today to find more information about the morphology of words invented in the text of Narnia, two have caught my attention the most. One is a compilation of descriptions of meals eaten in The Chronicles and the other is Wizard Words which tries to source terminology invented by J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books. Horrifying as it is, I haven't read the Harry Potter books, but I saw the movie and was fascinated by the use of Latin in the dialogue-- and now that I'm studying Latin it is interesting to learn how Rowling played with it to create mystical-sounding nonsense words.
The author of this Wizard Words site didn't hestitate to throw in a little political history to spice the mix, either:
Binns
------- Professor of History of Magic at Hogwarts
Leon Trotsky wrote that the Mensheviks, a Russian revolutionary faction, belonged in "the dustbin of history". The phrase has become a cliché. Dustbin is a British word for garbage can. This helps to convey the impression that Professor Binns is dry as dust, and the history he teaches is mostly rubbish.
Thursday, September 19, 2002
"You would think a band of Amazons was battling." - Statius AD 92
This is what happens when you get cable and/or purchase sets of whole show seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena the Warrior Princess at the same time. You start giving your Latin tutor enormous headaches by insisting on translating all the texts about battles which do not specify the third person singular person's gender as female (Her troops were sent but never arrived. The spears of her men were found in the center of town. She killed the man who slaughtered the inhabitants.) My tutor never fails to assume the male gender of the unspecified third person singular, I never fail to assume the female. Click here for more information on real written and archeological evidence of a legacy of real-live ass-kicking women warriors who fought fierce battles against and alongside men in ancient history.
I really am such a stereotype sometimes. Oh well.
This is what happens when you get cable and/or purchase sets of whole show seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena the Warrior Princess at the same time. You start giving your Latin tutor enormous headaches by insisting on translating all the texts about battles which do not specify the third person singular person's gender as female (Her troops were sent but never arrived. The spears of her men were found in the center of town. She killed the man who slaughtered the inhabitants.) My tutor never fails to assume the male gender of the unspecified third person singular, I never fail to assume the female. Click here for more information on real written and archeological evidence of a legacy of real-live ass-kicking women warriors who fought fierce battles against and alongside men in ancient history.
I really am such a stereotype sometimes. Oh well.