More Life

Put away laundry, saw my moment, and bathed cat. Gloves!! No injuries this time. Had to hold him down. Washing butt a problem.

UPDATE 1: God the cat is acting like it has just fucking escaped from Dachau. Get the fuck over it. I bathed you softly with a warm soapy rag.

UPDATE 2: He is TRAUMATIZED.

UPDATE 3: I tried to restore the cat's sense of empowerment by letting it catch da bird (its favorite toy) many times. Let the healing begin!!

UPDATE 4: he is still sad and traumatized. :( But also very loving? And fascinated
by the recycling bin? Idk. Boo. Stupid cat.

- Bit sorry to have commented on the Guardian time story and the Kate Bush album when, in the end, I like neither. Sad as that's a subject and an artist I'm typically fond of.

- Found out today our cat is 15 in human terms, if one believes 'cat years' as a relative indicator of development. Katy and I were a but surprised that 'one year old' was SO DAMN OLD. Get a *job*, Sasa, jesus.

- This Ikea Hackers DIY makeover of Ikea products site seems cool, and I want to check it out more: http://www.ikeahackers.net/

- If you have access to JSTOR or something like it, think about reading "House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic" by Roberta Rubenstein. It's an interesting retrospective on Shirley Jackson's career and life, the Female Gothic genre, psychoanalysis, mothers and daughters, and the uses and significance of food and home in her writing and life. I found it striking and resonant. The paper's prose style is a bit uneasy at first, but strong once it reaches We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Anna downloaded it and gave it to Katy, who gave it to me. V. good of them. It's made me want to read Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, ed. Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, which it sites. Good notes, too. Several quotes very resonant in them, re: eating disorders, object-relations psychoanalysis. This struck me for the beauty of 'love safely and hate safely': "As Thomas Ogden outlines Klein's position on this primitive mechanism of emotional division, "Splitting allows the infant, child, or adult to love safely and hate safely by establishing discontinuity between loved and feared aspects of self and object," in The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue."

This description of the Female Gothic seemed, oddly, particularly resonant for the Radiosonic Workshop Shalka audios:

"More specifically, Jackson's later narratives contain distinct elements of the type of Gothic narrative that has been termed "Female Gothic." Claire Kahane identifies the characteristics of traditional Gothic narratives, including "an imprisoning structure" within which the protagonist, "typically a young woman whose mother has died, is compelled to seek out the center of a mystery, while vague and usually sexual threats to her person from some powerful male figure hover on the periphery of her consciousness" (p. 334). Kahane notes that critical approaches to Gothic narratives characteristically emphasize an underlying oedipal or incestuous struggle between a powerless daughter and an erotically powerful father or other male figure (p. 335). She proposes, instead, that the central feature of Female Gothic is not an oedipal conflict but, implicitly, a preoedipal one, embodied in the daughter's search for/ fear of "the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront" (p. 336). Thus, in these narratives authored by women and focusing on female protagonists, traditional elements of the Gothic genre are elaborated in particular ways, notably through the central character's troubled identification with her good/bad/dead/mad mother, whom she ambivalently seeks to kill/merge with; and her imprisonment in a house that, mirroring her disturbed imaginings, expresses her ambivalent experience of entrapment and longing for protection."

We spend a fair amount of time making the TARDIS a space of imprisonment and safety, an unheimlich home, confining and freeing, in this series. There's worry about the disintegration of the self and the body and the personality for our TL protagonists, the mysterious Forces on the Phone (no spoilers) exerting a 'bad father' sort of control over them. There's threats that aren't deliberately dealt with, hovering over the narrative. There's a deliberate problematizing of existential senses of inside vs. outside.

TAKE THE FOLLOWING WITH A GRAIN OF SALT because I am always a bit ambivalent about psychoanalytic literary theory: Does the way that Slash treats male characters as psychologically female enable this? In an object-relations way, you COULD talk about D/M as simultaneously a post-Oedipal conflict and rivalry, a man's eroticized worshipful admiration for and wish to be rivaled (with a possibility of being bested) by another man, and as a pre-Oedipal relation, with the distinction between Who They Are being a contested subject, and a tension between liberty and being subsumed in one another, with either option posing risks to their autonomous selfhood. I *think*, though I might be wrong, that a traditionalist would say most men aren't eligible for a pre-Oedipal reading, thus the 'slash men are actually women' Joanna Russ and others postulated (She did it, I believe, in 'Another Addict Raves About K/S') here would play out in the narrative with some interesting psychological/character conclusions.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070725/ap_on_fe_st/death_cat

Cat predicts death and is a perfect short story in the making. Cat: Your life is a prompt for a mediocre liberal arts student to capitalize on. I hope you never wondered in your tiny cat brain what is was all about. Because that's pretty much it.


BWAH I am hung over, can't get back to napping, walked a long ass way at 6:30 AM to pick up my car from the bar and now can't get back to sleep, and am really sore from walking all that way (to 900 Governor and back from my house) last night in those netted tights and satin pumps. And I only slept like four hours and have to go and deliver for the wedge at 11. Then rush to finish that ass-ton of homework, then go to class, then slink in late to my Writer's Workshop. Fuck.

...Imma need me some coffee.

P.S. Awesome headline spotting:

Potter's magic can't beat Chinese pirates