When you’re a clumsy lad, the sort who wears an ancient army jacket (which, according to the salesman at the Army/Navy surplus store, was of Korean War vintage – complete with real bullet hole!) desperately in need of a haircut and generally a bit dodgy when it comes to your self presentation there’s a very high probability your dating life will be a valley of thorns.

In an imaginary, non-sexist world, one in which women were not by turns of degree seen as paragons of virtue or monstrous succubi (the history of the idea of the succubus is interesting indeed – see, for example, the Malleus Maleficarum) You might conclude the problem was something you were missing; some mistake you were making as a splasher about in the dating pool. Or, if you’re too young to put all that together – the brain not being completely wired at 15 – a usefully wise adult might point out your missteps.

But in a sexist world there’s always an easy explanation handy, waiting to be pulled off the shelf in case of emergencies: women (or girls, in this case, though the idea persists well into the age of rent and mortgage payments, echo cardiograms and baldness) are difficult, sinister, controlling, all powerful yet powerless, irrational yet calculating. Such comforting fantasies can only be maintained by a delusional support system.

With the machinery of sexism roaring at full power like a Ferrari Enzo it’s smoothly possible to settle into a sort of melancholia of the stupid in which you lament supposed harsh realities: your perfection is under appreciated, unnoticed, unsung. Surely the girls around you, being flawed creatures, are to blame for your sensitively felt loneliness.

This is the predictable evolution of the angel motif of an earlier stage – the cynicism that naturally follows idealism as ice follows water when the temperature drops. In an imaginary non-sexist world, the inevitable frustrations associated with mating might take a different form. But with sexist ideas as common as the air you breathe it’s simpler to accept there are no “good girls” available to tenderly minister to you.

These ideas are so powerful that even those who’re very successful daters express them.

Volatile Days…

The last few days have been unsettlingly violent in spite of the curfew. We’ve been at home simply waiting it out and hoping for the best. The phone wasn’t working and the electrical situation hasn’t improved. We are at a point, however, where things like electricity, telephones and fuel seem like minor worries. Even complaining about them is a luxury Iraqis can’t afford these days.

The sounds of shooting and explosions usually begin at dawn, at least that’s when I first sense them, and they don’t really subside until well into the night. There was a small gunfight on the main road near our area the day before yesterday, but with the exception of the local mosque being fired upon, and a corpse found at dawn three streets down, things have been relatively quiet.

Some of the neighbors have been discussing the possibility of the men setting up a neighborhood watch. We did this during the war and during the chaos immediately after the war. The problem this time is that the Iraqi security forces are as much to fear as the black-clad and hooded men attacking mosques, houses and each other.

It does not feel like civil war because Sunnis and Shia have been showing solidarity these last few days in a big way. I don’t mean the clerics or the religious zealots or the politicians- but the average person. Our neighborhood is mixed and Sunnis and Shia alike have been outraged with the attacks on mosques and shrines. The telephones have been down, but we’ve agreed upon a very primitive communication arrangement. Should any house in the area come under siege, someone would fire in the air three times. If firing in the air isn’t an option, then someone inside the house would have to try to communicate trouble from the rooftop.

full here at Riverbend’s blog…

I should be writing a blog post.

I should be writing a custom software manual for a client.

I should be reading Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception.

I should be doing laundry.

I should be researching hotels in Seoul.

I should be verifying a method for mounting OSX drives via Win32.

Did I mention I should be doing laundry?

I should be doing many things in the tightly compressed space that exists between returning from work, entering your home and falling asleep but instead of all that, I’m massaging my wife’s feet and moving my head like a madman to the ruthless sounds of the Metalchicks.

via Cursor.org…
by Marc W. Herold

Departments of Economics and Women’s Studies
Whittemore School of Business & Economics
University of New Hampshire

Four years after the U.S.-led attack on Afghanistan, the true meaning of the U.S occupation is revealing itself. Afghanistan represents merely a space that is to be kept empty. Western powers have no interest in either buying from or selling to the blighted nation. The impoverished Afghan civilian population is as irrelevant as is the nation’s economic development. But the space represented by Afghanistan in a volatile region of geo-political import, is to be kept vacant from all hostile forces. The country is situated at the center of a resurgent Islamic world, close to a rising China (and India) and the restive ex-Soviet Asian republics, and adjacent to oil-rich states.

The only populated centers of any real concern are a few islands of grotesque capitalist imaginary reality — foremost Kabul — needed to project the image of an existing central government, an image further promoted by Karzai’s frequent international junkets. In such islands of affluence amidst a sea of poverty, a sufficient density of foreign ex-pats, a bloated NGO-community, carpetbaggers and hangers-on of all stripes, money disbursers, neo-colonial administrators, opportunists, bribed local power brokers, facilitators, beauticians (of the city planner or aesthetician types), members of the development establishment, do-gooders, enforcers, etc., warrants the presence of Western businesses. These include foreign bank branches, luxury hotels (Serena Kabul, Hyatt Regency of Kabul), shopping malls (the Roshan Plaza, the Kabul City Centre mall), import houses (Toyota selling its popular Land Cruiser), image makers (J. Walter Thompson), and the ubiquitous Coca-Cola

full here… 

A digital camera equipped friend in LA (or, as he puts it, helLA) writes:

His name’s Holga, he’s from Germany and…”Why?”…”Coz she iz der vun fur me!”

Are we not veritable gods?

The real question at the end of the day is this: what is possible and what impossible when it comes to human thought?

Perhaps the root of sexism is the belief that women are ‘Other’ and, therefore, rightly excluded, because of this separate status from the fetishized male norm, from being considered simply as human beings; with all the good and evil that means.

Our ideas about women evolve within a sexist framework: even types of thought that seem celebratory, such as elevating women above the supposed muck and mire of life – idealization – are weighted by the seed of their opposite (you surely can’t have a madonna archetype without a whore for derision).

At around 13 years of age, probably a typical moment for the first flowering of conscious feelings of desire as desire (and not the fragments we experience as children, not yet directed and molded by dominant memes and biological maturity) I experienced my first serious crush on a girl my own age.

The details are mundane and familiar to those who’ve experienced or observed American style courtship at its earliest stages (clumsy attempts to get noticed, make out sessions in places like church basements, misunderstood poems from your love, the inevitable tearful breakups).

What fascinates me now about this Jurassic period are the girl-centered reveries that filled my awkward hours: girls, not as fellow creatures whom I found attractive, but as angels.

The angel leitmotiv was quite powerful and defined the ‘otherness’ of girls as I understood it at that stage. I, as a boy, was part of a bumbling, noisy tribe, not fit for polite company. But the girls, ah…they were the ones who smelled like a doorway to heaven had been opened for just a moment, allowing the fragrance of divinity to tantalizingly reach mortal senses. Even at that undeveloped stage I was a bit of a sensualist, admiring the curve of a foot, the small of a back…

This idealization was mostly nonsense of course. The girls were children too and just as likely to behave absurdly (or appropriately, considering what we were…kids) as the boys. Yet, in my thoughts, they floated above humanity like goddesses.

At 13 this is harmless enough (if it’s left behind with ‘why was I born?’ soliloquies) but it formed the core of an entire way of seeing that would alter its surface characteristics but remain essentially unchanged as the teenage years rolled on and into my twenties. Until, that is, it did change, but that’s another tale which comes later.

At the original moment of desire as consciously realized the idea of woman as Other – in this case, an object of worship – was fully in effect.

But the excessive admiration of beauty is only a kiss away from a fear of the beast. As I grew slightly older, reaching my mid teens, the angel theme morphed into another motif: women as cruel figures of immense power. Note how the basic, workaday humanity was still missing.

Which will be discussed.

Next.

altered Arnolfini Portrait via Something Awful…

Among other things, Foucault was concerned with the history of knowledge – how information, over time, arrives at the elevated plateau of being meaningful and important. Of course, I’m not Foucault (there’s a temptation at this point to insert clockwork mechanism jokes about not being bald, or French or, well, dead but these are all unfortunate and only merit parenthetical mention as signs of my imperfection). Still, the idea of applying a sort of archaeological tool set to the question of knowledge – or perception – is very appealing.

It’s particularly appealing after three glasses of wine. One more glass and the appeal may wane like horniness after a porn film has served its true purpose.

Even the most mundane and ordinary areas of life, such as how one came to have a particular set of ideas about romantic love (a relatively new concept, we’re told) and not another can be poured through this filter.

Doing so allows you the pleasure of pretending to be icily objective while simultaneously (and narcissistically) rolling around in the kids-toys-strewn-haphazardly-about-the-room details of your life.

But these are idle musings; it’s time to walk backwards, then forwards, then sideways, then through walls, into and yet out of a personal history of love’s labors and the beliefs that evolved as a consequence.

Fun awaits.

Monday.

Juan Cole gathers information about the sectarian war raging in Iraq:

Dozens of Mosques Attacked, Over 100 Dead, Thousands Protest

CNN reports that 7 US GIs were killed in Iraq on Wednesday.

There will be a curfew in the core Sunni Arab areas, including Baghdad, to prevent the worshippers from rioting afer the Friday prayers ceremony.

Sunni Arabs in Iraq blamed US troops for not protecting Sunni mosques and worshippers from violence. The US military ordered the US soldiers in Baghdad to stay in their barracks and not to circulate if it could be helped. This situation underlines how useless the American ground forces are in Iraq. They can’t stop the guerrilla war and may be making it worst. Last I knew, there were 10,000 US troops in Anbar Province with a population of 1.1 million. What could you do with that small force, when the vast majority of the people support the guerrillas?

full here…

Riverbend describes life in an ever more dangerous Baghdad:

Tensions…

Things are not good in Baghdad.

There was an explosion this morning in a mosque in Samarra, a largely Sunni town. While the mosque is sacred to both Sunnis and Shia, it is considered one of the most important Shia visiting places in Iraq.

Samarra is considered a sacred city by many Muslims and historians because it was made the capital of the Abassid Empire, after Baghdad, by the Abassid Caliph Al-Mu’tasim.

full here…

But first…

According to the New Scientist, it’s possible for a quantum based computer, employing the principle of superposition, to operate even when it’s unpowered.

Perhaps even more remarkably, I’ve recently hit upon the idea that I’m precisely like Tacitus. The evidence is overwhelming!

Evidence Item One: Tacitus begins his work, A DIALOGUE CONCERNING ORATORY, OR THE CAUSES OF CORRUPT ELOQUENCE, with the following -

You have often enquired of me, my good friend, Justus Fabius, how and from what causes it has proceeded, that while ancient times display a race of great and splendid orators, the present age, dispirited, and without any claim to the praise of eloquence, has scarcely retained the name of an orator. By that appellation we now distinguish none but those who flourished in a former period. To the eminent of the present day, we give the title of speakers, pleaders, advocates, patrons, in short, every thing but orators.

The enquiry is in its nature delicate; tending, if we are not able to contend with antiquity, to impeach our genius, and if we are not willing, to arraign our judgement. An answer to so nice a question is more than I should venture to undertake, were I to rely altogether upon myself: but it happens, that I am able to state the sentiments of men distinguished by their eloquence, such as it is in modern times; having, in the early part of my life, been present at their conversation on the very subject now before us. What I have to offer, will not be the result of my own thinking: it is the work of memory only; a mere recital of what fell from the most celebrated orators of their time: a set of men, who thought with subtilty, and expressed themselves with energy and precision; each, in his turn, assigning different but probable causes, at times insisting on the same, and, in the course of the debate, maintaining his own proper character, and the peculiar cast of his mind. What they said upon the occasion, I shall relate, as nearly as may be, in the style and manner of the several speakers, observing always the regular course and order of the controversy. For a controversy it certainly was, where the speakers of the present age did not want an advocate, who supported their cause with zeal, and, after treating antiquity with sufficient freedom, and even derision, assigned the palm of eloquence to the practisers of modern times.

[...]

By a strange and startling coincidence I began a 6th grade book report on George Washington Carver with exactly these words. Only instead of referencing Justus Fabius, or orators, or eloquence I wrote about George Washington Carver and the peanut. I also gathered the courage to ask Tammi Stevens to the movies. She was very pretty. Surely this was manly courage worthy of Tacitus! And, of course, Rome!

Evidence Item Two: Tacitus didn’t drive a DeLorean and neither do I.

Evidence Item Three: Tacitus, it is believed, was born in the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensi.

Although I wasn’t born in this province (due to its nonexistence at the time of my birth, among other factors) the name of the place where I was born includes the letters A and I.

The evidence is overwhelming!

Get to work.  Untold riches await.

Sci/Fi

The Time Smashers of Omicron Ceti 9 (from the book by famed ‘hard sci/fi’ author H.H. McFlintock the Third)

In which…

Our hero, a washed up, former Star Corps commander, is given one last chance to redeem himself. Humanity’s deadliest enemies, the Time Smashers, have returned to known space and only Vermillion Tau has the courage, the determination and the know how to stop them…cold!

But he harbors a dark secret that might ruin him and mean the doom of all mankind!

Action/Adventure

Skull on the Desert Sand

In which…

Our hero, a washed up, former special operative of Washington’s super secret counter terrorist organization – GlobalShield – is given one last chance to redeem himself. The freedom-loving world’s worst foe: the deadly organization, Al-Muwahhidūn (monotheism) has returned from their mountain redoubts to wreak havoc. Only Special Agent Brent O’Shea has the courage, the determination and the know how to stop them…cold!

But he harbors a dark secret that might ruin him and mean the end of freedom!

Political Thriller

Generic titles (must be one word to convey a classy aura): Transit. Equinox. Petrol. Berlin. Benzine.

If set in Europe, be sure to include lots of scenes in Parisian cafes and on the Trans Europe Express. Also, a thrilling car chase through quaint, narrow streets using corporate sponsored Audis or Minis…Also, an “offbeat” Euro beauty should figure prominently. If not set in Europe, see above for plot details.

Romance

I.Highbrow
Spring Rain

In which…

An upper middle class American woman (well, yes, White) quits her high pressure job in advertising/publishing/television/music and leaves Manhattan/LA to move to Italy/small town somewhere in the US (maybe Vermont, or the South) where she meets a ruggedly handsome carpenter/blacksmith/auto mechanic and begins the sex drenched love affair of a lifetime. Towards the end, it seems as if class differences and family/friend disapproval will drive the script-crossed lovers apart. But all’s well as one, or the other or both members of the dyad run through rain soaked streets to declare undying love as the credits scroll (optional end credit sequence shows children running around during the “a few years later…” sequence).

II.Harlequin-esque

The Love Professor

[image not available but imagine something appropriately softcore]

In which…

A beautiful, sexy, but love starved professor of literature at a small, liberal arts college begins a torrid affair with a younger man/another woman (if a woman, they’ll be the same age).