Extra! Ordinary! Read all About it...

In his latest collection of short stories, Stephen King puts forth an argument for his own brand of "non-literary" fiction.  Full Dark, No Stars is a grim, harsh book.  The stories are, typical of Stephen King, both hard and easy to read.  They are stories of seemingly typical Americans

Source: Inverse.com

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February 2019

Uncle Steve is among my favorite people living or dead.  Since starting this post about his really great collection of short stories, i've subsequently read The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, his (i think still) most recent collection.

King is an exceptional short story writer.  He's also a pretty good epicist.  But unlike this latter, the former is exceedingly rare in modern literature.  King's stories are about something.  They are structured and planned and plotted.

As opposed to contemporary (often self-proclaimed) literary authors, King's stories go somewhere.  They begin and end.  They're clean and tight - rarely any longer than they need to be.  They're surprising and sometimes not.  "The Dune" (in TBOBD) is like an O. Henry and M. Night brain baby.

(When i started this place, i was in my 20s and in a work group of 3 Master's students working on their theses.  Jon was writing about blogs, Paul was writing about Bret Easton Ellis {and in part book blurbs}, i was writing about zombies - and around the same time i was re-reading and writing about House of Leaves.  On my copy of HOL there is a blurb by Ellis, which talks about the greats of horror writing, Poe, King... - i forget the rest - bowing down to Mark Z. Danielewski.  As i was trying to write the sentence about "The Dune", i was thinking all of this and trying to make the O. Henry and M. Night figures do the same to the story...

Which leads me to some alternate names for this blog that i never considered before now:

• Life is in the Parentheses 
• Living Parenthetical

)

I think my other most recent reading of short stories was the collection by April Wilder.  I liked some of them, but they are the epitome of contemporary fiction - Seinfeld fiction.  The stories - the ones i like and the ones i don't - wander around characters without knowing exactly why or where we're headed.  

Not unlike these blog posts i suppose.

A Renewal of Vows

It's been nearly five months since my last published entry.  Since that time I've become a "dissertator", seen a few of my best friends in the world who I'd lost track of, come to understand the nature of the universe, and  adjusted my Netflix membership plan.

As such, I feel a renewed responsibility to account for the world around us (that's right, I can explain it to you... just keep reading).  So it is, I will re-purpose Roman Numeral J as an outlet for not only (though still) an anachronistic chronology of my own life, but also a regular, reliable commentary on the culture and society which impacts said chronology.  Therefore, it is my intention to write substantive, complex, confusing, and constructive criticism and commentary on any (random) collections of cultural artifacts.

My goal, then, is to write on a variety of topics (unfinished entries over the last five months include "Did The Secret cause the Recession?" and "Bitter Salt" {an article about Angelina Jolie's summer blockbuster}.  I'll do this at least once a week for as long as this blog continues.  Which means, the purpose and regularity of this blog will be changing.  I'm never quite sure what it will be about, but it will now be about something (again?).

I think what is most compelling me to this change is something I've noticed during my last year and a half of academic work, namely the idea of the proprietarianship of academic ideas.  At my preliminary exam defense, it was suggested to me that I'd naively misunderstood the thinking of an intellectual hero of mine.  I disagreed, but more so, I was offended by the proprietary way a thinker was being talked about.  Furthermore, in discussing various projects I've been working on over the last couple years I've been told alternately that what I was doing had already been done (or was being done) or that someone else wished they'd done what I was planning to do... it gets me to questioning what the point of all this work is exactly.  So, Roman Numeral J will serve, henceforth as a sort of open source theory.  I welcome all contributors, comments, dialogue.  Let's get to work.

C'mon you Party People

In support of the overall sentiment of today's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear and with the looming Mid-Term Selections, I've decided that now was the time to come out of my self-imposed Cone of Silence and/or Ambivalence.

Plus, Halloween is upon us again.  As some friends and I make our way around Milwaukee in T. Party garb (T-een Wolf, the Plain White Tees, Aarti Paarti, _____________), we will be working toward some of the same goals as Team Stewart-Colbert.


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May 2019

Ah, 2010 - back when the conservative political insanity was fun...

I stand by this 2010 Halloween pub crawl theme, though our compatriots were less political in their costume and messaging than Brooke and me (although if you look closely at Grant's sign, it's a Christine "I'm not a Witch" O'Donnell reference!). 

Rex was a bit confused and just dressed up as a pumpkin... maybe he's a pumpkin spice tea?

I do recall in seeing this picture that Bethany was going as "Sal-T-Hit Girl" (the Morton's Salt Girl crossed with Hit Girl from Kick Ass).  I have no recollection of what Grant's costume is.

you asked for it...

you, specifically you, Dave Wake...

and you got it.  Roman Numeral J is back, for better or for worse.  It will aim to be a regular, stumbling, but vital contribution to the blrld at large... That's right, the blrld (blogosphere/world) - And so i begin with friendship...

(This is not us) - Source: Flikr

Friendship is such an easy idea to capture I figure I may as well spell it all out for us here.  Modern life deters us from formulating new relationships, new friendships. 

I've never been, and am not, as a rule, good at friendship.  It's not that I don't value it, I do (above almost all else), it's that I tend to assume it, and then inherently believe in it, and then that's it.  In the status-oriented world that we live in (the Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter-verse), we all expect to be touched.  In fact, as the consumer beings that we are thought of (homo decoro?), marketing theory tells itself that 3 to 7 touches are necessary to make an impression.

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This post was almost entirely fully finished (or at least formed) on the original writing, but returning to close up the draft in October 2017, it feels continually, significantly true.  I love this picture - it's something I found somewhere on the internet (evidently on a Flickr account).  It's nobody I know, but recalls a time that Dave, Nate and I went to a costume party in Copenhagen as a pirate, cowboy, and Zorro (in particular reverse order).  That night ended wonderingly,,, and was a great night in connecting.

The Other Guys might be the second most interesting Will Ferrell movie EVER!

I went to a showing of The Other Guys today, which I was actually quite looking forward to. I'm generally in favor of Will Ferrell and Mark Walberg is hilarious. I liked the premise and was hoping (though not expecting) something in the neighborhood of Hot Fuzz. What I found, though, which was entirely unexpected was a coyly intelligent critique both of corporate criminals and of Hollywood (or American mass media more generally) selling us a very specific propaganda which often goes unremarked.

Source: rottentomatoes.com

As the closing credits roll, The Other Guys serves up a bevy of Michael-Moore-y statistics about the recent history of corporate excesses.  This was an embarrassment of under-estimating an audience, but the rest of the film provides a smart critique of bureaucracy, machismo and Hollywood cultural imagining.  This happens blatantly in the "real live" reactions to explosions and (hilariously) in Mark Walberg's ballet expertise, which he mastered to make fun of a neighborhood kid who'd been taking ballet ("You learned ballet, ironically?")  The strongest critique, though, is the parallel to The Untouchables and the history of Al Capone.  For all the big-action excitement, first in the opening sequence with the Rock and Sam Jackson, and later in Mark Walberg's incessant desire for "some action" or constant suspicion of drugs being involved...in everything.

 The real quality of a movie like The Other Guys, or any good comedy, really, is in its realism.  The best jokes are funny because they state real, important truths.  The best comedy is good because it says things that need saying.  This movie is not just good because it satirizes action films, nor because it rightfully critiques corporate criminals.  The movie questions our very enjoyment of the films it pokes fun of not because it thinks they are bad products (they are and they aren't, but that is irrelevant).  Rather, it is the complex relationship that any major motion picture has to the underlying rampant capitalism that is being critiqued that makes this movie worth another look, a closer look.

No Thing Theory

This morning I abandoned my bike next to a gas station.  I also threw the old sheet i've been sleeping on the last week down a garbage chute.  I'm planning to leave a dying pair of sandals and the toaster I bought when i got here too.  Temporary status is an odd experience... one that I quite like, but i'm not sure i fully understand yet.  To live in a situation which is definitely fleeting is, in some ways, a contradiction.  It doesn't seem like it should be, i mean, we all do things temporarily - take a vacation, go to school, rent an apartmant, i mean even your whole life, right, is a temporary arrangement.  Depending on your persuasion, it might brief layover, one of a sequence of repeating scenes, or the whole shebang, but it's temporal limitations are unavoidable (at least so far).

But to be stably fleeting in this already fleeting existence has been an odd experience over the last several weeks. I've always been a person who likes things - ephemera - objects, but since arriving in Miami none of my stuff (except my books, always always my books) matters much because it's 'miami stuff'. Stuff I will leave behind, or even if i don't, it's stuff I could leave behind.

I'm not sure what this adds up to necessarily, but it seems to me there's some sum worth discovering. Of course there's the cringe-worthy cliché about not letting your things own you or caring more about the people around you than the things around you, but ideas like these are clichés precisely because they are so wildly uninteresting. I'm also not the first to come to this less-than-brilliant conclusion. In the introduction of his recent bookThe Art of Life, Zygmunt Bauman discusses the same phenomenon as it relates to living arrangement and happiness. I've not read it all yet, but his thinking about the state of happiness seems somewhat in line with my own.


I've lost all track of what originally inspired this post, but i know it's something that means a lot to me.  And i'm sure it's terribly important.

Bitter Salt

I love summer tent pole movies as much as anyone.  I enjoy it when I'm blown away by one (say, Dark Knight), pleasantly surprised by them (Iron Man), or even when I just get what I expect out of it

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December 2017
Gosh, i do vaguely recall this summer that i spent in Miami while studying at FIU.  I saw a lot of movies.  Salt which i honestly recall not at all except that i think it was a movie that Angelina Jolie was in...

I remember telling my Haitian Creole class the following day during some Q&A exercises that i had gone to see Salt, and everyone thought it was pretty funny, because it was presumed i'd just gone to see Angelina Jolie in the movie... I think i went to see the random action flick because i'd seen pretty much all the movies that summer living alone in West Miami.

Also, i presume Salt was going to be the movie that i got what i expected out of it... If not, this was poised to be a much more complicated post than i originally thought.