FINISHED!!

Sort of. I've just finished a full draft of my dissertation (so now I'm on a high). Go me.

The only thing is, I know I still have a lot of work to do on it (I kinda left the Poe chapter hanging and I'm going to have to substantially change my intro because what I wanted to do over the course of the diss changed, which I knew it would), so I can't be unreservedly excited. Now I'm nervous that I'll have to change A LOT - that all the work that I've done isn't good enough. I'll probably feel like that until I let someone read the whole thing and not just certain chapters. I know some chapters are good--I've already gotten feedback on them--but it's different when you have to think about the whole thing as one big unit.

Anyway, regardless, I can work with what I've got. If it's not ALL brilliant, a lot of it is.

As Fatty would say, I'm awesome.

All-Stars

I'm sitting here at a quarter to twelve watching the All-Star Game go into the 13th inning. This is a helluva game, and if you like baseball but didn't watch it, you missed out.

I do feel bad for Dan Uggla though. He's had some tough extra innings, that one.

Come on NL!

Girl Talk

I was listening to NPR's rundown of the "Best Albums of the Year So Far," and one particularly caught my ear-- "Feed the Animals" by Girl Talk. Girl Talk doesn't sound like somthing I'd listen to, but it's not what you think at all.

"Girl Talk" is one guy, Gregg Gillis, who samples all sorts of music (most of it from the 90s on) and mashes it back together in amazing ways. Now I've heard other sample mash-ups, but nothing like this. What this guy does is absolutely amazing. He takes songs from all kinds of genres and puts them together damn near seamlessly. Most of the vocals he takes from rap, but the background music comes from nearly everything--Prince, Fergie, Metallica, Gwen Stephanie, Tone-Loc, Temple of the Dog (Yep), all sorts of other stuff I recognize but can't think of now, but literally, everything. I'm not well-versed enough in music technicality to be able to talk intelligently about what he's doing or why it works, but it seems like he's got a knack for finding extremely divergent musical forms that share basic beat and tonal forms--the music just plain out works. I think this is why most of the vocals are rap-based, the cadence and beat of rap is most easily superimposable over other musical styles.

Seriously, go listen to this yourself. It's incredible, and fun as hell. You can listen to the whole album on his Myspace page for free: http://www.myspace.com/girltalk. The album works either as separate tracks or as a single long mash (I think I'm using that word right, but I might not be).

Also, you can buy the ablum for whatever you want--seriously. It's for sale online and you just name your own price. Anything at all allows you to download the album, at least 5 bucks gets you the ablum and some bonus stuff, and at least $10 gets you all that plus an actual CD. I think that's a cool way to do it. It's here:

http://74.124.198.47/illegal-art.net/__girl__talk___feed__the__anima.ls___/

Ahab

Even if you've never read Moby-Dick, if you don't know much about Ishmael, if you don't know your beloved Starbucks coffee is named after a the Pequod's first mate, you probably know something about Ahab. Perhaps more than anything else from the novel, Ahab has entered our collective culutal consciousness as the embodiment of mindless pursuit. Whenever someone is searching fanatically for something, expecially if others see it as a pointless or dangerous pursuit, they are compared to Ahab, and the object of their quest the white whale.

In his unflinching pursiut in the "War on Terror," President Bush has often been compared to Ahab, though his white whale has changed forms--something even Ahab may have derided. In an interesting essay, "Moby-Dick and the War on Terror," Carolyn Karcher lists instance after instance where Bush and his inner circle were compared to Ahab and his special force of mysterious harpooners (though I don't think anyone made this connection, I especially like either Dick Cheney or Karl Rove as Fedallah). Bush's white whale was once Osama bin Laden, then Saddam Hussein, and now has become the distrubingly amorphous "the terrorists."

While these may be attractive comparisons to make, I don't think they do Ahab justice. Although Ahab, to us, is obviously on a doomed quest, its hard to argue with some of his logic. He's not unthinkingly going after Moby-Dick. He knows his quest seems ridiculous, he doesn't really argue with Starbuck's point that "Vengence on a dumb brute [...] seems blasphemous." For Ahab, it's not the white whale itself that Ahab is after. The quest is not a tit for tat "you took my leg, I take your life" retribution. Ahab rebels against the uncontrollable, he rebels aginst the futility of human existence, he rebels against the feeling we all have when faced with problems we did not bring on ourselves. We all have Ahab inside us. That common prayer, "Lord, grant me the serentiy to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference" is designed to keep our own Ahab at bay. As we all know, this can be a hard thing to do.

This is especially hard to do when you can express the desire to fight the unwinable fight as eloquently as Ahab can. For Ahab, fate acts through the whale, and since that's the case, a strike against the whale is a strike against fate. Listen to him say it: "'But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! [...]. That unscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principle, I will wreak that hate upon him.'"

Meditate on that comment, and see if you can still condemn Ahab. He may be flawed, but who is not? Who doesn't want to strike out against that inscrutable thing, to strike down the mask if we can't strike down the thing itself? Don't mourn for Ahab, but don't damn him either. Understand him, and learn. That's why I love Moby-Dick.