I would like to take back everything bad I said about football in the state of Texas during the course of the day.

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I had a bit of an intellectual crisis of late. In the last semester or so, my work ethic has … diminished, shall we say (and it was already pretty low). Sometimes, it makes me wonder if this is the right industry, etc. Anyway, I’ve been worried about my ability and/or desire to read novels for a living, at the same time that was struggling through Thomas Pynchon’s gargantuan (and grossly over-rated) Against the Day. Last night, around one in the morning, as I soldiered beyond page 350, trying to get to the end of Part 2, I realized I just didn’t care about the book, anymore. In a huff, I set it down, convinced I was a failure as a graduate student (I nominally study postmodernism and, despite this, have only managed to ever finish one of the quintessential postmodern author’s books).

This morning, I started reading Cormac McCarthey’s The Road, a stripped-to-the-bones travelogue through a postapocalyptic landscape. It’s fantastic. I really got into this afternoon and am hooked, having already finished pretty much a fourth of the novel (and generated at least one paper idea (possibly two)). Turns it out, the worrying was all for naught.

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Hooray! Today is a day for rejoicing amongst all true Georgia Tech fans: our confounding starting quarterback has been named Academically Ineligible for the Gator Bowl! While most football fans (Oklahoma’s, for instance) might be distressed about losing their starting quarterback before the big game, please note that Reggie Ball has thrown more interceptions than touchdowns 3 of his 4 years starting for the Yellow Jackets. Additionally (to trot out the entire list of grievances), he is personally responsible for our last four losses to Georgia. He threw the ball away in the red zone as time expired against Georgia on fourth down (and then claimed the ref told him it was third down (I thought people at Tech were supposed to be smart)). His freshman year, he “left the game with a concussion” after punching an assistant coach on the Georgia sideline. Good riddance. I think Georgia Tech might be the only team in Division I-A that has a better shot at winning it’s bowl game (against the juggernaut that is West Virginia Mountaineer football, no less) without its starting quarterback.

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Originally, there was going to be something full of bile about this incident, but, two days on, I find myself more filled with mirth than anything of the bitter tasting variety. I won’t go into details, as this isn’t some sort of seedy tabloid (I mean, we on the internet must hold ourselves to higher standards (that sentence is hard to say with a straight face)), but, let’s just say, that I was phoned with bad relationship news the night before leaving State College for the second semester in a row. Seriously, who does that? More importantly, the whole story would read like a bad joke, if I wasn’t the punch line, so I can find humor in myself. Finally, the whole thing, ultimately, played out exactly like I knew it would. The whole time, I was enjoying myself, but I knew what was going to happen. So, sure I’m upset about things, but, once again, I’ve found out I was right all along. Moreover, I think I’ve realized that I’m more awesome than I thought, which is wonderfully refreshing.

Anyway, not dwelling on that, because, frankly, who has time? I’m reading Against the Day now and it’s awesome. I’m only about 40 pages in, but Nikolai Tesla has already been mentioned and, well, if you know me, you know my feelings on the world’s prototypical mad scientist. Also, a little bird delivered an advance copy of All of a Sudden, I Miss Everyone, the new album by badass post-rock combo, Explosions in the Sky. It’s, as usual, excellent. While the internet seems to think it’s not as good as their last two, I like it best of all, because it combines the smooth playing of The Earth Is Not a Cold, Dead Place with the rocking out of Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever. So, I’m happy with both of those things. Further, did I mention that it was over 70 degrees here in Atlanta, today? I took a walk wearing nothing but a t-shirt, in December, and got hot by the time I got home. The weather is absolutely beautiful here, but I’m having trouble getting into the Christmas spirit (you know, a vague sense of unease) because of eating lunch on the veranda and worrying about whether or not I brought enough shorts home for Christmas Break.

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Writing in Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson offers the following reading of Marx on capitalism:

We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. The lapse from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human: still, the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress, all together.

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It turned cold here today (in the 20s tonight). Despite that, I took my usual 35 minute walk this evening. I’m still a little cold, 30 minutes later. Anyway, as I was walking home, I thought that some sort of warm beverage would be appreciated, but I didn’t want to risk staying up late, so tea (both black and ginseng), coffee, and hot chocolate were all out of the question. Having watched a lot of Star Trek lately, I remembered that there was an episode that mentioned a warm milk toddy. Googling around, I found a recipe that is probably pretty similar (not really wanting to drink raw eggs, I skipped this recipe). So I made this thing. It was delicious, but it got me thinking (especially when the author mentioned that she gave this to her kids) about why these specific ingredients help with sleep. Now, I’m not saying, but, well:

1. Nutmeg, in small doses (especially when heated), can produce cannabis-like effects.
2. Milk, when warmed, activates tryptophan and melatonin (in addition to psychologically reminding the drinker of being a baby (which is relaxing?))
3. and … Vanilla contains alcohol.

Mix those up with some sugar (which increases absorption into the blood) and I can imagine you would really have some drowsy kids. Totally awesome.

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As some of you may be aware, I’m currently completing a project: watching all seven seasons of Star Trek: TNG. I just got to watch my second favorite episode of the show today, season seven’s Parallels (my favorite episode is Tapestry (which interestingly also deals with alternate realities)). If you have seen much of the show, it’s the episode where Worf becomes unstuck in time. This episode scared the shit out of me when I was little.

The way the mechanics of the story work, Worf flies through a quantum fissure and ends up jumping between parallel universes whenever he get’s near Geordi’s visor. Part of the fun of the episode is watching Worf get completely disoriented when he discovers that he’s married to Deanna Troi and that they have two kids together. Anyway, when other eleven year-olds were dealing with real problems (like, i don’t know, girls and sports and , maybe, nuclear war), I was worrying (and I mean lying awake for hours at night in a complete panic) that I would go to sleep and wake up in a parallel universe where everything and everyone I knew was different or just gone (it got really bad when one day, I thought: “what if I wake up in a universe where I’m already dead?”).

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I’ve been reading Paul Virilio lately for a paper that was originally going to be about Virilio’s warped remixes of the Frankfurt School (it would have been called “Electro-Shock: Virilio and the Spectre of the Frankfurt School”). I was going to write about how Virilio’s hyper-denunciation of digital technology was a continuation of Theodore Adorno’s popular culture studies begun in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Ultimately, the conclusion of the piece was to be that Virilio’s method is outmoded and nostalgic for a world that no longer exists and is no longer able to exist (which is not to say that this world is inevitable, but to say that life without the Internet would be both possible and desirable is hopelessly naive). Anyway, reading through his extensive body of work, it became apparent that his recent stuff has become concerned with the transhuman and, specifically, the origins of the term in eugenics and what he calls “the logics of the camp” (with the camps being places like Auschwitz).

I find this critique troubling and am attempting to work through it in the paper, which is now going to be about critical methods for dealing with radical human evolution (probably titled “Electro-Shock!:Moves Beyond Human in Contemporary Theory”). I’m a little concerned, though, about Virilio’s conclusions on transhumanism, because they make some sense (sort of). He basically argues that to imagine a super-human is, at the same time, to imagine a sub-human and this seems, to him, to be closely aligned to Nazi rhetoric wrt Judaism and the Final Solution. I think the way I want to get to an answer to his question is, perhaps, by moving through it. I think he’s right, but I’m not sure he has drawn the inevitable conclusions from his super/sub human diagnosis. What I mean is this: while transhumanism does advocate for the creation of new and “better” humans, what that actually means is anybody’s guess (as a side note, I’m thinking about writing a paper about transhumanism in SF literature as a radical Other (in the sense that, in most books, transhuman entities are never dealt with directly, because representing them in the narrative is difficult if not impossible, given the radical difference that seems to underscore the transhuman condition (I think it may end up being an argument about textuality and how linear language cannot handle the multiplicity consciousness attributed to most transhuman entities in popular SF))). In other words, transhumanism is not a program of action, rather it is a process, a way of moving beyond the limits of the human. That may end up in the space that many writers have crafted in SF of a faster and more intense form of capitalism (in which case I’m inclined to agree with Virilio’s diagnosis) but it may end up somewhere else entirely (the influences of Buddhism and psychedelics on transhumanism should not be ignored). So, I think that’s going to be my method for this paper, but I’m really a lot more interested in this whole question, now that I’m starting to understand the stakes more and, also, the fact that the transhuman future does not, necessarily, have to be “good” (but it can be, I think).

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