I have to read Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang for class. Gotta have it finished by next Tuesday. According to the blurb on the book it is a "classic gem of destructive mayhem and outrageous civil disobedience - the novel that sparked the environmental activism movement!" Since the 5 people that I know that read this blog are dirty hippies you might be interested in reading it too and we can talk about it like intellectual people and then I'll steal your written thoughts about it and pass them off as my own. My class has a discussion board up for what we read and I'll post the funny things my classmates think and we can make fun of them together. Here's an example of what they offer from earlier this semester -
Alicia makes a really good point here. There are lots of women (wives/girlfriends/etc.) that compare themselves to actresses in porn videos to the detriment of their sex lives. At the same time, I wonder if the increased availability of porn nowadays has had a beneficial effect on individuals sexual relationships.
One of the biggest causes of domestic and sexualabuse within relationships seems to stem from men's lack of understanding about the needs and desires of women. If you view sex as just a means to achieve orgasm, you end up treating women as just a means to an end, rather than a person with her own sexual needs. This is incredibly dehumanizing. It's from this mentality that leads some people to rape and otherwise sexually assault.
But with the mainstreaming of porn, it has led to a more education discussion (even subconsciously) of what men, and especially women, want within the confines sex. It's common knowledge now that women have just as much sexual desire as men and have as many or more orgasms as well. Women aren't an empty vessel to be taken advantage of, quite the opposite in fact. The purpose of sex is about, as Alicia says, being in a mutally pleasing relationship.
(all spelling errors and awkward constructions are his)
I can't tell if that is something that genuinely doesn't make sense or just doesn't make sense to me because I'm actually familiar with pornography. Regardless, I find it hilarious. Here's an article in Salon talking about porn, too.
There's something cold and sad and deeply unerotic about being in the throes of it with somebody and thinking, "I saw this in 'Weapons of Ass Destruction 4.'" As a friend said recently, "Just because it looks good doesn't mean it is. Then I wind up feeling inadequate because I'm not enjoying it." Soon after, another friend mentioned a man she'd been dating, whose erotic repertoire included withdrawing his member at key moments to thump it on her. After puzzling over it with friends, she finally figured out: It's a porn move. Listen, if you're a professional showing off his stuff for the camera, that sort of thing almost makes sense. Out of context, however, it's another situation entirely. You know what description you never want a woman you've slept with to apply to your sexual technique? "Baffling."
I'm also finally getting around to reading Without Stopping by Paul Bowles after Kole gave it to me over a year ago. For most memoirs and biographies I end up preferring the portions of the book devoted to the subject's adolescence, before they do whatever they did to warrant memoirs and biographies to be published about them, but I'm not feeling that right now with Bowles. It has to do with the fact that I have no idea who is so I have no idea why he is so amused with myself and why I should be amused as well (probably what people are thinking about me right now, but this is for the greater good, I'm bumping that uncomfortable ad down the page). Anyway, Bowles' wikipedia page informed me of what he did and I suspect I'd be more interested in his later years regardless of my familiarity with him.
*I really don't find Jeff Dunham funny, the news that his sitcom received the highest ratings of any premiere on Comedy Central was distressing, and even his appearance on 30 Rock last week made me shudder a bit. That being said, this NYTimes article about him was a good read. I find ventriloquism to be just sorta weird (and creepy) and the article is as much about the ventriloquism community as it is about Jeff Dunham. Ventriloquist acts always strike me as just versions of this clip from Freaks And Geeks when Neal can only confront his dad's affair by doing a comedy routine with his new dummy. Ventriloquists wanting to be able to say the things they sometimes feel without having to associate/take responsibility for saying it, or y'know, I can't remember where I heard it, but take off the stupid puppet and start losing friends like the rest of us. It's like you're watching someone mentally lose it on stage like they're compartmentalizing themselves -
Already, during one of the convention’s featured performances — while Dunham and Murdick sat unassumingly in the last row, near the door — the ventriloquist onstage did a bit in which his dummy harangued him for envying Dunham: Dunham’s screaming arena crowds, Dunham’s expensive cars, Dunham’s hot girlfriend. “I’m not jealous; I’ve got my own style,” the vent told his dummy, but a little too vulnerably. Few people laughed; it felt as if something unsettlingly psychotherapeutic was being hashed out.
Other stuff from the article -
Peanut, a hyperactive purple Muppetish dummy, kicked off his portion of the show just by saying different words for breasts — “bodacious ta-tas” got the biggest laugh — and closed with a bit about ordering Chinese food, done in a preposterous Fu Manchu accent. By the encore, when Dunham brought out his redneck character to do a routine from his first DVD, all 7,000 people in the arena were ecstatically chanting the dummy’s punch lines together — a choir of thrown voices. (Dunham: “Do you have a drinking problem?” Everyone: “No! I’ve pretty much got it figured out!”) Then, when it was over — after Dunham fired some balled-up Jeff Dunham T-shirts into the upper decks with the kind of air-powered bazooka you see during N.B.A. halftimes — he literally ran out the arena’s back door and onto his bus, where he went back to work on the Umpire....
...Everyone read to himself. Dunham didn’t like one of Peanut’s first jokes, about how another reality-TV star, Kim Kardashian, would pass gas on a baby if it meant getting some publicity. “We’ve got to get away from the poop jokes,” he said.
McCall spoke up: “It’s not really a poop joke.” He was making a sincere, semantic point, but not too assertively. Dunham didn’t answer directly; he told a long story about an audition he did in the 90s. Eventually he said: “Just come up with something different about Kim Kardashian, that’s all. Something about her butt or her boobs.”...
...He spent a great deal of time safeguarding the integrity of his characters — “Peanut’s not going to ask her to freakin’ marry him right away! He just met her!” — and also swatting away jokes that felt too scatological or easy. “Again?” he said at one point, hitting a joke about pornography in another sketch. The scripts had too many porn jokes in them. Also condom jokes. For a time, Dunham just sat there, picking lint off his laptop — not in a passive-aggressive way; he just couldn’t hide his discouragement. “This show’s gotta have some art to it,” he said.
He was trying to train the writers to see what he sees: a kind of mindlessness that’s not totally idiotic. But they couldn’t yet, and maybe understandably: there are porn and poop jokes all over Dunham’s DVDs....
...Dunham does concede that he’s extra-sensitive to one of his largest constituencies: the conservative “country crowd.” “That’s why I don’t pick on basic Christian-values stuff,” he told me. “Well, I also don’t like to, because that’s the way I was brought up.” He then stopped himself short and said: “Oh, boy. I’m walking into something here.”
Dunham started to explain — as if realizing it for the first time — that this would appear to make the jokes he does about Islam with Achmed “hypocritical.” But he quickly unburdened himself of the idea. “I try to make the majority of my audience laugh,” he said. “That’s my audience. They’ll laugh at the dead terrorist.”
In fact, the jokes that get some of the wildest, loudest reactions aren’t really even jokes, just statements. Like when one puppet shouts that all Mexicans should learn English, or when Dunham wishes Walter “Happy Holidays” and Walter responds: “I’ve been wanting to say this for a couple of years now: Screw you, it’s ‘Merry Christmas’!” And the crowd doesn’t laugh; it riotously applauds. Dunham describes them as moments of “catharsis,” when the dummy says something “everyone wants to laugh about, or that you snicker at with one or two friends, but that you could never say out loud.”...
Like nearly everyone I met at the ConVENTion, Wade tried to convince me that Dunham — both by inspiring other vents and as an ambassador to pop and youth cultures — was leading a renaissance for the art, a return to mainstream prominence in America and maybe even coolness. Ventriloquism is finally transcending its stereotypes, Wade told me. “Jeff’s helping us all take that step forward, opening up these new vistas,” he said, adding: “I don’t even use a boy puppet in my show now. I’ve got a bird. I’ve got a talking horse.”
And here's Thomas Pynchon's introduction to 1984 -
It is the boy's smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and radiant, proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the day, is good and that human decency, like parental love, can always be taken for granted - a faith so honourable that we can almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps even ourselves, for a moment anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done to keep it from ever being betrayed.
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