Skip to main content

Suspicious? What month is it?

So I had a great post written on questions of agency and identity as explored through Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and High Fidelity (I focussed more on the film by Stephen Frears than on the original Nick Hornby book), and it mysteriously disappeared. I, of course, blame the government.

The crux of my post was that letting outside events and relationships with other people shape your life is fundamentally selfish, and that each of us bears responsibility for claiming our own agency. One of my favorite lines from Richard Linklater's Waking Life is an offhanded remark by a passerby, late in the movie, who tells the nameless protagonist (played by Wiley Wiggins) "As the pattern becomes more complex, it is no longer sufficient to be swept along," or something like the same. The patterns are becoming more complex, and we face peril if we are satisfied with passivity. But, like I said, that post got erased, so here's a BMW z3 Coupe, my current dream car.



Of course, like Paul and my housemate Leon, I covet the new Honda Civic SI. Who wouldn't? But the z3 Coupe is like the hybrid love child of a Mini Cooper, my beloved '93 Civic SI Hatchback, and four gorillas. If I were a person like me, that person could be very happy driving a z3 Coupe around. Very happy.

Comments

Anonymous said…
You are becoming such a yuppie. Gosh....
Anonymous said…
So now I have looked at all the links - I like the humor and art - and I know how you put together this art piece...I think the ratio of images inexplicable to me (like the one of "crux")/fey images is too high. Go with fey. Love, Mom

Now I can't remember if I pushed the publish button or not. Why don't they bring back rotary phones? I could use them.
Paul said…
So many links. Less is more.
Anonymous said…
As I mentioned to Andy a few minutes ago, this post is like the blogging equivalent of hamsterdance. Not that there's anything wrong with hamsterdance. Except for that one horrible, awful secret about hamsterdance. You know the one.

While his dream car practically oozes awesome, I can't help but wonder if it isn't on some level just a slick, soulless attempt to ape the Jaguar Hearse

Popular posts from this blog

Three Good Things for Thursday, March 7th

No time to waste, let's hit those Three Good Things: 1. "Fifteen bucks for the whole seat but you'll only need the edge, Edge, EDGE!" An impossibly red, impossibly cute 1997 Suzuki X-90. It looks like a real-life Barbie car, a mini two-seater pickup, minus the bed and with a little spoiler on the back. Also it has a T-top. In college some buddies and I drove up to Cleveland one weekend to see the monster truck rally at the Gund Arena. Were we genuinely interested in it? Was it an act of willful irony? We were the last gasp of Generation X, so there is truly no way to know. What I remember most aside from the noise and fumes was that the promotion ran a contest in between "acts" where local schmoes could try their personal vehicles on the motocross track they'd constructed on the arena floor, with the fastest time taking home a cash prize.  One of the first contestants roared out of the gate in a huge, very obviously brand new, very obviously expensively ...

Family and Gender in Ancient Rome

I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household...

Be true to your school now!

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to...