Dispatches From the Buckland Basement: 1.7

Chocolate crepes, white chocolate fondue crepes, pina colada mouse crepes with chocolate shavings and whipped cream. There's not much that would get me out of bed before noon on the weekend, but Sunday brunch at Buckland is well worth the suffering.

Dispatches From the Buckland Basement: 1.6

Last weekend I met a guy on the bus. Creepy, I know, but he reads my favorite obscure literary quarterly and likes Douglas Hofstader and isn't a Republican, and he even has cats who throw up on the floor.

So yesterday I met him at Hampshire, and we went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. It was a lovely, nostalgia-inspiring field trip. Then he gave me a tour of the Hampshire campus.

One thing led to another, and I ended up watching his screen saver (did you know those served an actual purpose at one point in time?), which was an entrancing game of ping pong, played by two rectangles which slid up and down the sides of the screen, bouncing a square back and forth between them. It also kept time: The rectangle on the left would miss the "ball" once every minute, and the rectangle on the right would miss every hour. The score of the game was recorded at the top of the screen and corresponded to the time.

The Hampshire boy and I had been watching the game intently for about five minutes, when all of a sudden, the rectangle on the right stopped moving. It just sat there at the bottom of the screen, refusing to play the game. The rectangle on the left scored point after point, changing the time from 4:48 to 5:48 to 6:48, and the rectangle on the right didn't move.

It took about 30 seconds for things to go back to normal. The rectangle on the right went back to blocking the "ball," and the clock reset itself to the proper time, erasing all evidence of the extra points which were scored by the rectangle on the left, but which really symbolized a victory for the rectangle on the Right.

The Hampshire boy said it must have been a glitch in the program, but readers of the "blog" will surely be no more persuaded by this bourgeois argument than I was. What I witnessed yesterday afternoon was free will. The spontaneous creation of consciousness.

This is clearly the most momentous metaphysical breakthrough of the past three centuries, so now that I've told my story, I will go back to writing my econ paper and wait for my letter from the Nobel Prize committee.

In the meantime, we can all learn a valuable lesson from the rectangle on the right. Whether you're a Mount Holyoke student who's so busy with school that she barely leaves her room except to scavenge for food or a Hampshire student who spends his days wandering aimlessly through a neohippie haze of pot smoke and quasi-Eastern religious experimentation, it's sometimes good to just stop. And put to use some of that free will which used to separate us from inanimate objects.

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

Dispatches From the Buckland Basement: 1.5

Dennis Kucinich is just as cute as a little bleeding-heart, gay-loving, tree-hugging, pinko button, and that's all I have to say about tonight's debate.

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

Dispatches From the Buckland Basement: 1.4

I was sitting in Existentialism before class, sipping my coffee and trying to finish the reading that was assigned for today. Professor Wartenberg walked in, and I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was 8:39.
'We're starting class late,' I thought.
We discussed Sartre's Nausea and the difference between a thing' s appearance and its existence. We learned Sartre's explanation for why there is stuff as opposed to nothingness.
We pondered at length Sartre's notion of time consisting only of the present.
I looked back up at the clock.
It was still 8:39.
It all made sense for a second, and then Professor Wartenberg explained the Dostoevsky assignment for Wednesday. He looked up at the clock and said
"Does anyone have a watch? The clock's broken."
That ruined it.

Lawn Monster

I'm limping around today on account of being attacked and mauled by a lawn sprinkler. I had been blissfully running around a friends yard when I rounded a tree, and the next thing I knew I was on the ground in a considerable amount of pain. Apparently I had collided with a large metal moving sprinkler like the one seen in the picture (spiked wheels and all). Witnesses to the incident reported that I hit it with what can only be described and a running drop kick and that despite its weight it had preformed a full 360 degree flip before landing unscathed and right side up about three feet away. While I don't exactly recall what I did moments before hitting the ground I have a feeling it was somewhat less graceful.
The aftermath was a gigantic bruise of my left foot and three consecutive spike shaped cuts of my right knee. If there had been a camera present this would already be on youtube. As if the sprinkler hadn't done enough damage the lawn chair I sat on to recover sprung forward and whacked the back of my head when I got up adding insult to injury. This marks my worst lawn related accident since that gnome thing which for the sake of my dignity (what's left of it) I will not mention here.

A Concise Retort

When people tell me that the problems of my generation are no greater or more significant than those faced by my predecessors and should therefor be looked upon as an innate part of the human condition, I promptly tell them to fuck off, because if perspective breeds apathy then I'm content with the ignorant assumption than my actions have meaning and consequence.

Interpreting Art: 'The Penitent Magdalen' by Agostino Carracci

"I'm an attractive woman, Ted. Why can't I seem to find a relationship that lasts?

Maybe my boyfriends would stick around longer if I didn't whip them, kill them, skin them, and hang their skulls from trees to demarcate the boundaries of my forest habitat.

I know I should hang your skull up with the others, but, sniff, I can't help remembering how sweet you were, Ted. You got me a pet cherub for Valentine's Day and everything.

It's like I don't even know what's right anymore, you know? I've been going around my whole life just assuming that killing men was the right thing to do. Just because it's what I've always done. But what if it's not right? What if Mom and Grandma and Great-Grandma were all wrong?

This totally sucks, Ted. I just want to be loved."

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

Dispatches From the Buckland Basement: 1.3

I went up to the kitchen to get M&Cs tonight and was horrified to find not butterscotch cookies, not raspberry brownies, but celery sticks sitting flaccidly on the counter next to a bowl of haggard peanut butter.

Celery sticks are neither milk nor cookies. Does the Student Government Association imagine us too stupid or unobservant to tell the difference? They are making an abomination of a time-honored Mount Holyoke tradition.

In times like these, when change-- political, social, and economic-- starts to seem inevitable, we must remind ourselves that not all change is progress. Not all change is for the best. It is important now more than ever for us to maintain the traditions that have made this fine institution and its students what they are today. Traditions of community, of scholarship, of cookies.

Also, celery is gross.

Patriot Day Festivities

Ever since September eleventh became a national holiday, people have wondered how best to observe this significant and tragic date. Most of the people I know either observe a moment of silence sometime in the morning or do nothing at all. I don't think I've ever seen a public display (other than the one I'm about to mention) or piece of decoration to denote this day as a holiday. Unless you count those color coded terror alert signs.
Here in Boulder we've developed a sort of local tradition in the absence of a more official celebration. Ever year on this day, a wide variety of local conspiracy theorists come together to stand on a busy street corner and denounce the covering up of the "truth" of 9/11. The congregation routinely crosses the legal line of "peaceful protest," but I think the arrival of the authorities fuels their convictions more than anything.
This year I took a stroll through the mass and did my best not to laugh at some of the things I overheard. My favorites were: "I'd've been here last year, but I was in prison...again", "come on man, we'll go to jail together," and "Gimme back my sign." In addition to this, there were pamphlets showing how the whole thing was a controlled demolition, and an angry old man obstructing traffic by waving his cane violently at cars.
I personally feel that we don't need to resort to conspiracy theories to incriminate our government, but I have to admire these people for their tenacity. It made an otherwise unmarked holiday rather entertaining. I love Boulder.

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

Interpreting Art: 'Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes' by Artemisia Gentileschi

Having just lopped off the head of rival astronaut Holofernes, Judith has no choice but to toss the severed head to her maidservant, P.J., and hide behind the curtains in her living room. Peeking out of the window she sees the rest of her spaceship's crew walking up the driveway.
"Hiding behind the curtains didn't work so well for Polonius," murmurs P.J. as Captain Thwankonicus rings the doorbell.

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

Interpreting Art: 'Amature Philosophers' by Jack Vettriano

"Hey Bill, considering all of the intricate processes-- like the geological ones that created the billions of grains of sand we're walking on now-- which seem designed to exist in and shape this exact world instead of any other, how could there not be a god deciding how things were supposed to be from the beginning? Could this perfect evening really just be an accident?"

"I don't know, Jimmy, but our hats sure are bangin'."

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

The Old Man Finds a Nickel on the Sidewalk

On the morning of the following Sunday, The Old Man woke early. So early, in fact, that the sun had not yet risen. After toasting a couple of Eggos, he somehow got it into his head to go on a walk to his old high school, which was only two miles away from his house. He squeezed on his sneakers and headed out.

When the Old Man had walked about three-quarters of a mile, he found himself on top of a grassy hill. He stopped and turned East. The sun popped into view like a light-up blood orange, spewing its juices all over New England, and the Old Man walked down the other side of the hill.

"What am I doing?" he asked himself. "Why am I here?"

When he was only a block away from his old high school, the Old Man noticed a shiny nickel laying on the sidewalk. He picked it up and examined it.

"Why," he said to himself "This nickel is quite unlike any nickel I have seen before. It differs in some essential quality, but I cannot seem to put my finger on which quality makes this nickel unique. Perhaps the lettering is bigger. Was the building on the back always so lumpy? It seems to be somehow lacking in detail, like it is not a nickel but a mockery of a nickel. Someone must have made it in order to poke fun at people who rely on money to save them-- as if it were Jesus or the South Beach Diet-- from solitude, decrepitude, irrelevance, and self-examination but never look at their money closely enough to recognize a parody. How clever I am not to have fallen for for the trick!"

The old man put the fake quarter in his pocket and continued walking toward his old high school in a cloud of self-satisfied humming, but when he reached the lawn in front of the school, he still did not know exactly how his fake quarter was different from a real quarter. This thought nagged at him so persistently that he determined he must find a real quarter to compare with his. He walked across the street to the house of a stranger and knocked on the front door. A young man came to the door and looked inquiringly out at him from a fat face.

"May I have a nickel?" asked the old man. "I need to make a phone call."

"It costs fifty cents to use the pay phone now, old man," said the young man.

"I already have forty-five cents," replied the Old Man. The young man clinked his fat hand around in a bowl next to the door and then handed the Old Man a nickel.

"Thank you," said the old man, and he walked back to the lawn in front of the school where he sat down to compare. He took the fake nickel out of his pocket and held it up next to the new nickel. They both had their faces towards him, and he stared and stared, but there was no difference. He turned them around, but they looked exactly the same on both sides. And suddenly he knew something he had not known before.

It was not the nickel that was different but himself. Something in his brain. He was looking at the nickel differently or thinking about it differently, and worse, he realized that this was not the first time. Looking back on the week, he remembered many things which had seemed to him changed in some small way. His toothbrush, his mailbox, the pillow from the couch which he always used to like holding on his lap when he sat down and there was no company, and now nickels. They had all changed for him, but he did not know how they had changed, because he could not remember the way they used to be.

"The subconscious knowledge of this bizarre metamorphosis must have been the source of my impulse to visit my old high school," he told himself. "I'll go inside and look at the things I used to see every day. I'll touch the walls and smell the air. I can't remember how things were before last week, but maybe I'll be able to remember what they were like fifty-five years ago. I will figure out how it all was and be very careful not to forget this time." The old man put the two nickels back in his pocket and walked up to the front door of his old high school. He pulled on the handle, but the door did not move. "It must be locked," said the old man to himself. "I forgot it was Sunday."

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

How the Walrus Got His Tusks

Hegelians Are Acting Like Moles in Whack-a-Mole

Rightist and Leftist Hegelians popped up in my assigned reading for Marxian Economic Theory, except they were called Conservative Hegelians and Young Hegelians. Karl Marx was a Young/Leftist Hegelian until he rejected the way Hegel applied Idealism to history. Marx thought it would be more useful to apply Hegel's notion of dialectics to economic theory, so apply Hegel's notion of dialectics to economic theory he did.

Pictures of Georgia

Pictures of Vienna

I never had a cookie imply that I should kill my mother... until the GOP debate.

After waiting in line with my fellow green-shirted supporters of privatizing social security, being herded through metal-detectors, and sitting down in my seat on the floor of the stadium, I opened my goody bag. There was a fortune cookie in it. 'Yum,' I thought to myself. I opened the cookie and read the fortune. "If your ailing mother passes away on Dec. 30, 2010, you inherit her estate tax-free. But if she makes it to Jan. 1, 2011 half the estate will be taxed away," it said. Suddenly the cookie didn't look so appetizing. I looked around suspiciously, but no one else seemed to notice anything wrong. And this was not the only inexplicable occurrence of the night.

During the debate, a New Hampshire woman mentioned that, as a citizen of the 'live free or die' state, she thought people should marry who they love. I clapped and clapped, happily reassured that no one could possibly be opposed to something so obviously good. Then I realized I was the only one clapping. Is it now uncool to marry who you love? Did I miss the issue of Cosmo where they announced that marrying for money is the new black?

The rest of the night proceeded in a similar manner, and I left the stadium with my head in a confused haze, like I'd just spent the night in fairy-world, but the fairies cared more about unborn, bean-sized fairies than they did about real live kid-fairies who they sent overseas to die for no reason.

Has this strange, perverse world existed alongside our own the whole time? Where did it come from, and more importantly, how can we stop it from taking over our world?

Dispatches From the Buckland Basement: 1.2: Library Day Special

Welcome to the third semiannual Library Day, my personal holiday dedicated to checking out all of the books I will need for the upcoming semester. This year, Library Day is especially important, because my dorm is located more than two-hundred feet from the library, making it slightly inconvenient for me to make the trip every time I think of a new book that I need.

Some highlights from this semester's selection are

"Existentialists and Mystics" by Iris Murdoch
"The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories"
"Schrodinger's Baby" by H. R. McGregor and
"Puss 'N Cahoots" by Rita Mae Brown and Sneaky Pie Brown

I hope you are all celebrating this holiday with the traditional wine and cheesecake, and remember the Library Day Motto: If you can't pick, take them all.

Dispatches from the Buckland Basement: 1.1

Over Nebraska I paused in the middle of picking raisins out of an oatmeal-raisin cookie to cup my hands around my eyes and look out the window. The big dipper was sitting right across from me, which got 'Back in the U.S.S.R.' stuck in my head, so I went to sleep. When I woke up, we were over Lake Erie, and my cookie was cold.

Dispatches from the Rotner/Uhr Basement: Season 1 Finale

I’m “blogging” at you today from the Denver International Airport in Denver, CO. I want to be completely honest with my readers so that they know they can always trust me to convey the full, unadulterated truth here on the “blog.” In spite of the fact that this feature is called “Dispatches from the Rotner/Uhr Basement,” I am not, in fact, in the Rotner/Uhr basement as I write this. I am, as I said, in Denver. It’s been a busy day.

My family threw me a good-bye dinner at the Lazy Dog tonight, where it came up that I am almost twenty. Max informed me, in his serious voice, that “When you turn twenty, people start considering you to be old.” Go figure.

I almost forgot to pack my clean clothes, because they were in the dryer, and I’ve gotten so old that the things I fantasize about now involve laundry and having already taken it out of the dryer.

Anyway, this is the end of “Dispatches from the Rotner/Uhr Basement: Season 1.” “Season 2” will premier in either December or June, but until then, I hope you enjoy the first season of “Dispatches from the Buckland Basement,” which will be even better, because the title in an alliteration. Isn’t it convenient how, wherever I go, I always end up living in the basement?

Dr. Mirakle and the Homicidal Gorilla

I was channel surfing at around two o’clock this morning, when I came across a channel called ‘Chiller,’ which was playing a movie called ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ The story was so far from Poe’s classic tale that it would have been entirely unrecognizable had the two not shared the same title.

The movie, made in 1932, is about Dr. Mirakle (played by Bela Lugosi), a scientist who talks to his pet gorilla. He drives around Paris in a carriage, plucking women off the streets and putting gorilla blood in them in an attempt to prove that humans evolved from apes. Can Dupin, a brave and pious young medical student, kill the gorilla and disprove the theory of evolution in time to save his girlfriend?

Anti-evolution propaganda is always amusing, and ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is exceptionally so. I highly recommend it to all my readers.

Hold the Foam, with Jean Chicago

An Intrepid Introduction

Time flows differently inside a cafe. Outside, taxes are due, semesters begin and end, "Walk" and "Don't Walk" signs flash in alternating sequence. Inside a cafe--especially inside the Apocryphal Cafe--eons pass in moments as novels are conceived, gestated and birthed. Philosophies are annotated and incarnated. Cargo cults are revived. Caffinated people and ideas flirt with eachother in all possible combinations. It may be a commercial business on the second floor of a soulless shopping mall, but the Apocryphal Cafe holds more mystery, romance and political intrigue than any dim, smoke-filled cafe in Amsterdam or Paris. It is a cafe attached to a bookstore in a college town somewhere in the continental United States. You've probably flown over us. It's the sort of over-educated town where your cab driver has a PhD in medieval French poetry, and where you can't make jokes about something not being "rocket science," because someone's bound to say "Actually I am a rocket scientist."

An americano-drinking customer once confided in me that he thought a barista sounded like a South American freedom fighter, who for undisclosed reasons of an undoubtedly sensitive nature, had sought asylum behind the cafe surfboard. In a way, it's true. In the six months I've been brewing coffee at the Apocryphal Cafe I've come to know and love this strange world and its coffee achieving baristas. Of course we have our competitors--The Day Old Bagel, Seattle's Piss-poor Coffee, Queequeg's--but only at the Apocryphal Cafe is every barista a stunningly attractive, great souled genius. Only at the Apocryphal Cafe is the chai always sweet, but not too sweet, the bagels formed in infinite circles and the coffee is always just brewed. Every barista has his own shining daemon; her own forte; his own oeuvre; her own story. These columns will chronicle our fight for freedom of the muse, freedom of own unique point of view, freedom to live and tell our stories. Order an annotated bagel with a footnote of cream cheese, and welcome to the Apocryphal Cafe.

--Jean Chicago

Take That, Frienemy!

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