happy halloween

you're welcome.

cane toads!

this is a real documentary about real toads and their real australian friends. it is amazing.











my favorite part is the proposed commemoration of the cane toad with a cane toad "bust" that will provide "tourist potential."

also, the part where the little girl plays with her deadly cane toad pet using bad horror film camera work.

also, the part where the van zigzags across the highway in order to run over as many toads as possible.

thought for food

from nikhil pal singh's black is a country:

the public is less a concrete aggregation of persons than an ethical ideal and symbolic construct that signifies the democratic institution of modern politics itself, to which the watchwords of "publicity," "public opinion," and above all, "publication,"attest. intellectuals in turn can be understood to be among the primary producers of public discourse - theoretical and practical knowledge of the social world - knowledge that becomes a key stake in social and political struggles to conserve or transform that world.

singh's definition speaks to my concerns with academic writing. though singh does not really help me formulate a definition of the "public" that suits my own position and occupation, the connections he draws between the intellectual, the social, and the political are useful in thinking about what "public" really means. not everyone is public. children, for instance, are not public beings - they are socially, culturally, legally, and politically subsumed within a family structure, be it their parents or the state via an orphanage.

the notion of the "public" as a construct also speaks to contemporary concerns with the public as really composed of a number of overlapping yet distinct and often competing publics. in other words, books are written for a number of groups. for instance, roald dahl's charlie and the chocolate factory was written for young adults, parents, and me.

and speaking of food, i would like to refer you to the title of my post. having read this entire post, i now require that you send me edible items as a token of appreciation for having imparted knowledge and wisdom. i am a poor graduate student. this is literally how i feed myself. ta!

wading through judith butler - accessability & academia

working in any academic field necessitates a decision about what kind of academic you wish to become. will you be a teacher? a researcher? an attempted amalgam, generally resulting (hopefully) in a longstanding position at some little liberal arts place far removed from the reality of american political culture?

these choices essentially represent a spectrum - you choose to be 70% teacher and 30% researcher at middlebury college, or you choose to be 80% researcher, 15% teacher, and 5% really awkward dude at columbia. become and independent researcher and you've jumped off the deep end of the research pool, while community college teachers generally represent the teaching end of the spectrum, as all of their research time is taken up commuting.

i am reading reading ayn rand and judith butler simultaneously, and i prefer reading rand, though i agree much more with butler. what does it say about academia that this is an assessment that most everyone - from the lay reader to the grad student to the tenured philosophy professor - would be very likely to adopt?

butler has encountered numerous complaints about her unreadability, responding to complaints in her 1999 preface to gender trouble by equivocating and then accusing her readers of not being responsible or hardworking enough to wade through her impenetrable kantian wording. apparently, she

think[s] that style is a complicated terrain, and not one that we unilaterally choose or control with the purposes we consciously intend. . . . certainly, one can practice styles, but the styles that become available to you are not entirely a matter of choice. moreover, neither grammar nor style are politically neutral. learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself. . . . it would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself. but formulations that twist grammar of that implicitly call into question the subject-verb requirements of propositional sense are clearly irritating for some. they produce more work for their readers, and sometimes their readers are offended by such demands.

so let me get this straight . . . impenetrability is subversive. and those who do not throw grammatical constancy and structure out the window are rejecting "radical" (and thus, substantive) solutions to the problems of inequity.

does feel just a tad elitist to you? does it? because it should. a definition of radicalism that relies so heavily on jargon-laden philosophical analysis that apes kant's looping analytic style is both absurd and self-aggrandizing.

butler goes on to query whether

those who are offended [are] making a legitimate request for "plain speaking" or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life? is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty?

thanks for the condescending lecture, judy. apparently, my need for transparent writing is merely a product of my superficiality, a result of my immersion and susceptibility to capitalist culture, which has insidiously climbed into the ivory tower, a la poison ivy. break free of capitalist grammatical nuance! embrace complete incomprehensibility!

after rolling my eyes continuously while wading through this complete crap, i began to think about what good academic writing might look like. academics all too rarely think seriously about the mechanics of their profession. after all, intellectual work is (unfortunately?) frequently aimed at other intellectuals, and when intellectuals are not speaking directly to one another, they are formulating a way of "dumbing down" not simply their language, but their ideas as well. this method of writing produces butler's assumption about simplistic language as a sign of and a vehicle for simplistic arguments.

is this relationship inevitable? are grammatical difficulty and intellectual breadth directly correlated with one another?

i certainly hope not. because there is a larger question here, one that relates to the elitism that i feel is implicit in much of butler's writing and approach to words and ideas. how accessible should academic work be? certainly, there are a number of options here, but again, the question is generally framed in terms of a choice: research or teaching.

this is not simply a kick-off question to an academic career - it is a question within the research option. will you, as a highly trained (over-educated) scholar, write for a scholarly audience or a popular audience? what is the difference? how does the aim translate into the right grammatical and syntactic approach?

i never want to write a book that only academics can understand. what would be the point? on the other hand, i don't want to condescend to a "popular" audience that i perceive as an army of dolts. the reading public is not a bunch of dolts.

so who is the reading public? i throw out the term as if its meaning was self-explanatory, but the question is not one i can answer at this point. to conceive of the people who read (intelligently) as a homogeneous group is a faulty premise.

so i start with a compromise. right now, everything i write is something i might be able to assign in an undergraduate seminar class. this means days of revisions, generally. it is far more difficult to retain nuance without resorting to jargon and obtuse sentence structure. being vague requires two drafts. being clear and concise while retaining the complexity of a scholarly argument requires days of revisions, hours of agonizing over word choice and argument structure.

do i write this way because it is naturally the way i write? i'm unsure. perhaps my mind is just as good as a middle-rate undergraduate student. and perhaps judith butler writes the way she does because she has the mind of a philosophical giant - and she will only speak to those like her. at any rate, i promise to never - ever - assign judith butler in any undergrad courses i teach. ever.

impenetrability is not subversive. impenetrability is a waste of everyone's time, brilliant ideas or not.

hope

hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul,
and sings the tune--without the words,
and never stops at all,

and sweetest in the gale is heard;
and sore must be the storm
that could abash the little bird
that kept so many warm.

i've heard it in the chillest land,
and on the strangest sea;
yet, never, in extremity,
it asked a crumb of me.

the power of camp novels: reading ayn rand

a certain amount of flexibility is required in order to become a good historian. this flexibility is particularly important because you will inevitably end up studying the one thing that you promised yourself you would not touch with a 10 foot pole. indeed, you should refrain from making these sorts of promises to yourself. the path to a ph.d. is replete with far more dramatic opportunities to let yourself down.

ayn rand never quite fell into the category of refuse-to-read or refuse-to-study, but i certainly always assumed that i'd have little to no use for her books, given the absolute uselessness of the people i knew who really enjoyed rand.

i am now reading ayn rand. a lot of ayn rand. starting with anthem and working my way forward, i am currently nearing the end of the fountainhead. and i'm finding that i do have little use for rand's books, though not for the reasons i thought i would.

they are pure, unadulterated camp. sure, heavy-handed libertarian moralism infuses the actions, personalities, and personages of every character, but the overall tenor of the fountainhead is that of a politically-charged teen novel - full of melodrama and (forcibly) stolen kisses and clingy dresses and evil geniuses and love triangles.

a definition of camp would include something about an affectation or appreciation of manners and tastes commonly thought to be artificial, vulgar, or banal. this is a fairly broad definition. more specifically, the use of the word "camp" often indicates an appropriation of "high culture" (or what was previously regarded as "high culture") in pursuit of "low culture" ends. there is good camp and bad camp but, as susan sontag notes, the line is fine, and there is nothing worse than camp done poorly: "when something is just bad (rather than camp), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. the artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish."

camp often involves referencing - a signal that the author knows the history of his or her medium and is deliberately choosing to denigrate it, looking to induce either laughs or discomfort (and often both). sontag observes that "camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. it is the love of the exaggerated, the 'off,' of things-being-what-they-are-not." camp is a stylized form of exaggeration.

in this sense, rand is campy without recognizing the fact. she would hardly lower herself to acknowledging that she has learned anything useful from anyone, though her novels obviously model themselves somewhat on her beloved victor hugo, both in dark tenor and saga-like chapter layout. rand novels are supposed to be gothic novels for the modern (and i mean modern in the early twentieth century asceticist sense) reader.

unfortunately for rand and, perhaps, fortunate for her reader, the careful avoidance of reference or response actually serves to heighten the campiness of the fountainhead and its siblings. and this, i suspect, is what makes them so popular. without reference, one has a much harder time creating depth, and literary depth is the enemy of the uninformed and poorly read pupil. readers work their way up to joyce's ulysses. rand's books, by contrast, sit at the very bottom of the nuance pile. they are accessible in a way that few 700 page books are, and the sheer length of the novels, alongside rand's insistence that they are philosophical treatises, lends an academic aura to writing that would otherwise be considered extremely subpar.

i remember when i first discovered that books had subtexts. i was eight years old, lying in a motel bed en route to my grandmother's house in albany, ny. i was reading a wrinkle in time and, about 1/3 through, realized that the book was a critique of centralized authority, alongside a liberal religiosity. i remember this moment as sudden, ecstatic illumination, the sense that people kept telling me i was supposed to feel in church but never experienced. if you are aware that you are learning something, you can be actively exhilarated by the process and the fact.

i suspect that ayn rand functions in much the same way for the average reader. there is nothing challenging about her books and they feel vaguely taboo, independent, and - for those who misunderstand the term - intellectual. rand's subtexts and philosophical bent floats just under the surface, and the surface is made of saran wrap. you can see her points coming before they reach you, and her heavy-handed application of lessons is never mitigated by allusions to other writers or references to other philosophies. the historian in me is appalled at the lack of literary and ideological contextualization.

but for many readers - and the ayn rand institute's subsidization of purchase of her novels for classroom use inflates their numbers - reading the fountainhead must be akin to my experience reading a wrinkle in time.

reading ayn rand does not necessarily a libertarian make. one must be predisposed through upbringing or rebellion against that upbringing to embrace her flat set of teachings. but the book's ability to spark a recognition of one's own intellectual capabilities is a powerful tool in the libertarian arsenal, because this approach produces incestuous, cult-like followings. reading madeleine l'engle was part of a continual process that i became aware of in a short moment in a bed that wasn't mine along i90. and i go back to it, reading it every year and finding something new to love each year. i have turned into a socialist feminist who does not believe in or trust institutionalized religion, but i reread this anti-authoritarian, nuclear family-oriented, and occasionally heavy-handed liberal catholic on a yearly basis, with wide-eyed, uncritical wonder.

every person cherishes the book that facilitated the recognition of their personal, individual intellect. i suspect that rand's popularity stems from her ability to spark that recognition. books don't have to be complicated or even well-written in order to play this role. sometimes - too often - nuance is the enemy of influence. and perhaps we should look more seriously at rand's demand that every philosopher be forced to encapsulate his or her philosophy in a work of fiction. the caveat, of course, being that the lessons lying under the storyline ought to be clearly visible through all those words.in other words, your book might garner a devoted readership with the inclusion of a little campiness.

as for me, in my post-eight-year-old life i prefer to stick with the resolutely difficult. a wrinkle in time is a benchmark rather than an endpoint. onwards into the abyss!

david lynch embraces america (?)

david lynch has begun an interview project. his carefully detached delivery maintained throughout, lynch somehow manages to convey a certain sense of caring in this clip - something he generally has a difficult time doing, probably hinged at least in part on the fact that he has spent a career fucking with our collective need to identify linearity in . . . well, everything, including movie plot lines.

and a large part of that queasy removal is strung through these interviews as well. lynch is committed to ambiguity though, so even his most sincere introductory clip has elevator music lilting through the background, and the interview project website hawks a david lynch coffee collection alongside his films.

but this project feels like lynch moving backwards to a movie-making style and approach to humanity more in line with the elephant man, after all these years of twin peaks variations, spin-offs, and shorthands. something like compassion for his subjects lurks underneath lynch's little speeches, and the various clips of interviewees manage to walk the fine, ever-wavering line between voyeurism and genuine curiosity.

not that the very idea of documenting the "real" america by asking questions like "what would you like to do before you die?" and highlighting the little old man who avows that "when i was young, we didn't have toys." pieces of lives that feel like pieces rather than windows into something larger. a distorted real life puzzle resulting not in a whole, but in the amplification of the pieced quality of life and the fact that none of it fits together properly anyway.

but the interview project is not about these backcountry people anyway. this is lynch once again making it known that he is interested in these sorts of stories and people, and the interviews result in a self-deprecating look at who david lynch is, rather than a pastiche of american faces and stories designed to enhance and enlarge the meaning of american life. and david lynch has no interest in helping you to understand him. though he has compared his work (termed "american surrealist" by dennis hopper) to edward hopper's art, for me, francis bacon is always the artist who springs to mind.

lynch is film noir, but the menacing central committee and its shadowed agents and informants have been replaced with something more amorphous and yet personal. an ultimate goal - achieving worldwide communism - has been replaced with a question mark. as a result, you often get the sense that you are in fact to blame, you might be the evil in the world. there is an imperceptible line between waking and dreaming, there is an imperceptible line between sanity and insanity, and there is an imperceptible line between good and evil. so what are you and where are you anyway? even the most accessible of lynch's films explicitly blur these distinctions. lynch is democratic in application as well, for second-rate actresses, midwestern farmers, detectives, and insurance men are all similarly afflicted with realities rife with unreality.

in the end, the most honest filmmaking lynch has done is the daily weather report he gives from his painting studio, a routine of which he says "people are kind of interested in weather. it’s not artistic. it’s just me sitting there in my painting studio."

this observation about observing is perhaps more revealing than it is meant to be. lynch films, art, and absurdist commentary are all designed to merge art, money-making, entertainment, voyeurism, philosophy, and social commentary into one impenetrable mass. short films about death, long red and blue dreams, surrealist serials, and realist parables are all, in lynch's world, predictably impenetrable. everyone falls down the rabbit hole together. good thing lynch makes sure we're all properly caffeinated beforehand.

the insidious creep of star wars

star wars has, indeed, colonized everything. including burlesque.


i imagine that the audience is a bunch of adolescent boys with large red glasses. much like this guy:

quite frankly, i don't entirely understand the obsession with star wars. but then again, i put fried eggs on everything and have an unnatural fear of orchids, so i shouldn't be one to talk.

latisse redux

update!

apparently, the ny times concurs with my negative assessment and makes the very pertinent point that latisse is made by the very same people who brought women the equally beneficial botox treatment.

“There is a very large demand for eyelash enhancement. Eyelashes are a very important part of a woman’s beauty regimen.”

lists of lists of lists of lists of lists

this post is about lists. i am obsessed with lists. a minor case of obsessive-compulsive disorder will get you only so far in life. lists allow you to not only act upon your disorder, but comprehensively catalog its various contours and enshrine these contours in documents, which can be saved and archived and added to over the course of days, weeks, years.

graduate school does not help me fight my addiction. graduate school is an enabler. syllabi are lists. comprehensive exams require lists. dissertations demand that one be able to cross-reference across ever-growing items within lists, creating linear lines of thought through the linking of book after article after speech after book that apparently ought to lead the reader through some sort of argument if you could only put that argument into something explicable.

now there are programs for the list-making addicts. i, up until now, have carefully maintained word documents with lists of books, while remaining devoted to my first list medium, the little red leather notebook. i have a decade of notes on modern art, books, quotes, recipes, and album information, as well as fairly vapid personal thoughts carefully stored away in that little notebook. the handwriting is very neat.

but i occasionally wonder whether my little notebook is obsolete. have i created so many other forms of list that i've effectively listed-over my written notes. redundancies abound. entries cancel one another out.

zotero may effectively replace all my other forms of list-making, condensing, formatting, and expanding data within whatever magical ether aura comprises the internet, which mysteriously extends outwards from my computer(s) into the great beyond.

my knowledge of the internet and technology is so fundamentally underdeveloped that these lists are simply less tangible and real to me, somehow. i still print articles and papers out and write on them. i am a committed book-buyer. i like paper and shelves and boxes. i write too many notes on everything, including napkins and my palms.

in some ways, zotero is too easy to use. because i like lists so much, i find myself essentially shopping for books to read via worldcat, carefully creating new folders and filing away authors and titles. i am collecting. whether the collecting has an end purpose is far less clear and far more important, yet the process is addictive, as are most networking tools on the web. seemingly inexhaustible amounts of information are fed to your computer one manageable piece at a time, obscuring (at least temporarily) the vast network of which the one book title on your screen is a small part.

and people just keep publishing things. this inescapable fact is one of the most infuriating things about academia. there is nothing you can do. people's careers depend upon an apparently limitless production of books that seem absolutely necessary to "the field." your career depends upon the apparently limitless production of books that seem absolutely necessary. suck it up. read the books. write your book. force people to add it to their lists. do a little dance. repeat the process.

not to make the academic process seem overly repetitive. i am a great believer in the infinite nature of interest. i am interested in almost everything, and it's difficult to bore me, so long as you seem like you're mildly interested yourself. a liberal arts education ought to buy you this committed lack of focus. as far as i'm concerned, i can force almost anything to at least relate to something i'm directly interested in, and if it seems like i can't, than the failure can only be chalked up to a lack of imagination on my part.

but this relates to my possible problem with online cataloging systems like zotero - they force you to create linear lists. now, i suppose that i could do the cross-referencing work myself, and i certainly am not naive enough to believe that tech designers far more intelligent than myself will never come up with a handy, easy-to-use, possibly voice-activated system which cross-references my reading lists, folds my laundry, and tucks me in at night. but that, too, involves a loss of control and the need for creative accounting and documentation on my part.

to be entirely truthful, the little red notebook was ordered and out of order at the same time. entries are arranged in the order they were received. they are not alphabetical, they are not organized by topic. topics proceed in a stream-of-consciousness fashion entirely determined by whimsy, which i may possess in over-abundance. like my purposefully never-made bed (an island of unkemptness in an otherwise angular room arrangement), i kept the notebook because it didn't conform to my unbendingly neat predisposition. that notebook is my form of anarchy. it hardly seems fair that a program like zotero is capable of stripping away one of my few sources of disarray, especially given its ease of use. i added about 300 books to my personal list in just one week. articles have pdf files attached. citation data can be exported into endnotes. placing a book in your queue is almost like having read it.

in my head, the topic-specific folders are color-coded, like this totally bizarre real-life example:

the library appears to be more a fashion statement than an organizational approach. then again, simply sitting in that room is probably like going to see the wizard of oz, sans flying monkey encounters.

perhaps my paranoia about losing a lack of organization is premature, though. i have a sneaking suspicion that i'm absorbing ideologies propagated by the libertarian women i'm currently researching, a tendency to identify with anyone i'm reading canceling out reason.

and to be fair, i have read a great number of the books i filed away. many are titles of books i have sitting on my shelves, the books that are spilling onto the floor because there is no more room on my shelves and they have begun to stack themselves upon one another in a book-made bookshelf for more books. i often compare them to a disease.

i have a feeling that this is my new form of intentional disarray. unfortunately, book collecting is a far more expensive method of staving off ocd than is . . . writing in a notebook. but hey, i take what i can get.

i do wonder though - does anyone else ever feel like organization is closing in around you?

at least my sense of humor accords with some list-making, organizing tendencies. the initial photo is the first to appear in a google image search for "lists."

the person you are on the phone

i really hate phones. well, not phones, specifically. conversations employing phones. there's something creepy and disconnected and fuzzily fake about phone conversations, and consequently, i feel like i'm being creepy and disconnected and fuzzily fake when talking on the phone. and i probably am, just like how i am at parties with people whom i kind of know but not well enough to feel comfortable, impelling me inexorably towards awkward half-comments that land on the ground and just sit there, staring back up at me, unwilling to be entertaining or insightful or even what i meant in the first place.

although sometimes i think that phones are actually an instance in which people become more like themselves than they are normally? do you feel more acutely like you when you talk on the phone? do all of your insecurities and confidences become larger and more inescapable the nearer a phone gets to your face?

perhaps phone conversations are a chance to watch yourself, third-person-like, demonstrate what a caricature of yourself might look and act like. apparently, i am a terrified bunny. this is not a reassuring realization. i will store said realization in the back of my head and hope to god that it gets pushed off the edge of my memory precipice, which i conceive of much like the cliff in far side cartoon of lemmings leaping to their death. let us pray that this particular memory is not the "prepared" lemming with the inner tube.

at least my thoughts are adorable, if not brilliant, right?

this fear of phone calls would not be so problematic if i did not have to call people i don't know very well, as part of my (chosen) career. right now, i'm conducting a series of interviews for a panel paper i'm writing on women in congress. in order to collect information on the inner workings of congress, i have to phone women who worked as secretaries and staffers and interview them while furiously transcribing as much as i possibly can on my laptop writing writing writing and hoping to god that i don't miss anything really excellent amidst nervous overworked shakiness.

i begin to wish that i had learned to type properly approximately 30 seconds into each interview. the wishing takes more time and brain energy than one might expect, immediately setting my transcriptions back and launching me into a panic that generally does not subside until the interview is well past 30 minutes.

i am not trained to do oral histories. i verbally flail around for information at least once each interview, and i generally feel as if i have somehow insulted the person at least twice by the time i'm wrapping up. wrapping up almost always involves an apology.

after each interview, i write a follow-up email that is calm and composed and thankful. it does not resemble the person on the phone at all. the interviewee in all liklihood wishes that the person writing the email had been the person conducting the interview, but all of that is done and over and there is nothing anyone can do about the preceding awkwardness except shove it gently towards the memory precipice. until i go present the information at a conference.

are these two people - writing and talking rachel - actually entirely different individuals? would the world implode if they ever met?

i am coming to realize that my writing and wildly enthusiastic embrace of any and every piece of information i can get my hands on are simultaneously my two greatest strengths and also the qualities that render me potentially volatile amidst the day-to-day interactions that fill my pre-abd graduate years. especially classes. at least once every semester, i nearly break down into a tearful, angry mess in class. it is because i care. it is because i care, and am incapable of controlling myself. conferences are going to be a blast.

so i guess that these two qualities i have are not entirely irreconcilable. they're just generally at odds with one another within the context of daily interactions. i have arranged and cultivated my innate qualities so that i am more at home in and amenable to academic life than daily life with friendly couples get-togethers and coffee shop run-ins and idle chitchat. i only get along easily with those i know very, very well and those i don't know at all and can deal with directly, rather than through some handheld device that will possibly suck my soul out through my ear.

at least interviews are onetime shots in the dark. they are not extensive enough to allow me to launch into anything intensely personal and my role is one of formal listener, rather than talker. i do not talk if i can help it. i have been told that i am a very good listener.

if only i could figure out how to translate that skill to my everyday interactions. exempt from speaking! of course, given an imposed silence, i would immediately want to talk all the time. because being a contrarian is an academically useful quality as well.

i quit.

down with the dictionary

i am continually amazed that books are still banned. whatever for? the financial rewards and occasionally unwarranted critical acclaim writers reap for getting their books banned ought to outweigh the temporary bad press emanating from insane right-wingers.

it's always the case that some of the books that make it onto these lists come as complete surprises. indeed, any list containing books by howard stern and shel silverstein ought shock and annoy, like the american library association's list of banned books from 1990-2000.

i think the especially insane thing about this particular list is its direct relationship to politics - sarah palin requested that each of these books be removed from the library. yet i wonder what the relationship between religion and morality ought to be. clearly, they are inextricably bound up in one another and always have been, even if institutional religious involvement is a more recent phenomonon.

are we comfortable with combining morality and politics, while religion and politics ought to remain mutually exclusive. given this particular differentiation, it is important to discern exactly what separates morality from religion. is one dogmatic, while the other is more flexible and relationally-defined (subjective)? or does religiosity simply indicate an institutional commitment?

most basically, morality is one of many attributes individuals are supposed to attain through involvement in a religiously-defined community. perhaps stand-alone, self-generated morality might be better equipped to integrate thoughtfulness and openmindedness.

the fear that generates censorship always shocks me - if we are capable of living in a society that allows the ku klux klan to exist and hold yearly rallies, why does a wrinkle in time frighten us so much? can anyone raise children in an environment that shields them from alternative opinions with the internet around? might the internet's existence negate previous arguments for parental and local control over their children's education?

sarah palin's banned book list:

i bolded those i have (surreptitiously?) read. under the blankets with a flashlight. some are quite bad. most are very good.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It's Okay if You Don't Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster
Editorial Staff
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween
Symbols by Edna Barth

the dictionary? for serious?

lash out!

oh my fucking christ there is a drug to help you grow your eyelashes. who the fuck comes up with this stuff? who? shouldn't they, after all those years of hard work in school, devote themselves to curing cancer or figuring out how to raise the dead or something? eyelash growth? for real? maybe these were the kids who stole lab materials to get high and stuck their pens in the lab table outlets.

at any rate, this is just further proof that drug companies are now making up ailments in a terrifyingly successful attempt to sell the horribly undereducated american public shit they don't need during a time of economic crisis, because they are really, really vain. and female. restless leg syndrome? that doesn't even sound real. and for those who are afflicted with "inadequate or not enough eyelashes," you may come out of the closet - for your secret, secret defect can now be named. it's either a twelve step program for dealing with your inadequacy (oh god, how many times have i lain awake at night, desperate for a solution to my imperfect eyelashes, sobbing into my pillow) or it's drugs. pick your poison. seriously. look at this essay on potential ailments stemming from latisse, possibly the most vain and unnecessary drug marketed to the middle class:

The most common side effects after using LATISSE™ solution are an itching sensation in the eyes and/or eye redness, which were reported in approximately 4% of patients. These may occur immediately after use, but should usually last only for a short period of time. Eye itching and eye redness are not allergic reactions, and do not mean that your eyes are being harmed.

LATISSE™ solution may cause other less common side effects, which typically occur on the skin close to where LATISSE™ is applied, or in the eyes. These include eye irritation, dryness of the eyes, and redness of the eyelids. Skin darkening (or hyperpigmentation) is another less common side effect. This condition causes areas of skin to become darker than the surrounding skin color, but has been reported to be reversible after discontinuation of the product.

wha?! are men still making this shit up, or is it women now? is it a heterosocial workspace of devious, greedy chemi gerbils and devious, greedy advertising . . . ferrets? it can change the color of your eyes, for christ's sake!

but just to make a drug that solves a problem that's not a problem seem like a normal - nay, historic - pursuit, latisse's website has given you a fucking timeline. starting in 4000 bc, when the egyptians used a mixture of soot and metal to make their eyes look bigger and thus sexier. or it was used to deflect the sun and prevent glare. whatever.

moving forward, they slide over that several thousand years when wearing makeup was an indication that your were a prostitute and instead emphasize really, really racist filmmaker d.w. griffith's pioneering use of fake eyelashes in the film intolerance.

then we wrap up with . . . latisse! godsend! "and it's about time to make history."

speaking very seriously for a moment, what the fuck? i don't understand! this is the new thing i'm supposed to feel inadequate about? have we run out of functional and significant body parts that quickly? i feel like these sorts of drugs aren't actually meant to be sold and are, instead, marketed in order to discredit my sex's ability to reason. seriously - a dude points out the sex-specific nature of this drug during a news story:

never fear those warnings, though. a recommendation, from latisse's own website, to allay your fears. a testimonial! i'll spare you the mildly hilarious and jump straight to the completely, awesomely insane:

"While pregnant with my second child at 23, I went through a lot of stress, and as a result, I began to lose my eyelashes … to the point where I literally had none! My eyes looked weird. It was embarrassing. I never realized the value of my eyelashes until they were gone.

To make up for the loss, I started wearing false eyelashes all the time, which wasn't always convenient. But I kept wearing them … for decades! I'd pretty much given up hope of ever having eyelashes again.

Then, at age 61, I was asked to participate in a clinical study for eyelash growth by my doctor. He didn't make any promises, but I was hopeful. The results were amazing! Finally, my lashes grew back thick and long! I was so excited. Now I have beautiful long eyelashes."- Jeannie

thanks, jeannie! and if you're not yet convinced, ask stylist anastasia soare - also known as "the definitive brow expert." she went to college for that. clown college.

i cannot emphasize this enough: what the fuck?! admittedly, i have an extreme hatred of commercials aimed at this mythical group "women," which appears to love babies, weddings, low fat foods (and chocolate), and home cleaning equipment. pointing out this absurd stereotyping, i give you sarah haskins:



do i belong to this group "women"? if i do, will i ever be able to bring myself to admit my dirty secret to others? will i ever willingly associate myself with kelly ripa? oh god - i think i threw up a little in my mouth just then.

but if i can ever come clean, latisse helpfully allows me to send an e-card to all my best girlfriends! and tranny buddies? spread the love!

kermit gets homicidal

writers should not underestimate children. i think it's an enormous pity when people treat kids as if they were all sweet but just a little mentally handicapped. as if they were puppies rather than reasoning individuals, albeit small and still developing ones. now, i certainly don' t think that a 5-year-old has my sense of mental acuity, because i am really, really smart. hah! but that kid is probably sharper and more inventive and interested than my 40-year-old high school english teacher who had us watch the tv version of gulliver's travels starring ted danson instead of having us actually read swift and then (egads!) discuss the book. because he hated anyone disagreeing with him and discussion tended to lead to disagreements, he generally opted for lectures composed of historical facts gleaned from textbooks, arranged chronologically, and then deployed via bullet point sentences clearly designed to smother your desire to learn. this method largely succeeded, unless you took enormous pleasure in disrupting class and making a general nuisance of yourself. which i did.

perhaps i'm just bitter about never getting to talk about the complete and total awesomeness of jonathan swift in a classroom setting. but my point is that kids are active and engaged learners who respond not to condecension, but to challenges and activity and, quite frankly, anything interesting whatsoever. treating kids nicely reveals more about the adult than the child.

which is why i am such a huge fan of morbid humor for children. for some reason, people tend to interpret this assertion as either cruel or irresponsible (or both). in fact, the frequent antipathy this opinion generates has led me to develop a boring person litmus test. if you think that kids should be exposed to flowers and rainbows and kittens until they are 21, you are boring and i want nothing to do with you. if you think edward gorey's the gashlycrumb tinies is both art book and illustrated children's story, i may deign to speak with you again. poor you.

morbidity is intellectually challenging - that is what makes it so good for developing minds. it forces you to think and interpret images, events, and relationships counterintuitively. death is funny. death is funny.

the thing is, people who find morbidity to be unsuitable for children generally think morbidity is simply in poor taste for everyone. which means they don't get it. they don't think death is funny. in the right circumstances. here lies an atheist. all dressed up and no place to go.

even if they didn't deploy gorey's kind of overtly violent and ennui-ridden imagery, the best children's entertainers created work tinged with the depressed and morbid. did sesame street ever seem a little strange to you - entertaining, but kind of unsettling, as if there was something you weren't quite getting?



henson had a wonderful, quite, deadpan sense of humor that i still find enormously endearing, especially when it tips into the vaguely offensive. one should not be too serious and one's not-seriousness should not be too upbeat. you end up launching yourself into ashton kutcher humor, and i start gleefully contemplating your demise, turned into a homicidal kermit myself. which is why i love the complete lack of emotion in the narration of henson's films on these coffee commercials. and their "documentaries."





the wonderful thing about henson's creations and, indeed, edward gorey (at first, they seem to have little in common) is their attempt to create stories and characters that will appeal to children and adults in equal measure. morbidity seems to be a good way of bridging this gap, largely because it reduces an occurance that is often complex and loaded with meaning to something very simple. because death is very simple. you are alive and then you are dead. almost anything could precipitate death, thus the hilarity of gorey.

you are unlikely to be assaulted by bears anytime soon, but that's the point. basil's fate is the same as ernest:

and choking on a peach is equated with wallowing in self-absorption and self-pity:

ennui - like being mauled by a bear! it's funny and unnervingly true, especially when one considers the fact that in the case of melancholy, you are the bear mauling you. gently and quietly. these morbid, occasionally cringe-inducing equivalencies often remind me of biblical lessons, whacking you so squarely in the face with a lesson that you might not see it, focused as you are on the stars circling about your head. details. in conclusion, the bible is horribly, excitedly morbid - and often feels geared very much towards children.

so i encourage you to expose your child to the ghastly baby as soon as it emerges from the womb.

news that makes you look normal

strange news stories force you to realize that, no matter how strange you think you are, there are much stranger people out there, and their strangeness is impairing their ability to live life on a day-to-day basis. i collect these stories in a little notebook. they are all earnestly written. the misfortune of others shall quiet my own discord.

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"Taste for Gummies Gets Man in Sticky Situation"

ROGERSVILLE, Tenn. -- Police in Rogersville says a man's taste for gummy fruit chews landed him in a sticky situation.

The Kingsport Times-News reports Rogersville police chased 19-year-old Wesley James Hough as he fled on his motor scooter after taking a Life Savers Gummies pack valued at a little more than $1 from a Dollar General store on Monday.

Hawkins County Sheriff Roger Christian said Wednesday police found meth lab ingredients and components stashed in Hough's yellow motor scooter.

Hough was charged with promotion of manufacturing meth and theft under $500.

He remained in the Hawkins County Jail Wednesday evening on $10,000 bond, with an arraignment set for June 8.

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"Authorities Believe Bug Caused Crash"

Plymouth, IN -- A bug that flew into a moving vehicle, frightening the driver's child, is believed to habe caused the driver to strike a utility pole and telephone junction box Sunday morning.

Marshall County Sheriff's Department investigators said teh driver, Jeffery Parenti, 39, of Plainfold, Ill., told them he was driving his 2002 Ford Excursion eastbound in the 8000 block of 3A Road when the bug flew in one of the open windows an 11:20 a.m. Sunday.

Police said Parenti told them his child became frightened and, when Parenti attempted to capture teh bug, his vehicle went off the road, striking the utility pole and telephone junction box. No injuries were reported.

Parenti, police said, told them he stopped and assessed the damage, saying he's glanced the utility pole with his bumper but did not notice the damage to the junction box. He then left the area.

Bremen Police Department officials located and stopped Parenti to make a report. No charges were filed, according to county police.

There also was no word on whether the bug made it out of the vehicle without injury.

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"Notes on the Olympics"

South Bend, IN -- I have been largely bored by the Olympics, but the one sport that has grabbed me is table tennis. Derided by the ignorant as "ping pong," its grace, speed, and athleticism are a revelation.

I was a teenage prodigy at table tennis, but the other kids at school thought I was just a weirdo. It's not cool - but it's a subtle and wonderful game.

If you're still not quite interested enough to pick up a bat, then read Howard Jacobson's wonderful book, The Mighty Walzer - undoubtedly the only great Jewish table tennis novel ever written. It's almost as much fun as playing.

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note: the initial picture is of an austrian art installation by dutch artist joep van lieshout. it is an oversized skull containing a sauna, with bathtubs and showers located on each side of the neck. the sauna fits 8 people and, when in use, emits steam through the skull's eyesockets.

irony and self-abjurement

the oxford english dictionary defines irony as "a figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used." irony's more specific dramatic meaning includes the "ill-timed or perverse arrival of an event that is in itself desirable . . . a [l]iterary technique in which the audience perceives meanings unknown to the characters."

yet the greek etymological roots of irony point to a worse kind of disingenuity. εἰρωνεία eirōneía which, when translated, roughly equates irony with hypocrisy and pretended ignorance while hinting at an underlying meanspiritedness.

now, i am ironic. not my existence (though that's debatable, i suppose), but irony makes a regular appearance in my general conversation. this often leads to problems. one time, i accidentally convinced a friend of mine that i did, in fact, believe everything pat robertson says. but i never thought about the fact that i simply lived with and among a very irony-receptive audience until i met a girl who did not understand what irony was because she had grown up in spain, where irony apparently does not exist.

as far as i was concerned, this was a vast oversight on the part of the spanish. how could i possibly flee to spain after defaulting on all my college loans now? it's one thing to learn a language and another to learn how to be honest and straightforward all the time and i was, quite frankly, ill-equipped to deal with consistent honesty. fearful, i proceeded to teach quenna how to speak and respond to irony - at her request.

the process began with baby steps - my first directive was to pause whenever anyone said something that sounded . . . untruthful. ridiculous. potentially insulting. if a qualification or a half-hearted, self-satisfied comment did not emerge within 30 seconds or so, the person was either being truthful and was simply weird or they were, in fact, being an unmitigated jerk. potentially, both.

quenna then moved to practicing saying untruths with a straight face. she would wander into my room to tell me that pants were originally meant to be worn on the head as a kind of wrap but migrated south to fend off frostbite. or that the christian right was beginning to make sense to her.

eventually, she graduated to saying the opposite of what she meant, completely deadpan, straight-faced, serious. and then she moved back to spain, where no one would understand this kind of behavior.

so if not the spaniards, who uses irony? i think upper and upper middle-class, college-educated, liberal people are ironic. in that they are ironic and they employ irony to make points, mostly to themselves. fundamentally, i think irony might be a form of verbal and emotional bullying. you're an idiot if you don't get it.

am i a bully? i don't think i come across that way. but i might think you're an idiot if you don't get it.

the brits argue that americans don't understand irony. in that we are far less likely to think that deadpan humor and uncomfortable situations are less funny and more . . . straight-up uncomfortable. this is a fair assessment, i think, if properly qualified. british advertisements employ irony, after all. we've only just begun to steal that particular approach, and our versions of funny-by-not-being-funny ads tend towards existential ennui.

i find that intended american irony falls flat:


whereas unintended irony is mindblowingly hilarious:


though the producers clearly understood the ironic facets of this commercial, the lack of understanding prompted an equally hilarious response:


are americans just naturally funny, in an ironic way? is it because a large number of americans don't really understand what in the world irony is? is laughing at this kind of behavior a way of taking ourselves less seriously, or a method of differentiating ourselves from those who are acting in ways that we perceive as uneducated or heavy-handed or . . . wrong?

the discrepancies between intended and unintended irony would indicate that taking academic courses on irony as a literary device might not be the best way to develop the ironic sensibilities of americans. but just in case, you can now buy papers on irony online:

As the world is becoming more specific, the writing techniques are also becoming more specific. The writers have more variety of literary tools such as allusion, metaphor, symbolism, and irony. Irony is the most common and most efficient technique of the satirist. Since this technique is so popular and being used in many different ways, people do not really understand the true meaning of the word. A clear understanding of the word irony as it applies to literature can be attained by an analysis of its formal, historical, and informal definitions.

alanis morrisette should have read this before asking the world whether rain on your wedding day was ironic.

setting aside the god-awful nature of the language here (this is an a+?), there is a sentence arguing for irony as a "tool," a method of making one's point. and certainly, irony is a literary tool - thus the number of writers who defend it as a necessary and oftentimes immensely illuminating method of conveying information and meaning. david foster wallace is (was) a proponent of irony as a method of stripping away sentimentalism and, in a lot of ways, deconstructing complexity. as he writes, "the great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates."

this is an interesting observation, although i do not necessarily agree with his interpretation. after all, is irony not also a method of obscuring one's meaning? is it not a veil used to deflect criticism and interrogation, a method of self-abjurement? a way of not taking responsibility for one's opinions and conclusions? and can we trust a man who proclaimed irony to be king and then proceeded to kill himself?

apparently, there are then two versions of irony - using irony and viewing or interpreting events through the lens of irony. i suspect that i tend towards the latter, which is why i find most everything to be at least a little humorous. irony is my way of not taking myself or the world too seriously. as jessamyn west asserts, "a taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself." though her differentiation between humor and irony seems a bit like pedantic hair-splitting to me.

instead, perhaps jean stafford is correct in correct in noting that "irony is, i feel, a very high form of morality." although maybe she was being ironic.

the lord knows

i wonder if the old person who wrote this note apologizes for the sins of others when he or she goes to confession.

in love with elvis perkins

if you ever get a chance to go see elvis perkins in dearland live, you must do it. it will be an unadulteratedly joyful experience. he writes songs that make your heart feel like it's going to explode.

from ash wednesday:


from elvis perkins in dearland:


part of me didn't want to post this, wanted to keep the music a secret somehow, something that was mine in my pocket. oh, well. silly, since he's been on letterman.

faster, pussycat!

i love kitsch movies - those b horror films that develop cult followings of both the socially withdrawn and the overly intellectualized collectors of arcane trivia. i am firmly in the latter category, while also occasionally allowing my feet to dip into the former group during fits of self-absorbed melancholy.

as moving (to new york, to london, to virginia) is especially likely to trigger acute feelings of ennui or overconfidence, one of the first things i do post-move is find the weirdest film showing in local theaters and straightaway go see it.

in london, the film happened to be faster, pussycat! kill! kill! this was extremely exciting, since i'd been meaning to see russ meyer's 1965 cult classic for the better part of a decade, having spent hour upon hour watching other b-film horror flicks during a couple high school summers. stuff like attack of the 50 foot woman and plan 9 from outer space and (my favorite title) amazon women on the moon at a tiny family-run theater briefly reopened in the hopes of finally attracting an audience in staid northern indiana. valiantly rallying whenever the weather warmed and weird high school kids began milling around, the theater closed about two months after each opening. apparently, the weird kids were going elsewhere. i generally sat alone, near the front, after having chatted with the elderly couple who practically set up camp in the third row from the back.

london had a much larger weird theater and film selection - so faster pussycat! kill! kill! it was. the south end theater was just as small, but it clearly had a devoted following and, with its red couches, cigarette stench, and basement feel, fit the film. mildly louche!

though faster pussycat! kill! kill! revelled in its disreputability. don't race the fastest PUSSYCATS - they'll beat you - to DEATH! what a tag line!

faster pussycat! kill! kill! begins with a voiceover proclaiming:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence. The word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains... sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled. Yet violence doesn't only destroy, it creates and molds as well. Let's examine closely then this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained within the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakable smell of female, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don't drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, any time, anywhere, and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor's receptionist... or a dancer in a go-go club!

wherein we turn to said go-go bar, where the three anti-heroines pole dance. but this is not thrill enough - looking for greater excitement, they hop into their tiny sports cars and drag race across the desert. embodying a number of fabulous stereotypes, blonde bimbo billie, vaguely ethnic and agressive lesbian rosie, and leather-clad dominatrix varla are also overtly male. they are violent, domineering, sexual, competitive, and congenitally enraged.

the best part of this film is the snarky innuendo that laces every line of dialogue. check it:

Gas Station Attendant: [staring at Varla's chest as he pumps gas] Just passing through, huh? Boy, that motor's sure hot! You gals really must have been moving on these little machines. Yessir, the thrill of the open road. New places, new people, new sights of interest. Now that's what I believe in, seeing America first!
Varla: You won't find it down there, Columbus!

aaah, the ever-present parallel between women and cars! a lot of "body work" talk, a lot of "look under the hood" suggestions, a lot of "great headlights" commentary. cheeky!

yet also more than simply cheeky. this is a film that equates sex and violence. embrace one and you embrace the other. neither proactive sexuality nor violence was associated with women until the late 1960s - women were simply not as sexual as men, and because men tended to employ violence in defense of the sexual sanctity of their women (as well as their own heterosexuality), women eschewed violence as well.

given rape and domestic violence data, the link between sex and violence ought not shock us as much as it does - and though meyers' film is certainly not feminist, it raises a number of questions about the ways in which depictions and constructions of sexuality are intertwined with the right to violence.

not to over-theorize the film or anything. it's a booberific cult classic, after all. these are former playboy bunnies we're talking about.

the trailer ---->



this is a great movie. i'd rather not reveal the murky and completely nonsensical plotline, but my favorite part of faster, pussycat! kill! kill! is possibly the sexualized fried chicken dinner near the end of the film. it is truly masterful.

you must see this film.

The Old Man: Women! They let 'em vote, smoke and drive - even put 'em in pants! And what happens? A Democrat for president!

hobo chic

riddle me this - why do strange "fashion" trends occur in a recession? does the recession simply allow women to get more creative when it comes to making imprudent and unnecessary purchases? is it just more of a challenge to our innate instinct to make ourselves look like someone other than ourselves? or does someone out there look more like themselves with fake eyelashed glued to her lids? is there a male equivalent of this tendency? are they simply buying more cost-effective aftershave? did they restrain themselves from purchasing that chicago bulls logo-emblazoned laz-e-boy with built-in cup holders? oh man - i want that chair. but not with the bulls logo. the bulls suck.

enough questions. to the numbers! you can't argue with numbers (social science!), though they are courtesy of the guardian, so we're really looking at the british version of this bizarre phenomenon.

Fashion products flourishing in the downturn:

Selfridges
Sales of false eyelashes are up 30%. Demand is such that it is setting up a lash bar in the London store this month. Watch sales are also up 30%: Toywatch is one of the highest performers.

John Lewis
Accessories are doing great business - branded handbags are selling extremely well, with Osprey and Lulu Guinness bags up 58% and 42% respectively. Gucci sunglasses sales were up 19% on last year.

ASOS
Top sellers for the first three months of 2009 include bow design (£29.50) and jazz-print dresses (£37.50), with 12,000 sold in all. Shoes are also doing well.

Superdrug
Sales of hair dye are up 17%, as are manicure and pedicure tools. Nail polish remover sales have risen 13% compared with 2008.

Harvey Nichols
Fragrance sales are very strong, particularly older heritage brands such as Baghari and Creed, as customers prioritise quality over quantity.

now, there are a few trends that i think i understand. for instance, shoes. everyone needs shoes, excepting members of that crazy cultlike (hippie?) group who refuse to wear shoes - apparently their only protest against modernization and all the accompanying totally awesome stuff you can plug into outlets and play with for hours without speaking to another soul. a woman at grinnell attempted to explain the shoeless rationale to me while i was standing in the dining hall line once, but i stopped listening after about 30 seconds, right around when she was launching into some getting-back-to-nature diatribe. taking off your shoes is hardly getting back to nature. i refuse to take you seriously until you stop annoying people while waiting to get into a cavernous heated dining hall, so you can eat things prepared with electricity-sucking equipment and then stuck under heat lamps. you are not worthy to kiss the feet of the amish. those people are badasses. i once watched them erect a barn the size of new hampshire in three days.

either way, these are not amish consumers. these are regular jills. so what about manicure and pedicure tools? hair dye? sunglasses? are these faceless consumers attempting to disguise themselves in order to escape debt collectors and the irs? are all the new handbags for storing the dozens of passports, driver's i.d.s and social security cards necessary to evade capture by the government? is bernie madoff entirely responsible for the bump in fake lashes sales?


"In the economic downturn, it's important for consumers to look for chic and cheap deals in unusual places. The message to consumers is clear: recession chic is possible. Just take the time to compare prices and make good choices and you can still treat yourself well. . . . The brilliant colours and patterned fabrics in [this] collection will cheer up anyone suffering from the recession's gloom."

sold.