Stein and social status

Joel Stein's essay in Time looks at online social networking. Nothing new, and there was a similar essay in Slate also a few weeks back that targets the same ground. But this time, Stein sort of stratifies the online networking sites. Your online networking tool says a lot about you. Stein claims that Friendster is mostly Asian, hi5 is Eurotrashy and Twitter is for geeks.

Twitter is for geeks? Since when? But then again, I follow a tech update site via Twitter, which then sends me updates at 2 freaking AM. Oh yeah, must be a geeky thing then.

Yun lang naman.

IM IN UR WASTELANDZ RUINING UR LITERATUREZ

I knew it was just a matter of time: presenting the LOLification of T.S. Eliot:

april hates u, makes lilacs, u no can has. (1)
april in ur memoriez, making ur desire.
spring rain in ur dull rootzes.

Tepidmonkey points out that the LOLcat Wasteland sort of misses the point: "There’s just no point to this if there are no pictures of cats to look at. The lolcat pidgin isn’t that interesting in and of itself. Lolcats took off in the first place because everyone likes to pretend that their cat has thoughts and feelings and is trying to talk to them when they meow, and because everyone likes looking at pictures of cute kitties. But this text-only stuff? Do not want."

So somebody was game enough to suggest that perhaps this photo can accompany the text.

But all in all, I found it amusing, and I'm assuming this isn't just an English major thing. It was rather interesting to follow the ensuing comments in the Mefi post as LOLcat grammar was applied to other literary works. But anyhow, consider Proust:

I made you a madeleine.

But I eated it.

There were two Basho haikus, here and here.
Somebody took a stab at Jabberwocky, the Tiger.

But my favorite is William CatLOLs Williams:

OH HAI i saved you a plums, but i eated it,sry

via the always amusing

From My Girl to Soldier's Bride

/insertfandom

Because Markmomukhamo insists I'm a fan, might as well. Here's your unsolicited My Girl news of the week/month/year/decade/millenium: Anna Chlumsky is engaged!

She's slated to marry soldier Shaun So, who served in Afghanistan. Since she is Catholic and her fiance is Chinese, the ceremony will be a mixture of both: "My church, Chinese reception." There won't be any bride "kidnapping," but will most likely have a tea ceremony. Both their fathers are chefs and have restaurants, the reception will most likely have a little of both.

The article says there's no chance of Macaulay Culkin attending his erstwhile co-star's wedding, since she doesn't "have his address."

In the weirdest of universal coincidences, when I was reading the papers the other day, I also saw this bit wherein Macaulay Culkin's girlfriend who was on That 70s Show, claimed that Mac is a homebody and is a "terrific cook."

Now I can't be bothered to look up a link for that, so go figure.

/endfandom

Betrayal

When I was first studying drama and screenwriting, Harold Pinter's play (and then movie version) Betrayal has been mentioned again and again as an excellent exercise in crafting memory. And in those heady undergrad days, memory was something unreliable. And it's therefore interesting to see how our own memories get twisted by our own brains.

Aside from memory, structure was also one of the biggest virtues of this piece. If a story unfolds a certain way, there must be a valid reason for it, and not just playing out a technique for technique's sake. Again, this is something that is chalked up to memory as well.

Betrayal tells its story backwards. A man and a woman had an affair. But instead of showing us its genesis first, it shows us the aftermath: the woman and her husband are separating, their marriage irreparable; and the woman's affair with the husband's best friend, which ended years ago, wasn't the only indiscretion in this failed marriage--the husband had his own.

The play was written in the late '70s, and by reading the wiki on Harold Pinter, one is informed that his affair with Lady Antonio Fraser informed him in the writing of this play. But that's beside the point. Affairs in general are frowned upon, whatever time and space one occupies. The topic of marital infidelity is also something that's been written about; and surely, the way the story unfolds is not that novel. Although a number of the sites I read did say that the structure was what made it interesting. We've seen lots of affair stories, and they all tend to be generic at some point. But what saves this is that by telling the story backwards, one gets a sense not just of the effect of the affair on those involved, but how people deliberately leave out things, twist details.

After reading, one gets the idea that Jerry is the one who feels the loss largely. Since the play ends with the time he and Emma first get that stab at intimacy, we are left with a picture of an adoring Jerry. He seems to love Emma more. He tortures himself with trying to place the memory of throwing Emma's little girl in the kitchen--was it his kitchen or theirs? Ultimately, these little details give us the bigger picture.

It's been a long time since playwriting or screenwriting class, and I suppose the excitement over this structure has waned a bit for me. I was expecting something flashy, I suppose. But the play is solid in its structure, very spare, but the richness of the quality of the memories of the characters was something worth following.

This is a real quick read--probably took me over an hour. I got my copy of Betrayal (Book #18) from Booksale for Php70. Not bad on its own, but as part of a P300 splurge on a single afternoon it did help burn a pretty hole in my pocket.

Birthday Stories

Here's a weird one: I first saw and browsed Murakami's Birthday Stories in a bookstore in a strange city on my first trip abroad on my birthday a couple of years ago. That day, I think I only read Murakami's contribution to this feast, "Birthday Girl." It's only now that I read the rest of the stories in the collection. Again, after a weird coincidence: I was cleaning out my shelves in the office and this book dropped on my lap, as though from heaven. I don't remember buying it. But after some asking around, the riddle has been solved. Although I suspect I would have been happier if the book really was mine, a sign of the universe's weird sense of humor.

It's difficult to pick which story is my favorite, because there are several. Russell Banks' "The Moor" has a middle aged man walks inside a bar for a drink with the guys and sees an old lady who looked quite familiar. The woman was celebrating her eightieth. On the way out, one of his chaps joke, "An old girlfriend?" The truth isn't that far.

Old ladies seem to be recurring characters in this collection. There's the woman i n Daniel Lyon's "The Birthday Cake," who didn't want to give out her weekly supply of cake to a young mother who was too busy to buy her little girl a cake. The old mother in Ethan Canin's "Angel of Mercy, Angel of Wrath" called her son in another city to tell him that some birds got in her apartment. She never reminded him, and yet waited for him to remember that it was her birthday. Then there's the three old ladies who attended a little boy's birthday party; one of them told the story of "The Emperor Who Had No Skin."

There were at least two stories which hinted at gayness. In William Trevor's "Timothy's Birthday," a young man sends out the sully youth he now lives with in his place for a birthday lunch with this parents. In Claire Keegan's "Close to the Water's Edge," a nineteen year old Harvard student goes to the fancy Florida digs of her mother's millionaire second husband.

Then there's Raymond Carver's heartwrenching "The Bath" (otherwise known as "A Small, Good Thing" in other editions), where a little boy gets hit by a car and goes on coma on his birthday. And while his parents stand guard over him, a furious baker calls and calls their house for the uncollected birthday cake.

Taken together, the stories almost prove that there's no such thing as a "happy birthday." Although they're not entirely pessimistic either. The world may be a bit bleak, and happiness is fleeting and hard to come by, but it does, and when it does make an appearance, you want to hold on to it as hard as you can.

Got to read Birthday Stories (Book #17) for free: Thanks goes to (1) Kinokuniya Bookstore in Bangkok, and (2) to Booboochichang who apparently left this book in my cluttered shelf some time ago.

Dead Man On Campus

I caught Dead Man on Campus on TV yesterday. I didn't even know the title of the movie until a few minutes ago. Of the actors, the only one I recognized was Alyson Hannigan of Buffy and band camp fame. It wasn't even a big role--as this movie came out in 1998, a year before band camp made her famous. Here, she was the best friend of the lead actor's love interest. And oh, her hair got burned.

A cursory check with the movie's credits in the International Movie Database revealed that the slacker roommate Cooper was played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar, teen pinup from Saved By The Bell, and Josh, the nice boy gone bad, was played by Tom Everett Scott, of the one hit wonder film That Thing You Do.

As far as plot is concerned, this one doesn't have much. Here's the barebones summary from Imdb: "Two college roommates go out and party, resulting in bad grades. They learn of the "if your roommate dies, you get an A" clause, and decide to find someone who is "on the verge" so to speak to move in with them."

Their candidates included a geeky boy who thinks everyone is conspiring against him and a frat boy with a death wish. But my favorite is the British rock star wannabe whom turned out to be a poseur on all counts. "You can't be suicidal if you're into show tunes!" And he was a high school cheerleader too.

The film was billed as "the best college movie since Animal House." Call me geeky, but I personally think another college movie as more qualified. But then again, that's just me.

But forget the plot unoriginality, perhaps the best part of the movie was its opening sequence with its ingenious use of animation, SAT score sheets, human anatomy drawings, etc. In fact, the web site Forget the Film, Watch the Titles tells us to do just that. I missed the first two minutes, so here it is, courtesty of the good folks in YouTube:

The Great F. Scott

I've been reading a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald lately. On my desk at home and in school I have Flappers and Philosophers, his first collection of short stories, This Side of Paradise, his first novel, and Malcolm Cowley's A Second Flowering, which is about the "works and days of the Lost Generation."

I've also just finished The Diamond as Big as The Ritz and other stories. (Book # 16) The title story has John T. Unger, who vacations with his a classmate. Percy Washington's family is obscenely rich, and for three generations, his family protects their secret enclave. Trouble begins when John falls in love with Percy's younger sister Kismine. Paradise doesn't last long. Soon enough he discovers what happens to young men who fall in love with young women whose family owns a diamond as big as the Ritz.

One thing which surprised me upon reading Fitzgerald again is not that his stories are mostly long. 20 pages is a bare minimum, which is good for me: my grad fiction class requirement is 40 pages! 40! I have 30 to go. It's that his stories contain chapters instead of the transitions that I've gotten used to in most contemporary fiction.

But what I particularly like about Fitzgerald is that most of the conflict in his stories come from what Malcolm Cowley calls the "Romance of Money." Fitzgerald was never really an out and out Marxist. But the conflict between classes was palpable because they were presented in unbearably real (and often traumatic) situations. He was part of that generation of writers born between 1895 to 1900 and came of age in the Twenties, the Jazz Age, when money, lots of it, could be earned, easily.

His young men on the make work in advertising, business, stocks, entertainment. Success was measured not by what you own, but how big an annual salary you got. These young men partied with and fell in love with debutantes, and to their simple request, "W Y B M A D I I T Y?*" the answer was always yes, why yes!

But the thing was, earned money will never be in the same league with old money. New money flowed, yes, but old money was as solid as a house in West Egg, and those living across could only yearn fitfully for that green light blinking at the dock.

There's also a lot of Fitzgerald floating about in the web. The Guardian has a series on great interviews of the 20th century. Michel Mok's interview presents Fitzgerald a few days after his 40th birthday and four years before his death, as a man "consumed with fear that his name will never be in lights again."

This is the Fitzgerald after the crack-up, echoed in his stories "An Alcoholic Case" and "The Lost Decade," where the protagonist was a weird sort of Rip Van Winkle. He had slept through most of the 1930s in an alcoholic haze. His time has passed and he didn't know how to live in this world anymore.

According to a foreword by Jay McInerney, most people have dismissed the interview as "a hatchet job," but while it was "unseemly," it's also "not unfair." He even says that there's a poignancy to it that Fitzgerald agreed to contribute to his own "depantsing":

What possessed him, you can't help wondering, to expose himself this way? It's as if he has determined to be a representative figure once again, even at the expense of humiliating himself, to reaffirm his significance as a generational totem by portraying himself as an exemplary victim of its faults. What makes this document even more poignant, almost unbearably so, is that Fitzgerald seems to have undervalued the literary achievement that would one day resurrect his reputation, even as it would always remain intertwined with the tragic myth of his life.

*Will You Buy Me A Drink If I Tell You?

Hello Moto: You Suck

I've been a Nokia girl all my life, and almost all my phones suffered the same end: stolen or death by drowning. But I figured, maybe a change wouldn't be so bad. So I got myself a new mobile recently, a Motorola w375.



Here's a YouTube video demonstrating the w375's "capabilities."




I liked the orange one, but it's out of stock. I got a shiny black phone. The first thing I noticed about this new phone was that it made me a slower texter. The keypad takes forever to react, and is prone to moving on to the next letter so I had to be really careful keying things in. There's something to be said about Nokia's very friendly GUI.

Then the battery gives up way too fast for a brand new phone. The w375 is dead after a day and a half. I thought that perhaps I didn't really fully charge it the first time. But hey, no worries. The manual said I could charge it by charging it to a PC via the mini-USB cable. Great.

Until the day I finally had to do just that. I'm far away from home, unexpectedly, and although I carry a big bag, a phone charger isn't in it. But hey, I have DSL, nyahaha. I can look up the phone's manual and charge it via PC. Harharhar.

But the phone doesn't display the "charging" icon and it's asking for a driver. I check the website and says that all drivers should be in the installation package and that the phone's software is already up to date.

Still no go.

Then I check users' forums and find out that I'm. Not. Alone. Read mostly unsatisfied customer comments here.

It turns out that Motorola did not include a set of drivers for the w375. How nifty is that huh?

Hay naku, had I known I would have just bought another Nokia phone and not this one which boasts a camera--crappy and an alternative USB storage device--all 100kb of it.

Hello, Motorola, if you're reading this, it's the first and last time I'm buying a phone from you.

Disappearing Acts

In the September issue of Vanity Fair, Susanna Andrews writes about Arthur Miller's Missing Act: "For all the public drama of Arthur Miller's career—his celebrated plays (including Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, his social activism—one character was absent: the Down-syndrome child he deleted from his life."

via

Bread Talk

It was such a busy day after the rather long weekend and I was looking forward to enjoying a little reward to myself: a bun of Berries and Cream from Bread Talk.

So imagine my surprise (and slight disappointment) when it turned out to be mostly strawberry stuffing and no cream. Nyar. Although in fairness, nag-uumapaw lang siya sa strawberries ha. Pero nyar pa rin.

Bread Talk is supposed to be the Krispy Kremes of Singapore. Only that for the last few years, their designer breads had also conquered the Philippines. There are lines all the time whenever I pass by a branch, and at one time I was trying to enjoy my cup of coffee when a swarm literally descended on the Gateway branch, the same crowd I was avoiding at the mall. It turned out that Carmina Villaroel of QTV's Day Off was trying her hand at baking bread.

But really, why call the store Bread Talk? Someone said the owner wanted the people to talk about the bread. But in my head, I imagine that this is the wicked sort of pick up lines that bakers use. Somewhere along the lines of:

Hey baby, you've got some really hot buns.
You won't forget my baguette.
The filling just won't go away.
Don't let me stuff you.

Nyar, BreadTalk, look at what you made me do. What happened to the tagline, "We Make Your Day"? But pretty nifty, noh?