Fractionals

For some reason my internet has been wonky ever since I got home. Some sites (Stylus, email, bloglines) have been working fine, and some, including any Blogger sites, have been refusing to load. My connection seems to be fine, and I can post stuff to my blog, I just can't see my blog. Anyone else experiencing something like this?

Anyways, a few things: Although of course I don't like every record in it, I am tickled pink by our top three albums this year. I didn't vote for Ghostface or the Clipse because voting for the only two rap albums I heard all year had the whiff of the illegitimate to me, but I do love Fishscale.

Mark k-punk has another fantastic post on hauntology up, and as I'm planning on submitting something to Perforations upcoming hauntology issue on Joy Division and absence I've been thinking about the subject. The best bit:

My claim was that, in hauntology, there is the possibility of a positive alternative to postmodernity. Against the disavowed revivalism of postmodernity's 'nostalgia mode', there are the spectres of lost futures. The 'spectre that haunted Europe' was not, after all, a returning revenant, but the avatar of the new...

The ghost embodies dyschronia (it is the apparition of his father's spectre, of course, which causes Hamlet to declare that the 'time is out of joint'), even as it calls for revenge, reparation, for things to be set right (and for its raison d'etre to disappear). Yet hauntology must be about the enjoyment of dyschronia, about the unwillingness to set time back into joint. Ten years ago, the most apt image of dyschronia - in either its traumatic or its ecstatic modes, and these are not always extricable - would have been the future invading the past. Perhaps now, though, dyschronia is most strikingly encountered in the persistent traces of that which has never arrived, but which will never go away.

Wow. Just wow. Of course, I won't be spending all semester on that, and as I am going to be the TA for the Philosophy of Art course I look forward to thinking way too much about aesthetics during the winter, although maybe also trying to sneak a little of this in there too.

Warren Ellis linked to a fantastic set of warning signs for the future; I link to that particular example because, like the first commenter, I think it'd make an awesome tattoo.

Mike Powell has been on fire recently, but the second part of his year end musings is particularly strong. Mike articulates something important about boredom, something I recall trying to get across to another student one night but was too drunk to do so. Being bored /= something bad, not necessarily. I've certainly missed boredom this semester.

Speaking of which, I just checked my marks - I got an INP in the pass/fail MA seminar ("interim pass," I assume, as we still have a semester to go), an 87 on the Spinoza/Kant/Nietzsche course (I had an 84 going in to the finals!), and an 88 on the Plato class, the one I hadn't gotten any marks back in previously! I might just do okay in grad school after all. That's certainly higher than my marks in undergrad, although the bar is higher too (I get the impression that if we get less than 80s, we might as well not bother, you know?).

I mostly just slept, ate, talked and watched a bunch of movies/TV shows in Ithaca, but one thing that did come out of it is that I now actually do want a Mac laptop (after borrowing Kiernan's for the whole visit). I don't need one, not even slightly, so I won't be getting one. But if I won the lottery? Oh yes.

I finished my Christmas shopping last night, and today we're making our way down to Kincardine, so my year-end stuff (which will go up here and also at the FF7) may have to wait a while. I'll have free time, sure, but I'll be spending it with family. I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays as much as I am, because this year I really appreciate them.