Tangent(s) Tuesday
I’ve been watching the first season of Dead Like Me over the past 4-5 days and am really digging the writing and the performances. It reminds me a bit of Buffy, not because of the young woman as protagonist trying to work through life while being supernatural, but because the show creates a world for itself that is not ours, not quite, but near enough in all the important bits that when you watch it, you find yourself written into the dialogue, into the actions and the tears and the laughter, seeing yourself reflected in a gesture, a glance. While I may be stating the obvious, whether the show is Twin Peaks, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, or Doctor Who, the trick isn’t that they create fantastic worlds, but that our own world is fantastic, if only we stop and recognize it as such.
Dude, the new Macbook Pros are out and LtL is a happy camper. After switching over this past fall with a 17″ iMac, I have decided to sell that, my Thinkpad R31, the attempted reconstruction of the Thinkpad 560x as well as a few pints of blood plasma and just a fourteenth of my soul and get me a nice, new, shiny laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy my iMac, but have grown tired of stwiching platforms when I go back and forth between the desktop for my main work and my Thinkpad for mobility. Also, my impetus to have a desktop stemmed a lot from the amount of academic writing that I was doing while a Ph.D. student, writing that I tended to do best at home surrounding by my books and journals that served as sources. Now that I’m doing less of the academic writing–although I am still doing some–I find that having the mobility is important. Plus, I want to start developing some Podcasts with a few people and want to have a portable recording studio. My Thinkpad can handle some of that, but is slow and I’m getting more and more used to working with programs that are specific to the Mac. MacMall offers a $150 rebate from the Apple price, so I’ll probably order from them, although I may stop in at the Apple store tomorrow and just see if I can wrangle some sort of deal. Regardless, I should get it by the start of next week. Sweet! Reading Proust’s Swann’s Way, I keep thinking that he was writing a hypertext novel, only he was bound within a form of linear narrative so that the hypertext doesn’t occur by drilling down or by actual links, but through the sentences themselves. Once you sort of let go and let each clause and sub-clause and sub-sub-clause work as links instead of straightforward narrative, the reading process goes much easier, you can sort of drift along, realizing that it’s ok if you’ve lost the link you started from because eventually all the links will rejoin sometime down the page–or, more likely, several pages later.
I’m thinking of finding a theme for Wednesdays that has something to do with Odin/Wotan/Woden. Not sure what aspect of his myth that I’ll focus on, but perhaps each Wednesday I’ll find something to connect his exploits or attributes with either my life or the world around me.
Check this stuff out (and if you want to buy if from Amazon, it would be fabulous if you link through my site!):
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