12 posts from February 2007

Sam (digammagirl on LJ) interviewed me:

1. Why are you a Christian?
OK, this is a tough one and one that might earn me some very odd looks (tm) from folks across the board. The more I think about the universe, the more I believe that logic is not a valid way to reach metaphysical truth. It's not that logic isn't an interesting exercise -- it's that you reach a certain point, and after that, it's turtles all the way down. I can't even verify to my satisfaction that the world exists. So, how should I reach truth? Well, a combination of gut feeling, tradition, and guesswork. My ancestors were largely Lutheran preachers or Mormon polygamists, and since the Mormon thing is right out, that leaves Christianity on the "tradition" end of things. As for gut feeling, I had what I can only describe as a religious experience about a year ago that seemed to lead me to Christianity. As an academic, I know plenty about the different states of mind that can produce such experiences, but nonetheless it was powerful and moving and I choose not to second-guess it. Finally, the morals expressed in the gospels are very attractive to me personally. I'm not so hot on a lot of the Old Testament, and I sure don't like most of the modern conservative evangelical movement, but when it comes right down to it, Jesus was pretty awesome. Put all that together, and -- well, I've learned that if you behave as if you have faith, faith comes to you. I still can see the point when someone tells me that Christianity is a bunch of superstitions and fantasies, but they're superstitions and fantasies that I've come to believe in. And they're no more or less valid than, say, the fantasy that you truly know someone else's mind.

Plus, you know, it kind of sucks to think that there's no point to the world, and I'm really not down with existential crises. Christianity has helped me avoid those.

2. What interests you about virtual reality? Surely the real one's got enough things to interest anybody.
Mostly that in virtual reality, one can escape the difficulty of traveling across the world. It isn't that virtual reality is "better" than the real world to my mind, it's that through it one will hopefully someday be able to speak to others "face-to-face" without actually being face to face. Videochat hasn't done it, mostly because seeing fifty people chatting on TV-like screens isn't easy, and also because it doesn't preserve privacy. But just as chat rooms and IRC were a godsend for communication across nations, so I think virtual reality will be.

And for all that, all the very basic ways I think VR will impact communications, it also does provide more levels of representation and more "performativity" than chat rooms. In chats, everyone is only identified by a name -- in VR, you are represented by a sim. I think of my friends on Second Life in terms of their avatars, but in chats, I was always able to keep in mind that whoever was behind that name might actually be quite different from what I expected. How people will deal with that is interesting to me -- it's the sockpuppet problem on a vast scale.

Then, finally, VR has interesting effects on religion by radically unmooring people from some of the very basic, unifying things that have connected them for ever. People try to practice their religions in Second Life, but there is no Mecca so they pray... facing what? And that's the least of problems. When people can fly, when people can alter their physical characteristics to hypersexualize or desexualize themselves... well, it's going to be interesting to watch what people do with it.

3. You are stranded on a desert island with three books. What are they?
Barring the stupid answers like How to Escape a Desert Island Without Tools and Avoiding Dehydration... I'd say the Bible (might as well get a lot of bang for your buck, and I always did intend to read those books of the Old Testament where it's nothing but genealogy...) and Ulysses (since I haven't read it yet and I'd have lots of time to try and figure it out) and Pride and Prejudice (because it's comfort reading).

4. Do you feel that you are forced to "identify against yourself" frequently, for whatever reason? If so, how and what for?
You know, I was just thinking about this. As a woman, one is constantly forced to identify against oneself. I was watching "Rome" and realized that one of the main subplots essentially made me identify with a man who raped his slave-girl, killed her fiancée, and then eventually came back to her for forgiveness. This being HBO, she forgives him, and the series ends with them walking off into the sunset together (no, I'm not kidding). Now, I really like the fact that "Rome" asks us to accept ancient value systems, that it doesn't hide from portraying rape. Even though it doesn't do a very good job of showing the woman's perspective, whether that woman is a power behind the throne ordering people's murders or a slave-girl being carried off, its main characters are men and we are therefore going to be asked to identify with them above others. What troubled me was the fact that I didn't particularly notice that I was identifying against myself until well into the series, when the soap-opera-style drama went a teensy bit over the top (even for Ancient Rome, and that's saying something).

That not noticing happens a lot, especially when I'm in class. I don't want to be the crazy feminist who's spouting off about stuff that, let's face it, isn't important to most people's view of history. No woman wants to appear that way in a serious scholarly setting, it's just humiliating to feel like you're working in the service of an ideology rather than in the service of truth. But the fact is that we're working in the service of an ideology nevertheless, and a different person's truth.

5. Fanfic. Why should I care? (Express your answer in haiku form.)

Where else can one get
cheap-as-free erotica with
any kink you want?

(did you really expect something that wasn't tongue in cheek, if it had to be a haiku? Though I suppose it's true, if it comes to that, cheap-as-free kinky erotica is probably as good a reason to read fanfic as any.)

And now, you know the drill: comment & I'll interview you.

It's curious how this semester I feel so extremely stretched, in a way that I haven't for ages. I mean: as a sophomore, I found it difficult to understand Eliade, Geertz, Rappaport. But I didn't really struggle with them. I wasn't willing to. Now, reading Gadamer and Kittler, trying to wrap my head around hermeneutics, I feel like I am finally really using my brain. I come to conference expecting to be surprised and startled by how wrong my initial interpretation was. I am not bored in class, and I am not sidetracked by the asides that have always previously been more interesting than the thrust of the text itself. I can't understand the asides at all, they're on too high of a level. I can only barely claw my way through the main thrust.

It's fantastic!

In other news, though, Kittler is either a misogynist or practicing historicism to a point where I can't separate 1800s attitudes towards women from his own. I've never read a book that's made me more angry, not even Freud (who at least has the excuse of writing a hundred years ago) or Gadamer (who wasn't openly disdainful of "the Other," as Kittler calls women, but rather didn't seem to think about the possibility of fundamental differences of experiences such as those created by our gendered world). Nope, Kittler flat-out is writing about German men, and has no interest in the experience or writings of women, much less anyone who isn't German. If I didn't have to learn discourse theory, I would seriously flip out, but I don't have the luxury to do that.

(As I was walking into the library today, James started singing Snoop Dogg lyrics at me and insisted that I do a video honey dance. This lead to the thought: I bet that in German you could make a word that was something like `hermeneutic-theory-video-discourse-honey.' It would be 100% appropriate to describe the Reed lifestyle. We're all 'bout the sex, drugs and rock n' roll -- just as soon as we've finished reading Heidegger, natch!

I've been watching a lot of The X-Files lately and I suddenly remembered that song, "David Duchovny." Bree Sharp, right? The hymn to TV-FBI-hunkitude?

Get a load of this video (poor quality, too bad) - about a million celebrity cameos, made by the cast & crew of The X-Files for David Duchovny's birthday. (The celebrities mean business, too: Sarah Michelle Gellar on the set of Buffy; Brad Pitt on the set of Fight Club; Rosie O'Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg; Jerry Springer, many more -- and of course Skinner, Scully, the Lone Gunmen, and Chris Carter!)

This is becoming a video-blog, and I... don't... caaaare!

CollegeHumor gets something right after all: Osama Team Hunger Force!

Okay, so you've seen "Fergilicious," but this is something altogether different (and awesome)...

...necessarily.

But Terra Nova is always a pleasure to read (and I suggest that if you play MMOs, you check it out) because of such lovely puns as "Discipline & Pwnage," a post about raid tactics & their inherently limiting nature - etc.

Via Neatorama: Mr. Rogers addresses the Senate. Man, oh man, is it worth a listen.

My childhood was so much better for Mr. Rogers...

This is pretty entertaining.

I'm not totally sure how I feel about it, but you know. It's pretty interesting anyway.