Caring for others means not being careful

If you're just being helpful, you're just ingratiating yourself. Caring is not careless but it's not careful either in that it involves resistance.

From writing to the title to writing to the pun (as abbreviated title)

My new minimalist strategy of writing to the graphoseme.

Non-sense is not the same thing as nonsense

Just because what you write isn't useful doesn't mean it's useless

Lost Causes and Other Lost Causes

FaceItBook.com

THIS IS THE NAME OF A NEW WEBSITE I HAVE CREATED WHERE FRIENDS TRY TO BE REAL FRIENDS BY BEING HONEST IN PUBLIC, AS IN "FACE IT, YOU REALLY NEED TO GROW UP. YOU ARE 36 AND STILL LIVING WITH YOUR PARENTS?! COME ON." EVERY POST BEGINS WITH THE DEFAULT, 'FACE IT.' OF COURSE, PEOPLE WILL INEVITABLY MISTAKE FRIENDLY ADVICE FOR UNFRIENDLY INSULT. PEOPLE WILL RESPOND TO ADVICE WITH COMMENTS LIKE, "OH YEAH, WELL, YOU REALLY NEED TO FACE THIS, MOFO!" AND SO FRIENDS JUST TRYING TO HELP FRIENDS FACE UP TO THEIR WEAKNESSES IN THE HOPE OF MAKING THEM STRONGER WILL END UP DEFRIENDING EACH OTHER AND START POSTING THE PEOPLE THEY HAVE DEFRIENDED AND TRASHING THEM ON THEIR FACEIT.COM PAGES UNTIL THEY ARE DEFRIENDED IN TURN. THEN THEY WILL TRASH THEM ON OTHER YET TO BE DEFRIENDED PAGES. SO THE AIM WILL BECOME, INADVERTENTLY THOUGH NECESSARILY GIVEN THAT WE ARE, AFTER ALL, JUST HUMAN, TO LIST AS MANY "DEFRIENDS" AS POSSIBLE. EVENTUALLY, SOMEONE AT THE NEW YORKER WILL PULISH AN ARTICLE ON THE WEBSITE.

Resig-Nation: A Touch of Cheese in Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a startling instance of the extent to which cynical reason has now penetrated the pre-teen world of pre-programmed celebrity worship and popularity contests. In a country where the rule of law never applies to the ones who flaunt it the most, where the Supreme Court allows corporations to be persons and buy elections, where injustice may be recognized now and then but justice never meted out to the powerful criminals (Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Wall Street, and so on), a pre-teen film with the usual loser formulas apparently no longer can be made. In this deeply nightmarish take on middle school, the wimpy kid, who is actual a real jerk, wakes up to find himself an impotent old man (at the beginning of the film, he wakes at 4:00 a.m. a week early to go to school). It's like 1950s sit-coms turned upside down. Now Father Knows Best is Mother Knows Best (the mother is the moral center of the film, the lawgiver; the father is ineffectual, if supportive of his jerky son); Eddie Haskell is now the wimpy kid, while Beaver has morphed into the wimpy kid's best friend (the loser who keeps getting to win because of the jerky things the wimpy kid does to him). A pre-teen Napoleon Dynamite appears as a total nerd, but no one is mean to him, and he seems fine thinking he is actually cool. Lolita has become Humbert Humbert (a pretty and preternaturally articulate girl who wears great outfits and edits the newspaper is first seen hanging out by herself reading Ginsberg's Howl). The ironic and self-conscious literary or rock star loser (Thomas Bernhard or Beck) has no place in this pre-teen narrative in which "wimp" is code for immature, cowardly, selfish, bullied, brat. It's a testament to the film's unflinching and uncynical take on our "resig-nation" to cynical reason that the ending only provides a touch of cheese. When the wimpy kid finally does a brave thing by saying he ate the piece of swiss cheese that's been lying on the playground for months, not his friend who was forced to by teenage bullies, the beyotch on the block girl yells out that he has the "cheese touch," and everyone runs away from him. The newspaper girl approves and he gets his nice friend back. But that's as cheesy as the film gets. Injustice will prevail, bullies will get away, as will older brothers, and neither cowardice nor bravery provides a way out for the wimpy jerk or jerky wimp. At least the film does not wimp out.

Intelligent Dasein and Final Destination 2

The entire Final Destination series is a parody of Creationism and the "proof" offered by "Intelligent Design." Death is the negative theology of Creationism. Just like "G-d" death cannot be represented or even presented, anthropomorphized, personified, or embodied. Clearly, there is only Da-sein, being there, a Heideggerian post-Christian existing toward death to be confronted in these teen pics. There is no priest figure as in A Haunting in Connecticut or The Exorcist. There's just the black guy who works at the funeral home where he creates corpses. Final Destination is the most openly parodic, starting with the TV interview of a guy who has been marginalized who finally gets a chance to talk about "death's design." The guy turns out to be psychotic, as we can see very clearly when he confuses inference with proof, and the TV interviewer calls him on his bad logic. The psychotic's account of death's design is the inverted mirror of the Creationist one. The only difference is that the plot of each film proves the psychotic right. Death always makes a come back. You can't skip over your mourning; you death is pre-planned, and all you can do is da-sein your life unto death, meaning that you are back to Kirkegaard's existentialization, as it were, of Christinaity: lay people face up living out their sickness unto death by taking a flying leap knowing will be no safety net, no safe landing, just falling.

Final Destination No. 2: Don't Ask, Don't Smell

The Final Destination 3D is the only one of the four Final Destination films to have two full on premonition sequences, one at the beginning (like the other three) and also one near the end (unlike the other three)। The fourth installment also redoes the opening title sequence, which cites death scenes form the previous three films, at the end of the film। FD 3D does not depart from the other there so much as it redoubles the uncanny repetitions already operative in the first film, Final Destination. In the first and most significant death sequence, death is liquified, revealing and then hiding itself to the audience through trick and reverse photography while leaving its victim looking like he has committed suicide? But what is the hang up? What is death's victim hung up on? Consider that the death is not a closed case. The victim's friend (who's telepathic reactions are crosscut in this death sequence) is framed as the possible murderer of what only appears to be a suicide. The first death follows from a scene before the premonition sequence, in which the victim tells the survivor visionary they should both go to the bathroom to take a dump before boarding the plane so that the girls they want to date won't smell the smelly left over in the bathroom on the airplane should they use it immediately after either guy has left it. Before they can move a move on either girl, they have to make a movement, together, in an overhead tracking shot showing them in stalls right next to each other. They fail to get the girls to move, to change seats; instead, the survivor moves his so that the girls can sit together, both in the premonition and the dream sequence. After the funeral, the two guys meet up, but the victim to go first after the plane explodes says his parents won't let him hang with his visionary buddy. Why does the friend have to be the first victim? Why do we go from dumping solids as prophylactic against death to liquid shower scene as personification and agent of death? To ask these question is already to see that Final Destination is already the second in a series yet to be, its phantom title being Final Destination No. 2. Even before being blocked by the sapphosocial girls, the possibility of heterosexual coupling in flight leads to homosocial panic attack, a need for reseating (note the later plot development involving a reinterpretation of the meaning of the seating arrangement) as we that see the death drive is a death drift, that sexuality has no telos exept for death, that sexuality cannot be differentiated and sequenced (anal to genital stage, homo to hetero, buddy to f-buddy) but only seralized in (re)in-stallments with only one explosion (the airplane) to be repeated. Final Destination squeezes out this secret just enough for a Romeo and Julian coupling become visible after the funeral and even more through the crosscutting as we see one partner reacting to the death of another partner, giving the film its alternate title, West Suicite Story. Choose either or both titles. Seat yourself. Or flush. In either case, we can see that director has prefigured the FD sequels to follows as segments rather than a series, as pieces of a tootsie roll to be cut off, excreted for theatrical consumption for audiences that already p/resists incorporating their own deaths, much less the death of others (who go unburied and unmourned). Even as it starts, the FD series has already crapped out.

"Maurice Blanchot est Mort"

Did you know that Derrida's essay "Maurice Blanchot est Mort," which he added to the 2003 reedition of Parages will not be included in the forthcoming translation of Parages (Stanford UP, 2011)? And it isn't included in The Work of Mourning either because that book came out in 2001.

The Wound of Mourning

The Wound of Mourning. That's the title that the editors of their collection of Derrida's obits and eulogies, not The Work Mourning. Perhaps The W(h)ine of mourning would work too. Or the (K)Not Working of Mourning. Anything but "work." So Protestant.

The F#@K It List

The F#@K It List. That's the title of my new trade self-help book. The Pitch: instead of making a list of the things you want to do before you kick the bucket (as in the movie The Bucket List), you're better making a "F@#K It list of the things you have been doing but didn't want to do and have managed to stop doing.Like the Book of Proverbs, my book will dispense (with) "wizdumb" in the form of totally contradictory advice. Like "hurry up and die" and "But wait! There's more. . ." By stopping yourself, you manage to grow emotionally and eventually have a better death. Chapters include "Hello, Death, Goodbye Life," "It's YOUR Funeral," "Die Right,""He Did It His Way," Wait for it . . . . ," "Downhill Racer," "Give It a Rest," and "Have a Great Death." Target Demographic: Readers 55 and older.