Interpretive Interactionism

Norman Denzin's Interpretive Interactionism is an excellent handbook on qualitative methods in the postmodern era. His ideas will be enormously helpful to me when I embark on the interpretive/analytic phase of my research, and will help me write up my process notes and even my orientation to the interviews as they are happening. This has helped clarify the goals of my research which is to untangle the meanings embedded in, articulated through, and structuring "the existentially problematic emotional experiences that occur in the lives of ordinary people"

Disgrace

I just finished reading Coetzee's Disgrace and had to post about it right away. I actually felt the need to write about it in order to get away from the sickening, sad, hollow feeling it left me with. It is written so sparsely, so cleanly, but it is like this slow emotional bleed. Without much consolation. There is, in a hopeless way, some consolation for the main character, but not for me as a reader. The descriptions of dogs being euthanized were excruciating, and for the main character there was just loss, loss, loss. It seems so unfair to have to come to terms with such sadness, but then, what is the alternative?

By the way, this cover is from another addition of the book. Mine had a very blank, elegant cover, that is sort of more fitting. But I thought this looked cooler on the blog.

"Back to the Mothership" on salon.com

I just read a wonderful Jod Kaftan piece on salon.com about what it was like being raised by the actress who played Spock's wife on Star Trek. It is really funny and insightful and incredibly well written. It was too hard to choose a favorite line, so I'll share one which resonates with my own particular existential angst:

Responding to a compliment on his thick red aura, "If you're a 'Star Trek' agnostic, like I am, all you can say in these situations is 'thanks'; the true agnostic just thanks people for their input, then privately envies their absolutism."

http://www.jodkaftan.com/

Igby Goes Down

I love this movie. I watched it for the second time tonight. The first time I thought it was hilarious. This time I thought it was more intense. The dialogue is witty and dark, all the characters sardonic. I think I laughed more the first time I saw it because I was with someone. I never laugh as much when I watch things by myself. Amanda Peet is so beautiful. And I loved Jeff Goldblum in this. I'd write more about it, but I think the Times review, that I got off Netflix, puts it very well: Even though the movie drifts uneasily between satire and realism, and its visions of military school and bohemia feel secondhand, it maintains a ruthless emotional honesty. Ultimately, it gets at something that no other recent American movie has captured quite so acutely: a resentful, lurking disappointment in the good life.
Instead of bringing them happiness, prosperity has left most of the grown-up characters with only a frustrated sense of entitlement floundering in a spiritual void. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=1&res=9C02E3DB1339F930A2575AC0A9649C8B63&oref=slogin

On Charles Schulz

Read a review in the New Yorker this morning of a biography Charles M. Schulz. He was apparently a kind of anti-social, shut-down, unaffectionate man who was devoted and obsessed with his work. He was the richest cartoonist of all times. The review made me more interested in reading Peanuts again, but didn't inspire any interest in the guy's life. I'm not interested in his wives and families. I'm more attracted to the way he dryly depicted the existential loneliness of a simple grade-schooler.

Groopman on "disorders of consciousness"

Just read an article in the New Yorker by Jerome Groopman on brain-imagery technology and people in vegetative states. This technology shows that non-responsive patients are still "unconsciously" processing information. They are capable of interpreting and imagining. There is something terrifying about this. It is so cool how our brains work, but brain biology stuff confuses my sense of self. Thinking of myself as this neurological processing unit... I don't know.

Fortunately the imaging technology results led to helping a couple of patients recover. Most still don't, though.

It is so scary to think of being in a coma, being alive but not alive. And it is worse to think about being in that state and being conscious. As a doctor quoted in the article explains, "The thought of coma, vegetative state, and other disorders of consciousness troubles us all, because it awakens the old terror of being buried alive. Can any of these patients think, feel, or understand those around them? And, if so, what does this tell us about the nature of consciousness itself?"

Elegy on Toy Piano

I just finished reading this fabulous fabulous book of poems by a fabulous fabulous writer. The poems are so cool -- they incorporate technical scientific language and imagery with lyricism and humour into these strange and distinctive poems. Funny harsh poems questioning existence and nothingness. Poems which can be read too fast and must be read again. A book of poems in which I like everyone so much I can't choose a favorite. Poems packed with great, swiftly moving lines so that it becomes impossible to isolate the perfect phrase, because each is seamlessly woven into the whole. I love Dean Young.