Ridiculous.

[danuv]

It would seem the gods of focus were with me today. I was able to get up and finish Introducing Foucault , something I was beginning to doubt would ever happen, and I even somewhat understood things. A little. Sometimes. I hope. I think I got the general idea of why he gets brought up so frequently in so many of my books.

After I completed that task my mother came by for lunch (Southern breakfast, biscuits, sausage, eggs, grits, bacon and gravy) and took the kids away. Tomas got off work a bit early and we spent an hour and a half getting to the movie theater that is a ten or fifteen minute drive away. Oh Marta. We had a fantastic dinner at a healthy little cafe around the corner from the movie theater that is the sort of place that plays Belle and Sebastian. There can't be too many -sorts- of those places. Anyway, the sandwiches were quite good and I got a big side of spinach/strawberry/orange/almond/goatcheese/basildressing salad. Were it not such an enormous fucking pain in the ass to get there via Marta (like if we had a CAR) we would probably eat there (or from there, the takeout business seemed to be booming) much more often.

I was hoping that the new Leonard Cohen documentary would be playing but alas, it hasn't opened here yet. It was a toss up between a comedy and a film noir rerelease. Since the noir had a script by Graham Greene and was directed by the same person that directed The Third Man... well The Fallen Idol won. You also don't get too many opportunities to see films like that in a theater here. If only we had a theater in Atlanta that showed older movies. Surely there would be enough interest in one?

While waiting for a train later, Tomas gave me his description of life in WoW.

"You go walking around until you see a guy with a big yellow exclamation point over his head. You walk up to him and say, 'Hello!'. He in return says something like, 'Ya know, if there's anything I hate in life it's Kats. Please go kill 20 Kats.' So you go and you kill 20 Kats and you come back to the guy and he says, 'Way to go! But what I really hate more than Kats is TomKats! Go and bring me back 35 TomKat paws!' So you go and you find the TomKats and proceed to kill them. Of course getting 35 TomKat paws isn't as simple as kiling 35 TomKats because apparently not all TomKats have paws. Some of them must hobble around on their stubby leg stumps until you kill them. So you kill oh, 80 or so TomKats and you return to the guy with the paws and he says, 'Excellent! TomKats are awful but the thing that has really ruined my mood is a big TomKat named Xavier. Go kill him.' Only what Exclamation dude fails to tell you is that you can't actually kill Xavier till you've gained another 20 levels at which point you could care less about killing him. So you turn to the next guy with an exclamation point over his head and he says, 'Ya know, if there's anything I hate in life it's Thudrumppers. go kill 20 for me!'"

Sounds about right.

Comments

[tinctoris.livejournal.com]

Quest givers in WoW have some serious anger issues.

[macaholic.livejournal.com]

what is the point?

[danuv.livejournal.com]

That's just how you level. Once you're done leveling there are other things to do with other people apparently. I don't really expect to do any of those things because I don't like playing with other people which really makes a game like WoW essentially pointless. Basically I farm (do things to make money). It's pointless too but it's something I can do for an hour or so at a time when my brain needs to shut the fuck up. Like the virtual version of fishing but without all that nature and crap. :P

[macaholic.livejournal.com]

lol

I would rather just play SimCity.

[apeystar.livejournal.com]

Yeah that sounds like WOW to me. heh.

[thehangedman.livejournal.com]

Such is the way of the MMORPG. Especially that part about creatures seemingly not having certain body parts while others do.

[brododaktula.livejournal.com]

How was Introducing Foucault? I haven't read it and Steven said the only worthwhile part was the actual sex stuff, as I recall. Although now that I think about it the sex on the pool table may have been Sartre and I could be totally confused. Except I am pretty sure he thought the Foucault book sucked.

[danuv.livejournal.com]

I don't really have anything to compare it to. Nothing in there about sex on a pool table that I recall. Does Steven have an alternate book to recommend that doesn't suck? :P I have The History of Sexuality: An Introduction by Foucault sitting here staring at me... glaring at me really. I'm quite certain it will be incomprehensible and make me feel like a total idiot. Not that I've tried it yet.

[brododaktula.livejournal.com]

It's more that he went through a phase where he was reading nothing but those Introducing books, and this was the only one I remember him hating. Unless I'm really confused and you read a different book. Was this the comicky one? I'm basically sure the pool table was Sartre. I forget what semi-sordid stuff this one dealt with rather than Foucault's actual theories.

I think the best way to deal with Foucault is probably just reading him, keeping in mind that his views on classics and sometimes other facts are pretty wacky, because his theories are useful. Just guessing from your interests, the stuff about asylums and the Panopticon rather than sex per se might be most useful to you. But I haven't read as much as I should, even though this was supposed to be the year when I went back to reading about philosophy.

We have a copy of The Foucault Reader around the house, but I haven't actually read it myself. It looks like it might be a good starting place if that's what you actually want. There's absolutely nothing wrong with not liking Foucault unless you mean my pet turtle of the same name, because adoring him is pretty much mandatory.

[danuv.livejournal.com]

It's the 'Chava doesn't cope well with abstract thinking' problem that I'm worried about. :) He keeps getting brought up in the feminist art theory/history books I've been reading lately which is why I was trying to get some grasp on his ideas. They are the sorts of books that tend to assume you have some working knowledge of his ideas, which of course I don't.

[brododaktula.livejournal.com]

Well, in that case, his Wikipedia entry looks decent to me from what I know and that would at least let you grab whatever seems most relevant to whatever you're reading. I think the real trouble you have is that in the 20+ years (ye gods!) since his death he's become sort of passe among a lot of feminist theorists who don't like his incomplete and male-centric theories on sexuality, so you're probably running into books that expect not just that you know about him but that you know all the commentary about why he's loopy and inadequate in your particular field.

His own ideas are not all that abstract (or not in the oooooh, how big and abstract way, I think) but can be really, really hard to express, which in some ways amounts to the same thing. I guess I can't really help much!