Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

Look, we all knew it was going to happen one day, we knew it every time he taunted a tarantula or straddled a disgruntled croc, and I know I'm not the only one who found it impossible to watch his shows without yelling "Oh you are SO asking for it, dude!" at regular intervals, but that doesn't mean it's not a little bit shocking and a lot bit sad to hear that Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin was taken out for good by a stingray today while filming a show off the Great Barrier Reef.

And I don't want to hear any "I told you so"s from the peanut gallery, not even when you learn that the show he was filming was called "Ocean's Deadliest," because as annoying as Steve Irwin could be (I've always preferred that South African guy Nigel Something who swims with the sharks), I demand a moment of respect for a guy who loved scary animals with such fervent lunacy. For reals.

In case you start wondering what happened to all my sea-life posts, please note that LEVIATHAN (Lovers of Entertainment featuring Various Insurrections of the Abyss Told as Hydrographic Adventure Narratives) now has its own blog, so much of that material can now be found over there. I encourage you to drop by and sample our wares, including

- an exploration of the nautical roots of the term "skylark"

- coverage of the NYTimes' report that manatees are not dumb, just weird

- an impassioned case for the taxonomic reclassification of Peter Lorre as an aquatic organism

Highly worthwhile, obviously.

A final note on The Da Vinci Code, which I finished last night: if this book is to be believed, it takes a brainiac team including a well-published British Royal Historian, a world-famous Harvard symbologist, and a Parisian forensic cryptologist about 75 pages to solve a riddle that a young junior professor of 18th-century literature can figure out before reading the last line. I'm not kvetching, and I'm not boasting. I'm just saying that I think I should be more famous and better paid.

I did keep turning the pages right up until the very end, too enthralled with yelling the answers and impending plot twists to the characters even to get up and refill my wine glass. Which, in this reader's estimation, is a pretty fun way to spend a cold evening.

OK, enough of this Dan Brown business. When was the last time we had a good shark post? Or, for that matter, a good robot post? Do you see where I'm going here? Could it be ... robot sharks?

Pretty damn close. According to Discovery News, the Pentagon is funding research into neural impants that will turn everyday, run-of-the-mill sharks into "Stealth Sharks."

"The Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails," said the report, carried in Saturday's edition.

"By remotely guiding the sharks' movements they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted," the article said.

Without even mentioning the ethical issues of taking endangered wild animals and transforming them into remote-controlled drones of the U.S. military, it seems to me that this is a Very Bad Idea. Have these people never seen The Day of the Dolphin (the Oscar-nominated film in which George C. Scott and his hot lab-partner/wife teach dolphins to speak English by forging creepy paternal bonds with them and then watch in horror as their humanoid dolphin-son is abducted and used in a plot to assassinate the president)? Have they never seen Deep Blue Sea (in which a team of scientists have the bright idea to cure Alzheimer's by injecting mako sharks with a serum to make their brains grow really, really big and then are shocked when the sharks get really, really smart and take over the lab and eat everyone, including LL Cool J's parrot)? Is our government really funding a project to develop A Button that controls the minds and wills of a global Army of Sharks? Is no one on the Pentagon's payroll to ask questions like, What if the bad guys happen to get the shark remote? What if rewiring the brains of the ocean's most ferocious and ancient creatures doesn't exactly line up with the current national agenda? What if the sharks turn out to be as clever as they are in every movie scenario of this sort and turn around and eat us all en route to inheriting the earth?

For the second time in this post, I cannot help but feel that I have untold marketable skills that are not being put to use.

I'm running off to copy syllabi for the first class of the spring semester, but had to drop in with more DIY encephalopodic fun.

Meet the Ninja Squid, creation of the brilliant beadgirldesigns and brought to you by the super-cool, like-Ebay-but-craftier website Etsy.

I also neglected to mention the other day that I learned of the Knitted Squid Hat from the BookCrossing Chit Chat forum, whence the link for the Ninja Squid also came.

Is it time for Second Christmas yet?

Because last night I found myself watching (horror of horrors) Ghost Whisperer starring the queen of insipidity herself, Jennifer Love Hewitt. (Who, incidentally, is slated to star in a film called She Had Brains, a Body, and the Ability to Make Men Love Her, which is ironic in every way imaginable. The IMDb plot summary reads: "Jennifer Love Hewitt plays a young Odessa, Texas housewife and former homecoming queen who became one of the city's most popular hookers until she, her bordello sisters and 68 prominent Odessa residents were arrested in a scandal that shook Texas." I shall have to see this movie.) Back to CBS: I was so captivated by the sheer fact that I was home alone on a Friday night watching such dross that I couldn't move, and proceeded to watch Close to Home, Numb3rs, and half the local 11 o'clock news before peeling my eyeballs off the television, to the immense relief of my poor, tortured brain.

Now, if I had cable, I could have watched National Geographic's Dog Whisperer instead, which looks fascinating, and would have saved me the plunge into the greatest shame spiral any non-alcoholic Friday night has ever witnessed.

I had planned to get up early and work today, but I stayed up late into the night reading The Moor's Last Sigh (fan-fucking-tastic), which cut into said plan. Now the least I can do as I caffeinate my way into the second half of this dreary Saturday is at least try to focus on something a bit more upbeat than my depressed sleeping patterns, my missing boyfriend, my mind-fucking job search, and the CBS Friday night lineup. Thus I give you the giant squid.



While in New York recently, I visited the American Museum of Natural History, which has been one of my most favorite places in the whole wide world since I was a little, little girl. They have, of course, added a big shiny new section with a planetarium and lots of physics-centered exhibitions since then, because Natural History (as my very educated little sister sillygirl84 explained with stunning erudition) in an archaic category that now contains all those embarrassing elements of 19th-century thought that could not migrate into the modern scientific categories of Biology and Organic Chemistry and such. So now the old section of the museum, with its uncanny dioramas of stuffed natural specimens, among which are scattered, without categorical distinction, models of things that for technical reason couldn't be stuffed and mounted, like giant squids and Native Americans, is (despite the integration of video displays representing the "real" natural world) less an educational exhibition than a hallowed monument of an earlier moment of American scientific and historical culture that we prefer now to hold at a polite distance from the higher technologies of Enlightened Knowledge.

But in the corner of the Deep Sea room, there's a menacing diorama of a giant squid attacking the head of a sperm whale. Walking through that dimly lit room from the upper level, down the stairs, under the suspended arch of blue whale, and across the quiet expanse of floor is so much like plunging into the briny deep that when you come face to face with this horrific spectacle, less Discovery Channel than Melville epic, it's really freaking scary. By some trick of the light (I think), there appears to be no glass between you and the enormous, squid-entwined head of the whale, which produces a visceral thrill very different from the cinematic excitement of watching big animals on TV.

It's so cool.

It's alive! ALIVE!!!

So here's to the giant squid, which (as you may recall) was photographed alive for the first time just a few months ago. In honor of this glorious creature, I'd like to direct you to my new favorite procrastination outlet, Poor Mojo's Almanac(k), which features a very informative Giant Squid FAQ, which are answered by none other than the great squid himself. In fact, through this site you too can approach the giant squid with any of your pressing questions, such as how to quit smoking, how a sperm whale manages to eat a giant squid, and the giant squid's position in the perennial debate on boxers or briefs. Also, you can get instructions on how to knit a squid hat for baby. I invite any- and everyone to knit me squid hats for the new year.

Go visit Poor Mojo and have a merry, squiddy ol' time.

Those of you paying close attention to the fascinating and often sordid details of my day-to-day life will know that, back in Providence, a small group of friends and I would regularly convene to watch sea-creature and maritime adventure movies. What began as a casual Shark Movie Night quickly became an institution, and a momentous one at that, which shall henceforth be known as Lovers of Entertainment featuring Various Insurrections of the Abyss Told as Hydrographic Adventure Narratives.

Last week, a founding member of LEVIATHAN (known elsewhere as Z) sent an alarming message to the membership that I thought fit to distribute more widely, considering the grave nature of the issue at hand:

Dear Friends,
I write to alert you to a hideous travesty of all we hold sacred, now about to unfold itself at a theater near you. I refer to the forthcoming film, grievously mistitled "The Squid and the Whale." "Oh goody," you might think, "that is sure to be a rip-roaring nautical yarn of the sort I love best, replete with ferocious cephalopods and cetaceans locked in a variety of uncomfortable-looking combat positions. Perhaps some hapless swimmers will be entertainingly savaged by these noble sea-beasts!" But no, should you think thusly, you would be sadly mistaken. For "The Squid and the Whale" is in fact yet another trivial domestic farce, a coming-of-age story in which the mighty maritime monsters of the title are reduced to mere *metaphors* for some snivelling adolescent's parents. Ooh, how terrifying! Mummy and daddy carping about visitation arrangements! Fie, say I! This is beneath the dignity of the lowliest scallop! Not even the (admittedly quite fetching) presence of Anna Paquin can rescue such a cinematic miscarriage from the scorn it so richly deserves heaped upon it. Please do your utmost to teach a lesson to the pandering ninnies who would capitalize on the sacred awe a title such as "The Squid and the Whale" inspires in the bosom of every god-fearing American to pawn off such piddling nonsense on an unsuspecting public. Demand accountability!

Yours in Righteous Indignation,
Z>

Please join us in protesting the unwarranted abuse of sea creature references to sell tickets to middlebrow meditations on the feeble trials and tribulations of landlubber existence! Action taken might include: writing angry letters to the movie company, area cinemas, local government officials, and everyone else you know; picketing the movie's opening, preferably dressed as a squid and/or a whale; sneaking into the movie when it opens, sitting in the back row, and yelling, "Where's the squid?" and "Where's the whale?" at appropriate intervals, which is to say, every two seconds until you get kicked out of the theater.

Sitting in the Hope Street Cafe, working on the conclusion of my dissertation, thinking very erudite thoughts about Jane Austen and the material markers of gentry class distinction, and I realize I'm singing out loud along with *NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye," which is playing over the cafe speakers. And people are watching.

I took all of yesterday off and Z and I hopped a bus to Newport. We spent the first part of the afternoon basking in the sun on a beach of sand as fine as flour, the second part clambering over the treacherous rocks that constitute the famous Cliff Walk, and the last part sleepily munching on juicy shrimp and sipping a fruity syrah in a mostly deserted wine bar. We saw many varieties of sea scum during our Cliff Walk, and we took pictures of all of them: green scum, dried scum, big scum. Perhaps I'll post them later.

For my birthday, Z gave me (among other things) a cephalopod-shaped lighter. I've put the eBay image of this marvel below, but there's no way you can appreciate the magnificence of it without seeing it in action. His head flips open and spews a violent jet of fire, and the little markings on his body light up a phosphorescent blue. I've been calling him Squiddy, but I'm trying to think of something more fierce.



Z told me I was not to use Squiddy as an excuse to take up smoking, so now I have to think of something else I can regularly set on fire.

A friend of mine gave me The Facts of Winter, a lovely and perfect gift, except for the fact that I had already read it (see my journal entry). It is such a beautiful book, I can't bring myself to wild release it, but I was wondering if any of you were interested in reading it. I could start a special bookring. Let me know.

Saturday morning. Up early to finish Middlesex (more on that below), and torn between lazing about the house on the internet and going out into the world to be a participating member of the human race, for once, I compromised and decided to do the whole blogging-in-public thing that's so hot with the kids these days. So I found myself in Ocean Coffee Roasters on Waterman Street, a little underground hovel of a coffeeshop that has raised bad service to the level of an art form, and where I have, in the past, been able to leap onto one of a number of wireless networks haunting the place. Despite the bad service, I often gravitate toward Ocean because it's on my walk to campus and it is the only cafe in the vicinity that serves your coffee in an honest-to-god coffee mug, and offers at least the possibility (which is not to say the likelihood) that someone will come to the table and refill it. Fortunately, my friend Matt was working today, which meant more attentive service than usual. When he's not refilling coffee mugs and serving up hummus sandwiches, Matt plays the viola in a number of local experimental music outfits. He's my favorite waiter. Unfortunately, the wireless networks were unusually coy this morning and I couldn't get any to take for more than a minute at a time. So now I'm in the lobby of the Science Library across the street, securely fastened to the Brown wireless network. The SciLi (as the locals call it) is sunny and quiet, much more pleasant than the lobby of the (arts and humanities) Rockefeller Library (i.e. "The Rock," like the pro-wrestler-cum-action-hero), which is low-ceilinged and dim and inevitably full of anxious people with a discouraging, lost look about them. The lobby of the SciLi is all windows and light and even two trees—an atrium. With internet service.

I finally finished putting together my job application materials yesterday, and sent them off. I condensed a semester's worth of letter-writing, dissertation-abstracting, CV-arranging, syllabus-designing, and all associated revisings and rewritings into one week, and it sucked. But now that I've done it, I have to admit my advisors were right. Not only will it be easier to put this stuff together again in the fall, but I have a much clearer sense of what my project is about. Now I just have to finish writing it. Heh. My rewritten third chapter is due at the end of the month. The fourth, on novels of sensibility, by the end of the semester. That means my pleasure reading is likely to come to a screeching halt this spring as I dive into various 900-page efforts by members and satellites of the Bluestocking circle. *sigh*

This, week, however, in between bouts of work and despair, I read Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. The first 200 or so pages of this book were absolutely stunning in their playfulness and readability. It reminded me of nothing so much as diving into The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay last year—that blissful sense of remembering how much I love to read a good story intelligently told. As the book went on, it's not that it became bad; it just settled into standard "really good" novelistic prose. I don't mean this to sound too negative. This novel is certainly better than most books one might pick up to pass the time. Eugenides is a wonderful writer. It's just that the first third of this story is transcendent, and then it becomes simply very, very good. Kind of like The Corrections, which didn't have the same sort of trajectory (if anything, it had an opposite one, getting better as it progressed), but was similarly "good" with moments of the sublime.

Middlesex is now on its way to Flakes through a Wishlist Book Relay. The Book Relays are my latest form of BookCrossing addiction. The wishlist relays are particularly compelling. You scroll through the current offerer's wish list, and if you can send them a book from it, your name goes up and someone comes along and does the same for you. It is so compulsive that I actually found myself in Myopic Books looking for titles on other people's wish lists rather than my own, like I was willing to pay for the element of surprise. Some of my wishes recently granted were Neil Gaiman's Stardust (courtesy of marlene_tc), Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn (courtesy of Tribefan), and Johanna Sinisalo's Troll: A Love Story (courtesy of Zmrzlina).

Since I might not be able to read many non-dissertation books for a while, I've decided to start keeping track of all the books I buy and receive through BookCrossing. Acquisition is, after all, the next best thing to reading. The inspiration for this new tally actually comes from one of yesterday's purchases, Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree. But that will come in time. For now, I give you February's bounty (in addition to the titles mentioned above):

( Books Bought in February )

There may have been more that I can't recall right now. There have certainly been a few more in the last few days, but they'll have to wait for the March tally. Everything in its proper time and place, people.

One last note: if you live within leaping distance of an IMAX theater, go see James Cameron's latest deep-sea adventure, Aliens of the Deep. For one thing, there are some cool creatures. Yay for cephalopods. And they're in 3-D. But more than that, the film offers a glimpse into the bizarre world that is James Cameron's fantasy life. As far as I can discern, Cameron really wanted to build a spaceship and go looking for alien life on another planet. But since the technology could not be devised for such a journey (not for lack of urging on Cameron's part, I'm sure), he did the next best thing: built spaceships to go to the bottom of the ocean and pretend he's on another planet, looking for aliens. It's really pretty convincing. Less so, however, when he has computer animators simulate the diving crew actually encountering an alien-squid metropolis on Europa. In short: Earth is weird, and James Cameron's version of it is weirder.