Just bits and pieces today:

Kyra and I have been having an interesting discussion in the comments about books and films and audiences, and dirty sealed sections in girls' magazines, and while I don't think there's much point to bringing it out here, I do want to take a couple of minutes to look at just one of the points that has come up over the course of the last couple of days, which is the question of agency in spectatorship, and how that agency varies when watching films compared to reading books.

I spent today working on an essay about Blade Runner, and in researching that, I came across this fantastic quote from Jenna Tiitsman:

Our spectatorship is a selective subjectivity, an image created in the action of deciding what and how to see, all of which arises from an original atomic field.

Selective subjectivity. What a great way to put it. Let's all just wallow in her phrasing for a little while.

(As an aside, I've posted a couple of my uni pieces that have some bearing on this issue: a brief paper that I gave last week on the differences between science fiction films and novels here, and the essay I handed in today about the problems of genre in Blade Runner here. I haven't toned down the academics at all, but the first one in particular should be completely accessible - which is not to say that the second one is massively dense, either. My engineering mates get it ...)

Anyhow, I think Tiitsman has really hit the nail on the head with that one. It's a poststructuralist perspective, of course, which is something I tend to sympathise with -- that idea of ongoing construction of meaning. Poststructuralists are among the wankiest and most disliked social theorists -- uncharitable people might suggest that that's why I find myself so drawn to them - birds of a feather and all that true stuff.

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My favourite Indonesian meal is beef rendang, and I've just made it for the first time from a packet which is not the packet recommended by my Indonesian friend's mum. It's delicious, but seriously fucking spicy (for reference, rendang should be pretty mild). My tongue is burning.

I'm going to try making it from the packet I was given next week.

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"Oh, Bart, don't make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice."