My favorite thing for the week: my Glade Wisp. If you haven't seen the Glade Wisp on television or become lucky enough to have one it is a magical air freshening device, which is just a little plasticy thing that sits on the table. You might respond by telling me that there are many air freshening devices which are made of plastic and sit on tables. You would be right. The cool part about this one is that the way it freshens the air is by taking this bottle of fragrance oil (perfume) and poofing out a little poof of it into the air. The reason I wanted this particular air freshening device was because you can actually see the little poof it kicks out into the air. I mean, if you watch the little thing every couple seconds you see a little Wisp (creative fuckers huh) of smoke-like stuff come out of it. Every time it does that I get a smile on my face. I don't know why that is, but it rocks. I have named mine The Poofer. I think Katie is getting sick of hearing "The Poofer just poofed!" every couple minutes that I am not absolutely absorbed in either a book or a television program. At some point I am going to try to die the perfume-stuff blue and see if my poofer will poof blue. If your house smells bad or you like things that do really simplistic but neato actions every now and then my poofer came with a bunch of coupons for three bucks off a new poofer, so I can hook you up.
The worst coincedence ever happened tonight, we were coming home from debate practice and decided that we needed ice cream. This was not a bad decision, in fact, it was a very good decision, because we technically had custard, and that custard was hella good, and I liked it. Anyway, on the sign at the Andersons, where we got the custard, it said something like "Come See the Tigers and Wolves." That didn't mean anything to me at the time, I assumed it was some joke or something that I didn't get, but we walk up to the door and there was a little flyer which indicated that on Saturday the 25th and Sunday the 26th there would be baby siberian tigers and baby wolves at the fucking Andersons. There are going to be baby tigers, quite arguably the cutest fucking things on the entire fucking planet, within like 2 miles of my house. I could walk over to see the baby tigers. Unfortunately, I will not be able to take that walk. Instead, I will be at King's College, in beautiful Wilkes-Barre, PA at the first debate tournament of the year. I mean, I have no problem going to the tournament and since Katie is going to be there I obviously want to accompany her rather than sit here alone except for the couple hours or so each day I would spend with the tigers. Regardless, I will be missing the baby tigers right down the street. That is too bad. I need to find some tigers. I suppose zoos are good for that.
I know the previous two topics were not entirely related to each other, but this one is arguably entirely less related. When we were back home in Minneapolis and sitting at Katie's rents place watching a baseball game, Katie found this article in Gourmet magazine. It was ostensibly a reporter covering the Maine Lobster Fest, or MLF. It did that, of course, it discussed the world's largest lobster cooker, the main eating tent, the cooking contests and the like. That was a couple solid pages. The other 5-7 pages were a discussion of the ethics involved in the cooking and consumption of lobster. Of course the article, written by David Foster Wallace I should mention, seemed to recognize the obvious problems involved in his covering this event by going off in such a fashion, whether the ethical questions were really under the purview of the readers of Gourmet magazine, who for the most part, are probably l-oo-bster fans. I would imagine that anyone who has read this blog can probably imagine what I thought of his argument (which I should mention, ultimately concludes that lobster is murder, at least concludes that in a mild fashion with several caveats etc.) and anyone who has watched the Good Eats on lobster would undestand that in this I am especially convinced. Nonetheless, I won't go into the fact that the closest living relative of the lobster is the cockroach or the grasshopper. If you are willing to crush a bug in your house or not get upset that the shit you clean off of your windshield after a long drive is fucking millions of various species of insects then you should have no problem at all killing a lobster in order to eat it. Maybe you wouldn't want to deal with the act yourself, but again, this is not the subject of my discussion.
The thing I wanted to mention concerned a tangential part of the essay, his comments on the tourist nature of the event. I haven't explicitly read this argument somewhere else, but I get the idea that it does exist in some form or another. Since the MLF is pretty much the best reason to come to Maine. I mean, I guess technically just loobster is the best reason to come to Maine, but the MLF is the king of all lobster eating occassions. Wallace's concern (I will see if I can find this article and paste the link, heres a link to an article about the article there are a bunch of other ones, apparently this was a much bigger deal than I realized) is about the authenticity of the event, whether the locals actually come, whether it is part of Maine and part of lobster culture. (THE POOFER JUST POOFED!!) I guess the substance of the argument was that Wallace didn't understand why anyone would want to participate in tourism, and (in this respect I may be either boiling him down too much or putting a philosophical slant to his essay which wasn't there, I don't have the original in front of me, you can check it out yourself) since your presence at the event as tourist automatically destroys that event in its authenticity. Its like the Schrodinger's cat "indeterminacy" argument, (the best description I've ever heard is written by Douglas Adams in one of the Dirk Gently books, but the jist is to imagine a cat is in a sealed box with a radioactive particle which has exactly a 50% chance of decomposing into a compound which will kill the cat and a 50% chance of simply remaining neutral, the argument is then that the cat is both alive and dead until the moment we observe the result, you can find a better and certainly more scientific explanation with a quick google search, but I will leave that to your personal taste) once you are there to see it you aren't just an observer, your presence alters things.
There are a couple problems I had with this part of the argument, primarily the whole notion of the authentic event, I've never really gone for the romanticism that accompanies this attitude towards small town rituals. Like these fisherpeople, who are just fucking people who happen to live where the lobster do notably, they aren't a different species of homosapiens, have some innate connection to the waters of the Northern Atlantic. Regardless, the response I wanted to mention came up in another piece of reading I was doing before class one morning, Don Delilo's White Noise . I am referring to a section wherein two characters go to an old barn which is a tourist trap entitled "The Most Photographed Barn in the World" and is always surrounded by people with cameras taking snapshots. The argument presented there is that you are there precisely not to capture the barn in its authenticity, because that barn no longer eixsts. The most photographed barn in America depends on the fact that you are there to photograph it. In contrast to the authenticity of the event that Wallace is out to protect, Delilo sets up the "aura of the barn," which is a consequence of its popularity. The aura envelops the barn, whatever might be underneath it is never seen, you are there to experience the aura which is the common element of anything "tourist." Anyway, thats why I love Wisconsin Dells and the State Fair and rest stops and the twine balls and the like, at least thats part of it.
Maybe some unity next time.
Peace,
MB-K
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