The House Holds for Now

Well, last night didn't turn out so bad, did it? Not only did Obama win, but by the end of the night I was seeing people who normally avoid using the word "rape" even ironically for fear of triggering anyone's sensitive psychological state were happily joking about how Todd Akin had been "legitimately raped". Though the fact that he got a percentage of the vote at all remains worrying. Once again, I'm praising the American public for actually doing the very least it ought to do. I mean, taking out even the patriarchal complex the guy's words evince. How about we avoid electing people who are comfortable discussing with an air of authority things they obviously didn't bother to expend the tiniest bit of energy researching? To say nothing of the fact that Akin's and Mourdock's intentions were obviously to downplay the seriousness of a traumatic physical assault.

And it was a close race altogether. I'm at school now--already I heard students talking about how angry the results of last night made them. One guy talking about how all he wants to do is drive around his "big ol' V8". Could he be more of a caricature?

We finished watching The House of Usher--Corman seems to have co-opted the story for one about typically disaffected teenagers dealing with the crazy adult orthodoxy of the 50s. Kind of a low-rent Rebel Without a Cause. In contrast to Poe's work, Roderick Usher and his sensitivities are set up as alien and in opposition to the POV character. Corman takes a tale of the workings and susceptibilities of the human mind and turns it into a shot at those square adults. But, as I said before, it is campy fun.

We got into groups afterwards, because we can't do anything in this class without getting into fucking groups, to discuss the differences between the movie and the story and discovered that no-one in my group had bothered to read the story, which had been assigned almost a month ago. Though one person in the group said she didn't like it and thought it was "sick".

So maybe I'm not entirely unsympathetic to Corman for using the story to talk about how loony and self-absorbed modern American society is.