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Tuesday, May 09, 2006
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The Full Panoply. As with the Jetta commercial (see a couple of posts down), it’s not the overtly sensationalistic elements of another advertisement about which people are talking that strike UD, but the language. This ad -- a self-advertising personal website to be precise - features a professor, someone a reputable university -- University of Southern California -- has hired to teach writing, even though, as her website reveals, she cannot write. You have to go back to the late lamented Harriet Miers Blog!!! for anything like the Diane Blaine blog. In fact, if like me you’ve been missing the Blog!!! something terrible, Blaine's a godsend. UD finds the fact of a writing professor who can’t write far more scandalous than the three topless photos of herself she’s put on her page, photos which have so offended the local tv news that it’s put up a slideshow. Madame Blaine couldn’t be happier -- she has posted a direct appeal to literary agents -- and she remains keen to offer on her webpage further testimony of “the full panoply of my rich and meaningful life.” The photos, she explains, are “an intertextual homage to Ingres.” Beyond this gesture, she means through them “specifically to confront and erase the body loathing that my culture foists on us women.” Naturally Blaine continues to be attacked by “my enemies” --- people who can only think of “upholding hegemonic ideologies, consciously or not, that perpetuate oppression… including hierarchies of racism and sexism among others.” But let them persist in belittling “someone like me who is demonstrably talented.” Ms. Blaine will respond with her much-remarked “wisdom and peace and compassion. …In my morning meditation I have been asking that these people who seem so infuriated by my existence find the peace that I have found and continue to seek and to spread.” |