Nadeen Boman's Breast Implants; Every Jay McInerney Book Stolen

Summer's here, and everyone knows what that means: a four-month paid holiday courtesy of a SSHRC grant. Ordinarily I'd feel guilty about taking your tax dollars, but my old SSHRC money went to break a car lease and pick up a new 2010 Jaguar XJ, so this new SSHRC cash is tucked into my pocket, later to be dropped on a craps table at Fallsview Casino.

Fuck. Have you glanced at the competition results from this year's SSHRC offensive? This is truly a glimpse into the mashing of priorities that stick the honest working-stiff in a Regent Park apartment where mentally ill tenants piss and shit in the stairwells while the gov. cries poor. Seventeen grand to Kim Havens for her dissertation, "Resistance Themes in French Postcolonial Literature for Children." Seventeen grand to Jessica MacEachern for her dissertation: "Eyes roving over an empty hog's skull: poetic perceptions of constructed neutrality." Seventeen grand to Adrienne King for her dissertation, "Edith Wharton and existentialism: a reconsideration of Wharton's milieu." Seventeen grand to Erin Julian for her dissertation, "Dangerous boys: the performance of female communities in Ben Jonson's Caroline drama."

Outrageous. Absolutely outrageous.

I know that I'm being an asshole about this, but it's just another kind of investigative journalism or self-loathing. Call it either. You know that if you make twenty grand a year and you need a root canal you're stuck pulling out that tooth with string and a doorknob. But if you're a grad student the gov./CUPE'll basically re-build your body from scratch as long as your paper on Wooff's Harbinger Farms shows some progress. I remember sitting through a CUPE meeting where some SSHRC recipient was bitching over the fact that CUPE's provider wouldn't cover her condom costs. The system's been fucked for so long that no one should be surprised when tenure turns into a memory, and profs aren't earning $140 K/year for teaching two seminar courses.

So that just shows you where my mind's at right now. It's the reason why I've been watching so much TV. And is anything more habit-forming than shows where young, attractive women try to lose weight? Chief among those: Bulging Brides, and The Last Ten Pounds Boot Camp. I love this Tommy Europe character. Here's a personal trainer with a 100% success rate; a guy who takes an overweight chick off her couch and six weeks later has her running a ten km sprint up a mountain. The other star of the show's a nutritionist named Nadeen Boman. Now because I'm so into this thing and have watched dozens of episodes I've noticed something completely unimportant and maybe even perverse: Nadeen has a new chest. The first season she was wearing camo. tops and earth tones. Suddenly she's Ms. Cash--the woman in black. And not just black tops; I'm talking about black everything. Black tights, black tanks, black cardigans, black sweaters. She could be pregnant and you'd never be able to tell. But every so often she turns to the side or the light's just right and it looks like her breasts are much, much bigger. As far as I'm concerned, that's amazing. I have no idea whether it's just an optical illusion, but that's just my guess.

As far as the McInerney goes, I went to a university library to pick up some Jay and it was all gone. The online catalogue said that the books were all shelved, but every single JM book was missing from the stacks. So, because I felt like it, I took five or six Foucault texts and shelved them around the building, on different floors. Maybe that's crazy, but it'll really piss off some too-literate grad. students looking to show how Dungo "controls the discourse" in Matt Cohen's The Bookseller.

If only they had a wood-burning fireplace.