I've been slogging along all day long painstakingly writing a(nother) paper on The L-Word. There are aspects of this process that I find very engaging, but at the same time I'm reminded that critical work inevitably makes me want to flop around on the floor making incoherent "Grrr! Argh!"-type noises.

I just came back in from taking out the trash, and in my neighbors' flower gardens, I saw the most amazing, huge, whings-whirring-in-a-propeller-like-blur Sphinx Moth. It was so softly furred I wanted to stroke its back with my index finger, but I didn't want to frighten it away.

Some of my friends stopped by in the evening with a bounty from their vegetable garden: home-grown peaches, cucumbers, zucchini, and best of all, a fatly shellacked shiny eggplant! I ate one of the peaches, flesh still warm from the afternoon sun, in wet greedy mouthfuls over the kitchen sink.

And in honor of Friday Cat Blogging, I offer you a Still Life with Cat and Eggplant. I suppose, to be more accurate, it should be titled Still Life with Eggplant and Cat Obnoxiously Rifling Through Plastic Bag of Cucumbers.

And finally, Household Security has shockingly captured on camera the presence of an Eggplant Licker on the premises.

That's what I'm doing right now too: critical writing and floor growling. I feel your pain.

Okay it is big,purple and shiny. Why wouldn't you lick it? Hell I think I might be licking my screen.

G., I'm glad to be in good company, then! Floor growling solidarity sounds empowering.

And T., I agree that it is nothing if not an extremely lickable eggplant. I'm glad you think so too!

L., what's the gist of the paper? Or are you too argh-y to stand such a question?

I think you ought to change the title of "still life with cat and eggplant", since, although the eggplant appears to be still, the cat seems to be in motion. Is that cat licking the plastic bag? Why do your cats lick everything?

M. Luminous

It is the peach that caught my attention. There is nothing quite like a perfectly ripened peach.

E., the gist of the paper deals with how moments of meta-narrative in the show seem to both enact and critique anxieties of lesbian representation--anxieties of representation that have been reflected in both the hotly-contested reviews of the show, as well as in scholarly discourse regarding lesbian representation over the last decade or so (i.e., assimilationist visibility vs. marginalized invisibility, identitarian "authenticity" vs. Revlon Revolution "passing," second-wave vs. third-wave feminism, lesbian vs. post-lesbian, policing of various types of "negative" stereotypes). In looking at those moments of meta-narrative, I'm trying to suggest that they simultaneously manage to privilege the characters on the show as potentially authentic/natural/positive through contrasting them with highly constructed or problematic representations of women and/or lesbians, but at the same time the meta-narrative also repeatedly foregrounds the fact that the characters are also themselves fictional and constructed, thus highlighting the impossibility of representation to adequately capture some sort of "essence' or to stand in for the real. (I don't know if that made any sense.)

Luminous, I don't know why my cats are all such lickers. It seems as if they are suffering from some sort of oral fixation, doesn't it?