In other news...

-For starters, I'd forgotten how much I hate moth season in Denver. It usually lasts all of June--the city is filled with miller moths, which are small enough to somehow get indoors over the course of the day but large enough to leave big greasy-looking splotches when you kill one. I missed last year's, and the year before I seem to recall being not-so-bad because of a late freeze, so I'd all but forgotten about them, but my reaction to moths buzzing around my room at night is completely visceral and somewhat embarassing. Nothing quite like flailing at an insect lazily caroming around my room to make me feel like a kid again.

-I was watching "the Real World" tonight on MTV, and remembered a little essay by Chuck Klosterman I read at some point over the spring about how the Real World was more enjoyable than the vast majority of reality television (he cited Big Brother, but I think it applies to tv generally) because it utilized an enormous library of popular music. His argument was that the score to a Real World episode imbued all the conversations and clips with meaning by placing them in a context created by pop cultural associations with specific songs. The realization I had tonight was that this is, strangely enough, a direct application of some of the historiographic theory we read in one of my classes last semester--Hayden White's theory on historical emplotment. The distilled idea is that there are archetypal 'plots' available to a culture (tragedy, satire, heroic drama, etc) and that historians 'naturally' embed the events they describe into one or more of them in the process of historical writing. White describes this process as a critique of traditional histories, since actually human events contain far more complexity than can be conveyed once a plot has been (unconsciously) selected and used. This is exactly why playing "Black Hole Sun" during a conversation MTV has decided is a "turning point" is so... helpful to viewers. By providing signposts throughout their chronicle of the lives of the seven strangers chosen to live in a house together, MTV is able to emplot complex and decontextualized interactions into a recognizable narrative. And that's why I love "the Real World." Well, that and the fact that they chose Denver for this season; I'm hoping to find people to go downtown with me to cruise the bar scene, and, hopefully, get us on MTV, which, even though the network itself is so easy to put down for selling out, catering to pre-teens, and what have you, still would be pretty cool.