More from Uncle Feemus's e-Mailbag

hey feemus sorry i missed our meeting today i had practice and then had to catch up on my calc hw can we reschedule for thursday at 7pm i really want to talk about my paper and what you think i should change.

Um, no. Of course, since there was no signature, I had to try to figure out from the email address precisely which student this was--three had not shown up for meetings. And notice that he is uninterested in his essay apart from instituting whatever changes he imagines I will suggest. This is what I call a "what do I need to do to get an A" meeting. It never works. To get an A you kinda need to have your own ideas.

Oh, and 7pm? Ha ha ha ha ha. Nice try, kiddo.

Dear Sir,
I am joining your class late. Will my grade be calculated from the time I join, or will I be penalized for the time I missed? Is there a time when we could meet so that you can help me get up to speed? I would be happy to buy coffee.

kindest regards,
Future Lobbyist of America

Ok, this one at least has punctuation. But are you kidding me? It's the fifth week of the semester! And while they don't pay me what I'm worth (which I'm convinced is incalculable), my job does at least pay me enough to buy my own fucking coffee (even if I have to listen to Cat Stevens to get it). And I love the "calculate my grade from the second month of the term" business--that's a pretty ingenius request, actually.

Hi Feemus,
Can you tell me where Memorial Hall is?

thanks,
Aporetic

Um...what? In the time it took to email me, you could have looked it up on the online freakin' campus map. And how the fuck should I know where Memorial Hall is? Do we even have a Memorial Hall?

Hi,
Here's my essay. Can you read it and get it back to me with comments in lecture today so that I can revise it before I turn it in?

Thanks,
Student Who Grew Up With Lots of Servants

Should I make a few phone calls for you while I'm at it? Maybe reschedule your squash game? Do you need a latte? To paraphrase my second grade teacher: Yes, dear, I can. But no, I won't.

Oh dear God I hate my job. When I started This Old Blog I was on a leave of absence. I was looking back over those posts and I think I was a lot calmer then. Sigh.

I have to remind myself that 75% of the students don't drive me to murderous daydreams and actually care about their education rather than just their grades and actually want to learn or at least want to not learn in respectable, if sullen, silence. I've got to work that into some kind of more succinct mantra.

Update: We have a new winner!! I like this one, because it's just so goofy. Plus, I like the kid.

Dear Feemus,
Are we expected to read the assigned readings?

thanks,
Hopeful Student Who Thought He'd Give it a Shot

Update update: A new contender, who gets bonus points for the Saturday email:

Hi,
I saw your email on the department website. I'm taking a class in your department and I can't remember my teacher's name and email address. I need to talk to her about an extension on the midterm. She has short blonde hair and she's about 5'7". Can you give me her email address?

Sincerely,
Hasn't Been to Class All Semester

Scale, Part Two

I'm still thinking about scale. The more I think about it, the more I think that representing shifts in scale is how a lot of great art achieves its effects.

There are, of course, other ways of defamiliarizing something: one can dislocate an object from its expected context, one can warp or disproportion it so that it has to be relearned or reimagined. But scale remains crucial somehow.

In my last post, I tried to think through the process of magnifying and/or miniaturizing of everyday objects and how this defamiliarizes them. Hence, of course, aestheticizes them.

I think this is true of verbal art as well. For poetry or prose, for realist or non-realist writing--all of it involves some distortion of scale. And again, I think this is done either through the microscope or the telescope.

In epic, for instance, everything is simplified and therefore amplified.

Achilles has no complicated inner life: "Sing, Goddess, the Rage of Achilles," the poem begins. It is ironically the flatness (in Forster's much abused terms) of the characters that gives the narrative its depth. The battle of injured merit against implacable authority needs to have everything else stripped away.

Otherwise, it would just be a whiny warrior and a crappy king.

There is a moment in Book 18 when Achilles mourns Patroclus, his friend who died fighting in Achilles' stead and he reflects on his refusal to fight: "I sat by my ships, a useless burden on the earth." In a man represented as possessing the full range of human emotion, this would be a poignant line. From Achilles, it is tragic.

This is true, I think, for other genres. What makes a thriller, say, interesting is that only the exciting bits of people's lives make it to the plane of representation.

How often, for instance, does Jack Bauer say, "Hold on a minute, I've really got to pee."*

Subtler emotional effects, as well, depend on being magnified by being isolated.

But the minaiturization is interesting, too. Think about Ulysses or anything by Henry James. Time is slowed down--the very act of thinking or of perceiving is defamiliarized by being recorded in minute detail. We think much faster than we can read Joyce writing thinking (say that 10 times fast) (or think it ten times s l o w l y).

And we notice detail much faster than James depicts perception. Time is distorted, ordinary objects are made numinous by the scrutiny and meanings given to them. The proportion is wrong, which is why we keep reading.

Well, not me. I can't stand Henry James. But you know what I mean.

*Of course, examples abound of what I'll call the "large scale" works attending to the small scale. Madame Bovary or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold are two example that pop immediately to mind as works that play vigorously with both scales. As, too, does James. It should also be noted that I haven't the foggiest idea of what I'm babbling about.

A Conceptual Artist Walks into a Bar...

I've been thinking about scale. When things are in their ordinary proportions, they are just that: ordinary. They are in a sense invisible to our intellects.

Changing the scale of something defamiliarizes it, concentrates it, focuses it. I think this is true whether the scale is large or small, but I'm not sure. So I imagined Christo, famous for his immense scale installations, discovering the small. I'm not sure if this is exactly as it would play out:

Christo walked into a bar and ordered a Perrier. The bartender dropped a paper cocktail umbrella in the glass as he handed it over. Everyone’s a comedian, Christo thought.

He pulled the tiny umbrella out and slid off the little pink rubber stop that kept it shut. He opened and closed it a few times—the hinge mechanism was a bit rough and it moved awkwardly at first but then more smoothly. Christo admired the balsa ribs and the cheap prettiness of the crepe paper fabric. It was a bright orange-red with surprisingly delicate ivy twisting around it, dusted with yellow blooms, rejoicing in their own flowerness. In the center of the umbrella, where the crepe paper appeared darker due to the density of the folds, Christo thought he saw the figure of a boy sitting on a sea wall sewing umbrellas. He wanted to unfold the paper to be sure, but he didn’t want to destroy the little toy. There were more, of course: a highball glass filled with them on the bar and, presumably, a whole box or boxes of them in a store room somewhere. How many of these were made, he wondered. How many in a day? In a year? Why did the artist choose to work on such a small scale? Who was the artist?

Did these umbrellas make the world more beautiful? Did they reorganize one’s perception of the world? Did the imbalance of scale and the irony of an umbrella immersed in liquid perform an important aesthetic action?

Christo wondered if anyone had ever been killed by a cocktail umbrella.

Christo started thinking small. Maybe snowglobes? A Reichstag snowglobe wrapped in a cocktail napkin.

Better than Ann Coulter

Ok, here's a quote from Gerald Schoenewolf, the man who wants to put an end to political correctness and the "victim culture" that it perpetuates:

When I tried to talk to anybody about my views, even educated people who I assumed would be open-minded, a glazed, hardened expression would come into their eyes. Before long they made it clear that what I was saying was heresy. If I persisted in these views their eyes would begin to gleam and they would throw the usual labels at me -- sexist, homophobe, bigot, racist. When I attempted to assert my views in my writings, my papers and books were either trashed (a typical reviewer dismissed my book, Sexual Animosity Between Men and Women, as the work of a "sexist") or, even worse, ignored.

Hilarious. Seriously.

This is a guy who's gonna teach us NOT to be victims??

This is what logic textbooks of the 22nd century will call the Larry Summers Fallacy: Asserting that if people don't agree with you, your exercise of free speech has been curtailed.

Christ Alldamnmighty, if I had a dollar for every time what I said was "trashed" or "ignored," then, I don't know. I'd have a lot of money. I bet there are billions of people RIGHT NOW who are ignoring my work.

Should I blame the conservatives? Are THEY the reason that I am being so widely ignored? Or is it because I am blogging rather shrilly on a very tired subject on a Sunday night when normal people are spending time with their families? Hmmm...it's easier to think that I am a victim of anti-free speechers who are ingnoring me on purpose than to think that people just aren't interested in my crackpot ravings.

Update: "Dr." Schoenewolf got his much vaunted PhD from the non-accredited Union Institute of Cincinnati, which serves the tri-state area through its distance learning programs. Just what I want in a health care provider.

The Ironing is Delicious

Former Attoney General John Ashcroft gave an interview with the New York Times. An excerpt:

Now that you have left your post as U.S. attorney general and are working as a lobbyist, would you still defend the president's willingness to disregard the Geneva Conventions in the treatment and torture of suspected terrorists?

I think there is a very sound argument for saying that those who violate the Geneva Conventions should not benefit from its provisions.

Um, do you think he understood the question? Is there some kind of brilliant logic hidden in there somewhere? Or does Ashcroft beleive that Bush shouldn't benefit from the Geneva Conventions?

I'm confused. But I remind myself that this is the guy who had the Justice Department spend $8,000 to cover up a statue's breast. I mean, c'mon--who can't find curtains for less that $8,000? That's just crazy.

This Just In: Christian Mistakes Marx for Jesus. Hilarity Ensues

My god, liberals can sure miss the point.

People are getting all worked up over Gerald Schoenewolf, a professional Homo-Changer, wrote an article in which he claimed that we should explore "other ways to look at race in America."

One "other way" that he mentions, is to look at slavery as a favor done to blacks, who got to move from "the jungle" of Africa to Europe or America where they were "in many ways better off."

"Jungle" seems not to be a geographical or ecological term for Schoenewolf, but some kind of a cultural marker. I don't really get that.

But liberals outrage just seems so misplaced. Are we really surprised that a guy who hates fags for a living might also have some other ideas that are a little unsavory? I mean, lots of folks are bigots. Not many of them make a career out of it.

But the essay itself is Hi.Freaking.Larious.

It's got a wonderfully wry pseudo-academic tone. One imagines that Schoenewolf is skewering those East Coast intellectuals that the populist right is always on about (and who the old money right is mostly friends with--it all gets very confusing). The thrust of the argument is that since Marx, we have valorized victimhood and have repressed the rights of non-victims to shape public discourse on social matters.

But my favorite bit is this:

The Industrial Revolution brought along with it a new class, the middle class of worker, and Marx decided that this new class was being victimized. Thus began the idealization of the underdog (oppressed) and the demonization of the top dog (oppressor).

I think I hurt something I laughed so hard. This is not coming from a Steve Forbes, this is someone from the Christian right.

Um, Mr. Schoenewolf, I think that the "idealization of the underdog" started a little before Marx. I kinda think is started with JESUS.

Oh, and anyone who thinks that the workers created by the Industrial Revolution were "middle class" doesn't know shit about history.

The really really funny thing about the article is how it framed itself as an anti-PC polemic; throughout the essay Schoenewolf whines that everytime he tries to say anything about race (like that slavery helped blacks) "he is quickly shouted down as though he [were] a complete madman."

I love the way the far right is so deadset against the "victim mentality" (and sure, who isn't?) except when it comes to society's real victims: white men. There, they understand the pain of the victims. This rhetoric pervades right wing speechmaking--even when they control the Presidency, the House, the Senate, and most of the wealth in the country, they still want to steal the tears of the poor.

Ok--I've strayed from the point of my post. Which was, I think, that liberals need to stop getting so shocked by all this. Of course the guy who thinks he can turn a Mary into a married is bound to have some slighly off ideas.

Liberals in this country tend to live under the assumption that if they point out how ridiculous something is, then it will help somehow. As though this Shoenewolf's supporters are going to say: "Hey there, I'm all for the gay-bashing, but do you really think that stuff you said about slavery and feminism was really fair?"

Bitch, please. Not gonna happen.

Maybe if we really care about civil rights, we should find some candidates who actually support civil rights. How many Democrats voted for the Marriage Protection Act?