The Week in Review

Blog posts planned but not written:

1. Ridiculous conversation overheard on the bus.

2. Slightly hysterical ranting about Nicolas Sarkozy and how if he's elected the world will end.

3. Nostalgic post about how much better the Iran-Contra Hearings were than the Gonzales ones (from and entertainment perspective).

4. Bitching about my job (oh wait, I actually wrote that one).

5. A look back at the Larry Summers comments about women in the sciences.

6. A cautionary tale about eating sushi from the cafeteria (the gist of which would have been: "don't"; but the post would have been simultaneously touching and funny. As long as you find food poisoning touching and funny. Which maybe you don't. So maybe this was a post best left unwritten. But seriously, don't eat sushi in a place that also serves hamburgers and burritos).

But....the weather has been too damned nice. I have been trying to work myself up into my usual fever pitch of thin-skinned annoyance and self-congratualtory moral outrage, but it's too hard when the sun is shining and trees are finally starting to get leafy.

I sometimes think that if I moved to San Diego or somewhere like that I would lose all trace of personality.

Luckily, it's going to rain tomorrow so maybe I can get back to normal.

Of Hope and...Less Hope

I got this very charming email yesterday:

Feemus,
Sorry I missed class. I took a nap and set my alarm for 1am instead of 1pm. Can you believe it? Anyway, sorry, and I put my essay in your mailbox.

-Your New Favorite Student

Note the tone: contrite without snivelling. Note the information: all relevant material included, all bullshit omitted. Note mainly that the student is not asking ME to do extra work to make up for her absence.

This shouldn't be such a rarity, but it is. I think she might just get extra credit!!

Anyway, I was mooning about, my faith in studentkind restored, when I got this one:

Dear Feemus,
Will there be a penalty if I write on more than one author? I know you said to write on just one.

thanks,
AlreadyKnowsEverything

Now, they're asked to write one just one author because it increases the likelihood that they will actually say something interesting. Or just something. I have explained this rationale to them. It's too hard in a short paper to write about multiple works and show what's at stake in comparing them. These papers are inevitably some kind of summary.

The kid who wrote the email has ALREADY turned in a paper in which she simply catalogued where each "theme" (how, oh how, I HATE this word) appears in 5 different works. We talked about how this is not interesting.

But what pisses me off most is that she think that I'm some kind of referree, assigning "penalties" for infractions of some rigid set of arbitrary rules.

Is it summer yet???

"I Don't Recall"

How many times did Alberto Gonzales say that he didn't remember? 70?

That's a lot of not remembering.

But to claim that one doesn't remember, no matter how transparently false the claim, is to invoke radical epistemological uncertainty. It is a thing which cannot be disproven. And it works startlingly well.

What's more damaging from a PR standpoint is the matter of the missing emails. There is something more unsettling to us, I think, about the destruction of records than about being lied to.

The eighteen minute gap on the Nixon tapes. The shredded documents of the Iran-Contra affair. These deletions of public records became lightening rods for criticism.

I've been thinking a lot about why we are more bothered by these deletions than by other, equally damaging (and equally permanent) ways in which the government deceives us. And I think it has less to do with politics, or even deception, than it does with our anxieties about memory and the ways in which we connect ourselves up to our past.

In 5th century BCE, the technology of alphabetic writing was already a few hundred years old in Greece, but the practice of daily, personal writing was new (among those few who could afford such things). Plato theorized these journals, called "hypomnemata" [lit. "beneath memory], as a kind of artificial memory, recognizing at once their potential and the loss they entail.

On the one hand, they denaturalize our relationship to ourself--our memory becomes externalized, hypostatized, prosthetic. The technology of writing is a technology that enables forgetting. Literate cultures have vastly inferior memories to oral ones.

But the hypomnemata also permits us to become analytical and comprehensive. By expanding our natural memory, writing allows us to perform unnatural but enormously useful mental tasks.

I think that one of the reasons that the destruction of documents seems so much more threatening than even being lied to by our public official is that it is a concrete and visible violation of the (artificial) body politic. The enormous amount of activity, of process, that goes on in government is far more than anyone could remember, and our anxiety about how alienating is makes any violation even more grievous.

To say "I don't recall," no matter how patently false is to invoke a kind of forgetting that is familar to us all. To delete documents is to force a kind of forgetting that does permanent damage.

Just some Monday morning ramblings.