This Blog is Stolen Property

Troy Davis

2008-03-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

I've been an absentee blogger. Busy times in Feemusland.

Here's my take on the primaries:

Shut up, Geraldine Ferraro.
Shut up, Bill Clinton.
Shut up, John McCain.
Shut up, Ralph Nader.

Here's my take on the Spitzer scandal:

A thousand dollars????

and

Shut up, Dershowitz.

But here's something important. A possibly innocent man, and one who certainly has gotten shafted by the "justice" system just had his appeal for a new trial denied. There's no physical evidence and 7 out of 9 eyewitnesses have recanted their testimony.

Even if one supports the death penalty, this is a gross misapplication.

Here's a petition to get this man the new trial that he deserved.

Put the Plastic Right Inside the Machine

2008-02-29T18:35:00.001-08:00

I have had a strange month. I have been away from home now for 29 days. I haven’t slept in the same bed for more than two nights in a row. Some of this was a week’s planned vacation, which, due to a variety of circumstances, got flanked by other travel plans.

One of these other circumstances was a campus visit in Los Angeles, at a job I’d interviewed for in December. They offered me the job.

I live now in the Northeast, but I’m from the Northwest. And if you’re from the West, and anywhere north of Monterey, I think it’s encoded in your DNA to believe that Los Angeles is the place where quality of life and human decency go to die. It's all smog and gangs and plastic titties as far as we're concerned.

I've noticed that there's not quite the same antipathy to SoCal in New England, where California is still sort of aspirational. But then again, New Englanders still eat something called "boiled dinner," so there's no accounting for taste.

I'm kidding, sort of.

So while I was wrestling with the decision about the job I went on my vacation, which coincidentally was a hiking trip in California's central coast area. My hiking buddy is an old friend who lives in the Northwest but is French. We got to the top of some very pretty mountain which looked out over a beautiful valley, the sparkling ocean, and about four other gorgeous mountain ranges, and he asked, "So why exactly is it that everyone hates California?"

My first reaction was to clarify: "We don't hate California, we hate Southern California." But he pointed out that two years ago we had an equally terrific hiking trip, and a more visually stunning one, in the Mojave. He also pointed out that I actually like Los Angeles when I'm there, just not when I think about it.

So I tried harder to explain why we have this fascination with and simultaneous antipathy toward Southern California.

I thought through all the stereotypes and all the resentments and all the (admittedly unfair) generalizations.

California is too big. It's too powerful. It has too much say in the government.

California has an enormous rich/poor gap. Rich hypocrites go on about meritocracy while hiring labor at less than a living wage.

California is violent. Drugs and racial hatred run rampant.

California is shallow. It cares only about appearences. It's a cultural wasteland that churns out garbage that we consume only to hate ourselves for it.

Then I realized something. I told my friend: "California is for us what the US is for Europe." If Oregon is California's Canada, then California is America's America: big, rich, powerful, and vulgar.

But hell, I like America. I like California. I am taking the job.

Do I Need Anger Management, or Does the World Need to Be a Less Annoying Place?

2008-02-06T08:37:00.000-08:00

I have been on eight airplanes in the past seven days. Not for vacation. I am crabby.

Seriously, what's up with people?

On one flight, I sat next to a young woman, about 19 or 20. The flight attendant asked everyone to turn their cell phones off. The young woman continued to text-message with glassy-eyed urgency. The stewardess came by and asked her to turn it off. She raised the "just a minute finger" until the stewardess walked off. And she continued to click out her life's story as though the fate of the world rested on her getting out: "lol ur funny i cnt w8 2 c u." The flight attendant asked AGAIN for everyone to put their phones away. But this girl never did. She tried a couple of times, but it was like the Ring--it just kept exerting some dark and inexorable force over her. She'd try to put it in her bag, but then she'd flip it up again and text some more. She continued to text all the way through take-off until, presumably, she had no more service. But she kept checking and clicking throughout the flight. She tried to read a book at once point, but after 30 seconds, she flipped open her phone again and clicked out some more crucial messages. Was it really for this that we have opposable thumbs?

On another flight, I sat next to the whistler. He didn't whistle a tune. Or even a note. Just this hollow monotonous whine. Was it wrong to want to stab him with my plastic fork? If so, how wrong?

My next travelling companion was an aging Lothario, the kind of middle-aged straight white guy who still wears a moustache. The kind of guy who wants to talk about money and business. And, in this case, who wanted to keep ringing for the stewardess so he could flirt with her. Which is gross. BUT the stewardess hung around in the aisle (the flight was only about 1/2 full) and flirted back. And then kept going to the intercom thingy and flirting over the loudspeaker so that the whole cabin had to be subjected to comments like: "You guys are just the most fun passangers. Even if [giggle] some of you want to [giggle] tease me. You know who you are." Sweet Savonarola on a Spit, what a nauseating pair.

At this point, a hijacker would almost be a welcome sight.

Gregor Samsa, You've Been Very Bad!

2008-02-02T20:21:00.000-08:00

New favorite sentence from a student essay:

"Greek tragedy is full of rape and insect."

My Worst Student

2008-01-29T07:24:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of bad students out there. There was the kid who never came to class and then questioned my commitment when I refused to hold extra private sessions to get him "caught up."

There was the student who I think was stalking me. That guy really hated me. He would make chopping motions near his throat whenever I saw him.

There was the student who thought that her B- reflected my lack of understanding how hard she worked on her final project and not (as was the case) my infinite generosity in the face of banal and sloppy work. After her first request for a new grade, I emailed her the portion of the university handbook on how to appeal a grade. I assured her that I would be happy to cooperate with the preceedings. She declined. She didn't want to appeal the grade, she said. But she still sent me another ten emails about how she wanted a higher grade.

There are the kids who don't wear shoes and put their feet on the seminar table. There are the kids who text their friends during lecture. The various assortment of wheedlers, whiners, and grade-grubbers. There are the keeners who think they are too smart for the class (they mostly think they are too smart for education). There are the slackers, the absentee jocks (um, I mean "scholar athletes"), the entitled prep school douches.

But the worst student I ever had didn't fit neatly into any known "bad student" category. She had elements of many incongruous categories (part keener, part slacker, part system gamer) and added modes of badness I had never seen before. She was truly one of a kind. If I've written about her before, I apologize. But someone asked me the other day about my worst student, and I can't get her out of my head (not in the good way).

Her cell phone rang at least once ever single class. She brought her laptop to class, despite my asking them not to bring laptops to what are fairly small classes that emphasize discussion. She sighed dramatically when I asked her to ease up on the techno-intrusions.

Her essays were both incomprehensible and pretentious. These did fit into a known category, the students who, rather than thinking closely and critically about the material, instead spit out some fancy-sounding nonsense resulting in a pseudo-sophisticated mush of makes-me-want-to-die. Here's a hint: throwing Wittgenstein into a shitty paper doesn't make it better, it just makes it embarrassing. And why does it never occur to them that I might actually have read Wittgenstein? And that I can see that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about?

Ok, so she wrote these really dreadful essays. But she took her B- without complaint, which was a pleasant surprise. But then she started haunting office hours. Now, I encourage students to come to office hours. I often find that some of the best teaching and learning happens outside the classroom. I like to talk to students one on one--it's a great way to help a struggling student or challenge a really bright one. But this student wanted neither help nor thoughtful discussion. She would just come by and ramble about Wittgenstein or whatever. I tried to steer these "conversations" into more focused or profitable channels, but no dice. I began to dread office hours. She would also wait for me after class. I would tell her that I didn't have time to chat, so she would follow me to wherever I was going. She once followed down into the subway station (and I wasn't even going to take the train--I was just trying to get away from her!).

Then the absences started along with the increasing absurd medical claims. I have all kinds of sympathy for illness. And frankly, I have sympathy for students who sometimes just feel too overwhelmed to come to class. What I don't have any sympathy for is students who fabricate illnesses. And this girl fabricated a doozy. She didn't just have the flu. No, she had some rare and mysterious neurological disorder for which she was seeing an osteopath, a neurologist, and a psychiatrist. I was fully on board with this last one.

Her illness was suspicious on the face of it. These suspicions were confirmed when I saw her, after receiving a frantic email about how she couldn't come to class because of a flare-up of her illness which was keeping her confined to the infirmary, lighting up a cigarette outside a bar. I walked past and she chased me down to tell me that she'd just gotten out of the hospital. Whatevs.

But what sets her apart from all the other loonies is the excuse she had for why her final essay was late. She wrote me to say that she had been working on her paper for days, despite her weakened condition. She bravely soldiered on through her fake illness to try to write her paper. But when her disease-ravaged mind finally cleared, she reported, she found that she had written the whole thing in German.

That's some fancy disease, Missy.

Yes, It's Still the Economy, Stupid

2008-01-23T08:28:00.000-08:00

It's ALWAYS the economy, Stupid.

The media is busy telling us that the parameters of the campaign have shifted. It's now about the economy. What are the candidates saying about the economy? Who has the best plan for the economy? Who can reassure people about the economy?

Well, it's never not been about the economy. But whenever politicians and the media talk about the economy, they use the term in both the most parochial and obfuscating manner possible.

It was, of course, the defining moment and image of Bill Clinton's campaign. James Carvill's slogan served as a reminder to his candidate that whatever Bush Sr.'s superior resume on foreign policy, the country was in a recession and all the Gulf War victories in the world didn't really matter to Joe Sixpack if he didn't have a job.

True enough, as far as it goes.

But this rhetoric conceals the fact that the wars (both Bush Sr.'s and Jr.'s) are about the economy. They are about enriching corporations at the expense of human rights, human life, the environment, and longterm planning about what kind of country we want this to be.

To divorce issues like war and social justice and the environment from "the economy" serves politicians and the media well. Because it ultimately really serves the status quo, and mainstream politics of whatever stripe is really about status quo-ism. So they pretend that "the economy" means that the subprime mortgage market doesn't tank or that people can afford their prescriptions.

It does mean those things. And those things are vitally important. But until we start seeing these economic issues as related to the economic structures that are poisoning the atmosphere, putting workers in unsafe conditions, starting wars, and shifting the tax burden down the social ladder, we're not going to make much progress.

The economy doesn't start and stop with one's own bank account. Pretending that it does only enables the tacit alliance between government and corporations.

"The Tragic Tale of Feemus's Forehead," or "The Devil You Know"

2008-01-17T19:14:00.000-08:00

Would you like to hear a story about my forehead? No?

Well, it's the only story I have today.

The story of my forehead begins in the mountains. It was a lovely summer hiking trip, and our hero (that's me, minus the heroics) was thrilled to be in the out-of-doors. Fresh air, vigorous exercise, pleasant companionship--what could be nicer?

It was very nice. Except for what happened to my forehead.

Now, I always wear lots of heavy-duty sunscreen and usually a hat and if I am outside when the sun is shining. Because I am a burner. I can burn through my clothes. I routinely burn despite 45 spf sunscreen.

After snorkling once, I discovered a series of tiny blisters along my arms at the water line. That was a funny looking burn--the half of me that was in the water was white and the half that was out was bright red (and slightly blistered). I saw lots of pretty fish, though. And I got slammed into a coral reef by a crazy riptide. Which was sort of fun. And sort of bloody.

Anyway, I take the whole sun thing pretty seriously.

But in the mountains in July, there's only so much one can do. The atmosphere is just so thin and the sun is so intense that sun damage happens. I didn't get too badly burned though. But something new happened: I spotted. I got these brown blotches on my forehead. I guess they're freckles, except they're not polka-dotty. They're solid. And fairly dark.

And....they are in the shape of horns.

No shit. They are almost entirely symmetrical, one on either side of my foreheard. And they look like horns.

I got home. I waited for them to fade. They didn't fade.

So I kind of just forgot about them. No one said anything, so I just figured that no one else could see them (this is one of the drawbacks of being single. There's no one to say, "Honey, I love you, but that Mark of Cain you're sporting on your mug is starting to creep people out."). I went on like this for months until I visited my family.

First thing out of my niece's mouth: "Uncle Feemus, you have HORNS."

"Oh that's nice, kid," I said. "Well, I didn't want to bring it up, but you're short. What are you, like four feet tall? I hate to break it to you, kiddo, but that's short. You notice I didn't bring it up, though? That's the polite thing to do. But you, you open with the horn thing. Real nice. And you know what? When I first met you, you were bald. Completely bald--total cue ball. And you couldn't even hold your own bald head up. But I didn't say a word. Polite thing to do."

She stared at me. "I know you're trying to be funny, Uncle Feemus," she said. "But you still have horns."

So I thought, well maybe it's just my niece who can see them. Maybe it's just the angle (she's short, after all). But then I see my Mom and she's all, "You got something on your face." And then she starts making for me with the dread bespittled thumb.

"Stay away from me with that thumb, you miserable harridan," I said.

"Oh sweetie, I know you're trying to be funny. But really, you've got something on your forehead."

Sigh.

I explained what it was. And my mother bought me some--get this--bleaching cream. For age spots. AGE SPOTS??

I am young enough to get attacked with spit-thumb, but old enough to have age spots? What the fuck?

Anyway, I am home now. And a little alarmed that I've been walking around with horns for six months and no one's said anything.

But I am a little reluctant to use the bleaching cream. It just seems so...I don't know...disturbing.

What's next? Calf implants?

Take Backsies

2008-01-15T17:31:00.000-08:00

Can I take back what I said about Huckabee? He's crazy. How vigorous must one's bigotry be to want to reshape the Constitution to conform to it?

What is with all the candidates having to prove how aggressive they are? Whether it's the terrorists or the immigrants or each other, virtually every candidate is behaving as though the single most important quality in a president is willingness to spoil for a fight.

It's embarrassing to watch so many intelligent and educated people admitting that belligerence is all they they have to offer.

Vanity of Vanities

2008-01-14T07:51:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about the book of Ecclesiates. It resonates so thoroughly in our culture that we don't always perceive it. It's like Shakespeare or Benjamin Franklin or Alexander Pope, where we quote it without realizing that we're quoting.

On the one hand, I find this phenomenon fascinating from a purely structural standpoint: when we say "Hope springs eternal" or "It's Greek to me" or "there's nothing new under the sun," what are the structural properties of the utterance? These phrases are so familiar and so well-worn that we typically don't think of them as citations.

It's a different situation (by degree, at least) from if we say something like: "Sound and fury signifying nothing." In this phrase, I think, we recognizing the phrase as citational. We might even know that it comes from Macbeth, or at least from Shakespeare. At the bare minimum, we recognize that it is a literary quotation; that it's different from ordinary discourse; and that someone, once upon a time, put those words together in that particular fashion.

I don't think we do recognize that with citations such as "It's Greek to me." Or at least I don't. Phrases like that just seem to get absorbed into what we apprehend as "ordinary" language.

The great linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, said that lanugage is a "system of difference without positive terms." Which just means that linguistic sign only have meaning in relation to one another. Every word we choose (Saussure calls this process of word selection the "paradigmatic" axis of language) derives its meaning from the words we exclude. If I tell you that I think oak trees are beautiful, you understand my meaning by understanding everything I've excluded: aspens, beeches, Douglas firs, maples, larches, lampposts, kittens, etc. "Oak" has no meaning that is not relational.

Saussure also discusses what he calls the "syntagmatic" axis of language, which is the combinative work--how one orders those paradigmatically selected words.

But what goes on with a phrase like: "It's Greek to me"? Both the paradigmatic and syntagmatic processes precede utterance. So the selection happens at the level of syntagm, I guess. We choose to say, "It's Greek to me," rather than, "I find it incomprehensible" or something like that. What I find interesting though, is how these phrases get in under our "citation radar."

Certain theorist, such as Roland Barthes, argue that ALL language is citational. Which is, of course, right as far as it goes. All language is pre-owned, so to speak. Even neologisms use known parts of other words. Using language entails a submission to its forms.

But we forget this. We have to forget it, or we'd go a little mad. That's why, I think, it's a little unsettling to discover the "origin" of a phrase that we use without recognizing its citationality. I think I laughed the first time I read Julius Caesar and saw "It was Greek to me."

No point to this, really, just thinking some stuff through. What I'm really interested in is why Ecclesiastes has this kind of pervasiveness in our culture. More on that later.

The Primaries Are Enough to Make Anyone Cry

2008-01-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

I find it disturbing that the campaign season is now almost as long as a Presidential term. It's the old magicians' trick: keep your eye on the presidential hopefuls while the real government takes away your civil rights and your children's futures.

But what's really about to make me cry is how the vicious insipidity of the media is almost making me support Hillary Clinton.

Almost.

So she cried. Whatever. Bob Dole cried, and no one asked whether it was authentic and no one suggested that it betrayed psycholgical instability (because frankly, Bob Dole would have kicked your ass for suggesting it. Bum arm and all). Hillary cries, and we are treated to endless punditry about whether they were "real" tears or whether the "ice princess" was just acting.

Ugh.

But what really gets my goat is that her New Hampshire win gets attributed to her tears, because the tears mobilized "the women's vote." How much do I hate this phrase, "the ____ vote"? It's never, "the straight vote" or "the white vote" or "the men's vote." It is almost always used to (however subtly) discredit or denigrate whatever gains the candidate has made: "Hillary's win in NH is attributable to the women's vote." What's lurking in statements like these is that the win doesn't mean quite as much, because she didn't get the "real" voters. She just got the women's vote.

Because women like tears, I guess. Whatever.

Phrases like "the ____ vote" also have the effect of making the _____ into an unthinking monolith. It denies plurality of opinion, circumstance, and principle to the ______ group. It denies that there is any difference of opinion among gays or women or hispanics or blacks or whatever. And that these groups vote only on issues that relate directly to the feature that has them slotted into "minority" status. "Women's issues." Blech. Only straight white guys, apparently, have thoughtful, wide-ranging, and nuanced political minds.

It almost makes me want to support Clinton, just out of annoyed outrage. Well, until I remember that she voted for the war and the Patriot act. And that she and her husband play into some very icky pseudo-liberal racial stereotypes when they call Obama a "dreamer."

In related news, I wish Huckabee's politics were different. I kinda like him.

Happy New Year

2008-01-08T10:18:00.000-08:00

So, I made a resolution this New Year. I don't usually make resolutions. One reason is that I figure that if something is worthwhile, I might as well just start (or stop) doing it immediately and not wait until Jan. 1. The main reason, though, is that I don't like taking stock of my life. Because, you know, yikes!

But this year, I made a resolution, and I am giving myself the whole year to keep it. It's to finish things. I resolve to finish everything that is worth finishing and get rid of everything that isn't. I resolve to finish all the half-read books, all the half-written articles, all the projects around the house that have been started over the years. I am going to finish unpacking boxes, some of which haven't even been opened in five moves, seven years, and 3000 miles.

And here's the hard part: I am not going to start anything new (within reason, of course) until I have finished everything that is worth finishing.

It's going to be a long year.

Dear Crazy Coed

2008-01-04T12:14:00.000-08:00

Dear Crazy Coed,

You have very nice legs. I will grant you that.

But it's 4 degrees out. It's -13 with the wind chill factor. Please stop wearing shorts.

Sincerely,
Feemus

Out of the Mouths of Babes

2008-01-04T10:33:00.000-08:00

I went out to dinner last night. I was by myself and I brought some work along. The waiter seated me - despite the fact that the restaurant was nearly empty - in a table jammed between two other occupied tables. So instead of working, I eavesdropped. Sort of unintentionally.

There were a man and a woman having a fight. I was seated next to the woman, so I only heard her side of the conversation:

No....I'm not doing this here...no...I'm not doing this in public...No....because I'm just not discussing this in India Palace.......fine, fine, you wanna do this here? let's do it....

After several minutes of rancourous back-and-forth, she said something that would have been hilarious, if it weren't so sad. She said, with a kind of frustrated weariness:

I would be more fun if you ever did the dishes.

The Bickersons settled their tab and left, so I started (inadvertantly) listening to the conversation at the next table. It was much more cheering. And man and his 10 or 11 year old son were talking about books and religion and culture and all that. I got the impression that they'd recently been to visit a Christian friend of the dad's, and the son had questions.

It was a really capitivating conversation (even if I hadn't been forcibly capitvated by sitting about 7 millimeters away). The father was intelligent and knowledgeable. The son was quick and curious. The father explained the common heritage of Christianity and Islam with Judaism. He mentioned similarities with other religious traditions, all without lapsing into platitudes or muddle-headedness. He didn't try to elide religious difference, just put it into intellectual and historical context.

The son asked pointed and thoughtful questions throughout the conversation. At one point, he asked: "So, do they have, like, the Talmud? Or the Midrash?"

The father told him that many Christians and Jews don't acknowledge the deep connections between the New Testament and the teachings of Jewish oral tradition. He told his son that Jesus was, in many ways, the greatest popularizer of Jewish thought in history.

Without missing a beat, the kid said, resignedly but without resentment:

"Because nobody listens to the Jews."

I was glad the dad laughed, too, because I couldn't entirely suppress a giggle.

Cutest. Kid. Ever.

Political Agenda at Microsoft????

2008-01-02T19:23:00.000-08:00

My spellcheck doesn't recognize "Royalism" but it DOES recognize "Parliamentarianism."

Which is funny. To me, anyhow.

Total Recall

2007-12-28T20:06:00.000-08:00

I had dinner at a friend's tonight. We were having a pleasant time, chatting of this and that. As people do.

Then I glanced at her coffee table. And sitting on it was a very familiar book. A very familiar library book. And I said, "Say, are you reading Landscape, Liberty, and Authority? Did you happen to have recalled it recently? Say, for instance, LAST THURSDAY???"

She had, indeed, recalled the book from me. Which is, of course, ok. It was a funny moment, though. We all recall books, but it's a practice that generates a fair amount of resentment.

Because our university library permits one to recall books from other patrons even if that other patron has just checked the book out that very day (I had, in fact, had the book for about 36 hours when my friend recalled it). And then the library charges the recallee $2 a day if they don't return it. And the system permits one to recall a particular copy of the book, so people will recall a volume that could easily be found in a different branch of the library just because they're too lazy to walk 1/2 a mile to get it.

But even beyond these quibbles with how the recall policy is implemented, it can just be downright frustrating to have a book taken away from you. Doubly so if there is a pattern of recalls, if all the books on a particular subject started getting summoned. Newness is key in academia and it can produce a kind of paranoia to think that someone is working on a similar project. And the last thing this place needs is more neurosis and anxiety. I had a colleague once confess that he had recalled a book from himself without realizing it. And then had a small crisis because he needed that book.

Once upon a time, the library here used to tell you who was recalling your books. They thought it would foster scholarly community. They stopped this practice when they realized that it was more likely to foster scholarly stabbings.

David Brooks is Still a Moron

2007-12-16T15:13:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I've done a "David Brooks is a Moron" post.

I thought I'd spend an hour or so this Sunday afternoon with a second pot of coffee and some ridiculous I-heart-the-rich-and-powerful column by the New York Times' leading lover of the status quo. Lately, I especially enjoy the way Brooks is ever so slightly (and with ever so little self-awareness) distancing himself from the Republicans. Just to prove that he's an equal opportunity suck-up.

He loves the rich and powerful of any political stripe.

Ugh.

Well, I fired up LexisNexis (I'm too cheap to buy the Times anymore) and searched for his latest column, ready to pick apart his rhetoric and point out the banality of his positions to possibly comic effect (Brooks writes most of the comedy himself).

I couldn't get past the first few sentences:

The 2008 presidential election has fundamentally shifted, but it hasn't been because of events in Iowa and New Hampshire. It's because of events everywhere else.
In Washington, the National Intelligence Estimate was released, suggesting the next president will not face an imminent nuclear showdown with Iran. In Iraq, the surge and tribal revolts produce increasing stability. In Pakistan, the streets have not exploded. In the Middle East, the Arabs and Palestinians stumble toward some sort of peace process. In Venezuela, a referendum set President Hugo Chavez back on his heels.

What stopped me wasn't the horrifying suspicion that Brooks was going to argue that the past several years of US foreign policy have made the world SAFER (I don't know if he did argue that--I really had to quit reading).

What stopped me was the mention of Iraqi "tribalism." This word has crept increasingly into discussions of the situation in Iraq. It's revolting and it betrays the paucity of our historical imagination.

Tribalism? Who can use this word without cringing? This is the word that Europeans used to describe conditions they helped create in Africa and then to legitimize colonialism.

Of course there were groups in Africa before the slave trade and colonialism. Yes, these groups were sometimes hostile to one another. But tribalism? That was a European invention. The discourse of tribalism grew out of nineteenth century anthropology--the primitivist implications of the term constructed Africa as a barbarous place that could only benefit from imperialism. This rhetorical strategy was followed by policies that produced and codified "tribalism."

This is not to say that Africa was a utopian paradise and that everything bad in the world is the invention of white guys. But the discourse of tribalism is enormously damaging and after a couple of centuries of it, we've almost entirely naturalized it. And the violence in Africa after the decline of the colonial powers bolsters its claims. But we've largely inversed the causal relationships.

So now we're doing it again. Not that Iraq doesn't have it's ethnic crises. But they didn't arise in a vacuum and calling them "tribalism" isn't going to help. It's arrogant. It's ignorant. It's destructive.

Tag Part 2-In Which Feemus Learns an Important Lesson

2007-12-11T18:29:00.001-08:00

I often use this blog to vent about the ridiculous and outrageous behavior of some of my students.

The 2am emails asking me to proofread an essay that's due at 10am. Followed by indignation when they are reminded that (1) I'm not their proofreader and (2) I am typically ASLEEP at 2am. Or at least not answering email.

The emails asking where Smith Hall is. How the hell should I know?

The emails saying: "I was running late for class today and didn't have any way to let you know. Can you give me your cell phone number in case it happens again?" WHAT????

The emails asking "Can you tell me what the main causes of the English Civil War were? I can't find anything about it online."

The emails saying: "cldnt mk it 2 clss 2day. cn u tell me wht i missd? thx."

The emails asking "Hey Feemus, you forgot to tell us what we're supposed to read. Do I have to do the reading? It's Monday and we meet tomorrow." Hmmm...the syllabus might help.

So one day, I get an email asking if I can provide "pronunciation brackets" for the characters' names in a French novel that we were reading in translation. Not my job, really. But not the most unreasonable request I'd gotten that day. What it was, though, was about the 37th such request I'd gotten that day.

I forwarded it to my friend Dave, who has a knack I lack for dissuading such e-requests but who is typically sympathetic to my plight. So I forward him the email with this, my own commentary, appended:

Hey Dave--

check out this email I just got--is this unbelievable, or what?? and considering that he will hear a lecture on this tomorrow, this is about the most relevant email since Ralph Nader wrote to ask what time he should show up for the debate.

how fucking lazy ARE these kids?

Here's how I feel like responding:

Dear Mr. Johnson,
I appreciate your enthusiasm for such a crucial feature of the work. I cannot
tell you how flattered I am to think that of all the resources available to
you, I am the one to whom you turn. Rather than waiting until lecture, or
consulting a French pronunciation guide, or asking a dorm-mate who speaks
French, I am honored that you have chosen instead to privilege MY opinion on
this serious matter over any other authority.

I am also flattered by the implicit compliment that you pay to my time
management skills. I am honored and humbled by your assumption that I am so
caught up with my own work as an educator and a scholar that I have nothing better to do than act as a consultant on questions that could be easily answered through any number of means. I am also so pleased to see you have the mental flexibility to not take "office hours" at face value. Anyone can drop by during office hours, but it takes a special cognitive fluidity to understand that "1-3 Tuesdays, 9-11 Fridays, or by appt." REALLY means "whenever I feel like it as long as the technology is available."

It also gives me great pleasure to note that you have not restricted your
question in anyway. I am certain that this will lead to many more delightful
email exchanges, when, after I send you a list of characters with "pronunciation brackets," you email back to query, "but what about..." Oh, Mr.
Johnson, I do see an enchanting conversation to come!!

Hope all is well, and please let me know if you need your dry-cleaning picked up
or your steak cut.

-Feemus

Which was a little harsh. But Dave has heard worse rants from me.

Ok, except I had NOT forwarded the email. I had hit "reply."

When I realized what I'd done, I actually threw up. This was several years ago and I STILL feel sick about it. I did a search through my "sent mail" for this exchange in order to write the post, and reading it is still like a punch in the gut. I am such a dick. That is an actual verbatim copy of what that student received (except that his name isn't really Johnson and mine--you may be shocked to hear it--isn't really Feemus).

As soon as I realized what I had done, I wrote an email containing what is quite possibly the most sincere apology ever written. Because in the instant that I realized what I'd done, I realized what I knew all along--that this kid was just trying to get by. Like all of us. Sure, if I answered every email that I got along these lines I'd never get anything else done. But he doesn't know what my inbox looks like.

I wrote to him and explained that I was a jerk. That my frustration had very little to do with him and that I had just used his email as an excuse to vent and to feebly attempt humor. That while I never ever meant for him to see my fake reply, it was still wildly unprofessional of me to be forwarding it to my friends. And I asked him to come see me during office hours or at his convenience so that I could apologize in person.

And......nothing.

I waited out a couple of the most tense days of my life. And then finally I heard a soft knock on my door. He walked in and said: "Sorry not to come see you sooner. But I was having a hard time figuring out what was going on. I mean, you seem so nice. And I don't know any Dave."

He let me apologize and he accepted graciously. We talked a little, and I only felt worse to discover that he was a transfer student from a less competitive institution (we get virtually none of these) and I got the sense that he was feeling a little anxious about being at a new school. Which, you know, ouch.

He turned out to be a really terrific guy and one of the most genuinely motivated students I've ever had. I'm not sure he ever really trusted me (can you blame him?), but he put more into getting an education than the rest of the class combined.

Although honestly, he could have done next to nothing and I would have given him an A.

Oh, the guilt.

I wish I'd learned some lasting moral lesson. That I'd learned patience and tolerance, to understand that each email that tries to extend my working day to 24 hours potentially has a really great person behind it who maybe was having a rough day themselves. I wish that was the case, but that mostly wore off in about two months worth of "Hey Feemus, my roommate didn't wake me up when he said he would. When can we meet to make up the class I missed?" Didn't wear off entirely, but mostly.

What I did learn was to double and triple check before sending a forwarded email.

Good luck to you, Mr. Johnson, wherever you are. I am still really really sorry.

And that is the story of one of the worst things I have done.

Oh Dear God

2007-12-11T18:03:00.000-08:00

The Mormon missionaries on my bus are getting dumber. Which scarcely seems possible.

I've written before about these chipper little mouth-breathers. These good-natured boneheads that sucked so bad at missionary school that they got sent from one US city to another US city. These were the missionary cadets who couldn't learn another language or comprehend cultural difference. So here they are. With me on the #8.

The last time we checked in with these eager little converters, they were asking the homeless for restaurant suggestions. You wouldn't think it could get worse.

You would be wrong.

Today, I am sitting on the bus trying to read my book. When I hear a gratingly cheerful voice that I know without looking is coming out of a scrubbed face which is sitting on top of a black suit. I can't hear the other guy's part of the conversation. I glance over and I can see him doing the math in his head: "if the bus averages 1 stop every two minutes, we'll get to the Square in 16 more minutes--can I go this long without punching this guy?"

But I don't hear him say a word. Just the missionary's very loud part of the conversation:

-What are your plans for the holidays?

-I am with the Church of Jesus Christ. Have you heard of the Latter Day Saints?

-I am from Utah. Where are you from?

Then there's a pause. I don't hear the other guy's answer. But the missionary says,

v e r y s l o w l y,

and EVEN LOUDER:

Wow. You're all the way from England? Your English is VERY good.

Save us all from salvation.

Tag--I'm It. Again.

2007-12-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

Thanks, Benticore.

Well, I'm crazy busy at the moment, so I think I'll take this tagging as an opportunity to write seven self-indulgent biographical posts.

That'll teach Benticore! I guess the rest of the class will just have to suffer for what he did (I learned that one from you, Mrs. Husby!)

So this post is going to be about education.

I have a very conflicted relationship to higher education. And not just because my students are annoying.

Although they are annoying.

I mean with the whole institution. Don't get me wrong, I think that college education is wonderful. I think that it offers (to the one student in ten who's not a total tool) a unique opportunity for intellectual exploration and reflection and rigor.

But it's so freaking expensive in this country (even state schools) that it becomes implicated in class hierarchy. And that sucks. That sucks a lot.

It's not that only the middle-on-up classes pursue higher education, but that these are the groups for whom it is most accessible. A huge number of students are, like me, from the working classes. And they feel, like I did, that they don't belong.

I am not the first person in my family to graduate from college, but pretty close. For those of you in a similar situation, you know what this means: you are simultaneously living out your family's social mobility narrative, with all the attendant American-dream-crap pressures, but you have no model for how it works and no money to make it happen. Your family fetishizes education, but in the abstract. For every degree earned, you are met with pride but also with suspicion. There is a subtle strain of "so I guess you think you're better than us now" for every academic achievement.

Middle class kids get money for college, not necessarily because their families *have* money, but because their families know how to *get* money. They understand grants and scholarships and loans, etc. Working class kids get the imperative: "go to college." What they don't get is any kind of support to make this happen. They often go to high schools that aren't geared toward college-bound students. My PSAT scores made me a semi-finalist for a National Merit Scholarship. Not one person in my high school, no teacher and no administrator, suggested that I submit the necessary materials to try to become a finalist. I didn't even know that there was someone whose job it was to help with college. The only thing any of us knew about our school guidence counselor was about his drug habits, because he frequently bought from students. I had never even heard of an AP exam until I started teaching students who had taken it. I didn't even know how to get a college application form.

After not completely finishing high school, I tried community college. I was working full time and was ill. I lasted a year and a half before I thought: "fuck this. I don't need this upward mobility crap."

After several years waiting on table and tending bar, I finally went back to college. Not for a degree, but just because I wanted to know shit.

The first time I stepped on campus, I nearly burst into tears. I am man enough to admit it. I had never been on a university campus before. This was a campus built in the academic gothic style, with lots of pointy stone buildings. It looked like something out of a movie. A movie about horrible prep school boys. I am not an emotional guy (unless you count annoyance as an emotion), but I was utterly overwhelmed with the feeling that I didn't belong here among all these pointy buildings with all these smart people who had graduated high school and who knew about the right fork from learning how to eat not from learning about how to set the table for people who were going to eat. And at the same time, I felt like I had never been more at home. I know how corny that sounds, but it was an intense few minutes. I wiped my eyes and my nose on my shirt sleeve (you can take the boy out of the trailer park, but....) and got on with it.

It was cool. I learned shit. I was making good money, and unlike the rest of my colleagues in the bar biz I didn't have a major cocaine habit. So I could spend my spare change on learning Ancient Greek. With the added bonus that my septum is still intact.

I loved it. My professors liked me (will wonders never cease?) and I liked school (unbelievable!).

After many years of doing this, someone from the university called and said: "you know, Bub, you have a degree. Take it already."

So I did.

Nothing changed. I still took classes and still tended bar and all was well in the world of Feemus.

And then one day, I broke my leg. Ouch. So I thought, why not do something different? Why not do something that doesn't depend on your body (which, frankly, wasn't getting any younger). So I went to graduate school.

And I saw that most people in academia were just like me. Two of the senior faculty members where I am now are from coal mining families. A few have fathers who are mechanics. Very few people come from money.

But we're all still implicated in this middle-on-up class structure. Because that's the culture. That's where most of the students come from. And they have profoundly internalized the customer service model of education. And we let them get away with it. In part because we are a little in awe of their glamour and stunned by their entitlement. And because we've been trained to respond to the desires of the "consumer." Shame on us, you know.

Education shouldn't be about selling degrees to those who can afford it. To those who are only at the college because they are legacies or because the library is named after their grandma.

And it kills me that I have to argue with kids who tell me that they shouldn't get a B because they pay $40,000 a year (yeah, sweetie, YOU pay it. sure) and then hear from people who WANT to get an education and can't because of financial considerations. That just sucks.

This wasn't meant to be a poor-me post. I've been very lucky in my life. I've gotten more breaks than I deserved. But I do believe that until we make education more equally accessible, from K-12 on up, this whole meritocracy discourse will remain bullshit.

Happy Birthday

2007-11-28T07:49:00.000-08:00

To John Stewart, Anna Nicole Smith, Claud Levi-Strauss, and Feemus.

If anyone needs me, I will be weeping softly in the corner.

What Fresh Hell is This??

2007-11-27T17:20:00.000-08:00

Yeah, yeah. I know I've been tagged again. I'm getting to it. Get off my back, will you?

But in the mean time, I would like a little e-sympathy for my current pitiable and debilitating situation: I have an Eagles song stuck in my head.

All day I have found myself humming "There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes."

Ugh.

I once had a conversation with some folks about dealbreakers. You know, those things that will keep you from even getting into a relationship with someone. My friend Steve's is if a girl wears a pink baseball cap. My friend Julie's is if a guy talks about money. Mine is if someone really likes The Eagles.

Although if she's hot enough....

Anyway, more thoughtful posts to follow. After I get this damned song out of my head.

On the plus side, I ate the last of the green beans for breakfast this morning and I am now officially done with Thanksgiving leftovers. So we'll call it even.

I've Been Tagged

2007-11-19T13:03:00.000-08:00

The charming and delightful Sherri has tagged me. Harumph.

I am now supposed to tell you all seven things about myself. Seven?

Hmmm....off the top of my head. I am:

1. Lustful
2. Gluttonous
3. Envious
4. Prideful
5. Slothful
6. Greedy
7. Wrath-y

No? How about: Dopey, Sleepy, Bashful....I can't remember the rest. I could look it up, but see above: number 5.

I was tagged once before and am tempted to use the five from that list, but I'll be a sport and try to think of seven new things.

1. I'm irrationally fond of soup. I eat cold soup for breakfast whenever there's any left over.

2. I have no hand-eye coordination. As a small child I struck out at tee-ball. Tee-ball! A dear friend once told me that our friendship depended on his never having to play tennis with me again.

3. I am a terrible procrastinator.

4. I am left-handed.

5. I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

6. I have worked at two different bars where people have been murdered. They were both shot. I hated the first job and loved the second one.

7. I am a packrat. Everytime I move I force myself to get rid of boxes and boxes of stuff. And then not a day goes by that I don't think: "Gee, I wish I had something from that box."

Relevant? It's Relative. And No, That Probably Won't Be On the Final

2007-11-18T14:16:00.000-08:00

What is this "real world" I keep hearing about?

Whatever it is, I am sick of it.

I mean, I'm cool with the notion of reality. I live there, mostly. But if I never hear about the "real world" or "relevance" or "transferrable skills" as the criteria for university curricula again, it'll be too damned soon.

My objection to "relevance" as a curricular benchmark has nothing to do with Ivory Towerism or some snobby hostility to practical education. Quite the opposite, in fact. But the way the rhetoric of "transferrable skills" gets used is so limiting as to be an utterly cynical cave-in to anti-intellectualism or, more usually, solipsism. Lurking in the concept of "relevance" is the insidious idea that education isn't meant to shape a student, just help him get a better job. Maybe if we would embrace the somewhat old-fashioned idea that education is about recreating selves, not ass-kissing the selves we already have, we could see that knowledge might have relevance beyond its capacity to cash out in the next five minutes.

I teach literature. What are the "transferrable skills" imparted by studying literature? Well, they include critical thinking, enhanced communication ability, patient analysis, a greater awareness of the world around us, which is full of language and text.

All these skills are "relevant" or "transferrable." But the paradox is that these skill don't get imparted by teaching to the "real world" application. They are imparted by challenging students to work through a text, attending to its formal features and its embeddedness in its historical moment. This is what gives a literary education its relevance. Not some watered-down hackneyed "look here, kiddies, Shakespeare is just like us. Now write an essay on How Shakespeare is Relevant to My Life."

I can't think of anything more valuable in the "real world" than to disabuse young adults of their misconception that if something doesn't directly and IMMEDIATELY correlate to their own precious lives that it's worthless.

The Merchant of Venice might not help you get a better score on Guitar Hero II, but reading it might just make you a better and more able thinker.

It's the same for all "pure" knowledge classes. Do you need calculus everyday? Maybe not. Does learning calculus help your mind learn to think? You bet. Education (whether in an institution or on your own) makes your world bigger. That seems pretty damned relevant.

I Am A Bad Person

2007-11-15T20:20:00.000-08:00

I have just spent the last forty-five minutes going through a database of academic journals to read bad reviews of a colleague's book. My research excursion didn't start out with this project in mind, but once I got started I couldn't stop.

It was the happiest forty-five minutes I've spent all month.

I am not proud.

I can't help myself. I really kind of hate this guy. He's pompous and meanspirited. He's a lazy teacher. He's smart but too clever by half. He treats the department administrative staff as though they are his personal assistants. He cons his undergraduates into doing research for him. He never speaks to anyone below him on the pecking order without trying to make them feel small. He's nauseatingly deferential to the departmental superstars. He's a jackass.

And yet, I would like one day to be the sort of person who wouldn't spend forty-five minutes reading bad reviews and feeling cheerful.

I'm going to stop.

Right after I see what Lewis Montoya wrote about it in Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies.

Help me.

Do You Have Popular Mechanics?

2007-11-14T08:37:00.000-08:00

Never watch football with me.

I grew up in a football lovin' household. My dad was a jock and loved football. And basketball. And tennis. And Greco-Roman wrestling. But mainly football.

I hated watching sports as a kid. Playing them was ok, but I never got the appeal of spectatorship. We didn't have a tv, so watching sports mostly meant going to a smelly and noisy high school gym or an ice cold ball field. I usually brought a book. My dad usually pretended not to know me when his friends came by.

I'm kidding. Sort of. My dad and I get along great, but I've always thought that my indifference toward football was my small way of rebelling. And that my love of baseball, which I discovered as a teenager and which my dad doesn't like, was an extension of this rebellion.

I'm not hostile to football, it's just not my thing.

But some folks came over to the Feemus homestead this weekend to watch a little college football. I admit--I was a lousy host. I've been so busy with work that I actually brought my laptop into the living room (nothing enhances the football watching experience quite as much the clacking of a keyboard). I wasn't watching the game. But it's hard for me to keep my mouth shut for too long, even when I don't have anything to say, so occasionally I have to yell out stuff.

If there's an incomplete pass, I have to say something like: "THAT'S gonna be a base hit."

Or I call players for intentional fouls. Or for icing. I just won't shut up.

It's a minor miracle that I have any friends.

Still, there's something about sitting around the living room on a Saturday afternoon watching men in shiny pants run after a ball that really is conducive to, for lack of a better word, bonding. So we sat around the living room and watched men in shiny pants and counted up the divorces and failed relationships between us. And someone said: "None of us may ever have kids."

Which, you know, we all already knew. But we made the obligatory "...that I know about" joke.

And the conversation turned, as conversations do, to sperm banks. We all tried to convince my friend, Jack, that he should make a donation. Because the world will be a much less hilarious place without another Jack.

And then the conversation turned, as conversations do, to what kind of *ahem* "reading material" such banks provide for their donors:

"If they're updated as frequently as other doctor's office mags, you've probably either gotta jerk off to some girl with Farrah hair or some dude with a Tom Selleck mustache."

"I wonder if they have, you know, specialty magazines."

"Such as?"

"'Juggs and Ammo,' maybe. Or 'Pony Girls'?"

"Um, that 'Pony Girls' reference was a little too quick, man."

"I heard about it from my brother."

"Sure."

"I wonder if they get any weird requests. It'd be funny to ask the nurse for specific publications."

"Like?"

"Sear's catalogue?"

"'Excuse me, Miss, do you have the Wall Street Journal?'"

"'No thanks, I don't need a magazine. I brought a copy of Jane Eyre."

"'I hate to be a bother, but do you carry 'Cat Fancier'?"

Ever since this conversation, every book or publication I think about I think about in this context. So work is becoming a little embarrassing. I mean, there are only some many times a guy can burst into laughter when someone mentions Kant's Critique of Pure Reason without getting a reputation as a bit of a loon.

I guess it turns out that this post isn't really about football. Let's blame the writers' strike for any thematic incoherence in today's blog. Agreed?

Oh Feemus, Where Art Thou?

2007-11-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

Good lord, has it been two weeks since I've posted anything? I have been very busy trying to find a new job. Which, you know, ugh. It's a dreadful process, but not dreadful in a way that makes for interesting blog posts.

Except...

Lots of colleges and universities have religious affiliations. The one I'm at now does, in fact. This usually doesn't have much bearing (or any) on curriculum. Some colleges ask faculty members to affirm the principles of the insitution. But there's one college I've come across who asks for a little bit more. They have a five page document about faith that one must sign, including a section on behavioral expectations. A sample:

The College will not condone practices which Scripture forbids. Such activities include occult practices, sexual relations outside of marriage, homosexual practice, drunkenness, theft, profanity, and dishonesty. Westmont also recognizes that Scripture condemns “sins of the spirit” such as covetousness, jealousy, pride, and lust. By their very nature, these sins are more difficult to discern. Because they lie at the heart of the relationship between the individual and God they are of central concern to the Westmont community.

Ok, I think I broke like six or seven of those before noon today. But the one that just kills me is the prohibition on covetousness, jealousy, and pride. That just makes no sense. Academia would collapse! Covetousness, jealousy, and pride are to academia as oxygen is to fire (if this were an analogy question on the SAT). But who's going to police this?? The pride squad?

The whole document is weird. Faculty members can't possess alcohol or tobacco on campus. And not only do they have about 38 references to heterosexuality and marital fidelity, they also mandate for their unmarried faculty members "healthy family relationships."

But have they met my mother?

When I Grow Up, I Want to be a Congressman

2007-10-29T15:47:00.000-07:00

Because congressmen get to do all kinds of important things.

Like censuring 100 year old atrocities.
And debating whether or not Master P should say "ho" so much.
And deciding which month is officially Country Music Month.

Sweet Fancy Moses.

I'm annoyed with Congress. I really don't think they understand that there's a war on.

Anyway, Congress decided NOT to vote on ENDA (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act) last week. They probably had more pressing matters. Perhaps a non-binding resolution against cannibalism. Or a strongly worded condemnation of Hitler (that'll learn him, but good!). Or maybe they just wanted to catch Happy Hour at China Palace.

But I'm not even angry. It's just too predictable.

I'm writing because this is funny. A friend emailed me the link to some guy's site--he (the owner of the site, not my friend) clearly thinks that ENDA is the end of the world and that the gays are carrying the handbasket in which the country is going to hell.

That's not the funny part. The funny part is his banner ads, all of which (at least when I looked at the page) were advertising gay personals, hookup sites, and advocacy groups. Heh.

That's what you get for trying to make a profit off your sanctimony.

Why Don't You Turn Your Head And Cough??

2007-10-23T09:16:00.000-07:00

When violins are feeling particularly well, they declare themselves to be fit as a Feemus.

A horse with an especially robust constitution might say that he is healthy as a Feemus.

Through sheer dumb luck there's not much wrong with me. My joints are rotten and I'm allergic to everything, but other than that I'm hardly ever sick.

Which is a damn good thing because I HATE going to the doctor. I average about one visit every two years. I had to go last week for some required consultation about my allergy meds. There's some new HMO rule. Whatever.

So my doctor, who I quite like, decided for some reason to send me to an Ear Nose and Throat guy to make sure that some swelling he saw in my throat was indeed just hay fever related.

This afternoon I went to the ENT doctor. What a freaking sadist.

He wanted to stick an optic thingy up my nose and down my esophagus. I, on the other hand, would have preferred that he didn't. He was unamenable to compromise.

Out came the scope-on-a-rope. Up came my (entirely rational) defenses against having tubes threaded through my sinuses.

But I was cooperative. I did wince, though, when the scope seemed to stop moving through the nasal cavity and started boring up into my brain. It was excruciating. But I bit down and held still.

Until the doctor said: "This procedure doesn't hurt."

Oh really, doc? Well that's a huge fucking relief. I'm glad to know this blinding pain doesn't have anything to do with your procedure.

Stupid doctor.

It's Like Deja-Vu All Over Again

2007-10-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

So, the US is pressuring the Iraqi government to help crack down on Kurdish rebels in Turkey.

Remember way back to Gulf War #1? When Bush Sr. told the Kurds they should rebel against Saddam Hussein? And then when they did rebel, we totally abandoned them? We were all "Kurd who, now? How did you get this number?"

First we tell Iraqi Kurds to rebel and don't support them. Then we tell Iraq to aid in the suppression of Turkish Kurds. Want to start the pool on when the Kurds start trying to kill us?

You know, because they hate freedom.

Ngo Dinh Diem.
Saddam Hussein.
The Khmer Rouge.
Mujahideen.

How many more groups are we going to support out of expedience without thinking through the long term effects?

The Triumph of the One Party System

2007-10-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

Do you ever do that thing where you say a word over and over until it becomes just a collection of sounds? Try it with "radiator." Or "apocalypse." Or "tennis ball."

After about the fifth repetition, it ceases to have any meaning.

Any time a word is repeated often enough without careful thought, it loses some of its punch. It's a "free floating signifier" as we say in my line of work. Because I have a silly line of work.

Now, that's not to say that the word can't be reinvigorated with meaning. As soon as it gets cold out, the meaning of "radiator" returns. Or, as much as we throw the word "Nazi" around, so that some soup vendor with strict ordering practices is called one, once we stop to think about Nazism, the meaning returns.

It's time the Democrats on the Senate intelligence committe stop repeating "warrantless, warrantless, warrantless" and think about what it actually means. They voted yesterday on how to regulate warrantless surveillance. I think we're officially down the rabbit hole.

It's been repeated so often, they must think of it as just another category of wiretap. Phone tap. Wireless tap. Warrantless tap.

The so-called opposition party is arguing over the means by which executive power is allowed to run wild. Shouldn't the word "warrantless" clue them in that these wiretaps are a gross overstepping of legal power? And what about the "executive order" that the President says authorizes them? Not only is this effectively an encroachment on legislative power, the details are secret. Shouldn't the Democrats be trying to make government more transparent and the office of the President less authoritarian?

I'm worried that we're not just drifting toward a one party system, we're letting the lines between the legislative, executive, and judicial blur. That can only lead toward totalitarianism, and it's time Congressional Democrats took a stand.

Or maybe they're just counting on getting one of their own in next year and think that warrantless wiretaps might come in handy.

Separation of Church and the #8

2007-10-17T19:05:00.000-07:00

Now, I'm usually all for religious tolerance. But if my commute keeps getting used as a battlefield in a Crusade, I'm going to go all Saladin on its ass.

The bus is loud and annoying as it is. There is the woman (I'm sure I've mentioned her) who talks on her cell phone about how great the Atkins diet is. Every single day.

Yeah, I can have all the bacon I want....yeah....no, really....and cheese....yeah, and hamburger...

How many friends can this woman have that can stand to listen to this list of saturated fat every day???

There's the guy who sings opera. Loudly.

There's the usual assortment of crazy people, normal people, arguing couples, chatting couples, sad babies, happy babies--in short, just general noise. That's just how it is.

BUT...the missionaries? MUST. BE. STOPPED.

Seriously, I have nothing against Mormonism. Well, except for the super-offensive posthumous baptizing of Shoa victims. I do have that against the Church as an institution, I suppose, but nothing against individual Mormons. Most Mormons I know are kind, tolerant, and interesting.

But I very very much have something against being proselytized every day on my commute.

My favorite was the time the missionary woman sat down next to me, nudged my open book, and said without a trace of irony: "It's wonderful how some people can read on the bus."

It was wonderful, my dear. It was.

Here's my question: how much do you have to suck at missionary school that they send you to Boston??? It's like the assignment for people who couldn't learn another language or evince any kind of cultural sensitivity?

It's this latter point that pushed me over the edge today.

There's a homeless guy who rides my bus. Nice enough guy. Smells bad, but I'm sure I would, too, if I were homeless. So this missionary guy starts talking to him. The homeless guy has the best missionary shut-down line I've ever heard:

Oh yeah. My family's Mormon. My brother's a good Mormon. He got a draft deferral to go on his mission. I got sent Vietnam.

Ouch. But the missionary guy didn't get the sarcasm, I guess. Because he said--I am not making this up--he said: "Oh, Asia. I've always wanted to go to China."

What the hell?

But it got worse. The missionary guy then asked the homeless guy--I could NOT make this up--he asked him: "Where's your favorite place to eat in Cambridge?"

Um, the guy's homeless. Homeless. He's not exactly working his way through Zagat's.

I wouldn't mind the conversion attempts on the bus if the people who are supposed to be my spiritual superiors had anything like a damn clue.

Sheesh.

The Dustbin of Bloggery

2007-10-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

My brain is a little worn out (not from overuse, I assure you!). Usually writing this blog is a way of doing some (minimal) intellectual work without the pressures of production. When I'm stuck at work, writing something low-stakes and/or playful helps me reconnect with why I like language and/or why I think it's important.

But lately I feel just as stuck with the blog as I do with everything else. This too shall pass, of course. But it's led to some rather banal posts (don't deny it), so I thought I would go into the "edit posts" feature of Blogger and see if I had started any substantive or funny posts that I could finish up.

Well, it turns out I've started and abandoned LOTS of posts, some of which just have a title and some of which have notes, and almost all of which are a total mystery to me. This one looks to be literary analysis coupled with some sleep-deprived raving:

Watching the Detectives

I am Feemus's insomnia. In desperation, have taken to falling asleep in front of tv. Detective shows are best for falling asleep. 21 Jumpstreet or The Rockford Files are the jackpot. Barnaby Jones ok, too. Wonder if Buddy Ebson liked Donna Douglas or Lee Meriwether better.

Structural difference between detective stories and fairy tales:

In detective stories, even edgy or genre-bending ones, the structure is revelatory; opacity eventually gives way to transparency. Motives become more or less intelligibe. Everything that happens means something. All process is process toward an end—even the inevitable red herrings are involved in that process. Fairy tales are the opposite. Instead of being essential, instead of leading the way to eventual unravelment, details in fairy tales are very often just there. They seem to resist rational explanation or to fit themselves into the plot in any way. Why, for instance, are Cinderella’s slippers made from glass? Does it matter? Is some point being made about transparency in the midst of disguise and dissembling? A girl born into privilege who is made to act like a servant dressing up as a privileged girl, the clarity of the glass slippers being emblematic of the fact that she was disguised as her true self. Is it suggesting that we are always in a state of performance even if what we are performing is the truth? Nothing is ever explained in a fairy tale. Details assume a kind of transcendent meaning because they remain at the level of suggestion, because they refuse to yield their secrets. Would Bluebeard have killed his wife if she hadn’t opened the forbidden room? And why was Bluebeard’s beard blue? This detail, important enough to find its way into the title of the story, important enough to name the character, is never explained. The blue beard was grotesque in its irrelevance to the story, in its inconsequence. Or is it inconsequential? Was Bluebeard murderous because of his disfigurement? Was his disfigurement the external manifestation of a maimed and brutal soul? Why didn’t he simply shave?

Lee Meriwether, I bet.

Well, at least I see where I was going with that one. But what about this?

bacon

weil - bacon - johnson - tom tancredo - risch

Your guess is as good as mine. This one seems simple enough:

Crazy Sells

Ron Paul, Mike Gravel. Crazy is the new White Southern in Presidential politics.

This one seems to have been on roughly the same subject:

Loyal to the UnRealpolitik

I love watching Gravel throw that rock into the lake. Don't ask me why. Dude's nuts.

This one, I was clearly pissed off. Frankly, I still am, but no longer have the energy to sustain it:

Harvey Mansfield Can Suck My Thumos

I don't even think he really understands the concept of thumos, and are we really going to let a culture that wouldn't let women out of doors dictate our notions of gender? Seriously?

But the jewel in the crown of incomprehensibility is this one, that has nothing but a title:

irredeemable evil

I wonder what side I was coming down on, pro or con?

Omnia Fert Aetas

2007-10-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

In my halfhearted attempt to find new employment, I am in the process of updating my job materials. In particular, my CV.

Now, as a lazybones, it didn't surprise me much to see that I had little to add since I last updated it.

What did feel a bit like a punch in the gut, though, was looking at the "Languages" section. I had German listed. I tried to think of one single thing in German. And couldn't. The old memory couldn't dredge up anything.

I am actually getting LESS qualified. If this trend continues, pretty soon my CV will just be my name.

At least it will have brevity going for it.

I wonder if old arthritic ninjas feel like this when they have to strike "hand-to-hand" off their resumes.

No, they probably still feel pretty awesome. Because they're ninjas.

I wish I were a ninja.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

2007-10-08T08:56:00.000-07:00

I recently had an anniversary of sorts. On September 28th, 2001, after spending more than half my life as a smoker I finally gave up cigarettes.

Now, I haven't been perfect. There have been a few lapses, usually at a party or during a particularly busy time at work. Because the smoke bone, as we all know, is connected to both the drink bone and the stress bone.

And I still dream about smoking. I dream about pulling the little cellophane tab, opening up the top and removing the foil-covered paper releasing that first whiff of tobacco that promises both comfort and excitement.

But in the past 6 years, I've smoked maybe 30 cigarettes. And I'd switched brands to OPC (Other People's Cigarettes, for those of you who've never had this monkey on your back).

Because for all that I dream about it, I don't really have any desire to smoke anymore. Nor do I particularly have any nicotine cravings.

So I was bewildered on Thursday when I went to the grocery store, did my shopping, got to the checkout line and asked the clerk for a pack of Camels.

She went to get them while I stood there stunned, blinking at my unintended and purely reflexive request. I wanted to tell her, "Wait, I don't want those. I don't smoke." But I was too stupefied. And frankly a little embarassed to admit that I'd gone into some instinctual timewarp.

It would be like telling the waiter when he brings your ribeye, "I'm sorry, but I am a vegan."

So I put the cigarettes in my bag, hoping that the soy milk and organic kale wouldn't judge them too harshly on the walk home. I suddenly felt very protective of my twenty little friends.

I got home and put them in my sock drawer. I don't want to smoke them, but I don't want to throw them out, either.

Bush Opens Mouth, Black Hole of Irony Now So Dense That No Logic Can Escape

2007-10-04T05:39:00.000-07:00

The President vetoed a bill yesterday to expand health insurance for children.

Because it was too expensive. He says he doesn't want to have to raise our taxes.

Holy Moly--are you kidding me? Now I go on and on about how everything in government is a choice, they just try to conceal the fact from us: we can either go to Mars or we can vaccinate babies. We can either give tax breaks to McDonalds to create minimum wage jobs or we can improve infrastructure in low-income neighborhoods.

Usually the fact that it's a choice is hidden. But not this time--here the choice is clear: we'd rather spend the money killing Iraqi civilians. For this President to play the fiscal conservative role while he's spending $175-200 million a day in Iraq is not only profoundly self-deluding, it is reprehensible.

After balking at the price tag, the President does offer an ideological objection to the plan: that it would "federalize healthcare." While I think that federalizing health care is a splendid idea, I'll grant that the President has some coherent free-market belief that runs counter to single-payer health care. I disagree, but I'll grant it. (Although as a side note, I think that he should have to give up HIS federalized health care before he argues that, but that's just me.)

But the bill didn't try to create a single-payer system. It would have enrolled uninsured children in private health care. If someone has always had health insurance, either through their parents or their university or their job, they don't know what it's like to live without it. Lots of people are working two part time jobs (because places like Walmart will keep them at 31 hours a week so that they're not eligible for benefits) and can't get health care through their employer and can't afford it out of pocket.

The President objects that too many higher income people will become eligible in the new program. But a federally set "poverty line" simply doesn't make any sense. The city I live in has a cost of living that is about 210% of the national average. People here routinely spend 75% of their income on housing. So poverty here is experienced at an income level that would put someone outside of poverty in another area of the country.

New York recently did a study that showed that a person in Brooklyn with two kids needs $44,000 a year for the bare necessities. $44,000 a year would be an extremely comfortable living in most parts of the country. Having federal cut-offs for poverty fails to take into account the huge variance in cost of living.

The President says that the bill is just another entitlement program. But aren't people entitled to health care? Of course, this is the same President who tried to slash veterans benefits, including eliminating 5000 beds in VA nursing homes while maintaining that people who oppose the war don't (say it with me now) "support the troops."

More Job Market Hilarity

2007-10-02T11:14:00.000-07:00

I was flipping through some job postings and came across one, the heading of which simply read:

Chair of Dementia

Now, I realize that this is likely a job for a position as the head of a psychiatry department. But it still cracked me up.

"Chair of Dementia" is totally the name of my new imaginary rock band.

The Hilarities of the Job Hunt

2007-09-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

As I may have mentioned recently, I am in the middle of a half-hearted job hunt. Well, quarter-hearted.

At any rate, many of the job postings are quite hilarious.

One job wants a specialist in literature of "the Restaration period." Um, you mean the RestOration? Now, I am no great speller, but I think that the chair of an ENGLISH department might be able to get all the words in a job posting right.

There's a job in the Upper East Side that pays $38,000 a year. Which, I don't exaggerate, will not cover rent in the smallest, crappiest studio apartment on the Upper East Side.

Some of the job posting are just funny because one can't imagine who could possible fill them: "We are looking for someone who can teach the theory of drama from Aristotle to Ibsen; who can contribute to our departmental conversation on post-colonialism, queer theory, and the genalogies of modernity; subspecialty in either medievalism or 18th century trans-atlanticism preferable."

But the one that I found most striking said, in the place that most postings affirm that they are equal opportunity employers (or sometimes that they aren't: that they give priority to Catholics or whatever), this one said that they hire based on the principle of "impartial love."

Impartial love? Isn't that what singles bars are for?

No, wait. That's impersonal love.

It turns out that this institution was one of the first co-educated colleges in the country and was the first integrated college in the South. Which makes it harder to laugh at what seems like a very strange commitment to "impersonal love."

Harder, but not impossible.

Better Wake Up and Smell the Real Flavor, 'Cause the Congressional Hearing's a Fake Lifesaver

2007-09-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

Can you believe it?? Congress is holding hearing on hip-hop lyrics. Again. Did I wake up in 1986?

I have a little message for the putatively Democratic congress who was given the majority in the off-term elections because Americans were sick of the situation in Iraq. Here's my message:

There's a Goddamned War Going On!!!!!

Seriously, this is just nuts. I know that I've blogged about this before, but honest to Pete, I just can't get over the stupidity of EVERYONE involved in this nonsense. The conservatives are acting like fear-mongering demagogues. Liberals are refusing to have a backbone. And Master P? Dude, don't apologize.

Just walk away. That's the only appropriate response to these hearings. Get up and walk the fuck away. It isn't Congress' job to police lyrics (and we'll just leave aside for the moment the fact that heavy metal has just as many sexist, racist, and homophobic lyrics as rap, but the old white dudes in Congress don't feel as threatened by Axl Rose as they do by Easy E. Or, you know, someone who isn't dead).

"Bitch." "Ho." Yeah, I don't like those words. They are not nice. They are damaging, they really are. But you know what?

There's a Goddamned War Going On!!!!!!

Does calling women bitches promote violence toward women? Maybe. Does war promote violence toward, you know, EVERYONE? It sure does.

And you want to protect women? Maybe you should get cracking on that health care thing. Or include domestic violence in your "protection of the unborn" legislation. The leading cause of death for pregnant women? Is murder.

Murder, not rap lyrics.

Ok, I promise to stop ranting now.

Why I'm Mad at the Southern Poverty Law Center, or How I Became Slacktivist of the Year

2007-09-28T07:37:00.000-07:00

No, it's not because I hate poor Southern lawyers.

It's their targeted fundraising. They seem to have targeted me as a douchebag.

Every six months or so I get a letter from SPLC saying something like this (and I am not exaggerating):

Dear Mr. Feemus,
We are erecting a Wall of Heroes in Birmingham, Alabama and would like to honor you there for your ongoing bravery and commitment to protecting civil rights. We have a stone tile with your name on it; for an additional donation of $35 we will proudly place your name next to other heroes of the war for Social Justice.

Sincerely,
Rosa Parks

Honestly--they get people like Rosa Parks (or at least her rubber signature stamp) to tell a bunch of checkbook liberals that they are "heroes." This letter makes it sounds as though the recipient chained himself to the prison doors to prevent Yusef Salaam and Antron McCray from being falsely imprisoned.

I'm hoping that Gabriel Byrne will play me in the movie.

Seriously--I find this icky. It has actually made me quit giving money to them, hoping that I will get fewer of these embarrassing letters. And I never gave that much to begin with.

But it makes me wonder what kind of an asshole gets this letter and thinks, "Yeah, I AM a hero. I bet that fifty bucks I gave totally solved all the problems in this country. That took some real courage on my part."

Hell, Wall of Heroes--where's my freakin' Nobel????

It's quite savvy in its own squicky way, playing on middle-class guilt or white guilt or whatever other kind of guilt will let people be misled into this kind of astonishing self-aggrandizement.

And it is astonishing how quickly white guilt can seamlessly translate into white self-congratulation.

But the effects of this strategy are more than just off-putting, they are actually deleterious. We don't need monuments, we need work.

They should send letters saying:

Dear Mr. Feemus,
I bet you feel pretty good about that miserable little check you sent last year that scarcely covered the administrative costs of cashing it. I bet you think you're pretty darned swell. Well, why don't you get off your self-satisfied ass an DO something. For a change.

Sincerely,
Rosa Parks

p.s. And clean out the garage while you're at it, you lazybones.

So, I was looking for the actual letter so that I could quote it's outrageousness to you all, but I couldn't find it. BUT just as I was about ready to post this, I got an email from the Human Rights Campaign (another organization, which focuses on gay rights, to which I occasionally give a few bucks) and they wrote to tell me that the Matthew Shepherd Act passed. The email said: "Your commitment was inspiring."

I guess I'll have to cross the HRC off the donation list. I can't stomach it.

It's really just revolting.

You Want Me to Buy What?

2007-09-23T14:09:00.001-07:00

If you're like me, you get a little creeped out by the notion of targeted advertising.

If you have Gmail, you know just what I mean. Gmai scans one's mail for keywords and then puts up ad banners that relate (in however strange a way) to these words. For instance, if I get an email that contains the phrase "Yankees suck," it will be attended by, say, ads for Louisville Sluggers and Hoovers. It's unsettling.

Then there's the guy who's designing billboards that will change their message depending on what station a car has its radio tuned to. That's just nuts.

We're not just plugged in. They're plugged into us.

Advertising has developed smart bombs, need-seeking missiles designed to activate our own private commodity fetishism.

It makes me wonder, all those emails I get about Megadik and off-brand Viagra: Do they know something I don't? Have there been complaints??? LADIES?

We're surveilled, we're hacked-into. The Ministry of Propaganda for the corporate fascists is no longer just constructing reality, it's constructing tailor-made realities, reflecting and recreating individualized inadequacies that can never be remedied but may be temporarily slaked by purchase after purchase after purchase after....

Christ, Feemus--you're getting kinda paranoid.

Well, I do sometimes get a little on edge about these things. Which is why there was something reassuring this week about getting TWO phone calls from someone trying to sell me a new windshield and a letter in the mail trying to get me to switch my auto insurance.

I haven't owned a car since 2002. It's rather comforting to know that I still have a few secrets.

I think this post started off as a rant against some letter I got from the Southern Poverty Law Fund. I don't know where I went off topic.

Slave to the Machine, Or How My Gym Is Turning Me Into An Asshole

2007-09-19T06:09:00.000-07:00

A month or two ago, Alain Finkielkraut, a philosopher and one of the talking heads of the French media, criticized the new President's exercise regime. Nicolas Sarkozy's public jogging came under attack for being undignified and too, you know, American.

Now, I would argue that of all the ways in which he is imitating American presidents, jogging is the least worrisome.

But the central part of the critique is that jogging, unlike walking (in the somewhat dubious tradition of the flaneur, perhaps), does not lend itself to reflection or meditation. It is about the regulation, the ratiocination, of the body.

Well, when I first read about this, I just laughed. I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Eh, the French. What are you going to do?"

But then...I joined a new gym. It's closer to home and less crowded than my old gym, so it seemed a no-brainer. Everything was fine. They gave me a tour and showed me this thing called "Fit-linxx." Which I find both revolting and mesmerizing.

This system logs in every workout that you do on a machine at the gym, and then gives you "points" for every hundred pounds you lift or every five miles you run or whatever.

When the tour guy first told me about it, I thought: "Doesn't that strip every shred of in-the-moment joy from one's workout? To know that you're being surveilled and measured by some electronic chip?" Ugh. In short, I got all Finkielkraut on its ass.

But then, oh dear, how can I tell it? Then, I got hooked. I am now obsessed with my "points." I figured out how to record workouts that I do outside the gym. So, if I take a run around the resevoir, I immediately log it in to Fit-linxx. I am so filled with self-loathing I can hardly stand myself.

And yet, at the same time I am wondering if there is any cardiovascular benefit to self-loathing and if I can log it in....

There is something insidious about this need to make our lives external, verifiable to ourselves. It's somehow real only insofar as it has an electronic expression somewhere (I have achieved a kind of meta-level of this by blogging about Fit-linxx: both my workout and my angst about it are now available in digital format).

Although, as I sit and decry the self-alienation of the computer age, I remember that it's just part of a continuum. In 5th century Greece, with the advent of book culture, people started keeping diaries of sorts, called "hypomnemata." Michel Foucault describes the phenomenon:

What seems remarkable to me is that these new instruments were immediately used for the constitution of a permanent relationship to oneself -- one must manage oneself as a governor manages the governed, as a head of an enterprise manages his enterprise, a head of household manages his household...So, if you will, the point at which the question of the hypomnemata and the culture of the self comes together in a remarkable fashion is the point at which the culture of the self takes as its goal the perfect government of the self – a sort of permanent political relationship between self and self. The ancients carried on this politics of themselves with these notebooks just as governments and those who manage enterprises administered by keeping registers. This is how writing seems to me to be linked to the problem of the culture of the self.

So, as they say, plus ca change.

I wonder what Foucault (rest in peace) would have had to say about the perniciousness of Fit-linxx?

Happy Days

2007-09-16T14:51:00.000-07:00

It can be a pretty grim world. There are days I can hardly bring myself to read the paper.

But sometimes the old world gets a shot in the arm. Something happens that puts a mark in the "things that are good" column of the ledger, and the world records a net gain.

Kinda puts all the other stuff in perspective.

If I'm Not Religious, How Come I Have All This Religious Guilt?

2007-09-15T07:47:00.000-07:00

Last night, my next door neighbor knocked on my door and asked if I could come over and reset the timer on her lights. One of her grandkids had knocked the plug out of the outlet, and it was after sundown.

This happens every so often on a Friday night. It's of course no problem for me. Except that I feel so...impious. My head feels conspicuously bare. The kids all look at me in a mix of awe and suspicion: I am the guy who breaks the rules. I always feel as though I am intruding somehow. As though I am being judged.

I'm sure they're not really judging me, so I've been trying to think through why I feel this way. Religion and religious people don't make me uncomfortable. I wasn't raised in a religious household, so whatever I don't believe is just habit not some kind of ideology (I'm looking at you, Chris Hitchens).

I know this sounds like a cliche, but some of my best friends are religious. And they don't make me uncomfortable.

I have friends who are outside of the religious mainstream--Orthodox, Calvinist, etc. We talk about religion and I don't feel uncomfortable. These are lively and invigorating conversations.

So what is it that makes me feel so guilty when I go next door to flip switches?

I think it's a kind of longing, an awareness that while I am free to use electricity on shabbat, this freedom comes at a price. It's not faith that's at stake so much as connection. When I talk to my friends about the Election of souls or the function of snoods, it's a matter of belief. But when I see the family sitting down for their sabbath dinner, each assenting to the prohibition against turning electricity on or off, it's not just about belief. It's about a community. It's about faith uniting people, about traditions followed consciously and thoughtfully. It's rather beautiful.

Or maybe they really are just judging me.

Question

2007-09-15T07:44:00.000-07:00

Has anyone ever been to Lubbock, Texas? Is it nice? Would I like it there?

I am sort of considering applying for a job there on a bit of a whim. I'm whimsical like that.

It's probably hot there, right?

Unusually Serious Post

2007-09-12T17:36:00.000-07:00

About ten o'clock Tuesday night as I was lying in bed not sleeping, I heard fireworks. Five minutes or so of fireworks. And then again about an hour later. I would have assumed it was for the new year (and a belated shana tovah, if it applies) except that I have heard fireworks on September 11th every year since 2002.

I don't understand. I don't understand the fireworks.

This post is about my memories of 9/11. It's not political. I have political thoughts about 9/11, but they're not here. This post isn't my usual schtick--it doesn't try to be funny or clever or outraged or anything. And my story isn't special; it's just the ordinary story of shock and grief that we all went through. This is just what I remember about that day, and I've been remembering it a lot this week.

Like everyone else, I'm sure, the morning of September 11th 2001 is both unreal to me and unforgettable.

Boston is not New York. We don't have any constant reminder of the violence. But the two planes that were driven into the twin towers left from here. Bostonians were on those planes. Logan Airport is about five miles from my house. There's a kind of immediacy about the attack for this city, I think.

But not so much for me. The fear, maybe. But not the loss. I am not from Boston. I had lived in Boston for exactly 27 days when the planes were hijacked from the airport five miles from my new house. Whatever immediacy the attacks had for this city, I experienced as a spectator.

I was still adjusting to the move. The movers were late with my stuff. They ended up being nearly six weeks late, and the day before the attacks I had called to see where the fuck my stuff was and they said it was in Montana. Which is a long way from Boston. I had no furniture and the air matress I brought with me had a hole in it. So I was sleeping on the floor and crabby as hell. I didn't have any clothes with me, except for whatever I had shoved into the gym bag for the drive across the country. I think it consisted of one decent looking shirt, pair of sweats, a pair of jeans, and a Black Sabbath t-shirt that a friend once gave me after, on a dare, I sang "Iron Man" (badly) at karaoke bar. I was a little worried about starting my new life in a Sabbath t-shirt.

I was homesick and regretting the move. I've moved around before, but this move felt like something had ruptured. Like I was severed from my old life in some irreparable way. And maybe I was. I left a relationship that was too new to pick up and move across the country but too longstanding not to hurt like hell at leaving behind. I was deeply ambivalent about the career choice--it was the first time in my life (last, too!) that I'd ever done anything that could properly be called "ambitious." As both a committed Leftist and a certifiable lazybones, the notion of ambition has a kind of dread about it for me.

I was in a kind of mild culture shock. I'm still shocked by how rude this city can be (especially after the hyper-polite Northwest) and how alive people are to class and ethnic difference. But the city also just feels different, looks different, and that's what I was noticing then. A lot the difference is architectural--I'd come from the very newest bit of the country to the very oldest. My neighborhood seemed like something from a movie set to me. Plastic flowers set out on the asphalt yards of old Victorian houses. Old men in wifebeaters smoking cigars on the stoops. The sharp change of scenery just as you cross Beacon Street, from concrete and peeling paint to trees and and shrubs in front of glorious brownstones.

I heard about the attacks on my way to work, on the way to my very first official day of my new life. I heard about it walking through this movie-set neighborhood. I didn't have a tv or a radio or a computer (they were somewhere in Montana) so I hadn't heard anything. I first heard that there was something wrong from two women standing on their stoops shouting at one another. It seems like this was about 8:30 or 8:45, so nothing would have been known for sure except that some planes were in trouble and fighters from Otis were being dispatched. But maybe it was later. I don't know for sure.

I got to campus and found the building I was supposed to be in and a woman who I had met the previous week but whose name I had forgotten told me what happened and told me the evacuation procedures. There was a rumor that we might be a target.

The rest of the day went by in a kind of blur. Everything I knew about what was happening was overheard or prefaced with "now, I'm not sure, but what I think happened was..." I didn't feel the horror of it because I didn't really know what was going on. The closest I got to understanding the scope of it was when a man, whom I'd just met but knew by reputation, a man who was about 70 and as venerable as all get-out and one of the smartest people I've ever met--he asked "are we still supposed to talk about poetry?"

I muddled my way through the day, still not sure what happened. Then I went to a bar, thinking I could watch the news on the tv. I happened into a bar that doesn't have a tv. But they put the radio on and everyone in the bar sat there listening, staring at the radio.

I didn't want to drink. I didn't want to be in a bar. But I knew exactly zero people in Boston and I didn't want to be alone, either. I didn't have a phone (in Montana) so I couldn't talk to my friends or family. So I sat there for an hour or two, reading that morning's paper which seemed like it was from a different world. I think the front page story was something about the Big Dig.

As I was walking home, I started to have those guilty inappropriate thoughts that one sometimes has at a funeral or upon hearing devastating news. Like hearing that a friend died and wondering, however briefly, if you can get your hands on his collection of 45s. Or being at a funeral and mentally mocking the sappy music. These thoughts are inadvertent, but horrifying. Horrifying that your brain can betray your every impulse toward decency. So I was walking home and I realized that the visit my sister had planned would have to be cancelled. Thousands of people dead, and I was worried about my social calendar. I also kept thinking that none of this would have happened if I hadn't moved, if I hadn't pursued some stupid ambition. Or if it happened, it would have happened 3000 miles away and I could ease the pain of it in the bed of someone who loved me and who I loved. Thousands of people dead, and I was worried about my relative proximity to the event. I don't know that I have ever felt sicker at myself.

I stopped off at the Walgreen's Drugstore and bought a radio. A radio that I could scarcely bear to turn on.

I don't remember if I slept that night. I don't remember anything after plugging in the radio and not turning it on and looking at it resentfully. As if it were responsible.

The next night - it seems like it was a Wednesday - I had a fancy party to go to. I wasn't sure if it would still be going on, but I didn't know how to find out without a phone or a computer. And I had to go; it wasn't perhaps compulsory, but it was expected.

It was one of those weird official parties that I'm still not entirely used to. Half the people there have Wikipedia entries, occasionally someone with a Nobel or a Pulitzer shows up. And I think, "Feemus, what the fuck are you doing here?" This was my first one, and the unreality of it was almost more than I could bear. Some people were avoiding talking about the attacks, preferring to talk about baseball or books instead. Some people couldn't talk about anything else. Someone said her neighbor was on one of the flights to L.A.; she was trying not to cry. And most of these people, many of whom I was meeting for the first time, didn't seem like real people yet. They seemed like icons or fictional characters.

And I was suddenly overwhelmed hostility and resentment toward their celebrity. As if it were in poor taste to be famous or renowned under the circumstances. Thousands of people were dead and the world was changed and all they could do about it was stand around being famous. What goddamned good did that do?

I know that isn't the least bit rational, but that's how I felt.

I persisted in a state of unreality for a couple weeks. Two things made it real. I finally saw the pictures of people jumping out of the towers holding hands. And the day we invaded Afghanistan I heard that we broadcast warnings, for civilians to take cover. And I wondered how many Afghani peasants had radios. And what it would feel like to them when the bombs started dropping. Would they hold hands? Reality wasn't any better than unreality.

That's what I remember from 9/11. It's probably just like what millions of other people remember. I don't know why anyone would want to shoot off fireworks. I don't think we need a reminder. I think we all remember pretty well.

No One Wants to Hear What You Dreamt About Unless You Dreamt About Them

2007-09-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

But I'm not going to let that stop me.

I've never been a very good sleeper, but I occasionally get bouts of severe insomnia. Where I can't seem to get thirty minutes of sleep in a row. Just some fitful dozing and a lot of flopping around and kicking the covers and generally making a nuisance of myself in bed. More than the usual flopping nuisance I am in bed, that is.

This is not a good condition to be in. But it occasionally has some hilarious side effects.

The most obvious of these hilarious consequences results from the narcolepsy that inevitably accompanies a long stretch of insomnia. After six weeks or so of sleepless nights, I will fall asleep on the bus or the subway. I once fell asleep and rode to the end of the line on the last bus of the day. I was stuck in a part of town I'd never been in and where there didn't seem to be any pay phones (this was before the celular era).

The subway is even dicier--you can wake up with your wallet gone and your virtue in imminent danger. "Buddy," I woke up once saying, "I don't even touch myself there."

I've fallen asleep driving, which really isn't funny at all.

I fall asleep at work, in meetings, pretty much anywhere I should be awake. During one particularly prolonged stretch (about six months) of insomnia, I actually went to the movies every day for a week, because it was the only way I could get any sleep. That's some expensive shut-eye, but it was totally worth it.

But it's the dreams that are the strangest. In the minute or two snatches of sleep I get, I have very vivid dreams. You know the kind that come when you're still half awake? They're not the REM dreams, but some other kind. Anyway, I have these during whatever sleep I get at night plus whatever inadvertant and inappropriate naps I take during the day. And they are often so vivid, that I don't realize that they were dreams.

I spent all morning in the library looking for a book that had a chapter I particularly wanted to read. This chapter concerned something that I am currently working on, and I was very anxious to read it. I knew the author and the title. I knew it was the second chapter. I knew what it was about. I knew the chapter title.

The book was Frances Yates' The Rosicrucian Enlightenment and the chapter was "The Figure of Adam in the Hermetic Tradition."

And it wasn't there. The book was there. But it didn't have the chapter.

So I figured it must be another book by Frances Yates, and I had just mixed up the titles. So I looked in all her other books. And it wasn't there. So I thought maybe I had gotten it mixed up with another book with a similar title. I looked through every single book on the topic (50 or so). And that very special Chapter Two was just nowhere to be found.

And as I was heading over to a different library, it hit me: the chapter was in a dream. Which I should have known, because I've read The Rosicrucian Enlightenment before. And I don't remember anything about Adam in it.

But the dream was so real. I can still see the table of contents, listing this very useful chapter.

I am left with a very unsettling realization:

My dream life is as boring as my real life. In fact, it's almost indistinguishable.

Which is sort of pathetic but also sort of funny.

1001 Penis Tales

2007-09-05T07:33:00.000-07:00

So, perhaps as an antidote to all the Viagra spam I've been getting lately and all the penis enlargement offers* (along with some breast enlargement offers), today I get a spam email with this subject heading:

Now get soft for half the price!!

Really, this is the very worst product ever. And being half-off doesn't help one bit. Can they make it smaller, too? 'Cause that's sure to sell like lukewarm-cakes.

It's like some guys in the lab accidentally came up with this drug to, ahem, slacken the old wedding tackle (maybe they'd never heard of the miracle of whiskey-dick, although perhaps this new product is faster acting and has fewer side-effects) and just thought: "What the hell? I bet those boys in marketing can convince someone that they need this."

It turns out the email just wanted to sell me some knock-off software. Which is much less funny.

*A friend forward me an email the other day for a patch--a patch-to enlarge one's equipment. Ok, is it just me, or does ripping that thing off sound deeply unpleasant? But the ad copy was hilarious:

Your tiny penis looks like from the Disney World. With Penis Enlarge Patch it will look like from the Giant Planet.

Happy Labor Day

2007-09-03T17:56:00.000-07:00

I had a long pro-union post planned for today. But you can probably guess the jist of it. It would likely have begun with a quote from "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill" (best union song ever) and ended by calling every politician to the right of Karl Marx a corporate tool. Yawn, right?

So instead I thought I would post a poem. Because a poem is a kind of work. And also kind of not.

Work is the thing that transforms the world, remakes it. It also remakes the worker. In this capacity for remaking lies the both dignity and the danger of labor.

A poem doesn't remake the world in quite the same way. But it tries.

I went to a lecture once given by the great poet, Allen Grossman. He made the truest and most melancholy observation: there is very little happy poetry.

Take love poetry, for instance--about 79% of it is about wanting someone you can't have. About 20% of it is about having had someone. Maybe 1% is about having. The moment of sufficiency or satisfaction just isn't productive of poetry.

A poem is both a compensation for, but also a marker of absence.

Here is a beautiful poem about how language tries - and fails (though not completely) - to make the absent present.

My Grandmother's Love Letters

by Hart Crane

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

2007-09-01T07:28:00.000-07:00

I almost can't believe that I'm writing this, but....I'm going to defend Bill Richardson on the whole "is being gay a choice" thing.

Sort of. And with deep ambivalence.

For those of you who might have missed the brouhaha, here's the deal: during a round table discussion with the Democratic candidates about LGBT issues, Bill Richardson was asked if he thought that being gay was a choice. He said yes.

You could have heard a pin drop.

He was asked the question again. He said yes. It got very uncomfortable in the room. And he's getting a lot of flak for it.

Perhaps rightly so, but I think that the Left (even the soi-disant "left" of the Democratic party) needs to think through more fully the reason why this position is so upsetting to them.

The logic goes something like this: "if it's a choice, then it can be condemned. If it's inborn, then it is morally neutral."

But this logic cedes the parameters and the terms of the argument to the anti-gay bigots. It lets the homophobes frame the discussion. The Left does this frequently, and the Right is terrific at exploiting it: look at the way the Left's rhetoric of equality gets used by the Right to justify ending affirmative action and to support neo-segregation.

With the is-it-a-choice-or-is-it-biological argument what the Left has ceded is this: the implicit presumption that if it's a choice, then it must be a moral choice and choosing to be gay is the wrong moral choice. The very terms of the debate presume that homosexuality is something that needs to be explained away or apologized for. It is essentially a demand that gays defend or explain why they're "like that."

Now, I don't thing that sexuality is a choice. But I do think that this debate profoundly misses the point.

Because what's really at the heart of the matter is bigotry. There is no one who is condemning homosexuality whose position will change if they can be convinced that it's biological. Then they will simply argue that that gays are organistically defective. As a friend of mine once said: "If they think it's biological, then they'll identify it as a disease." The real problem is pathologizing homosexuality, whether as a genetic or a psychiatric or moral disorder. The real problem is about rights, not about etiology. The fact that biological etiology is the last word exposes the fragility of straight liberals' advocacy for gay rights. It's a cheap way for the Clintons and Edwardses to soften their refusal to stand up for gay rights.

The other thing that should alert good leftists about the fucked-upness of the inborn vs. choice debate is how simplistic it is and how it runs counter to what has been at the center of intellectual leftism for the past forty years. For the past several decades, it has been a hallmark of leftist theories that "nature" itself is just an expression of culture. Gender and race have been aggressively (and rightly) denaturalized, exposing these seemingly indisputably natural categories as social constructions and exposing the ideological work that these categories perform. The left has fought against biodeterministic explanations of everything from femininity to criminality. But we are capitulating on this one, letting people who are hostile to homosexuality paint us into an intellectual corner and ignoring the fact that by ceding the terms of the debate, we have already lost.

Who we are at any level isn't as simple as choice vs. biology. Identity isn't a matter of just biochemistry or decision making. And rather than silencing one another for deviating from orthodoxy, we should focus on fighting bigotry and discrimination. And nothing was ever solved by imposing intellectual orthodoxies. Should we talk about genetics and brain chemistry? Of course. Should that end the discussion? Of course not.

Not that I think Richardson was likely thinking of the social construction of reality or Foucauldian epistemes or scholarly debates about enculturation or whatever when he made his blunder, but I think the reaction does highlight how by allowing the Right to (once again) set the terms, the Left has once again lost its moral authority. Of course, I think the fact that of the candidates only Kucinich supports gay marriage may say something about where moral authority on this issues lies.

For a better analysis than my hasty Saturday morning post can provide, here's what the fantastically smart Stanley Fish has to say. Even though I don't agree with him about Paradise Lost.

Hmmmm....Edited to Add: I cross-posted this entry over at Daily Kos, which I do occasionally when I am attacking the Democrats (just to be contrarian). I was surprised by some of the reaction. I certainly was not trying to say that being gay is a choice or to deny anyone's experience of their own sexuality. Not at all. And I wasn't trying to say that Richardson isn't a total doofus on this issue. But I will say that I am more concerned about his use of maricon than I am about the choice matter. And I am more concerned about watching the so-called liberals haggling over whose "domestic partnership" plan is stronger or weaker because they are afraid or unwilling to fully support gay rights.

And I am deeply concerned that defending homosexuality with biodeterministic arguments has two bad effects. 1) Defending it makes it seems as though it needs a defense. 2) I don't want clinicians deciding what, for me, is an ethical issue about civil rights, acceptance, and human dignity. What other moral decisions will we leave up to the biologists? Biology simply cannot account for the complexity of human identity and behavior. I once heard the much-missed Stephen Jay Gould give a lecture in which he said something like: "Whatever there is to be proud of in humanity, it isn't biology." And if we make biology the basis of our claim to human rights, we are left vulnerable to each scientific finding that advances, revises, or contradicts the last.

Morality and civility are very often based in ignoring or suppressing or rechanneling biological realities. If I am out to dinner and am still hungry, I can't simply take food off my dining companion's plate. Even if I have some biological imperative to try their pasta. Especially if it doesn't have too much sauce. Men are typically stronger than women--that doesn't legitimize men carrying out their biological impulses on women against their will. Animals shun members for procreating without permission, they eat their young, they engage in all kinds of behavior that is perfectly natural without being something that we wish to emulate as a human society. Nature makes a very poor basis for human society. Affirming the rights and dignity of people makes a really great basis.

Too much is unknown about identity and sexuality from a biological standpoint to make biology the only guarantor of rights.

Nothing against biologists. Some of my best friends are biologists.

Really.

And most biologists I know don't see humanity as a sum of biological imperatives, either.

My mother, who is not terribly political, always manages to see through the bullshit of politics (mine as well as everyone else's). She was telling me about a coworker whose daughter can't get insurance through the coworker's partner's health plan (my mom's workplace doesn't offer insurance). "If they could get married," my mom said, "that little girl would have health insurance. How is it 'family values' to let kids go uninsured?"

Edited AGAIN to add: the biology issue seems especially problematic for protecting the rights of transpeople. Going back to the point that being inborn or genetic is just going to make the bigots say that non-normative sexualities and gender identities are a kind of congenital illness: look at the research that tries to prove that psychopathy and sociopathy are inborn. This biological argument is used as an excuse to lock up teenagers for life. But what's even more disturbing is the way in which some of this "inborn sociopathy" stuff gets linked to non-binary chromosomal gendering. The XYY hysteria of a few years ago carried with it a very strong whiff of homo- and trans-phobia and a phobia that adapted itself quite easily to accord with the idea that sexual/gender identity is inborn.

Maybe He Could Get the Poet Laureate Job

2007-08-28T10:44:00.000-07:00

With Alberto Gonzales leaving, Washington gets a little less poetic.

The depth and grace of Gonzales' talent can be heard in how he modulates the cadence of the anaphoric "I do not recall"--a less gifted artist would have been content to let this become merely a catchy refrain. But Gonzales was not afraid to take risks as a poet, employing a subtle variatio, in which "I do not recall" becomes "I can't remember" becomes "I don't know" and returns with renewed forced--in an almost transcendent register--to "I do not recall." It has the rhythmic seductiveness of Gerard Manley Hopkins, coupled with the incisive brevity of early Ezra Pound.

And who can forget his prose poetry? The merest sample is enough to demonstrate its genius:

I am not aware that it certainly was in my mind a problem or basis to accept the recommendation that they be asked to leave.

In "Man Carrying Thing," Wallace Stevens wrote: "The poem must resist the intellegence almost successfully." Stevens, whose often abstruse lyricism is clearly an influence on Gonzales' work, is outstripped by the younger poet, who in this breathtaking passage resists the intelligence with utter success. The student surpasses the master.

But as much as Gonzales' work hearkens back to these poets of High Modernism, one can also see the influence of postmodernism in this creative auteur. One of the hallmarks of postmodernist literature is the transgression of generic boundaries between high and low culture. This embracing of so-called "low" genres can be best seen in Gonzales' work in the plot-heavy Padilla Affair.

Gonzales demonstrates his mastery of the thriller in the exciting last-minute plot twist, in which the prisoner is finally granted a civilian trial just as the story's chief antagonist, the justice system, is about to compel the Administration to adhere to the law of the land. This critic, for one, never saw it coming! A roller-coaster ride of adventure, from the first illegal detainment to the Constitution-defying denouement!

Goodbye, Alberto Gonzales. D.C. was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

What is That Thing Nuns Wear?

2007-08-23T12:02:00.000-07:00

Oh, yes. A habit.

But the nuns probably don't say: "I am going to wash my habit." or "Hang on a sec, let me put on my habit." They probably just say "I'm going to do laundry." Or "I've gotta get dressed."

Because the habitiness of a habit becomes invisible after a while.

So, I called my folks yesterday and mother told me that they bought a dishwasher. "Oh dear God," I said. "How is Dad taking it?"

Because my father has a thing with the dishes.

When I was growing up, it never seemed out of the ordinary to me that my father did an enormous amount of the housecleaning. Both my folks worked full time and my mom did most of the cooking. So it all seemed to work out pretty fair. To the extent that I gave it any thought, I probably just assumed that my old man was an enlightened guy.

Which, you know, he mostly is.

But I think that part of it is also a slight compulsiveness. This is most evident with the dishes. With hilarious consequences.

When it's my parents' turn to host a holiday meal, my father hovers around the table, waiting for dishes to wash.

Father: "You done with that plate? Let me take it for you."

Feemus: "I think I might have seconds in a minute."

Father: "Great. You can have them on a nice clean plate."

And then he reaches for it. Even if there's still food on it. Food I intend to eat.

Good grief. My sister and I joke that over the years we've developed the "prison-yard grip," hunched over our dish with the non-fork arm (left for her, right for me) snaked around the plate for protection. "Get away from my chow," we've learned to snarl.

We're totally ready for the big house.

But the really funny thing is the coffee cup situation.

If you ever visit my perfectly lovely parents, here's a bit of advice: never, under any circumstances, set your coffee cup down. Anywhere. It will get whisked away and washed, even if it is full of coffee.

Astonishingly, I have a kind of temporary amnesia about this behavior--I always momentarily forget what's going to happen. My sister, too.

Here's a typical scene when my sister and I go for a visit. For the full effect, you need to include bemused partners looking on (we've both made inter-species matches: coffee-drinkers with non-coffee-drinkers):

Feemus: "Hey Dad, have you seen my coffee cup?"

Father: "Did you want some more coffee? I'll go make a fresh pot."

Feemus: "No, no. I'm just looking for my cup."

Father: "I'll make a new pot. It'll be done in a jiff."

Feemus: "No, that's ok. Just gonna find my cup. It has coffee in it."

Father [somewhat evasively]: "Oh, um, it might have gotten washed."

Sister [entering]: "Hi guys. Have either of you seen my coffee cup?"

Father: "Hi honey. Your brother just asked me to make another pot. Ready in five minutes."

Sister: "No, I was just..."

[Feemus and Sister finally realize (for the 400th time) what's going on]

Sister: "...I guess I just misplaced it. I'll make another pot."

Feemus: "I'll help."

[Feemus and Sister walk off giggling]

FIN

Well, at least I know where I get my habit of pretending not to understand questions that I don't want to answer.

So, I'm not sure what my poor father will do now that they have a dishwasher. My mom handed off the phone and I asked him how he liked it. "It's great," he said. But I could hear the tension in his voice.

So I called my sister. "Did you hear that the old folks got a dishwasher?" I asked.

She had not only heard, she'd gone for a visit over the weekend and had seen the beast in action. "It's nice," she said. I asked her how our father was coping. "Oh, it's pretty much the same. Now he just takes your stuff and puts it in the dishwasher. I had four separate cups on Sunday morning and he threw half my breakfast away when I got up to take a phone call."

We laughed. Then she said, "You know what's really funny?"

"What?" I asked in perfect innocence of how the answer would forever shatter my peace.

"You do the same thing."

Oh.

The Unbeatable Slow Machine

2007-08-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

Philip Larkin is easy to despise.

He made a career out of whining about his career. Most of us would be thrilled to make a living writing poems about the dissatisfaction of writing poems and about how women (or men) just don't understand us. Most of us don't get awards and tenure and buckets of cash for our dissatifactions. We just get ulcers and divorces, while Larkin cashed in, and still complained.

It's enough to make you want to do that obnoxious violin thing with your thumb and forefinger.

Except, you know, he's brilliant. No one else quite captures how much an objectively good life can suck. How baffling it can be when nothing's gone wrong but yet nothing seems to be right. The unsettling feeling that life is living us. All the self-indulgent (and self-consciously guilty about it) miseries of happy lives.

His birthday was earlier this month. Happy Birthday, you crotchety dead S.O.B.

Here's a poem:

Ignorance

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,

Even to wear such knowledge - for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions -
And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why.

Go Big or Go Home

2007-08-17T14:01:00.000-07:00

So Karl Rove thinks the Congressional Democrats are "obsessed" with him. That he is their "white whale."

It's hard for me to listen to this without laughing. For the most part, the Congressional Democrats can't seem to be bothered to be obsessed with anything except handwringing and in-fighting.

I'd like to see them get a little obsessed with Rove. I'd really like to see them get obsessed with getting us out of this war and giving us back our damned civil liberties.

When I think about real honest-to-goodness Congressional obsession, it's Bill Clinton who springs to mind. If ever a Congress was obsessed with a single figure, it was with Bill Clinton.

And rightly so, perhaps. Travelgate. Whitewater. Filegate. Troopergate. Blowjobs.

Oh, the blowjobs.

There were a lot of things to obsess over. But there's sure as hell a lot to obsess over in the Bush Administration, too. And until the Gonzales business, the Congressional Democrats (even the scant few who voted against the Patriot Act and the war) have done precious little obsessing.

I've been contemplating why. Also, thinking about Homeric poetry.

The story of the Iliad, for anyone who's forgotten, is pretty much this: a coalition of Greeks are fighting a nine year war with the Trojans. With each victorious battle, they seize as much property as they can, which often includes some women. Agamemnon has to give one of his women back (to appease Apollo) and then decides to take one of Achilles' women.

So Achilles refuses to fight. "You're so mean," he tells Agamemnon. "You always just take whatever you want. And you drink too much. And nobody likes you. And it's not fair. I hate you."

It's all very manly.

Anyway, without Achilles the Greeks get their asses handed to them and all the soldiers are pissed off at Agamemnon for being such a shitty leader. "Dude," they say, "that's just cold to take his slave woman. And not even offer him another one. And without Achilles, we're pretty much fucked in this-here war. So make nice already."

And then some more stuff happens. It's a really great poem.

But (at least for the purposes of today's post), it's interesting that it's the dust-up with Achilles on which the warriors focus their resentment.

The poem begins with the slavegirl stealing incident, and not with the affair that got the whole war going in the first place. Which, as we all know, was when the Trojan prince, Paris, came to a dinner party at the king of Sparta's (Menelaus) house and then took of with his host's wife, Helen.

Not very nice manners.

Menelaus and his brother, Agamemnon, get a bunch of men together from all over and go fight a war.

But the warriors don't question why they should risk their lives trying to get a cuckold's cheating woman back from some skanky prince. They don't question the complicated extra-legal conventions of hospitality that are the putative reasons for waging the war. They don't ask if imperialism is the real reason that Menelaus and Agamemnon want to get all invade-y. These guys have been away from home for nine years, camping out, away from their families, and they don't seem to question their leadership AT ALL until it comes to this relatively minor incident with Achilles NINE YEARS into the war.

But really, what would the story be like if the fighters hald meetings about what constitutes good governance, what the limits of authority are, and how Menelaus and Agamemnon had overstepped these limits?

y a w n . . .

That's not dramatic. What makes the quarrel with Achilles so dramatic is how immediate its terms are. How accessible. Sex, honor, property, injured pride. These are all things we can make sense of. MUCH more interesting than reexamining our system of political values and taking stock in our complicity with our own subjugation.

George Orwell once leveled the charge against Charles Dickens that his novels were not radical or even reformist. Orwell argued that in fact they promoted a kind of quietism and that in a Dickens' novel:

[The] whole moral is that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious. Bounder by is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work well enough that, all through, is the implication. And so far as social criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this, unless one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.

Leaving aside whether or not this is strictly true, Orwell's point ignores the fact that Dickens had a story to tell. "Capitalism" in the abstract doesn't usually make for a very interesting villain. But a cruel capitalist does.

For proof, one need only read some of the proletarian fiction from the 1930s; it's heartfelt and intelligent and utterly dreadfully skull-numbing in both its storytelling and its orthodoxy. [exceptions do, of course, abound. Zola, for instance, or Brecht]

The truth is, it is very difficult to demonize very large evil. Satan is never more interesting than when he has a specific and limited (i.e. a human) agenda. Revenge in Genesis (and Paradise Lost), a little friendly game of chance in Job. Evil is boring (and might force us to confront the fact that we're not exempt). An evil character is interesting. Evil has to be scaled down in order to be compelling or comprehensible.

That's what Bill Clinton was to his Congressional opponents. An evil character. His scandals were all immediate. Accessible.

Compare Filegate with the warrentless wiretaps. The Clinton administration came under attack when a member of his staff requested background reports on a number of individuals, many of whom were Clinton's political enemies. This rightly caused inquiry (although Clinton was cleared of wrongdoing) and the staff member, Craig Livingstone, resigned.

This was an alarming abuse of power, a Nixonian move that evinced a paranoic insecurity and a Machivellian will to power. But in its very pettiness there's something in it we can understand. Who hasn't wanted the dirt on someone? It's like peeking into someone's medicine cabinet.

But when President Bush announces that he's wiretapping citizens and residents without warrents and intends to keep doing so, well, it's no longer like peeking into th emedicine cabinet. It's not even like taking off to Troy with your host's wife after the party. This is more like fucking your host's wife on the dinner table while eating the last pork chop. It's so outrageous that it's completely incomprehensible.

Take Travelgate, in which civil servants were allegedly fired so that the Clintons could hand out sweetheart deals to their friends. Or Whitewater. The Clintons were charged with using their position and influence to enrich themselves and their friends.

Which is bad.

But compared to the scope of Enron and Halliburton, it just doesn't rate. The comparative paltriness of the money involved made the Clinton scandals seem more scandalous. Because we could put a face to the people who were injured.

If the Clintons had only had more impressive friends, we might never have paid so much attention. But their friends were, like the Clintons, parvenus who wielded their newfound power clumsily. Both their ill-gotten gains and the displaced costs of these gains were small scale, and therefore visible.

The sheer scale of the damage done by the Halliburton contracts on the other hand makes it difficult to see. I've written before about how effective the neocons lies are--they are effective in direct proportion to their size. Ditto scandals. Go big or go home.

I am an Idiot

2007-08-13T17:14:00.000-07:00

Today I'm doing a little proofreading, and I come across this sentence:

It's important to note here that the ethical concept of "hubris" is often metaphorically extended to pants and animals.

I've been laughing for about 15 minutes. Pants and animals! Hubristic pants! Animals wearing pants! Oh, the hubris of animals wearing pants! It just doesn't stop being funny.

Although maybe it's just me. It has been pointed out that I have the sense of humor of a 12 year old (do you think he wants it back?). One time I got stuck teaching Romantic poetry and we were reading Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and I was feeling a little punchy while discussing this passage:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced.

and I asked the students if they thought Coleridge wore a belt or suspenders with his thick fast pants.

They were not amused. They looked at me with very grown-up unamused expressions.

I can't help it. "Pants" is a funny word. It's even funnier as a verb.

Unless you're the direct object.

World's Lamest Post

2007-08-13T10:13:00.000-07:00

I'm not kidding.

Does anyone have a tip for getting an ink stain off a hardwood floor without damaging the finish too much?

I keep a bottle of hairspray to get ink stains out of clothes, but it's not doing any good on my floor (except to make it sticky). I've tried Murphy's Oil Soap, which likewise doesn't do anything on the ink. No luck with vinegar, either.

Any Heloises out there? I'm starting to obsess about this ink stain. And I'm not sure I can take on any more obsessions right now.

Where's Burt Lancaster when you need him to make you forget about your floor???

Professor Backwards Died Yesterday When His Cries of "pleH" Went Unnoticed

2007-08-11T07:59:00.000-07:00

I have a plea for help. It's a bit of a long shot, but here goes.

I remember reading a story in The New Yorker or maybe the Atlantic Monthly about 12-15 years ago (when I still read the fiction in these mags) and for some reason this story popped into my head last week and now I am obsessing about it.

Because I can't ever remember plots, I have no idea what happened in the story, or even what it was about. If it was The New Yorker, probably nothing, you know, actually happened. But what I do remember, is someone talking about feeling both a quietness and a sense of expectation, a kind of prolonged about-to-happen-ness.

He likens this sense of quiet expectation to the first reel of a Deborah Kerr movie, when she's going about her ordinary life, before the Burt Lancaster character appears. We are living, the narrator said, "in the days before Burt."

I've got this stuck in my head and I can't find it anywhere. I've googled the shit out of every possible combination of words, and nada. I put it into a number of the university's periodical databases and nothing. I am starting to wonder if I made it up.

I know this is a totally random, but does anyone remember reading this?

The last time I had something like this nagging at me like this it was about some song that someone put on a "mix tape" for me 20+ years ago and all I could remember was that the lyrics included the phrase "fuck Mary Tyler Moore." After pestering my friends to see if anyone remembered this song, I finally did a google search and came up with some very unpleasant things (poor Mary!). But at last I found the song. Hm....all I can say is that the mid-80's was a weird weird time.

I Know I Promised No More Sports, But...

2007-08-09T07:53:00.000-07:00

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently issued this statement:

Tonight, Barry Bonds etched his name into baseball's history books and took his rightful place among the sport's immortals.

Um, Ms. Pelosi, I don't mean to be a noodge, but isn't there a war on? And, you know, like, global poverty and unaccounted-for weapons-grade plutonium and state-sanctioned torture and a federal government that's rife with cronyism and corruption?? Shouldn't you be trying to get us back some of our civil liberties instead of issuing statements about the Giants' game???

Also, we write in books, Ms. Pelosi. We do not etch in them. I know it's petty to carp on mixed metaphors, but petty is just how I roll. Today, anyway.

And also, sheesh--his "rightful place among the sport's immortals"? Hyperbolic much? Her statement continued to say that Randy Johnson is "Adonis-like" and that Jim Thome is "a fierce intellectual" and that Floyd Landis is "an undisputed champion."

P.S. I now officially promise to stop blathering about sports and to stop hating on Bonds (who I really don't hate, and heck records get broken all the time. Although I was a little upset when Bonds broke Rickey Henderson's record for walks. But I got over it). Although most of the hate in this post is for Pelosi. Get back to work, lady.

When Assy Beats Classy

2007-08-08T07:35:00.000-07:00

So, the big not-news is that Barry Bonds has the new home run record. Everyone still likes Hank Aaron better, though. This pretty much sums it up. Deep thoughts to follow.

So, I am officially off my electronic media ban. I was pretty good--a few lapses here and there, but that's to be expected. One thing I really missed during my month of abstinence was sports. I did break down and watch one game (the Mariners lost. To the Red Sox. It was horrible).

I don't really like the sports writing in either of my local papers, so for the most part I read sports news online. So while I was restricting myself to print media, I didn't do much more than read box scores and check standings.

And oh, what I've missed. Actually, I didn't miss having to endure the lengthy run-up to Bonds breaking the record. All the endless pontificating about what this "means" for the game. Yeah, it sucks that someone hateable replaces someone loveable. But that's the game.* Half the time I can't even remember why I hate Bonds. Except for that stupid dangly earring he used to wear. Blech.

But this festival of Bonds-hating taps into something odd about sports celebrity: certain players are loved or hated for reasons that go well beyond either matters of play or off-field behavior. There's just something about sports-fandom that demands heroes and villains, in a way that other types of fandom don't.

Because, I think, unlike other forms of entertainment, we don't choose our sports loyalties for merit or for the satisfaction they bring us (ask a Cubs fan). I won't buy a Britney Spears album or watch a Jerry Bruckheimer show because I know that they will suck. But there have been lots of years when I know that the Mariners will suck, and I still watch the game.

It's this frankly and inescapably irrational nature of the commitment that leads to the need for good guys and bad guys, I think. I don't need to demonize Britney because she just doesn't matter when I've got the Lou Reed playing. But man, did I enjoy hating Paul O'Neill. Hating Paul O'Neill made baseball better in a way that hating Britney doesn't make music any better. I was actually sad when old Paul retired, I liked hating him so much.

And Bonds is like Paul O'Neill--he's not a monster or any more of an asshole than many other players. He just seems to fit the bill for this decade's villain.

*Although I do think that Hank Aaron's stats from the Negro Leagues should be added to his records from the Majors. But that's another post.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Other sports new from while I was gone:

- A few marks can be placed in the good guy column: Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripkin got into the Hall of Fame. Griffey made it to 2500 hits.

- Gary Sheffield said some offensive things. The world yawned. For whatever reason, I can't ever be annoyed with Sheffield. Yeah, he's a jerk. But he's such a patient hitter and just one of the smartest at-bats in the game, I just kind of love him.

- Rickey Henderson officially retired. And a little piece of me died. I guess we'll have to wait until I'm commissioner to get him back. And seriously, let's get cracking on that letter-writing campaign. I'm looking for a new job, and I think Commissioner of Baseball is just the ticket.

And I know this isn't a sports blog, so it'll be back to our regularly scheduled bitching about stuff tomorrow. Because this is a bitching about stuff blog.

This Just In: America Likes Breasts

2007-08-08T01:01:00.000-07:00

Just not Hilary's.

Ok, I know I'm a month or so late in getting to this, but.....seriously, what's the deal with the Washington Post covering, so to speak, Hilary Clinton's cleavage???

Granted, it was in a fashion column, but still. Who the fuck cares? Is this relevant?

Now, as you all know, I am no supporter of Clinton. She's a classic Depublican. And it sickens me that she can't admit that her votes on the Patriot Act and the authorization of force in Iraq were wrong, while she criticizes the Bush administration for these very things. Blech.

But in terms of appearance, this woman is between a rock and a hard place. I remember when her husband was campaigning the first time and everyone criticized her hair for being "too severe" and her clothes for being too conservative. And now her tits are making the Washington Post "uncomfortable" for being too "private" while not being "forthright" enough. Forthright?

I don't even want to know what that means.

It just shows to go you how little things have changed. The male candidates clothes do make the news with sickening frequency, but it's nothing like the scrutiny that Clinton's (and Rice's, for that matter) do. It's vulgar and pandering.

Let's all take our cue from Bill and just ignore Hilary's breasts entirely.

Was that a cheap shot? Oh dear, I'm as bad as the Post.

In other political news, my boy Kucinich kicked some ass last night in the debates. Go Dennis. Everyone likes an underdog. Except for, you know, the press and the financial backers and the primary voters and...

Well, I like Dennis. Not only is he unflaggingly honest and decent and fearless, he's the only one of the candidates to have had the mafia put a hit out on him. A mafia hit!!

Well, Congratulations

2007-08-01T17:51:00.000-07:00

I've been doing pretty good on my whole electronic media ban (I had a brief cave-in, but I recovered). I have another nine days of abstinence, but I felt a little attack of curmudgeonliness that just had to get blogged out of my system.

I was talking with a friend once about the general shittiness of our students' papers and he said:

Just once wouldn't you like to say to them: "Well, congratulations. I read your essay and now I hate books. And not just the one you wrote about. You made me hate them all."

I often feel the same way about professional literary critics. Tonight I am reading a book about the poetry of Andrew Marvell, one of my favorite poets. The central thesis of the book is that all of his poems can be read as anticipating the Last Judgment. The claim's not completely without merit, even if it is a little totalizing for my tastes. I mean, surely some things might, every once in a while, be about something else.

But I was willing to play along, until the author gets to this passage about "To His Coy Mistress." This is the Marvell poem that gets most frequently anthologized and so is his best known. [I'll put it at the end of the post, for those of you who were never forced to memorize it!] It's not my favorite, but it's a brilliant and puzzling and fascinating poem about some poor bookworm trying to get laid. You gotta like that.

The author argues that the poet, rather than trying to get into his coy mistress's petticoats, really just wants to convert her, so that she'll be saved.

Convert, you say? Is that what the kids are calling it these days? "Hey baby, you wanna come up to my place and look at some pamphlets about the apocalypse?" Hmmm...I wonder if that line ever works. If so, those Jehovah's Witnesses are getting more trim than a barbershop floor.

Where was I? Oh yes, this dreadful book. Here's what the author wrote:

The speaker compares his sexual potency (‘My…Love’ here implying the tumescent penis) to the absolute power of the final Kingdom over all other Empires: ‘slow’ but sure is its victory, as we know. Another Christological image appropriated by the speaker, this sexual joke picks up the pun on ‘juice’ in the previous line, and is a wittily literal rendering of ‘flesh is grass’ (penis as plant), of Daniel’s prophecy that the clay feet of the Idol/Empires shale ‘mingle…with the seed of men’ (2:43), and of Christ as the victorious ‘seed’ of man (Genesis 3:15)—semen is Christ-like, generative and therefore vegetative, too. In other words, consummation is the planting of the seed of the Kingdom-trees; it is the desired End…and sex is at once conversion and the Kingdom that conversion wins.

Well, congratulations. I read your book and now I hate poetry. And sex. And the Book of Daniel.

Thank you for listening. See you in a week or so,

Here's the poem:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Valediction

2007-07-09T07:27:00.000-07:00

Feemus Unplugged

This Blog is Abandoned Property

I couldn't come up with a very clever title. It's just as well.

I am taking temporary leave (sabblogtical?) for a month. I am going to try to live an unplugged life. I'm hoping it will improve eyestrain and attitude. I'm hoping it will reconnect me with what it means to be part of the solution. I'm hoping it will remind me that the revolution will not be brought to us by Xerox. I am hoping that it makes me less crabby and more productive.

It will probably just make me want to watch tv and read (even possibly write) blogs. Ah, well.

I think tv and computers and blogs are great, mind you, I just need to restore some balance. I think I'll still listen to the radio, though. I mean, I gotta have Car Talk.

I hope to see you all in a month.

Happy Independence Day

2007-07-04T12:20:00.001-07:00

Let's see...today we can celebrate Scooter Libby's independence from justice. Or the Supreme Court's independence from the values of racial equality and integration. Or the President's independence from reality. Or the war's independence from leadership. Or...

I can't even go on. It's too easy. And too disheartening.

Have you noticed that everytime anyone in the government has mentioned freedom in the last several years it's when they're taking one of them away?

Christopher Hitchens is Not Great

2007-07-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchens' new book, God is Not Great, is making quite a splash. It is one of the most damaging and moronic thing he's written to date.

Now, I don't believe in God. Not even a little bit. But what I do believe in is not being a smug jerk. Hitchens' polemical "antitheism" is just as rigidly dogmatic and exclusionary as any religious extremist position and, even worse, it's based on the same misunderstandings of intellectual history as much of the rest of his work.

It's a point almost too obvious to make, perhaps, but when the nation and the world are being threatened by tyranny, absolutism, and a resurgence of imperialism, it may not be the right time to drive wedges between those who stand together in opposition. The coalitions between religious and secular opponents of war, corporate greed, and the violations of civil and human rights, need to be fostered, not weakened. Just as it is commonly noted that only Nixon, as a Republican, could have made overtures to China, so too I think that in the struggle against religious totalitarianism it will be the religious moderates who will ultimately be the most successful (it's a shame our policies are systematically either destroying or radicalizing the Muslim moderates, but perhaps that's best left for a different post).

But what annoys me most about Hitchens' position is his refusal to analyze or historicize his own idols. Hitchens bases his attack against religion--or rather, against belief--in the values of the Enlightenment. He has said that since 9/11 his mission is “to defend the Enlightenment, to defend and extend the benefits of rationalism. By all and any means necessary."

Hitchens poses these values of "enlightenment" and "rationalism" against the superstitions of religion. But while he is eager to argue that religion is part of an historical moment, his historical understanding is too impoverished to see that his own values are historically conditioned and carry with them their own myths and superstitions.

In a recent interview, Hitchens had this pseudo-anthropological nonsense to say about religion:

Religion is an attempt at philosophy. It's what stood in for philosophy in primitive times, and it does raise some quite important questions, for heaven's sake. You can't deny that, right? So where it ends, I think, real philosophy does begin, just as where alchemy ends, chemistry begins and so forth. Astrology with astronomy and all the rest.

Where to begin? First of all, Hitchens engages in a bit of question-begging, with his fallacious (or at least uninterrogated) presumption that the human sciences are progressive in the same way the natural sciences are. This, on the face of it, is bullshit.

Tony Kushner is great. He isn't better than Shakespeare. He isn't better than Sophocles. Wittgenstein is great. He isn't better than Hegel. He isn't better than Empedocles. There just isn't progress in the humane disciplines in the same way that there is in the hard sciences.

But even overlooking this error, Hitchens' assertions are just plain wrong. Chemistry doesn't have its genesis at the termination point of alchemy, but within it. Many natural philosophers of the Early Modern period, such as the great scientist and occultist Paracelsus (who posited a chemical understanding of the body, overturning the Galenic model of the four humours), considered their work alchemical. Likewise with astronomy and astrology.

And for Hitchens, who is so enamored of the Enlightenment, to say that "real philosophy" begins only at the end of religion is utterly preposterous. The Enlightenment was not a godless intellectual phenomenon by any means and what Hitchens means by "reason" is not a stable and timeless concept.

First off, if the only real philosophers are those who reject religion, the philosophical underpinnings of both the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution collapse:

~ The thinker from whom we get Hitchens' beloved term "Enlightenment," Immanuel Kant ("Aufklarung") did not reject God, but rather thought that presuming his existence was a practical necessity for a philosopher.

~ The father of experimental science, Francis Bacon, rejected the idea of a "Mosaic physicks"--i.e. one that was grounded in the Bible--and advocated keeping science and religion separate. But this is not a rejection of religion--he thought that the "unwholesome mixture of things human and divine" makes not only for bad science "but also a heretical religion."

~ Rene Descartes, the great mathemetician whose programmatic doubt in everything but reason provides the model for radical skepticism, was deeply religious and he saw his work as fulfilling a spiritual and worshipful purpose.

~ Pierre Bayle, one of the first organizers of an encyclopedia (a very Enlightenment project) argued that God could not be known by reason. And as much as Bayle advocated reason, it didn't stop him from being a committed Catholic (he converted from Calvinism).

~ John Locke, the great popularizer of empiricism (which, while very unlike Descartes' Rationalism, was nontheless part of a continuing trend), the sine qua non of the Enlightenment, was utterly devout.

~ The one true atheist among the Enlightenment philosophers, David Hume, was no proponent of the rationality that Hitchens' promotes: "Reason," he wrote, "is and ought only to be a slave to the passions."

The list, of course, could go on forever. Hitchens wants to delegitimize any philosopher who has not repudiated religion, but this leaves us with a scant handful of philosophers and even less math (take away Newton, Leibniz, Pascal, and Descartes and you're left without analytical geometry or calculus or probability. I guess being a math major would be easier at the University of Christopher Hitchens).

What's even more maddening about Hitchens' smug dismissal of the "primitivism" of religion in favor of "rationality" is that it presumes that "rationality" doesn't have its own range of meanings and its own set of myths.

Like all fundamentalism, rationalist fundamentalism is dangerous. Because like all fundamentalism, rationalist fundamentalism asserts its own infallibility. It's stunning the religious fervor with which Hitchens praises reason as the answer to everything.

Now, I'm all in favor of reason, but I think that there's something important to be learned from that place where religion and science intersect: both tell us that there is more to the universe than the phenomenal world, than the world of perception.

This is true for the moral universe, as well. Shutting people out because they don't agree with you isn't rational or reasonable. Trying to fight the violence of religious fanaticism with secular fanaticism is not reasonable. Churchill once said something about the cure for what ails democracy being more democracy. And I think that the cure for what ails religious tolerance is more religious tolerance.

And as far as the Enlightenment goes, I think Theodor Adorno says it a lot better than I ever could:

In the authority of universal concepts the Enlightenment detected a fear of the demons through whose effigies human beings had tried to influence nature in magic rituals. From now on matter was finally to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties. For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion. Once the movement is able to develop unhampered by external oppression, there is no holding it back. Its own ideas of human rights then fare no better than the older universals. Any intellectual resistance it encounters merely increases its strength. The reason is that enlightenment also recognizes itself in the old myths. No matter which myths are invoked against it, by being used as arguments they are made to acknowledge the very principle of corrosive rationality of which Enlightenment stands accused. Enlightenment is totalitarian.

I Don't Know if You've Heard...

2007-06-28T10:11:00.001-07:00

Apparently one of the Hilton daughters has recently had some legal troubles.

What the Fuck Is Wrong With This Government?

2007-06-28T09:43:00.000-07:00

Seriously--every damn day I think: "I've seen it all. This is the craziest shit ever."

And then they do something crazier. And no one seems to be able or willing to stop them.

First, they took away our civil liberites and OUR right to privacy (while enhancing their OWN capacity for secrecy) with the Patriot Act. Oh, and thanks Clinton2 and Edwards for voting that in. Way to make stripping us of our rights and freedoms a bipartisan activity!! Ain't coalition-building grand?

Then the President decides that being the Chief Executive isn't enough and he starts using signing statements, so that he can (in total contravention of the Constitution) disobey laws without vetoing them. So now he's Chief Executive and Chief Legislator. That must be nice for him.

Then he gets Alito in, with his crazy-ass Unitary Executive bullshit so that he can expand his powers even further (I guess "judicial activism" is ok, as long as it is stripping powers away from the legislature and giving them to the President). All that's missing now is a goddamned crown.

Then we suspend habeas corpus. Oh, and thanks Clinton1 for making this possible with your own suspension (the first since the Civil War). Because, you know, if we call someone an enemy combatant then they don't deserve to have rights. The great thing about this, is that by ignoring Geneva Convention rules, we can call anyone we want an enemy combatant.

And now--the Vice President says he's not a member of the Executive Branch???? How is this even happening? How on earth is he getting away with this? I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow I woke up and they told us that the Bill of Rights doesn't count from a strict constructionist standpoint. Or, you know, that water is really dry.

Who would have thought that the most decent, honorable, and productive thing that Dick Cheney would accomplish in office would be to shoot some other rich white douchebag in the face?

Thank you for letting me vent. I apologize for the lack of analysis and the somewhat salty language. Your patience is appreciated.

UPDATE: I just read that the President has invoked "executive privilege" (not in the constitution and affirmed by the Supreme Court only for instances in which national security would be compromised) in order to avoid complying with the investigation into the firings of U.S. attorneys.

I wonder if that means that Dick Cheney will have to hand over the documents. Because he's not, you know, part of the executive branch.

Oh Dear

2007-06-28T09:32:00.000-07:00

I saw a billboard today for what has to be the lamest product ever, even taking spray-on hair into account.

It was for Coors, which now apparently has a heat-sensitive label. The ad copy read:

The Only Beer That Tells You When It's Cold

Who the hell is this being marketed to? People without fingertips?? People who don't understand refrigerators? Who the hell can't tell on their own the temperature of their beverage???

People who buy Coors, I guess.

The world is a very very stupid place.

Sign of the Times

2007-06-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

Having lived most of my life in cities with very large homeless populations, I find myself not precisely hardened to the problem, but more detached than I should be. I don't like this detachment--I think it's a symptom of the ethical anaesthesia that lets us live useless or damaging lives.

But this post isn't about self-flagellation.

It's about signs. One of the side effects of my daily callousness toward the homeless problem is my connoisseurship of panhandling signage. These fall into certain categories:

The heartrending:

Social services has my kids

or

Vietnam veteran--HIV+

Ok, this last one would be more devasting if its owner weren't in his late thirties/early forties and therefore unlikely to be a Vietnam vet. Maybe he's a veteran of too many Full Metal Jacket viewings.*

The sadly humorous:

Will work for hugs. Money ok, too.

or

Won't lie. Need beer.

The ironic meta-sign:

Sad Story

Well, one thinks they've seen every possible category of sign, but today I saw a new one that's left me a little stymied. It didn't belong to a traditional panhandler, but to a busker, which is weird enough in itself. The buskers are almost invariably sign-free and careful to distinguish themselves from street people. Busking around here is considered a honorable profession--advocates for the noise-polluting institution like to point out that Tracy Chapman and Mary Lou Lord both got their start busking here.**

But today I saw this busker with a sign. She certainly didn't look homeless--she was rather fashionably, if somewhat trashily, dressed in a low cut top and thigh-high boots. She had elaborately dressed hair and well-manicured (if somewhat trahsy) fingernails. She was singing a torch song, something about being done wrong. And by an upturned hat she had a sign that read (I'm not kidding):

Please help. Need to get prescription for antibiotics filled.

I just don't know what to make of this. Apart from the weirdness of this woman's in-between-ness, half busker and half well-dressed panhandler, the specificity of her sign just threw me. Antibiotics? Isn't that a lot of information?

I sort of felt like telling her that all I could see when I looked at her sign was:

Got the Clap. Need the Cure.

But then, I'm not a very nice person.

There's no point to this story.

*When I was a bartender, I heard lots of stories about Vietnam. I'm sure that at least half of those guys were never there. There was one cusotmer who would try to convince me that he was a Vietnam vet, despite his being in his clearly thirties (this was about ten years ago). I even carded him once, just to make sure. He was born in 1963. So unless he was VERY precocious, I'm sure he never fought Charlie on the delta. Just sayin'. You'd think these guys could at least update it to the Gulf War. Or maybe Granada--that would at least be original.

**I know that I've bitched about the buskers before, and I know how miserably curmudgeonly it sounds. I swear that I never hated street musicians until I moved to the busking capital of the free world. On any given day when the weather's decent, there are 5-10 of them in a three block radius and many of them are amplified (ugh) so that their sonic real estate overlaps. This ceases to be music and it just noise pollution. Also, I am a curmudgeon.

Sigh....

2007-06-14T19:14:00.000-07:00

Do you have one of those friends? The kind who is just freakishly smart, that you're half in wonder and half alarmed? The kind who makes you sort of amazed that you're even in the same species as them?

Well, I went to lunch with TWO such folks today. I came to the realization that I am their Ralph Wiggam.

"My cat's name is 'Mittens.' His breath smells like cat food." That's about what I can contribute. Seriously, by the end of lunch, I was pulling my hand into the sleeve of my sweater and splaying the fingers and saying: "I made a starfish with my sweater."

I feel blessed to have such friends. But also a little mystified.

A Day in the Life of the World's Laziest Man

2007-06-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

I'm working from home this week, which is nice, but not always productive of work.

This morning, I was getting some leftover tabouleh out of the refrigerator for breakfast. And I don't know how it happened, but the bowl slipped out of my hands. Everything was in slo-mo: I could see the bowl falling and the tabouleh flying in excruciating detail. I heard myself yelling "nnnnnnnooooooooooooo!."

And then everything went back to normal time and I had about a quart and a half of salad everywhere. All over inside the refrigerator. Down in the vents of the refrigerator. All over the floor, the countertop, the cupboards. All over me--bits of tomato and cucumber and bulgher in my hair and on my glasses. Everything smelt of garlic and mint.

So I spent the morning cleaning up. I actually had to bust out the old screwdriver and take the refrigerator apart in order to get it all up. There's still a faint sheen of olive oil on the cupboards and I don't think I'll ever get the garlic smell off me. I'm half tempted to go the mikvah down the block and see if they can help.

I have given up on work. I still haven't had any breakfast. I am going to the movies.

The Laws of Gravity Are Very Strict

2007-06-06T07:02:00.000-07:00

Continuing yesterday's ramble....

I had an enormously bratty student once, whose thesis I was advising. She was very difficult--she wouldn't show up for meetings or would show up late. She badmouthed the administrative staff of our department (which is a great staff and includes a few personal friends). She badmouthed Americans.* The night before her thesis was due to her external readers, she emailed it to me at midnight and asked me to proofread it. In short, she was a nightmare.

But the biggest sticking point in our relationship was about what a literary essay entailed. She wanted to write about how good the books were and what they made her think of. It was like a parody of some horrible New Age-y class where everyone talks about their feelings.

"I just don't understand why everyone in this department insists that an essay should have an 'argument,'" she would say. And then the capper: "I don't see how this prepares me for later life."

She wanted to be a journalist, and she didn't see how thinking critically about language would be helpful in later life! Sheesh.

This dispute finally had to be resolved by the old standby: "because I said so" (which is both an alarming and a deeply satisfying thing to say). But before it reached that point, I brought out all the heavy artillery in my war to defend the study of literature. It's a question I get asked a lot: "what is the point?"

I don't mind the question, really. In fact, I think it's important to remain institutionally self-critical, to avoid complaceny and to be prepared to defend the relevance of a discipline that is not "useful" in a strictly market-driven sense. It's also important to defend against this corporate-type notion of utility that's creeping into discussions of the function of the university, but that's a post for another day.

So here were my answers:

Studying literature patiently and critically makes us more attuned to the ways in which language is used and the ways in which our perceptions of reality are linguistically or discursively shaped. We are surrounded by language: in advertising, political speeches, newspapers, textbooks. Very little of this language is rhetorically neutral, even if it pretends or strives to be. It's an important--a "useful," if you will--skill to be able to analyze and sort out what the rhetorical posture of a piece of writing is.

Even more broadly, it permits us to see the metaphoricity of concepts that we've naturalized, metaphors that we mistake for immutable truths. When we speak of the "body politic" or the "head of state," we are speaking metaphorically. It's important, "useful," to be able to see this as a metaphor, so that we don't take it as a given. The government-as-body is an old and pervasive metaphor (but this doesn't make it a truth, just a persistent trope). Aesop told the fable of the belly (retold by Shakespeare in Coriolanus), which legitimizes the subordination of the people to centralized power.

In the 14th century, Nicolas d'Oresme wrote a work, De Moneta, about the function of money. He likened coins to the then-current theory of bodily humors, arguing that coins should circulate throughout the realm the way the humors circulate throughout the body.

The frontispice to Hobbes' Leviathan shows a king made up of tiny people, literalizing the connection between the body and the body politic.

And while anatomy gets used as a metaphor for government, government gets used as a metaphor for anatomy. In the 17th century, William Harvey's treatises on the circulation of the blood were rife with political metaphors. In his 1628 treatise, De Motu Cordis, he describes the heart as the “prince” who governs the “oeconomy of the body,” dispensing its resources to its
“dependents.” The heart is to the body what the king is to his kingdom.

In 1649, published shortly after the beheading of King Charles I of England, Harvey wrote another tract on the circulation of the blood, the catchily titled De Circulatione Sanguinis. In this work, Harvey focuses attention away from the activity of the heart to a more republican emphasis on the importance of the blood itself in supplying nourishment to the body. The heart in this new work is no longer prince, but a first among equals (at the same time as England was
replacing the monarchy with a republic—coincidence??).

In The Federalist Papers, James Madison writes that "the states which lie at the greatest distance from the 'heart' of the union may partake least of the 'circulation' of its benefits."

Now, this might not be a very good metaphor, but it's still important to note how overlapping the figurative language of science and power are.

Science is full of metaphors, tropes, and analogies, and like all figurative language, there are certain implicit values and certain rhetorical postures. Medical science is perhaps where the metaphors are the most obvious, especially when we are a generation or two removed. "Hysteria," for instance shows how the discursive construction of femininity shaped the ways in which women were diagnosed, even after the uterus was no longer believed to be involved in "hysterical" behavior.

But metaphors exist in less polemical ways, as well. Why, for instance, do we call it the "Law of Gravity" rather than the "Rule of Attraction"? What is the difference between saying that something is "innate" versus saying that it's "hard wired." Gaston Bachelard wrote about how the symbolism of fire, along with its phenomenological properties, shaped scientific discourse. Theodore Brown's terrific Making Truth discusses how even the most rigidly empirical scientific language is filled with metaphor--his chapter on the shifting metaphor of the atom is especially great, I think.

This is not to say that science or government or any of the other institutions that regulate and formulate our ideas about reality are nothing more than poetry, but understanding the poetry of everyday life makes us better able to understand the way these institutions are constructed. It makes us better able to live thoughtfully and critically in the world.

That was my answer. Tune in next time to hear about why I think this is radically incomplete! And then I'll get off the boring pedagogy posts.

*Now, I'm not opposed to badmouthing American policies. In fact, I quite favor it. And among friends, it's ok to poke fun at one another's country more generally, but this girl was NOT my friend. And she just went on and on about how stupid Americans are and, get this, how bad American education is. The why in the world did you come to school here???

That Stoichiometry Problem Was Just Beautiful

2007-06-06T06:53:00.000-07:00

Matthew Arnold says something about how the history of culture alternates between epochs of expansion and contraction. Great periods of creativity are enabled, Arnold argues, by periods of reflection and criticism.

Now, the things that Matthew Arnold and I agree on can probably be counted on one hand. One hand with a couple of amputated fingers. But lately I've found something attractive in this notion, in part because it legitimizes the work of literary criticism and in part because lately I can't get any work done.

So I'm telling myself that I am in an epoch of contraction. Hm.

One of the things I've been reflecting on in this epoch of contraction is what it means to teach literature. I'll save the "why bother" question for tomorrow's post (I feel an epoch of productivity coming on), but today I'll take it as a given that we do, in fact, bother with literature and I'll take up the question of what it is, precisely, that gets taught.

I had some friends over the other night, including a very nice gentleman whom I'd just met. He was browsing through the bookshelves and pulled out a copy of Milton. "Do you like this," he asked me. His tone wasn't belligerent or derisive, but bewildered.

"Yeah," I said, a little embarrassed.

"I had to read that my freshman year in college," he said, "and I hated it."

"Oh." I was at a bit of a loss. "Maybe you didn't have a very good teacher."

I said that just as a filler, just as something to say so that I wouldn't have to defend Milton or my literary taste or to reassure my guest that it's ok to hate Milton (which, of course, it is, but it sounds patronizing to tell someone so).

So I just said it as a reflex, as something to say. But as soon as I said it, I realized both what utter bullshit it is and how pervasive a notion it is, on both sides of the pedagogical relationship. Both teachers and students seem to have it engrained in them that teaching literature in large part means teaching the appreciation of literature.

For students, this notion manifests itself in pretty transparent ways. If they didn't like the books, the class must've sucked. Or, more common where I teach, the students fall all over themselves in their essays to prove how much they enjoyed the texts. These essays are excruciating. I call them the "Shakespeare is an important theme in the plays of William Shakespeare." These essays evince no original thought and resort to such critical ciphers or tautologies as "the human" or, for the very dim or very young students, "the relatable."

It would chill you to the bone to hear how often a student's thesis is something like: "the work of Sophocles is important and good because it is still so relatable. It remains relevant to our lives even 2500 years later." Swap in whoever for "Sophocles" and an appropriate time value for "2500" and you've got about 50% of the essays I read. And then the student proceeds to warp the work in order to make it fit with contemporary values. Antigone was a feminist. Hamlet is an everyman. The Wife of Bath is Hilary Clinton.

You get the idea.

As much as I caution my students against this, I realize that I may be complicit in this ethos of "appreciation." Because, of course, I do appreciate literature and I want my students to, as well. But I think it's important to remember that this is a mushy and ultimately secondary pedagogical aim. Writing about literature involves analysis and patient argumentation, it is, as Nietzsche reminds us, the slow, fine work of the goldsmith applied to language:

it teaches how to read well: i.e. slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes.

One of the results of this slow attention, this training of the inner thought and the delicate fingers and eyes, is appreciation. But appreciation is something that happens (or maybe doesn't happen) alongside the activity of criticism. One need not enjoy Milton in order to attend to him, to exfoliate the densities and ellipticalities of his verse. I think perhaps we would do ourselves a great service in literature classes if we were more aware of how much we let the idea of "appreciation" creep in. People tend to really appreciate (rather than just cyncially perform their appreciation in an assignment) what challenges them, what expands their understanding.

I somehow don't imagine that chemistry teachers, as much as they want their students to enjoy their subject, have "appreciation" at the top of their pedagogical priorities. Neither, I think, should we.

Any thoughts? Any memories of what made a great literature class? I've been thinking a lot about the role of literature in education during my epoch of reflection, and I would love to hear other thoughts. My own shift so frequently and my students are of surprisingly little help (comments on course evaluations range from: "you are nice and funny" to "I hate that sweater you always wear" to "you didn't let us write about 'themes'--what the fuck was I supposed to write about? I hope you get fired" to "you're so funny it hardly felt like going to class" (now there's a dubious compliment!) to "you say 'interesting' too much. God, can't you think of another adjective?")--I am curious what other people think.

THIS is Why People Hate the Democrats

2007-06-01T11:30:00.001-07:00

It's the endless self-righteous hypocrisy.

I was walking around this afternoon in a state in which Kerry beat Bush by 25% and in a district in which Kerry beat him by over 50%. I live in the bluest county of the bluest state.

This is a neighborhood in which, as this afternoon, those annoying Greenpeace clipboard-holding haranguers get a sympathetic ear and donations from passers-by (not me--I don't care how good your cause is, I think it's rude to accost people on the street. But I'm a curmudgeon).

And in one short block, in this bluest district of this bluest state, I passed THREE buildings that had their air conditioners blasting and their doors wide open. Two were restaurants and one is an arcade with large doors on either side. It's nice to have such a building with such a walkway. But to air condition the whole building and leave the freaking doors open?

That's just obscene.

And this, I think, is why people hate the Demorcrats. They preach about how America uses up too many natural resources, and bitch about the culture of excess, but as soon as their own comfort or their own business's bottom-line is involved, they punk out. They start talking in vague terms about structural change.

Of course we need structural change. We need to find new and renewable energy sources. We need to develop more energy efficient appliances. We also need to not be air conditioning the fucking out of doors every time it gets uncomfortably warm. Then maybe the Democrats can get some credibility back.

This rant was brought to you by the good people at DuPont.

Bush Gives Memorial Day Address: Black Hole of Irony Created

2007-05-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

The administration that has been claiming for the past several weeks that it can't recall its own policies is suddenly the champion of memory.

In Bush's radio address on Saturday, he told the story of Marine Sgt. David Christoff who died in the Iraq war. Christoff joined the military on September 12th, 2001. His reason for enlisting: "I don't want my brother and sister to live in fear."

I understand his impulse. September 11th was terrifying and bewildering. I've never identified so strongly as an American nor felt so protective of this country.

Bush wants us only to remember that shock and fear. Apart from that, his Memorial Day speeches have exhorted us to forget.

He cynically uses the story of Christoff to make us forget that this Marine's death in the Iraq was had nothing to do with the reason he enlisted--the September 11th attacks.

Bush speech this morning at the Arlington National Cemetary has a similar project of un-memory.

In this morning's address, Bush spins the now-familiar fiction that the war in Iraq is essential to protecting freedom in this country:

The greatest memorial to our fallen troops cannot be found in the words we say or the places we gather. The more lasting tribute is all around us -- a country where citizens have the right to worship as they want, to march for what they believe, and to say what they think. These freedoms came at great costs -- and they will survive only as long as there are those willing to step forward to defend them against determined enemies.

It is, of course, utter nonsense to suggest that the war will ensure our freedoms of religion, assembly, and speech. It's pure doublespeak, designed to make us forget that it's our own government who is surveilling mosques, corralling protesters into Orwellian "free speech zones," and compiling police databases of peaceful dissidents.

The Bush administration wants to use this Memorial Day to make us forget the truth and to submit to the palliations of a rhetoric that imposes meaning on the violence and death in Iraq. On what Bush, with cynical irony, calls "this Day of Memory," he tries to sever us from our memories and substitute for them self-serving fictions.

Our troops and our dead deserve better.

Um, Ironic Much?

2007-05-25T09:35:00.000-07:00

President Bush on the new bill for funding the war:

As it provides vital funds for our troops, this bill also reflects a consensus that the Iraqi government needs to show real progress in return for America's continued support and sacrifice.

Yes, by all means, let's talk about what the Iraqis owe the Americans. Perhaps we could also ask the Nicaraguans to pay us back for all that money we gave to the Contras.

Maybe we could ask the Vietnamese to finally step up and make reparations to the family of Henry Cabot Lodge for the expense of executing Ngo Dinh Diem.

The Russians, too, should be asking Afghanistan to try "to show real progress" for their tireless efforts throughout the 1980s to liberate them from religious tyranny.

And by all means, let's ask the Yankees to offer something in return for all the Red Sox' losses after the Babe Ruth trade. I mean, it's only fair.

Should the Iraqis be doing better? Of course they should. But until we stop treating international relations as some kind of video game and actually think through the consequences of our meddling before we undertake it, we have no right to demand amelioration "in return" for our shortsighted strategies. Sheesh.

I Am A Moron

2007-05-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

So, here's a little tragicomedy for your delectation. I call it "When Bad Things Happen to Stupid People."

Ever since a virus ate my computer a couple years ago (I couldn't resist opening the email attachment that promised naked pictures of John Ashcroft....uh...I mean Anna Kournikova...never mind...), I have been left with just my laptop and a pervasive sense of anxiety.

All this is compounded by the fact that I don't understand computers at all.

Anyway, I came home late Tuesday--I'd gone to a party after work and had taken my laptop with me. I got home around midnight and thought I'd do a little work before going to bed. I plugged my computer in and opened it up.

And....................nothing.

I pressed down on the little "on" button for several seconds.

And....................nothing.

And then I started wondering what was going on. I thought maybe I hadn't shut it down properly and the battery hadn't turned itself off (this has happened before) and that it overheated and broke. Or maybe it got knocked around at the party. Or.....I don't know.

I made sure it was really plugged in, and tried again, and nothing.

For three days I have been panicking, making lists of all the stuff that I haven't backed up (don't ask me how such a list would be at all helpful, because I don't know). I berated myself for not having one of those little plug-inny-thingamajigs that saves everything. Or learning how to upload stuff to the university dealiemabob. I called everyone I knew to ask what to do.

I finally got an appointment with a computer fixing guy, who took it and plugged it in and asked what the problem was.

Because, you see, the computer is fine. My electrical socket is not. Which is entirely unsurprising--this house is a hundred or so years old and nothing works.

None of this explains, though, why I didn't notice that the light on the surge protector wasn't on, or why I didn't try it in another outlet.

Sigh.

I am very glad to have my computer back, though. Now I guess I'll go buy one of those doohickeys.

This Just In: Republicans Full of Shit

2007-05-19T08:52:00.000-07:00

A Washington Post article about the new immigration bill says that many on the right "derided the agreement as a sellout of conservative principles," characterizing it as a form of amnesty.

Not only are they full of shit, the Republicans are entirely lacking in any sense of (alarmingly recent) history. It was Ronald Reagan whose "amnesty" toward illegal immigrants started this whole mess. Because as nice as "amnesty" sounds, his program was really about policing a newly racialized border.

Before the Reagan sleight-of-hand (keep the audience's eye on the flashy "amnesty" while you start building barriers with the other hand) people crossed the border more freely and there was less incentive to become an "illegal." A person could simply go home at night or after the season. Work in the US, live in Mexico. But the Reagan rhetoric and policies turned an economic situation into a military one. The border crossers were no longer laborers, but invaders.

The Reagan amnesty was a propogandist fiction used to legitimize the creation of an enforced (and racialized) border. The very word "amnesty" suggests that these worker had been doing something that needed legal forgiveness, but until the 1986 bill, this wasn't necessarily the case.

By destroying the fluidity of the border, Reagan created an incentive for illegal immigration. If one can't keep one's job and go home at night, one contrives to make one's home where the job is. It ain't rocket science.

But what really pisses me off about this is how the very architects of NAFTA are the ones bitching about immigration. One the one hand, they want us to believe that we are all part of a single market, that economies should overflow national boundaries and that we'll all benefit from relaxing economic regulations.

Although I've never quite understood how the guy losing his job or the other guy who's being employed at crap wages with no health insurance are really benefitting. Although I do see how Chrylser is benefitting.

Where was I? Oh yes: so the Republicans want us to think beyond national boundaries when it comes to NAFTA, but when it comes to immigration, we need to be vigilant about these borders.

Part of this is surely a kind of reflexive racist response to the brownin of America, but an even larger part of it is about supporting and maintaining the real goals of NAFTA: the endless supply of cheap labor south of the border. If we permit a fluid border, we run the risk of ACTUALLY, rather than just rhetorically, blending the economies, thereby effectively raising the standard of living in border towns and bringing wages more in alignment with those of the US.

Republicans can't stand the thought that the bullshit they spout about NAFTA--that is will help workers--might actually come true, so they've concocted this new hysteria about immigration to help ensure that they don't ever have to live up to their "conservative principles."

Half Past Ten

2007-05-17T11:06:00.000-07:00

We had a departmental party last night. These are slightly awkward affairs--the sheer concentration of geekiness always seems slightly precarious. That much geek in so small a space; I'm always partly convinced that the parties are surrounded by a kind of geek event horizon, that they're invisible to cooler passers-by. It has something to do with the relation between nerd escape velocity and the speed of light. Or something like that.

At any rate, they're often productive of some of the most charming conversations. These people can argue about absolutely anything:

A: Is that "Take a Letter Maria" playing? That song always makes me want to dance.

B: Except that it's about, you know, adultery and heartbreak.

C: And sexual harrassment.

A: But the music is so cheerful.

B: I don't think it's harrassment. It's about finding new love.

C: Yeah, it is. Sure. Except does Maria have any choice in the matter? Or is it just some asshole overcompensating for the fact that he can't satisfy his wife by coercing his secretary into sleeping with him?

B: Sleeping with? That's not in the song. That's all in your mind.

C: And don't even get me started on the race thing.

B: What? You're insane. The race thing?

C: About the boss creating a hostile work environment for his economically vulnerable Latina employee.

B: I thought the boss was black.

C: Are you saying a black guy can't be a bad boss? Don't be so closed-minded.

A: I wonder if the boss's name is Jones. Maybe his cheating wife was cheating with Billy Paul.

B: Billy Paul? Oh, yeah. "Me and Mrs. Jones." Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones. That's a good song. Or a good bad song. I know it's wrong (but it's much too strong). I like it.

A: Yeah, but you can't dance to it. Like "Take a Letter Maria." You can dance to that.

D: [walking over] What are you guys talking about?

C: The abuses of power.

A: "Take a Letter Maria."

D: What? Who's Maria?

TV-o-Rama

2007-05-14T15:35:00.000-07:00

I've had the flu this weekend. It was one of those delicious illnesses that left me too sick to work but not so sick that I couldn't get decently comfortable. Just sick enough to stay home and watch tv.

Watching 20+ hours of television in two days is quite a strange experience. These are the things I learned:

"This Week" hasn't changed in the 15 years since last I watched it. Well, except that it used to be "This Week With David Brinkley," who is now dead and replaced with George Stephanopolis. But everything else is still the same: Cokie Robert's hair is still frosted within an inch of it's life. Sam Donaldson's hair still looks like it came from the bargain bin at The Hair Club for Howard Cosell Impersonators. George Will's hair still looks like it came off some wholesome lad in a Norman Rockwell painting called something like "Little Know-It-All Gets the Shit Kicked Out of Him." Also, the political commentary is still largely moronic.

That Law and Order show is always on. Is there any crime those clever writers can't commit and then solve?

Television offers a kind of disturbing cultural continuity. It isn't simply that the genres are so calcified that there is very little variation between a '60s sitcom and a current one, but that the old ones have been on in reruns for so long that they feel like part of the fabric of our consciousness rather than artifacts of a lost past. Somewhere out there, the Beaver is always getting into some misguided but well-intentioned scrape and Ricky won't let Lucy in the show. And 24 hours a day some authority figure is coming to the 4077th, ready to bust them for disobeying regulations only to be deeply impressed by how well they do their jobs. Doctors are heros.

Wolf Blitzer is some kind of automaton.

I learned a lot from the advertisements, as well:

I am fat.

I am hungry.

My supply of personal electronics is dangerously low. In fact, if I don't get start buying tiny devices to play music and talk and take photos it's entirely likely that I will never get laid again and I will die alone. Of cancer. Of cancer of the loneliness.

Freud's theory that homosexuality is essentially narcissism would be better applied to the people who hook up on eHarmony.com. Those people in the commercials all look exactly the same. It's seriously freaky. I mean have you seen them? These couples look like identical twins of different genders. Freaky.

It's been a very educational weekend.

Best Excuse Ever!!

2007-05-14T15:15:00.000-07:00

I wrote to a student to ask when I might expect an essay that was due last Friday. This was the reply:

Hey Feemus,
The paper was due on Friday? But my day planner says it's due on Wednesday. I always write everything down in my day planner.

-QED

Well, if it's in your day planner, it must be so. I'm sure that the mistake was on the syllabus. You have my sincerest apologies.

Would you mind looking in your day planner to see when the final exam is? I would hate to give it on the wrong day.

Just when you think you've seen it all...

Take That, Max Weber!

2007-05-10T18:28:00.000-07:00

Max Weber dreamt of an ideal type of bureaucracy that had the potential to liberate the governance of organizations from cults of personality and the arbitrary exercise of power. He saw in this ideal bureaucracy a type of administrative power that was fair, impersonal, and rational.

Max Weber never worked for my employer.

I got a letter on Tuesday stating that my health insurance has been cancelled. But my deduction is being refunded.

What the fuck????

I have been on the phone almost non-stop for the past several days, talking to every single person at this place who might possibly be able to help. Or at least tell me what in the hell happened.

But everyone I talk to tells me to talk to someone else. I've logged more phone time than a teenage girl during prom season. And I have yet to hear if Debbie really really likes my dress or if she's just pretending so that I'll let her ride in the limo with us.

The most help I've gotten is from the guy who said: "Well, maybe you can, you know, like buy some insurance somewhere."

Yeah, buddy. I wish I'd thought of that.

The funny thing is, what Weber and everyone else say about bureaucracy, that it's "impersonal," is starting to feel very untrue. It's starting to feel VERY personal.

So now I have to worry about encroaching paranoia as well as getting sick while I don't have insurance. Great. Just great.

?????

2007-05-10T18:11:00.000-07:00

I've been going through some handwritten notes for work and came across this word, plain as day and in my own handwriting:

sanyindecerou

I have no idea what it means.

It almost looks like: "sang indecorously."

Which is, by the bye, the only way in which old Feemus ever does sing.

The context gives no clue. It's not even clear what part of speech it's meant to be. I wonder if I was having a stroke or something while I was writing?

I once did some translating for someone from a very old and much-transcribed manuscript. As is often the case, the scribe(s) didn't know the languages well--or at all--and so the some of the bits were just almost gibberish. It took me hours just to figure out what language some of the stuff was in.

This was like that, except that 1., I wrote it in what I presumably intended to be English, and 2. I wasn't getting paid.

Still, I'd like to know what the hell it means.

Women in Science Redux

2007-05-07T08:25:00.000-07:00

Two years ago Larry Summers, then-president of Harvard University, attended a conference at which he said that differences in "intrinsic aptitude" may explain why there are so few female scientists at top universities.

As I'm sure we all remember, this caused a firestorm and was one of the factors that led to the resignation of an already beleaguered Summers.

The controversy played out in the press as a fight between political correctness and free speech. Which, of course, it wasn't. Summers' supporters portrayed him as a maverick intellectual whose only interest was in pursuing the truth, fighting against the forces of PC thuggery.

Well, they're back.

Steven Pinker and Alan Dershowitz asked Summers to be a guest speaker in their course on "Morality and Taboo" this past semester at Harvard. For Pinker and Dershowitz, Summers is a victim, "a martyr of taboo in the ivory tower," according to an article in the Harvard Crimson.

What Summers has consistently failed to understand, and what Pinker and Dershowitz seem to ignore, is the context of these statements. Summers wasn't a scientist looking for gendered patterns in brain activity--he's an economist who was spouting off at a policy conference. It's appalling that he refuses to understand how damaging it is to explain away the under-representation of women in the sciences by biology (based not on, you know, on any knowledge of biology, but on his sense of how the world works and the fact that--I'm not kidding--his daughters play with dolls).

This is the "logic" of The Bell Curve: underperformance by historically marginalized people is due to natural inferiority. It's a way of decoupling the present from the past in a way that lets us off the hook. I'm not equating racism and sexism, but those who deflect questions of race and gender inequality often use the same rhetorical strategies and promote the same status-quo-ism. There's no need to confront and elminate our prejudices if we can naturalize them. There's no need to make structural changes in our culture to address bigotry if we can prove that bigotry is based in biology.

Now, I'm not saying that Summers is a misogynist or a racist (even Cornell West acquitted him of the latter charge after another startlingly imprudent conversation).

Again, it's a matter of context. A matter that Summers refuses to acknowledge. In his speech before Pinker and Dershowitz's class, he threw out the possiblity that fewer women are in the sciences because they pursue other careers due to their "superior verbal abilities" in evidence in early standardized tests.

But the merest glance at how people respond to these "superior verbal abilities" is enough to show how not analogous this is to the "women in science" issue. Boys lower test scores on the verbal portion of these tests are regularly attributed to a different developmental timeline--the assumption is that boys are later but not lesser. Another response to these differences is to ask how we are failing boys in terms of language education. The Times recently devoted several Sunday columns to this very issue.

And since the world of belles lettres is dominated, for any number of reasons, by male writers, these lower scores do not contribute to any widespread cultural assumption that men aren't good with language.

What's so frustrating about this, is that Summers does understand the importance of context when it comes to issues that matter to him. He famously said in a speech in 2002 that academics who were advocating for the divestment from Israel were “anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent.”

Implicit in this statement is an understanding of how important context is. When the debates about divestment from South Africa were going on there were people of good conscience, black and white, on both sides of the debate. And no one who supported divestment was accused of being anti-white or anti-Afrikaaner or anti-Dutch or whatever.

Because those are not relevant categories. While there presumable are people who hold these prejudices, the prejudices are not historically significant, because white Dutchmen have never been the victims of large-scale race hatred.

But the state of Israel declared its independence in the wake of an unspeakable mass murder, facilitated by the anti-Semtisim of not only Germans but of the rest of the world who let the genocide happen without doing anything until millions of lives had already been taken. Anti-Semitism is something to be taken seriously (although perhaps taking it seriously means not using it as a label to hurl at anyone who disagrees with you).

That Summers can't see the important of context when it's anyone's but his own, that he can't understand why people think that his statement was "sexist in effect if not in intent," is offensive. That Steven Pinker piggybacks on this to support his own reductive biodeterministic theories is annoying. That Dershowitz uses it to get some publicity is unsurprising.

But it's important that we not let Summers' martyrdom obscure the fact that we need to find out how to get all our students to succeed at the level of their abilities, not at the level of our expectations.

The Week in Review

2007-05-05T07:48:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-02T07:33:00.000-07:00

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"

2007-04-30T08:48:00.000-07:00

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.

School's (Almost) Out For Summer

2007-04-27T07:26:00.000-07:00

The end of the semester is in sight, and not a moment too soon. It's been a particularly aggravating term--the ratio of absolute loonies to normal students has been particularly high this semester, and I think it's good for the health of all for me to get the hell away from them.

Here's an email from a kid who has not come to class ONCE this semester.

Dear Feemus,
I know that I need to turn in some work to you [um, like three weeks ago]. It would be helpful to me in completing this if you could remind me of the format and the topics for these assignments.

Also, could you tell me when and where we meet. I know I shouldn't have to ask this, but I can't find the information anywhere. I would like to end the semester on as strong a foot as possible.

Sincerely,
OffToLawSchool

Get the fuck out of here. We have ONE week of classes left and you think that coming to class NOW is going to do you any damn good?

And you think my job is to be "helpful" to you? My job is to fucking TEACH you. I have been available to teach you for several months now. I have emailed you several times--with no response--in concern about your failure to attend or to complete your work. I have emailed you to remind you that I am available during office hours if you are having academic difficulties. And nothing from you. But now that you realize you're failing, you want me to "be helpful"??

The really sad thing is, this kid isn't even the most annoying one this semester.

Although, of course, there are many wonderful students as well. They rarely email. I love them.

Partly Sunny with a Chance of Apocalypse

2007-04-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

The weather is so bizarre here this year that it's starting to freak me out. First of all, there was a day in January (a month where the average high is around 35 F) when it was over 70 F.

Perfect weather for horseback riding. You know, if your name happens to be Pestilence, Famine, War, or Death.

This was follwed by typical New England weather--lots of snow and brutally cold.

Then we get to April, which is a bit of a grab bag. But not usually like this. Last week it was snowing. Yesterday was 75, tomorrow will be 85.

It's a very strange experience. Because it's been so cold, the trees are still all skeletal, but the air is hot and humid and all the animals are out--the birds singing in the bare ruined choirs, so to speak.

I can't quite describe it, but it's very disorienting to have the heavy, sultry feeling of summer in the air and not a speck of green on the trees. From indoors, it looks just like winter.

Although, I went for a walk earlier today, and in the nicer neighborhoods the trees are starting to bloom. I guess the rich can afford spring. Bastards.

Lawyers Are Funny

2007-04-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

But not "ha ha " funny.

I was waiting for the bus this evening trying to ignore the bagpipe busker, and I overheard these three lawyers talking. They were all three impossibly young and well-dressed and good-looking. One was telling a story, which was received with great mirth.

A: And he totally didn't account for contributory liability.

B: [laughing incredulously] Get out.

A: I know, right? Can you imagine? [laughs]

C: How can you not account for contributory liability? That's hilarious.

They all laughed like frat boys at a fart joke.

But I have a hard time believing that it's actually funny. Even if I knew what "contributory liability" is.

Then I got on the bus and sat next to Scab Picking Man and across from No Boundary Music School Guy Who Sings Opera The Whole Fucking Busride.

And that's the story of my commute.

The End.

Hey Poor People, You Suck!

2007-04-17T16:09:00.000-07:00

In Ruby Payne's startlingly influential book on education, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, she writes:

Low achievement is closely correlated with lack of resources, and numerous studies have documented the correlation between low socioeconomic status and low achievement. To improve achievement, however, we need to rethink our instruction and our instructional arrangements.

Ok. That sounds reasonable, if a little vague and simplistic. It's a great idea--it's vital, in fact--for teachers to be aware of and able to respond to students with different types of backgrounds.

But Payne's book isn't about developing pedagogical flexibility or adaptability. It's about pathologizing the poor.

Her book is riddled with overstatement and bizarre value judgments. Payne informs her readers that the poor have the television on all the time and never listen to one another. She writes that poor children "may not know any adults worthy of respect." She tells us that poor kids tend to be disorganized because planning and prioritizing are "not taught in poverty."

The Washington Post reported yesterday that Payne's Framework has become a canonical resource in a number of public schools, which use to book and Payne's host of supplementary for-profit services to train their teachers to elevate test scores in low-income schools.

Throughout Payne's book, she makes assertions about what happens "in poverty":

"Poverty tends to address issues in the negative."

Fighting physically is "necessary to survive in poverty."

"The culture of poverty does not provide for success in middle-class because middle-class to a large extent requires self-governance in behavior. To be successful in work and in school requires self-control in behavior."

So.......poor people are violent and uncontrolled. They can't carry on a conversation because they are accustomed to shouting over the blaring t.v. and over one another. They are disorganized and disrespectful.

Well, no wonder the sum total of our educational goals is to get them to pass a standardized test.

That someone wrote something this offensive, ignorant, and untrue about poverty and education doesn't surprise me in the least. That school districts are spending money on it is shocking.

Payne's thesis rests on the dual assumptions that "the culture of poverty" is monolithic and that it is inherently dysfunctional. Neither of these assumptions is true. First of all, poverty isn't a culture, it's a circumstance. This is not to deny that this country has families who have been living in poverty for generations and who have developed certain patterns of behavior or beliefs in response to this fact. But this is not the same thing as having a widespread "culture of poverty." And even if we wanted to discuss it in these misleading and overbroad terms, there is still no single culture of poverty. Poverty is as multicultural as any other socioeconomic class and its boundaries are as fluid.

Her second assumption, that "cultural" poverty is inherently dysfunctional and counterproductive to educational success is just stupid. Is poverty related to lower educational scores? Of course. Poor people have fewer resources, shittier schools, parents who are less able to be involved in their kids' educations (because of work schedules, language barriers, etc), more afterschool jobs, less stability. Of course there are additional educational challenges. But not because poor people as a whole are culturally sick.

Payne lumps all poor people together and makes them radically "other" to middle-class norms. Her book often reads like an anthropology essay written by an over-eager but not overly-bright student doing fieldwork for the first time. What is aggressively lacking in Payne's work is any effort to offer a nuanced approach to dealing with students from different backgrounds (and my own experience is that students from materially privileged homes can be just as fucked up and tend to be a LOT less self-disciplined than kids from poorer backgrounds). The plain fact of the matter is that any group of students is going to be diverse in terms of what they need. The only way to deal with this is to attend closely to how they respond to various methods and adjust accordingly. But this requires smaller class sizes and a desire to educate the students, not just to make them proficient at passing exams. It requires us to give teachers the resources they need to succeed.

Payne's absolute refusal to see beyond her preconceptions to any kind of nuanced pedagogical notions can be seen in her defensive and nonsensical response to why she doesn't address the matter of race in conjunction with poverty and the problem of teachers unintentionally reproducing or reinscribing racism in the classroom:

The real issue is that I am white, and there's a huge belief out there that if you're white, you can't talk about poverty and race.

Yeah, lady, THAT'S the problem. Rich white people just don't get enough voice in shaping the public policy in this country.

They Really ARE From Another Planet

2007-04-16T18:12:00.000-07:00

I know it seems like I make these students up just to amuse you all.

If I didn't see some of these emails with my own four eyes, I wouldn't believe them either. From the kid who, in his delirium, could only write in German to the girl who wanted me to hold private sessions with her so that she wouldn't miss choir practice, the shamelessness of these people really is almost unbelievable.

Here's the latest. I have a student who has an essay that is a MONTH LATE. Now, I'm a procrastinator, so I am reflexively sympathetic to procrastinators. But a MONTH??

Oh, and that's AFTER the extension I granted her.

So anyway, I emailed her to ask about the status of her essay. This is her reply:

Hey Feemus,
Yeah, about that. I told my resident dean to get ahold of you. I guess he forgot.

JustGotAnF

Wow, really? You told the dean to get you out of doing your work and he didn't follow orders? Shocking.

Really, it's just so hard to find good deans these days.

The Old Gray Mare, He Ain't What He Used to Be

2007-04-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

I have, as I mentioned, had houseguests this week. Which was wonderful, but it's forced me to confront two slightly unpleasant truths:

1. I am old.

2. I am lazy.

After 10 days of just barely fulfilling my responsibilities as a host, I feel as if my bones have been replaced by oatmeal and my brain by something mushier than oatmeal.

A week and a half of having fun and being active and missing out on a little sleep and I am totally ready for a "Matlock" marathon on the Hallmark channel.

Maybe a nice game of checkers.

Dude--BURN!!

2007-04-11T09:30:00.000-07:00

I have out-of-town guests this week, which is keeping me too busy to blog. But I am at work right now and pissed off at my boss (quelle surprise) and feeling a little riposte-y. So I thought I'd post a riposte.

Here's a Yeats poem and Ezra Pound's response. Please have a 4-5 page critical essay in by Monday at 5pm.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

by W.B. Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evenings full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

The Lake Isle

by Ezra Pound

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales
not too greasy,
And the votailles dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time.

Religion Makes People Grumpy

2007-04-06T09:41:00.000-07:00

Everyone I know is grouchy this week. Half of them are wearying of their Lenten abstentions. The other half are in carb-withdrawal until Passover is over.

A group of girls behind me on the subway yesterday had this conversation:

A: Let's get some pizza.

B: I can't have pizza.

A: Why not?

B: Passover.

C: That's stupid.

B: You can't say it's stupid. You're not Jewish.

A: Well, I'm Jewish and it's stupid. There.

C: Hey--sorry. I didn't mean anything. I gave up chocolate for Lent.

A: That's stupid.

Everyone should be much happier come Wednesday. "A" will probably still be a bitch, though.

The Difference Between the Greats and the Also-Rans

2007-04-03T19:05:00.000-07:00

I have a student who has been angling for an extension. I think that he actually is sick or depressed or something. It doesn't matter--I'm happy to give him an extension.

What I am less happy about is the daily updates about the degree of his distress. And the course of his treatment. Why do I need to know? This young man has been to see a neuropath and a chiropractor and a neurologist (how is this different from a neuropath? I don't know. But I'm sure that I'll get an email in the next hour or so explaining it) and a psychiatrist and an osteopath.

Why do I need to hear all this? I ALREADY gave the kid his extension. Doesn't that give me a pass on hearing about the debilitating pain?

Here is the latest email (and remember, I have ALREADY GRANTED AN EXTENSION):

Dear Feemus,
As you know, I continue to suffer from this mysterious ailment. Since early childhood, my doctors have struggled to diagnose this difficult and variable illness. I have been in excruciating pain for the past several days--barely able to get out of bed and frequently in convulsions.

I have tried to work on my essay, but on account of my medication, I often find myself in a state of delirium. I wrote several pages of my essay, only to realize that I had been writing in German.

Please be patient as I work through this.

Sincerely,
Mr. Sicky

Dear God.

I love the inadvertantly-writing-in-German bit. It's a nice touch, simultaneously Victorian and Oliver Sacks-y. It's a wonderful detail, evoking a student so dedicated to finishing his essay on dramatic ironies in Racine that he jeopardizes his health to work on it, only to discover that his brain is so disordererd by illness that it resists by permitting him only to write in German.

Ok, but here's what would have made this detail truly transcendent: if he'd followed it with "And I don't even know German."

That, friends, is what separates the bush-league excuse-makers from the Hall of Famers.

Shameless Self-Promotion

2007-04-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

That last post reminded me that I might use this forum to plug my forthcoming album, a tribute to the literary canon, called "Straight Outta Norton."

It's due out in July, released on Tenure Traxx, the academic subsidiary of Death Row records.

A sample of the title track:

"When I leave, you best read your Wharton,
'Cause when I come back, I'm coming straight outta Norton."

Straight Outta Loudoun

2007-04-01T18:49:00.001-07:00

I realize that by now everyone in the free world has already seen this. But...oh my. It's a testament to just how awful this is that I ACTUALLY FEEL BAD for Karl Rove. It's kind of like watching Fawlty Towers--Basil Fawlty totally deserves every humiliation that he gets, and yet...

It's like watching your eight-grade science teacher trying to be "cool."

Except much MUCH worse.

It's like if you had to watch your eighth-grade science teacher trying to pick up a woman in a bar with his decade-old pop-culture references and his really great story about how the Noble Gases got their name. And then when the lady turned away he tried to smell her hair.

Except much MUCH worse.

As the wise Doctor (Dre) reminds us: "Parental Discretion Iz Advised."

Kids Say the Darndest Things

2007-03-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

I was on an airplane recently next to a very charming three year old named Maggie. Or Megan. Whatever.

She was looking at the little safety card with the little cartoon drawings of air disasters.

"Hey," she said, "how do we get those masks?"

Her mother explained that we probably wouldn't get them at all. Maggie was momentarily crestfallen until she looked back at the card: "Whoa...SLIDES!"

I think she was pretty disappointed by the uneventful flight. And I've never been convinced that those slide things would actaully work.

This Just In

2007-03-23T18:03:00.001-07:00

Anna Nicole Smith is still dead.

Words Are Hard

2007-03-19T18:30:00.000-07:00

I used to subscribe to the Columbia Journalism Review. It was one of those periodicals that languished at the edge of the coffee table, looking on with envy as the more popular periodicals got thumbed through.

"Ooooh, well look at little Miss New Yorker," the CJR would no doubt think, "I guess she'll spread her pages for anyone. And would you look at the way The Nation's subscription cards are just hanging out? I guess we know how someone gets her 'circualtion figures' so high, if you know what I mean."

Magazines can be so petty.

Where was I? Oh yes, the CJR. The one feature that I would always read was the back page, where they'd print funny typos and odd grammatical constructions.

Once, in an article about a company whose finances were on the rise, someone had edited the copy so that it read: "After the second quarter earnings, they were back in the African-American."

My all time favorite was from ad or an article about a weight loss procedure. Some woman had gone from 240 pounds to 160. The copy read something like: "She lost 80 pounds. A third of her left behind!"

That must've been 15 years ago and I still laugh a third of my ass off everytime I think about it.

Today I went to cnn.com (occasionally I like to check in with the lowest common denominator) and saw this headline: "Toddler improves on experimental medication."

Now there isn't particularly anything wrong with that phrasing. But I stared at it for several moments wondering what kind of genius toddler it was who was making these pharmaceutical advancements.

Then I saw this:

People protest by acting as killed war victims during an anti-war demonstration to mark the 4th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in San Francisco, California, March 19, 2007.

That's just egregiously bad English. In the first headline about the toddler, I simply misread the function of "on."

Or when my students write that Thomas Hobbes "supported the erection of the king," well that is simply them being entirely tone deaf.

But the above sentence is just dreadful. "Killed" is awkward, there are too many prepositional phrases, the last of which makes it sound as though the US invaded San Francisco as part of the Iraq war.

And this presumably went through an editor. Blech.

My students often complain about being corrected on such minor things as grammar and clarity. "But, can't you just talk about what I'm saying and not how I'm saying it?" they plead.

My dears, I often have no idea what you are saying.

"A third of her left behind." Hee hee.

No, This Is The Worst Product Ever

2007-03-18T12:42:00.000-07:00

Patchouli deodorant???

I actually saw this in the store today. After the liquid soap debacle, I've been keeping my eyes peeled in the toiletries aisle.

Patchouli deodorant.

That's gotta be some kind of oxymoron.

Like "darkness visible" or "Justice Scalia."

I apologize if anyone out there is a devotee of the stuff. I have almost no tolerance for anything scented, so I am a poor judge perhaps. But I do remember as a teenager thinking that my friends wore patchouli to cover up their pot smoke and B.O. It was many years before I realized that patchouli actually sort of smells like pot smoke and B.O.