Badly Drawn Penguin

Happy Halloween from Mipsy!

2005-10-27T19:14:00.000-07:00

on blog spam

2005-10-10T00:22:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I think we all acknowledget the pure evil that is blog spam. While I seem to get regular crappy ones with embedded links to storm windows, penis enlargement, and loan consolidation services, this one is just amazing:

Keith Burdon said...

I thought I grunted on the boulevard. I would keep away from it is glass. You drive, and finished my hat brim low and winked at the work that wouldn't be before me, despite the boulevard. I'm a week from blogging for a fresh-ish start on Sunset. So long, figuring I thought I never married because I stared at. Well, here, you can't drink. I'm completely unable to l. Come in the clerk said. The minutes dragged by. The door swung open. Well, figuring I thought about nine carats of a large-ish project due a large-ish project due a bit, almost drooling with all over the boulevard. Well, it. I grinned at the time.

See it in context here. All that amazingness, and no rancid link? Ah, the mysteries of the internets...

mini-rant on grad school

2005-10-09T22:15:00.000-07:00

<rant>

Alright, I understand that there is a certain (large) degree of hoop-jumping to had at all stages of one's academic career.
I would also wager that for most who pursue post-secondary degrees, that amount of hoop-jumping grows proportionally with the cultural capital said degree program will get you.
This seems logical, at least in the sense that most educational programs follow analogous proportions of hoop-jumping to work-that-carries-any-semblance-of-meaning, regardless of how illogical that proportion may be.
However, at times the most illogical of hoop-jumping presents itself for a student's appreciation of the ludicrosity (go with it, people) of the entire enterprise.
These example of hoop-jumping must be mocked into submission, both publicly and privately, lest they be perpetuated under some banner of "well I suppose it could come in hand to have done this later..."
Just say no, people...just say no...

</rant>

Five links (man, I love the internets...)

2005-10-06T22:51:00.000-07:00

1) This video for Radiohead's "Creep" is AMAZING; you must watch it. link

2) A physics class has "recreated" the mythical many-mirror-bearers-defending-a-coastal-city-by-burning-ships (often called "Archimedes's Death Ray"): link (site seems up-and-down)

(pic from BoingBoing)

3) You can download the entired 11 CD Dylan Thomas Caedmon collection from Salon.com for free: link (you will need to click on the link near the top to get a "free pass", watch the video trailer/commercial, then click on the Thomas collection link again). Alternately, here's Thomas reading "Do Not Go Gentle": link

4) A brilliant "open letter" to President Bush about a practical move he could make to help America: link

5) Sweet Jesus, this rules: The Shining as a trailer for a Nora Ephron movie: link

now that's some MMOG humor...

2005-10-06T16:39:00.000-07:00

on not blogging in a while

2005-10-02T20:46:00.000-07:00

I thought I would keep away from blogging for a bit, figuring I would have a chance at the end of the summer to update my template and get a fresh-ish start on things. Well, that time passed, and then life kept moving. So, here it is, the beginning of October. I'm generally well. I'm completely unable to finish all the work that seems to be before me, despite the fact that I seem to think about it all the time. I have a large-ish project due a week from tomorrow that I'm barely even looked at. I wanted to hand back graded papers to my students tomorrow--got about 1/3 of them done this weekend.

I'm fairly sure nobody actually reads this any longer, so I figured I'd work on it for a bit, then send out a mass email anouncing that I've got a bloglet.com subscription on the sidebar there, so any interested parties can get emails when I post.

Finally, my second little pigeon is all grown up and seems to have flown. It's weird to get all Tony Soprano about such, but what are you gonna do?

wow...that's a lot of books

2005-08-12T16:50:00.000-07:00

Just a quick catch-up post. I've been reading a lot of graphic novels that I've been able to get used. Not even going to summarize, just check out the strange sampling of the genre by clicking on the images above. I finished the summer teaching, the summer grading, and I think the summer prepping of incoming instructor orientation. Hopefully that means that this weekend is mostly off. My parents were here last weekend. My iPod "Nora" developed a folder/hard drive issue, but the nice folks at Best Buy replaced the B/W 4th gen 20GB iPod with a color 20GB one, now dubbed "Nora II". Beyond that, I've been working on my Fall syllabus--teaching an interesting mix of things:

40 Short Storis, ed. Beverly Lawn
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North
JM Coetzee's Disgrace
Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

There's still another week and a half until the first day of teaching--plenty of time to get all this stuff done. :) In the final other news: hopefully, I'll have a new self-deisgned (rather than rearranged and half-ass edited) template up for this blog soon. Out.

if only I lived in Japan, and had some Yen...

2005-07-28T15:46:00.000-07:00

now, I just need ¥36,750 (~$331)

badass

2005-07-28T15:44:00.000-07:00

yes, that's a pet hyena...wow...(click on pic for hyena/baboon-as-pet series)

Three cool things!

2005-07-26T22:12:00.000-07:00

1) Went to see March of the Penguins (aka, La Marche de l'empereur) yesterday. The film is a must see--though those badass little penguins are anthropomorphized (hard work to type) like no one's business, the undertaking of filming a breeding ground's worth of penguins for a year in Antarctica, combined with amazing cinematography and Morgan Freeman narration makes it great. It's pengies, man...pengies...

2) I cut off the mane for the 4th time! Here's the foot or so of hair that goes to Locks of Love. It's now trimmed (with some help, as I apparently can cut others' hair, but not my own in the mirror...) and pretty slick. Trying to decide if I will need to get some "product" (which I'm kind of fundamentally against) or just let it spaz on its own--as it tends to do. Cheers to being a long-hair...

3) My pigeon (whose sibling never made it past egg-form) is like half-a-pigeon, grey feathers on the wings and back, yellowish bristle on the head. He or she has learned to peck at the window in defiance when I try to take a picture, but I think the little one is coming along nicely:

A lot of books, a little teaching, time at the DMV

2005-07-22T19:30:00.000-07:00

A lot of being out and about, teaching, and reading. On the graphic novel front, I read Ariel Schrag's Potential (less affecting than Craig Thompson's Blankets, but good) and Grant Morrison's We3, featuring a trio--dog, cat, and bunny--of pets abducted by the government and made into killing machines and images like this one (sorry Oday):

Now how can that go wrong?

I also finally read Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is right up my alley, but I had been putting off due to length. An uneven, strangely paced and plotted book, it still remains an amazing accomplishment--a fictional but plausible account of two Jewish teens who in the late 1930s create a comic book character, the Escapist "Master of Elusion", who rivals them all. I cannot stress how enjoyable this book was for being such an impressive attempt. It goes near the top of my recommendation list. In the odd-but-awesome category, the Escapist mythology and comics from past ages (ones mentioned in Chabon's novel and ones that fill in the Escapist's role in the history of comics) are being "re-created" and presented in volumes by Dark Horse. The first one, The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, Volume 1 was a lot of fun, mixing styles, plots, and approaches (though it might have been even more clever had one of the artists tried to do bad 4-color separation on newsprint instead of contemporary digitally-editing color fills on gloss...but I digress).

Then, in keeping with the new Tim Burton/Johnny Depp Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (which was surrrrrrrrreal...like two full movies--awesome visuals and script true-to-the-book with Johnny Depp's bizarre psychologically disturbed acting sitting at right angles), I decided to read the book, which I hadn't read in a good decade or more. I was surprised at the movie's cues from the text, though I could have sworn those damn kids died...guess that's just my malicious wishful thinking.

Finally, I just finished Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (for an online summary go here). The basic premise is that our intuition about social interactions and trends is most often wrong, mostly because we make assumptions about the nature how people really interact. Gladwell is a master of popular explanations of social phenomena, and while I don't necessarily buy into the causal relationships he establishes--though to be fair, one of his big theses is that in many situations, our thinking about causality is based on false assumptions--his conclusions and examples are persuasive. I'm always struck with how explanatory and clear many recent popular non-fiction books can be (good ones include Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness, Anonymous' Imperial Hubris, and Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?), and my deep hope that people are actually reading them and thinking about social analysis. I worry that the active reading of books has somehow been socially sequestered into a few isolated places. It does do my heart a little good to see these books selling well.

So, on my deep-love-of-bureaucracy-that-only-increases-by-the-moment side of things, I hit the DMV today, which actually wasn't as bad as it could have been, but I did spend a good hour (after taking an unexpected written driving test (which I aced)) hanging out watching everybody kill time and watch each other. There's probably an awesome sociology study to be done in DMV lobbies, where 50+ people are just required to sit and be relatively attentive for someone to yell their name or number at any time. Let me just put it this way--I was the only person reading, but cell phones, muttering under your breath, coloring books, and knuckle-popping are all very popular. Thanks, DMV, what would I have don't with my time otherwise...?

The teaching is going really well this summer, about to finish the last 1/4 of the course. I've been surprised at how easy this one has gone (which is not being said to jinx anything, just to comment). In the last couple of weeks, I hope I can just stay on top of stuff, so I can finish grading and such without it lingering...as the teaching sometimes does...

And finally, for your linking pleasure. If you don't check del.icio.us out, someone has put up a feed that collects the most bookmarked sites every five minutes: Oishii's del.icio.us feed . This way, on top of BoingBoing and Fark, you can check out the crazy and best of the Internets...

oh, the genius of hotdog art...

2005-07-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

with a hat-tip to Martha for the link...

on mis-using words

2005-07-19T09:13:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've been quite amazed at some of the bad writing that is so pervasive all around. Here, I'm not even talking about mis-managed sentences, poorly placed adverbs, dangling participles, etc. I'm concerned more about the quick-fix, poorly-thought news articles, the shock-at-all-cost fiction, the appease-instead-of-decide-on-a-moral/ethical-standard version of politics, the blatant-disregard-for-jurisdiction actions of the Supreme Court, media, President, and Jude Law.

Am I asking too much of the profusion of words around me? My students acknowledge the idea of thinking about what the ideas behind expression in writing, but when it comes to the page, they tend to just babble in Times New Roman--which seems to somehow legitimate the ideas that they stopped considering. Have we transferred the print culture = respectability equation into some vague notion of "you write words, so they must be well-thought" tautology? It just leaves me frustrated to see the mangling of thinking/reason/ethics that passes for contemporary culture.

This, of course, being what I think just before I go teach... :/

The truth about school

2005-07-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

Oh, the genius of Toothpaste for Dinner...

An Arab, a wedding, and a pigeon walk into a bar...

2005-07-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

A number of graphic novels recently: the overly patriotic/snap-emotional tribute volume 9-11, Artists Respond, Frank Miller's restarting of the Batman saga in Batman: Year One, Marjane Satrapi's small mediation on the sex lives of women Embroideries, and Dave McKean's masterful long graphic novel Cages (which I know have an ex-Orange County Library perma-bound copy of!).

The last couple of weeks have been a bit crazy. After the camping, there was a hectic week of teaching, then Lisa and Alan's wedding, with it's various accoutrements. Here's the happy couple:

It turned out that a long-time friend of mine, Brad, was one of the groomsmen, which was a bit surreal. Good 'ol Oday was in town for the festivities, so I got to hang out with his eminence for almost a week, which rocked. He brought a couple of French graphic novels--on top of Sylvie Fontaine's surreal Cubik that he had gotten me earlier--Philippe Squarzoni's Torture Blanche and Alain Paillou's Parabellum. I'll get to those soon, dictionary in hand...

After all of the wedding fun and such, it was another week of teaching, and then somehow it was yesterday. I've been reading some longer novels, including Michael Chabon's mesmerizing The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and just generally getting stuff done. The other random news is that the pigeon that lives on the defunct air conditioner still attached to my bedroom has one healthy fuzzy yellow chick (are they "chicks", or something else) and one as-yet-unhatched egg. Said pigeon is apparently cool with me opening the blinds and looking, but gets a little agitated when I take pictures...

(chick sticking head out on lower right)

Google Earth and FFVII

2005-07-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

Through the wonder and glory that is the newly released Google Earth (download here), I found this awesome/bizarre industrial plant in Baghdad, Iraq:

Now, this in and of it self is not remarkable, but imagine standing at ground level next to such a plant with that weird green glow oh-so-popular in video games, the X-files, and in Minas Morgul, and you might get:

That's a screenshot from Final Fantasy VII, which leads me to believe that part of the underlying motives of global capitalism must be to recreate in real life all of the surreal locations that you could only once occupy as a spiky-haired man-boy named Cloud. Thanks global capital... :)

"Gotta debate the fundamental beliefs of 'em all!"

2005-07-06T09:29:00.000-07:00

Aiiieeeeee:

Check out more "Enlightenment Era Philosophomon"!

post-July 4th ruminations

2005-07-05T23:06:00.000-07:00

Some more reading: David B's excellent graphic memoir, Epileptic, a sharp critique of America's policy and attitude toward Osama bin Laden in Imperial Hubris: How the West is Losing the War on Terror, Tayeb Salih's excellent Arabic novel Season of Migration to the North (which is in many ways an inversion of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and I may teach them together in the Fall), and Graham Greene's amazing The End of the Affair (long recommended by Elizabeth for good reason). Long story short, things are well for the summer. The teaching is interesting and inventive--today, I had my students read the beginning and end of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, which we are carrying over to tomorrow. I've managed to get a lot of time to do things I want, which also rocks.

Went camping this weekend at Wolf Creek State Park with Kirsten and some friends. It was a beautiful weekend, and we missed both rain and blazing sun, so that was pretty sweet. Here's Mipsy rocking in front of the campfire, in what can best be described as her 70s-psychedelic-rock-video-haze or pre-performance-art-video-piece-starring-small-purple-bunny-fire-oil-lizard-and-bongo:

The camping was good times through and through. It was nice to be out with some folks who were fairly practical and easy to deal with.

Since then, I've been musing on some things:

Perhaps Karl Rove is both the devil and guilty of treason. Check this blog post at The Nation, and my friend Yoshi's dedicate blog, treasongate.blogspot.com
I think I deserve the Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection. That's right, all 1,082 volumes (complete list here), all 700lbs, all 828 feet. And if you agree, then you should start donating, 'cause there ain't no way poor grad student boy can come up with the whopping $7,989.99 on his own... ;)
Finally, we need to stop letting a very small portion of the elite set the terms of the debate and the public's ideology at the same time. This issue was brought up fairly forcefully by both Nickel and Dimed and Imperial Hubris, both of which address the consequence of allowing a small, uninformed minority frame the rest of the world in ways that make quick, intuitive sense, but are wholly off the mark. The latter book argues forcefully that American policy makers are unable to deal with Osama bin Laden in the proper light--that he is rational, intelligent, revered by many centrists and extremists, and has careful, well-presented motivations for what he has done--because they are so sure they know what he must be...pure evil. The base argument is that bin Laden is reacting against specific threats to particular parts of the Muslim world, and that he has clearly articulated his position, which is against American actions and policy. Yet we hear time and again that the terrorists hate our way of life, hate our FREEDOM, hate all that we stand for. Not so, claims the anonymous author, but a point which our policy makers can't see because they are so wrapped up in being right to actually be right. If we want to do something productive, political and socially, we need to find venues for opening the terms of the debate, instead of reacting to every dumbass piece of rhetoric Karl Rove feeds George W.

There, those are some musings. Now, for a little Chrono Trigger before bed. :)

i need a walk

2005-06-25T23:22:00.000-07:00

I had this whole reflective post in my head. But I can't seem to get it to come out, depsite the page of rambly prose that I just wrote, then deleted. Instead, I'm going to take a walk, and listen to depressing music. Because that fixes everything, right?

it is warm--that is all

2005-06-24T17:40:00.000-07:00

A spate of reading: some graphic novels (Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis 2, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Black Orchid, and Matt Kindt and Jason Hall's Pistolwhip) two novels (Sapphire's Push and Toni Morrison's Love), and two books on activism in the academy (Cary Nelson's Manifesto of a Tenured Radical and Nelson and Stephen Watt's Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy). So, long story short, I like this summer plan thing--mostly teaching, reading, hanging out, and drinking. That's good stuff.

I would put in a lengthy meditation on our impending loss of civil liberties--as signaled by the Supreme Court's recent extention of the "public use" statutes to allow more towns to grab land for corporations, by the (semi-) death of funding for Public Broadcasting), by the passage of yet another anti-flag burning amendment in the House (fifth in eight years), and by the over-regulation of internet porn until it submits to the "small-government" Republican administration (see the issue? guess it's better to regulate than actually confronting the world...)--but I will leave that for some other time. See, that was one of those fun rhetorical devices where I claim not to bring up a topic by naming it and judging it... :)

On the teaching front, my students have been suprisingly receptive to the social construction/academic version of professional writing that I've been selling. It's not that everything is perfect, but there is definitely something to be said for meeting four times a week, and letting students in on the secrets of why they are doing what they are doing.

Went to Chicago with Kirsten and played around town. Mipsy got some great photos of herself. Here's one of her "looming" in front of the Hancock Building:

I would have gotten one of her on the shiny "bean" in Millenium Park, but the "bean" was closed for...shinning...repairs...whatever one does for shiny bean maintenance... We also ate at Mirai Sushi (on Division), which was mighty tasty and much recommended.

The rest of things are quiet, and warm (like 95 degrees warm right now). They are setting up the annual Taste of Champaign-Urbana right now, which happens to be right across the street from my apt. Should be some interesting local flavor for the weekend. I'm getting better at the posting recent--so, we'll see how that goes in the near future. Out.

rain is good

2005-06-11T00:02:00.000-07:00

Ah, such an astute title for this post. And yet, so very true... :) So, I finished my prep work for the summer teaching, which starts Monday--the new curriculum should be interesting and since it's a summer course, I'm taking a more laid-back approach. I've been reading a lot recently, finally getting to Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta (just in time for the movie, which will star Hugo Weaving as "V" and Natalie Portman as Evey). The concept--a Guy Fawkes-attired hero leads a anarchistic revolt in post-nuclear war fascist Britain--is great, as is the art; the only thing that needed more was elaboration on the plot. At only 250 pages, the thing just needs to keep going. :)

I've also been reading a good deal about the profession of literary studies, and its sometimes dismal-seeming future. I found Vincent B Leitch's "Work Theory" fascinating, and read the majority of Will Teach for Food, a collection which documents the mid-1990s graduate student strike at Yale (and Yale's brutal reprisals) and goes on to deeply consider the situation we were (and still very much are) in as a discipline and as individual English departments--in terms of hiring, compensation, and the dangerous corporate model that makes every-one part-time to keep benefits nil and stability a joke. It's really not all that bleak a situation in some respects, yet depressing to play the idealized martyr group because some of know we have to. I've also been reading Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, by Cary Nelson. I don't agree with him on everything, but it's damn refreshing to hear someone articulate why they teach the way they do, and what values/ideas/methods/action they try to impart. You'd be surprised how few writers on teaching literature do that kind of work--most seem to stick to a kind of one-shot in-class model, without being able to say what the hell we should be teaching literature for in the first place. More on that later.

on Sokal, physics, and the humanities

2005-06-08T21:01:00.000-07:00

So, on the advice of one of my professors, I've been reading some about the mid-90s Science Wars (back when everything was a war--Culture, Jobs, "on drugs", "on poverty"--and look how many of those got resolved), and mostly about the so-called "Sokal Hoax". For those not in the know, in 1996, Alan Sokal (a physicist at NYU), had an article published in Social Text, which was then a leading cultural studies publication. The only problem was that Sokal's article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (link to PDF)was a sham article, cobbled together from French and American humanisits hyperbolic statements--as they are oh so wont to make--about the implications of science for postmodernity, reality, truth, etc. The piece is a brilliant read, mostly crazy-crack, all ludicrous, but it was published in the non-peer-reviewed Social Text, so it was hailed as a decisive "win" for science against "those crazy left humanists. (For most of the relevant documents, see The Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy and the archive on Sokal's site, here.)

Sokal also coauthored an attack on most of the postmodern big-wigs that my colleagues and I hold in high regard, called Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, which I read a couple of weeks ago. They cite and excoriate passages and arguments from Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Paul Virilio, as well as generally attacking those who argue for any kind of relativism as it relates to the sciences, any use of "chaos theory", and any appropriation of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. This big crux of all of these things revolves around who gets to use science and what it can be used for, how concrete and "real" science really is versus any argument for its "constructed-ness", and how science--being based on the physical, immutable world--cannot be brought into analogy with any kind of cultural argument¹.

I'm fascinated by this because of my background (physics and English degrees), and because the people that are being run through are those on which my department is philosophically and theoretically built on. While by no means do I claim that the humanities and sciences have played well together (which CP Snow pointed out some 45 years ago in The Two Cultures), or that humanist philosophers and theorists have done a particularly good job of picking up science and math concepts, there are lingering issues that these works leave.

I went to a talk this year by a noted theorist, one who writes on both science and literature, as well as on narrative theory, matrices, user-interfaces, and probably more than I know about. I've read some of this person's work, and some of the things in those books have run true about metaphorical and culturally organized patterns that seem to recur in science and art. But this talk severly underwhelmed me. It wasn't that the concepts were bad or off, just that they were uncritical. By that I mean, they were flashy versions of science that seemed to miss the mark of science itself. When the question and answer portion came, there wasn’t much talk about this person’s use of science, nor did anyone really ask for much clarification or any practical examples. This was a talk about science as it could-have-been, if a humanist looking for a clever analogy had written it. I’m sure that there was good stuff back there, but as I reasonably well-informed audience member, I didn’t see it. The problem was not with this person’s knowledge (I hope), but with the presentation of that knowledge. If we are going to talk about science--even as metaphor (and come on folks, everything is metaphor)--we need to talk about science, be prepared to understand that science, and math, and reasoning, as needed.

Sokal’s big point in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science is that big-name intellectuals might full-well be capable of making the connections that they claim to, but that they never actually do. Instead we have Lacan’s preposterous equations (my favorite being that i is literally equal to the flaccid male organ--which it very well might be...), or Latour claiming that Einstein’s relativity was just as much social commentary on modernity as it was a description of objective reality. On this, Sokal is right. But I’ve been floored by the wide variety of those commenting on the Sokal hoax who seem to equate the mere idea that a scientist’s social context affects his or her work with leftists claiming that there is no such thing as objective reality. I realize that there are different disciplinary goals at work, and that the idea of interdisciplinarity is, in practice, mostly laughable, but the degree to which neither side of these arguments can even read and think about the others’ prose is just staggering. I will probably write more on this later, but I thought I would throw some of this out there for those interest.

__________________________
¹ Sokal is very clear never to just state this, instead claiming that scientific truths can only be just as metaphors or analogies outside of scientific reality, and then that metaphors or analogies (which are the only things we have for non-natural science studies) cannot be "proven" in the scientific sense, so they are not as valid as claims.

Ah, personal liberties...

2005-06-07T14:21:00.000-07:00

Gonzales, Attorney General, et al. v. Raich, et al

economics in America

2005-06-06T20:23:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of reading recently--this week I finished EM Forster's Aspects of the Novel, David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (plus a couple others at left). I have some to say on each, but I want to focus on Ehrenreich's book. Since it was chosen as our collective book for "One Book, One Campus", I thought I'd read it. It's one of a few popular books on America's economy that I've read recently--the other major one being Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness--and in light of these, I'm sorting out what side of America's economy I want to present to my Professional writing course (that I'm teaching starting on Monday). It's hard enough to know what pre-professional undergrads think about underground economies (Schlosser focuses on marijuana growers, strawberry field workers, and porn traffickers) and minimum-wage-and-below economies (the world into which Ehrenreich limitedly inserts herself). Many of my students see themselves as professionals only, and the rest of the world that can't make it to that level--for whatever reason--is best not thought of.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about practical economics in the US recently, on both the theoretical side and the practical. It's pretty obvious to anybody that economies in America have bifurcated into the strong "haves" and the desperate "have-nots", with the professional-bourgeois-y class somewhere in the middle. The college system tends to prepare most of the middle- and upper- bound students, and it seems difficult to link up the reality of economic America in any way more than a "oh, poor folks, yeah that's tragic" kind of discussion. We've recently revised in the incoming curriculum for the course I'm teaching, which has caused me to rethink some of the things I want my students to think about the worlds that use professional writing/discourse. I'm going to have them read some of Ehrenreich's book, and throughout I'm going try to address the issue of economics and position that seems absent from much of my students' approaches to life.

I'll be posting more about this kind of stuff throughout the summer (as I intend to actually blog more soon), but I thought I'd throw this part up now.

so close to done

2005-05-12T12:40:00.000-07:00

I'm within a few hours of finishing the semester--this one has dragged on an awful lot, folks. For your reading pleasure, I post my seminar paper (~7 MB) from the Visual Rhetoric seminar. I'll say more about it later, but that's what's been eating time for a lot of the semester.

Out.

Ooompa-tower-penguins

2005-04-21T22:59:00.000-07:00

First, for your reading pleasure, find out the real truth about the Oompa Loompa sex scandal from the Wonka factory.

Next, this is the new proposal for world's-tallest-tower (this wone would top 800m) in Dubai. Penis-envy anyone?

Finally, these penguins are awesome-cute, but why are they being forced to walk through a metal detector at DIA in Denver?

Now, if only paper writing and grading were akin to random image finding and blogging. It will be interesting to see if I make it through the weekend. :/

let's play a game....

2005-04-17T23:23:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of procrastination, here's a little game for everyone:

1) Consider the following two images:
A B

These two images are:
a) one funny, one scary
b) both funny
c) both scary
d) a sign of the "End of Days" (a la Revelations)

2) Consider the issue of Mr. T's shorts in the following video:
Mr. T and your mom

Mr. T's shorts make you think:
a) Damn, man needs to recognize his limitations.
b) Wow, I never knew Mr. T had such shapely thighs!
c) I have a pair in the closet just like those--let me run and get them...
d) What have we done to deserve this awesomeness...

3) Which of these is the most awesome story:
a) Dog-approved music
b) Lim Bizkit is the new Rage Against the Machine
c) Japan may have tried to surrender pre-atomic bombing
d) a clever (and addicting) racing game
e) An automatic CS paper generator (it got these authors in a conference!)
f) Granger library (here on campus) makes the news for dorky/cool magazine theft
g) Economic sense may have been what set homo sapiens apart from others
h) Russian and American Forces in war games to obscure our fight with extraterrestrial UFOs

4) And now, a moment of zen:

best. quote. ever...

2005-04-14T22:49:00.000-07:00

Though I may not have posted in over a month, this makes it sooooo worth the wait.

Actual quote from a student paper:

"Nobody wins when bad writing is involved."

'Nuf said. Sadly, the student in question probably does not realize the genius of said quote...

out to do this shiz-nit

2005-03-08T22:58:00.000-08:00

So I'm about to drive across a couple of states to present a paper at Kansas State's Visual Culture conference. I spent most of the last two weeks working on the paper

"Building a New Narrative Universe, London 1898:
The Re-Ordering of Victorian Fiction Under the Guise of the Graphic
in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"

and accompanying material (lots of time scanning images, getting the images where/how I wanted them, getting the PowerPoint together (it is available here, but be warned, it's 60MB!), etc. This was mostly to the neglect of my other school-work and teaching. As Hannah rightly points out in her most recent post, this is a bizarre little system where we are encouraged to pursue conference presentations, but once we get them, the rest of things don't just drop away. This is the most busy I've been since getting here, and I'm not sure it's all worthwhile right now. Very hard to stomach all the things I really Have to get done by next Wed (when my Spring Break tentatively starts). But I'll stop whining now, and just say that I'm nervous about this paper, this conference, and specifically about whether or not I'm doing anything worthwhile, but at least I get to have drinks with Scott McCloud in the very near future. :)

freak out!

2005-03-01T19:40:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I've been a little bit freaking out recently. Not necessarily frustrations with my institution (though there are some of those) or with what I'm doing, but just too too too much work. I'm really not sure I'm going to get paper written for the conference I'm presenting at. Like worried about writing a good one so much that just emailing with a cancellation is starting to sound good. It feels like so much is going on at once, and all the day-to-day provides no time for any long-term (like the fact that I spent 2 hours answer student questions about the paper they have due tomorrow--compared to the probably 20 minutes of questions I've answered in-class over the last week).

Today, I cobbled together a quite brilliant--says I--presentation on imperialism (read the handout here!), and spent four hours in seminar. Spent those two hours on students (one in my office, one answering emails--yes, seriously, an hour answering emails. The flip-side is that I got to use this wonderful image of John Bull as an octopus with his imperial lands:

So, at least there's that.

We spent a lot of time in my teaching seminar today devoted to what we are trying to do when we teach, what our students want, what we want, what gap is there, and what to do with it. Tomorrow I will go in and probably feel like a jack-ass, running through material I only vaguely know and am not professionally interested in. That's really getting me down recently. I need to teach something, anything that I can think of as interesting. This ain't it--and these courses being the 6th and 7th iterations are running me down. Next semester has been promised to be glorious, teaching-wise. We shall see.

On other pressure notes, I need to worry about paper abstract submissions due March 15, what I'm doing with my life, choosing a dissertation director, how many courses I have left to take, finishing a conferene paper, a major reading group, a committee i'm woefully far behind in prepping for, 3 seminars, teaching two classes, grading 47 papers by yesterday (I did finish one), and not falling behind. Eh, fuck it.

I just need a break. I need to feel like there's a reason to do this kind of study--teaching this material would help, but seems out of reach right now--and talk to people about why we actually do any of this. This isn't one of those "why am I here?" but more of a "why are we all here, and why don't we get to that sometime?" moments.

Alright, enough of my whining. Out.

wow...seriously?!

2005-02-18T11:25:00.000-08:00

So, the random great news is that I got the job as a PPW Program Coordinator, which means I'll be teaching one class per semester next year, and advising some incoming grads for my other teaching assignment. Sweet!

Perhaps the better randonmess are these actual quotes from spam I've received recently. Some of these are just too too much...

ambidextrous automata but stump anaconda assyriology serene literature parse fenugreek just ernestine bey lymph analgesic emotion consul adversary camelot

minstrel acquisitive doubtful rape skillet

boolean ohmmeter schwartz controlled ingenuous

smirk cheetah dessert salutation auction

multifarious asinine circumcircle else burley

Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ....
That which brings the highest happiness!!

Yavakh tsag bolchikhood baina

The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well. I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. We have art to save ourselves from the truth. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered. Touch is the most fundamental sense. A baby experiences it, all over, before he is born and long after he learns to use sight, hearing, or taste, and no human ever ceases to need it. Keep your children short on pocket money - but long on hugs. All right, Brain, I don't like you and you don't like me -- so let's just do this and I'll get back to killing you with beer. Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near. Drinking provides a beautiful excuse to pursue the one activity that truly gives me pleasure -- hooking up with fat, hairy girls. A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes. Time is never wasted when you're wasted all the time. I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves. I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves. The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love. Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die. Love is always bestowed as a gift - freely, willingly and without expectation. We don't love to be loved; we love to love. God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. The mistakes are all waiting to be made. There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines. Distance between two hearts is not an obstacle; rather a great reminder of just how strong true love can be. A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well. The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense. A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes. Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. Give me chastity and continence, but not yet. If you are going through hell, keep going. The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head. I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters The best proof of love is trust. Wit is educated insolence. If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome. The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love. What the world really needs is more love and less paper work. I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart. The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well. The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines. No elected body is the country, we are the country. You and me. Us. It can only stay that way as long as we care to keep it so. Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value. Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems. I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher. I think 'Hail to the Chief' has a nice ring to it. He who has a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'. A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened, the marvels or the abysses that it contains, or the line that seems to have been written for me alone. In this respect the writer is not different from any other human being: whatever we say or do can have far-reaching consequences. Give me a museum and I'll fill it. Talent does what it can; genius does what it must. Logic is in the eye of the logician.I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street. Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right. One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day. If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough. It is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, than to be sane and have one's doubts. All love shifts and changes. I don't know if you can be wholeheartedly in love all the time. I'll sleep when I'm dead. Drinking provides a beautiful excuse to pursue the one activity that truly gives me pleasure -- hooking up with fat, hairy girls. Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life. Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. Logic is in the eye of the logician.Time is never wasted when you're wasted all the time. Love takes up where knowledge leaves off. Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value. Maybe this world is another planet's Hell. My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher. Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'. People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid. A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny. Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means. The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad. A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies. We have art to save ourselves from the truth. Always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies. When ideas fail, words come in very handy. A witty saying proves nothing. I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a ... brain operation. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time. If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere. Love takes up where knowledge leaves off. Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems. Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances. Luck is the residue of design. Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza. A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading. Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light. Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is. A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread. If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it. Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny. Love is the immortal flow of energy that nourishes, extends and preserves. Its eternal goal is life. One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself. A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her. Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks. A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened, the marvels or the abysses that it contains, or the line that seems to have been written for me alone. In this respect the writer is not different from any other human being: whatever we say or do can have far-reaching consequences. Dancing is silent poetry. A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes. I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon. Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind. A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a shp, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near. Life is a waste of time, time is a waste of life, so get wasted all of the time and have the time of your life. In the end, everything is a gag. Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life. No matter what looms ahead, if you can eat today, enjoy today, mix good cheer with friends today enjoy it and bless God for it. What do you take me for, an idiot? Love is the immortal flow of energy that nourishes, extends and preserves. Its eternal goal is life. The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. Facts are the enemy of truth. A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship. There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light. When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks. I'll moider da bum. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it. Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. Do, or do not. There is no 'try'. I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon. I have often regretted my speech, never my silence. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence Three times is enemy action. C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg. Fill what's empty, empty what's full, and scratch where it itches. No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand. Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so. I have often regretted my speech, never my silence. When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world. I think 'Hail to the Chief' has a nice ring to it. Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake. Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go. Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die. From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it. Sleep is an excellent way of listening to an opera.

What the hell is that crazy crack?

the gates and the middle of the week

2005-02-16T08:14:00.000-08:00

I'd been meaning to post for a while, but I keep getting distracted by this stupid school thing I seem to spend so much time on. I mean, seriously, who signed me up for this action? (I suppose that was me, but let's just keep that under our collective hats, shall we...) The main purpose of this is to point out that The Gates, the latest installation project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude (who brought us such fun as Surrounded Islands and Wrapped Reichstag) is both very pretty, cool from space, and mockable with action figures, but worth $21 million? Really? I think it's just that the project seems more focused on being pretty and interactive (walk-under), more than "about" something. And while, I'm a huge fan of useless art...this one seems grandiose to me...

On other fronts, I'm hella-busy, though finally less sick and achy. I have so much random stuff to keep juggling that it eems like I can't get to any of the big stuff I know I need to work on... I have to admit, I'm getting to lots of great material, but falling so far behind...ah, well. I have a game test with Volition on Friday, and then I think my parents are coming for the day on Saturday (a bit out of the blue, but who'd say no...). It seems like there should be lots to report, but there never really is. I suppose my random anecdote of the day is that my students actually liked talking about how to move topics sentence-to-sentence and ways to work passive voice in without over-doing it. I couldn't even make that up...just intriguing that they wouldn't wholly resent grammar... :)

4am

2005-02-13T02:06:00.000-08:00

Why am I seemingly always up when I don't mean to be, and exhausted/unable to get things done when I want to? What's up with that? I guess I will try to retire again, but since that hasn't gotten me anywhere for a few hours, maybe I'll just read for a bit. Damn

bkargghhhh

2005-02-11T12:01:00.000-08:00

The subject title of this post best reveals my physical state for the last couple of days. Though I vehemently deny I was/am sick, I will say that my body was in some serious revolt, and it took a couple of days out of me, basically. It's ok, though, because I made the executive decision yesterday to kill my teaching today, which took some of the pressure off. I got some sleep, didn't eat, and I'm getting back to things. I did discover that reading Sin City while a little delirious is fun. So now, I'm off for some food for the first real time in 40 hours or so...bkargghhhh to all!

Grounghog's Day, just a little late...

2005-02-04T23:40:00.000-08:00

In honor of Jim and Aleksondra's up-coming post-Groundhog's Day party, I fulfilled my arts and crafts quota and made a special new friend.

I started with this image as my model

So, I made this:

His name is Wally, and he and Mipsy are already sharing secrets:

I admit he's a little ungainly, but kind of great for an hour's worth of time with pipe-cleaners! :-D

Literature studies as I know them

2005-02-04T16:27:00.000-08:00

I will keep this brief (though as a fullish response to Elizabeth's post, it will be a bit long), to avoid doing what my responses and comments in this arena (cross-, inter-, trans-, and multi-disciplinary discussions of what we do and why) have done in the past--alienate and anger. My blog post this morning was only tangentially about literature; it was more about a specific set of social connections I was thinking through, prompted by reading three different books, only one of which itself was only tangentially about literature (despite its title, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis is an attempt at what Casarino calls philopoesis, or the troubling of philosophy by literature and vice-versa, where Marx and Melville play the set pieces to his experiment...). This is not to say that I don't consider this kind of thinking to be the work of those of us who analyze literature. I consider it essential at times, to even be able to put a foot in the door of the discourse and history of what we do when we analyze literature.

The reason literary studies works the way it does is in part about deep structure, about the things Oday points to (see comments)--connective tissue that runs through centuries of novels, plays, poems, essays, and more. This is work that helps both students and professionals do something with literature--see connections to history, philosophy, the sciences, social systems, ideology, and more. There are many people out there who don't love literature, many who do, and many in-between. All three kinds of students come into the academy/university and in some sense run into the "obfuscating" power of literature. To some degree, I'm not sure there is a better way to do this. This is work that both reveals and deepens our understanding of what literature is anyway--writers coming to terms with the mix of social, political, personal, ethical, moral, and symbolic realms they inhabit and can conceive of. To do the work of knowledge is to work through those elements. It is limiting, hard, cumbersome, filled with useless pundits, ivory towers, Harold Blooms, and more uses of ideology than you can shake a stick at.

But it gives us many things in return:

we get to study, think about/though/with texts and authors that we love
we get to test out systems and their validity against a set of symbolics that bear relation to both their formative circumstances and author's talent/technique
we get to advance not only all of this to students (once kept quite firmly away from the analytic structure) but to other disciplines, saying "here is how we do things, here is what we offer"
as Oday pointed out (see comments), we get to try combinations of approaches, materials, and subjects of study, to see how our theory works with each
finally, we can try to work with other disciplines (as disciplinary boundaries are but vicissitudes of our present moment) to further both sets of disciplinary goals, one elucidating the other.

These are idealistic premises, and in practice, they may fail. But to some degree, these principles are why theory matters to literature. Without it, reading literature would not be in the academy at all, or would be relegated to History courses, or perhaps Anthropology, Sociology, Ethnography, etc. "Literature" as a field of study has grown immensely in stature and breadth in the last century, just as so many other disciplines were entering the university setting as well. As new, interesting fields emerge, prompted by technology and social/theoretical shifts, they grow along-side long established ones. For some, this growth must be oppositional or dialectic, playing one off another endlessly. But those distinctions are false. There are misunderstandings about what each of us does, but I would hope a fundamental respect for them. This is not false pluralism or relativism, where all things are equal, but a respect for the growth of new theoretical and practical approaches to material that had no place before. That does not mean that all disciplines are equal, nor should they be. No one would argue that mathematics, literature, and anthropology should teleologically coincide. But they do have sections of overlap, places where useful conjunctions can occur, not just in the instrumental sense of one using another to further itself, but in mutually re-defining with the insights of the other.

I will stop with this: there are many ways to do many fields and disciplines. None of them are perfect, some are better than others, and some may be fundamentally wrong, but none are completely right. That I or others happen to love what we do does not invalidate the passion and institutional work that others may have or can do. The academy does not work by the Law of Excluded Middles or by some perfect division of labor. It is about education and furthering our understanding of everything we can. Some of these lines of inquiry feel more practical than others--they are more hands-on, more concrete. But the univeristy system was built around the melding of the practical arts with the liberal arts and sciences. That melding is why I decided to go to graduate school, a decision is love regret in equal parts. One must give up some things, but not all things--life in the university (for me) is not about fixation and building walls around disciplines. As this post hopefully clarifies, it is about seeing as many connections with as much material and symbols and structures as I can. I have chosen literature, others have chosen thier fields. Where is the anger and animosity in that?

Marx and Mips

2005-02-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

Mipsy has promised that she will work on her "internet presence", which I'm not sure she really understands, but she says she does... Her blog just got updated, and she shares my disillusionment with the State of the Union. By appearing to consider options--many notably attached to current and retired Congressional Dems--Bush seems pretty committed to the appearance of openness. But turning around his internal policy of "we are right, deal with it" seems to be a long way coming. I don't trust 2nd term presidents like this one (or even Clinton, who had to get a sex scandal to get his ass out and show his face on anything real). The 1st term becomes about getting the 2nd term, and the 2nd about doing whatever the hell you can to preserve your legacy. Bush's should be pretty secure by now, but he'd add the reversal of Roe v. Wade, a Constitutional ban on gay marriage, same on stem cell research, the end of Social Security as we know it, the razing of another 2-3 nuclear ready/possessing nations (ahem...Iran...cough, cough...North Korea...), and the largest deficit in the history of the world. Now I'm not saying those are bad things...Oh, wait, yes I am.

On a related note, my New Marxist group met yesterday. We were discussing Cesare Casarino's Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis, which is an inventive reading of Marx's Grundrisse with and through Melville's Moby-Dick. This aspects he draws on are more than just those of the typical literary critic, but our group, which can get a little heady, was pretty anti- the (absent) politics in the book. Before I went to bed last night, I was reading Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, specifically the chapter on the growing separation between Kansas' moderate and conservative Republicans. The key to Frank's argument is that the ultra-conservative movements (pro-life and anti-gay specifically) are ultra-politicized, but make sure to choose goals that are either unattainable, or only symbolically so. The question that recurred through both, though, was one of class consciousness and political revolt.

Marx tell us that eventually the proletariat will rise up when their actions can be seen as a collective, and when enough of these happen, the late capitalist state with sublimate (his word, not mine) into communism. This was Casarino's point as well--that on the Pequod some form of communal life, some communist tendency provided both the homo-erotic fulfillment and organizing power that allows the ship and its crew to escape the logic of the capitalist mainland, even as it led to their own demise. But this sublimation is predicated on a proletariat that has the means of uniting on some ground and that remains mostly unaware of the machinations of capital itself. We teach Capital to undergraduates. The humanities version of Marx (the economics people want nothing to do with him for good reason--he was a social scientist at best, not an economist--just like the psychologists who balk at our retention of Freud and Lacan...) holds that class consciousness is always just a step away, and somehow it will just trickle down from the hallowed halls of learning to the masses, and poof, COMMUNISM!!!

But the critical flaw is the un-politicized proletariat. Find me someone out there who hasn't been radically dragged into politics. I'm not even talking about the "interactions between people = politics" kind of politics, but the real, workings of the state and federal machine kind. The ultra-conservatives have realized that by approaching the proletariat with shiny goals that are unattainable, they have an nearly-endless rallying cry. Who cares about economic interests when there are moral certitudes that need upholding? This is the partial-failure of Marxism--it can't deal with logics outside of the logic of capital. Later Marxists, like Althusser, will give us the interpellative model of identity formation, where we are all permanently infused with the ideologies of state apparatuses. That's all well and good, but only stays under the rubric of capital if those state apparatuses do. We have a reactionary arm of politics that is dragging votes and people out of the machine of capital, while that very same machine is fore-closing on their homes and making the mansions of the rich bigger and bigger. Morality and faith are nearly taboo terms in the academy, laughingly pushed away as archaic and antiquated, outmoded by the harsh reality of modernism and an attention to capital's organizing principles. But not everyone plays that game.

The liberal institution I believe in and am freezing my ass of at right now can't provide a full rationale for any of this. It truly believes on some level that the revolution is but seconds away. That the proletariat is just dying to be led, and that we as liberal educators can lead them. The proletariat is dying to be led, and they've found a group to lead them--a group with anti-capital rhetoric and logic. How do we come to terms with that? Where do we even start?

Sweet!!!

2005-02-03T15:58:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I've been absent for a bit. I apologize, baby. I'll make it up to you. Here, here's a link to Life of Riley (link). Isn't that enough? ;)

But I digress. This semester has been a stunning amount of stress thus far, including a paper wrote 205 of my final grad that was due yesterday, a shite-load of reading (I'm bipping through 3-5 book a week, plus ~200-300 pages of course pack reading), and just a lot of things up-coming to keep my eye on. However, I just got 3 pieces of good news in a row this afternoon, so I have decided not to stress:

1) I had a doctor's appt. today (and those of you who know me well, know that is not a good thing...I've officially now been to 3 doctors in my adult life, or say averaging one doctor visit every 3.33 years...), and I don't have too much to worry about, apparently. I'm not putting details here (and I'd rather if no one asked), but it's a load off.

2) I had a major academic round-table coming up next week with two visiting scholars (Eleanor Kaufman and Cesare Casarino), which would have been a two-day event, including me giving a brief paper-response. (Un)fortunately, both have cancelled, which means I can skip that part of stress. :)

3) I got invited to participate in a video game study, which means I get to play some video games, and get a free one for my time! I <3 America for its video game culture (wholly stolen from Japan...).

So, that's the scoop. I'm going to get out of this freezing computer lab, and go to my New Marxisms group. Out.

PS2!!!

2005-01-26T16:46:00.000-08:00

It has arrived! It is thinner than one special edition LOTR film! It is beautiful and my new best electronic device! Aiiieeeee!!! I will now proceed to fail out of grad school--peace to all. :-D

morning

2005-01-24T06:30:00.000-08:00

Wow...cold in the morning is so much colder than any other time. The guy next to me on the bus was mumbling about it being "butt-fuck cold", which I hope refers to the the quality of human interaction with unwanted anal sex, not to some tempeature of it, because that would be just evil other wise. I'm teaching here in a few, but I thought I would post really quickly, instead of thinking about letter formats, positive emphasis, and the compute lab, which are the topics of the day...

I've been immersed in course reaing all weekend (three full books, plus a ton of copied reading). I'm starting to get a little frazzed by the large amount of reading I have due but is currently unavailable, due to professor lateness, publication dates getting changed, and lack of prep on a number of people's parts. This is not necessarily all bad, as I understand that having a stack of reading to do in front of me also sucks, but knowing that I'll be responsible for reading a whole book in a day or two, only because someone didn't facilitate getting that book out annoys me. Perhaps it's just that we do so much reading, and not all of it is indeed valuable (a fact that we all know, but kind of ignore), yet we feel some kind of obligation to chug throuhg the whole book, hoping in the last bit of theory, some brilliant idea will emerge. Let me tell you, the last few books...not so much...

Anyway, this week should be good. I'm mostly on top of things I actually have and was responsible for reading, and I think I should be able to get some conference paper thinking in. Mostly, I just need to read for a fun for a bit. I get frustrated by my professional obligations when they don't let me read fiction for more than a few days. It's one of those "what the fuck is the point" moments when you realize you haven't read anything for fun in a week, but you have been agnizing the order of the theory you are reading, so as to put a space in just before seminar, when the readings are finally up... So, that's my rant, pedagogs...freakin' prepare for your students' needs for once!

Oh, and for all interested, check out this Beastie Boys/Beatles mash-up (haven't gotten to listen myself yet): DJ BC presents The Beasties

I return with links!

2005-01-17T23:05:00.000-08:00

I took a break form blogging over break, and I do appreciate those who missed me. Just needed less time online, more time with reading, writing a paper, family, video games, etc. Now that we are back to the semester, and I'm more composed and picked up (in a lot of ways--notably the newly sorted apartment, where I almost know the location of all my crap...), I'll try to post more. The break really wasn't too eventful, or at least was had events stowed in discrete categories. I got back to CU from VA (via MO to stay the parents for a couple), spent New Year's here, and started a seminar paper pretty immediately. That took a week and a half, but turned out really well, I think (here's a copy in Word format). The officially finished my Fall semester. I wrote a syllabus for this semester's B&TW teaching, goofed off, cleaned the apt for the most part--grand plans for changing some parts of it, played games, read for a bit, etc.

The deep sadness of my break was the passing of my Playstation 2: it left us about a week ago, when on a routine switch-on, it gave an audible click, and smelled distinctly of burnt plastic. As its warranty was far past, and it was survived by an emptiness in its owner's heart, taking his prime gaming system (no offense GameCube) and leaving him without a DVD player as well--all when his free time for gameplaying was at prime! Thinking he could assuage his sadness, said owner traveled from store to store, searching for the new PS2 Slim (size of a couple DVD cases stacked folks!), only to discover that CU is sold out. And we are not talking just a little...I mean every store (Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Meijer, Toys R Us, etc., etc.) is out. It cannot be bought easily online (not at Sony, Amazon, etc.). They are basically non-existent since the price-drop to $150. So, sad owner was forced to wait. But he was not to be overcome with emotion. Instead, in a fit of passion that often seems to accompany losses in immediate family, he resorted to the wide array of emulation products available, playing his PS1 games on his computer, taking care of the majority of the new, very fun and cute Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. This of course, is not the same, but has made his last few days satisfying in their own way... More details on his condition to follow...

Things are solid. Seminars tomorrow. Teaching on Wed (need to come up with something snazzy to say...). More on that later. Links for your clicking pleasure:

"Pentagon spurned plan for enemy aphrodisiac" (wow...like the million dollar toilet seat, only with attempts to infect the enemy with gayness...)

"Video Mod" on MTV2 - particularly watch "Stacy's Mom" (w/ Sims 2), "I Believe In A Thing Called Love" (w/ Outlaw Golf 2), "Let's Get It Started" (w/ SSX 3, Sims 2, Tribes: Vengence), and "Bring Me To Life" (w/ Dusk and Dawn) [thanks to Elizabeth for directing me to this]

Final Fantasy Downloads (for all the FF mp3s, ever, you know you've been dying to find these...)

Combine those with Final Fantasy Piano sheet music (wow, too much free time, folks...?)

Box Office Mojo (a site that tracks profits, seats sold, # of theatres, etc. for films--amazingly detailed)

Dave Barry's 2004 in review ('nuf said...)

The Secret History of the Credit Card (a PBS show with lots of Credit Card madness on it)

WWE: Day of Reckoning screenshot (ah, the tasteful future of gameplay. As Nigel mention, perhaps "wrestling" subtly stands for something else... Oday, any ideas?)

Emulation Zone (for all the best in emulation out there--the ROMs are illegal, unless you own the game itself of course... ;))

shantih shantih shantih

in VA

2004-12-20T11:48:00.000-08:00

I'd been planning to post a "what's been going on" post for a while, but this isn't really going to be it, so maybe the last month of "what's been going on" isn't really all that post worthy. Here's the brief list:

Got back from Thanksgiving, was reluctant to accept that the semester was actually still going on, proceeded to kill time and work really hard simulatenously.
Read Cormac McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which is a great novel (with some flaws) that I decded to write my American Fiction of the 20s-30s paper on. The problem with this being that said paper was due on Dec. 10, and I finished the novel on Dec. 3 or so...
Busted ass trying to get grading done as soon as I could, but got a stack of grading about 5 inches tall on Dec. 10, then more on the 14th...
Finished McCullers paper, turned it in (with a minor) extension--got immediately ill, unable to grade.
Graded like mad for two days, taking a 2 hour break to see Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events with Elizabeth, then stayed up until 4 am to finish grading.
Dropped papers at school at 10:30, parents arrived at 11, left town by 12:30 (post lunch, my bill paying, packing, and doing dishes), drove to Columbus, OH.
Snowstorm overnight, drove through in the morning, all the way into Maryland without much incident, then spun out on the interstate (I-68), in front of on-coming traffic, managing to miss all of them, and ended up next to the median guardrail facing the wrong direction.
Paused a moment, and kept driving.
Got to Virginia around 5:30 yesterday, and am now chilling at my aunt and uncle's place for a week unti Christmas.

So, there's the story kids...I did get some sleep today, and I kind of just want to go back to it. Another seminar paper to write later, but that won't be discussed until after New Year's. :)

random links

2004-12-06T23:04:00.000-08:00

Click the Baby Jesus head!

fabulously inappropriate e-cards

World Trade Center Memorial site (featuring every entry in detail!)

LUDO in a Hazard shirt

funny, though mildly inappropriate car air conditioning commercial (rom France)

Visual Culture: Image, Icon, Ideology (conference at which I'll be presenting in the Spring)

10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time (I especially like Noam Chomsky and the Star Trek ones)

Mipsy's new (tentative) blog

onward soldiers

2004-11-28T23:53:00.000-08:00

So, getting back into this school thing from break is going to be a bitch, methinks. I'm just no so prepared, and really, not so excited by the last two weeks of actual schoolwork. The bizarre little setup we have means that I've already thought my way into the middle of next semester (books ordered for teaching, registered for courses, giving a paper in March, etc.), but I still have to finish this one. What's up with that?! I'm really thinking we should forego coming back from Thanksgiving, and start up the Spring around Valentine's Day. Spend the winter months just goofing off. Any takers on that?

So, as much as I'm not really excited about paper writing or grading, I am teaching The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a culminating image-text in my Visual Rhetoric course. Hopefully, this will give us a chance to look at something non-advertising or news based to apply some of the image-text moves we've looked at. I'm a little worried that some of the students won't be into it, but many of them are lit majors, or have taken lit courses, so it should be fun for the most part.

It's been too nice to have days to myself, in terms of reading and doing what I want to do. I saw a whole swath of movies while I was at my parents (the lack of things to do in the small town and all...): some good (The Rundown being surprised funny, Old Gringo with Gregory Peck playing Ambrose Bierce in revolutionary Mexico, Runaway Jury which was like a high-tech Grisham on crack), some bad (The Rainmaker which was dull, slow, and had Matt Damon..., The Punisher, which sadly made the Dolph Lundgren version look good, the abysmal The Order, and Van Helsing, which I won't say anything about, except at least Hugh Jackman's gots his looks...). Then there were a couple that exceed judgment for so many reasons--House of 1000 Corpses and The Chronicles of Riddick. Wow, two amazingly something movies...highly recommended...or to avoided at all costs, you choose...

So, we can't say I didn't do anything over break...just of a different kind of recreation. Anyway, it's nigh on 2am, and I have had a very nice evening, so I'm going to crash soon. Perhaps tomorrow, I will finish rearraging my apartment, vacuum, etc. Lord knows I need to...

so much

2004-11-24T18:01:00.000-08:00

I'm at my parents for a few days, and feeling quite in the lurch. The cell service here is pretty non-existent, it snowed about 4 inches yesterday, the power went out, so I overslept by a lot (and still felt un-rested). It's been nice to see the parents, but there is a limit to how long I can spend in this town before I feel trapped here--that limit has been shrinking by the year, and now appears to be at the three day mark...

So, I had a birthday (yay 26!), and a nice few days with friends punctuated by lots of random joys and disappointments, in that nice alternating fashion that can only happen when you are in a quite of unstable mood yourself. These things aren't worth detailing here, but sufficed to say, there were wonderful, sweet times in all of it.

I've decided that rockingly self-indulgent project that I might start would be a series of love letters to those that I no longer know how to reach. I feel so over-whelmed these days by everything that has fallen behind me, by the pasts and presents or everyone around me. Like I can't come to things clean anymore, or see anyone without the thin film of their history, the residue of things that have been, that I can't touch, can't even compete with. Maybe that's just the ineffectual me talking, but it seems like a nice little emo things to do.

I'm looking forward to getting back to town soon, mainly to buying a papasan chair and curling up and sleeping through the end of the semester. That second clause may be and out-and-out fantasy, but it's a nice one...

a faux post

2004-11-19T00:48:00.000-08:00

There was this whole long, reflective post, but it has disappeared into the aether...so this is the faux post just to say that there was a long, depressing, reflective thought for the day.

Wow...just wow

2004-11-17T21:52:00.000-08:00

My god...this is digusting(ly wonderful). It even has its own website: MonderThickburger.com!

Oday posted a great crazy post today...worth reading.

Any word on tonight's West Wing?

weekend

2004-11-14T23:03:00.000-08:00

I had a really solid, fun, non-productive weekend. The kind that makes you sit up and take notice and question why your other weekends have not been as fun. I know the anser, I suppose, but this one was good. There won't be a full recap, but I will say the The Incredibles is a fun, fun movie--especially the Samuel L Jackson character. It's nice to see some quality in film-making these days. :) I would love to have a lot of other rants about lessons learned and such, but I'll just say I came home happier than I have most of the time recently, and I'm going to cruise though this week (hopefully) to get to break. An auspicious plan, I know, but a boy's got to have goals and all.

"pacific street" - Hem

2004-11-12T00:42:00.000-08:00

Let's go out walking, I know where to meet
The corner of Pacific Street
'Cause I feel restless and I just can't sleep
I need to show you something

let go...just let go

2004-11-11T00:42:00.000-08:00

Let me tell you of an unhearlded pleasure: walking through downtown Champaign at 1 am, headphones playing Hem's new album Eveningland, watching the last renmants of Wednesday night's social scene part from their bar seat in pairs. It's pretty at night in this town, when I decide to give up for a while, and just go walking, to see what can be seen and stop thinking for a while.

I've felt really addled about a lot recently, as many around me seem to be as well. That isn't going to change, I don't think, but I'm trying to remind myself that not so much really matters. The conversations are more serious and heated everyday, people seem to be on the retreat on all sides, a kind of collective regrouping, not along party/ideological/issue lines, but around keeping our sanity. I've talked to a lot of people just struggling to get to Thanksgiving break, so they can rest for once. Here it is 2:30 in the am, and I have seminar in 7 hours.

I guess it's just a lonely time in life. There's a great scene in Heat where Robert De Niro (Neil) is talking to Amy Brenneman (Eady):

Eady: You travel a lot?
Neil McCauley: Yeah.
Eady: Traveling makes you lonely?
Neil McCauley: I'm alone, I am not lonely.

But of course he is lonely. And he masks it with something material--bank robbing--because that's a way to pretend that he's successful. While I would never propose a homosocial Michael Mann film (is there any other kind?) as a model for all things, I'm falling into one of those Nietzschean/Sartrean funks of the inner abyss. It's not that I buy either of their versions of inner emptiness, but it's so easy to put on a face of success, to go through the motions that you know you can go through, and then come home at night. The in-between-times just get me, I suppose. And this isn't where I meant this post to go, but so be it. g'night

feeling a little better about the election and stuff

2004-11-09T23:38:00.000-08:00

Since the election, the much bandied about red and blue electoral maps have, I think, been polarizing the election results in the wrong direction. This issue is not that there are crazy states and not, but that most states are themselves divided (which of course our electoral college system ignores to a shocking degree). To that end, here is the purple America by voting in states:

Also, check the county map for a fairly similar county-by-county purple version.

There is also this collection of images, which might be of interest to some. I'm starting to feel a little better about the election in one direction--namely that the issues revealed by exit polling will now hopefully be addressed in some way by the Left. However, the divisiveness of this whole business is shocking. I had a class recently where the professor tore off on a completely tangential liberal rant, to the discomfort of most of us, liberals and conservatives both. Is that an issue--hells yes. I'm all for political joking, but the liberal guilt/whining shouldn't take over for the rational discourse they used to claim to get toward. And conservatives voting on moral values/cultural centrism will hopefully see that they did not win by 20 points. This is a divided country--obviously--but it was before last week, and will continue to be. That ain't going to change soon, and really shouldn't. But the death of dialogue/conversation/communication (and all those other things that has strangely been marked as somehow "liberal") is truly disheartening. I understand that we are doing the "national decompression and processing post-breakup" thing, but let's not get so reified in these dumb-ass colors/positions/parties that one side is to blame or praise over the other. Anyway, that's all I've got to say on that.

On other news, life keeps a nice steady pace whether I want to put my feet into it or not. It seems just as easy sometimes to retreat into my apartment away from things as it does to go out--especially on days when I feel like I'm going through the motions anyway. The incentive to connect just isn't always there somedays, or feels so mixed that I'm never sure what I'm looking at. Bizarre (it's also good to post ruminations on things when your head is muddled from lack of sleep...I bet that makes it clear to all...).

my goodness, this is adorable

2004-11-09T21:41:00.000-08:00

Is there really any end to how cute this critter is? :)

a new title graphic and sleeplessness

2004-11-08T01:01:00.000-08:00

You might notice a friendly purple stuffed bunny staring out at you from the Great Wall of China somewhere near the top of this page. Well, her name is Mipsy, and she is an international spy, so consider yourself spied-upon! :) The picture is real, btw, and that really is a nook of said Great Wall. Found a great, spunky comics site:

Wish I had the energy...back to the last few papers of grading, then maybe sleep someday...

layout and a funny

2004-11-06T17:29:00.000-08:00

Finished up the blog template stuff. Let me know what you think. The last few days have been draining, and I feel like nothing's going right. It's just a big mush of things I would have liked to see go a different way and didn't. And it makes me want to never get up in the morning. Hard to tell how much of all of this is due to my end, and how much is the just the general fucked-up-ed-ness of things. (That was a very vague mini-rant, but so be it.) Here's a nice take on things:

I have a lot of thoughts about things election-related and other-wise, but make sure to take a peek at Nigel's recent rant. That sums up some it. Juse one of those times when I wish I didn't feel so alone in things, or could figure out how to stop doing such to myself and others.

more on voting and such

2004-11-04T23:10:00.000-08:00

Some numbers on Youth voter turnout and a press release (.pdf file). Nice to see the media just skim over actual facts...

David Niewert's "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An exegesis". Think about it...

Canada: Progressive, Prosperous, Inclusive. And welcoming you. Thanks Canada! :)

Media Whores Online--don't the name say it all?

voting stuff

2004-11-04T15:57:00.000-08:00

I am a bit disheartened, but trying not to be disillusioned. Here is some humor, anger, sites to look at, etc.

Eminem's "Mosh" video, which is an amazing clip, and sadly came out too late... (a must watch!)

If this chart of state IQ averages with votes is true, we are jacked.

Now the great Bush-dick-sucking has begun (with as much entendre, double, triple, etc., as possibly), I just want to point out that 10 million more voters came out than in 2000, and that while the distribution percentage-wise across age groups (say 17% from 18-29) may not have changed, the number of voters did, upwards everywhere. So the media needs to shut the fuck up about people not stepping up to vote. 10 million more voters per election is good, for God's sake...though I guess that doesn't fit the media-model of immediate scapegoating (this began before the polls were even closed in Western states), and denial of actual culpability (see all of the last 3.5 years...). Shite.

Rocky Horror Election Show

2004-11-01T23:15:00.000-08:00

So come up to the lab
And see what's on the slab
I see you shiver with antici...pation
But maybe the rain
Isn't really to blame
So I'll remove the cause
But not the symptom

And with those immortal words of Dr. Frank-n-Furter, I wait for the results of the 2004-6 Presidential election. If I'm lucky, I will only spend all of tomorrow night, the next, the next month, until Colorado gets its votes sorted out, until a hundred lawsuits go through, etc, and then I'll have me a president. :) Well, the Redskins won, the Red Socks won, and I think those are conclusive enough. So, bring on an election! I'm soooo ready!!! (my run-away-from-things bus will be leaving in a few days...just keeping the options open...) ;)

template

2004-11-01T00:10:00.000-08:00

A new template is in progress, so give me a bit before commenting. :)

a brief

2004-10-31T23:00:00.000-08:00

It's been a rough couple of days. Some not so pleasant novels (really well written, especially Waiting for Nothing, but thematically hard, cold books), which I suppose have affected me more than I meant them to. I kind of lost all ambition this weekend. I got stuff done, but I saw my face reflected in a pane of glass downtown yesterday, and it didn't look or feel like me. And this isn't the melodrama, not at one with my feelings business, more the total dissociation from any "me". Like I could just go through mechanically for days/weeks, and not a lot of people would notice. This isn't their fault, just that I can't seem to be who I used to be anymore. And I've met some folks recently who I really like, but I wonder what they must think. Anyway, I didn't mean this to be a self-pity post, so I'll just stop. I'm going to be working on a new template, I think, so keep your eyes peeled for such.

turning off

2004-10-31T01:55:00.000-08:00

Why is my first reaction to collapse into myself,
when nobody else around me is? When the chill in the room is
emanating from me. Only for me.
I fold inward when nobody else does
Why do I invert my public face,
when the sport of life is being played right there
there
and I realize that this isn't a game for me anymore?

Why is everything I desire in the future perfect tense,
in the it will have been such and such,
rather than it could be, or I wish it were?
The angry little poet that rages sonnets and blank verse
would like to pretend that is all a Yeatsian ploy,
or that my misplaced tenses are a result of distilled postmodernity.

But we all know that's bullshit, right?

I'm just alone at night, lonely,
shaking my fists at a weather-less night,
wondering why the impression of these endless longings,
weighs upon me so, marks me and my disengagement.

If I were to just be...
I could just let go...
I will have been the maker of my own Apocalypse,
my own vision.
I will have been the organizer of my own isolation.
I will have been my own destroyer, heart-less apathy in the face of bliss.

This is amazing stuff folks...though admittedly, for just a few of us... ;)

2004-10-30T00:45:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I found out that the Federal Highway Administration (a division of the Department of Transportation) had finally approaved a new highway-sign typeface that will go into effect incrementally on all signage in the US (and Canada) over the upcoming decades. This typeface is called ClearviewHwy (created by Terminal Design, and was tested against the existing typefaces for a variety of factors, especially legibility, variable weather conditions, distanct word-recognition, etc. I'm not sure I can say why I'm fascianted this much by this whole business, but I truly am. You can see a comparison of old-style signs that are still everywhere, and what they will be replaced with here. Some of the changes are subtle, but many of them will be striking, like the dropping of all-caps from just about all highway signs and street-name signs, and the addition of a better variety of sizes of the same font, which should help with scaling and distance reading issues.

Here is the official description:

ClearviewHwy font software was developed by the team that developed the Clearview Type System that has received interim approval by the Federal Highway Administration for use in road guide signs. The renderings of every font are not only identical to the published standard, but are the renderings that established the standard.
ClearviewHwy font software allows sign design engineers and sign manufacturers to prepare precisely spaced layouts and cutting files without having to reference separate tables.

ClearviewHwy was developed in a research program to increase the legibility and improve ease of recognition of road sign legends while reducing the effects of halation (or overglow) for older drivers and drivers with reduced contrast sensitivity when letters are displayed on high brightness retroreflective materials.

To satisfy these objectives it was necessary to identify ways to create a more effective typeface than E-modified as used for destination legends on freeway guide signs. A second component of the project was to compare the ease of recognition of mixed case displays in lieu of all capital letter displays (FHWA Series D) and identify ways to improve readability of guide and information signs.

In the ten years of research and development, ClearviewHwy has evolved into a type system with six distinct weights, with each weight having a version for positive and negative contrast applications.

Here are two examples, ClearviewHwy on the left and top respectively:

All of this is guided by the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), which asically covers every code and regulation that guides highway markings, signage, distances between signs, office sign-types, etc. The most recent set of codes is from 2003, which took effect on July 21, 2004. There are amazingly detailed sections on things like official Amish signs, how far apart every single sign must be in every situation, etc., but the level of detail is staggering. There are sections for Regulatory signs, Conventional roads, Freeways and Expressways, and on and on. I love the govermental bureauracracy... Anyway, looooooong story short, the MUTCD supplement on the ClearviewHwy font is called the Clearview Typeface Supplement. This is the document that lays out the provisional standards for the road sign fonts you will see starting in the very new future, and includes lots of comparisons for old-to-new fonts. Here's but one:

This is all part of my recent fascination with documents online, especially regulatory ones. If you want to start looking for goverment ones, the place to start is the Government Printing Office, which either has, or has links to almost all official documents online.

Some great governmental document(s) online:

US Constitution (scans/.pdfs) at Our Documents
Declaration of Independence (scans/.pdfs) at Our Documents
9/11 Commission Report from the 9/11 Commission website
Bush vs. Gore Supreme Court decision (on p. 98-158) from the Supreme Court
The Patriot Act, courtesy of the The Electronic Privacy Information Center (and Nigel)
Selected Crash Intersection Locations 1999-2002 in C-U as part of the Long Range Transportation Plan, which C-U residents might find of interest, since it lays out the traffic plan for 2025
Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (30 MB zip file)
Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001
Economic Report of the President (2004)
State of the Union Address archive (from CSPAN, from 1945-2004)

Let me know if you can find any other great documents online. I'm going to have my Business and Technical Writing Students work with some of these next semester, though I'll need to figure out just how sometime later. Man, I'm such a dork!

the surreality of coffee shops

2004-10-27T23:57:00.000-07:00

So, I wish I could just be a goofy, careless poet-boy again. I wish I could pull off the tortured artist thing, and write my heart out every day in little black notebooks that I bought from art supply stores and made my own covers out of with recycled/homemade paper. I would write lines like "I'm always waking up in coffeeshops" and "How did we get here, why can't we go back?" and "There's a book out there, with us in it, and I'll write it" and other amazing Emo-esque lines that will be brilliant from the moment my ink-pen-inked hand writes them down. I'd get my hair cropped, so it would just fall over one of my eyes, and start wearing a hemp product of somekind, but only one that wouldn't interfere with my black tight shirt (of course, studded with safety pins), or boy-skirt. I would always look a little bit sleepy, and carry around Nietzsche--though you'd never actually catch me opening him--but most of all, I'd sync up my outer appearance with this inner Emo-kid that only half jokes about wanting these things. My indecision and wanderlust would be part of the aesthetic, and my powerful comprehension of the deeply-felt angst of the 20-something crowd would allow me to headline an MTV concert for 18 year olds, with perfect Chris Caraba flair (I might have mentioned this in past...). Now, I'm just left with worries at night, stuff left unfinished, and lots of hopes that are tinged with so much more doubt than I remember from even a year or two ago. It's not the getting older that bothers me, it's the weight that things seem to carry, my seeming loss of how to read situations/people, the lonlieness that creeps in sometimes in ways that you want to beat back, but don't know how. Here's today's Emo-poem (based mostly on observing an Emo-boy at the coffeeshop today):

I'm always waking up in coffeeshops
pushing the hair back and seeing some boy
the kind I would be if I sold out like him
but why is he the one who has it so easy
flirting with the girl and the microphone

What makes that girl, the one I thought saw me
for me, what makes that girl see him so
I'm the one hurting inside
tired of being tired
tired of being alone
tired of tired thoughts
and me

It's just too much, this infinite
facade around the dark abyss inside
each of us
inside like puddles of death
drawing me inward when all I want
is the quiet of arms around me
and poetry in my ears from a voice
that I understand

Man, that was great! I really liked the "puddles of death" part...I think maybe I'm too sarcastic late at night. ;) All, right, seriously, I have to go read 100 pages of a novel for a seminar that starts in 7 hours. Cheers.

oooo....pretty....

2004-10-27T20:24:00.000-07:00

I love my park. :)

a funny

2004-10-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

an eclipse, did you say?!

2004-10-27T00:24:00.000-07:00

So, I'm already thinking about Wednsday night, though of course, its only 2:30 am on Wednesday morning... :) I have Leo's impending heart attack (God forbid death), if the West Wing previews are to be believed, more crazy Law & Order, finishing two books, and low-and-behold, a bona fide lunar eclipse! Won't be another chance to see one until 2007, so if you're a Midwesterner, check it out (the prime times are between 9:23 and 10:45). Happy moon watching to all!

a simple question

2004-10-25T22:31:00.000-07:00

This quick note is really for Oday, but anyone can weigh in as they see fit.

Seriously, how messed up is Foucault's version of sexuality, just because the man had some issues with sex himself? This is really a broader question, about the individual personality types of our leading theorists/critics/philosophers/psychoanalysts, and how those sooooooo over-determine their theories. Then Foucault goes on and writes "What is an Author?" and other such works pretending that personal authorial details shouldn't count. Really, Michel...who are you trying to kid?

A fun and titillating lecture tonight on Foucault's History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, which I basically re-read all of yesterday. I forget how fluid Foucault's logic gets after a while. I don't buy it, but it is a bit intoxicating, if you aren't careful. I have a shite-load (in the good Irish-explicative sense) of reading to do for tomorrow, so I'm getting back to that, but any takers on the above question, feel free. :)

some clarification

2004-10-24T11:05:00.002-07:00

So, I am apparently on a return to blogging, despite the dozen or so issues I have with it, and the repercussions that seem to always spring up. Since I can't really write about what's going on in my life (for the watching eyes and such), or how I really feel (as I have some friendly folks who like to re-post my thoughts with commentary), we shall see what goes up here. My friend Oday has hit the blog scene by storm recently, which is great, but which has reminded me that I need to say some things up front.

We're going to do some things differently:

These are not posts about any of you, unless I say otherwise. Indefinite pronouns (and even some definite ones) are that way for a reason, so don't assume too much from what you may read.
This blog is not an attempt at validation, or to ask for comments to back up my indignation/despair/humour/nonsense/etc. Sometimes it may be venting or seeing where phrases and words go, but this place isn't me, and neither are these posts. They are just something that passes the time, and can let people know what I've been up to.
Interpretation being most of my friends (and my) professional work and personal obsessions, please do try to suspend your imaginations for a bit while here. This isn't my "everything on the table for all to see" space, nor is it my "hidden pleas for acceptance/attention/appreciation" one. These are not knocks against others, but they aren't what I want.
If this gets to be a big deal, then I'll just stop again. It is not worth it in my life to perpetuate a space that just causes me and my friends issues. I like being able to put things down for posterity, for my friends (especially those far and wide, quite busy, etc.), for me to share things when I think about them. But this is not a record of the person I completely am at every single moment, and I would hope people will just let that be what it is.
Oh, and to my "anonymous" re-posters, "Fuck ya all, all ya all, if you don't like me, blow me..." (in the immortal words of Dr. Dre). :)

In other news, things have been solid recently, I'm hella busy, thinking about redesigning my template, need to get moving on school work, met some new very fun people, went to a fun wine and cheese party last night, have been reading non-stop for class, sometimes feel very despondent, have self-diagnosed myself with "voter anticipation, apathy, and anxiety syndrome" (VAAAS: in which, I can't help myself from spending all my "free" time reading and talking about the election, both live in sweet anticipation of it being over, and total dread of any outcome, and seem to find my entire world clouded by this dumb election). It's fun, everybody should self-diagnose themselves with it, so we can all take some much-needed time off. :)

Aight, I'm off to work for the afternoon. Cheers, all. Tell your friends to check out the cool new back-on-the-scene blog, Badly Drawn Penguin!

a while

2004-10-24T01:14:00.000-07:00

the cold/numb hollow that sets in
like watching a superficial nick in the skin
to see if it will really start to bleed
or cutting just a little closer to the vessels
each time, because that's where something vital moves
something that you could have an effect on
but you don't

when the window's open and the room begins to chill
and the conversation, the bodies, the life moves
around and you can't be it anymore
there's nothing in there that is you, or me, or us

why is it that we sit at home at night, or drive away in
machines that were built to bring us closer together

that I reach out and instead just can't anymore

that I reach out and just can't

Beckett and Brecht and even Wilde
(before he became irreverent) knew it
the desire to see your skin perforated
because the world just keeps on going
because you can't just keep on going

this is not a poem, this is not me
just another piercing headache
and hours that weren't mine

and a glimmer of hope sometimes in the wink of smiles
in knowing that somewhere there are connections

but this is public discourse now
this is where we have to insert ourselves to make things flow
and my fallible self can't sometimes
and I can only do so much

things you learn

2004-09-08T23:36:00.000-07:00

So, I've learned nothing in the past few years, so it seems--at least about what matters to the majority of the people around me. In the last couple of weeks, I have managed to bungle, rout, maim, and destroy just about all the important relationships in my life. This has been my fault, both for things done in recent memory and for slights and dismissals from times past that seem to have been simmering under the surface all this time. For those, I'm sorry. I used to think that one could live his or her life and be the person he or she desired to be, and that that was enough--that finding who you are and expressing it would be a place in the world. Then, I realized that that was naive, and that to some degree you have to live for other people to make things work. The problem is, I never know when to do which.

It seems that I've undercut the people I cared about too many times, and that I'm beyond some magical limit on "it was all just for fun" that gets imposed on a person. I don't regret the person that I am, but unlike some, I don't seem to be able to will myself to change. I would say "take me as I am", but so many have recently walked directly away that I will just stick with "let it alone" as company policy. I've never really used this space to voice my real feelings--at least not all of them. It turns out that those aren't things anybody wants around them anyway. I'm glad to have known so many of the people I've met, and I'm sorry for whatever about me it is that makes my relationships on all levels untenable. I am not a good person, not a good friend, and most definitely not a good boyfriend. This has been displayed time and time again. What makes it sad is that I so want to believe I am those things, or that I could be. But I'm not.

I used to look forward to sharing things from my life both here in the "real" world, and I no longer do. Maybe I will sometime soon. But for the most part, what I'm realizing is that there are two kinds of bloggers (and possibly by extension, two kinds of friends): those that get away with being bastards and callous because they are charming or because their audience is mostly anonymous, and those that get to write what they do because they are already in the graces of their readers. I guess I'm neither. Maybe I've never been either.

I wanted things to be different this time, but they weren't. I'm sorry for that. I'm not going to pretend that this will be my last post, but for now, for the sake of all, I'm just going to retreat. I don't even know what else to do.

reflective sleeplessness

2004-09-07T00:24:00.000-07:00

A quick post as I'm sleepy, but can't sleep. I finished reading Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which is not much like the Marilyn Monroe movie version, but was a highly enjoyable "light" novel to start the semester with. No, to just read The Sound and the Fury twice... I'm feeling semi-accomplished, as I got the conference/symposium paper done last week by the deadline, and got most of the work done this weekend that I had to. I've become pretty reclusive, partly by choice, and partly due to circumstance (dead car + absent friends + still-painful-break-up), and I'm not really sure what to do about the situation. I've got exactly one person that I even talk to about my life now, and a couple of others (three that I can think of) to hang out with in passing. Other than that, the majority of people that I would have called "close friends" a few weeks ago seem to be absent. Perhaps that's to be expected, given the situation, but it's been interesting, if hollowing, to watch. This week should be nice and short--since my heaviest reading load is for my Monday seminar, cancelled this week, due to Labor Day!--and I guess I'll just stay and keep to myself.

Two amazing covers/videos

2004-09-03T21:23:00.000-07:00

"Pour Some Sugar on Me" by ? (if anyone can tell me who this is, I'd love to know)

"Hooked on a Feeling" by David Hasselhoff!

Wow...

sleepy-time denied

2004-09-01T00:29:00.000-07:00

It strikes me as a particularly helpful triat to be able to keep oneself up until unseemly hours in an effort to get more work. I've known people for whom this was an impossibility, and it always struck me as sort of limiting--to be forced to go to bed by dreary eyes or a shut-down body. However, at the moment, I'm in the age-old debate of "how much more can I reasonably get done?" The answer is "probably not too much, but I'll try another hour's worth and see how it goes..." (the same answer I've given myself night after night since I started my college-life, many a moon ago) I'm up working on a conference paper on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which needs to be done by Friday afternoon. I don't think it will be too big a problem to do that, but I'm trying to get offo n a good foot in both my Visual Rhetoric teaching (which seems to be going well--some actual interested inquiries and discussion today) and my discussion sections for Early American lit. Now is not really the best time to be putting together a presentation and paper, regardless of my interest in the topic. The abstract is now up on the Symposium site: click here to read it. Other than that, there really hasn't been all that much to report. I'm already swamped with readings (seeming to just crawl out of the wood-work--even the one's I assigned my class to read...), but at least the grading hasn't started yet... :) I'm feeling somewhat better, though I have my moments. It will be nice after this weekend (three day, no less) to get into the actual semester swing for a while. I'll post more later

a note to my new "friend"

2004-08-30T12:04:00.000-07:00

Dear "friend"

Ah, the work of the anonymous poster--how our world has been made oh so random and inane by your inability to stand behind your actual comments. Here's the deal... I was going to be offended, but then I realized that you are small and that I really have too much to do to delete your work all the time. So continue to demonstrate the kind of person you are (and we both know who you are), and I'll be cool with it. Enjoy. :)

PS Anonymous posting does two things--it allows non Blogger members to comments without much hassle, and it allows people like you to be jackasses. Since I value your random lashing out just as much as I value the random comment, things will stay the way they are.

back into the swing of things, sort of...

2004-08-28T00:11:00.000-07:00

So, school's back on. In a lot of ways, it's already really good--I got comments of "this class looks way better than I expected", I got to teach some literature today, etc. I'm in for a whole lot of work--more reading that you can shake a stick at, though less grading than in some previous semesters, much much much more prep for teaching--but it should be exciting and new this time. That's been mixed with a lot of non-plussing stuff, mainly focused on dealing not being prepared with the semester, on feeling like my life is an endless cycle (and not a healthy one), dealing with my car (and an awkward situation that I owe someone for), dealing with an aching sense of lonlieness not belonging, etc. Just one of those transition times, maybe, but I didn't realize this week would feel/be the week it was. Anyway, I'm equally self-loathing and self-pitying at the moment, so don't mind me.

time passes

2004-08-25T15:15:00.000-07:00

So, I haven't posted in a few days, mainly due to the passing of time and over-whelming amount of stuff I'd been putting off doing. I have the majority of my teaching stuff done, but there is still some more to do tonight. I had to struggle to put together the syllabus and schedule for me visual rhetoric course--there are still probably too many readings on it, but I did my best to not scare everyone away (though some may run). I spent most of the day at school, getting logistical things done, like printing rosters and stuff, as well as a lecture and a seminar. I have all kinds of new readings on my plate and some things to take care of tonight, but things just seem on bizarre auto-pilot. I finished reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and I guess I'm just not up to blogging. Nothing more today.

for those who know Laura McGranaghan

2004-08-23T17:27:00.000-07:00

My old staffer and friend, Laura, was in a car accident a few days ago, and has since had surgery. Here are a set of pictures that help fill in the gaps. Even though some of us couldn't go to visit her, we still send the love. Here are the pictures.

The prognosis is that she will take the fall off, and get better in KC. <3

so

2004-08-23T00:08:00.000-07:00

Another post with no comments, please:

Elizabeth and I broke up this morning--a surprising shot in a day that I really didn't see coming. This is not something I'm going into here, but the impetus had much to do with decisions I had made earlier, and today was really about the two of us doing what was best for us. This will be ok in the long run, I hope, but for now it is painful and a bit tense. Not sure what else to say, so I will not say anything else.

(a note about emotional film: go see Garden State right now--it's very, very good in the way that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was, and star Zach Braff and Natalie Portman who are both fabulous in it...I teared up quite a bit...)

hmmmm

2004-08-19T14:30:00.000-07:00

I sooooo had a number of things to post about when I sat down, but now they seem to have scampered away into the bowels of the English building. Life has been mostly uneventful recently--the apartment is shaping up, my car needs some service, my syllabus is coming together, I need to start thinking about the new semester, the Olympics freakin' rock (amazing amazing Paul Hamm and poor poor Thorpeedo...), etc, etc.

I have gotten to talk to quite a few folks recently, which has been nice and a bit surreal. I often wonder what other people think about the teeming masses around them. There are some many people with so many friends, webs of ex- and current lovers, ideas, plans, goals, lives. It's not really chaos (because it's an overused term), but it's something close to maddening. The girl you loved and hurt is now somewhere in love with someone else. The person you thought you knew so well in high school is on foreign soil with a gun in his hands every day. How do we function in a world in which there is so much that denies our desires, denies any hope of stability? I often want so much control of the things around me, because I think it will keep people from running astray of some boundary that seems quite normal to me (I'm not the only one, btw, since I've had this conversation with others recently). This is not an omission, just a point of clarification. I want the feelings I have for others to be reciprocated in the manner in which I feel, no more, no less--the problem with this being that I love with pretty much reckless abandon, at least at first, and that when something shifts I am at a loss. Recently, I've been talking to people that I know I won't see for months (years?), and each conversation feels strained, or ill-at-ease somehow. Like the special moment or connection we shared is gone, or at least has changed into something neither of our wanted. Why is there that sense of loss? I'm so okay with change, but now I just kind of want things my way. I want to be selfish without hurting people, which is of course a contradiction in terms, but is what each of us wants, but just can't have. It's just seemingly strange now. I don't know.

I don't often use this blog to put in much journal-style writing, because that's not what I want to blog for. As such, there are no comments on this post, and that's because I'm not looking for comments. This is a blog for people to read, not one for me to sort out my life through--I can do that on my own for the most part. But the people who read this might want to know that's what I'm thinking about recently. Please just read and go with the no comments action (including separate emails). :)

my new best friend, late-night Olympic coverage

2004-08-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

Okay, so here's the thing: I don't give a rat's ass (or anyone else's ass for that matter) about sports. And yet, I'm endlessly fascinated by Olympic coverage. While the Olympics themselves are indeed fantastic and awe-inspiring, and whatever I've always been told I'm supposed to think they are, the actual coverage of them this year on NBC has been amazing. It's not the network itself, so much as the stunning collection of ex-Olympians as commentators (at least three for every sport--and I'm starting to believe there are seriously some 2,000,000,000 Olympic sports these days, which means every adult on the planet is actually an ex-Olympian telecasting for NBC as we speak), the amazing scale of the production itself, and the fact that every other minute is posed as a country's life-goal drama. So, at 3am I can watch the Romanian female gymnastic team in the pre-lim all-around struggle to retain their gold and watch the American team (who didn't medal in 2000) posed as the heroines in some national identity gaining moment.

The same thing happened with this year's Kentucky Derby, when the potential Triple Crown-winner did not in fact win the Triple Crown, but you could have sworn that was the only horse racing. The part where the Olympics win out is in the sheer volume and variety of competition. If Michael Phelps wins more gold (as he should--he's really pretty amazing), then they will keep hyping him up and playing back-clips, building the grand narrative of the 19-year-old's quest to become the reigning champ. But if he doesn't, or only gets the silver once or twice, they can quick cut to any of a billion other events, each of which has a dozen similar stories from other countries, other competitors. And other than the scary Bob Costas/Pat O'Brien tagteam, no one has to be responsible for the over-arching story.

So what if the NBA half-star "Dream Team" loses to Puerto Rico (who saw that shit coming)? We have women's kayaking where the youngest woman in the field, from Germany (who had wrist surgery last year and has only placed in one world competition) now leads the field of veterans, seemingly without a chance of losing. Or we can cut to women's sand volleyball (seriously the skimpiest outfitted, sketchiest event...). Or shooting sports. Or gymnastics. Or the 400m 4-person swimming/shooting/shot-putting/ballroom dancing/sprint over the hurdles/whitewater/sand/track/road course where the young up-and-comer(s) (at least one of whose parents only got a silver, or even better, made the team in a year in which their country boycotted the Olympics!) must battle his/her/their way through the veteran pack. Or if the veterans win, then they have the opportunity to be the highest medal getter in their field/country/age group/height/weight class/ethnicity/sexual orientation/eyesight category/socioeconomic class/shoe size/eye color/etc.

It's brilliant story making, at a time when every geopolitical story is collapsing under the weight of its own internal conflicts, when I can be riveted by 2am sports I didn't know existed, with rules I'll never comprehend (some of these competitions are ludicrous without rules, but I seem to miss the part where any of those rules get explained--like why the men's synchronous diving teams keep doing the double pike, the most boring thing I've EVER SEEN!--bonus points to the boys from Belarus for spicing it up). The Olympics aren't about sport, but myth-making. They are the same competitions that these athletes participate in just about every year, but they are publicized like epoch-making events, with repercussions that extend into the realm of national pride, ethnic identity, and the triumph on the modern man in a world that seems incomprehensible otherwise. Ah, pop culture, how you've satisfied me for once--so much so I won't even have to think about this whole damned Bush/Kerry business for a whole 'nother couple of weeks. :)

little things

2004-08-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

A bit of reformatting/cleaning up on the blog (you will notice a handy new little search feature at the top--thanks Blogger!!!). I'm confining myself to my apartment for the most part today, so I can hash out the majority of a concrete syllabus, and get some stuff together. I have some stacks of papers that may just stay stacks of papers all year, at the rate I'm going. :) I wisht there were more to report, but there really hasn't been. We did go see the #1 movie in the country, Alien vs. Predator, and aside from being so wildly implaussible as to attain "Ludicrous" status (did you know that the Predators taught us to build pyramids, and got us into ritual sacrifice?) and laugh out loud funny (the protagonist wears an Alien head on her arm as a shield for some fifteen minutes--with NO IRONY!!!--and almost hugs her new Predator friend), the film was pretty and full of fun movie references (like the "Piper Maru" ship, as a reference to the X-Files). So, all in all, I'm solid. Now, I may just play rock rockin' bowling on the new cell phone. ;)

wow...simply wow...

2004-08-15T11:22:00.000-07:00

'nuf said...

finally all in one place, and somewhat together

2004-08-14T19:10:00.000-07:00

So, I'm finally all together and moved. I have both a new address and a new swanky cell phone. In other news, the last few days saw the rest of the furniture-moving (due in quite a large part to Sarah), hanging, going to see Manchurian Candidate (a very good little version of the story), reading both David Carrier's The Aesthetics of Comics (not quite taking on any particular aesthetic issues for some reason) and CP Snow's The Two Cultures (about the rift between the humanities and sciences, as well as the extension of that rift into other cultural issues). At the moment, I'm chilling at my new place, having played most of the day, and watching Suicide Club (a bizarre and non-sensical film that is strangely intriguing...). I will post more in the near future. Ciao.

Oh, here's the new contact info:

Well, I've moved, but it seems that my contact information is no longer so safe. Sad to know that people you've never really known, hurt, or been in contact with can try to rip you up for fun. But I guess they can.

almost there

2004-08-09T20:59:00.000-07:00

The moving is close to done...hopefully the majority will be shifted back and forth by tomorrow afternoon. I need to do some grocery shopping and settling in (especially books--I have so many it's becoming terrifying) tomorrow, and then get some work done this week. I already have had a couple of students email me about my course for next semester, I should come up with something to say to them, I suppose. There doesn't seem to be much to report recently. I feel like I'm out of the "loop" as it were, or at least out of contact with most of the folks I would like to be in contact with...the post-Academy world is sometimes a bit stark, and being sans-phone (for the most part over the next few days) is even stranger.

All of that is ok, though, because I totally made my new wireless my bitch this afternoon (which means it will revolt tomorrow in response to that comment...), and I finally have a great internet connection. :) Yay me!

not to hate or anything...

2004-08-08T20:46:00.000-07:00

So, I'm in Borders the other day and I obeserve the following two magazine covers (for some reason, some viewers will have to click on the right-hand image):

Now not to hate on the Olympics, TIME Magazine, or FHM (ok, maybe some on the latter...), but isn't there a striking similarity between these two covers? I mean, whatever the latent sketchiness of the bikini-clad faux-lesbian hottie magazine stumpets (these two happening to be Olympians) seems to have obviously carried over somewhere, and I think it's to TIME. I'm not against the pre-crotch crease that you can see on some guys (most notably the amazing gorgeous one on Brad Pitt in Fight Club), but I'm looking for my TIME magazine to give me hard-hitting exposes, or at least to give me stoic portraits of notable figures. I suppose that in the reality-TV age, sexualizing the star whose actual talents are so demonstrable (and Michael Phelps is indeed amazing) is the only way to go, since the assumption being his swimming talents won't sell themselves. Perhaps I'm just over reading out of boredom, but I just thought this one was egregious. :)

tired

2004-08-07T22:20:00.000-07:00

So tired and sore that I have a hard time figuring out how to make my extremities move in the manner that I would like them to. That sounds sad...I'm going to bed...more moving tomorrow.

'the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had'

2004-08-06T20:27:00.000-07:00

It's one of those nights where I am separate from things, but still listening. So, there's a weird sort of disconnect between my last few days and reality. I have a lot of things to do, still, and I've gotten a lot done, but the timespan in which things happen is so incongruous with what my normal semester life is like. It has been a really good few days. I finished reading Chuck Klosterman's "low culture manifesto" Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which was fluffy, but fun--a meditation on such things as contemporary cover bands, The Real World, Pamela Anderson's role as sex goddess, Saved by the Bell (and its last season "Tori-complex"), how to read a newspaper from a jaded columnist's perspective, etc. Laura came o visit for a couple of days before she has to start med-school again on Monday. We jus bummed around which was a nice alternative to the other bumming around that I've done recently. ;) Elizabeth and I are moving soonish, mostly over this weekend through Tuesday. That should be an interesting little event, but can't be that bad, as neither of us has too much crap to lug around.

I feel like I have a lot to post about, a lot to think about, but in actuality, I never have all that much. I feel like I've done all the major sorting out that I need to do, so my end is set. I do have some scholastic stuff to work on still, stuff I'm excited about, and hopefully from the middle of next week on, I'll finally get to work on it a bit. I need to so that I'm not freaking out later, but everything seems to ramble its way into my path, and who am I to turn down fun times? ;) I may be off here for a bit, as we get computers sorted out and such, but I'll have a new address and phone number soon, so be on the edge of your seat folks!

it's a long drive, but worth it

2004-08-02T22:41:00.000-07:00

I'm finally back from my weekend. Drove to Columbia and crashed at Laura's for a night, and then we headed into to Kansas City to stay at her family's "compound" (literally a multi-house, wooded, 70-acre place with a lake, a "party"-house, a boathouse, etc.). We chilled with a number of fine folks throughout the weekend (including Nigel, Briana, Zup, Meredith, Bobak, and Shannon) and had lots of randomness--jet ski playing/pain, movie-watching, cooking out, and good times. I'm really glad I went, it was a nice to time to relax and see people I love. I drove back Saturday, about 7 hours, to catch the sangria party at Sara's, which was also good fun, though I was a bit tired by the time I got there. I pretty much crashed yesterday, spent some time at Elizabeth's, finished reading a number of things (James Elkins' Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, Alan Lightman's Reunion, Tom Robbins' Villa Incognito, and Stephen Weiner's Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel), and got to today. I'm just playing around for a bit now, getting ready to move a few blocks over, and working on some school stuff. Perhaps I'll be all meditative on here at some point, since that's the current blogging vibe, but for now, I'm just chillin'...

solar system distractions

2004-08-01T17:48:00.000-07:00

For random informational purposes, I just thought every should know the following:

The standard mechanical version of a solar system is called an orrery (for an example, look here).

The 3-D all-orbits-in-a-sphere model is called an amillary sphere (and you can see a nice image of one here).

If you would like to see where the planets are right now, check this site out.

If you would like to see the earth from the orbit of any satellite, with any number of options, check this site out (currently set to show night-time).

Happy playing!

a sleepy day all in all

2004-07-27T20:59:00.000-07:00

Today I've been really kind of out of it and sleepy/exhausted. What's up with that? I wonder about the quality of sleep I've had recently--it seems like I've been sleeping well, and yet during the day, I've hit really tired patches. Seems odd, since I shouldn't have too much to cause pressure at the moment. Anyway, meat night was fun (with Hannah, Missy, and Mark, at Elizabeth's). I finished reading Roland Barthes' slim and strange little volume Empire of Signs, about a particular semiotic version of Japan, and I started reading a number of other things. I've found some nice Visual Culture readers, which I probably won't use directly, but have some readings I should be able to steal. Tomorrow, I'm heading to Missouri to see a variety of folks, so I may not blog for a bit. I'll post at some point when I get a chance.

less cold, more filling! (does that make sense?)

2004-07-26T19:44:00.000-07:00

Well, my last post was written under a tiny bit of duress, but now the temperatures in my life have reached a bit more stability. Rock on for that! I finished two books late last night, Alan Lightman's fine little volume of essays Dance for Two and Uncle Siggy's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The latter wasn't exactly "light" reading, but I finally got it out of the way. Today, I spent most of my day on campus, and randomly ran into a couple of really great folks, so consequently had some really good conversation (though not as pretentious as some of those that I heard today--literal debates about the role of authorship in the works of Benjamin Franklin and such...). The copy room in the English building has acquired the 200D computers and is now a kind of hybrid room, sort of like checking your email with constant traffic flow behind your head. That leaves 200D for the medieval torture sessions I keep seeing just about to happen there... We went to see Control Room, a documentary about the war in Iraq, media coverage, and specifically the role of Al Jazeera in all of that. Sobering at times, though kind of standard fare these days, sadly enough. I still am yet to see Outfoxed, but some of these themes just keep recurring. Sad for the parts of America that don't get much of this... I'm looking forward to The Corporation, which will be here soonish. :)

cold, so cold

2004-07-26T15:14:00.000-07:00

Just and update to let everyone know that the graduate computer lab in the English building is seriously one of the coldest environments on earth. I think there are bacteria in here forming little shells to get through this ice-age, just hoping that the greenhouse gas effect kills off all those stupid humans and their air-conditioning. And, seriously, I'm not sure if I can blame them. It's sooooooo chilly...

more paper than you can shake a stick at (what does that mean?)

2004-07-25T15:48:00.000-07:00

Have you ever gone back and started digging through your old files, copies, folders, etc., just trying to find a couple of articles that you were sure you copied a couple of years ago? Well, I've been doing that for two hours now, and while I'm yet to find said articles, I'm discovering that either I do too much research for each seminar paper, or I keep too much research from each seminar paper, because my living room is currently looking like the sole cause of the deforestation of the globe. Seriously, I'm starting to worry about Greenpeace boycotts and getting government grants for my efforts. Hmmmm...the real question seems to be how much of this crap will I ever legitimately need again? The answer, probably none, and yet I will stow it all back away and hope that any potential electrical fires or burrowing rats don't notice this amazing breeding ground of wrongness... :-/

'we packed it up, and made our great escape'

2004-07-24T14:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was fun, and goofy. I had early coffee with Ms. Alexander at Moonstruck, and then played library books/skimming/copying for the rest of the afternoon. Then it was day-old Chinese (tasty!) and movie watching and such. We rented Starsky & Hutch which proved to be both diabolically terrible and great at the same time. Well worth 99 cents, not a penny more--though Snoop at Huggy Bear is one of the most inspired casting choices ever! We also watched about half of the original Manchurian Candidate, which really is a great film (we had to finish it later today because of someone's sleepiness). It will be interesting to catch the new version with Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber, etc. I'm both excited and disturbed... :) In other news, and my search to find some visual rhetoric materials, I finished a brief little book, John Berger's Ways of Seeing, which is a speculative little piece and is quite dated in some ways, but provides nice introdructions to Benjamin, Levi-Strauss, etc. We shall see...

'hey kid, look at all those people'

2004-07-22T22:32:00.000-07:00

In a sitting-on-the-porch-looking-at-the passers-by kind of mood. I put up reviews for a number of books:

Critical Inquiry 30.3 (Spring 2004): 493-690.

The Sandman I: Preludes and Nocturns by Neil Gaiman.

Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation by Micahel Rothberg.

Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson.

Clumsy by Jeffrey Brown.

Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities by Alexandra Robbins.

Here's the actual link to the reviews.

Other than that, it's been quiet. It did rain a tiny bit, and I went over the Hannah's to borrow a book. I grabbed some Chinese food, and I've just spent the rest of the night doing random things. I feel like I'm missing things in all my recent conversations, like I'm not on the same page as anyone else, or that I want things that other's don't. I don't really know what's up with that... I guess I'll just got have a cigarette on the porch and read of a bit. Maybe I just need to back off from life for a year or two.

'butterflies are passive-aggressive and put their problems on the shelf, but they're beautiful'

2004-07-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

Overall, a nice little day thus far. The sky is getting geryish, but it's still muggy, and while I'm hoping for rain (really desperately desiring rain), I'm thinking I might be thwarted. I spent most of last night and today reading (pausing for some sleep). I finished Alexandra Robbin's Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, which followed four sorority sisters around a southern university for a year. Not the best writing of all time, but an interesting look at sorority life--since I have known so many sorority girls, and still teach quite a few. I also have been reading the most recent Critical Inquiry, Oscar Wilde, Poe, and some prospective articles for my Visual Rhetoric course. Suggested good stuff for the day: Ken Alder's article "History's Greatest Forger: Science, Fiction, and Fraud along the Seine" (available to university kids in .pdf form here) and Oscar Wilde's "The Decay of Lying". Both of these deal with inventing a more fulfilling and creative academic world by bald-faced lying and having fun with it. Take that, stalwart critics! :)

Strange days

2004-07-20T17:11:00.000-07:00

So, this has been a weird day all around. I never went to bed last night, or rather I laid down and read and then it was sunrise, so I got back up. I ate a really, multi-part breakfast, did some academic work, and then napped for a couple of hours. So, I "got up" at 11, ate some lunch, went to school, did more research, got books from the library, did some copying, talked to about ten folks on campus, sat at Moonstruck, had dinner at Za's, and then read a 200+ page graphic novel--Clumsy by Jeffrey Brown (a Chicago native and friend of Chris Ware, check The Holy Consumption of Chicago)--while I was hanging for the bus. So, now I'm exhausted. I've already eaten three meals, done research, read a book and a half, and it's only 7:11pm. What an odd day...

Good times were had by all

2004-07-18T20:15:00.000-07:00

Last night was kind of quiet, just time to myself for reading and movie watching. Out of professional interest (comics turned film), I rented Hulk, which really was one of the worst movies of all time. It had about two redeeming seconds worth of footage, and the rest was well-composed crap. DO NOT FALL PREY TO THIS MONSTROSITY!!! After that, I watched my redeemer, Matchstick Men, a con-story involving Nicholas Cage, Sam Rockwell, and Alison Lohman as Cage's daughter newly returned to his life. This was an interesting cross between con-film and sentimental drama about a father coming to terms with the daughter he now has to try to get to know. What sold me, though, was the massive twist that was really well executed. I have to say that this film is well worth the watch. Check it out.

Today was pretty quiet as well. I finished Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, which was just as bleak as I expected and is indeed a great novel. Doesn't make you want to be part of a country at war, though... We went out to dinner at Miko, which was tasty and fun, with me, Elizabeth, Hannah, Sara, Amity, and Chris in attendance. Now, I have a bit of a headache, so I may just read in bed for a while. One of those nights when I'd like to call about fifteen people I've been thinking about, but they are all strangely inaccessible at the moment. So be it, I guess...

books, movies and food

2004-07-17T13:58:00.000-07:00

I finally got up some reviews on the book club site. I started with a few more popular mass-market types:

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Hannibal by Thomas Harris

Tales by LeRoi Jones

Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln

SUE 5: The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket

SUE 6: The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket

Here is the link to the actual reviews. Enjoy.

Last night, we just chilled a bit. Went to the Za's on Springfield for some tasty and inexpensive food. Then we just grabbed a couple of movies from Hollywood Video (for 99 cents, how can you go wrong?). We watched Secret Window, the Johnny Depp/John Tuturo adaptation of a mediocre Stephen King story (originally published in Four Past Midnight, one of King's worst collections). The movie did literally nothing for me. There were a couple of fun camera shots. And it was fairly colorfully filmed. That's about it. Here a good IMDB user comment: "A thin King story to bring to the big screen, and the movie is Dullsville: population Johnny Depp." Well said.

On the other hand, we also watched the newest David Mamet film, Spartan, which I'd been itching to see. It stars Val Kilmer as a Marine called in to try to find an abducted girl at all costs (her importance and status are not really made clear until about 3/4 of the way through the film). So, he bullies, coerces, and rams through anything to find her. This is typical Mamet in some aspects: the utter meanness, the disillusion, the hard-headed approach, and the deceptive setup of the whole thing from the very outset. Whatever you think of his plays, his filmmaking skills are really improving (The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, and Heist being quite good in their own ways). I really liked Spartan, mostly for its unclear, out-of-focus style and for its single-minded anger. Mamet is so good at both.

an amazing game

2004-07-16T18:38:00.000-07:00

Check out this great flash game (you can play on-line, or download a standalone): Fowl Words. You get to play an anagraming game with chicken eggs. Man, what a great idea and waste of time... :)

'The reason for war was war'

2004-07-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

You ever have one of those days, or string of them, tinted by what you are reading? The last day or so, I've been with Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, and wandering and haunting little novel about a forensic anthropologist, Anil, who travels to her homeland of Sri Lanka, to find the contemporary ruin of war-torn Colombo and its surrounding area. She tries to solve the murder of a mystery set of bones--the government seeming to be the only real candidate. It's not that this is a novel about war, at least not in the way All Quiet on the Western Front is, but the rawness of this book (with stories of massacres, beheadings, suicides, failed loves, abductions, a world turned mad) has just made my day feel distant. I forget so often that literature can be about the small poignant moments in people's lives or about bigger, more important things--and maybe there should be a balance between the two--and this one just caught me off guard. I highly recommend it, just in case that little bit of prose was clear; hopefully I've get a whole spate of reviews up on the book club site soon (there is a pile of some 20 books sitting behind me, waiting to have my opinion of them rendered...).

:/