August 27, 2003
will write for luxury estate
75 words and $100 for a potomac overlook, a townhouse in old town alexandria, or a country estate?
why do i feel like this will get enough advertisement without any mention here? hmmm. come to think of it, nevermind.
contest? what contest? i have no idea what you're talking about.
no phone calls for the next couple of hours, please. i'll be back when i've finished writing this short essay i need to take care of. it's for... uh... class.
August 26, 2003
more fragments
no narrative follows.
completed a syllabus and course policies. one to go.
made final changes on this summer's dissertation chapter.
got pretty nervous about a violent storm that blew through this afternoon. trees sideways, sky green, wind audible, cat unnerved. aftermath was not minor. apparently, a power line fell all the way across the beltway, shutting down both directions and electrifying the median guardrail. a halted beltway is no minor traffic event.
spun around on my chair a lot.
slapped the side of the computer, hoping it would automatically birth a strong weblog entry.
watched about forty minutes of smoke on amc. i couldn't watch anymore when the kid lets water run over the sink, ruining some of auggie's merchandise. i don't even remember what got waterlogged. a seriously good film. too bad i didn't have the heart.
reflected on the honor of being classed as an "academic type" over at the left-hand side of heck's kitchen. we all have goals. showing up on jm's site is one of mine.
down the street there's a softball game going on. every once in a while, i can hear the crowd cheer. that's kind of nice, in a fourthofjuly way.
August 21, 2003
wallace redux?
any reason alabama state supreme court justice roy moore should not be paying $5,000 / day in contempt-of-court fines? if he were to be held in contempt (looks like that won't happen), the state would be liable for that fine (details via AP via WaPost). that seems backwards to me.
well, at least i'm able to take some comfort in the fact that justice is level-headed back down home in the south, where the lib'ruls haven't taken over yet.
by the way, i notice that arrested protesters were cited and released immediately. i don't seem to recall those being the tactics during IMF/World Bank protests up here in Our Nation's Capital. i wonder if any of the alabama resistance movement had to urinate on themselves as their wrists started to bleed under the abrasion of plastic handcuffs as they were held for hours on buses, unable to use a restroom. hmm. i guess god's people get better habeas corpus.
a.m. agitprop
i've been reluctantly digesting each of joe conason's week-long series* in salon. each piece is excerpted from his new book, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth.
i say reluctant because books with that sort of title (see, e.g., treason, libel, rush limbaugh is a big, fat idiot, etc. ad nauseam) probably answer fewer questions than they sell titles. i say probably because i've never read any of them. there are plenty of good things to read. i'll look to them instead. (again with the snobbery). (again with the self-loathing parentheticals). (this is getting cheap, played, tired).
predictably, conason (whose daily column in salon i like ) gets fairly reductive. his pot-or-kettle response to conservative insistence that the republican party is the home of "hard working normal americans" is not a nuanced explanation that neither party is so monolithic but instead the inverse of his enemy's: the democratic party is the home of "hard working normal americans."
intermittent gripes aside, i've enjoyed... no, that's not it at all... been intrigued by the series. very much worth the time. that doesn't mean i'll buy the book.
*salon, of course, requires a subscription. sort of. i rely on the free day pass. probably ought not do that, but pocket change is tight. we got this here depression on.
August 18, 2003
pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
the questions popping up about blogs and selves and performance and honesty and autobiography, even if unanswerable, are really brilliant. i refuse the responsibility of linking entries with that list of terms... simply too rich for that. and so, a limited anthology of striking conversation: george, elouise, chuck, and kf. these are only four of their several compelling entries that meditate on these questions. follow all links. come back here some other time. i'll still be crafting the same lame responses to their good questions.
so, reading ryan's response to george's response to elouise's observations about blog selves as characters, i wondered.
if identities are the functions of performed and interpreted codes (and i think they are), is there any way to distinguish the kind of agency of a blogging self from that of an RL self? i ask because in my daily experience that gets no blog version (the 23:45:00 that doesn't make it into that record) i have much less control over the self i project. with a blog, the limits of the genre's conventions (or, the material conditions of the technology) fosters at least three conditions: first, i must edit my self into a fairly abbreviated representation (something i don't do in the grocery store), second, i must make choices about how much of my self makes it through that edit (something i cannot accomplish entirely in the grocery store, so long as i'm an observed person), and third, blog readers cannot "see" aspects of my identity i keep off-blog.
oh, right, and i can make stuff up, too.
each self is clearly about the negotiation of codes, susceptible to being read. and, as i've babbled about elsewhere, book-form texts about experience (real or imagined) offer fewer means to construct and convey identity. but if my blog's me has no desire to tell anyone i got a haircut -- very much part of identity, right? -- i've exercized some control i don't have while looking for avocadoes in a public space. any meaningful difference between the two?
i'm surprised by how rearguard i'm being. seems like i'm arguing for some kind of essential self who controls his or her identity! i shall now announce that i'm performing the role of devil's advocate.
by the way, curtain-time at the grocery store is 7:00 weeknights. i start in produce and work towards dairy. critics have called my ballet of shopping a "graceful pas de deux in which grocery carts and bread loaves come to life in a symphony of movement."
August 17, 2003
where the deer and the antelope play
an odd thing happened this afternoon.
i've got no guilt about my attachment to second-tier television. i am easily sated by watching hours of documentary networks (i am, in all likelihood, the discovery network's target market). i love the discovery wings channel, the biography channel, the travel channel, and pretty much anything else that sets out to dumb down and explain things to folks like me.
extended aside: there is a paradox afoot, here. i loathe air travel. i am the guy next to whom you would rather not sit during take off, as i am likely to shift around alot, holding onto the seat in front of me in order to work off some anxiety. the greatest accomplishment of my life, possibly, was the collection of flights i took between d.c., frankfurt, johannesburg, and the south african lowveld last year. and yet, i assure you that if you and i, friend, were walking along, and a plane flew overhead, i could tell you whether it was a 737 or an A330. there is comfort in facts, somehow. i highly recommend salon's ask the pilot (subscription required) column for white-knuckled flyers. end of extended aside.
so, as an afficianado of nonfiction television, i happily forfeited a few hours this afternoon to rebroadcast episodes of the pbs series/experiment frontier house. i call this odd because i generally get little or nothing from "reality" television, a mass of re-tooled drivel to which i am perfectly content to snobbishly condescend. (wow... how's that for snobbishly condescending syntax?! where's my masterpiece theatre?). natalie has persuaded me to watch a few episodes of the amazing race, and i'll confess to indulging in some survivor as each season gets interesting. each has its merits, yet those winning moments are utterly erased when travelers shout "speak english!" at korean cab drivers or producers offer up embarrasingly uninformed "tribal" music from the wrong hemisphere. catty crooners looking to be american idylls confound me, too.
i think it was the pbs framing that sold me. instead of the utterly predictable crap that accompanies joe millionaire, i get a soothing narrator whose graceful exposition of livestock slaughter, infectious disease, and waste removal make frontier house "history." i'm learning, consuming facts, growing my inner liberal humanist. probably no different from ogling at the array of boob jobs on (apparently pointless! there's no known prize) temptation island (seriously, no need to follow that link), but frontier house scurried off with my afternoon like a little prairie mouse, darting across the cabin floor to a favorite hiding place in the gingham bedding.
i actually got a bit choked up when the kid realized his family pig was going to play the leading role at the upcoming community dinner.
and then, they blew it... the last thirty minutes of the last episode caught up with all three families (one finds itself blissfully wealthy but... eh... unfulfilled in its malibu estate; one finds itself vagabond-ish, one finds itself all kinds of separated). couldn't take it. the reality reared its head, and the moral-of-the-story got rammed down my throat. no, thanks. it may have been a hard scrabble life out yonder on the prairie -- i bought it, anyway -- but when it transformed into the "real"... yawn.
i'm a bit perplexed. do i want my reality-tv fantasy at a distance? do i need it pushed back to the 19th century, its logic rigorously upheld? when the shining faces of the 1830s became the lipsticked and shaved faces of the 21st, the show lost its appeal for me. that's weird, i think, because its historical context, ostensibly its accuracy, its detailed attention to nonfiction, had me consumed. maybe its the over-the-top packaging that highlights the artifice of mainstream reality tv. hyperkinetic cuts, loud music, car crashes, smashed (fragile) egos, all that. but there were pbs characters i grew to loathe in just a few hours, too.
then again, its just t.v.
August 14, 2003
status report
page 14 of a chapter i'm working on is in front of me. i've marked it all up, and it waits on a little antique book stand i like to use. the section title i see is "doppelgangers." the lamp is giving insufficient light. blinds are closed to cool things off a little. still pretty hot, though. on my right hand side, there are stacked books, notes, and already-dealt-with pages of the draft under revision. a pencil and two pens are on the desk. the cat just got up from the cozy red chair, stretched, and went for a walk to the den's hardwood floor for another nap. on the messy top shelf of my desk, more piles of books taunt me with the context i'm trying to use to shape what i'm writing. no music is on, and i think that's a problem. the cat is back.
that's about it. thanks.
August 13, 2003
epistolary back-and-forth
possibly much later than most, i just found gabe hudson's dear mr. president letters project at mcsweeney's.
i could spend all day reading those.
one thing i notice, though, is the collective rush to write like dave eggers that is evident all over mcsweeney's. not just in these letters; many of them are not at all egger-ish. i love eggers' style (although i was less taken with you shall know our velocity than with his a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, which is my favorite memoir), and in all fairness, i'm not really a regular mcsweeny's reader (and even if i were, it would be nary impossible to cover all the material they publish). but it's kind of lame to see everyone imitating so unsubtly. i don't know what you call the style... it's sort of victorian flourish meets heartland pragmatism meets 1890s advertising copy meets CAN-YOU-TELL-THAT-I'M-BEING-IRONIC?! knowingness.
but, like i said, i could spend all day reading those letters.
i think i'm using parentheses too much.
dang it. that last thing, the "i think i'm using parentheses too much" sentence... that's a faux dave eggers move. a silly and artificial flourish, too self-aware for its own good. funny to the author, no doubt, but almost as bad as writing that includes its own criticism, just like this little diatribe. f***ing contagious. sheesh.
August 5, 2003
this fall's canon
at last, i think i've got a booklist for my introduction to the novel, one of two survey courses i'm teaching this fall. the other, introduction to folklore, i've taught enough to have a pretty good sense of what i want to cover (that's always a much shorter booklist, anyway... i use a textbook and supplement it with shorter course packet material).
i can easily think of several reasons not to talk so casually about syllabus construction. then again, so much intersects as we make these choices. briefly, here's what drove this selection. some pressures are less direct than others.
observations or suggestions are actively solicited.
the conditions of my canon-making: this is my first time with a broad survey of the novel. this is my first time with a broad survey of any genre. i've wanted to teach this one for a while. teachers should introduce the books they love (hmm... maybe that's too romantic). i'd prefer to teach works i've encountered as a student. i'd prefer to teach some of the novels i've already taught. this course needs to at least try to represent the long history of the genre. fourteen weeks doesn't exactly lend to that sort of coverage. while race, gender, class, and regional quotas strike me as a wrongheaded approach to course planning, race, gender, class, and region occupy much of the genre's imagination. i need a theme, a rationale to connect the six to eight works we can address in one semester; right now, i hope to create a narrative of the genre by emphasizing the novel as both an epistemology and a maker of epistemologies. i worry about silly course titles, but something like "the novel as knowing" or "the novel as knowledge." if i understand my department's near-future plans correctly, this is probably the last time i'll get to develop my own course plan at maryland (umd english has long relied on t.a.'s and lecturers to handle its introductory surveys, but next spring it will shift to a model in which senior faculty teach large lectures with traditional t.a.'s). i recognize that someone in my place should devote the overwhelming majority of his or her energy to dissertation completion, fellowship application, and professional development, and not to 200-level booklists.
so.
shelley, frankenstein
twain, pudd'nhead wilson
conrad, heart of darkness
faulkner, as i lay dying
hurston, their eyes were watching god
delillo, white noise
kingsolver, the poisonwood bible
alternates. and some brief rationalizations.
- johnson, rasselsas. could teach with some rambler essays. could just introduce those and move on to shelley.
- melville, moby-dick. such an important novel. just too damn long for this class.
- rushdie, shame. this avant-garde may need more sophistication than what an intro. survey can provide. that's tough, though, because i'll expect some thoughtful responses to the other books. worried about rushdie's sense of humor.
- kerouac, on the road. underrated by our hallowed halls of academe. overrated by its hyper-devoted readers. somewhere in the middle, a significant american novel.
- coupland, microserfs. have had good experience teaching this, my favorite, coupland novel. but i find that white noise does the same thing better. and then i consider doing generation x. i then i think shake my head.
- morrison, beloved. probably some kind of heresy to not teach morrison. i'm just tired of this novel. aren't we all? overwhelmingly, in my american lit class, this is the one they'd already read.
- norris, mcteague. ah, the dentist with the big tooth outside his office.
- woolf, to the lighthouse. modernism and time. i'm happier (what a word!) with faulkner's modernist temporality.
- ellison, invisible man. too long?
- mailer, the armies of the night. just not sure i want that conversation in my suburban washington, d.c. classroom right now.
gasp! no austen. no dickens. no fielding. no dostoevsky. no joyce. no james.
