blog? what blog?
power went out at 2:30 thursday afternoon. came back on 12:30 tuesday morning. threw out pretty much all food and got a better sense of what should go in an it's-the-end-of-the-world kit. i guess we weathered.... oh... we're not talking about the hurricane anymore? ok. sorry, i'm behind.
courses seem to be alright. although i'm sensing some unease, some reluctance to respond to discussion questions. once the conversation begins, things are good, but some prompts are falling pretty flat. can't put a finger on it. bad discussion questions, maybe. five years into teaching, i'm still trying to learn the art of shutting up and letting students think and respond to questions. i'm quite happy about both groups this semester, as they seem pretty much right on -- keeping me on my toes, anyway [note: for the first time, i'm wondering whether any of them have found this alleged blog. hmmm.], but the first few weeks of bliss are clearly over.
i've been told i have a job in the spring. that's comforting. i'll be a traditional t.a. finally (grading student work, no lectures, no exam prep, no leading of discussion). pros and cons abound, i imagine, but, hey, the axe is swinging, so it's good to know that it won't hit me before may. right now is fellowship application time (as you two who are reading this no doubt know).
finally went to the afi silver last night. attended the jim henson event. fun fun fun to watch the old muppet material. a little too much panel discussion, though. as others have made clear already, i'll say that the "theatre and cultural center" is a striking building. as we sat there last night, i found myself kicked by myself for not seeing this summer's screening of lawrence of arabia. couldn't be helped. maybe next time.
oh, my director likes the chapter i wrote this summer. time to article-ize it.
i feel pretty sleepy. must be friday afternoon.
he'll be eulogized enough without much sound from this obscure corner, so i'll only say that the story and the music of johnny cash have meant a lot to me. those will, of course, persist, but the hush emanating from his death is resounding.
9/11 (with Allen Ginsberg in mind)
Andrei Codrescu
9/11, I can barely remember you, they’ve buried you in so much hype!
9/11 I wept when you were first on television! I wept for New York, for the dead, for all of us, for myself, for the world!
9/11, I was sure that the world had changed forever because bad guys wanted America dead and hated us because we listen to rock 'n' roll and wear no miniskirts on our naked faces!
9/11, I cheered when our warplanes ripped through the skies of Afghanistan scorching the caves where our enemies burrowed and I marveled at our precision-guided bombs -- trying to ignore their occasionally murderous imprecision!
9/11, I sat mesmerized in front of Fox News and CNN as the gargoyled faces of the Cold War began crawling out of the musty cellars of history and, eyes unaccustomed to light, blinking, began to spout the doctrines of Total War!
9/11, I started to feel sorry for you when retired generals, admirals, spies, loonies and fakes brushed off their swords and rushed to your defense! So many double-chins! So many watering eyes! So many dentured grins and brush haircuts! So many double-bottom suitcases clutched in so many pimp-ringed hands! They even brought Ollie North from felonious disgrace to stand up for you with his Constitution-overthrowing boyish old looks!
9/11, I felt bad for you when the Lefties crowded you from the other side with their guilt-filled jaws of "I told you so," and their eternal excuses for the wretched exotics of the world whose suffering they experience in their marble-topped kitchens between arguments about what wine to serve with the wild rice! And I wept for you again, when soured professors who missed the collapse of commie fascism in 1989 descended on you like rabid wolverines led by Noam Chomsky, whose teeth marks are all over the zero ground of American academia!
9/11, you saved the paranoids from self-cannibalism!
9/11, you were a boon to advertisers and publicists and flag manufacturers, and they sold you with cars and pizzas and they drained you of your raw primal power even as they pretended to grieve for you! Zero down payment until Doomsday!
9/11, you were a godsend to poetasters who were out of the gate lamenting and whining before your towers even gave out!
9/11, your dead and your heroes are covered by thick layers of ash and greed and the Republic owes you an apology...
9/11, I close my eyes and recall you in all your gory glory and I still hate those who did this to us and to our greatest city.
9/11, I can barely remember you and I'm sorry.
in addition to the infrasound story, two more aural events.
a performance of john cage's as slow as possible has begun on a german organ. this interpretation will last 639 years.
listen carefully.
i entertain one reckless indulgence when natalie goes abroad. i leave the bedside radio on all night. who knows what that does to my head, really, but i'm happy falling asleep to as it happens.
this habit began when n was in east africa for a few months a couple of years ago. bbc world service, part of the overnight lineup at wamu, has been a fairly good source for african news. it can be difficult to find a reliable connection to the other side of the world sometimes (just for kicks, try to find on online news source for, say, kigoma tanzania; doesn't count if it's only updated once every 17 days). that program helped me fall asleep for three months. so now, i still turn the radio on.
that's an overlong introduction to the point of this entry. at some point last night, i woke up at an odd moment. bbc has a story on infrasound, that is, tones below 20Hz that are apparently capable of stimulating very strange phenomena.
But in a controlled experiment in which infrasound was pumped into a concert hall, UK scientists found they could instil strange feelings in the audience at will.These included an extreme sense of sorrow, coldness, anxiety and even shivers down the spine.
it seems that geological activity can be one source of infrasound, which may explain reports of poltergeists; organs are responsible for spiritual sensation in church.
the line that, well, gave me chills in my 1/4-awake-wee-hours-stupor, not included in the linked version of the story: composers have for some time used infrasound at "apocalyptic moments" in their works.
nothing like ghosts and apocalypse to soothe the listener back to sleep.
so, i went to the howard dean rally on campus tonight. platitudes and aphorisms, for sure, but an american political phrasebook that's much more my own than "bring 'em on."
it felt odd to be there. weird to figure out which comments i wanted to applaud. strange to think to myself, "wait a minute! things aren't that simple," and then remember that i went in cynical and that no rally ever explains anything. group clapping and chanting, i worry, does very little beyond reminding your antagonists that you're out there (contra the alleged majoritarian "silence," i guess). but i still clapped a few times. i'm a sucker for the "take america back" rhetoric, as i'm sick of hearing about how "anti-american" perfectly american people are. my stomach turns at this insistence that criticism and hatred are synonymous.
after watching every televised presidential address and press conference over the past two years, i feel like someone else merited one of my weekday evenings.
highlights (in all likelihood, this exercise serves me more than any wandering reader, because i'll say nothing that others haven't already said better) (jeez, dave, did dr. dean say something mean? you're all self-deprecating? what gives?):
bush was bashed, but every instance was bookended with assurances that bush-bashing is only necessary, not sufficient. an alternative was promised.
education and health care got the most time. you want your kids to have good, funded schools. you want reasonable healthcare. "how much did your tuition go up this year?"
also jobs. unemployment sucks.
bush gave all of your money to "ken lay and the boys down in texas." (i think that phrase was used four times.) the middle class (that's your parents, young college people) need tax cuts, but we'd all happily pay clinton-era taxes, so long as we have a clinton-era economy (honestly, the principles with which that economy will reappear weren't provided at the rally...) (i haven't really heard anyone dumb it down enough for me, though).
a fair number of infiltrators booed and hissed and chanted a lot. dean was, at first, gracious: "let them have their say." then he was funny: "when they've lost their jobs and 401k's by next november, half of them will be voting for me, anyway." then he was funnier: "let's give them a moment of silence for the gop." okay. maybe that's just cheap. but they were just yelling, for chrissakes.
"restoring the dignity and honor of the united states with the world" got much applause. even the cynical threesome standing behind me cheered for that one.
i think some people groaned when he compared "your generation" with "my generation." i'm reading (very slowly) neil sheehan's a bright shining lie, at the moment, so i'm a pretty sympathetic ear for someone who wants to reflect on the abstract parallels between the early 1960s and the present state of affairs (they are, simply put, uncanny), but i think he misfired with that one. his simple declaration that the war was a bad idea got spirited applause. campus activism's death knoll has rung at umd, so dean's flower power imaginary failed to register.
um. this is the first political thing i've gone to since a very small rally for pat buchanan in the early nineties. if i recall correctly, that north-mississippi vfw hall event (maybe it was another venue, but the small room with the small stage with the big flag sure seems like a vfw hall in my memory) had about fifty attendees. tonight, the emcee-ish speaker said there were 3,000. the doctor said 3,700. overestimates, i suppose, but not by much.
the above illustrates adequately why i'm not a reporter.
here's the dirty secret, the moral of my story, without caveat. it was unspeakably good to hear a mass of people cheer for things i believe. even if i don't buy everything dean said -- and i don't -- and even if the mass-as-such leaves me skeptical, i feel a little better than i did after the president's address last night.
this morning, halfway through another waterlogged run, i speculated aloud that this year has got to be one of the wettest d.c. has had. natalie looked up into the grey wetness that is our sky and whimpered.
yup. as of today, we're a foot and a half above average, and if that jet stream continues its hover, itsy bitsy spiders will continue to be washed away as we go for the record.
go see for yourself at washington post.
in a fit of narcissistic googling, i came across something more than a little unusual.
David Eubanks - Personal Biographer - oral history, your life story in a book.
maybe there's serendipity, here? life-writing, indeed.
another semester starts for me tomorrow morning. i haven't got much to add to the other things herders and the like have observed about teaching that first day of class. george and elouise, among others, have had some nice things to say about the mindset of those facing that moment. (sorry no direct trackbacks, but the issue appears more than once).
i visited campus late last week to copy course policies and syllabi, to find the new classrooms and determine the velocity needed to get from one to another in eight minutes. again, among the ford explorers, the sidewalk clutter, the overflowing plastic bookstore bags, and the visible signs of another summer's demise, i was one of the many who think of move-in time in terms of this:
The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang our and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags--onion and garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.I've witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years. It is a brilliant event, invariably. The students greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. Their summer has been bloated with criminal pleasures, as always. The parents stand sun-dazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction. The conscientious suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks. They feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women crisp and alert, in diet trim, knowing people's names. Their husbands content to measure out the time, distant but ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood, something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage. This assembly of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation.
jack gladney, professor of hitler studies at the college on the hill, said all that, of course, in don delillo's white noise. i think he's a little rough on the parents. the umd moms and dads hardly seem so easily readable. and now, of course, station wagons are bigger and look like trucks. but that's a passage stuck in my early-september head.
last night's comment on my syllabus entry probably wasn't the cheerful confidence booster i need immediately before the semester, but things are otherwise all systems go.
{unecessarily magisterial tone} and so, in the morning, this and this commence. {/unecessarily magisterial tone}
one more thing: umd students in my classes have demonstrated greater intellectual prowess every semester i've taught. i'm looking forward to the very hard work they'll make me do this time around. also a bit frightened. that's a good thing.