The Weblog

A slight change

2008-08-18T13:57:00.004-05:00

Due to inexplicable disk space overuse charges from my ISP, I have decided to move The Weblog to a Blogspot. The old address should now redirect to this one.

All previous links to The Weblog are now broken, because I have deleted all the files at the adamkotsko.com address. You may also have to resubscribe to the RSS feed. All those with posting privileges are able to post normally -- publication will likely also be faster. (It seemed to republish the entire blog to the Blogspot server instantaneously, for instance.)

I'm considering moving to Wordpress as well -- the switch to Blogspot doubles as a necessary intermediate step should I decide to go that route. The only drawback is that their free accounts offer no control over the template, and you all know how much I love my design.

UPDATE: I decided to go through with the switch to Wordpress, and the new address is much better than my stupid name. Please update all bookmarks, blogrolls, feed subscriptions, etc. Thanks for your patience.

The hell?

2008-08-16T18:20:00.005-05:00

I notice many people saying "the hell" when they seem to mean either "what the hell?" or something along the lines of "the hell they did." They need to stop doing that, because it's ridiculous.

They also need to stop saying "natch."

Friday Afternoon Confessional: John Edwards

2008-08-15T00:00:00.002-05:00

I confess that I was led astray by John Edwards. What has led me to this conclusion? It's not just the fact that he cheated on his wife who had cancer -- though I have to think that even in more enlightened Europe, people might be able to work up a little outrage about that. It's not the fact that the woman he cheated with appears to have been really into New Age bullshit and honestly wasn't very attractive. It's not even the unbearable hubris that led him to seek his party's nomination even knowing he had this skeleton in his closet.

What really cut to the quick for me was the fact that his poverty non-profit was in large part a slush fund allowing him to keep up his public profile in anticipation of running for president in 2008. I further confess that this article, which just came to my attention, was actually from last year -- meaning that I should've known. The one issue that not only made me vote for Edwards but also made me a little bit smug about it was poverty.

I confess that before his affair was revealed, I might have dismissed any ethical questions about this non-profit -- in fact, maybe I already did and simply forgot about it. After all, wasn't the best way to fight poverty precisely to elect John Edwards? Now I'm wondering how much of that money was spent on healing crystals for his little fuck-buddy.

(I confess that though I've been writing in the first person, this post grows out of an IM conversation with Brad.)

Sports Nerds Unite!

2008-08-14T15:27:00.002-05:00

Weblog football fans, a couple of you have mentioned to me a desire to assemble a fantasy football keeper-league. What say the rest of you, anybody interested.

We're looking for five committed football fans with time on their hands ready to waste in the service of meaningless competition, and is keen on at least a three-season commitment. We're not aiming for a high-stakes league or anything. The first step is to glean the interest, and then we'll work out specifics.

If you're interested, just include your email in the appropriate comment field -- or, if you're daring, paste it into the comment itself. Preference goes to those who comment early and/or we like more.

Publishing Genius press press

2008-08-13T08:33:00.002-05:00

There's nice press on my press and Stephanie Barber's book in this week's Baltimore City Paper. Bret McCabe's article says

These Here Separated to See How They Standing Alone is her new book, just issued on local poet/performer Adam Robinson's Publishing Genius press, and it is both the printed text of her shorts' narration and another ripple to Barber's works in and of itself. On the one hand, you can follow along with the film's narration in the book--which comes with a DVD containing the six shorts covered in it--but divorced from their visual counterparts and the often distorted vocalizations, they become their own little catalysts to imagined headspaces. And seeing only the words on the page reminds you just how powerful a spell her often simple and still images cast over viewers.

I'm happy to see the book's title understood like this. The article references her work a lot, sort of more than is typically seen in alt-weekly arts writing. He even characterized me as a poet and a performer, which is how I like best to be known.

Tuesday Hatred: Bringing in the consultants

2008-08-12T01:11:00.000-05:00

I hate that Adam offered me the chance to hate again after I had already written something that was at least supposed to be hateful at unfogged. I hate that jms will probably jump all over me for even mentioning that other thing, because she's such goddam purist about repetition. I hate that even though some guy called Dan thought it was a good post, I thought it sucked: I felt in writing it as if all my vitriol, of which I formerly had such a large measure, had disappeared. I couldn't go through with it. They say this is normal, but I can't stand it anyway.

I hate that the art library only checks books out to people for one week, and that their generous online renewal offer extends to two (2) one-week renewals for grad students (undergrads get only one!), which meant that I had to take Painting as an Art, a moderately heavy book, back in just so that some library worker could fumble his sweaty paws all over my ID card for what seemed an eternity. Then I had to take it back, of course. This despite the fact that I read the first lecture and a half in the book the day I checked it out, then didn't read any of it at all until today (that is, three weeks later), and actually only decided to check it out again after reading some of it on the train and deciding that it possessed sufficient interest despite its many manifest flaws. Maybe I won't read any of it until three weeks from now. WE'LL SEE.

I hate the fact that, on facebook, one can "become a fan" of modus tollens. Come on. What the shit is that. (Asks the person who's facebook-friends with Cicero.)

Adam recently IMed me to complain about his dissertation progress—I hate that. It is a cosmic upset that Adam should complain to me about procrastinating or whatever the substance was. I don't even have a frikkin' topic, by gum.

Did you know that our gracious host really is bringing in an outside Hatred evaluator? I don't know if this person works for McKinsey or some such or not, but I do know this: this person and I have a history—one enacted in part on this very blog—so I fear that this background might color the evaluation of my performance. I hate this fucking uncertainty.

A neglected pun makes a comeback

2008-08-11T11:37:00.003-05:00

Whatever else one could say about the fighting between Russia and Georgia, one thing is for certain: it has led to a major upsurge in the number of articles and blog posts entitled "Georgia on my mind."

"The Devil went down to Georgia" is also enjoying a bit of a renaissance.

A thought on Batman

2008-08-10T11:06:00.001-05:00

In the DC universe, there are plenty of superheroes to go around -- so why wouldn't Gotham City try to recruit one with actual superpowers?

A Quick Review

2008-08-09T11:48:00.002-05:00

The top three Democratic candidates for president this year were as follows:

A white guy who really wanted to stick it to the rich, was regarded as a "phony" -- and was cheating on his cancer-afflicted wife
A woman who is regarded as being essentially the devil by a substantial portion of the population
A black guy whose middle name is "Hussein" and last name is one letter off from "Osama," whose father was an atheist, former Muslim, and non-citizen, and who attended a church headed by a Scary Black Preacher

I voted for option #1 in the primaries, though it's now clear to me that an openly left-wing populist candidate would've been absolutely destroyed by corporate power even if he wasn't cheating on his cancer-afflicted wife. All things considered, I think option #3 really was the best way to go.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Sleep is for closers.

2008-08-08T09:09:00.003-05:00

I confess that the bank and I have made up. They have, after a month and a week, finally given me the money the deposited into someone else's account. I confess I feel bad for Anthony Smith of Phoenix who the bank inexplicably gave my money to. I confess that the bank depositing my money into the account of Phoenix's Anthony Smith really ruined my shit. I confess to near-crippling bouts of anxiety caused in part by the bank cock-up. I confess that I've taken to a rather strange set of sleeping habits for the past few months. I confess that staying up all night in the red light district of Nottingham while watching all five seasons of The Wire at once is making me paranoid. I confess to having an understanding now of the hookers lines of territory and being freaked out by this one pimp in a track suit who looks like he's got the devil in him. I confess to having ill-will towards those who wear track suits.

Wednesday Sex: A Question

2008-08-06T16:28:00.002-05:00

To all Weblog readers:

What do men resent about women (if anything)?

Answers in the comments, please.

Prolegomena to Any Future Dissertation

2008-08-06T12:12:00.002-05:00

I am planning to start writing chapter 2 of my dissertation soon. Once I am finished with it, I plan to rearticulate chapters 1 and 2 into a tripartite argument, though I am currently unclear as to whether that will require the use of three chapters or a single long chapter in three parts.

At that point, the project will be fully laid out and broadly situated in terms of the contemporary field, and the sensible thing to do would be to proceed to actually do what I say I am going to do. Yet isn't there another, equally attractive option here? Couldn't I continue to expand the argument of "chapters 1 and 2" to the point where they were effectively an entire dissertation, then write a concluding chapter pointing toward my original dissertation topic as a promising avenue for future research?

Dogs watch TV now

2008-08-05T19:20:00.002-05:00

A previously mentioned local TV station is in the habit of showing commercials in which they introduce a dog, tell the neighborhood that the dog lives in, and then claim that the dog likes a particular show that the station shows. Sometimes they have the owners make these outlandish claims, and sometimes they just have a voiceover.

If it is true that these dogs watch TV and have preferences, then one thing is clear: dogs have shitty taste in TV shows. Seriously, who watches Becker?

Tuesday Hatred: Presumption.

2008-08-05T00:31:00.002-05:00

Adam asked me several hours ago, am I feeling hateful? I am. But I was not present to receive his question—so even characterizing his asking me as taking place at a more or less distinct period might be inept—and now he's gone. So I can only assume that he was asking me, or preparing to ask me, to preside over this Tuesday's Hatred. The Monday-Tuesday transition in Chicago already having come and gone, with no Hatred yet being posted, I decided to quick quick quick write one up and post it. One might call this presumptuous—hence the title. See how that works? This used to be a regular gig of mine, you know. I know what I'm doing.

I hate the way people went about solving this puzzle. Once you get a list with no correct answers, it's easy, people! Let's introduce some names and notation. Call the list with no correct answers "Wrong". Makes sense! And say that, for any list, L[i] denotes the ith element of that list, and L[i/e] denotes the list L with the ith element replaced by the element denoted by e (so the thing before the slash is an index, and the thing after the slash is a potential list element—here, a song). Then, once you've got Wrong established, you just toss out a bunch of other potential lists. If any of them has even one right answer (call this list with at least one right answer "R"), your next eight guesses are Wrong[i/R[i]] for 0 <= i < 8, assuming zero-indexed lists (as god intended). This will quickly allow you to suss out which answers in R were right. You can then build on this in short order. GOD!

I hate this shit, and also that my reaction to it is, you know, what else is new? Maybe I can change things through graduate study—oh wait, except I hate that too, or maybe would if I were actively engaged in it in any but a nominal way. If I were going to invoke nautical metaphors for my hateful situation, they would probably include "listless" and "in the doldrums" but not much else, because, let's face it, I don't know much about the nautical life. I'm pretty ok with that, though.

I hate bad improv. I hate that the much of the first act at the concert I attended on Sunday consisted of bad improv. I hate that I accidentally took the wrong CD from the merch table after the concert: I wanted Trignition (Vinny Golia, Bertram Turetzky, Barre Phillips), but took Triangulation (Vinny Golia, Bertram Turetzky, George Lewis). I hate that there seems to be no remedy for this. I don't even like Triangulation very much; plus I already own it. I hate that Achewood runs so irregularly and that Chris Onstad seems to have decided to devote so many energies to this paid update text message bull flop. I hate that at an earlier concert (Some Ensemble of Lisa Mezzacappa; Aaron Novik's Catastrophe Practice) some attractive chick was totally, like, looking in my direction, even at me, like, you know, totally eyeing me, man, I wasn't making it up this time, fer shure, but I resolutely persisted in the stoneslessness required not to even attempt to converse with her. I hate that variations on the preceding can probably be found in every previous hatred of mine: can't I at least not repeat myself in writing, even if I do so in life? No. I can't.

At times I hate Stanley Cavell's writing style. Is that ok? Can I say that, you know, in public? It doesn't seem poetic or profound or anything to me, but rather self-absorbed. I guess that's no surprise to anyone. I also hate Jeff Malpas' book about Davidson, which seems calculated to shed no light on anything, but rather to teach the student that, whenever a problem seems about to crop up, one can simply mumble something about holism or indeterminacy or whatever and TA_DA! problem solved, just as common sense would mostly have it! I'm also prepared to say that I absolutely loathe, really detest, Word and Object, and I haven't so much as opened it. I'm pretty sure that if I were to open it, I would not be able to stop myself from hurling it across the room soon thereafter. Even if I didn't read any of it: just opening it would be sufficient.

I harbor a certain attitude towards the job that Oxford University Press did in editing Mark Wilson's Wandering Significance, which was really transcendently (in the sense of being inexhaustibly) shitty—the editing job, that is, not the book—there are many nonsentences or ungrammatical sentences, typoes, and misuses of words per chapter, misattributions (e.g. authorship of Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman to Gleick, who wrote Genius), simple mathematical thinkos of the sort that a copyeditor with a modicum of domain-specific knowledge ought to have been able to catch, and so on and so forth. I can only assume that actually no one edited it at all.

I hate campylobacter.

The Body's Grace

2008-08-04T15:04:00.002-05:00

If you haven't read this, you should. I'm both surprised and unsurprised at how close it is to what I would have wanted to say.

Monday Mad Men Blogging

2008-08-04T11:57:00.001-05:00

It really is as good as people say!

AAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!!!!!!

2008-08-02T21:16:00.003-05:00

Obama is haughty now!

Yes, he's a proud man -- but then, you'd expect that since he's fucking running for president! And maybe he comes off a little superior, but that's because he actually is superior to his opponent, whose greatest achievements in life are having been shot down in Vietnam and unceremonially ditching his first wife for a wealthy heiress.

I should probably stop following the news until some time in late October. At that point, McCain will probably be trick-or-treating in black face handing out campaign literature, just having a good old time.

Not knowing what to do

2008-08-02T11:20:00.003-05:00

I have spent close to a half hour sitting on the couch sipping on a cup of coffee -- essentially, doing nothing. I don't know what to do.

This morning, I finished my usual morning tasks early (go through my feeds on Google Reader, do vocab exercises on Super Memory, read a couple pages of German), leaving a gap before lunch. The problem is deeper than that, though. I don't know what to do after lunch, either.

I could clean the apartment, having only cleaned the bathroom yesterday, but I don't want to inconvenience my roommate by mopping the floors while he's home. I could do other non-mopping tasks (dusting, the small amount of vacuuming we have), but they would only take a trivial amount of time.

I could do some review in preparation for writing my second, "easy" dissertation chapter, but I've hit a roadblock there -- some stuff I was going to consult from Ritschl's Doctrine of Justification is from volume 1, and I only have volume 3. I don't even know if it's really necessary to use the Ritschl stuff, since my main concern is Aulen. Still, it's a roadblock.

I could read some Nancy for my AAR presentation. I could also read Laclau's Populist Reason, seeing as how I've agreed to do something for a panel thereupon that may or may not come together as an additional event at the AAR. I could also finish a book that I've been nursing for about three weeks, or at least make some progress.

I could even take advantage of the fact that all extant episodes of Mad Men are available "On Demand" currently, or watch one of my Netflix.

I could also write a blog post with some kind of content to it, but I feel drained of all content unrelated to my dissertation and have decided not to blog directly about my dissertation. I'm not especially overflowing with dissertation-related material at the moment either, in any case.

Instead of doing all that, though, I apparently chose to express my inaction actively, by writing a blog post listing everything I could be doing, but am not in fact doing.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: The Bible doesn't mention us

2008-08-01T00:00:00.003-05:00

I confess that I routinely go far too long without getting a haircut. It is such a world-historical event that everyone notices, even bartenders and clerks at Walgreens. I confess that every time, I think to myself, "Maybe I should go closer to once a month rather than once per quarter," but I never follow through.

I confess that I am similarly negligent about shaving, which I only do if I have a date or, failing that, if the itchiness becomes distracting.

I confess that I really don't want to clean the bathroom.

I confess that I could easily turn around and rewrite the chapter draft I finished yesterday. Moving forward is probably the best strategy for now.

I confess that I can imagine what it would be like to be a sports fan and it seems like it would be a fun thing, but the time commitment deters me.

I confess that I often marvel at the persistence of internet trolls. Think what a different place the world would be if we all had such sociopathic fervor!

On the old saw, "I'd hate to see how you treat your students"

2008-07-31T09:53:00.003-05:00

Academics often hear this complaint from online correspondents who feel their opinions are not being sufficiently respected. The correspondent is thankfully able to handle the abuse with aplomb; the same cannot be expected of vulnerable undergraduates. (The sinister undertone: the academic should likely be barred from teaching.)

What the correspondent is missing here is that a teaching situation is fundamentally different from a lively debate among peers. In the former situation, one expects ignorance, cliched opinions, faulty reasoning -- that's why the students need to be in class, after all. In the latter situation, no matter how often this expectation is frustrated, one also expects that voluntary participants in, say, a political debate will have some type of knowledge, some consciousness of what types of arguments are common and which are novel, etc.

Most often, of course, they do not. Instead, they simply wish to vent their political impulses in much the same way they would vent to a close friend about a fight with their spouse or significant other -- and indeed, they appear to have as much emotion invested in their ignorant, cliched opinions as they would in such a fight.

An academic in such a situation is in a double-bind. On the one hand, if they genuinely treat the person as a peer -- that is, if they subject their arguments to sharp criticism and demand facts -- they will be dismissed as moral monsters who like to torture 19-year-old business majors. On the other hand, if they treat the person like the ignoramus in need of instruction that they are, then the academic is a patronizing elitist: "You think you're so smart -- well, all you've got is three letters beyond your name! Up there in your ivory tower, you haven't gained the rich experience in 'real life' that I have attained in my work as an insurance adjuster and reader of right-wing blogs!"

In short, whatever the virtues of "book smarts," they will inevitably be shouted down by "street smarts."

Dreaming Life

2008-07-30T10:41:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I made significant progress on my dissertation chapter. I finished probably the most conceptually difficult part, bringing together Bonhoeffer and Jean-Luc Nancy, and I was feeling good.

Apparently I was not as satisfied as I thought, though, because last night I dreamed that I was writing a book on Nancy as a kind of side project to keep me from being bored while doing my dissertation. I had made rapid progress and already had four chapters, but I felt I needed a fifth one to round it out. Casting about for a topic, I thought, "Oh, of course, I can do a chapter on The Experience of Freedom." Then I wrote it up in a matter of minutes. Another book, in the bag!

Although this dream probably does reflect my vast ambitions, arrogance, pretentiousness, etc., I think that more fundamentally it falls into the same category as when I've had a data entry job through a temp agency and I dream of data entry.

I'll give you something to cry about!

2008-07-29T13:17:00.003-05:00

Instead of its current approach, the media should repond to accusations of bias or unfairness by doubling down.

John McCain's complaining that they are unfair to him after they've spent years hanging on his every word and explaining away every "gaffe" -- and by the way, exactly what the fuck is a "gaffe," and do they ever occur outside of political campaigns? -- and they should punish him for it. Similarly, after being the inevitable front-runner for months in the media narrative, Hillary suddenly started complaining about how much the media loved Obama -- again, she should've been made to suffer for that.

The only language these politicians understand is force. A few months of aversion therapy, and they'd be thrown back on actually trying to make a case for their candidacy rather than "working the refs."

Tuesday Hatred: Complaints about Google Services

2008-07-29T00:01:00.000-05:00

I hate that Gmail is not able to take into account the fact that I have received a delivery failure notification for one of the addresses in my contact list. It seems that it should be able to notice the error, then move that address to the bottom of the auto-complete list. I hate that searches for "to:" and "from:" are so unpredictable -- I can type in the name of one of my most frequent correspondents and get zero results.

I hate it when I search for businesses near me on Google Maps and it gives me a zoom out to the entire Midwest with twenty options. We must have very different ideas of what counts as "nearby." Even worse, when I click on a particular option, it does not recenter the map nor does it give me an intuitive way to zoom into that spot (say, at the smallest zoom that still shows both my house and that business).

I also hate that Google Maps apparently does not acknowledge the existence of the Red Line north of Roosevelt, only showing stops that are transfers to other lines. It does give me the Red Line if I ask for public transit directions, but only reluctantly -- it much prefers for me to take the Brown Line to Belmont and then take the Purple Express to Evanston, for instance, even though it's almost always much faster to take a bus across to the Red Line. I hate that it constantly wants me to take the Lincoln bus all the way to Fullerton and then get on the Brown Line, even though the Lincoln bus stops at the much closer Western Brown Line. Even more ridiculous is its desire to put me on a really circuitous bus route when my stated final destination is a rail station.

They should have the ability to reroute and then take people's suggestions into account in constructing future routes (for instance, it could start to realize, "Huh, people really don't want to take the Green Line to Garfield when they're headed to a destination at U of C. Interesting. Maybe I won't send unwitting tourists in that direction"). Computer route planning systems are inherently limited, and allowing user suggestions is the only way to get around that.

"Next, as in NOW, right NOW!"

2008-07-29T00:00:00.004-05:00

A local television station plays reruns of South Park. Episodes are preceded by a brief summary, then the announcer says that the episode is "next, as in now, right now!" The entire quoted portion is said in an urgent, breathy voice.

I do not understand why they do this.

Fun Fact

2008-07-28T19:15:00.002-05:00

On Sunday, The Girl and I went to brunch. Her glass was empty at one point, and the waiter brought out an unsolicited refill, saying, "Diet Coke, right? It looked like a diet." He was in fact correct, and I said, "Good eye." He responded that there was a very distinct difference between the two -- you can almost see through regular Coke, and Diet Coke is much darker.

I did not know that.

John McCain: Absolute Idiot

2008-07-27T10:03:00.003-05:00

If McCain somehow wins the election, my big worry is that he's so stupid that he'll nuke us all by accident. We will all be longing for the competence and polish of the Bush administration.

As The Girl just said in chat, "someone who can't use the internet cannot be trusted with WMDs."

Catholic Baiting

2008-07-26T16:13:00.002-05:00

In comments to an Unfogged post, I came up with a great way to bait Catholics that would actually directly involve an area where the political influence of Catholicism is having a concrete negative effect on a disadvantaged group -- a woman should wash down a morning-after pill using communion wine. Ideally, she would chew up the communion wafer, insert the pill, then use the wine to wash down both at once.

Beside something like that, putting a nail through a communion wafer and putting it in the trash seems distinctly amateurish.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Life Together

2008-07-25T00:00:00.001-05:00

I confess that this week my productivity seems to have declined due to having too much time to work. There is only so much time I can put in writing on any given day and still have it be beneficial. On days when I have an evening engagement, then, I try to schedule that block of time for the afternoon. On days when I am totally free, the urgency of doing it in the afternoon is lost, and in addition I'm faced with the prospect of having nothing to do in the evening if I write too early. After putting it off, however, I often find myself further procrastinating, until I reach the point when it's "too late" to start and I might as well just wait until tomorrow.

I confess that I have been lazy in my research assistant work and on transcribing some lecture notes that fellow students want to purchase from me. I confess that I have been watching too much TV, even by my lax standards.

I confess that my apartment is starting to feel dingy, though everyone who visits still considers it remarkably clean. I still have not reached my "threshold," which is perhaps higher than usual since I would feel stupid taking an afternoon out to clean when I am behind on my self-imposed writing schedule.

I confess that the relative lack of comments this week has bothered me.

Wednesday Sex: Not Just For Wednesdays

2008-07-24T15:40:00.005-05:00

We might ask what it is about sexual difference that makes it different from other differences, from the difference that is "what there is" according to Badiou. In particular, what is it about sexual difference that affords it, according to a familiar line of critique, the power of delegitimising any and every project of universality, any and every construction of a "same" capable in principle of including everyone?

The kernel of the problem emerges with some clarity in the context of arguments against women's priesthood. Christ - so the argument goes - is simultaneously the "son of man", humanity restored to its original creaturely perfection, and "biologically" male. If we affirm that Christ is God incarnate, then we affirm that he is not not human, and therefore not not the bearer of a binary sexual trait: not not a man. Now, the role of the priest is to personate, imperfectly, Christ's perfect humanity: to be the "vicar" of Christ. The humanity of the priest is vicariously Christ's humanity; in particular, his biological maleness is vicariously Christ's biological maleness. The humanity of women cannot be vicariously Christ's humanity, because it obviates Christ's biological maleness: the woman priest figures forth in her female person a castrated Christ, a Christ missing part of his full humanity. It follows that a Christ capable of being personated vicariously by a human being of the opposite sex would not be a fully-human Christ; and a church that affirmed a less-than-fully-human Christ would have to be considered wholly renegade.

Now, the discrepancies between the humanity of this or that male or female (or otherwise-appointed) person and the humanity of Christ are clearly necessarily manifold. There is no vicariousness without discrepancy, no priesthood without unchristlikeness. But we must then distinguish between two kinds of discrepancy: that between perfection and imperfection, and that between likeness and unlikeness. What opponents of women's priesthood seem to think is that the male priest's manhood, if perfected, would become Christ's manhood: his distance from Christ is his imperfection. A woman cannot be perfected into Christ: perfect womanhood is Mary. Women are not more imperfect than men, but differently imperfect (and differently perfectible). There is between Christ and Mary, two models of perfection, a symmetrical relationship of like to unlike rather than an asymmetrical relationship of perfect to imperfect.

One may well feel that this entire schema is simply too stupid for words. Nevertheless, there exist counter-arguments. For me the most convincing is that which begins by acknowledging that Christ's full humanity entails that he bears, like all human beings, an amalgam of particular traits: the person of Jesus is, in particular, male and Jewish; but also Nazarene, the son of a carpenter, a subject of the Roman Empire and so on. Jesus of Bethnal Green would be a different person from Jesus of Nazareth, as would Jesus the son of a private equity fund manager. A Haitian Jesus would be in certain respects more Jesus-like than an American one. None of these traits can be said to be either more "contingent" or more "essential" than any of the others. What can it mean for such an amalgam to be perfected?

It is quite possible for a particular human individual to bear traits that, carried all their way to their ideal forms, are finally incompatible with each other. "Being myself" means being a rattlebag of things that don't especially go together, which is what makes "being true to myself" such a doubtful enterprise; one can only "be true to" that which is subtracted from such an amalgam. (The ever-popular alternative is to make an idol of some figment of oneself and repress the remainder). What makes Christ truly Christ is not in fact the amalgam of traits that he bears, but that he calls God "Father". To imitate Christ is first of all to pray as Christ prayed, and taught his disciples to pray: "Our father..."

The joint predication of Christ's perfection and of his maleness does not specify an ultra-male Christ, but a Christ whose amalgam of particular traits, maleness among them, is made the support of a filiation. There remains a difficulty, obviously, over the masculine coding of this filiation. A Christ who prayed to the Goddess, to the universal mother, would no longer be the Son of the Father. This is a serious problem, which has at bottom to do with the purity of the male line. For the time being, let's just note that the address-structure of the Lord's Prayer is universal at one of its posts: anyone can be an addressor. The Son announces that all are to address the Father as "father", undoing the binding of the male line to a single male heir. Christian fidelity is the impure filiation of impurity - of human beings, in all their amalgamated particularity - to that which, subtracting itself from the differences which are "what there is" in the amalgam, convokes a new body, a novel configuration of the nothing new.

Whatever personal qualities or qualifications one might desire in a minister, and however one might attempt to evaluate the viability of a person's professed vocation to the priesthood, it is clear that in the matter of vicarious personation of Christ what counts is that one should be human, bearing an incompossible amalgam of traits, and that one should place this amalgam in support of a universal filiation. There is no single trait, be it of race, gender or sexual orientation, that can separate anyone from this filiation. Or bind them to it, for that matter: there is no priestly caste. Literally anyone can be called to be a priest - a thought which is not altogether comforting.

I watch a lot of TV: Or, On misplaced loyalty

2008-07-24T11:06:00.003-05:00

The first episode of season 4 was promising, but subsequent episodes have been very disappointing. There is only so far into the season you can go without exhausting the excuse of still "setting things up," especially when there are only 13 episodes.

My loyalty to shows can become a problem. Perhaps Weeds will redeem itself, but I had no reason to believe that Prison Break would -- yet I continued watching. If we had been a Nielsen household during the last season of Prison Break, I don't think I would've been able to live with myself. As it stands, Fox should give me some kind of award. I'd like to say I'll boycott the next season for (ridiculously) bringing Sarah back to life, but I am unlikely to go in and take it off the DVR's list of shows to record and I am almost certain to be bored and depressed enough this winter to sit and watch the thing.

Hopefully they will at least maintain the tropical setting, so I can enjoy the weird lighting and the characters' perpetual sweatiness during the harsh Chicago winter.

Sure, the economy might suck

2008-07-23T15:26:00.002-05:00

But look at it this way: at least you're not living in Soviet Russia!

The evidence for the badness of the Soviet Union: free heating and long (also free) commutes. Perhaps not the most resonant examples in times of rising oil prices. Encore un effort if you want to be an apologist for capitalism!

A Note to Right-Wing and Centrist Pundits

2008-07-23T10:54:00.004-05:00

The surge didn't work. The majority of positive effects associated with the surge were underway well before the surge was even thought of. And even the fantasy version of the surge (including everything good that happened six months before the surge) didn't achieve the stated goal: stabilizing the security situation in order to make room for political reconciliation.

McCain was not right about the surge. Obama's opposition to the surge was not a case of dogmatic opposition to the war blinding him to a brilliant idea. The surge was a failure on its own terms, even though it improved security somewhat around Baghdad. Similarly, the Iraq War was a collosal clusterfuck even though it succeeded in removing Saddam Hussein from office. It's strange, I know -- something can fail while still creating positive effects.

I'm pretty sure that hanging the entire rationale for your candidacy on one of the few policies in Iraq to arguably have some positive effects despite its overall failure is a bad strategy. Perhaps McCain will manage to persuade some people who are currently undecided, though, meaning that his strategy will have been successful, regardless of whether he achieves his stated goal of winning the election.

Tuesday Hatred: Dear Prudence

2008-07-22T09:09:00.002-05:00

I hate that Jared's apartment burned down. Please visit this post to donate.

I hate running out of cereal. Even more, I hate running out of toilet paper. Normally I try to stay stocked up, replenishing well before I'm out, but within the last several days, I've run out of both.

I hate that there are people seriously considering voting for John McCain. Everything he does somehow manages to be even stupider than the last thing. By the end of this campaign, he's going to be promising an investigation into alien abductions -- as a way of stimulating the economy.

Help Jared Sinclair

2008-07-21T15:10:00.006-05:00

Friend and contributer to The Weblog Jared Sinclair has just lost everything except for his computer and notebooks in an apartment fire. Jared is a talented musician and lost his guitars and recording equipment in the fire. He is also an avid reader and had a pretty nice library that was lost as well. He didn't have renters insurance, so he really needs as much help as we can give him. The link below will allow you to donate directly to him. Please let others know as well.

Help Jared Sinclair by donating now.

UPDATE: Jared, ever the artist, made a video tour of his burned out apartment.

The Passion of Manohla Dargis

2008-07-20T13:25:00.006-05:00

I have long enjoyed A. O. Scott's reviews in the New York Times, which for me are equalled only by those of The New Yorker's Anthony Lane. So it is with some disappointment that I must say that the Times' newer reviewer, Manohla Dargis, is terrible. She mixes overwriting with cliche in a way that is unprecedented in the history of prose.

Take, for instance, her review of The Dark Knight. She approves of the casting in the new franchise that began with Batman Begins: director Christopher Nolan "brought a gravitas to the superhero that wiped away the camp and kitsch that had shrouded Batman in cobwebs. It helped that Christian Bale, a reluctant smiler whose sharply planed face looks as if it had been carved with a chisel, slid into Bruce Wayne’s insouciance as easily as he did Batman’s suit." Shrouded in cobwebs? Insouciance?

Here's another highlight: "In and out of his black carapace and on the restless move, Batman remains, perhaps not surprisingly then, a recessive, almost elusive figure" (my emphasis). On the restless move: I don't even know how to respond to this. Tinkering with a cliche I can see, but "on the move" seems to be closer to an idiomatic expression than a cliche properly so called -- and so the interruption of an adjective is jarring, in an unproductive way. One begins parsing out the intended meaning: is Batman's "move," on which he is, what is restless, as opposed to Batman himself? What is gained through this locution that "restlessly on the move" would not have achieved? I will admit that "and on the restless move" has a certain iambic quality that arguably communicates movement -- but the movement on the level of rhythm is arrested by the oddity of the expression, an oddity that has no apparent function other than to fit into the very rhythm it disrupts. Do we really need our movie reviewers writing experimental prose, especially when the experiment fails so badly?

Also, "carapace"? Thesaurus addiction destroys lives.

Even worse was the opening paragraph of her review of The Bourne Ultimatum, the review that first brought her to my attention and that I vividly remember over a year later:

Jaw clenched, brow knotted, body tight as a secret, Matt Damon hurtles through “The Bourne Ultimatum” like a missile. He’s a man on a mission, our Matt, and so too is his character, Jason Bourne, the near-mystically enhanced superspy who, after losing his memory and all sense of self, has come to realize that he has also lost part of his soul. For Bourne, who rises and rises again in this fantastically kinetic, propulsive film, resurrection is the name of the game, just as it is for franchises. This is the passion of Jason Bourne, with a bullet.

My favorite part: "our Matt."

One also reads with horror the opening paragraph of Dargis's review of Sex and the City, a trainwreck of alliteration that is unprintable on a family blog such as this one.

Psst, everyone

2008-07-19T21:55:00.001-05:00

It's Adam's bday.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Hella

2008-07-18T00:00:00.005-05:00

I confess that my much-discussed problems with German appear to have been mainly Adorno's fault rather than the language's fault. I've switched to Erik Peterson as a reading text, and it's going much more smoothly. I confess that using the Super Memory software to learn vocabulary has been helpful. I confess that I probably need to get back into the habit of stumbling through a few lines of Greek every day, too.

I confess that it is way too hot out.

I confess that when Anthony told me that someone attempted to post a comment on this post of mine asserting that "100% of the verse in the Bible condemn homosexuality," I decided to start a verse-by-verse commentary:

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" -- see, it doesn't say "the earth and the earth." Already, we see God's intention is to have complimentary pairings.

"Now the earth was formless and void" -- because of all the sodomy going on.

That was as far as I was able to get. I think it's an interesting hermeneutical lens, though.

I confess that when this is posted, I will be watching The Dark Knight.

Band Names

2008-07-17T13:46:00.003-05:00

One relatively unexplored source of potential band names is office equipment. For instance:

The Staplers
The File Cabinets
The Three-Hole Punches

These names can then be expanded using an adjective or other modifier:

The Greasy Staplers
The Groaning File Cabinets
The Three-Hole Punches of Love

Postcard van West Vlaanderen

2008-07-17T08:47:00.006-05:00

Cheers, from the Sint-Sixtusabdij van Westvleteren. Now considered by many alcoholic authorities as the best beer on the planet, the monks recently got with the program a little and realized they could make a bit more money from their most famous product -- though, after eating what seemed like two pounds of it, I can testify that their paté is just as much reason to visit.

The pick-up site looks like a drive-thru, but it is far less convenient than one might think. To get a crate of 24, and you're only ever allowed one crate p/month, you have to call months in advance to make a reservation. Actually, you make a reservation for a reservation, because you have to wait several days or weeks for a return call, indicating when you should come by and what will be available. Even then, when your appointed day arrives they may not even have the exact variety you were dead set on drinking -- choices being, the 'blond', the '8' and the '12', all of which, I can attest, are exquisite and worth all manner of hardship to acquire. Upon receiving your share of that which can only be called happiness, use it wisely, the monks then make you promise not to re-sell it, which of course you do with haste. Or, so it seems anyway. In Brussels, I saw a crate of 24 being sold near the Grand Market, for nearly seven euro a bottle.

Or, you can do like me, visit the abbey around lunch, enjoy a meal with two '12's and one '8', two pounds of paté and fresh bread, one heaping helping of ice cream made with their beer, and then stumble around the 7 km walking-path whilst belchy and bloated. Soon thereafter, I found the skies darkened by clouds and night, my sense of consciousness fading, stinking of beer, cheese, and the marijuana one inevitably happens upon during such events, listening to the Saxophone Summit and Wayne Shorter Quartet at the Gent Jazz Festival.

It was, I suppose, like any other day in Belgium. But a special one all the same. I will miss my second home.

UPDATE: Further photos of my adventure in beer, for the interested and those uninitiated in the glorious ways of Belgian beer, can be found here.

2008-07-16T09:42:00.003-05:00

My recent Weblog post "Obama's at the country club looking for the real killers" has been plagiarized: "Obama loves America the way O.J. loved Nicole".

You read it here first. Do I understand America or what?

A worry

2008-07-15T19:04:00.002-05:00

Is Obama asking us to get out of the impossible war in Iraq so that we can become more embroiled in the, if anything, even-more-impossible war in Afghanistan?

Isn't there some kind of third option that doesn't involve responding to terrorism with an interminable military occupation? For instance, maybe Obama could consider saying that, in addition to using 9/11 as a pretext for a war against a completely unrelated war, Bush was criminally negligent in allowing the attack to happen in the first place. That is to say, one crucial, yet oft-overlooked, tool in our anti-terrorism arsenal might be basic competence -- paying attention to memos entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike the US," for instance.

I've repeated this often, but two of the 9/11 hijackers were living with an FBI informant! It doesn't take a vivid imagination to envision actually catching them before they attacked, rendering the interminable occupation of any country -- even a country that provided a training ground for the failed attackers -- completely unnecessary. Conspiring to kill a bunch of people is actually considered a crime in itself, believe it or not, so we could've just put the would-be attackers in prison.

Hell, we probably could've also managed to avoid the whole thing where we rounded up foreigners more or less at random and tortured them for six straight years, too, simply by following traditional law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering practices whereby we assume a goatherd is just a goatherd unless we have a really good reason to think otherwise. Once we identified probable members of the conspiracies, then we could've tried to extract information through some kind of incentives and negotiation rather than through sheer brute force -- perhaps even getting some of them to wear wires, etc. You know, like on TV when they're trying to infiltrate the mob! A lot of these terrorists are engineers, etc., so maybe that strategy would even produce a situation where instead of assuming that swarthy people are terrorists, we assume that the newly-arrived swarthy engineer is in the witness protection program because he helped to unravel a terrorist organization. A hero, really.

But no -- instead of going that far, let's depart like two steps from Bush: yes, the proper response to 9/11 is an insane nation-building project, but in Afghanistan, not Iraq.

The Process

2008-07-15T13:23:00.002-05:00

A White Bear writes the following in comments:

The process seems to me to be:

1. You write this blog on the internet, so you must desperately want advice from strangers who wander by.

2. My advice is that you are obviously a pig-headed idiot/slut who is insane and requires a lobotomy/serious dicking [for the ladies].

3. How can you not want my excellent advice? Believe me, I, a stranger on the internet, have your best interests at heart. I just want you to be happy, and by taking my advice, you can achieve enlightenment.

4. What do you mean, I don't know you well enough to give you advice? I read every fifth word in like three of your posts, so we're basically intimates now. Your BLOG is on the INTERNET where I can READ it.

5. Who are all these people telling me I'm being stupid? They're your little echo chamber circle-jerk, aren't they? Just because they've known you for years and are mostly your intimate friends, they think they know you better than I do. Hah. HAH! How much do you pay them to stroke you off all day?

6. BAN me then! BANISH me, you tyrant! I will go down in history as the hero who finally vanquished your ego! I will have triumphed forever if you delete my comments! It will prove that you know how right I am and how wrong everyone who has ever known you is! I'll not sleep for weeks, with the smile I'll have on my face, knowing how I wormed my way into your brain and forced you to recognize yourself for the first time in your life! BAN ME.

See, if you just skip to 6, you don't have to hear the entire thing every time. It's inevitable.

Yes, my blog is a circle-jerk for people who actually care about me and read the posts carefully. If you want to join in, we have a pretty good time. If you don't, go read someone else's blog.

Meta-Blogging: Or, On being an asshole

2008-07-15T11:39:00.003-05:00

There seems to be a widely shared misunderstanding of precisely what makes me an asshole. That I am an asshole is well-known, and I will not dispute it here. The problem is that people seem to believe that I am an asshole who:

does not countenance disagreement and
wants every comment on this site to be laudatory.

It is true that I object to contentless personal attacks (such as being called "arrogant") and will normally fight back against them -- to me, that shows that I am a bit short-tempered, but does not constitute assholishness per se. It is something I am working on, but I think it is an appropriate and understandable response. Were I to respond more kindly to people pointlessly attacking me on a personal level, it would be an act of generosity, not the fulfillment of an obligation.

The real triggers for my annoyance, however, are as follows:

Boring comments: This includes things that I've heard a billion times before, so conservative and religious right talking-points all fall under this category. Stating boring conventional wisdom in general, especially without acknowledging that it is boring conventional wisdom, is also objectionable, even moreso when I have stated and rejected the conventional wisdom position in the post itself. In the latter case, the appropriate response is not simply to assert the conventional wisdom position, but to produce a novel and convincing argument in its favor. (Referring to irreducible facts of "human nature" does not fulfill this requirement.)
Misreading my post: Nothing in blogging bothers me more than people's apparent sense of entitlement to respond without carefully reading what they're responding to. I don't object to people disagreeing with me -- just make sure you're actually disagreeing with me. As a blogger, I obviously like to know that people are reading my stuff, so including simple clues can help you avoid conflict. For instance, if you wish to defend a conventional wisdom position that I have rejected in the post, don't just assert it as though I didn't think of it. Instead, you can say, "I know that you reject this position in your post, but..." or "Even though it's conventional wisdom, I think in this case it actually is simpler just to assume that X is what's going on...." See? It's so easy.

When you officiously put forward boring, cliched opinions in such a way as to imply that I have never heard them before or demonstrate that you gave my post only a cursory read before responding, you are actually being an asshole to me. I know that seems impossible! After all, since I am ontologically an asshole, every conflict in blog comments must be entirely my fault regardless of the concrete circumstances. People can insult me on every possible level, egg me on, threaten me -- and the fact that I often respond aggressively and forcefully argue my position is enough to outweigh it all. I've learned to deal with that.

But if you want to come to my blog that I pay for and talk to me, maybe you should learn how to deal with me. Maybe you should cut me a little slack and realize that I'm human, too, with actual human faults and some less than desirable behavioral triggers -- rather than, say, idealizing me at first and then lashing out at me when I turn out not to be perfectly affirming of you. Weird, I know! I have such strange ideas of how human interactions should go, sociopath that I am. Still, I thought it might be helpful to people for me to put this out there.

UPDATE: I am going to be more aggressive in comment moderation from now on. No current regular commenters are in any danger of running afoul of my new policy, which will basically include deleting comments that fulfill the above criteria rather than getting into pointless arguments with the people. At some point, I may also decide that preemptive moderation of some kind is necessary -- that would be a pain, but comment volume is not super-high on this site anyway.

Tuesday Hatred: All y'all

2008-07-15T00:00:00.004-05:00

I hate colloquial abbreviations of pronouns, especially "ya" and "'em." I am willing to tolerate "y'all," but only in the context of the phrase "fuck all y'all."

I hate taking a cab. Late at night, sometimes it seems like a better option, but I always watch the meter and get more and more antsy. $7 to get home! I could've paid $2 for the CTA! I'll never understand people who take a cab because they're running late -- just be late, I say.

I sometimes hate the "always on" aspect of graduate study and academia in general. You know how a lot of people have a defined time when they're working, then they are able to relax and enjoy themselves outside of that time? I can relax and enjoy myself to a certain degree, but it's to the point where I am instrumentalizing it -- the ultimate goal is to make me better able to work, and when it gets excessive, I start to worry that I'm somehow falling behind.

More Asymmetry of Parody

2008-07-14T22:06:00.002-05:00

The proposed McCain New Yorker cover is yet another illustration of the asymmetry of parody. The Obama cover is of course all about the ridiculous lies that paranoid conservatives have made up, whereas basically everything in the McCain cover is true -- the only possible exception being the implication of extremely frail health. Obama is not really a Muslim terrorist married to a black radical, but McCain really is corrupt and really does love war.

Of course, the Obama cover is really a liberal skewering of conservative paranoia, but it could easily be imagined as a sincere conservative attempt to skewer Obama -- just as with Colbert, the parody functions through decontextualized repetition. A conservative satire cannot take the same strategy -- it must introduce some exaggeration or distortion.

A New Approach to Gentrification

2008-07-14T14:54:00.002-05:00

Perhaps if white yuppies want to claim bad neighborhoods, they should start their own gangs and initiate turf wars.

T-Shirt Idea

2008-07-13T11:46:00.003-05:00

If it were to come about that Osama bin Laden were actually captured and was then tortured, one could make a t-shirt with bin Laden's face and the caption, "By his wounds we are healed."

Niceness

2008-07-12T12:53:00.001-05:00

What is our opinion thereof?

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Fiscal Austerity Measures

2008-07-11T00:00:00.002-05:00

I confess that, as happens every six months or so, "money is tight." Don't worry: I am by now a skilled financial manager, having attained valuable scrounging skills through years of graduate study. I confess that I have been a real spendthrift in recent months, but I do not have a lively sense that the present situation could've been avoided.

I confess that a friend of mine told me about a potential job teaching a 4/4 load for $30K way down on the south side, and I'm seriously considering taking it if it becomes a real option, simply because I'm sick of having to piece things together every month.

I confess that I'm starting to hope for Amazon referrals to pick up somewhat. In fact, now might be an opportune time to explain the system to you. As you know, I have customarily had two graphical links to Amazon products in my sidebar up at any given time. When you click one of those links and buy something -- anything at all, not necessarily what I linked -- I get a cut. The percentage is not huge, but it can add up over time. It would be especially beneficial to me if someone were to buy a laptop or other big-ticket item through one of my links. By using my links, you are essentially taking money directly from Amazon's pocket and putting it in mine, thereby "sticking it to the Man." I encourage everyone to do so at their next opportunity.

I confess that working on relatively mindless financial writing all week was something of a relief, and not only because I'm getting paid.

I confess that after a grand total of four times jogging, each for about a half-mile, I have managed to injure my ankle. If I end up having to go to the doctor, that will be extra humiliating. I suppose that I will need to continue my habit of taking brisk walks through the neighborhood -- you know, like a middle-aged woman.

Ricky Gervais meets Larry David

2008-07-10T15:26:00.001-05:00

Part 1 of 6:

The rest: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

(Thanks to Brad for alerting me of this.)

Arrogance

2008-07-10T11:12:00.004-05:00

One of the most frequent charges levelled against bloggers is arrogance. At the same time, it is among the most content-free charges possible. On a certain level, the very act of having a blog is arrogant in so far as it means assuming that people want to read your thoughts. Even worse is forcefully arguing in favor of one's own beliefs: yes, of course, you, the Mighty Blogger, have sole access to wisdom and generously enlighten the peons.

The very act of stepping into the public square, the very demonstration of even the most minimal degree of self-assurance, is an unpardonable sin. We must all be humble agnostics -- so it's no wonder that woman bloggers are subjected to greater harassment and vilification, given cultural expectations of female passivity.

Bloggers with academic ambitions are often subjected to an appropriately nuanced version of the arrogance charge: they are pretentious. Again, this charge is completely content-free, completely unrelated to any notion that someone is pretending to be something they are not. In fact, if one has read all that one claims to have read, etc., that is even more pretentious, because intellectuality can only ever be a put-on. (See the entry for pseudo-intellectual here.) The very claim to have an interest in the intellect is inherently overblown, and so any particular instantiation of that interest necessarily falls short of the implicit claims to genius, world-historical status, breaking the history of thought in two with one's every word, etc.

The charge of "pretentiousness," of course, is a simple application of the same logic that leads to the general accusation of "arrogance" -- it punishes a particularly offensive claim to be a non-humble non-agnostic.

What's more, since everyone is presumed to be a humble agnostic, the very attempt to be anything but that is implicitly a claim of superiority over the unwashed masses. Thus the very act of publishing a blog is, paradoxically, an anti-social activity -- a "fuck you" to the general public. Fuck you, you ignorant depressed people, fuck you all -- I am going to make you listen, I am going to inflict my thoughts on you from my godlike perch, I am going to hit you over the head with my rightness until you bleed.

Is That It?

2008-07-09T00:00:00.002-05:00

[This short story is dedicated to Adam, Anthony, and all my old Illinois friends. I miss you all, comrades.]

Five years ago today, Saul Zuero, now an obscure philosopher and former zoo janitor, then an obscure zoo janitor and former philosopher, discovered what was and remains the World’s Only Officially Documented Miracle. All doubts have been dispelled, all possible scientific explanations exhausted. All things being equal (and in spite of the fact that there is every indication that they are not), only one avenue of theoretical causation remains open: the Divine. It happened in Chicago, on a Tuesday.

— Part One —

“You!” she cursed, wagging a long-nailed finger at Zuero. Her lips, curled in anticipation of her invectives, were a ghastly shade of pink, lighter than her quick-tanned skin.

“Me?” He sounded surprised, like he’d heard his number called at a raffle.

“This is your responsibility!” These were her own mother’s words coming out of her mouth, in the same frothing tone.

“Um. What?” He gulped.

“This is your responsibility!”

Uh-oh. This was not good. He recognized the signs. People were staring. It was only a matter of minutes now, seconds maybe. He could feel it, a clenching in the gut, a wincing. Here comes number seventy-three.

Five minutes earlier, the young Zuero had stood motionless, his shaggy head tilted in deep thought, both hands crossed over the butt of a push-broom handle. He was on a pebbled walkway that coursed through the bird pavilion. Lulled into a trance by the interlacing patterns of some palm fronds waving in a waft of air, there was no telling what passersby guessed he was thinking. He might have been thinking of the Triumphant Entry, or the Girls of Hawaiian Tropic. Whatever it was, the sound that broke the spell wasn't the din of predatory bird cries or the ill-mannered whines of a spoiled toddler. It was the unmistakable sound of a powerful stream of giant avian feces painting a white line down the pavement.

Splat-splat-splat-splat-splat!

It sounded like a ridiculous Nickelodeon invention rapid-firing a dozen Super-Sloppy fistfuls of soggy oatmeal in under a second. By the time he turned around to face it . . . .

[click here to read the rest of the story]

Tuesday Hatred: Writer's Block

2008-07-08T00:00:00.003-05:00

I hate writer's block. Thankfully I don't get it too terribly often, but when it happens, it doesn't seem to come from not knowing what to say, but rather from not knowing what order to say it in.

On the chapter I'm working on, I had a situation that was very closely parallel to a chapter from my Zizek book. I knew that I had X number of things to cover in the chapter (or the remainder thereof, in the current case), but one didn't seem to fit neatly, so I initially decided to put it first just to get it out of the way. All my attempts to follow through on this plan failed -- in the case of the Zizek book, I started the relevant section probably six or seven times and could never find any momentum, and in the present case, I just didn't try to write anything at all.

Cycling through other possible orders, I found many that seemed to work, but all of them excluded this troublesome part altogether, which was not an acceptable solution. Finally, in both cases, I had a sudden insight into a structure that would tie all the required parts together with a deep inner necessity -- and it was absolutely crucial that I put the previously out of place part first if my argument was to make any sense at all. I hate that my life so often seems to be pulled directly from Hegel.

I hate that I haven't been able to follow through on not caring about traffic stats for AUFS, as the original concept of the blog required. I hate having a blog whose title is difficult to type.

I hate being the only person in a subway station. I hate how much of a spendthrift I've been in the last few months.

Interested readers will find this post's evil twin, the Tuesday Love, at this blog.

An AUFS Update

2008-07-07T10:56:00.003-05:00

I have finished my reading of Agamben's Il Regno e la Gloria and posted the results -- including a PDF compilation of my notes -- here.

In comments, Alex asks if I will be making this a regular practice. What's perhaps more important is for it to inspire other academic bloggers to make it a regular practice, because it seems like the perfect kind of thing for an academic blog to do -- both for the audience and for the bloggers themselves.

Hitchens and Chesterton

2008-07-05T13:16:00.002-05:00

From Adam Gopnik's recent New Yorker article on Chesterton, "The Back of the World" (not online):

The really startling thing in the book [The Man Who Was Friday] is Chesterton's imagining of the anarchists as philosopher-demons. It's easy to forget just how scary anarchists could seem at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the previous quarter-century, they had killed a French President, an American President, and the Russian Tsar, and had bombed the Royal Greenwich Observatory, near London. (The same score now--Sarkozy, Bush, Putin, and the London Eye--and we'd all be under martial law.) "Anarchism," for Chesterton, has the same resonance that "terrorism" has for English writers like Amis and Hitchens exactly a century later: it represents a kind of vengeful, all-devouring nihilism that is assumed to be pervasive and--this is the crucial thing--profoundly seductive, sweeping through whole classes, of intellectuals, or immigrants, or, especially, immigrant intellectuals. Chesterton's portrait of Syme could be the portrait of the "awakened" post-9/11 liberal: "He did not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion. [...]"

If the parallel between Chesterton and Hitchens et al. holds, then let's see if we can extend it. On the one hand, at least as far as this article shows, Chesterton essentially missed a phenomenon that was actually hugely seductive to intellectuals and was going to exert actual world-historical influence on an unparalleled scale, namely, international Communism. On the other hand, his ideas wound up being pretty closely parallel to another world-historical force that represented a much more significant and systematic nihilism, namely, fascism. I think the second point is pretty clear in Hitchens' case. The question would be whether there is a parallel for the first in our circumstances.

A Question

2008-07-05T12:42:00.002-05:00

Did I intend to be a writer or an academic?

Friday Afternoon Confessional: José Can You See

2008-07-04T00:00:00.003-05:00

I confess that I'm not clear on the extent to which my allergies actually did disable me this week, as opposed to providing a ready excuse not to get much work done. I confess that in any event, my writing process is going much more slowly than I had anticipated.

I confess that this bumper sticker looks more and more prescient lately. I confess that I probably would've predicted this kind of thing back in January, but then I drank the Obama Kool-Aid.

I confess that the vicious cycle of hovering over the computer "checking" things is very difficult to break.

I confess that I want to write an academic article about Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Special TV Offers

2008-07-03T11:03:00.002-05:00

Is there any possible mechanism by which they could know if you were calling within ten minutes of the end of the commercial? Especially one cheap enough to pay for itself by denying callers their bonus items? I suppose that throwing in something worth $100 for free does add up.

Degrees of Racism

2008-07-02T09:27:00.012-05:00

SEK's latest post mentions the fact that Jack Bauer often finds himself trying to disarm bombs planted by a "dark foreigner." That prompted a question: is it actually more racist that the dark foreigners are almost always acting on behalf of some evil white person?

Wednesday Sex: Ejaculatio Praecox

2008-07-02T08:03:00.003-05:00

So, er, I basically did this week's sex post yesterday, over at poetix, and now I'm all spent. If anyone wants to do a Weblog-exclusive sex post today they're welcome to. I'm just going to curl up and have a little snooze now...

Tuesday Hatred: O Canada, O Canada

2008-07-01T00:01:00.003-05:00

I hate my allergies. This year, the trend seems to be away from extreme symptoms and more toward simply draining me of all energy and motivation.

I hate the fear that wells up in me whenever I think seriously about the academic job market. Everyone assures me that I'll "be fine," and hopefully they're right, but going a year or two without getting a real job would be a major blow to my emotional health -- not only because of the lack of recognition from the big Other, but because it's tough to imagine continuing my present financial condition indefinitely. I suppose that once I actually finish the degree, my desire to minimize hours will at least slacken somewhat.

I hate that the trucking company my dad works for shut down without warning this weekend. He is guardedly optimistic that he'll be able to find something else relatively quickly, but that is a very scary thing to have happen at that stage of his life.

I hate that our whole system is still based on the model of the 1950s and 60s, where loyalty to a company was rewarded with essentially lifetime employment, and that so much of that system is actively destructive in the era of mass layoffs and "flexible" labor. The health care "system" is a great example of that.

I hate that there are people in the US who are even seriously considering voting for a Republican in the upcoming election, much less people absolutely committed to doing so. What more could the Republicans possibly fuck up to dissuade these people? Would accidentally nuking a US city be enough? It probably depends on the city, now that I think about it.

I hate the thought that I would ever forget about love.

A Naive Question on Mugabe

2008-06-29T14:13:00.002-05:00

Why have the election at all? At the moment it became clear that Mugabe would use violence to coerse people to vote for him and especially once the opposition candidate dropped out, he had effectively maintained his hold on power -- so why go through the farce of an election and inauguration ceremony?

Another Point about Torture

2008-06-28T09:49:00.002-05:00

Bob Hebert writes about torture, continuing his long streak of addressing the most important issues while being almost completely ignored. His arguments were familiar to me, and they are more than enough to convince any reasonable person that torture should never be allowed.

I did think of an additional point, however -- at some point, these "bad apples" are going to return to civilian life. A good number of them will likely go into some form of law enforcement. Do you really want someone who sodomized a prisoner with a broomstick, forced a prisoner to howl like a dog while urinating on him, etc., etc., putting handcuffs on you?

The Primal Forces of Nature

2008-06-27T14:42:00.003-05:00

A classic scene from Network, which I recently watched:

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Caring is Creepy

2008-06-27T00:01:00.002-05:00

I confess that I have read as many contemporary works on my dissertation topic as I am able to handle for now and that I want to begin an initial draft of the first chapter. I confess that the accelerated dissertation schedule I have set for myself alternately seems to be insane and to be the only way for me to maintain my sanity.

I confess that the standard dissertation format, at least in theology -- in which one plows through chapter after chapter of summary of the recent debate, then enjoys the release valve of the final "constructive" chapter, which in any rational system would be the beginning of the book rather than the (tenuously connected) end of it -- seems to be pretty soul-crushing for all involved.

I confess that I'm getting fatigued from reading Agamben, though I may well be reading his masterwork.

I confess that I'm not eating enough fruits and vegetables. I confess that in the two weeks since I "started jogging," I have gone jogging three times.

I confess that while out with a friend on Tuesday night I suddenly fell into a spell of intense loneliness, tinged with despair. It remained consistent all day Wednesday as well, dissipating somewhat on Thursday. I confess that writing about it here appears not to have helped.

Updated: Postcard Life Stories

2008-06-26T14:43:00.006-05:00

Hey.

I wanted to tell you that author of three novels Michael Kimball is doing a thing that is awesome.

He is writing people's biographies on postcards. He will do you. He wants to. Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard).

Daniel Trask, author of two novels, might get into trouble for DMR, his book about taking retards to the zoo. Apparently, the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation isn't happy about it.

A Googleplex

2008-06-26T14:42:00.000-05:00

I notice that one can add an RSS thread for Google Reader -- presumably one's own list of posts -- to Google Reader.

I was one click away from doing it out of curiosity, but then decided against it. I didn't want to risk creating an infinite regress situation that would swamp my account, Google's servers, and ultimately the Internet as a whole.

Amazing

2008-06-26T10:40:00.002-05:00

Via the Advanced Theory Blog, I came across this absolutely brilliant remix of Radiohead's "Nude." It defies any description that will do it much justice. Just watch.

Obama's at the country club, looking for the real killers

2008-06-25T13:58:00.000-05:00

"Obama's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by" (Karl Rove).

"The key to the statement is that in the image he is with 'a beautiful date.' Not Michelle Obama .... When you think of a "beautiful date" specifically at a country club, do you picture an African-American woman? Would Rove's target audience? Or do you picture him there, a black man, smoking a cigarette indoors at a country club, with a white woman on his arm?"
(HW at Talking Points Memo)

What you picture is O.J. Simpson at the country club with Nicole -- or, more recently, O.J. with a different white woman at the country club where he's looking for "the real killers", the way Obama will be using ineffectual police measures to find the terrorists.

Fortunately, the other black man in America's country clubs is Tiger Woods. But for that, Rove's meme would have won the election. Give him points for virtuosity and effort.

Wednesday Sex: Americans Aint Getting None!

2008-06-25T02:01:00.008-05:00

[This shameless attempt to generate irritated comments is brought to you this week by Infinite Thought, who is currently a sexy vampire, like Drusilla in Buffy, having recently been diagnosed as being allergic to the, er, sun].

Despite Elvis, despite all your bleach-blonde hardcore, and despite all that geo-political muscle-flexing, it is quite clear that Americans aren't really having sex at all, or, if you are, aren't doing it properly. You also can't flirt very well and don't understand insinuation. I blame one thing: the CV. The constant demand to sell your very being in every possible social situation leaves no room for any other mode of address than 'Hi, I'm Chuck. I've been with Shell for five years and before that I was with Evil Arms Corp Inc following my MBA from Harvard.' I imagine sex between Americans, when they ever do manage it, is interspersed with one or both partners getting up at various points to sit at their laptops and work on their employment history.

The economic precariousness of American life combined with the post-puritanical imperative that all work is good and that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough is not entirely the fault of its good citizens. Indeed, there is much to be said for the pioneering expansiveness of hard-working Americans, with their no-nonsense friendliness and direct modes of address. Don't misunderstand me: I like Americans. I just don't know how one would sleep with one. Would it be a business-type arrangement? A form of exercise? A short-cut to a job offer? Something to put on the CV?

Part of this sexlessness involves the decision about what a body is for. Half of you seem to have decided that it is a machine for processing fat and have turned yourselves into lard-factories for that purpose alone. The other half seem to be on a bid for immortality with levels of health-fanaticism that make Arnie in The Running Man look like Homer Simpson. Neither of these corporeal cults are sexy. I mean, I'm not claiming that British folk don't eat too many pies and look like pasty, rotten-toothed minor Dickens characters, but after a couple of pints we are pretty sexy, at least we think we are, and therefore probably are, a bit.

Americans, because they are remarkably consistent as characters whether drunk or not, are less able to create the excitement that arises from a previously rude person becoming friendly, or vice versa. Your frat-boy stripper-raping jocks would do exactly the same horrible things after twenty beer-stands as after three (besides, your beer has no alcohol). Your whiny, inappropriate-sense-of-self-deserve women would still bitch and moan in bed in the same way as they would outside of it: 'he didn't even bother looking for my G-spot! Lo-ser!'

Still, perhaps the impending global economic crisis will create great roving hordes of desperate, ambiguous sexy Americans who'll do anything for the kind of approval no longer available in the job market. It's the only way to break the tyranny of sex-as-work, you crazy puritans!

Tuesday Hatred: Strangely warmed

2008-06-24T00:01:00.006-05:00

I hate allergies. I hate it when allergies make the prospect of a casual stroll to enjoy the nice weather seem too exhausting to contemplate.

I hate having been such a spendthrift of late. I hate that I still don't have any teaching work for next fall. I hate how bad a lot of academics are about answering e-mail. I hate the many inexplicable delays that characterize academic life more generally.

I hate that several packages have yet to arrive: two books I ordered from Amazon, plus additional copies of my Zizek book.

I hate it when several figures from my past come back in rapid succession.

I hate it when people say "the surge" was a success -- and even more when those same people take that made-up success as evidence that we'd be stupid to leave.

And you should also love, if you have it in you.

Weird!

2008-06-23T17:49:00.002-05:00

From the front page of the NY Times website: apparently Obama has yet to appear at a mosque and asked a Muslim representative not to speak on his behalf at one. I have absolutely no idea why this would be the case.

Soviet-style

2008-06-23T13:59:00.003-05:00

CR alerts us of a Bloomberg column in which it is averred that opponents of suburban sprawl "would apparently love nothing more than for the population to be confined to Soviet-style concrete-block high-rises and be forced to take state-run streetcars to their little jobs at the mill."

Let me say that I, for one, would be in favor of Soviet-style concrete-block high-rises and state-run streetcars (are there other kinds of streetcars?). As one who grew up in the suburbs, I often felt confined to my own home. It was spacious, of course, but at the same time rather lonely. Presumably in the Soviet system, I could've had easier access to friends.

Perhaps there would've even been some type of make-shift yard or playground generously supplied by the authorities. We did have a nice swingset with monkey-bars, etc., in our yard, but again -- it wasn't as much fun for just me and my sister. Even if we didn't have many friends in our stark, concrete building -- nothing really matches the hominess of cheap drywall, after all -- we would've had access to the aforementioned socialized transit system.

Indeed, even after becoming adults, we would've been able to get around without needing to personally operate a piece of expensive and quickly-depreciating heavy machinery on which we'd need to pay exhorbitant insurance premiums mandated by state law. Perhaps that trade-off would've meant working fewer hours at the good old mill! More time for family, for friends, for repainting the concrete walls. Hell, more money for paint! Though one would assume that the only color of paint available would be grey.

Oh, how I sometimes long for the stark Soviet upbringing! I imagine that it would've been possible to give people simple and rational directions to my dwelling place, rather than saying, "Yeah, go up Deer Creek Lane and then kind of follow the curve around. Then turn right and follow that curve to the left, and we're the fourth identical house on the right. It's the one with the nice big yard we never fucking use because we're working so many hours, to pay for the landscaping that we put in to keep our neighbors from bitching about our ugly yard -- which we can't actually verify that they're doing, because we never talk to them."

Sacrifice

2008-06-22T09:54:00.003-05:00

Even at this late date, one often hears pundits speak whistfully of some alternate history where Bush would've asked the American people to "sacrifice" -- either after 9/11 in general or specifically with regard to Iraq. Normally the idea is that there is something morally beneficial inherent to "sacrifice," even in service of a bullshit war. Frank Rich's column today includes a somewhat strange variation on the theme:

Perhaps if Americans had been asked for shared sacrifice at the war’s inception, including a draft, they would be in 1968-ish turmoil now. But they weren’t, and they aren’t. In 2008, the Vietnam analogy doesn’t hold. The center does.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Would it be better, in Rich's mind, if the American people were in turmoil over the war? If we follow the Vietnam analogy, it seems that the "sacrifice" would incline at least a significant majority of people to be more receptive to McCain's promise of victory -- after all, we don't want to have done all this "sacrificing" for nothing!

To the extent that I can decipher his intention, it does seem that Rich thinks "turmoil" would be a truer, more authentic reaction than the complete tuning-out that he is discussing in the rest of the column. Even for a war opponent, it would appear, "sacrifice" has the magical property of making things more deeply meaningful.

I predict that no matter who wins the presidential election, we're going to see a lot of commentary calling on the new president to break with Bush by calling for "shared sacrifice" -- on climate change, on Iraq, whatever. We just need "sacrifice," damn it! We need our president to preside over "sacrifice!" Bush's mistake wasn't lying our way into war, constantly defying the constitution and the law, instituting torture -- no, it was leaving us to our sordid little lives, failing to give us meaning through "sacrifice."

Making Sexism Sexy Again

2008-06-21T00:05:00.002-05:00

A recurring motif in recent movies -- particularly Judd Apatow-brand film products -- is that if men fulfill their most basic human duties, such as treating others like human beings, displaying basic competence in any activity, etc., women will fall in love with them. It's not even that this marginal effort will allow the woman to finally see the diamond in the rough that the man really is -- it's just that there literally are no better options out there.

On the one hand, the most likely interpretation of this phenomenon is sexism. On the other hand, maybe we men have unconsciously colluded to depress expectations to such a degree that these movies turn out to be fair-minded sociological portraits -- yet more proof that homosexuality is not a choice.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Profound Mumblings

2008-06-20T00:01:00.003-05:00

I confess that I walk around my neighborhood assessing people's lawns. I confess that though my current landlord takes much better care of the lawn than my previous one, I still sometimes wish he would edge. I confess that sometimes when I look at the huge field of a school along the Brown Line, I daydream about mowing it. My summers of lawn care have permanently scarred me.

My grocery bagging days have produced a similar effect. I confess that the dedicated baggers always do a shitty job (two items per bag! throw the pasta sauce in with the bananas!), but the cashiers normally use some basic common sense.

I confess that I'm not good on the phone. People always seem to assume I'm upset or depressed, especially if they don't know me well. Text messaging is really the way to go for me, and I confess that I quickly became addicted, even before getting my phone with deployable keyboard.

The Ultimate ATM

2008-06-19T10:25:00.003-05:00

At a bank near my apartment, there is an ATM that formerly asked you to input the desired amount "in multiples of $1.00." I normally inputted an amount such that the withdrawal and the fee would add up to a round number, making myself one of the few people with exact change in a world full of $20s.

One weekend, the ATM was shut down for repairs, and when it came back, it asked you to input the desired amount "in multiples of $5." It was disappointing, but better than nothing, and I still strategized my withdrawal amounts to get $5s. Then yesterday I went to the ATM and inputted $57.00, apparently thinking of what the total withdrawal would be with the fee included. Imagine my surprise when it gave me the exact amount -- it had been capable of giving ones the whole time, and the message to input the amount "in multiples of $5" was apparently just a polite request.

Wednesday Sex: Design for Fantasy

2008-06-18T11:39:00.004-05:00

Guest post by Owen Hatherley, he of Sit Down Man, You're A Bloody Tragedy, amongst other locations.

Lost Girls is Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's pornographic/fairytale version of The Magic Mountain, in which Alice (formerly of Wonderland), Wendy (who used to knock around with Peter Pan) and Dorothy (for whom there is no place like home) all find themselves holed up in a Jugendstil hotel on the eve of the First World War, and spend their time recalling their previous adventures and generally being extremely louche. Today, when incessant artistic plagiarism and cross-referencing are so rife, it's bracing to find something which uses the past as a spur to making strange rather than smugly filing away old styles in the continuum. Lost Girls is an amalgam of all the fin de siecle fixations with aberrant sexuality, opiated decadence and ornamented obsessive elegance, on the eve of their destruction and replacement with a masculine machine aesthetic.

The book does this, interestingly enough, by using plagiarism as estrangement. The hotel proprietor leaves in each room a White Book (cunningly concealed in one of those perennially unread hotel Bibles) in which subtly reworked explicit versions of Oscar Wilde, Pierre Louys and Guillame Apollinaire are accompanied by hardcore parodies of decadent artists and/or lithographers like Aubrey Beardsley, Franz von Bayros, Alphonse Mucha and Egon Schiele (who have little in common other than their sinuous lines and prurience) - Alice uses this, amongst other things, to coax her friends out of the conformist identities they've set up for themselves. Of course, when questioned by Alice (a part-time pornographer herself) the proprietor strenuously denies these are forgeries. The book intersperses these morphings of original works with Gebbie's own stylistic promiscuousness to the point where they blur into one another. Decadent art provides a way for them to blur their fantasies and their experiences to the point where the gap between one and the other seems irrelevant.

'...I mean of course it's all terribly decadent, wallowing in the senses like that, all pleasure and no purpose. Everything just decoration and icing sugar...'

Wendy, who has attempted to become a suburban housewife after her days frolicking with Peter and his Lost Boys, is married to a Harold, a (seemingly asexual) closet case, who disapproves somewhat of the hotel architecture, which has many similarities with the work of Otto Wagner - a box where every surface is filled with tendrils and phantasmagoric embellishments. He dismisses this effeminacy to the proprietor as mere 'noodles', and continues: 'if you're talking about real artists for our time, you can't beat the chappies who design our ships'. As well a dullard and closet case, Harold is clearly a closet Corbusian, his gripes seeming like a declaration from L'Espirit Nouveau. Or even a Vorticist, the actual contemporary art of 1914: and with Lewis he would have disdained decadence and 'the mid-Victorian languish of the neck'. Lost Girls draws on an art that was already finished by 1900, and Cubism and Futurism are nowhere to be seen - the only concessions to the early 20th century are the odd lifting from Matisse and (of course) an orgy at the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps. The line of Lost Girls is nearly always curved, sinuous, no cubistic sharpness or rectilinear geometry to be seen. The art of the 1890s, still present in the minds of these older women (ranging from their 30s to 60s) holds out unfilled possibilities, of a world of untrammeled fantasy, of hallucinatory, languid sexuality unencumbered by work or by war (although colonialism and the approaching catastrophe are always lurking at the corner of the frame).

For the Lost Girls, then, all that will come after - from the war onwards - is by implication an effacement of fantasy in favour of a machinic empiricism. The irrationalist line, meanwhile, serves to take the characters out of the everyday lives they've imposed upon their fantasies, and return them to their real desires, those that they have to hide in polite society. Whether or not their fantasies could be imposed upon a machine aesthetic, meanwhile, is another matter. In short, can we imagine a Constructivist pornography, or would it have to be tied up with all the things - power and sadism, mainly - which are absent from the girls' fantasies?

A Literary Organ

2008-06-17T17:41:00.003-05:00

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that The Valve, a literary blog founded to help advance the discussion of literature, has -- after just over three years of existence -- finally decided to engage in an extended discussion of a particular work of literature, namely, George Eliot's Adam Bede. A bold choice, to be sure.

They appear to have set themselves a reasonably leisurely schedule, so I'm sure that we'll still be able to count on all the philosophical quibbling, pop-cultural analysis, and really fucking long posts by Joseph Kugelmass that we've come to expect from the site over the years.

Tuesday Hatred: True Crime

2008-06-17T08:59:00.003-05:00

I hate alarm clocks with overly aggressive snooze features. I hate it when the mail for the whole building comes in one big unsorted pile. I hate buying an externally beautiful red pepper and finding that it's rotten on the inside -- though doing so did teach my a valuable moral lesson.

I hate John McCain. I hate his horrifying grimace:

I hate to think what this campaign season would look like if Mitt "I'm quitting so the Democrat terrorists won't win" Romney were the nominee.

Now go love, you hateful, petty bastards!

Antiheroes

2008-06-16T15:46:00.002-05:00

Is George Saunders this generation's Kurt Vonnegut? If so, he needs to grow a better beard. Barring that, he has a great piece of prose in the most recent The New Yorker. Complete with one of the better closing lines that magazine has seen in years.

Worst Bloomsday Ever!

2008-06-16T13:21:00.001-05:00

What will the blogosphere do for the four to six weeks before Ogged inevitably ends his latest retirement?

A Question on Taxi Driver [SPOILER ALERT!!!]

2008-06-15T16:35:00.002-05:00

You know that part after the violent bloodbath, where there's the letter from Iris's parents and the newspaper clippings about how he's a hero, then he's fine and gives Betsy a ride -- we're to understand that as some kind of fantasy he's experiencing as he dies, right? If it's considered "real" within the frame of the movie, then that's just ridiculous.

Happy Father's Day

2008-06-15T13:08:00.002-05:00

On this joyous day, when fathers across our great nation and, indeed, all around the world are receiving neckties and Tom Wolfe novels from their adoring offspring, I have only one question for my many illegitimate children: Would it have killed you bastards to call me?

I understand that the situation is complicated by the fact that I have made sure that your respective mothers do not know my phone number or, in many cases, my name or facial appearance, but the Lord rewards those who do the research necessary to the appropriate display of filial piety (cf. Judges 3:20-25).

Remember They Might Be Giants?

2008-06-14T17:54:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite TMBG hits is "Kiss Me, Son of God." Searching YouTube for a video, I found this anime video, which is actually pretty well-done:

This video is less well-done -- it appears to replace the audio for a scene from Total Recall with the song, with no editing whatsoever. A strange project, surely, but perhaps not as strange as this slideshow of Lenin photos accompanied by "I Will Always Love You".

The fact that I've linked that Lenin video before seems to me to be a sufficient pretext for returning to another classic Weblog link, my favorite essay on Heidegger and ancient Egyptian religion, "Autofellatio and Ontology." It was originally given as a public lecture, but YouTube unfortunately does not appear to have the footage.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Star-Studded

2008-06-13T00:00:00.003-05:00

I confess that reading this interview with the creators of a softer world made me want to start a collaborative online art project, but Brad wasn't online at the time so I gave up on the idea. I confess that this one is one of my favorites, a trait I likely share with virtually every fan of the site.

I confess that my supposed desire to create a Weblog book may be part of my ever-more-elaborate plan to procrastinate on my dissertation. Recent steps in that direction have included the following:

Learning a new language to read a book that will soon be available in a language I already know.
Starting an intensive program to learn the vocabulary for a language that I need only for the sake of one text in my dissertation.
Obtaining new piano sheet music in my first attempt to learn a new piece in over three years.
Vaguely expanding my cooking repertoire.

I confess that my initial effort to get out of my rut of eating virtually the same thing every time I cook for myself resulted in eating the same thing two nights in a row -- penne alfredo with spinach and mushrooms. I confess that I proudly characterized this meal as "semi-civilized" to more than one friend. I confess that I've had some chicken breasts in the freezer for like six months and don't know whether I can still use them.

I confess that I have still never had bánh mì, even though Mike recently discovered that we live like three blocks from a Vietnamese bakery. I confess that I sometimes miss Kankakee's fabled Chinese buffet, Great Wall King, which must mean I'm still a suburban midwesterner underneath my sophisticated urban trappings -- and the trappings aren't even that sophisticated!

It's time for another "Good Idea, Bad Idea."

2008-06-12T14:47:00.003-05:00

Good idea: taking up jogging to promote health and wellness.

Bad idea: jogging for the first time in years when it's 87 degrees out.

Bonus nostalgia:

On My Greatest Hits

2008-06-12T00:00:00.004-05:00

Sad but true: I've been thinking about making a book out of The Weblog. I've talked to Adam Robinson about doing it through Publishing Genius; I've e-mailed John Emerson to discuss the possibility of self-publishing. My motivation is to bring a kind of closure. I wouldn't shut the blog down, because it's settled into a pleasant routine, but at the same time I've been thinking for a couple years that my best writing in the blog genre is behind me.

The only step I hadn't taken was reviewing some of the archives, and tonight, more or less at random, I did. In some posts, I espoused some opinions I no longer hold, though that problem isn't as acute as it was with my ancient archives from The Homepage. The main issue, though, is that there is such an adolescent quality to my personal writings. Instead of trying to develop a non-adolescent way of writing about them, I just stopped -- and the loss of the "personal" posts, even more than the shifting of "academic" materials over to AUFS, probably accounts for the shift in the character of this blog.

One might also say that the division into two blogs eliminated some of my more speculative philosophical-theological posts, but it's hard to tell whether the division was cause or effect. I wrote a few posts in the old style on AUFS, notably this one, but as I begin to develop my intellectual project in a more formal way -- a project that is not discontinuous with what I've written on this blog over the years -- I have been much less inclined simply to "throw stuff out there" in quite the same way. Yes, I could be talking a lot about my dissertation project, for instance, but I don't think that doing so would actually benefit me in the same way that thinking out loud on the blog used to.

The changes in my life that have been most reflected on the blog -- gaining some distance on my more adolescent struggles and starting to chart out my thinking and writing on a larger scale -- have been unambiguously positive, and I'm much happier on average than I was when I was producing my "best" blog material. At the same time, reading the old stuff made me sad, made me want to somehow recapture that moment. Perhaps I'm describing nothing more than simple nostalgia, which is harmless enough. Yet I wonder if perhaps the best way to gain closure is to acknowledge that a particular door has already been closed for a while now.

Wednesday Sex Addendum Link

2008-06-11T13:51:00.002-05:00

The Worst Things I've Done to My Partner During Sex

Wednesday Sex: Andrea Dworkin

2008-06-11T09:07:00.016-05:00

One of many memorable phrases in Andrea Dworkin's Ice and Fire is her description of a female lover who "fucks like a gang of boys". Dworkin is generally seen as promoting, in opposition to the "metaphysics of power" implicit in penetrative intercourse, a kind of diffuse eroticism of caresses, and this in turn is generally construed as lacking in gusto, the sort of thing one might go in for if one lacked the manly vigour to deliver a good hard poke where it was needed. But the sex in Dworkin's fiction is seldom less than shattering; even the bad sex, of which there is rather a lot, is often fiercely and disturbingly eroticised. Near the start of the Ice and Fire, a group of children play a game called "witch" which involves boys chasing girls; if you're caught, you get put in a cage. Dworkin vividly describes the thrill of running, being chased, wanting to be caught and wanting not to be caught: the adrenaline rush produced by the dread of capture. It's evident that this is a fun game, a game the girls want to play, even if they might want to be in pursuit rather than pursued from time to time.

Dworkin's problem is not that female sexuality is diffuse, placid and affectionate while male sexuality is selfish, genitally focused and violent; her sexual politics do not amount to a demand that men adopt the "female" sexual persona so that we can all flop around together in lacy undergarments cooing like soft-porn lesbians. The problem is that this separation of roles, which filters the components of generic sexuality and assigns them arbitrarily by gender, is ideologically subservient to the metaphysics of male domination: it insinuates that metaphysics into the most intimate bodily experience.

A secondary problem is that Dworkin more or less wholeheartedly buys into the notion that sexual pleasure is self-shattering or dislocating: that it dissolves the body's boundaries, releasing it from its fictive integrity. This self-shattering is ambiguous: it may be construed as the liberation of desire, the realisation of some deeper and more complex self concealed beneath the crust of habit; or it may be construed as destructive of selfhood, as annihilation. Dworkin argues that there is a tradition of male sexual ideology (manifest in both pornography and scientific writings on sexuality) that represents women's sexual pleasure as destructive of selfhood, as submission to a superior force which objectifies and pulverises, and that this view of female sexuality is not compatible with a view of women as sexual (or political) subjects. By contrast, where male (heterosexual) literature characterises men's sexual pleasure as self-shattering, it represents this shattering either as liberatory or as wilfully self-annihilating ("expense of spirit in a waste of shame"), rather than being-annihilated: there is comparatively little in this tradition to suggest that men's authentic sexual being is realised by their being pummelled into oblivion.

Where contemporary feminists tend to take issue with Dworkin is over the experiential character of intercourse: the idea that fucking men weakens your bodily and political integrity (the one grounding or shadowing the other) doesn't fit with their self-experience as (or aspiration to be) both sexually and politically active and confident. That fucking women them diminishes them (and, also, that being fucked and being diminished by being fucked are natural for women, are what they're there for) is evidently an idea that misogynists have about women - but it would be oddly self-hating for women to have the same idea about themselves.

Dworkin's response to objections along these lines was to insist that, whatever private libidinal spaces people might carve out for themselves, the political reality of male dominance meant that the misogynistic conception of women's sexuality had been institutionalised, was continually promoted in the guise of sexual "fantasy", and needed to be confronted at every turn.

Finish the sentence...!!!

2008-06-11T07:37:00.005-05:00

The best time to blog is...

Penguins only ever jump when...

In French Agamben reads like...

Hilary Clinton's handbag was found on...

When Boris was in Somalia and caught the flu he said to me that...

あまり大きな声では言えないけど、あの人はうちの姉の．．．

Where in the world did you hear...

Collective action is the best solution for...

Tuesday Hatred: Perculsus

2008-06-10T00:00:00.012-05:00

I hate this gloomy weather, but even more, I hate what it does to my mood and motivation levels.

I hate it when something well-paid is also boring, producing contradictory incentives. I hate the vague sense that the petty insecurities cultivated in academia will never fully go away.

I hate that the only solution to having had too much coffee appears to be having even more coffee. I hate that it took me nearly a year of living in this apartment to figure out that the strange smell that periodically arises in the kitchen stems from the dishwasher getting full.

I hate the recurring "villain" character on Law and Order: Criminal Intent. I hate that there's nothing on TV and won't be for months.

I hate that the linking culture in blogs seems to be all but dead.

I hate that Tuesday Love has been so unreliable of late.

So, um....

2008-06-09T18:53:00.003-05:00

I changed the template. I know it will be a shock since the last major renovation came while I was still living in Bourbonnais. I believe it can still be improved, and I welcome tips (aside from just changing it back). In particular, if someone can produce a new stylesheet that will make the two columns on the right more elegant, I welcome that.

Poetry Offer!

2008-06-09T14:02:00.002-05:00

I am writing a book of poetry to be published by Narrow House Press. It will be out in the winter. It will be really awesome.

This book, it is going to be made up of poems about people. Here is what I have so far:

Elisabeth Elliot the evangelist
my grandmother Erma Ruth Rogers Tyner
Helene Cixous the post-structural feminist
a crazy guy I met on the street
Frederic Law Olmstead who designed Central Park
Xanana Gusmao the PM of East Timor
Joe Louis the boxer
Mario Mendoza whom they named The Mendoza Line after
and Soren Aabye Kierkegaard the strange Dane

I am also taking requests, so if you think of someone I should write about: comment away. If a poem about that person makes it into the book, I will acknowledge you as the originator of that person. Why not?

Language Update

2008-06-09T12:52:00.003-05:00

On Saturday, I got fed up with the huge number of readings in my Italian book and decided to skip through only to the grammar sections. The verb conjugations and other grammatical points were eerily similar to French. Also, with some exceptions, the vocabulary seemed to be largely a matter of picking up on the different spelling patterns in Italian, which I got through the aforementioned excessive reading passages.

(A sidenote: the book I used, From Italian to English, left much to be desired. The explanations were unclear, the readings did not closely match the grammar, and the vocab help was haphazard at best. The guy would also just plop in multi-page lists into the middle of chapters: every irregular past participle, for instance. If Italian is the first language you're trying to learn to read, this book would be a disaster. Coming at it with knowledge of French and Latin, though, it was adequate, and I assume that most grad students would be more likely to be learning Italian as a supplemental language rather than their first one. Overall, the one-star review on Amazon is generous.)

Sunday morning, I worked through the first few pages of the Agamben book that motivated this bizarre quest to learn Italian, and I have posted the results here, in what I hope will be the first in a series of posts giving you, the blog-reader, an inside track into cutting-edge untranslated theologically-inflected political theory.

It brought me a feeling of joy to successfully read Agamben in the original, albeit slowly. I wonder if learning a language for a particular author, rather than for purposes of general erudition, tends to be more effective.

Language Overload

2008-06-07T16:18:00.003-05:00

I fear I am reaching a breaking point in my language acqusition. This sensation is slightly over-dramatized because I am on a crash-course to get through an Italian grammar book, a task requiring over two hours a day at the pace I've set myself. I am taking this on when I have just barely started in on actually reading a Greek text and when my German has felt like it is in an even worse state of disrepair than usual.

Why am I doing this to myself? The main reason is that I want to get some working knowledge of all the primary languages I'll have to deal with in scholarship before leaving graduate school. I may be able to maintain them, at least to the point where I'll be able to get them back up to a usable level whenever the occasion comes up, but taking on a new language after getting a job seems unlikely, at least for the first few years.

My worry is that I've overextended and set myself up for failure. At least the Latin and Greek will more or less take care of themselves in the course of my dissertation research -- and I'm enjoying the convenience of learning vocab for both through the Supermemo software.

Getting a decent German vocab list for Supermemo seems like the holy grail for me at this point, because my real problem is vocab rather than grammar. I may ultimately have to make my own, perhaps based on a book of theological German vocab that I got out of the library (it includes many philosophical terms as well). But then there's the danger of overextending my Supermemo time -- though it seems to get down to like 5 minutes a day of repetitions after you get over the initial hump. Having gone through the very basic Greek vocab list before sitting down to read was a huge help, in large part because the memorization process naturally led me to break down words into their constituent parts, which is also crucial for German.

Then of course, at some point I need to figure out a way to learn how to actually speak one of these languages.

First Jesus, now Batman?

2008-06-06T22:29:00.002-05:00

Thinking about the new Batman movie and the new franchise generally, I have come up with the basic plot for a future sequel that introduces Robin. First of all, as will become clear, this plot absolutely requires that Gael García Bernal be cast as Robin.

I don't know how Robin should end up being taken under Bruce Wayne's wing, but I think he needs to come from a lower-class background -- maybe there could a scene where he disrupts one of Bruce Wayne's parties, illustrating that he's a kind of foreign intrusion of energy into an otherwise hermetically sealed world. After he leaves in a huff, Bruce goes up to his room to comfort him, Robin is initially hostile -- but it's because he's embarrassed. You see, he's developed something of a fascination with Bruce, and his impetuous nature leads him to make a move. Bruce is shocked, but receptive. They start an affair -- preferably secret, to work with the whole secret identity angle, etc.

So Batman and Robin are gay -- this is no big surprise. The elegance of this solution, though, is that it explains why Robin is out there putting his life on the line with Batman -- he's doing it out of love. As I said, I haven't worked out how Robin comes to be in need of housing at the Wayne mansion, but it probably shouldn't be because his parents are murdered -- both because that would presumably make him underage and, more importantly, because it would heighten the contrast between Batman's grim quest for vengeance and Robin's youthful exuberance. Also, it would be elegant in that the same character trait that caused Robin to make an advance would also lead him to be implacable in his quest to find out what it is that Bruce is doing every night, as well as to decide that he needs to participate -- probably through some scene where he ends up coming along and his life is endangered. Batman says: "Never do that to me again!" Robin retorts: "Since I'm coming along with you from now on, I guess you'll need to train me so I can fend for myself!" (The dialogue could use some work.)

Probably Batman needs to be really grudging about the whole thing, until Robin finally proves himself by saving Batman's life in the course of the dramatic final confrontation with the villain.

I totally think it would work. America's ready for a gay Batman, and I'm ready for the millions of dollars this would bring me.

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Indulgences

2008-06-06T00:01:00.000-05:00

I confess that I got a new phone and might actually be in love with it. I confess that having used an ancient phone for so long has likely kept me from fully understanding its inadequacies. I confess that I signed far too long of a contract to get it for free (after mail-in rebate). I confess that the whole notion of a mail-in rebate is so transparently a rip-off that I can't believe people have put up with it for so long.

I confess that I have occasionally been staying out way too late recently, and weirdly, it almost always seems to happen when I'm out with one particular person.

I confess that I have begun a crash course in reading Italian, all so that I can read an Agamben book that will be available in French in a couple months. I confess that I am not enjoying reading the contemporary literature surrounding my dissertation project, though I am relieved to find that my initial intuition that my angle is unique has been borne out thus far.

I confess that in my quest to find adjunct teaching work, I got some wrong information and e-mailed my CV and cover letter to a retired professor who was reportedly on her deathbed.

Getting Rid of Clinton

2008-06-05T10:21:00.002-05:00

Obama's not really going to have to name her as his running mate, is he? One of the benefits of the coming election is that we get to get rid of a power-mad vice president -- if we're going to not only install another one, but also have a rogue former president regularly wandering the halls, then I don't know what to conclude but that the terrorists have won.