Dear Special Snowflake

To my faithful readers: This semester, I haven't been as direct and authoritative in the classroom as I should have been. The reaping time has arrived, and so I give you yet another "dear student" post. I imagine it will feel cathartic. 

Dear Student,

You are a special snowflake. But you do have to write a new draft, just like everyone else. You heard my instructions in class, and you may also have read them in my follow-up email or on our class website or in the special snowflake email I sent you. I don't know how to say it any more clearly: Write a new draft. Your first attempt was crap. 

Although you are a unique individual with outstanding potential, I'm not going to answer your email during the weekend. Even though you need my immediate response because you have a super important thing that you have to do instead of the work for my class. Sure. I'll give you an extension. You should get the opportunity to be the best you that you can be.

However, I did not cause your scholastic emergency. Let's face it: I'm going to hold this whole sorry episode against you. That's one of my special qualities.

A censory experience

This is fascinating, if a little elderly for the web (2005). Human Events.com, which claims that it's been "leading the Conservative Movement since 1944" [huh?], published a list of the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries, as identified by a "panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders."

You can imagine the top three, perhaps: The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and The Little Red Book. Das Kapital makes the list at number 6, following closely on the heels of The Kinsey Report and preceding The Feminine Mystique. Works by Dewey, Comte, Nietzsche, and John Maynard Keynes fill out the list.

 They've agreed on this socially and politically conservative list. It makes a kind of ideological sense, I suppose.

The Honorable Mention [huh?] includes works that confuse me in one of two ways: Either they should be on the list itself (e.g., What Is to Be Done by Lenin, Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir ) or it's unclear why they would be listed at all (e.g., works by Darwin, Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson).

A third puzzling category exists: I understand why Adorno, Foucault, B.F. Skinner, Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, and Freud would be on the list, but the books they chose to list for each author don't make a lot of sense. Regarding Foucault, why Madness and Civilization and not Discipline and Punish? Why Freud's Introduction to Psychanalysis and not The Psychopathology of Everyday Life or Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality or any book that Freud actually wrote and not a made-up title.

So I'm beginning a list of titles that should scare conservatives even more, starting with Georg Simmel's The Metropolis and Mental Life and Our Bodies, Ourselves. Care to add more?

Slightly better

I've been wanting a list of GOPers who are abandoning ship, so I started to make one, complete with quotations. 

Then, I found this, which gives more commentary than my list does. I'd add Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Buckley (who was basically fired for his endorsement), and George Will. Notable newspapers endorsing Obama include the notoriously anti-Democrat Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, The Boise Statesman, and The Salt Lake Tribune.  

But what I really, really want is a list of actual members of the party who aren't also in the media. Colin Powell, of course. And The Wall Street Journal claims that Bernanke endorsed Obama by praising an economic policy that looks like Obama's. Then I saw this delicious little treat, a list that includes Republican administrators and elected officials. Rumor has it that Sen. Hegel** isn't too far behind. 

Any additions to make?

------

** Yes, I meant Chuck Hagel, not the 19th century German philosopher.

On the apparent multiplication of things I don't know

Lately, I've been feeling a little dull. Here is an instantiation meant to reproduce this feeling:  

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a little story called "The Garden of the Forking Paths." (You can probably find it online.) The key mystery, if you can call it a mystery, surrounds Dr. Yu Tsun's ancestor, Ts'ui Pen, who undertook a double task: to write an intricate novel and to construct an equally intricate labyrinth. In both, everyone would lose his way. Someone murdered Ts'ui Pen before he completed the novel, and the labyrinth was never found. Other stuff happens in the story, which is quite good, but my chief interest is in this kernel of narrative uncertainty. 

Conventional narrative depicts a character making a decision that eliminates all previously available options. Borges presents the possibility of a world in which every option continues to exist simultaneously, each leading to unlimited future possibilities, some of which converge but for different reasons.

I've been waiting for feedback from my committee on material I gave them a month ago. As days pass, I imagine increasingly elaborate reasons for their silence. I also increasingly think of the things I should have addressed in the draft I gave them: race and slapstick, the myth of the persistence of vision, and sources that my sources referred to, and their sources, and so forth.

"The Garden of the Forking Paths" helps me think about the internal and textual problems I'm encountering. My mind attempts to contain all courses and recourses, while I struggle with the ongoing textual impossibility of tracking down all sources connected to any given bibliography. (Each source I trace contains within it its own bibliography, which I feel compelled to track down as well.)

All things stem from this philosophical dilemma. Clearly, no one can get it all. But it still makes me feel dull. 

This afternoon, around 2 pm

Me: So Paul [my advisor] made a joke about how I should be researching feverishly on the next part of the diss.

Sam: How's the research going?

Me: Meh. Right now I'm working on establishing the relationship between these little snickers minis and the size of my ass.

Sam: Do you think it's causal?

Love!

According to wired.com, Banksy, the infamous yet anonymous British graffitist, has hit NYC, and it sounds like his biggest statement yet. Wednesday marked the opening of The Village Pet Story and Charcoal Grill, an installment featuring anamatronic creatures that directly cross the line between animals and prepared food, among other boundaries. I'm talking hot dog hamsters here, people.

The Wooster Collective published a statement attributed to Banksy. I can't vouch for its provenance, but it's funny, so here's some of it:

I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and the sustainability of factory farming, but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing.

I think we all knows what that feels like.

Debate 2

The general consensus (as far as I can tell) is that Obama won the debate. Several moments of note won't get much replay, but McCain's gestures and body language said a lot. Sam pointed out McCain's gesture of "hey, get a load of this idiot" when Obama was talking about helping small-business owners affording health care insurance for employees. (See minute 49 of the debate.) I'm sure we viewers at home missed McCain's other sighs, grimaces, and physically awkward movements.

You know it's bad when the New York Times's editorial scolds McCain outright: "Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have been running one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember. They have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions—into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia." The editorial further asks that McCain's team offer a better solution than "inciting more division, anger, and hatred." 

Even the right-wing bloggers over at the conservative National Review have just about given up (e.g., Andy McCarthy says, "We have a disaster here"). By comparison, the current president's first campaign looks like a tea party.

I can't say I was energized by the candidates' standard talking points, won over by the odd forum style, or delighted by Tom Brokaw's seeming inability to umpire. But the news coverage today and last night point out how poorly McCain is doing, both in the debates and in the polling, while they show a calm Obama who is able to take a few shots of his own without aggression. Obama won the debate. Now let's see him win the election.

What I found

When I was looking for my measuring tape this morning, I made some odd discoveries. One of them was not finding the tape. Here are some things I did find:

• A foot-peddle for a sewing machine I no longer own, which I got rid of because I couldn't find its foot-peddle
• A foot-peddle for a sewing machine I do own but don't often use because I keep losing the foot-peddle
• My college seam ripper (identifiable by its aging masking-tape label)
• A roll of stitch-witch (excuse me, "interface tape")
• About a yard of elastic
• Some dress-maker's tracing paper and (in a separate location) my tracing wheel
• Several different kinds of rulers (metal, plastic, right-angle, hemming, fascist)
• Dozens of blank notepads, in various sizes
• A yard of material I once liked
• Cord for making trim, which I made into a make-shift measuring tape
• The memory that at one point in my life I really liked to sew
• A variety of bobby pins and barrettes
• A ratting comb
• Five highlighters

Amazing. Now, I'm going to misplace a five-dollar bill.

Re-learning an important lesson

When hugging a kitty, don't squeeze it too much around its middle.

Also, FYI: It's snowing on Mars!

Dear Student*

Dear Student: I'm pretty sure that the word you want is "undertow," not "under-toe." Also, when referring to a woman, one should not use the word "female" as a noun. An animal can be "a female," but a woman is not. In short, use the word "woman." Finally, when you send an email to me explaining that you're "not feeling well," don't ask me if you're going to miss "any information."

*Please note that I do not intend for the "Dear Student" posts to be read by my actual students. As such, I limit identifying details and never use a student's name or description. Furthermore, 

nearly every error or problem identified in the "Dear Student" posts comes up in my response to the student(s)'s work—albeit in a much different form. So it's not like I'm just making fun of my dumb students and not actually trying to teach them.

***I am instituting a new class policy, I've decided. Each student earns 25% of his or her grade on the basis of class participation, as described in the syllabus. Clearly, I need to describe more fully what this means. It means that I'm paying attention to who's talking and who's prepared (as measured by our new, required 10-minute in-class writing assignment). Now, you can get a possible 5 points each class period, 2 of which are predicated on the substance of your in-class writing. This more specific method of measuring student performance will, I believe, benefit me and (possibly) the students. Not to make a fine point, but I've had enough. Whee!