Kiss me, I'm shitfaced

I become more and more annoyed each year at St. Pat's day celebrations. Ooh, Irish for a day--what a great reason to get drunk and act like an asshat. After all, that's what being Irish is all about. People are planting bombs in Castlewellan, while the idiots here drink car bombs. 

Okay, that's not really why I'm irked. I could list all of the reasons why it doesn't make sense (e.g., these protestants should be wearing orange) or why it's offensive, but when it comes right down to it, I just resent these people drinking it up yesterday at the Edge. They remind me of those kids in grade school who used to call me "p'tato-head." 

The social worker

Mary Ann Howell, my assigned social worker, is a walking disaster. A little backstory: this balding, rotund woman was supposed to be a key support for me when I was in the VITA unit, but she has fucked up at every turn. She likes to blame those fuck-ups on me. The most important task I gave her was to send a short letter to the deans of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School and to the Director of Graduate Studies in my department. 

After--literally--several weeks, she finally accomplished this task poorly and after a lot of foot-dragging. This week I received a packet of letters, back-dated by several days and mailed in a hand-addressed envelop. She sent these letters to the associate deans of those schools, rather than to whom I told her. She didn't identify me as a graduate student in the English Department, so they have this random name of someone somehow connected to the university, probably.

What's worst is that one of the letters was incorrectly addressed to "Mildred" Bergquist, rather than Francille Bergquist. The grammar is terrible. She has effectively lessened my credibility rather than added to the solution. This is enough to make me seek out her boss and make a formal complaint.

A reply to J-P's comment on the previous post

My response was getting so long that it made more sense to put it into a comment of its own. The Kindle (and devices like it) probably are boons to inveterate travelers. Books are heavy!

J-P, the questions you ask regarding paper books generally provoke tons of (let's say) vigorous discourse in my field. I could definitely imagine a future in which owning paper books becomes a luxury, a electronic books and their attendant devices drop in price. Just as it is now a luxury to own a horse for now good reason. (Also heavy.)

I believe that the codex (even if not made with paper) will and should endure, but that we'll use it differently, perhaps with more respect or shared ownership within a community. Codices resist change and censorship more easily than electronic documents do. The paper book signifies a drain to our environment, but how does that compare to the environmental impact of producing, distributing, and recycling electronic devices and the infrastructure that they require? (That might be an unanswerable question at this point.)

What I do know is that many codices are beautiful in themselves. As are those luxury horses. (But with less poop.)

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And now a question regarding my own crappy paperback codices: Does anyone know how to get one's paperbacks re-covered to make them hardbacks? Most of our books are paperbacks, and I like to imagine them as cloth-covered hardbacks, in a range of colors. As a child, I lusted after the huge library of leather-bound books that belonged to one of my father's colleagues. They had a pleasing uniformity of size and color, with exotic names on their spines, like "Seneca" (an Indian chief?) and "Cato the Elder." Now I know I don't want any leather books or the authors in their canon. But it's really cool to think of a cloth-covered canon of our own. So if any of you people know where I could get this done, or anyone on Etsy who would do it, please let me know.

How to start a fire

I miss reading good books but cannot give up the luxury of a quiet voice reading me to sleep. Nevertheless, no illusion stands between an audiobook and actual reading.

In the service of trying to do more real reading, I checked out the Kindle, a device Amazon is pushing. Its screen works like paper, sort of, allowing the user to read even in bright daylight. It also connects to Amazon through a cellular network, allowing fast and free downloading of comparatively inexpensive books anywhere a cell phone can connect. It's ugly and expensive and technologically selfish, but most reviews were positive.

After some thought, I realized that the new device wouldn't solve my central problem. And—this is important—the thing can't retain the physical elements of a paper book, like page layout, paper quality, typeface that isn't Cambria. You can do what I plan to do (here in a minute). Pick up the closest book and smell it. Turn the pages and listen. Look at its age, and open it until the spine cracks. Smush the pages and write your name on the surfaces that creates. Read it until the page falls away, in that mysterious process of becoming absorbed.

Now call me Ned Lud. 

Seeing problems

I'm thrilled that Obama won, but now that it's Thursday (2 days after the historical victory of the spirit of our great country), I'm back to thinking about me. I'll bring it back around to the political, so bear with me.

When I was a very small girl, I had night-terrors. I would wake my parents, my father would try to soothe me with milk and tales of tryptophan, and then he would send me off to bed. They eventually got a little impatient with that routine. So I got into the habit of getting myself out of bed, drinking some milk, and reading on the living room couch.

One night (I was probably around 8), I awoke from a nightmare, and we were out of milk. I got my book, but feeling especially sorry for myself, I sat on the couch and cried. The sobbing woke my father, and for some reason, I didn't want to tell him why I was sad. Instead I blamed it on the book. (In retrospect, the book, The Secret Garden, may have set the mood.) He took it away from me and sent me back to bed. I assigned fault to the book, and my father accepted that assignment. (The truth came out later. That night and others like it were nascent expressions of what came to be my mental illness.) No matter why I lied—shame, my need to please, their demand for me to be perfect—this memory strikes me as a metonym for the lies my family used about my true need for help.

I don't raise this specter of self-pity to simply rile your emotion. Rather, it's a micronic (not a word but should be) analog of what we as Americans do as a nation. We lie to each other about the "housing bubble," say, then the bad mortgages, then the interest rates, even as they compile upon adjacent economic injuries. Only crisis draws enough truth around itself, and by doing so is revealed.

As we celebrate President Elect Obama—it feels so good to write that phrase—we hope to wait for him to take office so that he can address what's happening in our country and in the world. Will we lie to each other or will we point to the tide of the next crisis? Can we even see it yet? Where is the child, the book, the father? Let me say that I have great confidence in Obama's leadership. Having a post-Boomer, Black president should cause us joy, but may it not blind us to his need to please and our demand for his perfection. May it not blind us to our continuing moral problems, both at home, abroad, and in those nebulous, lawless plots of land we refuse to claim as our own. May the smug enjoyment of our right choice not deflect our insight: Electing Obama does not make America virtuous. It simply makes us better.

First, the voting; second, my self-centered celebration

Sam and I voted last Monday. Organizations that try to get out the vote offer a lot of reasons: doing your civic duty, taking advantage of a right that we cherish, changing the current regime, crack. (My thanks to John Oliver and Acorn for that last one.) They add up to the same basic tenet, that without individual action and participation in government, America ceases to exist. The U.S. as we know it ceases to exist. Representative democracy evaporates, without which our constitutional republic fails. Regardless of party, no one (I honestly believe) wants an oligarchy. 

Every time I watch one of those commercials for voting or for voting (like the one Tiffany has up on her blog right now) and Obama, I think about the one thing that ties U.S. citizens together. It's not culture, it's not region, it's not attitudes or values, it's not even geography. Why would I identify myself as connected with someone living hundreds of miles from me in one direction (Houston, TX: 856 mi) more than someone in a different distant direction (Toronto, ON: 774 mi) or another (soldiers in Iraq)? Because we all get to see who our next President will be on Tuesday. We all participate in the same government, the same political experiment.

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In other news, I got great feedback on my most recent draft. A wonderful feeling.

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?

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

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.

update

See post below for initial details of weird asshole old guy.

After one of my students left, the guy said, "So are your office hours over yet?"

And I mumbled something like, "We'll see, I guess." Then, I said, louder, "Since you bring up my office hours, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't interrupt me while I'm with a student." A request that I think is reasonable and appropriate.

Asshole says, "What, Vanderbilt doesn't give you people an office to do your shit in?"

Then, there was a stupid little "you were rude to me"; "no, you started talking to me first. you were rude to me." So, yeah, I could have handled it better.

To prevent a yelling match, I left to talk to the proprietor, Sam, about the escalating situation. This little asshole old guy followed me right up there, talking over me, and Sam said to him, "Just a minute."

Then, Sam talked to me about how I was a long-time, valued customer, and he'd take care of it. I went outside, Sam talked to the asshole, and the three of us sat together while Sam basically told us to play nice. Apparently, to the old guy, asking me to plug his computer in was less interruptive than just barging through. What would have been better would be for him to go around my chair and move the power strip so he could plug it in himself without bothering me.

While I appreciate the proprietor's need for diplomacy, the compromise he tried to create wasn't enough. I probably won't be coming here anymore. 

But at least the asshole old guy left. 

working at the coffee shop

I really like working at JJ's and meeting students here. Overall, it's a good experience. HOWEVER (didn't you know that was coming?) there's this older guy who often shows up, and he always sits next to me, which in itself is creepy. It's not like no other seats available near the powerstrip. 

Because of where he sits, he generally has to climb past me to plug his computer in, which also makes me uncomfortable because I don't like to be that close to strangers. He always apologizes for getting in my way, which isn't really an apology because it happens each fucking time.

There's a coffee table on which people rest their beverages. It's pretty big, which is great. So creepiness #3 is that he puts his stuff so close to mine that he has to lean toward me to pick up his coffee cup. Ew. And he tries to make conversation.

Now, if this series of events only happened once, that would be fine. It's easy to be generous and polite if the other person is as well. It's becomes less and less easy the more frequently it happens. I intended to ignore all of this as though this desperate old man just wants a little attention and perhaps camaraderie. The smile of an obviously married woman? The scent of clothes worn a third time, not really dirty but not totally clean either? Ick. Just ick. 

Today represents my last little nerve. I don't know what to do.

I was meeting with a student this morning when he sat down. Then, during an obvious conference (more obvious to someone sitting too close), he interrupts to ask me could I please plug his computer in so that he doesn't have to climb over me. Three things: 

1) don't interrupt my meeting/conference/conversation/whatever to make me do a favor for you. 

2) the favor itself is unreasonable because it is he who sat down after my student and I did. (He left for a moment, and my student leaned over and asked, "do you know that guy?" I explained that I didn't, and she said, "I thought maybe you did, but when you didn't say Hi, I wasn't sure. Yeah, he's weird.") Also unreasonable because the powerstrip is on a long cord, and he could move it so that he doesn't have to bother anyone ever.

3) Now I'm spitting mad, and I would say something, but I didn't at the moment, and now it's been about 10 minutes, and I don't really know what to do. The presence of my student made him sit a little farther than usual, so it's not like I can ask JJ's gunther to help me. When I look up, straight ahead in front of me (as I often do when I'm thinking and writing), he always looks at me. (It's pretty obvious.) I'm mad and creeped out, but I won't move because I don't want to cede my territory. This is where I sit. I shouldn't have to move, and this creepy guy is taking advantage of JJ's overall sense of decorum, so I feel I can't yell at him. Part of me is angry at myself that I didn't tell him immediately that he was interrupting a student conference (with the subtext that he could figure something else out about his stupid computer that didn't involve me plugging it in for him or him crawling over me to do it himself). 

What should I do? What would you do? If you know what to do, would you do it for me?

I don't even know what to call this, it's so awesome.

Now this is the Hillary Clinton I grew up with and loved:

Actual, for-real water bears in space AND the best atom-smashing machine ever; or, yes, yes, I'm a nerd

Two exciting science-y things happened this week. 

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ONE: Wired reported the findings of a study in the journal Current Biology in which some scientists shot tardigrades, aka water bears (which are a kind of invertebrate animal), out into space, exposing them to radiation, and they survived. If you wanted, you could easily see one  without a microscope. They can slow their metabolisms by a factor of 10,000 (the article says) which allows them to survive vacuums, starvation, total disappearanence of water, and extreme temperatures (above 300F and below -240F).

Not only did they survive, one group was able to repair the DNA damaged by the radiation and reproduce at the same rate as the control group, making normal little water bear babies. Amazing.  Seriously awesome. Now that we know that these tiny creatures can survive in space, scientists can start to figure out some stuff, like improving human DNA repair (e.g., aging much more slowly) and adapting to space.

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TWO: Yesterday, international scientists turned on the Large Hadron Collider and shot its first beam of protons, which traveled the entire 17-mile track. In a few weeks, they'll shoot lots and lots of beams, at which point atoms will begin to smash into each other, creating particles and possibly subparticles. This thing is incredible. It can generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than our sun.

The importance of the Large Hadron Collider cannot be underestimated. They'll be able to test such ideas as the Big Bang Theory, String Theory, the Multiverse Theory, and the Dark Matter Theory. The scientists who have been working on this thing say that the worst-case scenario is that they'll find out nothing, a waste of roughly 7,000 scientists from 20 countries at the cost of about $10 billion. Which isn't too bad, I guess, considering that the cost is still less than we spend in Iraq each month. (Data source: Congressional Research Service, as of 2/2/2008)

One of the worst case scenarios, floated by "crackpots," (i.e., physicists who aren't down with Einstein), is that the Large Hadron Collider could create a Large Black Hole. No more student loan debts!

Britain's Astronomer Royal put the odds of the Large Hadron Collider destroying the earth  at 1 in 50 million. An analogy: if my math's right, if everyone in the world (6.6 billion) participated in a lottery, and the lottery money had to be equally divided among all of the winners, 36,000 people would walk away with some cash. And then blip out of existence.

See if that might happen.

Sarah Palin

Four legs good. Two legs bad.

Addendum: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Wilde's amazing rocket

Okay. So I'm going to reframe this Clinton/Tubman thing a bit. Sam, as you know, I think you're right. I believe that Clinton appropriated Tubman's achievements to score political points for herself. At its very best, the analogy was hyperbolic and inappropriate. At its worst, the analogy fails on racial, sexual, and regional bases. Do we really want to raise the specter of slavery at a time when Democrats are trying to win southern states? Also, it strikes me as odd that many commenters have referred to Tubman as an African American. A lot of white people use "African American" when they mean "person of color" (or, more commonly, "black"). Tubman wasn't a citizen, and to call her an American strikes me as disrespectful. 

More important, Obama is not a slave who has to Keep Going, nor are the voters, nor is the DNP, nor is America. Obama is a Democrat I am going to vote for so that no McCain administration can dig the U.S. further into debt, war, and despair. 

As a Democrat, I recognize the importance of the narrative arc we've constructed. But Clinton's use of Tubman pains me.

It's not about Tubman as a role model. It's not about feeling part of the struggle for basic human rights. It's not even about using an analogy based on a common history of the fight against racism and sexism. The problem is that the senator used Tubman as a symbol that conveniently incorporates the categories of woman and negritude. (Here, I'm choosing Sartre's version of negritude, rather than Benjamin Rush's or Fanon's.) The Tubman symbol itself provided an image of unity, and it was a short step from there to find an opportune piece of rhetoric produced by the Tubman symbol.  

Unity by itself as a piece of rhetoric has tremendous political charge. Just ask President Wilson about his White House screening of the infamous D.W. Griffith film about post-Civil War unity. Cue the footage, accompanied by that Wagner tune.

If this part of this post seems a little too strong, consider its scale beside the scale of Senator Clinton's rhetoric. My invective doesn't even hold a taper.

**Another caveat: Only the next part of this post is directed specifically at another person.

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Ed: I've concluded that you no longer get to talk to me. You can spend your life believing that women are as good as men only to the extent that they resemble men, that you are always the smartest person in the room, that tucking your t-shirt into your pants is a good idea, and that Sam should step out on his crazy wife. But you will never spend another moment of your sad, silly life interacting with me. Another tip: if you want to commit passive suicide by yelling at men with guns, try a little harder. It's not rocket science.

Extreme rhetoric

After adding a few entries to the blog roll, I went on a search to find comparable right-wing entries. A few of the better known sources, like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, would be fine, but I wanted to find something more like the right's version of AlterNet. The other side's ideas would be enlightening. I've known some Reagan-style conservatives who persuasively argue their point of view. Unfortunately, none of them run blogs. 

(Left-leaning websites can get overwrought, but the hostility of some of the right-wing websites astounds me: "JaMarcus Obama"? Really?)

Instead of achieving my goal, I have rediscovered the joys of poking commenters with their own ideological sticks. It's fun, but I'm still at a loss for less mainstream right-wing websites. That run substantive, fact-based pieces. Whose supporters don't rely on their orotund demagogues. Whose commenters avoid using all caps to call people names.

Any ideas?

Party politics; or, soapboxing it

Standing on your principles can be pretty lonely.  I'm not going to the Londkes' party this afternoon. [long pedantic paragraphs grudgingly redacted. Short didactic paragraphs to follow]

It's simple: The Oxford American Dictionary defines prejudice on three levels: unfounded opinion, biased behavior, and the consequence (hurt or injury) of such behavior. 

Speaking is a behavior, for example.

I understand that a person's culture forms many of those irrational opinions and that no one can escape culture's force. But you must try to recognize your irrational opinions and personally work against them. Part of being an American, for example, is being chauvinist but condemning bigotry.

A person—even a friend or acquaintance—who chooses to embrace his or her bigotry rejects the possible benefit of your doubt. (Yes, T, even the benefits you wish to extend through doubt, although I know you mean to act through generosity and charity.) Taking a person at her word means acknowledging that she is responsible for her behavior. It's a way of honoring someone's human individuality, even if she rejects someone else's. 

As a consequence, I don't go to a person's house if he or she exhibits prejudice without reservation. Even when no one else chooses to act on principle. Even if my choice makes me lonely, unpopular, or sad. I refuse.

Rest peacefully, Mr. Russert

Tim Russert died this afternoon. You can turn on any t.v. channel or look at any website for the obligatory language of public grieving, but, watching MSNBC, I was deeply moved by the expressions of loss by those who knew him as a man. 

To me, Russert has only ever been a face on the screen, yet his integrity and curiosity were always evident. As much as I will miss him as a journalist, his family and friends must be devastated. 

Sam and I were talking about it just now, and he said what I've always felt as well: When you part from someone you love, even just to go to the grocery store, you should say, "I love you." The future is inscrutable. Our lives are short in time's span. But we become meaningful through expressing our connections with each other, however fleeting and however flawed.

From Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion":

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Proper

I've been thinking about words to do with "uptight." My online American Oxford Thesaurus gives a number of synonyms (close and far), including 1) tense, nervous, on edge, anxious, hypersensitive; and 2) straitlaced, prim priggish, rigid. 

Further exploration of the definition of "prim" yields "stiffly formal; feeling or showing disapproval of anything regarded as improper." The AOD pairs it with "proper" in its example, as in a "prim and proper lady." Synonyms range from "formal" to "prudish" to "governessy," if you can believe that one.

Now, I disapprove of a lot of things that, naturally, I think are improper, in the AOD's first definition. Personally, I think that makes me a bit of an asshole, not a prude. But what is quite interesting is the constellation of these words around the notion of femininity. To be proper is to be prim. I know this isn't news (always cross your legs at the ankles, darling!), but the persistence of the association between being anxious and being a woman still surprises me.

Hysteria had its diagnostic heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Symptoms included weakness, fatigue, inappropriate appetite (too much or too little), gastrointestinal discomfort, other pains unassociated with injury, and extreme sensitivity or (paradoxically) insensitivity to sensory perceptions. The symptoms were unfeigned and unexplainable by any other diagnosis. Until recent updates to the American Psychological Association's differential diagnostic criteria, patients could be diagnosed as hysterical without complaining about symptoms, a phenomenon known as la belle indifference. 

Essentially, hysteria was a catchall for bodily complaints that couldn't be explained by a physical examination. Or let me phrase this a different way: hysterical women were women who complained or didn't act like ladies. The APA, in the interest of reform and equality, has retained hysteria as a diagnosis but labeled it "conversion disorder" instead.

So the associations of "uptight," "nervous," "anxious," and "high-strung" with  "high-maintenance," "prim," "prissy,"and  "prudish" gestures toward hysteria, and you don't have to be Freud to see that it all still points to sex.

Do any of these terms (or terms like them) make you feel dismissed or belittled? How do they affect men (e.g., by feminizing men who worry a lot)? Can they be re-incorporated, as the word "queer" has been? I'm interested to hear your responses and ideas.