shopping and the sister

I met Mares's boyfriend this weekend. Nice enough guy. I felt no click of recognition, the kind you might feel when meeting someone you can talk with. Not a lot of conversation. Here's a brief sketch of the weekend: 4-hour drive in the truck to Atlanta (mostly uneventful, which is good), brief visit at the apartment, trip to a pool hall/restaurant to play cut-throat, back to apartment to play Monopoly, early to bed. Sunday was a quick cup of coffee, then Mares told me that she wasn't interested in going with me to IKEA, which is understandable. I would have rather gotten brunch myself. Which didn't happen either. In fact, I felt that she ditched me in favor of going somewhere with the boyfriend. So to sum up: silent boyfriend, no sister-and-sister time, and a curtailed visit, all of which must have been motivated by a reason I don't know.

She had seemed like she was excited by my visit, and I was excited to see her. Instead, I'm saddened by the whole thing. Mary is the family member I feel closest to, and it hurts to think that my visit might have been a chore to her instead of a pleasure.

The IKEA part, the part of my trip that I dreaded, happened to be the most successful portion of my trip. Weird.

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.)

---

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.

---

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

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!