Halloween

An entire month without a blog update. In the five years I've been blogging, that must be a record. Two days until Halloween, which means two days until the third annual trick-or-treating meet-up at our house. Nicole and I live in a good neighborhood for treats, so various friends and family members converge on our place.

I'll prepare the fixings for walking tacos. What, you've never had a walking taco? You open up a little bag of Fritos, add your favorite taco ingredients, stir, and eat with a plastic fork. Deliciousness. I'll probably hang back and hand out candy with anybody not inclined to walk the streets.

At some point, I'll visit the Berkley Boneyard, which makes Clark Griswold's holiday decorating look modest. Seriously, click on the link. It's just some guy's house. I think our nephews Ali and Yousef are spending the night. So we'll probably watch something horrifying. Good fun.

I hope to take pictures of Halloween festivities this year and post them to facebook. Stay tuned. And if I have any readers out there who haven't friended me on FB, then what are you waiting for? Not sure I have any readers, period, but such is the facebook world in which we live.

in time and out of time

When should a good piece of writing be timely and when should a text be timeless? I used to buy into a dichotomy between "rhetorical" writing versus "belletristic" or "aesthetic" writing, a dichotomy informed by faith in genre boundaries. Political speeches and op-ed pieces rely on showing awareness of the current context and siezing the kairotic moment. Literary texts concern themselves with broader themes and abstractions that transcend a particular time.

Of course the dichotomy's bunk.

We appreciate political speeches from two-thousand years ago and study their broad themes and ideas. In fact, we apply methods of literary analysis to "great" speeches. We understand literary texts in their social contexts, sometimes to the chagrin of great books proponents. What of a novel like The Jungle that can only be understood as a piece of rhetoric, a timely and purposeful critique of meatpacking at the turn of the twentieth century.

A great moment from The West Wing, itself a series of its time (comfort food for liberals during the George W. Bush years) and timeless (the capital-t Themes like civic obligation). Communications director Toby Ziegler is resisting hiring Will Bailey to help him write the president's second inaugural address. Toby critiques Will's past work on the grounds that he uses pop culture references, thereby lessening the "shelf lives" of his speeches. I like what this scene suggests about the ambitions of rhetoricians, or the possible ambitions anyway. Work can transcend.

random stuff

• This Saturday is honey-extraction day down at Anna's. Looking forward to helping out, avoiding any stings, and leaving with some delicious honey.
• Any Detroiters out there want to go hear some good live music on October 15? The Gossip bring their fusion of r&b and punk rock to the Majestic. If you like Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer, and the Buzzcocks, you'll love the Gossip. Send me a message if you're interested.
• Should I watch "Flash Forward"? Do I really need to get hooked on another tv show, especially one that looks so similar to "Lost"?
• Like many others, I am hoping against hope for real health care reform. Coverage for the millions who are un- or under-insured. A public option for those who can't access private plans. Don't get belligerent about the cost of Obama's plan unless you've been out there marching against the billions we've spent waging war on Iraq.

a pilot project of sorts

For some time, I've held to the belief that I do not have the right disposition to do administrative work. The prospect of administering a writing program does little to excite me. I like interacting with students in a traditional, classroom setting. I like writing. With tenure I feel I am in a place where I can decline tasks that don't give me joy.

I agreed to run the Civic Engagement Project (our service learning program) here at UM-Dearborn this year and already the work has allowed me to give administrative work a trial run on a slightly smaller scale. Slightly smaller in that the job is 1/3 reassignment time. Directing CEP involves less tedium. I love having the chance to develop new relationships with community partners and trying to enhance those we already have. Supporting our new faculty fellows is genuinely exciting. And I have a great yearlong Vista who is creative and energetic. Props to CEP. In all honesty, I dig the course release too, which gives me a lovely 2-2 teaching load for the academic year.

What have I learned about administration? You spend a lot of time on e-mail. I had really cut down on hours spent reading and writing the e-mails by switching to facebook for informal communication and unsubscribing from various listservs. Guess what? I'm back. It had been a long time since I spent more than ten minutes crafting the language in an e-mail message. Now that's a regular occurence.

I also have learned that you need to talk up your office. At the American Democracy Project meeting over the summer, one presenter called this your "elevator soundbite." You need to have an accessible, clear, catchy description of the work your office does. P.R. Easy enough. One of the challenges is being ready to pitch to your provost or dean or the new faculty member you just met or the dude at the rec center whose name you never remember.

Here's another thing new to me. Budgets. More specifically, making decisions about budgets. I'm not talking about household budgets, I'm talking about a program budget (albeit a meager one) where you have the prerogative to provide teachers with resources and offer professional development opportunities yet you also need to demonstrate frugality.

Closely connected to the use of monetary resources, another lesson has been that administration gives you chances to travel. Next month, to Boston to observe a very well-established service learning program. Each summer, the American Democracy Project meeeting. In February, the Campus Compact Institute at a resort in Traverse City, where I've never been.

I'm a big proponent of sucking the marrow and so forth and, at the risk of sounding idealistic, I never want to regret missing a chance to learn more and do more as a teacher at UMD. That's true if I retire from here in thirty years or if I find a new job next Spring. I have to admit that the challenges and opportunities of administration mean more chances to learn more and do more. I might even get the chance to work on those aspects of my disposition (on-again-off-again shyness, overly developed sensitivity) I thought might make this kind of work too tough.

Patton Oswalt on the KFC Famous bowls

The language here is rough, but this makes me laugh.

Patton Oswalt on the KFC Famous bowls

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from the market

Yesterday my friend Jim had free tickets to the Lions' pre-season game. Though I am fighting off a cold of some sort, I was glad to accept Jim's invitation to join him. Earlier, though, my parents had decided to come to Michigan for a somewhat impromptu garage sale at my sister Anna's. Nicole and I did a quick cleaning of the basement and filled a couple boxes with stuff for the sale and Nicole took Hyatt and Smokey (to hang out with their canine cousin--or possibly niece--Molly, not to sell!) down to Anna's bright and early in the a.m. for the sale. Jim and I joined the sale in progress later in the afternoon. The sale was mostly a bust, though we had fun passing the afternoon outside. For my dad's birthday, Anna made a pretty spectacular boston cream pie, not to mention a post-fast feast of chicken, lentil soup, and fatoush. We non-fasters ate with equal gusto.

Before Jim and I got to Anna's, Nicole and my dad ran to the farmer's market near Anna's that tends to have give-away prices, especially late in the day. Jam as many ears of corn as you can into this big bag for a buck. That kind of thing. N. went a bit overboard, but I have to admit her purchases have resulted in a fun Sunday. After all, what's better than cooking on a Sunday? Nicole likes freezing stuff, so she's made stir-fry kits with onions and various kinds of peppers. She's also done a couple bags of blanched green beans, ready to be steamed and eaten. Nicole also got a peck of banana peppers for one dollar (!), so I'm marinating pepper rings for a version of my dad's pepper salad. Tonight, eggplant parmesan, as soon as Nicole gets back from Costco with the fresh mozzarella. I've got the slices of salted eggplant draining in the colander right now.

A day of cooking comes a day or two after finishing Frank Bruni's Born Round, a memoir that I loved. You might know Bruni as a restaurant critic at the NYTimes and if so you'll probably appreciate the book's later chapters which give insight into the funny and high-stakes relationship between restaurants the elite media that can make or break them. My favorite parts of the memoir came earlier, though, when Bruni describes growing up in a food-obsessed, extended, Italian family. He walks readers through holidays when his grandmother and mom would spend weeks planning, shopping, cooking, and trouble-shooting humongous meals. Every detail had to be perfect. Meals were about quality and quantity, almost in equal measure. Throughout, Bruni describes his struggles with his weight, with body image, and with several eating disorders. His bizarre career trajectory alone makes the narrative interesting, but if you can relate to a familial life centering on food or if you routinely go to more than two or three stores to buy ingredients for a meal, then Born Round is a must read.

Nicole's home. Back to the parmesan.

Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino has always had lots of fun writing playful dialogue for bad guys, sadists even. The criminal who tortures the cop in Reservoir Dogs had some charm, to say nothing of a sense of humor and a familiarity with pop culture. Those mobsters in Pulp Fiction who love to talk about the ins and outs of European fast food make their living killing people. Tarantino's never been especially interested in pursuing the morality of his characters or the morality of his own representations of criminal life.

The minutiae of everyday life (long conversation about tipping practices, anyone?). The way a fetish-like obsession (for Tarantino, an obsession with movies) creates an alternative universe. Those things interest him a great deal.

Inglourious Basterds--which let me say I absolutely, positively loved--has mostly gotten very positive reviews for its ambitious scope, playful approach to narrative, and most of all the performance of the actor playing Nazi Colonel Hans Landa. A few reviews, notably the N.Y.Times, New Yorker, and the Orlando Sentinel have pointed out not only the film's violence but also called into question the ethics of representation involved in parallel stories (obviously fiction) about a band of violent American Jews who hunt Nazis in occupied France, as well as the aforementioned Nazi Colonel who--like many Tarantino baddies--has urbane charm.

First, the Landa character. How many sadistic bad guys in fiction and film have been represented as cunning and charming? Of course a *Nazi* bad guy is worlds apart from a "purely fictional" bad guy a la Hannibal Lecter. The ethical dynamics shift when the characters have roots in history, especially THAT moment in history. But in my view Landa is never defined by his charm at the exclusion of brutality. No, this is not a film interested in moralizing (and that in and of itself might be a problem for some viewers), but neither is it a film that fails to balance the urbane with the vicious. That balance creates the film's suspense, in fact.

Second, the band of "basterds." They combine the expected and the unexpected. As viewers, I think we expect the genre tropes they represent: the war movie (the basterds have both a 'gee whiz,' all-American, baseball fan G.I. thing as well as a cigar-chewing, Dirty Dozen thing going on) and the gore movie (not for nothing does Eli Roth of Hostel fame play one of the basterds). We don't necessarily expect the global historical revisions or the over-the-top spectacles the basterds help to orchestrate. In other words, they defy simply categorization. And that helps the representation go beyond something merely pornographic (as in, one intended outcome only) or exploitative (though a bit of the latter is part of what Tarantino mashes up to create his unique vision). As the AV-Club points out, Inglourious Basterds is among other things an antidote to sterile middlebrow representations that teach us that Nazis are bad.

cedarland during ramadan

Ramadan began yesterday, so shout out to family members, students, UMD colleagues, and friends who are fasting during daylight hours this month. Nicole and I made a last-minute decision to head down to Dearborn tonight to grab a bite. Naturally, we ended up at our favorite place to eat in all of the greater Motor City area: Cedarland.

Detroiters should know that for the rest of Ramadan Cedarland has great specials around dusk to sundown for fast-breakers and non-fast-breakers alike. Each night they have three or four items not found on the menu, served with lentil soup and either fattoush or tabouli. I got kibbeh served in a warm, thick yogurt. Nicole got stuffed squash (basically, dolmas) cooked until the squash was falling apart in a lemony tomato sauce. A lot of familiar flavors in both dishes: lemon, parsley, cumin, and so forth, but definitely a change of pace from usual Cedarlad stuff like shawarma and garlic sauce.

Plus, the breaking of the fast creates a happy and interesting atmosphere, even for non-Muslims like us. We always feel welcome at Cedarland, which feels a bit like an American diner: well-lit (to a fault), lots of families, friendly waitresses.