guts or gall

On his way to the U.S., Pope Benedict answered pre-screened questions including one about clergy pedophilia. I didn't think his staff would allow discussion of the topic, given how tightly they control the Pope's conversations and also given how the discussion opens the Pope up to criticism. The headlines emphasize the Pope's words aboard his plane, where he said he's "deeply ashamed" of the scandal.

I suppose it's gutsy on the part of the Pope and his inner circle to engage questions about the scandal. Or maybe he has no choice. Maybe omission of the scandal from his agenda would be the bigger, more glaring sin.

Before becoming Pope, "Joseph Ratzinger" (his given name) headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office that oversaw the Vatican's response to the scandal (despite the scandal being outside the CDF's jurisdiction, but how Ratzinger's office took control of vatican response is another story). Noone has ever held Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, accountable for the mishandling of the situation, for his "leadership" that emphasized a "public relations" tone, a tone that U.S. bishops clearly picked up on.

An example of this leadership? The British press uncovered evidence that Cardinal Ratzinger ordered bishops to handle allegations of sexual abuse internally and keep the allegations from law enforcement. Ratzinger situated the church's jursidiction within the context of a "pontifical secret" and threatened to excommunicate diocesan officials who tattle to the cops. Nice.

So forgive me if I suggest it takes some gall for the Pope to speak with moral authority about the scandal. Though, I can see why he says he's "deeply ashamed." It will be interesting to see if the U.S. media downplays the Pope's history with the scandal as much as they've downplayed, say, the church's condemnation of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. On yesterday's Diane Rehm show, Rehm mentioned the pedophilia memo but the panelists quickly changed the subject. Will others bring up what seems to me to be a relevant piece of context? We'll see.

my hometown

Today CNN.com has made a story about Youngstown, Ohio, the lead story on its homepage. Long a symbol of blight, massive decreases in population, and de-industrialization, a new plan in the city embraces smallness, focusing on improvement of infrastructure, quality of life, and services, without wasting resources and time dreaming of growth. The story reviews some of Youngstown's failed attempts to attract a new industry or initiative (supermax prisons! blimp factory!), each of which was painted as an opportunity to return Youngstown to the baby boom years of population growth. Interestingly, the story avoids discussing what the national media usually talks about when it talks about Youngstown: organized crime and government corruption. The story also avoids explaning how the city can thrive with a rapidly shrinking tax base.

heard on the streetcar

The rhetoric and composition community discusses New Orleans: Should the conference return to N.O. sooner than later to "support" the city financially? Does academic analysis of the city have the potential to prompt social change? How can the field turn its attention to how language ("post-Katrina" and so on) constructs realities?

The WPA list had a brief conversation--that seems to have died out quickly--about urging NCTE to interrupt the scheduled rotation of conference locations and hold Cs in New Orleans again. I respect the urge to make such a gesture. It's an urge to spend money in the city, an urge to offer some solidarity, and an urge to feel relevant in the face of a complicated and unjust situation. Jeff and Jenny have both rightly pointed out that these urges also create an opportunity for outsiders to pat themselves on the back despite how ineffectual (yay...we've helped expensive hotels pay low wages to members of the working class and working poor) and unethical (the awful "Katrina tours" that Jenny mentions) some of the manifestations of the gesture are.

Obviously New Orleans is a place that has relied for a very long time on tourism and business travel. Going to New Orleans *does* provide the city with revenue. But who benefits from the types of revenue we brought? Most of the hotels where Cs attendees stayed are certainly operated by godless corporations, but many attendees also took part in the city's arts scene, including the scene beyond the French Quarter. Such participation certainly doesn't warrant back-patting, but may play a small role in supporting the good work of a musician or artist. Some attendees may have been moved by the underpasses' "tent cities" to take part in advocacy work. Visibility (i.e., the visibility of difference and inequality) can lead to change.

But I was struck by the words spoken by a woman on the streetcar I was riding. We struck up a conversation about the streetcar's closure through the stretch of Canal Street where a movie was filming. The woman, who lives off Canal, was talking about how the interruption of service screwed up her ability to get home. I wondered aloud whether movie production brings in as much money as folks often insist it does (Mitch Albom's leading a movement to bring more Hollywood productions to Detroit) and the woman responded: "Yeah, it brings in lots of money. But I'm tired of people from the north spending money here and then thinking they can do whatever they want."

back from 4Cs

I hope to find some time to blog about specific panels in the next few days, but, in the meantime, the '08 4Cs struck me as the best in years. I didn't go to a single weak session. In fact, many of the presentations (I went to seven panels including my own) provoked and engaged. And they were all pretty well-attended, too...not always the case in past years.

As always, catching up with grad school friends was a highlight. A crew from U-Arizona hit Bacco and enjoyed the odd marriage of Italian and Creole cuisines. I had the crawfish ravioli...tasty. Nominating Committee meetings took up a lot of time but I appreciated the chance to learn more about how the Cs takes care of such business and have a say in future leadership. Look for your ballots in mid-June, folks.

All work and no play? Course not. I made time to hit the Louisiana Music Factory, a great two-floor record store that devotes the whole ground level to New Orleans artists--iconic, obscure, and all points in between. Caught part of John Mooney's in-store set. He pretty much took off the roof during an Electric (notice the capital "E") version of Son House's "Louise McGhee." Nice. The upper level boasts an impressive selection of non-Louisiana artists on both vinyl and CD. I got a copy of Black Merda's first album on CD. It's a Russian import. I didn't even think the band's catalogue was available on disc, so this was a geeky discovery that kept me smiling all the way back to the hotel. Black Merda was a great 60s Detroit band--part Funkadelic, part MC5, part Jimi Hendrix Experience. Also got one of the Dengue Fever CDs that I didn't yet have...DF is a contemporary surf-rock band from California that's a whole lotta Farfisa organ, a whole lotta bilingualism, and a whole lotta VOICE, thanks to the song stylings of Chhom Nimol, the Cambodian legend who sings lead on most tracks.

Finally, I have to mention taking the streetcar to the New Orleans Museum of Art in order to check out the world-class modern sculpture garden. Located in City Park, the place is gorgeous, thanks in part to the low-hanging live oak trees that fill the park. What a great place to stroll. The most striking feature of the sculpture garden is the breadth and diversity of the collection, from the Warhol-esque, humongous safety pin to the haunting image of a lynching.

But the pleasant surprise was the NOMA's huge George Rodrigue exhibit. Rodrigue based his blue dog series at first on the werewolf legend, loup garou, but soon the blue dog took on a life of its own. Rodrigue uses the dog itself as a kind of canvas on which he can compose a wide range of emotions. He's used the image for purely aesthetic creations, but also for commercial campaigns too. And, of course, for fund-raisers. I enjoyed the exhibit quite a bit and would like to learn more about Rodrigue, by all accounts a fascinating figure.

God bless New Orleans.

nola

Preparations for New Orleans are in full swing. Yesterday and last night (past midnight, actually) I did some Nominating Committee work, coming up with a few different draft-versions of a ballot that (I think) balances experience with new perspective, represents diversity in terms of type of institution, region, race, gender, and so on. Thank goodness for the rest of the committee. I'm sure I've neglected some important consideration. The NC has an open meeting, where we entertain still more nominations, and then a closed meeting, where we set the ballot. The committee experience has been interesting, though paperwork intensive, and I'd gladly do it again.

Today I'm doing some final revisions to the paper. If you're looking for a panel during the "D" slot (Thursday, 3:15-4:30), come check out "Writing Realities, Writing Cities: From the Motor City the the Big Easy." I'll be talking about some research I've done on how Detroit's garage rock movement represents urban life. My UMD colleague, and Louisiana native son, Randy Woodland will talk about the jazz funeral trope. And Tom Uskali from Pine Crest High School in Florida will talk about ethics of representation issues in writing on place. I hate sparsely attended panels; hope to see a crowd. The more people in attendance, the less nervous I am. Apologies for blatant panel promotion.

post hoc ergo propter hoc

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

Meanwhile, the big winner of the Democratic fist-fighting is Senator McCain. A Gallup poll released Wednesday found that 19 percent of Mr. Obama’s supporters said they would vote for Mr. McCain in the general election if Mrs. Clinton were the nominee. More startling, 28 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters said they would defect to Mr. McCain if Mr. Obama were the nominee.

Kristof makes an interesting leap here. I haven't seen any evidence that the high rate of potential "defectors" has much to do with the battle for the democratic nomination being protracted and contentious. I know that conventional wisdom says that the nominee must "unite the party" after primary season and there's something to be said for the argument that a protracted battle leaves less time for that mythic unification. But I'm not convinced that the "fist fighting," to borrow Kristof's phrase, is actually going to make democrats vote for McCain.

Democrats are getting more press. McCain took part in the ultimate photo op in Iraq and couldn't get anywhere near the ink that the democrats have been getting. Many pundits are suggesting that this increased attention is bad for Clinton and Obama. The argument goes something like this: you have more opportunities to screw up when eyes are on you.

My sense, though, is that the democrats have much more name and face recognition. McCain's coming off like a Bob Dole or Mike Dukakis, i.e., a "that other guy." And in an election where affect is clearly playing a gigantic role (Clinton and Obama share so many stances, yet people feel so differently about them), that kind of recognition matters.

Yes, a lot of Obama supporters say they'll go McCain if Clinton gets the nomination, and vice versa. First of all, I don't believe a lot of them. I'm an Obama supporter and there's a part of me that will have trouble voting for Clinton, knowing what I know about her voting record in the senate (supporting the patriot act, supporting the patriot act's renewal, supporting Bush's expanded war powers, etc.), but I couldn't bring myself to vote for McCain. I suspect I'm not alone.

And, again, I'm not even sure democrats saying they'll defect necessarily stems from the fact that the primary season has been long and heated. In fact, there's something to be said for the length and the nature of the "battle." They're honing their messages, which is good practice for the campaign vs. McCain. They're fostering public discourse.

Of course those two advantages rely on the candidates staying on message, avoiding ad hominem mud-slinging, and operating above the non-issues on which the press fixates. And, admittedly, their campaigns have not always done those things.

i am not afraid of you

...and I will listen to this whilst grading papers and prepping for 4Cs.

Follow link to hear NPR's stream of the Yo La Tengo gig at SXSW earlier this month. The band doesn't know how to put on a bad show so, you know, this is great to listen to while working. You'd expect YLT, famous for both dipping deeply into its huge catalogue and playing covers that show off their knowledge of arcane rock history, to play a show geared toward the music geeks of SXSW. But this show is the closest they get to a 'greatest hits' set. Early on, they play "Autumn Sweater," "Mr. Tough," and my favorite, "Little Eyes."

anger

In a recent College English article, Amy Robillard* wrote:

...anger is a legitimate and justifiable response to what one has been persuaded is an insult that violates one's sense of moral justice and the sacred values of one's community. Anger by definition includes the assignment of responsibility and the possibility of revenge, which is pleasurable because it is sanctioned by the community whose values have been violated.

Robillard suggests plagiarism is a site where we might challenge the cultural conceptions that emotions and authorship are private and individual things. She asks whether we often avoid anger at plagiarism as part of a larger desire to look liberatory ("I don't get mad at students")? And she also asks whether our anger at plagiarism (when we allow anger...on blogs, for instance) is framed by our desire to look smart ("Usually I'm smart enough to design assignments that prevent plagiarism and when I don't, I'm smart enough to realize I'm reading something that's been plagiarised").

So I'm trying to reconcile the insights of this article with my own anger at a student of mine who has just plagiarised. I fall into all the traps. I get defensive about my assignments, my syllabus, my teaching. I feel insulted as an individual and as a member of a particular profession/community. I worry that my response somehow will weaken my credentials as a liberatory teacher. I take some perverse sense of satisfaction that I wasn't "fooled." And I'm aware that virtually every response fits into the schema of responses that Robillard outlines. The irony is that my response to plagiarism (which insults us in part because the practice is an affront to originality) is utterly unoriginal.

All of that is a round-about way of saying: I'm angry.

(*"We Won't Get Fooled Again: On the Absense of Angry Resonses to Plagiarism in Composition Studies." College English 70 (2007): 10-31.)

weekend

Easter presented a nice get-away opportunity with family in Youngstown, OH. Nothing too exciting, just low-key holiday weekend. Played 500, went to church, took in an auction, and watched basketball. My oldest nephew was pretty bummed when Georgetown lost (he's a freshmen poli-sci major at G'town). Once Arizona bowed out--in the first round, natch--I didn't much care who won. Still I was hoping Butler would make the Sweet 16, as they were robbed with that low seed.

Anyway, good food over the weekend, too. Of course Easter Bread, the sweet, frosted bread my parents make at their church (a $15,000 fundraiser this year!). Ricotta bread and spinach bread, also delicious. And of course the ultimate Easter food: meat pie, stuffed with sausage, egg, provolone, and other good stuff. Per tradition, we cut into all the baked stuff after the long Saturday night mass. Nothing like carbing it up late at night. Sunday dinner was at my brother's house: baked artichokes, lasagna, goat chops grilled with lemon juice and garlic. I don't need to eat for another week.

Sadly for Detroit, most everybody back home in Youngstown's been following the Kwame Kilpatrick mess on the national news. "So, what's up with the mayor up there?" I heard, all weekend long. Well, for any Youngstown readers out there: as I wrote the last two paragraphs, the prosecutor just handed down twelve criminal charges against the mayor and his ex-chief of staff. Full story here, but the short version is this...the mayor has twenty hours to turn himself in for booking and arraignment. He's facing perjury, obstruction of justice, criminal conspiracy, and misconduct charges. The million dollar question becomes, will he step down?

UPDATE (2:25 p.m.)
Answer to the million dollar question: Hell No. Kwame and one of his attorneys held a press conference less than two hours after the prosecutor's and said just that. Incidentally, Kwame's legal team is headed by Chicago's top trial lawyer Dan Webb. His new public relations team is headed by out-of-towner Judy Smith, who has represented Monica Lewinsky, Clarence Thomas, and Larry Craig. Does Kilpatrick have any moral authority to rail against hiring from outside city limits?

outside reviewers

Here's another odd component of the tenure application process. The university sends my tenure file out to five senior members of my field. My department's promotion and tenure committee chooses these reviewers, but I get to suggest 10-15 possible candidate. I hear that the committee generally uses folks from the submitted list.

They have to be tenured professors from other universities, ranked either associate or (preferably) full. Makes sense. They are also supposed to be from schools equivalent to or better than UM-Dearborn in terms of prestige. This is a bit more dicey, given that prestige is a pretty contested concept (are we talking Carnegie classifications, U.S. News and World Report rankings, or what?). Also dicey because "prestige" in composition studies (prestige of particular presses, institutions, etc.) is not always the same as prestige in other fields in the humanities.

Finally, the "prestige" thing is dicey for me because much of my research is in the area of open-admissions education and working-class culture. In many cases, senior members of the field working in these areas don't necessarily work at high prestige (by many definitions of the contested term) places.

A further thing that makes it tough to assemble this list: I'm not supposed to include anyone with whom I have a "close professional relationship." Kind of vague, eh? Some of the guidelines are specific: nobody from my dissertation committee, for instance. Nobody who I would call a "mentor." Fair enough. But what about someone who I invited to my campus to give a guest lecture? What about someone whose book I reviewed in a major journal? What about someone with whom I've gone out for coffee at 4Cs?

Is it better to pick people who you don't know at all? Because doing so makes it less likely that the person's expertise lies in my own areas of research. And don't you want people working on similar issues and questions?

the professor as open book

Today the New York Times explores why professors reveal "personal" information online. The article begins:

It is not necessary for a student studying multivariable calculus, medieval literature or Roman archaeology to know that the professor on the podium shoots pool, has donned a bunny costume or can’t get enough of Chaka Khan. Yet professors of all ranks and disciplines are revealing such information on public, national platforms: blogs, Web pages, social networking sites, even campus television.

The Times talks to several blogging and/or social networking professors who mostly discuss how engaging in such technologies gives them a chance to appear more accessible, human, or interesting to undergraduates. Other voices in the piece suggest they are responding to student demands to be more "entertaining."

Unfortunately, nobody talks about writing. Either none of the professors interviewed brought up writing, or the Times chose not to include those particular quotations in the piece. Either way, the ommission was striking. No mention of blogging as an opportunity to WRITE WITH students and colleagues. No mention of how the technologies under review provide the chance to catalogue ideas and information, make connections (personal and intellectual and all points in between), talk back, write-to-discover, and make sense of things, which are all WRITING concerns.

Instead, the piece emphasizes the personal, the notion that professors are "revealing" or "sharing." Not inaccurate, I suppose, but I would have liked to see the verb "writing" in there once or twice.

1992 Nostalgia

Ah, synchronicity. So many things today have taken me to the year 1992. First, a student in my advanced creative writing class distributed a story for workshopping called "It's Hard To Say Goodbye to Yesterday." Immediately I asked if title was an allusion to the Boyz2Men song. Her response: "what's Boyz2Men?" I explained that my senior class song had the same name as her short story. Only one student in the class had heard the song. Me and one other kid in my graduating class, one Joe Westberg from Green Bay Wisconsin, objected to the schmaltzy choice. Frankly I thought it was pretty easy to say goodbye to that particular yesterday. And Joe--a pretty big fan of stuff that nobody else dug (I recall he was a big Moody Blues, Dr. Who, and Faulty Towers fan)--wanted to select a Monty Python song (might have been "Henry Kissinger"). We were voted down.

Then, I come across a story in today's Free Press about The Gaelic League which, in 1992, became the first place in Detroit I fell in love with. Of course the story today highlights the 'League as a great place to go on St. Patrick's Day, but in my first year of college, it was a great place to go anytime. I had a green-and-white striped t-shirt that I always figured would decrease the likelihood of getting carded. The Corktown pub boasted a fine singer named Larry Larson who performed each Friday and Saturday, mostly Irish songs, but also folk tunes from various traditions, oldies, university fight songs, anything that sounded good on an acoustic guitar. When Green Day put out its big record, Larson took to performing a mean version of "Basket Case." He'd see a U of D (not exactly a sports school) crowd enter and launch into U of D's fight song, which none of *us* really knew. I see in the article today that Larson still plays there, though I haven't been there since I graduated from college in '96. The last time I went there may have been St. Patrick's Day, 96, when I drove perhaps eleven people there in my LTD Station Wagon (a 1973 model, just like me). Why haven't I gone back? Probably because it was the perfect place during that moment.

Finally, reports that the Lemonheads have reformed. At the big SXSW festival, they performed the great 1992 "It's A Shame About Ray" album from start to finish. I know it's cool to say that one's favorite record in 92 was one that is now universally annointed as classic ("Loveless" or "Slanted and Enchanted"), but in truth I listened to the Lemonheads more than I listened to My Bloody Valentine or Pavement (though the latter is a favorite as well!). The "Ray" record is as perfect a collection of power pop as anything Big Star ever released. "Bit Part," which is maybe 90 seconds long, uses a movie set as a metaphor for any place where love happens ("I want a bit part in your life, rehearsin' all the time"). "Alison's Starting to Happen" got some play on 89X, the 'across the river' Canadian station that gloriously soundtracked the post-"Smells Like Teen Spirits" moment and was more melodic than anything else on rotation at the time. I still have the worn cassette, recorded from a friend of a friend's copy, I listened to then, and half the record is on the band's compilation CD that Nicole got me at some point, years later. But in the last sixteen years I never bothered buying a CD of "Ray." Why not? It was the perfect record at that moment.

Oh yeah, and a Clinton is running for president.

neftlix, recently

Michael Clayton. I don't get the fuss. The film offers an interesting, intriguing even, salute to moody suspense dramas of the 70s (The Conversation et al) but doesn't add anything new to the genre. I admire the film's restraint. Corporate wrong-doing, for example, looms in the plot's background but never becomes a site for polemics. But the narrative jumbles together familial dysfunction, midlife crisis, addiction, business ethics, friendship and masculinity, mental illness, and much more, lacking a real focal point. Of course, as the film's title suggests, the protagonist himself (played competently by George Clooney) is supposed to provide that focus. For me, though, the character wandered in and out of too many conflicts. And the Tilda Swinton character struck me as sexist and stock. The only woman in the narrative is a ruthless and unethical go-getter. Did I miss the film's self-awareness or completely misread this oscar-nominated representation?

In the Valley of Elah. Tommy Lee Jones gives an eerily cold performance as a retired Marine and grieving father. His character's son, also a Marine, is murdered soon after returning home from service in Iraq. The film becomes a police procedural (a played out genre for anyone who watches network tv) but Jones's performance makes "Valley" powerful. He barely sheds a tear, even while identifying his son's remains or listening to his wife blame him for their child's death. That's not to say he doesn't react or he's not full of grief. The character's reaction is flawlessly consistent with his training and values. I appreciated the straight-ahead way the film dealt with the horrors of war--torture, drug abuse, de-humanization--mostly seen through grainy cell-phone videos taken by the murder victim. For some, these horrors represent following policy or letting off steam. For others, these things signal all that is reprehensible about war. The film allows for both. I suspect some see this as a sign of the film's non-committal perspective, but, for me, witnessing these acts without exclamation points made them all the more striking.

I'd like to...

1. Completely cut Splenda out of my diet. I only have maybe two or three packets a week, on average, but I know I'm consuming something toxic. I've heard embalming fluid comparisons. Why not just avoid altogether?

2. Live within walking distance to work. This will probably never happen. At least as long as I teach at UMD, where the only residential area within walking distance involves hoofing down a main road that lacks sidewalks.

3. Believe that the writers of the West Wing based, as they're now claiming, the Jimmy Smits "Matt Santos" character on Barack Obama.

4. See Detroit's mayoral scandal be resolved with something approaching justice.

5. Have a firmer understanding of why in the world Madonna had The Stooges play two of her hits (bizarre video here) in her stead at her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I've seen some surreal stuff but this makes that Elvis-Richard Nixon meeting look like a Normal Rockwell print.

community literacy

The Community Literacy Journal has gotten a nomination for Best New Scholarly Journal from Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Good luck to the journal, which is housed at the University of Arizona, and edited by John Warnock at UA and my grad school mate Michael Moore (no relation to the documentarian), now at Michigan Tech. The journal grew out of a very popular class in Community Literacy that exposed many a UA grad student, including yours truly, to the possibilities of service learning and other types of community engagement. C.L. Journal is an example of a relatively small outlet that's publishing very, very good work. I hope they keep it up. John and Michael maintain a strong web presence too (see link above), something that a lot of established journals seem to struggle with.

i'm late on this...

Stuff White People Like is really funny. I caught a quick snippet of a bit about the site on Mitch Albom's radio show last evening (so you know the blog has long ceased being hip), and Michael makes some smart observations about it here. I'm interested in how "white" serves as a proxy for social class and/or politics, or perhaps more accurately the term is a synecdoche for "priveleged." At any rate, a nice send-up of liberal guilt, bougie lifestyles, and armchair activism. Too many quotables, but I'll leave it at this, taken from yesterday's entry on "hating corporations":

If you plan to engage in lengthy conversations or get high with white people it is recommended that you read No Logo or one issue of AdBusters. Failing that, it is acceptable to buy a copy to leave on your coffee table. When white people see it, they will recognize you as someone who can see through the advertising and has a proper perspective on life.

When engaging in a conversation about corporate evils it is important to NEVER, EVER mention Apple Computers, Target or Ikea in the same breath as the companies mentioned earlier. White people prefer to hate corporations that don’t make stuff that they like.

the reason God invented youtube

are you kidding me?

Last night, after classes, I race from campus to church where our Peace&Justice group had organized a session on health care reform. Sleet and freezing rain the whole way. After the session, snow covers the sheet of ice on Livernois, 9-Mile, and Coolidge roads. This morning, six more inches of the white stuff. I shovel the stoop, the driveway, the sidewalk. Everbody eighteen and under has a day off school. Me? I have to drive to campus for a morning session grading placement essays written by transfer students. Traffic's light since the schools are all closed, but I experience the pleasure of the icy Southfield Freeway for what I hope is the last time this season.

milestone

Yesterday I turned in my tenure file: a thick collection of documentation, something UM-Dearborn emphasizes. You've got an article forthcoming in a particular journal? PROVE IT with a letter from the journal's editor. Anyway, the portfolio is full of documents and artifacts like syllabi, assignment sheets, photocopies of publications, letters from colleagues who have observed my classes. Even moreso, the file contains lots and lots of reflection. Reflect on your stuent evaluations. Reflect on your research agenda. Reflect on your contributions to your discipline. In five years in the seminary, I never took part in so much contemplative thought.

The file emphasizes the past three years, my "probationary" period at UM-Dearborn. My teaching during my three years at Miami University and four years in grad school at the University of Arizona is largely absent from the file, aside from entries on my CV. Likewise, pre-UMD publications don't really "count" all that much toward tenure, except in so much as they show consistent contributions to the field and/or potential to stay active after tenure. No copies of those early publications in the file--again, just entries on the CV.

I won't hear the yay or nay from the university for over a year. The file goes through my discipline, department, college/dean's office, provost, president, board of trustees, and somewhere in there gets sent out to external reviewers. I probably won't get a response until the end of academic year 2008-2009.

The process, so far anyway, has been largely humane. I could complain about the need for greater transparency (when exactly do external reviewers come into the picture? how exactly do pre-UMD publications count?) but what I don't know is largely a result of my own refusal to obsess over such things. Finite amount of time. Even more finite amount of energy. If it comes down to either doing real work (writing an article, moving forward a relationship with a community partner like St. Peter's Home for Boys, etc.) or working on tenure (networking with administrators who I don't know, tracking down documentation of the minutiae of P&T procedures), I'm going to pick the former.

I'm not advocating a total laissez faire approach. I met deadlines. I followed formatting guidelines. I dotted and crossed the appopriate letters, etc. I'm just saying that sweating out certain details would have affected my sanity, which is already questionable. A senior colleague back at Miami--a person with a very impressive rhet/comp career--unofficially advocated this philosophy to me and it ended up being advice I used. Whether or not it ends up being "good" advice remains to be seen--at the end of academic year 2008-2009.

McCain

I'm sorry that we live in a country where any presidential candidate would be "honored" to receive an endorsement from John Hagee. In fact, I'm sorry we live in a country where a Hagee endorsement matters at all. Hagee, recall, makes headlines periodically for claiming Hurricane Katrina, for example, was God's punishment for a city that hosts "gay parades."

Hagee's also called the Catholic Church "the great whore," which is why John McCain's enthusiastic acceptance of Hagee's endorsement is getting some attention. McCain has backpedaled (his spokesperson said that accepting an endorsement doesn't equate to accepting that person's ideology wholesale) but that doesn't change much. Does Hagee contribute anything to civic discourse beyond hate speech? Does McCain even care what the answer to that question is?

Arizona II

Back in Michigan, but full of good memories of the southwest. I ended up doing two hikes with Mark, one in the South Mountains and one at the Lost Dutchman state park west of Apache Junction. Thanks to an unusually rainy winter, the dessert looked greener than ever. Strenuous but beautiful walks. Did I mention that Mark and A.J. have a humongous lemon tree in their backyard that gives more fruit than they know what to do with? We filled a suitcase with lemons when we left last night! We spent time in Tucson with our Arizona hosts, of course, enjoying two great Mexican meals: lunch at Tortilleria Jalisco (the best tortillas in town) and dinner, as predicted, at El Torero (best tacos in town).

Spent part of our Tucson time at "the Mission," aka San Xavier, the seventeenth-century Jesuit mission south of town, located between the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui reservations. You can pick up "milagros" (little pins shaped like body parts) and pin them to the robes that clothe the San Xavier statue--who is laid out as if entombed--a way to pray for a body part that ails you. The other tradition is to wait in line at the end of Mass and lift the saint's head. Many believe that if you are unable to lift the heavy head, your soul may be in jeopardy. I used to attend Mass sometimes at the Mission during my first year in Tucson and once got food poisoning from a fry bread sandwich I bought outside the church. Much better memory: teaching at a charter school on the Yaqui reservation during first year with the RCTE program.

We drove to southern California for a few days to stay with Hung and Ann. I've known Hung since 1988 and we were best men at one another's weddings. We drove up and down the coast and did some whale watching. We saw no whales but did watch a fisherman struggle for twenty minutes reeling in a seventy-pound stingray. Our most excellent hosts treated us to dinner at a delicious Peruvian restaurant in Torrance, but mostly we stayed in and caught up after not seeing H&A since 2005.

A much-needed week away from the snow and ice of the motor city. Though we were
constantly teased about only visiting to re-connect with Mexican food, our motivation really was to stay close to people we're lucky to call friends. Thanks much, guys!

live from Arizona...

The sun valley has really spoiled us so far. Temps hover in the mid-70s and the sun shines. I have no idea what kind of mess Detroit is in...snow? ice? sub-zero temps? I've got no clue. Last night Mark's parents watched their kids so our hosts Mark and AJ and Nicole and I could go out. We ate at a very cool fondue place in Tempe. We must have spent nearly three hours there, eating, drinking, chatting. We were going to take a walk on Mill Avenue, the Arizona State University strip, but a huge meal left us all feeling lazy. Instead, we came home, made a fire, and sat under the dessert sky until well after midnight. Excellent trip so far. Having great friends in the state always gives us good reason to visit, and keeps me from getting too regretful about leaving Arizona after grad school. On today's schedule, some hiking and possibly some reading too.

sour grapes and class manipulation

For the first time since the presidential race began, Barack Obama has begun to get attacked. Until now, Bill Clinton has been the only prominent voice lobbing ad hominems in Obama's direction. Now I scan a.m. talk radio during my commute and hear the scorn of pundits who loathe the thought of an activist or community organizer in the White House. Those words--"activist" and "community organizer"--are said with abhorrence and a dramatic pause afterward, as if the criticisms are self-evident. The McCain camp now impugns Obama for being a gifted orator, as if speaking well signifies poor character.

A noteworthy anti-Obama tirade took place in my hometown--Youngstown, Ohio--the other night (see here and here). Introducing Hillary Clinton, Machinist Union President Thomas Buffenbarger launched bizarre personal attacks on Clinton's rival and actively encouraged the crowd to boo not only Obama but also Obama's supporters. So insulted is the Clinton camp by Obama's refusal to canonize Bill Clinton's legacy, they let surrogates resort to name-calling. So sour are the grapes as Obama pulls into the lead, they risk splintering the party's base.

What did Buffenbarger say about Obama? With the same disgust in his voice that the right-wing radio hosts use when they call Obama a "community organizer," Buffenbarger questioned why anyone would want "the editor of Harvard Law Review" as their president. Because, I guess, you don't want someone smart in the White House? Or you don't want someone with a law degree from the ivy league? Such anti-intellectualism seems bizarre in the context of a Hillary Clinton--who is not only smart, but also in posession of a J.D. from Yale--rally. Buffenbarger also said:

The Barack show is playing to rave reviews sold out at college campus after college campus. Standing room only crowds to hear his silver-tounged orations. Hope, change, yes we can? Give me a break! I’ve got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak. This guy won’t last a round against the Republican attack machine. He’s a poet, not a fighter.

Um, I don't drink lattes, drive a Prius, wear sandals, or have a trust fund, and I back Obama. Discrediting a candidate for being elite is an old, and often effective, trick of course. Our current president--a third-generation millionaire and ivy league legacy admit--successfully played this game of class manipulation first against Al Gore, and then against John Kerry.

What bothers me is that Buffenbarger perpetuates an anemic, limited-and-limiting stereotype of the working class and organized labor: they all distrust lawyers, environmentalists, peace activists, and people who drink lattes. A union president should know better than to make such generalizations. When I was volunteering on the Kerry campaign in Ohio four years ago, I went to events at union halls that had coffee stations with choices that put the university's coffee stand to shame! My father-in-law (a janitor who was active in his union for decades) is the person who encouraged my wife to become a lawyer. Does Buffenbarger really think he or his rank-and-file benefit from divisive rhetoric and the reproduction of stereotypes?

tacos and nostalgia

In two days, Nicole and I leave for our first vacation in a long time. We'll spend my spring break in sunny Arizona, and take quick trips to Mexico and southern California. Visiting the southwest sounds attractive right now primarily because 1) we can't wait to visit our friends Mark and AJ and Hung and Ann, and 2) we've had NO RELIEF from icy sidewalks and single-digit temps in motown.

But food is a close number three in terms of Arizona's appeal. When I think about the four years I lived in Tucson, I get nostalgic (and hungry) for the many Mexican restaurants that dot the city. July, 1998, I moved to Tucson to start the Ph.D program at Arizona. I got there the day the WPA conference--held in Tucson that year--began. During the weeks leading up to the conference (and my 2,000-mile trek), a discussion on the wpa listserv centered on where to get the best Mexican food in town. So I got there with a pretty good list of resources!

South Tucson in particular boasts countless mom-and-pop restaurants and tortillerias. Homemade tortillas of south Tucson? Nothing better. My favorite place by far is El Torero. The proverbial hole in the wall. Except at El Torero, the hole is covered with an enormous stuffed swordfish, apopos, best I can tell, of nothing. Yes, a huge swordfish hangs on the wall. If the place wasn't pink, it would be hard to find. Tucked on quiet 26th Street, the joint always looks like it's closed. I remember eating lunch there with Bob Connors (and, as I recall, a motley assortment of our faculty and grad students) the day he visited our writing program, a few months before his untimely death. I remember my graduation party there, the night before commencement, the surreal experience of my parents and my dissertation committee around the same table. I remember taking my pal Mark there for lunch; he had never eaten at El Torero before and when his wife later told him that she had on several occasions, he was pissed off at her for never having shared its joys.

What to eat at El Torero. The topopo (a huge salad shaped like a volcano)? One of the dishes they top with mole sauce? Naah, go for the tacos and save the fancy stuff for Mi Nidito or one of the joints back in the university district. Tacos at El Torero forego the ground beef in favor of thin slices of bistek, the always fresh taste of queso fresco, and shredded cabbage. If I ever visit Arizona and don't go back to El Torero, do me a favor and slap me.

Moving across the country by myself was a challenge--especially moving to a city whose hot climate, bilingualism, and residents perpetually clad in sandals marked it as completely unfamiliar. Taking a grad seminar in community literacy and service learning (taught by Tilly Warnock: best. teacher. ever) during my first term served as a nice intro to Tucson life. So did being in the know about El Torero.

Arizona, here we come.

happy talk

I've been thinking a lot about what makes people happy. In my basic writing class last month, we read Paul Clemens' book Made In Detroit and, by the end, most of the students had concluded that Clemens lacked happiness. How else to explain his search for meaning? Why else would he wrestle with the meaning of his fiance's brutal attack and his dad getting carjacked? Yes, they said, of course these events affected Clemens emotionally, but why in the world--aside from his pervasive lack of happiness--would he approach these issues intellectually?

Writers lack the ability to "move on," many in the class concluded; writers like Clemens fail to "simplify" (one student used this term and it really resonated for others) their lives. We had a great discussion about how reflection, analysis, critique, and knowledge always have the potential to upset us and keep us from feelings of gratification. Knowing why McDonald's tastes so good. Knowing why that CD costs 8.99 instead of 14.99.

And yet I'm aware that much of my contribution to that discussion assumed the secular-liberal-academic values so rarely questioned in the world of campuses, English Departments, letters, etc. 'Knowledge comes from disinterested, rational thought.' 'The human condition is complex and cries out for nuanced, sophisticated explanations.' 'A life of books is the best life of all.' 'As a culture, as Neil Postman famously opined, we're amusing ourselves to death.'

These are not necessarily values for which I wish to cheerlead. I don't know for certain that a life of books is the best possible life. I love to read novels, as time allows. I love Naomi Shihab Nye's poetry. Reading Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness in grad school changed the way I look at the world. But my connection to these books is rooted in pleasure, not in some kind of exalted "life of books," and I don't think I'm alone in that respect. How is my connection to books (including "idea books") different than my connection to punk rock or the tv show "Lost" (given that all of the above are rooted in pleasure)? How is a connection to the stuff Postman critiques different than a connection to "good fiction"? I know a lot of English professors who seem to be "amusing themselves to death" on the New York Review of Books.

I challenged much of what my basic writers had to say (simplify! don't overthink it!), but I hope I did so in a fashion that made clear that we have a wide variety of value systems that might undergird how we make sense of the world. The secular-liberal-academic way(s) of understanding the world--adopt a disinterested, analytical stance--has not cornered the market. (And of course I don't mean to turn secularism, liberalism, or academe into fixed monoliths--there are many different versions of all three ideologies.) Most of my students take either Christianity or Islam very seriously and their identities as Christians or Muslims are more significant in their lives than their identities as academics. And yes, these two identity markers DO butt up against one another with some frequency.

All of these thoughts came to a head for me today as I read several reviews of Susan Jacoby's new book "The Age of American Unreason," reviewed in both the Times and Salon.com. Jacoby's book is another in a long-ass, usually quite popular line of critiques of our mythically dumbed-down-and-declining-right-now-as-we-speak culture. From the Salon review:

The chief manifestations of this newly virulent irrationality are the rise of fundamentalist religion and the flourishing of junk science and other forms of what Jacoby calls "junk thought." The mentally enfeebled American public can now be easily manipulated by flimsy symbolism, whether it's George W. Bush's bumbling, accented speaking style (labeling him as a "regular guy" despite his highly privileged background) or the successful campaign by right-wing ideologues to smear liberals as snooty "elites." Unable to grasp even the basic principles of statistics or the scientific method, Americans gullibly buy into a cornucopia of bogus notions, from recovered memory syndrome to intelligent design to the anti-vaccination movement.

And while I'm sure Jacoby makes some compelling points, for me her credibility is damaged by the implication that "junk thought" is new. To be fair, I have not read her book; perhaps the reviews are misrepresenting her argument. Self-help books and demagogue politicians have long histories. Over a century ago, PT Barnum scammed boatloads of the "suckers" he said were born every minute. Why the claims of newness?

I'll save the critiques of Jacoby until I've read the book. But in truth, I probably won't, because I have little interest in analyses of these issues that fail to account for the multiple value systems--all of them socially constructed (itself, I'll admit, a notion informed by a pomo-light version of secular-liberalism!), situated, ideologically bound. It's all a little too Allan Bloom. A little too much like the "where have all the bookstores gone?" conversation before faculty meetings.

Both reviews of the book suggest that Jacoby blames religious fundamentalism and partisan political ideology for the alleged decline in smarts. And while I find much to fear in the rise of fundamentalism in particular, I'm not convinced that fundamentalism or partisanship are any guiltier than other value systems for shutting down independent thought. A fundamentalist is told what to think about, say, gay marriage. A loyal republican is told what to think about gun control. But a loyal academic faces the pressures of groupthink, too (try bringing up "America's Next Top Model" at a faculty meeting).

That's why Sharon Crowley's "Toward a Civil Disourse" is such an interesting book, because she deconstructs liberalism and fundamentalism with equal gusto. And, to return to my own students, one of the useful things about Made in Detroit is that Clemens walks us through the inadequacy of BOTH his family's laissez faire attitude toward race in the city AND the body of African-American literature he falls in love with in college. Neither provides a framework that can adequately explain his own lived experience. And so he wrestles. And so he considers various perspectives. And he writes. And perhaps ends up a little bit unhappy.

yo vivo

The tenure file is done, save some final editing. Some of last term's service learning students and I are working on some promotional materials for our community partner. Those two facts explain why the blog has been quiet for a few days.

But I am alive and life is good. I've been working out every morning before work. Nicole and I celebrated Valentine's Day last evening with dinner down the street at Sweet Lorraine's, a place I had always avoided because it seemed kind of pretentious. But their menu pulls from interesting sources (a little French, a little cajun, a little British pub, etc.) and the tuna nicoise salad was very good. Eight days until "spring" break begins (our academic calendar is bizarre) and Nicole and I leave for a week in Arizona. Goodbye, snow. Final reason why life is good: The Dirtbombs have a new disc coming out and are playing a record-release show this weekend in Detroit. Today's Free Press gives the band some well-deserved love. Can't wait for the show.

In less decadent, bougie news, our church hosts Cass Community's roving homeless shelter next week. Preparations are underway--another reason for the blog's recent silence--for what is always a powerful experience. 55 homeless men and women (of the estimated 18,000 homeless in Detroit) will stay in the church next week, so that will occupy most evenings, especially Saturday when we're cooking a humongous spaghetti dinner. The annual event is always an important reminder, frankly, of what a deeply f***ed up culture we live in.

lies lies lies

The Kwame Kilpatrick scandal continues to dominate conversations in Detroit. Yesterday the mayor's attorney Sharon McPhail read a statement--full text available here--that argued the media ("they own the printing presses," she said scornfully) has told only one side of the story and that "the city" does not have an opportunity to be heard. McPhail said these words in a statement that was carried live on most local television and news radio stations (I listened on my way home from work). When Kwame Kilpatrick wanted to make a statement of his own, local tv stations all carried it, allowing the mayor to dictate the rules: I'll talk in my church, side by side with my wife, etc.

Referring to the sealed court records that local media brought a lawsuit in order to access, McPhail said: "It is important to note that none of the documents involved the so-called text messages that have been the subject of such fevered media coverage in recent days." She also said: "In fact, no secret deals exist or have ever existed."

Local media won that lawsuit despite the city's vigorous appeals (story here). According to the Free Press,

The most important document is a nine-page confidential agreement that the mayor and city lawyers had tried for months to keep secret. The document, signed by Kilpatrick, his then-chief of staff Christine Beatty and lawyer Mike Stefani, who represented three police officers in a whistle-blower lawsuit against the city, pledged to keep text messages between Kilpatrick and Beatty secret.

How can McPhail's statement be understood as anything but a series of lies? Will she be held accountable? Probably not. Unlike the mayor, at least she wasn't under oath while lying. Will *he* be held accountable? It's starting to look like he might. The city's strategy now seems to be to drag things out in the hopes that public outrage will diminish. I hope it does not.

lost, sick, weathered

First things first. Tonight LOST follows up last week's satisfying season premiere with a new episode to obsess over. As usual, EW has a great pre-episode article that doesn't give away any secrets but reviews pieces of LOST mythology that pertain to tonight's episode. The article also features an interview with Jorge "Hurley" Garcia. (If you're keeping score, Hurley happens to be my favorite castaway now that Charlie's moved on to that big Driveshaft gig in the sky.)

Today I've lost my voice. No, I don't mean I have writer's block. I mean my throat is beyond hoarse to the point that I can only speak in a whisper. The odd part is that, other than the hoarseness, I'm fine. In fact, I worked out this morning before coming to the office. I've had a mild cold the past two days that I think I've fought off with oranges, tea with honey from my sister's bees, and many glasses of water. But the throat problem remains.

Probably fortuitous, then, that the Michigan Campus Compact (a service learning organization) conference in Mt. Pleasant has been canceled. I was scheduled to give a presentation tomorrow morning on our service learning efforts at UM-Dearborn...and getting to Central Michigan U. for the presentation would have entailed leaving home at 5:30 a.m. Today I'm conferencing one-on-one with Comp 99 students most of the afternoon and tonight Nicole and I have a Berkley Democrats meeting, so I wouldn't mind sleeping past 5:30 tomorrow.

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Listening to: SSM: Break Your Arm for Evolution
Reading: Composition 099 first drafts
Watching: duh, LOST (tonight, that is)
Awaiting: the return of my voice

fiction watch, part two

Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon received awful reviews upon its release a few months back. See, for instance, the scathing NYTimes piece which calls the novel "emotionally and intellectually incoherent" as well as "banal" and "ludicrous" (the obligatory words of a negative review in the Times), all before getting to this one-two punch:

There’s no plot in this novel. It’s all free disassociation. “The Almost Moon” is really like one very long MySpace page. Sebold isn’t imagining people and events; she’s just making stuff up as she goes along...The real shame is that “Reading Alice Sebold” isn’t listed in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” After you’ve finished this insult to the lumber industry, your health care provider won’t cover your search for a cure.

Ouch. Critic Lee Siegel sounds like he wanted to start some kind of literary version of a Biggie-Tupac beef. Alas no such beef transpired. And the Times' fighting words didn't scare me off, either, as I finally got around to reading Sebold's poorly received third book.

Sebold once again begins a book with an act of graphic violence. Her memoir Lucky (an unflinching work of non-fiction that I've taught several times) begins with a painstaking, nearly unreadable account of her rape. Her debut novel Lovely Bones--whose nearly universal accolades partially explain critics' vitriol for her new book--starts out with the rape and murder of the fourteen-year-old protagonist.

In the first chapter (actually the first sentence) of The Almost Moon, the middle-aged, troubled, narcissist Helen smothers her elderly mother to death. This is Sebold's trope. Dispense with the gory and the graphic and then get down to business. Sebold is interested not so much in trauma as much as trauma's aftermath. The little girl at the center of Lovely Bones watches from heaven as her own gruesome death impacts her classmates, her family, her neighborhood, and her killer. In Lucky , she narrates the two decades during which she and her loved ones cycled recursively and chaotically through various stages of grief regarding her rape.

The Almost Moon has a much more surreal feel than her earlier books. Much more surreal, even, than a little girl looking down from heaven. Helen does one inconceivable, absurd act after the other. Many of these acts, including seducing her best friend's son, appear gratuitous and pulpy and over-the-top, and I can see why critics may not have approved. This doesn't seem like the work of a well-respected MFA graduate and Oprah guest. The present action careens wildly.

Meanwhile, Helen flashes back to key moments in her relationship with her mother, offering a not-so-subtle (nothing in this novel is subtle) psychoanalytic rationale for the scene-one matricide. I won't give away what transpires in these explanatory sequences, as they form the emotional center (!) of the paradoxically center-less book.

As with Sebold's other books, readers burn through The Almost Moon quickly. I read it in two sittings, which is unlike me. I suspect even the most vitriolic critics fell victim to the novel's poisonous readability. I loved the gonzo present action and thought that Helen's madness made sense. The novel--narrated by Helen herself--is mad because Helen is mad, despite her steely moments. I admire how Sebold finds Helen's voice and then allows her to speak no matter how blue her disassociative notions sound to us.

The flashbacks were a bit heavy-handed in their facilitation of Sebold's metaphors (Helen is a nude model because, you see, number one she's angry at her mom for giving her a body complex, and, number two, she's naked before us on the page...get it?). Like I said, subtlety is no where to be found here. The book is flawed and struggles to match the unabashed, total pathos of Lovely Bones. But it's a novel that sticks to its vision and voice.

one day of the war

Wednesday randomness

Jack Lessenberry has written a compelling op-ed on the mayor's text message scandal, a call for his resignation:

What few seem to realize is that this is not about sex.
Kwame Kilpatrick, for all I care, could have carnal knowledge of an Allis-Chalmers combine, if he paid for it. He could have had all the little girly-girls service him that he wanted. And if he paid for the rooms and broke no laws and did it on his own time, it might be disgusting or morally wrong, but it's not the public's
business.
Abraham Lincoln once, on being told that Ulysses Grant was a drunk, asked what kind of whiskey he drank so that he could send a case to his less successful generals. No, this isn't about sex.
That's the giggle factor. What it is about is lying under oath, committing a felony and destroying people's careers and wasting millions of a poor city's money to cover his own personal mess up.
You cannot get around that. You cannot survive that, if the rule of law makes any sense.

Amen to that. As Detroit cut curbside garbage pick-up and other "non-essential services," shut down firehouses, and watched the Big Three exit stage left, Kilpatrick settled a whistleblower case for $9 million of the city's money so that the cops suing the city wouldn't testify and reveal his affair with his chief of staff. His family already knew about the affair, according to his own statement, which means his children watched him on the news as he lied under oath. His chief has already resigned, he's the subject of a criminal inquiry into his alleged perjury, but his aides snickered (!) when asked if the mayor would consider stepping down. He'll speak tonight at his church and the whole metropolitan area will watch. Most of us will be sad.

...Speaking of sad, how fast did this ugliness turn uglier? By now, the composition studies community has finished buzzing about The Chronicle's latest ill-informed "analysis" of the teaching of writing. One of the paper's columnists listed titles of papers given at our national conference and used those titles as evidence of the discipline's lack of "legitimacy." How dare they engage with the social context of language use instead of sticking to "basic writing" (a disciplinary term the author doesn't understand) and expect to be taken seriously?

At first, the online responses echoed the responses in the composition studies blogosphere and on comp studies professional listservs. Later responses, though, seem to suggest that somebody rallied the troops and shifted the tide of opinion: writing courses don't teach students to write or think, nobody on campus respects writing teachers, writing courses indoctrinate, blah, blah, blah. Should have known the conversation would go nowhere.

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Listening to: The Go: Whatcha Doin' (1999); Detroit talk radio
Reading: The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold; Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching by Laura Micciche; a boatload of short stories by my English 323 students
Watching: The "Lost" recap show; Mayor Kilpatrick's address (not this second, obviously, but I think both are on tonight)
Awaiting: The new episode of "Lost," of course.

ivy league

So I'm watching "The Good Shepherd," the Matt Damon thriller about the early history of the C.I.A. and the film's version of life in the ivy league (circa 1939) fascinates me. Rich boys, foppish one minute, full of swagger and a macho awareness of their cultural capital the next. The film highlights these kids reading a lot of modernist poetry, putting on productions of HMS Pinafore, singing tunes in four-part harmony. Did life at Harvard and Yale really look like this seventy years ago?

Does ivy league life look like this now? Pop culture representations seem to construct this version of the ivies. The Harvard class reunion from "Good Will Hunting," where cliques seem to congregate around the barbershop quartets the respective alums belonged to. The ivy-league-educated staffers on "The West Wing," who all obsess over Gilbert and Sullivan.

Anybody out there have any first-hand accounts of whether life at the ivies consists of the future senators and Simpsons writers singing a capella and talking about Pirates of Penzance? Or is this just the impression Aaron Sorkin and Matt Damon WANT us to have?

fiction watch

Last night I finished Diary of a Bad Year, J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, and found myself looking beyond some of the self-indulgence that turned me off initially. Coetzee tells the story of a reclusive and somewhat lecherous old writer (a novelist and retired academic) who hires a young woman named Anya to type his latest manuscript, a collection of hyper-erudite musings on, well, the world. Senor C, Coetzee's how-autobiographical-is-he? protagonist, tackles everything from the war in Iraq to Bach's unmatched genius. Any given page of the novel is divided into three sections: a snippet of Senor C's manuscript, the writer's first-person narration of the "story," and finally Anya's version of events. Senor C is a little bit Humbert Humbert, a little bit Coetzee (obviously), and a little bit of the professor who taught the first Brit Lit survey you took as an undegraduate, which presents intriguing possibilities. But the three narrative threads--the novel's hokey conceit--keep the narrative from exploring all of these possibilities. It's probably cliche to suggest a later novel from an iconic writer reads like a draft, but that's exactly the impression I had, particularly in the early chapters.

But Coetzee redeems the story in its second half, when he allows a plot to materialize. Anya's lover, an eager young businessman named Alan, hatches a plot to rip off Senor C. Alan brings some humor. I especially liked Alan's defense of his scheme; he feels Senor C's fortunes are wasting away in low-interest accounts, which Alan finds sinful. I haven't given away anything significant and I'd recommend the novel, even with its flaws, as a somewhat interesting, self-aware critique of academic critique. One of the central ironies involves Senor C's focus on the macro-dangers of global capitalism while remaining clueless about the micro-danger of the capitalist who lives in his building.

what doesn't kill me...

The voices of Kipatrick's detractors grow louder and louder. See, for instance, the letters-to-the-editor in Detroit's two papers, the News and Free Press. Mostly opposition. Calls to resign. Calls for prosecution. A few from the city. Many more from the suburbs.

The irony is that this vocal opposition makes prosecution LESS likely. Will prosecutors bring perjury charges? Depends in large part on whether they think a conviction is likely. If (and it's a big IF) the text messages are real and if they were obtained legally, then perjury seems very easy to establish. But it comes down to likelihood of conviction. Will a jury in the city convict the mayor, as suburbanites call loudly for that conviction?

The racial divide. The city-suburb divide. The grandest of Detroit's narratives. Kilpatrick, like Coleman Young, successfully uses negative criticism from the suburbs to bolster support. Echoes of Clinton. Republicans calling for Clinton's removal from office ended up looking petty, personal, and conspiratorial.

some quick observations of press coverage

The scandal is ubiquitous. Hallway conversations. Dinner conversations. And, of course, the media. Local NPR affiliates, of course, feign restraint. Commercial media makes no pretenses about its obsession. Some quick notes:

• Reporters get "meta" very quickly, covering not only the story, but the fact that they are covering the story. A radio host this a.m. says with certainty that this is the biggest story in Detroit since the Malice Green story fifteen years ago.
• The search for a cool name. One columnist posits "blackberry gate" as a good choice.
• Race, race, and more race. Kilpatrick's "hip hop mayor" nickname is brought out. White pundits talk about how "they" voted for him and "they" deserve" him. Of course this emphasis on race (the racist tropes of the media, etc.) allows Kilpatrick (who cares not about how the media sees him--that's a losing battle) to frame the whole scandal as another personal attack on him, the hometown hero.
• Media outlets try to distinguish themselves. Again, NPR in particular sees itself above the fray. But even the popular press points to supposedly seamier outlets. The Free Press headlines a sidebar "Blogs gorge on mayoral message scandal." Ah, so BLOGS are gorging themselves. Unlike the commercial press?
• Alliteration. Tawdry texting tales.

texts, lies, and videotape

So, yet another scandal for Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. He has survived allegations of wild parties at the mayoral mansion, keeping an expensive entourage, killing strippers, taking spa trips with cronies on the city's dime, on and on.

Now, the biggie. Local press obtained 14,000 text messages that allegedly prove Kilpatrick and his chief of staff purjured themselves. Two cops had sued the city, claiming they were dismissed for threatening to whistle-blow in an investigation of Kilpatrick's security detail--an investigation that would have exposed an affair between Kilpatrick and his chief.

Under oath, Kilpatrick swore unequivocally that he never had an affair with the chief and that he did not fire the cops. The 14,000 text messages include some pretty clear indications of an affair ("I want another night...at the Residence Inn! You made me feel so good that night") and that Mayor and chief made the decision to fire the cops.

Naturally, the press goes wild. The whole city drips with the gory details. Obviously, the sex sells, and this story--which is about consensual but adulterous workplace sex and the lies under oath that followed--breaks a decade, almost to the day, of the publication of the first Monica Lewinksy stories.

But the technology angle is as flashy as the sex. There's a record, somewhere, of every key stroke we make. News reports review the ins and outs of the Freedom of Information Act provisions that gave the press access to these text messages (made from a city-owned device). One of the investigative reporters highlights the sidebar pieces the paper's "tech guy" will surely do during the scandal's fallout. A caller to talk radio this morning says he works for a major cell phone provider and that homeland security mandates they back-up their customers' every text message, every call, every photograph, every voicemail and maintain tapes for the feds to access on demand.

Remarkably, on the same day Detroiters learn of a story about thousands and thousands of six-year-old text messages resurfacing in their entirety, the White House reports that its tech people have not been able to access archives of White House emails from December 03 and January 04, the period when weapons inspectors concluded the absence of WMDs in Iraq. Go figure. Oh, and preservation of west wing emails is required under the Presidential Records Act. Alas, no sex in that particular scandal, so the story will probably receive little attention before disappearing like those emails.

great new blog

Well, new to me anyway. Thanks to Motor City Rocks for the link to a blog affiliated with It Came From Detroit, a great indie documentary about the rock scene in the city, circa turn of the milennium. Looks like outtakes from the ICFD film itself, as well as videos from the bands featured therein. Good stuff. Already they have footage from SSM, Soledad Brothers, and other acts that are well worth checking out. Hope the folks over there continue to maintain and update the site. I also hope they release the film on DVD. As far as I know, it's not yet available. They may be shopping for a distributor, since as far as I know it's only been shown at a couple festivals and the Detroit Film Theatre down at the D.I.A. (where I saw it).

why my e-mail inbox runneth over

• nominations for various CCCC positions...keep 'em coming folks
  
• ideas from my fellow Peace & Justice Committee members for the "Elections 2008" series we're planning at our church
• unsigned messages--my secret pet peeve--from students (my car broke down, what did I miss yesterday?, when did I sign up to workshop my story?) whose email addresses (worldofwarcraftdude1990@freeemailservice.com) don't exactly give away their identities

equal time?

Don't let anybody tell you I never say anything nice about the presidential candidates from the right side of the aisle...

That Huckabee fellow knows a little something about good Detroit music. Veteran rock critic Susan Whitall points out the old boy's apparent affinity for the Funk Brothers. Right on.

the middle of the MLK weekend

I do a pretty good job staying mindful of what a friggin' awesome job I have. And this term, thanks in part to my pre-tenure course release, I find myself able to concentrate on 1) my two groups of students and the interesting things they are writing and 2) the civic engagement teacher-research I'm doing. Oh yeah, and that tenure portfolio too.

And yet, like many others who refuse to be workaholics, I love weekends when I can break away even from work that brings much, much pleasure. Friday night, after a particularly long meeting, I managed to work out before leaving campus. Nicole and I ate at a new burger place here in Berkley (mediocre food) and then caught a late showing of Juno, which was as funny and beautiful as the accolades indicate. Maybe moreso. I loved this film. Saturday morning we drove down to Sylvania, OH., and saw my nephew Tony perform at a high school speech competition, doing a one-man noir version of Juluis Ceasar (sample humor: "gimme a Martinus, barkeep" "you mean Martini?" "if I wanted two, I'd tell you").

After a little house-cleaning back home, I made a simple tomato sauce with lots of garlic, basil, and red pepper flakes; some whole wheat pasta; and faux meatballs with eggplant (frozen from my dad's garden), Italian breadcrumbs, and much parmesan cheese. Nothing is as relaxing as cooking. My friend Jason came over for dinner and we talked about seminary memories for hours. Today went to mass, then out to lunch with the crew from church.

I'm going to relent and do a little paper grading this afternoon and evening (and also start Coetzee's new book "Diary of a Bad Year" fresh from the library shelves), because tomorrow is Martin Luther King Service Day on campus. Nicole and I will join a group of students at one of the soup kitchens downtown for a morning of work, followed by an afternoon program on MLK back at school. Nice chance for faculty-student interaction. Then to my sister Anna's to hang with my parents who are coming for a quick visit.

Schoolwork? It'll be there on Tuesday morning.

getting my ya-ya's out

The Rolling Stones will release a live album in two months, presumably because at this point they only have about two dozen live records in their catalogue. Not to mention umpteen "hits" compilations that slice and dice their career every which way (the London years, the Decca years, 40 Licks, the Mick Taylor years, 64-71, 77-83, our uneven Reagan-Thatcher years, Hits We Wrote While Shooting Up in Barbados). Not to mention vast networks of bootlegs. Not to mention youtube footage of that trainwreck at the Super Bowl in Detroit a few years back.

Out of fairness, their forthcoming platter is the soundtrack to a Martin Scorsese concert film--don't get me started on their many concert docs from the disturbing Altamont footage to this cheesy "imax experience" I saw when I was like 19--which very well might rock, a la The Last Waltz.

But can the new record possibly be anywhere near as good as this? Those shows from the year of my birth were amazing and the "Happy Birthday Nicky" discs capture freewheeling, drunken abandon. It's hard to imagine a time when the Stones didn't feel obliged to play "Satisfaction" every night. You get Mick Taylor. You get a setlist heavy on Exile on Main Street tracks. You get the bluesier second night, where they trot out "Love In Vain." Tight.

vote

Berkley, Michigan. 7:30 this morning.


No signs outside. No campaigners in sight. No lines. No stickers for voters. The polls had been opened for thirty minutes and I was the seventh voter.


NPR reports that pollsters expect less than a twenty percent turn-out today in Michigan. The four inches of snow on the ground should keep that number lower even than expected.


A sitting president with record-low approval ratings. A mortgage crisis in the state. Auto industry in shambles. A wartime election, with candidates promising everything from "immediate" withdrawl to one-hundred years of occupation and many points in between. Age of oldest Supreme Court justice: 87.


Less than twenty percent?

do you--DO!--feel like I do?

The Detroit Free Press conducted a strange poll in anticipation of tomorrow state primary, asking primary voters how they would "feel" if candidate x were to win the presidency come November. Not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton elicited some of the strongest responses.

Nearly four out of five people, 79%, who plan to vote in Tuesday's Republican primary said they would feel "not so good" or "terrible" if Clinton is elected.

Clinton evoked a similarly strong response from Democratic voters, with 36% saying they would feel "pretty good," and 32% saying they would feel "ecstatic," if she is elected.

Unlike many, I kind of like Hillary Clinton on a personal level. I just think she has a deplorable record in the senate and fine it fairly bizarre that any progressives would back a candidate who twice voted for the Patriot Act. Though not one of the choices in the poll, I'd feel "better" if she were elected in November and perhaps "worried," given that Clinton's stance on issues has been so strongly shaped by popular opinion.

I worry that this poll represents another instance of the media's intense focus on likeability and the disproportionate and sexist attention given to H.C.'s "do you like her?" factor. The problem, for me, with this focus is that it deflects attention from that senate record. Not unlike how the focus on our current president's verbal foils and anti-intellectual stance distracts from his frightening ideas.

questions

• Why has every orange I've bought this winter been so lousy?
• Why has nobody seemed to question the age discimination of Homeland Security's new REAL ID act, which mandates new rules for driver's licenses issued to those born after Dec. 1, 1964? The ACLU is rightly critiquing the sharing of personal information that's going to happen now, but where's the resistance to the age issue? What, nobody over 44 is a terrorist or con artist?
• Where did my free time go?
• Why is the deadline for WPA grants on Monday?
• Why is my over-enrolled creative writing class in the smallest room on campus?

from the morning workout

Been doing an hour on the cardio machines every morning this week. Must keep up this habit. This a.m. on the i-pod:

• One Way Ticket-Aretha Franklin (Spirit in the Dark)
• I'm Not There-The Band (Basement Tapes)
• D.T. Shadows-Fleshtones (Beautiful Light)
• Far Gone and Out-Jesus and Mary Chain
• Lord Anthony-Belle & Sebastian (Dear Catastrophe Waitress)
• Pam Berry-The Shins (Wincing the Night Away)
• Life in Prison-The Byrds (Sweethearts of the Rodeo)
• Heart of the City-Jay Z (Blueprint)
• Since You're Gone-The Cars (Greatest Hits)
• Bomb the Twist-The 5678s
• You Still Believe in Me-The Beach Boys (Pet Sounds)
• Damaged Goods-Gang of Four (Entertainment)
• Galang-M.I.A.
• Not Dark Yet-Bob Dylan (Time Out of Mind)
• Country Feedback-R.E.M. (In Time)
• Lonesome You Lonesome Me-Boogieman Smash (Crowned 7")
• Ain't To Be Played With-Big Maybelle (Complete Okeh Sessions)
• Zealots-Fugees (The Score)
• Kingdom Come-Jay Z (Kingdom Come)
• Rock Me Baby-Etta James

Lyric that most resonated as I thought about tenure process came from Jay-Z: "I don't want much/f*** I drive a nice car/some nice cooked food/some nice clean drawers."

MT on Michigan primaries

This week's editorial in the Metro Times suggests voting for Kucinich in the Michigan primary is the only option for folks on the left. Because the Michigan Democratic party violated the national party's charter by moving the primary up to January 15, the Obama and Edwards campaigns both pulled out. So Clinton's a virtual lock. As further punishment for the charter violation, Michigan delegates don't get a vote at the national convention. All this means translates into the major candidates from the party 1) ignoring Michigan until August, and 2) having no pressing reason to address the state's reeling economy or the collapse of the Big 3 until, you guessed it, August.

The editorial frames a Kucinich vote as a do-no-harm vote: send a message to the party--without any of the guilt of voting for a candidate who allegedly isn't viable. The piece reads:

The way News Hits sees it, this is a perfect opportunity for progressives in Michigan to make a statement without taking any risk. And the way to do that is to vote for Kucinich.

He — not Clinton — is the one who opposed our disastrous invasion of Iraq from the outset. Clinton can claim she was conned by the Bush administration's deceptions, but Kucinich was exposed to the same smoke and saw through it.

Kucinich — not Clinton — is the one calling for immediate troop withdrawal. And he's the one seeking the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney, demanding that they be held accountable for the damage they've done to this country and its Constitution.

Kucinich — not Clinton — is the one proposing a single-payer, government-run health care system similar to those in place in every other industrialized nation.

And the piece doesn't even get very far into Clinton's senate record: supporting the Patriot Act, supporting the Patriot Act's renewal (when it was starting to lose popularity), getting involved with non-issue garbage like hearings on video games. Go Dennis!

discipline

Right now I'm reviewing two separate articles for two separate journals and both articles take lots of risks with form, tone, and diction. Both pieces are quite interesting and original, in part because of the risks. And yet I find myself slipping into "policing" mode in my responses--urging the respective writers to re-think *some* of the flourishes that distract. Okay, finding that balance is key when playing with narrative/voice/and such, but I'm trying to resist pushing the 'discipline.' The last thing I want to do is shut down that element of play.

campaigning

Another great post from Carrie Brownstein, NPR blogger extraordinaire. Brownstein offers her meandering take on campaign music, outlining how politicians can strip not only edge but also point-of-view from music by co-opting songs for campaign appearances. She refers of course to Bill Clinton's effective use of "Don't Stop" and the bi-partisan ubiquity of U2, and then gets to this interesting piece:

Yet what do we expect from Presidential candidates? I mean, above everything else, do they have to have good taste in music? No, it's certainly not a requirement. In fact, maybe the less the candidates get nearer to our own tastes, the better. How strange, for instance, if Spoon's "The Way We Get By" was the soundtrack to Hillary Clinton's stump speech. And the further the candidates' beliefs get from our own, the less we want to know that they might actually share our cultural tastes. Like if "The Greatest" by Catpower accompanied Mitt Romney wherever he went.

Well, frankly, I woud kind of like a president to share my affinity for, say, The Dirtbombs. I wouldn't use pop culture sensibility to decide what candidate to support (at least consciously), but I'd find if awfully reassuring. Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant performing duets at Bill Clinton's inauguration fifteen years ago felt as hopeful as hearing the Clintons talk about universal health care (so much for that one).

Brownstein also asks what tunes we think the candidates SHOULD use. Here are my picks:
Barack Obama = "Gut Feeling" by Devo
Dennis Kucinich = "Underdog" by The Dirtbombs or "One Man Revolution" by Nightwatchman
Hillary Clinton = "Only" by Nine Inch Nails or "Means to an End" by Joy Division
John Edwards = "Here Comes Your Man" by The Pixies or "Sue Me" from Guys and Dolls
Bill Richardson = "Second Best" by Dolly Parton (perfect for a vp hopeful)

Hyatt this morning

who wants another week of break?

Me, that's who.

Starting to get those tasks checked off my list, and here it is the Friday before classes resume. I'm putting finishing touches on the syllabi, which makes me eager to get into the classroom, but oh the things I could do with another wide-open week. "Stop Your Sobbing" by The Pretenders just popped up on itunes. No joke.

Exciting to see Obama take Iowa. I hadn't watched a long stretch of CNN in a long time, but I watched and listened last night after his win as he mostly went through his stump speech:

At this defining moment, we cannot wait any longer for universal health care. We cannot wait to fix our schools. We cannot wait for good jobs, and living wages, and pensions we can count on. We cannot wait to halt global warming, and we cannot wait to end this war in Iraq.

All the pundits contrasted Obama's pathos with the more reserved and platform-oriented content of Huckabee's post-caucus victory address. I was starting to doze, so I can't remember which pundit compared Obama's message--curb partisan bitterness and affect changes for common good--with what she saw as the gist of Hillary Clinton's sad, post-Iowa speech: I should be president. Spot-on observation, I thought. Speaking of H/C's appearance at the podium, boy did Bill Clinton ever look sad about the loss.

tenure, part two

Day two of working on the tenure portfolio. Some observations:

• The university-wide format does not always allow for easy articulation of the work of humanists. I can see how some of the categories that represent the work of scientists can cause anxiety. I have nothing to put under patents, licensures, synergistic activities (the example given in the tenure guidelines literature: "developed a methodology for modeling and analysis of system robustness"... err, I haven't done that), or technical reviews. Does that make me look weak? Conversely, I find myself relegating some work--writing entries for encyclopedias, chairing the 4Cs nominating committee--to "other" sections.
• One requirement in the teaching section involves creating a table showing enrollment in all of your classes. When you teach writing classes with low caps, your record looks lightweight next to, say, a psychologist who teaches big lecture courses. Further, involvement in interdisciplinary programs like first-year seminars, women's studies, honors, and the m.a. in liberal studies further lowers your "numbers."
• Stuff you did before you got to your current institution doesn't matter very much. I'm sure this varies school-to-school, but around here, it's all about what you've done while on faculty at UMD, particularly in research and publication. I get the rationale: show that you can be a good academic in your present climate; your publications "brand" your present institution (Professor X is on faculty at university Y). Seems to me, though, that *ongoing* contributions also matter, especially for faculty hired at the advanced assistant level.

tenure

Today I've started assembling my tenure portfolio. The process strikes me as less cumbersome than many make it out to be. Make copies of publications. Write some reflective pieces that discuss how said publications connect. Write a bit about what you think you've contributed to your field. Gather all the syllabi and a sample of assignment sheets you've used over the years. Synthesize student evaluations.

Okay, there IS a good amount of paperwork involved. And a part of me thinks that right now I *could* be working on an article or getting ready to teach next week. Overall, though, it's kind of nice to look back at professional accomplishments and to take some time to recognize connections and even, gasp!, coherence among things I've written, courses I've taught, and projects I've worked on.

I've sometimes heard comments like "I couldn't do anything that year, I was going up for tenure," or "Don't sign on for any committee work while you're putting together your tenure dossier." Not sure I fully understand those comments. I certainly see how the red tape gets irritating and I definitely relate to the ever-present anxiety, but so far it's been kind of enjoyable.

Similarly, a big discussion went down on WPA-L last week about how writing a dissertation is allegedly a painful, alienating thing. And I've known some people who did have a bad experience for various reasons. Happily, though, a few folks suggested that they were NOT "bothered" by the process of dissertating. Refreshing to hear a few people speak positively. I see the tenure portfolio in the same light as the dissertation and wonder why there is so much dissatisfaction.

tasty

Like so many others, the new year, for me, brings a healthier eating resolution. More exercising and less coffee drinking, too. Stressed about the upcoming tenure process? Drink a pot of coffee. Feeling down? Eat (a lot of) something. Must stop doing that.

Luckily I made limoncello pasta LAST week. Oh, is this ever delicious. My brother has taken to making limoncello, the Italian "digestivo" typically made from lemon zest and sugar and grain alcohol (he uses vodka instead), and gave us a bottle for Christmas. Here's what I did. While boiling a pound of bowties, I mixed in a big bowl equal parts limoncello and cream (about 1/2 cup of each), a couple tablespoons of butter, a pinch of kosher salt and a couple pinches of dried parsley. After pasta cooked, I drained, tossed in bowl with other ingredients, and added a bunch of parmesan cheese (a couple cups). Excellent stuff.

Not going to be eating more for a good while though. Happy 2008, ya'll.