seattle, part 1

First time to the Pacific Northwest. The range of sights astounds: mountains, the massive Puget Sound, the colors of the market, young people in public. This definitely won't be my last trip to Seattle. Wallace Falls, an hour or so east of town, offered one of the highlights.


Lew and I at "middle falls," about halfway into the trail. The falls, in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, seem moderate (trail's about 5.5 miles), but the elevation gets tough during the final, switchback-intensive, leg to upper falls. Pics don't do justice to the 265-foot waterfall, the views of the snow-capped Cascades, or certainly to the sound of the falls, particularly now as the snowmelt increases the intensity.

reconstruction part 2: the 80s edition

Tom Tom Club, "Genius of Love" (Tom Tom Club, 1981). Aside from maybe "I Zimbra" and "Burning Down the House," the Talking Heads rarely flew a funk flag, so the band's husband-wife rhythm section formed the Tom Tom Club. Artists ranging from Grandmaster Flash (1982) to Annie (2005) have covered and/or sampled "Genius" and for good reason. Bassist Tina Weymoth handles most of the vocal duties and over the hookiest of synth lines and funkiest of beats narrates a sonnet-of-sorts in which her love is like a great r&b crooner. Then, in the song's breakdown, her husband, drummer Chris Frantz yells the sonnet-closing couplet for her, intoning the name "James Brown" again and again and, well, you can't help but dance. Nicole and I saw the Tom Tom Club co-headline with the B-52s at a casino's mini-outdoor ampitheater in southern Arizona in 2000 or 2001. A warm and dry night. On stage all night, 40-somethings singing what poet Allison Joseph calls "disco liberation." We broke through the half-hearted barriers between seats and stage and stood in front of Tina Weymouth (and, afterward, in front of Fred Schneider during the B-52s set) as she rocked the Sonoran desert, moving Tom Tom Club through a covers-heavy set that included the band's version of "You Sexy Thing." But "Genius of Love" was the evening's high point, besting even their co-headliner's rendition of "Rock Lobster."

Dead Kennedys, "Take this Job and Shove It" (Bedtime for Democracy, 1986). In seventh grade, I had two DK casettes, 'Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death' and 'Bedtime for Democracy', though what I really wanted was one of those black t-shirts with the DK logo in red. Though now I understand that the band's debut record 'Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables' is their masterpiece, at thirteen I dug the fast-paced 'Bedtime for Democracy' best. The songs waste no time. They waste nothing. The "Take this Job and Shove It" cover--the opening track of the record--clocks in at under ninety seconds. The song tries too hard to be subversive, but so do thirteen-year-old Dead Kennedys fans. If the country version of the song gives the finger to a mean boss-man, this version gives the finger to the world that allows mean boss-men to exist in the first place. I still like 'Bedtime,' a thematically tight record, with self-explanatory tracks like "Chickenshit Conformist," "Macho Insecurity," and "Rambozo the Clown" nicely cohering, and never failing to remind me of the things I hated about the Catholic school I attended.

Lou Reed, "Romeo Had Juliette" (New York, 1989). What did I know about New York City at fourteen or fifteen? Certainly part of my impression of the city came from beat poetry and Velvet Underground music and Rolling Stone articles about first generation punk rock. About the time that Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing came out, I got Lou Reed's concept album about NYC, a record that spoke to gentrification and AIDS and police brutality and vigilantes and drug addiction. Without a doubt, the record represents the highpoint of Reed's post-VU career. As strong a time capsule and as potent a piece of art as the Spike Lee movie, 'New York' was, as its liner notes suggested, like a novel. And "Romeo Had Juliette," an ode to teen love gone wrong, was the novel's most vivid moment. Full of striking images, particularly those that imagine the protagonist Romeo Rodriguez ("A diamond crucifix in his ear / is used to help ward off the fear"). Check out the youtube performance, in which Reed mumbles the song with a toothpick in his mouth the whole time.

reconstruction

I admire the story Noel Murray at AV Club tells. Murray meanders alphabetically through his record collection, taking stock of his tastes and life as he revisits "pieces of the puzzle." He situates selected artists in a canon that exists between rock-criticism land (usual suspects like Pavement are well represented) and his own private universe (dude digs southern rock). Those selected artists get their own entries. He uses categories like "personal correspondence" where he narrates his interactions with the music. In another category, "fits between," Murray places artists between two other musical artists--The Go-Go's end up between B-52s and the Bangles, Gomez between Pearl Jam and Free. Murray approaches this task with the care of Paul Shaffer picking out a song to play as a Letterman guest walks onto the stage.

After a recent i-pod mishap, I had to reload 30 GB worth of tunes onto my machine. This reconstruction process gave me a chance to meander like Murray, pausing over my own pieces of the puzzle:

R.E.M., "What's the Frequency Kenneth?" (Monster, 1994). I can picture myself at 20, sitting in Nicole's car listening to this for the first time. I am picking her up from her co-op job in Troy, Michigan. I am enrolled in a creative writing class with Hugh Culik at the time and, as I sit in that white Dodge, I wish I could write something with the surreal abandon of the lyrics to "Kenneth." "Butterfly decal rearview mirror dogging the scene" sounds an awful lot like a Burroughs cut-up, which Culik talks about constantly. The song famously comes from non-sensical threats yelled by assailants as they beat Dan Rather outside of CBS. Rather, enjoying the surrealism, performs the song a few weeks later with the band on David Letterman, whose show I watched at least two or three nights a week in 1994 at Smith Media Center, in the offices of the school paper, with the rest of the staff. With miscelaneous members of that staff, I saw three R.E.M. shows during the Monster tour, in Ann Arborn, Auburn Hills, and East Lansing. It was making up for lost time, as I had wanted to go see the band since I was about 12 years old. Each show opens up with a different low-key track from Monster, after which--at all three shows--Peter Buck (allegedly playing Kurt Cobain's guitar) launches into the opening riff of "Kenneth."

Dr. Dre, "Let Me Ride" (The Chronic, 1992). Two years earlier I'm still in the seminary, living in Detroit's Six-Mile/Livernois area, in a huge house that used to be a convent for cloistered nuns. The area is rough. Police helicopters, car alarms, liquor stores with single cigarettes for sale and built-in ice cream parlors and Thai take-out counters. I sit in the room of Hung, one of my fellow seminarians and unwrap a care package his family has sent from New Orleans. The care package contains dried squid, cans of lychee fruit, and a couple cartons of Marlboro Lights. Because the dried squid goes best with beer, according to Hung, we walk to Tradewinds on Livernois. Returning to Hung's room, we enjoy some American beer and Vietnamese snacks as Dr. Dre enjoys heavy (err, constant) rotation on Detroit radio. "Let Me Ride" is essentially a cover of Parliament's "Mothership Connection," poppy and infectious and funky, with original verses about gangbangin' in L.A. The paradox is the perfect soundtrack for eighteen-year-olds (who happen to be studying for the priesthood) drinking cheap beer on a Friday night.

Seattle

The most recent 4Cs was wall-to-wall business. Editorial board meetings. Sessions. A workshop. Nominating committee meetings. Too much. Seattle's going to be a different story. I've never been to the Pacific Northwest before, so I want to live a life outside of the Westin. And, as my conference funds are practically used up, I'm paying for much of this trip out-of-pocket. So I'm planning to dig on Seattle as much as possible.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't been to the Rhetoric Society of America conference for a few years and I'm really looking forward to hearing some papers (not to mention giving one: check out session C-11, everybody, where I'll be talking about how the literature on social movement rhetoric contends with class). But I'm planning a little fun too.

My buddy Lew and I already have tickets for next Monday's Mariners game against Boston. And at some point, we're going to make our way to Wallace Falls for a little hiking. The forest looks breathtaking, as does the 265-foot (!) waterfall. And I don't want healthy pursuits like exercise to monopolize, so a visit to Mike's Chili (same recipe since 1922) is in order. Saw a Mike's Chili segment on 'Diners, Dives, and Drive-Ins'--best show on the food network--and damned if my mouth didn't water a little.

Anybody in the know about Seattle? Leave me a comment and tell me where to go while visiting there.

for my next trick...

Oh, that Smokey. She's full of tricks. Today I slept in, took Nicole out to breakfast, and then settled into my home office to work on an article. Early afternoon, I let Hyatt and Smokey in the backyard, the fenced-in backyard that is, and returned to work. When I opened the door to let them back in, only Hyatt came. I could see Smokey standing in the driveway but when I called for her, she stayed put. I figured she wanted to enjoy some more fresh air, so I let her stay outside. Big mistake.

Ten minutes later, I went back outside and she was gone. Nowhere to be found. Instantly, I grew worried. Smokey's the shyest thing you've ever seen. Clearly a survivor of abuse, people freak that girl out. I started walking the neighborhood in a bit of a panic. No sign of her. I called Nicole, who was able to come home from the office to help look. I called my in-laws, who are retired, who also pounded the pavement. Still no sign of her. We looked for three hours. We called the police and the county and the rescue where we got Smokey (their number is still on her tag). I knocked on neighbors' doors, explained the situation, and asked them to check their backyards, as I thought she might be cowering under a bush.

We took a break. My father-in-law grilled some burgers while I took Hyatt around the block a few more times, thinking maybe she'd run to her big brother. Nothing. By the time everybody went home, I was convinced Smokey had been dog-napped. I took Hyatt around the block one final time. When I got home, Smokey was in the backyard, wagging her nub of tail on the same spot of the driveway where I had last seen her.

I don't know how she pulled that disappearing act. Maybe she was hiding all afternoon. Maybe she's got the ability to jump over a four-feet high fence and then jump back after she's done with her adventures. The latter is pretty doubtful, since she's still, unfortunately, too darn scared to be much of an adventurer. Or, maybe one of our neighbors found her, knocked on our door, and then tossed her in the backyard since nobody was home.

But I'm thinking the most likely explanation is that Smokey is an illusionist. Cuz she pulled a straight up disappearing act. Now she's fast asleep on the couch. Life is back to normal, and boy am I glad. I realized how attached we are after only one week.

Hyatt and Smoky in the backyard

Smoky, the rat terrier on the left, is still very shy around people. In fact, she likes to go to the back corner of the yard and hide under the shrubbery. Here's Hyatt trying to coax her out.

lost

Holy smokes, or rather holy smoke monster, Lost is having a season to rival its weird and original first season. For example, has anything in the show's four seasons been as scary as those images of Abbaddon and the ageless Richard Alpert?

Despite all the cool stuff we've learned about the Oceanic 6 and their post-island lives, this has been the season of Ben and Locke. For at least the last season or so, the show has given us much evidence that the two have mirrored fates, twin/rival affinities for the island, dual identities as geeks and macho men, and a mutual and intense rivalry with one another. After their interactions this season, I'm convinced that they are both deeply evil individuals whose wills-to-power have taken over their obedience to "the island" or "Jacob" or whomever the (formerly?) higher power might be. I don't think Ben gives a damn that he killed his daughter. I'm not sure that he was even surprised when the mercenary called his "bluff." Likewise, I don't think Locke would hesitate to sacrifice Hurley or any other beloved individual. Under siege, he was comfortable leaving Claire and Sawyer outside.

From the always-obsessive Entertainment Weekly recap, which offers a mind-blowing reading of last night's episode and is always must reading for any fan:

Locke is born early. At age 5, he takes a test that most likely would have taken him to the Island if he had passed. He didn't. That same year, Benjamin Linus is born. At age 16, Locke is invited to go to a science camp that again would have taken him to the Island. He refused. About that same time, Benjamin Linus and his father joined the Dharma Initiative. The implication, it seems, is that Ben has been walking the path that was originally meant for Locke. Ben was the contingency plan — the course correction — for Locke's altered destiny. But Ben is his own person, of course, and he has done things differently from what Locke would have done, and this, in turn, has created further changes in the original order of things — changes that I think a certain ticked-off, Island-deprived billionaire named Charles Widmore is trying to reverse. The scene at the rehab center between paralyzed adult Locke and his wheelchair pusher, the creepy Matthew Abbaddon — who accepted the description of ''orderly'' with knowing irony — was meant to suggest one way Widmore is scheming to restore the original order: by getting Locke on that Island and taking back the birthright that was supposed to be his.

(Unless I’m getting this reversed: What if Ben was the man of destiny, but for decades, various forces — including Alpert and Widmore-Abbaddon — have been vainly trying to change destiny by getting Locke to the Island to supplant the über Other?)

Regardless, here's the twist — the twist that could turn Locke into a mass murderer of sorts. As we saw at the end of the episode, Locke's plan for saving the Island is moving the Island. Now, I have no idea how he intends to do that. But if I'm tracking correctly the weird science Lost has been laying down this season, I wonder if where we're headed is a catastrophic gambit in which Locke will move the Island not only in space but also in time, which I'm guessing will cause some kind of massive retroactive course correction — or, rather, already has enacted a course correction. In fact, I wonder if the secret to many of the metaphysical mysteries of Lost is that all of the show's drama is playing out against the backdrop of a timeline that's in flux — where old history is giving way to new history as the consequences of Locke's future Island-saving actions trickle down through time. And so that wreckage of Oceanic 815 at the bottom of the ocean? That isn't a hoax — at least, not in the new timeline taking hold. That's real. And it will be John the Quantum Ripper's fault.

netflix, recently

I am attempting to catch up on last year's second-tier Oscar bait and my response is often ho-hum. Take for instance Charlie Wilson's War. I had high hopes, mainly because of Aaron Sorkin's involvement. Sorkin has some unimpeachable writing credits to his name including the early seasons of The West Wing. Alas CWW is a real bore, unaware of whether it wants to be a political intrigue yarn, a screwball comedy, or a morality tale.

Usually Sorkin's work displays his knack for combining those three genres. Know what? The combination works better when there's an easily definable hero. In The West Wing, that hero was Martin Sheen's left-leaning President Bartlet, whose flaws (sneaking a cigarette once in a while, having a big old academic ego, orchestrating the illegal assassination of a foriegn leader...no big whoop) were few. CWW has too much moral ambiguity and not enough Sorkin-style pomp.

The title character--based on a real guy--is an aw shucks womanizer, drunk, slacker, and congressman. That's fine. In fact, despite the cliche factor (every film that takes place in the 70s or early 80s has the obligatory coke and hedonism), those traits present the potential for some pretty interesting character development. But even work that revels in ambiguity needs to establish some kind of STANCE toward the character, and CWW does not. Should we look at Charlie as a paranoid anti-communista? As someone resonsible for writing the artists-not-yet-known-as-the-Taliban a blank check? As a hero who took care of business? I still don't know.

On the other hand, one of Philip Seymor Hoffman's other films from last year, The Savages is wickedly funny and wickedly sad. Hoffman and Laura Linney play siblings whose mean father, from they are estranged, develops dementia and needs their care. Their Peter Pan-esque names are John and Wendy. The siblings both aspire to get prestigious fellowships in drama and theatre. John is an academic married to the book project he's been working on for too many years ("Well, Brecht was a complex guy") but unable to connect with human beings. Wendy aspires to write a masterpiece and can't figure out why she's having an affair with a shlub ("I have an MFA!!").

The film's central "joke" works well. These two know much about theater but have no ability to handle the drama of their own lives. Heavy handed? Maybe, but the film knows enough to provide uncomfortable humor not so much as relief but rather as the logical conclusion of having nothing else to hang onto. What can two people this dysfunctional do but speak one-liners that would make brilliant dialogue in the kinds of absurdist theater they worship? Extra points for the great sequence where Wendy blows off an assignment at her temp job so she can finish writing a fellowship grant and then steals boatloads of office supplies.

shame shame shame

From an e-mail this a.m. from Human Resources:

Colleagues,

As you may have discovered in recent news coverage, the Michigan Supreme Court has upheld the Court of Appeals ruling that the Marriage Amendment prohibits public employers in Michigan from providing health insurance benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of their employees. We are hearing concerns from faculty and staff so I want to take this opportunity to reiterate that the University of Michigan does not offer benefits on the basis of same-sex domestic partner relationships. That category of eligibility was eliminated more than a year ago after the Court of Appeals made its ruling.

The University cares deeply about the recruitment and retention of its outstanding faculty and staff, and we design our benefits with these principles in mind. We believe all of our current benefit offerings are in full compliance with the law in the state of
Michigan.

In partnership for health,

new addition

Our happy home has an additional member. Smoky, a three-year-old (we think) rat terrier, now resides with his big brother Hyatt. Smoky comes from the Last Chance Animal Rescue and has clearly had a rough go of it thus far. She's shaky around people, including Nicole and I. As in she literally shakes, although now that she's been with us a for a few days, she calms down after sitting on one of our laps for a few minutes. A good sign. Hyatt doesn't scare her at all. Right from the time she came home, Smoky took a shine to the mellowest, laziest pug in Michigan. While we wait for Smoky to get used to being around us, it's good to know that Hyatt's a calming presence. Pictures will follow soon.

Hyatt today

Today I'm working in my home office down in the basement. It's a room full of books, papers, records and CDs, an old library table I use as a desk, and a futon. Rarely do I use the futon for anything other than setting stuff on. However, Hyatt uses it constantly. I'm peer-reviewing an article for TETYC and putting some final touches on a 4Cs proposal. Hyatt, he's not doing a whole lot of anything.

milestone

As the academic year comes to a close, I realize I have now been at UM-Dearborn for as long as I was at Miami of Ohio, i.e, three years. Ohmygarsh, I've been out of graduate school for six years.

mistakes, overreactions, abuses of power

This story is all over the papers in Detroit and has even gotten a bit of coverage from the national news. Maybe a movie-of-the-week will follow.

The events look something like this. Guy takes his seven-year-old to see the Tigers and buys the thirsty tyke what he thinks is an expensive lemonade. Actually, it's a bottle of Mike's Hard Lemonade, an alcoholic beverage. A security guard spots the kid imbibing, takes the bottle away, and calls the cops. The kid is rushed in an ambulance to Children's Hospital and then placed in foster care for several days while Child Protective Services and the Department of Human Services investigate. The father, who insist he had no clue the drink had alcohol, is ordered to vacate his home for a week even after the boy is allowed to return.

Now here are two additional pieces of context. 1. The parents of the boy are both academics who don't watch television. 2. Michigan DHS and particularly the foster care system is, by most accounts, in utter shambles, dealing with a severe lack of foster care parents, a high-profile lawsuit for gross mismanagement of the children who are wards of the state, and the fall-out of the murder of young Ricky Holland who was murdered by his foster parents after the overworked DHS workers failed to intervene.

Response to this unfortunate series of events at the Tigers game has been informed by those two pieces of context. Driving home from my teaching gig yesterday, I heard a.m. talk radio take calls from folks from two camps. One camps suggested that DHS, in the midst of a p.r. nightmare, grew overzealous and is probably trying to reverse its do-nothing reputation. The other camp (the "blame the dad" camp) fell into two sub-camps, one who couldn't believe anybody would be unfamiliar with Mike's Hard Lemonade, and one who saw this as an example of the "no common sense," out-of-touch, too-good-for-tv academic.

The show's host rejected the "blame dad" logic, put the parents on a pedestal for being "too smart for television," and praised academics as icons of the smarter, more bookish lifestyle that all Americans should strive for.

I'm not sure any of these responses are all that useful. Blame the "no common sense" guy. Turn the academic into a cliched icon. Even the blame DHS camp--members of whom made valid points, don't get me wrong--seemed like a bunch of Monday morning quarterbacks. What if the story could become an impetus for action? What if the story could change the minds of those who advocate for the gutting of public support for social services? What if the story could encourage folks to organize against the abuses of power that are all too common among law enforcement agencies? What if the story prompted more people to take a role (parental and otherwise) in reforming the foster system?

book review

I was thrilled to see a Richard Marback-penned review of Who Says: Working-Class Rhetoric, Class Consciousness, and Community in the new issue of Rhetoric Review. Marback offers a careful and thorough reading of the book and has some good things to say. Thanks for reading!

multi-tasking

It's finals week and of course grading portfolios is a priority right now. One class done and one to go. In the midst of all the reading Deborah Minter from UNL came to UM-Dearborn yesterday to give a very good talk on uses of portfolios for teaching and learning (how timely was that?). Several comrades and I are bouncing emails with 4Cs proposal drafts back-and-forth. Oh yeah, and next Monday I start teaching a two-week 'study skills and culture of higher ed' class for high school juniors who'll take UM-Dearborn classes next fall in our dual-enrollment program. So as always, a pleasant and busy mix of tasks.

netflix recently

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte make for a tasty, early-60s double-feature. The two horror films have virtually identical plots and motiffs too (major plot spoilage ahead): Extended flashback scene reveals a bratty young girl, extremely close to her father, get away with a violent crime. Next, delayed-but-grandiose opening credits. Next, 120 minutes of Bette Davis in outrageous make-up, camping up a series of gory, grand guignol scenes. Finally, a contrived O Henry moment, facilitated by sharper-than-you-thought-she-was maid, reverses our fear of disassociative Davis character.

That describes either film. "Baby Jane" centers on Davis as a former child star torturing her disabled big sister. "Charlotte" pits southern belle Davis against her innocent (or is she?) cousin, played by Olivia de Havilland. The latter might be the better film, if only for its campy take on southern dysfunction. The Sound and the Fury meets Stephen King's Misery. And you've got Agnes Moorehead as Charlotte's perpetually loyal servant, lurching around the plantation like an Igor character. But you have to give "Baby Jane" the nod as the better of the two, if only for 1) Joan Crawford's steely performance as the big sister and 2) Bette Davis's costumes. She looks like Courtney Love.

How did these two bizarre spectacles become huge hits at the dawn of the 60s? What made the masses flock to theatres to see sixty-year-old women kick each other, push each other down staircases, etc.? Surely the violence and aesthetics of Psycho influenced some of the key "Charlotte" and "Baby Jane" flourishes. The ax murder that opens "Charlotte," for example, borrows from Psycho's shower scene, although we see a lot more gore in "Charlotte." But I think the kitchen sink casting has a lot more to do with the success of these horror classics. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Joseph Cotton, Agnes Moorehead, Olivia de Havilland, George Kennedy, Bruce Dern, Victor Buono. Even relatively small roles get the Hollywood treatment, making these into event movies. In that respect, maybe star-studded, invite-JFK-to-the-opening movies like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and the original Ocean's 11--moreso than anything from Hitchcock--are the real cinematic antecedents of "Charlotte" and "Baby Jane."

How long until these two films get remade? I'd like to see Pedro Almodovar direct.

endorsement

Michael Moore offers compelling words of support for Obama's campaign.

warm weekend

At long last, a sunny and springlike couple of days in the D. On Saturday Nicole and I enjoyed pizza at Pi. Might be the best pizza in Metro Detroit thanks to the brick oven and the great selection of toppings (I recommend the artichokes). Pies are only $3.14 (get it?) on Mondays; I'm going to get one on the way home tonight.

Anyway, we soaked in some rays afterward while doing door-to-door work for Mark Richardson's campaign. See link on the right to the 'Richardson for State Representative' website. Knocking on doors isn't my favorite kind of involvement in the democratic process, but when you find a good candidate, the effort is worthwhile. And when temps approach the high 70s, can't compain too much.

Normal stuff--yard work, church, and such--took up much of the remainder of the weekend, but on Sunday, we enjoyed my nephew Yousef's soccer game and a launch party for Liz's book, which really is high on my stack of things to read after finals week.

Listening to: REM: Accelerate

get yourself a copy of this

"Illuminating the creative, joyful, and serendipitous nature of the research process."

So reads the tagline of the new book Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, edited by Gesa Kirsch and my colleague Liz Rohan. Contributors all tell stories about research--the connections, the discoveries, the new possibilities.

recently downloaded, and recommended

I spent part of yesterday reading for an article I'm writing, a lit-review-ish essay (or part of an essay) about the emotional dimension of civic engagement. Of interest, the disconnect regarding modes of engagement: the affective connection students in service learning courses sometimes have with volunteerism and the similar connect faculty have with advocacy/activism. Then I baked cookies for my students while listening to some recent i-tunes purchases:

The New Pornographers, "Don't Bring Me Down"
A note-for-note cover of the E.L.O. disco-pop, early-days-of-MTV gem. A perfect distillation of what the NPs do, that is, make pop music without apology or irony.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, "100 Days, 100 Nights"
More soul than anybody from the Mariah Carey, every-song-has-to-hit-three-different-octaves school of R&B. I'm crazy about this song. It's Amy Winehouse meets the Detroit Cobras.

Sonic's Rendezvous Band, "City Slang"
I had read about this 70s gaggle of Detroit rockers (members of the MC5 and the Rationals and the Stooges, oh my!) but never heard their stuff before. This punk ditty doesn't match the quality of the best work of the band members' original groups, but I really like piece's swagger. No sad sack shit here--just a loud, guitar-driven motor city anthem.

2Pac, "Hit 'Em Up"
Six minutes of 2Pac saying unkind things about the Notorious B.I.G. A remarkable piece of work, completely immersed in inflammatory nihilism.

Ciccone Youth, "Addicted to Love"
Weird. Kim Gordon doing karaoke. Yes, it's that "Addicted to Love." A long time ago, I had a bad cassette copy of this whole record, a Sonic Youth side project and homage to 80s excess (the record also had covers of several songs made famous by "Madonna Ciccone"). Gordon's robotic monotone calls to mind the mannequin-like women in the "Addicted to Love" video. The track is a kind of feminist manifesto, a SY forays into politics. So you might look at this as a companion to "Kool Thing," the Kim Gordon-Chuck D duet that slammed mysogyny in the hip hop world, or "Youth Against Fascism," with the famous "I believe Anita Hill" and "the president sucks/he's a warpig f***" lines. Or, you might just rock out to a Robert Palmer cover. Either way, weird.

six word memoir:

"i wonder what will be next"

The 6-word memoir, brought to you by Bonnie. If you're reading this post and you'd like to write your own memoir, consider thyself tagged.

1. write your own six word memoir
2. post it on your blog and include a visual illustration i you’d like
3. link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post so we can track it
4. tag five more blogs with links
5. leave a comment on the tagged blogs w/ an invitation to play

heard 'round the world?

I love this picture.

Hillary Clinton has a beer and a shot and reminisces about when her grandpa taught her how to shoot a gun. Barack Obama bowls a couple frames. Must be time to court the working-class vote. Remember when John Kerry went duck hunting and circulated pictures of the garage band he was in as a teenager (at prep school, but still)?

After she recounted the gun story, one reporter asked Hillary Clinton when the last time she shot a gun was and she got quite angry. Who likes to be called out? Especially so close on the heels of her revelation that she and her husband made $109 million in the last eight years.

Much has been made of Barack Obama's recent words about how residents of small towns (because you can't say "working class") sometimes "get bitter" during hard financial times. "They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," he said.

I believe Obama when he calls this a poor choice of words. During tough times people do sometimes turn to various things good, bad, and all points in between for comfort: too much food, booze, religion, hatred of others, and lots of other things too. But I don't blame those who are offended by the diction either. "Cling" suggests desperation, I suppose. And there's something honest about acknowledging that members of our society do feel desperation right now, but there's also something dismissive about the term.

And the end of the quotation often gets left out. Anti-trade sentiment is just a result of desperation? A lot of folks (many of them who feel disenfranchised by the democratic party) oppose free-trade not because they're "clinging" to some final vestige of an antiquated ideology by because they (we!) think it results in unethical conditions for workers in the U.S. and elsewhere. I'm less offended as a person of faith (who, I guess, "clings" to religion) than I am as a critic of free trade (who also "clings" to a particular ideology about trade practices).

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.