Thoughts on Tony Soprano

I'm finally getting around to watching "The Sopranos," a decade after the show's peak in popularity and seven years since the series went to sleep with the fishes. I grew up loving "Goodfellas" and "The Godfather" (not to mention films like "Moonstruck" with funny and spot-on Italian-American characters who aren't in the mob), so it's about time I catch up with Tony Soprano and company.  In no particular order, some reactions:

• Tony Soprano strikes me as somehow more monstrous and hard to like than the so-called anti-heroes his character inspired (Walter White, Don Draper, pretty much anybody on "The Wire") on other marquee programs. Tony's a coarse bully. Walter White and Don Draper do some despicable shit but Tony is an even worse husband. He's got Catholic guilt but no remorse. His guilt is all sub-conscious; he has freaky dreams but never hesitates to kill, hurt, or embarrass people with less power than him.
• He's not really respected as much as feared. His "friends" are sycophants; even the goons who are related to him maneuver against him when they sense vulnerability or when the anger and resentment against him boils over.  (Possible exception: Silvio)
• Compared to other tv/movie mobsters, this group is pretty pathetic. Nobody is as glamorous as Vito or Michael Corleone. They hang out at a dumpy stripclub, struggle to "pass" anytime they're around civilians. They have monetary mobility but rarely cultural mobility. They don't know how to code switch when they go to a college campus or a charity function. I'm not saying their working-class ethos makes them pathetic--it's their lack of self-awareness. Lots of working-class people, both real and fictional, are much savvier and more flexible than Tony Soprano et al.
• Tony's life is ugly. He and his crew engage in domestic violence (in some cases with both their wives and their mistresses), abuse drugs, and suffer profound, visible, pyschic damage as a result of being criminals. This isn't just like Michael Corleone looking sad after killing his brother or even Henry Hill acting all paranoid and red-eyed as he keeps a look-out for helicopters and makes sauce. It goes beyond that. In "The Sopranos," we get prolonged images of, say, Christopher shooting up and Tony sitting in therapy. Like I said, they don't express any remorse, but we see the damage and destruction constantly. Even if he wears expensive clothes, Tony Soprano does NOT make this life look desirable.
• Last thing: James Gandolfini was brilliant in the role. The strained breathing, the compulsive eating, the non-verbal reactions to others...has anybody ever embodied a character this well? All the stylized camera work and heavy-handed symbolism (eggs! birds! prosciutto!...every object signifies something, as if David Chase had Joseph Campbell on his desk every time he wrote a script) help the cause but Gandolfini's acting was perfect. I think "The Wire" boasted better, more consistent writing. "Breaking Bad" is more addictive. But Tony Soprano was a vivid, compelling, despicable person thanks to brilliant, brilliant acting.

Groggily Returning to Motown

Here's a surreal experience. I dozed during part of my flight back home yesterday. I had also popped a couple Aleves to combat some neck pain from sleeping wrong in Savannah (get off my lawn!). So I was groggy and let most everybody get off the plane before me. Upon stepping off the plane onto the jetbridge, I saw my nephew Ali standing there behind an empty wheelchair.  He looks at me and says, want a ride Uncle Bill?

Now, Ali works at the airport assisting seniors and others who need help going from gate-to-gate, but I wasn't thinking about that. For a split second, I thought the plane had gone down and this was my journey to the afterlife. Ali was like some kind of Anubis figure, accompanying me as I passed. I came back to reality and realized he was just working.

Savannah Part 2

It's a rainy and humid Sunday in Savannah. Perfect day for soul food at the United House of Prayer for all People, a church that has its own cafeteria, the Masada Cafe. Soul food places better have all the sides: greens, mac-n-cheese, candied yams, corn bread. Masada has all of the above and more, including "red rice," already spiced but begging for gravy. I had the meatloaf, fork soft, not too salty, and perfectly paired with the sweetness of the yams.

Savannah

At the WPA workshop and conference, the annual gathering of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, we drink wine courtesy of textbook publishers, share research and ideas, and chat with people we went to grad school with. It's Savannah, so there's shrimp and grits to be had too. Last night after sundown, the heat but not the humidity having lessened, two friends and I walked around old Savannah, through gothic-looking cemeteries and squares, by gigantic homes with even more gigantic front porches, and down to the river, where an electric guitar called us into a place called the Bayou Cafe. A trio, never caught their name, was playing the blues, guitar, bass, and drums. Three young guys, locked in, amps turned way up, wailing, at a place with no cover charge. Behind the band, through a window, you could see a riverboat on the Savannah. They did a version of the Stones' "Monkey Man," with no piano or rhythm guitar, their ax guy recreating the slide guitar parts on his regular electric. Wild.

Change of Venue

I've been going down to my office at the University most every weekday. Days when my program faculty are grading placement exams are really the only days I need to be there, but I've been meeting with various folks about the curriculum of our honors writing classes, working on some scheduling issues, brainstorming programming for the Writing Center this year, and doing a bunch of other administrative things.  It's just easier to be present than to figure out how to do these things at home, plus there's something about just being present.

Today, though, a nice change of pace.  I'm at home waiting for a contractor to come give an estimate on laying a new front porch (really, more of a stoop).  So I'm doing some writing at the dining room table, plus making black bean burgers from scratch, and contemplating a bike ride later this afternoon, if it's not too hot.  I'll likely spend a little time getting organized for my trip to Savannah, Georgia, later this week for the Writing Program Administrators conference.  Good to smell the veggie burgers baking, good to have a ceiling fan and a snoring dog nearby, good to get back to the writing.

6 Burgers: 2 cans of black beans, 2 eggs, big onion, big carrot, garlic, handful of panko bread crumbs, salt, coarse pepper, parsley, generous squirt of mustard. Blend well, form patties, bake at 375 for thirty minutes or so.

A Lot Of People Won't Get No Justice Tonight

Logging onto Facebook makes it impossible to ignore last night's Trayvon Martin verdict. And while the vast majority of my Facebook friends see the verdict as a gross miscarriage of justice, the sad truth is that we live in a country that values vigilantes and guns and denies racism. By all accounts, George Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin around the neighborhood because Trayvon looked suspicious. We live in a country that wants Zimmerman to be armed, a country that's going to provide Zimmerman with niches in which he'll get rich and famous. Trayvon Martin is dead and now we can watch Zimmerman earn six-figures at speaking engagements at gun conventions. How many days until Zimmerman has a book deal?

Re-Entry

Coming back home hasn't been easy. I miss the surprises of the Middle East, the sensations, newness, and pleasant hardships that come from distance. The rush and push of airports and metro stations. The bread and zaatar and coffee. For the past month I've walked slowly through life at home and on campus and in Detroit. I've watched too much television, had too many migraines, and eaten too much shitty American food. If I say some things out loud, maybe I'll do them. I'm going to finish my book about Lebanon that I've started and stopped writing too many times to count now, and then I'm going to try to publish it. I'm going to lose a lot of weight. I'm fifty pounds heavier than I was when I moved back to Michigan in 2005 and even then I was fat. Blogging's going to be part of my day-to-day life once again. Re-entry has taken a month. That's too long. I'm back.

These Are Days

Natalie Merchant performed with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra last night. Her setlist emphasized her more recent recordings of sleepy folks songs as opposed to songs she made famous (to me anyway) while fronting the 10,000 Maniacs in the 1980s and early 1990s. She forgot lyrics a few times (she performs sporadically) but the DSO sounded great and her music with and without the Maniacs has always been compelling and pleasant. That word, pleasant, sounds like faint praise but it's not. She has a warm, comforting voice that as much as her lyrics make her songs seem much more like poems. Orchestral arrangements of her songs make all kinds of sense.

A final thirty-minute set without the orchestra found Natalie with her pianist and guitarist doing an unplugged set of songs that people came to hear: These are Days (easily the most recognizable 10,000 Maniacs song) and solo tracks like Carnival. Plus, fun, on-the-fly snippets of motown oldies. It was an unabashedly laid-back, joyful way to end her performance. She reminisced about opening for R.E.M. decades ago at a Michigan show on the evening of her birthday and being given a cake on stage by Michael Stipe. She introduced "These are Days" by telling the audience it was a song they loved in their dorm rooms back in Ann Arbor.

Natalie and the audience owned the nostalgia in equal parts.

Present company included. 10,000 Maniacs was my first concert. Summer, 1989, with Tim Finn of Split Enz as opening act. At Nautica Flats in Cleveland, Natalie sang most of In My Tribe and Blind Man's Zoo, the two classic Maniacs records. I saw them again later that year and once more, a couple years later in college. Their songs were topical (learning disabilities, child abuse) but also imagistic ("he kicked a tumbleweed and his mother called him home, when the Arizona moon met the Arizona sun"), wrought and smart and affecting without seeming too pretentious, when I was 15 and found appealing the idea of a rock band with a worldview and when I was 19 and that worldview seemed less likely to mean life would forever feel alienating. 1992 was a moment, maybe because there was a democrat in the white house for the first time since I was in first grade. Natalie sang a duet with Michael Stipe at Bill Clinton's inauguration and rock stars were writing songs about Anita Hill and Buddhism and touting feminism and authenticity in Rolling Stone.

Nicole and I were talking about concerts before the Natalie Merchant show this week and I commented that circa 1993, if certain bands came to Detroit, it was only a question of who I'd go with. Kids from dorm (in Detroit, not Ann Arbor), maybe my pal from high school, Jason, who lived across town. It was rare that a show would be more than $15 or $20 and a couple hundred saved from slinging Taco Bell all summer or a work-study check from the school paper could cover that no problem.

Somehow Natalie's flawed show with the symphony captured both a collective, personal present and collective, personal past. The sleepy present in her main set, the freewheeling past in her encore.

Hey Jack, now for the tricky part: / When you were the brightest star, who were the shadows? Of the San Francisco beat boys, you were the favorite. / Now they sit and rattle their bones and think of their blood stoned days.

a new beginning...

here is the new blog, which I'll be updating live from the United Arab Emirates for the next 5 months:

http://shemesterinsharjah.blogspot.com

We're hiring...

Asst Professor of Multicultural or Multilingual Writing and Rhetoric

Job Summary

Work-Title: Assistant Professor of Multicultural or Multilingual Writing and Rhetoric
Department: College of Arts, Sciences, & Letters-Language, Culture, & Communications
FLSA: Exempt
Posting Dates: September 26, 2012-November 26, 2012
Go here to apply:
http://umjobs.org/search


The University of Michigan-Dearborn (UM-Dearborn) is one of the three campuses of the University of Michigan. UM-Dearborn, a comprehensive university offering high quality undergraduate, graduate, professional and continuing education to residents of southeastern Michigan, and attracts more than 9,000 students. Our faculty comes from respected universities and doctoral programs, are recognized for excellence in research and teaching, and are active in professional and academic service roles in their respective fields. US News and World Report recently recognized our campus as a Best Regional University.

The campus is located on 200 acres of the original Henry Ford Estate. Dearborn is centrally located within one of America's largest business regions. The geographically diverse area provides faculty with a variety of urban, suburban, and rural areas within a reasonable commute, including Detroit, Detroit suburbs, and Ann Arbor.

Job Description:
The Department of Language, Culture & Communication (Composition & Rhetoric Discipline) invites applications for a tenure-track, assistant professor of Multicultural or Multilingual Writing and Rhetoric faculty position, starting September 1, 2013. Funding for this position has been approved.

The Department of Language, Culture & Communication has 17 faculty members representing Composition & Rhetoric, Public Communication & Culture Studies, Journalism & Screen Studies, Linguistics, and Modern & Classical Languages. The Composition & Rhetoric discipline has 7 faculty members and has responsibility for the college-wide Writing Program and Certificate in Writing.

Qualifications:
All candidates with a primary interest in composition in multicultural or multilingual writing and rhetoric are invited to apply. Secondary areas of interest may include multicultural literacies, contrastive rhetorics, teaching in global contexts, transnational rhetorics and literacies, rhetorics of race and ethnicity, or related secondary areas.

Candidates must have a PhD in Composition and Rhetoric or closely related field in hand by 9/1/13 and must show demonstrated achievement in scholarship and potential for publications in the areas of multicultural or multilingual writing and rhetoric. Experience teaching writing at the collegiate level is required. Evidence of familiarity with best practices in the teaching of writing, including within multilingual or multicultural contexts and using computer-mediated pedagogies, is highly desirable.

In addition to teaching writing and rhetoric courses at the introductory and upper levels, the candidate will be expected to pursue an active scholarly agenda, engage in curriculum and program development within area of expertise, and contribute to undergraduate writing certificate program and first-year writing program. We especially welcome applicants who bring culturally and theoretically diverse perspectives to their research and teaching practices.

The University of Michigan - Dearborn is dedicated to the goal of building a culturally diverse and pluralistic faculty committed to teaching and working in a multi-cultural environment. We are an equal access/equal opportunity employer and campus community, and do not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, religion, color, marital status, age, national origin, disability, veteran or marital status, sexual orientation, or genetic information.

Currently this classification is considered exempt in compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

Note: Please make sure to upload all your application materials as one single PDF file.

U-M EEO/AA Statement

The University of Michigan is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.

Peanuts

Jesse 2009

I find myself wandering through Patti Smith’s “Camera Solo,” the exhibition of the singer-poet-artist’s black and white Polaroids at the Detroit Institute of Arts.  My favorite Patti Smith songs play in my head, “Ask the Angels,” “Redondo Beach,” as I look at the everyday and the extraordinary.  Like her muse, the late Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith has a fetish for everyday objects and she captures simple, decontextualized, sometimes cold images of slippers, pieces of jewelry, and other ephemera owned by persons Smith admires or loves.  “I suppose it’s my way of taking their portraits,” she writes.

The exhibition features numerous photographs of literary beds: John Keats, Victor Hugo, Virginia Woolf, the poet and punk rock icon Jim Carroll, with whom Smith shared a bed.  We see their beds, sheets crisp, undisturbed, empty forever.  Smith: “I like to take pictures of beds.  We have extraordinary things happen in beds.  We sleep, conceive.  We dream.  We make love.  We are ill in our beds.  We recuperate.  So our beds are very important in our lives.”

Many of us die in bed too.  Robert Mapplethorpe, the artist with whom Smith lived in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, first as a lover and then as a collaborator, died in a hospital bed in 1989.  Smith’s beautiful memoir Just Kids, deserving winner of a National Book Award among other accolades, narrates their complex relationship and exists as a eulogy and encomium to her soul mate.

Mapplethorpe’s life and death hover over Smith’s work, her memoir obviously, but also her lilting and vital new record “Banga,” and certainly the pictures of beds that are part of “Camera Solo.”  Lonely images of beds, resting places if you will, are litanies of Smith’s deceased inspirations.  Smith sings to Detroiters walking through her exhibition, Where would I be without Keats, without Hugo, without Woolf?  Jim Carroll’s most famous song was called “People Who Died,” also a litany of the dead.  Carroll didn’t die in bed, but rather is said to have died at his desk, writing.  All of this hovers as well.

No matter how strong the invocation of Mapplethorpe, “Camera Solo” is never maudlin; beds are a more affirming motif than, say, gravestones.  Yet the empty beds suggest coffins with their crisp linens and their extravagant austerity.

Iconic images of beds usually feature persons in them.  John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their love-in.  The grandparents in the first Willy Wonka movie.  Most of Patti Smith’s beds are empty, their owners no longer in need of them.

One notable exception is “Jesse, 2009,” Patti Smith’s photograph of her daughter reclining in bed, a shy, melancholy look on her face.  Jesse wears a tank top as white as the three pillows propped in the photograph’s background.  She shares her mother’s androgynous style, a style made famous in the album covers shot by Robert Mapplethorpe.  The photograph’s composition is Cartesian, vertical creases on the sheets, a horizontal headboard, but Jesse’s body is sclerotic, sprawled atop the sheets, too human to conform to the object’s coordinates.

The photograph is the most humane image in “Camera Solo,” and not only because it’s one of the few to depict a person.  The photograph is life itself and changes the resonance of the bed motif.  Toward the end of Just Kids, Smith describes her final encounters with Mapplethorpe, who died when Jesse was a toddler.  Smith returns to New York from her adopted home in Michigan, Jesse in tow, to visit the dying Mapplethorpe.  One of his last photographs of Smith is a picture of her holding Jesse.  Part of Smith’s life, slipping away, another part only beginning.

Indeed, our beds are important in our lives, and in our deaths too.  “Camera Solo,” another gift from Smith, celebrates the breathing.  I’m glad I wandered.

Unsolicited Advice

Not that they've asked me or anything, but here are my suggestions for the DNC:

At your convention, don't mention the names Romney and Ryan.  Resist the temptation to discuss the dude who doesn't think you can get pregnant from rape and the dude who held the congressional hearings into the loyalty of American Muslims.  Don't talk about Clint Eastwood or the chair.

You don't have to take silly ideas seriously.

Show the country that you are the big boys with big ideas, the party that doesn't care if gay people get married, the party that believes that church groups are less equipped to handle natural disasters than the federal government, the party that wants to maintain safety nets for the poor and old.

The Republicans used their convention as a chance to criticize Obama (I get it, that's what the opposition party does when running against an incumbent.)  Use your convention as a chance to articulate ideas. Not opinions, not silly stuff, not pandering, not religious dogma.  Ideas.

By The Numbers

Two weeks until my summer class begins, and I'm trying to get in as much work on my scholarly writing as I possibly can.  I write in my basement office.  It's cool down here, which is a blessing on days like today that are in the high '90s.  My dog sleeps on the room's futon.  My desk is an over-sized old library table.  What else is in the room?  A University of Michigan welcome mat.  A laminated "Clergy" sign (meant to put on the dashboard of a car parked illegally) that was in the glove compartment of the first car I ever bought (from a priest).  A framed front page of the Youngstown Vindicator from August 14, 1945 ("Japanese Surrender; WWII Ends"). 

What else?

Number of pictures of dogs playing poker...3
Number of images of St. Anthony...2
Number of images of Mary...2 (little knic knac of Pieta; pic of Our Lady of Barea)
Number of records and CDs...hundreds and hundreds
Number of images of dogs...29 (about half of them are playing poker)
Number of things that used to belong to any of my four grandparents...7

I've gotta hang up the flags we bought in the Middle East.  There's not enough stuff on the walls yet.

Hitch

Good evening.

Cable's been running Alfred Hitchcock films in heavy rotation and I've managed to see several for the first time and several I haven't seen for years.  I caught "Family Plot" and "The Trouble with Harry" this weekend.  They prove that he not only can do dark humor but also outright parody.  The former in particular is every bit as funny a Hitchcock homage as fellow 1970s comedies like "Silver Streak" and "Foul Play."  Great cast too: Babara Harris, Karen Black, Bruce Dern, and lots of very familiar character actors.  I guess this is a drop-off for a guy who directed Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart a bunch of times, but, still, pretty cool.  Meanwhile, "The Trouble with Harry" is absurd and whimsical.  Both are fun and generate real laughs.

Also managed to DVR and watch "Rear Window" and "Vertigo," two of his most famous.  Both are so stylish and cool-looking, it's easy to forget that they are also very very suspenseful.

A bunch more on the DVR, so I've got lot of reason to put off some schoolwork.

X

I taught The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my English 327 class this past term.  I've always found the text interesting and, at the risk of sounding pretentious, important, but this time reading it was a deeply affecting experience.  Conversion plays such a profound role in the narrative.  This time I read the text as a story of changing who you are.  It's fundamentally possible to do just that, the book suggests.

"The young...are the only hope that America has.  The rest of us have always been living in a lie."

"Anything I do today, I regard as urgent."

And his representation of the Middle East, the site of Malcolm's second great converstion, resonated:

"Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land."

Indeed, when Malcolm leaves the U.S. for the first time, he's struck by comparative friendliness.  Even in Germany, en route to the Arab world, he sees this change:

"We went into a lot of shops and stores, looking more than intending to buy anything.  We'd walk in, any store, every store, and it would be Hello!  People who never saw you before, and knew you were strangers.  And the same cordiality when we left, without buying anything.  In America, you walk in a store and spend a hundred dollars, and leave, and you're still a stranger.  Both you and the clerks act as though you're doing each other a favor."

From USA Today

Sigh.

Budgets

In between classes with little time to think or convince myself to maintain some semblance of optimism, but let me just take a moment to say that the proposed budgets coming out of Washington and Lansing are atrocious. When you're too far to the right for the U.S. Catholic Bishops, Rep. Ryan, you've wandered from the herd my friend. A significant portion of the country (and perhaps the state too) want to dismantle not only safety nets and social service networks but also the entire public sector and public sphere. How can you look around and not conclude that this place sucks?

Heard Outside the Courthouse

Dropping off some papers for Nicole, I overheard the following conversation among two men and one woman who were enjoying a cigarette break outside of an area courthouse.

Woman (pointing at the building): "That place didn't do shit for me."

Man #1 (shaking his head): "That place didn't do shit for me."

Man #2 (nodding his head): "That place didn't do shit for me."

Reading Locally

I found myself in St. Louis last month, wandering downtown streets with locals, NCAA basketball fans, and fellow attendees of a conference for college writing teachers. Never one to pass an indie bookstore, I stopped at Left Bank Books where I noticed a sign proclaiming “Buy locally, read globally.”

It’s not bad advice.

And yet I tend to advocate for reading locally too. I like local writers. I also like writers who write about the physical spaces and places I know. Those who write about my hometown and adopted hometowns, map the geographies where I too have walked, and imagine what the place is and how it means. They do the crucial, intellectual, and affective work of making the familiar unfamiliar. They write their own versions of a place and invite me to do the same.

At 17, in love with Kerouac, my favorite sequence in On The Road was Sal’s bus ride through my home state: “[W]e got on the plain of Ohio and really rolled, up by Ashtabula and straight across.” Ashtabula, just an hour north of Youngstown, my hometown. Sal doesn’t even get off the bus in Northeast Ohio, but this mention of the local suggested transcendence to the young me.

Somehow this affinity for Kerouac’s Ohio allusion led me to an anthology called Youngstown Poetry put out by the great Pig Iron Press, a local institution, a legendary small (and thoroughly local) press. Talk about buying and reading locally. The Pig Iron volume contained “local” writers, which was great and all, but what I loved was the text itself: the poetry of steel mills, the poetry of Italian neighborhoods and sausage sandwiches and Catholicism, the poetry of Mill Creek Park. The poems themselves, some by locals and some by transplants, put this familiar place in a whole new context.

At 19, I took a community-based poetry-writing workshop at the Pig Iron facilities. Other participants were a generation or two older than me, but I felt at home at that local place: part Kinko’s, part lending library, part artist’s studio. The press called downtown Youngstown home, sitting a block or two from Cedar’s, my favorite bar in town. Pig Iron welcomed anyone committed to reading (and writing) locally.

Kerouac and the Youngstown poets started my lifelong affair with book and poems and songs about the idiosyncratic places I loved due to circumstance and quirk. The text need not name the place. Youngstown’s own Stiv Bators never mentioned, in my recollection anyway, Youngstown, but when I listened to his most notorious band the Dead Boys I knew that he too was a product of the Catholic Schools of my diocese. When the Dead Boys repeated the line “ain’t no loser” in their punk classic “Sonic Reducer,” the words wrote their own story about the place—a transgressive and loud narrative, the narrative I needed to hear.

But the literature of place, the work that I’m calling “local,” isn’t really about places. Those poems, songs, and novels are about me and my relationship, as a reader and a human being, to that place. Stiv’s not singing about Youngstown. Kerouac’s not writing about northeast Ohio. Though it’s called “Youngstown,” even Bruce Springsteen’s ode to the city of my birth has less to do with the events the song narrates and more to do with audience members, like me, who have a reference point. About the time Springsteen was writing the words “I’m sinking down, here darlin’ in Youngstown,” I was trying to scrape together the money to put down the deposit on the starter kit for new door-to-door knife salesmen, and, yes, working at a fast food joint in Youngstown. Surely you see that Springsteen was writing about me.

My affective relationship with places led me to great local work (and great local work stoked my affective relationship with places) even as my geographies changed. A few years later, when Detroit felt like home, the poet Jim Daniels and his verse about assembly lines and working-class auto workers in and around the Motor City held great appeal. I loved spotting names of streets I cruised and the narrators—especially in Punching Out, Daniels’ great cycle of poems about the reluctant young auto worker Digger—whose voices sounded like people I knew.

And I loved that poetry especially when I moved away from Detroit for the first and only time I’ve ever done that, in the mid-1990s. Homesick, I was missing Detroit and Detroiters and, yes, Daniels was writing for me. And I was still reading locally, even though I was miles from Michigan.

From Jim Daniels to Philip Levine, currently our nation’s Poet Laureate but I’ll always think of him as a local guy. Eventually the pulpy procedurals by the great Detroit crime novelist Elmore Leonard. Later still, the ultraviolent blaxploitation of Donald Goines, whose Detroit novels Whoreson and Dopefiend proved as influential in the hip hop world as Scarface and George Clinton. Reading locally.

I took temporary leave of Detroit last year, spending a year teaching and writing in Beirut, Lebanon. Another adopted hometown, another place I love. There, I read in translation the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who wrote in exile in Beirut for many years and was concerned with place for so many important reasons. In his poems of Palestinian liberation, Darwish imagined a place whose very existence is often denied. Whose work could possibly underscore any better the need to imagine locales and speak to readers who share a complex affinity and connection to a place? His work wasn’t about Palestine. It was about his readers. I can’t claim to understand how it feels to be Palestinian, but I know how it feels to read one’s way into a new relationship with a place.

I just finished Annia Ciezadlo’s fantastic memoir Day of Honey, her story of being a war correspondent first in Iraq and then in Lebanon. More specifically, in Beirut. More specifically, in Ras Beirut, living at one point around the corner from the building where I lived in the Hamra neighborhood during my year abroad. Late in her memoir, she recalls a period of intense sectarian violence in Summer, 2008, and recalls the streetfights that took place on my block, even mentioning my building, where she visited the residents taking shelter in the basement.

These passages were riveting to me, not due to the subject matter, but because of that familiarity, albeit a familiarity that was challenged and recast as I imagined and remembered the place anew.

Reading globally? Maybe. As much as I love the steel mill poetry of Youngstown and the dirty crime fiction of Detroit, I’m increasingly drawn to non-fiction about the Arab world. A space on the other side of the globe, my most distant homeplace. My goodreads.com booklist suggests an eclectic, broad array of reading material. But so many of those books, so many of my own idiosyncratic obsessions (punk rock, working-class poetry, the Beats, the Middle East) have much to do with my shifting localness. Of all the things for which I’m thankful, some of the most profound blessings have been calling multiple places home and discovering writers who create place-based work that’s just for me.

Buy locally, read locally. Because it's all about you.

Experimenting (stumbling) with a new genre...

4Cs Chair's Address

Just got back from 4Cs, the annual flagship conference in my field (Conference on College Composition and Communication). Always nice to spend a few days reconnecting with friends from graduate school and from my first job. I mean, Facebook is great and everything, but you can't beat dinner in the big city (St. Louis this year) and the obligatory can't-believe-I-graduated-from-Arizona-a-decade-ago conversations. Panels and presentations always differ in quality and always will, but I consistently walk away from sessions with ideas and/or energy.

Malea Powell gave the chair's address and did a fabulous job of provoking thought. She discussed her own subfield--Native-American Rhetorics--and questioned whether it's time we move beyond relegating such pursuits to "alternative" status, challenging *everyone* to get involved in de-colonizing work. This blurb doesn't do her talk justice. Also noteworthy: Powell's inclusion of multiple voices during "her" talk--various members of the field went to the mic and told brief stories of their own about their inclusion (or lack thereof) and/or entree into Comp Studies. "This is my story, make of it what you will," they intoned. Which was interesting, but also left me asking: what if we choose to ignore your story?

Why not end each person's story with something like, "This is my story, please think about it and adjust your practices accordingly"?

Morning

I shared Billy Collins' Morning with my students today. "Why do we bother with the rest of the day[...]?" the poem asks. Some of my favorite poems by Collins capture the home, the day, the ephemera of the narrator: the barking dog next door, cello recordings, student papers. "Morning" is no exception, as we encounter the vitamins, espresso, and arcane machinery of literacy that define an idiosyncratic a.m.

This morning, before I shared "Morning," I realized I never loved the Southfield Hwy. until the Southfield Hwy closed for several months, humanizing my Berkley to Dearborn commute each morning. My own morning is sometimes bad radio and good cereal. The latter has whole grains, the former is bleached bland carbs. I should listen to NPR each morning, and not just during Bad Radio's commercials. Sometimes I walk the dog around the block, other days are lazy and she settles for the backyard. We should circle the block each morning. With thanks to Billy Collins, two morning resolutions.

Ethnographies

Though on "Spring" "Break," I'm reading the ethnographies my Composition 106 students wrote. Many of them chose fascinating places to visit and study: Eastern Market, a braille bookstore, an after-school tutoring program for minority kids, CityYear Detroit, etc. Been a while since I enjoyed reading student writing this much. Definitely would like to keep this assignment in heavy rotation when I teach Comp 106.

Ashes

We always had "School Mass" on holy days of obligation like Ash Wednesday. Boys in corduroys, girls in jumpers filing into pews. The priest coming down from the Altar for kid-friendly homily. Once the priest talked about Jesus saying we must forgive our neighbors not merely seven times but seventy times seven times. "How many times is that?" the priest asked. "490," an eighth grader volunteered. School Masses tended to be interactive. I was about nine and that kid and Jesus both seemed brilliant to me. We happened to have School Mass the day John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan and James Brady. Wikipedia says that was March 30, '81. I don't think March 30 is a holy day of obligation. Must have been some special occasion.

Once at School Mass, Fr. DeLucia gave a rousing talk about why people set up mangers at Christmas. Francis of Assisi started the tradition. An Italian invention, don't you know? Homilies at St. Anthony's often invoked the Italian people the way the dad in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" invoked Greeks. We invented it all. The pinnacle of civilization. This "manger homily" was from the days when both Frs. DeMarinis and DeLucia were at St. Anthony's, right before the priest shortage rendered such an arrangement a luxury. Both priests had names starting with the letters "De." No wonder I entered seminary.

On Ash Wednesday, the homilies discussed what kinds of stuff one might give up for Lent. Candy, pop, fighting with siblings. Mass meant a day without Math or Social Studies. Those underpaid teachers, nun or otherwise, must have loved holy days of obligation. I'm talking about "grade school" here. We just called our Catholic school "grade school" because K-8 was under roof so distinguishing between "elementary" and "middle" made no sense. At Ash Wednesday Mass, every kid lined up for ashes on the forehead. Most boys ended up with black smudges on their uniforms by the end of the day. We also got burlap squares with black crosses on them, meant to be pinned to one's winter coat and worn throughout Lent. I've never seen these burlap pins since. Was that a late '70s/early '80s fad? I can picture dozens of kids at recess, running around in unbuttoned winter coats, little burlap pins above our hearts. I started Catholic school nearly thirty-five years ago and didn't go to a secular, public place of learning until grad school. And in 2012 these recollections rise again from the ashes.

Professional Accidents

I'm reading Roger Ebert's memoir LIFE ITSELF and enjoying the writing very much. I've long thought of Ebert not only as a good film critic but as a good writer. He's always personal and often funny. His readers know him and like him. After a bit of a false start in which Ebert lists extended family members (for a chapter or so it's like reading the genealogical passages from Genesis), LIFE ITSELF settles into a folksy, fond series of thematic recollections. A chapter on his dad. A chapter on Catholicism. More thoughts later, I'm sure.

In the meantime, a connection. Ebert points out that although he works hard, happenstance has played a significant role in much of his professional life. His boyhood pal's dad happened to be a newspaper editor. The Sun-Times happened to need somebody to review films soon after he became a "newspaper man." Is Ebert the exception or rule? Happy accidents and random events often conspire and affect our lives, sometimes in profound ways. When I started my master's program (1996), the new TA director happened to be an enthusiastic, recent graduate of Arizona's rhet/comp program who talked up his alma mater. More recently (2009), surfing the list of Fulbright host countries while racked with killer migraines, I came upon Lebanon and stopped surfing.

Here's a big one. At the end of my first year of undergraduate study (academic year 1992-1993), I was turning in some piece of paperwork (this was pre-internet) in the liberal arts dean's office. I hadn't declared a major but was thinking of either philosophy, Spanish, or both. The secretary, filing my papers, saw I was undecided and said, "Do you want to declare a major?" I was about to say no, when my Intro to Drama and Poetry professor peered around the copy machine and said, "Yeah, he wants to major in English." I had tested out of first-year comp (yes, it's the focus of my teaching life and I never actually took the class!) and instead took a literature class during Winter semester of freshman year. The secretary grabbed a major declaration form, wrote "English" on it, and handed it to me to sign. Which I did. Dr. Jim McDonald declared my major for me.

Three Things

1. For the first time since graduate school, I'm teaching MWF classes. Hello Friday. After three weeks, my sense is that Friday morning is great for freewriting and discussions, not as great for peer review and other more regimented tasks. Today, among other things, my two classes included: watching a youtube video of Patti Smith covering Adele, a discussion of Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Arabic Coffee," and a discussion with a young woman about her name happening to be the name of a city in Lebanon and a tasty dish often eaten at funerals or during Ashura. Believe it or not, we were focused (mostly). For the first time this term, I wasn't wearing jeans nor slippers.

2. I love goodreads.com and wish I would've joined sooner. Great place to track books you have read, are reading, and plan to read.

3. Naomi Shihab Nye visited Ann Arbor this week and I had the pleasure of going to both a reading and a lecture. Also, got (another) autograph. [I love signed books!] She has such an amazing presence at readings in particular and she shared some of the poems from her new book, Transfer, that use lines from her late father's journals as titles and use her dad's point-of-view. Quite beautiful. Definitely one of my all-time favorite poets.

Hunger Games Trilogy

I would have loved these books even more if they existed in 1987. The fourteen-year-old me loved Stephen King's "Bachman books" which strike me as the most obvious antecedents. The best Bachman book, "The Long Walk," centers on a futuristic America where oppressed young citizens elect to take part in a marathon walk where the last person standing wins a lottery and all the losers face death by firing squad. Oh how I loved this story. The Hunger Games books have a similar conceit: dystopian society in which a reality tv competition pits teens against one another in a fight to the death. I don't want to say more about the plot because you should read these books before the first film adaptation comes out this March. They're quite compelling and I admired how damn dark they were too. Relentlessly dark at times. The third book, "Mockingjay," dragged a bit, but the first two--total page-turners.

Tuesday Tuesday

So I'm thinking of joining Weight Watchers. We have a group on campus and it's cheap. One of the challenges (and they are legion!) is that a lot of good Lebanese food adds up quickly in terms of points despite all the health benefits. Olive oil and lebneh are examples. Both have calories and (good) fat so the point value is high. I just hate the idea of turning to food that's actually less healthful just because it's lower in points. But then I think of the health benefits of weighing less. I know that the answer here is to eat much less olive oil and lebneh, in addition to other healthy foods.

Have a rare morning today to work on my research/writing. (So why am I blogging then?) Then it's off to campus for a meeting, class prep, a panel discussion on All American Muslim, and a work-out. Livin' the dream.

Surely a post is coming about The Hunger Games. I'm mid-way through the third and final book in the series and I'm loving these novels in a big way.

youtube, archives, fandom

Did you know that users upload forty-eight hours of video per minute to youtube? This shouldn't amaze me given the fact that youtube has permeated nearly every facet of society. Still, think about that. Forty-eight hours of footage. Every minute.

This got me thinking about the volume and diversity of live music that is available. Putting aside music videos, promos, and other "professional" clips (if such a thing can even be said to exist), consider for a second the accessibility of live footage of your favorite band. You can't go to a rock show and not see dozens of people filming a song or two. I imagine this is true for most genres. Grateful Dead fans famously (audio) taped and traded shows for decades. Official live albums--again, were talking audio here--were especially trendy during the arena rock 70s (Kiss, J. Geils, Frampton, The Who, Cheap Trick, Bob Seger, and others created iconic road records) and attracted even casual fans who approached the live album as a kind of greatest hits. And of course bootleg live records also circulated, especially among hardcore fans.

But youtube provides aural and visual representations of live music, mostly fan created. I wonder if record companies, (some) bands, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, et al, will eventually create more corporate sanctioned "channels" and crack down on amateur bootlegs. For now at least, much of youtube belongs to fandom. Like live albums in the 70s, I see the live music on youtube as walking the line between appealing to casual and hardcore fans. The casual fan can search for a single track and find it in seconds. The hardcore fan can search for a particular song at a particular show or make note of different versions of the same song over some particular period of time. Jay-Z and Kanye West seemed to nod at this phenomenon when they performed multiple versions of "N****s in Paris" at shows on their recent tour.

Another parallel. Like those who bought a live album or bootleg in the 70s or 80s, fans today who surf youtube can appreciate the mythology a band creates by its choice of covers. Springsteen saluted 60s r&b and garage rock by covering Mitch Ryder, for instance, and buying a Springsteen bootleg a generation or two ago was an education in his influences. Want to see Weezer doing "Pumped Up Kicks" last year? Want to see Green Day do AC/DC? Youtube's got you covered. Have at it.

What's surprising, though, is how much pre-youtube and pre-camera phone live music is out there, and it's archived for our pleasure. I was too young to see The Clash in person but I can see them via youtube in their early days in London all the way up to when they opened for The Who in '82. I've always been fascinated by the infamous '72 tour where The Rolling Stones (with--sorry Ron Wood--the great Mick Taylor on second guitar, showing off cool new songs from "Exile on Main St," and supported by Stevie Wonder!) destroyed hotel rooms, did a lot of heroin, and reportedly blew minds on the stage. And now I can watch Keith play Happy a year before I was even born.

I can find clips of the night I saw Neil Young in Cleveland in '93 and ended up with a minor misdemeanor citation from Cuyahoga County. I can find clips of the first rock concert I ever attended (10,000 Maniacs). I don't mean the same band during the same tour, I mean the exact show. I can even find clips of local bands from Youngstown, Ohio, circa early 90s. And I don't remember anybody ever having a video camera at Cedar's or The Penguin Pub, but the clips are there. Couple that nostalgic ability to re-see with the archive that is setlist.fm, much less trafficked but in my mind an equally addictive site for the hardcore music fan, and you've got quite a record of your sordid past. If you haven't been to setlist.fm, it's function should be pretty self-explanatory. It's a wiki that houses the setlists performed by popular music performers. What exactly did Neil Young play that night I saw him twenty years ago? The answer's right here.

I know that Patton Oswalt and others have commented on the internet taking away the magic of the search by putting what used to be obscure right in front of us. But I like the idea of preservation of the minute details we obsess over. Accessibility doesn't take away the obsession, and it certainly doesn't take away the magic. (I don't see Oswalt liking comics any less.) In a way these archives keep us honest: The Stones didn't play a three-hour set of Motown covers in '72. And nobody claims it's the same as being there. I'd have loved to see The Clash opening up for the Pistols on the Anarchy Tour but I was three years old. Seeing it on youtube's not the same thing obviously. But I can access the archives, feed my fandom, and be honest (oh yeah, they didn't play very well).

Recent Reading

The joys of break are the joys of reading for pleasure. I devoured Life, the Keith Richards memoir, and got a kick from not only the Brit dialect but also the lingo of swinging London. Richards tosses in plenty of instances of "baby" and groovy sounding sentence fragments too. He uses these fragments to underline, sometimes stating the obvious (a stand-alone like "Wild" might follow an anecdote that absolutely is) and sometime editorializing (often his comments critique Mick Jagger's ego and love of fame). You get the obligatory stories of heavy drug use, but you also get a sense of Keith's deep, deep love of music and musicians. Wild baby.

Also read the somewhat mediocre Geraldine Brooks novel People of the Book. I loved the premise--a researcher and rare-books expert tracing the history of a sacred, centuries-old Jewish text through Europe. Also loved the recurring theme of "conviviality," the togetherness invoked by stories of Christians, Jews, and Muslims interacting together (15th Century Spain! 20th Century Bosnia! Palestine! Australia!). It's a globetrotting, time-traveling narrative and the good, bad, lovely, and ugly of the interaction of Big Western Faiths comes up thematically and drives the plot too. While the historical chapters popped, the present action sometimes tried too hard to combine pulpy action and romance with the more heady themes. DaVinci Code for the New York Review of Books set. Good but not great.

grading playlist

Due in part to the fact that I spent over half of 2011 out of the country, I didn't listen to enough new music to compile any type of "best of" list. But I do have an enjoyable collection of (mostly) 2011 tunes to keep me company while I grade portfolios during the next few days. If you haven't heard any of these, download them from your favorite legal music source.

1. "East Harlem" by Beirut. Catchy, lilting melodies from a band I decided to sample because of the band name, although they aren't Lebanese. Their 2011 record is pretty good but this is the highlight.

2. "Lonely Boy" by The Black Keys. In 2002 or so, when The White Stripes and Strokes peaked in popularity, this would have been a HUGE hit. Bigger sound than their earlier stuff yet still loyal to that simple, garage aesthetic.

3. "Black Rabbit" by Pujol. Great rock and roll song that deserved to be bigger. Why didn't this get any buzz on avclub, pithfork, et al?

4. "Rolling in the Deep" by Adele. It says something about the lousy state of pop music that when "Rolling in the Deep" comes on the radio, you instantly notice what a beautifully written song it is. But Adele's not just great from a craft and composition perspective. Her voice is lovely and unique and she doesn't feel the need to turn every song into some octave exercise. She gives "Rolling in the Deep" subtlety and nuance.

5. "Otis" by Kanye West and Jay Z. I'll just pick one song from the awesome "Watch the Throne" collaboration. Why not make it the big single? The lyrics couldn't be shallower (gist: we are really, really rich), but the Otis Redding sample is brilliant.

6. "What Can I Do?" by Black Belles. This band killed at the inaugural MI-Fest in September. Band members all dress in black and wear witch hats yet their show somehow worked in the middle of the day (I'm reminded of seeing Ministry play an afternoon slot at Lollapalooza twenty years ago). 60's girl group sound meets riot girl punk.

7. "F*** You" by Cee Lo. I think this is technically from 2010, but I didn't pay attention until Motley Crue tossed in a cover (mashed up with their own, similarly themed "Don't Go Away Mad") at their Detroit show this past summer. Lyrics are completely over the top and the tune is totally addictive.

8. "Forget You" by the Muppets. An all-chicken version of the Cee Lo song from the new Muppet movie. Smartest part of the movie. Repeated listens do NOT get old. Love it.

9. "Future Starts Slow" and "DNA" by the Kills. One of my favorite bands. They get points for sheer consistency--all of their records have been good including the 2011 release "Blood Pressures" (which is getting no end-of-year love). These two tracks show off the drum machine / rock guitar / brooding vocals that form the trinity of the Kills' aesthetic. PS: the band put on an outstanding show in Columbus in July.

10. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by the Muppets. Second greatest moment in the movie. A barbershop quarter version of the Nirvana classic, complete with Beeker deliving the "libido" line, among others. Also stays fresh upon repeated listens.

what have I been reading?

Join the Club, by NYTimes' Tina Rosenberg, which I'm reading with my first-year comp students. Rosenberg posits the "social cure" as an effective strategy for social change, telling loads of stories of successful organizing where the success stemmed directly from the social capital gained by a sense of community. Rosenberg argues that peer pressure represents positive potential. Pretty good stuff.

Also reading various texts about Shi'a in Lebanon and Hezbollah specifically. The best has been Max Weiss' In the Shadow of Sectarianism, though I also made my way through Zahera Harb's Channels of Resistance in Lebanon and Eitan Azani's Hezbollah: The Story of the Party of God, the latter providing really useful context but succumbing to significant bias in its discussion of the contemporary situation in "the south." Been doing some extra reading to add to what I'm learning in the Lebanese history class I've been auditing and, ultimately, trying to contextualize my understanding of Mleeta (the "Hezbollah museum"), which I've been trying to write about (may turn into an article).

Doc on Afghanistan

This film screened on campus yesterday. "Where Soldiers Come From" follows the lives of several young men from the U.P. who join the National Guard, deploy to Afghanistan, and then return to their civilian lives changed. Might be the best documentary I've ever seen. All I can say is please, please, please watch it. PBS is streaming the movie for free. Follow the link.

Steinbeck

Tonight is "Working-Class Rhetoric" night in my MALS (master's in liberal studies) seminar and we're reading luminaries like Eugene Debs, John Steinbeck, and Jane Addams. Here's a nice taste of Steinbeck, from his essay "Starvation Under the Orange Trees"

If you buy a farm horse and only feed him when you work him, the horse will die. No one complains of the necessity of feeding the horse when he is not working. But we complain about feeding the men and women who work our lands. Is it possible that this state is so stupid, so vicious and so greedy that it cannot feed and clothe the men and women who help to make it the richest area in the world? Must the hunger become anger and the anger fury before anything will be done?

Pittsburgh

In addition to spending a few days in beautiful Youngstown, OH., I had the pleasure of visiting Pittsburgh's "strip district" for the first time this past weekend. The district houses Pittsburgh's version of Little Italy, a non-residential area packed with Italian delis, bakeries, and import stores. Among other things, Nicole, my parents, and I got some most excellent prosciutto and bread. I always forget that Pittsburgh's less than ninety minutes away from Youngstown. Must make the strip district a regular destination, next time with a side trip to the Andy Warhol gallery.

What's Wrong with All-American Muslim?

TLC's new reality tv show revolves around a group of Muslims who live in Dearborn, Michigan, where I happen to teach. Aside from making money without having to pay writers and actors, TLC seems to want to offer honest, interesting portrayals of Muslims to counter the predictable, ugly stereotypes the media often reproduces. The producers managed to find representatives of the community who practice the religion differently, but have so far missed lots of opportunities.

Let's start with "the community." The group the show seeks to represent is somewhat ambiguous. American Muslims in general? Not exactly, because the show is in many way *about* Dearborn and its unique dynamics. And the show seems to focus, implicitly at least, on Arab Muslims in order to engage with the cultural-religious-ethnic enclave here. That's fine; certainly the program has no obligations to represent the totality of American Islam. Indeed, looking at the intersections of religion, culture, and ethnicity could be really interesting. So, then, why do the show's personalities all seem so homogenous? Most of the stars are Shi'a from South Lebanon, which in some ways makes sense because that particular group is so prevalent, visible, and active in Dearborn. Seems like a missed opportunity, though, given the Yemeni, Palestinian, and Iraqi Muslims who live here too. All the characters seem very upwardly mobile, too. If you want to engage with religious, cultural, and ethnic intersections, broaden the scope.

The program also doesn't provide much context. Maybe this will happen in later episodes. So far, the show hasn't told us anything about Dearborn's history. No mention of the city's history of racism and segregation ("Keep Dearborn Clean"), for instance. Maybe the reality tv genre simply can't make room for this kind of context, but why not show the city's evolution from segregated white community to ethnic enclave? Likewise, aside from high school football players mentioning briefly the racist taunts of opposing teams, there was no mention of post-9/11 Islamaphobia. The show doesn't have to "go negative" per se, but barely mentioning this seems to me like missing context. Perhaps the show wants to tread lightly in order to connect to as wide an audience as possible, but, sheesh, if the show is about honest representations, than tell the truth.

Somewhat related to the context or lack thereof, how come there was no mention whatsoever of the old country? I don't think I heard the words "immigrant," "Lebanon," or certainly "South Lebanon" during the whole episode, aside from one woman saying that her husband "comes from the same village." If the show is exploring cultural identity and how religion and ethnicity intersect, than surely this will eventually come up. Given South Lebanon's especially contentious relationship with Israel, will mentioning context more explicitly be acceptable? Will anyone say something like, "My family comes from Bint Jbeil"? And is that desirable? I'm speaking as an outsider--neither Arab nor Muslim--so my perspective is necessarily limited.

Also, speaking of shout-outs, how about a mention of U of M Dearborn?

CSA

CSA: The Confederate States of America is not as shocking a film as it thinks it is. CSA imagines how the contemporary world might look if the South had won the American Civil War. Interesting premise, though the premise doesn't really go anywhere.

[spoiler alert...] What does the film imagine as the consequences of a Confederate victory? Slavery is legalized throughout the land. Abe Lincoln dons blackface, is taken into hiding by Harriet Tubman, and eventually is captured and exiled to Canada. The Confederate States colonize much of Latin America. South Africa becomes their chief ally. The late nineteenth century? Pretty much manifest destiny on steroids.

Clever and intriguing but once you know the premise, you pretty much have experienced the film. I will say that the narrative structure is smart and effective. CSA takes the form of a British documentary airing on a Confederate tv station for the first time, complete with commercial breaks. The commercials are brilliant.

Zinn

The great historian Howard Zinn writes about his recollections of dropping napalm on a German-occupied French village at the end of WWII. He says the allies were essentially waiting for Germany to surrender at that point and that dropping the napalm was fundamentally unnecessary. He recalls getting the orders from commanding officers and then, along with his fellow pilots, carrying out the orders.

After his honorable discharge, his GI Bill-funded education, and the beginning of his distinguished career as a teacher and activist, Zinn concluded that war was unjust and looked back with honesty at his involvement in that injustice. He says when he thinks of getting those orders, he can understand why many fail to act when challenged or faced with an opportunity to take a stand. It's hard, for one thing. It causes us pain, discomfort, and loss.

I think of this as I read accounts of the molestation and rape scandal at Penn State. A coach who runs an outreach program for at-risk children commits rape. He's a powerful and influential man. Janitors and graduate assistants catch him in the act, hem and haw, and eventually tell others at the University. Nobody calls the police. The abuse continues. The inaction of the growing network of individuals who knew but did nothing is stunning. Taking that stand might have been hard, might have hurt one's career, might have resulted in losing a friend or losing one's standing.

But it would have been the right thing to do.

Collaboration

In the process of getting the partnership between the writing programs at UMD (where I teach) and AUB (where I worked while on a Fulbright in the Middle East last year) solidified. We are linking eight classes next semester. Students in these classes will partner with students abroad and interview one another and get acquainted via various online media (Skype, Facebook, etc) and ultimately write "literacy profiles" of one another. It's great fun and a chance for the teachers and students alike to meet up and learn some things about reading and writing in different social, cultural, and national contexts. Currently writing several grants to get the partnership some needed funding. Also working on IRB approval, an online space where all the student writing will be housed, and a million other things connected to making the project meaningful and maybe sustainable and scalable. Meantime, Margaret, my UMD colleague, and I are writing up a report of the pilot version of this partnership we tried out while I was at AUB. We've given several presentations about what we did (linking our two classes in Fall 2010) and we're working on an article version. I've not collaborated much in the past and, while working with others is in some ways slower and involves much more communication, this is a social way to operate.

Taqwacore

Taqwacore = Islamic punk rock

But here's the interesting part. The genre didn't really exist until Michael Muhammad Knight wrote a novel called The Taqwacores, which one scholar calls "The Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims." Nearly ten years old, that novel inspired the birth of a small but meaningful youth movement, primarily in North America, of Muslim teenagers interested in adopting the rebellious pose of punk rock while maintaining staunchly Islamic identities. The word "taqwa" means something like piety or faith. Taqwacore bands popped up, writing and performing songs about Islam and using a hardcore punk musical aesthetic.

On Thursday night, UM-Dearborn screened the film version of The Taqwacores, directed by Eyad Zahra, who graciously answered questions after the screening. I encouraged my students to attend and about six or seven of them did. The film follows young Yousef, a Pakistani-American college student who moves into a house inhabited by devotees of taqwacore. Yousef is pious and conservative whereas his new housemates engage in all manner of "haram" (immoral) behavior and challenge Yousef's assumptions about what a good Muslim is. His new mates represent a range of Islamic ideologies. One woman, for instance, wears a full burka covered with punk rock patches and espouses a sexually liberated version of feminism. One is an openly gay man. One loves punk music but believes in a very traditional version of Islam, with men and women socializing separately.

Zahra shot the film with hand-held cameras in a rickety looking house in Cleveland. The movie's as lively and chaotic as the music at its center. At times, the story tries too hard to shock the audience (several scenes are sexually explicit, for instance) but overall it's a challenging and nuanced story that definitely got my students talking. We chatted in the hallway afterward and one student told me our conversation was better than the movie (which he found offensive--but, again, it inspired him to think and talk). I appreciated the range of characters in the film. And in a way, The Taqwacores reminded me of Kevin Smith's Dogma, which is deeply irreverent but takes Catholicism seriously and rolls up its sleeves and engages with church teaching. The Taqwacores did that for Islam, showing, for example, how this group of young people question their beliefs while maintaining their faiths, identities, and even traditions (turning Friday prayer, for instance, into a rotating sharing session in which each member of the community talks about what Islam means to them). They pray, although the call to prayer is played on an electric guitar, sounding a bit like Jimi Hendrix's rendition of the National Anthem. And the film has a sense of humor too. Band names include Hezbollah and the opening credits roll as a song called "Sharia Law in the U.S.A." (can you guess which Sex Pistols song this tune references?) plays on the soundtrack.

I'm awaiting response papers from my students who chose to attend (it was optional) but I'm curious to see how they connect the film to the short story collection we read, Halal Pork by Cihaan Kaan, which also uses an avant garde aesthetic to try to capture the complexities of young, American muslims in the post-9/11 decade.

Hating on Studio 60

One of my favorite distractions, I mean websites, avclub.com, has turned bashing Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip into a zen art form. Their latest critique makes some valid points but I still do not get the level of vitriol toward this well-meaning program. Directed and largely written by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing fame, the program followed the exploits of the producers, writers, and stars of a fictionalized version of Saturday Night Live.

Sorkin turned liberal presidential staffers into minor deities in West Wing and he attempts to do the same thing to comedians in Studio 60. Writing an amusing sketch doesn't quite have the same gravitas as running a country, though, so I can see why many didn't find the latter program compelling. The Studio 60 characters were unapologetically leftists and at times sanctimonious. Think Alan Alda on MASH. I saw the show as a kind of an extension of West Wing and--on both shows--found the larger-than-life intelligence and work ethic that the characters projected to be inspired. I love being a writer and teacher but I don't have the hyperbolic dedication of the fictional characters in Sorkin's universes. His shows are pastiches of dedication, every character a walking hyperbole, many of them voicing Sorkin's political views as they walk!

So I can see the somehwat limited appeal. AV Club's latest critique raises the question of why the show's critics are so vocal even four years after its cancellation (it's one of those one-season wonders, premiering the same season as the similarly premised/titled 30 Rock, which has a totally different tone), but the piece doesn't do much to answer that question. Instead, it reviews all that is problematic about the show:

In premise and execution, Studio 60 was a work of unbearable, overweening arrogance. It began with making the lead character of Matt Albie both a clear Sorkin surrogate and a writer so ridiculously romanticized even M. Night Shyamalan might say, “Get over yourself, dude. You’re a fucking writer, not Jesus’ younger brother, the one God really likes.” Albie isn’t just a principled, gifted writer; he’s a man who gets out of bed every morning aching to making a stand. He’s admired by men and irresistible to women who run the gamut from a Maureen Dowd surrogate played by Christine Lahti to the high-end skanks of the Rockettes. Even with a head full of bad chemicals and a belly full of pills, he’s able to single-handedly write a peerless work of transcendent social and political satire everyone in the known universe will be talking about around the water cooler Monday morning. Writing 90 minutes of new comedy every week is a Herculean endeavor for even the most gifted writing staff; now imagine 90 minutes of brilliant comedy emerging anew weekly from the mind of but a single man! On pills, even! And with the kind of problems you would not believe! As I write this, I realize that that this is not a man I’m writing about. This is a God. Oh sure, this man-God has an ego. Wouldn’t you?

The piece goes on to call out the show's self-congratulatory tone, its failure to live up to the promise of its brilliant pilot (in which a producer of the show goes rogue during a live broadcast and rants about the dumbing down of pop culture), its caricatures of conservative Christians, preachy dialogue, its failure to live up the "show don't tell" dictum, and its mishandling of race and war and 9/11. Quite a list of critiques. And, frankly, I can't refute most of these. Because even moreso than West Wing (often called "porn for liberals"), Studio 60 offered a fantastical, affective viewing experience for members of the left. The stakes were comically (so to speak) high for these characters because they just believe so strongly in their worldview (secular, progressive, civil libertarian, humanistic, etc.) and, yes, the dialogue verged on propaganda because these characters did not exist divorced from their own ideologies. I also love the way both Sorkin shows dealt with the writing process. Here are a great set of representations who recognize what good writing can do.

So anyway, I still don't get the level of vitriol, which doesn't come from conservative blogs, etc., which I imagine could care less about a failed tv program from 2006-2007. It comes from pop culture obsessives like AV Club writers. I suppose in part they want pop culture to be better: I love, therefore I criticize. But why the historical memory regarding Studio 60? Even with all the problematic aspects of the show, I'd expect indifference from non-fans, not hatred.

Wilco

"It makes no difference to me/how they cried all over overseas/If it's dark in the poor places tonight/I'm not going outside."
-Wilco, Poor Places

Monday Misc.

Strange and unfocused day today. It's mid-morning and I've read the news, gotten some reading done, answered a few emails, and written two letters of recommendation. I have a mid-day meeting on campus, after which I plan to work out, write, and study some Arabic.

Hung out with our pals Jim and Janice this weekend. They came over and we watched Verlander miss his chance to win 25 regular-season games (bummer!). Various family members were in town to help Anna and company harvest honey from the bees. Mass Sunday morning. Sleeping past 6:00 am. Nice times, though I continue to have some residual, post-Lebanon blueness.

Shout out to Tony taking the GRE today. And to Gia the pug who's staying with us for the week. Time for an early lunch.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Too many words have been written about R.E.M. in their thirty-one years as a band and their one day of retirement. Even before mainstream success, they made for great copy in the alt press. Media coverage of the band actually created some of the important narratives of (indie) rock: artistic integrity, credibility, resisting the imperative to "sell out," reluctance and liberal guilt in the face of success, the transition from indie label to major label. R.E.M. pioneered these now-ubiquitous narratives. Ditto the fan narratives: I knew them before you did. I discovered the band early on. Their early stuff is great. Ditto the idea of a gateway band. Just as kids today discover Dylan and the blues through Jack White, kids in the 80s and 90s found Television, Velvet Underground, and Mission of Burma through R.E.M. Without R.E.M., there's no Kurt Cobain telling his fans they can't like both him and Axl Rose. There's no Eddie Vedder retreating from the media gaze and retooling Pearl Jam as journeymen instead of buzz-band. There's also no "modern rock" format on your FM dial. If it weren't for R.E.M.'s string of I.R.S. records, there would be no fan-boy worship of Sub Pop and Third Man.

Like thousands of other nerds (not indie rock nerds...nerds) in 1986 or so, R.E.M. made sense to me and around the time that "Document" came out, they became my favorite band. In junior high, Jack Kerouac's book "On the Road," the notion of going off to seminary, and the music of R.E.M. (and to a lesser extent The Smiths, Dead Kennedys, and 10,000 Maniacs) created this odd and incongruous universe that seemed so anti-establishment. A fourteen-year-old needs a favorite band. My college roommate Jim and I saw R.E.M. three times on the "Monster" tour--in Auburn Hills, East Lansing, and Ann Arbor. By that time (post "Man on the Moon," "Losing My Religion," and "Everybody Hurts"...the big three), they were big enough to play three Michigan shows on the same tour...and with opening acts like Wilco, Radiohead, and Patti Smith! The last R.E.M. show I saw was on the Vote For Change tour in support of John Kerry in 2004--a show in Cleveland with Bruce Springsteen, Bright Eyes, and John Fogerty. They all came out to jam on a finale of "Born to Run," "People Have the Power," and "(What's So Funny Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding?" Michael Stipe and Springsteen trading verses on "Born to Run" was a good moment.

All of that is well and good, but says little about the music itself. Much of R.E.M.'s catalogue is unfuckwithable rock and roll. It's jangly, artsy, punky, melodic, evocative, and illusive. Just for the hell of it, a dozen great R.E.M tracks:

1. Life and How to Live It (1985's "Fables of the Reconstruction)**
2. Begin the Begin (1986's "Life's Rich Pageant")
3. Rockville (1984's "Reckoning")
4. What's the Frequency Kenneth? (1995's "Monster")
5. Finest Worksong (1987's "Document")
6. I Believe (1986's "Life's Rich Pageant")
7. Harborcoat (1984's "Reckoning")
8. Radio Free Europe (1981 single)
9. Feeling Gravity's Pull (1985's "Fables of the Reconstruction")
10. Lotus (1998's "Up")
11. So Fast So Numb (1996's "New Adventures in Hi-Fi")
12. Man-Sized Wreath (2008's "Accelerate")

And a few live covers to find on youtube: See No Evil (orig. by Television), Crazy (orig. by Pylon), Superman (orig. by The Clique), Strange (orig. by Wire)

UPDATE: **Upon further reflection, I feel the need to add the following assertion about my list's number one: the lines "if I write a book it will be called Life and How to Live It" represent the best closing lines of a rock and roll song, ever.

UPDATE #2
Two nice links from salon.com
A series of remembrances of the band.
An essay about the band's influence.

MI Fest

Nothing beats great live music, especially when it's close to home on a sunny, cool Autumn day. Tony and Alice--my second eldest nephew and his girlfriend--drove up from Ohio to enjoy the inaugural festival and after late-morning sustenance from Dearborn's Sajouna (jibnee!) we headed west past Ann Arbor (no time to stop and cheer for the Wolverines) and got to the Michigan Speedway just in time for the Black Belles, a garage punk quartet whose members seem to aim for a witch aesthetic. Known mainly for backing up Stephen Colbert on the single "Charlene," the Belles kicked it without any Comedy Central cameos and somehow managed to make white make-up and tall black hats make sense in the context of an outdoor festival. I got the sense their aesthetic was a bit more geared toward a smoky bar after midnight. But they rocked, so, you know, kudos to them. They also circulated with fans afterward, made possible by a pretty low turnout. That early in the day I'm sure there weren't more than a few thousand people, max, and only a couple dozen at the second stage, where we camped out until nearly sundown.

Other acts who, like the Belles, are on Jack White's Third Man Records dominated the second stage. Black Milk, an excellent Detroit hip hop artist, was undeterred by his status as the only rapper in the house and had a very nice set, making me sorry I never discovered his stuff until he put out a single on Third Man. Must seek out his earlier stuff. Pujol and Jeff the Brotherhood both do a scruffy, stripped down rock act--more the kind of band you'd expect Jack White to produce--and seemed to be having as much fun as the crowd. White seems to have fostered a real family vibe at Third Man and the camraderie came across from the tiny stage. The Speedway facilities are not huge, which was a plus, as you could wander freely to your car for snacks and water and be back to the stage area in a few minutes. Did I mention how great the weather was? Sunny enough that my ears were red when I woke up this morning, but chilly by the time the sun went down.

Speaking of sundown, we ventured over to the main stage in time for the Romantics ("What I Like About You"), straight outta Hamtramck, Michigan, who broke out a Kinks cover in addition to the British Invasion-esque songs of their own, including, of course "Talking In Your Sleep," which benefited from the lack of the 1980s sheen of the recorded version. Did they close with "What I Like About You"? Of course. Did 40-somethings dance nostalgically on the lawn? Of course. As Sheryl Crow was taking the stage, a young woman smelling of the venue's expensive inexpensive beer, came over, told us we seemed cool (which I thought she was going to follow up with an invitation to "party") and handed over three VIP bracelets. Thank you, kind intoxicated girl, if you are out there.

The VIP area had free drinks but the line was too long so we headed toward the stage and got really close to Sheryl Crow. I'm not a fan or anything, but hearing her upbeat tunes up close was pretty cool. She kept saying we were in Detroit and referring to her friendship with Kid Rock, who I thought might join her for a duet or two. He didn't. She broke into a nice version of "Stuck in the Middle With You" at one point and had a really strong backing band. And the age-diverse crowd had a good time. Thanks for coming to Michigan Sra. Crow. We were about two hours from Detroit, but close enough. Really, her music isn't really my speed, but she's got really top notch pipes. Actually, much like hearing the Romantics, I appreciated her voice live, divorced from the production of her records.

Okay, after her set we worked our way close to the stage. A lot of the 40-plus crowd headed for the parking lot, leaving behind some huge Jack White fans. Really. Around us, I heard people comment on roadies who they knew from the White Stripes days. Wow. The Raconteurs, the second of White's three beloved bands, headlined the show and really killed it. I mean, they know how to please a crowd. The band has five amazing musicians when you include the keyboardist with whom they tour. They played much of their two records and the crowd sung along. Guitarists White and Brendan Benson both do a Zeppelin-esque thing--lots of solos, lots of shredding. Like a lot of the Third Man acts of the second stage, you got the sense they were having a fabulously good time on the stage. They played "Old Enough," my favorite Raconteurs track, so I was a happy audience member. Jack White's relatives sat in rows on stage left, rocking out, apparently (the local press reported) after traveling in his tour bus from Detroit. That Jack White. Whatta guy. When the family came out, I commented to Tony and Alice that maybe the older woman in the yellow jacket might not want to sit right next to the amps. A guy in front of me turned around and said "That's mom," so I figured, well, Jack White's mom probably knows better than anybody here that it's about to get loud. It did. Fitting for a guy who's become one of the definitive icons of Detroit rock and roll to close the day. Despite some hiccups last week, the MI Fest acquitted itself as a worthy event that I hope becomes an annual Fall tradition.

Ahlan wa Sahlan

Winding down after the second week of Fall classes, I realize that keeping up is going to be a challenge. Keeping up with the paper load, keeping up with the writing I plan to get done, keeping up with my Arabic. What's the routine look like? Something like this:

Mondays are writing days. I'm in the middle of several writing projects connected to the work I did in Lebanon and don't want to lose any momentum.

Tuesdays/Thursdays are campus days. Teach two sections of Comp 105 in the morning, followed the Arabic 101 class I'm taking, followed by office hours, followed by the Lebanese History class I'm taking. **By "taking," I mean sitting in.

Wednesdays are semi-campus days. Work out on campus, spend much of the day grading papers and doing class prep, teach my grad class in the evening.

Fridays are wild cards. Spend at least part of the day writing, though often I have various meetings and commitments on campus.

Every day: find an hour or so to work on the Arabic. I'd like to make time to blog, too, and post some updates here about the writing projects in particular, but also some rants about trying to learn Arabic. Stay tuned...