It's not April Fool's Day Yet

I'm not a shill. I swear.

Check it out: http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/snuznluz.shtml?cpg=50T.

Car Repair, the Iron Lotus, and the Restless Panda

After being in the body shop for four days, my car still isn't finished. I must take it back on Tuesday for an indeterminate length of time.

***

Glenn was kind enough to take me to pick it up at four thirty. I didn't leave with my car until 6:15. What was I doing all that time, you ask? Why, I was reading DUB magazine's latest issue. If you ever want to feel illiterate, I recommend reading a dense technical manual tricked out as a fashion magazine. There was no dictionary present. I recognized most of the words used by DJ Envy and Tony Hawk. Also, apparently, there is some kind of Spike Lee limited edition clothing line.

***

So, one of my highschool classmates myspaced me last week and let me know he was coming into town to present a paper at a marketing conference. We hung out. Went to see Blades of Glory--which is solidly funny--and discussed things I am not at liberty to discuss here, as I will be using them to my advantage against one or all of you at some point in the future.

It turned out that this acquaintance had been intrigued by my mentioning going to the San Diego Zoo with McKenzie on Thursday. Just as we did, he came to the conclusion that the panda is a terrible evolutionary pathway. But he, unlike McKenzie and I, braved the lines of people straining to see one. Apparently, there was a sign reading, "If the female seems restless, don't panic. She's just in heat!"

Which makes you wonder how many phone calls the zoo received:

"Um, hello?"
"San Diego Zoo. How may I direct your call?"
"I'm standing at the panda enclosure. I'm calling you from my cell. Can you hear me?"
"Yes, sir. I can hear you."
"Um. Well, this panda seems...I don't know. Restless."
"I'm sorry?"
"Well, it's pacing around, and I just don't know what it's going to do next."
"..."
"It's like some kind of caged animal, pacing back and forth. Looks like Brando, you know? Dangerous. Unpredictable. Bestial."
"...I'll let someone know right away."

Or how many times someone ran to find a zookeeper:

"You've...huhahuh...got to come...huhahuh...quick...ahuh..."
"Ma'am, what's the emergency? Catch your breath. What's wrong?"
"Panda...uhahuh...restless....secure....in a cage....danger to no one..."
"Oh, that. Right. Well, she's just in heat."
"OH SWEET LORD, NO!"
"Don't worry ma'am--it's completely natural."
"SOMEONE PUT AN ICE PACK ON THAT RESTLESS PANDA!"
"I'm not sure that would work, ma'am."
"WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!"
"Probably."

Voyeurism

The moon is high in the sky, watching me watching them.

Right now, across the parking lot, in a dimly lit window on the second floor of a Palo Verde apartment building, I can see the perfect silhouettes of two young people deliberately, devotedly, with slow and subtly changing rhythms, playing Wii Sports. It fills me with a kind of trembling--an obscure fear before the beauty of human endeavor. A coyote is barking. At a pause in the action, one of the figures slips away, only to return seconds later with a bottle of beer.

Spring has finally come.

This has probably been done a million times, but...

The following is a list of prepositional phrases identifying places where I have recently found religion*:

Between Asimov's guide to Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.
Behind the Blueberry Zinfandel Sorbet in the freezer.
In a file labelled "2003 Taxes and Misc."
Under the back seat of my car.
In a Jack Chick pamphlet.
In a roadside bathroom.
In the year 486 BC.
In my sinuses.


*You may substitute any of the following nouns or noun phrases for this one: Jesus, one of McKenzie's earrings, corn nuts, change, crumbs, a page from Warminski's exam, mold, or my self-respect.

Thanks, JC!, I haven't laughed this hard in about six days.

Sister!

My little sister is in town this weekend.

Yesterday, I took her to class with me, where, despite a lengthy explanation of her presence, my kids took her to be a college senior who might--for inexplicable reasons--be transferring to UCI. I guess we Tanners look old.

Last night we watched 8 mile again. For all three of us it had been a long time coming. I, for one, had never seen the movie in English. Thanks, Marianne.

We also played some video games and watched some Family Guy. Then Jessie went to bed early because she had to be at her Honors College Open House registration at 8:00. I wrote until late, and then I went to sleep.

Now, I will go to work. For those of you who get this on some sort of feed, Sterling and Christal will be in town tonight, and we are thinking of going to a late show of 300. Give me a call on my cell phone if you would like to go. (Offer available in Southern California, only.)

JC Ascendant!

My friend and co-conspirator on the much-discussed-but-never-before-heard-by-most-living-souls Battle of the Worlds rap opera project, JC!, just got a job blogging at Wii Fanboy and DS Fanboy. So, if you liked his regular work on 20xx Games, or if you have ten minutes to spend checking out video game stuff, then you should leave him a comment.

Update: I have found and recovered about 75% of Battle of the Worlds off of some back-up discs that pre-date my sojourn in Auvergne. Those of you who express interest might be rewarded with some hilarity.

Sometimes you miss your own point.

Joe, over at The Kugelmass Episodes, recently posted his take on Buffy sexuality as a prelude to a discussion of pop-culture sexuality. If you plan on continuing to read this post after the first two sentences, it might serve you to read that post here. My comment in response follows, and, in re-reading my comment in light of Joe's response (which follows farther down the linked page), I did a double take. Sometimes, it seems, you miss your own point.

I guess I'd start by saying that it seems Joe's point and my point have passed each other in the night without really connecting. You might say they were strangers. Strangers who passed in the night. And couldn't really see each other because it was dark. They might have exchanged glances.

Saying, "Trying to continue holding fast to the shows protestations of romantic feeling creates more problems than it solves," Joe goes on to talk about the romantic choices of the characters as evidence (and, please, correct me if I'm wrong) for the shallowness of sexuality in pop-culture as read through the show.

My point, in evoking Schiller, was completely different from talking about the characters' romantic entanglements as some kind of Tragic Romance that was valuable for the sake of its affirmation of sentimentality. I was trying to evoke the logic of the show itself in Schillerian terms...and I did a terrible job.

Let me try again. After an incredibly long and stupid excursus, I hope to return to Joe's argument on his own terms.

I am going to ventriloquize Schiller for a second. And, since that's boring, I am going to put myself into dialogue with him.

The scene: Jonathan's kitchen, 4 am. Enter Jonathan, hungry.

Schiller: Art is a salve for a wound.
Me (surprised): Who the fuck are you?
Schiller: I am Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.
Me(rummaging in fridge for sandwich fixin's): What wound is that, Johann? Er...Christoph? Can I call you Christoph?
Schiller: I prefer Friedrich, actually.
Me (under breath): Could have guessed.
Schiller: What was that?
Me (toasting bread): Nothing. You were saying? A wound?
Schiller: And the name of this wound is "history."
Me (gets out stone ground mustard, decides to go with white wine instead): Oh, so. Good. Heals it right up, then, does it?
Schiller: No. Nothing can heal the wound that is history.
Me (prepares cheddar cheese) : That's a pretty crappy salve.
Schiller: No. For the wound is not a wound.
Me (disinterestedly folds roast beef slices so they will fit on bread): No?
S: No.
Me (retrieving bread from toaster and constructing a sandwich): ...
S: ...
Me (impatiently): So, what is it then?
S: It is the anguish caused by the ironic position of wanting to be original in the face of history, when one is trapped within the march of history.
Me: And art heals that anguish?
S: No.
Me (looks at sandwich. looks at door): Of course not.
S: Art merely holds up the possibility of creating something beautiful. Something that would transcend history.
Me: So, art is a time machine?
S: No. Art is failure.
Me: What?
S: Art cannot transcend history. It merely provides us with the eternally foreclosed possibility of transcending history. The art that remains is a failure, but one that contains within it that possibility for others.
Me: Okay. Nice to meet you. I'm going to go eat my sandwich, now.

Fin.

Okay. So, I was not trying to evoke this as a way of saying that the tragedy of their specifically romantic choices was what was worth holding onto in the show. Rather, in my opinion, all the choices by all the characters (not just the principals), through this same formal construction, seem to be attempts to get out of one situation in order to arrive at another. Even the vampires and demons succumb to the idea that the status quo is hell (the status quo I refer to here is specifically not the status quo held up by Buffy as normalcy/popularity, etc, but I will get to that in a minute). The possibility of change, however, is constantly removed beyond reach. Stake a vampire, there's another vampire. Kill a demon, there's another demon. Blow up a hellmouth, there's always Cleveland. The thing that makes this interesting is that it works both ways. Kill Buffy, you get Kendra. Kill Kendra, you get Faith. Kill Buffy again, you get... Like the attempt to make art, the attempt to change the status quo is merely an attempt, and one that results in failure. This is why making art and attempting change are both inferior to making sandwiches.

This particular logic produces two effects, which coincide with Joe's argument in, I hope, productive (or at lest interesting to read) ways.

The first of these effects is the endless production of irony. In the face of the impossibility of the Slayer accomplishing what it is that she is created for, all of her exploits become ironic. This is what leads, on the one hand, to the ironic hahas of the meetings and the Scooby Gang's overall idiom. On the other hand, this leads to those moments of "total negation," where Buffy is alone in the night with vampires: youth destined to kill ancient things that are already dead. This is futility in the face of history. Perhaps that is a useful way to think through the show, perhaps not. It is clear to me, however, how this conception of the show's irony produces the kinds of desire to which you refer, without needing to bring in the death drive.

The second effect that I perceive is perhaps a simple by-product of the first. After all, the problem of irony is that once it begins, it is difficult to tell where it ends. We must examine the status quo with this in mind.

The status quo of this show is ironically presented (it is here where your reading of the show's lack of insight into highschool might be in conflict with mine). The school is simultaneously every school everywhere, and a very specific location--the confluence of ley lines, etc., the Hell-Mouth, we are told. But then, the specificity of this location is revoked. It is A hellmouth. Any hellmouth anywhere. It has become-- because of its ironic construction--both like and unlike any other school.

The normalcy that Buffy craves is ironic because it doesn't exist. The show points this out over and over again. Find one character that fits the image of the status quo that Buffy longs for, and the whole show falls apart. Those characters that are marked by their lack of supernatural abilities, occult activities, etc., are also those that are torn apart in most unnatural ways. Buffy can never win. To win would be to assert a status quo that is some kind of status quo ante. This is impossible both in the Schillerian sense of the impossibility of transcending history, and because there is no before time within the context of the show. Demons have always existed, and vampires, and humankind has always been on the brink of death, ("Apocalypse. We've all been there.")

This is the element of the show that I find to be insightful. It is not the equation of the SAT and money to college applications on the show--just to take one example among many--that is damaging. It is that equation outside the show. The show is contextualizing this kind of decision-making within a discourse wherein everything the viewer's status quo presents as valuable is made laughable by virtue of irony and the basic questions of survival that the show raises.

Last thing. I promise.

This relates to the "'real' perversions" of the show. The thing that is being shown to be perverted on the show is the perception of high school held by people that incorrectly perceive themselves as holding up a vision of the status quo. This is ultimately why Cordelia, the champion of that vision of reality, is subverted and brought into the fold of the Scoobies. If you believe that SM culture--this example will have to stand in, synechdochally, for others--is not taken seriously by the show--is somehow marginalized or made insignificant by the fact that Spike and Drusilla engage in it (and, here, I am thinking of the suggestion that none of the "principals" engage in it)--I suggest that you take a look at the sex life of Buffy and Spike again. There, if nowhere else, are moments that specifically address your concerns about sexuality. If I have to put it in psycho-analytical terms, and believe me, I do so only as an example of the structures I am trying to suggest, what the show does to the status quo of everyday life is what Freud does to the status quo of sexuality in--and here you have me at a disadvantage--"Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality." Please correct me if I have my reference wrong, but it is here where Freud suggests that the norm, when it comes to sexuality, *is* pervervsion--or, if I must qualify, that perversion is present in even psychosexually healthy beings. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from the moment of its title, enacts this belief, but not in purely sexual terms.

Wamp-wamp (What it do)

When I am listening to Clipse, I sometimes think about stupid things. Like which is stupider: Ghost Ridin' the Whip or Ghost Rider?

I was recently pleasantly surprised to learn that the lyrics to E-40's song really were Ghost Ridin' the Whip. And that a whip was a car or something. I thought I was just hearing nonsense where sense was to be had. It turns out I was hearing sense and thinking I was hearing non-sense, which made me feel old.

I don't like hyphy. Have I mentioned that? Perhaps someone can make a mixtape that will make me want to go dumb.

Having said all of that, I should point out that this post should all be interpolated between the beats of Wamp-wamp, and, otherwise, you should not search for it to have something to do with Hell Hath No Fury. You can think of this as my Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge post, and this sentence as the hot snap of my neck cracking at the end of an interminable fall.

The World is Full of Lies

So, today, after convincing Tomemos to come along to play softball because everyone would be there, no one showed up. Tom and I did some two-man batting practice, and I regretted hitting balls as far as I did. Indeed, held firmly in the clammy scrotal grip of this exercise in futility, I began to doubt the necessity of ever hitting a ball at all.

Despite our predicament, I feel like we had fun. One interesting outcome was the imaginary creation of Final Fantasy Baseball. (This happened when Tomemos suggested that a pop-fly I had hit straight up in the air about a quarter mile was designed to break someone's glove. I immediately thought: glovebreak.) Of course, this opens up a floodgate of SquarEnix possibilities that they have never dared to dream of.

That I could even think such a thing means EAs grip on this reality might be slipping.

Hesitant fumblings toward something awful.

Over the last month, I began several times a post that talked about grief in terms that made it abundantly clear to me that I was unable to talk intelligently about my own grief. This despite the inclusion of several homilies stolen from Latin and scenes taken from Virgil and Apollonius Rhodius, which technique everyone knows increases your understanding of your own situation through a kind of paratactical organization of time, emotion, and erudition. Everyone also knows (and, here, please read "Everyone knows" as "The author now knows") that it is an empty and symbolic way of dealing with anything, this endless referring to an external locus where supposedly universal scenes are depicted. It is an attempt at vocalizing what is essentially doubly marked with, on the one hand, an introspective silence, and on the other, a kind of continous mental screaming that overawes all thought and becomes just another way of remaining dumb. One camouflages the inadequacy of one's own rendition of events with someone else's inadequate rendering of other events, emotions, times, places...

I suppose that I just want those of you who still read this blog to know that I am planning to continue it as a semi-regular project. I just needed to gain a little distance from the events of early January, because to write about them immediately somehow seemed inappropriate. It seemed to take those events and make them abstract. I felt that the kind of detachment I would need to have to write the post I nevertheless tried to write five or six times would somehow be damaging in the end. Certainly, processing the emotions I experienced was difficult enough, lapsed often enough into confused or embarrassed or abject silence without the added abstraction of text. Now, though, text is creeping back in at the edges.

For those of you who do not know the nature of those events--cannot have known because of the fundamental impediments to the spread of information with such sharp contours despite, or perhaps because of, the intricate intimacy of the social networks in which we are all ceaselessly engaged and with which we are continuously engaging and the extreme reluctance everyone (including myself, cf. paragraphs one and two, supra) feels in the face of this topic, combined with my permanent, shuddering distaste for the telephone and people's (sometimes quite heated) arguments about how "private" a person I am...
I am starting over.

In early January, my wife and I suffered the loss of our daughter, Elissa, who was diagnosed with triploidy in mid-December. Labor was induced, following confirmation of the diagnosis by amniocentesis and doctor's orders, because of the dangers inherent in continuing the pregnancy. Elissa did not survive. She was cremated soon thereafter.

For those of you who did know, and who offered your support (in whatever form), I wish to take this moment to (however (yes, yes) inadequately) express my gratitude. Thank you.

For those of you who did not know, and who might be saddened or angered or...by my reluctance to pick up a phone, or let you know in some more pleasant way than this, I wish to express my sincerest regrets. [I have grown comfortable with regret in the past few weeks--comfortable in a way which is striking to me.] Please know that I made no conscious choices to exclude anyone from the process. I blundered my way through as best I could.

I am sorry.

Video Tour of the New Apartment

End of an Interim

Hey. How's it goin'?

Q: ...

Me? I'm fine.

Q: ...

No, none of that.

Q: ...

Well, of course. I mean, there was the one.

Q: ...

I was in a swimming pool, because it was a pool party, and I was standing in a ring of people. We were all handed golf balls. We all were told we had to somehow hit the floating target in the center of the pool. Most people immediately put their golfballs in their mouths. I chose to throw mine. It struck the floating target, which was wearing a little crown of tortilla chips with a die cast metal car hood down in the center of it.

Q: ...

I don't know. It was important for some reason. I could tell you about all the other dreams arranged with this one, but I find that paratactical dream relationships, when they are narratized, become just funny instead of easier to access. The alternative route is to organize the telling paratactically. Like, "I was in a hallway. I was in a swimming pool. Golf balls were coming out of people's mouths. A woman looked like Birdo. My locker combination was a series of smells. Dried blood. Cloves. Peppermint jelly. Marinara. And all the way back around to Cloves."

Q: ...

Sure. I can tell the same dream in a way that makes it unrecognizable. Just a matter of shifting your focus. Just like you can tell two different people about your day.

Un-Blog! An exercise in meta-blogging, brought to you by E398!

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Behold, Rhetorgand!


Description: This blog is intended to fulfill the requirements of E398. As an added bonus, it constitutes yet another glistening electronic coil of the World Serpent that is my internet presence.



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October 15, 2006
From Tadpole to Butterfly
It suddenly (NB It struck me after I read the prompt.) strikes me that I have no idea where my kids are emotionally. Cognitively, they are present and accounted for. I have a few that are extremely slow to grasp what is being asked of them in terms of production (and yes, we do actually require that they produce something, despite our emphasis on process) but exceptionally quick to grasp concepts in class, etc. Politically, they are all new-born babes. Most of them are realizing that they have no idea what they mean when they say, "I'm conservative," beyond, "I'm like my daddy." (Here's a fer instance: "I am conservative, and that means being compassionate. It is the responsibility of the government to take care of everyone who can't take care of themselves. Otherwise, you are just letting them die, and that's not very compassionate." Or, another gem, "I'm as liberal as the next guy, but the only people on welfare are junkies. Why should we pay junkies to get high?")

Emotionally, though, that's a puzzler.

I had a girl and a boy come in five minutes apart. Both crying. The girl put her head down and occasionally sighed extremely loudly, which would make the boy cringe. The girl eventually came to me and said that she needed to leave because she was sick (ten minutes into class). Then, I got a nasty email from her saying I wasn't at my office hours and I really should have been because, since she missed class, she was really behind and really needed my help. This was, of course, untrue--so untrue that four people from her section and three from the other two sections managed to find me right where I always am. So, what does any of that mean, emotionally?

I don't think it means anything.

At least, I think it means more rhetorically than it does emotionally.

It being all impossible an' all to tell what is going on in this person's head, I can only surmise what she is feeling based on her behavior. And her behavior is sulky--that is, designed to draw attention to her apparent emotional state and inflict pain on any that observe her. She cast a wide net--like a new space cadet laying about with a pain ray. Everyone was imposed upon. This is a rhetorical position that is provocative in its very provocativeness. "My personal issues are way more important than the progress of this discussion section," it says. "And you should all be aware of the intense amounts of soul-searing pain that I am in and share in it to the degree that you are able," it adds, after a thoughtful pause.

So, I don't know precisely what she's feeling, but I do know that a part of what she's feeling is rhetorically motivated/performed.

The email, though, was the best part. As if she could somehow make me feel guilty for being where I said I'd be when I said I'd be there and the very tool she could use to do this was the fact that she was not where she was supposed to be when she was supposed to be there in an incredibly melodramatic manner. Hoisted by my own petard!

Of course, all of this is a ritual. There is a certain charm to watching someone of that age sacrifice dignity on the altar of convenience in order to get one last gasp out of a stand-by tool from childhood: the tantrum.

2 Comments (Most Recent: October 15, 2006)

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October 10, 2006
The Power of Metaphor for the Labor-Shunning Personality, Wherein certain references are made to the gnostic and cabalistic traditions via the names, ranks, and dominions of the principal thrones of..
... the host of heaven before the creation of those infernal regions first adequately described by so noble a mind as Miltonius' and preserved by so popular a mind as Mike Carey's, wherein the author's failure to import his writing practices to the classroom is elucidated, and wherein an inappropriate Lockean metaphor for the operation of the mind is put forth...

It begins: Calling something a "writing practice" implies that it is something one practices. That is to say, it is making it seem as though there was some kind of continuity between writing something at one moment and writing something else at another moment. This does not seem to be the case for me--if, indeed it is the case for anyone beyond the most superficial similarities of routine. There is an almost infinite slippage/breakage/separation between papers, between drafts of papers, and between modes of writing. I mean by "routine" all those things that are behaviors that surround writing that are not writing themselves. Some (I think the idea is most) professional creative writers write at the same time every day. Those who do not write for about the same amount of time every day. I understand this practice of reinforcement helps them. Similarly, when I write, I have a routine. I avoid writing. I find this very helpful. Nothing is written until it absolutely must be written or the entire free world will drown in a tide of fire--the clear consequence of my continued negligence. I stress about writing. Then, I don't do it with every fiber of my being. Eventually, I begin to talk. [NB: I have had recourse to speak to my fiancee about this process as it is as opaque to me as is the UI of the Writing Studio. The description in so far as it actually describes what an eyewitness reports of my writing practices is hers. The purple prose, of course, is mine.] I apparently talk ceaselessly about the central nexus of ideas that are forming the kernel of the paper that is yet to be written. [NB: Incidentally, one of the worst things about the Writing Studio is the irregular boundaries in text windows that make it impossible for one to view all of one's work at the same time, which leads the writer to avoid re-reading for grammar/spelling and organization because of the constant irritation of messing with scroll-bars.] Imagine, if you will, that I steal TS Eliot's infamous metaphor about poetic imagination. Imagine that I put it in here. Imagine, then, this bullshit session as me forming that platinum filament by sheer force of will. If I had to liken this part of the writing process to any one thing, it would be to the power demiourgos given by Yahweh to his son Michael. Of course, Lucifer's power is needed, too. The lightbringer, among the Sons of Man, has a very important role to play. Once the filament is formed, it must be heated in order to cast forth the light of reason! Poesis, is after all, a making and a raising of a lamp! No, but seriously. I talk it out first. Sometimes I write it out, if, say, I'm broody that day. Then I write for about ten hours. I then read what I have written and determine if it actually has a point. I spend an hour reconfiguring what is there around the absent or present point. Then I make my fiancee read it. She says something like, "Mongooses fighting over the corpse of a cobra make more sense with their gibbering clicks and high-pitched yips than you, sir, manage to make in twenty-five pages of so-called Academic English." Then, she gives me a few suggestions for organization. These usually include telling me to move the last paragraph to the front. Then I print it and turn it in. Last Spring, she, being a behaviorist by both training and inclination added positive reinforcement to the mix. For every ten pages of rough-draft or rewrite I produced I received a reward. Common decency requires me to refrain from spelling that out. Rest assured, the reward scheme reduced my writing time to an average of 6 hours a paper and improved the response received from my instructors. Now. How can I bring this into the classroom? I cannot. I cannot tell people to wait until the night before. I cannot explain to them the reward system that has brought me such paroxysms of bliss. I cannot tell them to write first and to think of a thesis last. Or, if I do, I go against the entire motto of process over product. For we explain process as a series of re-writes, but graduate school is without the possibility of rewriting. Or, to be more precise, grad school is about the constant deferral of re-writing to some future epoch where everything is time and wine flows like slightly less viscous wine. In conclusion, I can think of no metaphor that would adequately describe the process of writing. I can, however, think of one that describes what I have already described. My mind, when engaged with the threat of imminent deadlines, is a member of the species dionaea muscipula. Slowly, slowly, slowly the ideas begin to leave my lips with the delicacy of drosophilia pullipes or musca domestica alighting on my mind's sensory hairs. Mechano-sensory response is initiated by the stimulation of those hairs, and the mind begins to close around the spoken idea, slowly, at first, until hairs in both hemispheres sense the same increasingly benighted idea. Then, swift as the adult swift-footed crab, the mind slams shut and begins to digest the idea. Of course, it all breaks down because what is produced is not a chemical sludge that powers the mind, but printed wood pulp with my ideas smeared all over it.

1 Comment (October 10, 2006)

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September 29, 2006
On the first day of classes, my teacher gave to me:
One lesson on the formal characteristics of haiku. This turns out not to be as ridiculous as it sounds. It took place after an in-class attempt to write about a moment that involved the exertion of power. The haiku served to narrow focus, alert them to what was essential about their moment, and think very carefully about word choice and sensory description. It was a wild success. The model haiku I wrote for them was about returning from a party--I showed it undergoing revision. Remember, kids! It's all about process:

Walking home after,

the sprinklers dampened my pants,

under the new moon.



This became:



Stumbling home after,

sprinklers wetted my pants, a

heavy autumn dew.



I explained to my kids the reasons for the changes, stronger verbs. Association with "wet" and "pants" to allude to another reason why my pants might have been wet despite the claim about sprinklers. Replace "the new moon" which is very specific, yet recurring, with the more formalistically appropriate, but heavy-handed "autumn." "Dew" allows another opportunity for humor, as in other areas of the country, there would be actual autumn dew, not water from sprinklers. Of course, heavy speaks to that as well as to the physical feel of denim soaked with water. Their mouths dropped open as they gradually realized that you had to choose each word for a reason. Then they got started. There were some gems, but not as many of them went for the comedy, and that was unfortunate. They have a tendency to think that "My mother takes my power" is an understandable seven syllable line when removed from all context.

The other two classes went great. There was 100% participation in all sections--even from the frat kid who said "I hate writing because it takes too much reading. I don't read. That's why I like math. Because you don't have to read. You just look at numbers and see what they tell you." When I said that that sounded an awful lot like reading to me, he actually blushed.

My first office hours were a little strange. I brought a Zola novel, all set to do some reading for fun, as everybody assured me that no one ever made use of the office hours. I had seven people show up, and this meant that I didn't really have time to get into any kind of detail with any of them.

One of my students had a really sophisticated moment for her paper draft--they were supposed to write about a significant moment in their lives that concerned communication. She picked a moment where an apparent crush had picked a song out of his playlist for her to listen to. She tried to navigate the differently mediated levels of what was being communicated by a) the selection of the song as a demonstration of taste, b) the lyrics in the song as they applied to her, and c) the implication of those lyrics beyond the communication of listening preferences. This seemed to me ambitious in a way that reminded me of 398. Asking people to perform rhetorically in a space that purports to be about the instruction of the instruction of rhetoric is like painting a self-portrait in which you are teaching a class on self-portraiture with several competing portraits occupying the frame.

Overheard on the way back from teaching...

"Yeah. I mean, as soon as I heard she was Catholic, I proposed to her. I was like, I mean, really Catholic, and she was all, yep."

The Summation of Human Compassion

You ever get that crawly sensation on the back of your neck?

Your Band Name is:

The Pink Officers

Band Name Generator

I accidentally swatted a ladybug that was crawling on my neck. Reflex action. It was more of a brushing, really, and it seems that the victim will recover. It was touch and go there for a while, though.

Exotic Dancer Name Is...

Tiger

Exotic Dancer Name Generator

Have you ever been having a conversation where both you and the other person seem to be completely convinced that you're talking about the same thing, but secretly you think that you are talking about something different, and you can't shake the idea that maybe the other person is also talking about something completely different? Perhaps speaking in code?

You Are the Very Gay Velma!

She might not even realize it... But Velma is all about Daphne... not Fred!

What Gay Childhood Icon Are You?

I have become convinced that internet quizzes are the new I Ching.

You Are Royal Blue

People find you difficult to understand. In fact, you often find it hard to understand yourself. You think so much that sometimes you get lost in your own thoughts!

What Color Blue Are You?

Here's a joke: A woman from a noir detective film goes to a 1960s psychiatrist and says, "Doc, I think my husband's a refrigerator." The psychiatrist leans back in his leather chair--which squeaks a little--and asks, "What makes you think that?" The woman brushes her spit curl out of her eyes and says, "When he sleeps, his mouth hangs open." The psychiatrist closes his little spiral notebook with a flourish and says, "That's perfectly normal. I'm told that I sleep with my mouth open as well. Does that make me a refrigerator, too?" The woman says, "I don't know. Does the little light that comes on keep *your* wife up all night?"

You Are 52% Gross

You're more than a little gross, but probably no more gross than the average person. Maybe it's time to drop some of those disgusting habits that could eventually embarrass you!

How Gross Are You?

So far, the entries to the sweepstakes are few. The next person to enter has a 25% chance of winning.

Sometimes it's a piece of cheese, suspended in the air.

The photo is for Edward.


The title is an incredibly obscure reference to one of Edward Monkton's cartoons that I once saw--one that purported to explain the meaning of life with a little rhyme:

Sometimes it's a chicken,
Sometimes it's a chair,
Sometimes it's a piece of cheese...you know the rest.

Today, for me, life is exactly like that piece of cheese. [Jonathan's editors have proposed a sweepstakes-style competition. Whoever finds the most apt justification for Jonathan's use of Monkton's wildly provocative simile will receive a shiny nickel in the mail. Seriously. Jonathan's editors have your addresses. Send entries via comment in the format: Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because...

Here are some helpful examples: (1) Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because it is slightly damp to the touch and swings back and forth with a subtle and difficult to master rhythm while managing a series of antithetical, almost- revolutions. (2) Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because it hangs from a string connected to something no one is sure of, over a drop of indeterminate length, the end result of which drop being uniform in its finality and various in the amount of mess made upon impact. (3) Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because you can always eat cheese, but, then, really, what's left to do after that--play with string? (4) Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because, even though you are relatively safe from some things, (i.e., being stepped on) you are incredibly vulnerable to others (i.e., bugs finding the string in their interminable wanderings along the ceiling and then, due to some unfathomable twist in the decision tree that begins with finding pieces of string hanging from the ceiling, crawling down it, finding the cheese at the end and making a sort of cheese house for themselves in which they will breed new generations of bugs, all living, rutting, and dying in the house that is their only food source, until all the cheese is gone and the last, cautiously curious scions of the House of Cheese crawl back up the now nearly slack string to reclaim the nomadic ideals of their forebearers...) (5) Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because if you put on a blindfold and slice at either (the life or the cheese) with a knife, and, somehow, make contact, then both the life and the cheese are going to undergo irreversible changes at the physical level. (6) Life is exactly like that piece of cheese because it is not suspended in a vaccuum. &c.]

I don't have much for you in the way of...let's see. Oh! I know. Here's a list of the screennames from Place4Friends.com that have recently flirted with me:

spicy_bun
ever1luvzastar
purejae
love4life20004
luckycharms82

Which one do you think likes water polo?

O lente currite equi noctis!

I had a nightmare the other night wherein everything I touched dried up and blew away...The dried husks of all things were crumbled bits of beetle carcasses blowing in a funeral wind. I was choking on my own blood. Then, right as I realized that the ground, too, was crumbling like baked filo dough, my hands twisted and the bones burst from within them, hot strips of flesh pelting my face and body as I reached out to keep myself from sinking into the desiccated Earth. A bird screeched the lyrics to pollywolly doodle, and I awoke.

My mouth was so dry it had cracked in three places. I was bleeding into the back of my throat. Somehow, my hands had both been folded almost against my wrists and were pressed against the bed under my belly--once they woke up again, the pain was crystalline. "Well, that explains the dryness and the pain in my hands, but what about..." I realized I had sneezed all over my pillow and face. It was a most loathsome morning.

Current thinking...

For various reasons, I vacillate daily on the topic of whether or not I want to be an academic for the rest of my life. I just sent an email to a contact of mine to try and get some info about how one goes about seeking literary representation. If any of you have a clue how to begin that process, please send it my way.

I am also thinking that parts of Project Zero Sum, my secret codename for my juvenile novel, Kanjangaroo, can be salvaged and repackaged as honest-to-gods sf. I am playing around with various hideous schemes to make it part of a novel cycle--the kind sf publishers love--and the best candidate so far is something incredibly high-concept. Those of you might remember my dangling just the very tippy tips of my toes in quantum theory-esque concepts in that piece, and my understanding has certainly gotten better. The multi-book arc would be called something preposterous like, "The Book of the Shattered Earth," that would get some publisher's little whiskers all a-twitch. Then, the first volume's name would become "Coherence." You see? Multi-level punning of the kind that built the book, playing off of John Lyly's inherent (teehee) lack of coherence, the masturbatory moon/Earth shattering thing--which, incidentally, has since become the premise of a sitcom/soap opera--and the reverse of what is, as far as I understand--and Dave can correct me if I am wrong--a concept called decoherence, which is, simplistically, the reason why extremely improbable things don't happen at the macrostate level, namely that the interaction of large numbers of particles at the microstate level makes the extremely improbable on a small scale almost infinitely improbable on a large scale. Said reversal being somewhat what drives the improbable powers that John Lyly develops, leading to the shattered Earth and all the Earths of the Palimpsest...I say somewhat, because I also liberally borrowed from the mystically powerful but theoretically kinda ridiculous many worlds idea. The second volume would be, then, "Decoherence," and it would chronicle Epiphany's attempts to save the oneironauts spread throughout the dreamtime when all of those probability waves begin to collapse--if "collapse" is even an appropriate word--and force all realities back into the one doomed by John Lyly's insane act of indifference. The final volume would need to be completely overblown and hopefully nihilistic--in keeping with the tone of the last part of the first volume--and it would therefore be the incredibly pretentious attempt at a really moving account of godlings faced with mortality, that is to say, the human condition. I dreamt last night of Nabokov's "Lolita," and I thought something stolen from him would be reeking with appropriateness. Isn't there a phrase toward the beginning of Part Two that goes something like "a violet paradise wherefrom death and truth are banished"? Let me look...Okay, I can't find it at the moment. But even if he didn't write that, I'm going to say that whatever title I come up with for the third Book of Shatterearth was taken from Nabokov. "Wherefrom Death and Truth are Banned, Volume Three of the Book of the Shattered Earth." That has a nice, hefty pomposity to it, don't you think?