public television and academic discourse

Earlier this week, I did something I used to do a lot of when I was much poorer than I am now...I watched PBS.

Now, I enjoy PBS. They do great programming, and their shows are usually intelligent and insightful. However, it's hard for them to compete with stupid, campy fun...what would you rather watch at the end of a long day, Nature or an American Gladiators repeat?

But I did catch a very good episode of Nova on Typhoid Mary. It was cool, and not just because they gave Tony Bourdain a long interview (he's my hero, and I'm contemplating ways to teach his book on Mary). No, it was cool, because it was truly interdisciplinary.

History? Sure it was, but it was more. It also went into the history of science, on how people used to think about diseases...we sometimes forget that antibacterial handsoap has not always been ubiquitous. It also went into class...because the working poor at the time had much greater pressures than the rich. Of course, it went into race...Mary was Irish, and this was at a time when everyone (including government officials) treated them as one of the lowest groups of scum. Damn straight that gender was an issue. And there was plenty of more stuff as well, more approaches.

It does go to show, though, that most of the academic divisions we normally use are fairly arbitrary. We divide disciplines for many reasons, but it's infrequently a neat or surgical affair. There is always overlap. You cannot talk about one thing without having to talk about many others.

And it addressed these issues in a forum available across the country, for free. Man, I need to watch more of this channel.

higher education, tech style

I'm in the middle of doing my second batch of conferences for my online class, and I'm doing these conferences electronically. Yes, it's real 21st century stuff. I meet my students in the chat room, and we discuss just like we would in person.

There is a problem with the whole procedure, though. While I appreciate the ability to do this from anywhere in the world, we have the basic issue that very few people can type as fast as they would talk. Practically, it means that I fire off a question, I wait for a little while, then I get a response. While I'm responding, the student has to wait for me.

It's not horribly efficient. Conferences I would normally finish in 15 minutes take about thirty. I have to think fast, but I still can't type as fast as I think or would talk, so there's plenty of unused time.

It does have its upsides. I have found time to do these journal entries, for instance. But all in all, I'd rather not be staring at a computer screen right now. I do enough of that through the day.

Why can't the machine just tap into my cerebral cortex?

shouting!

So I'm in the middle of doing conferences, and I have a slight break. My rss feeder shows me this article entitled "On the overuse of exclamation points," and I just have to look. This is really one that everyone who e-mails or text messages should read.

I have a love-hate relationship with the exclamation point....okay, mostly hate. 95% of the times a comma is used, it's to stress something that is completely unworthy of stress. It's a nice day! Okay, sure, but is this really the type of thing you should shout?

Much like the writer of this piece, I don't want to sound like a fogie or a grammar cop. And while the concept of medium difference is intriguing, I don't think that's entirely the case. People don't just have much faith in the power of words to convey information. Why else would people be forced to mark their "funny" lines with LOL?

Besides, isn't being misconstrued half the fun?

Sigmund was never equipped to handle this

one of my dreams last night revolved around some genetically modified shrimp that, in addition to being tasty when boiled, each had the ability to store an mp3. Me and some other people were trying to figure out how to broadcast the shrimp tunes.

teaching and the immediate future of this blog

The semester starts Monday for me (weee!!!! I was getting so tired of...um...being my own boss? Having no schedule? Working on whatever the hell I wanted to?), and this time around, I'm requiring my students write a twice a week media journal...critical reflections on the the media they experience. To show them what an egalitarian guy I am (or to trick them into thinking I'm anything less than a ruthless dictatorial bastard), I'm gonna do the assignment alongside with them. I'll be cross-posting my media journals here. Watch for them...they'll give you a clue to the state of higher education in this country.

I'm like jelly here...

On the writing front, I managed to convince a publisher to move an article of mine up in their 5+ year cue for articles. So, if anyone is a subscriber or has access to The Journal of Popular Culture, look for "Holding Out for a Hero: Reaganism, Comic Book Vigilantes, and Captain America" by yours truly. It will be in volume 40, issue 6. Only please, be kind...it was written years ago.

mr. stage diver, it's not about you.

The spousal unit and I went to see Modest Mouse last night in Columbus. Ultimate conclusions are two-fold. First, Columbus is just too damn far to drive for a weekday concert...my poor lovely spousal unit had about 4 hours sleep. Secondly, Modest Mouse might be the best band playing today.

I have before expressed my love for their new album. Well, I saw a live clip on Conan (I think), and I was nervous, because the sound on that one was awful. No worries live, though. The band was tight, the sound was amazing, and the bass player was particularly smoking. Lots of songs from their last two albums, of course, but there were dips into the back catalog (most of which I own, but I realized I really have to give it more attention).

The problem was the crowd. As it was in a major college town one week before classes start, it was overrun by "hip" teens and such. Most of them looked identical to each other. Many of them were stoned out of their gourd (often smoking pot directly in front of us). There was one girl behind us for a few songs who insisted on yelling every two seconds, and she sounded like a cat in heat...and not in a good way.

There was a ton of crowd surfing and stage diving. I've always found these to be slightly annoying. Maybe it's the old, curmudgeonly side coming out, but I'd rather pay attention to the band than to lift some jock geek over the crowd or, worse yet, have them jump on me. But it got worse, because some of the people insisted on getting up on stage and staying there...dancing, waving their arms, shouting "look at me." The band was not amused, and the singer eventually made several snide comments, such as "if you want to put on a dancing show, we do have other things we could be doing...we could check our e-mail."

Eventually, the security did finally wake up and start doing their job, and the second half of the show was mercifully light on such knuckleheads. Good thing too, because the band was smokin'.

another themikedubose blog

I've had another blog for a while and had no idea what to do with it, so I decided to rename it interwub postcards. I'm going to use it to post links to neat websites and such that I run across in my daily interwub ramblings...you know, the standard blog thingie. This is still my main blog, and I will still keep all my writings and musings here.

But hey, if you wanna know how I waste my time, check out the new place!

so, when was your first time?

I've seen the commercials just like you have. However, I'm still not sure if "to internet" really is a verb.

But when did I first internet?

I took a typing class when I started going to college...well, to the community college down the street. I probably should've went to a better school, but I worked 35+ hours a week during high school, partied the rest of the time, and consequently didn't get that great of grades. Besides, the community college was much cheaper, and at that point in time, the only real reason to go to college I had was that I didn't know what else to do. I did, however, holdthe sneaking suspicion that Little Caesars Pizza really shouldn't be my career.

So I went to college, and someone told me that I would have to do papers for higher education. I further realized that even if the profs would've accepted handwritten work, chances are they wouldn't be able to decipher my Sanskrit-esque scrawl. So I took a typing class, and it has paid dividends. I know people who've written their dissertation using "hunt and peck," but frankly, I don't know how they do it...as is, my hands don't keep up with my thoughts.

The fringe benefit of typing class, however, was that I got to use a computer for the first time in my life for something other than playing horrifically bad video games such as Leisure Suit Larry. The class had a bit of de facto word processor training build in, so I got to play with that state of the art program, WordPerfect 5.0.

(For those of you who've never had the pleasure, if you wanted to do anything at all other than just type, you had to use an arcane combination of weird keystrokes, such as doing a control-F7 combination (or something like that) to make text bold...you didn't just click on a button, because there were no buttons, nothing to click on them with anyway...and woe betide those who lost the template explaining the myriad of keystrokes needed to do anything whatsoever. This program also had the added advantage of the screen looking nothing at all like your printout...ah, the glory days).

After the typing class, I figured there might be something to this whole computer thing...yes, I was a visionary even back when I was an obnoxious teen...so I took another class which was 1/3 WordPerfect, 1/3 dBase, and 1/3 Lotus 1-2-3. I didn't use the other programs at all, however. I didn't own my own computer at the time, so I spent a lot of hours at the computer lab writing. Then I got my A.A., worked pizza and selling water, and forgot computers altogether.

Then I went back to school and became reacquainted with computer labs in general and WordPerfect specifically. Soon, however, I noticed the "new" computers at the lab...they had some weird attachment that I later found out was called a "mouse," which you used to click on "icons" in "windows." Wild. Then the library installed some computers and, while killing time between classes, I jumped on one and saw an icon labeled "Netscape."

That was my introduction to the internet...it must've been 1995 or so, so web sites went beyond text only, but the content out there was pretty strange. I remember looking at a lot of Netscape's Site of the Day candidates and seeing stuff such as "The Men's Guide to Urinal Etiquette," "Bert is Evil," and "Virtual Bubblewrap." I did also find some useful sites, but strangely enough, the stupid ones are the ones I remember with a certain fondness.

Soon, I saw a flyer which said that my university would give me a free e-mail account. I had no idea why I would need one, but it was free, so I signed up. The e-mail client? PINE, which was no graphic, two color, and ugly as hell...but at the time, it still reeked of "the future" to me.

Exposure to the web and to e-mail eventually made me realize the possibilities. I did research. I looked into graduate schools. Eventually, I started my own internet literary journal, which ran for three years and six issues and published some really nice work. It was eventually taken over by someone else when doctoral school robbed me of any extra time, and now, the web site address is being held by some weird site which has links to "Online Poker," "Debt Consolidator," "Airline Tickets," and "Bisexual Dating."

I've been online a long time, and I've experienced the medium as it has grown into something remarkable. I remember when my old 33.6 modem was state of the art. I remember when Internet Explorer didn't exist. I remember when there were no "Social Networking" sites.

I can't imagine being without internet access. Nowadays, I get tons of mail to multiple e-mail addresses. I do most of my research from my home and have access to material I could've never touched just ten years ago. I get news feeds, photography from the Hubble telescope, letters from family and friends, all delivered daily to my desktop.

Even though I rely on the internet to a staggering degree, I have to admit that, for the last few years, we've been doing it on the cheap here at casa DuBose/Lamb. I have been running dial-up, and whenever I mention this fact to anyone, they react in abject horror.

No more, however. Next week, we make the leap to high tech. I have cable internet being installed, so we'll finally be able to grab music, use youtube, download pdfs, work from home.

We will be getting rid of our land line entirely. We will still be available, but you're gonna have to call me or my lovely spousal unit on our cells (e-mail for the number if you don't have it).

Once we get cable internet added to our satellite television and cellular telephones, we will be 100% digital.

Don't hate us for our technology.

(post 300, by the way)

on being a gentleman loser

Alternative Country musician Robbie Fulks once said that once you hit a certain age, country music is sitting there waiting on you. While I don't know about that (I'm a bit more open to country than I ever was, but I still like very little), I have found myself drifting more towards Steely Dan than I ever had.

When I was younger, I had grandiose notions of eventually becoming a rock star...and that was mixed in with a lot of loner hero imagery, which I suppose is pretty typical for a lot of angst-ridden, painfully shy teens. That mostly died in me bit by bit as a result of failed band attempts, failure to even get jam sessions with friends, and seeing the bands my friends did have destruct for a number of weird reasons, including egotistical band members, a key musician either starting to drink heavily or quit drinking altogether, or the stereotypical "band getting screwed by one too many bar owners."

It was probably just as well...most professional musicians either end up as drunk/drug addicts, in severe debt, divorced from their porn starlet wife, and the subject of a very embarrassing and formulaic VH-1 special, and I'm not just that telegenic.

When I adopted the student lifestyle, I initially assumed it would require monastic/hermit living conditions. At first, such a lifestyle was necessitated by the fact I was working 3 jobs while going for my M.A. When I started going for my Ph.D., I had a fair problem finding people in my department to drink with...one thought I was an alcoholic because I could have more than three beers in an evening.

Eventually, I found people to hang out with. Then, as we were all in grad school, they all moved out, and I found myself relatively friendless. I lucked into new friendships, and then those friends got jobs and moved away. So I got another batch of friends, only to have them either move or go into dissertation freakout mode. My last group of amazing best friends moved away last month, and I miss them terribly. And while by this time I realized that people would eventually scatter, it threw me a little more than did the previous times. By now, I don't work at BGSU and in fact have very little connection to the school, so I have no real idea who's gonna be my next hang-out friend...I just don't have many close contacts to my local hang-out scene. I am currently auditioning, and there are some really good candidates and wonderful people, but I'm not sure yet which ones of them will put up with me.

Aside from the transient nature of non-tenure academics, I have to put up with none of my departed friends being within close driving distance save two, and I'm really too busy to plan the full-day trips that hanging out with them would require. And I don't have time to do the Michigan-Wisconsin-Minnesota-Iowa road trip to go hit bars with departed friends/drinking buddies. Not only that, I have a number of friends who don't drink at all anymore. It's perfectly alright by me, and if someone doesn't feel it would be healthy mentally or physically for them to drink, I certainly have never wanted to push anyone towards it. But it does really change the normal evening out procedures in ways I still haven't 100% grasped.

The problem is that I still love the bars. I really enjoy drinking as a social activity... I'm long past doing it to alter my mood swings... and bars have a great ambiance that allows you to overcome social anxiety and limitations on suitable topics of conversation. As a result, I've had some of the best academic, theoretical, theological, and philosophical conversations of my life over minipitchers. Bars relax me. But going to bars by yourself is just a little creepy, let alone boring, and I don't really have many people right now who I can call up on a whim and ask if they wanna share some drafts.

It's left me feeling a bit like I'm pining after lost glories. That's where, I guess, my current Steely Dan infatuation comes in. When I listen to them, their music is largely "whatever happened to the world, and why isn't it as cool as it once was?"...and this is how I've been feeling.

As I was checking my mail, I had the mp3s on, and "Midnight Cruiser" came up. I got a bit fixated on the line "For one more time, let your madness run with mine."

Most of the people with whom my madness used to run now live elsewhere. Consider this an open call.

is there anything more boring than...

So I'm sitting at my home computer working on a paper. Well, working only in the barest possible sense, as there's nothing whatsoever creative in trying to fit a potential journal's style guide. Saturday, I got to go through the entire paper and eliminate any instance of two spaces after punctuation. I just finished changing all the citations from MLA to the journal's own twisted version of Chicago. My next exciting task is to, and I quote from their style sheet, make sure I'm using "single quote marks for integrated quotations within the text, double quote marks for quotes within quotes"...for some stupid reason.

What's even worse: "when quotation marks enclose less than a complete sentence, the closing quote should precede the final punctuation. When quotation marks enclose a complete sentence or more, the closing quote should follow the final punctuation. If the source/page numbers appear with the quotation, place them in parentheses after the closing quotation mark but before the final full point." I'm not sure I even understand this, and I teach writing, for Christ's sake!

What gets me is that Word is utterly no help. I've been a big critic of Word's strange compulsion to screw up my margins and indentations, but it can't automatically change citation styles? Is anyone who works on word processors listening? Us academics could use some assistance.

I need to figure out all this stupid crapola before I get to the real business...gutting a few thousand words out of this essay and doing a new intro. Wee!

publication, baybeee!!!!!!!!

Another publication! Woohoo! I just got word that my article/narrative “Two Years in Hell: My Life in the Adjunct Class” has been accepted for the forthcoming collection Thinking Class: The Adjunct Experience. Another line on the ole c.v. is great, and it's inspiring to know that my crappy experiences have come to some good after all.

Now, how do I celebrate?

a good academic journal?

I am putting the finishing touches on (what I think is) a pretty good paper on the tv show House. Any advice on where to send it? I unfortunately just don't know the good television/media journals like I should.

C'mon, this is your time to let your voice be heard! Tell me what to do!

the best news of the week

Ex-Queen guitarist Brian May is finishing up his Ph.D. in astrophysics!

It's just a good thing he's not getting a Culture Studies Ph.D., or I'd feel like he's infringing on my territory and would have to become a famous rock star in retaliation.

on writing and such

Yeah, I know, I've been away from here for a while. There is, however, a reason...I've been trying to get my writing agenda through before I return to the teaching grind.

There has been some progress. The book proposal is done....now I just gotta write the cover letter and start mailing. The House article is 98% there and will be done as soon as I think up a good closing hook (and incidentally, if anyone watches the show, would you let me know? I'd like another opinion on the show-related paper content). I'm starting on the horror chapter of the book into article, and as soon as I can figure out how to cut about 3,000 words, I'll be fine.

I'm not sure how much of my football/race paper I'll get done. I'm gonna have a valiant push, but I might have to go into the Fall. This will, of course, necessitate recycling my comp I lesson plans entirely, but you gotta do...

Not gonna get to the cyberpunk/models of identity paper at all, but I am working on getting that up for a conference next Spring. It's the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts meeting in Orlando. This leads to one other beg/request for help from any academic friends floating by.

Anyone interested in helping me (and a good friend) put together a panel for this conference? If you have something on scifi (or, for that matter, fantasy) and how people adopt identity, gimme a shout.

Conferences are 100% more fun when you have people you know with you...it's been scientifically proven.

on the sadism of sidewalk engineers

Mother, I hope you're okay...I pray. Yes, I admit it...I might've strayed, even though I swear I was trying with all my heart...but it's a long walk back from the bars, and there might've been a moment when I...I hate to admit...stepped on a crack. I can only pray that your spine is okay.

Wapakoneta music fest

It was years ago when I first started my relationship with and love for Wapakoneta's roadhouse Rhythm & Brews. I was just getting into (the now unfortunately defunct) band Slobberbone, and I wanted to see them play live. I heard they put on a magnificent rock show, and, as I was starting to lose faith in rock and roll (corporate rock and reunion tours just sucked the life out of the music for me), I really wanted to be proven wrong, to find out that rock still mattered.

When I checked out the band's tour schedule, I saw that their only Ohio gig was in Wapakoneta. I had never heard of Wapakoneta. I had to break out a map to figure out where it was. When I saw that it was, essentially, in the middle of nowhere, my curiosity really was...made more curious.

I drug along the lovely spousal unit to the show, and it was amazing. Some quotes from a mailing list post on the night:

Rhythm and Brews in Wapakoneta was a much nicer place than I was expecting...my girlfriend described it as "something out of Urban Cowboy"...minus the mechanical bull, however....

The crowd was also different than I was expecting...much more diverse. There were even balding 60 year olds there, and almost everyone knew all the words to all the songs.

Since that night, I managed to find my way back there several times. I saw Slobberbone on multiple occasions (including their farewell tour), I saw Two Cow Garage, I saw the Bottle Rockets, and I saw The Yayhoos (chronicled here). I always loved the bar. It is perhaps my favorite venue ever for live music. It is very intimate, they draw a wonderful crowd of enthusiastic fans, it sounds great, and, as an added bonus, they have good pizza.

This past Saturday, the spousal unit and I headed down to Wapak (as the locals call it) for Rhythm & Brews' tenth anniversary party. The show started at 7:30. We got to see:

1. Nashville singer Stacie Collins was act number one. We saw her walking around the bar before the set started, and it was obvious that she was one of the performers...her sprayed on clothing, ridiculously high-heeled boots, cowboy hat, and arm warmers definitely marked her as "not civilian." As a performer, she was amazing. She was a great singer and a killer harmonica player. Her band included Georgia Satellites/Yayhoos alum Dan Baird and former Jason and the Scorchers guitar player Warner Hodges (and the Scorchers drummer as well). It was balls-out country/blues/rock.
   
2. Next was the Yayhoos drummer's band, Terry Anderson and the Olympic Ass Kicking Team. Ultimately, good bar rock, but the wife didn't like Anderson's voice.
   
3. Former Jason and the Scorchers singer Jason Ringenberg was third. He started out with a few solo acoustic songs, all very politically charged. One really cool one chronicled the life of a Tuskegee airman. He then played a song from one of the Cowboy Jason albums ("Punk Rock Skunk"), which is his kiddie music persona...it was fun.
   
   Then we got a full hour of a Jason & the Scorchers reunion. All I can say is, why in the hell didn't anyone turn me on to these guys when they were together and regularly putting out albums? They were amazing. It was the second set of Warner Hodges on lead guitar of the evening, and he might be one of my favorites I've seen in years.
   
   
4. Next was Warner Hodges again, this time with his own band, The Disciples of Loud. They had a second guitar player who looked like an anorexic Dog the Bounty Hunter. This guitar player and their bassist were wearing matching zoot suits. They were very loud...almost painfully so. I actually considered going outside to give my poor ears a break.
   
5. The Drams headlined. They were a little drunk, but when a band doesn't go on until 2:15, I guess you have to expect that. They were still good. We only got about 3 album songs, a few Slobberbone covers, two Neil Young songs, a decent amount of new material, lots of rambly speeches. They had the club owner join them on drums for "Powderfinger." We got "Robert Cole" as an encore song. It was beautiful.
   

When the evening was finally done at 3:45am, I stumbled to our car. I felt drained, blown out, thoroughly finished. It was a hell of a lot of rock and roll. It was very fun, probably the most fun I've had at a concert in ages.

the endless summer has ended

On our trips to Florida, I've taken my lovely wife to many of the hot spots, a number of the places I used to hang out, and a decent percentage of the cheesy tourist attractions. Every vacation, I try to make clear just what this particular chunk of Florida means to me, and why my Florida isn't like the Florida that everyone thinks about when they think of Florida...if you can follow that at all.

But damnit, they keep changing my Florida.

When you're in Florida, one of the things that everyone immediately latches onto is the beach. Well, until I got tired of my amazingly frequent and swift sunburns (and subsequent bouts of sun poisoning), I too used to spend some time on lounge chairs looking at the waves. Of course, I also brought either a few 2 liters of Jolt Cola (chug a few of these, and the resulting caffiene buzz makes five hours on the beach seem like five minutes), plenty of cigarettes, and often some cheap beer wrapped in one of those can wrappers that turned it into a "Pipsi" or a "Dr. Pipper." Mind-altering substances somehow help you get more in zen mode with the waves

Even after I got tired of the par-broiling and subsequent pain, I'd still head out on the hour-long trip to Jax Beach. They had the city's only heavy metal bar. They had one beach-side place that must've been happening, because it always smelled like vomit. They had hoardes of rampaging teens cruising down 1st Street at night and a small brigade of laughingly ineffectual bicycle police trying to "run the punks away." Of course, if you actually tried to go on the beach itself during the night, the cops swarmed onto you and would escort you either back to the street or, in a more draconian move, towards their jail...one would guess the officers were taking out some vengeance for people laughing at their speedo bike shorts.

You see, Jax Beach always had a mild identity crisis. They wanted to be a tourist resort. They only wanted families, preferably rich ones, to come, stay in resort hotels, spend lots of money. They wanted to be Daytona without the sin, the fun, or the Girls Gone Wild party bus.

Unfortunately for them, Jax Beach did not attract those kind of people. Instead, it was definitively working class, as much of Jacksonville was. It was blue collar parents letting their kids run amuck. It was construction workers trying to forget their work week by watching bikini-clad babes slar mysterious substances into their skin. It was teenagers trying to forget the mind-crushing boredom of their overcrowded school by diving into the crashing waves...which I'm told are big by east coast standards.

If I were to boil my memories of Jax Beach down to one scene, it would be laying on a towel on the beach in front of the heavy metal bar, smoking a cigarette and drinking a "Dr. Pipsi," half listening to the bar band play Van Halen...all the while trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of work next weekend for a concert.

This was not a tourist beach. It was a working class beach.

This Florida trip, me and the spousal unit finally went back to Jax Beach. It was my first trip in over eight years. None of the bars I remember still stand. There are, as far as I could tell, no places I could stagger up through the sand to a bar deck and grab a long neck. Instead, there's high rise condominium after condominium. There's a beach walk/pavillion built by the same evil bastards who did Baltimore's Inner Harbor. It's safe, clean, free of rowdy teens.

It was bland, sterile, safe, completely unremarkable. It could be AnyBeach, Florida. They've taken my working class beach and made it a theme park.

Coming from Jacksonville, I've always had to tell Northerners that all of Florida is not Disney. Unfortunately, every time I go back, a little bit of Jax has been turned into Disney. It's sad that my former home so much feels the need to live up to outsider expectations as to what it should be.

new Flickr photos

There's a new bunch of art photos up on my flikr site. Faves?

As a preview, I'm enclosing "fire grill ii" to the right.

persecution

A week or so ago, I had several posts on this blog pasted with comments that read "DOUCHEBAG" or some variation thereof. Last night, while walking home from a friend's birthday drinking celebration, I was the victim of a drive-by...a lame type, but one nonetheless.

I was about eight blocks from my house. This suv thingie went around a corner, and I heard what sounded like them running over something. I paid it no mind and kept walking, quietly humming a Grand Champeen song under my breath. The suv went around the block, came back around, and the little bastards shot me with a bb gun in the neck before taking off.

I have no idea what might've brought this on. It's been years since I taught in BG, so it couldn't have been disgruntled students. I haven't cut anyone off or anything, because I rarely drive over the summer. I haven't called the cops on anyone. So this wasn't someone being vindictive...it was just someone being a jerk.

What's surprising about all this is that it's all so 4th grade. Why would someone put anonymous yet unimaginative insulting posts on someone's blog? Why would anyone who hit puberty go around and shoot strangers with a bb gun? Did they not have the intestinal fortitude to give me a wedgie or something?

The sad bit is, I was feeling great. I have been writing, I have been making friends, I had a good night, I cooked out two nights in a row, I was going home to a wonderful spousal unit. After getting bb'd, I just felt pissed, mad, and hoping I can hurry up and get a job and move away from undergrad housing areas and be an adult.

Next, I fear I'm gonna have to start dodging water baloons.

FLA trip...quote of the visit

During our recent trip to the ancestral homeland, I got to see a whole bunch of friends, most of the ones I was expecting to see, and a few that took me by surprise. One of those, who I did not even know was living in Jax, had the quote of the trip: "My brother just broke up with his long-term girlfriend...and then got a chin implant."

food television and the quote of the week

One of my old roomates came into town this weekend. We were watching Food Network for some reason, and we had a great conversation deconstructing how the network uses concepts from pornography in their programming.

Specifically, when you watch one of their cooking shows (as opposed to their annoying reality or travel programming), they have a lot of shots focusing on melting cheese, gooey deserts, or luscious sauces. This is the standard "let's get them drooling" approach which is also employed in food magazines and ads.

In particular, we were watching Giada De Laurentiis's program Everyday Italian, and, especially since that woman can cook, the food porn shots were in full force. They had gooey, melting ricotta cheese over pasta, close up, in slow-mo...the only thing missing was the "bom-chicka-bow-wow" music.

It was not, however, only the food shots...the host was definitely the subject of a porn gaze. Giada is an attractive woman, true, but she apparently likes to work in the kitchen in very low-cut tops, and the camera knows this...a good 2/3rds of the shots were centered on her cleavage. I'm not even gonna get into the food tasting shots, because they were bordering on "if I had kids, I wouldn't let them watch this." Suffice to say, I think there's another paper in all this, pornography and attracting the male viewer to cooking.

Anyway, Giada was doing the aforementioned great looking pasta dish, and she added some chopped herb to the skillet. The resulting conversation went like this:

former roomie, sounding unnaturally alarmed: "What was that?"

me: "Parsley."

roomie: "Oh, thank God. I thought she was adding cilantro."

me: "Are you a cilantro hater?"

roomie: "I have two rules about food. I wouldn't eat human flesh unless I was pretty certain it was procured in an ethical way...and I don't like cilantro."

best site on drive back from FLA

On the drive home from FLA (and there will be more about that one coming up), we passed the fine edifice pictured on your right. Naturally, it inspired some conversation.

There was a time when I subscribed to the "a church must look 'a Church'" philosophy, and by that standard, this fails miserably...it looks like a reject from the now defunct Heritage USA park. This is not glorious, and it does not enhance the aura of anything.

I have long since quit thinking churches have to look any certain way. Instead, I now believe that those glorious cathedrals really are more about the institution showing how big and important they feel...and while I don't know exactly what God might think, I'm pretty sure He doesn't need his ego stroked. And if the public display of power and importance is just about the church showing "I'm bad," then that's the kind of thing that puts more people off religion than anything else.

But what about Stone Jesus? Is this just a big "look at me!"? Yes, this certainly draws attention to its subject, but at what cost? Does this not also just make the religious organization sponsoring it look silly?

I did notice on my drive an increasing amount of visual displays of faith. There are at least two Christian trucking companies out there, a few Christian hotels, and any number of commuters who feel the need to tell the world what they believe?

I guess this all ties in to the "I support our troops" car magnets and ribbons. While the sentiment is nice, I'm always wondering how exactly these people support our troops. I have friends and ex-students who're military, and I know that there are things they'd rather have from us than people putting yellow magnets on their Hummers.

Likewise, when I look at Stone Jesus, I've gotta think if all the effort put into this statuary could've gone to something useful, to either God or mankind. Or, as my wife said, "imagine how many starving people they could've fed with the money they spent on that."

blog attack

I have been attacked here. It was one thing when I started getting comment spam. Now, I have someone who's responding to posts with "DOUCHEBAG" and variations thereof. I wouldn't mind so much if they (1) had anything to do with the posts, (2) had any real reason with which I could debate, or (3) were clever in someway. As is, I'm just kind of puzzled as to the point of these anonymous and uninteresting attacks. They have been deleted.

If you want to insult me, I'm all for it...just please do so in a relatively clever and relevant way, please.

part one in a continuing series...

One of the things that my wife tells me is that I have too much rage. She seems to tell me this most often when I'm driving. My general response is that people need to be told when they are being stupid...otherwise, how will they change?

So, in an attempt to satisfy both my wife and my own point of view, I present the first entry into the ongoing series "what's wrong with the world":

I was just at the grocery store, and while ringing up my groceries, the cashier picked up my watermelon and asked: "Would you like this in a bag?"

annual trip to the ancestral homeland

The spousal unit and I will be in FLA from this sunday to June 3. Photos and recollections to come.

why science has become cool to me

My research over the last few years has caused me to gain a new interest in science. I've been paying attention to a number of astronomy-related developments, and here are some things I've learned:

• There is a moon of Saturn which has lakes made of polyethylene.
  
• One moon of Saturn has volcanoes which spew ice into space...those ice chunks are a large part of Saturn's rings.
  
• The Hubble has photographed dark matter.
  
• Mars has huge ice sheets below its surface.
  

These discoveries make me realize how much more exciting science is than scifi. Sorry I don't have links for any of these, but I'm gonna start posting this kind of stuff when I see it.

more proof that celebs have gone too far

Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick has been accused of hosting dog fights at this house/estate, and other football players are showing support. One of the more frightful quotes, from Washington Redskin Clinton Portis: "It's his property; it's his dogs. If that's what he wants to do, do it."

I love football, but idiots like these guys make it hard to do so.

note on the death of Jerry Falwell

So, last night, on the way to see the Hold Steady, we were discussing the death of Jerry Falwell and that man's importance and claims. A quote will suffice:

"Damnit, if you just liked men instead of other women, all those brave heroes of 9/11 wouldn't have had to die."

sum...sum...summertime

For the last number of years, I have had a strange relationship with summers. When I was an undergrad/MA student, I generally took classes...so there was no real distinction between summer and anytime else. This continued when I took a class after my first year as a Ph.D. student. The summer after that was a full-out cram for the standard pre-dissertation exams, so again, it really wasn't a break.

After that, I've mostly spent summers either working on my writing or procrastinating by drinking and watching too much television. I can never seem to do them both, and I know that I desperately need to balance teh two.

The thing is, I tend to need deadlines to work, and I find it hard to take my self-imposed deadlines seriously. I finished my dissertation because I made my glorious dissertation advisor give me absolute deadlines (which I needed, as I was starting part-time work the next year). The summer after I finished my diss, I took off in an attempt to write a lot...but without deadlines, this just turned into a decompression summer. The summer after that, I did the zoo thing (previously chronicled here) rather than write. Last summer was supposed to be writing but became decompression instead.

So this summer is weird in that I have to work. I have a full agenda. I just have to get to it. If I want any success on the job market, I have to dramatically up the number of publications I have, and summer is the only time I can do that (a 5/4 load doesn't lend itself to research). I'm beginning to get afraid that if I do not find a tenure-track job soon, I'm gonna be typecast as a writing instructor rather than as a media scholar, which is what I want. So, I have to find discipline.

In summertime, there are (as always) distractions, both good and bad...especially when one is tied to the college life. Already, I have a few friends who will be leaving for jobs elsewhere. Cookouts and drinking bouts tend to happen with a much greater frequency. As is the case with many friends, the spousal unit and I will be doing an inevitable family visit to the sunshine state. After that, we get to concentrate on finding her a new job (especially as she will be, shortly after the summer's up, laid off thanks to a bank merger).

But I think I can balance the work and fun sides this time around. After all, I have a job waiting for me in the fall. I can largely recycle teaching material for my Fall classes. Everyone around me is fairly healthy for a change. So I think I can still write and have fun.

I just need to get all taoist on this. Harmony. Balance.

Maybe I can achieve this by an intense combination of chanting and destroying my TiVo.

it's official!

In a faculty meeting today, one of my bosses leaned over to me and whispered "You might be the meanest bastard in this department."

quote of the night

Last night, on the way home from the bars: "I don't think I really have that much of an alternative lifestyle...I get up, I watch some TV, I go out and drink"...

why Roger Ebert rocks.

Film critic Roger Ebert just wrote a very great article on why he will be attending a film festival, in spite of numerous surgeries to rid his body of cancer that have left him temorarily disfigured and unable to talk. He writes: "We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I’m not going to miss my festival."

Everyone should have this kind of love for their life.

do not, NOT elect this moron

Republican presidential candidate/police state fascist claims that there will be a "new 9/11" if Democrats win the presidency.

I swear, I will move to Canada and become a Toronto hot dog vendor if this guy becomes president.

last day of my popularity

Today was my last "in the classroom" day of the semester. Only one student wished me a happy summer.

This says something. I have, however, no idea what.

Onto grading. My posts might become relatively erratic as I try to avoid student writing.

I'm ten years retroactively hip

While I love heavy music, I've never been a fan of bands where people just shout or scream. It never seemed a positive step to me to abandon melody...in fact, it just seems to make the music more juvenile-sounding and amaturish. This is one of the reasons why I missed the boat on a lot of punk rock.

I know, for instance, that Black Flag was a tremendously influential band, and I realize that I should be a lot more cognizant of their impact. However, I tend to just not like them that much. The same can go for their former singer Henry Rollins' solo work, which to me sounds like a lot of yelling.

Hey, there's nothing wrong per se with yelling...I do it all the time. However, I never charge anyone to hear me screaming. Mike yells are definitively open source.

So although I don't like his albums, I am, however, a fan of Henry Rollins as a spoken work performer. I've seen him a few times and enjoyed it tremendously. I own a pretty cool cd compilation of his spoken word performances. I also have an anthology of his writing that I like (even if it is a little "over the top" at times).

When I found out that IFC gave him a show, I was happy. I managed to get my lovely spousal unit to watch, and now we are both regular viewers.

When the debut episode of The Henry Rollins Show season 2 came out the friday before last, we were tuned in. The guest was Marilyn Manson, and I said to the lovely wife, "this could be a trainwreck." I had no special feelings toward Manson, but he always struck me as a "button-pusher," merely out to be as creepy and controversial as possible, only for the sake of staying in the public's eye.

Boy, was I wrong. He was fascinating, intelligent, charming, and reflective. Both the spouse and I were riveted, and I even felt inclined to delve into his music.

That's how I found myself listening to Antichrist Superstar on the way to work. That's why I find "Beautiful People" stuck in my head. That's why I realize that if I were into this band ten years ago, it might've helped me connect with my students.

If I were to mention it to them now, however, they'd only say something like "that is so 2001." Bastards.

how far we've come (?)

Students at a Georgia high school attend their school's first integrated prom.

Yes, everyone, it is 2007.

food product I should've thought up

On our way back from Cleveland, the spousal unit and I stopped by a turnpike service plaza to...well...get serviced, I guess. After, we hit the food court, and at a bagel place, I saw one of the ultimate food ideas...a bagel dog. It was a grilled hot dog wrapped in bagel dough and baked.

I'm a big fan of weird food. I've even done the 7/11 taquito. So, of course, I had to try one.

Evaluation? Disappointing. It was an everything bagel skin, and the seeds n' such overwhelmed the dog flavor. Furthermore, grease from the dog seeped into the bagel dough, leaving a fairly gross layer of bagel slime.

How can something that sounds so right end up so wrong?

recap of the decap, academic version

This year, I reentered the academic job market in a limited way. I currently have a lectureship, and as non-tenure positions go, it's about as good as one can expect. I have zero interference in the classroom, great colleagues, and I'm fully comfortable with the college and the surroundings. However, it's still a non-tenured job, and I still only get to teach intro classes.

I want more. I want to deal with students doing in-depth research. I want to be able to build on their previous knowledge. I want to do courses which aren't general overviews or skills courses.

So, this year, I sent out some applications. It was much more relaxing than my previous searches, because I could ignore any job with a high workload, low pay, bad location, community college, or anything that didn't actually fit in with my skills. I only sent out twenty apps, but they were good ones, and I thought that I would honestly fit in with any of these institutions...unlike in my previous searches, where I would try to argue my way into anything at all.

There was one college that wanted more material, but they never contacted me after I sent a huge packet of writings. However, I did get a phone interview for a very nice looking job.

The interview itself went better than I could imagine. When I was asked to describe a course I'd like to teach, one faculty told me my class was something he would want to take. When I explained what I could add to their department, another told me "that's what we had in mind when we wrote the job description." Plus, in research and in talking to the faculty, the job itself looked marvelous, the kind of thing that I could stay at forever. I finished the phone interview really wanting this position.

I have, unfortunately, heard nothing back from them. I'm well aware that academic departments are tremendously busy and backlogged, and that just because I haven't heard anything doesn't mean that I'm out of the running. However, although I would still jump at the opportunity for a campus interview, I have come to the conclusion that I need to proceed as if I will be here next year...it's a better motivator than wondering what one might've done wrong.

I'm working on better positioning myself for another job market run. Last time around, I found myself without an expected book contract, which would've really helped my publication record. Now, I've been concentrating on getting a lot of article submissions sent. I finished the adjunct article already, and I'm deep into my House article. I have a full research agenda on-tap for the summer. I will be nicely positioned next year. I will think positive thoughts.

Of course, the phone interview institution might still want me...I hope so. I'll keep you informed.

new Flickr photos

I've posted some more of my art photos to my Flickr page, including my first photoshop mutation (cemetary ii mutation, included here)...I hope it wasn't overboard.

What I did over my Spring Break

I am an academic. This means many things, but one of the main things that come out of this definition of identity is that my schedule has built-in vacations. Well, they’re not really vacations in the traditional sense...while I might not be working my standard teaching position, I instead have to make up all the scholarly stuff I don’t have time to do during the normal semester.

It’s been this way for me ever since I started the academic game as a lowly student. The only difference then was that instead of just catching up on papers and such, I also upped my hours at whatever part-time jobs I was working so that I could continue to afford to go to school.

There are a few exceptions to all this…I go see my parents every few years over summer break. I tend to drink slightly more over the mini-vacations…not surprisingly, when academics don’t have to teach the next day, thoughts tend to wander over to the gross hedonism which their normal schedules do not allow (and in fact work directly against).

About the only true time that I ever get to “get out of Dodge” is when I have a conference to attend. This is as close as most academics ever really get to pleasure travel, and it’s definitely a working holiday, because one has to present and, if the attendee of a conference is lucky enough to actually find relevant panels to attend, listen to other scholars. Sadly enough, I don’t get to do much of the latter…I have the misfortune to not be doing sexy academic work, plus I have a low threshold for the boredom one normally gets from the standard presentation…believe it or not, most academics are not, as is Mel Brooks, stand-up philosophers.

About all the notable travel I’ve done in years (with the exception of last summer’s Minneapolis trip) has been for conferences. My trip to Europe? A conference in Spain. A trip to see my old roommate in Wisconsin? A Milwaukee conference. Visiting the nation’s capital? The CSA annual meeting. Going to Canada? A conference in Toronto. My honeymoon? A conference in New Orleans.

This spring break, I went (with the Spousal Unit tagging along) went to the Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Baltimore, MD. Yes, it was a regional, but I’m trying to market myself as an English guy, so the MLA side was important. I had no special attraction to Baltimore, but the panel seemed good, so we went, leaving on March 1.

The first thing I learned was that you should always double-check online directions. The ones I got (courtesy of the hotel-booking site) had me taking I-80 to I-70. Eventually, I figured out that the two interstates never actually meet. Unfortunately, I only found this out after going significantly (2 2/1 hours) out of our way. I found a detour back to the proper road, but that detour took us through several Pennsylvania towns that used to be mining towns…now they were just centers of crushing poverty. We didn’t get to the hotel until after 9, by which time Baltimore’s beer stores had closed. Damn blue laws…they added to one hell of a birthday.

The next day, Friday, was designated as “explore the city” day. We drove the five miles from our hotel to the conference hotel (my University doesn’t offer any travel support, so I stay wherever is cheapest) through a part of town which, like we saw in Pennsylvania, had crushing poverty…only it was urban poverty, not rural. We registered at the conference okay, and then we went to our single panel for the day.

The panel was on Physics and Literary theory, which is certainly an intriguing combination. Unfortunately, two out of the three presenters cancelled…as well as the organizer/chair. This was fine by me, however, as the one presenter that was left (doing postcolonialism and dark matter) was the one I wanted to see anyway. She did a great job…I learned some new approaches.

Afterward, the wife and I walked the 8 blocks or so to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, which is kind of an attempt to create a franchised tourist mall, complete with tourist restaurants and gift shops. We snacked lightly at the food court, where my darling wife had her first raw oyster. She seemed to like it, although she wanted to throw on way too much toppings.

We ambled around the waterway for a while. I’m torn…I like waterfront views, but in most major cities, the waterfront only really reminds you of the true extent of pollution. The harbor was no different…there were several artificial inlets which collect trash. We were following these two native Baltimore women over a bridge spanning one of these, and I heard one say that she’d once seen a severed deer head floating in the water.

After wandering the harbor area and looking at a lot of touristy crap and dining at a very mediocre tapas place, we decided to walk over to the Fell’s Point region…several people on Postcard recommended we hit some bars there. It was quite a walk, though, especially since my wife was, for some reason, not wearing sneakers. When we got there, we found Leadbetters, Baltimore’s best dive bar (voted so several years in a row), and went in so the wife could rest, and I could drink. It was a classic place, and I enjoyed my $2 pints of Yuengling.

We then hit a cool record store, hit another restaurant for oysters and crab, and wandered back to the Harbor, where the spousal unit bought me a tourist tee-shirt. We then stumbled back to the car. Unfortunately, as we had been walking for hour and hours, our feet were hurting…and the wife started to really slow down just as we hit a very poor, very rough spot before our parking garage. But we didn’t get mugged or anything.

I presented my paper on heroes in the show House on Saturday. My presentation went well, and I got a lot of questions (which normally doesn’t happen…usually, I get ignored until time runs out). Afterward, the panel chair asked me if I would be interested in contributing my essay to a collection she was editing. Networking is a beautiful thing.

I went downstairs to find a bathroom and change…I was wearing a suit (not something I’d normally do, but English people are rather formal). However, the hotel was also having an early “St. Patrick’s Day Irishman’s Business Luncheon,” and the lobby was flooded with drunk middle age businessmen in green blazers and green ties, and they were all blasted out of their mind…at 11:30 in the morning. I swear, if someone would’ve started a fight, it would’ve been the summation of many bad stereotypes. I had to fight my way through these drunken men to get to the restroom to change, but it was worth it for one comment I overheard while struggling out of my suit: one businessman in the bathroom said to another “Let me shake your hand before you whip out your politician.”

The wife and I went to lunch at the Lexington Market (a kind of international grocer market center) with one of my colleagues. The Lexington Market was very cool…apart from the grocer booths (one filled with shockingly fresh seafood on ice, one with piles of butchered animals, and so forth), they had a bunch of individual food stalls. I ended up with some fried chicken from a soul food booth and a Malay stir-fry.

We went back to the conference so I could see a panel on depictions of space and the cityscape, or something like that. It sounded very interesting, but it was three people directly reading their long papers in quiet, monotone voices. My poor wife had to fight drowsiness, and I demanded we stop at the hotel bar afterward and drink. We then went to a “how to get a job” panel which taught me absolutely nothing I didn’t figure out on my first month on the market. It did, however, provide a forum for some NJ professor/geezer to tell us several times that it wasn’t too late to look for a non-academic job; I swear, for a minute, I thought he was about to tell us that there was no shame in flipping burgers.

Afterward, we went (with our lunch colleague) to a famous crab restaurant in the Inner Harbor. There was a tremendously long wait for some skimpy servings of overpriced food that was not as good as the food court meal we got the day before. We then looked at more crab-related touristy stuff before heading back to the hotel…we needed sleep for the next day’s drive back home.

So what did I do the rest of my break? Well, on Monday, I went with some friends to Howards and drank. Tuesday, more drinking at Howards. On Wednesday, I went with a friend to the Kildare House outside of Windsor, Canada, so he could watch a Scottish soccer game and talk to the very cool Scot expatriates…then back to his place for drinking. I also drank on Thursday (can’t remember where), and on Friday, another friend came in from out of town, so (wait for it) we drank at Howards until he left, then I went to a friend’s house for a wine party. I detoxed the rest of the time, because I’m too damn old to continue to drink like a frat boy.

Since then, I’ve wisely cut back my drinking. Unfortunately, I’ve also had to cut out my crab and oyster intake…but one does what one has to, I guess…

why I like Tony Bourdain

from Anthony Bourdain's post on Micheal Ruhlman's blog:

"I explained that I would be an enthusiastic supporter and participant of all things Beard [the James Beard Foundation] when and if I saw some kind of an effort to acknowledge the people who are actually doing the cooking in this country--the between 30 and 70% of restaurant employees of Mexican and Latino origin--of varying legal status. I was thinking a few bucks set aside for free para-legal advice. Maybe a widely accessible library. English lessons.

Her response? She looked at me with an expression of absolute sincerity and said, " Oh..we're very aware of the important contribution of our Lateeeno population." Then, proudly boasted about the good works Beard House has been doing on their behalf: " Why...just last week at a dinner at the House, 7 out of 10 of the waiters we hired were Lateeno!" She looked at me, guilessly, as if expecting a pat on the head."

Brilliant.

(Yeah, lots of little posts today...I'm doing conferences, and I have some time between students. There will, however, be one long mack-daddy of a post coming.)

proper professor wear

My office is right down the hall from the pscyhology testing area. I'm not sure what exactly they do there...I would like to imagine that it involves electro-shock therapy, but I'm sure the university bureaucracy wouldn't allow it.

Anyway, whenever I hit the restroom, I ineveitably see one or two of the grad students wandering the hall outside the testing room. They have recently taken to wearing lab coats...I guess in an attempt to seem more "authority."

I wonder if this would work for me. If I donned a lab coat when I taught or did office hours, would students start calling me "Dr. DuBose," as opposed to the "Mr. DuBose" or "hey, scumbag" I now hear?

Where can one get cheap lab coats? Is it worth it? Would they clash or accentuate my current wardrobe of Hawaiian or concert shirts?

good news

I did my dissertation on 80s culture, so during the course of my writing, I read a whole lot of stuff about people who were particularly scummy. So, when I read about Reagan budget director David Stockman being charged with fraud, I just had to giggle.

news I wanted to hear

Apparently, intellectuals are fairly apt to listen to heavy metal...here's the article.

where's the snow?

It's almost 70 outside. When I went to the library, there were scantily clad girls rollerblading, people eating lunch on the green, people in teeshirts, people worshipping the sun god Ra, people protesting global warming, people cooking eggs on car hoods, people staring at the sun and going blind, people sharing sunscreen...

social art

I just ran across this amazing site called The Homeless Camera Adventure, where someone gave cameras to homeless people and published the resulting photos. The images are generally haunting, and the comments are bewildering...definitely worth a look.

the album of the century

I have been granted early access to the new Modest Mouse album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. I can't quit playing this...the only way I listen to anything else is when the spousal unit snags the cd. And then I have to fight to get it back.

Modest Mouse shows depth they never had before. It's as heavy as Good News for People Who Love Bad News in parts, funky in others. They can manipulate more emotions than ever, as evident in the haunting "Little Motel." Every track is just damn cool.

It officially comes out next Tuesday. Go get you some musical goodness.

returning to the blog with bitter thoughts

Yes, I've been away. Long, explanatory e-mail coming. For now, just this:

I really hate daylight savings time. I hate everything about it. I hate having to go around changing clocks. I hate losing an hour. I hate knowing that tonight, I will have to go to bed at what my body thinks is 10pm so I can get up tomorrow at what my body thinks is 5am.

Lousy politicians. Lousy farmers. PICK A TIME AND STICK WITH IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

academics in virtual mourning

I just found out that the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard died Tuesday. Is it a real death or a hyper death?

I have mixed feelings about Baudrillard. Baudrillard wrote a book about America in the 80s called (strangely enough) America, and I had to deal with it intently in the diss/soon-to-be book...and it was tremendously helpful and insightful. I used to love his takes on things before I studied him in-depth for a directed readings course. After reading a ton of his stuff, however, the joke got old very quickly.

Through his all-encompassing reliance on hyperreality, Baudrillard inspired a thousand dime-store postmodernists who turned the philosophy into a self-reflexive parody. And while this is primarily a criticism about his followers, his own writing (done in that playful, hard to follow French academic style) often lent itself to their misinterpretations, thus encouraging the moron brigade. Some of the disciples of postmodern in general and him in particular ended up focusing on the warpings of reality via representation rather than the reality itself.

Yes, we are living in a world where representation often plays a tremendous role, and yes, often people reference the image more closely than the reality, but there is still reality, authority, and all that in spite of hyper-representation...and by denying (or at least obscuring) this real power, he turned academics into a huge game for some of his followers.

Yes, he advanced thought, but he also allowed, through his writings, a reductive strain of postmodernism, and this strain opened the whole field up to ridicule, at least in the eyes of his critics. Ultimately, in spite of his very real advances, he might've done more harm than good.

academic overload

It's a strange period of my life in terms of research. After long periods of dormancy following the dissertation and my years of adjunct hell, I am deep into more research than I care to think about.

Just this semester, I am on track to finish:

• a conference presentation and subsequent paper on House and models of authority figures in the postmodern media
  
• a paper on constructions of race and ethnicity in pro football broadcasts (focusing on the return of the NFL to New Orleans)
  
• a book review of a book on New Orleans tourism
  
• a narrative of my year of adjunt hell
  

This is on top of my summer plans to:

• revise and submit my horror fiction chapter of my diss
  
• revise and start shopping around my book proposal
  
• rewrite my diss theory chapter to center on cyberpunk, network theory, and identity
  
• teach myself Gramsci
  

In the midst of all this, I just discovered, while doing research for one of my many papers, the common theme of my current work. I even have a title for book two: Whither Authority? Control, Networked Intelligence, and Authority in the Postmodern Media.

I hope I stop thinking of ideas before I explode.

a special day

Today's my lovely wife's birthday. If there was justice in the world, there would be dancing and street carnivals worldwide.

yesterday's random quote of the day

"It didn't make me throw up...it just made me cry"

new Flickr photos

I have new art photos up at my Flickr page if anyone's interested. I include, for your viewing pleasure, a sample.

hearts and sliders

In celebration of that great greeting card-inspired holiday, the spousal unit and I went to (as I've mentioned before) the White Castle Valentine's Day Candle-light Dinner. And it was everything we expected.

There was a hostess who showed us to our pink table-clothed, flower-balloon-candle festooned table. The store was decorated in pink, with hearts. There were Cupid garlandss adorning the windows.

One of the workers, wearing a plastic apron decorated with hearts, took our order like a real waitress...she dropped off our menus, got our drinks, took our main order, brought our food, and checked up on us a few times. Actually, now that I think of it, we got better service from her than at many fine restaurants. And the whole staff approached the night with much better of a sense of humor than I would have, if I would've been a minimum wage-earning fast food employee being asked to play dress-up.

The meal itself was classic White Castle. My wife and I each had a number of sliders and split a sack of fries. Afterward, the waitress brought us a complimentary cupcake (with a heart ring stuck in the frosting) and a bag of Valentine candy.

It was probably the most romantic V day I've ever had...which says something about me, no doubt. The wife also enjoyed it very much...which, no doubt, also says something about her. This is why I love her.

mental state

In response to my last post, I have already recieved an e-mail and an international call from a worried friend. All I can really say is, to quote "Crash" Davis, "I have been known to howl at the moon."

Anyway, the lovely spousal unit will be home today, so all is well.

absence

She gently brushed her lips against mine, kissing me, before smiling and thanking me for being so understanding. I just smiled and told her to drive safely before watching her drive away. What else could I do?

I felt bad enough as it was. I know that her mother, my mother-in-law, was in the hospital, I know that she was facing surgery, and I knew that my spouse should be there, needed to be there. I knew this, but I still resented it horribly.

And it's not that I don't like my mother-in-law and wish her the best. My mother-in-law is fantastic...smart, funny, insightful, caring. It's awful that she's ill, it's awful has to have surgery, it's awful that she has to travel to Cleveland for competent doctors. She puts up with too much in her life already, and she really doesn't need or deserve any other intrusion.

I know this makes me awful, but I cannot help but resent her a little bit for getting my wife for yet another weekend, in spite of how much I love my mother-in-law and want her to be well.

I am lonely, you see.

It's not like I don't have enough to keep me occupied. I have a presentation in two weeks, for which I haven't typed word one. I have parents, relatives, high school friends, life-changing former roomates, all of whom have been waiting months for word one from me. I have papers to write, book proposals to revise, classes to plan. Instead of doing any of this, however, I keep finding myself just sitting, doing nothing, being lonely.

Lonliness is never like it is in the movies or in overdramatic novels. There's no wailing, no shaking tears, no cavernous bouts of depression. I'm just empty. I have to force myself to do anything, and even then, I'm just going through the motions.

I read the saddest books I can find, and they suddenly move me not in the slightest. I try turning on the television, but that's no good...everything on the TiVo is one of "our" programs, and there's utterly nothing else that draws me in even a little. I try splurging, fixing myself a thick steak for dinner, but as good as it is (and I find myself knawing on the bone, regressing into a neanderthal), it doesn't really bring me any joy...five minutes later, and I am back on the couch, staring blankly into space. Nothing works, and there is no escape. Finally, I give up, crawl into bed, stretch out fully...but I keep looking over to her side, reaching out my leg so that I can feel her warmth, and she's not there.

It will only be a few days, I know. My love will be back on Sunday. Right now, though, that seems unimaginably far away, deep into the future. I want her here now. I want to see her eyes that can light up the room, see her flash that smile that makes me want to explode. I want to make her laugh, I want to hold her close, I want to smell her hair and have her body pressed up against me.

Before I had someone, I used to be scared of giving myself completely to someone else, of putting myself at anyone's mercy. Now, it doesn't frighten me that I've invested so much of myself into her as I thought it would, because she brings so much to me, makes me such a better person. I just need her, and when she's away like this, it reminds me of how much. Now, I'm just a little scared because I know why, deeper than ever, that I don't like being alone, apart, separated.

She did call yestersday, so I did get to hear her voice. It was lilting, beautiful, vibrant, and it filled me with so much joy yet also so much sadness. I wanted to talk to her forever, but after she left, nothing really happened to me, so I had no real tales or events to relate, and I couldn't really think of anything to say...so the call was entirely too short.

There was so much I needed to say to her, but I had no idea how to say what I needed to say, which always seems to be the case. How do you say the things you really need to say? Can you even really say them, without holding that person close?

That's why I'm lonely.

deconstructing food tv

Yes, I still don't have time for this (I haven't e-mailed my own mother in weeks, yet I post here), but Anthony Bourdain has a great take on the various Food Network personalities. Read it if you're as much of a geek for this channel as am I.

wither sex advice?

I'm really way too busy to be posting anything (3 weeks 'till a conference presentation, and I haven't written paragraph one), but The Onion A/V Club has Sarah Silverman answering sex advice questions...it's brilliant but not for the faint of heart.

pain and weather

Today, it was so cold that my face hurt after walking from my car to the office. We had a low of -1 F. People live in weather colder than this. I have no idea why.

Screw you, you ratbastard groundhogs.

greetings on this, the most Freudian of holidays.

Even the damn groundhog's in on global warming...Punxsutawney Phil didn't see his shadow, so even less winter this year.

Hope your day doesn't keep repeating.

the weirdest product ever

I was with my wife at the in-laws this past weekend, and we went to the Dollar Store to pick up supplies. They had, and this is no lie, "Placenta Shampoo."

Apparently, when you sell your products for a dollar, you have to do away with such fancy things as "marketing" and "product names that are not utterly disgusting."

As soon as I can get the photo off my phone, I've gotta post it.

I'm living in a third world town!

When my wife was home for lunch yesterday, someone from the city came and told her that our house was under a "boil water before drinking" advisory. Don't they only do this in places where people don't have shoes?

how lucky I am

Today is the anniversary of the day me and my spousal unit got legally connected, contractually bound. When we were talking about the occasion the other day, I told her that I can hardly remember what it was like before I met her...all I can remember are long nights curled up naked, in the fetal position, sucking my thumb, and letting out slow wails of depression.

Okay, I exaggerate. There was also drinking involved.

So, what did my lovely wife want to do to celebrate this special day? We're going to eat barbecue and see a Ben Stiller film.

This is not just an isolated incident. For Valentine's Day, I made us reservations for the White Castle Valentine's Day candle-light dinner. Now, it would be one thing if my wife humored me in my love for kitsch. But she is actually quite thrilled at the prospect...she did her happy dance.

I told my friend Bob about this, and he said "it looks like you two have a lovely, laid-back life together." I couldn't agree more.

Life is wonderful when you're with the perfect person.

warming up to the truth

I'm sitting in my home office, looking at the massive Ohio snowfall. So far, we've hit 1/4" for the year. My first year in Ohio, I was hit by a 10" blizzard right on New Years. This year, I"ve only had to break out my thick jacket once so far. This clearly is not right.

Personal experience tells me that this whole global warming thing is definitely not a myth. The research backs all this up. The vast majority of scientists at the American Meteorological Society agree that global warming is caused by human pollution.

Personally, I think that global warming is the nuclear war of the 21st century.

Our president seems uncertain, however, and many people who don"t think these things out on their own and just parrot his language like to avoid the evidence and research. This scares me, and you see this manifest in the tremendous number of high rise pickups, humvees, and minivans on the road.

You know what cares me the most, though, is an article from Reuters that outlines how a coalition of major corporations (including Alcoa, General Electric, and DuPont) are petitioning W. Bush to tighten environmental standards. Even major companies are willing to go through major regulation and expense? Global warming must be worse and more imminent than we thought.

Break out your speedos, because those oceans are rising!

specialized Mike vocabulary

I'm trying to start a movement to get people to incorporate more colorful language in their daily lives. The first work I'd like you to use is "squadoosh," meaning nothing, nada, zip. In a (true, unfortunately) sentence:

"Even though I've had several bites, leads, and promises in my 2006-2007 tenure-track job search, so far they have come to exactly squadoosh."

C'mon, use it in your own conversations!

cheap sensationalism...or art?

Is anything off-limits as a subject for art? Is there anything we're not ready to deal with as a culture? Should there be?

All of these are questions raised (or at least addressed) by a great article in Wired called "I, Colombine Killer" about a video game which puts you in the perspective of the Columbine shooters. It's a great read, and it will really make you think about the uses to which art can be used.

cutting it close

Way back when, I used to be a wild, unadulterated metalhead. I had the requisite long hair, which marked one as a metalhead, and also as a rebel/freak/dangerous person.

(To be fair, I also had the spiked wristbands, the fingerless leather gloves, and oodles of concert shirts, all of which also similarly marked me...but that's another blog post)

Having long hair, for a time, seemed to make one an acceptable target for prejudice and discrimination, especially among those old-line southerners. The police, for one, really loved me. I got thrown out of a McDonalds. I had my car searched. I was frisked at least once. From the non-police side, I also was refused service in a few restaurants and bars, was stared at repeatedly, and so forth.

Part of the fun of having the hair was entirely, I admit, in this shock value. It was always interesting to see how angry some people could get over a simple fashion choice. However, the further we went from the eighties, the harder it became to really provoke a reaction with the hair. Before I went to college, I was working as a temp in a business that required formal wear. More than one of the suits had long pony tails. This was a sign that long hair had gone from political statement, past avant garde fashion, and had become mere yuppie wear.

If it wasn't going to shock, what, I eventually had to ask, was the point of long hair? For those of you who've never had long hair, there are plenty of drawbacks.

1. You go through a tremendous volume of shampoo. This gets to be pricey.
2. You spend an inordinate amount of time getting ready to go in the morning.
3. Ever driven in a car with the windows down? This leads to, in those with hair, massive tangles...and these suck.
4. Getting rid of tangles really hurts.
5. Does anyone really have the time in their schedule to devote to dealing with split ends?
6. Burning your hair when the wind blows it into your cigarette is very stinky.

What are the advantages? More than once, I had some hot blonde want to discuss hair care or offer to crimp my hair (hey, it was the eighties)...but if a woman is really interested in your conditioner, I seriously doubt they're looking at you as an object of lust. At the very least, it never happened to me.

All these things and more were on my mind when I got my hair chopped. The long hair had quit doing what I wanted. Instead, it merely became a social marker, signaling me only as a member of a particular group...and, especially as I was getting ready to move across the country and restart my life, I had no real desire to have any concrete social marker at this point of my life...so the hair went.

The initial big haircut was done at an honest-to-god real hair salon that a friend worked at, during my lunch break. What made this whole process interesting is that I told utterly no one that I was getting two feet of hair removed. Afterward, when I showed back up to work, everyone to a person let out an "Oh My God!!!"...except one professor (with whom I was working) who didn't even seem to notice. When I went home that night, my parents took a full minute to recognize me. When I went to a bar that night, a friend of mine took five mintues to recognize me. The shock of it all was pretty cool...it felt liberating to be removed from all the associations of long hair.

When I got up to BG, I had no idea where to get my hair done, so I went to one of those "Hair Cuttery" mall-esque places. This was never a good idea. When no one working in a hair place has good hair, that should be a sign to go elsewhere. The only plus was that they took off way too much, so I only had to go every six months. The down side was that I often looked like a weed wacker attack victim. Plus, the hair stylists wouldn't shut up, so I was always forced to have some ridiculously inane conversation about the weather or American Idol or something. Also, they usually played Top 40 Country radio, which gave me moderate indigestion.

I then went to one of the local barber shops, and my hair started immediately looking better. The only real problem was that the bartender insisted on talking politics. This is never good. He was a leftie, which can itself good. However, he's a little to the left of V.I. Lenin, which is just unsettling. He also gets worked up easily, and when he's ranting, he gets really wild, redfaced, and loud. At the best, the quality of the haircuts decline when he's telling me with extreme emphasis how Bush and a cabal of masonic businessmen are going to declare martial law, all the while gesticulating with pointy scissors that come dangerously close to plunging into my cerebellum.

I went to a new barber shop today. My hair looks good. The barbers didn't talk to me at all during the hair cut. They had good magazines to read. I didn't have to worry about being socially marked as anything.

Hey, is it a sign of being an adult/old man that you go to a barber shop? If so, that is one social marking I never expected...

another entry in the ongoing saga of who I resemble

One of my new students told me that my facial gestures reminded her of Napoleon Dynamite.

She must not want to pass.