slow food

there's a scene in 28 Days Later, a film that haunts me for some reason, in which the family on the run from a fatal infectious pandemic (I hope I'm just kidding with that link there) finds a grocery store, abandoned since the initial infection 28 days earlier. they run around throwing food into their baskets—soda, bags of chips, boxes of whatever, cans, and then we see the father running into the produce section which is, as one might imagine, a pile of mold. except for one section of apples or similar fruit, which looks perfect. he shouts with irony: thank god for irradiation and genetic engineering! [all quotes and summaries of this film are from my foggy memory of seeing it years ago, so don't hold me to this...]

the film is set in England and with its strident anti-GMO stance the moment is particularly striking. It makes you wonder if the entire produce section in the US would be, well, just fine after 28 days. probably not. But likely more than just one kind of apple would have survived.

which brings me to food and slow food. OddsareOne's tales of debaucherous eating and cooking and living over the course of one afternoon also struck a chord. not only of missing friends far away, as one might expect, but also of celebrating a life-shift toward cooking and away from preparing/zapping/grabbing food. It's been several years since Sam and I seriously attempted to formulate strategies for eating non-takeaway, non-processed food, and it meant a decent amount of change to our lives, including not going into the middle of the grocery store, purchasing more fresh veggies and meats, and cooking almost every meal, including breakfast and lunch. this is extremely difficult, not least because in the US, aside from the major urban areas and coasts where most of our peergroup lives, it's very difficult to purchase fresh veggies and non-processed food. the "instant grits" selection at our Food Lion in Fredericksburg was enough to make you want to give up entirely.

Liz gave me a cookbook last Xmas on sustainable cooking which was fascinating. not so much because of the recipes, but because it was written by a team of chefs in Oregon who tailored the recipes to what they could get locally. they were big proponents of the "local food" movement, supporting local farmers, stopping the pollution of the environment by eliminating the plane flights through which most of us get our foods, eating seasonally. as a result, sad to say, the recipes didn't so much work in the middle of PA, where we had a lovely grocery store but not the particular kind of mushroom, onion, fish, or whatever called for in the recipe. but it was an interesting and illuminating read because it revealed the limitations of this "slow food" "local food" movement in the US: it's fine for those (wealthy folks) in the big cities with access to exotics like "olive oil" but for those in rural areas, or even just outside of those big cities (as Fredericksburg is), finding the local, the clean, the fresh is a huge chore and sometimes impossible. This of course links back to OaO's blog about finding enlightenment: sure, if you're not worrying about money or where you're going to sleep that night, it's easier to devote yourself to things like slow food or meditation. But even if you want desperately to eat locally and avoid processed foods, and you live outside of an urban area, you must make what I consider to be a superhuman effort to find the organic farm that perhaps delivers veggies to your door once every two weeks, or travel to the farmer's market (that's open only 6 months out of the year) to get your food, or drive an hour each way to the nearest whole food-type store, or spend several weeks canning and preserving, as many people do, but again, few have time for this.

and the UK is not immune to this class-division in what goes into the body. we went into this store called "Iceland" yesterday to see what it was: it's a store entirely made up of packaged frozen food. poor folks and pensioners shopped there. we fled back to our farmer's market, french festival, best-butcher-in-wales lives, but it was haunting as well. how do we stop this madness?

merry-go-round psychoanalysis

it's the most gorgeous day ever today. literally. high 60s, clear, blue sky, slight breeze...Sam and I went down to the city centre to get Sam a haircut and have some lunch, wander around. it's our new-found Saturday thing, sometimes called a "weekend." very exciting.

and there's a French fair downtown--that's right, haricots verts, fromage, pain au chocolat, the whole thing. so we had a toulouse sausage (avec moutarde, s'il vous plait, natch) and sat by the merry-go-round watching kids go in circles. it was a small little thing, probably 8 vehicles on it--a double-decker bus, a fire truck, a mermaid ship, a motorcycle (from Australia with Florida plates--very confusing). and we mused on the reasons for its attractiveness to kids of a certain age. it's fascinating.

They all drive or pretend to drive, so there's something about independence there, and control, heightened by the fact that it's a bit confusing so there's a danger (not a real one, but nonetheless the scent of danger) of losing one's parent who's paid a quid to watch you go around in circles for 3 minutes.
And because of the spinning perhaps, they get to be alone, in charge of their lives and bodies, for that 3 minute span. and mom's approved of it. some kids would look for their mom each time around, others wouldn't respond when she'd yell at them to smile for the camera. they were in their own little world--truly on the motorbike or the top of the double-decker.
and then there were the ones who recognized that they were the object of jealousy. they would sit up straight, big smiles, knowingly lording it over the kids waiting for the next go-round.

once you're old enough to have more independence in your daily life, say once you start going to school at 5, I imagine these things become less exciting. less of a novelty. but it was fun to watch the ones for whom this was the best part of their day. sometimes I wish I could be as easily entertained. instead I demand well-written dialogue driving intelligent narrative and accompanied by brilliant directing. perhaps if I just tried the mermaid ship, everything would change....

earthquake relief

with the death toll at 25,000 and the relief efforts patchy at best (and the governments involved coming under strident criticism—good to know the US isn't the only one....), it's tough to know how to help out the survivors in Pakistan, India, and Kashmir. A recent post to the H-Asia discussion list (link above) gives an annotated list of relief agencies that need money and will actually purchase what people need, as opposed to giving them wet, oversized clothes when they really need shelter from the current cold and the oncoming winter.

as discussed earlier, some of these regions and cities are in constant crisis mode, but this particular situation is of course way over the top, and while we tend to think of India as a hot, humid country, that is a legacy of our colonial, orientalist past: India's climate ranges quite a bit, and the areas hit are some of the coldest in the country come winter.

define "mass"

cool mod building
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

the most non-touristy picture ever.

two questions:

• what is it about concrete that's so sexy?

and

• why is it that one can never purchase enough hangers when one moves into a new place?

Edinburgh

wow
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

We have successfully completed our first 'mini-break'. I'm a fan.

Edinburgh is beautiful. Truly a city and yet rather small and utterly manageable. Highly recommended.

p.s. Thanks to all for suffering my Serenity propaganda, and for going to see it. It's certainly not going to be a financial hit, but it might make a buck or two.

serenity and the big city

Sam and I just got back from a lovely visit of our friends Steve and Kim and their son Teo in Edinburgh. Hence the delay in posting and the gap in our bloggedness.

We of course, along with walking many if not all of the streets of the city (this according to my feet/legs/hips, by the way) also saw Serenity again at the big-city movie theatre in town. very fun, and the second viewing revealed a few more elements of the film that were interesting, predominantly the directing. the near "one-er" from the title through the next, oh, 5 minutes, in which we are introduced to everyone and the ship in one long, uncut shot (except for a bit of fudging as they go from upstairs to downstairs), was amazing. the way Joss framed individuals from steep angles above and below was quite effective, I thought, to heighten the mood/make you feel trapped/whatever he was going for at that time.

I'd like to comment on a few things noted elsewhere. Yes, the uber-state theme is seen in other SciFi contexts, from Star Wars to Star Trek (on next generation it seems that the heroes are in fact part of said uberstate as well), and all of the distopic scifi contexts you can name. Unlike many of those, and Star Wars in particular, the driving thrust of this film is not the overthrow of the Alliance, (that battle is lost prior to the film's timeline) but the negotiation of the Alliance—a much more Foucaultian understanding of power and the state, in which Mal's crew is able to retain freedom, liberty, whatever "value" you'd like to call it by following the path of the Western: being outlaws when the law is, well, not so hot. or not so hot for you and yours. And, like the Klingons (my heroes and a blog for another time) the crew has a code, not ultra codified, but one that Joss articulates in brief, clear moments, whether the early encounter between Zoe (fab fab fab. we love her) and Mal over the man he sentenced to death in an earlier scene, or the protestations of Jayne regarding his ostensible distance from the approach of the Reevers to killing people.

We talked after the film about how Joss was trying to do so many things: the genre of the western, with its cameradierie, outlaw culture, and internal code; the humor sometimes found in those westerns, but often not, set up not with one-liners or slapstick but by characters colliding and situations allowing it to come forth; the message about governmental fiddling with societies and the problematic outcomes of most if not all of these fiddlings over history; the action-movie requirements of the studio that led him to spend a bit too much time on fights and action and not quite enough on character development/relationships.

All this to say that my earlier assessment still stands: Joss is a serial type guy, and this film is awesome. But it's not Firefly. What to do?

it looks like it did alright in the US on the first two weekends, so let's hope for one of two outcomes: either Universal grants Joss the 3-pic deal to continue its fabulousness, or perhaps (and one can only hope) Joss decides that a return to the serial format is where it's at, HBO gives him unlimited funding, and we all live happily ever after.

Seriously Folks

I'm feeling rather hurt. Emery is watching Battlestar Galactica - a very legitimate choice, but not to be chosen first. Greg went to see Flightplan - unconscionable!

Trust me, just go see Serenity, if not for me, then simply because you will be glad you did afterwards.

Then, please come back here and make your apologies.

blue sky

Cardiff: Civic Centre
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

in addition to the blue sky of Cardiff last weekend (I've uploaded a few more for you, taken with a "real" camera) the sky is blue today as well, which is lovely, as they say here.

the folks at stonesthrow and at odds are one are much better at epistilary writing than I—heck, Greg wrote his dissertation on it, for god's sake. but I do have to say that I enjoy this sort of "open letter" format. it's very different from what the late 20th century considered letterwriting, and it bucks the trend toward some sort of overweening need to protect "privacy" as if we had that in the first place. (just because you're paranoid, right?) however, it does foreclose the possibility of direct responses, one-to-one. and so:

Greg: you're not a slacker. you're just happy. most of the time. not Sound of Music, twirl on the hilltops happy necessarily, but pleasantly happy. and yes, very passionate about things. standards. brunches. singing. gameshows. friends. Rick. this is fabulous and why we love you.

Paul and I will continue the general freak out for the rest of us. you may now return to your regularly scheduled rerun of the Pyramid. Maybe you'll catch the one with that guy from PA...

Show Me

For the last couple of years I've been carrying around this quote from Wendy Brown and posting it on my door. It's rather long, but it ends as follows:

theory is never ‘accurate’ or ‘wrong’; it is only more or less illuminating, more or less provocative, more or less of an incitement to thought, imagination, desire, possibilities for renewal.

I spent yesterday reading al these texts that are tangentially about Butler. They were very disappointing, as they wasted all their time talking about a dozen different theorists and how each one was wrong or limited in just these ways, and then bouncing on to someone else in order to say the same thing. The argument ended up being that we 'needed' theorist A mixed with theorist B, but in just this one sort of way.

Reading this crap made me realize why I love Brown's description of theory. I want theory (or anything else I read, really) to show me something. It strikes me that there are three ways that theory can show:

1. A truly great theory or theorist (there are very few of either) shows me the world in a way I hadn't seen before. It puts things together, reveals connections or ruptures, remaps bodies and matter in a way that had simply never occurred to me. Thus, after reading a great theory one simply sees differently. And yes, that's why the Greek word theoria means seeing and showing.


2. Thus, it is appropriate for writers, sometimes, to spend their time and energy simply talking about another theorist. In trying to figure out what they are saying/showing, this secondary work shows us something as well.


3. But theory need not be about only itself. Often theory can be best used to show us somethig about the world, to take the theory as already written and then put it to work to reveal or illuminate concrete events or cases in the world.

What theory should not be, however, is about moving around theories and theorists as if they were pieces on a chessboard. The approach to theory that treats 'theories' as monolithic entities that are somehow valuable in their own right – and then spends all their time doing 'math' (i.e. adding and subtracting) with these theories – does not show anyone anything at all. This is the work that always trots out 'standard critiques' as if they are givens. To criticize a theory can prove very important, if the criticism itself shows something. But hearing things like, 'Foucault can't account for agency', 'Butler is determinist' over and over again, can quickly lead one to that ridiculous conclusion that theory proves onanistic.

This cannot be described as a problem with theory, however. It's a problem of bad writing, of poor argumentation (over here they'd call it a bad narrative, and I wouldn't disagree) in which theory gets used as the crutch. In other words, if they weren't babbling about theorists, the authors I read yesterday would have had nothing whatsoever to say, because they had nothing to show me at all.

Rugby in Cardiff

Rugby!!!
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

We only watched the match for about 5 minutes, but that's all it took to understand completely why the Brits make fun of American football. The play you see above is a set 'throw in' play. I don't know the real, technical term, but I do know that the guy being held up in the air (and the guy holding him up) are both designated to do so - was told a lovely story of a 2 hour train argument between Welsh folks about who should play these roles.


In Wales, by the way, Rugby is the sport of the people and is taken very seriously. In England, by contrast, football (i.e. real football, what Americans call 'soccer') is the working class sport and Rugby is seen as a bit of an upper class game. In Wales that's reversed. It's funny: from the States, 'UK', 'Great Britain', and 'England' all seem to be roughly the same place 'over there'. It took about a week here to grasp the fact that wales is not England; they are utterly different nations (literally).

As a side note, if you check out this photo group on Flickr you'll see why I'm now convinced that the convergence between mobile phones and digital cameras makes sense.

on weekends

the lack of blogging over the weekend can be blamed on our newfound conviction that one should, indeed, celebrate the weekend with its traditional rituals: reading, walking, watching movies, shopping, hanging out with friends, eating meals at restaurants, and exploring the countryside.

the shocking thing is, that's precisely what we did on Saturday and Sunday. that's right—two full days of weekend.

for those who don't know us well, this is revolutionary because it perhaps marks one of the first times we've done such a thing, other than in conjunction with plane travel, since I can remember. seriously. I'm trying to think about graduate school and whether I ever took a weekend off but I can't think of anything.

at St. Mary's and Redlands we had to plan ahead (sometimes weeks) to take a full, single day off—to just be with each other, watch the latest Joss Whedon show (did ya see Serenity yet?), eat at our comfort-food Mexican or Salvadoran restaurant, walk the dog, drink coffee, whatever. and of course that sacrosanct day was preceded and followed by panicked 18-hour days, in which e-mails were checked up until the midnight deadline, student papers frantically graded, and endless meetings stretched before us.

so it has been a strange thing to take two days off, in a row. we went to Cardiff on Saturday, explored the town, wandered through its huge park, ate some of the local food (sandwiches—they are obsessed with them here), wandered through the used bookstore underneath the victorian arcade. we returned to Swansea for a dinner out with many people from the university, which began at 8 pm (horrors! people eat this late?) and continued until midnight, at which point we walked (no one drove, very refreshing) to Sam's colleague's house where we drank peach schnapps and beer (not both, some of us drank the schnapps, some the beer) and talked until 2 am. I haven't been out that late since college, sad to say.

we got up late on Sunday (of course) and finished our books (harry potter for Sam and American Gods for me—thoughts on that to come), ate some food, watched Motorcycle Diaries and some british TV. drank tea. very relaxing.

keep posted. we may try this weekend thing again.

You MUST Go See Serenity!

If you live in the US and you are reading this post, drop everything else and go see Serenity. See it at the opening tonight; then go see it again on the weekend. Then call friends and make plans to see it again.

Joining the Existential Fray

Rebecca and Paul, joined significantly, in the comments, by Emery, have been waxing philosophical of late. Don't they know that I am supposed to be the philosopher around here? Well, to be fair, Emery has certainly read more philosophy than I (and taken notes on it), Rebecca has read everything I've ever written and heard aloud most of what I've read, and Paul's discussions of science, technology, and life continually convince me that he should be the theorist, not me. So I suppose my credentials don't mean much.

At any rate, they've been talking about striving and ambition, and finding a way to live in the moment at hand rather than disrupting that moment with longings and frustration. In Heideggerian terms, it's all about recognizing one's thrownness into Being, rather than struggling against it, thereby producing fallenness. Dasein (us) is that creature for which Being is at issue. The posts referenced above prove that for sure.

I want to add a new wrinkle: what to do when you find yourself on the precipice of fallenness precisely because life seems so good? You start to worry about when the bubble will burst, about what darkness lies round the corner, all because things seem a bit too good to be true. I've been doing this over the past week or so: becoming strangely paranoid and freakishly worried, all because I seem to really, really like the place I live, my new job, and my new colleagues. Plus, folks seem to appreciate me around here, and what could be more suspicious than that? My 'authentic Being' seems to consist of living with a chip on my shoulder, and they are trying to take that away from me!

narrative and blogging

Interesting post on blogging, feminism, the archive, temporality, and film...makes me wish I was in Claremont to go see the talk!

Apple Loses (sort of)

cliffs
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

There's no use denying it: for communicating with and sharing digital images, flickr beats Apple's .mac service hands down. The two links above are to (roughly) the same set of images that I just uploaded. The .mac photos are on their own page (with cool 'themes'), but that's a weakness as well as a strength (see below). Flickr piles everything in with the other Flickr stuff, and this, too, has benefits and drawbacks.

To be clear, these are two distinct technologies. .Mac does many things very well - 1 gig of storage space (used to communicate with students), spam free email, free goodies, and a great way to build simple websites. But Flickr's genius is that it doesn't require you to build a website (even one it builds for you) in order to share images. With .mac I can export directly from iPhoto (great!), but I still have to go back and edit my homepage to include the new photo page I've made. With Flickr I can also export from iPhoto (thanks to some guy who wrote the plug-in...really, thanks!), but then I can follow the link to my Flickr site, and then click 'blog it!' and be done! That's what I'm doing now, and it's brilliant!

By the way, all the photos were taken with my new phone. This post was going to be about that (I'll blog it later), but I found myself more interested in the question of how to disseminate the photos I was going to talk about, than talking about them.


EDIT: The drawback to Flickr is that since it's Rebecca's account, it tells Blogger I'm Rebecca. Post above is by Sam, just so you know - not that authorial intention matters....

Slice of Life: Kitchen

Slice of Life: Kitchen
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

Check out my fuller use of flickr with this pic...I hope to start and/or join a new trend.

momentarily or for a moment

Odds are One's post today prompted me to add to the discussion of living in/for/of the moment rather than constantly planning; of trying to figure out whether this is what you want or that or some other thing, or keeping options open, but committing to what you have as well.
It's not having what you want, it's wanting what you've got. or something.
I think it's good that we want more than we have, that we're striving for something most of the time, whether that's staying above water this week, making sure your kid grows up right, or becoming a rock star. Ambition, in its weakest form, is still a good motivator. So I'm pro-ambition.
But as someone mentioned to me the other day, southern Wales is the sort of place where ambition comes to die. And she meant it in a positive way. It's beautiful here (wait for posts during February to switch that around), the people are overwhelmingly nice, everything is at your fingertips, from fresh eggs to bus service to the beach to all of the UK and Europe one plane hop away. And people on the bus have conversations about how they really don't want to work more than three days a week, I mean that's really the limit, isn't it? Oh yes, they say, no more than three days, and even then...
And as someone who has bucked the inertia of a tenure track job (some might say quit a perfectly good, permanent position) I am loathe to enter into another inertia-laden situation. But I think inertia and the death of (or lessened) ambition are two different things. I think low levels of ambition still can allow you to thrive in a comfortable location.
I suppose this is the moment in our lives, post-20s, pre-midlife crisis, the "thirtysomething" years, if you will, that cause one to wonder what one was striving for all those years, and whether that's really what you want. and then, realizing it's not, what to replace it with? Certainly the amazon/acupuncture path has nothing normal about it, and nor does the leaving (two) tenure track jobs path.
and if it takes a lot of thought, care, and words to figure this out, then perhaps that is the shortest route to a balanced path, and perhaps we're just, momentarily, again assessing our lives before we once again plunge into them. We're just a bit more careful about the location of the plunge now then we were in our Salad Days.

the Wurm

Rhossili Beach
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

we had planned to bus-it out to the Wurm last weekend, but the boot sale got in our way. Sam's colleague kindly invited us on a family trip out to the beaches yesterday, and so we piled into his rather small car with his family and went off. very blustery, appropriately gray, and dramatic cliffy beaches. precisely what you might expect from south wales. more pics at the flickr site.

and no we did not go out on the Wurm, although the kids were up for it... next time.

contraception. for free.

I had heard prior to arriving in the UK that contraception here is free. I did not, of course, believe this. but having now visited my "GP" to figure out how to translate my prescription from US pharmacy speak into UK pharmacy speak, he has confirmed this revolutionary notion. on the surface it doesn't seem revolutionary, I'll grant you. but my monthly prescription costs about $20 if you find the cheapest place to get it and go with generic. that $240/year has been lessened for me by various health care plans that have covered prescriptions at varying levels. So for me, amongst the wealthiest in the world, this is a nice bonus, a few extra "quid" that I can spend on iTunes downloads, new boots, or ringtones for my mobile.

but it's revolutionary nonetheless, because free birth control means it's free. you need only go to a doctor (also free and freely available—I made an appointment one week in advance and waited only 15 minutes for the appointment once I arrived. I paid nothing to see the doctor.) I imagine that in major urban areas where the population density is higher and there are fewer doctors this would not be the case (in terms of the waiting and the ease of appointment) but the free part, at least to see the doc, would be the same. and he told me to see the chemist at the pharmacy. which pharmacy? I ask, thinking there will be some sort of limit on where I can go, who I can see, etc. Well, perhaps there is a limit, if you consider that he told me to go to the closest pharmacy to my home, two blocks down the road. I didn't get the sense that I was required to go there, though, just that he chose that one for convenience.

so then I thought that perhaps there were limits on who could get this free contraception in terms of age-limits. so I did some digging (not a lot, mind you) and found this patient information site that involved an argument about how best to make sure that teens came in to get the contraceptives so that they wouldn't get pregnant. Here's the advice they were giving to GPs:

Under 16s Guidance from BMA and others states that 'the duty of confidentiality owed to a person under 16 is as great as that owed to any other person'.
However, there is complete right of confidentiality where issues such as abuse and child protection are involved. Guidance also states that 'any competent young person, regardless of age, can independently seek medical advice and give valid consent to treatment'. Following the Gillick case the Department of Health issued the following guidance on providing contraceptive advice and treatment to young people under the age of 16: A doctor needs to be satisfied that:

• That the young person could understand his advice and have sufficient maturity to understand what was involved in terms of the moral, social and emotional implications.
  
• That he could neither persuade the young person to inform the parents, nor to allow him to inform them, that contraceptive advice was being sought.
  
• That the young person would be very likely to begin, or to continue, having sexual intercourse with or without contraceptive treatment.
  
• That without contraceptive advice or treatment, the young person's physical or mental health or both would be likely to suffer.
  
• That the young person's best interests required him to give contraceptive advice or treatment or both without parental consent.

(Dept. of Health 1986 guidance on the provision of contraceptive advice to young people under 16 years old)

wow. it had always seemed silly to me that in the US the debate was over abstinence and forcing kids not to have sex, when what it should be about is making sure that stupid acts, like those we all did as teens, don't end up utterly changing your life, taking choices away from you, putting you in situations that you aren't prepared for. and teens do stupid things. and when we don't give them any respect in their own choices as they begin to make them, when we take away their ability to choose something smart, that just seems societally irresponsible, nigh suicidal.

of course, the free health care thing means this is possible in the UK and not in the US. but it doesn't have to be that way. we could at least allow greater access for those under 18 to get contraception, for free. because there's always trouble when the unwanted child comes along and you have to drive four states over to get the abortion, which you waited too long to get anyway (out of shame and you're supposed to abstain, right?) and you don't have the money for it (raising the child or getting rid of it) and now forget college, forget pulling yourself up out of poverty. you've been ignored and forgotten.

revolutionary. that's all I'm saying.

old things: Swansea castle

Swansea Castle
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

they don't call it the old country for nothing. and this, in the grand scheme of things, is relatively new, although founded in the 12th c., most of what you see here is several centuries later than that.

straight on to the right is one of the major bar-hopping streets of Swansea. the founding Normans would be proud.

on unemployment

I had two interviews this week, both in London. this is, on the one hand great news, as it means that people might want me and being wooed is always nice. it also reveals a certain paradox embedded in the state of non-jobbedness that has just begun to strike me and take form. several of you out there who may be reading this have, I know, experienced periods of being "between jobs" or, as perhaps is more apt in my case and some others', purposively choosing not to work in favor of other, less lucrative, activities. being able to do the latter is a luxury, one for which I am extremely grateful and for which we have sacrificed some things, although not a huge amount in my estimation. last year I called it my unpaid sabbatical, which was how I thought of it. a year off, I write my book, I finish my book, I become employed again in some sort of inevitable cycle.

but, as I discover now, inevitable cycles rarely exist. perhaps the Vedic yuga cycles of 40,000 years might be considered inevitable, but even they run into bumps in the road. perhaps Shiva won't, in fact, burn the universe to a crisp in the ultimate cleansing ritual this time. or perhaps he will, but not until week after next. (yes, I've read too much Rushdie. shoot me.)

and so last spring (ironic in its seasonal rebirthing symbolism) I went through the hazing ritual known as the job market yet again, for the seventh time in eight years. granted, some of those years I applied for only one or two jobs. but five of them were more or less all-out job search years. and this time I received a whopping 6 interviews (that's batting more than .500, by the way) on-campus. and looking back now on those interviews, it feels like I was trying to make myself fit them (something one often does in interviews) by making myself smaller. hunching over a bit. breaking a few bones in my feet to make them look like a size 8. that sort of thing. metaphorically, of course. and it didn't work. they saw through me. saw that I finished a book last year. that Duke Univeristy Press is interested in it. that I am about to publish the only ever reader in Asian art history. that I am well-published in scholarly journals. that I am a great teacher. and so they did not hire me. some did not hire anyone at all. most hired newly minted PhDs who are probably very smart and very promising.

and so this autumn (one doesn't use the word "fall" for seasons in the UK) I am looking for a job again. but it seems that something has changed. I'm no longer on an unpaid sabbatical. this state of non-job, pick-up job, seeking job is now a part of my life. and I'm not looking for a job (well, of course I am, but...*) in the sense that I'm not assuming some sort of inevitable yearly cycle of job ads, job applications, job interviews, job offers (or not). I'm looking for a way of being an academic, an intellectual in this world. a way that perhaps makes use of some of the things I've learned and some of the things I've learned how to do. I suppose everyone, in every field, might go through something similar at one point or another. I've done the traditional track (first comes PhD, then comes tenure track job, then comes tenure and...) and so now I'm looking for the other thing. or things. I'll let you know what form it takes when I get there. or perhaps, more properly, as I'm navigating along.

---
*if you are reading this and happen to have a full-time post at a university or similar doing something that might use Asian art history, and you happen to have such a post in well, the greater southern Wales region, please give me a call.

Serenity 2005. again

so Sam already posted on Serenity and its glory. it is glorious. I would like to add, by way of providing some thoughts on the film without actually telling you anything substantive about the plot, a few things.

• Sarah Paulson of Deadwood fame (she plays Miss Isringhausen) has a small part in Serenity, which is very cool.
  
• Joss has been stolen from already—Firefly's use of the quick zoom, acknowledgement that space is, well, very quiet: silent, if you will, and his playful use of language have been seen on other (later) shows, such as Battlestar Gallactica (the new one), where the quick zoom and the quiet space take center stage, and Deadwood, of course, where cursing mingles with a rhythm of language that is, well, lyrical.
  
• Joss steals from pays homage to several sci fi and western directors over the course of the film, which is very fun.

and finally, while the film is utterly brilliant, and just perfect, and amazing in all respects, I do have to voice the notion that of course, film and television are utterly different media, and Joss Whedon is best in serial formats. It has been argued that serial formats like weekly shows, or even better, daily shows (soaps) are closer to life and therefore are able, through art, to allow us insights into our lives that cannot be provided in a two hour film. I think this is true, and while some writer-directors excel at the two-hour medium, I think the smaller, more intimate, slower development of the characters and plot arc in a series offers more range and depth to someone like Joss. And, when not forced into the 40-minute, 5-minute-at-a-time-between-commercial mini story arcs each week—in other words, when one is on HBO, the movement of plot and character becomes even more interesting and rich. So. Joss needs HBO to give him a contract. Is that too much to ask?

Serenity!

It's probably not proper blog etiquitte to post merely for the sake of gloating, but I swear, that's not what this is about. I'm just so terribly, indescribably excited that last night R and I got to spend two and a quarter hours watching a piece of art that Joss Whedon made. (The fact that we got to do it ten days before it can be seen in the states, well that is material for gloating, but I won't go there.)

As some of you out there know, I positively hate trailers that tell you what happened in the movie and I can't stand spoilers, so much so that I don't even read reviews. So it's hypocrtical of me to write a review before any of you have seen it. Thus, I'll just say this:

• It's brilliant.


• The jump to the big screen goes quite smoothly.


• If you're a Joss fan, it's great.


• If you've never seen Firefly, it's great.


• It has some turns in it you won't expect.

boot sale

boot sale
Originally uploaded by doppio macchiato.

no, not a sale of boots, although I did look at the local Clarks yesterday for that, but a sale from your boot, specifically the boot of your car. much chaos, many children, and fabulous finds like:

• dish towels, £1 pack


• matching coffee and tea canisters (very 70s, in coffee color of course), £2 the set


• new flat head and philips screwdrivers, £1 each


• two translucent glasses with Buffy and Angel silkscreened onto them, priceless (okay 40p, but who's counting?)

the Worm

To be cut off on the Worm either means twelve hours of boredom or else a brief but exciting ride in an RAF helicopter - an experience not worth the embarrassment.

as the daughter of a geologist, I of course purposively know nothing about geology, having scorned any proffered knowledge for most of my childhood living in the Rocky Mountains. and as we are planning to take a little day trip out onto the Gower Peninsula (which Swansea is on) to check out the beaches (not, I'm guessing, in any way similar to beaches on The O.C.), I did some web surfing to find out where to go and what to see. and I ran across the Geological Society site on Gower and its geology. it's a self-guided course on geology based entirely on the Gower peninsula!! imagine my excitement! (actually the maps are pretty cool, and I like how you are given direction based on rock formations, not roads or signage....)

and so we are off to Rhosili, the last place covered in the cumulative course, as, of course, jumping to the end of the instructions is also a trait I picked up from my father, where we hope not to be cut off on the Worm.

cities and rebuilding

as we are currently experiencing a new city, one whose center was bombed to the ground during the second world war, and as others in our little blog-o-sphere discuss global warming, seeing into the future, and rebuilding New Orleans, I've been prompted to reflect on city building. and if we thought democracy was messy, cities are unbelievably messy. the good ones—the ones that work most of the time in most of their places, the ones that shift and change gradually and have the ability to adjust, the ones that seem to be seamless—are not the overly-planned ones. or I should say, not the newer ones. DC, Canberra, New Delhi, Chandigarh, even portions of every US city now set upon by mini fake urban expansions—these cities tend only to work in their less planned areas. And, thinking of DC here, many of them are not resilient—they can't bounce back from trauma in any real way. DC is still showing the scars of the 1968 riots, and based on my visit there a few weeks ago, they are not going away with "gentrification." on the contrary, the differences across the city are becoming almost more pronounced as the rich set up boutique fashion shops next to pawn shops, empty windows, and check cashing stores.

this post was spurred by Greg's post on NO and the future rebuilding efforts one hopes might actually occur. they didn't for DC, the nation's capital, but perhaps NO will face a brighter future than that. I was trying to think about tenets for (re)building a city; what you need in order to prepare the soil for some good organic growth. infrastructure for one, hopefully public transportation that encourages people out of their cars and into human interaction (sorry Corbusier). and easy access to food through smaller, local markets rather than the massive box stores on the edge of town. and places to walk. places to ease the city-ness of the city, like central park in Manhattan. should it be a garden city, like the town I was born in, designed from the ground up? or a cardo-and-decumanus grid city, on the grounds that hey, if it worked for the Greeks and Romans, it's good enough for us. or perhaps we should go back to local, vernacular forms of building, attempting in part to respect the landscape and its history. or take a page from Amsterdam's book and perhaps acknowledge that what we're doing by living in NO is ridiculous and hubristic but historically important and thus we must fund the effort to hold back the water and hold up the land.

all of this reminded me of a review of a book on cities that recently came across my e-mail in-box, about resilient cities. the reviewer has one major and interesting critique of the book, the kind of critique that can only arise out of a good book, mind you, so this isn't damning the book. Andrew Herscher, the author of the review points out that the book's focus is sudden, burst-like disasters that effect cities and their responses to them. he suggests that one of the problamatic things the book (and I think by extension our understanding of Katrina and other disasters in our future) assumes is that there is such a thing as a normal working of a city, a status quo, interrupted by disasters, and so the book's project is to see how resilient cities are to these interruptions.

but, as Herscher would no doubt point out, what we're seeing in NO is that in fact this city has been in perma-disaster, much like DC, much like Mumbai, for a very long time. disaster involving socio-economic inequality, racial inequality, infrastructural neglect, and all the rest. a city that's not resilient but in "terminal urban disaster." Much like many cities in the so-called third world, the lesson of NO is at least in part that we can't pretend things are working when they're not. we can't wait for a disaster to kill thousands of people and wipe out an entire city to begin to try to fix things. and frankly, we can't merely mount a critique of the president for his handling of this Katrina disaster. it should be more along the lines of the government's understanding of the socio-economic picture of the entire south—the US south and the global south. as Cornell West wrote a few days ago, we need a marshall plan for the south and we need it now.

the barista

The Barista
Originally uploaded by Rebecca the Expat.

it is difficult to underestimate the importance of the new barista in the 'tall'....so shiny! we're very excited.

Of Teaching Hours

Now that we're back on the grid, I've quickly become overdue in posting. The problem is that living in a new country presents an almost infinite number of things to comment upon as amusing, intriguing, or befuddling, i.e. just the sort of material one might blog about. I'll try to stay focused.

Over the last week I've learned more about the British Higher Education 'system' than months of previous study. Unlike the US, there is no 'standard teaching load' here. Instead, what is standardised (at least within departments at particular institutions) is teaching hours. On my first utterly jetlagged day in the department, my HoD (that's Head of Department - there are no chairs) gave me the rundown on teaching expectations, and he did so solely in terms of total number of hours.

I wanted to try to put those numbers in perspective, by first presenting a very brief history of my 'total hours taught' at prior institutions. So here goes...
Note 1: teaching 'hours' here, I've found, are rounded up from 50 minute lectures and tutorials, so I've 'rounded up' similarly for US institutions. Thus, 50 minutes = 1 hour here, so 50 minute class periods in the US = 1 hour; 80 minute class periods = 1.5 hours; and 110 minute class periods = 2 hours.
Note 2: this does take ANY account at all of admin work, out-of-class student contact, etc.

• small public liberal arts college, 12 hours per week for 30 weeks = 360 hours


• small private liberal arts college, 9 hours per week for 28 weeks = 225 hours


• large US research university, 6 hours per week for 30 weeks = 180 hours


• UK University, maximum number = 140 hours
  

Now, what I'm almost too embarassed to even admit is that after explaining that 140 was the maximum (and normal) number of hours for members of staff, he then went on to stress that that was far too many hours for me to undertake in my first year. Thus, I'm teaching significantly less than that this year (and I am too embarrassed to give you the actual number).

I'll withhold commentary, except to mention how much difference is elided in the US, precisely because teaching hours are never mentioned. Let me put it starkly: in the US system, institution #1 and institution #2 have precisely the same amount of teaching, i.e. 'a 3/3 load'.

week one

we are through to the beginning of week two on our (ad)venture here in Wales. it's been unbelievably gorgeous weather, and this morning I looked out our kitchen window to see airline tracks in the sky, probably (given the time I got up, around 7 or so) at least one of which was the Continental flight from Newark to Bristol that brought us here a week ago. bit of circularity to get the morning started.

now that we have internet and aren't relying on our neighbors—

[total aside: for the last week our lives were ruled by the little ice cream cone that is the airport icon at the top of the screen. it seems our neighbors, lovely tho they are for having an unprotected network, turn off (!!!the horrors!!!) their computer, including wireless router, when they are not using it. thus Sam and I have been running around the rather huge flat shouting "internet! it's up! internet!" whenever the cone turns black, probably to the amusement of our neighbors, who were likely playing with us the whole time. we are, by the way, known as the "americans next door" just fyi.]

we are back in the loop, so to speak, and are coming up for air on the whole Katrina disaster. Apologies for being late to the bandwagon, but it must be said again.

the stories of blatant racism, protection of corporate property (Wal-Mart, Walgreens, various grocers) and private property (the entire West End of the city, where the wealthy folks live) over the protection of the lives of those trapped (quite literally) in the city is astonishing. The mismanagement and ludicrousness of "praise" given by Bush to the homeland security chief is par for the course, the surprise is that he resigned, instead of receiving the traditional administration promotion. As usual, I find Jon Stewart to be the best for summing it up.

ffotograff

photos are up! see this and other highlights from our first days in Swansea...

normal & faucets

what's interesting about living in a country you're not used to is that it's tough to figure out what normal is.

for example, our flat (or our "tall" if you're being physically accurate), has all of the hot water on the right and the cold on the left. at first, I thought perhaps I had forgotten (I'm not so good at right/left in the best of circumstances) which location they were in the last time I was in the UK. but then I started thinking, no—this must be normal, or perhaps it's a wales thing. And then, when I tried to take a shower this morning I realized that no, in fact, cold on the right is "normal" even in wales. For, unlike all the other taps in the flat (okay, there are only two sinks total and the bathtub, so three others), the shower indicator is a single unit, indicating that cold is to the right and hot to the left. the thing is, not so much in this house. I discovered this after about 5 minutes of waiting for the hot to kick in (is it normal to wait this long for hot water? I thought. maybe there's something strange about that seemingly small box water heater with impenetrable switches in the kitchen? yikes, toes getting cold...) and then it hit me. hot to the right. worked like a charm. so the house is weird, and/or we've identified what "normal" is: creative plumbing.

We're Here!

Views of the bay, the park, and the flat, all to come. However, right now, broadband is a bit hard to come by and exhaustion hit long ago!

in wales/cymru

so we are in wales, where all the street signs are in welsh and english, folks drive on the left side of the road, it's "rubbish" (not "trash" or "garbage"), and we're unbelievably jetlagged. currently it is almost dark, and our flat (which is, indeed, more stairs than anything, and thus fails to be "flat" in any way) is fabulous, with views out over the bay from both the main room and our bedroom, a huge guestroom, a lovely kitchen, back patio, and a few of our belongings already wending their way into its fabric. thanks to terrell we had a smooth ride from the Bristol airport to Swansea, were able to stop for various items along the way, both technological and food related, and are beginning to settle in. photos to come...

images of/and death/disaster

As I've had some free time the last few days, and as I'm in DC, a city that has one of the best newspapers in the country, I have been reading the newspaper. it's not that I don't read the news normally, I watch Jon Stewart and scan my RSS BBC headlines with the best of 'em. but we haven't gotten a physical newspaper in years, because of its wastefulness in terms of paper and the ease of access to more up-to-date news on-line. and because of salon.com, to which we subscribe, a news outlet that provides interesting, well-thought out coverage of current events as well as reflections on on-going stories that are not in the news cycle but should be, and columns that provide an entirely new slant on "advice" or "flying commercial airlines."

But as you know, and as ockham's razor has noted, the last few days have been all about New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and for good reason. as an art historian type, I'm always interested in the images; I had a former student who did a project on the photos of the first gulf war, and the way we were shielded from images of the brutality of war and death.

so I've been watching with some interest the images out of NO and comparing them to other disasters (not so natural) that have also caused massive destruction and death, and to which the NO situation has been compared in the text of the news: Iraq. a national guardsman in NO told the news that it was better in Iraq, because despite the constant threat of death, at least you knew you were getting three meals a day, there was a plan, and some semblance of organization.

in the washington post yesterday they included pictures of an old man in a lawnchair, slumped over, and the caption identifies him as deceased, as others mill around him near the superdome. it struck me that we are seeing more images of death from NO and the gulf than we have for the entirety of our war in Iraq or Afghanistan. It's horrible what's happening in NO. and I'm extremely angry at the hubris and arrogance of a national administration that ignores warnings from experts to fix the levees, fires those experts, and then squabbles over whether sending the military in is legal. oh, and continues to stay on vacation for two days after the storm hits.

but the picture of the massive pile of shoes (see #14 in the slideshow) on the bridge in Baghdad on wednesday in the aftermath of the stampede set off by rumors of a suicide bomber is just as horrifying to me. almost 1000 dead there. jumping off the bridge into the Tigris to their deaths, some at the end of the bridge jumping onto the concrete. and the death toll there will rise in Iraq just as surely as it will in NO. for me, despite all the very real differences between the two situations, both images strike me as icons of mismanagement at our highest governmental level. and when I say "our" I mean the U.S., our elected officials and those whom they appoint to run things.

Basawan is a genius

we are in DC, and I went up to Baltimore yesterday to see the exhibition of Akbar-period Mughal paintings at the Walters Art Gallery in an exhibition called The Pearls of the Parrot in India. The manuscript has been unbound for conservation, and so while it's in pieces they decided to do an exhibition of the folios. John Seyeller of the University of Vermont did a huge research project on the manuscript several years ago and so the exhibition has great helpful and informative text, and even a little wall activity in which you can play connoisseur, attributing the paintings to the correct artist. Very fun.

And Mughal painting is amazing. It's not my field at all, but I just love looking at these works. They are painstakingly painted, beautiful, and layered with meaning. The feats of the artists are just unparalleled. Okay, maybe Persian painting, and a few others. I might give you Caravaggio. Or more parallel, van Eyck. But still. This is amazing stuff. Basawan, one of the top artists of the court, just cannot be matched. the link above gives you the barest sense of my favorite painting in the exhibition. the horse in the bottom right corner is absolutely astounding, the vegetation above the cave is amazing. and the figures are just fantastic.

moral of the story: go see Mughal painting when you can. Many museums have at least one example, but the best are the Met in New York (where this image is), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and several museums in the UK.

what to do?

so many things have occurred in the last few days. among them:

• we watched the last and final episode of six feet under. give me a month or so, and then I'll be able to handle blogging about its brilliance.
  
• we re-watched the entire first season (including the summer season) of The OC. the last ep, about separating, sailing off into the distance, was not so good on the old psyche as we prepare to sail off on our own journey.
  
• I finished reading Richard Powers' Goldbug Variations, purchased Gould's 1981 recording on iTunes, and am now set to deepen my universe.

so what to blog? Perhaps further proof (as if it was needed) of Powers' geniosity (not a word, I know, but it should be).

Jim Steadman was a regular, always late punching out. He had ostensible business: "Transfer of power, Ms. O'Deigh. Somebody's got to steer this pitiful ship." But Jimmy's nautical function was, if anything, ballast. (p. 183)

Less Ranting, Some Clarification, and a Few Good Things

We sold our car today - a truly traumatic event. Perhaps the stress of trying to conduct such a major transaction just a few days before leaving town helps to explain my rant from a couple of days ago. (Or, perhaps I'm just not very nice.)

With no home and no car, it must be time to move to another country. Thus, in the spirit of Rebecca's list from yesterday, and in an effort to be more positive, here are a list of 'good things' so far as I can tell, about living in the UK.

• Freeview! While we've been talking in this country for years about "high definition" television, in the UK it's already done. You can buy a little box for about £40 that lets you watch a few dozen all digital channels for free. Or, even better, for a bit more money you can buy a freeview box with a built in DVR. It's not Tivo, but it's very, very close, it's free, and the new boxes have easy transfer to computers.



• Public Transportation! Swansea is rather remote by UK standards, and yet it's less than a 3 hour, direct train ride from London Paddington. All you London and Europe visitors should take that as a hint to visit.



• A liberal media, if you want it. A truly conservative media, if you don't.



• No national debate going on concerning evolution.

questions / gofyniadau

As we near the impending departure for Wales I find myself forming my apprehension/excitement into question format:

• how will I live without peanut butter?
  
• how can I possibly go on without my doggie Luke?
  
• will we, car enthusiasts extraordinaire, be able to stand not having a car?
  
• what will my flat american accent sound like to the lilting sounds of the Welsh?
  
• how will I live without Jon Stewart?
  

but wait—out of the blue, a bolt of lightning! I won't have to live without the Daily Show, for lo, it is in syndication on a new cable channel in the UK. Thanks L for tipping us off to this...
Perhaps I can go on. even without peanut butter.

The Folks at Stonesthrow - far too nice

So, the G man as I like to call him (not really), posts today about the work of a psychologist called Haidt (that's really his name, and I don't know how to pronounce it, but yes, 'hate' works for me).

Haidt argues, says G, that folks make decisions based on 4 moral intuitions. Roughly, these are intuitions about, 1. suffering, 2. reciprocity, fairness, and equality, 3. hierarchy, 4. purity and pollution. He then claims that 'liberals' tend to draw from only the first two intuitions, while conservatives draw from all 4. G then goes on to say other interesting things.

But I want to stop right here and yell: the folks at Stonesthrow are being far too nice today.

And thus I ask rhetorically, liberals stop at the first two but conservatives have all four? Does Haidt mean genuine cultural conservatives? If so, fine. But there aren't any genuine conservatives running the country or taking up the far right side of this country's political spectrum. And the right in this country doesn't have much at all to say about fairness, equality, reciprocity and suffering.

I'd put it the other way around: conservatives stop at the last 2, while liberals have all 4. (I mean, Pat Robertson has asked God to strike down another Supreme Court justice and called for the US assasination of a world leader, all in the same week!)

Finally, those 4 moral intuitions should be weighted toward the first two, especially reciprocity and fairness - that's what the democratic revolutions of the last few centuries have been all about. If so-called 'conservatives' want hierarchy and purity, then they should sign up for a trip through time back to early 20th century totalitarianism. After all, Hitler and Mussolini...those guys knew purity and hierarchy.

Why on earth would we want to value purity and hierarchy on the same plane as we value fairness, justice, and a sense of duty toward other suffering human beings???? They are not, and should not, be equal values. And if they are equal 'moral intutions' then we need to do some work on our intutions'.

blogging and washcloths

the tone of this little corner of the blogosphere has, well, gotten a bit heady of late, and thus I endeavor here to bring it down a notch or two.

which leads me to comment on Sam's post below on blogging. I have been reflecting on the phenomenon of the first few weeks of blogging for, well, the first few weeks of blogging. it's an interesting medium, in that audience becomes at first a problem (as in, to whom am I talking? who will care?) and then, if you let that go, the question of audience becomes an interesting ghost behind your writing, occasionally sitting on your shoulder and suggesting that perhaps, in the interests of ever wanting to return to the US, one might not want to post that GW Bush is a dickwad on one's blog. Or, as in the case of a friend of mine who just e-mailed me (let's call him/her JO), leading you to establish elaborate anonymity schemes for those you are talking about so as not to hurt anyone (including, let's face it, yourself). I have attempted to avoid the latter, but it does require some effort, which is interesting. I've read on other blogs that the blogger's friends seem to know them better through the blog than through direct interpersonal contact, for example, which while at first glance is somewhat disturbing, at second glance makes sense: you are whomever your audience reflects back to you, and so when there's no reflection, it's up to you to figure out who you are at that moment. So blogging. very interesting. not at all linear, not at all contained.

which brings me to washcloths.

over the past few weeks, I've been thinking that I should blog about washcloths. when you have a blog this is a common thought (not the specifics of the washcloth, of course—that's just my neurosis) and that's interesting, because as Sam says below, the timing of the blog/thought pattern is different than any other writing one usually does.

but my washcloth "insight" is related to OddsAreOne's postings about narrative and the universe. for I haven't used a washcloth in I don't know how many years. and then we got some of that fab Dr. Bronner's liquid soap stuff, and as I am morally opposed to those silly poof balls that were all the rage in mid-1998, I pulled out a washcloth. suddenly, I'm five. it's astounding. you should try it. the feeling of washing your face and ears with a washcloth is exactly like when you were five. there's no linearity to it, no narrative, no physical connection even, as the skin cells etc. I have today have turned over however many times since I was five, right? the disconnect, the forgetting of that feeling—it wasn't even a memory before I used the washcloth again a few weeks ago. this is how time and history works—how narrative and memory work. vide the ghosts Sam writes about in his book. we can't predict them, we can't know when they will return (see OddsAreOne's postings about social science and stats here) but they are real, and it's likely (what are the odds?) that they will return.

So it's not about the predictability, it's about the manner in which the universe operates, right? storytelling, repeating (not precisely) the same tale, the same narrative. that's what Richard Powers' books are all about too—multiple narratives. so much for non-heady. to sum up:

no new narrative can be written. writing is rewriting. touching (haptics, if you will) is crucial for our understanding of the universe. and well, you are now and always have been five.

That One Thing

The common joke is that academics only ever have one good idea in their lifetime; they only really write one book, but then they continue to rewrite it over and over again. If it's a really good book, a really great idea, then the rewrites are tolerable and the later books sell. Of course, in order to write the later books, the academic in question must be willing to continue saying the same thing for 30, 40, or 50 years. Some academics have a mediocre first idea, so the later books aren't worth writing. Some academics have a great first idea, but aren't willing to slog through the rewriting. Thus, if an academic has only one book, it means that they are either quite average or really smart.

I got my one idea in 1993. In spring of that year I read (but didn't understand) some Derrida, and I read (and mostly understood) some Bill Connolly. Then, in the fall I read Heidegger, particularly his later writings on language.

So what was the one idea? Language is not a tool for use by humans; rather, language is that upon which human existence depends and that in which it flourishes. This idea is not intuituitive (nor is it all that earth-shattering), so I spent some time trying to explain it and trying to figure out what it implications are for how we think about history, temporality, and politics.

Then, I thought I'd buck the trend and study queer theory, cultural studies, film theory, and the politics of television - in other words, try to come up with a second idea. I've now written enough in those areas to know that I'm still saying the same thing. (But perhaps??? in interesting ways.)

But none of that narcisstic bio nonsense was the point of this blog entry. The point was to say that my "one idea" is perhaps more clearly expressed over at TheOddsAreOne in these three posts - here, then here, and finally here. Paul isn't tallking about Heidegger or language, but what he's saying about human beings and their relationship to the universe, to history, to time, is really all I've ever tried to explain about language/politics. Sad it took me so much more time and so many more words...

Oh, and along the way, I think I finally get what evolution is all about. Funny how it has almost nothing to do with "survival of the fittest."

Why it Matters

I do a lot of work on feminist and queer theory, and particularly on the politiccal and theoretical concept of 'heteronormativity'. As, I suspect, many writers/teachers/intellectuals do on occassion, I often worry about the so-called 'importance' of my work. This worry is exacerbated by the impression often given to me (and sometimes said to me directly) that I should be doing something more significant, more political, less abstract. This impression comes both from other scholars (who are studying Marx, or Congress, or, if they aren't social scientists, 'real' things in the World) and from non-academic friends who wonder why I'm concerned with a word they've never heard of. I wonder, too, whether the whole thing isn't heightened yet again by the sense that when it comes to 'dark forces' in the world, 'heteronormativity' isn't really high on the list (probably because many of the people that I know, also have gay friends who are quite 'well off' in many senses of that phrase).

And then one stumbles upon what you see below:

From the good Reverend Dobson, tips to tell if your son is at risk of thinking he is gay:

Evidences of gender confusion or doubt in boys ages 5 to 11 may include:

1. A strong feeling that they are "different" from other boys.


2. A tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy.


3. A persistent preference to play female roles in make-believe play.


4. A strong preference to spend time in the company of girls and participate in their games and other pastimes.


5. A susceptibility to be bullied by other boys, who may tease them unmercifully and call them "queer," "fag" and "gay."


6. A tendency to walk, talk, dress and even "think" effeminately.


7. A repeatedly stated desire to be - or insistence that he is - a girl.

From the good Reverend Dobson, tips to cure your son of gayness:

[T]he boy's father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

I could talk about this for pages and pages and pages. In an effort to show enormous restraint, let me just make two (well, three) points.

• Note the irony of the far right's position on homosexuality. ON the one hand, they insist, above all else, that it is unnatural, while on the other they go to all this work to actively prevent its emergence and to construct heterosexuality. They are literally constructing the natural right in front of us!


• I saw some discussion of this on other blogs (e.g.), and the comments section spent a great deal of time (rightly) making fun of these notions. They were filled with narratives that went like this, 'I did #X, and #Y, and #Z, and I turned out great'. Or, 'aren't kids that "roughhouse" more likely to be gay?'. OK, sure - funny enough. But can we possibly imagine for a moment the effect of this discourse on queer kids??? These folks, who are supposedly all about what they call 'family' (I need to blog some day on this, because I have no idea what they are talking about when they use this word) are saying to parents the following: if your kid is getting called a fag at school, you need to add more pressure to their lives, to force them to be what you want them to be. I don't know, sounds like something akin to 'abuse' to me.


• Finally, this whole discussion is not about overt discrimination or prejudice against adult gay mean and lesbians. And that's precisely why the concept of heteronormativity is so important. Upholding the heterosexual norm has all sorts of effects that cannot be seen through the lens of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

What is Blogging; Or, Why I'm Not a Good Blogger

I've been meaning to post something for over a week now - it will be up above this post in just a bit - but it occurs to me that this is not good blogging. I don't know what blogging really is, but I feel certain that blog posts shouldn't be "planned" as mine has been. I know the blog entries that I read and like certainly don't sound planned. On the other hand, some of them do intimidate me by their depth and breadth of knowledge.

And this all suggests to me that blogging might be a unique form of "literarity" in that it says something potentially substantive to a potential public, yet is not a formal publication or piece of research. I'm sure others have thought about this in more detail than I, but it makes me wonder...about things, that is.

paranoia magazines

so I've decided that most, if not all, magazines with titles that include the words Health, Organic, Pure, or Natural are paranoia-inducing, fear-mongering negativity machines. This is not clear from their covers. For example, the September 2005 issue of Organic Style touts: 25 Good-for-You Beauty Bargains for Under $25 and down below, The Great Lip-Balm Road Test. In their FreshLiving: Home section they have an article on healthy furniture. Seems mostly positive, no?

No. The furniture piece goes into great detail about how your sofa is killing you with PBDEs (polybrominated diphenylethers), which are banned in the EU. And, just by the way, these things exist in more or less everything plastic, including computers, shower curtains, and tupperware. Last month featured an article on plastic food storage and how it was going to kill you. So after Sept.'s issue, we are now all sitting on our organic cotton rag rugs eating out of glass conatiners.

the furniture thing I can kind of dismiss—turns out IKEA doesn't use these PBDEs, so we're feeling alright about it all. Plus the immanent move to the EU means less toxins for us...but then...

I'm reading the piece on the beauty bargains and I can't help thinking: so if this shampoo is fabulous and has nothing bad in it, why do they sell it in a plastic bottle leaching PBDEs into my bloodstream? Perhaps too negative. I stop reading that piece.

On to the lipbalm toss-off fluff piece, which is lighthearted until it points out that the petroleum jelly I've been using forever is (obviously, if you think about the name) a non-renewable resource!! I'm participating in the depletion of the world's oil reserves by moisturizing with what I thought was "pure" and "simple" (well, it is, of course, pure and simple petroleum...)

and just when I convince myself that I'm contributing much less to the world's demise than if I drove a gas-guzzling car all over town, it hits me: the petroleum jelly is stored in plastic!

like I said. paranoia-inducing, fear-mongering publications. steer clear.

to letterhead or not to letterhead

I would like to pose a question about status/title/affiliation that has arisen in connection with my on-going "between jobs" identity. namely, the "independent scholar" question. last year I was affiliated with Penn State's history department and with the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, as a visiting scholar and research associate respectively. On the job market, this meant that I had letterhead to use, which was great, and on the ground it meant a variety of benefits for me, including working on the collection at the ROM, getting library access and giving a paper at PSU, etc. etc. I put these things on my cv with titles as they are above. go here for some advice about why getting affiliations like this is a good thing...

but it seemed to raise more questions than it answered. so people would ask to share stories of living in Toronto (I gave my address in State College clearly on the application materials) and they'd assume I was affiliated with the art history dept at Penn State (again, I was clear about this, but as an art historian, it was confusing). in the end, I felt it was more confusing than not, and while I imagine if I had not used letterhead I wouldn't have gotten a few of those interviews (seriously—go here and do a search for letterhead), the downside was that it raised questions like what are you doing, where are you, and why can't you be clear about it, despite my attempts to be clear.

so I'm feeling that I should switch to the dreaded "independent scholar" label. this seems straightforward, and somehow I feel like it's more honest to my full identity as a scholar—yes, I did research at the ROM and work with their collection, but "research associate" implies that I'm there every day working in the back room.

so my options are:

• stick with the ROM affiliation and letterhead, and somehow explain it better
  
• stick with the ROM affiliation and don't explain, just put it out there
  
• go with independent scholar, no letterhead
  
• go with independent scholar, create some very simple letterhead for myself
  

for the last option I was toying with a simple monogram-like letterhead: R • M • B with a full width line across the top of the page, above the monogram.

obviously thinking too much about this.

I clearly need help (on a variety of axes). thoughts?

evolution, or Richard Powers is a genius II

as you can surmise by the list at right, I am still reading Powers' novel Goldbug Variations which is awesome but, in its awesomeness might be included its astounding length (639 pages). thus I am still reading it. and he is brilliant. I've always thought our pop evolution understanding was problematic, so here's Powers:

On second look, I see I've misunderstood evolution as badly as my schoolgirl botch of Mendel. Education is wasted on those of school age. Now I find that evolution is not about competition or squeezing out, not a master plan of increasing efficiency. It is a deluge, a cascade of mistaken, tentative, branching, brocaded experiment, secrets seemingly dormant, shouted down from the past, wills and depositions hidden in the attic, how-to treasure maps reading "Tried this; it worked for a while; hang on to it," program-palimpsests reworked beyond recognition, churches renovated so often in a procession of styles that it's impossible to label them Romanesque, gothic, or baroque. It is about one instruction: "Make another similar something; insert this command; run; repeat." It is about the resultant runaway seed-spreading arabesques, unrelated except in all being variations on that theme. (p. 250)

this leaves me wondering: why didn't my bio teacher in 10th grade just read this passage to us? so much clearer and more accurate than "survival of the fittest," no? sigh.

Hawaii and other musings

So we're back from Hawaii as many of you know. Great fun, hard work, too much sun, lots of yummy beef, and much weddingness was had by all. We drove up to the North Shore of Oahu in the rain, ostensibly to go to the beach (thwarted by said rain) but actually to, well, eat. Our menu included: a stop at a shrimp stand for tempura shrimp and garlic shrimp, with side of rice and (of course!) cold macaroni salad. A second stop at a shrimp stand for more garlic shrimp, which included the sight of us (Sam, Rebecca, Nate, Jenna, and Kathy) scooping up melted butter and roasted garlic pieces with our hands and licking them. Not pretty, but very yummy. Then, on the way back we stopped at the best Ahi burger place on the island (also a stand) to sample their fish--amazing. At that point we had to get back to our beach house in order to prepare to go out to dinner in Waikiki. Sigh.

I offer two wedding pics here. Feel free to let me know which you think might be more appropriate to capture the week... :) (you may click on them to get a bigger view)...



OR...



da pig. not, in fact the wedding day, but the day before. how fabulous is this?

will be posting full pics to the flickr site soon...

Required (Recent) Reading

There's nothing interesting or creative in my head these days, as I'm struggling to make three paper deadlines (two for publication, and one for a conference). But there's plenty out there to read:

• John Gray's devastating critical review of Thomas Frieman's neo-liberal tract, The World is Flat. Gray annihilates Friedman's argument (and that's always fun), while teaching readers a lot along the way.
  
• Paul's brilliant eponymous entry , at his newly-named blog. Can we somehow find a way to burn this information in every media member's brain?
  
• An exemplary post from Matt Yglesias.
  
• Apple's justified propaganda over their reinvention of the mouse. I don't have one (yet), but, of course, I want one. How could you not want one?
  
• The Foundations of Political Theory 2005 Newsletter , just so you can see that I won an award. :)
  

Enjoy!

birthing? the book

so the book is off my desk as of noon today!! this accounts for my lack of posting the last week (very restrained, very little procrastinating). when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, it's all about the light. go toward the light, man! so Duke University Press now has the manuscript in its hands, and I'll update you on the various turns this process will take. here's hoping there aren't too many.

there's relief, no euphoria yet, not a little panic and anxiety thinking about the fact that others get to read it now. others that I haven't chosen and approved of. arg. as Katie posted a few weeks ago, I think we all feel like hacks a little over 50% of the time, and we're all in mortal fear that we'll be found out. this could be the moment, no? hopefully not. as I wrote on Liz's blog a few days ago, staying in school is somehow cowardly, and so as I haven't left (current unemployment aside) it does seem like "they" will now inform me that yes, indeed, it has all been a sham, and we were kidding when you got whatever affirmation you got on a piece of paper that one time. like the PhD.

the robes are lovely, however.

bottom line: the book's off my desk! yay! hee hee.

hermeneutic circle time

The audience for a piece of writing emerges in response to the writing; indeed, ideally the piece helps to form the audience, to bring it into existence. But one cannot write (well, I cannot) without, to some extent, imaginging who the audience for whom one writes; a good piece of writing needs to know its audience beforehand. The audience comes after; the audience comes before. I'd call the whole thing untimely, but it might bore you.

But where and how to enter the circle? I ask the question, specifically, because I'm currently writing two pieces on what I might call 'the political theory of television' (PTTV). Of course, PTTV doesn't really exist – I made it up. It just happens to encapsulate my own particular intersection of political theory and cultural politics of TV. Thus, if I want to write for someone other than myself (I do), then I must consider two (or more) previously consolidated audiences: 1) political theorists, and 2) cultural studies folks who do TV. Problem is, the first group doesn't like to take TV seriously, and the latter group seems to get edgy if I do too much theory (and that's what I do).

Luckily, the deadlines on these piece creep up on me so quickly that I cannot be bothered to let this dilemma paralyze me. Yet, I think the topic is intrinsically interesting, and I wonder what others think about it. Perhaps some comments?

to market to market

I must rant a bit about the hassle that shopping for food has become.

the olde-tyme method of shopping, wherein one went to the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, all along the same road, and your milk was delivered to your door bi-weekly was certainly a bit of a hassle. enter the supermarket, fabulous time-saving invention in which one could do all of this in one stop! so efficient! so lovely!

except that now we go to the natural supermarket, the cheap supermarket, the farmer's market, the local meat farmer for organic meat, the big "regular" supermarket and perhaps a few ethnic markets in between. and if we're lucky enough to live near Trader Joe's, that's one more. not to mention the inevitable Target run. oh-oh- and Costco, of course! at each place, one must navigate the hugeness of the parking lot followed by the hugeness of the interior of the store, followed by the check out process.

self check out? 15 items? cash only? endless lines with slow checkers—a few stores have been better than others in my experience, with Wegman's and Trader Joe's having the best customer service and Food Lion dead last. but this isn't about individual store experiences, this is about the aggregate moving around. we've come full circle from olde-tyme days, and now we long for the individual small-scale local folks where you can walk down the street on your way home and be done with it.

My potential future landlady assures me, quite happily: you never have to go to the supermarket! best butcher in Wales down the street from the place! music to my bacon-craving ears.

whistler wedding

I've uploaded the pics from the weekend, centered, natch, on L & P's wedding. thus most of the pics involve green grass, beautiful views, and a white dress. don't tell Laurie.

click on the link above to access. to view them in time order (rather than most recent first), view as slideshow. feel free to add comments, and if anyone wants copies of anything in larger format, let me know.

cream cheese coulis

On KB's blog, you may have noticed the sidebar information: "The only thing we have planned about the wedding is the reception music" followed by a list of songs. Having been asked to prepare a one hour playlist for the reception at Paul and Laurie's wedding this past weekend, we have spent far too much time philosophizing the reception music playlist strategy. Everyone has a must-have, must include song, usually something you can dance to, and of course something from the 70s and a few power ballads from the 80s. Feel free to list yours in the comments.

we of course differed in our strategy from the two other groups asked to prepare a list, and then in addition differed between the two of us as to what was acceptable. and then there were those we told (you know who you are) who demanded certain bands, genres, and the like. bottom line: it's fun to put together a playlist in order to attempt to either

1. make people dance, including those who may be reluctant. I'm thinking here of the scene in 13 Going on 30 (yes, and I'm not embarrassed about it, okay!?!) in which Jennifer Garner as a 13-year-old in a 30-year-old's body leads a group of New York hoity-toity partiers in a re-creation of Michael Jackson's Thriller video dance sequence. [note: you must imbibe much alcohol during dinner/reception in order to transform the guests and their dancing into this type of thing. worth it.]


2. make people happy, including those who may dislike your absolutely favorite songs. in some ways this is about making the bride and groom happy by playing their faves, but really it's also about making multiple generations happy and willing to dance or at least stay at the reception.


3. make a statement about lurv or weddings or your friends themselves, something ostensibly woven into the lyrics that, like a runny chocolate sauce on ice cream or the cream cheese coulis on our unagi sushi last night, will permeate the brains of all those attending. osmosis works, by the way.

this is why we began our playlist with White Trash Wedding from the Dixie Chicks.

back in the USA

we are back stateside, after spending a glorious weekend in Whistler BC to see our dear friends Paul and Laurie get married. so pretty. so lovely. we hiked, okay, well, it was on a paved bike path for some of it, but there was gravel too! and enjoyed the fab people watching at the Whistler resort. a good time had by all. pics up soon. watch this space.

hiding under the bed

I suppose I don't really understand fireworks. in Vancouver, WA you can purchase crazy levels of fireworks including something called an "M-1000" and set them off during the week before and the week after July 4th. what this means is that everyone in a 50 mile radius interested in pyrotechnics moves to Vancouver for the 10 days around the 4th and sets off fireworks starting in early evening until about midnight. The guy who sells the fireworks gives 250K to the city every year, which they use to fund the big fireworks show downtown on the 4th. with this graft in place—oops, sorry, I meant respectable capitalist exchange there, not graft—the practice will likely continue for many years.

so there are three guys who hang out, shirtless, setting off huge bangs and firecrackers literally on the pavement outside our front door every night. Luke is not amused. he is, however, smart, and thus realizes that the safest place in the house is in the basement underneath the bed. we haven't seen him much the past few nights. I hear his reaction is similar to Adam's on the 4th—when one hears large bangs, one should scream and get as far away from them as possible. this is smart. rules to live by. hide under the bed.

narrative and wotw

we finished our midsummer blockbusterfest by seeing war of the worlds yesterday. and rediscovered, of course, how Spielberg really just should have stopped after Raiders. really. as I have not read or heard wotw in Wells' original, I do not know where the narrative holes come from, but origins aren't my issue here. the inability to tell a story is.

Spoiler alert: do not read if you haven't seen the film yet!

holes

• the lightning takes out all electrical machines and yet guy on street can film the attack with a camcorder, allowing spielberg to do the meta film of the filming shot through its viewfinder


• why didn't the aliens take over the world when they initially buried the killing machines? why wait until humans had evolved into folks with armies?


• microorganisms: haven't aliens heard of bacteria?


• aliens painstakingly check the basement of a remote farm and yet somehow the rich folks in the brownstone in Boston are unscathed, and it seems that their top concern might be that the brie got a little warm, what with the fridge not working...


• if the goal is extermination, why do it one by one?


• first the son wants to fight (patriotism, revenge) then he just wants to see: I gotta see this! (voyeurism)


• the son lives???? what?????


• and couldn't they have given him a shower or something in their unscathed brownstone? or did he just arrive 15 minutes before Tom and the kid?


• what's the blood for anyway? just the gross-out factor? sheesh

merely problematic

• Tom Cruise knows more about cars than the mechanic down the street


• Tom Cruise is the only one who figured out how to fix a car in the entire northeastern seaboard


• don't they have to stop for gas?


• as the world falls apart, and your kid has just seen dead bodies floating down the river you still attempt to cover your kid's eyes??


• why kill Tim Robbins' character? okay, moral quandry, but it turned out to be completely unnecessary


• morgan freeman. say no more.

finally, could they time the "I gotta pee dad" moment more perfectly? and set it next to a rushing river? yikes.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

They literally blew up the suburban family household! What more does one need to say? Well, just this: Brad and Angelina were, indeed, great together, but I thought that what made the movie was their comic timing, not the sex.

stuff, stuffity stuff, and more stuff

so we have now made the decision to keep all of our personal possessions in storage for another unspecified number of months. some of our things were stolen back in October, reminding me of the moment all my film was stolen in India on my first trip over there. all of my spent film, that is, along with my good friend Debby's film. And of course, as murphy's law would have it, we were a few days away from finishing our multi-week trip. a lesson in what's important—not stuff, not records of stuff, but doing things, hanging out, people, good food, and not stuff.

then I dropped my powerbook while on my dissertation research in Patna, India. dropped it on a concrete floor from four feet. needless to say, it did not bounce, and broke into many pieces, but I mashed it back together, crossed my fingers, and pressed the power key, and miraculously it worked. many many many people have written dissertations without computers, and I kept envisioning that yellow legal pad upon which my research could be recorded. either way, just stuff.

then Bekins destroyed all our things by "professionally" packing them, and proceeded to pay us next to nothing for the privilege. opening each box when unpacking was a lesson in separation from material goods and also a lesson in how to control a nervous breakdown.

and so when we got the call and the horrifying, out-of-focus, almost psychopath-like polaroid (you know, like the ones they staple to the wall in multiples in the small dark room that the hero stumbles on just before getting killed?) of our storage unit, we were disturbed, but consoled ourselves that it was unlikely they took anything fully irreplaceable, as those things tend not to fence well. we were right, so that's good, and I'm gradually coming to terms with the fuller no-stuff existence. on a side note, I was sort of hoping that the thieves had taken everything—a picture of a completely empty storage unit. The upside: no stuff to move. The downside: fairly obvious.

All this to say, we have sealed up our possessions again, neatly packing them in case we do find a place to settle for more than a year and can call movers to bring it to us. Jackie's kitchen packing came through the theft beautifully, and the antique furniture is all there. And of course, waaay too many books. stuffity stuff stuff.