That's etymology, not entymology

So all my writing efforts have shifted toward the diss, so I thought I'd offer up one my favorite paragraphs so far, from chapter 1. It's exactly the kind of paragraph that might get cut, but I hope it doesn't:

"'Genre,' like 'invention,' also has roots in both science and literature. What words like these give us is not an excuse to do interdisciplinary work, but a directive: if the words we use to categorize idea and things within our separate fields are shared by other fields (genre), and if the words we use to describe our procedures and methodologies are also shared (experiment, invention, etc.), then we must assume that this sharing contains more interest than the kind provoked by etymological kinship. It is not that etymology is not important; rather, the interest provoked by etymological kinship, which is a kind of pleasure in finding origins (and which is supposedly a question for a linguist and not necessarily a literary critic), is a pleasure that threatens to make us forget the serious nature of what is at stake when we search out the genealogy of words. If we assume that language plays a key role in ordering experience, and I certainly do, then we must take the pleasure of etymology very seriously. For when we search out the history of a word, especially a word like invention, and when we track its historical shifts in meaning, we are also tracking the history of an idea, the history of a practice, a whole range of circumstances that both prompts the change of a word’s meaning, and the circumstances produced by that shift. There was never a time when “invention” was more pregnant with meaning than in nineteenth century America; this tells us something about this particular word and this particular nation which we would not understand without understanding them together."

Still here...

Man, I have been terrible about keeping up with this. The good news is I've been writing my diss at a pretty steady pace, and have been quite happy with the quality as well. I should have the first draft of my first chapter done by late April, at the latest.

My parents are coming in next week. My dad and I will be playing golf on Saturday morning at the Golf Club at Vistoso, which is a beautiful desert course north of town. We'll surely hit up our favorite cigar shop as well. Then a spring training game next Sunday. If Ada is in an ok mood tomorrow, I'm going to take her to watch the M's play the Diamondbacks.

Hopefully I'll have some interesting pictures to post soon. As of now in Tucson, it's warm, we've just picked the last of our fruit, and the orange and grapefruit trees are blossoming, which means bees and hummingbirds, too.

Welcome Home, #24

Today it was announced that Ken Griffey, Jr. will be returning to Seattle to play for the Mariners. While he is way past his prime, and while he never should have left in the first place, I'm very happy that he's returning, and I'm determined to see him in a Mariners uniform one last time.

Given that he played in the steroid era, and unequivocally took no part in the cheating ways of McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, and now ARod (what a tool he is), his numbers are even more impressive given the fact they're legitimate. If he had stayed healthy, he would seriously be challenging Henry Aaron's all-time home run record. His days in Cincinnati were spotty and his legs eventually gave out under him.

But I've never seen a more beautiful swing, or a more graceful outfielder than Griffey. When I was younger, and cursed with being a Mariners fan, he brought a lot of joy to me as I collected his baseball cards (a hobby which has now ruined itself by becoming way too greedy, exclusive, and expensive), and generally anything that had his name on it. I still have his Fleer, Donruss, and Upperdeck rookie cards. One time my dad drove me all the way down to Seattle because Griffey was there for an autograph session at the Seattle Center, but when we got there the line was ridiculously long. I was extremely disappointed, so when my dad and I arrived back in Bellingham he bought me said Upperdeck rookie card.

My sisters might remember me running around the house like a crazed maniac when Edgar Martinez doubled Griffey home in Game 5 of the opening round of the playoffs versus the Yankees in '95--what is still the best game, and moment, in Mariners history. To see Griffey round those bases, slide hands first into home, his teammates pile on, and the huge Kingdome go absolutely wild. That was incredible.

What I also liked about Griffey was that he idolized his father. When Ken Griffey, Sr. played with him in the outfield for a few games early in Jr.'s career, you could not have witnessed a happier ball player. All smiles and very fun to watch play. As someone who also idolized his father, I really identified with that about him.

Anyway, welcome back Kid. Now I need to go out and get another #24 jersey. And there might be a reason to watch the Mariners this season.

Hot for Teaching

Ugh. Sorry for being away for so long, but there's a good reason: I'm finally writing my diss, really putting words on paper, and I'm excited about the direction it's taking. Which means every other kind of writing seems kind of superfluous right now.

But I don't want to lose the, like, three people who read this blog.

Teaching has been exhilarating lately. Despite having taught various courses and hundreds upon hundreds of students, I've never had a class of around 30, for which I get to teach literature--not freshman composition, not lit and film, just literature--twice a week for majors. What a significant difference it is to have students who want to be in class, and who actually take notes regarding things that I say.

I'm happy for the opportunity to teach every term, mostly because it helps pay for school. I've been in graduate school since 2004 and I do not owe a dime for it--and that's because I've been able to teach. The problem is they usually stick me in Freshman Composition. It's assumed that because we study literature, that we automatically know how to teach writing. Now I probably know better than many grad students in other fields, but I do not consider myself an expert in teaching writing--it is truly a field unto itself. Literary criticism is an entirely different animal than teaching basic composition to students who can hardly write a sentence.

And so in my composition courses I rarely assign literature because what I hate even more is teaching people who don't give a crap about it. Which is why this term has been so great. I literally run out of time every single class, because I have so much to say and so little time to say it. I have to curb the urge to simply lecture the entire time, because it's such an intoxicating feeling. It's in front of a class like this that I realize how much I've learned--how many different ways I can take a lecture depending upon what associations I happen to be making that day with the material we cover. I'm usually quite fluid with my words, but I'm working on overcoming what I think is a monotonous tone when I lecture--and my low voice doesn't help. I like to pace, because it helps me think, but sometimes it prevents me from making eye-contact with students, which I'm also working on.

So far, the students have liked Dickinson the best, and for very good reason. What an amazing poet she is.

43 is the loneliest number

I started this blog as a way to vent about politics when the Democratic primary was capturing most of my attention, and I'm actually surprised I haven't written more lately on that topic. I was planning a kind of farewell to Bush post, but figured I'm not going to say anything that hasn't already been said.

I'm glad he's going back to Texas and I'll at least say this: since Bush insists upon the necessity of justifying each and every one of his actions based upon what happened on September 11th, 2001, I will use that reference point, too.

The terrorists who attacked us that day could not have had a better president for furthering their goals. Jihadists know that they're never going to defeat us militarily. They absolutely know that. What they wanted to do was attack our ideas, our self-confidence as a people and a civilization. The symbolic weight of 9/11 matches, and perhaps surpasses (at least from a historical perspective) the heartbreaking legacy and memory that the dead leave behind. This tactic was not fated to work, however; it worked because we allowed it to work.

Bush and his cronies scared us, lied to us, forced us to hunker down, and made the Constitution into a negotiable document, all in the name of protecting us from terrorists. Illegal wiretaps, the promotion of torture, unchecked executive power--these are all developments that Bush thrust in our faces as if we were some third world country who was beholden to a tyrant. We, as a citizenry, are certainly responsible for letting him do this, as are the myriad Democrats who fell in lock-step with Bush in each and every case of "national security" (they, too, wanted to cover their ass).

But what is supposed to set America apart is the dream of America. I am a realist about what we are as a country, despite the tendency of our collective patriotism to obscure some of our less respectable actions and traits. But what separates America is that our ideals, our vision of ourselves which always forces us to look in the mirror, which is embodied in and by our founding documents, should not be sacrificed for anything--not even our own safety. "Give me liberty, or give me death" should be taken seriously. Because without those ideals we are another Rome waiting to fall. When we sacrifice our ideals (even as we sometimes fail to live up to them), we sacrifice our collective identity.

Bush, I'm sure, did what he thought was right. But surely he was also covering his ass as he led the fight on implementing his Orwellian policies. No president wants to be responsible for the deaths of his/her citizens. And so maybe we'll just wiretap, but just a little bit; or, we'll only torture the really bad guys. When exceptions are made, the rule falls apart. And many things have fallen apart in the last eight years.

I could go on but I'm in a celebratory mood today, and ready to move on.

2 million in Washington! Wow!

Stream-feed: 11:56 p.m.

I'll be passing out syllabi tomorrow, and I'm kind of nervous since I've never really taught an actual literature course before. There was English 300, lit & film, but that was four weeks during summer, and we mostly watched movies. There was that 400-level post-Joyce Irish lit class I co-taught with another professor, but that wasn't really my class. There's the surveys I've TA-ed for and of course the myriad composition classes. But nothing like this one and it makes me anxious because being a literary critic and teaching literary criticism are two totally different things. What do I teach a sophomore or junior about literary criticism; even more importantly, what do I leave out? Where to begin? Do I start all sentimental and get all teary-eyed about how much I love words, language, and stories, and hope they pick up on my enthusiasm? Or do I go in there like a cold practitioner? I've made certain choices, I've chosen my texts, thought about the ideas, terms, theories, techniques, etc., I've learned and practiced over the years, but what is the best way to communicate these things other than just assigning readings and "discussing" the readings. It's not the little, detailed questions they'll ask me that make me anxious, but the big ones that are much more difficult to answer...why study literature? why is something good or bad? does goodness or badness even matter? what distinguishes literature from other pursuits of knowledge, truth, pleasure, love....I have answers for these questions but some of them are so tenuous. I change my mind about the answers to these questions constantly. I know that I know a lot more than they do, and I'm confident in what I know, but getting a PhD also means that yes, I have some answers, but it also means I have many more questions...more questions than my class will ask...anyway, I'm excited, at least, that I'll be able to teach the texts and authors that I love for reasons that extend beyond their capacity to receive literary analysis...I always appreciated enthusiastic teachers--ones whose lectures were living evidence of an extended love affair with what they study. I'm not exactly ebullient in front of a class, but I'm pretty fluid and sometimes I surprise myself when I utter a phrase and I'm not sure where it came from. Lecturing helps me to realize how much I've learned....but I also hope to engage with students more than I usually do this term. That will be easier given the fact that I want to be teaching the course, and am not being forced to teach the course..........Took care of Ada today. She began the day next to me in bed and played with my eyebrows with her index finger. She played, ate, swung in her...swinging chair? (don't know what else to call it)....rocker I guess...crapped twice, fell asleep while I watched Big Love, awoke hungry, laughed at me, played some more, waited for mom to come home...a pretty typical day but wonderful for its normality--a normality I like and can live with. It's amazing how much she smiles, as if Wordsworth were right--that children are purer and closer to wisdom than adults who become corrupted in their age and more distant from the simple truths that children know. I don't believe that sh#@ but sometimes I think Ada's living in a completely different realm than me and her smile is the only bridge between where I'm at and where she happens to be floating. I'm fine with that. I fully plan on communicating the standard cliche to Ada that she should stay young as long as she can because youth is full of illusions but aren't illusions so comforting, so necessary? Art is of course illusion, even the gritty kind intent on exposing our illusions, which is a kind of art whose intent is to replace one illusion with the illusion that complaining about the illusions isn't in fact an illusion, when in fact it really is. M. Arnold said, aptly, that literature is a criticism of life. I agree, but that criticism is no less an illusion than the illusions its intent upon correcting...perhaps a better illusion though...an illusion of one's own making, enjoyed consciously for its artifice...and not because one is ignorant that it's an illusion in the first place.

Back from Break; New Year's Resolutions

I'm finally back to a semblance of a routine after being in Oregon for two weeks. It was a great trip but coming home is always refreshing, and given that it's the new year, I have a list of resolutions I'll share, and what I've already done, or not done, to accomplish them.

1) Maintain a disciplined writing schedule

I have already canceled our satellite service, and we are going to pay for an extra day of baby-sitting every week so I can have more time to myself. Do you understand the magnitude of what I just wrote. I. shut. off. the. T.V. Granted, it's a little easier since football season's almost over, and most of the shows I like I can watch online anyway. But still, that's pretty big.

2) Remember family birthdays and important occasions, and send a card. Family, please hold me accountable if a significant event passes by and you have not received at least a card.

3) Lose some weight. Probably not going to happen, but always a new year's resolution classic.

4) Be a better husband. I'm a good husband but one can always be a better husband, especially if you love your wife. I've fallen short at times last year.

5) Make this a dynamic blog that people want to read. Looking back at the last six months or so, my most commented on posts relate to popular culture and politics. My least commented on: literature. I'll work on that.

Something I wrote today

Any readers of Hegel out there? Or London?

"It is not that Buck is really human, or that humans are really animals; I am not interested in drawing easy equivalences. What I am positing is that if Buck can be inserted into humanist equations, like Hegel’s, and remain a dog (or, in other words, if Buck can survive being made a metaphor for the merely human), the possibility for a literary understanding of human/animal relations becomes possible and promising; for if our goal is a different future, posthuman or not, and if that future depends upon reconceptualizing the human, without, on the one hand, falling back on nihilism (in which humans have no value, as such), or on the other, fulfilling the equally terrifying dream of an all-too-human future (in which humans are over-valued, as such), then we must begin to imagine, in our stories, and read into the ones that have already been written, the possibility that becoming human, or becoming animal, might at least avoid the inevitability of one “becoming” only at the expense of the other."

Fighting the future with mustaches

I've been waiting for mustaches to make a comeback, and I think this recent Rolling Stone cover just might help its long awaited return.



I've always been amazed at Brad Pitt's chameleonesque hair. He can go all Legends-of-the-Fall in weeks, shave it for his next film, then appear days later with George Clooney's very fashionable 1950s look.



I wonder if there's some magical Hollywood secret gel that allows celebrities to grow their hair out more quickly than the rest of the plebeian masses.

Anyway. Mustaches: why did they wander in the cultural desert for so long, collecting all kinds of sleazy connotations, like some creep in a windowless van (Michele associates mustaches with child molesters, which pretty much disqualifies me from ever growing one, even though I really really want to)?

I'm also waiting for body hair, in general, to make a comeback. Americans are obsessed with shaving everything, but I just can't keep up; what is it about body hair that so reviles us in one era, while being completely acceptable in others? I mean, Burt Reynolds used to be considered, like, a Greek God or something.



And then a mere 10 to 20 years later, this would completely repel 99% of women.

I think there must be an aesthetics of smoothness that's very active in the human brain--that makes us believe that rounded, consistent shapes are some kind of surface-manifestation of inner purity. I don't think that it's just sexual either. There's evolutionary reasons for why men are attracted to curves--they are supposedly the outer reflection of healthy reproductive capability (or so I read).

Yet, why is it that so much future-oriented design is almost inevitably sleek? For example, take the two robots from Disney's recent movie, Wall-E.



The old design is baroque, gothic, broke-down. The new design is exceedingly simple and egg-like. If you'll recall Terminator 2, the old design, occupied by Arnold Schwarzeneggar's smoothly shaved skin, is nevertheless a collection of intricate humanoid parts on the inside, while the new design is liquid metal.

In addition, if you compare the spaceships in the first three Star Wars films, they are much more complex and labyrinthine than the ships in the latest three.





My question is, why does new always equal smooth? Because in each case I actually prefer the old design, and yet I've always somewhat fetishized the new as well (hence my taste for Modernist literature). With the exception of home design, painting, and literature, in which I certainly prefer modernist straight lines and minimalist flourishes, the clunkier, more gothic-church like design of the "older" models registers more "soul", even if the object rendered is a machine.

So I think there's also something in us that rejects the aesthetic of smoothness at times, and lets us enjoy the sloppy effectiveness of the Millenium Falcon, the simple tasks completed by the squeaky but soulful Wall-E, and the human-in-waiting of the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101.

My next step must be to convince Michele that my desire to grow a mustache simply stems from my yearning to reject the onset of a featureless future that we humans can only seem to envision as a plain free of the scars, blemishes, and accretions that pock reality and erupt through the curvature of our utopias.

Think she'll buy it?

No Excuses

...for the Beavers. If you can't stop simple run plays then you don't deserve to win. It does hurt, but it's almost better that they lost big and not on some last-second field goal. It really seemed like I was watching a different team out there; the offense was fine, even though having Quizz would have given us a run game and might have changed things, just like a couple blown calls could have changed things. But it wasn't close enough for those kinds of excuses to register much validity. You don't give up 700 yards and win a game.

Plus, we've won the last two against the Ducks, so they were kind of due. It looked like the extra week to prepare really helped, given the way they picked apart our defense. And that was no coincidence. The Ducks did not want to lose to us three straight years.

So no Rose Bowl. It was a good season, though, and once again Riley's team over-performed. At the beginning of this season I thought it would be a rebuilding year. I'm just hoping that one of these years we'll be able to put it altogether and make a more dominant run for the Roses, in a year when the Pac-10 is a bit stronger.

Alas, I'll end with a philosophical question. Is there anything else in life comparable to sports, in that it matters so much (to some people at least), but over which you have no control whatsoever? It doesn't matter how hard you cheer or how much your care, what happens on the field will happen regardless of the intensity of your fanhood. I would love not to be a sports fan, but I'm beyond having the luxury of choice in that matter; it sure would save me a lot of time and heartache, especially given the fact that basically all my teams suck, and probably always will.

And I still hate the Ducks. But what fun is sports without an enemy to loathe?

I. HATE. THE. DUCKS.

My friend from the KFO (that is, Klamath Falls, Oregon for my non-Oregonian readers) came down over the weekend to watch the Beavers play the Wildcats. It was a great game, and best of all, we won on a last second field goal.

Now it's Beavers/Ducks, in Corvallis, for the Rose Bowl. I have talked a lot of smack in my lifetime to Ducks fans, and being an Oregonian, there's literally no way that if you're either a Duck or a Beaver, that you can avoid having friends and/or family in the other camp. Usually, I can still get along with them as long as we don't talk football. But this week, those people are not my friends or family: they are simply my enemy.

There are three teams I hate in sports, and which deserve nothing but scorn:

3) the Pittsburgh Steelers (for robbing the Seahawks of a Super Bowl victory)
2) the New York Yankees
1) the Oregon Ducks

I hate the Ducks uniforms and their faux-trendiness, I hate the fact that they think they're god's gift to college football, despite having accomplished very little, I hate the fact that they're not the Beavers. I hate their yuppie fans, and their wannabe yuppie fans.

I. HATE. THE. DUCKS.

Have fun in the Las Vegas Bowl, you pieces of crap.

A few short film reviews

A few films old and new that I've seen recently.

The Candidate (1972)
(I had my class watch this one). Worth seeing for how little politics has changed, if in fact the film's portrayal of campaigning is accurate. And Robert Redford must be Brad Pitt's father. Like George Costanza, I have a staunch record of heterosexuality, but he is a good looking man.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Capra's best? A film that is great for more than it's idealism--it's very well told, and the acting is thoroughly professional.

Transamerica (2005)
Surprisingly good. Felicity Huffman's Best Actress nod is well deserved.

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)
Natalie Portman. Check. Scarlett Johannson. Check. Then why was this possibly the worst movie ever made? Previews that promised a sexy historical drama, and delivered on none of its promises. Any director who could take these two women, who are thoroughly capable of very solid acting, on top of their uniquely seductive qualities, and create such utterly bland, sexless characters (despite the fact that this story is essentially about sex), needs to find a new job.

Redacted (2008)
Brian de Palma's humble, yet very effective story, based on real events, of a group of American soldiers in Iraq who revenge a buddy being killed in a roadside bomb by arbitrarily raping a young Iraqi girl and killing her family. The film does not pretend to make this a metaphor for the entire war, which is why other Iraq War films have failed to attract much attention (they're ambitious without delivering on their ambition, or offer far too simple answers). This one sets out to tell a very limited story, and its humility ends up being very powerful. The two soldiers who commit the crime are vile, but there are other soldiers in the film, who, while they do not prevent the crime from happening, are haunted by their complicity. Their regret becomes the metaphor through which this film is capable of making larger arguments about the war.

Ed Wood (1994)
Pretty much the kind of fun weirdness one expects from Tim Burton. And Johnny Depp is the best actor in Hollywood. Period.

An American Crime (2007)
Very disturbing and very good. Katherine Keener and a pre-Juno Ellen Page. Another film based on true events. A type of modern day Scarlet Letter, in which a young girl becomes the neighborhood scapegoat, locked in a basement, and tortured by her siblings, neighborhood kids, and her adopted mother, until she dies. Fun for the whole family!

Still waiting to see Oliver Stone's W.

New Day, New Design

I'm feeling a bit more chipper than usual, so I've decided to replace the rather gloomy picture of me taken on a small coastal Maine island, and replaced it with another at the Grand Canyon. There is some continuity, in that I'm gazing outward, which I wanted to preserve. It's brighter, and I've lightened the gray of my page background color so the text is a bit more readable.

Tuesday

The closest thing I've experienced to last Tuesday was when the Beavers played the Ducks in 2001. I was writing for the OSU student newspaper, The Daily Barometer, and had been covering the football team all year. One of the biggest thrills of my life is covering that team--the best team OSU has ever put on the football field--and watching them go nearly undefeated and beat Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl. The Ducks, however, were very good that year. It was Joey Harrington's junior year, and they'd go on to win the Fiesta Bowl the following season. But they had a chance to knock us out of a BCS game that year, and I was very nervous even though I knew we had the superior team. It was a bright, cold day, and I recall walking over, through campus, with my fellow sports writers and absorbing the excitement as fans, alumni, and students swarmed campus, barbecued, tailgated, played touch football, and heckled Ducks fans.

The excitement was tangible that day. As Beavers fans, this was a benighted group who had endured many years of futility, but who also knew, I think, that their team was going to win--not only that, but we were going to beat the Ducks. We finally did, but my heart was in my throat the entire game, and I wasn't allowed to release any of my emotions because I had to sit in the press box the entire game. By the time I had written my story after the game, it was late and I walked home through that beautiful campus, and my roommates and I celebrated.

It wasn't a crazy celebration like I thought it would be, though. We mostly just sat there with smiles and drank some beers. It was one of the best days of my life.

Tuesday was eerily similar. I've known with quite a bit of certainty that Obama was going to win (I also predicted the relatively early call, which meant landslide). One thing the primary campaign taught me was that poll numbers, taken as a whole, are a very good indication of trends, and the poll numbers were very clear. Nevertheless, we hadn't won yet and it was a very nervous day. I was able to reach home by about 2 p.m., and flipped between CNN and MSNBC basically until about 10 p.m. When he won Pennsylvania, Obama's prospects were good, but when he won Ohio, I knew it was over, grabbed a bottle of champagne, popped it open, and toasted myself to victory. It was sweet. For some reason the networks didn't call the race after Ohio went Obama, even though they should have because the math was literally impossible for McCain after that. So, I stuck around with Michele, Ada, and my mother-in-law until the official announcement. Watching the celebration in Chicago made me want to be there in the worst way.

One of my favorite images of the night was when NBC showed Jesse Jackson in the audience. I'm not a huge fan of his--mostly because I think he's a shameless grandstander--but to see him so obviously emotional, with tears streaming down his face, almost as if he could not believe what he was seeing, that really affected me. It affected me mostly because there's so many people out there for whom history is a memory, whereas for me it is only something I've read about in books. I'm truly happiest for people like Jackson, and others like John Lewis, who was being interviewed throughout the night, because they lived the civil rights movement, they were there when King was shot, they've experienced the heartache of discrimination and prejudice. To see them rejoice was my favorite part of the night. I don't know how anyone cannot be affected by that. No matter what you think about Obama, the fact that a black man is president is truly astonishing and worthy of at least a few moments of respect for his accomplishment, and for all the folks who paid the hefty price for that accomplishment.

I felt celebratory, and since Michele had company, she encouraged me to go down and meet some friends at Club Congress, in downtown Tucson. Actually, they were her co-workers and ex-co-workers whom I have become good friends with. I didn't want to miss Obama's acceptance speech, so I hopped in the car and rushed down to Congress after McCain's very gracious concession. I got there just in time to see a group of about a few hundred people watching Obama on the bigscreen, and listening to his voice over the loudspeaker.

The crowd assembled was truly joyous--and I immediately remembered that day in Corvallis when the spirit of goodwill and community was so strong--and I watched President Obama deliver his last speech of the campaign. I stood on a chair in the back of the crowd and looked around at people's faces. I felt proud to be there among them--the type of crowd that put Obama in office--a truly diverse crowd: all colors, all ages...a microcosm of America. I am overwhelmed with pride this week, and I wish Mr. Obama luck in what will be a challenging four, and hopefully, eight years.

Great presidents aren't made in easy times, and these are no easy times.

Finally

A boy's dream

I was reading this today and thought I'd share:

...the late entry of America into Western history meant that out national existence began at precisely the same moment as the novel itself, and that we have no prehistory (except as we attach ourselves to a larger Anglo-Saxon tradition) of Epic or Poetic Tragedy. Even our underlying national mythos is a Pop Myth and our Revolution consequently a Pop Revolution, as compared, for instance, with either the French or Russian Revolutions, which began with ideological disputes and the formulation of high-level manifestoes. Our own War of Independence, on the contrary, began not with abstract ideas at all (though later we composed idological documents to justify a fait accompli), but with a group of quite grown-up men dressing up like Indians and dumping into Boston Harbor that supreme symbol of effete European civilization, British tea. It is an event cued by a boy's dream, only later translated into the Declaration of Independence under the auspices of Thomas Jefferson, himself a small boy in love with gadgets, though he fancied himself a displaced philosophe.

This is from an old essay by Leslie Fiedler, a prominent literary critic from the 60's and 70's. His Love and Death in the American Novel is one of my favorite pieces of literary criticism, even if its approach is a bit outdated (unfortunately, literary critics often take themselves too seriously, and as a result disqualify themselves from this type of off-the-cuff, if careless, commentary--commentary I find refreshing and permissible since, after all, we are not scientists).

I offer up this excerpt on the eve of another election because it contains a humor that is always dangerous to politics. Put under this light, viewed from this perspective, the mythic image of American history recedes back into a more chaotic reality, in which countries are born on whims and chance, and not necessarily fate or providence.

Whatever happens tomorrow, may we all retain our senses of humor, the most powerful weapon we have to fight off (or point out?) the absurdity of politics, and life.

Wanna take my class?

My course description for English 380 next term:

Section 002 – Schwartz
This course will introduce you to the methods, techniques, and theories associated with analyzing and writing about literature. We’ll deal mainly with three genres: the short story, the poem, and the novel. You’ll become familiar with literary terminology, a selection of basic critical methods—including “close reading”—and we’ll occasionally touch upon the relationship between literature and its contexts, mainly the political and social milieus from which texts originate.

Requirements for the course include a midterm and final, as well as 2-4 medium-length papers and one longer paper (+/- 10 pgs). We’ll read short stories by Faulkner, Joyce, O’Connor, Wright, and Melville; poems by Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Toomer, Auden, Yeats, and Keats; and Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963)

The Freshman

This might be my last term teaching freshman composition. I just received word I'll be teaching English 380 next term, a class required for the University's English majors. I've taught lit courses before, a summer lit and film course, for example, and I've assisted in a couple larger survey courses, but I've never had the chance to teach my subject area, during the school year, to a group of majors, and design and conduct the course myself.

It's a "literary analysis" class, which is much different from teaching composition almost every term, and cringing three to four times a term when I have to sit down with a stack of 50 papers and wonder why and how some of these students got into college. Once in a while, at least, the writing is so bad that cringes turn into laughs.

I always try to remind myself, however, that these kids are 18. It's difficult for me to remember my exact mindset when I was 18 years old, but I know that the stuff I'm asking them to think and write about, are the exact same things I was not very interested in 12 years ago, either. Man I feel old writing that. I usually just hope I'm able to teach them something. Usually I think I do, but only if they want to learn something. In a class full of business and nursing majors, however, that isn't always the case.

So I'm hoping that teaching majors will at least have the advantages inherent to teaching students who actually want to be in the classroom. Which will mean they'll also have a teacher that wants to be standing in front of them.

PS. On a sidenote, my efforts at becoming more calm are working, for now at least. As anyone reading this blog knows (is anyone actually out there?), I have been pretty obsessively keeping up with the presidential campaign. That is still true, but I've decided that given Obama's poll numbers right now (which are about as good as he can hope them to be), I'm just going to relax on the political posts for awhile so that I can keep my blood pressure down. Let's hope they're mostly accurate, as they mostly were in the primary campaign. Or else, two weeks from now, I might just finally erupt. Serenity now, Sam. Serenity now.

Upcoming post:
A review of Oliver Stone's W.

The New McCarthyism

Hmm. I'm liberal. I work on a college campus = I hate America!

It's the perpetual smile that's so loathsome. She's in congress. How could anyone vote for this person?

A Tribute from the Archive