A stretch of river LX: Inaugural dispatch from the Stretch of River School of the Dismal Science

Note: My computer still needs replacing, but at least it's no longer threatening to crash on me. So, maybe we can limp along here for a while yet.

My sole formal training in economics consists of a single Intro. to Macroeconomics class that I took in college (of which about all I remember are supply/demand curves). However, as you'll see, this isn't about economics per se except in the figurative sense of an intellectual economy--in particular, the one that exists at my place of employ. Yes, wiseacres, I do teach at a community college, but we do have an intellectual economy, even if we don't talk about it in any formal way. Which is part of the point of this post.

Some context first: The combination of Kansas' state budget having an estimated $500 million shortfall for this fiscal year and the state's electorate's having put into office an especially-conservative Republican governor, former U.S. senator Sam Brownback, means that public education will see some funding cuts. My school is better-situated financially than some and so should be okay, but neither are we about to go on a hiring binge, either, despite increasing enrollments.

All of which made my ears perk up the other day when I heard my colleague's outburst from his office: "It's gotta be a grant! It's gotta be!" I wandered over and asked him what was up; he said that the college had just posted job opening notices for not one but two full-time Economics instructors. Yes: Economics. When, from a strictly utilitarian point of view, we could really use a couple more English (or Mathematics or Biology or Chemistry or even (formally-trained) Philosophy or Religion) full-timers. My colleague knows all this; hence his exclamation.

I had class to go to just then, so I couldn't linger. The next day, though, I asked him if he'd found out any more about these mysterious positions; he said No but that he would right then. So, we go to the college's job openings list on the website, and here's what we found, excluding the less-exciting stuff like, you know, salary and such:

Economics Instructor (2 positions)

Full-time

Full-time Economics Instructor will be responsible to teach Economics courses. Knowledge of Austrian Economics expected and preferred. Prospective candidates must be willing to incorporate Austrian capital theory into their macroeconomic classes. Prospective candidates must be skilled in a variety of instructional techniques and technologies, with a demonstrated commitment to student engagement and learning outcomes assessment. May teach evenings and at multiple sites. Teaching experience and Master’s degree required.

(Here's a summation, and here's a detailed discussion of Austrian business-cycle theory (which incorporates capital theory).)

Now, my interest was really piqued.

Those of you who've followed this blog can probably guess that I'm not a fan of (what I understand of) the Austrian School. Not only is it not especially well-regarded as an economic theory, it meshes in distressing ways with other systems of thought (one in particular) that are either (take your pick) laughable or odious but which seem to be making inroads into mainstream conservative politics in this country. I would hope, though, that my eyebrows would raise if the position had specified the hiring of someone committed to Marxist or Chicago School economic theory or was a really big fan of Paul Krugman. It's the specificity of the call that is so odd, especially given that it's a call put out by a community college.

So here's a list of what's at issue for me as an instructor at a community college as regards these announced positions; as you'll see, they overlap, Venn diagram-like:

1) In all our talk as a faculty about assessment and incorporating technology into our teaching and the transferability of courses to in-state 4-year schools (a whole other blog post, I assure you) and all the rest, in my 11 years at my college we have never had a formal, faculty-wide discussion about our sense of ourselves (and I'm including our students here, too) as an intellectual community. Do these new positions signal that we now have such a vision, and will future hires reflect it? Or, will they lead to formal discussions of a vision?

2) If these positions are part of achieving a long-term goal of developing our faculty's intellectual diversity, I'm all for that. As the Wikipedia entry makes clear, the Austrian School has some powerful advocates even if most mainstream economists find their theories suspect; students need to know about these theories (the better to be able to discredit them, I would hope). But that does lead one to wonder whether, as my colleague fantasized, our next hire in Economics will be a Marxist--that is, given that as of right now we offer two courses in Economics, Principles of Microeconomics and Principles of Macroeconomics, how will achieving this intellectual diversity mesh with the larger goals of what are, after all, introductory-level courses?

3) If the answers to my questions are something along the lines of, "The Austrian School bit was just a string attached to some money we're after; no need to be concerned," well, that to my mind begs the question of why I or my colleagues wouldn't or shouldn't be concerned about our particular version of inculcating in our students some sense of what it's like to be engaged in intellectual work. Perhaps the fact that, as I mentioned before, we've not had that sort of discussion as a faculty indirectly answers that question. I would hope not, though; to say that that lack of discussion is its own answer reflects poorly on both our administration and our faculty.

4) Aaaand, I think I'd better stop here for now. As I have stated many times before on this blog, I have deep admiration and respect for my administrators and fellow faculty. To pursue things further here would be purely speculative and potentially unfair to them. But I'll conclude by saying this: I understand and accept and enjoy being part of the roles that community colleges play relative to 4-year schools and the regional economy. Speaking for myself, though, there's a danger in letting our vision of ourselves be determined too much by others (as embodied, for example, by the "student as customer" model of education) and not enough by our sense (not the state's, not would-be donors') of what it means to be educators and how best to model that for our students, no matter their particular ambitions. Part of that would seem to be not being beholden to any one particular ideology--not our own, and especially not that of someone outside the college.

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"The Most Curious Thing"

Before I forget (again), I want to make sure you know about Errol Morris's collaborative meditation with his readers (not sure what else to call it) on the meaning of a photograph taken at Abu Ghraib--a photograph which, he says, "aided and abetted a terrible miscarriage of justice." After reading the piece, I frankly don't know what to make either of that claim or, for that matter, of what the photograph does show--which is, surely, at least part of Morris' larger point. There is the photograph, which contains its particular information; and there is the photograph's context, which also supplies information, helping us "read" it--indeed, in many cases with photographs, it's that outside context that allows us to say anything about it other than the merely descriptive. But Morris has also supplied another context: the thoughts of the very subject smiling at the viewer, who has lots to say not only about her image but also her motive for having the picture taken.

For me, Morris' piece is about as fine an example of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in action as one is likely to find, something I'd ordinarily find intellectually cool and remain emotionally cool to; given the photograph's context, though, it's both emotionally and intellectually unsettling, for all sorts of reasons.

What, after all, is involved in the act of making meaning out of what we see? What is/are the effect(s) of "considering all sides" on the making of meaning?

To be read slowly, over a cup of coffee, and pondered long after.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily)

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A meme spreads

Dear reader(s), meet Liberty Fillmore, Cart-Whisperer:



If you need or want some context, go here--or, if that's not enough, here. I can't resist one quick comment, though: it's indeed a testimony (positive or negative, I'll let you decide) to the co-optative powers of the free market that the image of the abandoned shopping cart, which can be read as a commentary on the excesses of consumerist culture, itself becomes a means by which consumerist culture perpetuates itself. The cart is too-empty a vessel?

And, yes, you smart people out there, I know that by linking to it I'm participating in the very thing about which I feel more than a little ambivalence. All I can say to that is, short of finding a nice cave in Montana and taking with me a couple years' worth of tuna fish (not forgetting the can-opener) and an Uzi or two, at times the box is so large that one can't think outside it--and that that, too, is our collective doing.

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"Collage Students," Part V: Two models, and a solicitation

(Those interested can find links to all the previous "collage student" posts here.)

First things first: I am duty-bound to make note of the contributors whose own posts and their ideas served to spark and then spur on this series of posts: Randall (and the EMBLOS), with an assist from Walter J. Ong; Winston; a collective thanks to the good people of Clusterflock (in particular Daryl Scroggins and Sheila Ryan), where earlier posts in this series found homes and excellent comments; Conrad, whose post provides a model for what I'm after; Hank, whose post provides the attitude for what I'm after; Raminagrobis, whose oh-by-the-way mention of the meaning of a-leitheia is the reason behind what I'm after; and, finally, an interview with Brian Eno, the source of the term "curator" below.

The orchestra has begun playing, so I'd better get on with things:

Here's what I'm toying with as a priori assumptions regarding the sorts of students I see today and which I'll be using as a guide for shaping class discussions and assignments in my Comp I classes this spring:

1) My students--we all--are "collage students": that is, we are assemblages of experiences and knowledge, some of it commonly held, some not, the commonly-held things not understood or thought of in the same way from person to person to person.

2) We can divide "collage students"--specifically, their relationship to the things they know--into two basic types:

a) "collectors": the subject is meaningful to the student at a personal level, but that interest, for whatever reason, doesn't extend beyond the personal. That is, the student feels no compunction (or, perhaps, lacks the ability, or just flat hasn't tried) to explain its meaning to someone else. This student, if asked why s/he likes or is interested in something, is likely to say little more than, "I just do/am."
b) "curators": the subject interests the student at both a personal and an intellectual level. The latter means that the student is able to speak about the subject in such a way that s/he can convey to an audience why the subject should matter to others. This is the realm of comparison, the establishing of context, analysis, synthesis, etc.

3) The goal, I hope would be obvious to them, is for them to begin to think like "curators." I want them to think about that goal in relation to two things:

a)the definition of Truth as a-leitheia: "the absence of forgetting," along with Heidegger's further gloss on that word as "the uncovering of that which is hidden."
b) Neil Postman's distinction between "news" and "information" and how the finding and hanging onto of Truth--"the uncovering of that which is hidden"--these days has become both harder to do and never more important to do.

Okay: Those are the pedagogical assumptions and my first-day mapping out of those assumptions. Below the fold comes the solicitation.

Psst . . . c'mere, buddy . . .

Given all the above, do any ideas for writing assignments suggest themselves to you? I have some, of course; and, this week being my college's Faculty Development Week, I have occasion to ask my colleagues about all this as well, but I'd like to cast the net as widely as possible. The one framing requirement I have to keep in mind is that we have six writing assignments, five of which employ some of the rhetorical modes (example or definition, narrative or process, division/classification, cause/effect, compare-contrast) and the last must be persuasive. I've toyed with the idea of asking them to choose one "subject" (just about as broadly defined as possible)--something they are passionate about and think others wouldn't care about but should--and make it the focus, or at least the starting point, as the spirit moves them, of the various assignments. My fear is that students might find that limiting, but if I make it clear that they choose something that they are truly and deeply passionate about, my hope is that they will, with a bit (or a lot) of thought they should find plenty of things to say, and ways to write, about their subject.

The idea of audience will be especially crucial this semester, too: curators are teachers, after all.

Oh, yeah: if you think all this is just nuts, please say so, because I need to hear that, too. But please tell me why it's nut I will just say preemptively that what they'll be doing in this class--to not just regurgitate information but really think about getting at why this matters to them and should matter to someone else--will be by far the most challenging thing I've asked any freshman comp class to do. I've tried to design assignments before that (I thought) would yield papers of the sort that I want these to do this spring, but to no avail. Thinking about things in this way, though, just might do the trick. The other preemptive remark: I know my students are in a community college. All the more reason to push them.

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks in advance for whatever thoughts you care to share.

Technorati tags:
Pedagogy, Education, Teaching, Writing, Knowledge, Culture

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On the difficult nature of compassion; listening to Tori Amos in Arkansas

Back again from having been out of town visiting my children.  They are well, thank you for asking.  My younger daughter, mishearing a familiar heraldic term, asked if my family has "a coat full of arms."  I told her that it would be a bit disconcerting if we had one of those.  I also walked the difficult tightrope, with my older daughter, of on the one hand affirming her intelligence and on the other affirming her teacher's need to teach everyone in the classroom, which sometimes means that she (my daughter) will occasionally not see the need to be taught (much less be tested over) certain things.  A tricky tightrope to walk with a 3rd grader.  We went to the beach; to cool down, we saw Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure at the local IMAX.  We played Monopoly; we rented and saw the remake of Cheaper by the Dozen.  We hung out.  It was a good week.
I cannot improve by way of commentary on this piece by Leon Wiseltier in The New Republic on the metaphysics (if that term is appropriate for an emotion) of compassion.  I found especially significant the suggestion, sometimes forgotten, that the Holocaust is a horror not because it happened to any group of people in particular but because it happened at all.  Sure, that's an obvious thing to say; but it's a measure of the state of things these days that we need to be reminded that compassion isn't--or shouldn't be--conditional or contingent upon the aptness of analogy or politicized.
One of the CDs I took with me on my trip was Tori Amos' Under the Pink.  Amos' music isn't the sort of thing I  immediately think of grabbing for road-trip listening; to my ears, it has an assumed chamber music-like quality.  That is, it takes on the air of requiring close listening.  Some might--and have--call that "pretentious" or "self-absorbed": not the usual attitudes we expect of pop music.  If we're cruising on I-40, we usually want "Highway to Hell" instead of something like "Bells for Her."  But for some reason I've had Ms. Amos on my mind of late--perhaps because DeliriumSpeaks mentioned a few posts ago that she had been listening to "Cornflake Girl" while posting one of her posts and, for reasons I'll discuss later, "Cornflake Girl" is, to my mind, one of Amos' very best songs--and a fine pop song to boot.  It had been awhile since I had listened to an album of hers all the way through, so I picked Under the Pink to take with me on my journey (in case it matters, I also have Boys for Pele and From the Choirgirl Hotel [about "She's Your Cocaine," the reviewer in Rolling Stone wrote, "Her band rocks like the hardest working bar band . . . on Saturn."]).
I have a taste for the melodic-but-experimental (and vice-versa) in music, and I also confess that I'm a sucker for technical virtuosity.  Tori Amos' work as a musician and composer of music draws me to her on both those counts.  (Sidebar: my comments here won't address her lyrics, though I don't think it would take much stretching to apply them to the words.)  But more often than not, her compositions, their structure, I find distracting in their rather eccentric hairpin shifts in instrumentation.  The first song on Under the Pink, "Pretty Good Year," is a good example of what I mean.  It begins with a very pretty solo piano figure, supported by quiet strings--the sort of arrangement that in its apparent effortlessness and elegance and beauty and purity actually makes my eyes tear up.  Then come the bridge: "Some things are melting now" and the sudden shift to the electric guitars for all of, what, 10 seconds?  Then, just as abruptly, the return to the original arrangement and mood of the beginning.  That shift has always puzzled me.  Amos knows exactly what she's doing musically, so I can't chalk it up to Not Knowing Better.  It feels more like an act of musical willfulness rather than a moment that arises organically from the piece, a compositional acting out.  It's all the more noticeable in this 3:26 song.  I like when she (or any musician) takes musical risks, but sometimes those risks just don't pay off musically--or at least one version of the Musical Payoff.
It's a kind of inattention to the craft of writing the Standard Pop Song, which, whether it's Elton John or Eminem,  establishes and maintains the musical equivalent of Edgar Allan Poe's "singular effect" for, give or take, 3 minutes.  Wait, you might be saying.  You're judging Tori Amos' music by the same standards as Justin Timberlake's?  Well, yes--but also the Beatles' . . . and, for that matter, Amos' own two singles from this album, "God" and "Cornflake Girl."  Both establish a musical ground and don't stray from it for their respective durations.  And both are "conventional" only in those senses.  In this list I would also include "The Waitress," Amos' version of a Nirvana song, with its quiet verses and raved-up choruses.  It'd have made a better single than "God," but I'm guessing that its speaker's fantasy about killing her co-worker made people too uneasy for them to want to release it as a single . . . so instead they opted for a song in which the singer wonders if God might "need a woman to look after" Him.
This is not to say that unconventionally-structured songs aren't effective.  It is to say that in a 3:26 pop song there ain't a whole lot of time to give musically-willful moments a chance to breathe and establish a clearer relationship with the whole song.  By contrast, "Yes, Anastasia" works, despite its shifts in instrumentation, because of its length (9:33).  In more ways than one, it's Amos' most sustained song on the album.
All this is to say that I find Tori Amos' work on the whole to be more intriguing than successful.  She is her own woman as an artist, and I admire that.  But there are times when I listen to her that I think that she thinks her work is more about her than about the work itself, and that sort of thinking, more often than not, produces flawed art.  This is an idea that I can't do much more at this late hour than state--it seems that, like good poems, successful songs have an integrity to them that they themselves establish, and not their composers.  "Pretty Good Year" would work much better if Amos had just left well enough alone and let it finish as the aural confection that it starts out being.  "Cornflake Girl" works because she lets the song find itself; she stays out of the way and lets her beloved faeries do their stuff.

Those wishing to read the comments from the original LiveJournal post can go here.

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Our national obsession with "Our national obsession"

I am, for the moment, free of teaching responsibilities (I'll be teaching American literature and Composition II (the research paper component of the composition sequence) this summer).  I also confess that I didn't feel as though I had too much of interest to be blogging about here--there IS my unstated goal, after all, of maintaining the same consistently-high standards for my entries that I've thus far maintained (::detecting the faint whiff of sarcasm::).
Anyway: it's good to be back.
The ol' academic environment is perfect for me, I've decided: clearly defined beginnings and ends but, within those boundaries, the powerful illusion, so powerful that it borders on being reality, that I have a great deal of freedom and control.  Add to all that the fact that I truly DO take pleasure in seeing my students learn, and I can't imagine a better job for me.  I'd rather not be teaching this summer, but I don't mind it; and it will make me use my spare time more efficiently while working on the book--and return as well to working on the Concordance for House of Leaves.
Enough rhapsodizing.  Onward, now, to a curiosity I stumbled onto while checking last week to see if a student had plagiarized a paper.  It was the usual reason:  "Jeepers!  [Name of Student] sure has learned how to turn a phrase in the week since s/he last turned in a paper!"  I am usually not a suspicious soul, but this time I decided to be.  So: I picked a short sentence from this student's introduction which contained the phrase "our national obsession with thinness."  I typed it into Google, and though I decided the student hadn't plagiarized, it turned up enough to give me pause.  But so also did the OTHER "national obsessions" that turned up: security, technology, youth, celebrity . . . I don't argue whether these are indeed "obsessions" in my country--what intrigued me was the persistent characterization of my nation as being obsessed, period. 
I began to wonder, briefly, if this repeated phrase was some sort of sign that my countrymen have built in them a propensity for fixation on something.  But then I realized that, no, all nations and cultures have their various preoccupations.  One thing I learned as I read one of Seymour Hersch's New Yorker articles about the prisoner-abuse scandal in Iraq is that, because men as well as women in Moslem culture are required to keep as much of the body covered as possible, sex and the opposite sex are the subject of intense speculation--and (what a way to learn such things) the ultimate humiliation for an Arab or Moslem is to be naked in public.  Moslems are obsessed with sex because their culture denies them a culturally-sanctioned casual exploration.
Are peoples defined via their obsessions?  To a certain extent, yes, but in a negative-image sort of way.  The Renaissance-early 20th-century idealizing of plump women and frankly fat men was a response to the fact that most people simply didn't have enough to eat and/or worked so hard that they remained slim.  Now, though, both opposites are true.  We're obsessed with thinness (assuming for the moment that that is true) because so many of us are fat . . . or think we are, whether on our own terms or those established by government.  I was reading in an article this morning that said that the U.S. government says a 5'5" woman is considered "obese" if she weighs more than 145 lbs.  So, while I don't doubt that many millions of people in my country need to lose weight and get more (or even some) exercise, HOW we define what is "fat" of course will skewer those statistics.
As for our other obsessions . . . apparently we too are obsessed with sex, but in our case not because we're not getting any but because we're under the suspicion that we're not getting "enough" or that, however much we're getting, it's not "good enough."  Cosmopolitan's cover teasers (not the models but the blurbs for articles) often beguile with promises to reveal "56 Secret Desires Your Man Has" or "93 Ways to Seduce Him."  The men's magazines are no different; their promises are just stated more directly.  But the important thing here is the numbers: "Wow!" the held-captive-at-the-checkout-line-magazine-rack-gazer muses.  "So many desires!  So many ways!  Who knew?"
Security is a far trickier issue, because calming our obsession in that arena will undoubtedly infringe on the indulgence of another obsession, this one constitutionally-sanctioned.  Since the events of September 11, 2001, my nation rightly feels warier than before (though surely we realized, given such acts as Timothy McVeigh's blowing up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, that we've always been vulnerable to such attacks.  We Americans can be awfully complacent.).  Greater security at airports, we clamor for.  Okay.  But now we complain about random searches and about removing our shoes.  Arab-Americans rightly complain about being singled out for more than usual scrutiny.  And looser standards for obtaining wiretaps under the Patriot Act and new software that will permit the "mining of information" stored on computer hard drives have us nervous as well, as do, more ominously, our government's unilateral declarations that the prison at Guantanamo Bay falls under, essentially, no one's jurisdiction except the Executive Branch's.  Civil liberties are a big deal here, so big that the current administration's audacity (as many see it) in infringing on them takes us aback.  We've been a bit complacent in that arena as well.  But I hope that our civil liberties are one obsession that our recent agonizing over prisoner photos will cause us to examine more closely as a nation, to discuss seriously what simple but blurry terms like "liberty" mean and the extent to which they signify for non-Americans in our custody.
 
Those wishing to read the comments for the original LiveJournal post can go here.

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A rambling discourse on discourse; or: Free-floating signifiers, indeed

Today I kept bumping into situations and texts that brought home to me yet again, as if, in my profession, I needed further reminding of it, that language is a slippery fish . . . and that, if some are correct in their thinking, it will only become more so.
First up today was the Sears auto repair shop.  I had learned, to my considerable joy and relief, that Sears could do the remaining work my car required.  This pleased me because I actually have a little credit remaining with them.  So, I arrived there and began to tell them what I had been told at Pep Boys regarding what my car needed.  When I mentioned that it needed "a CV . . . something or other," it suddenly occurred to me that not only had I forgotten the full name for the part (it's a CV half-shaft, by the way), I had no idea what exactly it was that I was talking about--that is, what its function was.  Yet at Pep Boys the fellow told me that I needed a new one "before your wheels fall off."  That, of course, I understand; and that simply made my ignorance of this piece even more painful and embarrassing to bear.  After all: it's not as though this piece was merely some piece of automobile esoterica; it was vital not just to the functioning but also the saftey of my car, and yet I hadn't the foggiest notion of its existence, let alone its job.  At first I thought, rather simply, that this was yet another instance of what happens when any of us wanders into an area of knowledge that has its own language and we're not familiar with it.  But whereas in those other instances my ignorance doesn't unnerve me, in this case it did, profoundly so.  I felt disconneceted from a part of the world that both was and was not connected with mine, one that I should know more about and yet did not.  The automobile is ubiquitous; we here in this nation have relandscaped open spaces and (re)built whole cities to accommodate it.  It's so ubiquitous that we don't even SEE it any more--it no longer registers on our conscience how it has utterly altered the world's topography and, now, climate.  Yet here I was, about to pay $500 to have a part of my car replaced that I hadn't even known existed before Sunday and yet was vital to its operation.  Without knowing it, I got a small intimation of that state I would be reading about later in the introduction to Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition.
CV, I came to learn when the part arrived, stands for "constant velocity."  The CV shafts transfer the power generated by the pistons to the front wheels of the car to push them forward when one steps on the gas pedal.  Once the mechanic explained that, I instantly understood why I'd hear a very loud clicking noise only when I would accelerate.  No more clicking noise now, except in my little brain when I was able to explain the noise my car had been making.  Education is expensive.  I don't know if the lesson I learned has a value equivalent to the $500 I paid; but given the alternative (a car with its wheels falling off while I'm driving it), an ounce of prevention . . .
While I was waiting for my car to be fixed, I read some more in Bhabha's The Location of Culture.  As I noted in my entry about this book, Bhabha continues to say everything I want to argue about the New World as a miscegenated culture, except that he (still) has so far said nothing about miscegenation.  I've not gotten to it yet, but he has a chapter on the New World, so we'll see if he addresses it there.  At any rate, in what I read for today he discusses a small portion of Arendt's The Human Condition.  Arendt is one of those thinkers whose work I bump into with some regularity via other people's work but otherwise know little about.  But of what I HAVE read, I'm always impressed by her levelheadedness, her way of making things sound obvious and profound at the same time.  So today, I decided to go to my favorite Barnes & Noble in town (we actually have two on my side of town) to look for her book and at least read the introduction.  But of course, when I got there, I browsed and found some other things to look at and, in the meantime, forgot all about Arendt.  For the time being, at least. 
At any rate, one of the things I found was a book of art criticism in the John Berger vein by Rebecca Solnit called As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art.  I read her essay called "Noah's Alphabet," which consists of musings triggered by a visit to Dublin's museum of natural history.  The visit caused two central responses in her: 1) her appreciation for the animals' forms, which, curiously, she said she could appreciate more in their stuffed, posed states better than she could when the animals are alive (she said that in zoos she hopes to glimpse wildness but is usually disappointed; in the museum, she has no such expectation and so can concentrate on the animals' shapes); 2) (the more sustained and richer of her responses) the museum's displays of animals which were once native to Ireland but no longer exist in the wild causes her to meditate on the fact that the earth is fast losing its wild animals and that even its domesticated animals are no longer as easily seen in rural areas as they once were but are now raised in what we might as well call factories.  She thinks back on bestiaries and how, while we have vestiges of such books in children's ABC books ("aardvark to zebra"), animals are fast losing their privileged place in our cultural conscience as a source of metaphor--in other words, as sparks for the imagination.  My image of language as being a slippery fish, for example, would not help us visualize a certain quality of language if we were no longer familiar with the actual feel of fish.  The results are not just a further impoverishment of our languages' resources but also a further psychic detachment of humans from the very world that nurtures us--what Fredric Jameson describes as "modernism" (postmodernism is/will be that state in which there is no nature--that is, that nature will be of no consequence in our daily living).  The scene Solnit closes with drives this last point home most effectively: she describes a display at one end of a long hall consisting of skeletons of an orangutan, a chimpanzee, a baboon and a human.  The ape skeletons are standing but hunched over, supported by rods as though they were invertebrates; the human skeleton, though, stands ramrod-straight--or hangs, rather, because it is actually suspended from the ceiling by a golden chain that penetrates its skull.  A visual argument against evolutionary theory, at the very least; one could go further, Solnit says, and imagine that that chain links humans to God, keeping us from being grounded on the earth.
Something in that essay, for some reason, reminded me that I had wanted to look at The Human Condition, so I went off to find it.  I turned to Arendt's Prologue, and there I find writing that, though written in the late 1950s, may be even more apropos of our own time--and it seemed especially pointed in my direction today.  She says she started the inquiry that led to this book by attempting to answer a simple question: "What are we doing?"  Her occasion for asking it is the Russians' launching of Sputnik: the first sending out of a manmade object into space and thus, for her, the first concrete sign of technology's ultimate, unspoken purpose--to help us to quite literally escape the earth and its claims on us.  Because technology intervenes between us and nature, we paradoxically find it hard to talk about technology's effects even though it is of us, and this poses a danger to us as social animals: "Whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about."  Yes indeed.  Language helps us make sense: we convey and create meaning through language that we can then transfer to another conscience; and because technology separates us not just from Nature but from each other, language--and thus our attempts to think about the implications of technology--will suffer.
So also suffers our notion of work.  The other blessing/curse of technology is that it is designed to reduce or eliminate the need for human labor.  Arendt must have known, having written one of the definitive studies of totalitarianism, how the following argument would sound to certain ears; nevertheless, she indeed does raise a vital question by implication:
It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. . . . What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them.  Surely, nothing could be worse.
She is right in the sense that we've created a leisure class (or, a class with more leisure than it's ever had before) whose members have no sense of what could/should be done with that leisure: "Here we are now/Entertain us."  And the computer now causes many people to believe they are now freed from having to perform even the labor of thinking.  People don't calculate; machines do--that's the most benign example of what I mean.  But each semester I must remind my students that spell-checks only confirm the correctness of a word, not its rightness.  Imagine, then, their imprecision with language generally, impeding comprehension.  I have had two students this semester who, in different ways, held ME accountable because I was not able to convey to them that the words on their page didn't say what they were telling me they intended to say.  Yet such students are in college with the goal of avoiding "labor."  Be sure not to ask them to perform much while in school.
Rambling, indeed.
This was Book Talk, two days early.  Tomorrow: some notes on Joe Henry's album, Tiny Voices.

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The Location of Culture, by Homi Bhabha

First of all, something of an explanation:Ever since earning my PhD in 1994, it's been something of a dream of mine to turn the dissertation into a book.  Well, that has been a dream deferred . . . and deferred some more.  But I ain't getting any younger, and the topic (readings of various fictional and historical narratives of miscegenation (racial intermixing) from throughout the Americas that lead me to argue that miscegenation can be read as a trope of New World culture), amazingly, still seems viable after all this time.  So: yesterday I was watching I Capture the Castle (Larry had thought that since the father of the family was a novelist, I might be able to relate to him), and I'm confronted by a man who was once considered to be a literary genius but hadn't written a word in the previous 12 years, and I thought, Gee, THANKS, Larry, for thinking I could relate to this fellow.  Sorry, but I don't wanna.  So then, I cracked open good ol'Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture today; and (lucky y'all), I've decided that in order to stay on task AND keep the Sunday Book thing going, I'll write about the things I'm reading as I catch up with the novels and criticism and theory I'll need to flesh out a decent manuscript.
Coincidentally, Bhabha's book was published the very year I was defending my diss.; a couple of years after I finished, I read its introduction and wailed, "Why couldn't I have KNOWN about this before?"  The intro. would have been so nice to have around to argue against in MY intro.
Somewhat as raminagrobis does in his maiden entry on boredom, in the intro of my diss. I confess to be awfully disdainful of postcolonial theory without, um, having read a good deal of it.  My justification was pretty simple: at least as applied to the Americas, what little I had read seemed barely, if at all, to adequately describe that experience.  I suspect that much of that is because that theory arises out of a specifically British experience of colonization and empire, one in which the British and their subjects did not meld and merge into a new culture.  Such was, of course, not the case in the Americas, specifically in Latin America, though one can (and I would and will) argue that in the U.S., specifically in the South and Southwest, that melding and merging, though not racial, certainly has occurred culturally.  Miscegenation just doesn't get confronted in Spivak or Bhabha--nor, very interestingly, among postcolonialists in this hemisphere, some of whom are mestizos themselves.  If it IS discussed, it is done so either disdainfully as a thinly-disguised white man's assimilationist fantasy or as a still-painful legacy of the plantation and the Conquista.  I do not deny that history nor in any way see my project as mitigating it.  But it remains true that, running parallel to that history of rape runs another one, a matter of historical as well as literary record, in which people of different races meet and fall in love and, despite extraordinary pressure from within as well as without, attempt to have genuine, meaningful relationships with each other.  This sort of thing happened often enough in slave-holding states in my country that not only were laws passed forbidding, for example, white women to take black husbands, legislatures kept increasing the punishments for violations of those laws.  Of course, in Catholic colonies, men were encouraged to intermarry as a way of bringing new souls to the Church.  There's a bad joke in here about disseminating the gospels . . .
So, then, here's the central argument that I make (and I haven't forgotten the teaser about Bhabha's intro): that to those outside it, the space of consensual miscegenation is akin to what Foucault, in the introduction to The Order of Things, calls a heterotopia: a space that exists beyond our ability even to describe it.  It is unknowable because it exists outside (our) language: language can't account for the unimaginable, for things that aren't "supposed" to happen.  I make the further argument that the imagined space known by the oxymoronic term "New World" (as opposed to the historical space of the Americas) is also a heterotopia: neither was the emergence of a new culture distinct from European, African and indigenous cultures "supposed" to occur.
Bhabha, as nearly as I can tell, talks about the contacts between cultures as though they were oil and water.  The "other" (read: indigenous/colonized/enslaved) culture produces various linguistic defenses so as to protect itself against destruction or assimilation (which would amount to the same thing), but each remains unaffected by the other.  Weird, to these New World ears.  The other difficulty is this, at least from my perspective: the culture of the New World needs an etiology, a myth of origins.  But it's at a distinct disadvantage in that New World culture's origins occurred in historical time--Friday, October 12, 1492, to be exact.  And no matter, in any event, to the postcolonial theorist, according to Bhabha:
What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need  to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences.  These 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood--singular or communal--that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining society itself. (1-2)
This is so very close to what I want to do in my project, but it ain't it.  To my mind, it's precisely in "those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference" that we find the New World's "narratives of original and initial subjectivities."  So far, so good--except that Bhabha argues that we "need to think beyond" just such narratives.  No wonder, then, that at least in this version of the postcolonial theorist's task, the New World is Other.
I need to wrap this up for now, but I will say that I'm presently in the midst of reading Bhabha's chapter entitled "The Postcolonial and the Postmodern"; he's just talked at some length about a passage from Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text that seems to be yet another way of describing heterotopic language--something that I examine at length in my discussions of the novels and stories I've read.  But "miscegenation" appears nowhere in The Location of Culture; though it's always nice to mix it up with preeminent scholars, it nevertheless seems a huge flaw in classic postcolonial theory to propose a model that cannot accomodate the collective experience of almost a billion people.
More later this week.

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The Poetics of Space and Easter

In trying to establish, finally, my long-since-announced pattern of Friday Music, Saturday Film, and Sunday Book entries, I've decided to right the ship with this entry.  I hope it won't turn too weird.
I am slowly working my way through Gaston Bachelard's 1958 book, The Poetics of Space.  The slowness is due in part to my workload and in part to the fact that, though Bachelard is by no means the most difficult reading there is, his ideas are of the sort that require a slow mental digestion.  Consider the task he has set for himself: how we experience space--specifically, the spaces in houses and other structures, such as birds' nests and animals' shells.  Note: NOT the objects themselves, but the spaces formed by them.  This is often the subject of poetry and narrative, he argues; thus "Poetics" as opposed to, say, "Phenomenology," which he says his work is.  So, then, a fusion of phenomenology and poetics, as we see in these passages from the Introduction:
Only phenomenology--that is to say, consideration of the onset of the image in an individual consciousness--can help us to restore the subjectivity of images and to measure their fullness, their strength and their transsubjectivity. [Yet t]hese subjectivities and transsubjectivities cannot be determined once and for all, for the poetic image is essentially variational, and not, as in the case of the concept, constitutive. . . . For a reader of poems, therefore, an appeal to a doctrine that bears the frequently misunderstood name of phenomenology risks falling on deaf ears.  And yet . . . the reader of poems is asked to consider an image not as an object and even less as the substitute for an object, but to sieze its specific reality. . . . In this domain of the creation of the poetic image by the poet, phenomenology, if one dare to say so, is a microscopic phenomenology.  As a result, this phenomenology will probably be strictly elementary. . . . To specify exactly what a phenomenology of the image can be, to specify that the image comes before thought, we should have to say that poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul.  We should then have to collect documentation on the subject of the dreaming consciousness.  (xix-xx)
And off we follow Bachelard as he takes us into cellars, attics, corners, trunks, making us SEE these very familiar spaces as though we'd never really seen them before--and, of course, we haven't: they are spaces, after all.  They can only be experienced.
Which brings me to the Tomb, whose void we celebrate at Easter.  A former pastor of mine, in one of his Easter sermons, said that Easter is God's "Boo!", His big surprise.  But what shocks us is not Jesus' body, but its absence.  It is the space of the empty tomb that shocks, what is NOT there, that sets the mind to contemplating, Bachelard-like, this image that transcends language.  Jesus was delivered from death into life--and at no time other than Easter do we see and hear more clearly (and ironically) the pun in the phrase "from womb to tomb."  Jesus' tomb becomes the womb out of which not only He but all who believe in Him are born without a fear of death's power.
Back to Bachelard now: what is most impressive about his writing is his patient reading and obvious love of the poetry and narratives he's chosen.  He knows just how hard to push something; he doesn't overreach.  His tone is so modest, yet that modesty often leads his reader peering over the edge into a chasm of realization and catching his/her breath as s/he grasps the full significance of Bachelard's thought.  Or perhaps I'm overstating things a bit due to the time when I first started reading this book: I had just recently started reading House of Leaves, and it was quickly evident to me that Danielewski was more than a little indebted to Bachelard's work in terms of some of the themes he plays with in his novel.  For those interested in the intersection(s) between HoL and The Poetics of Space, have a look at this thread from the HoL forum:
this thread from the HoL forum. You might also find this other thread of interest as well, about the architect Peter Eisenmann.
Bachelard seems irrepressibly cheery as he discusses domestic spaces; if you read the first thread above, you'll see that I address that cheeriness and that, indeed, one way to understand how the horror works in HoL is as a sort of "what if" reading of Bachelard.  No matter, though.  Reading Bachelard is a magical experience.

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Daylight Savings Time; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; King Crimson

A rather crowded agenda for this entry . . . just making up for lost time.
Fearful Syzygy's recent entry on the Dane/Danish fellow/Dansker (which is it nowadays?) who attributes some of Denmark's fiscal rotteness to that nation's version of Daylight Savings Time inspires the first part of this blog.  As of 2 a.m. this morning, we have sprung forward here, "here" signifying most of the U.S.  Arizona opts out of Daylight Savings Time entirely; even stranger, though, is the case of Indiana, which not only is bifurcated by the Eastern and Central time zone lines but also has individual COUNTIES on BOTH sides of that line which have chosen not to spring forward or fall back.  It becomes more than a little complicated to rise with the chickens there in the Hoosier State.And that last line leads me to argue against Daylight Savings Time as well, though for a reason different than the one offered by the fellow in Denmark.  I don't know why DST was initiated there, but here it was proposed by Benjamin Franklin as a way maximizing daylight hours during the winter, when the days grow shorter, for the benefit of farmers.  With the rise of mechanization on farms (one of the simplest signs of that being tractors with headlights on them), that reason no longer applies.  No doubt someone in this country makes arguments in support of DST, but I truly can't imagine what they would be.  At least the chief argument in favor of raising speed limits on major highways to 70 mph was that some people want to drive faster than 65.  So then, at least from my myopic perspective, we keep DST around for the same reason that most school districts keep the 9-month school year: a tradition dating back to our agrarian roots.  Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.  Much can be said in support of the idea that our agrarian society, without sentimentalizing it, was in most respects a healthier society: poor diets, yes, but the labor performed on farms resulted in less obesity in the population; only the upper classes could complain of boredom--now, of course, even the poor are so media-saturated that boredom permeates all societal levels of our culture; and I do think that the sort of communal labor that gets performed in such cultures leads to the sustaining of societies whose people do give at least a small darn about the welfare of their neighbors.  But DST, even in our mostly-agrarian past, didn't nurture the strengths mentioned above.  It didn't save time, the way most machines are supposed to do; it saved daylight so that there was "more" of it for working.  It paradoxically didn't allow farmers to keep time with the rhythms of the sun and seasons but actually tied them more tightly to the workings of gears inside clocks: "Well, the clock says 6, no  matter what the sun says."Could one make an argument that DST, far from aiding farmers in their work, is actually, if not a cause, then at least symptomatic of my nation's move away from agrarianism and toward an urban society?  That and the railroads, whose invention created the need for standardized time zones in the first place?I have no proof for any of the above.  I think Thoreau would dig this, though (I've been teaching a brief excerpt from Walden in my comp classes recently).  We can't revert from urbanism, and I'm not arguing that we should.  But the fact remains, as Thoreau argues and demonstrates so eloquently, that our self-removal from participation in daily and the seasonal rhythms via the Machine has the long-term effect of emptying our lives of a simpler and more genuine meaning for our living.
Speaking of thought-provoking ideas: two weeks ago, I went to see the most recent Charlie Kaufman-written film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (starring Jim Carrey, Kate Wimslet, Kristen Durst, and Elijah Wood in a decidedly anti-Frodo role).  In an earlier entry, the Blog mentioned some favorite directors, but inexplicably left off the list was Spike Jonze's work with Kaufman: Being John Malkovic and Adaptation are really imaginative films in the fullest sense of that adjective, I think, not just for their quirkiness but also in that (and this is especially true of the first one) they at their hearts tell familiar tales but make them appear fresh: What's it like to see the world through the eyes of another person?  What if we could in some way remove ourselves from our decidedly subjective point of view and THEN, in effect, see the world as we see it, but this time from that outsider's perspective?  And, in Adaptation, just where IS that boundary between the writer and his work. It took seeing Eternal Sunshine . . . to see these matters more clearly, to see these films' quirkiness as means to their respective ends.  This is a romance, in both the movie genre AND the Hawthornian senses of that word (In his preface to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne says that in romances, the "work is not exactly put side by side with nature," thus permitting "a license with regard to every-day Probability, in view of the improved effects which [the author] is bound to produce thereby.")  Via decidedly sci-fi means--kinda like The Matrix, but this time we're inside individual minds rather than (maybe, maybe not) computers--this film examines the relationship between love and memory: what is it exactly that love is?  Is love the result of memory, or is memory the result of love?  How is love (or memory, for that matter?) preserved?  Is that solely an act of the individual who remembers his/her lover, or does it come from somewhere else, ie., outside the individual?  Once we gain our narrative sea-legs in the plot, we root for the lovers, as we're supposed to do in all movie romances; but when approached from the Hawthornian angle, the film becomes less about the particulars of the lovers' relationship and more about a metaphysics of love, a dynamic of love, that we couldn't examine, one suspects, without the literal invasion of a decidedly anti-R/romantic Machine into the plot.  I'm afraid to say much more here for two reasons: 1) The film surprises in many ways, not the least of which is the richness produced by its explorations of that metaphysics of love, and I don't want to spoil that for the potential viewer; 2) If I keep talking about this intellectually and visually magical film, I'll never get to King Crimson in Arkansas today.  Perhaps I can continue that discussion, though, with those who see fit to comment on this entry.
The drive from Wichita to where my children live is 14 hours, so I take along a selection of CDs to listen to.  I try for a variety of things; my selections for the spring break trip were: the Branford Marsalis Quartet, Romare Bearden Revealed; Led Zeppelin, Presence; King Crimson, THRAK; The Rough Guide to Samba; Lizz Wright, Salt; and Yes, The Yes Album.  Oddly, I want to talk about THRAK because it disappointed me.  I like very much early Crimson--the debut album and Red especially stand out, I think--and one of my favorite albums, period, is Discipline.  All these albums have an elegance to them: an emphasis on melody and precision.  Discipline in particular works because of its impossibly tight rhythm section of Tony Levin (bass) and Bill Bruford ("batterie").  More recent Crimson, though, is different.  From this period I have THRAK and The ConstruKction of Light, and each of these albums explores the possibilities of imposing noise over simpler song constructions (and I'm certain there's a better way to say this).  As a comparison: maybe an artier Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr.?  I don't mind noise, but what I found myself noticing on THRAK was a lack of melodic variety and, despite a couple of "quiet" songs, an emphasis on heaviness.  It became tedious, wearying to listen to: not the sort of thing one wants one's music to be when driving through the flatlands of the Mississippi alluvial plain.  As for lyrics, one of the refreshing things about Discipline is the wit of Adrian Belew's lyrics--after all this time, they still make my brain smile.  But in THRAK, the words sound forced or tired.  I suppose, then, that it disappoints because it's not the Crimson that I prefer; one could say that it's unfair not to permit a band that's been around for so long the license to experiment with its sound . . . would that Yes would do a bit more of that in its newer work even as it settles into the stage persona of prog-rock oldies band.  But it IS fair for fans not to especially approve of the results of those experiments.I like better The ConstruKction of Light; as its title suggests, to these ears, at least, there's a return to an intricate melodicism underlying the heaviness--you can see why they toured with Tool for about a month a couple of years ago.
Susan and I continue our discussion of Flemish/Dutch painting; more talk of that will be forthcoming.

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