more things

. . . part of the ongoing series

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

98. Blue pencils and green pens. I just love 'em. I made a deliberate choice a few years ago not to use red ink to mark or write comments on student papers. My sense was that red ink suggests a great deal of negativity, not to say bleeding from a newly-forged orifice, whereas blue pencil (the traditional mark of copy editors) suggests revisability and green ink hints of spring and growth.

97. New sets of John Pearse light guage phosphor bronze guitar strings (for a 12-string). I just love 'em. My friend Bobo the Wandering Pallbearer plays D'Addario phosphor bronze extra-lights, and I certainly see the reason why one would play them. I ordered the John Pearses as an experiment, and found the trebles smoother and the overall playability just a smidgen lighter, even in the slightly heavier weight string.

top 100 thingies

Having read Joe. My. God.'s post about the Time magazine top 100 albums list, I of course followed his link to the list, to be confused/bemused/disgusted/entertained. (I didn't put that link in this post, because I'd far rather direct random readers' attention to Joe. My. God. than to freaking Time magazine.)

Because it's Time's list, it's obviously suspect. There are albums on the list that really have to be there (Rubber Soul, Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Moondance, Kind of Blue, Joshua Tree, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road), and definitely artists who have to be there (Talking Heads, R.E.M., Neil Young), but as often as not they seem to be picking the obvious, rather than the best or even the most influential. I refuse, however, to fall into the trap of arguing with their list, because that would grant them the power to canonize that such lists aim for. Besides, I've never thought it made any sense whatsoever to argue about what should or shouldn't be in the canon. I once put together a list of 10 jazz records everybody should hear, put 12 on the list, and wrote about why you should hear them. But I did it mainly to tell someone something, and secondly for the sake of the exercise for myself. Sometimes it's fun to write about music (or indeed to dance about architecture).

It gives me an idea for a list of my own, a more comprehensive list than Time's:

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

I don't know if I'll be able to sustain this list, but I'll make it an occasional series (like the list of people not allowed in the house). Today, let's start with #100 and #99.

100. Binder clips. I just love 'em. Terribly useful gadgets, low tech, can hold together paper, chips bags, flour sacks. Can be used in place of clamps of various sorts in (if you'll pardon the pun) a pinch.

99. Jelly beans. I just love 'em. I especially like purple and red jelly Brachs jelly beans, but the oranges are good too. I've never been overly fond of Jelly Bellies, not least of all because of their connection to Ronald Reagan, but also because they're just not what I'm looking for in a jelly bean. Except the tangerines and the coconuts, which are sublime.

life continues . . . aaup summer institute . . .

Despite my recent demise in the new Harry Potter book, ordinary life resumed today after I got home from the AAUP Summer Institute last night. I'm normalizing as well as possible. My brain is cloudy.

The Institute was a mixed bag. There were a few minor but significant details that seemed to have been left unattended, or for reasons unknown impossible to achieve. University of Nevada at Reno has a wifi network on campus, but not in the dorms, where attendees mainly stayed. Instead, the AAUP's information said the dorms had ethernet connections, which was true, but for most people the connections weren't working (although mine was, by some fluke). The wifi connection on campus required a password-protected account, which we weren't provided. Apparently there was wireless connection in the basement of one dorm building. Other similar technical problems perfused, but the programs themselves seemed to go off without too many hitches.

I did the contract bargaining workshop, and I left with mixed feelings about that too. The presenters/facilitators took rather a long time talking about bargaining techniques, and I would rather have had time devoted to practice and to reflection on that practice. Instead, after 4 hours of lecturing to us about how to bargain, we broke into 3 pairs (management vs. labor) to negotiate on the basis of a scenario they cooked up for us, putting a lot of pressure on us with a scoring rubric to complete agreements, but not giving us much time to think about the process itself - which would seem to me to be the chief benefit of the role-play.

Of the three pairs, only ours completed the agreements on 6 out of 6 areas, and so we won the high score. I get the feeling that the others ended up stuck in a very competitive mode, and ended up not reaching compromises. Our two sides, although we bargained hard, tried to make the other side accept a deal, rather than stick to our guns. I think that was partly because both sides got something they wanted, and partly because both sides wanted badly to convince the other to agree. (In the lecture portion, the presenters told us about traditional vs. "interest-based" bargaining. Traditional bargaining is starting with positions, and compromising to reach middle ground. Interest-based is starting with expressing what each sides interests are and trying to problem-solve to help both sides achieve as much of their interests as they could. Our approach strikes me as neither of these. Our aim was to persuade the other side to take the deal, so it was sort of motivation-based. The whole time I was contemplating the labor side's psychological state of mind and set of priorities, trying to read their minds and push them and pull them to agree.)

It reminded me a little of what a professor of mine at UNC-Charlotte once called a "refrigerator" class. You get out of class, get home, open the fridge, pull out a beer - and then realize what the hell that class was all about. I can't yet quite put down in words what I have learned, but the above is close. The point is to find ways to press toward agreement, however you have to do that. (At one point our side decided to act as though we believed our budgets were about to be cut. I think that pushed the labor side to agree to a smaller raise, and as it turns out, their secret information was that our budgets were going to be cut. They may have been motivated by that information, or they may have been motivated by our posture that we knew the same thing. In my view, it doesn't matter which worked. I think that's my point.)

So anyway, Lauren got up late on Saturday, bussed over to Border's for her copy of the last HP book, and read is yesterday. We've started reading it aloud today. Five chapters later, here I am, not yet killed off in the book, and so, having blogged, ready to play guitars and then cook beef properly to get the memory of bad prime rib on the Lake Tahoe dinner cruise out of my head. (In all seriousness, this is getting to be sort of annoying: I'm routinely disappointed in any beef cooked by anyone else but me. You can't even get rare meat anywhere anymore!)

harry potter spoiler alert! harry potter spoiler alert!

The buzz about the next and allegedly last Harry Potter book is reaching a pitch that is usually reserved for Second Comings, but I'll leave that unexplored for the moment in order to announce this startling bit of news:

I die in the new Harry Potter book!

I know! I know! This was as shocking to me as it no doubt is to you! But according to reputable sources online, including iamdeadnowpleasestopspammingme.com and the Great International Chinese Communist Harry Potter Conspiracy (dot com), that miserable bitch J. K. Rowling kills me the heck off in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Well, first of all, BITCH!

Secondly, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, because (1) my death contributes nothing whatsoever to the plot; (2) I'm such a minor character that no one has ever heard of me, let alone become attached emotionally; (3) not only did my character not become more friendly with Hermione, but in fact couldn't even get friendlier with Hagrid, before this ignominious demise; (4) she didn't even have the decency to have Voldemort or Snape, or even a prominent Death Eater off me, but I had to die by misfired wand; and (5) I'm not getting paid for this!

Well!

Well!

Well, I suppose, Mizz Rowling, if that is your real name, you'll be hearing from my attorneys! (That's "solicitors" in your weirdo language, you miserable media whore!)

Wow, am I cheesed off about this. Plus I'm dead, so there's a limited amount I can do about it.

another new song posted

I posted another new one to our Soundclick page, a nicely askew song called "Falling Rocks." I enjoyed writing it. The guitar part is slightly discordant and doesn't resolve the proper way, which I love. I wanted to write a lyric that matched, and ended up writing an absurd bit of stuff while driving through heavy traffic in the Livermore Valley (the only way to travel, at least there). It fit the feeling of the song (which, if it had a working title, I don't remember it), so we put the two together. Lauren wanted an off-kilter sort of reading for her vocal, and achieved that too. This one also has an electric guitar part that you can't hear all that well, and aren't supposed to really, but it adds a dimension.

The song is not inspired by one of my favorite traffic signs. What I like about this sign is that although it's obviously supposed to mean rocks fall in this spot, I like to think of it as saying "Please park your car here so we can throw rocks on it. Thank you."

the summer so far. . . .

I had given myself a short list of things to do this summer. So far, I have done one of the big ones and two of the small ones.

The large item I have struck through on my list is the completion of another album-length CD of our music. We finished this just last week, and it has about 10 original songs, including three or four (depending on whether you're counting joke numbers) for which Lauren wrote both words and music, one for which I wrote both words and music, one on which Lauren and I co-wrote the lyrics and I wrote the tune, one on which I wrote the tune and Lauren wrote the lyrics (the afore-posted "5th of July," [top song on the page] which rocks), and a couple instrumental guitar tracks. I'm trying to get more sophisticated with recording, trying to add bass and lead tracks as appropriate, and that made this a bit more complicated and difficult to pull off. I'm happy with it. We're both happy with it. I think we're getting into a good songwriting mindset, and I think we're improving as writers.

Meanwhile, for whatever weird and at this date unexplored reason, over the last two days I've started writing 3 songs. One already has a bridge and chorus, and a lead part.

One of the small things is that we've made it to a couple art museums already, and out to the coast at least once: I wanted to be sure to get in some small day trips, to help our sanity.

The other small thing is that we've been down to LA twice already. I wanted to get down there a handful of times, and go someplace. In fact we're scheduled to take more such outings.

I haven't yet written a paper on Schutz or on Merleau-Ponty (that one will take as looong as it needs; it's still really in the roasting phase, and we're barely thinking about how to grind and percolate it). I have a book review to write. I haven't yet finalized classes for fall, but will soon because I've got some good and some delightfully silly ideas for Theory of Knowledge. We haven't yet watched Blazing Saddles despite threatening too. We watched Head tonight after driving up from LA. That makes much more sense than might otherwise initially seem to be the case.

And that's about it. My mom's birthday is next weekend, and I'm going to the AAUP Summer Institute (aka Red Camp for academics).

help

I think it was in late spring of 2003 that I started telling foreigners that the US was under siege. It may have begun in Helsinki, where Dave "Dave" Koukal, his better half Sharon Vlahovich, and I were accosted by Finns while walking on the street. As I recall it, several times whlie we were in Finland, we were yelled at, generally in Finnish, presumably for being US citizens. As US citizens, we took some blame for Bush Administration foreign policy, which was then still shocking to others. I told Finns I knew that the US was under a coup, and I asked if they wouldn't mind invading. I did the same thing in Canada a couple weeks later, and in correspondence and conversation since then.

The scale of it is fascinating, in its way. A July Harper's piece described the strategy, which is called "lawfare" by the Federalist Society (a neo-con lawyers' association, with close friends in the Administration). The idea of lawfare is that law should be used as a strategic means of attack. So rather than respect the rule of law, or acknowledge that its actions are legitimately limited by law, the Administration uses it as a tool to achieve extra-, non-, or illegal ends. The examples are legion, really legion. In addition to "signing statements" exempting the Administration from complying with laws even while the President was signing them, there's the business of Dick Cheney not being subject to any legal restrictions because the Vice President's office is considered part of whatever branch of government is most convenient to the goal of evading oversight and checks and balances, and of course the bit about firing federal prosecutors for not towing the party line. A news item this morning puts it more succinctly, however: "The White House told Congress on Monday it would not comply further with demands for documents and testimony in the probe of fired prosecutors, setting up a constitutional battle with the Democratic-led Congress." The rationale? Because it would limit presidential "prerogatives."

The counter-argument here may be that every winner does everything possible to turn the political system to their own advantage. I don't disagree. The difference here is the enormous scale of it and the tremendous depth of it. The quantitative difference is large enough to make a qualitative difference: the constant exertion of exceptional status for the Administration, at every possible turn, undermines checks and balances utterly.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that the now Democratically-controlled Congress responds, in effect, by saying, "Oh, you're above the law? Oh, sorry, didn't know. Sorry. We'll just carry on with, uh, well, I suppose we'll have a hearing or press conference saying what a shame it is. Let us know if you need more money."

meat

We bought our meat for the next few months yesterday at Marin Sun Farms. They do range-fed, grass-fed beef, lamb, and pork, along with chicken and eggs. We buy beef from them whenever we run out. The last cache lasted us about 8 months, and yesterday we trucked home a larger supply:

2 New York strips, bone removed but tied on - a 5.5 pound slab and a 7 pound slab, that I trimmed and cut into 1 1/2 inch thick steaks for us.
1 filet mignon, a half pound, for us to share on some special evening.
1 3 pound chuck roast for general purpose.
1 2 pound London broil.
6 gorgeous lamb chops, with the rib left long, but Frenched, which will be cute to play with presentations for.

We actually plan to increase our beef consumption rate, since towards the end of the last supply, it wasn't quite as nice. After getting all the meat put away, by around 9:30 we sat down to eat bits cut off the strip steaks with a little pan sauce, with farfalle and tomato sauce as a side. They were fantastic. There's really nothing quite beef produced that way.

thanks for shopping with us

The local Safeway is convenient, right off the Crankster Freeway, close to the place where we get cat food and to the Target of Death. The only reason we ever go to the Safeway is because it is convenient, and we think to ourselves, this thing we need is something not even Safeway can screw up or make unpleasant.

That has changed with their new bag policy, which is out of step with the general direction things are going in the grocery business in California. Trader Joe's and Raley's both sell bags for a buck, and give you a 5 or 7 cent discount when you re-use the bag. They offer to sell people bags who aren't using them, gladly give the discount, and are quite aware of the whole bag business.

Safeway's new bag policy, as stated, is "ORDERS WILL BE BAGGED IN PLASTIC (unless otherwise requested)." In other words, they aren't going to bother to ask you if you want a paper or plastic bag, or if you brought your own. We brought our own in today, and even though Lauren and I had started bagging our own groceries in our own bags, the checking drone started opening a plastic bag to put stuff in it. I had to startle her our of her daze by raising my voice to sputter "PLEASE don't put anything in plastic bags." "Alright," she mumbled. Then she finished checking things, and then realized she needed to give us the bag credit, of 3 cents. The policy might as well read, "ORDERS WILL BE BAGGED IN PLASTIC. Violators will be prosecuted."

fantastic new song

Today we recorded a new song and posted it to our Soundclick page. If I do say so myself (and I do), it's pretty damned terrific. It tells the tale of our coming together, three years ago today, the 5th of July (it's the first song listed). Play it, send people to it, listen to it obsessively, because it's that good.

hot

It was 106 yesterday. As usual, this was 4 degrees hotter than the predicted high. Today the National Weather Service predicts it will be 102, so I'm prepared for 108 to 112. It was 84 at 7:53 am.

There's no other news at the moment, because it's too hot for anything to happen.

It's the anniversary of Lauren and I cohabitating, which is the anniversary we most celebrate. We'll spend the day hiding from the heat.

trouble with priorities and valuesplus: I wake up with an argument in my head

Very late last night I suffered a sadly typical (for me) crisis of self-confidence, particularly, as always, related to what I do with my life. It goes like this: I am muddling through a teaching "career" at Cow State Santa Claus (as I call it, not to insult it but to play with the name of the institution). I am bemused to find that I've been teaching there nine years now. It's what brought me out to California, where I had no intention nor desire to live, especially not in the Central Valley. Since I started here, in my "temporary" position as what my campus alone among CSUs refers to as a "Visiting Lecturer" (it keeps getting ironicer and ironicer, don't it?), I've had the kind of teaching workload that makes any serious attempt at writing scholarly articles and books impossible except during summer. Nevertheless, I've been able for most of that nine years to keep my toe in a couple different academic philosophy circles, and I've had a couple ongoing philosophical/phenomenological research projects. None of that academic activity is sufficient, given the way the tenure-track job market in philosophy works, to put me in a position to challenge for one. In addition, I received my Ph.D. in philosophy in 1996, and the longer one is past the Ph.D. freshness date, the less attractive one is as a starting-level tenure-track professor. At least, that's what I believe, firmly, having been in academia and in the market.

Meanwhile, as has been documented in this weird public online journal, I've been putting a lot of energy into playing guitar, or rather, guitars. I've only picked up the guitar again a few years ago, and it's been unspeakably satisfying, especially learning the 12-string. I've written a handful of tunes, some of which I think are really good. Lauren has been turning them into songs, and it's been awfully damned cool recording our own stuff and giving friends copies of cds we've put together, even packaging them like albums. It's a small-scale way of living out a fantasy of being a musician (or, to use a term I hate for no good reason, a "recording artist").

Obviously, the more time I spend playing the guitar, writing tunes, recording them, futzing with the wacky German software that came with our cheesy USB-port pre-amp, the less time I'm spending on philosophical pursuits, and this summer I've spent only a very little time on those. The crisis of the night was over this. When I'm playing, I have the gnawing feeling I ought to be working on research and writing; when I'm doing research and writing, my mind often drifts back into music and the feeling I ought to be playing more. The result is that I've been feeling like I'm wasting my time, no matter what I'm doing, and that the summer (now already 4 weeks old) is drifting past. I should, I tell myself, stop all this nonsense and do something to pursue a goal.

It could be understood as a dilemma, a disjunct between two increasingly unlikely dream jobs. (This is probably a false dilemma, which should help me feel better, but doesn't.)

To get out of the Valley, away from Cow State Santa Claus, I'd have to ratchet up the academic work by leaps and bounds. Having been both in the philosophy job market and in academia, there are a lot of things I'd rather do, of which I'll provide a brief sample, for context: cut off bits of my fingertips while chopping onions; stab myself in the knee repeatedly with a dull Ticonderoga (Lauren: I've done that! Me: I think most people have); drop my 1928 Underwood No. 5 typewriter (which weighs about 25 punds) on my left foot, then drop my 1935 Royal "H" model typewriter (which weighs about 30 pounds) on my left foot.

And of course, there's simply no way on earth I'd be willing to do what it would take to make a living as a musician. I always suffer doubts I could be good enough (though that's probably silly, since a lot of people who do make a living as musicians aren't as good), but I know myself, my character.

In a way (and here's one very very unhelpful way in which this is a false dilemma), in both cases it's a question of my unwillingness to accept or deal in bullshit. Academia, academic job seeking especially, is absolutely overwhelmed by bullshit, coming from every imaginable direction (I've had the privilege of seeing it all on our fair campus - faculty making bullshit decisions, imposing bullshit criteria, giving bullshit evaluations; administrators making other bullshit decisions, making bullshit rationalizations for policies; higher administration giving bullshit explanations for why there aren't more tenure-track positions in the first place). The world of professional musicianeering I know much less about, but the chances of an obscure, fair guitarist and a very good singer who write folk-rock sorts of songs with often extremely bizarre chord changes making it, whatever that means, or even getting gigs, are absurdly remote. And I don't think I want to play "Stuck in the Middle With You" every night for a half-room-full of semi-sober geezers who sing the wrong words along to the chorus for the rest of my natural life.

We talked about this last night. Lauren assured me, as she always has, that I'm worthwhile as a human being, that I'm a good teacher, that my philosophical projects are valid, that I'm a good guitarist. This serves to remind me that we make a good life together, and that should be the only important consideration. If we can make a good life together when I'm stuck in the tenuous track of academia, when we're living in the Central Valley (motto: A Great Place To Leave; alternate motto: Not A Nice Place To Visit, But You Wouldn't Want To Live There), then what more could we realistically hope for? Ah, there's the rub: unrealistic hope. My false dilemma is predicated on being discontent with life, and feeling that it can't go on like this, that a change is necessary. In fact, I don't have to choose between my so-called career and my so-called guitar playing. So it seems at least on a bright midmorning in late June on a day that won't be too hot and I don't imagine I'll have too much bullshit coming my way.

Prepared as I always am for that eventuality, however, I woke up with an argument in my head. The argument concerns an ongoing discussion of the kind of work "temporary" faculty should have. There is a view, which I consider revolting, that lecturers are hired only to teach, and that therefore the only kind of work for which we should be recognized is teaching. In other words, although we may go out on our own and do research, publish stuff, go to conferences, serve on university committees, and so on, none of that really matters, because we're paid to teach. One of my first conscious thoughts this morning was that this notion is based on a preposterous concept of the division of labor in education. According to this absurdity, there is a tier of specialized "research" universities, where faculty are primarily responsible for developing what is often called "new knowledge," and then there are secondary and tertiary tiers where this knowledge is disseminated. This makes no sense whatsoever. Obviously, if I'm going to "disseminate" knowledge, that is, to teach, I have to develop two "new" knowledges: my own, and my students'. I have to know what I teach, after all, and if I'm teaching it, as a result of my teaching it, my students ought to know it too.

But what I really hit upon is how this view of the situation depends on an unexamined commodity form of knowledge. Knowledge, on this view, is something produced in a particular place by particular people, then sold, in little modular chunks, to be distributed down the line. On this model, I work in knowledge retail (discount). I don't know what "new knowledge" would mean otherwise. It's epistemologically bizarre, to say the least. (Now, I wonder, how can I parlay this kind of insight into an interesting topic of inquiry in the Theory of Knowledge course I'm slated to teach this fall?)

new tune, at long last!

We've finally started recording more stuff. The first thing I've decided to put up on Soundclick is a bit of fun called Mt. Diablo Windy Day Rag. Of course, it's not a proper rag. But I think it's snappy, and it is certainly a blast to play. The Soundclick page for it explains its inspiration. Mt. Diablo is part of the range to our immediate west, separating the Central Valley from the Livermore Valley and the Bay Area. The route you travel to get over there is through the Altamont Pass, so the area is commonly, and in my opinion falsely, called "the Altamont."

In any event, it's a hot guitar number. Perhaps people randomly crossing paths with my journal will check it out, and perhaps they will send others in the direction of the file.

By the way, it's a pretty good recording, made in our kitchen (which is more accustomed to being the place where we make food and beer). I think I'm getting a tad bit better at recording. It's also the first thing I've posted that I play on the Breedlove 12-string. Shazam.

I undergo a change of heart

My new Breedlove is having an unhappy night. The relative humidity in the House About Town dropped like a rock over the past half-hour, from 41% to 33%. The humidity outside is a steady 24%. But my Breedlove comes from Oregon, and wants to be at around 40-50%. I don't want my frets popping up, dammit!

I grew up in Ohio and North Carolina, where the humidity is so high you have to go swimming to dry off. One, perhaps the only, atmospheric trait of the Central Valley that I have heretofore loved is the low humidity. It still sucks when it's 110, but as they say, it's a dry heat.

Now I'm wishing it were more humid. It looks like we're gonna have to buy a humidifier. Or else build a very large humidor.

hotter in the city than it is in the summer

I've developed concern about the environment my new Breedlove lives in. It lives in the living room, next to the piano. It being the Central Valley, I figured it was likely to be too dry here. So I checked on this at the Breedlove guitar site, to find that the ideal relative humidity for my guitar is between 40% and 50%, or else it's between 45% and 50%, because the site has two different comments to make on this. It also notes that it was built at between 41% and 45%, so why it should ideally live in a somewhat damper environment, I don't know. We've made an inquiry.

Anyway, that led me to want to get a thermometer/hygrometer to check the environmental condition. Radio Shack sells one, but only one, that comes with a wireless extension so you get the outdoor temperature and relative humidity. It also comes with a barometer and atomic clock, so that it can, it says, predict the weather, but also keep totally accurate time (it checks in with the atomic clock in Denver, where we keep the time, every couple minutes, I think). This has the welcome side-effect that we can now monitor the outdoor temperature without relying on the national weather service. And this is good, for two unconnected reasons.

One is that the national weather service issues the temperature update 7 minutes before each hour. So you don't get up-to-the-minute temperature readings. That makes a difference especially between 9 am and noon, because it can rise several degrees over the course of a few minutes.

Second is that the national weather service's official Turlock temperature is taken at the airport (as it is for most locations). In the words of George Carlin, that's stupid, man, because nobody lives at the airport. Yesterday, the NOAA jokers predicted it would be 96 degrees in Turlock and Modesto. They recorded an official high of 100 degrees. We got a high of 102 in our yard.

It's been like that all year. The forecast calls for a temperature 5 or 6 degrees cooler than it actually gets, but the forecast remains unaltered. I figure the fact of the matter is that old temperature data skew predictions downward.

old habits

For years, I spent every morning with a mug full of ridiculously strong coffee and the Modesto Bee. Like much of my life, this activity was deeply disturbing, relentlessly disappointing, and the cause of ever-growing resentment. One of the main reasons for this was the Bee's always awful opinion page, particularly the dreadful letters to the editor.

This morning, checking the Bee site for today's temperature forecast (95) and yesterday's high (104), out of curiosity I checked the opinion page. I still do this from time to time, mainly when I'm expecting them to print something particular - a letter I've sent them, something related to the CFA or the CSU, etc. Today it was for the sheer hell of it.

Someone had written a snarky letter suggesting that since creationists believe the earth is only 6000 years old, we must similarly be wrong about half-lives of radioactive isotopes, so nuclear power should be regarded as safe, and we shouldn't worry about nuclear waste. Store it, our intrepid author suggested, by the Creationism Museum in Kentucky.

Someone else had written about obnoxious parents leaving a local middle school graduation after their kids' names were called off the long list, sometimes bringing their brats with them. Apparently something similar happened at the school's athletic awards ceremony.

Wait, hold it right there. The middle school has both a graduation and an athletic awards ceremony? I started to have a Paula Poundstone moment: why the hell are there so many ceremonies and awards? Why are we congratulating ourselves so much for so little? (It gets worse, of course. Paula was complaining about grade school graduation.) This seems to be a national trend, too.

For instance, yer local TV nooz probably tells you it's won some kind of award. It might start with their theme song and then a pan in on the silhouetted figure of the nooz anchor, while lights come up to illuminate him. "Good evening. I'm Smarmy Middleagedman and this is the award-winning Channel 9 Action Nooz. Our first story tonight: Drugs in our schools. But first, here's Perky Dingbat..." etc. The "award" is most likely presented by the corporation who owns the station. It's supposed to give an aura of prestige.

Which is why I'm so proud to announce that I have been named the recipient of the 2007 Groovetastic Award for all-round grooviness. This makes me a double award-winner this year, since I have previously received the Samuel Pufendorf Prize for Teaching Like A Mo-Fo for 2007. I'll be adding these to my syllabi for fall, of course, and having them printed on business cards (did you know practically all academics have business cards now?). I recommend this to anyone. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that self-help and get-ahead type books already recommend it. I already feel more prestigious and deserving. It's good to feel entitled.

I graciously accept these awards and your applause. Thank you.

gig, LA, *&^@-in' hot

So last Friday we played a few songs at the annual Cow State Santa Claus staff picnic. I couldn't really tell if we went over well or not. It's not that kind of gig, frankly. It's only sort of a gig. People were attentive, at least. I suppose if you're playing at an employee picnic and more people are paying attention to you than to potato salad, you're doing okay. Still, our very first public appearance has been accomplished. Perhaps I won't be so damned nervous next time.

Immediately, and I mean immediately, afterward, we drove to LA to visit, and I mean visit. I believe firmly that no one has ever visited so ferociously before. We played umpteen hands of cards, engaged in commercial and entertainment activities that could have been lethal to mere mortals, went to Long Beach, we even went to the LA County Musuem of Art (LACMA).

LACMA had an exhibition of work by Dan Flavin, whose biggest claim to fame as an arteest is his use of flourescent light. We took a couple pictures inside the exhibition before realizing that it wasn't permitted. Oh well, what are they gonna do, sue us? Anyway, although my loveliest wasn't all that keen on the idea at first, she soon realized what I knew from previous Flavinations I've perused: he has a way of presenting light as art and architecture, and also in a way that challenges you to consider how flourescent light makes you see.

Yesterday we drove home, up the Crankster Freeway, evading all the brain-dead idjits who drive up and down the Crankster Freeway [coupla hints, folks: (1) it's the one on the right; (2) the little white dashes on the road? Those are lanes]. By the time we got to Merced, Eddie Jetta's outdoor thermometer said it was 99 degrees. It was fairly stuffy inside when we got home, and eventually I succumbed and put on the AC, which we'll definitely need today, since it's gonna be 100 degrees here.

To end on a more positive note, I decided last night that today is Unofficial National Turlock Butt Day. So enjoy your butt and the butts of others, with any luck without legal ramifications.

since finishing grading

"Vacation" is one of the sample labels Blogger offers bloggers for their blogs. It reminds me that, officially at least, I am now on "vacation." This apparently means a lot of writing, going many places, buying lots of fruit, and in general being incredibly busy.

Monday morning, filled with anxiety related to all sorts of things only some of which I might later write about, I prepared to wakl to campus to file final grades. I decided that I should wear my contact lenses so that I could wear sunglasses, it being bright and warm out. I promptly lost a lens down the sink. I haven't been to the eye doc for a couple years, so I was looking forward to going and getting, probably, new eyeglass lenses to replace the very badly scratched ones I've got, but now I suppose contacts will be in order.

I got up to campus to realize that I had forgotten the grade list for one class. It was printed and sitting on my printer. I phoned my loveliest and had her read the list. She was patient and caring. I realized I was still missing three final papers. This always happens. I wrote in Incompletes for those, made copies upon copies of everything, then filed grades.

I walked home. Lauren had been baking a surprise, something by way of helping soothe the petty wounds of the day. Grading always puts me on edge, and this other thing I've been dealing with shoved me quite hard edgeward, so I was teetering for much of Monday. I felt very loved. We took off to buy more fruit, hit the grocery store, etc. The prospect of fruit is always nice. That particular afternoon, however, without our being aware of it, had been declared Drive Like A Complete And Total Freak Day. Drivers whose apparent aim in life is to either snarl traffic or cause hazards bug the holy heck out of me, but they make Lauren exceptionally, not to say existentially, jumpy.

But we made it home. We had one of our favorite meals, then watched the Ottawa Senators lose game four of the Stanley Cup Finals to the goddamn Anaheim Ducks (as we call them in a good mood). That was disgusting. We rehearsed a few songs, one I've been uncomfortable with and therefore insisted on playing despite my frustration, and that made me very tense again. I felt my back and neck and jaw all clench (if a back or neck can clench), played the tune through, made mistakes, got further frustrated, did it again, grrr, grrrr, grrrrr. Apparently, this was unpleasant for my love.

I put away one guitar, upstairs in the Room of Requirement, then grabbed another and noodled with it a bit. Downstairs I heard the telltale clinking and general mumble of a kitchen being cleaned up and something be plated and set at table. It was by then around 9:30 or so, and all useful hours of the day had been exhausted. I hobbled downstairs, where Lauren presented me the dessert she'd made for us: little individual heart-shaped tarts with extremely pink pastry creme and strawberries. That made Monday evening much nicer.

Tuesday, which was yesterday, we decided enough was bloody well enough, and we split for San Francisco. The drive out was difficult because of the wind, but it was pretty. We went directly, and without any trouble, to Golden Gate Park, found parking, walked to the de Young museum (first Tuesday of the month admission is free, so we went there and told them deep dark secrets). There's some good modern stuff in the de Young, and that's what I mainly like, so that was good. We only took in the concourse floor, decided that it was late enough in the day to move on to find something to eat and that our legs were tired, and left for North Beach.

We again got there no problem, except for the woman who ran a four-way stop and nearly crushed us. Unfortunately, our favorite place in North Beach was closed, since (we found out) it closes every Tuesday, so we found another place, which was okay. I had penne with pancetta and spicy tomato sauce, and Lauren had spaghetti puttanesca that I dubbed The Saltiest Pasta Dish in History. I mean, yes, anchovies are salty, and yes, puttanesca has to have a lot of anchovies, but holy jumpin' was that some salty stuff.

There was no better way to cure that than to avail ourselves of the very last moments of Happy Hour at the San Francisco Brewing Co., just down Columbus. Thence to City Lights, thence back to the House About Town.

I could summarize the last two days in a word, if forced to by some bizarre provision of the USA PATRIOT act. If so, that word would be: Whoof!

received: a letter, and numerous papers

I got a letter from my friend Bob the other day. Bob gave up on blogs a little while ago, and I'll be removing the link to his in a moment. He doesn't want to spend time that way, because, in his view, it's not a very rewarding way to communicate. He wrote me a letter instead.

We've written a lot of letters to one another. For a while, I was a quite avid letter writer, sending missives out to him, to Bobo the Wandering Pallbearer, to my high school friend Anne, to my friend Nancy. I generally typed them on my old manual machines, for a long time on an early 60s Hermes 2000, pages and pages of stuff about my life as a grad student, but mainly trying to capture a mood and lived experience.

Compared to email, a letter is a very different thing, especially written out longhand in fountain pen (as Bob's was, in virtually the same nearly illegible hadnwriting he's had since we were kids). It's tangible. It has a feint smell to it. The very good paper it's written on has a definite feel, with an affective dimension. I'm writing him back, in my nearly illegible handwriting.

Partly this is contextual: Bob has been my friend for more than 30 years. We grew up together in Ohio, and when I moved away at 13, writing letters was the way to communicate. Regrettably, perhaps, I don't have any of those any more. A flood in Pittsburgh lost me several boxes of my writing, including about 1000 poems, a couple plays, a dozen or more journals, and almost all my letters. I stopped saving correspondence, and finally have become so much more comfortable with electronic versions of things that I don't particularly like printing out any of my own papers any more.

For one reason or another, for many people, email doesn't have the same feel to it. The medium, or the genre, or the format, or the phenomenon, feels quasi-personal, somewhat institutional. Everything in email looks like a memo.

Bobo and I turned that into a source of amusement, by way of using the memo format inappropriately. You wouldn't write email within an institutional context beginning with something like "Dear Unmitigated Bastard." At least, you wouldn't if you're a fan of employment. In any case, this carried forward a tradition of ironic mutual abuse that began in college and continued through grad school correspondence (and beyond).

I'm a fan of all of it. Each medium has its best uses, I suppose, and each medium has its own way of habituating language and expression. It's a great source of fun to be able to pick them up in turns, to undergo the different ways media shape language and thought, affect, address, tone, all of it.

I'm gonna keep blogging, too, I figure, though as blog this has little "bloggy" about it, and I definitely regard it as a publicly kept journal more than anything else.

As such, let me make one final personal note on the day, most of which I've spent grading final papers. That note is:
WAAAAAAAAH!

Why oh why oh why does grading hurt? I mean, these aren't terrible papers. There've only been a couple duds, which is a very low duddism rate. They've been fine, some even quite good, and a couple wonderful ones. Still, ow.

bird or bourbon attack?

I always make the same joke about this kind of thing, so perhaps if I put this stupid joke before public (more or less) scrutiny, I'll be free from the demon pun. The joke is, of course, that a bus driver in Connecticut reported being the victim of a wild turkey attack.

My favorite version of this lame pun was a gag signature to an email message to my pal Jim "The Most Optimistic Man in America" Williams, based on a Rolling Stones song: "Wild Turkeys? Couldn't drag me away!"

(The salutation/signature line gag has been a feature of our correspondence forever. I can't count the number of times I wrote to Jim for no reason other than to use a gag salutation or signature I'd come up with. The object of this game seems to be to generate complex multi-level allusive puns, or to abuse one another, which in some people's estimation amounts to the same thing. We do enjoy ourselves.)