Look out! Things!

A quick dip into

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

74. Names for inanimate objects. I just love 'em. I have named most of my guitars, cars, and computers. I give ceremonial names to things, which I often don't remember, but that's okay because the names are meant for the ceremony anyway.

We spend Sunday morning from 11 until noon listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me on NPR, but before that comes on, we sometimes hear the end of Car Talk. Last week the Car Talk guys were making fun of people naming their cars. Although I don't believe naming a car is the performance of some kind of voodoo (or Christian Science), I do like to name cars. They seem to call for it, perhaps as vessels, but frankly because mass manufactured products often have more distinct personalities than we give them credit for (largely because of unique defects - cf. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects).

In any case, my first car, a 1978 Honda Accord hatchback with all the paint sandblasted off when it was driven for a year in Egypt by a colleague of my dad's, I immediately christened the William F. Buckley Jr. I had been obsessed with Buckley, the conservative columnist known best for his fantastic facility with specious argument and deliberately obscure vocabulary, since I started reading his column when I was 9. (Why I was reading Buckley at age 9, and why I enjoyed it, and why I understood it, are all probably best left unexamined.) So that was that.

The next car I owned was a crappy 1985 Dodge Daytona that I initially gave the name of an NPR classical music presented, Karl Hass, who started every broadcast by saying, "Hello everyone." The first thing that came on the radio of the Daytona, the first time I turned on the radio, was Karl Hass saying "Hello everyone." But before long the incredible rottenness of this alleged vehicle began to sink in, and I started to refer to it as the Detonate.

At present I drive a 2006 VW Jetta that we call Eddie Jetta, after a Weird Al Yankovic song called "My Baby's In Love With Eddie Vedder."

I've owned computers I've called Pornomatic and Crapola, and I've just named my nasty old Dell laptop, which we keep strictly to play PC games on, Deathtrap.

things upon things

Yet more of

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

76. Macs. I just love 'em. For years I was a Mac user, but I was more or less forced to convert to Windows about 10 years ago when nothing Windows could work on Macs. If I'm not mistaken, both sides of this stupid divide were for a time specifically making it impossible to move from PC to Mac and back. Because of the dominance of Windows and other Microsoft products [*cough!* racketeering *cough!*], especially of Microsoft Word, in the academic business, I was stuck with Windows. It was painful.

Since then, of course, Microsoft Word has become available for Macs (usually months after the updated versions are available for Windows), and in general Microsoft products work better in their Mac versions anyway, so I finally switched back not quite two years ago.

I have two favorite snarks about Microsoft. One is "It's not a bug, it's a feature." The other is that they're built broken.

75. Satires. I just love 'em. Tired from the last two days' campus-event-and-class-attending, I've spent some time this afternoon paging idly through some old Paul Krassner stuff, including reportage of his trip to a humor conference and his explanation of unintended effects of sending surplus TVs to remote islands of preliterate societies (namely, that monkeys will get ahold of them and proceed to plot against Jimmy Hoffa).

In the past I've written some satirical stuff about politics, pop culture, and academia. It's been a while.

lesson learned

One night, if you can't sleep, and you get out of bed to shuffle off to the next room to read a bit and try to get sleepy again, don't pick up Theodor Adorno. Most especially, don't pick up Minima Moralia, not unless you really like having nightmares. Goddamn Adorno.

Of course #1: That's why I call him Theodor "Don't Call Me Sweetie" Adorno.

Of course #2: Obviously, I should have known better. But I was annoyed by not being able to get to sleep, and Adorno seemed to fit the mood.

Note to self: Always have copy of Harpo Speaks! nearby.

10

There are 10 cell phone stores/kiosks in the Vintage Faire mall in Modesto. That's not counting either Radio Shack or Circuit City, which of course both also sell cell phones.

Douglas Adams loved physics, but in the radio series of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy he also explained an economic phenomenon called the Shoe Event Horizon. The Shoe Event Horizon is the tipping point in a civilization's economic development when shoe shops overtake all other production, so that it becomes unviable to build anything but shoe shops. As a result, the economy and civilization collapse and everyone who survives evolves into birds.

Obviously he was right, he just had the wrong product at the center of the theory. But to be fair, cell phones didn't exist when he wrote Hitchhiker's Guide. At the current rate, by 2011 every shop in the mall will be a cell phone store, and all anyone will do is work selling cell phones to one another.

I am not a fan. I don't desire an iPhone, or a camera phone, or a Blackberry. We have a pre-paid cell phone we only use while driving to LA, to report on our progress or the smog level in Bakersfield (on a scale from Totally Obscured By Brown Air to Instant Death). But even I felt like I should have a more up-to-date and snazzier phone, passing all those damn stores - all of them busy, by the way.

hunh? huh? go 'way, I'm tired

Yesterday my loveliest and I got up at 7 and drove to Yosemite, with the express purpose of hiking up to the top of Vernal Falls via the Mist Trail. This is my favorite hike. In the spring the trail is soaked by the water bouncing off the rocks below the falls, but in late summer in a dry year, it looks like this:

Check out that waterfall rainbow.

To get to the falls you hike from the floor of Yosemite Valley up around 1000 feet. At times, this is a steep climb, as for instance on the steps:

A closer look reveals that the tiny dots below us are in fact other hikers. There are 550 steps.



Then, after a long day's driving and hiking, we ate pasta and stayed up until 3 to see the eclipse of the moon, and I took these riveting and lousy pictures.

Earth eating the moon.

Moon eaten. (By the way, this is the best shot I got of the red, shadowed moon, partly due to my inability to stay completely still, but I think also due to the poor quality of our digital camera, a Pixblecch 3000.)

adding to the list

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

78. Lists. I just love 'em. Why, look right here: a list! I have often said there are two kinds of people in the world: people who list and deranged sickospeople who don't. Like the standup comic Rick Reynolds, I put things on my to-do list that I've already done, just to scratch them off. I sometimes also put things on my list that I wouldn't need to remind myself to do, or to give myself credit for being productive because my list looks like this:

- write to do list
- finish Pro Ethics syllabus
- eat lunch
- pick up campus mail
- write blog entry
- play guitar
- play other guitar

See? I'm more than halfway finished with my tasks for the afternoon!

77. Joke mottoes for towns. I just love 'em. Around here, the reference point is usually the visually and olfactorily appalling Tracy, which one could drive through on the way to and from the Bay Area. Once through Tracy, heading east, you hit Manteca, which prompted the Manteca motto: "It's no Tracy." Modesto became "Modesto: At Least It Ain't Stockton" (alternately, "No Me Modesto"). Yesterday we went to Lodi to go to a wedding, prompting the (obvious, I suppose) "Lodi: Oh Lord" (honorable mention to "Lodi: I'm Stuck!"). Then of course there's Sacramento, "The Town So Nice, They Named It Sac."

For years, I've called Turlock "Land of a Thousand Smells," but lately I've realized the city hobnobbers wouldn't go for this, so I'm thinking of proposing "Turlock: Nicer Than Tracy." Which is true, but is also sort of like saying "more enjoyable than having holes drilled in your face."

dem things, dem dry things

And now a couple more of

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

80. Gin and tonics. I just love 'em. Back in the wild days of my misspent youth, we would gather together for meetings of what we called the PhDC - the Philosophers' Drinking Club - at UNC Charlotte. At some point, for reasons that the ages have made obscure, etched though they are in the firmament, we decided that the official drink of the PhDC was the gin and tonic. This makes sense on a number of levels, not least of which is that, as PhDC co-founder Jim "The Most Optimistic Man In America, And That Includes John McCain" Williams has said, it is the alcoholic salt of the earth.

But don't listen to us. Listen to Douglas Adams, who noted in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe that "85 percent of all known worlds in the Galaxy" have some homophonic drink, whether it be "jynnan tonnyx" or "jinond-o-nicks," or my personal favorite, "gee-N-N-T'N-ix."

Gin and tonics are terrific accompaniments to Macanudo Ascots, and are best served outdoors, in warm weather, with good company.

79. First days of semesters. I just love 'em. I'm also petrified of 'em. There's just under 2 weeks left before the first day of fall classes. Am I ready? Does the Pope shit in the woods?

But that's not the reason I'm petrified. I can do more academic prep work in an afternoon than most people can do in a month. I am the Philosopher-Chef, and I sauté knowledge.

No, I'm petrified in the way you were petrified before the start of 4th grade, when you were aware enough of the whole school politics scene that you knew somehow it mattered if the other kids didn't like you. To this day, having taught now for (holy freakin' Gordie Howe) 15 years in one capacity or another, I still face the first day with that nervous feeling. And it matters so much less for me if my students don't like me, really. We'll be rid of each other in 14 weeks.

But it's fun, too. The jitters are sorta yummy. Everything is fresh, too. I'm trying new things, they haven't heard any of my jokes, I've got new jokes prepped. At Cow State Santa Claus there is an annual start-of-fall General Faculty Meeting, which I'm sure dates back to the days when the university held classes at the county fairgrounds and everybody ate dinner together once a month at somebody's house. New faculty (full-time faculty, that is) are introduced to all the assembled academics, college by college and department by department. It's as corny as Hee-Haw, but I love it. I'm a sucker for pomp, circumstance, and the idea that universities could actually be communities, even at this late date in the irreversible, irrevocable, ineluctable bureaucratization of the social world. Velvet cage, indeed.

2 reports from the "what could possibly go wrong?" department

Say you're a large toy "manufacturer," like Hasbro. You find that one of your main costs is labor, and that subcontracting the actual manufacture of your products to another country, say China, reduces your labor cost. By like 90%. You might find this a really attractive option, and hey, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, they might do things a little differently in China, use lead-based paint for instance. And it might turn out that labor conditions are extremely bad, and someone might eventually point this out, to your possible embarrassment.

Better yet, say you're a bank. You find that as housing prices escalated throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and as income stagnated or dropped in real terms (as it has overall since the early 1970s), fewer and fewer people can afford to buy houses. This is inconvenient, since mortgages are such a solid profit-maker. So you might decide to offer mortgages with unique features to attract customers, like a $400,000 loan with payments starting at $1200 a month. Then, when you've got a deal made, you raise the interest and payments to about $3500 a month. What could possibly go wrong?

On the other hand, if all the other banks do it too, and if nobody's really backing these loans with actual money, you might create a gigantic international mortgage and banking crisis. And you might have to close your own mortgage branch. Oops!

more things

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

82. Macanudo Ascots. I just love 'em. Yes, from time to time Doc Nagel smokes cigars. This isn't a recommendation. But it's just a nice sensation. I especially like the maduro variety of the little ascots. I associate smoking cigars with being outdoors in good weather, mainly because I have never wanted smoking in my home. This is because I am a non-smoker. I am a non-smoker who smokes. Everybody has contradictions.

81. Pictures of the sky. I just love 'em. Approximately 66% of photographs I take are of the sky. We get a lot of sky hereabouts, too. I took these:


dusk looking like the sky's on fire

a little later, now looking smoky and smoldering

pink and orange clouds!

birfday present!

Wednesday is my birthday, but the gifts are already piling up! Look, here's a pen and pencil set that my sister turned for me:

My sister is cooler than your sister (unless you're Zach).

things, but so much more than things

(Not that anyone pays much attention to it)

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

84. Letters of appointment. I just love 'em. Yesterday I got mine in the mail: three years, full time, lecturer range B. I get a three year contract because of a strong provision in the CSU-CFA collective bargaining agreement, that awards three-year deals to "temporary" faculty who have 6 years' continuous service in one department, and another three years to follow that, provided the lecturer in question hasn't strangled anybody and actually does the job reasonably well. Ah, collective bargaining.

83. Good blogs about stuff I'm interested in. For instance, The Comics Curmudgeon.

brief public service announcement

Look out! It's the masked flasher!

I don't know why, but I'm charmed by this idea. I'd never actually do it, but I'm glad he is. Plus I enjoyed the way the story was written.

them things

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

86. Vernal Falls and Nevada Falls trails. I just love 'em. Yosemite is my favorite place on earth, and my favorite hikes in Yosemite have been up these two continuous trails. In fact, my very favorite hike ever was up to Vernal Falls, leaving at 4:30 in the morning and hiking across the Yosemite Valley floor before making the climb. The round trip of that hike was around 7 miles, I think. It was beautiful. We were just in Yosemite yesterday, up at Glacier Point, looking down on my beloved trails. There's a telescope up at Glacier Point's geology exhibit you can use to spy on hikers at the top of the falls, dipping their tootsies in the pool of water the Merced River makes just prior to dropping off the cliff.

85. Pizza joints that sell by the slice. I just love 'em. This, like most all the items on my list so far, is a timely selection, as we've just returned from such a joint righ-cheer in our very own burg of Turlock (motto: Land of a Thousand Smells). I never really became a habitue of the local slice shop in Pittsburgh (where the term is "cut," not "slice"; they'll correct you and regard you with suspicion of being from out of town), but I always enjoyed the hangout feel and the way people would try to look and sound like tough New Yorkers.

this looks like the set-up for a joke, but I'm not the man to tell it

Just checking my RSS feeds, I saw a headline from the San Francisco Chronic-Ill about an armless man being sentenced for various driving and drug offenses. The start of the first sentence of the story is "A man with no arms and one leg who wouldn't stop driving..." and I immediately thought of those awful "What do you call a man with no arms and legs" jokes.

But read the story. This guy is someone to be reckoned with. Not only did he teach himself to drive with one leg and no arms, but apparently he managed to kick a cop, at least, he's charged with doing so.

Yeesh!

thingy

You don't think we should tax . . . ?

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

88. Writing/falling into new tunes. I just love 'em. If I were making a seriously concerted effort to make this list a ranking, this would probably be higher. Instead, it comes in #88 because, no sooner than we finished putting together another disc of our own stuff, but I've started writing or completed a half-dozen or so more tunes. A couple of them have been percolating a while, but two have come into being just in the last couple weeks, both of which are really promising.

I don't think of names or themes first, usually (one notable exception being "Mt. Diablo Windy Day Rag"), so I assign fairly random names to the tunes while I'm piecing them together. This time my working titles may stick, because at least in two cases they bespeak the mood of the tune: "Small Apartments In Large Cities" has a feeling that I associate with same, and is also more or less insanely complicated (there are - lessee - 26 chords in it, as of this writing); and "Working Title: Oasis" has a very satisfying habit of resolving the melody, so it feels like it could be about reaching an oasis.

I'm very nearly entirely untrained as a guitarist. I play what it occurs to me to play. I think that's what folk, rock, and blues music, and every other people's music, is really about, so I feel in good company. I had exactly 3 lessons when I was 17. Otherwise, I've learned things watching other guitarists or, in fact mainly, by spraining my wrist on the fretboard. In truth, I am able to make anything at all happen on a guitar because of three people and one animal: my loveliest, who inspired me to pick the thing up again after 13 years; my friend Jim "The Most Optimistic Man In America" "Talks Trash To Pete Townshend" Williams, from whom I learned how to find a finger-picking pattern and how to play "The Needle And The Damage Done"; my brother Mike, who was the first to show me that it's cool to play; and the cat, Morgan, who inspired an early song and who would always come to hear me play.

87. Mornings. I just love 'em.

I am not a morning person. I regard morning persons with suspicion, if not scorn. Nevertheless, I adore the morning. I love waking up. I love getting out of bed. I love morning light streaming through morning windows as I stumble down morning stairs into the morning kitchen to make ridiculously strong and badly needed coffee. I love every single thing about the morning, up to and including the ritual claw assaults and murder-by-tripping attempts of my beloved cat, Lancelot.

I even like mornings that are sickeningly early, waking to get on the road at 4 am for instance. And at that hour, or really at most any hour, I greet mornings in ill humor, but still, I love 'em.

I almost always get up before Lauren, which I also love, because one of the very finest aspects of mornings is the feeling of being the only one up in the household. Man oh man oh man, is that a great feeling. And it's one, I feel certain, you either get or you don't.

top 100 things

Yet more of

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

90. Going for walks. I just love 'em. Walking is, hands down, my favorite form of exercise. No, wait, let me retract that. Walking is, feet down, my favorite form of exercise. I don't walk on my hands, though if you like that kind of thing, I'll bet you have callouses I don't have.

I walk to work, as I've noted, whenever possible, which is most of the time. It's only 3.5 miles round trip, but that's more walking than a lot of people do. And I walk this much on what are quite probably unofficially the 3rd worst feet in Turlock.

We walked a couple miles today, before it got hot. It was hot enough anyway.

89. Going for day trips. I just love 'em. Yesterday we went on a day trip, driving to Turlock Lake, with the intention of swimming, not realizing that it's a bracing temperature. Today we stayed home, went for a walk (see above), and tucked into some work.

I started on a book review I'm doing for an environmental philosophy journal. I'm reviewing an anthology of papers on Merleau-Ponty and environmental philosophy, and my friend Bob has a paper in it. In fact, I knew this paper, and almost all the others, because they were mainly drawn from the Merleau-Ponty Circle conference held in St. Louis a few years ago. At that conference I made someone laugh so uncontrollably she had to leave the room to avoid completely disrupting the conference.

The speaker was someone renowned for a spiritual approach to environmentalism, including that we needed to get back to listening to the sounds and songs of the Earth, and all the rest of it. Bob regards such an approach with what I can safely say would be polite to call skepticism, so before the talk we were joking about starting to make bird noises while this guy was speaking. I offered my now years' distant friend Sally $20 if she'd do it. We laughed and laughed, and then the talk started. About halfway through, the speaker started to say we should listen to the sounds of the earth. I pulled out a $20 bill and put it on the table in front of Sally. She stifled a laugh, as did my friend Dave "Dave" Koukal. Bob retained poise. Sally and Dave recovered theirs, and then the speaker said something about birds (possibly even chickens), and I pulled out another $20 bill and put it on the table in front of Sally. She left. Dave snorted loudly, and I think Bob did too. I smiled very broadly.

Lauren is working on a special project, doing some research.

Tomorrow, we may go on another day trip, destination undecided.

things!

Still more of

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

94. Tom's of Maine toothpastes. I just love 'em. Lauren and I switched to them long ago. They're less sweet, have better flavors, and most of them still have flouride. My favorite of all is definitely Wintermint.

93. Wearing bright colors. I just love 'em. Over the last couple of years I've developed a serious fixation on matching the color of my shirt to my socks. This morning I'm wearing one of five green t-shirts I own, and I have three pairs of green socks to choose from. Bright colors please me. They feel joyful somehow. Plus they elicit some interesting comments. One day in a 9 am Intro to Philosophy class I overheard a student whisper to his friend "God made me come to class this morning so I could see that shirt," referring to a particularly colorful display. Whatever motivates.

92. Global knives. I just love 'em. I started buying them when I started to get serious about cooking. My knife work is decent for someone unschooled, I suppose. Because of the way we buy meat, I tend to have to break it down a bit, into reasonable quantities for us to eat, so I've become pretty good with a boning knife and a cleaver, as well.

91. Clouds. I just love 'em. I know, you do too. I never said this list would be profound.

more things? yep, more things

Onward! More of

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

96. Goalie masks. I just love 'em. When I was a kid playing goal, I wore glasses, so I couldn't have one of the fiberglass masks that gave goalies of the day that canvas for artistic, team-spirited, or humorous expression. I had to use a helmet and cage, which was what a few NHL goalies were starting to do. In the 80s that became the vogue, until sometime in the late 80s the current breed of hybrid masks-with-wire cages became the standard. They combine the best of each: the protection of the wire cage, the close fit of the mask, and thankfully, above all, the space for painting.

95. Farmers' markets. I just love 'em. We went to the Modesto certified farmers' market this morning, and found the usual suspects there. The potato lady had Yukon golds, 5 pounds for 5 bucks, so we picked them suckers up (which means it's gratin de pommes de terre à la dauphin night!). There were Mariposa plums, all kindsa peaches, and so forth. The MoFaMa (or rather the MoFoMa) isn't big, but the variety of stuff has gradually improved. Buying local doesn't assure you're buying sustainably or organically grown stuff (except that there are a couple certified organic growers at MoFoMa), but of the triumvirate of local, sustainable, and organic, my tendency lately has been to regard local as a trump card. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to buy organically grown apples from Peru. And if your beans have travelled 1500 miles to come to dinner, as the average US-eaten vegetable has, I don't see how sustainable that practice really is. Hence, local.

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.)

fruit and music

As might be expected, the opinion pages of the Modesto Bee have been full of denials, rebuttals, confessions, challenges, and lamentations in response to the "news" from last week that Modesto (a.k.a. Motown, or in the very local parlance of the House About Town, Funkytown, or, especially in transit away from it, a place named by the phrase "No me Modesto") is the worst city to live in in the US.

So far, none that I've read (admittedly a random and unscientifically small sample) have mentioned the single most obvious thing Modesto has going for it: fruit. This is probably because you could live just about anywhere in California, including, say, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Napa, Tiburon, Santa Cruz, etc., etc., and still get fantastic fruit. In that sense, fruit isn't a reason to live in Modesto.

However, the fruit is gorgeous. We're two weeks into cherry season, a week into apricot season, and we've had strawberries for quite a while already. Peaches and plums are around the corner. We'll pick the first cherry tomatoes soon. We've already had pounds of lettuce and Swiss chard, all from the little piece of yard my loveliest has tended so - er, tenderly.

I have no point. I have two more class days left this semester, and I have no point. I'm out.

Also in the Bee this morning was a review of the Modesto Symphony chorus performances of Friday and Saturday nights. I went Saturday and enjoyed it tremendously, although, like the reviewer in the Bee (none other than CSU Stanislaus' own Stephen Thomas), I was bothered at first by the lousy acoustics in the hall, and also thought there was something fishy going on among the violins in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. The Haydn Dm Mass was tumultuous, as its name implies. Good stuff.

Yesterday we found ourselves fruitlessly searching for a second-hand bicycle, but fruitfully finding fruit, of which I shall now consume.

pasta, music

On Sunday (I know; this is belated) I made a pasta dish:

1/2 pound pasta (shells in this case)
14 ounces cannelini beans (white kidney beans; I used canned, cuz)
14 ounces diced tomatoes (also canned, without salt)
4 leaves of Swiss chard
3 cloves of garlic
1/8 tsp or so crushed red pepper flakes
a few gratings of nutmeg
herbs of one's choice (basil, oregano, parsley)
2 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Heat oil, add garlic, then tomatoes and chard, salt (keeps the chard green), then other stuff except pasta. Boil pasta separately. Stick these together. If you like, add some grated parmesan or some crumbled feta or sump'n. 'sgood.

Music: Tonight we went to hear the CSU Stanislaus Chamber Singers, or as I refer to them in a jaunty mood, (chorus director) Daniel Afonso's Elite Republican Guard. They were, as always, impressive. Especially impressive were pieces by J. Aaron McDermid and Morten Lauridsen, both featuring generous helpings of dissonance. McDermid's was based on a religious-themed text by St. Ambrose, and knocked my socks off. The Lauridsen stuff was based on Italian poems about fiery passion, and featured a weirded-up minor chord, which Lauren thinks was weirded up by adding a second to it (thinking about this in guitar terms, to me, that means they added a ninth). I'm a sucker for dissonance, I am. Holy jumpin'.

funkytown worst of all

Apparently, a book detailing life and livability of a few hundred US cities has ranked Modesto last. The Modesto Bee article focuses on local reactions to the news, and of course Modestans interviewed by the Bee didn't see anything so terrible. Even the author of the book seemed to tell the Bee that the situation was not all that dire.

And really, if you take away the disgusting hot summer, the pollution, low level of educational achievement, minimal cultural scene, lack of good jobs, lack of affordable housing, poor urban planning, poor health care, high crime rate, lousy traffic, and the fact that despite all this thousands of people commute 2.5 hours each way to good jobs in the San Francisco Bay area (thus contributing to the pollution and lousy traffic), really, it's not too bad.

If you ask one of those commuters why he or she lives here, I imagine the likely answers are (1) the housing market, as inflated as it is, is more affordable than the Bay Area, and (2) it's a safer, more wholesome environment in which to raise kids. The latter of these rationales is easily understood, because it's entirely false. People who believe that are, simply, wrong. They do not want to know, and in many cases would flatly reject, the facts. As for the former rationale, it is certainly true that the housing market here has been better lately: a mere $289,000 can get you a 1100 square foot bungalow in some less desirable areas. So people who commute 5+ hours a day in order to buy a house are, clearly, more interested in achieving the American dream (to wit: mortgage) than in health, well-being, and so on.

To set the record straight on at least one point, there is no truth to the rumors that Modesto city planners intend to embark on a major urban renewal project involving razing all structures in the county.

wackiness, in the form of academic senate debate

I've had a fascinating day taking Lauren for a crown (for her tooth, not for giving airs of royalty), chasing down antibiotics for another tooth of hers, reading Intro to Philosophy response papers on W.E.B. DuBois (and contemplating what they mean pedagogically), and attending a rollicking Academic Senate meeting.

I've been on the Cow State Santa Claus academic senate since - geez, since spring of 2000, I think. First I was the philosophy department senator, and, since the institution of the academic senate lecturer rep a couple years ago, I've been the lecturer senator. For a brief time, my life pretty much revolved around academic senate, as sad a comment as that is about my life at that time. I still really enjoy it, because I like policy arguments and the flow of discussion surrounding them, and because I want to be as much a part of the university as I can - full citizenship, as it were, even though in the minds of many around there I'm "only a lecturer."

Today we had second readings on the last resolutions of the academic year, and ran headlong into serious controversy about student attendance in classes. Right now, our university attendance policy is vague, to say the least. Reportedly, there have been difficulties, especially for student athletes, who have had faculty be completely unwilling to accomodate them when they have to miss classes for games. I don't know how widespread the problem is, and I've always been open to accomodating any student with what I regard as a legitimate absence, but since there is no policy about this, students have no recourse when faculty aren't willing to be accomodating.

It's a complex issue, and ultimately I jumped on a motion to refer the whole thing to the educational policies committee. The faculty at senate had too many questions about the rewritten policy we were considering, and even if they weren't all well-founded, or sometimes based on confused readings, it seemed like faculty wouldn't buy into the policy if we passed this one. A bunch of students came to the meeting, and I know they were disappointed with what happened, but I think it's for the best. An unclear or toothless policy wouldn't have helped them, and a policy the faculty regard as suspect or illegitimate wouldn't have helped them either.

The meeting threatened to get very nasty and personal, but the speaker of the faculty averted that. Lauren and I came home in a somewhat heated mood over it, and we hashed it out for a while. It annoys her when I defend the faculty privilege/right of making their own academic and pedagogical decisions, including classroom policies. Her argument is that this doesn't recognize students' academic rights, but I counter that with regard to pedagogy, students don't have rights. It's funny, because I don't know if I seriously believe that. I say things as though I have complete confidence in my beliefs, but there aren't many that aren't negotiable, especially about these kinds of things. I think more than anything I look for reasonably practicable principles, even if these are at some basic level arbitrarily determined - if we erect some concept, even if it's incomplete, not sufficiently inclusive, etc., we have at least something to continue arguing about. It's folly to think any of these concepts, principles, policies, or anything else will reach a final form or fit all instances. But you won't notice the instances until you've picked a background to contrast them with.

That's the essence of rational argument, isn't it?

alienation

Aside from being a relatively crappy sci-fi series, alienation is also an important concept in Marx's critique of capitalism in the early manuscripts. It's also an important part of my Intro to Philosophy class, at least today. (It's also an important part of a complete breakfast, but that's as may be.)

I mention it because Marx is a challenge to teach. Over the years, I've taught this passage from the 1844 Manuscripts 2.7 million times, give or take, and just about every time, there's a handful of students who dismiss his analysis out of hand. They tend to make one of two arguments that I find baseless.

One is that since the Soviet Union collapsed, we know that communism failed, therefore Marx was wrong. That could be true, if communism had actually been practiced in the USSR, and if communism "failing" meant that Marx's account of alienation was wrong. The first premise is false, the second begs the question.

The other dismissal is based on a rejection of Marx's implicit account of human nature. The argument is that Marx assumes (falsely) that human beings are naturally cooperative rather than naturally competitive; that is, that the basic tenet of capitalist and proto-capitalist political economy, the naturalness of acquisitiveness and Hobbes' war of all against all, are the true state of nature. This is much trickier, but I think dismissing Marx on this basis overrates the significance of the objection. Even if Marx has too optimistic a view of human cooperation, this argument ultimately fails as a dismissal of the account of alienation. For one thing, in that period Marx's fundamental theory of human nature focused on our being creative, consuming beings who are social. He attacks the presumption in capitalist political economy that greed and competition are natural, but he does not claim that we are naturally either greedy or altruistic. In any case, it's probably not a valid objection to the main line of the analysis of alienation.

My problem in class today will be compounded by the fact that the course is nominally about the good life, and here's Marx telling us about alienation. It's a sort of negative of the good life, and I'll have to not only explain alienation but try to tease out how it points to what the good life does consist of.

I'll probably end up talking about cooking.

happy landings

I'm less neurotic than other people I know. I'm not afraid of heights. I'm not xenophobic, nor claustrophobic. I do not fear abandonment or machines. When a plane is flying low over a highway, however, I do often contemplate that it could suddenly, either in an emergency or because the pilot chooses that precise moment to snap, land in front of me. So I'm pleased to report not having been on Highway 4 when a plane landed there yesterday.

The wonderfully ironic background to the story is as follows.

It was a traffic reporter's plane.
The reason it was flying over Highway 4 is because, over the weekend, a tanker truck hauling gasoline burned and caused a major interchange between Interstates 80 and 580 to collapse - an interchange used by hundreds of thousands of commuters daily, all of whom now have to find ways around it, "ways," I should hasten to add, with fewer than the 5 lanes in and out of town offered by 580.

In other news, now crystal meth comes in delicious fruity flavors!

Let me randomly add that Lancelot's tests indicate a probable kidney infection, and he's on antibiotics. Prognosis is good.

sick cat

Over the weekend Christina and Guerin came over for dinner, and Christina mentioned that Lancelot seemed much skinnier than she last saw him, which would have been about a month ago. He's had a bad few weeks, going from being a very pukey cat (he's always been) to being probably among the top 10 pukiest cats in town. I called the vet first thing this morning and we got him in later in the morning. They drew blood, examined him, and gave him some subcutaneous fluids. Of course, I was thinking back to the summer of 2001, when Morgan died of sudden liver failure (it was suspected at least), after a couple weeks of doing her brave best. I was crushed. Morgan was a wonderful cat.

Lancelot is a wonderful cat in his own right, and in the last couple of years, now that he's an only cat, he's come into his own. Still, I'm horrified that he'll turn out to be very sick. We find out tomorrow morning. He's nearly 15, for crying out loud.

Anyway, he's nowhere near as sick as Morgan was, and as happens, the subcute fluids have helped him feel better this afternoon.

So it was certainly a great boon to my mood to read the following on the package of the new sponge-scrubby thing we picked up at Target (punctuation and grammar uncorrected from the package copy; emphasis in the original):

"nothing beats the feeling of clean. when everything is bright and sparkly. when your life is spotless and the possibilities are endless. and just for a moment - sigh - everything is perfect. until it's time to clean again."

Target has commodified my dishwashing.

not allowed

Since the NHL playoffs are ongoing, a couple further entries to the list of those banned from the house from the hockey world:

* Mark Messier. Though he's retired and 46, he's still not someone I'd like to run into in a dark alley, or a well-lit alley, and especially not in my living room. Lauren frequently notes that, even in a neat well-pressed suit, he looks like he is going to eat your face.

* Darcy Tucker. I love watching Darcy Tucker play, because he gets a shark-eyed look and becomes quite clearly insane. He fights, he scores goals, he wreaks havoc.

the "Virginia Tech shooting"

Lots of people have said lots of things about the "Virginia Tech shooting." Even calling it that says something pertinent about why lots of people have said lots of things about it. It's turned into a media event - or maybe is practically from the start a media event. But it's not the media's fault.

Adam Felber put it better than I could.

What above all I have to say about it is that I'm terribly terribly glad we don't watch TV news.

abstinence makes the heart grow faithfuller

The breaking news is that abstinence education abjectly fails to decrease either teen sex or risky teen sex. The reason this is breaking news has nothing to do with the study results that draw this conclusion, because that would be the foregone conclusion of people thinking rationally about these problems. The real news here is that America is experiencing a crisis of faith!

If we would only believe hard enough, abstinence education would work, global warming would be "junk science," and Iraq would be taking strides toward stability and peace. Despite the continuous increase in our work productivity (i.e., profitability), it seems that Americans are losing ground in faith productivity. That's what this nation really needs: not more faith-based initiatives (where the bulk of the $120 million spent on abstinence education went), but a Federal Faith Initiative. Faith itself must be restored through a concerted government program before any of these programs can reach fruition. F.D.R. had his New Deal. The Bush Administration should pursue something like this, a New something or other - New... New... well, they'll think of something; they're good with names.

The millions poured into new federal government projects for Compassion and so forth, and earmarked for groups who proclaim a particular religious outlook (and/or who happen to have supported President Bush's campaign in 2000) have produced very little clear success. This is clearly because of the faith productivity lag. After all, how could abstinence education have overcome the fact that an estimated 90% of the target population has intercourse, unless enough of us believed that "just say no" would work? The Administration can lead the way, by refuting studies that deny the effectiveness of abstinence education and reaffirming their conviction that abstinence is the way to teach safe sex.

Speaking of "just say no," consider how badly the War on Drugs is going. If only we all got together and believed drugs would go away, clearly they would, and we would win the War without firing another shot.

As for so-called global warming, in this case it's obvious that once the rapture comes, climate change won't be an issue, so I suppose we needn't worry about believing it's junk science any more. This is good, because we'll need to concentrate our faith productivity on those areas where we can make a real difference: sex and drugs.

staying put for a bit?

We got back from LA in plenty of time for my loveliest to get to choir rehearsal. It was an unpleasant drive up the Crankster Freeway, the seasonal northerly wind gusting across the road and apparently pushing slower-moving SUVs with drivers talking on cell phones over into the left lane. I lost count of how many times I was cut off by someone in a large vehicle, or a semi rig, by the time we got to Earlimart (which is the halfway point, and also the name of an indie alt band.

So I'm more or less officially sick of driving up and down the Moose-forsaken central valley. On the other hand, I have developed a sudden and demanding craving for Yosemite, and also for letting a couple hours drift by while I watch ocean waves. Back in the car!

collective action

The tentative agreement between CFA and CSU is good news. It's good news, obviously, for faculty: we're tentatively getting raises we deserve, and tentatively won't have to go on strike. It's good news for the CSU administration, because a strike by faculty would be embarassing, especially given how much political pressure and scrutiny they're under. It's good news for students, because classes won't be interrupted, and because CFA didn't accept the ridiculous offer the CSU made, which was contingent upon CFA not speaking against student fee increases. CFA remains able to advocate for students and the good of the university.

Someone on the Lecturers Council conference call last night ut the matter well: this is good news not only for us, but for a public that has become more and more disaffected, been treated to ever-increasing exploitation and disenfranchisement by hierarchical power. The good news is: collective action works.

tentative agreement

CFA announced today that it reached a tentative agreement with CSU on a new contract. More on that later. It's latish, I'm still recovering from the road trip to Arizona and back, and I've got a lot of pent-up job-action-related energies, anxieties, and so forth that I suddenly don't know what to do with. So I'm going to take a chance on relaxation and sleep.

The CFA website reference page for the tentative agreement info, I've just noticed, is called "settlement.html." I wrote a tune by that name, that I haven't written a lyric for yet, but which I think will include the line "set everything on fire and split the ashes," or words to that effect. The song, it should be noted (no pun intended) has nothing to do with collective bargaining. It should also be noted that the lyric line I've just quoted has nothing to do with the terms of the tentative agreement.

The agreement looks, on the whole, like a CFA slam dunk. But much more. And more on that, too, later. (Think: musings on the power of collective action.)