dinner

I can't really give full verbal expression to what goes on in my kitchen sometimes.

Gratin de pommes de terre à la dauphinoise

Innocent Yukon Gold potatoes, totally unaware what fate has in store for them, prior to adding boiled milk, cream, gruyère, nutmeg, white pepper custard.



With the custard added. This is the potato equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction at this point. I decided to get tricky, and temper the egg with some boiled milk, then dump the egg back into the milk, add the nutmeg, etc., and most of the gruyère, then reduce that into an actual custard. (Escoffier has you toss all the ingredients together unblended before bunging the whole into the oven. Not sure it would make that much difference, but this was pretty smooth.)



After 45 minutes in a moderate oven. If you lived here, you'd have quadruple bypass by now. (Only you wouldn't, because it's been about a year since the last gratin, hence the urgency to do this tonight.)

The notorious arugula, white peach, pignola, white pepper, and chèvre salad. Eat your friggin' heart out.

The filet, plated, with the madeira and green peppercorn sauce, sautéed mushrooms, and the gratin. Killer-diller.

new song - Variably

This is a ballad in E.

I'm repeating the song info from the Soundclick page: This is a tune I just sort of came across while doing fingerpicking exercises, and since then I haven't been able to stop playing it. I think it's too pretty. I mean, it's nice, lovely even, but where's the challenge?

There are a couple of flubbs in this recording, but my main reason for putting it out into the Interwebs is to see if I can stop obsessing over it.

(Sorry that the widget just plays and plays and plays. All the Soundclick widgets except this one are totally broken, and this one just autostarts. Still, it's good for my chart position!)

Now playing: Paper Cats

album of the day: Wincing the Night Away

Is angsty pop-rock really necessary? What happens when angsty pop-rock grows up?

The Shins offer answers to these questions in this 2007 release. The first is, yes. Whether you think so or not. The reasons angsty pop-rock is necessary are basically twofold. As a civilization, we're still producing new generations of angsty teens and young adults. That happens when people reproduce, apparently. Plus, somebody's got to give vent to melodramatic emotion, which, it would seem, continues to exist as a psychological and cultural phenomenon.

The answer to the second is, it doesn't. And that's the way it should be.

"Australia" is what hooked me. I was downloading Shins tunes, following a musical hunch, looking for new stuff, and the first one I started to grasp was this one, brimming with energy. Not every track had the same bounce and spirit, but everything I found felt alert, upright, anxious and at attention. Not just energy, but welled-up, tensed energy, ready to spring.

(Which, along with the band's name, reminds me of an elementary school playground game we used to play. It was our own version of those games where you throw an inflated rubber ball at someone, and if you hit them, they were "out." Some people call this game "dodge ball" or "battle ball." In fourth grade we played this against a brick wall of our school, on a strip of grass about 10 feet deep and 30 feet long. The players lined up right against the wall, and the pitcher would hurl a baseball at the players' shins. Those who were hit were "out." To say the least.)

The first several times through "Australia," I didn't really catch the lyrics, except for the very end: "starved of oxygen/ so give me your hand/ and let's jump out the window." And I thought, well, that's rather an odd sentiment at the conclusion of such a catchy tune.

Turns out, the dark expression of the theme - it's actually more about breaking free of restrictions or repressions - is common to the whole album. For instance, in describing a quintessential angsty moment - making the fateful decision to fall into tangled sex - in "Sealegs": "when that dead moon rises again/ be no time to stall or protocol to hem us in darling." (Morrissey, I'm thinking. The Smiths are still hanging around.)

Perhaps a question for another time is why I seem to need angsty pop-rock. Cuz I do.

On the other hand, the Shins have become mainstream in their popularity after crossover media exposure, and thus have lost at least 90% of their credibility among the angst-ridden demographic their stuff would seem to be perfectly suited to. No doubt that demographic have moved on to something else. With any luck, the Shins won't drink the Kool-Aid, become flaccid, and go on to years of impotent but lucrative popularity.

album of the day: Rain Dogs

Tom Waits is my hero. This album is one reason why.

I don't think any of his work tops this 1985 album. It follows the pattern of his records starting in the 70s and continuing basically through Mule Variations in 1999, with a couple exceptions along the way. The songs alternate between gut-bucket blues played on all kinds of weird instruments, and heart-wrenching ballads of remorse, lost love, and desperate loneliness. Waits' genius is that he writes and performs both astoundingly well.

I think Waits is underappreciated as a musician and singer, largely because of the voice he trained to sound ruined, and in the process, ruined, and because of the affected drunken style of his playing (especially on piano), which eventually led him to be a drunk. It's a strange story. Mainly to set himself apart, and to embody and act out the songs he was writing about the citizen-detritus he encountered as a down-and-out musician, he staged a persona. By the 80s, Tom Waits' performance persona and his actual life and consciousness were hard to distinguish.

That's not why he's my hero. In fact, it would be tragic, if he hadn't eventually gotten his head straight and figured out how to live with himself and with the world, more or less. Actually, I think most observers agree that the secret to Tom Waits' being alive, if not also of his success, is his wife Kathleen Brennan. (Rain Dogs marks their first collaboration as songwriters - which continues until now.)

He's my hero because he lays bare wounded souls he has seen, without exploiting them, and without really approving of their desperation, bad judgment, ill temper, what have you. He romanticizes them, for sure, but this only serves to humanize them, I feel; plus the surrealist streak in his music, lyrics, and performance keep you off-kilter, keep judgment in suspense, and this makes the work have power, and have you face some very deeply sad, troubling, beautiful, and absurd aspects of life that most of us prefer to ignore.

This album features mad French guitarist Marc Ribot, who plays angular, tangential solos that make very little sense whatsoever (he's sort of the album's resident Eric Dolphy), and Keith Richards plays on a couple numbers as well. There's a horn section on one track, a trombone on another, bass sax on yet another, marimba, accordion, bowed saw, and bangy-rattly things of various kinds. This is another reason I love Tom Waits - I call it the "fuckitity" of his music: "Bowed saw? Sure - fuck it!"

wild meaning

What The Visible and the Invisible boils down to is an attempt to evoke the origination of meaning, signification, and expression - the nascence of our experience of truth. Merleau-Ponty himself didn't get far, since he died - as the probably apocryphal but lovely story goes, while reading Descartes.

I translated an article a few years ago that argued that the issue is translation. Expression in language is a translation of what Merleau-Ponty resorts to calling the wild meaning or wild being of our pre-reflective experience.

We do not see, do not hear the ideas, and not even with the mind’s eye or with the third ear: and yet they are there, behind the sounds or between them, behind the lights or between them, recognizable through their always special, always unique manner of entrenching themselves behind them,... (VI, 151)

The very end of the chapter everybody in the Merleau-Ponty biz talks about goes like this:

In a sense the whole of philosophy, as Husserl says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain of language. And, in a sense, as Valéry said, language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests. (VI, 155)

That's pretty, but, as is so often the case with Merleau-Ponty, even in the stuff he actually finished and published, it's ambiguous. Since his point is that experience is ambiguous, and our giving expression to it disambiguates it in a particular direction, creates/discovers in it a provisional truth, then his own ambiguous writing is itself evocative. That's one thing I've always both deeply admired and been quite irritated by.

The human work of expression - and philosophy is just the account of how this work takes place - is this disambiguation or translation of what Merleau-Ponty calls "mute things" or "mute experience." He takes this from Husserl in the Cartesian Meditations, so I'll have to go back to that again (he was apparently reading that, Husserl's "Origin of Geometry" essay, and something by Descartes as he was working this out).

But I woke up last night trying to figure out what this idea of "mute experience" or "mute things" means. The philosophy which proposes that expression in language translates and gives voice to the mute things could seem to be a bad humanism - that is, a humanism that privileges the human source of meaning as not only our source of meaning, but the source of meaning. Clearly, Merleau-Ponty is trying not to do that - we're passive in our activity, after all, and for our expressions to express the mute things, they can't be merely ours.

Why assume things are mute? Why assume wild being is inarticulate - if that's what "mute" means? What does "mute" mean, for that matter? (That too could be considered a pun, but watch out for that smuggled-in dualism, bub!)

If I (to wit, a human) were to make the case that the mute things converse, that they disambiguate themselves, I'd probably be making the same humanistic mistake: this would obviously be my own account of their articulation.

I think I have the biggest problem buying "mute" things and "mute" experience when I consider music. Human beings play music, but music isn't a human phenomenon, it's a natural phenomenon - related to vibration, proportion, harmony. As much as we overlay all this with our musical expressions, music only happens because the universe is built this way. (I hasten to add that this is not a cosmological question, it's about how meaning arises.) I have a hard time admitting to writing a tune, because the tune is already implicit in - well, you might say, in physics, but let's continue to say wild being. Any tune is implicit in it. Any sequence of tones of any duration, spanning any register, including those we don't hear, is, simply, there.

This makes "mute" very hard for me to fathom, and I think pushing that a little further might help me figure out something about my take on the relationship between my subjection to "wild being" (e.g., that I vibrate, that bits of me vibrate aurally, in particular) and my active perceiving of others, the world, things (e.g., someone singing, music, guitars omg guitars), and to musical meaning. The passion at the heart of this leads me again to want an erotic account.

album of the day: Jazz Icons: Charles Mingus Live in '64

The album of the day is actually the DVD of the day. Sue me.

I'm not a jazz historian, but I do know a few things about modern jazz. One thing I think I know is that nobody was writing like Charles Mingus in the late 50s and 60s. Many of his compositions, and many of my favorites, are programmatic tone-poems, musical depictions of events, people, places, even concepts. I believe his music owes a lot to Duke Ellington, but translated through bebop and other more modern developments, and bent a bit by Mingus' own strange imagination and sensibilities. So, where Ellington would give us a beautiful suites like "Black and Tan Fantasy" or lovely standards like "Sophisticated Lady" or "Prelude to a Kiss," and you can hear the influence of Ellington's melodies throughout Mingus' corpus, once churned through the Mingus mind, out comes something like "Meditations on Integration," a long, often discordant suite in this set.

This was the tune new to me from these 1964 studio and concert performances from Europe. The "Meditations," recorded in a studio in Belgium, runs to well over 10 minutes, has several stylistic and melodic shifts, and constant changes in rhythm, tempo, and above all, emotional meaning.

And that's the secret to Mingus, I think. His work packs an emotional wallop at times, and he was able to both musically contemplate and allow space for soloists to just blow. The overall impression, especially watching the band work out, is of a very serious and reflective approach, which just happens to also be tremendously vigorous and athletic.

And varied. On "Meditations," Mingus plays the bass by bowing, plucking, strumming, whacking the strings with the bow, scratching the strings with the bow, then with his fingers, or caressing them with his fingertips or the palm of his hand, tapping or scratching the face of the bass, tapping the strings below the bridge. Oh, and bending the strings off of the fretboard, fretting them on the side of the neck. It doesn't look like he's doing this to do it - not like, say Reid Anderson of the Bad Plus, who (this is their aesthetic, after all) just seems to be playing around with what music can be. It's purposeful, and directed toward the ideas he wants to present about integration. And they are not, not every one, all happy thoughts.

Another typical Mingus moment on the DVD: They jump into "Parkeriana," a tribute to Charlie Parker, based on Dizzy Gillespie's "Ow!" (which is based, like approximately 17% of all bebop tunes, on "I Got Rhythm"). They play the headpiece, and then the soloists all jump in and start on themes from Charlie Parker. Trumpeter Johnny Coles starts in, Mingus starts frowning, and puts a halt to the whole thing. Then Mingus rips into a furious version of "Take the A Train," which they play for 10 minutes, until, out of concern for Eric Dolphy's sanity, they cool it.

(Maybe I'll do an Eric Dolphy disc once I've recovered. Yipes. After the first number, "So Long Eric," from the Belgian date, I had to blurt out, "Well, that was great, until Eric screwed everything up!" Which he did! He was playing in entirely the wrong tempo, and in the wrong key, and for whatever reason Mingus had the band follow him, before they had to work out how to return to the actual song. Eric Dolphy is not for everyone.)

more on flesh from Merleau-Ponty

Attempting an entirely novel account of perception, meaning, and truth, Merleau-Ponty begins to work up this notion of flesh. Only it's not a notion, it's more like an "element" in the ancient Greek sense, he says. Anyway, a key part of his discussion is that to be capable of vision we must be of the visible, as a common flesh. Our individual vision, our capacity to see things, arises by way of our being among those visible things. So while to us, at least before we reflect on it, our vision may seem sovereign, totally within our control, Merleau-Ponty attempts to evoke this implication of ourselves in the visible.

Vision, he says, in the first place is narcissistic for me individually. It opens to a world that addresses and seems to be about and for my vision. However, there's another side to it:

as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by thing things, my activity equally is passivity – which is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. (The Visible and the Invisible, 139)

I'm hooked. Seduction is perfect for describing this.

Double narcissism: to see and to be seen -- to approach the world with my abrupt, overly frank look, to look right into and upon things, to make things show themselves to me, naked; and to be looked upon, to have my seeing seduced by the things, by their nakedness. Seduction is, after all, reciprocal. The seducer draws me in, tugs upon me and reveals me naked, and my naked repose in the seducer’s sight of me seduces the seducer. In seduction there is that moment, that “element” of intertwining flesh, flesh that moves flesh through traversing the distance between us, pulling us by our flesh to one another’s, to the flesh of the seduction itself.

What this wants is not an aesthetics of perception, but an erotics – an account of perception, sensation, of flesh awake, sentient and captivated through flesh, by flesh. Any flesh, all flesh. So I wasn't merely being provocative in Montreal. And when I wrote my old erotic poem about blood fruit, I was really on to something. (I wonder if I was reading Merleau-Ponty then, too?)

This may seem weird at first, but consider some instances.

I scan for beauty, searching out something to please my eyes. I set this direction, I set out into this constituted beauty-world. If I come across a stand of scarlet lilies, I'm stopped in my tracks. This is a flower I'm particularly enamored of, one I fixate on, dream about even. And there they are! My quest for beauty has led me to be stunned, done in, entangled. The lilies have me in their petals, and I feel held fast in place, drawn and unable to pull away.



I really love white peaches. I'm stupid for white peaches. I grab a peach, intending to violate it utterly, you know, eating it, and as I bring the peach close to my mouth, its perfume, the velvet skin soft in my hand, reclined in my fingertips, and as I lay my lips upon it, I give myself over to the peach. It fills my mouth, it drips sweetly over my tongue, drenches my chin, my fingers, and I'm transfixed, mad with desire. There is nothing else in the world for me in that moment but the flesh of the peach, this flesh becoming my flesh.

(Man oh man oh man, do I love white peaches.)



So I'm going to work further on an erotics of perception and see where that goes. Fleshly, I suppose!

album of the day: Giant Steps

The first studio album of all original John Coltrane compositions, Giant Steps was pretty aptly named. It arrived just as Coltrane's second stint with Miles Davis was ending, and Coltrane finally had no other choice for developing his own music but to become and remain a band leader. It also marks a creative beginning for Coltrane and for the future of jazz.

My copy (cd re-issue, 1999) includes the original liner notes, where Coltrane is liberally quoted regarding his writing. Seems like he spent a lot of time fooling around at the piano, until some progression caught his ear, then he worked that up into a tune, found variations, worked those up, etc. This allows me the harmless and ridiculous boast that I write very much the same way Coltrane did, only with guitar instead.

All Music Guide's review is a bit over-the-top on this one. Yes, Coltrane was developing a form of jazz that brought solo musicians into more focus, and thus de-emphasized (and eventually did away with) written melodic tunes. And yes, Coltrane's approach to solos was tremendously innovative and damned weird. But I don't think this album, good as it is, is a radical departure so much as a coherent, cohesive development.

(And if you want to talk about a new way to play a sax solo, well, compare these 1959 recording dates to the 1960 and '61 dates that formed My Favorite Things. Trane put some serious work into his control and concept in those months, is my take.)

It's excellent on its own terms, and the band are superb. I mean, Paul Chambers on bass, you can't beat that. Plus I love love love hearing the emerging new Coltrane sound in tracks like "Countdown" and the title track. Dee-lish!

philosophy is sexy

Really, it is! Here's Merleau-Ponty on why:

... But from this it follows that the words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon Being, because they more closely convey the life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin. (The Visible and the Invisible, p. 102)

Seriously, that's hot. I love it when philosophy happens in a conference or a classroom. It's unfortunately rare, because I think a great deal of what happens in conferences and classrooms has already been tamed, domesticated, penned up (now, see, that's a nice pun right there). I always want to just go into a room and think, right there in front of everybody, hopefully with most everybody - because you can't really do it alone.

When it happens, we're opened up to the world, to words, to meaning, to Being as Merleau-Ponty says, and to one another. Either because it takes so much energy and adrenalin to get there, or because getting there releases so much energy and adrenalin, there's a rush. Something is emerging, an understanding is being conceived (another good pun). Hence the joy, as well.

Reading The Visible and the Invisible is bringing me back this feeling (when it's not annoying the heck out of me), that the past couple years of dread have dampened. I hope I can keep that going as the Fall term approaches, remember what it felt like in class sessions of a couple years ago - especially in the Theory of Knowledge class, when we had days we reached a point that all we could do was laugh, just burst out in laughter. Damn, that's wonderful.

Is that what it felt like to be a rock star?

album of the day: Let's Dance

It's no surprise Let's Dance is one of David Bowie's most commercially successful albums, since it was designed to be. The hit singles are all iconic 80s dance-pop songs, drawing heavily from the dawning New Wave movement that an earlier incarnation of Bowie had inspired.

It certainly has its 80s-tastic moments, and it has its flaws. "Ricochet" and the cover of "Criminal World" aren't terribly interesting, for instance.

But to me, the key to this album, and the reason "Modern Love" and "Let's Dance" (and even "China Doll") have lasted, is the brilliant move of hiring Stevie Ray Vaughan to play lead guitar. Vaughan was still struggling with Double Trouble around Austin, and supposedly driving delivery trucks to make ends meet. His brief, choppy, pulsing solos give those tracks a weird lacerating feel that has remained interesting and lively. Nobody would use those effects any more, especially not the absurd echo effect, and the heavy use of chorus pedal is straight outta New Wave, but still, I submit, without him, this disc would be pretty tame stuff.

Not bad stuff, just tame stuff. Some reviews I've read today suggested that Bowie's lyrics keep this from being a Duran Duran album. Sure. Back then, Bowie probably could have sung Yellow Pages listings for dry cleaners and made it sound freaky. Plus I think most of the songs have good bones.

The scary part? 1983. This thing is 27 freaking years old, and that's very hard to fathom.

reading _The Visible and the Invisible_

Despite my misgivings, I'm going back to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's unfinished manuscript of The Visible and the Invisible, the book he was writing when he died. Why misgivings? The extant manuscript is about 150 pages that amount to an introduction of the task of the book. The task of the book was to be an inquiry into the source of meaning and truth, as well as a kind of archeology of meaning and truth. Big league stuff.

The Merleau-Ponty academic establishment (Lauren's word: fandom) has pursued this book relentlessly. Especially during the 90s, it seemed that any academic conference discussion of Merleau-Ponty led straight to rather florid speculations about what appear to many to be the key notions on which Merleau-Ponty's account of meaning rest. These words, chiasm, intertwining, irreversibility, and flesh, are all really evocative, especially flesh (I'm a big fan of flesh, and indeed of flesh).

This speculation, especially at its most florid, always bugs me. It's weird that it does. I'm as kinky as the next guy - no, now that I think of it, I'm probably kinkier than the next guy - but the way people wrote and talked about flesh struck me as unseemly and profligate. For one thing, we can't know what Merleau-Ponty was going to write about all this stuff. Often enough, when the going got rough in this business, people would refer to the "Working Notes" published as an appendix to the book, and go on to use these (generally quite sketchy) phrases as the basis for an interpretation. As bizarre as it is to make pronouncements of things like "Plato's theory of ____," to take an unfinished work as the starting point, and proceed this way... it just seems licentious.

Yes, I said "licentious." I said "licentious."

And here is Claude Lefort, in the Editor's Foreword:

Thus again we discover death in the work, because its power is bound to its final impotency, because all the routes it opens and will always keep open are and will be without issue. In vain we try to brush aside the menace of this death: we imagine that what the work could not say others will say in the future, but what is has not said belongs properly to it, and the thoughts it awakens will be inscribed only far from it in a new work, by virtue of a new beginning. The meaning it dispenses always remains in suspense; the circle it traces circumscribes a certain void or absence.

The "new work" Lefort predicts has kept trying to say what is unsaid as though it were proper to this maddeningly fractured book, at least as far as the Merleau-Ponty gang are any indication. Grrrr! Grrrrr!

Meanwhile, what do you do with a 150 page dead letter? Read it, I guess, but I don't think I'll write back.

montreal - part three: sketch of a note on the state of academia

At the EPTC conference, one person thanked me for my paper and added that it was good to hear me give a paper again. It had been a while since I'd been to any kind of general continental philosophy conference. But that, and the general discourse of the conference, triggered another kind of reflection for me, on the business of academic conferences in general.

People who go to academic philosophy conferences might be aware of the phenomenon of Projects. Projects give everyone something automatically to talk about. Most papers are prefaced by allusion to an overarching Project the presenter has, of which this presentation is a part. After a presentation, there's often a comment, and the commentator will often relate to the paper in terms of his or her Project. Then there's a Q&A session, during which most questioners ask about the paper in relation to their own Projects. Projects pervade. Projects are everywhere!

And that's good. It gets things done. It gets people published. It gets them book contracts. It even gets some of them tenure. And this gives them greater access to resources for... more Projects.

And that's good. Philosophical Projects are good.

From my contingent standpoint, it's harder to take philosophical Projects seriously. I didn't win a tenure-track job. I didn't publish (much). So I didn't get more access to resources. I got more contingency. When I fully recognized this, my energy turned toward making precarious academic labor a little less precarious in whatever way I could - which isn't a philosophical Project in most respects.

Besides which, I can't help but notice some ways that philosophical Projects obstruct. They intrude on various conversations and interactions. Constant reference back to one's own Project makes a lot of the discussion following papers rather non-discursive. It can reach the level of being 8 people in a room, each talking to himself or herself.

What I've been able to do, in contrast, and following the rhythm of my labor (contrasted with the academically productive labor of the Projecting class), is more local and has less reference to the ongoing academic philosophical 'discussion.' For lack of a better name for them, I'll provisionally call the kind of philosophical engagement I mean philosophical behaving or conduct. The goal has less to do with public demonstration of my Project being publication-worthy or me being tenure-worthy, and more to do with trying to practice, to demonstrate, and to teach ways of living that are more self-reflectively provisional. It's not easy to maintain recognition of where my understanding falls apart, or of how little I know. It's humbling, but it's also just difficult because of how much of our everyday experience we take for granted. That's the sort of thing I mean by philosophical conduct.

It's odd. Among continental philosophers, especially among phenomenologists, there's often talk about our reflections are connected to lived experience. This is so in two dimensions: reflection begins from and should in the end be brought back to lived experience. I take it that the lived experience in question is not only the lived experience of tenure and promotion, nor even the lived experience of teaching. In effect, ultimately, and somewhat embarrassingly, I think it means we should be concerned about the state of people's souls.

montreal - part two: conferring and not conferring

Our main reason for going to Montreal was the conference of the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, a group that does so-called continental philosophy.

Conferences are funny things. Now that I'm firmly in the fringe of academic philosophy, and have almost nothing to gain or lose by going to these things, I'm pretty impatient with them. If I don't see a session on the schedule that is absolutely interesting to me, I don't go to any session. I wander around.

We spent almost all of one day walking around Montreal, from our hotel to Concordia University where the conference was being held, then back over to McGill (which was having spring convocation), then up into Parc Mont Royal a bit, just wandering, getting the feel of that part of the city on an ordinary day. Montreal is lovely - at least, those bits (like any city, it has its share of disused industrial tracts and post-industrial overlays, inconveniently located housing projects, and so forth). All the houses around there looked about 200 years old, including those that clearly weren't. It's the same kind of houses you'd see in old parts of DC (Georgetown, mainly), but with something about them that seemed a little, ya know, French.

I could never figure out where I was, the whole time we were there. This is very unusual. I have an excellent sense of direction, and have a strong proclivity for mentally mapping a place. But Montreal through me off somehow. I think it had to do with the density and busy-ness of the streets in the central city, and the fact that every block seemed to have two or three high-end restaurants, boutiques, a bar, a hotel, a bank, and a place festooned in neon inviting you to come in for "danse contact" (often also indicated by a silhouette on a sign). That made it hard to read the streets, and so I kept thinking I was going the wrong way, or indeed kept going the wrong way.

My Duquesne pal Dave "Dave" Koukal organizes a mini-conference within the conference (with Astrida Niemanis, a Canadian philosophy person) called "Back to the Things Themselves." The purpose of the conference is to engage in phenomenological description as a basic part of phenomenological philosophy - something not often done in most continental philosophy conferences.

I went to the first Back to the Things Themselves conference, ages ago, in New Hampshire, organized by three people. I came back from it really jazzed by the experience and told all sorts of people that this was the way phenomenology should be discussed by academic philosophers. There was one more conference organized by the initial group, but then it faded away. Over the years, Dave and I talked about starting our own conference along the same lines. One thing and another happened, and we never did that. So Dave and Astrida started putting this together as part of EPTC about 4 years ago.

All in all, it was a strong conference, and a strong conference within the conference. We went to a bunch of papers, almost all very good, and only saw one discussion break down into total chaos (following the presentation by a Cow State Santa Claus alum who went on to earn his PhD this year; the chaos was not his fault, and in fact had basically nothing to do with his paper). My paper went well, and the commentary was good and the discussion was interesting. I was surprised by the feedback I got. The paper has some very provocative bits about pain, strong smells, and sex (not as part of one single experience), but what people kept remarking on was my comment in the Q&A about not wanting to get involved in Merleau-Ponty's last, unfinished book, called The Visible and the Invisible. Maybe they were being tactful.

Luckily, I don't have that problem. But what I do have is more to say about academic philosophy, which will be the subject of my next, and final installment.

montreal - part one: travel, coronaries, etc.

Too much Montreal to discuss in one post. So for today, the travel part.

I've been stressed beaten over the head continuously with short lengths of rubber tubing over-stressed this year. I was grading up to the hour we packed to leave for Montreal on top of that. Then we got into Memorial Day San Francisco traffic (I was so stressed and so anxious that I forgot to make our favorite Memorial Day joke, of 5 years' vintage, to wit: "When I say it's Memorial Day, you say, 'how high?'!").

Saturday we knocked around in San Francisco, and that night I barely slept, tossing and turning, finally waking up around 2 am with my heart pounding. I have been concerned about my health because of the overwhelming pressure of the past couple years.

Sunday morning, I wasn't doing too well. We made our 7:20 am flight to JFK, but my heart was still pounding. By about a half-hour into the flight, I was short of breath, sweating, and my chest was tight with pain. I called the flight attendant and told her I was having chest pain. She looked freaked-out (I later discovered that was just sort of her look).

Here's what happens when you complain of chest pain to a flight attendant on a transcontinental flight.

The attendants emptied the very rear middle row of the plane (big 'un, a 767 with a middle triple row and two side double rows). They brought me back there. Meanwhile, they turned on the PA: "Attention, ladies and gentlemen. We have a medical emergency on board. If there is a doctor, a nurse, or any other medically trained professional on board who would please volunteer to assist, please let a flight attendant know."

Thus I became the Celebrity Medical Emergency of Flight 24.

A lovely nurse from Santa Rosa named Denise came back and talked to me a while. She checked my pulse, asked about my medical history, and asked for oxygen for me. The flight attendants turned up the O2 and a blood pressure cuff, and Denise got all that underway, while she told me I don't fit the profile for a heart attack victim.

I sat in the dark breathing oxygen for 10 minutes while, from time to time, passengers turned around to look. I felt physically rotten, but the pain in my chest started to abate. Denise all but diagnosed me as not having had a heart attack, suggested I get some juice, and just sit in the dark and hang out. The attendants got me apple juice and a cookie (and I never paid for the cookie - so there's a travel tip for you right there), and I sat in the back row the whole flight to New York.

It was a panic attack - my first serious one in over 6 years, and the first I've had that felt like this. I used to just hyperventilate and get light-headed and nauseated. Never had the chest pain before, but I think it may be related to the serious neck and back strain I've gotten from the stress. If you know about panic attacks, you know they're miserable and stupid, and that you feel like crap for at least a day afterward.

We got to Montreal by 9:30, which was late, because of construction at JFK. We couldn't figure out how to take the airport express bus to town to get to our hotel, so we took a very expensive cab ride instead. I'd had it at that point. It was a good decision: on the way out of Montreal, we took that bus, and there was no room whatsoever on it - no seats, no standing room, nothing. 30 minutes to the airport, stuffed in. Wouldn't have been good after a panic attack.

Our flights home were uneventful, except that the Montreal airport is pretty stupid to get through for an international flight. We got back to SFO at 11:15 or so. The Sleep, Park, 'n' Fly bus got us to take us to our car at around 11:45, and we were on the road to Turlock by just after midnight. So, after a 23 -hour day of conferencing (of which more in a later installment) and traveling, we were home by 2 am.

(Next year, this conference is in Fredericton, New Brunswick, which is further away and much less convenient to travel to!)

Lessons learned: Don't panic; don't die of a coronary on a transcontinental flight; nurses are lovely; if at all possible, don't fly from Montreal to the US.

er, uhm, er, a song?

I sometimes write songs under the alias Biff Nerfurpleberger. They aren't among the more introspective, musically weird things I more often do. Instead, they're, well, they're like tonight's offering, "Sad."

Now playing: Paper Cats

next year

Only 7 class sessions left in my academic year. I'll get there.

This has been one of the worst years of my career. From the start it looked terminal. By October I was told to look for employment elsewhere for 2010-11. I did, and found almost no teaching positions I could reasonably qualify for, and none I particularly wanted. But I applied, and received my rejection letters, and worried, and tried to keep doing my work.

Sometime in January I learned that a new possibility was arising that I would return next academic year. This is not because of the Governor's January budget request dissociative hallucination drug-crazed fit waste-of-time adding $305 million to the CSU budget. I don't believe the Governor has any intention of keeping his promises. I don't believe the Governor, no matter what he says. I can barely believe in the Governor, let alone the crapola he present to the public.

No, what I heard was that faculty in the department were finalists for other positions. They got them. So the department is shrinking by about 1/4 of its full-time faculty, and thus my job became 25% cut-proof. That's not to say I'm sure I'll have a job next year, again, despite the May release of the Governor's revised budget gambling addiction masquerade obscenity continuing to call for the $305 million additional for the CSU. Given the state of the state, the university's budget, the university's administration, and all the politics involved, I won't be entirely at rest until I not only have an appointment letter in hand, but have actually gone and taught my first classes in the Fall.

I can't wait to get the hell outta this place this Spring. This has been a terrible year. And now, weirdly, I can't wait to get back in the Fall to start the whole thing over again.

Oh yeah, and the collective bargaining agreement between CSU and CFA expires June 30th. We'll be in bargaining this Fall. So the fighting will simply continue, on more and other fronts. Can't wait for that, either.

concert: Verdi's Requiem

Wow, that was amazing!

Verdi's Requiem is very dramatic choral Mass, with a lot of solo bits throughout - which makes sense considering Verdi's main line of work was opera.

Last night and again tonight, the Modesto Symphony Orchestra and Chorus performed/will perform this intense piece. The show last night was tremendous - the finest MSO chorus performance I've heard yet. The group kept a strong tone through some very difficult passages, all the while keeping the focus on the operatic drama of the Mass. The soloists were all excellent, in particular the alto and bass, both of whom had distinctive voices for their parts (really the alto is a mezzo-soprano and the bass is a baritone-bass, but whatevs). Terrific, terrific stuff that should have gotten a rave review in the Modesto Bee - but I didn't see one there, hence me putting on the music reviewer hat.

Go see it!

end-of-the-year blues

(The year, in this case, is the academic year. That's what a year is for me. I don't really follow, believe in, or understand how to use the 12-month calendar. I translate my quotidianity into your bizarre, papist, Gregorian template strictly for your convenience. And I do it fairly poorly, because I don't care very much about your convenience.)

I often get pretty down as the academic year closes. I enjoy the rituals of the spring General Faculty Meeting, and like emptying my email inbox and working my way through The Stack.* But mainly, I dwell on things that went wrong, that I didn't do well, or didn't get a chance to do.

There's almost always unfinished business. I'm not the kind of teacher who just never gets through all the course material, and certainly not the kind that rushes everything in in the last two weeks. Most of my courses I have scheduled out precisely enough. The unfinished business is the business of thinking, and there's never sufficient time for that.

Then there's the inevitable acts of academic dishonesty to deal with, and students who don't do sufficient work to earn a good grade, or who disappear without turning in final papers. Those acts of self-destruction really bother me. Part of it is my desire to see students succeed, but it's also vaguely insulting to me, especially when it feels like I've done far more work in the course than a given student has. Doubly insulting when the student then blames me for a poor grade or for the F earned for cheating. (And yes, that's actually happened, on several occasions.)

I kind of mourn over missed opportunities in classes. I feel ongoing shame and embarrassment over miscommunication or mistakes - sending email with the wrong tone, or misnaming a student, or not recognizing a former student.

Four more class days, ending a week from Monday, and the onslaught of final papers.

yet another open letter to the President

Dear Mr. President,

Rumor has it that you're about to nominate a replacement for Justice Stevens on the US Supreme Court. Before you nominated Justice Sotomayor, as you recall, I applied for the position, even offering to take the job at a discounted salary. I didn't get the job, but I'm pretty sure I was a strong candidate for it. As the numerous rejection letters I've received from colleges and universities across the US and Canada always say, many highly qualified candidates have to be turned away.

In any event, I'm writing to apply once again to be a US Supreme Court Justice. From my previous application, you know I'm very well qualified and extremely willing. Allow me to provide more details about my qualifications that should demonstrate that no one could be a better US Supreme Court Justice.

The main thing a Justice does is make judgments. I'm a whiz at this. I can name several people who regard me as judgmental - although I have to admit that those people are intellectual cripples who wouldn't recognize judicial talent if it bitch-slapped them in the face.

I am also tremendously prejudiced against Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Flyers, whom I am glad to say are very likely to lose their playoff series to the Boston Bruins. I am also prejudiced against Atlanta (and the Atlanta Thrashers - stupid name for a hockey team, btw), Florida (and both the Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning - and don't even get me started on what a stupid name that is for a hockey team), some parts of Texas (Dallas Stars), Orange County (Anaheim hockey-team-name-too-stupid-and-of-such-vile-and-repugnant-pedigree-that-it-shall-be-nameless), Phoenix (Coyotes), and other cities where there should not be an NHL team.

My point is this. Prejudice is all about prejudgment. Pre-judgment. That's like judging prior to the time of judgment. So, prejudgment is obviously much more time-efficient, and - get this - the more prejudging you do, the earlier you finish judging, the sooner the Court can close up shop for the summer, and all us Justices head for Rehobeth. That saves the country money. See?

(I'm mainly prejudiced about places in the US South and their hockey teams, but I am all about professional development, and I'm sure with some mentoring I can develop many more prejudices. In fact, I feel one coming on now. Srsly, what's the deal with poor people? Who told them they have rights? Hey, poor people, sit down and shut up! Or we'll take away your welfare and gummint cheese!)

Plus, you know what? When someone asks me what I want with my vodka, I say, "just ice." That can't be a coincidence.

Attached is my updated CV and notarized statement of fealty to corporations (I've added the suggested language on "ass-kissing"). I look forward to an interview shortly!

Sincerely,

Doc Nagel

the wonder that is facnet

Facnet is a campus email list for general discussion of matters of interest to the university community, in particular the faculty. I believe it was named facnet to mean "faculty-network," but the scrip list is open and the archives are public.

Consequently, lots of faculty and staff shoot their mouths off on facnet.

For instance, facnet was a venue for complaints about Sarah Palin being chosen as a fund-raising speaker at a 50th anniversary gala for the university this summer. I weighed in on that one only to the effect that public universities' foundation boards maintain accounting secrecy in California, and so we have no right to know how much the university is paying for this event. Others expressed dismay at her choice because she's inappropriate as a speaker at (1) a public university, (2) in need of more public funds, (3) which might be achievable only with tax increases, (4) which she is apparently opposed to, given her activity with the so-called tea party movement, and, oh yes, (5) she's an idiot.

Meanwhile, several people, mainly staff members of the university rather than faculty, attacked critics for being leftists, for only wanting leftists to speak on campus, and so forth. This is both an ad hominem fallacy, and rather deliberately ignoring the context (there have been very few leftist speakers at the university, and certainly no one who represents the fringe the way Palin used to in the GOP).

Our commencement speaker (Marc Lamont Hill) was named this week, and from the same pool of staff came a weird, veiled accusation, couched not only in condescending and ad hominem rhetoric, but also an attempt at sarcasm. "Where is the outrage?" was the opening salvo. The email went on to make totally bizarre and non sequitir connections to other campus political issues, and to conclude, under a thin veil, that faculty are leftists and therefore only object to right-wing speakers because of this ideological divide.

I responded, pointing out that almost all of the email was making irrelevant points, and making the case that, regardless of all else, the choice of a speaker on campus should be open to honest debate. This morning, in another fit of attempted sarcasm, the emailer thanked me for "going the extra mile" and thanked all the faculty for not disappointing. The implication of this, I suppose, is that we confirmed the emailer's preconceptions.

I feel like posting a lesson in sarcasm, or a list of definitions of fallacies committed in this exchange. Because there's a way to use these elegantly, and then there's what the emailer did. I don't mind being the target of sarcasm or ad hominem as much when it's done well.

Perhaps I'll develop a little primer on successful sarcasm later, like the one I did years ago on the dos and don'ts of sneering. Some people, as George Carlin used to say, need practical advice.

fatal education

I could have typed that as "fetal," and said most of what I meant.

I teach a course I designed years ago about various political, pedagogical, epistemological, and ethical issues of life in the mediated, siliconized, affluent parts of the world. It's part of a pair of connected courses on the theme of human being in the information age. For several springs now I've used a book on post-structuralist thought and information technology - Mark Poster's Mode of Information. It's not easy reading, and every couple years I seek out an alternative, only to find that there's nothing else out there that does the philosophical heavy lifting and the concentrated concern with contemporary social life that Poster's book does.

Anyway, I go through this thing every year and do more work on Baudrillard, Foucault, and Lyotard (the three chapters in the book that I have my students read). Every year I write pages and pages of stuff that is somewhere between notes and an academic paper, and sometimes I share these with my class.

But what's really striking to me at this moment about the course is that nothing in my teaching life causes me more anxiety. This class is slowly, by degrees, killing me. I feel sick and panicky right now - half an hour before class, totally prepared, not only with a main agenda but several side trips we can go on, and no fewer than two backup plans in case the whole thing goes kablooey. My respiration is rapid and shallow, my pulse and blood pressure are elevated, my skin is clammy. (I am not hyperventilating, though if were to start, it's an interesting random fact about me that I am one of the best-performing hyperventilators on record. I figure this is because I am LungBoy [TM], with a lung capacity approximately 150% of normal adult males. Another story for another time, perhaps.)

Partly, this is because this course has provided me both some of the most rewarding and exhilarating, and some of the most dismal and soul-crushing, teaching experiences. I have succeeded and failed spectacularly in the course.

I never feel entirely confident handling this course material, which I know extremely well, because I can never tell how my students will respond, how they'll take it, whether they'll take it. I never actually feel like I've mastered the course material sufficiently (as though this was a necessary condition of teaching it, and as though teaching doesn't actively construct one's mastery on the fly, but ya know what I mean...).

I never walk into the class confident that all my students won't walk out. That's a weird feeling to have. Maybe today's the day?

privacy

Is your garbage private?

The press release today from the CSU Stanislaus administration suggests that CSU Stanislaus Foundation Executive Director Susana Gajic-Bruyea's garbage is private. The press release omits the information that Gajic-Bruyea is also Vice President for University Advancement - that is, an employee of the CSU, with an office in the CSU Stanislaus administration building. That's important, because the administration is claiming that the Foundation Board and the university are really separate entities.

It's important because, in the press release, the allegation is presented that the allegedly non-existent document state senator Leland Yee acquired outlining some of the details of the university's contract with Sarah Palin was discovered to be missing from Gajic-Bruyea's recycling bin in her office.

AFTER Leland Yee's press conference, in which documents related to the Palin fund-raiser were presented to the press, the university's Vice President for Advancement (who also serves as the Executive Director for the Foundation Board) looked through the recycle bin in her office for the relevant pages of the contract, and found that they were missing. The university has launched an investigation into, basically, who could have stolen documents from the recycle bin...

Here's what I imagine happens to my garbage and what I pitch into the recycle bin in my department office, in my narrow-minded rationalistic conception of the world and causality: I imagine that people take it away and recycle it, or take it to the dump, as appropriate. When I return to my office days after having thrown something away, and find that it's not there, my first thought is not that it's been stolen. I'm not generally surprised when documents I put in the recycling bin aren't there afterwards. That's because, to me, a recycling bin is a place to put things I expect other people to take away and recycle, and a garbage can is place to put things I am throwing away that I expect other people to take away and compost, burn, or put in a landfill.

Do I retain a privacy right, or property right, or any other kind of right over the things I thus discard?

What could be the basis of the assertion of such a right? Do I have it only if I've discarded or recycled something the discovery of which is embarrassing to me? So, can I throw away, hypothetically speaking, gloves I've worn while committing a crime, and when these are later found in my trash, assert that my trash can is, as it were, my confessor, and throwing my bloody gloves in the trash tantamount to a protected confidence?

Let me offer another analogy. Let's say I've just shot Tony Danza to death in cold blood. (I most certainly did not. This is the kind of thing some philosophers like to call a thought experiment.) I then throw my pistol into a dumpster. Someone finds my pistol, and police begin an investigation, using the pistol as evidence. Do I have, at that point, legitimate grounds to say that the pistol I threw away was my private trash, not meant for anyone else to have, to see, or to use against me in legal action?

Let's say I throw the pistol away in my office (which is a place of public accommodation, where I have very little right to privacy). How legitimate are my grounds to say this is private material of my own?

I'm not at all sure I've got a good analogy going here, but I suppose I was seduced by the trope of the smoking gun.

welcome to CSU Ionesco

I love absurdist drama - have since I saw a terrific high school production of The Bald Soprano, as part of the North Carolina high school theater competition. (My play, Escape, was being performed by my school, so I went to the regional and state competitions.)

I never wanted to exist inside an absurdist drama, but now I do.

So, the university turns 50 this year. Celebrations are planned for the summer, including what the university Foundation Board is billing as The 50th Anniversary Gala fund-raiser, starring Sarah Palin (presumably as Mrs. Smith). When this was announced, there was a tremendous backlash, some of it about Palin, but much of it about how the Foundation Board came to this decision, how it would be paid for, etc.

Ready? Here we go!

Under California law, the Foundation Boards of all public universities and colleges are not subject to the California Public Records Act. The Foundations are considered separate entities to that extent. Public money is used by Foundation Boards - sometimes a lot of it - and their purpose is, on paper, to support the public university, but the Foundation Boards themselves aren't public.

The Board has come under fire for choosing Palin, and the inappropriateness of her as a speaker at a public university has been pretty embarrassing to the university. People snicker about it.

When state senator Leland Yee filed a public records act request for documents regarding Palin's contract with the university, the Foundation Board told him there weren't any. Then they sent email to the campus assuring us that no public money was being used. If it's not immediately clear to you how you can have a contract without any documents, or how you can have a record that you're not spending public money on an event without any documents, then you're still sane and sober. Let me push you a little further into our madness.

At a press conference today, Yee broke the story that last week, during the university's spring break, and during furlough days when university employees are not working, employees of the Foundation Board were on campus, shredding documents. Documents related to Sarah Palin's fund-raising event. Including the contract.

And then they put the shredded documents in plastic bags in a dumpster. Where some students found them.

Our Foundation Board has oversight and approval authority over everything printed with the university logo on it. When I requested business cards, they had to approve them - not the issuing of them, but what was printed on the card. This is in order to protect the public image of the university.

Let's recap: Act One. Foundation Board needs to promote and protect the image of the university. Enter Sarah Palin. Snickering. Act Two. Deny existence of documents that aren't subject to public scrutiny in the first place. Shred them. Toss them in dumpster.

It's not that way, it's over here! It's not that way, it's over here! It's not that way, it's over here!

rejection season

I've received a handful of rejection letters from the various universities I've applied to for tenure-track positions. Most have been standard-issue form letters that say, more or less, "we've filled the position, we received many high-quality applications, thanks for applying." This doesn't say anything about your application, its relative merits, etc. It doesn't say whether yours wasn't a good fit.

Occasionally, they get more detailed, sometimes even telling you when something odd happened during the process. For instance, I got one this year saying that the funding for the position was reduced so that it went from an open-rank position to entry-level. (That I received that might mean that they assumed I wouldn't work for the cheaper price, which could have been true, but I'll never know.)

Years ago, I got one from a school in a very lovely place, who had put out a very general job description, that noted they received more than 700 applications.

Today I received one of the weirder ones. It had the usual form letter fare, but then included a final paragraph that said (to paraphrase): "Obviously, this is disappointing, but keep in mind that your achievements are abiding." What the ?

I have to assume everyone they rejected got this letter, and that it wasn't sent to some particular group of applicants who had either more extensive or more impressive CVs. I mean, I do have 40-some conference presentations, a handful of peer-reviewed publications, several book chapters, and so forth, but under contemporary standards I don't think that's a lot of accomplishment as a scholar. Plus, to me, "abiding" (that word is verbatim) suggests enduring, as though something I've done has significantly changed the philosophy world, and I know for fact this is impossible. Or at least not deliberate.

text of a speech I didn't give at the CFA Assembly

The 72nd CFA Assembly was held in Los Angeles this weekend, so yes, it was our second trip down to LA in 9 days. We just drove back up through Kern County dust and windstorms (which badly scratched the passenger side door of Eddie Jetta by nearly impaling us with a tumbleweed), and hard rain through Madera, Merced, and Stanislaus counties. It was harrowing, and now I've got to try to calm myself, and get some work done for my long class day tomorrow.

Luckily, last night I hardly slept. I was up half the night thinking about what a hellish academic year this has been for us and for our families and students. In particular it's been hell on lecturers.

I spoke last night to a lecturer activist whose campus is contemplating cutting 80% of the remaining lecturers for next academic year. It brought back so much of the strife we've dealt with at Santa Claus the last couple years, and my own personal worries about the end of my job here, and of the end of my academic career - a real possibility still, but more remote for me.

It got me thinking about the relative risks, rewards, and stress levels of faculty activists who are on the tenure track versus those of us on the tenuous track. This isn't to say the tenure-line faculty have been anything less than superb in their support -- for the most part. But they haven't so immediately faced loss of employment, loss of their colleagues, and the guilt and unfair blame we feel.

At the Assembly we discussed the CSU Chancellor's latest scheme to invent a problem and impose a draconian solution that helps to blame faculty - this "deliverology" nonsense they've bought from Michael Barber. CFA brought in a Barber critic named John Seddon to speak about how deliverology has worked in the UK (a key example: their public health service is now much worse and the cost management controls imposed by deliverology have resulted in increased costs).

So, there lie in bed, thinking that after all we've done to try to help preserve as many jobs of our fellow lecturers as we can, along comes a new plan that will necessarily result (is planned to result) in even greater loss of faculty work. And I got up and wrote a few words to say at the Assembly. I wouldn't have read it, but I would have used it to speak from - so I'd be more loose and spontaneous, which I like. Anyway, since I didn't say it, here's the text I wrote:

Good morning fellow faculty activists. I wanted to say something this morning about what has been, for me at least, the elephant in the room this whole weekend. Could I have all the lecturer activists please stand for a moment?

[Presumably, they'd stand. They're about 33% of the Assembly.]

I've spoken to many of my fellow lecturer activists at the Assembly this weekend, and not a single one expressed any confidence at all of returning to work, and to our struggle, next academic year. This is important to me because all of the troubles and stress we've dealt with has been compounded for lecturers who know their jobs are even more precarious now than a year ago, despite our fighting back. I hope to see all of you next fall. Thanks, you can sit down again now if you like.

We know why our situation is as precarious as ever next year: deliverology. I don't know about anyone else here, but I think the original version of this story by Franz Kafka is much better written. It also has a happier ending.

Because all of us are exhausted, and all of us can't afford to stop fighting, and all of us are facing the potential futility of our fight, I wanted, finally, to offer something I've been telling myself all year, for what it's worth. No matter the outcome for ourselves and for our colleagues, we haven't failed. We haven't failed ourselves, we haven't failed our colleagues or students, and we haven't failed our universities. And no matter the outcome, we should have hope. I don't have hope because I think the outcome will be good - I don't, in fact. I have hope because we're here now, and because we have fought, in solidarity and in love, and no matter what happens, we still won that solidarity and that love.

if it's not one thing, it's another

Been a long time since I've added any of

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

8. Old arenas. I just love 'em.

Tonight marks the very last regular-season NHL game in Pittsburgh's Civic Arena, known officially for the last decade as "Mellon Arena," because Mellon Bank (now Bank of New York Mellon) bought naming rights, but which the cognoscenti know is really the Igloo. The Penguins will play the New York Islanders. (Since the Pens are in the playoffs, this won't be the last NHL game played in the Igloo.)

Originally opened for the Ice Capades in 1961, the Igloo is the oldest arena in use in the NHL. All the old rinks have been replaced. It started in 1980 with Joe Louis Arena replacing the old Detroit Olympia. Joe Louis is sleek, ultra-modern, and therefore dated (ESPN's John Buccigross recently compared it to a K-car, which is apt). The Red Wings have been terrific in the Joe, so that's built some degree of atmosphere for the place, but in general, the modern arenas are soulless. Maple Leaf Gardens, the Forum in Montreal, the Buffalo Auditorium, Chicago Stadium - all replaced with these big box places.

I only attended one Penguins game at the Igloo, despite living there 8 years (and that's a whole nother story), and it was after having lived in California longer than that. We had seats in the very last row, right under the dome. Sound from the ice and from loudspeakers got kind of swallowed up, up there, but the feel of the place was still somehow intimate (compared to the San Jose Sharks' home arena, where a similar seat, costing a similar amount, is actually located in a virtual space stored on a series of servers distributed mainly in Quincy, Washington).

7. Post-punk alternative bands. I just love 'em.

My most recent obsession is with a band called Land of Talk. They are also yet another Canadian band (which has been a weird trend for me lately - New Pornographers, Feist - what gives?). As far as this kind of band goes, Land of Talk has some fairly predictable characteristics: high energy; discordant, angular guitar sound; occasionally screechy vocals; lots of angsty lyrics. This kind of thing can be done very very badly. Very. But when it's done well, and I submit that Land of Talk do it very well, it stomps up and down on several very important buttons in my brain. Very good accompaniment to a drive to the recycling center, for instance.

gala event this summer at Santa Claus!

Late last week, just before a staff furlough day, the university's Foundation Board announced that Sarah Palin would speak at this summer's 50th anniversary celebration, as a fund-raiser. This has provoked the kind of reaction you might expect from faculty -- anger that someone of her ilk was chosen to speak as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of a public university.

The conversation on campus has largely consisted of faculty and some staff saying she's inappropriate because she's demonstrated the intellectual integrity and curiosity of a deranged sociopathic muskox in heat, and other staff and administrative people saying that her detractors are leftists and should shut up because her invitation restores political balance to campus events. I think the balance of truth on these issues is clearly on the side of the muskox, but I also think this debate misses the point.

The other topic of conversation is whether she's going to be a viable fund-raiser, given that the event as described involves her speaking (at an amount the university refuses to disclose, although she commands $100,000 speaking fees), a five-course dinner, and dancing. At $500 a ticket, the university would have to sell 200 tickets to make up her speaking fee -- and never mind the tremendous amount it would cost for the dinner, dancing, rentals, security, etc. The university Foundation Board has responded to this issue by saying that not one red cent of public money would pay for her speaking fee, and that the event is to raise money, not to address the university. I don't think that's the point, either. (Although it's obviously also not an intellectually honest response, since the money in the Foundation Board is meant to be used prudently for the advancement of the public good served by the university. Claiming that the university community and their values aren't important in making this decision suggests that the only business the university believes it's in is business.)

Today it was revealed that Fox News' new Sarah Palin show (which isn't, yet, called "The Sarah Palin Show") had planned to air a segment edited to make it appear Palin had interviewed LL Cool J about his being a real American. LL Cool J discovered this, made a fuss about it, and Fox News pulled his segment, expressing their disappointment that he didn't want to be associated with a program that could inspire Americans. Interesting.

I think the real issue here is how this decision was made, by whom, when, involving what kinds of planning processes, with whose input. A current university employee with GOP political aspirations works on that side of the house, for instance. That person has consistently vilified the faculty and dismissed student concerns about budget priorities, the unilateral change to our academic calendar, and other issues that have plagued the university in the last several years. The decision has been made with absolutely no consideration of the actual community the university serves, the actual community the university is, or the real working and learning lives of the members of the university. This is not my interpretation, it is the Foundation Board's own claim about their choice.

What this illustrates is how universities have evolved as organizations (for it is a widespread tendency, not at all isolated to this campus). One part of the university engages in the day-to-day work of teaching and learning, where students and faculty engage in the challenge of education, in what are almost uniformly uncomfortable, poorly-equipped, poorly-maintained, inadequate and impoverished spaces -- because resources are not spent on improving the teaching and learning environment until absolutely necessary, or funded by a prominent, elite donor. Every month I encounter classrooms without supplies, or without working equipment, and the staff charged with those essential background activities can't keep up. Another part of the university spends large quantities of money on raising money, and does not have any legal requirement to account for its activities. My part of the university claims that the money-raising part of the university should be working in the interest of the university. The money-raising part of the university claims I have no right to ask about their activities, and that their activities aren't relevant to me, aren't addressed to me, and aren't for me.

Nominally, the university is in the business of education - teaching, learning, research, scholarship, creative activity, cultural re-production, the development of citizens. There is another, shadowy university that has no other purpose than fund-raising. And its purposes beyond that are not something they can be called upon to discuss.

face-to-face politics

To the driver who honked his horn, shot me the bird, and proceeded to yell at me about Barack Obama at the corner of Crowell and Monte Vista this evening at 8:58 PM:

Your approach to political discussion is interesting. Obviously, you noticed the Obama/Biden magnet on my trunk, and decided I was an appropriate person to talk to. As an invitation to dialogue, a blaring car horn and a fuck-you gesture significantly inform, as did your initial shouted question, "You actually like what this guy is doing to the country?" I rolled up my window and didn't engage with you because I don't believe the complexity of the issue of health care reform could probably be meaningfully discussed in those circumstances.

Now I'm remembering how I responded to all those "W '04" bumper stickers I saw absolutely everywhere here as the economy tanked and the Iraq fiasco dragged on in 2007 and 2008. I kept driving.

Of course, I did sometimes express to other passengers in my own car that I thought the economic, social, and global policies of the Bush administration were terrible, sometimes illegal, sometimes unethical. I never flipped anybody off and yelled at them because of a "W '04" sticker, and I frankly believe taxing people in the top 3% or so of income in order to extend health care to people who are susceptible of going bankrupt over an illness is a much better idea than invading a country on the basis of a series of false pretexts.

I'm sure you're really genuinely angry that health care reform has passed, and that you genuinely believe expanding health care coverage for more people is somehow illegal, unethical, and terrible. (It follows that you'll refuse to accept any benefits that may accrue to you as a result of passing the bill.)

But we can't talk, not on your terms.

the significance of notes

Phenomenology is hard.

I'm working today on a revision of a paper on sensation, re-directing phenomenological attention from the usual -- the transcending perceptual act of a subject consciousness -- to the subjection of our senses to their basic elements. It's tough stuff, for a lot of very complicated reasons that would take too long to explain here.

Anyway, I'm re-reading one of the greats, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, and stumbled across this typically intriguing line:

"Just as, when I look closely at snow, I break its apparent 'whiteness' up into a world of reflections and transparencies, so within a musical note a 'micromelody' can be picked out and the interval heard is merely the final patterning of a certain tension felt throughout the body."

(p 211 in the old Colin Smith translation - with, by the way, a footnote citing Heinz Werner. Some people think Merleau-Ponty stole his phrasings and ideas from others, including Werner. I dunno.)

I tell Lauren this, and she doesn't seem to have this experience. I get certain feelings from particular notes, especially on a guitar - certain affective dimensions and resonances. E feels, in a way, earthen, solid, or even stony. A feels warm but changeable and a little slippery. D feels angular and pointy. And I mean the notes, not the chords or keys - though the keys carry forward a lot of that general atmosphere from their home notes (as it were).

So not only do particular individual notes have proto-meanings for me, but changing the key of a song alters its emotional color to some extent as well. Take a well-known old song that's been stuck in my head all day: Roger Miller's "King of the Road." There's a key change for the last verse, up one-half step, which is a weird thing to do in a guitar song anyway, but also, to me, fundamentally alters the way the song tenses and releases.

Naturally, I assumed I was being goofy, until I read that line. Merleau-Ponty's description is right on for how a given note feels to me, though I'm emphasizing the emotional rather than the bodily feeling of it. Mid-20th century cognitive psychology, in particular by Gestalt psychologists, is strongly suggestive of these kinds of links - Merleau-Ponty spends a lot of time describing their research on the connection of color to mood, for instance. We know, too, that brain anatomy is partly responsible for the connection between smell and memory. So why shouldn't notes have that kind of relation as well? Maybe I'm not that goofy after all.

tax burden

I just filed our taxes for 2009. We're getting our usual sizable refund.

As I was filing, I was thinking about the way people complain bitterly about the burden of taxation that US citizens are prone to feeling they're under. People complain that 1/3 or some absurd amount is taken away from them by the greedy government. Like most people, I do object to some of what the government spends money on, though my list is different from most tax revolutionaries' lists. (I like roads and schools, not so much prisons and wars.) But the notion that the government is paupering us to spend like drunken sailors doesn't really fit the fact pattern in my life.

This year, a typical year for me, my effective rate of taxation, after all the deductions and so forth, was a grand total of 11.34%. Now, if you look just at the very much reduced federal "taxable" income (which is about 1/3 less than my adjusted gross income), I pay about 12.97% of that to the feds. But if you take the tax amount from the adjusted gross, my total federal tax is a quite reasonable and doable 8.95%. My rent per month is more than double what I pay in federal income tax.

The state tax is even more interesting. Californians of a certain political stripe love to harp on the incredibly high tax burden of Californians. This is a lie, there's no other word for it. The actual rate of property tax here is below every other state I'm familiar with. And the income tax is even lower. My income tax rate this year, versus my taxable income, was 2.7%. In relation to my adjusted gross income, it was 2.4%.

You know what? I pay about the same amount per month for satellite TV as for state income taxes. (And again, I'd prefer more schools than prisons...)

There are governments that impose serious taxes on people, and do things like fund universal health care, strong educational systems, programs to eliminate the urge to commit crimes, and to rehabilitate people who do. Given how much of our tax dollars go to the military-industrial complex, and how little goes to helping ordinary people's lives, the social services portion of our tax dollars are stretched incredibly thinly. And most of us should shut the hell up about burdensome taxes.

the future of the CSU, part 2

Today, let's look at

Deliverology
Deliverology is the name of Chancellor Reed's latest, greatest initiative to... uh... to...

Well, on one hand, Deliverology is supposed to be a way to improve graduation rates, by cutting budgets and eliminating faculty authority over courses. If it's not clear why improving graduation rates depends on cutting budgets and eliminating faculty authority, then I suppose you're not up to date with the most recent trends in corporatized public institutional management.

Deliverology is the "make the trains run on time" practice developed in Great Britain by Sir Michael Barber, as a way to run trains on time. You get the idea. It turns out to be rather simple: to make the trains run on time, you eliminate stations, eliminate employees, and reduce service. And voilà! Trains. Running. On. Time.

Apparently, the basic evidence that Deliverology works is that customers figured out how to get around the system. The ingenuity of people should not be underestimated.

Anyway, since trains are exactly like higher education in every conceivable way, it's obvious that using these strategies will work perfectly to make higher ed work better in California. And "work better" here means... um... you know, better. Like, better.

How about we let Sir Michael Barber speak for himself on the need for Deliverology in higher education:

Obsessions with policies that are wrong and expensive, such as continuing marginal reductions in class size or protecting teachers' "rights" to teach as they wish in the citadel of their own classrooms, is widespread. Many still cling to the demonstrably false view that creativity consists of each teacher making it up in the classroom. This is not creativity, it is betrayal.

You see, it's simple. The basic problem in higher ed is that faculty insist on "making it up in the classroom," that is, "the citadel of their own classrooms" where they presume to have "'rights'" to... uh... to...

So, Deliverology is a theory which states that:

(1) Faculty do not have the right to determine what they teach, or how

(2) When faculty do determine what and how they teach, they betray (uh..., someone...)

(3) Faculty must be controlled, and their teaching determined by someone who knows better than faculty what faculty should teach (in their own areas of specialization, because they... don't... er... know?... their fields?

(4) Students get more from their educations when faculty don't use their expertise to determine what and how to teach in the classes they are... experts... uh... in?

You might wonder, why? At least, I do.

the future of the CSU

The CSU administration has begun rolling out a strategy for dismantling faculty power and gutting the last vestiges of the integrity of disciplines, in particular in the liberal arts and humanities. It has several elements. Today we'll look at

Restructuring

Restructuring refers to the CSU administration's intention to replace as many faculty-taught university classes as possible with online courses with much higher enrollments, taught through extended education. Most of the courses slated for restructuring are general education courses. Restructuring has several implications for faculty work.

(1) The faculty who had taught those courses through the regular university are often "temporary" faculty, who, at the CSU, are a relatively stable workforce some of whose members have preference for work (a right to be re-hired to the same or similar assignment of work and amount of work). That is to say, these are faculty who have taught at the CSU for long enough to establish that they are competent professionals. Their primary employment is typically at the CSU. Many of them have careers that parallel the tenure-track faculty in every way except that they are never eligible for tenure. Restructuring eliminates their work through the regular university, so it eliminates the job protections they have earned.

(2) By shifting regular faculty work into extended education, and eliminating these positions for untenured "lecturer" faculty, the CSU cuts their academic budget. In addition, because teaching work through extended education does not earn benefits, the CSU eliminates its costs in that regard. For the instructional faculty affected, this changes their work from relatively stable, relatively dignified, relatively regular work, earning benefits (for very many - you have to work at least 40% of full-time to earn benefits), to work that is as precarious as casual labor, temp work.

The reason we can be confident that this will happen -- that is, that the faculty work will be shifted to extended education rather than eliminated outright -- is that the demand for higher education is not significantly lower in California than it was before the economic recession and state budget crisis. In fact, it is higher, and has continued to grow. Not that that matters. The CSU has had the plan in place long before, and was waiting for the economic crisis to provide the opportunity and excuse to implement it. "Oh no!" administrators lament, "our budget has been slashed! We must do everything we can to make sure our students can continue their educations, but we just can't afford these pricey faculty employees! We have to outsource their work -- it's the only way!" Given that most CSUs spend less than half their income (much less) on instructional faculty, this is shameless lying.

(3) So, the upshot is, the official faculty of the university will shrink, drastically (more than 20% at CSU Stanislaus from Fall 2008 to Fall 2009, with 15% cuts planned for 2010-11 academic year!). Meanwhile, many of the same people will be re-hired by the university to teach the same classes for a fraction of their previous wages, without benefits. Much of their teaching work will be online, with little or no support for technology, little or no access to university resources (library, etc.). But many of us have families, or are in the habit of paying rent or eating, and we'll have to choose this worst-case-scenario employment.

For students, the implications are pretty devastating as well:

(1) Extended education courses are often called "self-support," which is a euphemism that means students will get no state funding to support their education in those courses, and will have no access to most kinds of financial aid. What most students and the public do not realize is that the state budget allocation to the CSU pays for around 70% of the cost of their education; they pay 30%. If they must pay 100% of the cost, the cost obviously goes way up for them. Add to that that they will not be eligible for aid. Add further that they will still have to enroll in the regular university in order to earn their degrees and take courses for their majors. Essentially, the CSU will require them to pay fees twice, while providing a lower quality of service and less access to that service.

(2) This means, pretty obviously to me at least, that students who have fewer financial resources will be increasingly left out of opportunities for CSU education. Some have said that the CSU administration are not at all secretly pleased with this result, since it will leave the CSU with a "more desirable" student body. This is another euphemism that I shall not unpack because the very idea of it is too disgusting to me to contemplate.

(3) Like my lecturer colleagues, students will be left with the worst-case-scenario option for continuing their educations at the CSU. They'll simply have no choice but to pay and pay again, or else give up.

Why?

(You have to read that with Cindy Lou Who's voice.)

I believe the CSU administration's agenda is to achieve the following:

(1) break down faculty labor into modular components

(2) outsource faculty labor to cheapest available vendors

(3) maximize the extraction of funds from consumers of their services

(4) maximize flexibility in the allocation of public funds

This is the same agenda that has been pursued by privateers of such governmental functions as defense, and such public functions as provision of utilities and services. The CSU's refusal of public accountability (for instance, in the case of their million-dollar political efforts to resist Senate Bill 218, which would have required CSU to give public audits of their foundation boards) is a strong indicator of their intentions.

another open letter

Dear Talentless Spam Email Marketers,

I really have no need for 74% 82% 80% 78% 83% 80% discounted Viagra. I'm not trying to brag, I'm really just tired of the spam. You could at least get your story straight on the discount.

Anyway, why do you figure I'm on the market? It's because I'm an avowed hockey fan, isn't it. Jerks.

Yours sincerely,

Exiled Nigerian Prince Martin Embegke

P.S. I have a special offer to tender only onto you, dear one...

new career options #4

I'm one of those people who talks back to television. I especially talk back to ads, when they speak to me in some special way, or when they seem to miss a golden opportunity of some kind. I wonder sometimes if I haven't missed my calling to be in the advertising business.

I couldn't do market research, which would bore me to death. I'd have to work on the creative side, coming up with taglines or writing copy. I'd re-write all the ads for Progressive insurance, for example. Here's my idea. Same set-up with the bright white fake big-box retail electronics store, same actress as "Flo." Same great big nametag. The main difference - it's subtle, but I think it would be very effective - is that when "Flo" leaps out at an unsuspecting customer to chirp manically about Progressive policies, they punch her in the face. Every commercial would have the same basic script. "Flo" pops up. "Can I he-" WHAM! Memorable, eh?

I can obviously write better than the people who are putting together the awful ads for Bud Light and Chevy. The Bud Light ads where the guys express their love for Bud Light more freely than for their women? Half-assed. In my Bud Light ad, we pan over piles of greasy pizza boxes and discarded aluminum cans and brown bottles - about 4 cases' worth of Bud Light. We discover a disheveled, greasy guy in a greasy Barcalounger, apparently passed out. See? Simple story, told with bold, indelible images. Perfect.

And then, Chevy. Here I think we want to identify our target audience. Sell Tahoes by showing them in use - being driven very badly on crowded freeways by people who are totally oblivious, or possibly comatose. Avalanches being driven aggressively, tailgating and swinging wildly from lane to lane, with, of course, nothing in the truck.

Not only am I a veritable font of brilliant advertising ideas, I also have experience in the very similar field of higher ed. All we really do in higher ed is persuade people to believe things without any evidence or reasoning, right? Right?

death eating a cracker, signifying nothing

I'm not sure how to set this up. I blame the dreams, and Neil Gaiman. We took a brief junket to SoCal during the interim between Winter and Spring over the weekend, and my dreams were bizarre. On the drive back, Lauren read to me from the Neil Gaiman novel we're reading right now, American Gods.

I ended up with this thought.

I am missing a certain register of belief. I can't account for this, at the moment, but I know it's true. I simply can't make myself take seriously those metaphysical concepts the human species seems so prone to apply to experiences of the cycle of life (birth, death, rebirth, etc.), the significance of life (sanctity, the general goodness of life), or any of the various ways people seem to like to assure themselves that they'll continue life everlasting.

What I realized today is that my basic metaphysical belief related to life is a simple, ridiculous, counterfactual sense that, whatever Life might mean, my life, as I understand and live it, is everlasting.

Don't get me wrong. I believe that I know that, realistically speaking, I will die sometime. Everything alive dies. But my sense of life, of my life, is that it does not end. I suppose this could be because I can't imagine what the end of my life would mean, aside from the consequences for the living. If I were to die, that would mean the end of my existence, but that's an empty idea to me. The end of my existence is inconceivable, because with the end of my existence, the universe ends.

Death, therefore, means nothing to me. Life means everything.