Monthly Archives: July 2007

Lifestyle Polling

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The Rasmussen Group just called (Carole answered, but relayed the questions) & among the things they asked were:

  • Have you ever eaten pet food?
  • Does your partner have a nickname for your private parts?
  • If you had a duel with Dick Cheney, would you shoot him or would he shoot you?
  • Do you think Drew Carey is sexy?
  • Should men who are balding just shave their heads?

Of course, they also wanted to know about our credit card debt, age, marital status, income, political affiliation, etc. Is this Hillary Clinton’s pollster? This report from Rasmussen conceives of politics in a vocabulary so debased as to make clear thought impossible. If John McCain is the center of the American political spectrum, please shoot me now. But of course he is not the center. If you ask questions about policy on health care, the war, et al, McCain’s views are off the charts extreme; it is only when you employ code words such as “conservative” & the awful “liberal” that Hillary Clinton, of all people, comes out as some sort of screaming leftist harpy. I’d laugh if it weren’t so stupid. Americans are so fucking ignorant about political rhetoric it makes me want to cry.

Remarkable Bonsai / Richard Rorty

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I just ran across these amazing photos of bonsai by Walter Pall, who has developed what bonsai purists call a “naturalistic” style, though the viewer unfamiliar with the formal styles of traditional bonsai might not choose the adjective “natural” to describe these tress. All that apparently lifeless wood, by the way, called jin, is part of the living tree. What one calls natural is, clearly, a matter of perspective & relationship. There is no one thing that is nature, of course, over against which there is something else, presumably a mind observing nature as if from the outside. There is no outside. Nor any inside, either. Can you tell I’ve been reading Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope in between the Patrick O’Brian novels? It is one of those books that tells me what I already have already thought intuitively, but which gives me contextualized & clearly argued reasons for my sense of things.

Evil

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Executing an innocent person — even a merely potentially innocent person — is surely the the depth of evil. This execution, going forward tomorrow, combines so many kinds of moral failure it staggers the imagination. (See Mark Keliman’s commentary here.) My stomach turns at the knowledge that the United States has an “Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act” — the language combines Orwell’s vision of authoritarian corruption with Kafka’s sense of the nonchalant use of power in a perfect poem of moral darkness. Update: Davis’ life spared, but he still faces life in prison; if, as Mark Kleiman points out, he was spared because he is innocent of the crime for which he was convicted, he does not belong in prison.

Summer Reading / Writing / Blogging / Teaching / Weeding

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I seem to lose my obsessive need to share my opinions in the summer, at least in blog format. No doubt my wife & colleagues wish I would take up this outlet more often, sparing them my incisive, delightful opinions about this & that. From time to time over the last few years I have tried to focus the blog on a few subjects in order to do justice to them, but it’s no use. What intelligence I have is miscellaneous. And this format allows for miscellany. I might have written more here over the last few weeks, but my online course took more energy than I had anticipated. Apparently, there is some limit to the amount of time I am willing to spend in front of a computer. Combined with a couple of projects around the house & serving on a search committee, I guess I have been busy, though since I wasn’t meeting classes in the usual way, I didn’t really feel busy. And I just haven’t had the heart to write about politics or the bloody war. I read the news & follow a couple of political blogs, but my powers of analysis fail in the face of the whirlwind of idiocy there described. Truly, Americans are living through a shitstorm of dangerous stupidity.

The course I have been teaching online, Understanding Vietnam, officially comes to an end tonight at midnight, though students have until Tuesday to take the final exam & turn in their essays. About halfway through the course, I started a little essay about my experience up to that point, but I let it peter out & never posted it because I had such an inconclusive sense of what I was doing & how my students were getting along. I have a (somewhat) better sense of that now & will go back to that piece & give it another try. The short version: I liked some things about teaching online & disliked others; I think students got their money’s worth (to put it in vulgar terms), but I am not happy with the density of the information flowing in either direction. We (dean, chair, faculty, technical folk) will have to address issues of both pedagogy & technology if we’re going make an educational success of our online courses.

My department is in the process of hiring a junior faculty member in Literature / Cultural Studies & I have been serving on the search committee. I can’t say the duty has been onerous, but it has taken up a fair amount of time. (Not nearly as much time for me as for my colleague who is chairing the committee & has had to schedule visits, make dinner reservations & fill out affirmative action paperwork.) We had a very strong pool of candidates & last week our two finalists came in to give presentations, get endlessly interviewed, go out to dinner, & all the rest. I was impressed with both; each gave a presentation that engaged my full attention & stimulated my imagination. Each would make a fine colleague. Tomorrow morning, the faculty of the department gather to make a decision. I hope we get our first choice, whichever person we settle on, but we are in the lucky position of having an equally qualified backup. It will come down to our evaluation of what specific contributions the person can make to our curriculum, I think.

Consequently, I ain’t been blogging much. Instead of writing here — or anywhere, really — I have retreated into Summer Reading. Last summer, I read almost all one million pages of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, though I ran out of interest about two hundred pages shy of the end of the last book. What is it about summer & fictional series? This year, I have picked up the Patrick O’Brian sea novels that star Lucky Jack Aubrey & his sidekick Dr. Stephen Maturin & their adventures in the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I adopt a light tone here because this isn’t the sort of thing I would have expected to find myself reading. But O’Brian, like Robinson, creates a detailed fictional world & psychologically plausible characters. I’ve read three of the twenty books & probably have energy gor a couple more.

Then there is the fact that the fall term starts in about six weeks. I’m actually pretty well-prepared, having taught my scheduled courses many times before, but the academic calender focuses the mind of the professor. The mind of the poet remains somewhat unfocused, though I have been scratching out some drafts I think may have promise. Still some more time for that this summer, I hope, between putting down flooring in the dining room & pulling weeds in the jungle we refer to as our yard. The deer have cropped the hostas back to stalks. We hear loons at dawn.

The Primal Horde

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Reading this account of Williams syndrome (a genetic disability) in the NY Times & the light it sheds on the details of primate social evolution, especially language, I was struck by the fact that it does not differ all that much from Freud’s account of the dynamics of the “primal horde” at the beginning of Civilization & its Discontents.

“The conventional view,” Dunbar notes in his book “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language,” “is that language evolved to enable males to do things like coordinate hunts more effectively. . . . I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip.”