beds

Music: Mott the Hoople: All the Young Dudes (1972/2006 remaster)

It's taken me a while to get settled back into home life after a week of traveling and lots of driving. Dale helped me unload the van and lug grandmother's stuff into the spare room. It took me a few days to figure out where to store all the stuff I had crammed in that bedroom, but after a few days I've finally cleared it out and re-assembled granny's stuff. The guest room is not large, so I had to figure and refigure the configure to get the three pieces just right.

The bed is a full sized bed, and my old bed and box spring mattress fit into it snugly. The only place for the dresser was right next to it. You can see at the bottom of each piece that it is chipped (I guess from various vacuum cleaner bang-ups; my mother, her sister, and my grandmother are all "clean freaks"; you can get a closer look by clicking on the images). I put my old bed stuff on it and I think it looks fine. No, my sheets are not always so tidy. I decided to procrastinate one day by ironing and starching the tops of the sheets and some of the pillow cases in the event Southern Living magazine wanted to do a special feature on granny's relocated stuff. It's not like I know of any impending guests any time soon, so I might as well make it look pretty.

The thing where ladies do their hair and make up (is that called a vanity?) is off to the side. I was worried the mirror would get cracked on the way, but looks like we packed it well. That telephone used to be in my bedroom, but it seriously looks better in the guest room now. The furniture was purchased in 1939 when my grandmother and grandfather married.

Finally! My new bed arrived! With part of my summer teaching money I bought a king size bed. It's one of them fancy memory foam things, though not the Temper-pedic cause they're too expensive. This is a Sealy TrueFoam thing. Anyhoo, I'm still having trouble getting used to it, and I think it's a bit hot so I might have to by a cooling mattress pad, but it's comfortable and supposed to last me 20 years. The bedspread and pillows are all new too, an ebay find of all this stuff in one "lot": bedskirt, everything. It's supposed to be "plum," but it's almost black, so I bought some purple pillows to make it look less "dark." Whatever: I'll just go to bed singing "Undead, undead, undead." I'm still a gothic dark soul at heart . . . . At the Hole in the Wall celebrating a student's successful Ph.D. defense, I was telling colleagues about my sleepy-time purchase. "Why a king? That's so huge," said a buddy.

"Well, I like all that room and, you know, it gets hot when there is more than one person in there."

"Oh, what's that? Like the field of dreams? Build it and they will come?"

"Absolutely," I said. "And I hope in more ways than one!"

It was funny, I swear it was. But maybe you had to be there.

fearless risk-taker got the fear

Music: Meat Beat Manifesto: Original Fire

Last December I agreed to write a brief opinion essay for Inside Higher Ed, an online outfit that publishes some pretty edgy (if not at times needlessly anti-pomo) stuff. I don't read it often, but a number of my colleagues do and routinely post links to stories about this or that academic gambit or scandal. I agreed to write something after one of the editors "stumbled" across my blog about teaching queer theory.

Well, I finished a draft of the essay today. There is a reason I dragged my heels on this, and it has something to do with Meat Beat Manifesto's song, "I Got the Fear." See, getting the fear or "got the fear" is a reference to the brand of paranoia one gets when doing psychoactive drugs: are my parents gonna catch me? Does the police know I'm tripping my balls off? Did I just crap my pants? No, I didn't crap my pants. Maybe I did and I'm just trying to rationalize that I didn't crap my pants so that I don't stick my hand down there to find out? Oh, that's stupid, if I crapped my pants I'd smell it right now . . . " [ecetera and so on].

Well, I sort of got the fear about this article--have had it for months. When I normally publish something it's for an academic audience and, maybe if I'm lucky, twenty sets of ears or eyeballs. Period. Inside Higher Ed is widely read, maybe even 50 sets of eyeballs! So I'm a little nervous about having an audience for once in my life. It's kinda of scary.

Anyhoo, here's a teaser. I can't post the whole thing cause, you know, then there would be no put in sending it to the online joint:

On (Tolerating) Queer Theory, or, Why I'm Not Radical Enough

As a teacher of rhetorical studies, I've been trained to think about the differences between audiences and how to adapt one's messages to address those differences. Of course, having earned one's credentials in "the art of persuasion" and (presumably) possessing the intellectual tools of audience adaptation doesn't necessarily mean one can do it well, and last fall I really stepped in it. I've just completed my first year at my second tenure-track job, and as anyone who has moved from one institution to another can testify, student bodies in different places are not the same. In this brief essay, I share my experiences trying to teach queer theory in a class titled "Rhetoric and Popular Music," and in particular, I detail one attempt to adapt the course material and my teaching style to a handful of hostile students (and one "concerned parent"), navigating the problems of teaching "posthumanist" theoretical approaches along the way. If you'd rather skip all the drama, I'll be arguing this: sometimes it is permissible to retreat to a classic, liberal politics of toleration or humanism when teaching undergraduates because we no longer live in an environment that protects academic freedom. Although Kurt Cobain did once sing, "what else should I say/everyone is gay," sometimes students are not ready to interrogate what that means, and they'll make their parents call deans and chairs attempting to get you fired if you try to teach them.

techno ted's tubes

Music: Grandaddy: Sumday (2003)

In a recent post I mused about Senator Ted Steven's glossolalia and issued a challenge: If you can sit through a hearing of his speech on an Internet bill (the speech is here ) from beginning to end, you have met the Joshie Juice challenge. Your prize: my admiration. Well, a Korg-sequencing talent (er, well, someone who has ripped off Psychic TV) has chopped up the speech into tasty samples and made a smashing, dance floor techno hit of it: "Ted's Techno Tubes!". Now you can actually endure the speech, and dance to it too! DRINKING MILK WHILE LISTENING ALERT: HIGH SCREEN SPRAY DANGERNESS. Thanks to Mirko for passing along this 12"-er.

grandmother (7/16/06)

Music: Ultra Vivid Scene: Joy: 1967-1990

a life in 10' X 6' metal box

Music: Consolidated: Play More Music (1992)

In the humid Georgia heat at a "Pack Rat" storage facility between Loganville and Snellville, my mother and I loaded up the panel van with a dining room table and a bedroom set, a few things I remembered from my childhood (an art deco coffee perc and a ceramic parrot), and some chairs. Granny said on the phone that she and my grandfather bought the bed and dresser when they married over sixty years ago; it needs some TLC and refinishing, but that's a good summer project.

My grandfather died when I was barely a year old; they said he died of cancer, but he was a major, abusive alcoholic and there are hints he died from the bottle. He was an airforce pilot in the second big one. My cousin, a marine and helicopter pilot, took all of my grandfather's things. No one wanted much else of the things. Boxes of shoes, clothes. Dishes, bath towels older than I am.

I was astonished to see how little my grandmother had; everything fit into a small, metal box. The box was not even half full. I grew up in her small house, and it always seemed, from a kid's eyes, like so much. "87 years of life; they never had much," my mother said. I was surprised to see her secretly crying. I was surprised that I did too. I didn't know to expect this; maybe I did. I don't know

older folks home

Music: Marconi Union: Distance (2006)

Sore butt and swollen right ankle, but no sex to show for it. I did manage to drive a radio-only panel van from Austin to Atlanta in two days. I had my ipod FM-transmitter ready to go, but the i-pod "froze" mid-way through a telling of Snowcrash and I had to resort to talk radio. I was surprised to find Jerry Springer has a talk show on Radio (Free?) America and he's pretty damn good. Conservative talk shows like Limbaugh and Neal Bortz irritate after a few minutes. The best listening was a local program in Mississippi on African American "black on black" crime; older people were debating whether it was preferable to beat your woman over killing her (I am serious). I had a cell phone too, and usually during such long jaunts I phone everyone under the sun, but alas: my cell is paid for by the parental units and they decided to switch plans the very day I hit the road. (I do not want a cell phone; they tried to give me one. I gave it back. They gave me another the next year, "all expenses paid." I took it). I got in one good talk with a friend before "this SIM is not registered" message appeared. So I was bored. Very bored. No cruise control. No auto books. No billboards once you get outside of Louisiana (and no friggin' rest stops until Alabama). No livestock. No pirated new Thom Yorke album to listen to.

I don't know why, but having a slight hang-over while driving long distances can help one sit still beyond normal patience would allow. I stayed over one night in Baton Rouge with a friend, and we talked about girls and the Beatles and good scotch until one in the morning.

Given the price of gas ($70 per tank, and there were 3 fills to get here), readers may ask why I am driving from Austin to Atlanta? I'm driving because I am not only a mama's boy, but a grandmama's boy. I'm here to accept her stuff.

A couple of years ago Granny had a fall and broke her arm and a few ribs. She has always had what we called "Granny's Spells," fainting and so forth. My aunt has them too. Well, we figured out this time the spell was a mild stroke. So she was in rehab and getting better. Then, my aunt Hilda was driving Granny somewhere and Hilda had a "spell" too. They totaled the car, both went to the hospital. Granny re-broke everything (it's been a rough couple of years for my folks). In the midst of this, I was interviewing at the University of Georgia (I don't recommend interviewing while you're having a family crisis--and especially don't recommend interviewing while you are having a family crisis, when the institution is where the family lives). So, we sold her house and put her things in storage. Granny cannot bathe herself, so she's hanging with my folks for a couple of weeks, then my aunt and uncle's, and back again.

Ok Josh, so why are you there? Answer: Granny wants me to have some of her things. Her bedroom suit and dining room table. Since the Christmas holidays last year she has been asking me, "when you coming to get those things? I'm payin' $70 a month to store it." She says this with a kidding tone (I can hear the twinkle in her eye). So I'm here to receive a bedroom set and dining room table. I had some difficulty explaining this to my father a couple of months ago. "Son, why do you what that junk?" It's true, the furniture is not of any economic value. But it has use value, and you know, the symbolic value is incalculable. "Pop, it's not about the furniture," I would say. It's about making sure Granny knows I went through the trouble to get it. I want her to know that I have it. I'll be taking photos of the furniture in my home and mailing them back to show her. It's a ritual gesture, a needed one, one that's good for the soul and much better than chicken soup.

Coming home is usually harder and harder every year, it's tough to explain and one day I'll do it justice. This time, thank the Lord (if there is one) I'm not here for a funeral (a frequent cause). Weathering the occasional racist comment in the family is a real, emotionally exhausting thing I have to do sometimes (last night's lovely comment was about a black Hitler), but I won't report on that tedium at any length. I will report on a hilarious conversation with my mother last night:

SCENE: Back patio porch of my mother, the gardener. Petunias explode from clay pots everywhere, it's getting dark, and there is a wayward firefly every couple of minutes.

MOM: Oh, it's a nice night. You used to love playing with the lightening bugs; you'd put them in a jar and make a lantern.

ME: I remember that; you could squish their little behinds and make glow in the dark war paint.

MOM: We didn't have TV when we were kids, you know, so we played outside with the bugs. Summer was the best, because in June we had the June Bugs [Japanese Beetles] and in July came the July Bugs [cicadas], you know, them big ol' green bugs that'd leave their husks on trees.

ME: Dems Cicadas, didn't you hear the story about the ones up north last year that invaded Minneapolis and DC?

[discussion continues about Garrison Keillor's paean to the cicada on a radio show]

MOM: Well, when we're kinds we'd get them big ol' July bugs and tie a string to one of it's hind legs, you know, and then let go and it'd fly in circles [gestures to show how the bugs became mini helicopters]. You know, and they'd just fly and fly around and around and sometimes you know we'd have one in each hand and parade around with our flying bugs until the legs fell off and they'd fly away.

ME: [laughing] Damn! That's cruel. Poor cicadas. I'd hate to know what you did to kittens!

MOM: [laughing] "Aw, not cruel. They had six legs, plenty to spare.

dreamy diaries and deadwood delusions

Music: Yonder Mountain String Band: [self titled] (2006)

Last night I went to Club Elysium, touted as "Austin's Premiere Goth and Industrial Club" but better described as "Austin's Only Goth and Industrial Club," to see Diary of Dreams, a groovy little gothic/ebm outfit from Germany. I arrived late at 10:30 p.m., thinking that I would just be into the first song of the "headliner," but I was, sadly, disappointed. The opener was meditative but decent (a sort of world-fusion Mowai-like band), but the second act—comprised of mostly local yokels with five too many keyboards for what came out of the speakers—went from decent to intolerable. I know, I know, starting acts have to start somewhere, but after the tenth self-indulgent Chem-Lab tune, and a real massacre of a Duran Duran cover (as if!), I was in agony. Midnight came and went, and they were still at it, making my ears bleed. Diary didn't actually get on stage until close to 1:00 a.m.

I must have looked awfully agonized, because a man who looked an awful lot like me (sans the pointy beared) came up and shook my hand and introduced himself as "John." "I'm a owner; thanks for coming out." Very nice guy; I complimented him on booking Diary of Dreams, which was a real treat. Like most surviving gothic clubs in the United States, Elysium survives on its "80s" night dance parties, not booking primo darksider acts.

I said if they were playing in Germany, this place'd be packed full of people. He replied the turn-out for bands like this was typically disappointing (there were maybe seventy-five people there), and it would take some years to "educate the audience." I guess I passed as educated.

The sound designer, however, does not. I swear that was the most god-awful sound system I've heard in many, many years: all the bands sounded like they were playing thorough a megaphone. Yet, despite these shortcomings Diary of Dreams were indeed a real treat to watch, good stage presence, and upbeat despite the doom and gloom if their typical lyrical repertoire. It helps that the band is pretty to look at, too.

Ok, one more thing: What is great about the goth scene, as I'm sure I've written before, is that I know pretty much for any venue that 80% of the audience will be comprised of people my age, with similar backgrounds, polymorphous sexualities, and so on. I really like the fact I have a group of people that I can age with and have a good time; its nostalgic, absolutely, but in a sort of black-clad costume party kind of way. However, I have the good sense to know that my leather and PVC days are long over (actually, they never were to begin with, I was always the mod-goth type, but if I wore that sort of bondage-a-go-go thing, I know better than to wear skin-tight anything now). So what is up with these pudgy thirty something guys taking off their shirts and wearing ass-less pants? It's really quite nasty: pasty hairy flesh hanging out of someone's backside. I mean, this visual aid here is fetching, but this is a model in his twenties; not the brand of ass I was treated to last night. Ugh! No thanks buddy, you've fallen off the gruftie-have-a-clue-about-my-body-image boat and have sailed headlong into pathenticism.

Ever seen a "Gothic Supermodel?" Then you've not see Donna Ricci!

Speaking of patheticism, Mirko passed along a rant from Ted Stevens, a chatty Senator from Alaska. If you listen to this mp3 file, I'm sure you'll agree with me that the Ivy League has nothing on the Bumbling Idiots of our Grand Congress. People elected this person! I mean, it's great for democracy and all that idiots can get elected and re-elected, I mean, I'm all for that possibility. But the actuality idiocy in power . . . oh, god. I'll stop now. Here's the Joshie Juice challenge: see if you can listen to the WHOLE rant by Stevens without gouging out your eyes or madly stuffing your fingers in your ear-holes. I mean, this shit is like Vogon poetry.

psychobabble and the genetic indictment

Music: Passengers: Original Soundtracks 1

Ken over at his Ghost in the Wire blog posted an intriguing polemic yesterday about the validity and of psychoanalysis as an interpretive method or perspective in general. I've replied to his remarks there a few times, but I thought I'd recast my remarks on this page, because I like the discussion and I think Ken raises some important issues.

For the bystander who is unfamiliar with what I write as a part of my job, lately I've been working with psychoanalysis as a perspective for critiquing elements of popular culture. My latest work has focused on a Lacanian reading of demagoguery and I'm currently using Freud on group therapy to help makes sense of the films of Stephen Spielberg as well as reading a bunch of Jung on alchemy for a project with Tom on The DaVinci Code. Needless to say, I'm pretty deep in psycho-think at this point.

Ken argues—somewhat hyperbolically—that psychoanalysis is a false art or techne that is better read as a symptom of a larger, epistemological shift that has occurred (and presumably is still occurring) in the wake of the death of the sign. Psychoanalysis is better understood, he suggests, as a sort of epiphenomenal repetition compulsion, a symptom of the demise of the logic of the symptom. What has blinded its proponents to its failures as a true, explanatory discourse is a "genetic privilege" that eclipses any consideration of its necessarily mediated preformation as a discourse, a chief insight of Gadamer on the hermeneutical process.

To make this argument, Ken makes the following claims: (1) the fundamental problem of the human sciences is the transcendental character of interpretation, which is always already mediated by a language broadly conceived as a technology of representation/mediation; (2) [rhetorical?] scholars have yet to seriously reckon with the problem of interpretation because of a tacit, ontotheological tendency to assert a master discourse (rationales are various, but I'm happy to see that publication politics is part of this); (3) a good case study of the problem is the blindness of psychoanalysis. (3a) Psychoanalysis presumes underlying structures, so if one does not believe in such underlying structures, or finds such structures false or misnamed, then validity can go out the window; (3b) but we're more concerned with genetic privilege here. So far, then, the set-up to this argument is that too little attention is given to the conditions and particularities of a given, and presumably interpretive, discourse, and psychoanalysis is the poster boy of this sort blindness.

Ken's argument, however, is that if we reverse the privilege between representational preformation ("epigenesis") and psychoanalysis—if we read psychobabble as a symptom—then we might profitably understand it as a mournful discourse: psychoanalysis registers the death of the sign. He offers two "justifications" for this move: (1) psychoanalysis "dresses up" contingency as a necessary, underlying structure; (2) it's really not expository, but reactive.

Over on Ken's blog my reaction to this calling out (since my work is directly addressed) was initially that I don't have much to quibble with here. Indeed, what discourse isn't a mediation of some sort? And who would dispute the basic, Gadamerian understanding of the horizons of interpretation (as well as its limits) as a gesture? Or perhaps as Nietzsche put it, we always operate "on the backs of things," and that means there is no un-mediated access. Thinking through this earlier today, I would add, however, a number of responses.

First, theory is a name game. Insofar as I buy into the transcendental argument (call me Kantian or Derridian, but there is no access to the outside; we're stuck "in here," if by "in" we mean, basically, the outside/socious too), the critical task of thinking is, well, critical: what names work and what names to not, and what are the consequences of this name, as opposed to that one? I wish I could make recourse to some meta-theory to better illustrate the case, but, I regret this was in part Lacan's understanding of "discourse" in the technical sense: most theory, philosophy for certain, is a "master" discourse that necessarily asserts what Ken is calling "genetic privilege." In a sense, what Ken is talking about is what Lacan is talking about in Seminar 20: the university discourse is the master discourse in disguise.

Second, the "genetic privilege" of psychoanalysis is no different from any other interpretive discourse insofar as it speaks in the name of authority. Why? Because I would gamble the analytic meaning of interpretation entails authority/mastery: All interpretation presumes the object being made meaningful (primary) is not self-transparent, but requires another discourse—requires utterance about it--to ferret its truth. Insights into the truth of the object, however, always entail a certain blindness, a blindness to the preformation of its own interpretive procedure. Another way to put this is that every discourse, most especially that of a master, requires an "off scene" or, if you want, an ob-scene. We sometimes call it the unconscious.

Third—seeing that I agree with Ken at the level of the epistemic here—such observations imply even media-ecological (is that a word?) approaches to cultural objects, such as reading the psychoanalytic discourse as a symptom, will suffer its own blindness. Since I'm just learning the literature of that discourse, I'm not so sure what that might be at the moment, but I would hazard a Missy Misdemeanor Elliott "flip it and reverse it" gesture by suggesting media ecology's own libidinal investment in the gadget (the central object of all group psychology) blinds it to the agency of the signifier. If psychoanalysis is fundamentally mournful (and I think it is), then media ecological approaches are too joyful.

Fourth, instead of a reversal, why not an equalization or some perspectival form of homeostatis? This seems precisely the project of the work of Larry Rickels, who plays media-ecological and psychoanalytic discourse off one another, fundamentally to avoid reifying either as a master discourse (see, for example, the massive Nazi Psychoanalysis" series).

Finally, if Ken is right, that psychoanalysis can be understood as a symptom, it does not follow that it is not therefore expository. Exposition is not the same as interpretation (although ideally the latter leads to the former). In my reading of the psychoanalytic discourse—colored, admittedly, by Lacanian folks—the whole enterprise is not so much to make the world meaningful, but to explain how be comfortable with a certain degree of ineffability. Like I said, it's all a name game, in the end. Perhaps the fundamental issue that Ken points up is really the one of determinism: if transcendentalism is our problem and our plight, then perhaps the banishment of mastery is our goal? Still, I don't disagree with the major point of Ken's argument: the assertion of mastery entails a certain degree of blindness. For me, the best issue to consider in adopting this or that perspective is the consequence of its particular blindnesses: does that blindness get people killed? Fortunately,most university discourses do not (with apologies to Gramsci).

the agonies of randalls

Music: Alan Parsons Project: A Valid Path (2004)

Yesterday I thought I might go to the supermarket for a steak. I also decided to replenish my detergents, soaps, cache of spring water and soda, and other various items that require the use of a buggy. I very rarely shop with a buggy. I usually use a small basket that I carry on my arm. One reason I don't shop with a buggy is that they call it a "basket" in Austin. I hate hearing them ask, "do you need a basket" when I check out sometimes, especially when I do not need a buggy and used a basket to shop. The Easter Bunny uses a basket, not a buggy. I also do not like to use a buggy because most of the time it has a sticky wheel that wobbles and squeaks, the effect of which is like having a buggy with a siren on it that announces my immediate arrival to bystanders in the next isle.

Anyway, so, I go to my local supermarket one point five miles away, park in a surprisingly close spot, and procure a buggy (mostly to carry the spring water). I flipped up the kiddie leg-holes cover so that I could put items in the top mini-basket area without worrying about their falling through the kiddie leg-holes.

Now, contrary to the usual flow of shoppers who commence their shopping in produce, I go to the opposite side of the store and commence my shopping in the toiletries and pet food area. I need toothpaste first, so, using proper buggy etiquette I park my buggy at an end-cap of hot dog buns near the processed meats section at the end of the toiletries isle.

As an aside: people, if there is no reason to drive your buggy all the way down the interior of an aisle, then don't. You cannot fit more than one buggy down an isle and you cause traffic jams, risking someone's toes. Leave that massive buggy near where you are going, use your two goddamn hands, and return to your buggy with your booty. The sole exception for this are heavy items like spring water; grocers should make their heavy-item isles a little larger than most to accommodate more buggies.

Another aside: people, if you have more than two kids, or if you run a day-care center in your two bedroom apartment, there is absolutely no reason to bring your whole brood to the supermarket. No one enjoys your kids, and they mindlessly wander in the aisles and often without any sense of predictability.

After successfully parking my empty buggy near said end cap, I wandered up an aisle in search of laundry detergent and toothpaste. The toothpaste was on one side of the aisle, and the detergent, on the other. I got the toothpaste, then turned in the empty aisle to eyeball the detergent on sale. Out of the corner my eye, I spied a person rummaging through the buns on the end cap to my right. I turned to get a glimpse for some reason, feeling that slight pull of worry: what's she doing milling around my buggy? It was a short woman, just above five feet, but wide, with a moo-moo thing on that was orange striped. She wore glasses and had short, salt-and-pepper hair. She was breathing so heavy I could hear her from about fifteen feet away. She was in her sixties. She needed to exercise more. Anyway, I turned back to my task: Woolite Dark Colors or Cheer Dark? The difference in price was about 40 cents, but did they work the same? Probably. Probably made at the same soap factory, just with different labels. Do I have a coupon in my pocket for either? Nope. I had one for Tide, but not for the dark clothing detergents. Oh well, I guess I'll settle for the Tide HE Free. I grabbed my detergent and headed back to the cart.

The cart was gone. No cart. WTF? Where is my cart? I parked it here, and it's gone. Looking around, there was the squat moo-mooed lady ambling with a buggie toward the processed meats. Does she have my buggy? I looked: she had a buggy, but there were hotdog buns in it. The buggy was destined to soon have hotdogs in it. The kiddie-hole flap was turned up. Hmm. How many people do that to their buggies? I looked around: three other buggied shoppers, none with their flaps up. Damn! That bitch took my buggy. Oh well, better get another.

No, I thought. This is too polite. "Excuse me mam," I called. She turned, looking guilty. "Did you take a buggy that was parked here?" She then looked incredulous, muttered "no" while looking at the floor, and started to wheel away. Do I go wrestle the thing away from her? No, I caught her. If she wants to freakin' lie, let her. I headed to the grocers door, set my detergent and toothpaste on a floral display counter, went outside and got another buggy, came back into the store, picked up my soaps, and finished my shopping.

poetry reading, or, why i am not one

Music: Roy Orbison: Roy Orbison Sings the Lonely and Blue

Be cause I am not, that I am not Truth sashays, only to the tune Physis phoned in, that sour spirit, godless glottis (I can't get no, so, "blah blah blah") --props to Lacon-- Che rides motorcycles and diaries, and the gay man sitting on the floor on me laughed at all the anus malaprops

Bertrand was right to stop it, puttering tablets, he brought his own papers, petrified, pretty, puerile (and, dug, well, deeper purple than our reads) —trying to focus us stoned too many rules about fucking or Berating slow men and pixels, Being there in first places and there were too many men, and nipples were words harder rules, nipples as long as elephants he says (and Farid feigned, he got hard) no cry, no woman, except the Bee who gasped, lady cry

No woman, or gaped about speech, that not-secret queen, Jung animal (this town needs one [marked joke, with fruit bats in swarm the shadow]): "Birds in song/spit gold ropes." I lied too, and felt cry —I was whacked for the moment, swept even, a mocked bird, but too many rules about authenticity or Bating oneself out of the garage of the lonesome tailpipe huffer That stranger letter burns bushes, stuffing misogyny in faces, recompense drowns throats.

Batting or battling because, I don't know Be cause I am not one I don't feel it when I say it (something) people.

--------

Inspired by Farid Matuk's Is It the King?, which I strongly urge you to buy. It was a real treat to hear Farid read his stuff; unlike what they say about the movie version, the spoken word version makes clay breathe, but humbly.

D(Jx3)'s Mean-Ass Margaritas

Music: Gnarls Barkley: St. Elsewhere

Last night two super-smart, funny, and beautiful ladies slept over in my bed.

Now, before all of you congratulate me on this newest success, let it be said: (1) I make a mean-ass margarita; (2) if you drink more than one of my mean-ass margaritas in the evening, you should never drive heavy machinery; (2.5) I prefer alliteration to rhyme; (3) I have three beds that I can properly qualify as "my," however, two of them are also qualified with "guest"; (4) I have never taken advantage of anyone, including myself, as a consequence of my very good margaritas, with perhaps the single exception of making my mean-ass margarita drinker play board games with me; (5) regardless of whether or not my lodgers are lovers, I still try to treat everyone like a lover. Shaun, you know number five is true, although Bob may never understand. Perhaps Lyle Lovett sang it best: "I love everybody, especially you," if "you" means a joshie juice mean-ass margarita drinker.

I think I will need to add a sixth: (6) even though I prefer only the finest of 100% pure agave tequila, on the day after drinking one of my mean-ass margaritas—and especially if you have had more than one—you should not expect to get any intellectual work done. Nope. Instead, you can expect to surf the Internet mindlessly reading about the horrors of Julius Evola and ordering books that you do not need and will probably never read, occasionally interrupted by checking the stats page on your website, and even more than occasionally checking your email in-box in the off chance that since the last five minutes you checked it some fool or friend has emailed to say hello, or some past girlfriend has emailed to say, "I was wrong, you are so right, I miss you, let's get back together," or some very best friend has emailed to tell you about an upcoming show that you absolutely cannot miss—and that they have free tickets to give away to it. I'm hoping that show is the Gnarls Barkley taping at the Austin City Limits studio, but with my luck, I know I really need to re-adjust my imagination to the reality that the only possible email free ticket joy will be front row at the next Gwar show (and I will be forbidden from wearing a poncho).

PS: Super-doovy-groovy poetry reading tonight for my Austin peeps; if you're hip, then I'll know to expect to see you there!

southern drawal rhetoric conference

Music: Kontrast: Industrie Romantik

Minds are in momentum and there is a meeting of them: my colleagues at Texas A&M seem to be on board with the idea of co-hosting a graduate student rhetoric conference in the spring of 2008 or fall of 2009. I thought about the possibility after the dean here announced last year that there may be funds for such a thing. I had long heard about such conference co-hosted between Iowa and Northwestern, and always thought such an exclusive meeting was both a neat idea but also somewhat, well, needlessly exclusive. The idea for our conference would be to have Texas A&M and the University of Texas co-host, but to open the meeting up to our good friends in English departments as well and, given the scope and funding available, open the conference up to any graduate student that would like to attend and had something to share (well, there must be some kind of quality control, but the point of the conference is to both help professionalize as well as think together).

So why another conference for grads? First, there's money for it. Second, it's an opportunity to apply for "grants." As most rhetoricians know, getting grants in our area is pretty tough, and as most junior faculty know, all one hears these days from college administrations is "get grants [repeat ad nauseum]. So this will be an opportunity to seek out funding for me and a couple of juniors who need the vita hit. Third, I really think it is a shame to have so many programs within driving distance from Austin that have no "network." As rhetorical studies contracts, it's increasingly important to develop connections between our departments—to encourage guest speaking gigs and semesters at each other's institutions, and so on. Yet these reasons are minor compared to the fourth.

The fourth reason to host such a conference is to help set the agenda for research. In a field as small as ours, only a small swell of folks in group-think can force all of us—especially those of us who make it our goal to stay up with "theory"—to be reading this or that theorist. Recently, owning to the efforts of a small cabal of professors and their larger group of students, the work of Ernesto Laclau has become a major site of reading in the field. I reviewed for three divisions for this year's NCA conference in San Antonio, and over half of the submissions I read were about Laclau's work. It's quite bizarre, really, to see how two programs reading agendas become the "national" agenda for us in two short years. Although I find the work of Laclau interesting and potentially useful, I really do not dig the notion of learning one's Lacan from Laclau, or of reading Lacan only to understand Laclau. It's irritating to me. So, having a Texas-style graduate conference can pool together us folks down here who are not so much into this Midwestern program of "hegemonic politics" and establishing "chains of equivalence." While Christopher was visiting, we schemed about a possible agenda of reading that ties together our local interests. He thought of "structuralism," you know, pretty old school modernist structuralism. The more I thought about it, the more he was right: what unites the faculty at my department is a commitment to discerning structure; what interests me in psychoanalysis is structure; and poststructuralism is really a kind of structuralism, so, yes, that's it: structuralism! Who can claim to understand the project of the posts without an understanding of structuralism? No one. Having this foundational understanding pushed will benefit all of us, and with the added benefit of bringing more people to the discussion table.

the drama of secrecy revisited

Music: The Today Show

Last Friday the New York Times decided to publish a story about a secret government program that monitored a financial database known as SWIFT in their seemingly never-ending quest for "terrorists." Sunday partisan politicians blasted and defended the move, and on Monday both the president and vice-president publicly slammed the Times for compromising "national security." The story marks an increasingly emboldened—but not emboldened enough—press, no doubt a consequence of mounds and mounds of evidence of sanctioned (in both senses) abuse and torture by various U.S. federal agencies ever since Herr Commander declared a state of exception on September 20, 2001. In the name of a war on a rather abstract but highly connotative noun, it would seem one can prolong this state of exception indefinitely as long as evil lurks in men's hearts.

After the widely publicized abuse of "prisoners" at Abu Ghraib, the U.S. sponsorship of anti-humanitarian efforts has been hard to ignore, and I daresay many of us have been inoculated—if not downright worn-out—by all these stories of my government's turn to the darkside . . . or should I say, the public turn to the darkside? Regardless, this particular story intrigues me because the defense of secrecy is at issue. The Grand Wizard of our country maintains secrecy is what allows the U.S. government to prevent events like Nine-eleven. Representative Peter King of New York said that the expose on Friday was really the attempt of the editors of the New York Times to advance "its own arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda before the interests of the American people." So-called democrats have defended the Times by suggesting the CIA/Treasury department program is abusive and part of a tradition of secret abuse that stretches back to the phone-tapping surveillance that began shortly after Nine-eleven.

As I write this, the NBC report about the melee between the Times and the Bush Administration story has just ended, and is now reporting (if you can call it that) about the Harry Potter Book series: "Will Rowling Kill off Harry Potter?" The report is about a publicity tease in which the author of the book series has hinted two characters would die in the final book. "I've never been tempted to till off Harry until the book seven," said Rowling.

Now, since I'm horribly predictable, most of y'all know where I'm going with this: the stories about government secrecy and Harry Potter publicity are not merely coincidental: since the emergence of tabloid or "yellow" journalism in the late nineteenth century the sensational exposure and reporting of "secrets" has been the bread and butter of the Fourth Estate: as David Byrne sings, "same as it ever was." The current melee between the wizards of the All-Seeing Sauron's Tower and the Dark Tower of My Tax Dollars is merely part of an ongoing creation and revelation of secrets. Indeed, in our time of spectacle and surveillance, the art of politics can be defined as the interplay of secrecy and publicity. This is why Rep. King is wrong about the Times "left-wing agenda" (we need only point to their relentless critique of academics affiliated with the humanities in the last twenty years). This is why both brands of magic are premised on the delusion of novelty.

ghyll of antique childhood glide

Music: Fields of the Nephilim: Mourning Sun (2005)

cult of kim & thurston

Music: The Cure: The Cure (2004) Last night, courtesy of Dale Smith, one-half-ringleader of that underground poetic pantheon-collective Skanky Possum, Scott Pierce, another poetic genius/publisher (Effing Press), and lowly, woefully unpoetic me were Very Important Persons at the Sonic Youth jam. Some years ago Dale received a "fan letter" and package from Thurston Moore, who had been reading "the Poss" and Dale's accomplished poetic flights on the page from afar. Because Dale is a rock star for Thurston, our resident Poet Ph.D.-Candy-Daddy got to hook us up with the VIP treatment: can you believe I forgot to bring my motherfreakin' camera? We were twenty feet away from the action! Wow, what a show!

I've seen Sonic Youth once before, probably for the Daydream Nation tour, I cannot recall (I was still into psychedelics then, and honestly don't remember seeing it). So it was a real treat to see these legends sans the lysergic haze and, wow, what a great show! The sound was fantastic and the musicianship top-notch (what a difference thirty-years of experience and having a family can make on focus, heh?). I was surprised at how young the gate were, and the screaming that punctuated what should have been some more somber, melancholy tunes from the newer album (which I've not heard, but, if the show was any sort of glimpse, the newer album has a lot of Wire-like sounding songs, with percussion on the guitar and bass, that sort of thing). Kim was just a trip to watch: dancing around, flinging her arms with shimmy-style abandon, singing like Nico, but with that been-there-done-that vibe her a-tonal voice seems to hint.

Eh, I'm kicking myself I didn't bring a camera. After the show, Steve and Thurston came out to meet the VIP wristband contingent. They were really nice and friendly, talking about, well, nothing. I got tired of seeing all these people kiss Thurston's pinky-rings (he was really nice about it, you know, but the sycophancy was annoying). Dale was really, really excited to meet Thurston, and it was clear the feeling was mutual: they kept trying to talk about poetry, etc., and then some weedy schmoo would interrupt them and say, "oh, we emailed two years ago and . . . . " It was cool to be "backstage" and all, but, eh, I dunno. I can see why people go all ga-ga over Thurston. He still looks like he's 17, but he's almost fifty. And Kim didn't come out, which bummed us all out because, well, she's hot. She's got super-mean stair-master legs.

hell effin' yeah!

Music: The Farm: Hullabaloo (1994)

My boy Shaun just reported the most fantastic news this side of Christopher's announcement he's relocating to College Station: Shaun took a visiting post at the University of North Texas in Denton! Hell yeah, muthafukka! Two best friends only a coupla hours away? Oh, oh . . . my liver may not be able to take it! Let me just say I'm really freakin' happy about this news (and this means Shaun will also be in the running for a possible tenure track position there next year, too). Now, if the rest of you far flung best friends would apply for jobs in central Texas, I could really consider rooting here for good. Yay! for you Shaun! You RAWK!!!!!

PS: Any of you Austin peeps going to the Sonic Youth show at Stubb's tonight?

emo's austin

Music: Siouxsie & the Banshees: Superstition (1991)

This summer is the last time I will teach the "Rhetoric and Popular Music" class for a smaller number of students. I developed the course one summer for intersession while a graduate student at the University of Minnesota (circa 2001), and I've taught it at least once a year every year since. Five years is not a bad run for a course, although, I would be lying if I say that I was putting it to rest: the class is simply becoming a large lecture course, with some significant assignment modification.

One of the assignments of the course that I will not modify is a group ethnography: five or six students descend on some unsuspecting venue foreign to them and observe and participate in the "scene." The project does not focus on music as much as it does the "space" in which music occurs. The students are supposed to think about how the space of a musical venue helps to force a particular musical experience. To help them get ready for this project, I have a class field trip (which I stress is optional for them) to a local music venue. Since I've been in Austin, I've taken my classes to Emo's, a local "alterna" music venue that runs along 6th street and Red River.

Emo's is a great little music place for a number of reasons, if only because of their somewhat off-putting booking policy:

WE DO NOT book modern rock, alternative rock, rap metal, etc, etc...if this is your first time hearing of us, you probably don't play the type of music we're working with. We have a strict policy of the type of stuff that we do here...mostly underground stuff: punk/indie/emo/electronica/DIY hip hop/garage/etc/etc....

They do sometimes book, however, utter shite, such as the opening act on the late show last night . . . .

In any event, I cannot write too much about the experience last night because I don't want to "spoil" the exercise discussion with the students on Monday. There were two shows, one that started at 6 p.m., and another that started at 11:30 (I could only manage it until midnight, when I simply had to jet home to sleep). I can say that I've never felt so "old" at a show before: this was an all ages event, and the major draw, the novelty-bubble-punk band Bowling for Soup (whose charm wore off by the third three-chord song-n-lyrical "ya ya ya ya la la la la" genius even Weird Al would tire of). Mothers and fathers milled about watching over their middle-schoolers. Earplugs firmly in place (thereby marking me as a geezer) I moseyed up to the stage to see the uber-slick The Vanished finish up their set, when two young girls next to me, visibly distraught by my stage-rushing agressivity screamed to each other: "God, look at all the old people here!" "Yeah, what's the big deal?"

Of the six bands I saw last night, The Vanished were the most "radio friendly." They were also the prettiest to look at. I predict if they can come up with a single that's a little more gothy, they may do well. But, what's with the freakin' weird-ass mouth contortion? You must have to go to punk school to learn how to make your face look like you're having an orgasm with every three chords of your repertoire! I mean seriously: the lead guitarist's facial contortions were out of control( I fantasized of some fanatical high school girl running up on stage and stuffing a banana or something in it).

Regardless, last night was one riffy cliché after the next . . . a sure sign of my dotage: musical cynicism in a sea of pubescence. A gallery of the evening is here.

tenure tracking

Music: Brightblack Morning Light: [self-titled]

I am very fortunate to have landed a job that will provide a modicum of security if I can make good on the quid pro quo. Making good, in part, means that I have to keep publishing two peer-reviewed things a year in so-called "top journals." That kind of pressure is somewhat irritating, if only because "top journal" reduces only to three or four (depending on which colleague you ask), and these journals do not seem to include a number of those journals that I regularly read. Fortunately, during tenure review you can make arguments about journals and what not (for example, I find myself reading Rhetoric Society Quarterly more than Quarterly Journal of Speech, but the latter is considered more important).

Regardless, I try not to worry about the mercies of peer review. What has me a little more (or less) concerned is the prospect of "letter writers" for third-year and tenure review. I'm sure those of y'all who just went through or have long been through the process have some wisdom to impart about this, but, here's the trouble: one is supposed to develop a list of ten full professors who can fairly and accurately assess the quality of one's work and its "contribution to the field." (Said list cannot be directly submitted, but must be developed by a colleague who presumably comes up with the list without my input . . . I think.) Such a list should be comprised mostly of full professors from "peer institutions" (viz., research extensive and "equal" or "better than" the colleges' bloated fantasies about its status; not to be down on the college, I'm just saying we're not as all powerful and Sauron-like as we might have been in the 80s). From the way I understand it, the chair of my department will contact this list of ten people and see who has the time to review my tenure packet; those who have the time and who think they can fairly assess read my materials and write a cover letter about my value as a scholar. How scary is that?!!

Now, I can easily think of ten full professors who could assess my work and its (mis)contribution to the field. But the one stipulation that makes this problem troublesome is this: you cannot have worked or co-authored with or worked with or under said professors.

Suddenly this list becomes a challenge! Most of the folks who have commented positively on my work who are of the "full" variety are my colleagues, my co-authors, or my friends. In a field as small as ours, as the saying goes, "birds of a feather flock together." What is super great about being in a small field is that you'll sometimes have a big name email you out of the blue to say, "hey, dug your essay, and lets have lunch at the next conference." That's how I met, for example, Tom Frentz and Janice Rushing (with the Shaunster running interference!). But being in a smaller field also means that I know just about everyone who is into my particular "groove." The names who immediately come to mind are people I've written with or worked with or are currently writing with! Damn!

So, I was instructed to start thinking about people to tap for this thankless honor. And then I started thinking: uh-oh, I have "enemies" (only of the "mild" variety) as well. Friends have shared with me blind reviews of their work in which they are severely criticized for citing my work (I recall vividly a blind review of a friends' work in which "Gunn's research on Walter Benjamin is some of the worst in the field"—ouch). Recently at a conference I apparently walked into a charged bar scene in which, just prior to my arrival, scholars were critiquing my work and calling for my head on a platter (they didn't intone their calls in my presence, however). So I worry, too, about tapping one of these secret castrators as well. In other words, part of trouble of being in a small field is that your (playful? largely harmless?) enemies have to keep their disapproval of your work on the down-lo to keep the peace.

Anyhoo, I have about seven names that I've jotted down. A number of them are fulls who interviewed me and who commented positively on my work (not at the places in which I didn't get the job, though). A couple of them are reviewers of manuscripts who signed their names to positive reviews. And more than three of them I would consider mentors/friends who I've managed neither to publish with nor work with somehow. Alas, it's a short list. Any of my academic peeps out there know of a full professor who writes glowing tenure reviews of everybody, regardless if they publish articles on psychics, zombies, and taking a poo--indeed, regardless if the reviewed scholar's work is (for) shit?

onward (and outward) xian soldiers

Music: Cetu Javu: Southern Lands

NBC Affiliates were reporting today that a valedictorian's microphone was cut off during a graduation ceremony last week because the young woman began proselytizing. After reviewing her proposed speech school officials (including an attorney) edited many parts of the speech that began to stray toward a more fundamentalist hard-line. Officials told Ms. Brittany McComb that her audio feed would be cut off if she began to preach during the graduation ceremony, which officials noted may offend the faithful who did not subscribe to her particular understanding of Christianity, and which crosses the line between the separation of church and state. During an interview this morning with McComb and her parents on the Today Show, McComb said that she and her family discussed the bait-and-switch maneuver. Her mother said they thought the censorship was "just a scare tactic," and was surprised that her daughter's remarks were silenced because they in no way suggested that they were condoned by the school district. The young woman's father said that he intended to sue the school district for violating his daughter's first amendment rights.

In a related story, Jim Aune of The Blogora reports that Bush's main speechwriter for over six years, Michael Gerson, has left the building. As a story in The New Republic details, Gerson was responsible for Bush's uncanny sense of eloquence since Nine-eleven. The article's author says that Gerson's departure was in part a consequence of the mis-match of the president's word and deed over the past couple of years; the article seems to suggest that Gerson's impact on the presidency was merely stylistic. That kind of thinking is stupid (that thinking that reduces the power of rhetoric to "mereness"). Gerson's double-speak prose of spiritual warfare was in a large part responsible for garnering widespread support for Bush's agenda of warmongering binarism. I've made the case here and elsewhere for the incendiary effects of Gerson's righteous Christian prose, so I won't detail further except to say this: that this silenced senior and her family feel righteous about their right to assert their faith in a state-sponsored event is unquestionably a consequence of the tenor of presidential rhetoric over the past six years. In this charged, polarized environment of righteousness, in my mind unquestionably catalyzed by the "good and evil" binarisms of Gerson's born-again tongue(s) on the presidential teleprompter, evangelical Christians feel more emboldened than ever (except, perhaps, during the early years of this country's settling, oh, and maybe the first and second great awakenings, and . . . um, the 1970s post-hippy recovery, and I guess probably the Reagan years, oh, and um . . . . ).

Gerson may have left the building, but hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are taking to the public forum to spout off about the saving grace of a Jesus who will return soon to smite the unbelieving; Al Gore's inconvenient truth is just that, cause Jesus is coming, and he ain't a happy camper.

oh, the humanity!

Music: Milton Mapes: The Blacklight Trap

Austin-based Whole Foods Market announced in a press release last Thursday that they would no longer be selling live lobsters because it promoted the inhumane treatment of non-humans. Local celebrity and founder John Mackey said that the company places "as much emphasis on the importance of humane treatment and quality of life for all animals as we don on the expectations for quality and flavor." A PETA spokesperson argued that this was a bold move on the part of the company, for dropping a lobster into a pot of boiling water was akin to "felony cruelty to animals if they were dogs or cats."

The company relied on both a seven month report by the European Food Safety Authority , in which the authors concluded decapods feel pain, as well as self-commissioned, three-year longitudinal study by the local outfit, People for the Ethical Treatment of Edibles (PETE). By observing sample families from Austin and Houston, PETE conducted a comparative, ethnographic study to see how crrustaceans were used in Texas households. Their results, although not widely reported out of respect for Texas' cultural diversity, were astonishing.

"Few non-Hispanics have any idea of the ritual import of lobsters for the state, and we were surprised to discover the third largest trading partners with central Texas region were in the state of Maine!" said Fulton Offenshite, director of PETE. "Over the past two hundred years," reported Offenshite, "lobsters have replaced goats and sheep as the chief offering to Tezcatcatl, an ancient Hispanic deity that protects Mexicans from colonization and Anglo-American globalization." The report details what many readers unfamiliar with Tezcatcatl rituals would regard as a barbaric rite: "On Friday evenings determined by positions of the moon, a very small platform with two-foot elevated cross is placed on the dining room table. The family—usually the youngsters—secure a live lobster to the cross by nailing its pincers to each side, and the lobster is left to hang writhing until Sunday, when its arms and head are ritually dismembered and eaten raw," the report reports. Mackey said the news was shocking. "Although I respect the right of all peoples to worship as they please, Whole Foods cannot condone the ritual crucifixion of crustaceans," he said. "The Jews no longer sacrifice cloven hoofed animals to Yahweh," Mackey said. "I don't want to forbid our Tezcatcatl-worshipping customers from worshiping their god," he continued, "so we're working with Morning Star Foods, Inc., to develop a tofu-based lobster-substitute for sacrifice." Currently the lobster surrogate is too mushy to hang properly on the sacrificial crosses, however, a Morning Star representative said their company is making progress on fake lobster thickening agents.