a prayer: some things for which I am thankful

Music: Starlet: Stay on My Side (1999) In a small, two bedroom bungalow on Zoar Church Road, a copy of this painted photograph hung in the kitchen above the dining room table for over fifty years. My grandmother told me, many years ago before she lost the ability to speak, that she thought she and my grandfather received the photograph from a car dealership when they purchased a vehicle. Growing up in my grandmother's house I often pondered the meaning of this photograph, as it had a special attraction to me (you can click the image for a larger version). Later I learned that it was taken by Eric Enstrom in 1918 for a man at his request in the small mining town of Bovey, Minnesota. Obviously staged, the man and Enstrom assembled a family book (not a bible as is commonly assumed), a bowl of gruel, some bread, his glasses, and so forth. Titled "Grace," Enstom sold black-and-white prints of the image for years until its popularity led to hand-painted versions by Rhoda Nyberg in Coleraine Minnesota.

The painting has become a signifier for Thanksgiving with my family, which always used to be at my grandmother's house. Now with Granny in ill health and in a nursing home, my mother and aunt sold the house on Zoar Church Road. The dining table at which we all used to eat is now in my dining room, and the framed photograph of "Grace" has been given to me, but is in storage.

Granny always said grace at our Thanksgiving meals. She would often thank the Lord for what seemed like an interminable list of things. I remember she always said this phrase: " . . . and Lord, we thank you for this food and the nourishment it brings our bodies . . . ." Despite my agnosticism, I have never had a difficulty bowing my head to say grace, or sending spoken desires and wishes up to the ear of deity, should such a grand being exist (I'm doubtful, but hell, I'm open to surprise). Prayer means many things, and one of them is the spoken, public recognition of what one "has" and, at least tacitly, what others do not. Today I am not with my family and will be spending this holiday alone, but I think it would be in the spirit of the holiday to craft a public prayer of gratitude. So:

I am thankful for having an intact family who cares deeply for one another and shows it.

I am thankful for friendship, and that core group of friends whom I know I can call at 3:00 a.m.

I am thankful for having lived with my beloved Obi Wan-der-Ful for nine years. I miss him very much.

I am thankful for love, and those who share it with me in their own original, unique gestures.

I am thankful for music. If there were no such thing as music, life would not be worth living.

I am thankful that the Bush regime is almost over, and although I fear the new president will be little more than a return to frictionless neoliberalism, I am thankful that we are at least we're ten times less likely to be bombed.

I am thankful for Bailey's Irish Cream and coffee on holiday mornings.

I am thankful for humor and comedic relief, and for people who insist I not take myself, or others, so seriously.

I am thankful for having an affordable health care package, and I will be even more thankful when everyone in the world has the same opportunity.

I am thankful to be living in Austin, allergies and all.

I am thankful for peanut butter. I do not keep it in the house because it will be gone within three hours. I am even more thankful for the International Medical Corps and their efforts to end starvation and malnutrition with Plumpy'nut. You can give Plumpy as a holiday gift, if you want.

I am thankful for my colleagues, many of whom I would donate an expendable organ to should they need one.

I am thankful to have two computers, so that when one crashes (like my desktop did yesterday) I can still continue my so-called digital life.

I am thankful for the educational opportunities that I have had; I am thankful to be a teacher, so that I can contribute to making the same opportunities for others.

I am thankful for the intelligence, good character, and generosity of our graduate students.

I am thankful not to be in the hospital.

I am thankful to finally make an affordable living, to own my home, and to have invested "conservatively" for my retirement. I am thankful to live a lower middle-class life, for I know so many others do not have the opportunities to live such a life because of systemic disadvantages.

I am thankful for food, in general, and for having some in the kitchen.

Here's to wishing all of you RoseChron readers a happy giving-thanks day. I hope you were able to send and receive some love, and were caused to reflect on what you have, and unfortunately, what others do not. Amen.

joshcast: fall of frogs

Music: Turin Brakes: Ether Song (2003)

Well, the holiday season is finally upon us, and if you are an academic, you know what that means: time to work at home! Isn't it terrible that we seize on "breaks" as an opportunity to do the opposite? Sure, we'll squeeze in friends and family for a day, but mostly it's a time to get "caught up" on the piles of papers on our desks. The same is true of sabbatical, as Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas Frentz wrote in their classic essay, "The Gods Must be Crazy." Sabbatical used to be a time of repose, a time to stop working and to think it through while you rest. Now, if you are lucky enough to have sabbatical, it's time to write your next book. Worse, if you're at a place like the University of Texas that has no sabbatical, if you're lucky you can get a "Faculty Research Assignment," a semester off to finish some research project or another (the rumor is that you can get an FRA if there's a possibility of "matching funds" and if your project benefits the people of Texas; they're very competitive and not guaranteed).

Well, anyway, on that cheerful note I'm providing another joshcast, the second of four volumes of my "frog" ambient music series. You can find an mp3 of the mix here. You can find a pdf of the mix cover and track listing here. Here's what's in the mix:

1. eluvium: new animals from the air
2. sigur ros: hjart hamast
3. marconi union: we travel
4. namlook: music for urban meditation, part 2
5. the for carnation: emp. man’s blues
6. tear ceremony: dissolve
7. stars of the lid: requiem for dying mothers, part 2
8. burial: untrue
9. lusine icl: on the line
10. the field: kappsta 2
11. hammock: god send us a signal
12. robin guthrie & harold budd: the girl with colorful thoughts
13. susanna and the magical orchestra: hallelujah

Of course, as always, this mix is for preview only. If you like an artist, I strongly urge you to download their song from a music service or buy their album. Enjoy! For the previous volume in the series, see this post.

while you were away . . .

Music: Not Drowning, Waving: Another Pond (1984) . . . I did some laundry and finally washed the bedclothes for the guest bedroom. Everything is clean now (or that's what they say, sings Gillian). I didn't put up the tree as I thought I might, because I worried that shifting the potted plant will make it drop its leaves. I'll figure something out. I didn't manage to organize the office as I had hoped, nor did I get my impending talk drafted for the commencement of the Midwestern tour. I don't feel too guilty about that; I grazed some articles. One I liked quite a bit, "Defining Phonography" by Eric Rothenbuhler and John Peters. They have a nice line in there (many, actually): "Death, for Hegel, is the price of intelligibility." I read more of Sterne's The Audible Past, too. I thought a lot about my book in progress and how it's not going to get done unless I have another semester off, and I don't know how to get another semester off. We don't have sabbaticals here, either.

While you were away I thought about where I might go if I left Austin. You needn't worry about me leaving, however. I have no plans to leave unless it's with you, and I really do like living in Austin. Even so, you ask me this question frequently. I'm not quite sure how to answer. Probably closer to my parents, since I'm an only child, and I will have to take care of them one of these days, somehow. I do know this: if I go (with you) they better have sabbatical leaves. And a good local record shop like Waterloo (another Vortex of Money Disappearance).

While you were away I let the dog visit Sandra and Oliva, which helped quiet the house for a blessed hour. Jesús spied the Calico on the roof at eight in the morning and that started him barking, and his piercing barking has persisted throughout the day: after the kitty violated our territory, Oliva showed up babbling something in German, eliciting more yawps. Then the ambulance came because, apparently, Ms. K felt dizzy and all the white-gloved men got Jesús whipped into a cacophonous frenzy.

While you were away I saw your videos on YouTube and felt prideful. I watched Casino Royale on DVD on Saturday and immediately saw Quantum of Solace with Sal and Jer at the Alamo. I liked Daniel Craig as the new James Bond, he is a beautiful man. I wondered, however, if his eyes are really that blue or if they were enhanced somehow. I also liked how the new Bond films critique the economy of women (yet at the same time reinscribe it, and how Bond struggles with this reinscription). Casino is much, much better than Quantum, however, the latter relying much too much on jerky camera stylistics.

While you were away I read more of Derrida's Archive Fever, and was struck with the comparison I made between prisons and archives. I got to thinking the asylum is a special kind of archive, and the "fever" contained within it (the repetition compulsion of psychosis) is interestingly expressed in films that depict asylums. I thought immediately of Exorcist III, because I recalled a scene in which a man is furiously masturbating. I think there is also a scene like that Silence of the Lambs. I tried to find the scenes, but a cursory scan of each DVD didn't reveal them. I don't know quite yet why such a scene is important or what I would do with it in a given writing project; I just have a hunch such scenes help to demonstrate what Derrida means by "archive sickness" better than what other commentators have tried to use as explanatory devices. If the archive is a topography of narcissism and the death-drive, some crazy guy masturbating in a padded room seems to get at the idiom in a way that represents "textual embodiment."

While you were away I worked on a letter of recommendation for a friend seeking employment in the Midwest. The Midwest seems to be thematic for me this academic year (last year, of course, it was the Northeast). I remembered Christopher and I talked about a writing retreat for the summer in Montana. We would rent a cabin. Hike some days. Sit on a porch overlooking some green-treed valley. Bourbon. The sort of sustained intimacy of friendship that becomes possible in your thirties with anyone, regardless of gender or meat-eating. It's a comforting thought, a cabin the mountains. A semester would be better. A semester off for time in Montana to finish my book. The damned, cursed book.

While you were away Margaret and Jennifer talked about Spalding Grey (that damned, cursed monster in a box) and suicide. I assured them if I did it I wouldn't leave anyone hanging (at the very least certainly not my body), which means I need to be out of debt, and that means I will probably live forever. Highlander and Queen's question: who wants to live forever, anyway? Hunter S. Thompson was right.

While you were away I read some poems. Some by my friend Dale. Some by Sandra Cisneros in the book you gave me as a special gesture. I liked this one, in particular:

I Am So Depressed I Feel Like Jumping in the River Behind My House but Won't Because I'm Thirty-Eight and Not Eighteen

Bring me a drink.
I need to think a little.
Paper. Pen.
And I could use the stink
of a good cigar---even
though the sun's out.
The grackles in the trees.
The grackles inside my heart.
Broken feathers and stiff wings.

I could jump.
But don't.
You could kill me.
But you won't.

The grackles
calling to each other.
The long hours.
The long hours.
The long hours.

We have a lot of grackles here. There is a creek behind my house. No one that I know of would want to kill me, but I do like the title of the poem the best. No, I'm not depressed but thanks for your labor of worry.

While you were away I met Dale for drinks at the Longbranch. I like that bar, very down-to-earth and heavy pours. Dale is a good listener and a damn fine poet. He is one of my closet friends here, but he is on the job market this year and will leave me the next. I asked Dale what he thought of Cisneros. He said he was always suspicious of poets who use "mangoes" as a metaphor for anything.

While you were away I made myself some fish and listened to a lot of music: Stars of the Lid; Not Drowning, Waving; Rosie Thomas (I don't like the last album except for one song); and Chris Pureka. Pureka is a new find, a beautiful androgynous voice that is hard to describe. She covers "Everything is Free Now" on her newest album. I want to have her children now, just so I could overhear her sing lullabies in the night time.

While you were away I drank a little, but not too much because of the medication. My foot is healing. My neighbor, whose husband has gout, she said that I was too light and too young for disease. I said that I agree, but that it is my genetic legacy. My mother told me my father got it a lot in his early twenties, and my grandfather throughout his life. I said all the switches of my paternal codes of pain are starting to switch on, which means kidney stones, ingrown nastiness, and God knows what else are just around the corner. Working out and maintaining a decent diet has only slowed them by a decade. After this past week's pain, I am starting to question my threshold for it: maybe I can get the tattoo sleeves after all?

While you were away I made a mix CD, perhaps the closest link to the materiality of phonography and magnetic tape. Rothenbuhler and Peters have me thinking a lot about the album.

While you were away I checked Facebook a million times.

While you were away I blogged a lot because you didn't email. I reflected about you a lot. I felt the nothing of your absence. Thanks for phoning to tell me you missed me. God knows I missed you.

mal d’archive: a capacious metaphor driving death

Music: Stars of the Lid: The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (2001)

In a little over two weeks, I'll be speaking to the rhetoric folks at Purdue under the title, "On Vocalic Projection: EVP, backmasking, and the Ambivalence of Electronic Speech," or at least something like that. The talk is based on a book chapter and essay I drafted last year. The essay is more akin to a meditation than an actual argument, for in the book it provides a transition in focus from "live speech" to recorded speech (the distinction, of course, is brought into question a la Derrida in the book). What the analysis of my examples is supposed to do is demonstrate the ambivalence we have toward the human voice, the longing for immortality on the one hand, and the fear and truth of death on the other. It is something of an "inter-chapter," if you will. The problem is that as a stand alone article it's just not making sense; I have to fix this for my talk.

To prepare for the talk, I have gone back to the editor and reviewers' comments and, as I mentioned, started to reread Derrida's Archive Fever again.

As my own students are learning this week to review each other's essays, I am reminded of the nastiness that reviews can fall into:

Is there, then, something theoretical that we can learn by virtue of the way that this author answers this question, as insignificant as the question might be? That is what I was hoping as I started the essay. But I grew more and more disappointed as I recognized I was being carried along through an intellectual tour de force, performed by what appears to be the darling of a graduate program, who is yet to develop a sense of disciplined scholarship. I do gain a sense of who are the "smart" people with whom this author has become acquainted, as well as some of the "smart" ideas they had. But I am still waiting for something insightful and informative about the forms of electronic speech reference at the outset.

This is a particularly sadistic way of saying that I have no answer to the "so what?" question. What should a reader care about EVP and backmasking? What does an analysis of EVP and backmasking help us to understand or see better?"

In pondering these questions, I've come up with some tentative answers. They are:

• Examining the EVP and backmasking movements captures an important historical moment in media ecology: the 1970s. The 70s are often a forgotten decade for so many reasons (not the least of which being the end of the sixties, which spills over into understanding the 70s as a kind of cultural recovery period---the aftermath of the end of hope, if you will). Yet what happened in the 70s was the arrival and dominance of "home recording." The 70s was the golden age of home recording, the crowning achievement of what we might simply term "Analogical Culture." Digitalism, as a competing logic, unquestionably marks the onset of a curious from of amnesia that my essay resists.
• How people thought about fidelity and recording in the 1970s participated in a different form of "archive fever" than we witness today. I'm not sure, but I think I would thus disagree here with Derrida's understanding of the digital as somehow more "humane" than the dusty archive of the 1970s. The virtuality of the digital transforms the archive from the interior of a place---and thus the materiality of the traces cataloged "inside"---to an exteriority of no-place; the drive to archive consequently gets caught up in a utopic fantasy that is increasingly less mournful and much more aggressively destructive. What I mean by this is akin to what Benjamin has to say about the "aura" of a work vis-à-vis its reproduction. The Analogical Culture of the 1970s thus has a more theological character.
• Analogical Culture of the 1970s was more sonorously mournful because of the important medium of "noise." Analog recording more literally reproduced a prior "live" event; vinyl records, as I mused last week, raise the dead. Digital recording, however, is music that is produced by the playback device. Digitalism does not re-create the past in the present, but rather, presents sound (or whatever) at the moment. The consequence is the loss of distance or sonorous distancing that the medium of noise provides. In short, in the Digital Age technology has moved us from mourning to melancholia; sound (re)production is traumatic, in the moment, undistanced. The iPod, for example, is the new archive and exacts its own form of cruelty (lacking noise, the sound is so good it surpasses the threshold of pain as listeners go deaf).
• Perhaps the disappearance of noise and the melancholia that can result explains recent battles over forms of sonic mourning: the refusal of authorities to release the black box recording of United Flight 93, as well as the five year battle between The New York Times and the City of New York over hours upon hours of emergency phone calls, seem to be keeping the voices of the dead secret for a reason. That reason is not public, but there is a palpable fear of making the archive public. Perhaps this fear is over the "distancing" of mourning the immediacy of traumatic transmission in melancholia, an immediacy signaled by the digital?
• The relationship between technology and communication with ghosts cannot be separated from the archive as a metaphor for conquering origins and preserving the material trace.

Umm, I think I'm running out of steam. Just thinkin' aloud here about answers to the "so what?" question. I'm not sure any of these are satisfactory.

on nostalgia

Music: Milton Mapes: Westernaire (2003)

What ever happened to Eddie Money? And why don't I read more Derrida?

I was rereading Derrida's Archive Fever in the waiting room before I saw my "primary care physician" this morning. When I read, I use a small ruler and red pen to underline parts I might want to return to later. I found myself scribbling in the margins, too: "Freud's signature," a placeholder for both the biographical Freud and the entire enterprise of classical psychoanalysis. There he is, staring back. I've also been reading Jeffrey Masson's The Assault on Truth: Freud's Supression of the Seduction Theory this week, so Archive Fever is reading very differently for me this time. I'd like to be able to write like that one day: poetically, so that my own work has different meanings emerge for readers in their different life stations.

Derrida's later work is so much easier to read (and enjoyable) than the early work. He's one of those thinkers whom I used read because I needed to, but now I read for enjoyment. That's never going to happen for me with Foucault; Foucault is always agonizing for me to read. I'm not sure why. I think I like writers who fuck around with language (Lacan; Joyce; Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen)

Anyway, smelling a bald guy with whips somewhere below, I must confess that reading about the "death drive" and the aggression of the archival impulse made me worry a little about my medical record. What kind of violence is that sort of archive? Twenty-five dollar co-pay, up front, nice lady in purple scrubs doesn't even draw blood. It's an archive that should be protected, of course, from Health Care Conglomerates; not my lovers. There are some things they need to now in the untimely event of my death.

When I interned at the CDC in the division of AIDS surveillance, I got to see medical company memos and documents that would anger any sane individual: in the early days of the AIDS crisis, the CDC recommended anonymous testing because insurance companies would drop your coverage even if you simply got tested. That was a commencement and a command, to be sure, a law of certain death. Thankfully, we have a pharmakon now. And the people who work at the CDC, most of whom were do-gooder idealists, MDs with hearts of passion and care who sent me to do the dead logging. After going through those files for a week I would break-down. It was a sad job. Those people are gold, I tell you. You should admire the CDC for all that they do to keep people alive.

What a mood to be in when the nurse weighs my portly ass (didn't gain, didn't loose)! My feet got cold on the scale; my feet are often cold, in general. The thing about spending a life in front of screens is that you can wear house shoes and don't have to go outside if you don't want to. "Sedentary" is the name, and it is a frequent fount of evil. I saw a sign at the video store yesterday that read, "you can't get instant satisfaction on-line." That seems something akin to the truth.

I like my doctor, though, he is always in an upbeat mood, sends you on your way with a new positivity you didn't have before seeing him. Nice guy, from Louisiana. We talked about Baton Rouge today and missing the culture, but not the weather. Health wise, things are looking good all over, with the exception of my right foot. I've been feeling guilty for not working-out since last Friday; the doctor assured me that is the best policy until I can actually put a shoe on my foot again. He likes to visit with you; we probably turned a ten minute visit into a half-hour talking about Louisiana, the weather, and whether washing down an NSAID with beer will damage your kidneys. Probably not, he said. I left with a new positivity, and until writing this, forgot about death.

By the way, I might gaze at my navel in a minute and write about that too. Hang on.

So I'm dealing with memory and the subtle aggression of filing. Of putting things away and their inevitable return, at least until you pour on the stiff stuff. That too will come, about 3:30 p.m. today (lets call it the bon voyage hours).

There is a name for this mood or, better yet, this tone of thought: nostalgia. The OED defines the term as an "acute longing for familiar surroundings, especially regarded as a medical condition; homesickness." The word also connotes sentimentality, but that's not what I'm going for; I'm thinking in particular of a film I like by Andrei Tarkovsky titled, Nostalgia and its haunting imagery of unsafe, leaky, decrepit buildings. The etymology is some Greek term I cannot reproduce here meaning "return home." So I'm thinking about nostalgia as the counterpart to Derrida's archive, or perhaps as a form of achiving. Nostalgia-archiving---or nostalgia/archiving,---as the beginning of a certain form of self-estrangement, a commencement of not-being-there.

Until I looked up the etymology, I supposed nostalgia was a temporal term, but apparently it is spatial, and this is curious to me because of Derrida's notion of "toponology," the place of law. Nostalgia might be said to be a miniature, as another counterpart to what Gaston Bachelard calls "intimate immensity," not quite the universe of the house but certainly a point of return. Christmas trees and record shops; a familiar dream of sleeping with the enemy; the content and smiling face of a friend under the stars on Tuesday night.

Killing time en route to one of my other doctors yesterday, I was in search of color changing, LED cube string lights that I once saw at Toy Joy. For those of you not in Austin, I assure you Toy Joy is not what you think it is. Anyway, apparently they don't make these lights anymore. I was looking for them because I'm thinking about putting up the Christmas tree this week. It's a little early for that, but things around here are about to be empty---phones, buildings, bars---as most of the people I love are moving west, toward San Diego. Apparently there is a conference, an annual return in time, not place. Without the usual affections of friends and colleagues, I'll be at home with myself. A lot. One can really only download so much porn before it gets old, so putting up my festive, aluminum tree seems like a good alternative. So does egg nog while I attend to such a laborious chore. I can envision---er, in-hear---playing James Brown's Funky Christmas while I sip nog and hang mirror-ball ornaments. I should have bought that Elvis tree-topper.

Coming from Toy Joy empty handed and with a half hour to go yesterday, I dropped into the Vortex of Money Disappearance (VMD): Antone's Records. Nostalgia is what the store sells, really, as bin after bin of dusty long players move briskly at three bucks a piece. I really wasn't in the mood for record shopping, but for some reason the Eddie Money records found my fingers and open ear. Eddie Money had his biggest hit in the mid eighties with Ronnie Spector. It was titled "Take Me Home Tonight," and I remember the video played relentlessly on MTV. My favorite Eddie Money song, however, is "Shakin," and the video is fabulous because Money is coked-up and twitchy:

I looked and looked for the album "Shakin'" was on, and finally found it misfiled under a different artist's name. $2.99. Why the hell not? I've not heard "Shaken" probably since the sixth grade, just a year after Rob Hendrix's father taught us how to play the song (along with Billy Squier's "Everybody Wants You") in my first and only rock band. We played the PTA talent show. We won, but the parents were laughing so hard you couldn't hear the amps. I was the vocalist, naturally.

So last night, before bed, I played my new Eddie Money and was startled how overcome I was with memories and emotions; the voices from the groove enliven the dead. They do that for a lot of us, but not all (certainly not this generation of iPod-sucking isolationists). There's something about playing records on a turntable that takes me back to the pre-teen years. I had just read an article yesterday about a documentary film about a bunch of evangelicals who recorded the stories from the bible in fifty different languages. Copies of the records are archived somewhere in Tennessee. The word is alive (PIL riff, anyone?), the song is inscribed, dead for immortality. I thought I bought the album for "Shakin'," but was then reminded of another of Money's hit singles, "Think I'm in Love." This is a fantastic song for all sorts of reasons, but the most compelling is the simplicity of the lyrics and the way in which it really does capture the onset of affect, or rather, the realization that you've fallen: "Oh, fuck! Am I in love? What the hell is this? How did I let myself get to this state?"

I was amused. I remain that way. I could even plug in someone who still manages to elicit such doubts "in my heart," and she ain't Jesus (or Jesús). Keep in mind one of the central metaphors of Archive Fever is the heat, the fire in the catacombs, the "old flame" and the "burning bush." And Eddie Money doesn't sing, "I'm in love," he's all like, "I think I'm in love." That's what I like about the song; one is never quite sure.

It always seems to me that certitude in love is a little zealous, a form of overcompensation. The true standard of affect worth celebrating is the making of a decision of definition and sticking to it. Money dare says the L-word; that's a good first step. Honor comes with moving from thinking to confession. A signatory, a name, a loyalty to the signifier of caring. What seems to happen is that you make a decision to commit---to go with it---and then let that affect get defined in a certain way, something we call "feeling." Eddie Money, the archive. You can file it away, or open the folder and ruffle though the pages. You can go public and unsecret the secret; the institution may drop your coverage as a consequence. And then you might die. Take warning, though; the archive is also a prison.

Call for F-NCA SPARKLE! Submissions

The editors of SPARKLE! the offawl organ of F-NCA (Former Nutless Corporate Accomplices; props to Shaun for the logo!), is seeking submissions. We're actually not sure what kind of submissions we're seeking, but we'll print the best ones in our debut zine, to be distributed at the UNconvention site next week.

Actually, on second thought, we'd like a few things:

(1) Grayscale headshots (the head-to-shoulder kind, thank you). We're looking for headshots that resemble those of our rival publication, SPECTRA. The more professional, cheesy, and stiff the better. Brownie points to you if you wear a ruff collar. Double-brownie points if you wear revealing leather corset and are on a leash. The best headshots will receive an honorary administrative position and will have a column or report to abide their hotshot written for them. Lucky you. Or you can write your own column, even give yourself a title. If you do give yourself a title, be sure it is preceded by "Vice-"

(2) Columns to abide the headshots. We're looking for 300-500 word columns that express some viewpoint pertinent to F-NCA members, like the latest outreach program to private school kids in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, or a report on one of our stupid initiatives that benefits no one whatsoever. Or perhaps a report on the success of our new policy to ask for donations instead of demands for registration? Get creative.

(3) Grayscale group shots of you and your colleagues receiving some special award; the more awful the business suit attire, the better. Large corsages would be extra special. You make up the caption and the awards you and your colleagues are receiving (e.g., "Best How to Teach in a Trailer Lecture"; "Best Half-Written-and-Put Off Dissertation"; "Lifetime Achievement Award for Windowless Office Occupation," etc.). Just borrow someone's plaque from his or her office to use; we can't read the damn print in a group photo anyway. Hell, hold up a vacuum cleaner, we don't care.

(4) News of your publication or grant +in another field+ Did your "Janitorial Solutions to Queasy Crowds" appear in the QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF BLEACH four or five years ago? If so, we want to know about it!

(5) Mangled job ads. Did SPECTRA screw-up your job add this year? Let us print it in our classified section; we can screw it up BETTER!

Since the editors hatched this idea yesterday drunk off our assess, we don't have much time. Editor-in-Chief, DJ Joshie Juice, along with his Vice Editors-in-Chief, DJ Swift-Boat and DJ Sweet-Treat, will assemble your submissions into SPARKLE by Monday or Tuesday evening, which will be distributed to key distributors via email, who will print off and staple copies to be distributed at the UNconvention location.

We are assured our current F-NCA director, Jim Aoughneh, will vet the damn thing before its distributed. He said he'll pen us a special message, too.

EMAIL YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO: slewfoot@mail.utexas.edu. Please, no mega-huge files.

Thanks in advance for your creativity,

DJ Joshie Juice, DJ Swift-Boat, and DJ Sweet-Treat

Self-Appointed Editors of F-NCA SPARKLE!

mentoring: stylin' the transference?

Music: Siouxsie & the Banshees: Superstition (1991)

In the introduction to one of my favorite books, The Vampire Lectures, Larry Rickels describes his pedagogy as "stylin' the transference." He means to refer to "the transference," a term that Freud originally used to describe how the relationship between an analyst and an analysand (or patient) is established. In therapy, Freud noticed how his clients' affect became increasingly intense toward him: sometimes they would make romantic overtures; sometimes, they would speak to him in a manner that either reflected an intense hatred or affection for a parent. At first Freud thought these feelings were a form of resistance, however, he came to believe that their appearance in therapy was actually a sign of progress.

Eventually, in classical psychoanalysis the transference came to denote the way in which a patient "transfers" feelings for an earlier parental figure on to the analyst. For Freud, one of the goals of analysis was for the analyst to channel this strong affect in productive ways, "working-through" the transference so that the analyst no longer represents a parent or lover.

Rickels' joke about teaching as "stylin' the transference" extends Freud's observation to the classroom. As I've written on this blog before (here, here, and here), teaching attempts to establish a transferential relation between the teacher and the student: by accepting the affect typically reserved for a parental figure, the teacher attempts to channel it into learning course material (en loco parentis, indeed). In other words, it's because the student believes that you care about them as a person that they want to do well in the course. It's hard to learn from a teacher who doesn't seem to give a shit; one is motivated to do well and learn, in part, because one cares about the recognition or approval of the teacher. In short, students learn because they (desire) love.

Of course, there are other models of teaching as well, but in our culture it does seem like "stylin' the transference" is often the ideal (most films about teaching, and even the show Boston Public, hold up the good parenting model of teacherly heroism). Hollywood also holds up the "sexy teacher" figure as well, of course, and that has been the focus of my previous posts on this topic: working closely with a student creates the transference and countertransference, and loving feelings and attraction can develop. This is normal. The ethical response, however, is to "work through" such feelings but not to act on them. The teacher/student sex scandals seem to pop up year after year, and what we find is a teacher incapable of understanding that his or her feelings of attraction are normal---you just don't ACT on it. I've discussed this extensively in past posts, so I won't go into the topic any more than to say that overkill with guilt leads to backfiring; feelings are ok, and normal. Acting on them is where ethics come into all of this . . . .

What I do want to raise, however, is the flip side of the same coin: the mentor as parent. Unlike sexualization (a la Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher"), one culturally sanctioned way of dealing with one's feelings toward a teacher is to begin seeing them as a mother or father figure. Given the longstanding notion of the university as a surrogate locus of parenting, this figuration isn't surprising at all, and I'm noticing that as I get older, my own teaching relations with my students gets easier as I settle in closer to this model. I say this is the "flip side" because, you know, affect is affect, erotic or familial---and dreams often disregard the incest taboo (I'm thinking here of a mentor thirty years my senior who I always consciously took as a parental figure but who, one starling night, appeared as a lover in a dream . . . if you're an academic, you've had this kind of disquieting dream at least once!). My point is that at some level of consciousness affect doesn't obey the handy distinction between physical and intellectual attraction.

In any event, I think in the academic setting---especially at the graduate level---we tend to think of the advisee/mentor relationship in familial terms. In part, this is a legacy of the German educational system; my friend Mirko tells me it is common for folks to trace their "family tree" in terms of advisors o'er there in Germany. Much of this has to do with the need for a "rooting" in some sort of intellectual legacy, of course. But much of it has to do with wanting to be loved---wanting to be recognized by an elder whom you admire. If we understand love as a form of recognition, in other words, the apprentice model of the academic enterprise builds its reward system around love.

When I think about my own graduate experience, I vividly remember wanting the attention and approval of my mentors. Sometimes a critical remark from them would literally make me queasy, so important it was to win their approval. I'm thinking here of Robert L. Scott and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, in particular, both of whom were and remain very good at getting students to "work through" and move beyond this craving for parental love students foist upon them. They are also capable of evoking powerful responses of love and hatred from graduate students (indeed, a tell-tale sign of a graduate advisor "stylin' the transference" is the confusing "I hate them/I love them" factor; how many of us know someone who cursed the very ground their advisor walked on during the dissertation process, but them praised them with love after the degree was in hand?). I took to calling RL "pop" and Karlyn "mom" at the end of my tenure at Minnesota, in part jokingly, but also in part because I could see how I fashioned myself a make-shift "family" to make the graduate school process endurable.

Some weeks ago on this blog, and also in conversation recently, I discussed with a friend this theory. She noted that while my thinking is convincing theoretically, "on the ground," in practice, it overlooks some practical, real world concerns. Likening one's advisor to a "mother" or "father," for example, encourages a view of advisorly responsibility that is long outmoded and rooted in a patriarchal system: students do not need to be "mothered" or "fathered." Rather, they need to be mentored. Using paternal metaphors to describe the mentoring risks reinforcing irritating, if not harmful, expectations. I understand and even agree, to some extent, with this view. Over the past six years I have watched departments, my own and that of others, admit students who were clearly in need of "social rehabilitation." I personally do not want to "parent" students in graduate school; that's not my job!

Nevertheless, I'm interested in hearing what y'all think about this topic: what are the burdens of the parental expectation? What is mentoring to you? Is my argument about "stylin' the transference" as the actual norm of teaching plausible (even if we don't use the same language or lean on Freud)? Thoughts? Reservations? New dance moves?

saturday, on the prospects of love

obama in myth and fantasy

Music: Marconi Union: A Lost Connection (2008)

This week I've been slammed, and I regret I've not had much opportunity to blog. In the rhetorical criticism seminar yesterday, our topic was fantasy and mythic criticism. Sometimes in my seminars I open the class with a provocative rumination on themes or class topics to stimulate discussion. I thought I'd share yesterday's rumination, as it may interest readers here too. Here goes:

In preparation for seminar today, I emailed my friend and mentor Tom Frentz. I said:

Tomorrow my graduate class is reading about myth and fantasy, and they're reading up on this guy, Thomas Frentz. I was thinking: if Frentz were to do a mythic criticism of the election of Obama---or the aftermath of the election---what might he say?

As Tom is wont to do, he responded within two minutes. This is what he answered:

Good question. What, indeed, "might he say?"

Well, the as-in-"duh" answer would be he'd cast Obama as a hero in the Joseph Campbell mold and show the specific ways he worked through the three major phases of the monomyth---departure, initiation, and return. That would be both easy and---perhaps---fruitful.

A less obvious move would be to do Barack "intertexually" showing how he picks up on the extends the mythic trajectory past black leaders--King, Malcolm, Ali. This tact might result--I fear--in Obama's subtlely casting off those stereotyped anglo characteristics of the "angry black man" and taking on the more acceptable guise of---well---a dude who is, after all, only "half black."

Or---the most provocative move (that I can think of off the top of my addled mind) would be to compare a non-threatening black man (that would be Obama) to a very threatening (can you say "castrate"?) white woman (that would be Hillary). From this move, Obama emerges as the lesser of two fantasy evils.

Best I can do on the spot, dude. Feel free to share with your graduate class.

So I have shared Tom's remarks to my graduate class, and I would like to use his observations here as a springboard for thinking about myth and fantasy in rhetorical criticism, with the example of Barack Obama.

Unquestionably Tuesday was a remarkable moment, the culmination of the American monomyth in which Obama read the tablets offered him. In a subdued but prophetic tone, Obama purported to close a sickening chapter in American history by announcing the beginning of a new one. As Ellen Fitzpatrick remarked last evening on the Leher News Hour, Obama's victory speech resolved a centuries-long "moral contradiction" in one, singular moment, putting a period on a rambling and tortuous sentence that begin with the word slavery. Many have remarked---and some, under the tongue of cynical reason---that Obama is the material manifestation of Martin Luther King's dream of a colorblind dinner table, that Obama is the dream fulfilled. In respect to dreaming and it's most famous representative, the dream of Martin Luther King, we have something of a convergence of myth and fantasy.

Of course, I need not underscore the proximity of dreaming to myth and fantasy. As cultural stories with transnational appeal, myths regularly inform our dreams and structure our lives: the American dream, for example, is certainly mythic, and in both senses. The American dream is obviously a dream forever deferred, betokened by widespread financial crises and regular eruptions of violence (just this morning there was a shoot out between a swat team and determined youth near my home; I was trapped in my house for hours). Yet the myth of Ameritocracy still has a profound structuring and ideological power. Obama's success is said to be the fulfillment, not only of King's dream, but of the American dream. His chiseled chin rests alongside those of Oprah Winfrey and Colin Power in the black Rushmore of the popular imaginary. "Yes We Can" is resonant because it is merely a regurgitation of a dream of whiteness that would celebrate the achievement of a singular hero instead of recognize the need for community and textbooks and computers in inner-city schools.

There are other myths at work, too. Routinely one hears statements that Obama's presidency is post-ideological, which is code for post civil-rights era, post 1960s (the counterpart, as it were, to postfeminism). The flap last July over Jesse Jackson's unscripted remarks about Obama come to mind. As I've noted before, anyone remotely close to a screen will know that on July 10th the news broke that Jesse Jackson was “talkin’ trash” about Obama on FOX. Apparently unaware his microphone was hot, Jackson said to a colleague that Obama has “been talking down to black people” and that he wanted to “cut his nuts off.” These comments circulated widely because demonstrated division among blacks about Obama. The underlying warrant here is that all black people, especially black politicians, think alike and stand in solidarity. The news also created an opportunity for Obama supporters to spin this as good news: white people don’t like Jackson, therefore, this is a nice distancing moment that will draw more whities toward the Big O.

It was a shame, however, that Jackson’s “point” (pun intended) was eclipsed by his countless apologies. Jackson is angry with Obama for amplifying his “personal responsibility” rhetoric instead of focusing on larger, structural issues, like “racial justice and urban policy and jobs and health care.” What Jackson's “loving criticism” was to be about was the way in which Obama intones a therapeutic, Horatio Alger-style---or Oprah-style, take your pick---rhetoric that downplays the social-cultural and material causes of social ills---and the deeper reasons for single-parent households.

This is the Oedipal myth. The father being slayed here, of course, is a generation of male civil rights leaders, leaders who sometimes leaned on the figure of the angry black man to get things done.

The King is dead.

Notably, Jackson threatened castration. Of course, from a psychoanalytic vantage castration is the power of the father, what the child fears. Castration represents one’s entrance into self-consciousness and the symbolic world. He who claims the power of castration claims the agency of language. By claiming to want to cut Obama’s nuts off, Jackson is threatening to remove Obama’s rhetorical power, to muffle his speech. The motive for wanting to do so is obvious: Jackson opposes the one Oedipal myth---Booker T. Washington sleeping with white women and killing off the Great White Daddy---with another, the myth of the primal father who has the power to enjoy.

So much for the mythic, the myth of dreams. We should also take up desires; as Lacan notes, the fundamental fantasy is only got at indirectly, through dreams. And as Frentz and Rushing would note, the dreams of a people are on its screens. Thus we find Obama's bid for the presidency compared to a film plot, over and over again.

The fantasy structures that run through Obama's successes are certainly intriguing. Although myth and fantasy overlap, the latter is libidinal; fantasies concern what it is that you and I desire. Understanding fantasies as scripts for what it is that we desire, it is not difficult to reconstruct the fantasy that structures Obama's success. At some level, King's dream spells out the fantasy of miscegenation, the desire for racial integration broadly construed as an erotic appeal, and Obama's mixed race is a literal embodiment of such a fantasy. Romancing the mulatto, however, goes much deeper in America's reconstructive past; it is a response to the mythos of the Angry Black Man, a mythos, however ironically, that arose to combat what Houston Baker Jr. might term the Family Romance of Mulatto Modernity.

In other words, have seen this kind of black fantasy before. Born in 1856 of mixed race, Booker T. Washington would quickly become one of the most prominent African American leaders by his death in 1915. Hand chosen by a white patron to run the Tuskegee Institute, Washington had many friends in the white community. Although he privately funneled money into desegregation efforts, he publicly presented himself as a friendly dandy, arguing for a more cooperative approach with whites to slowly begin building legal and social equality. Baker is at pains to show how Washington's assimilationist and conciliatory approach served to mask and muffle affective affinities among blacks. Such an attitude---this fantastic Mulatto modernism---would eventually give way to quiet anger of Washington's rival, W.E.B. Dubois . . . but not until the late 1960s.

As Mark A. Reid has argued, the fantasy of the angry black man goes back a long way, but it is given material manifestation in grassroots organizations from the 1960s. In 1966 Stokeley Carmichael would be elected the head of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, an irony because he would eventually advocate retaliatory violence. In 1966 the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was formed, signaling a growing militancy among young blacks. Malcom X dared to recommend aggression. Just prior, inner-city rioting such as that at Watts on the 9th of August, 1965 helped to create the fantasy of the angry black man---the potentially violent angry black man.

The riots were televised; images of angry black people circulated widely.

It was thus in the early 1970s that the imaginary figure of the angry black man traveled from the streets to the screen. As Reid demonstrates in a number of essays, the black action hero emerged at a time when the Black Arts Movement began to vocally reject "art that tried to appeal to white America's morality." Thus 1971s Sweetback's Baadassss Song debuted in black theatres (NWS trailer is here). Reid argues that Melvin Van Peeble's film drew on "urban hero folklore" to develop the Sweetback character: he is a character who is "skilled in performing sexually, evading the police, and fighting. Unlike most white heros of the action film genre, Sweetback participates in sex to survive, and he performs with both white and black women. . . . Like mythic urban heroes, Sweetback directs violence against unjust white authority figures."

The follow-up to this action hero fantasy, however, is quite telling. Directed by Gordon Parks and scored by Isaac Hayes, Shaft notably toned down the angry part of the angry black man figure; in fact, he works with whitey to bust bad guys of color, and while he is familiar with Harlem, he lives in Greenwich Village. Of course, this was a major studio release (MGM I think), so with much care the film was softened to appeal to whiter audiences. The fantasy here is, again, mulatto modernism: a black man who upholds white American morality.

With reference to these two black films, perhaps in some sense representing the threat of Malcom X and the comfort of Martin Luther King respectively---as they were framed for television audiences---we can come to see the fantasy that holds Obama aloft, indeed, the fantasy structure that helped to elect him: Barack is giving us the Shaft, with a little Booker T. thrown in for good measure.

In his book, Dreams of my Father, Obama admits to cultivating such a fantasy: "I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds . . . One of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved---such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man that didn't seem angry all the time." He worked on the south side of Chicago, but lives in the well-to-do Kenwood neighborhood---one of the architectural gems of the city and which neighbors the UC grounds of Hyde Park. Remember, Shaft didn't live in Harlem, either.

Of course, as James Hannaham of Slade reported in September, the conventional wisdom on the political trail was that "Obama isn't angry enough." Huffington wanted Obama outraged at Rev. Wright, joining the voices of others that would "promote a Hollywood notion of how black men should react to injustice"---that is, with anger. Obama refused to rely on such a fantasy, such a figure, which he might taken very far---into outright demagoguery and Huey P. Land (that's Long, not Newton).

Make no mistake about it, however: in opposing the fantasy of the angry black man with the Shaftification of Booker T., Obama's efforts evoke and overdetermine another fantasy that is so deeply articulated to young, political heroes it almost goes without mention: who will assassinate Obama? This is a fantasy that already has been traversed, and that will be subject to traversal again and again. We ought not be worried about the red phone; we should be worried about the pin hitting the shell.

prelude to the blogsplosion

the party's over . . .

Music: Bloc Party: Intimacy (2008)

. . . and it feels like the day after Christmas when I was eight years old, but only worse. Halloween has really been my favorite holiday since the age of six. But today is sad. I just took His Danlicousness to the airport. And then there's a return to a healthy diet and working out again (both good things, but a weekend of naughtiness was really fun). And there's no NYE analog, just six more weeks of winter school and then enduring the adult Christmas. And you know adult Christmas is something more akin to a return to the primal scene for some of us, but that's another tale (stay tuned, I always blog about this when I get marooned in Georgia). Meanwhile, Friday's debauchery was captured on film; someone liberated me from my camera and took 300 photographs! I weeded out most of the condemning/embarrassing ones (I think)---at least of myself. Now, a break from partying until the end April, which, at my advanced age (according to my ugrads) is a good thing. I only pick up cigarette butts twice a year, thank you. Do I sound grumpy? Click the photo on the left for the gallery. And let me just say this is the most hilarious and endearing image of the evening ("Hrm, what are those two talking about . . . it's probably naughty . . . oh well").

yay samhain!

Music: Brendan Perry: Eye of the Hunter (1999)

With the wonderful, brilliant, heart throb Dan Brouwer in town (who did a smashing talk yesterday) and a costume party at my house tonight, bloggin's gonna be sparse this weekend (tomorrow is one of the two three days of the year I reserve for hangovers, along with Lent and May Day). Just tried on my costume. It's fab, except for the pants are too big and there's no place for a belt (losing weight is great, but it's important not to drop my drawers in front of a bunch of people). I am going out to buy suspenders after the keg arrives. Meanwhile, for a little of the (Marxian) history of Halloween, see my post from last year. Instead of a long post, I'll share with you this real life spooky image of a woman who sprouted a horn (click image for larger version). Kinda nasty, ain't it? I mean, it looks like a turd coming out of her head, except it's hard bone. And apparently this happens to others around the world. Proof of the demonic? Mwhaahahahahaha! If this image don't creep you out, how about this one of Klaus Kinski? Wishing y'all lots of treats tonight, maybe even the nice treat of a trick!

delicious peeping tomism

Music: Judge Judy

You have to turn up the volume pretty high to hear what this dude is saying:

on affect and honorable bigots, with the petulant demand for good measure

Music: The Young Gods: Only Heaven (1995)  

This morning I read an interesting article in the paper about the so-called Bradley/Wilder effect, which refers to harbored racism. Based on two elections in the 1980s, the effect refers to the six or seven point discrepancy between what voters say they're going to do in the polls and the actual election results when a black and white candidate are running. The logic is that folks become racist when they're in the polls, but do not want to admit of their prejudice when approached by pollsters.

Pollster John Zogby says we should dismiss the Bradley/Wilder effect for a number of reasons. First, we have better polling models designed to track prejudice. Second, we're no longer in the 1980s. Third, and most interestingly, we are living in the era of "honorable bigots," folks who are brutally honest with pollsters.

I found myself amused by the idea of an honorable bigot, which seems to abide a growing in-your-face attitude on the so-called right. Although there is no evidence she is a racist bigot (strategic racism notwithstanding), Palin's smug tone and fuck-you delivery style seem to be in-step with this new, honorable bigotry. I then I got to thinking about a homologous trend among some students here at the University of Texas: public petulance. Perhaps because I am at a university that cultivates a certain, offensive brand of pride, my senses are elevated. In general I am a sensitive person anyway. But I have an exhibit, which I think will interest a number of you.

As many long time RoseChron readers know, over the years I have been referring to a shift in a certain student sentiment: the arrival of the petulant demand. The petulant demand is a certain rhetorical critter made by students, which contends the professor or teacher has harmed them in some way, or that the professor or teacher is responsible for some unfair practice, on moral grounds. The petulant demand entails a tone of entitlement. Variations of this entitlement include, "I pay your salary, therefore"; "I have never received a B in my life"; "I am in the top 10% of my graduating class, therefore"; "I am just as smart as you, thus"; and very often "I'm a star athlete, hence . . . ." The petulant demand is homologous to honorable bigotry because of what we might call the "it's my opinion!" theory: All opinions are equally valid, especially if they come from me, and should be respected; therefore, I get to confront you with my opinion and if you don't like it, I get to say, "well, that's my opinion and I have a right to express it!"

Witness, dear reader, this semester's petulant display . . . but first some context. In my large lecture classes I give pop quizzes, always in the first five minutes of class. I explain many times the first couple of weeks of class that I am not responsible for their being late and missing the quiz, and this includes not taking responsibility for another professor who does not let students out on time. I allow for two quizzes to be made up for extra credit.

Many weeks ago our "smart room technology" failed. In fact, it always fails, but that's another rant for another blog entry. Anyhoo, because of this failure I resorted to reading the pop quiz aloud and having students answer on their bubble sheet. A student noisily came into class and approached me after I had read the second quiz question. In desperate tone, she said: "I ran so fast to get here. Can I have a bubble sheet."

"No M'am. You know the rules."

I proceeded to read the third quiz question. The student huffed and puffed as she sat in the seat in front of me. By the time I was reading the fourth question, she stood up---and this in front of 130 students---threw her book bag over her shoulder in a spectacular display of defiance, stormed out of the auditorium, and slammed the door behind her.

Now, my teaching assistants were visible startled, as was the class. I laughed. This did not surprise me, as it's happened before. What did surprise me was the email I received later that afternoon (which I've sat on for a month so this might blow over, and it has). Here it is, altered to protect the guilty:

Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:00:06 -0500 From: petulant student number five To: slewfoot@mail.utexas.edu Subject: Today's Quiz

Professor Gunn,

I would like to apologize for walking out of your class today, but I feel that you showed me, one of your students, a tremendous amount of disrespect. I was very excited to be in your class this semester having read some of your work and hearing great things about you. The first day of class I felt a connection to you because you reminded me of many of my friends at home. The metal heads and outcasts with a passion for music, especially rock and roll, were my great friends all through high school. However the majority of my friends were either too lazy or too concerned with drugs and the lifestyle to actually go to school and educate themselves. I felt proud of you without even knowing you for taking your passion for music and turning it into a career. I felt honored to work under you and found myself wishing that some of my friends could be in my place and see what they could have become.

All of that aside, I see that you are unlike my friends, because it felt like you do not have compassion for those beneath you, your students. I missed the first quiz because I walked in when it was already in progress, about five minutes late. I took my seat knowing the rules and telling myself I would make to all the rest and do the extra credit and everything would be fine. Since then I have rushed to class every single day, sometimes on time, sometimes one or two minutes late. The reason being because I have an Italian class at the business school that lets out at 10:50. It is a small class of about 13 and my professor almost always keeps us 3 or 4 minutes late. Now I am sorry but I feel that in a class that size it would be immensely disrespectful to pack up my things and walk out before my professor was done with his lesson. Not only that, I would not be able to receive my assignment because he saves it for the end of class to give out. So today, I watched the clock waiting for him to dismiss us and at 10:54 rushed out and across campus to the CMA.

You can imagine how I felt when I walked into class seeing that everyone already had scantrons, but relieved to not see the quiz even on the projector yet. However, to my amazement you still denied me a scantron! What is the reason for this "rule" sir? I understand if I come in and the quiz is over, I have missed my chance. But for the quiz to not even have begun and to be denied a scantron is outrageous. I felt that you showed no courtesy or common decency towards me and did not even take the time to recognize that I tried my hardest to arrive on time to your class. The "rule" that you mentioned to me today is not even in the syllabus. It is wrong, and I ask that you please take this into consideration in the future.

Thank you,

Petulant Student Number Five.

Yes, I'm the metal-head-gone-good who is disrespectful to my student because another professor held her late, and she didn't want to be disrespectful to him, because, you know, he works for the business school. All the elements of the petulant demand are here, including the entitlement clause ("I'm like you, because in high school I hung out with people like you, except they had more compassion than you") and the "it's my opinion" theory. Compare her letter to this one, and you'll note the entitlement clause and opinion theory are there also. There's also a fruitful comparison to be made with this note; instead of being equals in our mutual outcastness, however, we're equals in the ability to read Adorno. Of course, Petulant Student five has nothing on this guy.

I point out the similarities between the petulant demands and requests because of the strange way they seem scripted. First, all but the last stress the opinion theory in terms of the legitimacy or truth of feelings, as if affect some how trumps policy or has truth effects that transcend material constraint and circumstance (hmm . . . this seems related in some way to The Secret, but I'll explore that tangent later). There is also a not-so-subtle righteousness in the tone of these student's email messages, almost a sort of prophetic mode of address.

I'm just thinking aloud here, but there's something about these student's messages that reminds me of Palin's remarks to the Assembly of God congregation in Wassila that made the rounds a while back. It has to do with a certain conviction of feeling---whether it’s a conviction in Deity's voice speaking directly to you, or a conviction in one's dogma, or whatever.

Which brings me back, again, to honorable bigotry. Of course, "honorable bigotry" sounds like an oxymoron at first blush, because a bigot is essentially intolerant of difference, and "honor" is usually reserved for someone of good standing or with ethical discernment (the syllogism here is that ethical discernment excludes intolerance, of course). But in the context of the newspaper article I read for today, honorable bigotry refers to the willingness to speak intolerance publicly, to not lie about one's racist views. I can only think such new boldness is buoyed by the opinion theory and a new, permissible affectivity.

I've been asked to write something on the "affective turn" in the theoretical humanities. The more I reflect on these homologies and willful publicity, the new conviction in public feelings, the more I am wary of the celebratory optimism that seems to underwrite what Jenny Rice calls the "new new," or "critical affect studies." Elsewhere I have argued this political campaign has surfaced a new form of public feelings---a new permissibility, for example, to weep publicly. My in-your-face students and the advent of the honorable bigot are a part of this.

I just have to figure it out.

joe the plumber: this year's "old shoe"

Music: Marconi Union: A Lost Connection (2008)

About a decade ago Barry Levinson introduced us to a very funny and very disturbing film, Wag the Dog. The basic plot is this: owing to his priapic weaknesses, a sitting president has no chance of reelection and turns to a Hollywood producer to help him win reelection. The solution they concoct is to create a fake media war in Albania, which the president will end, garner widespread affection, thus cinching the next election. Gradually, the media inventions take over political intentions. To combat a drop of public interest, in the following scene the producer and political advisors create a new public nationalism by celebrating a soldier named "Schumann," caught behind enemy lines:

When I first saw this film---at the time as a graduate student more interested in the arcane than the political---I was amused, but overlooked its relevance. After Nine-eleven, the film moved into my interior creep zone as postmodern prophecy. As Benjamin warned, the aestheticization of the political can lead to a dangerous autonomy, particularly when the sovereign is elevated beyond the rule of law. Wag the Dog suggests this autonomy is not of a people or a party, as Benjamin assumed, but of the reality industries---a sort of governmental apparatus that is biopolitical at base but hypperreal in character. I've been calling this the "political uncanny." The political uncanny refers to the fantasy of a governmental apparatus fueled by sheer political drive (ends) but operating relatively free of control and consumption (means). The political uncanny on a stick is Gilliam's Brazil; it is the idea of politicians as automatons and government as a machine. Wag the Dog is thus really a fantastic tragedy, the horror of instrumento-promotional reason independent of the human.

Watching the last of the presidential debates and reading about "Joe the Plumber" for the past week has me to the point of nausea. McCain's pained and jerky movements---not to mention is almost mechanical shift in political allegiances---do make him appear like a machine. His campaign's apparently deceitful "robo calls" to households across the country add to this machinic aesthetic. But nothing makes me shiver inside more than this attempt to send up Joe the Plumber as an American hero: how different is this than "Old Shoe?" Well, it's not. The horror of contemporary politics is not that the battle over the heart and mind of Joe the Plumber is completely contrived. We could go back in history hundreds of years and see this folksy fabrication logic as a common occurance. What's new is the immediacy of truth effects of the digital age, the speed with which Joe the Plumber has become an emblem of the American voter, and that everyone knows Joe the Plumber is a fabrication. In other words, it's cynical reason: everyone knows Joe the Plumber is complete bullshit, but we don’t care. The MSM continues to do stories on Joe, to hound him at home and at his work place, to play up Joe the Plumber as a body over which the election will be fought.

The real life Joe the Plumber is expendable in all of this. That's what is uncanny about this whole thing: Joe the Plumber are us.

personal ad

Music: That Petrol Emotion: Babble (2001 remaster)

A Black Hole of Needy Voraciousness, Now Corked

Height: 5'9"
Body: I was 25 a decade ago
Hair Color: Brown
Hair Length: Hippie
Occupation: Drive-Thru: "Would you like fries with that A-?"
Religion: Yog Soggoth
Status: Marred and Scarred, Done.
Education: Never-ending

What You Should Know About Me: Please, don't bother. I'm so very done ( details here).

What I'm Looking For: I used to say a hole and a pulse; after this year, I also require something approaching humanity, but since this is not possible, I prefer resolute singularity.

on the masterful anti-master

Music: Iron & Wine: Our Endless Numbered Days I am sad. Yesterday I said goodbye to Angela Ray, a graduate school friend whom I have known for twelve years. She was in town to deliver a talk and to visit with my graduate seminar on rhetorical criticism. She was smashing, brilliant, all the things one would expect of Angela. We had a marvelous visit, and after having her around for three days the house suddenly seems empty. It's not devoid of love---Janet the foster kitty snoozes close by; I have email to catch up on and recommendation letters to write---but certainly there looms a palpable absence.

In our late night discussions, the topic of our mutual mentor, Robert Lee Scott, came up a great deal. We both had Scott in many classes together. And both Scott and Campbell served complimentary roles on our dissertation committees. Scott was my advisor and Campbell was Angela's, but these labels are really just only that---labels---as each mentor was essential to both of us. Anyway, Scott's retired now but wouldn't ya know, he's still teaching, a decade or so after he retired.

Angela said she enjoyed seeing me running a graduate seminar, and pointed to certain behaviors and ways-of-doing that reminded her of Scott. We talked about how we have internalized Scott's teacherly attitude in conscious and unconscious ways. We teach very differently, Angela said, but there is a similar communal mood in our classrooms. A celebration of curiosity. A respect for difference. For me, the irony of this observation is that Scott has infinite patience, and I'm typically impatient. Anyhoo, if my classroom even approaches the atmosphere of curiosity and mutual respect that Scott helped to create, I would be very happy.

Angela's remarks led me to reflect on my own pedagogy in the last couple of days, comparing it to the way Scott taught me. I often find myself remarking to graduates and undergraduates alike that lower division classes are skill-based and focused on a semblance of mastery. These courses focus on so-called lower order thinking skills, primarily that of knowledge and comprehension (as detailed on Bloom's taxonomy, illustrated here on the right; props to Laura Sells for introducing me to Bloom). Higher order thinking skills are supposed to be addressed in upper division and graduate courses. These classes begin with application, and move toward critical thinking (e.g., dialectical thinking that ends in "evaluation"). To this end, lower division courses supply readings at the eighth grade level (most textbooks are written at this level), since comprehension and eventual application is the telos. Higher division courses offer readings that are much more difficult to comprehend, and this is because critical thinking, not necessarily application, is the goal. The difference between these foci is one of mastery.

So what is mastery, exactly? According to the OED, mastery is defined as, "superiority or ascendancy in battle or competition, or in a struggle of any kind; victory resulting in domination or subjugation; an instance of this, a victory." In other words, the primary meaning of mastery is militaristic. Secondarily, mastery is defined as "more generally: the state or condition of being master, controller, or ruler; authority, dominion, control; an instance of this." Obviously in an educational context mastery is not reducible to a competitive sense of control, although certain testing practices tempt the charge. Rather, mastery in a educational context often concerns achieving a level of comprehension so that one has the basic knowledge one needs to control application. If anything, (undergraduate) college should teach students to apply their knowledge to real-world situations, or at least, to their existential experiences as a human being (I'm thinking here of the appreciation of art, spiritual pursuits, and so forth).

The character of mastery changes in graduate school. For my colleagues in the social sciences, mastery---particularly that which concerns "massaging the data," as my former colleague Jim Honeycutt would say---is still an important goal. Learning to control SPSS software and to run various statistical analyses are important skills one must master. It is on the humanities side of the aisle that mastery starts to become a problem. It seems like in the humanities, graduate school setting, mastery can easily tend toward "superiority or ascendancy in battle or competition." That is, mastery can become a form of warmongering, tapping into more primal urges and drives in a way that makes the pursuit of a Ph.D. both exhilarating and humiliating, depending on one's character.

Enter Lacan: I've discussed Lacan's concept of "the Master's discourse" from time to time on the blog already, so I won't get terribly technical this time. I have to say, though, that Lacan's thoughts and arguments about mastery have directly informed my pedagogy, not so much at the undergraduate level, but definitely in my graduate seminars. Basically, Lacan says that in the mode of knowledge production, there are four basic "discourses," sort of like genres, all of which are operative in any given rhetorical encounter, yet one of which tends to dominate or order the other three. They are: the Master's discourse, the University discourse, the hysteric's discourse, and the analyst's discourse. The most fundamental of these four discourses is the Master's, and this is because this discourse is the default or primary one.

Lacan's understanding of the Master's discourse is Hegelian, based on the Master/Slave dialectic. Basically, Hegel's understanding of self-consciousness is inherently agonistic; mythically speaking, recognition of difference will lead to a competition between subject and object that results in some sort of hierarchy, e.g., the Master and the slave. This mythic story, we note, is homologous to early, infantile life, in which an infant is dependent on a parent for basic needs; the teenage years begin the "struggle" when the kid recognizes the artificial servitude of adolescence, and so on. Lacan uses a fancy formula to describe this discourse, but the gist is this:

• The master is obeyed for no good reason, only because he says "obey me, or else!"
• The slave/worker/subservient develops knowledge as a result of servitude; she harbors the knowledge necessary to produce a surplus for the Master.
• The master does not care for knowledge, He only wants the surplus produced by the subservient person, as well as unquestioned servitude.
• The master has a secret: He knows he is just like everyone else, that he is just as subservient to signifier. He is secretly beholden to the slave, since the slave must recognize his power for him to continue as Master.

I could go on, but I think the gist of this is obvious. We have many examples of people adopting the Master's discourse. The most conspicuous right now are presidential candidates and certain kinds of religious leaders, as prophecy is ultimately a sub-genre of the Master's discourse.

Now, when we move back to the example of education, we see how the Master's discourse is operative in the classroom. This is the primary structure of the classroom setting for undergraduates, unquestionably: the student is subservient to the Teacher-as-Master. The Master's power is, of course, the grade. Technically, the classroom should demonstrate the University Discourse, in which the Master is replaced by Knowledge as the ultimate authority, with teacher and student below, but in most cases this is a shell game. Undergraduate pedagogy consists of the teacher becoming the Master with the power to recognize the worth of the student; the student produces a surplus for the master with the promise of eventual freedom (reminds me of the Indigo Girl's "Closer to Fine": "I spent for years prostrate to the higher mind/got my paper and I was free"). In other words, the Master teaches others to become micro-masters (of sorts).

In graduate school the role of the Master is different. When I think of Scott, his Mastery was sort of Buddha-esque. He was fond of citing a quote from Nietzsche (which I have forgotten) that said, essentially, one should go beyond one's teachers, one should distinguish oneself from one's teacher. Scott ruminated aloud a lot, but the point was never "I know something you don't know," nor did he do that silly Socratic "guess what's in my head" stuff. Instead, he tried to guide us down what seemed to be like our emergent paths, he nudged, and then sort of walked away. He never set himself up as a Master; he never engendered what I would term "guru pedagogy."

As I teach rhetorical criticism, it's obviously that guru pedagogy was the norm about thirty years ago, and that Mastery was taught and encouraged in terms of its first meaning: competition, domination, subjugation. A friend who graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-eighties said that a conscious decision was made among many of my current colleagues to operate the department on a "boot camp" model, "survival of the fittest." There were competitive basketball games among grads that got testy; classroom dress-downs; in general, it sounds quite unpleasant. Fortunately, our program has changed so much in the past twenty years that (at least from my vantage) this boot camp mentality has eroded. Iowa and Wisconsin's programs both had reputations for this as well, admitting more students than could possibly be funded, and then letting them battle it out. Key figures in our disciplinary history set themselves up as the Absolute Master, and graduate programs became little Mecca's toward which one worships. You applied to a program to sit at the feet of the Absolute Master, who whipped you into shape, or totally demoralized you to the point you could produce no surplus, cowering in one's intellectual inferiority.

I know this is unfashionable, but Edwin Black was one such Absolute Master, as was Michael C. McGee. I could name more, but many are still alive.

As no doubt some readers would note, guru pedagogy or the pedagogy of the Absolute Master is also very male or phallogocentric in orientation. Students become objects of exchange in the larger economy of the field. I think this is why none of Scott's advisees possess anything more common than a set of values; we study things that are all over the map. We are very different from one another.

Well, I see I've been writing here for an hour, which is much too long to devote to a blog. To bring this to a close, I guess I should say that if one notes a commonality between my graduate classroom and that of Scott's, I hope it is one of anti-Mastery, or at least, one that seeks to avoid the Absolute Mastery. The point of graduate-level reading is not control, but humility, a recognition of one's own ignorance, and an ability to give up a quest for Mastery in exchange for unbridled curiosity. Perhaps pie-in-the-sky (as there will always be Masters, and there will always be longings for one), but still, I think that's my graduate level pedagogy. Everyone enjoys being Master for a little while, but it's not a position one should occupy forever, or for any duration. Teachers learn from their students too. Creating a cooperative classroom, seems to me, means that teachers should step down sometimes and defer to the authority of students (they have the knowledge, after all, in the end). Creating an anti-Mastery pedagogy means that one reads difficult texts, not to master them, but to open one's mind to new ways of thinking. It means giving up the pedagogy of warmongering, sadistic competition, and fear.

boycott necessities

Music: Antony and the Johnsons: Another World (2008)

As I've discussed previously, currently a number of my colleagues are boycotting the convention location of our professional organization, the National Communication Association. I have elected simply not to go this year, however, I'm still supporting the boycott in any way I can (including, um, not going at all).

Some very awesome people have located alternative spaces in a LGBT friendly, labor friendly, non-convention hotel literally across the street from the Manchester Hyatt. I am responding to a public address panel, and although I will not physically be at the conference, I will still respond (just not from my own mouth), so I worked with our panelists to reschedule our panel, same time, same day, but in the shadow conference hotel. If you want to move your panel to the alternative space, you must announce your intention to do so no later than November first. What you need to do is type in your information on the master calender thingie at this address. After November first, this calendar can then be used to assign rooms. So use it, or no alternative space for you!

Second, and just as important, these rooms are not free. I don't remember the exact figure, but it's costing some very awesome people somewhere between four and five thousand buck-a-roos. So donations are being sought, and you can contribute here. Even ten bucks would help. I've donated $50, which is all I can afford at the moment. However, I have also requested my registration fee be refunded. When I get that I can afford to donate some more. If you don't plan on entering the conference hotel, why not request a refund too and contribute to the shadow conference fund?

I have been truly heartened and impressed by my colleagues, who have managed---not individually, but collectively---to salvage a conference with a clear conscience, do something socially significant that will make an impact, change the by-laws of our professional organization, and ride a common sentiment to its appropriate conclusion. Hats off to you Very Awesome Organizers---Phaedra, Dana, Chuck, and countless others---for reminding us why it is truly is a good thing to be in Communication Studies (it's the people).

. . . but when the wrong word goes in the right ear . . .

hey girl, move a lil' closer . . .