a deuce for the skycap

Eulogy for Kelly Lowe by Michael King

2007-10-10T06:10:00.000-07:00

I met Kelly at Perry Middle School in 1979, the same year I met Alvin Helms and Eric Fickas. I had just moved to Ohio from Santa Cruz, California, where I had spent most of my life, and the move was a difficult one. I left behind all my friends, and a hometown that seemed to hold so much of my history and identity that I was overwhelmed with homesickness when I left it. Kelly was one of the first people to make me feel welcome, and adopt me as a friend. In fact, Kelly, Alvin and Eric were the first real friends I made in Ohio, and we remained friends throughout that critical crucible of adolescence. The bonds I formed with them during those early, formative years were especially strong—so much so, that I later came to think of them as the Old Guard, the stalwarts who had really gotten to know me and shared an important part of my history with me. At this point, the Old Guard represents people whom I’ve known for more than half my life.

Kelly was one of the Old Guard, and it’s a gross understatement to say that the group, and the years I spent in Worthington, Ohio, would not have been the same without him.

From Air Guitar to Zappa

One common theme in our friendship was music. We were passionate rock and roll fans at a time when MTV was a brand new thing, and we jammed together—with or without instruments—on many occasions. In fact, playing “air guitar” was a favorite pastime of ours. We fantasized about forming a rock band (tentatively called “Fury”), and Kelly had his outfit for the MTV video ready for show time before he had his guitar licks ready. He did actually play guitar, but he also wanted to play drums—an idea that either got vetoed by his parents, or proved too expensive for his budget. Whatever the cause, a real trap set never materialized, but that didn’t stop Kelly from playing a faux trap set made of pillows arranged on his bed. He had the ’80s rock drummer act down pat, right down to knowing when to hold the drumstick aloft and twirl it between his fingers for dramatic effect. Those were some good jam sessions, and I can still hear Rush’s “Fly by Night” and “Spirit of Radio,” and see Kelly wailing away in a heroic impersonation of Neal Peart.

(Not long ago, before I heard that he passed away, I sat down to write Kelly a letter, and I was going to tell him about the new PlayStation game called “Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the ’80s.” We would have had a good laugh at that, because we were already doing the low-tech version of it in his bedroom in 1981. We were ahead of our time, I guess.)

He liked Rush, the Pretenders, Journey, Yes, Phil Collins, the Police, Van Halen, and (inexplicably) Kiss. I’m not sure what kind of professional musician he would have made, but I know this: He would have made a good MTV VJ.

We both had an affinity for progressive rock, and it was a strong common theme in our friendship. It seemed a fitting thing to draw us together. The music was sophisticated and intelligent, and the particular bands to which we gravitated (e.g., old Genesis and Yes) were filled with optimism and an adventurous spirit that rose above teenage angst and songs of unrequited love, and made a heroic attempt to reach for a larger world amid the stars. That common thread in our friendship lasted from high school right up until the end. (We were both enjoying the current crop of “neo prog” bands that are active these days.) Kelly even touched upon prog rock in his Zappa biography, and I thought that was a fitting way to put his enthusiasm for the genre to good use in his professional life. In fact, the whole Zappa book seemed an ideal pursuit for him, as it combined his adult academic prowess with his boyhood enthusiasm for rock and pop culture. I was really pleased to see him write it, and was pleased it was well received.

Kelly was a Frank Zappa fan even in high school, and it was little wonder why. With Zappa’s wild hair and outlandish lyrics that sliced and diced modern American culture and poked sacred cows and looked at things from strange new angles, it was not surprising that Kelly liked him. It some ways, Kelly was like Zappa: smart, yet without any stigmatic taint of nerdiness about him; popular, yet iconoclastic; a wild party animal, yet disciplined enough to do well academically. If Kelly had gone on to become a famous musician, I could well imagine him writing songs like “The Dangerous Kitchen,” and also using his public platform to speak out about social and cultural issues in his characteristically intelligent yet casual way.

The Madwoman of Shallot

Kelly and I were both active in high school theatre, and performed together in several plays. One of the highlights of our time at Worthington High School together was in our junior year (1983), when we both auditioned for, and landed roles in, the fall school play. This photo of us in “The Madwoman of Shallot” is the only photo of Kelly that I have. He played a police officer (on the left), and I played The Ragpicker (in the middle).

Kelly seemed right at home in the limelight, which perhaps foreshadowed his future profession of becoming a school teacher. I think Bronwyn Hopton, our theatre teacher, would have approved of the way Kelly chose to put his theatrical talent to use.

Dr. Everyman

Perhaps one of the most memorable aspects of Kelly, and one that certainly pervaded our friendship, was his sense of humor. Part of it was in his outlook, and part of it was in his delivery, but either way, words won’t do it justice. You had to be there. Suffice it to say that he always knew how to put me in stitches, and one of the most persistent memories I have of him is his great rollicking laugh. It made him very easy to like, and it was one of the things that marked him as a “people person.”

Kelly was always very bright, he was always an avid reader, and he always had an eye for popular culture. He seemed at once both critical of it and fascinated by it, as though he had one foot planted firmly within it, and one foot outside of it, which allowed him to comment on it from both the inside and the outside. Though I never had the pleasure of seeing him teach, I imagine he was right at home lecturing in his American Culture Studies class. He always was a lively and engaging commentator on our times. (Coincidentally, his nickname in high school was Doc, so we both got a kick out of the fact that he really did become “Doctor” Lowe.)

Kelly was writing a book about Jackson Browne, and I’ve thought about him more than once when listening to Browne’s solo acoustic version of “Everyman.” The protagonist in the song talks about getting away from humanity in order to find his true self, but somehow always ends up coming back to humanity in that same search. It’s an elusive and poetic piece that speaks of the energized tension between a critical assessment of society and a hearty participation in it. Perhaps Kelly related to Jackson Browne in part because he sympathized with his outlook on such things as this very tension. I think it takes a certain art for living to hold that tension in balance. Kelly was good at that.

Farewell

Kelly and I lost touch when I moved back to California, and he went on to attend college in various places, but we eventually reconnected, and although we wrote to each other only infrequently, there was something about that friendship forged in our adolescence that remained, a bedrock that I somehow felt even during the long spans of silence between our correspondence. I feel its absence now, like a strange, aching hollow. It’s hard to believe he’s gone.

This rambling reminiscence is probably too long for those who did not share those times with Kelly, yet it’s far too short to do more than scratch the surface of a friendship that meant a great deal to me. Kelly’s unwavering acceptance of me, his loyalty, his irresistible sense of humor, his authenticity, and his easygoing, affable demeanor, all helped me weather the sometimes trying times of middle school and high school. In fact, I often look back on those days as the Good Old Days, and one of the things that made them good was Kelly Lowe.

For me, losses of this magnitude can only be managed in small does over a long span. I’m sure I’ll be grieving the loss of Kelly for a long time. I can’t hear certain ’80s rock tunes these days without thinking of him, and getting a lump in my throat. Some of those old tunes will never be the same. Certainly the Old Guard will never be the same. Kelly was a good friend, and I’ll miss him more than words can say.

2007-09-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

Anybody still check this blog hoping to see it updated? I can't bring myself not not to.

Anybody interested in turning this blog into a celebration of Kelly?

Plus ça change, plus c’est pareil.

2007-06-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

This is Steve.

Kelly passed away on Friday.

I don't have any words right now, but here's a letter I wrote about him not too long ago that begins to scrape the surface.

I’ve been asked by Dr. Kelly Lowe to write a letter about his work as a teacher, and not only am I highly qualified to do so, I am thrilled to. Having taken several of Dr. Lowe’s courses at Mount Union College, I can say without hesitation or qualification that he’s a fantastic teacher with a wide range of pedagogical skills at his disposal.

My first class with Kelly was College Writing (EH 100) in the spring of 1996. As a reticent pre-med major with minor skill but no interest in writing, I initially viewed his class as merely the one before chemistry and the one after biology. However, within a few weeks of completing the readings he’d assigned, participating in the peer-review workshops he’d arrange, contributing to the in-class discussions he’d facilitate, and receiving the encouraging textual comments he’d leave on my essays, I found myself doing better in (and enjoying!) EH 100 more than I ever would have imagined. It was Dr. Lowe’s fine work in this class that directly led to me declaring a writing major (a major he designed, mind you) and pursue a career not unlike his. Over my subsequent three years at Mount Union, I enrolled in many of Dr. Lowe’s classes—Nonfiction Writing, The History of Rhetoric, American Culture Studies, Practicum in Peer Editing, my Senior Culminating Experience—and I found each to be equal parts illuminating, educational, practical, though-provoking, useful and fun.

Dr. Lowe’s demeanor in class is relaxed, conversational. He’ll often gather students around in a circle so that everyone may make eye contact as they discuss that day’s reading, or that class session’s writing prompt. Truly a facilitator, Kelly will allow a class discussion find its own way through students, only adding a comment or posing a question when he feels prudent. As a writing teacher myself, I can attest that this skill takes a patience and a commitment to the search for knowledge that I can rarely achieve myself. It’s so easy for an instructor to butt into a class discussion and steer students toward issues/ideas/material he or she wants to be discussed, and Kelly, to my knowledge, has never taken such an opportunity without it coming organically from the students themselves. Poetry in action, for my monies’ worth.

Another element of Dr. Lowe’s pedagogy I admire is his commenting strategies on student writing. Again, on my own student papers, I know how hard it is to resist “getting out the red pen” and focusing almost solely on those aspects of a student’s writing that are lack. And again, Kelly is a model of commenting that I aspire to: he responds to writers and not to writing. This difference is crucial. Never afraid to engage his students on the page, I found Kelly to be a question-asker in his commenting strategy—that way, revisions could serve as answers, and direct instruction has been nicely avoided. I’d like to think I ape this strategy from him.

Kelly’s pretty much the best teacher I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a lot. I strongly endorse his application, and I urge you to contact me if there’s any further information I can provide about his abilities outside the classroom: I’ve also worked with Kelly in writing center, I co-taught a grammar class with him, I watched him develop Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) while I attended Mount Union, and I'm golfing buddies with him.

For those of you who are interested...

2007-06-13T17:25:00.000-07:00

Mario Batali, one of my heroes (if you haven't read Heat, you've got to. Right now. I'm waiting), has taken a turn whacking the bloggers (on a food blog no less - ahh, the irony). You can read it here if you are so inclined: http://eater.com/archives/2007/06/why_i_hate_food.php#more.

Extra credit for anyone who can get me 7:30 reservations at Del Posto.

Quote of the night

2007-06-12T18:17:00.000-07:00

"I can kill a man and dismember him and be home in time for Letterman. But when my girlfriend is feeling insecure, I don't know what to say." -- Dexter.

P.S. Dirty Martinis and Vantage menthols make all television shows better.

Dear HBO: I'm breaking up with you.

2007-06-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

I'm a pretty big believer in monogamy. I'm also a pretty faithful guy. I've been married to the same woman for 15 years. I worked at the same school for 10 and took a lot of shit before leaving. I still watch whatever NBC puts on Thursday nights because I've been doing so since Cosby and Cheers.

And I was, until recently, an HBO man through and through. Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Half Hour Comedy hour, The Larry Sanders Show...I go way back with HBO. And we've had some great times together.

But it's time to break up. I'm very sorry. You have some promising new shows, although John From Cincinnati is beyond me. [I'll be back for The Wire, I promise].

I'm moving on. I've found a new love. Her name is Showtime.

I've spent the weekend with you and I have to say, it's a deep commitment.

Dexter, Brotherhood, Weeds. That's all I have to say.

What makes it difficult is that when I move in a month I'm moving to a place with no cable, which is forcing me, much against my will, to get satellite. I'm trying to decide between Dish Network, which gets me HBO, Showtime, Cinemax and Starz for about $49.00 or Direct TV, which gets me all of the above, plus the NFL Sunday Ticket for a juicy $250 per month for the first three months. Ouch.

That said, I've got to leave you now to get back to Dexter, who makes serial killing sexy. If someone turns up missing on the high plains, will you be my alibi?

My wife & daughter are out of town, day 2 (movie review edition)

2007-06-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

One of my strangest habits is that I really like to watch movies early in the morning, so when I fell asleep last night in the middle of Deja Vu, I woke up at five this morning and continued my festival of "C" movies. To wit:

Deja Vu. Actually much better than I thought it would be, except for the fact that I broke out laughing every few minutes because, right before she left, my wife told me about a student of hers who named her baby Deja Vu because she was watching the movie right before the baby was born and really liked it. I don't hold that against the film.

Epic Movie. Kind of funny. Probably a lot funnier on acid.

Let's go to Prison. Only funny in the sense that Will Arnett is funny. That said, he's really funny, so that made up for a lot. (Extra points for the movie being written by one of the guys in Mr. Show). I still don't know about Dax Shepard, but he was funnier here than he was in Employee of the Month.

I'm going to spend the rest of the day reading about Folk music, which is not necessarily as exciting as it sounds. On tap for dinner: Chicken with lemon, garlic and butter with rice pilaf, broccoli, and a bottle of Chateau St. Michelle Pinot Grigio. And as soon as I get to the store to buy more vermouth, it's Manhattans for everyone!

Entertainment for tonight - catch up on episodes of Weeds, Brotherhood and Dexter. Thanks, Showtime on demand.

Have a nice day.

My wife and daughter are out of town, day 1

2007-06-11T18:16:00.000-07:00

[Please note, this blog written under the influence of several glasses of good Italian red wine. See below for details]

My wife, as some of you know, is a strict vegetarian and hates mindlessly violent and/or thoughtlessly funny movies. And, for the most part, I'm down with that. But it's always nice when she goes away and I can give in to my baser instincts. What follows is my chronicle.

Breakfast: two crullers from Albertsons and a Starbucks venti triple latte. Watched the Sopranos and the last hour of the Tony awards. Since just about every media outlet was talking about the Sopranos today, I'll forgo, although I will say I liked the last episode of Twin Peaks, that introduced an entirely new story in the last five minutes, better. I was very sorry that Raul Esparza did not win for best actor in a musical - I got to see him in Company this March and he was incredible.

Lunch: small popcorn with butter and a water at the Capital 12. Saw Mr. Brooks. Was not disappointed (except that I had to drive 50 miles each way to see it).

Dinner: 7 oz. boneless rib eye, hash browns with garlic and Parmesan, asparagus with hollendaise, and a bottle of Selciaia Fassati Rosso di Montepulciano.

After Dinner Entertainment: Epic Movie, Deja Vu, and Let's Go To Prison, three Camel non-filters (all I'm allowed), and one bloody mary.

Not a bad day.

It's like Larry King, but with F-bombs

2007-06-10T19:32:00.000-07:00

For most of the first 10 years of USA Today, Larry King of all people had a weekly column on Monday mornings that were for the most part just a list of shit he was thinking – no transitions, mostly non sequitors, and some quite bizarre (his argument that you should be able to see the bottom of a cup of coffee fucked me up for years – that God I managed to get over that one). In the spirit of Larry and in honor of USA Today’s 25th anniversary, I offer the following random series of observations:

--there are a number of websites devoted to waiters bitching about crappy customers but none devoted to customers bitching about crappy waiters.
--speaking of waiters, if you’re too cool to have a note pad to write my order down, and I order my salad without onions, it’s your fucking fault if there are onions on it.
--and don’t carry my wife’s wineglass by anything other than the stem.
--I can’t wait for the iPhone. My days with Verizon are numbered.
--I drive a Cadillac. Who would have thought.
--the acceptance speeches at the Tonys are the worst.
--I’m glad I’m not going up against Spring Awakening for anything.
--My wife and daughter are now officially in the U.K. for the next 12 days. Let the Bruce Willis film festival commence. First up: The Last Boy Scout.
--My tickets to see Rush in Kansas City came on Friday. I’m now a member of the 11 timers club.
--Sorry Cavs.
--My mother and step-father and aunt and uncle are also in England. How the fuck did I mess up so badly?
--Steak dinners 11 nights in a row? Bet on it.
--Other than Spring Awakening, this year’s Broadway musicals suck.
--I’m going to watch the Sopranos season finale as soon as the Tonys are over. Don’t spoil it for me.
--I saw Ocean’s 13 yesterday. Don’t bother.

10 Albums that Changed my Life

2007-06-09T06:45:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of discussion on some industry lists I’m privy to about the death of the album and I’m sort of inclined to believe the dire warnings. Albums used to be complete/coherent things – with liner notes that meant something and songs that were presented in a certain order to achieve a certain thing.

Now albums, thanks to iTunes and others, are largely collections of songs. And while this isn’t a bad thing (I do more than a fair share of downloading of songs) it isn’t quite the same thing.

The following lists the 10 albums that changed my life for one reason or another. Note: these are not necessarily “the best” albums or even “favorite” albums. These are the albums that were “important” in some way in my musical development.

1. KISS, Alive I. Probably the first album I ever bought. A friend of mine had given me a tape of the album’s 4th side (with “Rock Bottom,” “Cold Gin,” “Rock and Roll all Night” and “(Let me go) Rock and Roll.” The sound of the cheering at the beginning of the side, reverberating off the back wall of Cobo hall in Detroit (the first city they were big in – hence “Detroit Rock City” in the coming years). I know every note on this album. It got me through elementary school and most of middle school (until Alive II came out).

2. The Cars, Candy-O. When I went to France in 1980 with my middle school class this was one of two tapes those of us who hung out at the back of the bus had (the other one, for the record, was Cheap Trick’s Dream Police). While I had heard the single (“Let’s Go”), I’d never heard the complete record before. The cross fades, especially between “Night Spots,” “You Can’t Hold on too Long” and “Lust for Kicks” are stupendous.

3. Pink Floyd, The Wall. Defines, for me, the concept album. I first heard this in Paris (extra cool – walking through the Galleries Lafayette with Joe Roderick seeing a huge group of French school girls in their uniforms belting out “we don’t need no education” as they walked through the ground floor). This album should get a special award for best album to listen to with headphones on.

4. The Beatles, The White Album. The first Beatles album I ever bought (that’s the nice thing about being a late Beatles fan – you can approach stuff out of order). I fell in love with the song “Bungalow Bill” and was hooked from that point. I remember cutting class on the day John Lennon died and sitting in the public library listening to this album over and over again.

5. Rush, Moving Pictures. My first Rush album – Freshman year of high school. This was an ALBUM – four great singles on side one (“Tom Sawyer,” “Red Barchetta,” “YYZ,” and “Limelight”) and then the art rock stuff on the second side. Probably some of the best track sequencing on an album – it simply makes sense. Probably the album that got me through my first and second year of high school. I have bought all of their albums since and have seen them on every subsequent tour (I have my tickets to see them in KC this August - do you?)

6. Various Artists, Soundtrack: Heavy Metal. One of the first of the great soundtrack albums. Song after song of creamy goodness. Some great singles (who would have thought that of all the Eagles, Don Felder would have the first post-group hits with the theme song) as well as some really usual stuff – Donald Fagin’s first post-Steely Dan song, a great song by Grand Funk Railroad “Queen Bee” and perhaps the best Cheap Trick single ever “Reach Out”. The album reminds me a lot of Christmas 1982 – ahh…good times.

7. Utopia, Oblivion. Helped me make it through my freshman year of college. Came out during my senior year in high school (the single was “Crybaby”) although I didn’t buy it until the end of 1985. A couple of songs, including “Maybe I Could Change,” and “I will wait” got me through my first college crush/romance and “Winston Smith Takes it on the Jaw” gets props for the best song ever written based on 1984. Their prior album, simply called Utopia, with the drop dead single "Princess of the Universe", got me to Grand Cayman and back and through senior year of high school. The ultimate power pop group with Rundgren as the mastermind and Kasim Sultan as secret weapon.

8. The Eagles, Hotel California. In 1977, after winning the egg toss at my dad’s company picnic, was given a gift certificate to Peaches records and tapes and bough this album based largely on the singles (“Life in the Fast Lane,” “New Kid in Town,” and “Hotel California”); I was blown away, however, by the other songs on the record, especially “Wasted Time,” “Victim of Love,” and “The Last Resort.” This album will always remind me of the end-of-the-year party (I want to say that it was the end of 6th grade, but I might be wrong) when we just put side one on over and over again and turned the lights down real low….

9. Japan, Exorcising Ghosts. My great bid to be alternative. Since the final two Japan albums (Gentlemen Take Poloroids and Tin Drum) were not available in the US, this was the only real way to hear their music. My buddy Mike King turned me on to them – sort of a Duran Duran on Quaaludes with much better musicians and a decent poet on the mic. Defined cool.

10. Fleetwood Mac, Tusk. Defines for me the album – fast song, slow song, Stevie Nicks song, Lindsay Buckingham song, good song, bad song…&c. Sprawling two record set with great liner notes and deluxe packaging. I got this album for Christmas 1979 or 1980 and listened to it nearly every day for a year.

Albums that were great, and important, but that just didn’t make the cut for some reason: Jim Croce, Photographs & Memories; Paul Simon, Graceland; Jackson Browne, Lives in the Balance and Running on Empty; Simple Minds, New Gold Dream; Sweet, Give us a Wink; Soundtracks: Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire and Top Gun, Star Wars and Tommy.

My editorial that the Chronicle of Higher Education rejected

2007-06-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

[Please excuse the rough-draft-ed-ness of this piece]

On Polite-ness

This past year, I sent out roughly 30 packets of application materials for positions in the halls of academe – these consisted of letters, each one written specifically for the department, statements of teaching, research agendas, transcripts, sample syllabi, recommendations, samples of my work, and anything else the department could dream up. Of these 30 schools, five never acknowledged receipt of materials at all. Five others acknowledged receipt of materials and never contacted me again. That leaves 20. Of these 20, five sent me nice letters telling me I wasn’t what they needed. I had 15 phone interviews and six on campus interviews. Of these, I never heard from seven schools again.

Think this is strange? I also submitted four pieces for publication. Three of which remain unacknowledged by the publisher, even upon multiple contacts. One piece I’ve had to email editors about 4 times just to make sure they received it.

The final straw is this: in March I was solicited to write a short piece for a yearly collection. Today I found that collection had been published and my topic had been assigned to someone else. The two weeks of work I did on the piece are, in effect, wasted. I never received word one about this piece after I was asked to write it.

Is this all complaining? Of course. It’s pretty typical of the stuff you’ll see on the job boards and in the hallways of departments.

But the fact that it’s constant and happens to others doesn’t necessarily make it wrong.
What it really is about is politeness, a rather quaint concept, I realize, but one that I think has pretty much left the building these days. We live in a world where people get off on being mean – from road rage to partisan bickering in congress to the extraordinary rise in lawsuits, we are living in a clearly adversarial moment in time. The importance of being right (or feeling that you are right) seems so much more important than doing the right thing, even if it costs you a moment of time, has created an angry, selfish world that has started to permeate the ivory tower.

And I think it’s wrong.

Look, I understand that academics has always had its adversaries – I got attacked during a question and answer session at my first MLA in 1994 and told that my degree was stupid and that as a grad student I didn’t really know anything, so I get it. There are intellectual bullies all around us.

But there don’t need to be.

Before I get called Pollyanna, I want to try and explain why I think that people who are responsible for teaching ought to conduct themselves in a way that mirrors the society we want, not the one we’ve got. Too often faculty of my acquaintance treat each other, their friends and family and their students like imbeciles. I think I know, at least in part, why.

For much of our lives we, as young, intrepid, future academics, were picked on. We were bookish, lumpy, had few friends and less style. We had a hard time hooking up, if we hooked up at all. We existed in a world where being smart or studious was looked down upon at best and actively discouraged at most. Many of us, myself included, have needed intense therapy to get over the damage, both physical and emotional, done to us in high school, by fraternities and sororities, by the mean girls and football players, and by a culture that thinks Paris Hilton both going to and coming from jail is, literally, worthy of a “Breaking News” designation on CNN.
Then we entered, however briefly, the one place that being smart is still considered “cool.” The University. So we connived to stay. As long as we can.

But a funny thing happened along the way to our enlightenment. We learned that being cool is kind of fun. It’s a rush. It’s powerful. Boys want to be like you and girls want to be with you (as long as you can sign their overload forms and be on their thesis committees – more about that later). That we now exist in a world where we are cool; where we set the tone and the fashion. Suddenly we get to be the mean boys and mean girls and make all the little people suffer. It’s revenge time, baby. It’s hazing, only this time we’re the good looking seniors and the students and new assistant professors are the pledges.

So we put them down and keep them out. We do it ever-so-nicely – their research isn’t “up to snuff”; their writing is “in need of work”; their proposal is “hackyned”; their students are “trying real hard.”

And when it comes to being polite – to doing the right thing and making the effort, we’re “really busy,” “overwhelmed,” “buried.” Of course, we aren’t. Not really. Not compared to someone who only gets two weeks of vacation a year. Not to someone who has to find their own sub if they want to take the day off. Not to someone who works at a wage set by the government as the lowest possible amount a company can pay them.

We’re not polite, in other words, because we really don’t have to be. We treat job applicants like shit because they are a dime a dozen (never mind that the search committee spends hours talking about how terrible the applicant pool is); we treat scholars who have submitted pieces to our journals like crap because there are twenty more articles in our in basket and besides we can always get something from that “really famous scholar” and/or our grad school buddy.
So a few words of advice – stop doing shit just because it looks good on your c.v.; don’t be chair if you don’t want to be chair; don’t apply for the editorship if you aren’t interested in the scut work that comes with the position; don’t volunteer to serve on a search committee if you hold all hires in contempt. Get over yourself. Realize that you are one of the lucky ones – you have a job doing what you like and what you want to do. How lucky is that?[1]

[1] Caveat: if Paul Stanly ever calls and asks if I’ll fill in for Ace Frehley on the KISS Alive 5 European tour, I’m gone. We all have our dreams.

Random Tuesday Observations on Summer TV; or, What am I watching this week? (With a short detour into radio and sports commentary).

2007-06-05T18:48:00.000-07:00

My lonely solitude ended today with the return of my wife and daughter from school and thus my Television watching has been reduced from 10 hours a day back to three or four. Below are some random notes on my recent TV discoveries:

The Tudors fucking rocks. Despite the fact that they've taken more than license with the history (some of it is surprisingly good; some of it is downright odd - the conflation of Henry's two sisters, for instance, is a strange choice). It's as good as Rome and in a time period that I actually know some stuff about.
I've watched Cold Case a couple of times recently (I haven't really watched it since I was trapped in a hotel room in Salt Lake City in 2004 while on a job interview for a job that I didn't get) and it's absolutely destroyed me. And I don't know why. Partly it's the stories, which are infused with more pathos that I've seen on TV in a while and partly it's the fact that almost all of the stories involve kids growing up and reckoning with the stupid things they did in high school or earlier and partly it's the excellent choice of music (big ups to the special Bruce Springsteen themed episode).
Countdown with Keith Olberman has now become appointment television for me. I know he's the devil, but he's my devil. "The Worst Person in the World" is the best 60 seconds of television on any given day.
I'm officially old, because the best part of my day is watching the reruns of the previous night's Daily Show and Colbert Report which are on at 9:00 our time (we get the west coast feed). An hour of fake news followed by a half hour of real news. Seems about right.
I'm officially addicted to Mike & Mike in the morning. In fact, I now listen almost exclusively to ESPN radio - Mike & Mike, The Herd, Jim Rome (not on ESPN) (I podcast Dan Patrick) only grudgingly give way to NPR in the afternoon.
I'm very glad for the Cavs - I lived in Ohio when LeBron was a high school kid tearing up the Akron city league. That said, I've got to go with the Spurs. Anyone who had to live through the Frank Brickowski and Artis Gilmore days deserves as many titles as they can get.
All of this is just killing time until Rescue Me and The Closer return (and that Philadelphia show - can't remember the name right now).

25 On

2007-06-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

This morning's USA Today had an interesting bit in the bidness section about things that have disappeared over the past 25 years. What made the list interesting is how fucking old it made me feel. Here are my random, work-avoiding, thoughts.

To set the scene:

25 years ago it was 1982. I was 16 and had just gotten my driver's licence. I was flirting with being born again, although that wouldn't last the summer (it had a lot to do with the pastor caring more about getting republicans elected than about the kids from our school who had been killed in a car accident and with the youth leader trying to pimp out girls from the church instead of the girls I wanted to date). The big songs from the year were "Jack and Diane" and "Heat of the Moment." I started, the day after I turned 16, working at Taco Bell (thanks, dad, for that infusion of Protestant work ethic - I still can't take a fucking vacation). I would end the year dating a very nice girl that I probably should have married but, in a trend that would continue through my thirties, I would make the disastrous choice to go out with someone else right after the new year).

Here are USA Today's 25 things that were huge in 82 and are all-but-gone now:

Indoor smoking - god; I can hardly believe that during my freshman and sophomore years at GWU I used to sit and smoke in class. All of the English profs used to smoke (the whole department smelled like pipe smoke - a wonderful smell that still reminds me of my grandfather).
Service stations - for a few cents more you used to have someone check the oil, fill up the washer fluid, clean the windows and pump your gas. Man, I could use that in Wyoming when it's 40 below and the wind is howling down off the front range.
The Soviet Union. Who would have thought - two of my roommates were "Soviet studies" majors. Wonder how useful that degree is now.
Typewriters - I had a nice Smith Corona that I started college with. I bought an Apple IIc during my sophomore year.
Vinyl Records - I went off to college with three crates (remember those?) of vinyl records. Now I have shelves of CDs and soon everything will just live on my iPod.
New Coke - I hated this shit. God bless old Coke.
Carbon Paper - my grandfather wrote his entire dissertation using carbon paper. I used it during grad school to make handouts (I do miss the mimeo machine).
Betamax - I had one of these. All my porn was on Beta. Nice. (Important to have the highest quality)
Phone Booths - good riddance - I just remember them smelling like pee and never having phone books.
Leaded gas - my first car was a '77 Caprice Classic that took leaded gas. That thing was a beast (and I loved the built in CB radio and eight track player).
Rotary dial phones - I had one of these all the way through grad school. Heavier than a 20 pound weight.
Videos on MTV - how I spent my entire youth. I still watch VH1 classic.
Baltimore Colts - needless to say, you can add LA Rams, Cleveland Browns, Minnesota North Stars, and some basketball teams to this list.
Oldsmobiles - lucky me - I bought an Olds in 2000, drove it off the lot, and listened to NPR tell me that Olds was going out of business. Lost a bit of cash on that deal.
Civility - I've written about this a lot in other places. I miss it.
American Bandstand - Before MTV this was one of the few places you could see your heroes on TV.
Pull Tab soda and beer cans - not missed.
The West African Black rhino - what the fuck? Come on USA Today, you can do better than that.
Hand crank car windows - you could still get these a few years ago - my wife bought a nice, fancy, Ford Escort with hand crank windows.
Home run kings - another USA Today dud. So what. Rules get broken.
Hair bands - I thought Kix, Winger, Slaughter, Poison, Motley Crew, and the rest would be around forever.
Afternoon newspapers - Used to be the Columbus Dispatch and the Knoxville News-Journal were afternoon papers. Makes me long for the days of the Citizen-Journal, Columbus's excellent morning newspaper.
Transistor radios - so what. Bring on portable XM.
Michael Jackson - this one did surprise me. Who would think he would be this weird?
Checker cabs - sort of miss these - big, roomy, inefficient.

The moviegoing art

2007-05-25T18:28:00.000-07:00

In response to E-dog’s challenge (see his post here ) about my most important movie-going experiences (in chronological order), I offer up the following (I apologize if I’ve fudged on the dates).

The Godfather (1972). My brother and I were bundled up and put in the back of our 1970 Toyota station wagon and taken to the drive-in in Cincinnati. While I remember nothing about the movie, I remember the event. Popcorn and puke and trying to sleep while the five families did each other in.

Star Wars (1977). I didn’t really read the paper or watch much tv at this point. I had no idea that this movie was coming out and had no idea what it was about and was, frankly, dubious, when my old man came home and said that he heard a couple of the guys in the film department talking about it. We went. The theater was maybe half full. I then proceeded to see it 70 more times over the summer (at Raintree cinema + disco; you remember it – right down the road from the Chi Chi’s and the Dunkin Donuts on 161). It is hard to imagine, in a world before The Matrix, Alien, Battlestar Glactica (the tv show) and all the others, the impression that this film made on my 11 year old self. (In a side note, when my boy Spike’s grandmother passed away and left him some money and he bought a killer rig including one of the first S-video players I’d ever seen, the first film we rented to watch on it was Star Wars.)

Blazing Saddles (1978). I think this was a re-release but our next door neighbor took his son and me. Most of the fun was him getting drunk and lying to my old man and then two days later telling him. Farmville, VA’s best.

Silver Streak (1979). My first date. I’m not sure the statute of limitations has expired on the damage I can do to a young woman’s reputation, so I won’t reveal who it was. Suffice it to say, I was not then nor have I ever been a playa’. I also remember seeing Continental Divide (Belushi’s next-to-last film) on the first date with out being driven by my parents (she drove; I was a lowly sophomore); and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), which was the first movie I ever drove someone to.

All the movies I saw with Spike on Friday nights during my exile in San Antonio. This was an incredibly lonely time for me and spending a year talking about film on a fairly serious level was one of the few things that helped me make it through. [For the record, the only film I really remember was Full Metal Jacket].

New Years Eve 1990. My boy Norris and I got several bottles of wine, lots of Chinese food, and several classics I’d not seen, including The Thin Man, The Philadelphia Story, Ball of Fire, and His Girl Friday. Not a bad way to spend the evening.

Reservoir Dogs (1992). Was dragged to this by Drew Williams. Saw it in an entirely empty theater. Went to see Pulp Fiction two years later in a packed house. As a grad student studying postmoder theory, these films were pretty fucking great.

Since I got married and had kids I haven’t seen as many movies; that said, many have come as pleasant surprises – Moulin Rouge, for instance, I saw on a whim while I was on sabbatical and thoroughly enjoyed it. Suffice it to say, I love films.

The best songs of all time, Stephen King edition

2007-05-23T18:40:00.001-07:00

In this week’s Entertainment Weekly music critic Stephen King has a neat piece about the twenty-four great rock songs. I’m taking up his challenge, since, while I like all of his songs, I think I have twenty-four different ones.

The rules are fairly simple:

No ballads. (I cheated on this one a bit - see below)

No soul/R & B/disco or rap. (This makes it difficult because “Staying Alive” might well be on my list).

No “tunes that have been played to death” (I’m not sure what the standard is for this, but I’ve left “Stairway to Heaven,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Free Bird,” “Hey Jude,” and “We will rock you” off my list since they’ve been played to death.

Finally, the songs on the list have to have “something new to say” to you every time you hear them.

These aren't necessarily in order. Sorry for that.

1. “Long Cool Woman (in a black dress),” The Hollies. The opening riff of this song made me want to buy a guitar. I didn’t for almost ten years but hey, I write about guys who play guitars.

2. “Barracuda,” Heart. Perhaps the best opening riff in rock. “Even it Up” is probably a better song…

3. “Limelight,” Rush. I will sing this song, out loud, at full volume, whenever I hear it.

4. “Rocket Man,” Elton John. I’ve been listening to this song for more than 30 years and I still don’t know why Mars ain’t a place to raise your kids….

5. “Lawyers, Guns & Money,” Warren Zevon. Perhaps the funniest song about raving paranoia every written.

6. “Watermelon in Easter Hay,” Frank Zappa. The best rock instrumental ever written.

7. “Fountains of Sorrow,” Jackson Browne. The research on the new book has forced me to listen to this song anew and I’m deeply in love with it. Honorable mention to “The Pretender.”

8. “Don’t Fear (the reaper),” Blue Oyster Cult. Not much more to say about this song. Great opening riff, great ending. Epic.

9. “(What’s so funny ‘bout) Peace, Love & Understanding,” Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Best anti-war song ever (I know, I know, I was 10 years too late for John Lennon, so fuck off). “Watching the Detectives” is just as good.

10. “Hearts & Bones,” Paul Simon. The most heartbreaking song off his most heartbreaking album. “Train in the Distance” from the same album and “She Moves On” from Rhythm of the Saints are close seconds.

11. “She,” KISS. Little remembered song that is the killer cut off of Alive I.

12. “Somewhere Down the Crazy River,” Robbie Robertson. Defines atmospheric.

13. “State of the Heart,” Rick Springfield. I know. Sue me. It was the right song at the right time.

14. “Tears,” John Waite. Off the same album that brought you “Missing You.” His best song off his best album.

15. “You Don’t Know me at All,” Don Henley. “You should have killed me baby, you always looked so good in black.” Yes.

16. “Engine 999,” Hooters. Best use of minor chords in a pop song ever.

17. “The Last Resort,” Eagles. Rich guys bitching about other rich guys. Hmm.

18. “Back in Black,” AC/DC. Crunchy.

19. “Since You Been Gone,” Rainbow. Good riff. Great forgotten singer (Graham Bonnet, where fore are thou?)

20. “The Weight,” The Band. I still can’t figure out what the hell it means.

21. “Sweetheart Like You,” Bob Dylan. “You will be known as the most beautiful woman who ever crawled across cut glass until your lips bleed.” Indeed, Bob.

22. “Boomtown,” David + David. “Handsome Kevin got a little off track. Took a year off from college and he never went back. Deals dope out of Denny’s, got a permanent hack.” Unfortunately, I know more than a few handsome Kevins. One of the most auspicious lead off songs from a first record in history.

23. “Painted Desert,” Pat Benetar. Perhaps the most perfectly produced record I’ve ever heard. (I do so miss that mid-eighties/early digital recording).

24. “Hypnotized,” Fleetwood Mac. From the long lost Bob Welch years. An underrated genius.

And then there are all of the songs that came to me as I was finishing this:

“Hotel California,” The Eagles
“Don’t Look Down,” Lindsay Buckingham
“September,” David Sylvian
“Still Life in Mobile Homes,” Japan
“Friday I’m in Love,” The Cure
“Rhiannon,” Fleetwood Mac
“I wish it would Rain Down,” Phil Collins
“Famous Blue Raincoat,” Leonard Cohen (Jennifer Warnes version)
“Everybody Knows,” (Leonard Cohen version)
“Some Guys have All the Luck” Rod Stewart
“Johnny & Mary” (Robert Palmer)

The list goes on and on and on.

DVR/Tivo question of the night

2007-05-21T20:19:00.000-07:00

I'm cranking up a big music post but between Heroes, 24 and the Ace of Cakes marathon on FoodTV I haven't had a lot of time to write.

Jack Bauer v. Syler. Who wins? (Think: Chloe v. Molly as support).

Are Micah and Molly the new superfriends?

PS - if you want any of your illusions about Warren Zevon dispelled, you must immediately read I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon. It redefines warts and all. (The cool thing is that I can write it off my taxes as research).

Signs of life for the new television season

2007-05-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

Came across the following preview for the remake of the Bionic Woman (from the folks who bring you Battlestar Galactia).

sad sad sad sad sad sad sad

2007-05-17T18:25:00.000-07:00

USA Today is reporting that Veronica Mars was officially cancelled by the CW today. Fuck.

What my wife and Michael Vick have in common

2007-05-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

Since I'm officially unemployed ("between jobs" is the language we like to use around here), I spend a lot of my time listening to sports talk radio (it leads me to believe that without meaningful work I would spend a lot of my day drinking and yelling at the media).

Today's hot topic was the accusation that the media was vaguely racist for investigating Michael Vick's relationship to the dog breeding/fighting camp/set up that was found when one of his homes was raided. Mike Golic, for instance, on this morning's "Mike & Mike in the Morning" show, made the argument defending the media that, in short, Vick asked for this - as the quarterback and highest paid player on the team, he invites scrutiny.

My wife is finding this out as well. As perhaps the most radical feminist I know, she has spent her life fighting for equality, and now, as she has taken on an increasing amount of responsibility in her job (and an increasing paycheck), she is finding that people, especially the public, are far more willing to offer a critique of her performance. And she hates it.

What both Vick and my wife are finding out is that the patriarchy, for all of its faults, offered up a pretty ready made set of both excuses and safety nets. Mike Vick fought and clawed tooth and nail to be the boss - to be the starting quarterback of an NFL franchise - one of only a few people in the country who have that job; and with that comes some shit, including lots of reporters whose sole job it is to keep looking into the shit you do. They don't, contrary to popular belief, do this because your black, or a woman, they do it because you're there - because you're the boss.

My wife, if you ask her just right, is struggling with some of the same things. She misses the fact that, even though it did a lot of evil shit, the patriarchy took a lot of pains to protect women. Some of these were odious (control over their own bodies, who they could date, what jobs they could have, &c.) but it also meant, for some, not having to worry about money in the sense that my wife worries about it today - that her paycheck is integral to our lives and that without it we would be unable to do some of the things we currently do. Unlike her mother and my mother, we would unable to take vacations or buy fancy cars or live in a big house without her salary. And now, with 11 days left in the school year, she hates this fact.

So that's the strange connections my wife has with Mr. Vick. In the words of one Mr. Neil Peart, of the Canadian rock band Rush, We will pay the price, but we will not count the cost.

A Few Choice Words to Remember the Reverand Fallwell by

2007-05-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

“Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them.”

“AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”

"I think [Desmond Tutu]'s a phony, period, as far as representing the black people of South Africa."

"The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen'."

“The whole (global warming) thing is created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability.”

Rest in peace, old sport.

Understatement of the year:

2007-05-10T11:44:00.000-07:00

From today's New York Times article about the folks who wanted to blow up Ft. Dix:

It’s fine to be a religion man,” said Murat Duka, 55, a distant relative of the defendants who was the first of the Dukas — now numbering about 200 — to move to the Northeast and work as a roofer. “But if you get too much to the religion, you get out of your mind and you do stupid things.

Indeed it does, old man, indeed it does.

At loose ends, pt. 2

2007-05-09T19:41:00.000-07:00

Needless to say, all this time on my hands has not been good for my posting. But I've gotten a lot of errands done, finished my article, and caught up on the news. Not much going on today and I'm off to Denver tomorrow to see some big wigs in rhetoric and composition give a talk at The University of Denver.

To tide you all over, I offer the following from the new President of France. Would that our President could speak so eloquently about human rights:

"I want to launch a call to all those in the world who believe in the values of tolerance, of liberty, of democracy and of humanism, to all those who are persecuted by the tyrannies and by the dictators, to all the children and to all the martyrized women in the world to say to them that the pride, the duty of France will at their sides, that they can count on her. France will be at the sides of the Libyan nurses locked up for eight years; France will not abandon Ingrid Betancourt; France will not abandon the women who are condemned to the burqa; France will not abandon the women who do not have liberty. France will be by the side of the oppressed of the world. This is the message of France; this is the identity of France; this is the history of France."

Selah.

At loose ends, pt. 1

2007-05-07T14:51:00.000-07:00

So today I woke up, took my daughter to school, ate breakfast, and then ... nothing. For the first time since, I think, 1981, I am at relatively loose ends for an extended period of time. As far as I can tell, I have either worked, taken classes, taught classes, or moved during a summer. Since I have nothing to do until June 27 (the day we debark), I am a bit wonky.

I have stuff to do, of course, including working on a book (ms is due in July, 2008) and I just finished a draft of a pretty long article on the rise and fall of the writing major at dear old MUC, but other than that, nothing, nada, zero, zilch.

And I have to say, for at least a day or so, it's pretty sweet. But I'm not good with idle time. After I finish up with the stuff on the DVR and Miami Vice, Season 4, the trouble will begin.

I can't wait to move

2007-05-05T19:34:00.000-07:00

Nice to wake up this morning to find out that the place where we are moving has weather even worse than the weather we are having here. Fuck.

The weather will always fuck you up

2007-05-04T16:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I went in to work in shorts and a t-shirt. Today, I watched it snow for four hours while I graded portfolios. Nice to know that we're having a white commencement. In May.

It's always nice

2007-05-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

To see you name in the table of contents of a good professional journal. My short reflection of the rise and fall of the MUC writing major was just published in Composition Studies (35.1), which landed on my desk this morning.

Ironically, the much larger piece by the folks who are still there and who have succeeded in carrying on the writing major's mission, was rejected. I'd like to gloat, but it's unbecoming in a department chair.... Still, it's pretty fucking funny.

I'm working on a much expanded version with my former colleague (who left at the same time I did) for a book.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

An interesting change of heart

2007-05-03T21:53:00.000-07:00

I just got the news today that my good old (for one more day) employer just filled two high-ranking positions with internal hires. While I'm certainly not upset (they are both way out of my department/area/speciality/interest) I am baffled by the rather incestuous nature of the administration here. In the past two years, as far as I can remember, we've filled the positions of VPSA, President, Provost, Director of Admissions, Dean of students, and Registrar with internal hires.

And then we wonder, in meeting after meeting, about why things never change?

Why should they?

The thing that makes me laugh, at myself mostly, is that I left, in somewhat of a huff, my last employer because they didn't hire from within (i.e., I wanted to move into the Dean's office and they wouldn't even consider it). And indeed, I've been fortunate to take advantage of another institution's desire to hire an administrator from outside their ivy colored walls.

So now I don't know what to think. I've seen both, and they both suck.

What's a poor boy to do (except, I suppose, to play in a rock and roll band)?

Ten things I might miss about the high plains

2007-05-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

I've just about finished packing up my office (15 boxes of books, five boxes of journals) and my email gets turned off Saturday night, so things are winding down. I've started on the inevitable tour of places I enjoy to have one last experience there (I did a lot of this in Alliance when it became clear I was leaving - living somewhere for 10 years will do that to you).

That said, there are some things I'll miss about living out here on the high plains:

Breakfast at the Overland Cafe. Good food. Good service. Cheap. Never all that busy.
The carne asada at Corona Village.
The coffee at the little place shaped like a playhouse in the parking lot of the Enterprise rental car lot. Best coffee I've ever had. That said, I'll also miss
Starbucks inside all of the grocery stores, the student union and the library.
The nice folks at both the Honda and GM dealerships - good customer service, who would have thought of that?
Sunset over the Snowy Range. It defines beauty.
Driving to Fort Collins on Saturday mornings (especially since XM started running old episodes of American Top 40). Ft. Collins may well be one of the most underrated college towns in the country (we don't talk much about it because it's so close to Boulder), but we never really had a bad time in FC. Good mall, good restaurants, and one of the finest eye, ear, nose, throat surgeons in the country.
Beer culture - Snake River, Boulder, O'Dells and all the Fat Tire you can drink.
Cajun Bloody Marys at Tommy Jacks on Friday nights with my wife.
Garlic potato soup and Snake River organic ale at Sweet Melissa's vegetarian cafe on Wednesday nights.
The people at Plains Tire.
My boys at Sigma Chi - I did a number of focus groups and educational programs there and we had a blast. And I was home by 7:00.
The Rec center. So nice I even worked out there. And that says a lot.
The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News. It was a pleasure reading them every day.
Being at a university that distributes, free to all students and faculty, the New York Times.
Clean air. Clean water.
No fleas, ticks, mosquitoes or termites.

Here's a few things I won't miss:

Tremendously overpriced housing market.
Most repair people and subcontractors have to come from over the mountain to fix our house.
The fuckers in their huge trucks who take up two lanes and two parking spaces.
The fuckers who keep opening the doors of their cars and hitting my car.
The fuckers in their huge trucks who drive around talking on their cell phones.
Living next to a truck stop.
Shari's restaurant. Repulsive doesn't even begin to describe the "eggs Benedict" I ate there.
Having to drive over the mountain to shop. Especially if you have a 14 year old daughter.
Parking lots that are made up primarily of huge trucks. Stupid me for leaving my X-ray vision glasses at home.
The terrible customer service at Hastings Books - really redefines "fuck the customer."
The people in student affairs.
The people in the English department.

I'm sure there are others but I have to go home to let the plumber in. Cue porn music.

You think you know busy?

2007-05-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of clearing out my office at school and beginning to work on my next book, as well as attending the 457 various choir, orchestra, band, honors, and awards events that seem to happen during these last few weeks of school.

Oh, and grade portfolios. And order books. And interview movers.

All of this, by the way, must happen without me being at home, since the house is being shown between 9-330.

So I'm a bit unsettled.

That said, I read Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires this weekend. It's excellent. She was the NYT's restaurant critic during the mid nineties - she had the pleasure of "discovering" folks like Mario Batali, Rocco DiSpirito, Daniel Boulud and others. Her wonderful populist reviews (she would often visit a restaurant in disguise and then visit again as herself and compare the treatment she received; as you might guess, she got the good stuff when she was there as herself). It's well worth it.

Ach. More later.

Running the gauntlet of angry women

2007-04-27T09:21:00.000-07:00

I spent most of this morning going through the termination process here at good old High Plains U and what I found was interesting. A couple of random thoughts before I begin to box up my office:

If you are somewhat ...uh...relaxed in your job offers and incoming employee paperwork, the exit paperwork tends to be complex if only to sort out all of the shit that should have been decided upon arrival.
If you are hired by a rogue associate VP and given a contract no one's seen before, and that contract never has to be filed anywhere, figuring out what to do about stuff like insurance, retirement, &c. is a pain in everyone's ass.
For some reason at both my previous school and this one, HR has been run by angry women. I spent several hours this morning being lectured by unhappy women. Why?
If I want to keep my insurance it will cost me in essence a month's salary. Next time you complain about how much insurance costs, ask if you can see the price without Employer contribution. It will shock you.
Boxes cost a shit-load of money. We've started to get estimates from movers and when we asked what it would cost for them to pack us up we were getting prices in the high $2000 range - much of that cost is for boxes (Mayflower is estimating, for instance, that it will take 245 boxes of different sizes and shapes to pack us up).

My life is, at this point, almost completely uninteresting. I have one week left here and then I'm at loose ends until July 23. Ugh. For a workaholic such as my self this is bad news.

My letter to the local paper that they didn't print.

2007-04-26T08:31:00.000-07:00

It is human nature to want to apportion blame when something happens - I wake up in the middle of the night and crack my shin on the laundry basket and instantly start thinking about who I can blame for that - my wife? The cats? Bush? In reality, I probably could have moved the fucking basket (let alone done the laundry, but that's another story).

Why am I interested in blame? Today's paper has a front page article about three deaths that occurred last summer in an off campus apartment. Two of the three students were enrolled in the U here (the third was the son of a faculty member who used to go here).

In the article, the parents of one of the dead blames the University. In a sense, I guess, they have to. They sent their precious cargo off to us and she was killed and they need someone to blame. Their argument, as presented in this morning's paper, is not too uncommon, although it is rife with fallacy:

The boy who did the killing was sanctioned for underage drinking. According to the parents of the deceased, every parent of every resident in the dorm should have been informed.
It came out after the incident that the boy who did the killing had a gun in his dorm room. According to the parents of the deceased, the residence hall staff should have known this. [How they should have known this isn't discussed]
According to the parents of the deceased, the University needs to hire "...qualified people who can foresee potential dangers and demand that certain treatment occur before obviously troubled individuals are allowed to continue being afforded the privilege of remaining on campus and receiving an education." In other words, everyone who works in student affairs needs to be able to see into the future. [Perhaps they should hire Snoop Dog, since he has "ho-radar"; perhaps he has a crystal ball as well]
Finally, the parents argue that students who come to college need more observation/intervention, not less.

And I sympathize. To a point. If something happened to my daughter, you better believe that I would not only look for blame but for revenge as well (the parents of the kid who killed my daughter? Suffice it to say that long term financial planning would not soon be in their vocabulary).

That said, these kids are adults. If they had all been working at Wal-Mart at the time, Wal-Mart wouldn't be liable. Or if they had gone to the same church, or eaten at the same restaurant. The cold, hard fact of this is that they were living off-campus during the summer (not, as far as I can tell, even attending classes). It was a tragedy. It was a murder. But I don't think the University is to blame.

Your daily news roundup

2007-04-25T07:53:00.000-07:00

Because I'm persona non grata around here right now (countdown to retirement: 7 working days and counting) I've got nothing better to do than provide you with some interesting hump day reading.

Christopher Hitchens on the VT massacre here. [Brutal, if you ask me, but, as always, provocative].

Beautiful editorial in USA Today from Jonathan Turley here. [Turley teaches at my alma mater George Washington].

Nice rhetorical analysis of a prominent right wing blogger here.

Interesting piece on the '08 elections by Garrison Keillor here.

We had almost two feet of snow dumped on us in the last 24 hours and today it's supposed to be in the fifties. Spring on the high plains.

And another thing

2007-04-24T07:40:00.000-07:00

For those of us who remember Punk the first time around (not Nirvana and not Green Day but The Ramones, Suicidal Tendancies, The Dead Kennedys and the like), Patty Smith's new album is kind of an interesting division/delight. It's interesting in the sense that one of the original punks has put together a tribute album that shows, in some sense, the roots of punk (Stones, Neil Young, Hendrix) and also the successors (Nirvana). And then there are the oddball cuts: "Everybody Wants to Rule the World"? "The Boy in the Bubble"? WTF?

Check it out here.

Two entirely unrelated things

2007-04-24T07:25:00.000-07:00

I'm walking out of my building yesterday and overhear the following:

Boy 1: "dude, I fuckin' tried to reach him all weekend long. He's not answering his phone."
Boy 2: "no, man. He got busted for possession and was so mad he threw his phone against the wall and it broke."

Excellent way to go in to the week before finals.

________

The second is a bit more interesting if only because it relates to why I am fleeing high plains U after only two years.

I'm at breakfast this morning and sitting one table over is a group of folks from student affairs. They are interviewing candidates for our currently-vacant Dean of Students position. The [admittedly sore] subject of orientation comes up. The two SA folks there proceed to take twenty minutes berating faculty for not caring about students, orientation, and all manner of stuff.

Somewhere, in another part of campus, two full professors are complaining that student affairs staff don't know their ass from a hole in the ground and are ruining the U due to their shitty admissions practices and their desire to have a combination day care/summer camp for 18-21 year olds.

How long, O Lord, how long?

An argument I'm working on

2007-04-23T18:58:00.000-07:00

This argument came to me while I was ranting at dinner. I'm still working out the details:

It seems as if guns are the only things we've decided, as a culture, that we need more of to solve a social problem. Think about it - we have a "drug problem" to which the answer is get rid of drugs. We don't like abortions so our answer is to limit or indeed make illegal abortions. Yet we have an increasing amount of gun violence (statistics tell us roughly 30,000 gun deaths a year - more than 10 times the deaths on 9/11 each year) in our country and the answers, from bloggers and pundits and commentators and indeed, presidential hopefuls, is more fucking guns. Are you kidding me?

Where are the holes in my argument?

On Bullies and Bullying

2007-04-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

There was a marvelous essay I read some time ago (in the 2004 or 2005 edition of Best American Science and Nature Writing) that made the rather straightforward argument that we had it all wrong about bullies - that bullies are, in fact, people who possess extraordinarily high self esteem and that their bullying often results when their own self-image is called into question.

This was all news to me. I was always of the opinion that bullies were those possessing low- or no-self-esteem and that they picked on the small kids to "make themselves feel better."

I'm not 100% certain which is worse.

Let me come clean: I was a victim of a lot of bullying in middle- and high-school. From the everyday teasing to the far more violent and malicious physical abuse, high school became for me, by my senior year, a fairly unending series of tortures, humiliations, and insults. To this day I'm not sure why I was the "chosen one" and there were others who got it worse than I did. But I was odd and, probably more than that, enjoyed being odd. I was also small - despite my current hulk-like proportions, I graduated high school a 5' 9'', 140 lb weakling. I didn't know how to dress (and thanks, Mom, for 18 years of toughskins jeans and garanimals match-ups; that fucking helped), I didn't know how to ask for a descent haircut; I had weird friends; I didn't go to parties; the list goes on.

And I see the same thing in my daughter - the "popular girls" have taken great delight in making her last several years miserable - she's small, she reads a lot, she's willing to be friends with the odd balls and losers, she doesn't judge, doesn't wear the cool clothes, doesn't want to fuck Justin Timberlake, doesn't drink &c. It breaks my heart.

[And here's strong irony #1: my wife was a self-confessed "mean girl" through most of high school and college. Fucking rich kids. She can't do anything about it either.]

The hardest part of my job, year in and year out, is to keep from making my job into one long series of revenge fantasies - making sure the star football player and his cheerleader girlfriend have as miserable a time in my company as I had in theirs.

But my self-esteem is too low for that.

It's something to chew on in the coming weeks. We're already getting reports from Blacksburg that the kid who shot up VT felt picked on and isolated. For some of us that's a natural state of being, but for someone who thought really highly of them self, it can, perhaps, cause them to lash out in wildly inappropriate ways.

It's something to think about.

Newsflash

2007-04-20T10:40:00.001-07:00

Interesting news from my old friends the Catholics.

"I love you. Now, don't get shot."

2007-04-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

I live, as far as I can tell, about 130 miles from Littleton, CO, home of the infamous Columbine HS. Today, most of the state of Colorado will, between false bomb threats, take a moment to remember both Columbine, and, unfortunately, Virginia Tech. Yesterday, we remembered Oklahoma City (where I almost ended up this year - long story).

What the hell is going on?

My wife, who teaches high school, is on heightened alert today, as she always is on "Columbine Day." As she and my daughter left for school, I remarked, only half in jest, "I love you. Now don't get shot today."

What the hell is going on?

Listen - I live in a state where owing a gun is practically a requirement for citizenship. Even the faculty hunt and fish. And I include fine arts and humanities faculty in with that crew. This place is a place one comes if one wants to get to know the land - to hunt, fish, hike, ski, bike, walk, and/or camp. I know that taking guns from people or making people register them is a fool's errand. That said, we've got to buck up and say that guns are indeed a growing problem in our culture and we've got to take some drastic measures. Elayne Boosler said it best at the Huffington Post: "We are getting tired of prying the guns out of your cold, dead hands." (Read it here). Perhaps some sort of trade off - we're going to see, as a result of this, a pretty serious erosion of FERPA, so trade some of that "freedom" for a reduction of freedom in guns (indeed, a commentator at Slate yesterday made the insanely great argument that the deepest inconsistency on the right is the right to have guns versus the erosion of rights to have an abortion. (Read it here - the additional argument, that Justice Kennedy's decision is based on a 19th century paternalism is brilliant as well).

We've got to get rid of FERPA. We've got to get rid of guns. We've got to get rid of the right. We've got to get rid of high-interest loans. Oops, sorry to work that last one in.

In other news, I've been getting estimates for moving. Wow, does that suck. The basic argument is "give us $7000 and we'll give you a "window" of when we might get your stuff and then pay us an extra $500 and we'll sort of help you fix anything that gets broken. Sheesh. That said, I don't miss the days of U-hauls and grad students....

Calling on Everybody

2007-04-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

Wilder recalled high school teachers trying to get him to participate, but "he would only shrug his shoulders or he'd give like two-word responses, and I think it just got to the point where teachers just gave up because they realized he wasn't going to come out of the shell he was in, so they just kind of passed him over for the most part as time went on."

Back to some meaningless Bullshit

2007-04-19T09:33:00.000-07:00

For now I'm suffering from VT exhaustion - except for the nagging worry that admissions offices are going to institute criminal background checks and mental health surveys for admittence to the University...

Anyway - thanks for the help on the Intro to Lit stuff. The tentative list is as follows:

Delbanco, Andrew. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. ISBN: 0674003837

Ellis, Bret Easton. Less Than Zero. New York: Vintage, 1998. ISBN: 0679781498.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1999. ISBN 13: 978-0743273565.

Lauter, Paul et al. eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol E: Contemporary (1945-Present). ISBN-13: 978-0-618-53301-5

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey in to the Heart of the American Dream. New York: Vintage, 1998. ISBN: 0679785892

Next question - I'm also teaching Advanced Composition - something I've taught a lot in the past and am now drawing a blank on. I've ordered Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy and had a whole list of stuff for a while and I keep second guessing myself. Any thoughts?

Now we're talkin

2007-04-18T12:17:00.000-07:00

Random thoughts on VT

2007-04-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

I've been obsessively watching the news for the last several cycles and have a number of random and uncollected thoughts about the disaster at Virginia Tech.

The English dept. did the right thing, although the grandstanding by a couple of the faculty ("he was the most dangerous student I've ever had in the history of the world" seems a bit extreme considering you only told counseling once); that said, we, as college faculty, are given often very contradictory messages: treat the students like adults, follow FERPA regulations, but report students if you see anything bad. Report, that is, at your own risk, since faculty and colleges have been repeatedly sued for just this thing ("reporting" a student to counseling). So it's a rock and a hard place - don't report them and you're fucked, report them and you're fucked. The sad reality of all of this is that the shooter was an adult in college, and there is very little that colleges are allowed to do. The real problem is what kinds of changes can/should colleges make? I think we're moving towards a system where colleges have far greater leeway to interfere in a student's life, but the cost will be an increasingly high-school-like campus experience. The final fact is that, given the little we know about the shooter so far, expelling him wouldn't have stopped him in any way. Somehow we needed to deal with him 15 years ago - where were his parents, the school system, etc?
I turn on Fox this morning to find some talking head making the argument that if the students and teachers had been armed this wouldn't have happened. I'd like to walk through the two logical fallacies contained in this argument: 1. if X condition had existed then Y would have been the result. This, of course, assumes that the gun people can tell the future. They can't. The second argument we keep hearing is that in places that have a lot of gun ownership, violence like this is rare. This is also fallacious. The basic argument is because of X conditions, Y happens. This is a classic post hoc fallacy. The idea that there are X conditions and therefore Y results doesn't mean that X caused Y. Indeed, as the British remind us, gun violence is very low in the U.K. for the very opposite reason than the NRA claims (i.e., that gun ownership is all but illegal in any circumstance). So if A reason is no good, then X reason is suspect as well. Indeed, the "proof" that is often cited, that some small towns in the south have all but required gun ownership and that gun violence is pretty rare in these towns, seems to need some context: 1. most of these towns are very small and had consequently few incidents of violence before the gun ordinances were passed; and, 2. most of these towns are fairly economically stable and thus had few incidences of economic crime. The final argument, that if you criminalize guns, then only criminals will have guns doesn't work if the answer isn't criminalize guns but get rid of them instead.
The President and the chief of police and the two-hour silence. I feel bad for these guys. I know enough about University administration to know that their heads are going to have to roll - you've got 33 sets of parents, wives, families, &c. who are going to look to lay blame. They will contact trustees. Trustees won't resign, so someone will have to be sacrificed. Because the head of counseling and the Dean of Students aren't well enough known, their resignation won't matter; thus the President and Chief will have to go. And that's too bad. The sad fact of the matter is that everyone thought this was a domestic dispute - angry boyfriend kills girlfriend and RA who got in the way and then fled. It happens in one form or another all the time (certainly, if a husband kills a wife when she's trying to leave, no one says to "lock down the town"). As many others have already argued, locking down a university is virtually impossible.

This is one of the worst things to happen in my life time. My heart bleeds for the fine people at VT. Their Rhet/Comp program is one of the best in the country - many fine scholars, including Diana George and Paul Heilker are there, as is the person who interviewed me out here (she left right after I got here to go to VT). It will never be the same down there.

Genius

2007-04-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

Do not pass go, do not collect $200. But check this shit out here. You'll be glad you did.

You've got to check this out

2007-04-16T18:14:00.000-07:00

While I'm still fucking stunned by the maelstrom of shit at VT (and, as I predicted, already the President, John McCain, and some gun group in Virginia have all come out and said we need more guns, not fewer), I came across the following "review" of the first annual Food Network Awards by my buddy Bourdain. Check it out here.

Priceless.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Wait. Strike that. People with guns kill people.

2007-04-16T12:59:00.000-07:00

I grew up on college campuses. I was born at McDonald Women's' Hospital, which is part of the University Health Systems of Cleveland. My father was in law school at Case Western and was living in what was then called married student housing. My grandfather at the time was the Executive Secretary of MLA and worked at NYU - my first playground. Indeed, no matter what else happened in the world, the safest place was always a campus. On vacations we would go and visit colleges (prettiest in the world: Cambridge). I learned to swim at the University of Tennessee faculty club pool (where, ironically, 20 years later I tended bar while getting my MA).

To sit in my office and literally watch the VT death toll go from 1 to 21 to 32 is horrifying. VT simply doesn't deserve this. I have friends there. Hell, I applied to work there. Twice. Of course no school deserves this. I simply can't imagine. The way it looks now (Monday, 2:02 MST) is that the shooter locked himself in with a class and executed the lot of them.

And we don't need a system to keep guns out of peoples' hands? Do people think he would have stabbed, bludgeoned, or strangled 31 people to death in an hour or so? Is anyone capable of that?

And I'm sure we'll here from the Prophets on the right that the liberal agenda brought this upon themselves.

Don't buy it. It's a tragedy that dwarfs Columbine and comes close, in pure evil, to 9/11.

There are just some days you want to pack it in. And go home. You have my permission to do so.

Sports Weekend - Imus/Robinson Edition

2007-04-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

It was a strange weekend in the sports world - to celebrate the anniversary of Jackie Robinson integrating professional sports at the same time we watched the flame out of Don Imus was pretty spectacular.

That said, it raised some interesting questions.

I was watching Sportscenter on Sunday morning with Stephen A. Smith when he started talking about a report which said that Major League Baseball has seen a fairly significant decline in African-American players. And in some ways, of course, this is a huge problem. But Smith doesn't seem to be looking for reasons (the reason cited most often is that there has been an increase in Latin American and Asian players who are involved in much more comprehensive youth leagues and are preparing to play professional baseball from the jump - sort of like Junior League Hockey in Canada). Instead he seems to imply that there are hundreds of African American baseball players out there who are being passed over by racist management.

Says who?

The whole baseball argument seems odd to me for a number of reasons:

Baseball is, like football and basketball, a blood sport - one that is dependent upon winning. Show me management that will pass up good players because of some deep seeded inherent racism. Can you find them? Remember Al Campanis? Baseball, more than any other league, has been swift to punish racism in its ranks.
Are we worried, if baseball is down to 6.8% that basketball and football are over 70%? When is a disproportion not a disproportion? It's wrong that our jails are over-populated with African-Americans. When is over-population not wrong?
Why aren't we worried about soccer? Hockey? Figure Skating? Medicine? Law? college Teaching? Engineering? Congress? Come on, Stephen A., start worrying about shit that matters. You should listen more carefully to your own constituency - on Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel, a number of African-American high school students were interviewed and they essentially said Baseball isn't for them - the rewards are too small, the competition is too great, and their heroes all play football and basketball. From the mouths of babes....

What Jackie Robinson did was great, perhaps the greatest political moment in the 20th century. Don't sully it for personal gain.

Don't believe the hype

2007-04-14T20:18:00.000-07:00

So I'm home alone because my wife and daughter are at prom: my daughter as an attendee and my wife as a chaperon (the glamorous life of the daughter of a high school teacher); I'm catching up in my favorite category of films: movies my wife won't watch with me no matter how much in love we are. Tonight's feature: Mission Impossible III.

And I have to say, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it's not bad.

So I find myself now asking if I didn't want to see this movie because I read all the reviews that said it was shit and if the reviews that said it was shit were influenced by the admittedly bizarre behavior of Tom Cruise during what can only be called his weird public courtship of Katie Holmes.

But the film was not bad. J.J. Abrhams created a more human version of the franchise, one that was missing from both of the previous efforts (I sort of liked the first one and didn't care for the second one at all, despite really liking John Woo's films). So here I am, two Manhattans down, dreading watching this film and it turns out the be really good.

Odd.

It will teach one to be more careful when accepting the opinions of the media. I should have known better.

Looking for a Job amongst the most civillized

2007-04-13T13:56:00.000-07:00

Since the truth can now be told (i.e., that I spent most of last year looking for a new job) and since I've successfully completed said job search and since I've changed the name/location of my blogging (thanks, money, for taking the hit for me should anyone come looking), I can speak, a bit, in broad terms, about the last year's job search, in part because it may well have been one of the most demeaning processes I've gone through and in part because it is so odd that I couldn't make some of the shit up that happened to me if I tried. Let me start with some of the raw data:

I applied for 30 jobs. Of these 30, I would gladly have done 25 of them (the other five were either hail Marys or entry-level).
I got 25 phone interviews.
I had 12 requests for on-campus interviews and went on 10 (2 I passed on).
I had two requests for on-campus interviews after I accepted my new job.
I was offered the one job I really wanted. And I took it. The same day. At what they offered (I'm a lot of things, but difficult I am not).
I logged close to 25,000 frequent flier miles, got upgraded to first class six times, missed two flights, rented three cars, stayed in three bed and breakfasts, one former lumber, one "European executive hotel," one airport Marriott, one downtown Sheraton and one casino; bought eleven books in airports, and only had to hassle one school about a reimbursement.

That said, it was an interesting process. Some of the odder things that happened to me:

I interviewed for a number of jobs I seemed under-qualified for and yet didn't even get a phone interview for an entry level job running a writing center at a small liberal arts school in Ohio (no, not that one). The fact that I could come right in and do the job seemed to count not a whit. (The realtor in town, however, emailed me weekly).
In at least three of the interviews I went on I met fewer than 50% of the hiring committees who were responsible for making the decision about whether to hire me or not. How is this even verging on ethical?
I felt, and continue to feel, REALLY BAD for turning one school on the East coast down. They were the nicest bunch of folks I've ever met. But the money was shit and the cost of living HUGE. Sorry. (Excellent drinkers, however).
I am extraordinarily happy that the angriest second-tier state school in the Midwest didn't hire me. I interviewed with them early in the process and would have accepted the position if it had been offered (the town would have been great to live in) but the job itself would have been a daily fucking nightmare. That said, they had a beautiful campus with a brand new library and an even brander newer starbucks.
Strangest moment: giving a presentation at one school in a major metropolitan area and getting in a fight with the dean who has just told me that I've "obviously never taught at a private school before." Huh? Try turning my c.v. to page two, ass.
Second strangest moment: taking three days to get home from one interview (snow on both ends) only to find a voice mail waiting for me when I get into my office telling me they'd offered the job to someone else. Good to make a lasting impression.
Best moment: drunken ride through Philly with the search chair weaving all over the place in his huge pick up truck, constantly lit cigarette ashing all over the place. Perhaps the best bit if sightseeing I've ever done.
I did get to go to MLA and act all important by having seven interviews in a three day period. However, I seem to suck at hotel-room interviews since I didn't get a single on-campus interview out of them.

It's really a pretty hard experience - even with what I thought was a passable c.v. I was treated pretty much like the red-headed stepchild everywhere I went. The sort of "sellers market" mentality that many of these schools had was insulting at best and downright noxious at worst.

This is the third time I've gone on the market (once in 1994, once in 2004, and this year). I'm hoping not to do it again. The job I did get, in a strange bit of karma, is exactly the one I've been looking for. Great group of folks at a great school in a great part of the country (have I mentioned the pool yet? Thought so. We also have a guest house, a barn, a lagoon, and a big acre of land that will either be a corral for horses or a par three practice hole - depends upon who gets there first).

Those of you on or going on the job market, you have my deepest sympathy. One of my hopes is that as chair I'll finally get a chance to run a search the right way.

The Don Imus Flap (special Snoop-Dog ho-radar edition)

2007-04-13T07:36:00.000-07:00

It's been, needless to say, a pretty interesting week in medialand. The quick disintegration of the 30 year career of Don Imus and the clear battle lines it has drawn/exposed over race and sex and class and privilege has been a fun one to watch from my perch high atop the Rocky Mountains.

There seems to be, from what I can tell, three things going on with/in the Imus flap:

Race: what white people and what black people can say about white and black people and who gets to decide this.
Sex: what men and women can say about each other and who gets to decide this.
Money. Plain and simple.

On race: Of course you knew Imus would burn for what he said. He's got too much history with the knife-edge or racism to keep getting away with it. The fact that he and his gang of angry white men had been doing this for a while finally served as a catalyst and not the excuse it had always been ("oh that's just Don being Don" finally led to "why the hell have you let him get away with this before."). The real issue, as NPR discussed ad nausem this morning, is whether this will make any sort of meaningful difference: Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, Opie and Anthony, Howard Stern, and others use this kind of language on a daily basis and no one is threatening them. [My answer to that is below in the money "section"]. The other problem, as pointed out so pleasantly by my buddy Snoop Dog, is that we're at a unique moment in our culture where people of color have some power in the media - Snoop's argument is pretty simple [and I'm paraphrasing here] I call women hos because I know what a ho is. I'm writing about the street, where women are hos and not about the basketball team whose women aren't hos. In other words, I have special ho-radar and Imus doesn't. The real challenge is going to be for the Sharptons and the Jacksons to call bullshit on that kind of rationalization (the we're just keepin' it real argument is tired). In other words, Imus can't call a women a ho because he's an old white man but Snoop can because he's a young black man.

On sexism. Related to the above is the ho business (far more insidious than the "nappy headed" part, if you ask me, although not initially). This is where Imus and Snoop tend to work the same ground - the idea that they can use their media power to keep women marginalized (they're all fucking for money - ain't that a shame). The fact that both Snoop and Imus feel they have a special sort of X-ray vision that can look at a woman and tell if she is, in fact, trading sex for money is demeaning, and the media is at fault if it doesn't draw this parallel/conclusion. To continue to let Snoop and 50 cent and Jeezy and Dre and Kanye West (who somehow becomes a "positive rapper" by calling women gold diggers instead of hos - riddle me that one Batman) demean women in the name of keeping it real is a growing problem that will, if I have to predict, cause a fairly severe backlash (I can already sense it brewing out here in the land of guns and Jesus).

Money talks. Everything else is for show. It was only after 10 sponsors pulled out of Imus that his show died. Why? Because this is about race but not really? Because, ultimately, this was a Stalinist show-trial of the highest order? Because we, as a country, don't really care what Imus said. But if there's a threat of losing money, then we'll jump high and often. It's an issue that isn't going away - as more than one commentator has pointed out, CBS is owned by Viacom, which also owns MTV and several record companies, all of whom makes millions of dollars through the selling of a gendered product that puts women fairly far to the outside.

Finally; it would be nice if this all lead to some conversations - because what no one is saying is the fairly obvious point that if you dress like a thug and then are called a thug, you are part of the equation, not an innocent bystander. The idea, expressed in a series of USA Today pieces from a year ago about recent college grads who go on the job market and show up for interviews in flip flops with their visible thongs and tats and then are shocked that they are perceived as unprofessional, is silly. Perception is reality. Imus learned it. Sharpton knows it, and the rest of us need to see it.

Intro to Lit: Taking Shape

2007-04-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

Good suggestions so far. I can't believe I left HST out - I'm loosing my grip. Fear and Loathing is definitely in (I've taught it before and it stands as a wonderful compliment to The Great Gatsby, specially since Thompson has repeatedly said that Gatsby is one of the novels he patterned F&L on).

Mamet's another good one, although since we're reading Death of a Salesman, I'm not sure what Mamet to do (I'd like to do Sexual Perversity in Chicago, but I'd also like to keep my job). Thoughts? What about How I Learned to Drive? Oleana? Company?

What about poetry?

[For the record, I love the Rabbit books, but my wife has sworn she would leave me if I ever taught something as fundamentally sexist as Updike. So I have that to worry about.]

Keep the suggestions coming.

Intro to Lit

2007-04-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

One of the courses I will be teaching at my new place of employment will be Intro to Lit, a three credit gen ed non-majors course. For many of our students, it will be the only literature course they take. The course has only one real curricular requirement, which is that students need to read fiction, poetry and drama (I've added literary non-fiction to that list).

Most of the courses are themed. The person doing it now is doing classics. I'm thinking of doing "The Post-War American Dream."

Any thoughts on curriculum? Assignments? Books? (I'm thinking, so far, of The White Album, Less Than Zero, The Great Gatsby and then the Heath Anthology (vol. E, 1945-Present) - it has a lot of good poetry (it's either that or kill them with something like Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror). This way we can look at G. Brooks and "Howl" and all sorts of good contemporary stuff (the anthology will be waiting for me when I get to my new location).

OK all of you master teachers and students - what would you want to learn in a class like this.

New Album Alert: Buffalo

2007-04-11T08:17:00.000-07:00

The Zappa's finally opened up the vault again and out crawled an absolute masterpiece. Buffalo is an entire concert recorded in Buffalo on October 25, 1980. It is an important document because it features what I feel was Zappa's best band - including Steve Vai on "stunt guitar" and Vinnie Colaiuta on "Drums, vitamins and percussion workbooks".

You can only get the record from the Barfko-Swill store at musictoday.com, and they want $20.00 for it, but if you want to hear some of the best improve ever recorded, you need to check it out ASAP.

Book Report: Political Fictions

2007-04-10T20:26:00.000-07:00

Recently, due in part to my idiotic tendency to to say yes to shit I really don't understand, I've found myself overseeing some testing of our young, impressionable first-year students. Since I've finished with most of what I "have" to read (stuff for an article I'm working on, stuff for class &c.), I ended up going back through the shelves of my office looking to re-read some stuff that I haven't read in a while. So I ended up re-reading Political Fictions, Joan Didion's collection of her political writing for The New York Review of Books. It's one of those books that I read when it first came out as fast as I could and then put it on the shelf. It's much better the second time around (that, and the fact that I've subscribed to TNYRB since 1989 in large part because that's where Didion has been publishing and so I read a lot of these when they first came out).

They are magnificent. She takes us on a history of American Presidential politics from Reagan to Bush II, with several stops in Clinton-land. The scary thing is that she sees the problems that we are having today just as they are beginning to form - the fact that politics, especially the process of running for office, has been so utterly corrupted by "the script" that it's an essentially meaningless operation. That it doesn't matter who we vote for or what we care about - the decision has been made for us by the 1000 or so people who pay for all of it.

Highlights: her discussion of Ronald Reagan approaching the presidency as if it were a film shoot; her evisceration of Bob Woodward's book about the 1996 election; her "critique" of Newt Gingrich; and her long re-assessment of Clinton in light of the Starr report.

Best line: It occurred to me during the summer of 1988, in California and Atlanta and New Orleans, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations.

It's a thing of beauty. It's prescient. It sees the future. If we had only listened.

The Articulation Blues

2007-04-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, USA Today and The New York Times are all reporting this morning on a study just released by the fine folks at ACT that high school teachers and college teachers expect different things out of their students and that 30 years or so of "articulation" work (the fine name we give to the process of University Faculty coming down from on high to shit all over high school faculty and tell them they're doin' in wrong) hasn't really done anything.

Ya think?

I've had an interesting experience over the last two years working on just this issue.

What has been doubly interesting is the fact that I've been doing this work in a state where there is only one four year school and where, at last count, close to 70% of our K-12 teachers got one or more of their degrees from our fair school. And we can't even come close to making things work here. If we can't, how the hell can they do this work in places like Ohio, where one can't go but 2 miles without bumping into a college or university of some sort.

It has led to some interesting conversations; I'll give you that. I spent, for instance, two days last February hanging around with a bunch of high school and university biology teachers and was interested to find that we already knew what ACT just told us: high schools are teaching way to much specific, testable "content" (in large part because that's what NCLB finds it easiest to test for: anatomy and physiology, terms, &c.); the colleges would rather students get here knowing the scientific method. Same thing goes for English: students are learning literature and literary terms, because that's easy to test for - university would rather students get here knowing how to write complete, readable sentences.

Part of this is a manpower issue - my wife, who teaches high school language arts, is pretty quick to think that the University is full of crap - let someone with 200 students meeting in a small room for 42 minutes a day five days a week try to teach writing process - how might that happen? (Indeed, the next time ANYONE on a 2-2 load complains about ANYTHING you have my permission to punch them in the face). And part of it's a training issue (Praxis, anyone?).

I have no answers to this beyond "why is ACT wasting money telling us stuff that we already know"?

For those of you in either K-12 or University - keep up the good work. It will all be done by robots soon enough, leaving us plenty of time to write journal articles no one reads.

Debate, Dialectic, Rhetoric

2007-04-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's because I just spent the past three days cleaning my house in order to sell it and my back hurts and my arms hurt and my feet hurt from hauling box after miserable motherfucking box of books from my office to the garage.

Perhaps its because I'm a lapsed Presbyterian with some lapsed Jewish blood and I just spent the weekend hearing about how I'm going to hell because I skipped both Easter and Passover to see Grindhouse.

Perhaps its because I had to go to Cheyenne on Saturday to buy birthday presents for relatives and because of the intense fog an annoying 45 minute trip took two hours each way and as a consolation prize I got stuck in the middle of the "Junior Prom Fashion Show" at Dillards.

Perhaps it's because as of Friday I own two houses and have two jobs.

Or perhaps its because I spent all weekend grading freshmen essays (assignment: argument, topic open, except you can't write about Abortion or the movie Rudy.)

So what do I get, but half a dozen papers on why all abortions ought to be banned and all abortion doctors ought to be killed.

What the fuck?

I live in a state where the state house is trying to pass a law requiring gun owners to defend themselves and there property with their guns. I live in a state with one of the highest incidences of automobile accidents that just this year got rid of open container laws and still doesn't require you to wear a helmet when you ride. I live in a state that is almost entirely owned by the government and yet the citizens hate the government.

I repeat: what the fuck?

I guess this is what I don't understand: no one, not me, not the government, not even Hillary Clinton, is telling you to get an abortion. So why do you feel you can tell everyone else? Is it because your judgment is that much better than theirs? Is it because you are morally superior to them? Is your God better than theirs? I just don't get where this comes from - you'll gleefully put prisoners to death, vote for a dude (twice) who gleefully sends soldiers off to their deaths, gleefully kill all manner of animals in order to both eat and stuff them, and yet if a 16 year old girl gets pregnant from a 24 year old boy who has no intention of helping either emotionally or financially, you'll tell her "tough shit, your fault, life sucks, put it up for adoption."

One more time: what the fuck?

The answer in all of these papers that I read was adoption. As if that's the panacea. As if it's that easy. As if the (supposed) millions of middle- and upper-class white families waiting to adopt children (never seem to see much research on this issue) are looking to adopt black or Hispanic children. As if putting a child up for adoption guarantees that it won't be state raised. As if.

Enjoy your Monday. My new house has a pool. You're all invited.

Making Precipitation Commence on Females of Questionable Repute

2007-04-08T15:04:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to understand my role in this new blog: I'm to put up silly shit that balances out Kelly's more thoughtful endeavors. And in the spirit of embracing my new position here at the deuce, here's some dorm basketball from Vandy that cracks me up.

I love the nonchalant reactions these guys give after most shots. Fun stuff. One of my goals for this year is to take a video of something or other (probably cat related) and set it to some hardcore hip hop and put it up on Youtube. Maybe slow shit down, show some replays, et cetera. Should be a lark, no? (FYI, I think I caught this on Deadspin first.)

Whatever else you might think, I'm still just Jenny from the block

2007-04-07T18:00:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my boy e-dog for letting me guest blog (which would make me the Anthony Bourdain to his Michael Ruhlman – see http://blog.ruhlman.com/ for more). Since I ended my blog in a fit of hubris-tinged morality, I’ve had a lot left to say and no where to say it. So, without further adieu, and with apologies to Sports Illustrated’s Peter King, I offer:

TEN THINGS I THINK I KNOW ABOUT THE STATE OF ENTERTAINMENT IN THIS YEAR OF OUR LORD 2007

1. Scrubs is no longer funny. I’m not 100% certain when this happened. Of all of the shows we were looking forward to this TV Year this was at the top of our list. Yet for some reason we are no longer interested in it at all. It makes me wonder how a show can go from high to low so quickly. The only thing I can think of is that the writers get complacent – that they’ve draw the characters so carefully that they can depend upon their external actions to carry the plot of the show and no longer need much plot that’s internal (the wedding, the dating, the baby &c). Now we just get a half an hour of idiosyncrasy that substitutes for story. Related to this is:

2. 24 is not particularly engaging either. In fact it sucks. And I don’t know why. The early premise – Jack back from China, Audrey gone to Six Degrees (a show that had a lot of promise), Chloe and her husband ruling the roost in the CTU, another President Palmer. What could go wrong. Well, apparently everything. I don’t know any other way to say it, but the show is boring. Jack, after six years of this shit, seems to make the same bad decisions year after year. CTU is infested with traitors year after year. The President is fucked by his cabinet year after year (and speaking of this, why the fuck is the President saddled with so many incompetents and losers all in one year)? For the last two years this has been one of the best shows on television. Now what?

3. Heroes turns out to be a pretty great show. I didn’t watch it when it began – I figured I already had too many shows to watch, but I ended up watching an episode when stuck in a hotel in Philadelphia and am now addicted. Which brings up another point – both Heroes and Lost have really tried my patience this year with the six weeks off between episodes crap. I say go to the FX model and have two separate seasons. Which leads me to:

4. FX has figured out that no one else has original programming in the summer. Starting with The Shield and later with the Denis Leary Show about Firefighters whose name I can’t remember right now, FX runs great shows all summer when everyone else is in reruns. Why is this? The networks have killed, again and again, the golden goose.

5. Speaking of killing the golden goose. There have been a number of articles in the music and popular press about the demise of the record industry (excellent editorial in this week’s New York Times by a couple of indy record store owners). As I was driving over the Curtis Street viaduct listening to a new album that I had just downloaded via iTunes for $9.99 when I realized that I would have paid $18.99 for the exact same record (give or take the liner notes and slightly less-compressed recording) at our local record store. Why? How fucking stupid to the record companies think we are? And now it turns out that EMI thinks that they are going to sell me songs at a higher price on iTunes. Why? Make money the old fashioned way – sign good artists, make good music, and then sell it to me at a fair price.

6. Were are you supposed to hear new music anyway? As it turns out, there’s a lot of great music, I just don’t hear it. You used to be able to count on FM rock stations (there’s a reason people talk about WMMS or WLVQ in sacred terms – these were radio stations that actually seemed to care about music, with program directors who seemed to be doing what they did because they loved being involved, however marginally, with the music business). Now I turn on the radio and hear the same 20 songs over and over again. And while I’m thankful to Clear Channel radio for making me and the rest of my family independently wealthy (full disclosure – my old man was a consultant for them when they bought their first radio stations and got in on the stock when it was first offered), I think they have just about ruined radio.

7. That said, I am in love with Explosions in the Sky. No further explanation needed. Check them out. I’ve had several due dates in the past two weeks and both of my articles have been written almost exclusively to Explosions (that and Alex Skolnick’s new album – he’s the former lead guitarist for Testament who has formed a jazz trio that is incredible). Check out their sick version of “Tom Sawyer.”

8. And speaking of “Tom Sawyer.” Rush has a new album coming out May 1. The Eagles have a new album coming out later this year. Sounds like 1981 all over again. If only we could get that big Supertramp reunion moving.

9. Speaking of reunions. The Police sold out the Pepsi center in an hour. Stubhub will sell me tickets for $999 a piece. Not worth it. Saw them (The Police) at Richfield Coliseum in 1982. It was worth it then. Not now. And Steely Dan is only playing the coasts. And the Eagles are working on their record. Not such a great reunion summer. Genesis anyone?

10. Final random thoughts: As I write this my wife and daughter are watching the HBO premier of The Lake House. Why? I just bought and read in one afternoon Atul Gwande’s new collection Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. I made my last class at Mount Union read his first book, Complications and they seemed to like it (he’s a staff essayist for The New Yorker). For those sad few of you who lack all of Joan Didion’s work, there’s a new omnibus collection called We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, which collects Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, and Political Fictions (and perhaps her memoir about California – I didn’t get that far in the TOC). Get it now. Miami Vice Season III and IV and Twin Peaks Season II are out. Why don’t you have them yet? And so, as I bid you farewell, remember, please, to “take Rico with you.”

Ball Rolling: Addictions

2007-04-07T13:53:00.000-07:00

Hello there. If you're reading this, then you know me, and although that's it's own reward, I'd like to offer you more than the pleasure of my company. For instance: this video of Eddie Vedder and Kings of Leon doing "Slow Night, So Long" is pretty much really great.

The lead singer of KoL (Caleb?) talks frankly and often about his addiction to beautiful women and how it'll be his downfall one day. Seems to me that if beautiful women is your addiction, you're okay letting it undo you. One of them happy problems, you know?

In my case, I'd list my official addictions as

Starbucks,
singing along with the car radio (even if I don't know the words),
reading fun stuff when I need to be reading Important Stuff,
double-knotting my shoelaces,
never breaking book spines,
crystal meth, and
BBQ potato chips.

I can't live without these things, or at least I'm not willing to find out what life is like without them. Whether any will do me in remains to be seen, but sooner or later I'm'a be singing the wrong song in the wrong car...

Any addictions you'd like to share? Or are you one of those pathetic even-keeled people who gets profiled in Prevention magazine?