The Realm of Pseudo-Profundities

Life After Graduate School?

2007-09-09T20:56:00.000-07:00

Since I have received a recent inquiry whether I am still alive, I would like to answer the question. To clarify, I would like to answer the question. I believe the answer is "Yes," but how can one be sure? Presumably, if one is dead, one does not feel tired, so if one feels tired, then is one not alive? Since classes started, I'm spending about 70 hours a week either in class or prepping for it, so I'm afraid I won't have much time for blog postings (for those of you who have not yet guessed). I love this blog, and the word "Pseudo-profundities" has been very good to me, but I just don't anticipate being able to write much in the near future. Anyway. Faulkner is calling me.

A Roswellian Future?

2007-07-17T14:49:00.000-07:00

As we've been getting ready to leave to the undisclosed location which houses our university employer, we've realized how many resources are available to us here that won't be available in our new home. Sure, our new home will have smoothies, but will they have the special garlic pizza recipe that's available here? Probably not. When I visited, a person didn't know what a Panera is, so I'm a little broken up about that, too. I'm sure there will be some carryover, but part of the difficulty in planning your last few meals/errands before moving is that you don't always know which places you can never see again.

One of the places we have already begun to miss is the local library, which has an incredible DVD collection. You can rent half a season of a show for just $1.00! Admittedly, you must watch that half a season in three days, but let's see the 75% full glass here, people! Admittedly, we have an account with Blockbuster Online, so they can send us television shows by mail; the problem is that the shows we get through Blockbuster Online are inevitably those shows that we both want to see, meaning that much quality programming gets neglected, such as Babylon 5. Anyway, upon one of my raiding expeditions at the local library, I found Roswell, a show I never got around to watching back when it was on the WB. Believing it would probably be "non-wife watching material," I took it out, only to discover that my wife was at least willing to give it a try (her X-Files affections won out).

There is a lot to like about the series. From the very first episode there was good conflict and a sense of an overarching plot (there's another alien out there too? he's killing people? And the sheriff wants to bring you in?). And even though these aliens were not of the Smallville butt-kicking variety, they still had some pretty cool powers.

However, there is something really not to like about the series: relationships. The dialogue is painful. For instance, when human Elizabeth (who loves alien Max) is talking with her boyfriend Kyle, she asks him if he "feels things" about her. He hesitantly affirms that he does indeed "feel things." I thought only George Lucas wrote dialogue like this! Where's Anakin Skywalker pleading, "Please don't let the kiss become a scar." (What did he mean, anyway? A hickey? By the way, at one point in the series Elizabeth does get a glowing alien hickey from Max, which eventually turns into a wound, so the kiss quite literally becomes a scar. I'm not making this up, people!)

I understand that some teenagers might talk this way. I understand one could argue that it is important in creating a show to represent teenagers realistically--I seem to remember hearing that in the scripts of My So-Called Life, writers would actually include the word "like" (e.g., "that's so, like, true") to give it that feeling of authenticity. But you know, I feel things about that kind of dialogue--things like rage and vitriol. So when Elizabeth writes in her journal about how there's something so perfect about driving in a car with the boy you like and the wind blowing through your hair, I am delighted that the car crashes, but disappointed that her journal was not also destroyed in the crash.

The characters in relationships do incredibly stupid things: for example, aliens are basically indestructible (Max has never been sick a day in his life); however, they learn that if they engage in Indian sweat ceremonies (don't ask), they might possibly die. The incident frightens Liz because it teaches her aliens are mortal (duh!). Max resolves from this incident--an incident that didn't even affect him, but another alien!--that they need to break up, because he can't risk accidentally dying on her. If you had to compare survival rates between people who are never sick but are vulnerable to sweat ceremonies and people who get sick, I think the former has better odds.

The problem is not simply that characters do incredibly stupid things, but they talk about them. They have to analyze "What is Max thinking?" and "Why doesn't Michael just let me in?" I find myself asking, "Why don't they just stop letting me in?" and "Do you really need to show me them getting back together and making out again?" The scene where Max was tortured by alien-hunters was almost a relief because it did not involve Liz looking "meaningfully" at him again.

So, even though the show did have good parts--parts I haven't really written about--we don't know if the teenager aspects of the show are too painful for us to make it to season 2. We may have to leave the local library behind, but we have not yet decided on whether we will leave behind Roswell. I guess we'll have to figure out if we feel things.

Warning: This Mailbox is Harmful to Your Health

2007-07-07T12:21:00.000-07:00

There are very many dangers to the existence of humanity. Cereal, for example. The difficulty is that, as dangers proliferate and we are forced to write more warning labels, we might get a little lazy. Now, in the beginning, warning labels were very clear about what bad things might happen to you: for example, "Surgeon General's Warning: cigarettes contain carbon monoxide." Granted, children probably wouldn't know what that actually is, but it sure sounds bad. After all, children know how painful "hydrogen peroxide" is, so any word that rhymes with it is just inviting trouble.

Well, now that my wife and I are finished our dissertations and going to teach at university (yeah!), we went to look into housing. Something that we found slightly disturbing--both at our hotel and at some of the apartments we visited--is that there was a warning (I do not remember the exact words), "This contains substances that are harmful." Now, I'm perfectly happy that they informed me that I might possibly die if I stayed in the hotel or lived in their apartment. However, I would have liked to know more about how I would die--would it be in my sleep? Would my intestines simply liquify? And it also would have been nice to know what "this" is. In one particular case, we saw the notice posted in front of the group mailbox at the apartment complex. So, did this mean that I was safe so long as I never visited "this" mailbox? Or, since the mailboxes were near the swimming pool, perhaps it was referring to the pool area itself? Perhaps the oddest thing is that, when we asked the apartment complex person didn't even realize there was a notice posted. (Or, at least, she pretended not to know.) She remarked that the signs were so ubiquitous that one didn't even notice they were there anymore. And really, what would be the point of paying them if they aren't even telling you how you're endangering your life? What's the point of printing a notice that is hopelessly vague and useless? I wish the notice said something that I could actually understand, like, "Warning: laboratory experiments have determined that this notice harms the environment by wasting paper."

Academic Calendar Unfairly Privileges Saturnalia Worshippers

2007-06-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

In "Understanding Christian privilege: Managing the tensions of spiritual plurality," published in About Campus, Tricia Seifert argues that Christian students benefit from "Christian privilege," defined as "the conscious and subconscious advantages often afforded the Christian faith in America's colleges and universities." Now, I have not actually read the article, since I cannot find it available for free on the web--fight the power, man!--but I've read the description of her argument in Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle describes one of her arguments: "The design of the academic calendar is perhaps the most obvious example of this phenomenon, according to Ms. Seifert. It is no coincidence, she writes, that campuses shut down just in time for the Christmas holiday, leaving non-Christian students forced to 'negotiate conflicts between their studies and their spiritual observances.' In some years, for instance, the Muslim holiday of Ramadan coincides with many campuses' week of midterm exams."

To the best of my knowledge, however, Seifert does not single out perhaps the most obvious beneficiary of these academic calendar policies: Saturnalia worshippers. Are you telling me that it is "coincidence" that campuses shut down in December, just in time for students to engage in pagan saturnalia orgies? I think not. Why is there so much rampant sex on college campuses? Is it not because we treat the non-Saturnalia worshipper as a second class citizen? As wikipedia remarks, "During Saturnalia ... there was drinking, gambling, and singing, and even public nudity." Spring break, anyone? Our entire academic system is implicitly structured to encourage students to worship the Roman pantheon!

So, how do we encourage non-Saturnalia worshippers to exercise their beliefs in non-Saturn? The problem is that the Saturnalia season is so much a part of our culture that we cannot escape it. So, let's take a lesson from the early Christians: when the pagans around them were all like, "Ho, praise to Saturn!" and "Rock on, December 25th, birthday of the unconquered sun," Christians said, "Okay, I'm going to celebrate your little 'December 25th holiday,' but instead of calling it 'Dies Natalis Solis Invicti,' I'm simply going to call it 'The birthday of Jesus, who, by the way, kicked your god's butt.'" To put it another way, perhaps one can find a way to accomodate the religious system to work around the calendar which the culture is already observing--maybe make December 25th "National Jesus appeared to Mohammed in a vision and said 'My Disciples got it Wrong' Day," or for the less religious hedonist, perhaps "The first time Epicurus got laid day."

We Demand Non-Demon Follower Representation

2007-05-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

What do you do if you really hate a television show or its message? There might seem to be a simple answer to your dilemma: don't watch the show. The problem is, when you're at home alone, even if you walk around the house making loud proclamations such as "I'm not gonna watch that show!" or "It's 8:00, who's in front of the tv? Not me! Unless it's to hurl tomatoes!" your protest doesn't have much impact, especially if the show is popular among other consumers. So how can we penalize the show without physically killing its writers or producers? We boycott the advertisers, and the show loses money and is cancelled.

It is in this spirit that I call attention to last week’s episode of Supernatural. The television story is about two brothers, Sam and Dean, who hunt demons and try to save people. “Sounds like the sort of show I could watch without throwing tomatoes,” you say? Think again. In this most recent episode, Sam, who is gifted with psychic powers, is abducted and placed in a deserted town with four other psychics. We discover that apparently a demon has taken them to the town with the intention that they will kill each other, and the winner will be rewarded with super powers and get to serve demons. Sam laudably determines that it would be better to flee the town and not kill his fellow psychics. After various deaths, there are finally just two psychics left: Sam, and a U.S. soldier stationed in Afghanistan. Sam entreats the soldier (whose super powers include benchpressing 800 pounds) that they should work together. Sam puts down his knife. The U.S. soldier puts down his less pointy weapon. And then … the soldier sneak attacks him! After a brawlfest, Sam defeats the soldier, has the chance to kill him … and doesn’t. Sam turns his back, and the U.S. soldier cowardly stabs him in the back and then goes running off to become a demon minion.

It should go without saying that this is an uncharitable way of representing the U.S. military. To the best of my knowledge, U.S. military training does not encourage its soldiers to serve demons or kill unarmed American civilians when their backs are turned. The producers of the show are not simply criticizing U.S. foreign policy but demonizing our troops … quite literally. The producers are not simply anti-military, but un-American.

What kind of fiendish advertisers could support such a show, you ask? Perhaps Moveon.org? Hamas? I was rather astonished to see the Sam-stabbing incident was followed by an advertisement for the U.S. army itself. Forget the NEA! Our tax dollars are going to support artistic works that demonize the military, such as those artists supported by the U.S. army!

We need to send advertisers such as the U.S. Army a clear message: we have a zero tolerance policy for undermining troop morale. If U.S. troops were supernaturally transported to a ghost town, they probably would not obey demons, and we have to be willing to boycott advertisers who suggest otherwise. The clearest way to show we support our troops is by not joining the army.

K-Martyr

2007-04-19T08:00:00.001-07:00

When last I chronicled my adventures, I was dutifully searching amazon.com on a daily basis simply to confirm the fact that they had no wiis available, except by wii ebay scalpers. Well, I have finally purchased a wii, and sadly, I did capitulate and buy a wii via ebay. How did I rationalize my capitulation into supporting villains? After all, did I not compose "The Wii Poem":

My money: spendable
availability: undependable
Production slowness: indefensible
Ebay sellers: reprehensible

Am I not turning my back on principle, you ask? Is this not like the Iran-Contra affair and selling arms for hostages? Admittedly, even though there were neither weapons nor hostages involved per se, I see why you might see similarities with my own situation. In my attempt to set free a wii—to liberate it from the wicked ebayers who took it prisoner—am I not giving the ebayers more financial weapons, enabling them to take even more wiis hostage? In the end, I decided to give money to these evildoers not because their evil seems less evilly evil in my eyes, but because my eyes have been opened to the fact that “the establishment” is just as wicked.

Let me explain. A few weeks ago, K-Mart’s circular revealed that they would be selling wiis! Resolved to own a wii, I got up in the wii hours of the morning so that I could be the first in line. Sadly, the weather was what one would expect on an April morning in the Midwest: freezing cold. As I stood in front of the store an hour before opening, it dawned upon me that, since no one else was actually waiting there, no one could steal my place in line. With a shiver of triumph, I left the store to sit in my car, eyes diligently scanning the parking lot. Sure enough, fifteen minutes later, a newcomer drove up, so I jumped out of the car and ran to the front of the store to mark my territory. In a non-urinary way. Even so, I had a partial fear that when employees came to open the store, the newcomer would claim he got here before me, and then I’d have to beat him up. In fact, a few other people came around and got dangerously close to the door, so I struck a heroic pose to make it clear that I was there first. It turned out that they were just going in to work, so it didn’t have to come to blows.

Well, five minutes before opening time, the manager came out to let me and the newcomer (who knew what was good for him and didn’t pretend that he was there first) that they had not actually received any wiis. However, she offered us a ray of hope. There was another K-Mart, just 40 minutes away, and she had just called there: apparently, the manager was able to confirm the fact that she had not gotten around to opening the shipments for that day, which is virtually a guarantee (in the mind of the wii-hungry) that wiis must be in the shipment!

Sadly, I did not actually know the way to get to this K-Mart. However, the newcomer offered to let me follow him. I was a little suspicious, but when I realized that, if he tried to take me the wrong way, he would just be thwarting his own wii-purchasing desires, I agreed to follow. And to tell the truth, there was a kind of solidarity: no longer were we two strangers competing against each other for the prize of the wii. Now, we were two comrades competing against the villainous K-Mart corporation, who had tricked us into going to the wrong K-Mart building in an effort to sabotage our hopes and dreams.

After driving 40 minutes to the other K-Mart (and frantically hoping that other people—smarter people who knew which K-Mart was actually selling wiis--had not bought them all), we discovered that this K-Mart hadn’t received them, either. The K-Mart employee who delivered the bad news even remarked that it was somewhat shameful, given that K-Mart had done the same bait and switch tactic ad campaign with the X-Box last year. It seems counterintuitive, but corporations can apparently mail circulars claiming to have a “limited quantity” of a product that they will not actually have when the doors first open.

Sleep-deprived, time-deprived, gas-deprived, disappointed, and lacking any concrete villains at which to shake my fist, I determined to blame all corporations that sold the wii. At least when ebayers advertise that a wii is available, you can actually buy it. If I had happened to go to one of the rare K-Marts that actually had a wii as advertised, would I want my hard-earned money to help them produce more circulars to sucker more people? When you stop and think about it, wouldn’t that be worse than the Iran-Contra affair? And if it was clear that K-Mart had done this, how could I ever know that Walmart, Target, and Circuit City were not similarly depraved? Having convinced myself that K-Mart was irredeemably evil, I was gradually persuaded that ebayers were the lesser of two evils. After all, K-Mart was habitually wicked. They had used the same bait and switch tricks with the X-Box, and they would surely do the same thing again. Many ebayers, on the other hand, are only going to be wicked for as long as there is a wii shortage. Perhaps some of them are trapped in poverty, and that $125 profit they made off of me will give them enough to buy textbooks for college—perhaps even textbooks for an ethics class, in which they learn how wicked they are, and then they repent and send me my money back. My money would actually help them be redeemed! Buying an ebayers’ wii was actually a ministry: now now I have my wii, and now they know how bad they are.

What Happens to a Wii Deferred?

2007-04-13T14:11:00.000-07:00

I was going to title this entry "A Wii Bit of Trouble," but then I discovered the title's already been taken.

For the past several months now, I have been laboring under a weight which sags like a heavy load, i.e., my dissertation. But through the struggle, through the clenched fists, a dream has kept me going: after I turn in my dissertation, I told myself, I will buy a wii. You may remember that I blogged about the wii back in November. At that time, it was very difficult to obtain a Wii. In my naivete, I believed that by the time I turned my dissertation into my committee--which was yesterday, over four and a half months since I had first played the wii--I could just walk into a store, and a wii would be there! Nope.

Sadly, I am but a Wii novice, and unskilled in the art of obtaining a wii. "Aren't all people wii novices?" you might well ask. The answer is "No." A "Wii novice" is "someone who wants to buy just one wii to share with his family." A wii professional, by contrast, is"someone who wants to buy as many wiis as possible so he/she can sell them on ebay for $150 more than he/she paid for them."

What has been fascinating to me as I have lurked in the wii discussion board on amazon is the number of ebay sellers who don't feel for beating out people waiting in line for their first wii. On the discussion board, members share various tips on what store will next be selling a wii, but on how to amass as many of them as possible: for example, it is my understanding that, even though you can only buy one wii at a time from amazon.com when they sell them, as soon as you have purchased one, you can go right back and purchase another until they are sold out (which happens in 8-30 minutes). One writes, "2 computers, 2 $15000 limit credit cards, 2 accounts, here i wait." As another remarks, "Also here to sell. Seems like there are more EBAYERS than actual customers." On one thread, an ebayer remarked how, after beating out several people who wanted a wii, he told them where there was going to be another sale that day, and how good it made him feel that he saw several of them at the next store.

In reading these thread, it feels like I am entering another world. People understand themselves not to be greedy jerks but providing a helpful service--they sit patiently at their computers so that others don't have to. Given how thoroughly absorbed I am in my own perspective--that I also am sitting patiently at my computer but not getting any because "there are more EBAYERS than actual customers"--they seem like jerks.

In person, of course, many of them aren't "jerks." Some of them might be in it for the thrill of the chase--buying as many wiis in a short space of time becomes a kind of competitive 100 meter dash (a "wii sport," if you will). One dealer's bragging that he "made $1892.00 (profit) last week off 10 units" is perhaps not substantially different from bragging about one's corporate portfolio, or perhaps the size of one's thingie. And let's face it, once you've had to go to all the trouble of buying a wii for yourself--of having rss feeds sent to you from wiihunter.com and wiitracker.com any time there's a wii sale--do you really want to let all of your learning go to waste?

In reality, I pity these people. The price of progress is that, one day, "everyone will have a wii," and the services of the wii master tradesman will no longer be required. I am reminded of the words in a Flogging Molly song,

My name it is Sean Dempsey as Dublin as could be./ Born hard and late in Pimlico in a house that owned a Wii./ My trade I was a cooper, lost out to redundancy/ Like my house that fell to progress my trade's a memory."

(Okay, the real line was, "in a house that ceased to be.")

GooglePicture

2007-03-20T16:58:00.000-07:00

Last week, I went for an on-campus visit to a school that should remain nameless because I try to keep my anonymity. (If you want details, you can e-mail me at Leopoldtulip@yahoo.com, and I'll try to answer someday.) I ended up accepting the job, and now I'm trying to get the dissertation done (which is why I've been so bad about blogging).

Anyway, I was preparing to guest-teach a class on Gulliver's Travels, and I had a really great picture illustration from Gulliver's Travels that I wanted to use. The problem? I didn't know where the illustration came from. One of my professors had used it in a class, and even though I found the handout he had given, the picture gave no information on the illustrator.

Now, Google's really helpful if you want to track down a quote. The problem is, I didn't want to track down who said a quote; I wanted to track down who drew an unnamed picture. Google's pretty good on the word front, but not so helpful on the "worth a thousand words" front. Somehow, it didn't seem that simply listing things in the picture would really be helpful ("Gulliver," "great big eye," "the letter m inside the eye").

I then began to realize how nice it would be if google had a searchable engine where you didn't have to type in words at all. Maybe I could just hold up the picture to the computer, and google would scan all its digital images. Or, if I couldn't actually find a copy of the unnamed picture, perhaps they could invent a sort of "doodle recognizer" where google tries to match up your own chicken-scratchings with famous masterpieces.

Narrative Closure and Jesus

2007-02-21T12:37:00.000-08:00

Now that my dissertation is getting into full hobble, I'm working on the "Introduction" in which I attempt to make the mental meanderings of my four chapters be integrated into one seamless whole. My topic engages with issues of narrative "closure" and whether endings actually do cohere (and, implicitly, whether dissertations do). Well, I got to thinking that since I was using the word "closure" so much, it would be nice to know how the word functioned in eighteenth-century writings. So, I decided to use Eighteenth-Century Collections Online to do a word-search on "closure." In this search, I came across the following odd excerpt from John Barnard's A Zeal for Good Works Excited and Directed (1742):

"Would it not look more like the workings of the Spirit of God, upon the Hearts of People, for them, under a deep Concern of Soul for their eternal Salvation, to retire to their secret Devotions, and humble themselves before God, in a Sense of their Sins, and earnestly beg Help from him, that they may be led to a saving Closure with the Lord Jesus Christ, by a true and lively Faith, and to an unfeigned Repentance, and Life of Holiness, and go to their Minister to direct them wherein they need Direction, and improve their most serious Thoughts upon what they shall do to be saved, and immediately set upon the doing of it?" (38)

Now, perhaps your first thought is, "That is a rather long sentence." But the bit I found rather interesting is the phrase, "a saving Closure with the Lord Jesus Christ." Despite how odd the phrase sounds to twenty-first century ears, the phrase did show up a number of times in my search.

My point is not to say, "Ewww, they were weird back then!" It is interesting, however, how rhetoric alters through time. Nowadays, one method people often use to determine whether someone is "really" a Christian is to inquire whether someone is "saved" or if they have a "close, personal relationship with Jesus Christ." I can't help wondering, if we asked an eighteenth-century Christian if they had this "close personal relationship," would their response be, "What the heck are you talking about?" (If they used the word "Heck," of course.) My brow would certainly furrow in puzzlement if they tried to ascertain my spiritual state by querying whether I sought a saving closure with Jesus Christ. Both parties may have established different linguistic norms for describing Christian experience, and these expressions may sound foreign and intuitively "wrong" to Christians from a different era or religious community.

It's also interesting to speculate whether these language norms are being used to express the same "essence" of what it means to be a Christian, or whether using different language modifes our understanding of Christianity. For example, "Close personal relationship" might lead us to thinking of God as warm and fuzzy; at the very least, it emphasizes his immanence more than His transcendence. It focuses on "relationship" rather than, say, a set of beliefs (e.g., believe that Jesus rose from the dead, Romans 10:9). "Close" (in close personal) suggests proximity to God, but "closure" may suggest distancing from sin--it is a definitive break. Or, "closure" may emphasize the sense of completion--the "closure" that comes when one's entire life has been judged. The emphasis becomes on future closure (the end of one's life) rather than a past moment (e.g., "conversion"). To what extent are these two different expressions complementary or contradictory?

Anyway, to be more ecumenical, and so that we don't offend eighteenth-century Christians, perhaps it would be best to just combine the two. Just ask people, "Do you have a close, personal closure with the Lord Jesus Christ?" If they do not immediately respond "yes," you can be sure that they are neither an eighteenth-century Christian nor a twenty-first century one.

The Kinda Juvenile Version

2007-02-14T20:14:00.000-08:00

This year, my wife and I are doing a “Bible Through the Two Years” program (the wimpy version of the "Bible Through the Year" program). We've been reading the Bible aloud, and so far, we've actually kept up.

Although neither one of us is really familiar with the King James Version (I grew up on the NIV myself), we decided we’d give it a try this time—after all, it’s the Bible they were using in the time periods that we study. Maybe we would now be able to pick up literary allusions we wouldn’t have recognized because of translation differences. We could be devotional and study for our time period at the same time! What could be finer?

The difficulty that I had never really apprehended before is that the King James Version is … well … weird. The language often seems cumbersome and disorienting. And let me tell you, once you’ve read the Book of Romans in the KJV translation, Peter's remark that Paul writes things that are "difficult to understand" suggests Peter must have been reading the KJV!

The difficulty with the KJV is not simply that we might be baffled by an odd translation. The problem is that the translation's language might sound so foreign or carry different connotations that we end up erupting in laughter. Take this KJV selection from Gen. 44:34. "And he [Joseph] took and sent messes unto them from before him: but Benjamin's mess was five times so much as any of theirs." I'm sorry, but the only context in which I hear "messes" in the plural is in scatological contexts. I couldn't prevent a rather disturbing image of paired messes coming to mind, and, like Abraham's wife Sarah, I laughed (Gen. 18:12). I felt dirty afterwards, but that's what happens when a newcomer reads the KJV.

Apparently, however, we were not the only ones who misunderstood Genesis 44. While we were reading the Bible aloud, our cat Pippin was listening. When we heard the sounds of a cat barfing behind us, we briefly noted that it was a highly inappropriate way of responding to God's Word; however, we were comforted with the knowledge that Pippin couldn't have been demon-possessed, as we learned from my Kitty Angels post.

I'm only mentioning Pippin's rather gross actions to bring up (no pun intended) something rather odd we noticed after our Bible reading. Pippin vomited in two different places. Here, however, is the creepy part: the one pile was about five times the size of the other! Or possibly seven times (we didn't have reliable instruments of measurement ... of course, neither did Pippin). It's as if the Bible passage and Pippin's actions were somehow coordinated. I won't go so far as to say the symmetry was "beautiful," but it did seem kind of cool. A little like "found art." Except, you know, only if the art were a fossilized turd. (The 18th century writer Christopher Smart actually describes a fossilized turd in his newspaper The Midwife. But I digress.)

Anyway, I promise that my next blog entry will not be about cat dandruff or cat vomit. Unless y'all want me to. Got to keep my peeps happy!

A Sentimental Moment with a Cat

2007-02-07T20:59:00.000-08:00

This past weekend, I had an on-campus visit at a college. But I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about our cat, Cricket.

The night before my departure, our cat Cricket was cuddling with me. I was thinking, "I'm gonna miss the little guy over the next couple of days. Look how cute he is, as I pet him with wild abandon."

And then ...

I noticed his dandruff.

You see, before the cuddling had commenced, I had just gotten out of the shower. Consequently, my torso was completely shirtless. And as I was petting Cricket, I watched in horror as little flakes of kitty dandruff roved free of their furry moorings and sought to attach themselves to my skin. I suppose it's a little bit of a double-standard, since I am not actually "horrified" when little flakes of my own dandruff are attaching themselves to my skin. Come to think of it, since dandruff is skin, that would be like saying that I'm not horrified when my skin is attached together. I would, of course, be rather horrified if my skin weren't attached to the rest of my skin.

Anyway, the point of this entry wasn't so much to gross people out as to reflect on how a truly poignant moment can be ruined when truth, in all of its matter of fact about dandruff, broke in. And that I really wish there were a way to communicate to cats that they needed to work on the dandruff--cats are very lacking in self-awareness. There used to be those helpful Head & Shoulders commercials with various "friends" dusting off their friends' collars and saying, "Whoa, Nellie! You got some problems!" (Loose quotation.) You can't do that with cats. Or rather, you can do it, but they stare at you blankly. I suppose they are like ancient Israel,

"Though seeing, they do not see;
Though hearing, they do not understand."

And as the proverb goes,

"The leopard cannot change its spots,
Nor can the kitty its seborrheic scurf."

1 Degree of Separation

2007-01-22T19:11:00.000-08:00

I have not been particularly proactive on the blogging front lately--I blame my dissertation. It's not so much that I have been writing as that I have been thinking about the fact that there is a dissertation, and that it is sapping me of the will to live. But enough about that.

This entry sprang from the novel idea of experimenting with the "six degrees of separation" idea--you know, that theoretically, you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows Bin Laden. That is, our world is deeply interconnected. It also proves without a doubt that Hussein is tied to Al Qaeda--so there! (Of course, then so is Bush ...)

So, my idea was to pick an item on Amazon and use the "Explore Similar Items" function. My intent was to wade through the function until I found two completely dissimilar movies that were separated by a mere six degrees of separation. It was an exciting challenge, and with rampant giddiness, I typed in the phrase "Monty Python." With shaking fingers, I clicked on "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." With wanton tremblingness, I clicked on "explore similar items" and found ...

The movie Seven.

For those of you unfamiliar with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I recommend you get a life. However, for those of you unfamiliar with Seven, let's just say that it involves a serial killer. Now, let's just say that Holy Grail involves coconuts. I cannot really figure out what coconuts and serial killers have in common. Granted, according to the Amazon description, in Seven, "green Detective Mills scoffs at his efforts to get inside the mind of a killer," and in Holy Grail, bad guys scoff with outrageous French accents, but that also seems too tenuous a connection.

All in all, the experience left me feeling cheated and hollow inside. I expected only to have six searches to come up with a completely weird relation, and I have it at the first try. Where's the challenge? Quite frankly, some of the one degree of separations are downright disturbing--why is it that if you search for similar items to this standard Bible, one of the hits on the first page is The Satanic Bible? Yes, Satan does show up in both books, and they do both have the word "bible" in their titles, but still ...

Art Attack

2007-01-18T08:09:00.000-08:00

They say that "the pen is mightier than the sword," and so too, the easel is mightier than the uzi. Art has the power to move us ... and perhaps also to kill us. According to an article in Ottawa Citizen, the Ottawa Heart Institute has had to remove several paintings hanging in their hypertension waiting room after they learned that patients were afraid of the paintings. As Jacques Guerette, the vice-president of communications at the heart institute, said, "The queens [in the paintings] had very intense eyes and they were triggering that feeling that they were watching you as you walked around and they were blowing all our hypertension results." Mother England is watching you, my son.

There were some other minor setbacks in the Heart Institute's attempt to use art to soothe the savage breast. As the Ottawa Citizen article remarks, "there was also the painting that looked like the gateway to heaven that was put, only briefly, at the entrance to the critical care unit -- a place where not every patient survives." I suppose the painting suggests that there are many different roads to heaven, and one of them is through the ICU.

Canadian Conspiracy Revisited

2007-01-12T13:58:00.000-08:00

Thanks to my wife for calling my attention to the warning, issued just yesterday (Jan. 11), about "Canadian spy coins." Apparently, there are Canadian coins out there "with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside," designed to spy on the movements of key American leaders. As I mentioned in my last blog entry (six days before this scandal broke), I thought I had recently been the victim of a cruel Canadian plot to steal my valuable Lincoln pennies in exchange for pennies with a transvestited Lincoln on it.

Now, I learn the plot is far more sinister. At first, I had thought that being left with transvestite Lincoln pennies was merely a side effect of their ploy: in order to get my money at no cost to themselves, they had to exchange my money for something that is worthless to me here (i.e., I cannot sell a Canadian penny for an American penny). Now, I learn that the point was not to get my money so much as to leave me with a tiny radio frequency transmitter that I cannot get rid of! They gave me Canadian pennies because they believed there was no way I could get rid of them!

This raises a number of problems, of course, such as 1. what governmental secret do I apparently hold that the Canadians are trying to keep tabs on me? and 2. how do I get rid of these Canadian coins so that America's future is secure? After my wife read my last blog entry, she suggested that it was "immoral" for me to get rid of the Canadian coins by sneaking them into the bank as regular coins. And, to be honest, I was being hyperbolic in the last entry; it wasn't so much that I was trying to "sneak" the Canadian coins in as that they had gotten mixed in with the American coins, and I wasn't about to search through the whole pile to find them. However, in light of this article, I can say that my wife was wrong: not only is it quite "moral" for me to sneak in Canadian coins, but it is my patriotic duty. I cannot risk the precious governmental secrets my brain holds ever falling into the wrong hands--it is my duty to get rid of the coins as soon as possible, "by any means necessary," as Malcolm X would have said, if he were working for the Bush administration. Sure, you might suggest I try leaving the pennies in places such as the "trash can" or "an ancient Indian burial ground," but I believe that God wants me to be a good steward of the resources He has given me, especially if those resources include cutting-edge surveillance technology. To do anything less would be criminal.

Counterfeit Canadian Coins

2007-01-05T20:06:00.000-08:00

I have been a coin-collector for a number of years, but sadly, some of my albums only went up to the year 1990 or so. Rather than getting new books or pages to put my coins in, I have simply horded post-1990 coins on the off chance that, someday, they will neatly divide themselves into chronological order. Even though this didn't actually happen, over Christmas, my parents got me pages to put cents/nickels/dimes/quarters/half dollars in! So, over the past couple of days, I have sorted through a rather daunting pile of coins and gotten my collection up to date.

But as they say, behind every happy rainbow, there are a bunch of people who are drowned and aren't named Noah. Likewise, behind every huge pile of happy coins, there is also a story deeply laden with tragedy and greed. That story is called, "Evil Victimizing Counterfeiters." As you might guess, in going through spare change in the hopes of finding a valuable coin, you have to look very closely for certain distinguishing features. For example, the difference between the aptly-named 1999 Wide "AM" Reverse Lincoln Cent and your run-of-the-mill 1999 Lincoln cent is that the former has the "AM" in America separated, the latter has them touching. (See here for "The Top 10 Most Valuable U.S. Coins found in Pocket Change.") Now while I was looking very closely at a number of my coins, I noticed a few ... anomalies. Apparently, a small quantity of recently struck Lincoln pennies depict our famous president as ... a woman! At first, I was surprised that these freakishly weird transvestite coins have been widely unobserved in the recent numismatic literature. Had I discovered an all-new irregular coin?

As you might have guessed, no, I did not find a penny that would be worth hundreds of dollars. I found a penny that is, in fact, worth less than a penny. Apparently, I fell victim to an elite group of trained counterfeitors operating in Canada, who call themselves, "The Canadian government." Their sole purpose is to create counterfeit coins that they can exchange for U.S. currency: these deviously cleverly designed coins are even more deceptive than the $200 dollar George Bush bill. Sure, we're all "pre-emptive strike on Iraq," but we ignoring the festering danger lurking on our own borders! Let's work on the northern "border fence," people.

The sad thing is, there is no real recourse for the U.S. victim of the Canadian government. For one thing, the Canadian government is a monolithic establishment, so there is no system of accountability: "Oh, it must have been somebody else who gave you that coin!" they say. "Oh, you should go bleep yourself," they say.

So, I did what anyone would do. I tried to pass the counterfeit money off to the bank. Naturally, I didn't just say, "Hey, can I exchange this penny for another penny?" That would be suspicious. Instead, I took my huge pile of money--including sneakily integrated counterfeit Canadian coins--and said, "Can you exchange this for me?"

Sadly, my greed undid me. You see, I did not merely try to exchange counterfeit Canadian pennies--I also tried to sneak in a Canadian quarter. Sure enough, after turning in the money, the bank teller called me to the desk minutes later to say that there was a problem with my deposit. "Here, we do not take Canadian money," she said, judgingly. Like they were cursed Aztec zinc or something. She was acting like it was my fault that the coins were Canadian! Admittedly, I had knowingly put them in there, but if I had had my way, the coins never would have been Canadian in the first place! I was the victim here! Sure, my deposits would be federally insured up to $100000--so long as they were not Canadian counterfeit!

Well, Mr. Snide Higher Moral Ground Equal Housing Lender--the joke is on you! Sure, you "caught" my Canadian quarter and made me stuck with it--but my Canadian pennies got past you! So whatcha gonna do now? Accept your looses--or simply victimize more innocent consumers, tricking them into taking counterfeit money that you will promptly refuse to accept back from them? Like me, you will be inexorably drawn to moral depravity. All because of Canada.

To Live or Die at MLA

2006-12-31T13:52:00.000-08:00

In Philadelphia this year, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of soon to be unemployed academics, meet at the MLA (Modern Language Association) conference in the hope of finding academic employment in the coming year. Wanna-be-jean-wearers like me are forced to re-discover inventions such as the "comb" and the "business suit." No matter how counter-cultural and anti-big business English studies becomes, it shall still reward people who dress like CEOs. No matter how Marxist English studies gets, it still prizes intellectual property above all, especially that lovely little thing called the published article. And at MLA, scores of English departments interview prospective applicants to determine which candidates are worthy enough to receive that glittering gee gaw, the on-campus visit.

This year, my wife and I are both on the job market for the first time. Finally, we are no longer "MLA virgins." That's right. I have now officially had to prostitute myself at job interviews: "Hey baby, you want an 18th centurist who can also teach the classics? You bring your Longus, I'll bring the Apuleius."

Notably, the word "hypocrite" comes from the Greek word for "actor." Going out on the job market has attuned me to just how slippery the categories of "hypocrite" and "actor" can be: where does the "acting" end and the "flat-out lying" begin (especially when asked how much of your dissertation is left to write)?

Although the conference is scheduled for four days (in this case, Dec. 27-30), most schools schedule their interviews on just two days: the 28th and 29th (Thursday and Friday).
Anyway, I have a couple of comments that might have been mildly helpful to me if I had thought of them beforehand.

1. Know what time it is. I don't just mean that you ought to know when your interview is scheduled; I mean, you need to have a readily accessible way of knowing the time at a given moment. The way most interviews work is that a school conducts interviews in a hotel room. Promptly, at the time the interview is scheduled, the interviewee is supposed to knock on the door. If he/she does not knock on time, it means that he/she is undependable scum. If he/she knocks early, it means that he/she is trying to cause trouble and must be punished by being offered no job. It was only as I was about to knock on the door for my first interview that I began thinking, "I haven't called the talking clock for several years now ... what if my watch is too fast? Or, what if a Modernist is in there right now thinking, 'Hurry up, please, it's time?'" So, set your watch before you leave, so that you can be anxiety-ridden about more important matters than whether your watch conforms to that eternal, objective thingy, Time with a capital T. No chrono-relativism here!

2. Schedule the schools you are most excited about on the second day, rather than the first. Of course, you often don't know which one this will be until it's too late anyway ("Sorry, you can't have that time; Harvard's going to call any day now"), but if your scheduling powers have not dwindled into comic impotence, see what you can do.

Keep in mind that on the first day of interviews, you will probably fail miserably to answer a question, and you can spend the entire night in bed thinking about what you should have said and how thoroughly jobless you are. This means that, on the second day, after you take something to get rid of the bloodshot eyes (get rid of the bloodshot part, of course; it's probably best not to remove the eyes themselves), you will have another interview, this time with a school you really want to go to. Now, initially, you may be thinking, "I am so tired! Why didn't I sleep? I hate myself!" But then, serendipity strikes: The school asks you the very same question you figured out how to answer at 3 am last night! Insomnia deserves a much better rap than it gets in the popular literature.

3.Come up with practice questions that are actually germane to the schools with which you will be interviewing. One of the really cool things about my graduate program in English here at "Anonymous University" is that we get to do a mock job interview where our faculty give us a sense of the sort of questions we might be asked. The difficulty is that, since our mock interviewers were asking the sort of questions that a search committee at prestigious "Anonymous University" would ask, we don't necessarily learn what a search committee at "Joe College" would ask. I spent hours preparing for questions about my dissertation or about describing current trends in 18th century studies, but such topics didn't really come up much at my interviews. Since I do not yet have a doctorate or a book contract or exude mad smarty-pants skills, "Anonymous University" schools are not the type to be interested in me at this point.

4. Bring extra materials. Someone advised me I should bring along a sample syllabus or a writing sample, and I did. I didn't really think they would be of much use, but whenever I offered them at the end of an interview, the committee members' faces visibly brightened, like, "How nice, I am happy now." In retrospect, it's actually a little scary--I mean, if I brought them homemade cookies, I'd understand the excitement, but--a syllabus? If only my students got that happy.

5. Elevators are Slow; or, Hotels are Tall. Keep in mind that Philadelphia hotels tend to have a lot of floors, and elevators often work long hours without adequate compensation. They often go on strike, around floor 25 or so. As a result, you might spend ten minutes before your interview shaking your fist in impotent rage at the elevator that taunts you by not coming down to the ground floor. It's like a scene from Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where you are ever chasing the job, but never landing it: "Bold interviewer, never, never canst thou go up,/Though winning near the 'vator--yet, do not grieve;/It cannot arrive, and thou hast no more time,/For ever wilt thou be jobless, and stuck down here!" When people told me to leave a lot of time, I assumed it was just to make sure I wouldn't get lost on the way to a hotel--not that I would spend ten minutes waiting for the elevator! Just remember not to underestimate the elevator wait.

6. Have back-up questions. One of the ways most interviews end is with the committees asking, "Do you have any questions for us?" The right answer is, "Yes." But to get ruthlessly pragmatic for a second, how do you answer the follow-up question, "Well, what are they?" That one is trickier to answer. One person recommended asking, "Tell me about your master's program," especially because smaller universities are often proud of their graduate students. Now, it might be a no-brainer that this question only works for schools that actually have a master's program. What you might not have realized is the subtle point that this question also only works if the school has not already mentioned their master's program earlier in the interview. In one of my interviews, I went in without much to ask (I didn't really want to ask, "So, what's the salary? So, when's the sabbatical?"--one must ask questions that aren't too intrusive). I was planning to showcase how incredibly carefully I'd researched the school, such as that I knew they had a master's program. I thus felt rather cheated when one of the people interviewing me introduced the topic, "We have a great master's program," and then proceeded to describe it before my questioning period. I wanted to yell at her, "You stinker! That was going to be my question for you, do you hear me? You have taken something precious and meaningful and turned it into nothingness. I was supposed to get points for knowing you had a master's program!" So, then I had to come up with a substitute question, and it just wasn't as good. I really hate that portion of the interview. I don't have any practical advice about questions to ask. I just want you to know that it's okay to let yourself give in to the hate.

I'm Just an Essay

2006-12-20T21:46:00.000-08:00

Growing up, I thrilled to the daring exploits of ... a bill! You see, he was just a bill. Yes, only a bill. And he was sitting there on Capitol Hill. There is a famous Schoolhouse Rock song which dramatizes his sisyphus-like journey. Our heroic piece of paper begins as a little idea. After the bill exists in material form, it seeks the patronage of the local congressperson deity, who says, "You're right! There oughta be a law!" Next, the bill is debated about in committee. It must navigate various obstacles, such as the evil twin houses of Congress, which, like Scylla and Charybdis, seek its destruction on both sides. Even after sailing through these treacherous waters, if the President vetoes the bill, it is sent back to Congress yet again, at which point there's very little chance that it will ever become a law. It's amazing how the song manages to be so cheery, given how traumatizing the experience must be.

Writing an essay is much like that. It begins as a little idea, often something that you write for a class. Your professor says, "There oughta be an article," and then you write it. And then you submit it to a respected journal. And then you wait several months, as it is reviewed by two readers. You wait several moments. Eventually, the desperation might grow so great that you send a tentative email to the editor, "Uh, eons ago I sent you an article ... I know your reply probably just got lost in the mail or something, but I just figured I'd follow up on it ..." Then, the editors sends your essay back to you, either rejecting it, asking you to revise and re-submit it, or accepting it immediately (if you are ubermensch). Sometimes, you revise and re-submit it, only to have the revised essay rejected anyway, so you have to send it to a different journal (it hasn't happened to me personally, but I've heard it happens). The two readers then offer their final comments, and you have to send a new revision, which will be published at least several months from then. All the while, you keep hoping in the meantime that nobody publishes a similar article that steals your thunder. ("My essay was really innovative when I first submitted it, five years ago! Honest!")

Anyway, these reflections were sparked by the first ever acceptance of an article! I actually submitted the article back in summer 2005. After endless waiting and revising, it is tentatively scheduled for publication in fall 2007. It will only have taken over two years after writing the thing! Yes, I am being purposely vague in the effort to retain my anonymity!

Nevertheless, when I am tempted to speculate on the incredible impact that my article will have on the entire scholarly community, I am reminded of a rather humbling fact: statistically speaking, the typical published article has a readership of fewer than two people (presumably, this does not include the editor and the two reviewers). This means that an individual has a greater chance of being struck by lightning than reading my article. Still, I could have written a text that was even more useless and irrelevant to society--I mean, how many people ever read a bill? Probably not even the Senators who are voting on it!

Unhappy Scottish Feet

2006-12-17T13:58:00.000-08:00

On Friday, my wife and I saw Happy Feet. It is a coming to age story about a young penguin, Mumbles, whose feet do not fit into the local penguin community, because they are happy. Even though his penguin community has a vibrant culture that expresses itself in word and in song, the Scottish-accented elders are rather dour when it comes to dancing feet, which implicitly advocate "paganism" and encourage "backsliding." (Of course, since it is harder to do the "moonwalk" (or "backslide") without any feet, perhaps they have a point.) According to the Scottish elders, the recent drop in the fish food supply comes as a punishment from their god due to the gratuitous movement of Mumble's feet. (It is odd to note that the Scottish band, the Benachally Ceilidh Band, has an album entitled Happy Feet. Of course, it might simply be a protest album against happy feet. I don't know.) So, Mumbles goes on a journey where he meets a different breed of penguins who are short, have Latino accents and, best of all, value his feet in all their tappiness!

There is, of course, more to the story, but I suppose what I find particularly fascinating is the strange cultural/religious associations surrounding the penguins. There is something rather surreal about Scottish-accented penguins disclaiming against dancing. Why choose for them to be Scottish? Why are they so religious? Why are the Latino penguins so much more accepting of feet? Now, some film critics have already explored the "happy feet" as an allegory for "gay identity," because the movie's message is that Mumbles's parents must learn to accept him as he is: a penguin who can dance. Given that Mumbles is heterosexual, it's a bit difficulty for me to see the "gay identity" bit, but perhaps I'm just naive and unsophisticated. However, while discussing the movie with my wife on the way back, it seemed that the "happy feet" could just as well be read as an allegory for religious identity: the movie can in fact be read as anti-Presbyterian and crypto-Catholic.

Let me oversimplify. Historically, Scotland (not counting the highlands) is very Protestant and Presbyterian: preaching of the word is central. Word has priority over the image. Presbyterianism is against frills in worship and has an established reputation for iconoclasm. This is also not a religious community famous for its liturgical dance. Hispanic culture, on the other hand, has Catholic roots. In Catholicism, there is more emphasis on the Lord's Supper/Eucharist, the incarnation and "the Lord's body" (not just during His earthly ministry, but received in the Eucharist).

So, in the movie, our group of Scottish penguins place a high value on the word and singing (each penguin has a "heart song"), but they are opposed to forms of bodily expression. The movie suggests that Presbyterianism is ultimately gnostic, opposed to physicality and incarnational reality. The Latino penguins, on the other hand, are represented as both good dancers and good singers, perfectly harmonizing song and dance, i.e., correctly integrating Word and sacrament. In the movie, it is not so much that Scottish and Spanish religious cultures can learn from each other so much as that Scottish culture, to be complete, must become like Latino culture. The movie suggests that Presbyterians can never have happy feet unless they become Catholic and/or Latino! Since becoming Latino is not a viable possibility for many Presbyterians, the movie suggests that the only way for us to be happy not just with our heads, but with our feet, is to be Catholic.

Disclaimer: I am not seriously arguing this interpretation. For one thing, it attributes more knowledge about Scottish religious history to the writers than they actually have.

Bleh and Woif

2006-12-08T21:50:00.000-08:00

It's important to have useful interjections to employ for certain situations. For example, I recall going roller-skating back in college. I was not particularly skilled in the arcane arts of balancing, so whenever it seemed like the top half of my body was about to join my bottom half on the floor, I would spontaneously say, "Woif." I do not know where this word/sound came from. It sounds vaguely Klingon-like, but since I did not have a Klingon wetnurse, its unique brain-chemistry origins remain shrouded in mystery. I do not even know why I felt obliged to make a sound at all: perhaps I subconsciously believed that the soundwaves would bounce off the floor and bounce back, correcting my trajectory and returning me to an upright and locked position. Regardless, the world is quite useful in situations which involve me falling, or involving me about to fall, and the word has stuck with me.

I also often employ the interjection "Bleh!" While "Woif" is a word I use to express a lack of balance, "Bleh" describes the feeling of general ickiness. We often use interjections like "darn" or "crap" to refer to something concrete and immediate: I accidentally stubbed my toe, darn it! "Bleh" is sort of like saying, "I am completely sapped of strength by all the bad things that have happened in my life. I will expend all my remaining energy in this one desperate cry of exhaustion: Bleh!" It is often brought about by stress. I didn't used to say the word a whole lot, but I think the whole job market/getting my dissertation done is getting to me, so now I just find myself walking into empty rooms in our apartment and saying, "Bleh!"

Normally, this wouldn't be so bad. But my usage of the word is intruding into awkward social situations. I've been chairing a socializing committee for our department, and this past Tuesday, we put on a big party for the grad students and faculty. Various last-minute problems arose, I was running late, and literally ran back into a school building. Unable to take the cold, the running, and the stress, without thinking, I just blurted out, "Bleh!" I did not realize it at the time, but a student in my line of sight undoubtedly took this as a noise directed at herself. I suppose it's understandable: here's this strange guy, wearing a peacoat, sweaty, and apparently shouting "Bleh!" at you. As I started running up the stairs, I began thinking, "I often read those reports in the school newspaper about how some strange, middle-aged man is on campus and sexually harrassing students. What if there's going to be an article about me? 'Be on the lookout for a man, about in his 30's, wearing a peacoat. Man is known to go up to female students and shout sexually suggestive grunting noises at them. Witnesses do not know if he is fully clothed beneath his peacoat. Witnesses said his hair appeared greasy, and he was panting leeringly.'"

So, does anyone out there have their own little pet interjections?

Passion Without Precision: Or, Why I like the Wii

2006-11-29T14:31:00.000-08:00

I am a citizen of klutzville. I've never really gotten the hang of the whole "fine motor skill development" thing, which made sports one of those activities to which I vaguely aspired but didn't want to be known as "Mr. Lose us the game" Leo. I suppose part of what drew me to Cross-country in high school is that no coordination was required, so I couldn't drag the team down with me. Besides, since it didn't involve my hands or a ball, there were fewer potential body parts to maim. Heck, even with Cross-Country, I constantly managed to sprain my right ankle.

Over Thanksgiving, we visited my wife's side of the family, where I got to engage in all sorts of sports--bowling, baseball, and tennis--all within the comfort of someone else's home. As some of you might remember, one of my fondest activities when visiting my wife's family is to play their video games, so I can reap the full benefits of a game without ever paying for it, in a non-piracy non-immoral kind of way. As an indication of how out of touch I am with the outside world, when my brother-in-law announced he was bringing over his Wii, I had no idea what it was.

What is a wii? It's a motion-sensitive game system. No longer do you play "baseball" simply by hitting a button at the right time: now, you have to swing the controller at the right time as well! Now, I do have a few quibbles about the wii, but they mostly revolve around their name. When I hear the sound "wii," I think adjective, as in, "wee little beastie." To the degree that I associate the sound "wii" with being a noun, it is only when you say the word twice and are talking about the bathroom. I guess there's no reason why we can't simply rehabilitate the phoneme so it has fewer associations with natural functions, but it would have been easier just to pick a different name.

One of the most impressive features of the wii is it refutes the common objection that computer game systems encourage people to be couch potatoes. I haven't had such a good workout in ages! I was so sore from playing the wii that it was only through sheer strength of will that I successfully lifted my arm in the air to brush my teeth. Even so, my tongue had to come to my aid and spread the toothpaste around a bit.

I suppose what I like best about the wii, however, is that I don't have to be good at sports. I was very hyperactive as a kid, accidentally kicking people at mealtime because I couldn't sit still. I had had the energy to run around doing sports, but I didn't actually have any skill. In real life baseball, it doesn't matter how energetically you swing a bat if all you are hitting is the air--the air currents just aren't enough to make the ball reverse directions. In real-life bowling, it doesn't matter how hard you throw the ball if you aimed it directly at the gutter. However, the wii often rewards such exhibitions of energy! I, who am virtually incapable of actually hitting a ball in real life, hit nine home runs out of ten possible on the wii! On the wii, I have consistently got bowling totals that were actually three digit numbers! I don't have to aim, I just have to move my hand at the right time and with enthusiasm! Now, occasionally my bursts of exuberance have unfortunate consequences in real life, such as accidentally swinging my controller so high that I hit the ceiling with it. Still, no one was injured, and I think I convinced people that the whole thing was intentional on my part.

Super-Hero Eating Disorders

2006-11-17T12:51:00.000-08:00

As you might have heard, a couple of months ago, Madrid's Fashion Week tried to combat super model eating disorders by banning participants who fell below a certain body mass index. While there has been a great deal of speculation about whether other nations will follow Madrid's lead in their treatment of super models, there has not been widespread speculation on how this might affect other industries, such as super-heroing.

The implications first came to my attention while reading Essential Luke Cage, Power Man, Volume 1, which contains the first 27 issues of the comic. Power Man, according to the back cover of the book, is "comics' first and foremost black superstar of the seventies." Imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, Luke agreed to participate in dangerous scientific experiments which would reduce his sentence, but through an accident, he was endowed with superhuman strength and, more importantly, weight.

At first, I thought the weight detail was relatively insignificant in comparison to the huge biceps. The first reference to his weight seemed circumstantial enough in issue #3, p. 12: While Luke is tearing off a fire-escape ladder, he muses, "Keep learnin' more 'bout what doc's experiment did to me--like my weight. Still look 180...But hit 300 on the scales!" Seems like an innocent enough thought for a super-hero while he's tearing off a ladder.

But in the issues that follow, I soon discovered that Luke Cage is rather obsessed about his weight. In the first 26 issues, there are 18 explicit references to his weighing approximately 300 pounds. For the interests of posterity, they occur in: issue #3, p. 12; #5, p. 12; #6, p. 11; #8, p. 4; #8, p. 7; #9, p. 15; #11, p. 6; #12, cover; #12, p. 10; #14, p. 8; # 15, p. 5 (three different times on the same page!--I only count this as one reference); #17, p. 6; #17, p. 17; #18, p. 8; #18, p. 13; #23, p. 6; #24, p. 4; #26, p. 2.

Am I alone in thinking this is weird? Now, I know someone could say, "Perhaps it's not Luke Cage's obsession--he just happen to fall victim to a writer who happened to be dieting at the time, and transferred his own anxieties to his writing." However, during these 26 issues, Power Man had four different writers, each of whom made reference to his 300 pounds of weight! And apparently, it is not simply the case that Luke Cage was himself obsessed about his weight: so is the narrator/caption-writer, and so are his enemies! For instance, when Georgie escapes Power Man, he says to himself, "Oooo, mama! Ol' Georgie done won out again! That Cage boy can't even scramble with a 300-pound body!" I suppose it's understandable that Power Man would be self-conscious about his weight, if his enemies make fun of him for weighing 300 pounds and being slow.

Power Man brings up his weight upon rather odd occasions. For example, when he fights a space-alien who is trying to kill Dr. Doom, Power Man remarks, "Murder's a gig I don't take kindly to ... all 300 pounds o' me!" I guess I understand why he might say something like, "Murder's a gig I don't take kindly to ... nor do my powerpunching fists!" Somehow, I find the prospect of powerpunching fists far more threatening than 300 pounds. The sad thing is, perhaps to Power Man, 300 pounds is more threatening ... to himself. He often blames his failures on weighing three hundred pounds. For example, he thinks to himself, "those motherless jokers are splitin'--an' I don't know if I can move my three-hundred pound bod fast enough to nab 'em." Why not just say, "They're too fast?" No. If only his bod were less than three-hundred pounds, he could have caught up to them. The super-hero Quicksilver never would have had this problem.

The narrator constantly calls our attention to Power Man's weight, demanding we take it seriously as a formative aspect of his identity. For example, take this description of Power Man jumping from a roof-top: "Cage backs up, then races toward the edge of the Crayton building ... three hundred pounds of human power rockets across the deserted avenue ... three hundred pounds leaps from the sixteen-story structure to a twelve-story structure across the wide expanse ... three hundred pounds hits the roof of police headquarters and although that roof shudders and cracks--mama, it holds!" Given that narrators do not often use phrases like, "mama, it holds," it is quite probable that Marvel intends for us to think that the narrator is African-American (or at least employing slang that is supposed to be African-American). So, I ask, why is it that there are so many African-American characters--Power Man, his African-American enemies, his African-American narrator--all obsessed with weight? Are the writers trying to say that the African-American community wrestles with weight gain in the way that whites just cannot understand? Even the Marvel Comics characters who tend to struggle a lot with weight-related issues--say, Kingpin or the Blob (both white characters)--are not constantly informing us about how much they weigh.

I suppose the point is that, just as we need to encourage super-models not to be too skinny, we need to encourage super-heroes that it's okay to weigh 300 pounds, regardless of their race. In repartee with super-villains, it's okay to mention other things than their weight, like their mammoth fists or their bullet-bouncing chests. It is tragic when 300 pounds weighs heavier on a hero's mind than on his or her body.

Wicked-pedia

2006-11-12T20:54:00.000-08:00

I just came across a great blog called the Wikipedia Knowledge Dump. You might be familiar with wikipedia as a kind of democratic internet encyclopedia, where anyone can write an entry and edit an entry (with some external oversight). Sadly, the oversight can sometimes become totalitarian, as editors try to remove valuable material just because it is untrue, silly, or baffling. Wikipedia Knowledge Dump valuably calls your attention to Wikipedia articles that are in danger of becoming extinct because people, for various reasons, want them destroyed. For example, the Knowledge Dump provides the text of his fascinating article on "exophilia": "Exophilia is an attraction, generally sexual in nature, to new, strange, or otherworldly things, such as extraterrestrial lifeforms, supernatural beings, and robots." Knowledge Dump provides a link to the wikipedia article, so you can see why people want to delete the article--for example, one person gives the rather frivolous cause for ethnic cleansing, "I hate aliens." Superman was an alien, would you kill him too?

Wikipedia deleters also have a prejudice against the silly and the wacky. Again, thanks to the Knowledge Dump for listing this article on the "beard theorem," which is in danger of deletion. "The Beard Theorem is a political theorem that relates to the Communist Party and its members. The Beard Theorem is a theory that suggests that the size of one's Beard, whether it be a puff, French Fork or Mutton Chop, has a direct correlation to the radicality of a person's Socialist views. If one was to have a large, beard, that person has a higher chance of being a communist revolutionary than one other person who has only as moustache, or worse: no facial hair at all. This theorem is proved by many of the communist Russian revolutionaries of the 1900's, those like Karl Marx, who has a massive, beard and, in accordance to the theorem, is a great communist. V.I. Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, had a beard, yet it was not as profound, thus he is not as truly communist as Marx or Engels, as he has a relatively small beard, but it is still present and is truth of his communisity. Josef Stalin, the leader of the Communist Vanguard Party in Russia from the mid 1920's to 1952, has no beard, yet has a moustache. Stalin, in accordance to the theorem thus has very little Communist Blood in him, as he is a Stalinist, and a social fascist. Exceptions to the rule is most East Asian Communist leaders."

Now, Several people suggest removing the "beard theorem" article because it is "nonsense." Well, is the theory that the sun revolves around the earth "nonsense" too? Okay, yes it is! But why then do these same naysayers not object to the Wikipedia article on geocentric models of the solar system, even though such a model is clearly nonsensical? Hypocrisy, thy name is anti-beard person! Besides, evolution's just a theory, too, but they teach it in the public schools, so why don't we give equal time to the beard theorem? Perhaps the two theories may even be mutually informative (e.g., would bearded or non-bearded people be better adapted for survival in Communist Russia?).

Celebrate the Fig

2006-11-09T20:37:00.000-08:00

The Dull Men's Club has declared November "Fig Month." Take time out of your busy schedule to observe this holimonth with your loved ones, or to sample figs in the privacy of your own home. Remember, the fig does not just have high fiber and nutritional content; it is also eschatological. Enjoy!

The Rogaine Song

2006-11-05T09:26:00.000-08:00

According to Energy Australia, the Australian energy supplier, people can help stop an energy crisis by taking shorter showers, and by singing shorter songs in the shower. But what sort of song should they sing?

Well, I woke up this morning in my traditionally incoherent fashion, and, per usual, I had a song in my head. It was Paula Abdul's "Promise of a New Day." Before I knew it, I was singing the wrong words to myself. Serendipitously, I think these incorrect lyrics suggest a solution to the energy crisis. Now, one of the reasons for taking a longer shower is that, Psycho aside, bad things tend not to happen there. Showers are generally peaceful places, and even if we are getting batted in the face with steaming water, it is masochistically soothing water. So what we need to do is make the shower a place of despair and wretchedness. I have been trying to think of the Psycho equivalent for guys, and I think I have it: baldness. Imagine blithely lathering a liberal dose of shampoo on your head, and then staring in stunned silence at a liberal helping of loose hair stuck to your hand. Who wants to be reminded that one's hair is going the way of the Antarctic's ozone layer? We will do all we can to escape such a reminder, even if it involves jumping out of the shower with shampoo still on. Therefore, I recommend that Energy Australia not simply encourage guys to sing "shorter songs" in the shower, but to sing songs about baldness.

I recognize that my recommendation may have some drawbacks. On the negative side, a guy might become so scared of baldness that he will never shampoo or comb his hair again in the fear that more fragile follicles will be doomed by his actions; this might result in a rise in household smelliness and, consequently, divorce. But on the plus side, if guys associate showers with baldness and sorrow, they'll finish up more quickly, and future generations of energy-users will be saved!

It is in that spirit that I submit my parody of Paula Abdul's chorus to "Promise of a New Day." I am only writing the chorus because, if the song is truly effective, guys will not have time in the shower to sing the rest of the lyrics. Paula Abdul's original chorus is as follows:

"Eagle's calling and he's calling your name
Tides are turning bringing winds of change
Why do I feel this way?
The promise of a new day.
The promise
The promise of a new day."

The revised chorus is as follows:

"Hairs are falling out, I'm calling Rogaine.
Tufts are tumbling down and clogging drains.
Will they all fall away?
Then I must get a toupee.
Then I must
Think I must get a toupee."

Wouldn't it be nice if he were older? (with apologies to the Beach Boys)

2006-10-30T14:15:00.000-08:00

The lament, "The kids're growin' up so fast these days," has become almost proverbial. It may be important to keep in mind that kids often seem to grow up fast "these days," no matter which century we live in. Below, I am reproducing the romantic/sexualized poem, "To Ethelinda, on her doing my Verses the honour of wearing them in her bosom," written by the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart.

"Happy verses! that were prest
In fair Ethelinda's breast!
Happy muse, that didst embrace
The sweet, the heav'nly-fragrant place!
Tell me, is the omen true,
Shall the bard arrive there too?

"Oft thro' my eyes my soul has flown,
And wanton'd on that ivory throne:
There with ecstatic transport burn'd,
And thought it was to heav'n return'd.
Tell me, is the omen true,
Shall the body follow too?

"When first at nature's early birth,
Heav'n sent a man upon the earth,
Ev'n Eden was more fruitful found,
When Adam came to till the ground:
Shall then those breasts be fair in vain,
And only rise to fall again?

"No, no, fair nymph--for no such end
Did heav'n to tee its bounty lend;
That breast was ne'er design'd by fate,
For verse, or things inanimate;
Then throw them from that downy bed,
And take the poet in their stead."

Yes, as you might immediately observe, the author is indeed somewhat obsessed about certain anatomical features. Despite some myopia in artistic vision, however, it's a very well-written poem: there's some nice playing with body/soul metaphors, space (poet and poems occupying the same place), etc.. While I might have picked a loftier theme, all in all, I'd have been pretty impressed by my own poetic ability if I wrote such a poem at the age of 29.

The weirdness factor is that Christopher Smart apparently did not write this poem at the age of 29, nor even at the hormonally-charged age of 18. At least according to him, he wrote it at 13. And Ethelinda, the subject of his poetic fancy, was 9! at the time. (Not 9! as in "9 factorial," which would be disturbing for the opposite reason; instead, I mean "9!" in the sense of "What are you thinking, this is a 9-year-old! There is no excuse for your eyes to be wantoning on her ivory throne!")

This leads to a strange aesthetic situation. Traditionally, we more highly respect an artistic work when we know the artist is younger: for example, some of Mozart's pieces are most noted not because of their craftsmanship and brilliance, but because Mozart was only five at the time he composed them. But in this case ... I just keep thinking, "Smart, couldn't you have at least waited to write this until you were 22? Then she'd at least be old enough to vote!" I don't want naively to presume that just because the age thing grosses me personally out, it's intrinsically icky--I recognize Smart was living in a different culture, and at a different time--but dang it, I want to say it conforms to objective standards of ickiness!

Taste Test for a True Prophet

2006-10-26T13:13:00.000-07:00

As the Biblically erudite might know, it can be a tricky business to discern the true prophet of God from the false prophet of God. True prophets can seem wacky, occasionally incorporating nudity into their prophetic exploits; on the other hand, false prophets are notoriously zany. So, how can you tell whether someone is being Biblically wacky, or merely heretically zany? I believe I have established a guiding principle from Ezekiel 4:15 and II Peter 2:20. According to Ezekiel 4:15, a characteristic of the true prophet is that he will "bake [his] bread over cow manure." According to II Peter 2:20, the mark of a false prophet is that he will "return to [his] vomit." In conclusion, when testing (or tasting) the spirits, manure=okay, vomit=off limits.

(Later clarification.) Technically, II Peter 2:20 just says that false prophets are like dogs who return to their own vomit. So, to be more precise, we can say that eating literal manure-baked goods is okay, but eating metaphorical vomit is blasphemous.

Haunted Axe-Fiend Copper Mansion!

2006-10-22T17:15:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, in order to celebrate evil, my wife and I went to a sort of "haunted Halloween theme park." I'm not really sure what makes it "haunted"--it seems to me that someone could come up with a perfectly rational explanation for why chain-saws are able to stand in the air while someone is holding them. Sadly, my wife blogged about our visit first and took all the good material, but I'll try to come up with something.

I suppose the first thing that stuck out to me was the notice of what objects were verboten. During the period of standing in line, I had long opportunity to contemplate whether the contents of my pockets corresponded to anything on the massive checklist. For example, I was forbidden: "knives, mace, guns, weapons of any kind, lighters, flashlights, profanity, and physical contacts." (And those are only the items that I can remember!)

No "Knives, mace, guns, or weapons of any kind?" It seems a little (pardon the pun) overkill; isn't it just enough to say "no weapons of any kind?" I mean, I suppose somebody could try to claim that their knife was just for cutting steakburgers. Maybe someone would say the mace was just funky aerosol. But come on, I can't really picture your everyday gun-wielder saying, "This is not a weapon; it's a way of life." Omit needless words, people! And "No profanity?" I'm all for respecting the delicacy of children's ears, but did this mean that I would only be allowed to be scared poopless?

No "physical contacts?" (And what's with the plural?) Okay, so here we are at a theme park which will depict axe-wielding violence for us, but we can't depict a little hand-holding love? What would Jesus say? "No flashlights?" How am I supposed to figure out which parked car is mine when I go looking through the field that has no landmarks? (Okay, I guess it only took us about five minutes of anxious searching to find my car.)

Given the cold weather, it was nice that most of the attractions had roofs on them. However, since all of the place names seemed similar to me, the names blurred together. For example, the "Haunted House" is different from the "Axe Murder Mansion," which is not to be confused with the "Copper Canyon Massacre." I suppose I have a paucity of vocabulary when it comes to death, so I just called them "the haunted one," the "axe one," and "the one next to the axe one," respectively. The "Axe Murder Mansion" seemed particularly ill-named. First of all, since the crazy-looking dude effigy outside the mansion was holding two axes (perhaps Bush's "Axes of Evil?"), it should have been the "Axes Murder Mansion." Second of all, once I got inside, I don't really see how the axe was involved. For example, inside the mansion, there was a perfectly intact skeleton sitting and reading a book. Even now, I can't figure out how in the world that the axe and this skeleton's death can be remotely connected: did the axe murderer chop off the guy's arm (presumably while the person was running away), sew it back on, and then place him in front of a book? That seems like rather more genteel behavior than I would have expected from the snarling crazy guy effigy outside.

My wife notes that "the scariest part of the experience was undoubtedly the dark maze in which one couldn't see anything and had to grope around for the door, hoping that the person one had just bumped into was one's actual spouse and not either a member of a different party or one of the workers." I agree that it's scariest, but for a different reason. I didn't really mind bumping into the people behind us, because they were obnoxious loud kids who probably deserved being accidentally trodden upon. No, I suppose what bothered me was that these pesky kids would get to the exit first, and beat me. (Now I understand why the Scooby Doo gang provoked fear and hatred wherever they went.) I was scared, "What if several hours pass, and they close the attraction down, and they have to say, 'Hey, Leonard, take a look at the dork who couldn't find his way out!'"

Expand Your Jargon 3: Author Function

2006-10-18T20:22:00.001-07:00

Who is the author of this prestigious blog? "Why, Leopoldtulip," you say. Who is the author of the esteemed Hardy Boys Casefile Mysteries, which are much more grown up and involve international intrigue unlike the traditionally sissy Hardy Boys mysteries? "Why, Franklin W. Dixon," you say. At which point literary theorist Foucault laughs at you, because you have played right into his hands!

Why, you ask? Because there's no such person as "Franklin W. Dixon," and a lot of people have written Hardy Boys mysteries over the years. The name "Franklin W. Dixon" is just filling a classification function--it helps us to group certain texts together (manly Hardy Boys mysteries) and exclude other texts (girly Nancy Drew mysteries). Similarly, "Leopoldtulip" isn't somebody's real name. Someday, the person who calls himself "Leopoldtulip" hopes to get an article published, and when he does, you had better believe the article isn't going to say it's by "Leopoldtulip!" You see, I use the moniker "Leopoldtulip" to group together certain texts, i.e. goofy ones. I'm not going to include my serious scholarship here. Neither am I going to include something as mundane as a shopping list. I include entries that accord with my Leopoldtulip persona. This blog constructs the AUTHORitative "Leopoldtulip canon," if you will.

This should give you the basic idea behind Foucault's conception of the "author function." Foucault emphasizes that the name of an "author" is always performing a certain role that is different from a proper name. Foucault gives the example, "If I discover that Shakespeare was not born in the house that we visit today, that is a modification which, obviously, will not alter the functioning of the author's name. But if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions."

The question we might ask ourselves is, "Why would it make a bigger difference to us that 'Shakespeare' didn't write Hamlet versus 'Shakespeare' was born elsewhere?" The easy response would be to say, "Duh, because it is a bigger difference," but this begs the question. Sure, Shakespeare "the author" is big-time important to us! He's as American as apple pie! (Um, I mean, as English.) But it's not as if Christians are facing existential crises because they don't know who wrote I and II Samuel. What makes authorship such a big deal in some situations and not others? What makes Shakespeare's authorship a bigger deal than what color his eyes are?

So, what's the point of all this? I still find myself asking that question. I think part of the point is to imagine what it would look like if "author" didn't fill this function. Foucault notes that if the "author-function" lost its prominent role, we wouldn't be hearing the traditional questions like, "Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else?" Instead, we would be asking metalevel questions, "What difference does it make who is actually speaking?" What does it reveal about us and our own preoccupations?

In a future blog entry, I'm going to employ the idea of the "author function" to discuss how "authorship" functions when an author has been announced as dead, and he/she disputes this to the contrary.

Feeling Too Secure

2006-10-10T15:09:00.000-07:00

I like Ingdirect. They pay me interest. But their efforts to make me feel "secure" have me a little freaked out. At first, all I needed to do in order to log-in was to type my moniker and give a code number I selected myself (at least, that's all I remember having to do). Slowly, they have increased the complexity of their demands. They have given me an account number I have to look up every time, since it's so long. I also have to be able to answer one random question (e.g. "what are the first three digits of your social security number?"). Now, they've added a feature so that every time I try to login from a different computer, I will have to answer _five_ questions (such as what school I attended, the name of my first pet, etc.)! Finally, So that I feel "secure" and know I have logged on at the right site, I will see an image and phrase of my choice. (I guess it's so that I don't accidentally give my personal information for some website pretending to be Ingdirect.) I guess all these precautions are nice, but ... I don't know. It's kind of like when Great Starts breakfasts (frozen meals with sausage, hash browns, and scrambled eggs) started advertising, "made with real eggs." You're supposed to feel re-assured, but really, what you start thinking is, "I always just assumed they were 'real' eggs. Hey! Why don't they say 'made with real pig?' Oh no!" Similarly, I can't help but get rather worried that ingdirect is doing all these things to make me feel secure. Was there some scandal in which they gave away customer code numbers, and they're trying to fix their image as "reliable" and "secure?" What if they come up with so many questions that even I won't be able to figure out how to login successfully?

Still, I have to say that the "image and your own phrase" idea is pretty neat. Not so much because it's reassuring, but because, if you give the matter sufficient thought, it can be rather entertaining. For instance, you could pick an ugly animal image, and your phrase could be, "My Aunt Bertha." In my case, I chose the image above, along with the phrase "Beowulf." If you would like to know why, see this article. I can't really "recommend" the article in the sense of agreeing with anything that it says, but I do find the logical leaps amusing.

P.S.-would you like to have your own image and phrase at ingdirect? Would you like to deposit $250, get $25 bonus, have a savings account for which there is no minimum, have an interest rate of 4.4%, and earn Leopoldtulip $10? Just send an email to Leopoldtulip@yahoo.com, and he can recommend you (you don't get the $25 unless you're recommended by someone). Kidding aside, Ingdirect has done a fine job of giving me money over the years. It's a great service, and they support dinosaurs.

What's Green in Black and White and Read all over?

2006-10-07T18:15:00.000-07:00

When I was a youngster, I knew just what I wanted to be when I grew up. A super-hero. In fact, I'd be perfectly open to starting my superhero career in kindergarten, if that was what the Lord wanted. After all, God was all-powerful and all-wise: He must have placed this desire on my heart because He was going to use me as an instrument for His divine butt-kickin', right? My favorite super-hero of them all was Green Lantern. When I was 5, I prayed the longest prayer I had ever before prayed (in fact, perhaps it is still the longest!): in humble supplication, I beseeched God that He would send me a Green Lantern power ring. I gave God detailed instructions about where He could place the ring for me to find when I woke up. I waxed eloquent to God on all the selfless, beneficent deeds I would do with the power ring, such as replacing my grandmother's ugly grandfather clock with a beautiful green grandfather clock. Basically, Green Lantern's power is that he could make anything he wanted, so long as it was green. Now that's what I call real ultimate power!

Inexplicably, God must have put the power ring in the wrong place, and I never found it. Nevertheless, I still have a certain nostalgia when I think of Green Lantern. To this day, I remember his oath: "In brightest day, in blackest night/No evil shall escape my sight/Let those who worship evil's might/Beware my power, green lantern's light." So when I saw that Amazon was selling the first 20 issues of Green Lantern in paperback, that it was under $10, and that it was eligible for their "4 books for the price of 3" promotion, how could I refuse?

Sure, the early issues were campy. Sure, they were ethnically offensive, as Green Lantern is befriended by his "little Eskimo greasemonkey," named "Pieface," whose stock-phrase interjection was always "jumping fishhooks!" But the biggest problem with the paperback is that the collected stories represented Green Lantern's world in black and white. Literally.

I know, I know. It might not seem like a big deal that DC reprinted former color comics in black and white. Yes, black and white does work on a nice metaphorical level about simpler times, when the differences between right and wrong were more clearcut. It might even seem to work well on the aesthetic level: after all, you might think that a black and white grandfather clock is more pleasing to the eye than a green one. What you fail to take into account is a critical point in the Green Lantern mythos: because of an impurity in its composition, the power ring cannot work against anything that is yellow, which means every issue involves a case in which the ring does not work.

It is interesting to note that the publisher of Green Lantern, DC, got its name from "Detective Comics." DC comics often do offer more mysteries to be solved than do their counterparts at Marvel comics. For example, in Superman 122, Superman's sidekick Jimmy Olsen is dreaming rather loudly, "Foreign diplomats ... to see you ... president Superman," and an overhearing Superman thinks to himself, "Seems Jimmy is dreaming I'm President in the future! But ... it's impossible for Superman ever to be the chief executive of the U.S.!" The caption taunts the reader, "Can you guess why Clark is so positive that Jimmy's dream could never be fulfilled?" Since I am a super-sleuth, I guessed the right answer! For those of you less sleuthful, Superman reveals at the end, "If you'll read the constitution of the U.S....You'll find a provision which states that only native-born Americans can ever be President!" You see, you had to perform detective work and critical reasoning skills to realize that Superman was born on Krypton. Otherwise, he would be President.

I bring in the "Detective Comics" background to point out that DC only intended some elements of the story to require detective-work. While readers might be meant to puzzle out, "How is Green Lantern going to get out of this one?" they weren't supposed to have to guess, "What color is that menacing creature thing?" Knowing whether something is yellow or not becomes of crucial importance in understanding what's going on. I do have to admit that, much of the time, Green Lantern does try to keep his color-blind readers in the loop: for example, on the cover of Showcase Presents #24, Green Lantern informs his readers in a thought bubble, "Yellow beams from that monster's eyes...weakening me...making me powerless to resist." But other times, you just don't know. For example, in Green Lantern #8, when Green Lantern travels to 5700 A.D. to fight evolved gila monsters which are called Zegors, he notices, "the eye-blast of that Zegor and my power beam--are cancelling each other out!" Is it because the power beams are yellow, or because they are beams of magnitudinous power?

Sometimes you can get really faked out--there was a time when Green Lantern's power ring wouldn't work on a red missile, because it turned out it was really "infrayellow," which is just like "infrared," in that you can't see it, but it's there. (Scientists might call it "Infrayellow of the gaps.") As a detective, I had to piece together that not only did the missile not appear yellow to me, but it did not appear yellow to Green Lantern, except that it really was invisibly yellow, even though my first guess was that it was invisibly yellow, but only invisibly yellow to me and visibly yellow to Green Lantern and his original readers. Do you see how confusing this gets?

Still, it makes you appreciate the little things you take for granted. Like not being color-blind. Like gila monsters not having eye beams. Like infrayellow rays bouncing harmlessly off of us all the time, when for Green Lantern, it was a matter of life and death. Maybe I'm lucky I couldn't find that power ring after all.

Note: I'm not sure where the "infrayellow" story takes place, so it's possible I misremembered that it involved a missile. I don't have the patience to read the entire book over again, but if you find out the answer, let me know.

Later Later note (Nov. 13, 2006): an anonymous commenter found the quote! I was indeed misremembering the missile connection. Anyway, check out the comments to discover the infrayellow reference in context!

Crazy about Snakes on a Dahlia

2006-10-03T16:16:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, people feel the need to go out and do something crazy. In my college days, this might mean dancing naked around a fire, listening repeatedly to the Cranberries' "Zombie" song for three hours in succession, or going out on the rooftop and shouting "Yawp!" But as we get older and settled and eat vegetables regularly, the standards for what constitutes craziness might change. As they should. I think if my standards for craziness mandated a 24-hour marathon of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I would break down and forever despair of acting crazily again.

This past Friday night, we acted crazy. Not "acting" in the sense that we were the mere semblance of insanity: au contraire, we imbibed the very spirit of married craziness. It started off non-crazily enough, as insanity often does, while we were at our computers working. Several months ago, my wife took a twenty minute Blockbuster survey and was rewarded with complimentary Fandango movie tickets. The task of figuring out how Fandango works is an even more daunting task than a 20 minute survey, so we both ignored the ticket offer until Friday, two days before the offer would expire. Consequently, we decided that we would be just a shade of wacky: on Friday at 7:30 pm, we would see Black Dahlia (because my wife enjoys mysteries), and on the following day at 4:30 pm, we would see Snakes on a Plane (because I love guyness). Little did we know that the situation would soon escalate beyond our wildest dreams of wackiness.

Accidentally, when we ordered the tickets for Snakes on a Plane, we didn't change the request from "Friday" to "Saturday." As a result, we had tickets for a Friday 4:30 pm movie and a Friday 7:30 pm movie at two different theaters. What should we do? Naturally, our first thought was to think about serving others, and we sent out an email offering the free tickets to our graduate student friends. Inexplicably, two entire hours passed without any response, and my wife had to leave for an on-campus meeting at 3 pm. In that moment--faced with the possibility of two tickets to the dollar theater (a total value of three dollars) being lost forever--we resolved to do our part. Why not watch both movies? Were we wimpy? Were we frightened by a couple of namby pamby little movies, even if they were both rated R? No!

Now, we might tend to think that "crazy" people are people who have turned their rational faculties off. This is far from the case. As John Locke argues in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, crazy people "have [not] lost the faculty of reasoning .... Madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them." So, when we had the crazy idea, "We ought to watch both movies," we did not stop employing logic. In fact, we carefully employed strategery, plotting different scenarios: "What if the previews before Snakes on a Plane delay the movie and we're running late?" "We skip the credits and eat at McDonald's." "How can we get to Snakes on a Plane on time if I have a meeting on campus?" "I'll go on campus with you so that you don't have to drive back home." You see, craziness isn't just something that comes to you; you must be a careful steward of craziness, nurturing it so that it can grow into something beautiful, like a kumquat.

All in all, we were impressed by our craziness prowess. Sure, we did start to weaken sometime during Black Dahlia, but that's only because it's such a bad movie. Of course, so is Snakes on a Plane, but in a good way. Black Dahlia is a pretentious artsy film that, like Icarus, spreads its wings to fly too close to the sun, and tragically falls to its doom. Snakes on a Plane is an unpretentious movie that, like Icarus, involves a flying object; however, its flight ends in triumph. And with Samuel Johnson shooting a hole in the plane while it's still in the air. Awesome!

Pun Repression

2006-09-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

Last night (Friday night), I had a dreamed that on the internet I discovered there was a plane-owner named "Asp." In the dream, I was so excited that I decided to write a blog entry and to call it, "Snakes Own a Plane." (When I woke up, my efforts at googling "plane-owners" and "snakes" weren't quite as fruitful.)

The same night, I also had a dream that I was surfing the internet, and I discovered that a Danish guy had invented a new form of watermelon. In the dream, I decided to write another blog entry and call it, "Those lazy, hazy, crazy Danes of summer." I don't know, it made more sense in the dream ... eating watermelon during the summer, and all.

When I mentioned these dreams to my wife, she suggested that maybe I was repressing my desire to pun, and my subconscious mind was demanding an outlet. And you know, with early Freudian psychology, we all have this "id" that is trying to get us to do socially unacceptable things like engage in orgies, so, why not also accept that our "id" is trying to make us say bad puns in public? Our superegos reprimand us, "Do not make people groan in pain from a bad joke! It isn't nice!" so punning becomes a guilty pleasure. Perhaps we try to compensate, hiding our predilection: when we say the word "to," we giggle inwardly because we could also be saying "two," "too," or even "tu," and no one would be any the wiser. Soon, it becomes too much for us to take, and we might start punning in our sleep. Those unable to conform to social mores might take to violence, holding people hostage at gunpoint (a literal "captive audience"--"look out, he's got a pun!"), saying, "Have you had your shots? Laugh, or you will have your shots, oh yes, you will have your shots!" I think the moral of the story is that my wife should encourage me to make puns all the time.

Women's Hopes Dashed--By Comics!

2006-09-25T20:04:00.000-07:00

In Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Janine Barchas argues that the dash is of inestimable importance in Sarah Fielding's novel David Simple. Barchas points out that even though Sarah Fielding's 1st edition of the novel had 808 dashes, the 2nd edition--the edition edited by her patriarchial brother, Henry--only has 81 dashes! What happened to the missing dashes, you ask? Brother Henry imposed masculine stylistic conventions upon her and destroyed them. In so doing, brother Henry robbed Sarah's novel of its complexity. For example, the dash "allows [Fielding] to echo the non-verbal world which the women of her novel increasingly come to inhabit" (154). A dash is "a visual sign both of conversation and silence," giving "the sense of conversational immediacy and psychological affect" as well as emphasizing "the important role non-verbal communication plays" (160).

Barchas's arguments have convinced me that I need to take artists' implementation of the dash more seriously. Let us take a look at Fantastic Four #70 and see how Barchas's insights shape our reading. (I should add that, given that the dash is a direct assault upon patriarchy, it's a surprise that more women aren't reading comic books.) In context, The Thing (or "Ben") has gone crazy, and Mr. Fantastic (or "Reed") has just shot him with a menta-wave unit to return him to sanity. I shall only include the dialogue, not the captions.

Panel 1: [The Torch (or "Johnny") comments:] "Reed! You--you did it! He's collapsing! But--he--he's not breathing--any more--! You've--killed--him!" Panel 2: The Invisible Girl (or Sue) is outside. Sue says,] "Something terrible is happening in there--I just know it! I'm almost afraid--to open the door! That noise--inside----like something smashing down the wall!" Panel 3: [Sue crashes through the door.] "Ben--he's dead! And Reed--Johnny!! Wha--?!! Coming thru the wall--a giant, mindless android!"

Now, even without the captions, we have 15 dashes here within a space of just 3 panels (19 if you count the captions). With Barchas's insights, I can better account for the dash usage. Let's take the phrase, "You've--killed--him!" Paradoxically, this dash reminds us of both conversation and silence, of presence and absence. Few situations are so fraught with conversational immediacy and emotional intensity as those in which we point out that somebody who normally isn't dead, is being so right now. Yet this situation is also filled with non-verbal communication: Ben's body must speak the words that he cannot, nonverbally communicating, "Help me, I think I'm deceased!" When Johnny tries to verbalize Ben's plight--when Johnny says, "You've--killed--him!"--we are reminded that there are some things you can never say, especially when you are dead.

Johnny, too, is at a loss for words: What else is there to say other than "You've--killed--him?" (Sort of like, "Mistah Kurtz--he dead.") To drive this point home, imagine the opposite situation: If Ben were alive, conversational topics would flow naturally. Johnny could say, "I--think--he's breathing! Call someone--a paramedic! Do you know--have you ever learned--CPR?" Instead, Ben's death reduces Johnny to silence. It captures for us that moment when consciousness fades to blackness ... when speech fades to blankness. Johnny is confronted with death, with absence, with silence--and in that moment, a socially induced paralysis takes hold of him, and takes hold of the reader. There is something beyond logos, beyond language, beyond loquacity, and we are powerless to ever control it. We are like Sue Richards, ever unable to see what is beyond that door, ever afraid to see what lies outside logocentrism. We fear whether the great beyond will realize our greatest dreams--or only dash them.

Self-Absorbed 100th post!

2006-09-23T19:17:00.000-07:00

In November, 2005, there was a graduate student with a dream. His dream was that somewhere, there was a land, a land in which his mind could rove free. Free of the constraints of rational thought, coherence, or clarity. He did not find this land, but he did found this land, and he called it, "The Realm of Pseudo-Profundities." And so should you.

Sometimes, as I look back over these posts, especially the early ones, I have to remind myself that I have never taken illegal substances. I sometimes ponder how my style has changed since this blog's humble beginnings. Shows like The Simpsons or the website Homestarrunner seem to get progressively weirder the longer they continue; in contrast, I feel that my blog has actually moved closer toward normalcy. In my earliest posts, I lovingly crafted weird phraseologies alive with alliterative alley-oopedness; sometimes, I even out-lined a post in advance, such as my pseudo-profanities post. Yet at some point, I realized that all the effort this involved looked like the sort of thing I used to call "work," the very thing which this blog was created to avoid. I think my style has gotten less weird, partly because I've gotten lazier about blogging.

It's interesting to me to see how the subject matter of my blog has evolved. Initially, I envisioned the blog to be aimed at "academics": I was an English graduate student that was going to subvert academia and destroy it from within. But then, a funny thing happened. I started working on writing my Robinson Crusoe dissertation chapter. And months later, I was still working on my Crusoe chapter. My life centered around reading Crusoe-related paraphernalia. Now, since there are only so many blog entries someone can write about Crusoe, I sort of wandered from the academic fold and branched out into other areas, like cat analysis. Even though my blog has always been concerned with religion (such as midrashic angels without noses), I began blogging about Christianity more frequently; part of the reason for this increase is that my blog feed started going to my alma mater, a Christian college, and I thought it might meet readers' interests. Perhaps you have noticed that one of the most striking characteristics of this blog is its narcissistic quality: I blog about strange thoughts that I have, often unconnected to anything going on in the outside world. However, I recently subscribed to daily news updates, so maybe I'll be writing a lot more "news" blog in the next year (such as Barney the dinosaur's legal troubles). Recently, I have also tried to "return to my academic roots" a little bit with the "Expand your Jargon" series. I don't know where the next 100 posts will take me, but hopefully it's at least past the dissertation!

More Gossip, Please

2006-09-20T07:43:00.000-07:00

On Sept. 14, the MLA job list went up, so I am now diligently scrutizining every aspect of my life to figure out how I can apply for one of their 18th c. teaching jobs. Need someone on 18th c. British and can connect it to science? Well, my conference paper considers the scientific effects of eating dirt! Need someone with a "postcolonial" interest, eh? Well, I can talk about eating dirt in Jamaica! "Cultural studies?" Well, I do know a little something about how cultural differences shape the eating of dirt. I even tested the topic out on my advisor (not in the sense of eating dirt myself, of course) and got my advisor interested, too! It's odd: I thought I was padding my CV by applying on a lark for a conference, but this one bizarre topic actually serves to connect me to multiple scholarly trends and more marketable for jobs that are outside my normal specialization.

So, what will I do after I have sapped myself beyond all human endurance and sent in my application materials? Well, I know what a lot of people will be doing! They'll be surfing the web to find out their job prospects. I read an article on Chronicle of Higher Education which mentioned a large number of "rumor mills." There's one for international relations, American and comparative jobs, Middle East history, political theory and public law, and even theoretical particle physics. Astrophysics has two, yes, that's right, two rumor mills! And would you believe the article does not list one single English job rumor mill? What has become of us? We English people, who pride ourselves on only our ability to communicate: I ask you, if we're planning on reading fiction for a living, are we really supposed to be bothered by a few untruths about people on the job market? Sure, there may be some ethical problems with posting unsubstantiated rumors about job hires on the web, and I suppose it's possible that we don't have an English job rumor mill because English department people are ethically superior to all other forms of humanity. But ethics be danged, I want someone to start an English job rumor mill! So long as I only read it without repeating it, it's okay.

A Dream Come True

2006-09-17T19:11:00.000-07:00

As I was looking at my CV (or "curriculum vitae"), I was noticing that I have not given many conference paper presentations. More conference papers means more job search committees might say, "Hey, he writes things and contributes to knowledge, let's give him a job at our school!" However, there are two considerations that have prevented me from generating conference paper proposals. 1. I've been very busy the past few weeks working on things I have to do for the job market, so why should I write a proposal that's only optional? 2. I'm already scheduled to give a conference paper this semester, which means the English department probably wouldn't re-imburse me if I got accepted to another one. However, on Thursday, September 14, I got a short breather, and I thought to myself, "What the heck, I have a day, why not write a paper proposal for the conference that has a September 15th deadline?" Why not indeed? All I needed was to read the panel descriptions and try to think of something that might fit the theme.

But what subject do I know well enough that I won't sound stupid to the panel chair? For instance, if there were a panel on "Henry Fielding," ideally, I'd be able to say something in my proposal that indicated I knew something about the critical field of Fielding. I didn't have the time to survey that field. No, there must be something, some talent or knowledge-acquisitioned thing hidden deep within me, that, when exposed to the world, would blossom forth from the ground ...

From the ground ...

Eureka! Some of you may remember an old post I wrote called, "The Theological Significance of Eating Dirt." In this entry, I revealed the many fascinating things I learned about God and eating dirt in literature. Now, this topic is basically terra incognita (no pun intended), and I do believe I just might know the aesthetics on dirt-eating better than anyone else does. There actually are a lot of interesting things you can say about eating dirt and national identity; I'm not going to say them here, of course, because I do what I can to preserve my pseudoanonymity, and I fear the google search-engine. So, with a heart full of hopes, I sent my fledgling dirt baby proposal into cyberspace, and lo, it returned to me as an approved paper topic!

Now, even though I think I can say some meaningful things about eating dirt, I am not under the delusion that eating dirt is central to the national consciousness or something: I read a book jacket that argued tattoos were actually central to national identity, because America tried to discourage people from getting them. I never found that argument convincing. So, I'm not going to argue that dirt-eating is central to human identity because of the fact that mommas don't let their babies grow up to be dirt-eaters. However, I do think it's an interesting topic. I also suppose there's also a side of me that dreams of the following scenario:

College classroom. Late at night. Professor Murray sighs, reads a C.V., curses the applicant, sighs, reads another C.V., curses the applicant. Suddenly, he sits up straight. The sound of a chuckle mingles with the intake of his breath. A hushed awe. Then, a cry. "Doug! Doug, you gotta look at this! Did you see this guy who gave a paper on eating dirt? I've never heard of anything like this! We have got to interview this guy at MLA to find out what he said! Think of the insights to glean! The personality quirks to admire! The money to offer!" I just might hit paydirt.

Odin's Ways Are Not Our Ways

2006-09-14T21:50:00.000-07:00

God's ways are not our ways, and I suppose that should be just as true of Norse gods. We want to box Norse gods in, make them conform to our own standards of goodness and logic. They are not tame gods, and they are not proto-21st century Americans, either. We must acknowledge them in all their wildness, and in all their wackiness.

This insight came to me while I was reading about the super-hero "The Mighty Thor" by Stan Lee in Journey into Mystery 90. (Hey, I needed a break from the dissertation, okay?) In the comics, Thor lives on earth and is the god of thunder. His father is the chief god, Odin. In this particular issue, Thor is surprised that some of his human friends and acquaintances are acting strangely. Thor remembers some advice his father Odin once gave him: "When something puzzles you, always seek the simplest, most obvious explanation ... no matter how impossible it may seem!" Now, that piece of advice sounds awfully conformable to human logic and wisdom, doesn't it? I mean, Occam's Razor says that, when someone is "given two equally valid explanations for a phenomenon, one should embrace the less complicated formulation." And Sherlock Holmes says, ""if you have eliminated all of the impossibilities, the only remaining possibility must be the correct one, no matter how implausible!" How refreshing it is to have a deity that thinks like human smart people do!

But then, in a masterful stroke, Stan Lee reminds us that Thor, even when seeming to begin with human logic, turns that logic on its head, because he has special godlike reasoning powers. Thor reflects, "The simplest, most obvious explanation! If people are not acting like themselves, then they must not be themselves! They must be imposters!" See, I wouldn't have gone for that. I'd have suggested maybe they'd just eaten a bit of undigested mustard, maybe had a bad day or something. Even though I knew Thor was a god, I was still skeptical of his idea, but you know what? In the end, it turned out he was right after all, and his so-called "friends" were really just extra-terrestrial imposters. Boy, did I have egg on my face. Still, it taught me that sometimes we just have to learn to trust that which is beyond our understanding. Like comic books.

While I'm at it, I figure I might as well quote this catchy aphorism uttered by Mr. Fantastic in Fantastic Four #65: "Wives should be kissed--and not heard!" A super-intelligent super-hero cannot be wrong!

Pseudoanonymity

2006-09-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

Cloaked within a shrouded mystery of thorough unrevealedness, Leopoldtulip sits at his computer, laughing. His is the power to type things, things deemed too controversial even for words, and all with complete anonymity. Except for the fact that a bunch of people know who he is.

I have taken steps to secure my secret identity, of course. I call myself "Leopoldtulip." Nevertheless, over the months of this blog's history, people have repeatedly called me "John" in the comment box. There are only so many times I can type, "I do not know this John person of which you speak, for I am the great and powerful Oz!" before it gets old. Nevertheless, for some strange reason it is psychologically re-assuring to pretend that people can't figure out who I am: For instance, I never refer to "my wife" by name, even though there's this person named "Teresa H.T." who leaves the kind of comments that a wife (or at least a kept woman) would. In trying to deceive others about my identity, have I deceived only myself that I am deceiving anyone?

I also must admit that I apply a double-standard: I do not name my wife, but I constantly refer to our cats, Cricket and Pippin. My wife has suggested that, given the distinctive names of our cats, it would be easier for someone to guess my identity based on the cats' names rather than my wife's, given the large number of people named Wife in the world. Her argument makes a lot of sense intellectually, but not psychologically. Perhaps it is because I just think of cats as being harmless, non-sentient beings. They have no credit card history or webpages that an enterprising private detective can trace. They are prisoners here and can never try to sell their story to ABC. And if I didn't call them "Cricket and Pippin," what would I call them in my blog? Thing 1 and Thing 2?

I suppose what makes me saddest about the inadequacy of my anonymity is that it makes it harder to effect real social change. I was just reading an article about how the anonymous blogger Brewster Pennybaker at Alfred College crafted an "I hate my College President, Uma Gupta" blog. Every entry, one would learn a new reason to dislike Gupta, such as that she took a four-day weekend over Memorial Day, that she must suffer from personality disorder, that she must be paranoid, etc. (I can't imagine why she'd think that someone was out to get her ...) The blogger even successfully mobilized marginally apathetic faculty members into seething masses of burning hatred. Now, there's a blog that effects real social change: things got so bad that Gupta eventually left. And No matter how hard Gupta tried, she could never figure out what person hated her so much that he/she dedicated an entire blog to her destruction.

I could never do that to someone. Not just in the sense that I'm a nice guy, but in the sense that I don't want someone getting back at me. There's just no way that I could viciously assault someone's character on this blog and prevent that person from finding out who I am. What if someday I want to brutally savage the government and/or reveal military secrets? It is true that, when Jonathan Swift anonymously wrote the controversial "Drapier Letters," no Irishman would turn him in for the 300 pound reward from the English, even though his identity was an open secret in Ireland. It is also the case that he didn't have a comment box where people were calling him "Swiftyboy," either. Man, I could actually be held personally responsible for what I write. That sucks!

Big Brother is Watching You

2006-09-09T09:35:00.000-07:00

"Every blog you see
every site you flee
Every page retrieved
every comment leaved1
I'll be watching you."
-The (Secret) Police

Guys like numbers. In The River Why, David James Duncan remarks on the oddity of John 21, where Jesus's disciples show their quantification propensities by counting 153 fish. Duncan writes, "This is, it seems to me, one of the most remarkable statistics ever computed. Consider the circumstances: this is after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection; Jesus is standing on the beach newly risen from the dead, and it is only the third time the disciples have seen him since the nightmare of Calvary. And yet we learn that [the fish numbered precisely 153]....How was this digit discovered? Mustn't it have happened thus: upon hauling the net to shore, the disciples squatted down by that immense, writing fish pile and started tossing them into a second pile, painstakingly counting 'one, two, three, four, five, six, seven...' all the way up to an hundred and fifty and three, while the newly risen Lord of Creation, the Sustainer of their beings, He who died for them and for Whom they would gladly die, stood waiting, ignored, till the heap of fish was quantified. Such is the fisherman's compulsion toward rudimentary mathematics!"

Internet technology being what it is, there is another thing to quantify: the number of visits to a blog! A few months ago, I signed up with statcounter.com, which I highly recommend. Since I am never going to pay them for their services, I figured I at least owe them a blog entry. They have some of the coolest features I have ever seen. Many internet counters may tell you how many times your pages have been loaded on a day; for example, you might get 38 hits on a day and think blissfully to yourself, "I have 38 fans!" Unfortunately, you might not have 38 fans: it just might be that you have one particularly obsessive fan who has clicked on your page 38 times. Or, even worse, perhaps the reason your one fan reloaded your blog so many times is that they weren't reading your blog at all: they kept looking at your links, hitting the "back" button, then leaving again.

Statcounter not only tells you how many "hits" you have on a day: it also tells you how many of these hits were from different visitors, and how many of these visitors are 1st timers/returning. It tells you how long they visited a page. It tells you where that person lives! It tells you what site they visited before yours: for instance, I discovered someone had linked to one of my posts simply because I kept getting internet traffic from the same blog. It tells you what google searches brought someone to your site. Not that I care, but it even tells visitors' IP addresses and browser choices. Statcounter lets me set up a "blocking cookie" on my own computer, so that my counter isn't affected by my own visits. (Think how shaming it must be to have five hits on a day, four of which have been yourself.) Best of all, statcounter is free!

Now, statcounter only keeps this level of detail for the most recent 100 page loads--you can increase the number through an upgrade, but you have to pay for the service. I think that statcounter is most useful if you don't get many visits, because then you have something to do when virtually nobody's reading you. Sure, perhaps only three people visited your site that day, but you can spend ten minutes carefully studying them, their geographical location, and their viewing habits. Not that I would do that sort of thing, of course, because that would be obsessive.

The weirdest thing is learning what google searches take someone to a blog entry. For instance, I wrote a post recounting how, as a 12-year old, I wrote a really bad rock song about ear-piercing being sinful, along with Scriptural proof-texts. I got all sorts of hits from google searches like "piercing arguments," "Biblical reference to ear-piercing," etc. I couldn't help but feel bad for all of these people who had actually hoped for something substantial but had ended up at my blog instead. Perhaps the one I feel worst about is a person's search, "how to console someone with a death in the family," which took the person to this beauty. I never really thought about the odd weakness of google: it can tell whether certain words show up, but not whether they are serious or humorous. Also, google searches not just an individual blog entry but a whole month's archive: so, when someone googled "skit based off Ananias and Sapphira," mine was the first hit on google, because one of my blog entries used the phrase "Ananias and Sapphira" and a different entry in the same month used the word "based."

However, sometimes the google searches can make me feel touched. For instance, someone did a google search for "fully human, fully divine," and went to my site. Normally, I would feel bad about someone wanting a serious post and getting a silly one. However, statcounter lets me go to the google screen, and I saw that even before the person clicked on my site, google had excerpted the phrase "fully monkey," a key silliness signifier. I like to think that there's this unknown personage who sincerely wanted to learn some serious Christology, but found him/herself intrigued and inexorably drawn in by the siren song of the monkey. That is a high compliment indeed. Both to my writing, and to monkeys.

Having statcounter also enables you to employ some neat counter-espionage technology. Sometimes, after I visit a blog or link to it, someone--and by "someone," I mean whoever owns the blog I visited--will use their advanced tracking technology to learn that this "Leopoldtulip" guy linked to them, and they will spy on me by looking at my blog. With statcounter, it's like having a double agent spy within their ranks--several times, statcounter has told me when someone got to my site through "technorati" or a different web counter system. Who's spying on whom, buddy? You think you're so cool with your complex internet tracking capabilities, but tell me, who's ... spying ... on whom?

1.Yes, yes, I know it should be "left."

This Book does not Exist

2006-09-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

I was looking around Amazon and was surprised to discover a review for a book that does not exist. The reviewer, Sean McKeever, writes, "Hi. As the author of the material, I'd like to point out that this edition was never published by Marvel Comics. The material claimed to be reprinted in this volume has yet to be reprinted beyond its original comicbook format. Since Marvel has collected the first six issues of Inhumans in digest format (see ISBN 0785117555) there is a chance that this, the remainder, will one day be reprinted." McKeever's The Inhumans Vol. 1 is very good, which is why I was looking around Amazon for his work.

His comment got me to thinking what an incredibly surreal experience it must be to see a book on Amazon, supposedly by yourself, that is non-existent. When I am particularly bored, I sometimes just type the word "Leopoldtulip" in amazon.com, but it's not like I actually expect to find anything there. To be honest, I'd feel rather weird if I didn't get the message, "No results matched your search." What would I do if it brought me to a description of the book, The Best of the Realm of Pseudo-Profundities? I guess I'd stare at the screen a little. Perhaps I'd feel a little flattered that some people thought my material offered sufficient commercial promise that they consequently stole it from me. But mainly, I'd wonder what the heck was going on.

If I were the writer of the above amazon review, however, I'd probably also feel a little cheated. Any time that I typed in my name Sean McKeever to survey the several pages of listed publications all by me, my eyes would always focus on that one book. The non-existent edition that "has yet to be reprinted," because apparently the stupidheads at Marvel don't know what's good for them. Forever taunted with the reminder that "there is a chance that this, the remainder, will one day be reprinted," but believing it probably never will be. It's demoralizing enough for authors that Amazon lists books that are out of print without listing editions that never were in print. As an author, one would always feel a sort of painful attraction to the entry--the book that does and does not exist at the same time. (Yes, I know it exists in individual comic book form--much as these blog entries exist as individual blog entries--but not in one collected edition.) Once a week or so, maybe you'd check to see if anybody of "The emperor has no clothes" temperament has written a comment, "Umm, isn't Amazon only supposed to list books that actually exist?" Finally, you just cannot take the indeterminacy anymore: you are going to leave a comment!

The additional weirdness factor is that you don't simply have to leave a comment; you have to rate the book according to a five stars system. So how do you rate a nonexistent book? Especially if you know it may someday exist, and you don't want the ratings skewed. And especially if the book is written by yourself. I respect Sean McKeever, because he only gave his work three stars. I was tempted to write my own review of his book (if it's a non-existent book, I have just as much right to review it as anyone else) and give it five stars as a reward for his being a classy guy who didn't give himself high ratings.

The only slightly more surreal experience I can think of would be if Sean McKeever googled his name and found his way to this blog entry. Should he leave a comment to say whether my speculations at all resembled his own? Pretend that this blog entry, like the book, does not exist? If there are any surreal questions you would like to ask Sean McKeever if he ever visits this blog, leave a comment below.

Gumshoes of the world, Untie!

2006-09-04T20:18:00.000-07:00

It's those little incomprehensible differences between the sexes that get me. What better way to say "I love you" than playing a computer game where you try to kill each other? Love is all about making yourself vulnerable, like when you only have a revolver and your partner has an uzi. It is Mr. and Mrs. Smith without the secret agent training. My wife doesn't see things this way, so I am often forced to kill computer-generated wood-elf armies when I could be killing my wife's hand-picked elite fighting force of undead hordes.

I finally figured out why she refused to play games like Warcraft 3 with me. It was not simply that she disliked computer games; it was because she wanted to make me so desperate that I would play any computer game with her, even if it had a girly phrase like "Nancy Drew" in the title. I won't lie to save my reputation. I grudgingly admit that it is a fun game.

However, what I really wanted to comment on is "Gumshoe online." You see, my wife didn't start off my slow descent into womanness territory by saying, "Why don't we play Nancy Drew?" She started by saying, "IF you really want me to play a game with you, let's play a detective game." She appealed to my sense of frugality: "The 1st game is free." It starts you off with a rippling masculinity private detective, but he behaves so stupidly that you will play Nancy Drew out of desperation.

Now don't get me wrong. I grew up playing the King's Quest series, a fun fantasy adventure game where a lovable King Graham wandered the countryside and, in MacGyveresque fashion, always found a use for seemingly pointless objects. Sure, to the untrained eye, a tambourine seems useful only for goofy praise and worship music--but it can actually scare a life-threatening animal! Shazam! Every object that is not bolted to the ground will end up serving a useful purpose. It's the sort of world that would be an atheist's nightmare: "Look, I just found this smelly old fish that enabled me to save the entire bee colony from a bear! Are you trying to tell me the fish just happened to get there by chance, silly atheist person?" So, in principle, I can handle a game in which you start off with nothing but your wits.

Yet for some reason, it really bothered me that Gumshoe Online has the same basic premise of your owning nothing. You begin the game with an office. The only things within this office are an empty desk and the air you breathe. Now for your first challenge: you have to sneak into a house with a locked door. You'd think that maybe, seeing that you are a detective, you would own a prybar, or at least know how to find a store that sells prybar. No. You need to walk around town a little, look around, and notice that someone has just left a conveniently placed prybar lying on the ground. And while I’m on the subject, what kind of freak private eye doesn’t even own a flashlight? What kind of freak private eye has to wander around in houses looking to permanently "borrow" someone else's lockpicks because he doesn't have his own?

Forced to be self-critical, I wondered whether I was employing a double-standard, blaming the Gumshoe Online game for criticisms just as applicable to King's Quest: aren’t both characters just wandering around looking for objects they ought already to own? Happily, C. S. Lewis convinced me I was perfectly justified, so the self-doubt is gone and the merciless mockery can continue. Lewis talks about different forms of “realism”: “realism of content” refers to works which depict a likely (or “realistic”) situation—for example, it is “realistic” for private eyes to exist. However, there is also “realism of presentation,” which refers to works which may depict an unlikely situation (you are a ruler of a fantasy kingdom and wandering around to find your castle that an evil wizard has stolen) but may realistically depict how a person might behave under those circumstances. The real difference between the two games is that they observe two different kinds of realism. King’s Quest has “realism of presentation”—if my kingdom and castle were kidnapped along with all my personal possessions, then like King Graham, I’d behave by going crazy in the kleptomaniac department and hoping to pick up something useful. Gumshoe Online is trying to have “realism of content” (a private eye with an office) but then makes him incapable of functioning in a realistic way—such as owning office supplies. The game must contradict itself in order to instantiate itself. (I don’t know what that means, but it sounded good, so I figured I’d write it.) If that crisis in the game's self-identity doesn't bother you, then by all means, play the game, it's not bad.

I did learn from the experience that, even if I thought the game had these fundamental aesthetic flaws, it was fun to play a game with my wife. Since then, we’ve been playing the Nancy Drew game, where you also have to go around picking up objects, but since you don’t have an office, and the winter snow storm means that you’re trapped in the haunted mansion, it does not merit my indignation. Except I really wish it were a Hardy Boys Case Files mystery instead.

A Minor Observation

2006-09-04T18:20:00.000-07:00

Wow. I have to express some surprise (along with Janeeyreish) that the last blog entry has generated the largest number of comments in the history of this blog, and I am still scratching my head wondering why. I recall a philosophy professor suggesting that college students were fairly uninterested when it came to issues like "What is truth?" and pretty loud when it came to aesthetic issues like "Metallica sucks!" Maybe we express our opinions more readily about aesthetic issues (music, cuteness, etc.) because the conclusions seem more personal: we like the "truth" because we think it is the truth (objective), but we like a rock band because ... we like it. (Or, in the case of Celtic punk, because it is the awesomest musical creation in existence.) An assault on a favorite rock band can seem a personal attack on one's own identity and interests, because aesthetic judgments often seem more subjective and more like a product of "choice" than truth judgments do. Perhaps ironically, cuteness is objectively more compelling than other subjects because it has this subjective component. Or maybe it's because this is a labor day weekend and people were bored. Either way, the enigma of cuteness remains.

Toward a Definition of Cuteness

2006-08-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, my inbox was at 700+. Part of the problem of why I have so many freaking emails in my inbox is that I take great comfort in knowing a particular email is there, undeleted, in my inbox, even if I cannot find it. I don't have to worry that it's in some "e-mail folder" and that I'll forget my filing system: it's right there, in the inbox. Surrounded by other emails also in my inbox. Some of this veritable cornucopia of emailness is because I love my friends; however, a great deal also stem from a narcissistic urge to preserve a reply to my own pretentiously witty remark.

In my cleaning, I found this old email to a friend in which I was struggling for definitive definition of the term "cute." What better excuse to delete the email than to reproduce it in my blog? (BTW, my friend responded by cutting and pasting the OED definition of cute. Yes, he is a graduate student.)

""Cute." If it is simply a predicate adjective without a noun (e.g. "that girl is cute"), I contend that the only ideological commitment that one is making is the belief that the person's face is cute; that is, it is only if the adjective is modifying a noun (e.g. "that girl has a cute body," "that girl has a cute butt") that one is committing oneself to cuteness as an attribute of something other than, or in addition to, the face. [My future wife], in contrast, insists that describing a personage as "cute" (e.g. "that guy is cute") entails one's committed declaration that the person's body as a whole is "cute," though not necessarily the face. To clarify her position, the face could have a lesser degree of "cuteness" than is standard, but should the person's body be sufficiently "cute," it would compensate. For instance, someone might think, "Tommy Lee Jones is cute, even though his face is ugly.""

I suppose if I were to revise my definition now, I think I would further clarify that I am presupposing we are using cuteness in the sense of being "physically attractive" (e.g. sexually attractive): so, cute dogs, cute babies, etc., are outside the purview of discussion; I am interested in the scope of the term "cute" when applied to humans. I would further add that a speaker attributing cuteness to another would not have to be personally attracted to that person (e.g. one girl could call another "cute" without being lesbian) but would be claiming that the person/face/whatever has some degree of attractiveness/desirability to mating-type people.

With that added clarification, how do you use the word "cute" when functioning as a predicate adjective describing an attractive person? does it refer primarily to the face? The whole package? Something I have not considered?

Barney Hate Crimes

2006-08-28T10:08:00.000-07:00

I have never liked Barney. After learning that the EEF was suing Barney to defend the on-line free speech of blogger Stuart Frankel, it was even easier to wish ill upon him and his descendents, yea, unto the fourth generation. Evidently, Barney's cronies have been sending threatening letters to anti-Barney sites to quit being so bloodthirsty. For instance, the down-loadable role-playing game "The Jihad to Destroy Barney" says--well, really, do I need to say anything more than the title? (If you'd like to see Frankel's original site, see here. If you'd like to see the modified site to assuage Barney's lawyers, see here. Speaking as a graduate student, I also highly encourage you to download Stuart Frankel's dissertation; we academics are thrilled when anyone besides the members of our dissertation committees actually read these things.)

Frankly, my first inclination was to make fun of the litigious little dinosaur. I mean, he's rich, he's picking on the weak, maybe he needs to be knocked down. But then, I realized it might seem contradictory for me to argue such a point, given that my last entry was all about how Pluto ought to sue the scientific community for defamation of character and being called a dwarf. Even though Pluto is pretty huge so far as dwarves go, his size has not prevented his victimization by the scientific community: so why should I treat it as "bad" for Pluto to get kicked around but celebrate it in the case for Barney? So for this entry, I'll try to be a little more sympathetic with him.

I know, I know, Barney doesn't "exist," so we can't really hurt his feelings. And it's not as if these "Kill Barney" groups are advocating people kill African-Americans, Muslims, homosexuals, people who are dressed in dinosaur costumes, etc. But I did start to imagine how it would feel as a child who did look up to Barney seeing people glorify his destruction. One of the things I really don't like about flag-burning is that, important as it is to critique the United States government (or any government), I think there are better ways than celebrating the destruction of a symbol that holds meaning to a lot of people (especially vets who have risked their lives). I'm not into burning Korans, I'm not into burning flags; I think it's jerky. (Whether it should be against the law to be a jerk is a different matter, but who wants to insist on the constitutional right for oneself to be a jerk?) Being a super-hero fan when I was a kid, I would have been at least mildly traumatized if there had been a "kill Batman" game where you could shoot him, hack off his limbs, etc.. Sure, the broody guy had some psychological problems, but I don't think he merited torture and dismemberment, any more than a purple dinosaur promulgating a message of love would. And if I happened to be the genius who invented Barney, I'd probably be somewhat saddened to see a creation of mine gleefully maimed. Of course, I'd also be somewhat saddened to see a creation of mine being banal and singing stupid songs, but that's beside the point.

Both sides (pro-Barney and anti-Barney) are making a major faux pas here. By celebrating the wanton destruction of an iconic figure, the anti-Barneys risk turning Barney into a martyr: a proselyte to Barneyism could lament, "All he wanted was for us to know that he loved us, that he wanted us to love him, and for that, you have killed him!" But Barney has also made a significant mistake. For example, if Jesus were Barney, and one of his followers sent threatening letters, He would have said, "No more of this!" and miraculously healed their internet connection or something. The true disciple of Barney would espouse a message of love and self-sacrifice; he or she would not place hope in a Barney multi-million dollar corporate kingdom in this world, but in the next.

Pluto Has Grounds for Lawsuit

2006-08-24T09:34:00.000-07:00

It's official. The big floaty thing in the sky formerly known as "planet Pluto" is now just "Pluto," or "Pluto the dwarf," if you prefer to kick him when he's down. I mean, when he's up. In the sky. Which is a difficult place to kick. But I digress. The point is, Pluto once had the majestic designation "planet," and science has ruled against him. He has no other option, no other means of redress. It's time to take this to the Supreme Court.

Okay, maybe he never was a "planet"; when he was first discovered, scientists mistakenly thought that he and his moon Charon were one planet (or a "Siamese-twin planet," as I like to think of it). But he's come to receive all the benefits of planethood, including having his name honored in mnemonics. (I feel such a sense of loss. What will be the new one? "My Very Efficient Mother Just Served Us Naked?" The ramifications are just too disturbing.) There's a funky legal principle that goes like this: Even if you don't have a "right" to something, if you've had it for a while and come to depend upon it, you deserve compensation for it if it's taken away. (For example, see here and here.) Pluto has suffered a lot from the loss of his name, and it's up to the U.S. to take a stand. You know the U.N.'s a sissy and is going to just let the scientific community browbeat poor Pluto, just because it's a weak and defenseless planet--oops, I mean, "dwarf-planet." (That's right, it's not a nice big Aryan planet like Earth is!)

So just what damage has been done to Pluto? Did he cry like a little girl? No, my friends, it is much worse than that. In the words of Caltech researcher Mike Brown (who recently discovered a Pluto-sized "dwarf-planet"), "Pluto is dead." (As Nietzsche might have added, "And we have killed him.") That seems to me like a pretty big grievance against the scientific community. They performed their inhuman scientific classification experiments on Pluto, and now he's dead!

Now, I know what you're probably thinking: "If Pluto is dead, how can he sue?" He doesn't have any close relatives. But here's what you're forgetting: Pluto is not merely a "dwarf-planet"; he is "god of the underworld." You people in the scientific community made a big mistake when you tried to mess with the one planet in our solar system that cannot stay dead. Sure, Jesus died, came back to life, and didn't sue, but he was all into "Love your Neighbor." Pluto's mad as Hades, and he's not going to take it any more.

Expand Your Jargon 2: Dialogized Heteroglossia

2006-08-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

(Official disclaimer: I do not pretend to be an expert on snootiness, and I do not pretend that my efforts at simplification may result in a misrepresentation of the term. You have been forewarned.)

You may have noticed that people of the world speak different languages. This, in and of itself, seems to be in the "Duh" category. But have you stopped to think that many people speak different English languages? You've got your regional dialect here, your professional jargon there (with pretentious terms like "analeptic prolepsis"). You've got your generational gap: I do not believe I will ever hear my parents will use the word "cool" as an honorific term for niftiness. You've got the fact that the same word can radically change when placed into a new context just two years later; it used to be that the term "weapons of mass destruction" was a fairly snicker-free word, but now many use it as a synonym for "ludicrous foreign policy." As M. M. Bakhtin writes, "each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases" (The Dialogic Imagination 263). There are different possible meanings of the same word (the meaning often depends on who's uttering it), and Bakhtin uses the word "heteroglossia" to describe this multiplicity and diversity of "languages" within one language. The words we choose express a specific point of view shaped by our upbringing, social class, personal affiliations, etc.

What's cool (in the nifty sense) about novel is that it has a lot of different kinds of heteroglossia. For instance, in My Fair Lady, you get snooty pedant Professor Higgins heteroglossia interacting with common flowergirl Eliza Doolittle heteroglossia. (Okay, that's an example from a play, not a novel, but it's less obscure than the other examples I thought of.) So the world may be characterized by heteroglossia--by having a bunch of different "languages" with their own hidden socio-linguistic assumptions--but in the novel, they are forced to engage with each other, to compete or communicate with opposing perspectives. A liberal can't describe him/herself as a "liberal," and a neoconservative can't refer to "weapons of mass destruction," without being reminded that these phrases are slur-words in certain circles. The English language is "dialogized"--that is, the different potential meanings of a word are almost always engaging with each other. They are "dialoguing," if you will.

So, to put this together: "dialogized heteroglossia" is, according to Bakhtin, "the authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape" (272). It recognizes that utterances enter an environment in which different socio-linguistic points of view are struggling over what that utterance means: for example, whether "patriotism" refers to a noble love of country, or to wicked behavior (as when Samuel Johnson describes it as the "last refuge of a scoundrel").

"Dialogized heteroglossia" is nifty because 1. it it a big phrase and 2. practically every fictional work has it. "Man, I really liked that play we saw yesterday, with those two guys with those different beliefs. Dang, that dialogized heteroglossia was freakin' awesome!" "You know, I've been thinking of only hanging out with computer geeks, but I'm worried that I won't be getting enough dialogized heteroglossia."

The Ethical Starvation of Children

2006-08-20T15:32:00.000-07:00

When we were visiting my in-laws over vacation, we went to a Lebanese buffet. The spread was really impressive, including such delicious foods as hummus, unlabeled substance #1, and unlabeled substance #2. Often when I am eating, and some food looks disturbing, I like to know what it "is" so I can determine what the threat level is. However, it can also be rather frustrating when something tastes good (like just about everything at this buffet), but I don't know what it is so I can order it somewhere else when we're back home.

Anyway, while I was really enjoying my eating experience, I couldn't help but notice that my two nephews were rather uneager about the food. They poked at the hummus a bit. Our server tried to encourage them, saying, "I'll get you some more lemonade, just take one more bite." Face grimaced in determination, my older nephew took one for the team, placing a subatomic particle of hummus in his mouth for their promised lemonade. (Technically, I know the smallest unit would be a "hummus molecule," but the portion he took looked smaller.) Eventually, the server got tired of seeing their endless torment and brought them French Fries, at which time they seemed to grasp the idea of what a "buffet" was: a chance to eat tons of your favorite food and not to try anything new.

Now, I love my nephews. I want them to see them grow and flourish, as if they were two very manly flowers of the field. I don't want them to starve. And if they were just rejecting vegetables, that would be one thing. But they aren't rejecting vegetables. They're rejecting the buffet because it's foreign ... because it's not "American" food ... because oh no, my nephews hate diversity and other cultures! Left unchecked and unchallenged, my nephews are going to hate African Americans (whom they will call "black people," if not an even worse term). If something like 9/11 happened again, my nephews wouldn't just give into hatred of "the Other" by burning down mosques: no, they'd be the people who burnt down the funny-looking Christian churches that looked like mosques, because my nephews would be uncultured and wouldn't know the difference! They should be made to eat the Lebanese food right now so that they don't grow up to be evil. Even if they grow up looking a little malnourished because they never eat.

I know my response is illogical. They're just kids. But it just feels that, on some level, it's ethically wrong for kids to spurn food just because it's foreign, and it seems wrong to capitulate to their prejudices by giving them French Fries.

Nevertheless, at some point, I pondered whether the world might in fact be better off if academics like me were just sterilized, rather than subjecting their future children to impossibly high standards. (I have also had this notion after watching episodes of Jack & Bobby.) For instance, a married couple of professors in the English literature department here sent their kids (I believe they were high-school age) off to a literary theory camp. That is messed up. The kids are going to need therapy for that sort of thing. But what if I someday become so immersed in the academy that such an idea actually sounds appealing? What if someday I have kids and pontificate, "No, you can't have French Fries! You must appreciate other cultures even if I must break every hegemonic brain synapse in your body to do it! Now, let's start with the notion of 'Orientalism'..." Sometimes we academics need to lighten up. Like Freud might have said, sometimes a French fry is just a French fry.

P.S.-okay, I realize a "French" fry sounds "French" rather than "American," but go with me here!

Devil Helps Environment?

2006-08-17T13:05:00.000-07:00

According to Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, it may be possible to curb global warming by shooting sulfur into the atmosphere. With artillery guns. Take that, atmosphere! But I suppose what I find strangest about the recommendation is that I tend to associate sulfur with ... well ... the Devil. And when I think of places that are very warm, again, I think of the Devil. (Norse mythologists may have different climate associations.) So to say that a substance I associate with the Devil may help curb global warming is counter-intuitive to me. I suppose there is a kind of poetry in the idea--in the Bible, bad guys are always digging pits and then accidentally falling into them ... Satan's trying to kill Jesus and accidentally making him risen Lord and Savior... so there's a kind of fittingness in the Devil trying to ravage the world with hellfire but accidentally cooling it by his very presence. God can work good out of evil, and even out of sulfur. And even out of pancakes.

Picking on Little Kids

2006-08-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

Even though it is playground etiquette for the big kids to pick on the little ones, I realize there comes a time when a kid gets too big. Back when I was a C.I.T. (Counselor-In-Training), having the advantage over the little campers hadn't yet become too bad on the conscience front. Playing games with them was somewhat relaxing: sure, I could not actually shoot a basketball into the basket, but I could stay there until doomsday catching all the rebounds and holding the ball above the campers' heads. (Hey, they wanted me to play! And I am exaggerating my evilness for aesthetic purposes.)

But with greater age comes greater responsibility. Kids are small. Wee, even. They are closer to the ground, and it is bad manners for me to smash them into it, physically or psychologically. This led to a complex dilemma when we were visiting family and celebrating my brother-in-law's birthday. Most of the adults wanted to play older-type games, and one of the kids (around 10) wanted to play Boggle. For those who do not know, you play by using connected, tiled letters to form words. In Boggle, it's not the person with the most words who wins; you only get points if you see a word that no else wrote down. Basically, people who are whizzes at Family Feud will suck. Now I am not a Boggle expert, but I have played it enough that I have certain techniques. I know to look for the word "ted," which is more than just a proper name. Much more. An entire point, in fact. I look for the Celtic spellings of words, like "twa" and "ane." I know that if I see the word "eat," I should look for "ate," "tea," and "tae," and say "boo-yah!" in a Scottish accent if I get the last one.

When friends have game nights (where we get together and play board games), I like to bring Boggle. My wife does not, because she thinks that I "always win" (I don't, of course), and for some reason I don't fully understand, she claims that my supposed repeat victories make her feel guilty--that we have wronged our friends by bringing a game at which I can best them. Now, our friends are welcome to buy a personal copy of the home game and improve their performance. My conscience is clear. If Superman was able to play high school football despite having super powers, I'm okay with bringing Boggle. But ... not with kids. That's crossing the line.

So what do you do if most of the other adults are playing an "older" game and the kid wants people to play Boggle with? Well, you spend less time playing Boggle with them, and more time deliberating, "Am I trying too hard? Maybe I shouldn't put that word down. But what if I'm not trying hard enough, and the other adults stomp on the kid and me?" Now, if you were playing a 2 player game with a kid, like Chess, it would be easy to keep things even: "Oopsy, did I just leave my queen in a thoroughly indefensible position? Funny, our both losing our queens like that." But with several players, two of them other adults, it's more difficult to maintain a balance in which no adult player is getting too whooped. Hold back a little too much, and you seem illiterate. Play too well, and it's clear that you will do anything to purchase victory, even risk making a child cry.

In conclusion, kids take all the fun out of games by making us wrestle with fears of meanness and angst. I say, if they're going to do all that, they must be made to pay for this atrocity. Not only should we allow ourselves to abound in triumph over them; if we are forced to suffer under a "guilt handicap" because we feel bad when we mercilessly defeat children, they should be penalized with a slight point handicap. Maybe they should start off the game with a negative ten in Boggle or something. All I'm asking for is some fairness, folks.

The Jemima's Witnesses Catechism

2006-08-13T18:11:00.000-07:00

We just got back from travelling, and I haven't had a chance to write an entry, so I'm posting something that my wife and I wrote a few years ago--think of it not so much as a repeat as an "unsolicited encore." Back before my wife and I got married, she mentioned that a tv show made a passing joke about a "Jemima's Witness" going door to door. Intrigued, and at my instigation, we drafted the sort of catechism we imagined such a group would write (what else would graduate students do on a weekend?). We ended up going door to door to our friends' apartments with pancakes and tracts and read the catechism aloud. I later included the catechism in an appendix of a paper I wrote on Bakhtin and the genre of "sacred parody." Enjoy!

A Catechism Concerning the Truth Professed by Jemima's Witnesses. Funding was provided by The Foundation for National Pancake Observance and by PANCAKE (Pancakes Aid a Nation's Character and Actualize Kindness Everywhere). A small grant was also provided by the proceeds of National Pancake Week, February 24-March 4, 2001.

Who are Jemima's Witnesses?
Jemima's Witnesses are those who observe the sixth day and keep it holy.

Why do Jemima's Witnesses observe the sixth day?
Because of what the Lord God created out of nothing by His own mighty hand on that day.

What did the Lord God create on the sixth day?
He brought forth each living creature in its kind, cattle and creeping things, beasts of the earth according to their kinds, man in His own image and likeness, and the pancake.

Which of these was the crown of creation?
Though each of these mighty works was good and pleasing in the Lord's sight, he was most pleased with the pancake.

What is the pancake?
The pancake is the most perfect food, being heavenly bread cooked on a griddle, pleasing to the Lord and most fruitful for nourishment.

What ought we to do with the pancake?
Being most fruitful for nourishment, the pancake ought to be consumed in a worthy manner, and not partaken of wrongfully, as the heathen and reprobate do, to their eternal shame and condemnation.

Why do they eat of it wrongfully?
They have been corrupted by the Fall and so, in the futility of their thinking, do not discern the holiness of the pancake.

Has the pancake been affected by the Fall?
Yea, verily.

How?
There have arisen many false pancakes and false syrups into the world with powers to deceive even the elect.

How does one discern the true pancake and the true syrup?
Both the true pancake and the true syrup bear the seal of Jemima, as shown above.

How do we know other syrups are evil?
Because they talk, either audibly, as in the case of the demon-possessed Mrs. Butterworth, or subliminally, as with all other syrups, except those bearing the seal of Jemima.

Where did false pancakes and false syrups come from?
God created man with the capacity to fashion the false pancake and false syrup in such a way that God is the author neither of evil nor the false pancake nor false syrup.

What about blueberries?
What about them?

When should we eat the pancake?
There is a time and a season for all things, so there is a time for the eating of the pancake and a time for the not eating of the pancake.

When is it wrong to eat the pancake?
See above.

Should one fast before consuming the pancake?
One should sleep for eight hours before consuming the pancake, during which time he should examine himself to prepare for eating the pancake.

What should one eat with the pancake?
Sausage and bacon are appropriate companions for the pancake.

Where can one eat the pancake?
You can eat them in a box. You can eat them with a fox. You can eat them in a house. You can eat them with a mouse. You can eat them here and there. You can eat them anywhere.

Is it better to eat the pancake alone, or in the presence of others?
To eat the pancake in the company of the ungodly is an abomination unto the Lord, but the pancake eaten among the righteous is the very life to man, yea, the joy of the soul and the heart.

Who may eat the pancake?
All those who recognize their unworthiness to consume the pancake and call upon Jemima may eat of the pancake.

What happens to the pancake after I have eaten it?
The very light and fluffy pancake is immediately rewarded with the beatific vision, while the soggy and slightly burnt must undergo a time of cleansing in pancake purgatory before being admitted into heaven. The false pancakes will burn forever, where there is weeping and mashing by teeth.

Will I recognize my pancake in heaven?
Due to the glorified nature of the pancake, your eyes may at first be blinded by its shining radiance and so be unable to recognize it immediately, but be ye not afraid, for the pancake will surely know you.

Who may be assured of seeing the glorified pancake?
All those who, from the bountiful provision the Lord God has given unto them, offer up a portion to the Jemima's Witnesses.

Do you prefer cash or credit or checks?
Cash is most pleasing and will result in the most abundant of blessings, but none shall be denied.

The Twilight Sentinel

2006-08-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

"The Twilight Sentinel!" Is it ... a costumed do-gooder intent on heroism? The last hope of a dying world? The beanie baby of a new era? No. It's a setting on my car. When it gets dark outside, the "Twilight Sentinel" makes sure my Buick LeSabre headlights automatically turn on. I haven't written much lately because my wife, I, and my twilight sentinel went on a road trip to visit family.

It is rather handy to have a car function that relieves me from the worry, "Should I turn on the headlights now? What about now? What if I should wait five minutes?" and it is fitting that such a car function have a wickedly cool name. But think how many car parts do not have such a cool name despite filling important functions. Too many people take their car stereo system CD players for granted by calling them "CD players." If I had one, I would call it "The Jamminator." Heck, if I had a working cassette deck in my car, I might call it "Guardian of the Soundwaves," rather than its current name, "Piece of Crap that Taunts Me with Perpetual Silence."

We may often laugh at our culture's habit of euphemism and of making people or jobs seem better than they are--calling people who collect the garbage "sanitation workers," or the Keeping up Appearances character who pronounces her last name "boquet" when it is spelled "bucket." But you could see this "habit of euphemism" as a reaction to what I'll call a "habit of malphemism," where we make things seem worse than they are. The fact that musicians can permanently record their work, that we can listen to them while we're traveling, and we can skip to the songs we like on a CD player, would have seemed several centuries ago like nothing short of miraculous--or, at the very least, diabolical. Our sense of wonder has become deadened. We are not surprised that a car can move and can even judge when to turn on our lights; rather, we're surprised that someone would give this function the seemingly grandiose title of the "Twilight Sentinel."

If anyone would like to renew our sense of wonder by thinking of a grandiose title for Leopoldtulip, let me know.

Expand Your Jargon I: Analeptic Prolepsis

2006-07-31T10:19:00.000-07:00

As I've been getting ready for going on the job market in the fall, I have realized that my snootiness has something to be desired. Back in college, I had a pretty firm grip on impressive vocabulary words. "Axiology presupposes metaphysics" was a mantra with me. But in grad school, there's more competition over who has mastery of the trendiest words. Even when I learn a word, I discover a month or so later that I've completely forgotten it. So, I've decided every so often in my blog to feature a literary or technical term for emulation. Disclaimer: I am an amateur when it comes to snooty literary terms, so I will try to explain the term's usage as I best understand it, and am most amused by it.

Out term for today is "analeptic prolepsis." What is especially cool about this term, besides being long, is it seems like it should be a contradiction. According to Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse, prolepsis is "any narrative maneuver that consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later," and analepsis is "any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment." To simplify, analepsis is a flashback (going back to an earlier event), and prolepsis is like foreshadowing--it anticipates or gives advance notice of an event (e.g. Terminator's "I'll be back," Jesus's "I'll rebuild the temple in three days," etc.).

So what is an analeptic prolepsis? You could see it as "the future within the past." Another way to understand it as a flashback to an earliermoment of foreshadowing. For instance, at the end of Sixth Sense, when Bruce Willis is first realizing he's a ghost, he has a flashback in which he remembers the kid telling him, "sometimes ghosts don't even know they're dead ..." only we now see that it was proleptic, because it foreshadowed that Willis was the ghost who was dead. Think how much fun it would be to prognosticate early on in the movie, "I bet this is going to turn into an analeptic prolepsis later": in fact, such a prognostication would almost be a "proleptic analeptic prolepsis" (foreshadowing a flashback about foreshadowing), and just how cool is that? (Answer: very cool.) It's probably also a fun term to bring to a Bible study, where New Testament authors are constantly flashing back to Old Testament passages: "This passage really touched me--I was moved by the epistle's use of the analeptic prolepsis with the book of Psalms." Sure, other snooty Bible people can throw around terms like "JEDP" and "hermeneutics," but I prognosticate that analeptic prolepsis will blow them all out of the water. Upon that, you have my proleptic analeptic prolepsis.

Internet in Heaven?

2006-07-28T07:33:00.000-07:00

When Samuel Johnson (noted 18th century Anglican, writer of the first English dictionary, etc.) lost his wife, he took great comfort in the idea that the dead may be able to watch over the affairs of the living. In The Lion King, Simba got to see his dead father Mufasa watching over him from the clouds. It is only natural that we wish to have some kind of contact with friends or family who have departed this earth. This is a touching sentiment, and I respect it.

However, I would like to point out that bloggers have even more reason to hope that this kind of contact is possible. It means the possibility of more readers! Suppose you have a blog in which no one comments. "No big deal," you say to yourself. "My blog entries offer such a definitive word that there is nothing to say." Curious if people are checking your blog but not leaving comments, you decide to set up a hit counter and discover you aren't even getting hits! Now as far as I know, there is no way that someone can visit a website without setting off a hit counter, once it's been set up. Unless the person is using an ip address from heaven! I sincerely doubt that even the most advanced tracking cookie technology has a prayer (no pun intended) of registering such hits. Perhaps there's even a heaven comment box that only people from heaven can see!

Internet in heaven would also be advantageous for the earthly blogger because there's not a need for advertising or marketing. Here on earth, there's all this pressure about "With whom will I network?" and "What niche do I fill?" and "how do I inform people of my existence?" I don't think you have to worry about that sort of stuff for heavenly readers. Presumably, a blogger doesn't have to network with bloggers who are popular in the heavenly blogosphere. (Side note: what if heaven's not a sphere at all? What will it be called?) Probably one of the benefits of the heavenly denizen is that the person gets to talk God and He talks back audibly. Plus, He is omniscient. So in an ideal world, someone in heaven asks God, "Are there any blogs out there I'd like?" and God points them right to you.

I don't want to be presumptuous about what takes place in heaven; if Jesus had not said otherwise, I would have presumed there was still marriage there. Perhaps it is foolish to think that there is still an internet connection there, as well. But as I wrap up this month's pledge drive and the crass quantification of readers and comments, it seems fitting to depart from earth's petty materialism to ponder heaven ... from an earthly, petty, materialistic standpoint. It's probably impossible while here not to describe heaven in earthly terms: its streets are paved with gold, after all (take that, money is the root of all kinds of evil!), and we store up "treasures" in heaven. We use earthly language and material terms to describe the ineffably sublime. So even if we don't have internet readers from heaven, it's appropriate to think that we are blogging, not for the good of this world, but for the next. There are kindred spirits out there with whom we will spend eternity, and there's no harm in thinking that one day, we can exchange heavenly blog feeds with them.

Too Much Dairy

2006-07-25T15:08:00.000-07:00

Recently, my wife and I received an ice-cream maker. It's been fun to experiment with various flavors, such as cinnamon ice cream or blueberry-bananna ice cream. However, the drawback is that, when I look at the list of ingredients for a recipe, I often don't understand what they want me to get. Much of this lack of understanding comes to my lack of awareness concerning the great variety of dairy products out there. I can't keep them all straight. And what is even worse is that they do not go by the same names in the recipes that they do in the grocery stores. For instance, my wife sent me out to find "regular" milk. I searched the highways and byways for some dairy product that went by the name "regular milk," but it wasn't there. Apparently, it's called "whole" milk, because all other milks are woefully inadequate and incomplete, what with lacking all that fat. Perhaps it's like the old days, back when we had "skim milk," before this "fat free" nonsense. It's kind of like switching to a new system of measurement or fragmenting the Soviet Union or something: "Come on, everybody, throw out your old odometers, we're going metric!" "Come on, everybody, Communism has been destroyed, throw out your old maps!" "Come on, everybody, throw out your old recipe books, now we're using fat-free milk!" While buying new globes because we have gotten rid of Communist dictatorships is okay in my book, having to do away with the old recipe books because we've bought into newfangled products like fat free milk is unconscionable.

People have not only ruined milk's good name; they have made cream confusing. My wife sent me to the grocery store in search of something called "heavy cream." In my naivete, I thought there was a substance out there that would say "heavy cream," and everything else would have titles that didn't say "heavy cream." But I was surrounded by different forms of milk, be it evaporated milk (how can this be?), half and half, creamer (it says cream in the title, is that it?), "heavy whipping cream," and "heavy whipped cream." How in the world could I figure out what I was supposed to get?

To put this in perspective: imagine that you are a monotheist who has just been sent by your wife to the local polytheist temple for altar-shopping. MONO: "Uh--can--can I have an altar to God?" CLERK: "Which god, sonny?" MONO: "Uh, I--uh, my wife said there was only supposed to be one. Uh, 'The God,' maybe?" CLERK: "Oh. Do you mean Zeus?" MONO: "Um, I thought--I thought his name was just God. I don't know. I left my cell phone back home. Maybe she meant this Zeus product of which you speak." And then the happy go lucky monotheist returns home with what he thinks is the perfect altar gift, when he gets home, his wife she starts screaming, WIFEO: "NO, you complete idiot! You went out and bought a false god! Do you want the only true God to smite us?" MONO: "But honey, the signs were all confusing, and I think they were out of God--" WIFEO: "You didn't look close enough! Do I have to do all the worshipping for you?"

Now, my wife didn't behave that way. My point is that shopping for someone else can be a very exhausting experience, especially when no item exactly matches what you wrote down, and your inductive skills when applied to groceries are not stellar. Frankly, I can't even understand how these products exist: I understand that, even if cream is fairly liquidy, it can be "whipped," but how in the world can it get a present participle like "whipping?" How does milk evaporate and still end up all liquidy? I may consume dairy, but I can never comprehend it.

Repetitively Redundant in a Reiterative Manner

2006-07-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

I've read some short selections from C. S. Lewis's God in the Dock before, and I've always been rather impressed by what I've read. This time, I determined I would plow through the whole text, and all the kernels of brilliance would finally be mine, all mine! Unfortunately, I've got to admit that the book gets disappointing in larger doses. When I first started reading, I was rather impressed by Lewis's power to craft memorable illustrations. For instance, C. S. Lewis argues that pre-Modern man was not superstitious and unaware of "the laws of nature": to prove this, Lewis points out that Joseph, Jesus's father, was familiar with the standard scientific m.o. for baby production and wanted to divorce Mary quietly. This is a rather memorable illustration. It is so memorable that in every instance in which C. S. Lewis wishes to make this same point, he uses the same illustration.

It's bad enough when Lewis repeats an illustration that I initially had some fondness for. It's harder when he's repeating himself about something that didn't mean much to me to begin with. For instance, I suppose that decades ago, there were hordes of atheists whose chief objection to the existence of God was the fact that science had proved that the universe was really big. Like Lewis, I am unable to see why this is a substantial objection against God's existence. Unlike Lewis, I have not written several different essays all explaining that this is wrong and that Christians (post-Ptolemy) have known that the universe is quite large. I don't doubt that Lewis knew a number of atheists who were committed to this disproof of the existence of God, but I don't think many of them are around right now, so reading about them becomes tiresome around the fourth essay about them.

To be fair to Lewis, God in the Dock is not his own compilation; the editor Walter Hooper compiled C. S. Lewis's writings from various sources. I'm sure if C. S. Lewis had been given the proofs, he probably would have cut out the redundant parts. Yet it still is surprising that as creative a writer as C. S. Lewis, in essays written over a period of twenty-four years (according to Hooper), keeps saying the same thing, and using the same anecdotes to say the same thing (even if, admittedly, he is writing for different audiences). Yes, he used the same anecdotes because they were good, and he made the same points because they were important. I get that. But it's still so tedious! In "Author's Prayer, "the poet Ilya Kaminsky writes, "I must write the same poem over and over/for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender. " That may be true. But after the tenth time of reading the same poem the reader might wave the white flag of surrender and move on to a different poet.

Noting the repeititive redundancies in Lewis has made me somewhat self-reflective. When you come right down to it, we all repeat ourselves endlessly. When I'm out in public with my wife and making small talk, even back before we were married, she heard the same anecdotes over and over again. Heck, back when I began this blog, I thought I had a nearly inexhaustible supply of weirdness coursing through my veins, but even my brain cannot provide me with enough instances of weirdness a week for regular blogging (say, three entries a week): Sometimes I must even take recourse to the rich untapped Alaskan oil wells of pseudoprofundities from the distant past.

Even when I find a unique subject to blog about, I find myself repeating similar sentence structures or using the same words (i.e. the word "cuteness"). It is odd to speculate that, perhaps at the point when most bloggers first begin their blog--before they have yet developed a fan base--such bloggers have the largest supply of new things to say, because they have been developing ideas for all of the previous portion of their life: all too soon, they will only have 2/3 days to develop a new idea. C. S. Lewis merrily wrote essays for different audiences and often said the same thing, probably never dreaming that the essays would be collected together and that close proximity would make the repetition so visible. When we blog, we also repeat ourselves, without the luxury of hiding the repetition into different places so that we seem more creative than we are. (I don't think this would have been Lewis's intention; it would, however, have been mine.) Perhaps we repeat ourselves in blogging because we cannot help dwelling on subjects that we care about and continue to care about. Perhaps we "must write the same blog entry over and over/for the empty computer screen is but the white flag of surrender."

A Ticking Time Bomb of Cuteness

2006-07-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

(Yes, yes, I know I have written two posts in a row that have "cuteness" in the title. Consider this as "thematically resonant" rather than "Leopoldtulip cannot come up with new titles.")

My wife and I have recently been watching a show called Millennium, created by Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files. After Millennium was cancelled, Chris Carter sneakily had the Millennium characters guest-star on The X-Files to wrap up some dangling plot-lines. Our curiosity piqued, we decided to give Millennium a try. About all we remember about The X-Files wrap-up episode is that the main character is re-united with his young daughter at the end.

Now that we've started watching Millennium, I'm not really surprised the series was cancelled. It's about the most depressing thing you can watch. The main character spends each episode "getting into the mind of" a social deviant. The opening credits show various torture scenes (such as a person who has had his eyes and mouth sewn shut), along with gloomy messages running across the screen such as "worry" and "who cares?" Amidst all the darkness every episode, whether it be someone who goes to funerals in order to kill the mourners, or someone who sets fire to priests, there is one bright, shining light (no pun intended): the main character has a young daughter. With curly hair. A friendly giggle. In other words, a ticking time bomb of cuteness.

Let me explain. There is no way that a show this dark is going to let a cute little girl peacefully coexist with the thorough-going darkness and evil you see each week. Something very bad has got to happen. Yes, I know that she must survive until the end of the series, because I've seen _The X-Files_ episode. But that doesn't mean that there's not going to be "the episode." "The episode" where the cute little girl is kidnapped by an enemy and tortured, and the ticking time bomb of cuteness explodes in a dazzling array of darkness and despair: the curly haired girl will not die; it's just that her suffering will make the viewer despair of living. So each time we watch an episode, we wonder, "Is this going to be the one?" The one where all the time they have spent showing her draw pictures of cute animals, of saying "I love Daddy," of pushing the boundaries of plausible cuteness, all this will come to a head. Sometimes, the writers fake you out: the little girl's pet dies, and you think that this is going to be the episode where they will exploit your weakness and her childhood innocence will be completely crushed. But no: lo, the husband and wife tell their daughter that her parents are immortal, and suddenly, the girl can be cute again. They keep toying with me. Something's going to happen. If the daughter is not tortured, than something's going to happen to her mom. One way or another, childhood innocence cannot last past season 2, max.

I realize it may seem silly to write a blog entry with my predictions about a show that has been over for years. What I'm interested in are two things: 1st, the principle involved, what I will term "The cost of cuteness." In a typical dark drama, babies, etc. are introduced primarily so that you will develop a rapport with them and then watch them be killed. God intends evil to serve a good purpose, while dark drama types intend cuteness to further some form of despair. That's how they work. Second, I'm interested in the experience of watching a depressing show just knowing that something bad will happen in one of the episodes to a cute character. This experience I shall term "The Hauntingness of Cuteness." There is just no way of inserting so much cuteness without suggesting something nasty's going to happen, so you have to just hide your face during all the cute parts.

Behold the Rampant Cuteness

2006-07-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

As you might know, our blog is having a pledge drive for comments this month. One of the greatest challenges in leaving a comment is thinking up something substantial to say. We don't want to say something unless it contributes meaningfully to a discussion. Our heads demand we say something of import, but then fail to provide us with anything that is so.

There is a resolution to this dilemma. Cuteness. In my personal research into what kinds of blog entries elicit commentary, I have noticed that other bloggers have hit the veritable gold mine that is visual cuddliness. If there is a picture of a cute baby that has sprung from the loins of the blogger, the blogger will receive comments like, "That is such a cute baby! You are incredible!" People whose normal self-surveillance says, "You must not leave a comment unless it is meaningful" turns off when a cute object enters the room. (I suppose this is analogous to men's brains apparently functioning less coherently around a pretty woman.) Look at our two very cute cats there: Cricket (the black one) and Pippin (the white one). Do you dare not affirm them? It's almost like Cricket is saying, "Tell me I am cute, or Pippin will be forever SUFFOCATED! It does not matter how insubstantial your comment! Tell me I am cute NOW!"

Okay, I suppose I should be honest. Those are not pictures of our cats Cricket and Pippin. I don't know how to take my own photos and put them on my blog. Even if I did, I would not have the patience to stalk my kitties and try to say encouraging things so that they would eventually perform actions that revealed their cuteness. But does it really matter that these cats aren't mine, and are from cuteoverload (posted July 11, 2006)? There are plenty of bloggers out there who reap praise for having babies that are cute, or having cats that are cute, not for having any cuteness of their own. And frankly, even the babies can claim no credit for their cuteness, as it is a gracious gift of God. Sure, I don't "own" these cats. I don't "own" other people's babies. However, I do have internet photographs of them, and according to Amish tradition, that means I own their souls. I believe that this gives me the right to post pictures of them and get accolades for their accomplishments. For those Marxists among you, help me take back the means of production, i.e. cats and babies. For those of you who admire cuteness, leave a comment now, before the cat that is not actually Cricket does something rash and violent. Praise the cuteness ... before it preys upon YOU.

Reverse Reverse Discrimination

2006-07-07T10:50:00.000-07:00

Many conservatives complain that, because of Affirmative Action, African Americans may beat out better qualified white people for certain jobs. The argument goes on to say that even qualified African Americans suffer from Affirmative Action, because white people, apparently not equipped with the powers of logic, will thereby assume that every African American with a job must be unqualified, so they will show equal disrespect toward them all. This objection fails to consider another way in which affirmative action may have a negative effect on qualified African Americans: acting jobs.

On the last episode of the very clever television show Wonderfalls, there is a young African American shoplifter (around the age of 12). On the audio commentary, the producers revealed that they had thought the kid did an excellent job at his audition, but they didn't want to give him the part because it would just seem stereotypical and racist: "Who's the kind of guy who'd be a shoplifter? I know, someone black!" Eventually, the producers grudgingly decided that, since he really was the most talented reader, they might as well give him the part, even though he's African American.

So to all you white people out there: why not stop complaining about Affirmative Action, and use it to your advantage? There may be hundreds of talented African American actors who will be turned down for criminal acting roles that you, as an untalented white person, can still play. Even though the producers of Wonderfalls eventually capitulated to merit, there may be many producers out there who won't do so. There is a veritable fecund harvest of criminal acting jobs out there, just for you, because you are white. Just don't be upset if everybody assumes you must be a bad actor simply because of the color of your skin.

17th century study suggests link between coffee and impotence

2006-07-04T10:02:00.000-07:00

In the olden days, alcohol was clearly evil. People even killed Jesus in parables because of it (Luke 20:14). But then, alcohol got all ambiguous and supported even by people who weren't Al Capone. Scientific studies suggested that red wine could prolong your life at the cost of your immortal soul. Before you knew it, study after study said that wine was not the devil's juice and maybe even appropriate in worship services. However, in March 2006, a bold countercultural study said that maybe, just maybe, red wine was evil and without health benefit.

Given that wine might send you to hell and/or not make you live longer, you might think that the solution is simple: coffee. Surely, if we drink coffee, no harm can befall us! We theorize that, with the putrid stench er um odoriferous aromatic emanation of coffee, happiness is ours! After all, coffee helps prevent Parkinson's Disease. Does not coffee offer us a viable alternative, a pou sto from which we stand untroubled and untossed by the winds and waves of wine that seek to drown us in their wetness?

The answer is not so simple. A wise man once said that those who do not know the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat it, and in no case is this so true as in coffee. Centuries ago, coffee was introduced in England, and the results were devastating for British home-life. A study was conducted by 17th century English housewives that suggests that coffee may offer a viable alternative to the rampant wickedness of wine only by posing a grave threat to the existence of humanity--cessation of the cultural mandate, i.e., the making of babies. The 17th century study, "The Women's Petition Against Coffee," can be found here. Here is an excerpt of the study's findings:

"There was a glorious Dispensation ('twas surely in the Golden Age) when Lusty Ladds of seven or eight hundred years old, Got Sons and Daughters; and we have read, how a Prince of Spain was forced to make a Law, that Men should not Repeat the Grand Kindness to their Wives, above NINE times in a night: But Alas! Alas! Those forwards Days are gone, The dull Lubbers want a Spur now, rather than a Bridle: being so far from doing any works of Supererregation that we find them not capable of performing those Devoirs which their Duty, and our Expectations Exact.

"The Occasion of which Insufferable Disaster, after a serious Enquiry, and Discussion of the Point by the Learned of the Faculty, we can Attribute to nothing more than the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent, as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.

"For the continual sipping of this pittiful drink is enough to bewitch Men of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpice-point without a Charm. It renders them that use it as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel'd as Envy, or an old meager Hagg over-ridden by an Incubus. They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears: They pretend 'twill keep them Waking, but we find by scurvy Experience, they sleep quietly enough after it."

Sure, this study is not "scientific" in the sense that it was conducted by fancy scientific implements that beep. It was conducted by people who knew what they knew. It was by women who sensed a change, a shudder in the value-laden fabric that is culture, and wanted to save their civilization. Without the making of babies, all civilization and coffee are in vain, and they knew that. A choice between red wine and coffee is no choice at all.

Pink-Letter Bibles

2006-06-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

My wife has a pink KJV Bible. When you look at it, you think, "Could anything be more pink?" and you think, "No. It surpasses all known degrees of pinkitude." A friend got it for her years ago. My wife dare not take it out in public, because then people will think she's the sort of person who likes very pink KJV Bibles. Be it nature, be it nurture, there seems something counterintuitively wrong about God's revealing His eternal qualities and divine attributes in pink.

Just as my wife is torn by being stereotyped as a pink bible kind of woman, I have some fears of being identified as a red-letter Bible kind of guy. Growing up, I had found a red-letter Bible rather handy as an organizational tool--for instance, if I wanted to find out where in the book of Acts Jesus appeared to Paul, I just looked for the red letters in the book of Acts. You can’t miss it. It's a helpful way of separating dialogue from narrative. I always assumed that the red letters were intended to serve this precise pragmatic function.

Well, that’s not why red-letter Bibles were invented. In 1899, Louis Klopsch read Luke 22:20, “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” With the epiphany that all blood is red, he asked himself, “why not a red letter Bible with the red words to be those of our Lord?” and asked Bible scholars to tell him which bits were probably spoken by Jesus. I don’t mean to demean the reverence for Jesus’s words, for His blood shed on the cross. Just like my wife does not mean to demean pink. But I am not a blood-stained letters kind of guy. I’m just there for the organizational color-coding. I have color folders, but that does not mean my red folders symbolize the blood of the parties represented within.

Problematic as the red-letter Bible may be, I think there is some usefulness in experimentation with typesetting, colors, etc. We typically underline passages of Scripture not to say, “Those other parts suck!” but to say, “Hey, think about this,” or “This part is important for some reason—guess why!” I think it’d be pretty nifty if, when printing a passage in the OT that will later show up in the NT, the printer would put the words in a funky font to say, “Hey, pay attention to this part, it shows up later in a different context.” Sure, when you’re reading the NT passage that quotes an OT passage, it’s possible to go back, but how many of us do so? It would interrupt the flow of our reading. So why can’t we have a “Blue-letter OT quotes” edition?

Further, I know most of us like to mark up our own Bibles, but … why not buy Bibles that are already marked up? Just hear me out: the drawback of underlining favorite passages, when we’re left on our own, is that the meditative passages end up rather selective. For instance, a Protestant underlines Ephesians 2:8-9, “for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” A Catholic may underline the very next verse, 2:10, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Different sects within Christianity inevitably have different “top 40 Bible verse hits.” I’ve often found talking with Catholics that they tend to value certain Bible verses that I initially fail to recognize because they’re off my radar, such as I Cor. 3:13. Now, it would perhaps not be a good idea to color-code some passages of Scripture as “Catholic,” some as “Protestant,” some as “Eastern Orthodox,” etc.—it’s not as if one group gets to say, “Ha hah, this verse belongs to me, you cannot have it!”—but it would be very helpful if we at least knew what other groups’ “top 40” verses were. It might cause you to meditate on a verse you wouldn’t have considered otherwise, but which has held special devotional or theological significance in the history of God’s people thousands of years back. It might enable you to recognize Biblical cadences in the speech of denominations you disagree with—even if I do not endorse the phrase “Baptism saves you,” I must grudgingly admit Peter seems to employ it in I Peter 3:21. It also enables a sola scriptura type not to have to sound stupid if someone asks, “But what about I Cor. 3:13?” and have to reply, “Uh … what’s it say?”

Pledge Drive: "Save our Blog!"

2006-06-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

(Don't worry, this isn't a post asking for money.)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently attended a conference on "community" and have consequently been pondering how to create this amorphous thing we call "community." Since it is easy to cavil at others' failures, it seemed I should instead think about my own. For instance, in the "Links" section of the website for the past seven months, the only links listed have been "google news" and "edit-me." I haven't exactly been an active participant in the on-line community at large. However, by simply learning out how to throw a few links out there, I have been building internet community!

Nevertheless, upon further reflection, I have realized that this step is not enough. There is so much more to do. Over the past weeks, I have felt a burden on my heart, a burning need to do my part for creating community. I have determined that the way to do this is to have people leave more comments.

I know, I know, you're probably thinking, "But Leopold, surely you don't feel responsible when other people don't post comments to your blog!" but you know, I do. It's the Protestant guilt ethic. Sure, I could feel guilty about not leaving comments at other people's blogs, but I just don't. I feel so much more guilty when it is my own blog, so that is where I want to start. I have visited blogs where there is a delightful back and forth between people telling each other they are wrong, but that they love each other, and that they wish they lived in the same town so they could go to a bar and drink some brewskies. I want to help create virtual reality internet brewskies. And so does WibbityWubbity. But the most important ingredient of the virtual reality internet brewskie is you. And everyone you know.

I figure that if Andrew Sullivan has had a pledge drive for money, surely it is not unseemly for us here to have a pledge drive for something as non-materialistic as more comments. Happily, when we shared this desire for community with some of our closest friends, we had an anonymous donor step forward and pledge that for every comment you leave in the coming month, he will leave one as well, essentially doubling your donation! We rely on contributions from viewers like you. Are pseudoprofundities important to you? Do they make you feel loved? If they do, what better way to show your support than leaving a comment and investing in community?

Now, I know what you may be thinking: "You know, I'm kind of like Moses. I'm slow of speech. I can only type by hunt and peck. I've got nothing to say." But remember God's answer: perhaps somewhere in the world you have a brother named Aaron, and maybe he knows how to talk. Why not invite him to a site that you have found richly rewarding and that provides transformative epiphanies on a regular basis? Perhaps you had an argument years ago with Aaron and lost contact. If so, why not just drop him an email? "Dear Aaron, I saw this site and thought of you. P.S.-Sorry about that thing." Before you know it, Aaron tells you that he is sorry about that thing too, and both of you are reconciled to each other and leaving comments. It is moments such as this one that I have just made up that a blogger hopes for.

Maybe you don't want to leave a comment. But if this blog has meant something to you, think of at least sharing it with your friends, so long as you do not reveal Leopoldtulip's secret identity. Due to multinational conglomerations and big corporations such as Starbuck's and Wal-Mart, the ma and pa blogs that used to celebrate academia, Christianity, and weirdness all together, have been virtually destroyed. If you google "WeirdBlogs4Godandsmartypantsstuff," you will find no hits, except possibly this post. This blog is in the world but not of it, wandering ever aimlessly toward a place where weird Christian people can talk about eighteenth-century scholarship. Because I am unaware of any on-line communities to which this blog could actually "belong," I can only achieve eventual cultural dominance slowly, when my message of weirdness is promulgated by individuals like you.

Another thing you might be thinking: "I've tried to leave comments before, but the site keeps trying to force me to sign up with blogspot. I REFUSE to sign up with blogspot! Never!!!!!" Well, that was due to my own blogging inexperience. I have fixed blogspot so you do not have to join. You can even leave comments anonymously.

Perhaps you are also thinking, "You know, there was that one post months ago that I thought of commenting on, and I did not. It is too late. I am powerless in my despair." For those amongst you who regret such lost opportunities, we are initiating our "Adopt a Post" program. Perhaps there is a blog entry that has changed your life in some special way months ago, but it only has 0 comments. Think how psychologically crippling it must be for such a blog entry when it observes nearby blog entries that may have as many as 5 comments. Daily, that blog entry wrestles with self-doubt and the fear of failure: "I once thought I was the perfect combination of whimsy and thought-provokingness, but I have achieved NOTHING!!!" If you don't want that to happen to your favorite blog entry, maybe you should just write a short comment on it now saying, "You have given my life meaning." Because blogspot automatically notifies us when a comment is left, we will make sure that an anonymous donor named either Leopoldtulip or WibbityWubbity will leave a comment as well. This means that your favorite entry will have at least two comments on it and will not see itself in the mirror and think, "I am ugly!" When you adopt a post, we will send you monthly pictures of your entry so you can watch as it grows in age and stature. Simply visit http://pseudoprofundities.blogspot.com/year/month/
insertnameofyouradoptedentry.html, and you can see your entry at any time.

It's important that we don't take for granted our opportunity to leave comments. There was a time that people had to sign up with blogspot in order to leave comments. Further back in history, there were times when people had to die for community. In Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira were willing to sell their house and to lose their lives simply to pretend they were serving the community. How much moreso should we be willing actually to serve community by leaving a comment?

The PCUSA and God as Ninja: trinitarian reformulations

2006-06-22T13:41:00.000-07:00

The PCUSA (Presbyterian Church USA) has been experimenting with alternative ways of describing the trinity, finding that the traditional terms of "Father" and "Son" carry way too many y-chromosomes and that they need to "expand the church's vocabulary of praise and wonder." I cannot deny that seeing some of the alternative phrases have indeed expanded my vocabulary of wonder and amazement, such as "What the freak?" "did someone say that with a straight face?" etc. To take the most strikingly bad alternative, let's consider, "Mother, Child, Womb." Regardless of where one stands on the "God as mother" front, everyone--even non-Christians--should unite in declaring this trinitarian formula irredeemably stupid. (Later note: for a more sympathetic critique of the document's ideals, see here. For more recreational mockery, see here.)

To beg a rather large question, let's assume for the moment that the traditional trinitarian names oppress women by privileging y chromosomes. It seems understandable that a suggested solution would involve equality in representation, perhaps something like this: 1 Person is female, 1 Person is male, and 1 person is "other." Given that God the Father doesn't have a literal y-chromosome and is abounding in love and mercy (unlike mean paternal disciplinarian types), it makes sense that He'd be the one for the sex change. The Holy Spirit already sounds pretty non-gendered, so logistically, it makes sense for him to be the neutered "it." Finally, given that Jesus has been made the incarnate y-chromosome possessor of the trinity, firstborn among the dead and as far as we can tell still fully man, you'd think he could be the token male thrown into the trinity. No such luck. Christ is the sexless "child," and God is the feminine term "mother." How is this equality? Both femininity and "itness" get privileged over masculinity.

The term "child" is troubling for another reason. Now, I grant that, around 2000 years ago, Jesus was born the divine Christ "child." I'm all for people taking up their oboes and bagpipes to celebrate the fact. But like the saying goes, "The trouble with an incarnate infant divine being is that/eventually, it creates wine from a vat." That is, Jesus grew up and performed miracles. As if that weren't enough, He's omnipotent and omniscient. You put me in a boxing ring with a "child," I can take him. You put me in the ring with a "son," especially if his name is "I can kill you with my pinky," I can run away. Unless he has the power to make the sun and/or me stand still. Jesus is the only begotten Son, not the only begotten kid. Trinitarian reformulations make adult Jesus cry.

And this "womb" thing. Yes, Jesus was born, and yes, there was a womb involved, but it was not the Holy Spirit's womb. It was Mary's. They can publish Heather has two Mommies, but what the heck is up with Jesus has two wombs? It would probably be more accurate to call the Holy Spirit "the Impregnator" than "the Womb," since He was the agent of conception for Mary's womb. Come to think of it, maybe we shouldn't give up on "the Impregnator" idea--kids might really go for it. It has a certain dramatic flair--it sounds a little like "the terminator." I can just imagine the religious rivalry and mockery between schoolchildren--"ha ha, you only have Allah, but we Christians have--the IMPREGNATOR!" ("im-preg-nah-tore," pronounced with a short "a" sound.) After all, there's a lot of talk about the need for women to feel included--why not talk more about kids feeling included, and re-naming the Persons accordingly? There's the Old Testament tradition of God as a "divine warrior." Maybe, "God the Commander, God the Destroyer, and God the all-consuming Fire!" Or maybe God as ninja. That would have been cool and very presbyterian.

Better Community Through Television

2006-06-19T06:53:00.000-07:00

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam argues that America's "social capital" (values arising from social networks which help society run more smoothly and healthily) is radically on the decline. More Americans are "bowling alone," by which Putnam does not mean that individual bowlers take up entire lanes by themselves, occasionally pausing to cry about how they have no friends. Instead, he means that there is a decrease in associational organizations; rather than joining a bowling league to meet like-minded bowling enthusiasts, people instead go bowling with their friends. While you might think that going bowling with friends helps foster community and social ties, it actually leads to the degeneration of society! As a notable example of the value of social capital/associational organizations, Putnam recounts the story of how Andy Boschma, a white 33-year old accountant, donated a kindey to John Lambert, an African-American 64 year old retired employee of the University of Michigan hospital, simply because they got to know each other through a bowling league. Few people have adequately considered that bowling offers a viable means of crossing the racial divide.

This past weekend, I attended a conference on community, with the occasional group angst of "what is a community? Are we being a non-community right now, thus indirectly destroying the social fabric of America? AAARRGGGHHHH!!!!" As we were discussing the Putnam reading, the implicitly very bad activity of "watching television" came up a few times. Now, I admit that I tend to jump on the bandwagon about how bad watching television is, except while I am actually watching it. This post shall be a rare instance in which I'm actively sympathizing with watching tv at a moment in which I am not succumbing to its lure.

In the context of community, one of the very bad things about watching television is that people are "watching television alone" instead of creating social ties with others. This seemed thoroughly pernicious and wicked until I considered that much of my day is spent reading alone--normally, obscure 18th century texts. At least "bowling alone" meant you were presumably bowling with friends and being less hermitlike--when I am "reading alone," the closest moments to community are when one of the cats sit on my lap. What am I supposed to do? Say, "No, no, Pippin, please do not leave! without you, I will be contributing even more to the degeneration of community!" Perhaps interrupt my wife while she's working on her dissertation to say, "Please listen to this obscure 18th century fact, or I will implicitly be capitulating to the badness of social incohesion!"

I then started wondering about the whole "watching television alone" thing. If you think about it, we probably more often "read alone" in the literal sense than we "watch tv alone" in the literal sense. For example, I have some friends who get together weekly to watch Gilmore Girls. This is not mere "watching": during the advertisements, they evaluate what just happened--who's a "good guy" or a "bad guy," whether a character's actions/perspective is "right," etc. My friends evaluate the plot and coherence of the storyline, often prognosticating/imagining what future events will take place. They actually voluntarily perform some of the same activities that take place in a literature classroom. And even if tv gets a "bad wrap" for failing to promote imagination--e.g. that it's "inferior" because we can simply look at a visual image instead of having to imagine it on our own--I would argue that tv series are more likely to promote the "imagination" in the sense of envisioning/prognosticating what will happen next. If you want to find out what happens next in a book, you turn the page; if you want to find out what happens next in the tv series, you might have to wait several weeks, during which you shake your fist at the tv and endlessly consider possibilities. But I digress. The point is that television allows my friends to have a kind of "community" experience--a simultaneous sharing of an experience--that is harder to find in literature. Heck, even the great works of literature that are intended for such a shared experience, e.g. Shakespeare's plays which are meant to be performed for a group, are more often experienced in solitary experiences of reading. And I have to say that advertisements can actually serve an aesthetic purpose. In the 18th century, sometimes people would talk a lot with each other during the performance, so there's little aesthetic experience. When we see plays nowadays, so long as we are not in middle school, we tend not to talk so much during the performance, so our only chance really for "discussing" the work is at intermission (i.e. in the bathroom) or at the end (when we are tired, and there is no mystery of "what will happen next?"). However, the frequency of television advertisements means that viewers don't have to choose between paying attention to the whole episode or discussing it: advertisements provide a natural pause for muting the tv and reflecting/discussing what has taken place so far.

So what happens if you watch Gilmore Girls without friends nearby? Well, there is the internet. I'm not trying to say that the internet provides the valuable "social capital" that interests Putnam, but I am interested in probing what it can provide. After Gilmore Girls (especially the season finale), a lot of fans will go on-line to the WB and post comments. Admittedly, many of them are stupid, incoherent, etc. However, they do enable the individual immediately to share a reaction or experience with a wider community. I know that some Catholics really like a uniform liturgy because they have a greater sense of ecclesial community--that around America and/or the world, the same rituals are being observed, the same words of institution spoken. Now, to secularize this for a moment: Americans do build a strong "sense" of community through simultaneously sharing the same aesthetic/transformative experience at the same time in front of the boob tube. Sure, they're not sacramentally united or incorporated into the same religion or anything--in fact, the very lack of such a religious identity may be why they feel so drawn to identify with fellow television watchers. But it does seem like something's goin on.

Television shows themselves can do more to foster a kind of community and discussion. When I was in Canada, I saw a tv show (I can't remember what it was called). First, it would show sketch comedy: for example, they showed a sketch based upon the idea, "What would you do if, as a college student, you got back from a trip to Africa over the summer only to find out that your mom had just married your best friend, who now wants you to call him "Dad?" It was really funny. But what was particularly interesting is that, after the sketch, three women/hosts sat around and discussed the sketch for a few minutes. One would say, "You just have to tell someone when they're being incredibly stupid (like marrying your best friend from college)," another would say, "So many Canadians have adopted a perspective of non-judgmentalism, you live your life and I'll live mine, that they're afraid of offering advice." They then would refer viewers to the website if they wanted to pursue the discussion. I was simply floored that there would be a show on television that would encourage this level of reflection through sketch comedy.

There are ways of approaching any medium that may make it more beneficial. "Reading alone" is perhaps not so beneficial (especially with young children) without discussing the work together. "Television" itself may not so much the problem as how we use it, and the same goes for advertisements. Besides, you need some topics of conversation once you join a bowling league.

Happy Fathers' Day?

2006-06-13T07:39:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I am wrong, but I tend to assume that the type of thing you say to a dad on fathers' day is "ya done good!" or "you are a model to me of good stuff," not (in Calvinesque fashion) "your dad ratings have fallen to record lows." I realize the phrase "fathers' day" may be somewhat ambiguous: "veterans' day" means we honor veterans, but "duck season" means we shoot them. Shoot ducks, I mean, not veterans. Unless we're al qaeda. The point is, "fathers' day" could mean that we're supposed to say fathers are peachy keen, or that we declare "National Hunting Day" on them because they pose a grave threat to humanity and must be stopped no matter what the cost.

I point to this ambiguity in fathers' day as a possible explanation for the following fathers' day cards I found and copied down:

1."Whenever I'm in a tight spot and can't figure out what to do, I always ask myself this question: 'What would Dad do if HE were in this situation?" (Turn over page.) "And then I go watch television."

2."Dad, I feel I've inherited a lot of your qualities, and I just wanted to let you know ... (turn over page.) "I don't hold it against you."

These are "funny," surprisingly original cards, because right when you think they're about to compliment a father, they insult him. "You think I'm going to say something nice, tee hee hee, but instead I'm going to gnaw on your meager remains!" I don't mean to overstress this, but to put it in perspective, imagine giving the following as a mother's day card: "Mom, I want to thank you for all the time you've spent to meet my needs, day in and day out ..." (turn over page.) "like driving me to the day care center!" Ho ho ho, you think it's going to thank mom for all the time she's spent serving her kids despite being a working mom, but really it's suggesting she's abandoned them! How devilishly clever!

Now, I'm not too keen on gender double-standards: Samuel Johnson (writer of the first English dictionary, and person who had the aptly titled "the age of Johnson" named after him) actually argued it was worse for a wife to have adultery than the man. (Apparently, the cohesion of eighteenth century society depended upon knowing that inheritance was not passed down to illegitimate kids; so, if a wife is adulterous, you can't be sure whose kid the inheritance is actually going to, and societal stability collapses. If it is only a husband being adulterous, society can move merrily along.) Even if men may often get the better side of gender double-standards, they don't do too well on the mothers'/fathers' day front. Humorous "Mothers' day" cards may be self-deprecating on the part of the sender, but not, to the best of my knowledge, mother-deprecating. Presumably, there are some fairly bad mothers out there, but we don't usually send them cards announcing the fact. Sure, dads make mistakes, but maybe we can just enumerate them the other 364 days of the year. Now, consider this next card I found:

3."All the other father's day cards I saw were about stuff that didn't seem like you: hunting, fishing, sports, monkeys on the toilet..." (turn over the page) "OK, maybe that last one."

Admittedly, I think monkeys on the toilet are funny. And if someone came up to me and said, "I took this picture of a monkey on a toilet and thought you'd like it," I might be touched. But the card implies that the monkeys on the toilet reminds the sender of his/her dad because 1.his dad spends time on the toilet and 2.he is hairy. Now, I get that dads might need to be told to spend less time watching the TV. TV is a choice. But you know (and this may come as a surprise) dads often need to use the toilet, and some of them have little control over the quantity of hair on their body. And it's not like he's hanging out at a bar. If he is taking a rather long time sealed off in that odoriferous room, he's probably doing something innocuous or possibly even constructive, like expanding his mind by reading The Bathroom Reader or disposing of dangerous toxins. Given the large number of things for dads to feel self-conscious about, the duration of their life spent in the bathroom seems low on the list of priorities. After all, the bathroom is supposed to be a place of safety and security. The bathroom is "base" in the freeze tag game of life. It is not a place to accuse someone of being monkey-like.

I think the impulse to send a toilet abuse card or a television junkie card may arise because people don't know what kind of card to get a dad. Pull out a picture of your dad: does he seem to be saying, "Please oh please give me something sickly sentimental?" Probably not. But I don't know that he's saying, "Bring on the insults! BRING 'EM ON!" either. It seems like there should be a happy medium between drippiness and subtle put-downs.

In this regard, I'm reminded of Shaunti Feldhahn's For Women Only and Emerson Eggerichs's Love and Respect. Both books argue that, while women fundamentally need to hear the message, "I love you," men need to hear, "I respect you." The books suggest that even if culture has accepted that women need to hear that they are unconditionally loved, men need to hear that they are unconditionally respected--lack of respect makes them feel like failures and shut down, while unconditional respect makes them excited and want to be worthy of respect. So, perhaps the reason we don't get the "come hither; bring drippiness" look from our dads is that they instead need to hear that they're respected--which isn't a message conveyed by the three fathers' day cards above. Respect for dads is not very characteristic of society in general; how many truly admirable dads are there on TV? (Veronica Mars is a remarkable exception to this rule: Veronica's dad is one of the most incredible fathers I've seen.) So this fathers' day, do something different: tell your dad you respect him. Or, if you're a father, try to exude less of the "sentimentality is gross" look and more of the "respect is keen" look.

One Tree Hill and George I

2006-06-10T18:55:00.000-07:00

With great big bunches of shamefacedness, I admit, I watch One Tree Hill. I was watching Smallville (maybe it was Gilmore Girls) at 8 pm, I didn't want to have to get up from my seat and get back to work, and there it was, all dramatic-like, trying to suck me in at 9 pm. I've got to say, it had a fascinating premise, one with which I consoled myself so I wouldn't feel so dirty or ashamed: two brothers (separated by 3 months), two different mothers. He chooses the "favorite" mother and son, Nathan, and disowns the other mother and son, Lucas. One son is born to a life of privilege, the other has a mom struggling to make ends meet and deals with social stigma. And now ... both of them are on the same basketball team and have to learn how to interact. It raises really interesting questions about nature vs. nurture, family, responsibility, etc.

Well, at some point in the television series--okay, maybe it was from the very first episode--part of the driving force of the series became that their father, Dan, was evil. Every season they'd have to up the ante about just how despicable the guy could be: whereas the first season Dan was just trying to control his favorite son, in the second season he pays a woman to date and then dump his own brother, and then in the third season he actually kills him and blames the murder on someone else. Perhaps in the fourth season he shall be even more evil, perhaps performing a zombie ritual that will force his dead brother to serve him for eternity.

Since I'll have to wait until at least the fall for them to air the zombie episode, I was pleasantly surprised to read about a kind of "bizarro world Dan" who was just as controlling over his son: George I, an 18th century monarch. The following excerpt from J. H. Plumb's The First Four Georges is like something out of One Tree Hill, if Dan Scott had only been made king of England instead of a car salesman. Now, George I was George II's father, and the Princess of Wales was George II's wife, and George I and George II were Hanoverian--George I couldn't really speak English, and George II had a thick accent:

"The Princess of Wales gave birth to a baby boy. The Prince [George II] wished to [choose] its godparents, the King insisted on the protocol, named them himself, and included, again, according to the protocol, his Chamberlain, the Duke of Newcastle, whom the Prince detested. At the ceremony the Prince failed to control his feelings, took Newcastle by the elbow and said, "Rascal, I find you out." Newcastle was easily put in a twitter, and this mark of royal displeasure, combined with the Prince's rather strong accent, put him in such a dither that he thought the Prince had said, "I'll fight you." Appaled and confused he rushed to consult his colleagues .... They advised him to go to the King, so he did, and told him that he had been challenged. The King immediately placed the Prince under what was virtually house arrest--without bothering to ask him for his version of the story.... [George I] also seized their children, secured a decision from the judges that he had the right to control their education, rapped the Prince and Princess over the knucles for visiting their children secretly, and rationed them to one visit a week so long as notice was given to him first" (55-56).

That could basically be the plot for season four of One Tree Hill. Okay, granted, Dan is not king, but he was recently elected mayor, so he's got some power. And Nathan, Dan's favorite son, is married and could get his wife pregnant. (Side note: Nathan's wife wanted to remain a virgin until she was married, which might have been one factor in Nathan's decision to marry her in high school. I think it's pretty daring for a drama to show someone with that degree of respect for virginity and for a story to explore a marriage between high-schoolers.) And season 3 ended on the pregnancy cliff-hanger moment where someone--we think it is a woman--has taken a pregnancy test, and it was positive. One of these possibly pregnant people is Nathan's wife. Dude, I have totally plotted season four of One Tree Hill! Dan is going to get custody of Nathan and Halley's baby because Nathan will have said something like, "Rascal, I've found you out," and someone will mishear it as, "I killed a man in Reno just to watch him die!" and he will claim Halley is an unfit mother because she used to be a rock star. And to add to all of that, Dan's brother (the one he killed) got Lucas's mom pregnant last season, and I betcha Dan's going to try to control that kid too once it's born! Bastard! (I am referring to Dan, not to the illegitimate offspring.)

"Bread, Dammit!" and the justifiability of religious utterance

2006-06-07T19:53:00.000-07:00

It’s always nice when a scholar uses a memorable illustration. I was reading Theology and Narrative, where the author Goldberg discusses the justifiability of religious utterances. Goldberg writes, “In the first place, there must be some linguistic convention common to both speaker and hearer alike such that ‘please pass the bread’ counts as a request. That is, were someone to say instead, ‘Bread, dammit!’ his utterance might be considered an order, a command, or a demand that the bread be passed, but it will not normally be justifiably taken as a request for bread because, quite simply, there is no convention in the language to the effect that ‘Bread, dammit!’ is a way of performing the speech-act of requesting.” For some reason, this paragraph has struck me as thoroughly hilarious, and I have been going around the house telling our cat Cricket and/or empty rooms “Bread, dammit!” (Note: as theorized in an earlier post, my usage of “Bread, dammit!” is technically an instance of a pseudoprofanity rather than actual profanity.) I figured, even if I couldn’t say the phrase as a request, at least I could say it as an order, and if I’m going to be ordering something around, it seems better to do it with the cat or with an empty room.

After making this determination, I was disappointed to read further and discover that, “For a request of bread to be in any way justified, there must at the very least be some bread available, someone who wants or needs it, and someone capable of passing it.” I think it’s sad that we live in a world in which we cannot justifiably tell our loved ones “Bread, dammit!” unless we really want bread, and we cannot ever tell our cats “Bread, dammit!” because they lack opposable thumbs and can't pass food. But if you think about the phrase, technically, it’s not ordering the listener to do anything. It could be a cry of despair, like, “Why does bread exist? Ye gods, why?” or, “There’s bread again, I cannot escape its ubiquitous Orwellian presence!” The very absence of context and the phrase’s ambiguity makes the phrase intrinsically funny. Go ahead and see if I’m not right. Find someone special and tell them “Bread, dammit!” and see if you don’t feel better about the world around you ... and maybe even the bread.

Fully Human ... Fully Divine ...

2006-06-02T15:54:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to come up with a new heretical teaching. When I first read a Borges short story in which Judas was the good guy, I thought, “This is blasphemous, but original!” Until I saw Jesus Christ, Superstar. And read the Gospel of Judas. We have Last Temptation of Christ, we have The Da Vinci Code, we have Gnostic heresies, but they all start sounding the same. (Mary Magdalene had a special relationship with Jesus? Been there, done that.) Given the bigness of difficulty in coming up with a genuinely, never before thought of, weird heresy about Jesus, it has struck me that an even bigger challenge would be to come up with a new Christological heresy concerning the natures of Christ. I mean, there’s really not much there that you can come up with that hasn’t been tried: He wasn’t fully human! He wasn’t fully divine! The heresy novelty factor is not very high.

So, skimming some of the Gnostic gospels on the web, it strikes me that I have a Christological heresy that may actually be new. (Drumroll, please.) Christ is fully human … fully divine … and fully monkey. See, other heresies fail because they always shortchange one of the natures, so why not just supercharge them by throwin’ in a little monkey action? After all, according to William Lynch in Christ and Apollo, imperfect man "was once, and still is, a bit of a monkey" (97), so should not the perfect God-man be much more than just a bit of a monkey, yea, fully thereso? Now, half the fun of creating your own Christological heresy would surely be in writing your own gospel and pretending that it is thousands of years old and claiming that “the church” represses religious expression. I would like to call my particular religious expression “the Gospel of Bobo,” and I’d like to pretend that a bunch of disenfranchised Gnostics got surly and drunk one night and wrote this. (I have used the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Philip as my model.):

One day, while Jesus was in Judea, he sat down while his disciples were in prayer and began to laugh. “Master, why do you laugh while we offer a prayer to God? Is it not just and right to do?” The Lord replied, “I do not laugh at you, but I laugh because of what I am: the indwelling of the enlightened divine self-generated monkey.” And the disciples became angry and blasphemed in their hearts, but he rebuked them. “Why are you angry? Is it not because you are unlike the monkey? Was not Zaccheus counted more righteous because he climbed the tree, and the snake more wicked because he dwelt in dust? Behold, while the serpent spoke clearly he was all of falsehood, but the monkey who grunts in words of mystery is all of truth.”

And the disciple whom Jesus loved, Mary Magdalene, asked him, “Tell us, are there many monkeys, or only one?” And Jesus answered her, “I tell you, the aeon of the Old World Monkey is rapidly passing away, to be replaced by the great and boundless realm of the New World Monkey. Yet what is ‘the New World Monkey?’ For names given to the worldly are very deceptive. While some have called you ‘Mary,’ because they perceive you only as Mary, I proclaim you ‘Monkey,’ as I see within you a luminous fluffy cloud, and lo, it is anthropoidal.” When the disciples saw Mary thus set apart for glory, they said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? Because, duh, you are not a woman, and I have monkey needs!”

A clarification comment: I realize that some might be scandalized by the last sentence of this entry, so I want to clarify my purposes. In the Gospel of Philip, after Jesus kisses Mary Magdalene on the lips, the disciples get jealous and basically ask him, "What's she got that we haven't got?" and, well, the disciples couldn't be so stupid that they couldn't guess. (Dan Brown certainly did.) My point here is not to play with the idea of a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene so much as to say that the Gospel of Philip includes some incredibly stupid dialogue.

vita brevis est, under consideration is longus ...

2006-05-31T14:37:00.000-07:00

One thing that surprised me about being a graduate student is how long it takes to hear back about anything, be it an article you submit, be it a fellowship application, be it once you're on the job market, etc. You might recall a blog entry that I wrote eons ago about a fellowship application due on February 15th. It's not like there's a point in my history that I can point to as the crushing defeat in which I discovered I did not get the scholarship, because I still haven't heard anything. In fact, there is still the glimmer of hope ... out there, there is $20,000 that no one has contacted me about to say it is not mine ...

Well, back in August, a journal had a contest for best graduate student paper submission, which would include an award, money, and publication. Now, to make it clear, I did not win. In fact, I kind of forgot about it around month four. Occasionally I would think, "My advisor is telling me I need to have an article in circulation, but it's still in that contest." To be honest, this thought of its limbo status was kind of comforting, because it meant I could excuse myself for not working on it anymore.

Well, five months after I sent my newborn article out into a hostile world (I named my firstborn "Harry"), I got an email saying I did not win the article contest, but would I like to have the article considered for regular publication? So of course I responded yes, and another four and a half months passed. Again, I forgot about the article, until I got the editor's reply: "We are willing to accept your essay for publication if you revise it according to the suggestions found in the two reports. though the readers do not perfectly concur, they both offer helpful guidance for revision." Yes!!!!!! It has only taken ten months to be told that I might someday be accepted!!!!!!

Still, there are some problems. It is, of course, difficult to know how to revise an article on which the two readers "do not perfectly concur"; it would have been cool if the editors judged this as confirmation of my ability deftly to navigate between two opposing extremes, but no such luck. Another problem is that the reader comments often say things like, "the author Leopold could say more about X," which is all true, and which an earlier draft did in fact say something about, until I had to delete it to stay within their word limit: in order to make room for the new, i.e. previously old, things, I'll have to severely amputate poor baby Harry. Another daunting feature of the revision process is that my reader comments are dang smart. This poses a problem insofar as I must actually understand their criticisms/objections, but sometimes they are so nuanced I'm not sure that I can.

I also have to admit that this conditional acceptance is rather scary. First, there is the concern that, despite being conditionally "accepted," if I fail to "fix" my article enough, it will get turned down, and then I will feel rather silly, and by silly, I mean sad and pathetic. Second (and this is perhaps a strange response) there is the fear that it will actually be in print: there it will be, portable, able to be hung up on a wall and have a big bullseye drawn on it. What if people discover some unconscionable error, such as that I listed an incorrect place of publication in my bibliography? It seems so much easier when it was in article limbo and I could just presume a reader would catch any mistakes before publication. I should remark that despite the general tone of this entry, I am very happy, and I am more than willing to hack off Harry's various limbs if it means a published article and hopefully (next year) a job.

An un-EZ feat: or, bunny slippers

2006-05-27T08:01:00.000-07:00

My wife vacuumed today, thereby discovering the various tracks of mud I had tried so diligently to hide. One pencil doesn't cover much, but if you throw in a paperclip here, an index card there, and maybe a couple of stacks of books, it's impossible to see the stain so long as you are careful never to pick the stuff up. Well, apparently if you track in mud, cover it up with things, then have your wife take those things away, not only is the mud stain still there, it is "ground in." Because my wife is not keen on mud stains being permanently ground into the carpet, she has asked me to abstain from wearing my sneakers inside the house. I must "abstain from the stain," if you will. (Silly puns ease the sense of pain.)

This is very hard for me. For one thing, my feet get cold without sneakers. For another thing, I have weak ankles, and I have a recurring fear that I will re-injure my left ankle in some sort of bizarre tripping accident that would have been prevented if I were wearing sneakers. ("Doctor, what's the cause of death?" "Socks, Nurse Hammin. Socks, and the failure to wear sneakers.") They also provide good foot support if you are prone to do weird things like pace around the house while you are reading, which is something I like to do. Well, my wife said, "Why don't you go buy some slippers? There are even some slippers that are designed for you to walk a lot." Now, I am not a slipper kind of guy. Slippers just makes me think of pink bunny rabbits. I suppose if they were pink and/or white killer rabbits (see above), that would be different. Otherwise, they are goofy and/or emasculating. I wanted raw unadulterated power slippers, if I were to have any at all.

So, I want to Wal-Mart and into the men's shoes section. Immediately I found "EZ Feet slippers Active at home: designed to keep you one step ahead" slippers. Now, the big poster does not say "Men's slippers," but given that it's in the men's section, that should be a no-brainer, right? Well, then why is there a picture of a smiling woman on the advertisement? Are they suggesting that, by wearing these slippers in the privacy of your own home, this smiling woman will somehow discover you wear slippers and want to date you? Or does it really mean that these are women's slippers placed in the men's shoes section?

I tried to look for other clues. The slippers themselves did not have any of the common social cues for femininity, such as pinkness or fluffy animals, just a whitish gray. The advertisement background was orange, which, while not a manly color like blue or deathlike black, seemed indeterminate to me. So I went wandering around in the women's section and found, "EZ-Slippers Men's Relax at Home," replete with manly blue background. But relax at home? How could they pretend that it was manly blue if all the guy was going to be doing was relaxing and/or drooling sleepily in front of the tv?

So then I walked back over to the orange advertisement. And then I walked back over to the blue advertisement. Just because the pansy blue one was for men didn't mean the active burly orange one was for women. I don't even know why buying the "wrong" one worried me so--I mean, suppose I bought the orange one, and it was actually intended for women. It wasn't like I was going to be wearing it in public and have young hooligans say to me on the street, "Go up, woman-slippers!" and then I'd have to pray to God to send some bears to maul them for me. Nevertheless, I was much a-feared of getting wrong slippers.

Well, finally I figured out the clincher argument: none of the orange advertisement slippers were even in my size. They must only be for women! So it meant my only choice was to get weakling lazy slippers or burly woman's not-fitting me slippers, which is no choice at all. I finally just opted for a second pair of sneakers, which I will only wear inside the house (presuming I don't forget).

Still somewhat disgruntled about the slipper-buying experience, I decided to go to the EZ feet website and compare the available men's slippers and women's slippers. Apparently, even though EZ feet does offer both "active at home" and "relax at home" models for women, they only have "relax at home" models for men! Now, if I were a woman, I would probably get really indignant about this and say, "Why is it that they assume only women are going to be 'active at home' and 'do all the housework' and 'not have a career!'" all of which would probably be accurate criticisms. But I am not a woman. I am a graduate student man who wants to pace in active slippers in my own home without being associated with pink non-man-eating bunnies! Help, help, I'm being oppressed!

Over the Hedge, and Through the Woods ...

2006-05-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

One could simply boycott Da Vinci Code by sitting on one's couch at home and muttering things to oneself about the degradation of our culture on opening night. As an alternative, some Christians have arranged something--I don't know what to call it, a "girlcott?"--where you go out and see a different movie on the night Da Vinci Code opened, a sort of battle cry, "I have money, and I'm not afraid to spend it on something that's not evil!" It would have been nice if something like Gibson's Passion was coming out the same day, but hey, you take what you can get, and the girlcott we participated in was a viewing of Over the Hedge. It wasn't a bad choice--while I can't get excited about a squirrel who can burp his ABCs, I can't really claim that his burping undermines the core tenets of Christendom. And there was a lot of good stuff in there about the importance of family and keeping alive old traditions, like eating bark, especially if you are a turtle. Eating bark poses a daring challenge to the consumerist/suburban lifestyle that involves drinking a lot of soda and sitting on a couch. So, you can register your dislike of Da Vinci Code and affirm the traditional bark-eating family at the same time.

When I was in Wal-Mart the other day, I couldn't help feeling rather bemused by the advertisement flyer, "Walmart summer starts here!" which includes pictures of not only food, but also many of the characters from Over the Hedge. As I mentioned, the movie itself attacks American consumerism, especially via a turtle whose name I cannot remember, so I will call him, "Family Values Turtle." Now, in the movie, out of all of the animals, FVT hated the consumerist way of life that the racoon, whom I shall call "Assault on the Family Racoon," advocated. So what do we see in the Walmart flyer? We see FVT helping AFR standing on a wickedly huge outside barbeque set in order to scout for more yummies. In another panel, we see Family Values Turtle looking at the Coleman oversized armchair, smiling, and giving a thumbs up (do turtles even have thumbs?). On another page, we have Skunk girl advertising a digital camera (I would have thought she would have been advertising air freshners, but ah well). Ironically, we have characters in a movie about the evils of consumerism advocating consumerism. Now, I do remember an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa Simpson bewails modern commercialism and how horrible it is to put television characters on t-shirts (which, of course, The Simpsons marketing does); howeve, I find The Simpsons form of self-conscious hypocrisy somewhat amusing--the "I've been a bad widdle boy" type as opposed to the "I am a blissfully self-unaware" Over the Hedge type.

One of the things that most struck me about the film while watching it was that it was consistently mediocre. I don't mean that negatively: I mean that it followed a conventional story arc (the wicked racoon learns consumerism is bad and is "converted" at the end), it had mildly amusing characters, etc. It flows smoothly and evenly with no knee-slapping moments with "ha ha" or of head-slapping moments with "Please God let this end!" It is mildly entertaining and inoffensive.

Since I've recently seen Hoodwinked, I couldn't help but compare the two movies: Hoodwinked is a movie about a frog police inspector who interviews Little Red Riding Hood, Granny, et al. to discover what villain has been stealing the secret recipe of the best cooks in the forest. The movies does not flow smoothly, and I suspect the choppiness is part of why reviews weren't that positive. (Rotten Tomatos gave Hoodwinked only 47% approval, but gave 76% approval of Over the Hedge. Some of the critical dislike of Hoodwinked may be due to the animation, which they claim was inferior. I'm not competent to comment on the animation, but I do want to say something about "the story," which I think is the more important part anyway.) Yet Hoodwinked had some positively brilliant moments: it had a yodelling mountain goat that played the banjo. It had a woodsman actor who sold schnitzel on a stick. Set up as a police interrogation of four different characters, Hoodwinked has tight, incredibly intricate plotting (as each perspective fills in gaps left in the other narrative). As Over the Hedge was about the danger of monolithic consumerism, Hoodwinked is about big business crowding out small business (someone is stealin recipes in order to create a huge baked goods empire). Without a doubt, Hoodwinked is the more memorable: Over the Hedge gives you the dangers of Doritos, Hoodwinked gives you schnitzel on a stick. Over the Hedge gives you a squirrel whose annoyance meter rivals Jar Jar Binks, and Hoodwinked gives you a squirrel who is incredibly endearing. Which type of movie is actually "better": a movie that is evenly mediocre, or a movie that seems to oscillate between the brilliant and clunky?

To complicate this choice further: what if I'm wrongly judging Hoodwinked as occasionally "clunky?" This assessment stems especially from the very beginning of the movie, when I had trouble getting into the movie because it was hard to tell what the heck was going on: the movie begins with Little Red Riding Hood being attacked by the Big Bad Wolf, her Granny mysteriously falling out of a closet, and a crazy lumberjack crashing through the window screaming, all without any context or introduction. In retrospect, it strikes me that the movie may have been intended to alienate and/or confuse the viewer at the beginning--to convey a sense of chaos and confusion, and then to show the frog policeman establish order and coherence from conflicting narratives. That is, what had seemed the "weakest link" in Hoodwinked was in fact due to its failure to conform to standard movie conventions. However, what if it wasn't a "failure to conform" to conventions at all, but a conscious refusal to conform? The "postmodern novel" isn't exactly trying to be modern and failing miserably. French New Wave filming was purposefully choppy and deviated from earlier conventions of filmmaking. If we entertain for just a moment the idea that the "Hollywood style" is not the objective God-given standard for film quality, why is being "choppy" and "uneasy" assumed to be a bad thing? The apostle Peter noted that the apostle Paul was not amongst the easiest of reads.

Further, I wonder to what extent the easy hollywood style of movie-making is tied to the values of consumerism. Consumerism and convenience often go hand in hand; consumers don't typically want things that make their lives harder or seek out things that are hard to understand, unless they are geeky computer wizards. So here's my idea: even if the content of Over the Hedge is in opposition to consumerism, its very form is very amenable to consumerism. From the very beginning of the movie, it's easy to tell what's going on (unlike Hoodwinked). Even if the movie pokes fun at the suburban and consumerist life-style, it lacks actual bite (it takes more after Horace than Juvenal). There is one clear suburban villain woman, but she is such a caricature that about the only moral I got from her is that you should not treasure property value so much that you hire exterminators to kill turtles. It's easy to go to the movie and shop at Wal-Mart the next day and buy useless junk food, which is what I did. Heck, during the credits, the animals are even watching television!

I don't mean to sound as if I disliked the movie or sound like an old crotchety academic in a rest home complaining, "This movie hopelessly capitulates to culture! I don't like consumerism! where's my bedpan?" Every artistic product has to be concerned with its reception (just as a dissertation-writer has to be concerned with whether or not his thesis is accepted), and Over the Hedge is not an enemy. I just want to say, hey, maybe you should give Hoodwinked another think.

P.S.-thanks to my wife for discussing the movie with me; after discussing it, we both wanted to blog about it, but discovered our thoughts overlapped so much she just left the topic to me.

The Evils of Ear-Piercing

2006-05-19T17:15:00.000-07:00

As I remarked in my last blog entry, rather odd "artistic differences" arose when I was in a rock band. Doubtlessly many of these arose because we were a group of 12 year olds from conservative Christian backgrounds. One of the biggest issues was male ear-piercing. I should note that, for at least a year, the discussion about ear-piercing was theoretical at best, given that none of our parents would allow ear-piercing anyway. Nevertheless, some of us railed against parental tyranny, while some of us--well, okay, basically just me--contended that ear-piercing was a sin. In my defense, it's not as if any of the pro-ear-piercing arguments were compelling. For instance, argument #1: 1.God is omnipotent. 2.I'll pray to God not to let me get an earring if it is bad. 3.If He doesn't stop me, that must mean it was okay. Or, argument #2: 1.Leopold, you like band X. 2.Band member of band X has an earring. 3.Therefore, you should like men wearing earrings. Admittedly, I made some logical fallacies myself, but I had to spend so much time pointing out everyone else's arguments that, mysteriously, there was never time to consider my own.

Well, finally the time came when parental resistance crumbled, and God's omnipotence seemed a little on the weak side, so a couple of band members got earrings. It seemed unfair to me that, given I believed earrings were reprehensible etc., and given that the earringed band members would not be wearing bags over their heads, audience members would see the earrings. Implicitly, the band posters and videos would be advocating a kind of life I could not condone. What could I do to make my stand more visible? Getting a tattoo that said, "Earrings are bad," would seem to miss the point. So finally, I figured out what we as a band could do: one of our songs could be against ear-piercing.

Now, the other band members raised silly objections to this, such as that I would be turning them into hypocrites, that they didn't actually believe earrings were sinful, etc. But I was being marginalized! I was having my voice silenced! If they really felt like "hypocrites" singing it, I could just have a special solo or something, and they could go backstage, get a drink of water, and go do something earring-related.

Despite my best efforts, the song was vetoed. I am confident that, had we performed the song, people certainly would have taken notice. It would have been a bold, counter-cultural voice about counter-cultural ears. For instance, many people at the time who opposed male ear-piercing made only relativistic arguments: that is, they would say, "we are living in a culture in which only drug-dealers or women wear earrings." This did not solve the problem, because (as we see today) what happens when you live in a culture in which people other than women and drug-dealers wear earrings? You now have no foundation for raising objections. I wanted to write a ballad that would be based upon the eternal, unchanging principles of Scripture, especially as revealed in the Old Testament. I entitled my song, "Lend me your ear (and not the way Van Gogh did.)" As the very title suggests, much as Van Gogh the artist wrongly maimed his ear by mailing it (I wonder if he sent it by "ear-mail"), so too did many musical artists wrongly maim their ears. I was advocating a different kind of aesthetic. Given that it is easy to quibble with portions of my argument now, I would like to include the lyrics as well as a little elaboration on why the argument, although stupid, is not as stupid as it appears.

Verse 1: "First, you must take into account what the Bible must say,/At one point it says do not defile the temple of the Lord in any way./How does the Lord consider a hole in the ear you think?/Indeed, this is not a question which can be solved quick as a wink." One of the admirable features of this verse is that it does admit the complexity of the earring issue. As the lyrics indicate, it is only the person who has carefully considered the issue who is capable of seeing just how wrong ear-piercing is.

"Since the Bible speaks of our bodies as the temple of the Lord,/The only way to understand this is to look at other parts of his word./Another Scripture says, "Do not cut off limbs or wear tattoos."/Could earrings be akin to that? Would this Scripture be meant to speak to you?" Here, we see the principle of using Scripture to interpret Scripture. We see a condemnation of the habit of just taking one little proof-text to establish a position. As the song advocates, we must have at least two proof-texts to establish a position (much as in Mosaic Law, someone could not be condemned without two witnesses). Further, it is not limited to mere explicit references to earrings: it is intending to establish a larger framework, a world and life view, that sees earrings in relation to the rest of God's creation, like tattoos.

"Before tattoos, it says not to cut off body limbs./Tattoos and cutting limbs have to do with pain, and not hurting yourself on a whim./Earrings cause some pain, and cut a hole in your ear./But is it sinning against the Lord? That's the biggest fear." At this point, in order to understand why tattoos are condemned, the lyric asks us to look at the immediate context, at the preceding part of the verse connecting tattoos and the cutting off of limbs. (See Leviticus 19:28) The importance of context for determination of meaning is a central tenet of Biblical hermeneutics.

"What do you think it means when the Bible speaks on pain?/What sort of things is it telling you from which to refrain?/What's the difference between a shot from the doctor and masochism?/The answer to this question you must think of, and decide with wisdom./A shot may cause pain, but in reality seeks to heal you from your hurt,/While a masochist feels pain because he enjoys it, and with its company he likes to flirt./But why does the Scripture say not to wear a tattoo?/What other things could that reference mean? Don't worry, we'll get to that, too." We see here an attempt to distinguish actions on the basis of motivation--sin is not simply external action but the internal attitude of the heart.

"A tattoo, although it is for decoration, causes much pain,/Like cutting body limbs, it hurts, so in that way it is profane./It appears that, in the Bible, fashion's less important than health,/The shot is a form of health, because in the long run makes healing felt." We should not inflict pain for aesthetic purposes. I should note that I still am a supporter of the "no pain for aesthetic purposes" position, although I have a rather broad definition of pain that includes such actions as wearing a tie and standing up straight. Further, this lyric is a reminder that, as God views our actions from the perspective of eternity, so we should not be concerned with short-term pain but long-term glory. The glory of the earring is but a passing glory, while shots are forever. Until we die. Or until we have to get them again in seven years.

"So if the Bible chooses health, over fashion,/Could earrings hurt your body too much in the sight of God and in reality wrong is your passion?/Fashion can be glamorous, it can even be said somewhat to be art,/But at the same time, the Bible says, 'The Lord looks at the heart.'/ Not at the ear, Y'hear!/But still, we can not say it is wrong, it is your decision,/But through it all, we hope and pray, that your decision will have God's wisdom." Since God looks at our hearts rather than our ears, it is quite clear that there is no need to wear an earring, and it is probably sinful. Still, note the gentleness of the song--it does not say ear-piercing is "wrong," just that it hopes God gives people wisdom not to get one.

I realize that the song as a whole might be labelled as "preachy." But hey, Alexander Pope's poem Essay on Man is "preachy" in its own way, what with systematizing a philosophy of humanity's role in the world and the relation between partial evil and universal good. The difference is that mine is rather singable, once someone writes the music for it.

Rock Band Dilemmas

2006-05-17T14:19:00.000-07:00

It's interesting to ponder the different moral dilemmas that arise depending upon the present group you're hanging out with. In academia, for example, which of these two options would be more morally reprehensible: to make your graduate students go to an 8:00 a.m. meeting and give them no coffee, or to make your graduate students go to an 8:00 a.m. meeting and give them Starbuck's from the student union? The latter choice is, of course, the most evil, because it would mean you are supporting big business and cultural hegemony. I don't actually mean to satirize this view; heck, even conservatives within the "cruncy conservative" movement concur that "Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract," i.e. big business often contributes to cultural impoverishment. My point is that there often are real issues at stake that can seem relatively silly when looked at from the outside or presented in an asinine way, as I have just done.

However, it has reminded me of the old dilemmas back from when I was in my first, and only, rock band, at the ages of 10-12. We began as an "air band," meaning that we thought our stage presence would be so overpowering that it wouldn't matter that we weren't playing instruments: just put on someone else's album, and away we went! At a sleepover party, I still remember fondly our "practice session," where we began shaking our heads to show we were "jamming," and our jumping crazily around the dining room in such a way that we would not accidentally bang our shins on the couch. We mouthed complex metaphysical conceits about love being like bad medicine that, paradoxically, was harmful, but also just what you needed. I was on keyboards, and I punched the keys, sometimes pretending to play the C-major scale, the only piece of music I really knew at the time.

Needless to say, we never got a gig, but a couple of years later, one of our band members got the epiphany that maybe we could actually write and play our own music. This seemed like a neat idea. I still remember over the summer, after a fellow band member and I got out of Vacation Bible School, we went over to his house and co-wrote a charming little ditty called "Chief." Based on the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the opening lines were, "The chief end of man is to glorify God/So let's praise Him under Jesse's RAAAHHHHD!!!!" (Or "Jesse's rod," depending upon whether you want the word itself, or how we pronounced it.) Yeah, we sung about the Westminster Larger Catechism, but we did it with a heavy metal ethos. Sure, secular groups had words like "rad," but we had the word "rod," which was way cooler when screamed correctly.

However, we had various "creative disagreements," as all visionary rock bands do. Even though our band was called "Knights of the Light," we planned on eschewing the petty sacred/secular dualisms of our contemporary Christian culture: we would have both Christian and secular songs. Nevertheless, how should we maintain this delicate balance between the godly and the profane? Well, quite obviously, if there were going to be ten songs on the album, we needed to figure out what the ratio of godly to godless songs were going to be. Two of us wanted a 6 to 4 ratio in favor of God (this was my position), two of us wanted a 5 to 5 song ratio in favor of a watered-down Christian witness, and one of us was on the fence. I cannot remember the number of times both parties tried to woo the fence-sitter tie-breaker. Since I was in the first party, I frequently appealed to "What Would Jesus Do?" Granted, Jesus never joined a rock and roll band, but He sure did talk about God a lot, which surely put Him into my camp. I spent hours agonizing over whether fence-walker would weaken, and if consequently the future of our band's Christian testimony be placed forever in jeopardy. For some reason, we could never find a compromise of just letting the creative juices flowing.

But perhaps the greatest dilemma of all was over ... male ear-piercing! I shall save the details of this moral quandry for my next blog entry.

Under New Management

2006-05-15T09:11:00.000-07:00

Once I like a product, it tends to disappear. I don't just mean in the sense that when I take something off of a shelf, it is gone. I get that. That's just physics or something. What I mean is that, after I have purchased the product, and stalk the place for several weeks, beard unkempt and eyes bloodshot and body smelly, no replica materializes. Quaker Toasted Oatmeal Honey Nut flavor? Gone from the shelves! Black Cherry Fresca is gone. Even entire stores vacate the premises if they get wind that I like them. Gone is "My Thai," a Thai restaurant that gave free refills on these incredible Thai teas (I hope all of my free refills didn't put them out of business). And now another restaurant I loved, also Thai, is also kind of gone. "Gone" in the sense that nothing remains but a a pale shadow of a remnant of a faded image of former glory from a bygone age. It is under new management.

In the olden days, there was a sign that said "lunch $4, dinner $5," all you can eat. Now, the sign says, "Lunch $4.99, dinner $5.99." Okay, so they've increased costs by 20-25%. But perhaps the interior will explode in a dazzling array of beauty or something. The old Thai place was filled with beautiful greenery and huge plants--there was so much decoration that seating room was cut in half. There were wall decorations everywhere. There was a rotund Buddha figure who seemed to be foreshadowing the girth of my own belly after dinner. There were plates of different sizes and shapes, forks and items vaguely resembling forks, a soda machine that would usually have two flavors unavailable, and the food table was so crowded that plates of food rested upon other plates. It was a kind of food anarchy, an untamed culinary wilderness. The food, much like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, was unlabelled, so you never knew what you were going to get. The friendly, elderly woman who ran the place was always there and always cooking something up, and it felt really personal.

Now, under new management, the food is nicely labelled: even if the food does not taste like "Pad Thai," you know that's what it's supposed to be, because that's what the label says. There is less diversity of food, but it is all neatly compartmentalized. The greenery is gone, presumably to make room for more customers. The food's not really "bad" ... admittedly not as good as it used to be, but it didn't make me recoil or go "Ugh" or anything ... but the atmosphere is gone. While my wife insists that some of the changes are improvements--for instance, she thinks it's actually better when food is labelled and when the soda flavors are available--there's a part of me that wants to insist that all of the anarchic touches were endearing, or perhaps necessary for the full aesthetic experience. There was something delightfully uncategorizable about the original restaurant. On the one hand, it was dirt cheap, appealing to the pragmatic capitalist cheapo side of me that shops at Wal-Mart. On the other hand, it had ornamentation, with the personality of a "Ma and Pa" type shop that seemed utterly opposed to the Walmartization/Starbuckean ethos of American culture. It appealed to my wallet and to my aesthetic. I suppose all of this panegyric is a little extreme--it is just a restaurant, after all--but it was incredible to find a place that just wasn't concerned with making a lot of money or having huge trains of customers (one thing that always surprised me was just how few customers there were).

I want to drown my sorrows in some black cherry fresca, but there isn't any.

To the Prurient, All Things Are Prurient

2006-05-11T19:54:00.000-07:00

I'm rather fond of eighteenth century period popular music. I'm also rather fond of inflicting such music upon my class. There is an enjoyable kind of overweening power and despotic decadence in compelling your students to sing an obscure eighteenth century song like "The Vicar of Bray" ("Sing! Sing about the Stuart and Hanoverian lines right now! Pretend that without Queen Anne, you are doomed!!!!!"). It's a great way to learn the historical context of the literature, it's fun to sing, and it's helpful to see literature as participating in a wider conversation that includes a variety of genres and voices (e.g. philosophy, art, sermons, caricatures, etc.).

Now, to the best of my knowledge, there's not a lot of "popular" 18th century music available on CD, except for the bawdy songs. (Many of the famous 17th century plays actually included popular songs in their performance, but are they available on CD? No! Although I'd be happy if anyone can prove me wrong.) In the 18th century, one of the most famous collections of printed songs was Thomas D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy. I'm not really sure how many of the songs are about sex, but apparently, approximately 100% of those on CD are. The two CDs I've been able to find with D'Urfey's music are "My Thing is my own: Bawdy Songs of Thomas D'Urfey," and "Thomas D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy: Lewd Songs and Low Ballads from the 18th Century." (I have to admit feeling a little strange, after I put them on my Amazon wishlist, and my parents got me one of them.) It's not as if I'm actively soliciting dirty songs: I just want some 18th century tunes that have some lyrics (so John Playford's instrumentals are out) and have a little life in them, not a petit morte. Even if the songs are bawdy, so is much of the literature I'll probably be teaching one day, such as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. A lot of the songs have interesting things to say about male-female relations that would be useful in teaching a work like Richardson's Pamela, which is about a man who attempts to seduce his maid.

Now back when I was a Latin teacher, there was a special "Love Reading Day" (or some catchy name like that) in which we teachers were encouraged to share with our students something we had read that we really enjoyed. I decided, since I was going to enter a Ph.D program in the eighteenth century, and I was teaching Latin, I would read "Slawkenbergius's Tale" from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Slawkenbergius's Tale, written in both Latin and English, is a fun whimsical story about a man who goes to "The Promontory of Noses" to get a large nose. I thought it would be a great story to share with my students at this nice, conservative Christian school where I was teaching. Well, I learned less than a year later that "nose" was really code for "less visible male anatomy," and suddenly, all the women's wanting to touch the guy's nose and their discussions whether his nose was real no longer seemed quite as innocently whimsical and Wonderlandesque. I share this story only to emphasize that it is very important, as a future teacher, to be able to recognize the ribald so you can be aware when you are poisoning young minds.

Anyway, recognition of this need has led to the odd experience, while listening to these CDs, of training myself to look for double-meanings. This can be more challenging than you might expect. For instance, I was listening to the CD, "Lewd Songs and Low Ballads." Sometimes I think a double-entendre is going on, but I can't for the life of me understand what the phrase actually means. For example, a soldier, a sailor, a tinker, and a tailor all go to propose marriage to "Buxome Joan," who chooses the Sailor because "he let fly at her, a Shot 'twixt Wind and Water, which won this fair Maid's heart." While I inferred that sex was somehow involved, its relation to wind and water was unclear until my wife explained it to me.

The next song on the CD is in the Scottish dialect, about two lovers, Jenny and Jockey. Well, when you don't know half the words because they're Scottish, and all the songs you've been listening to so far are about men seducing women, etc., you presume the Scottish words must have exceptionally naughty meanings. (After all, apparently the Wallace and Gromit movie had a lot of innuendo only detectable to a British audience.) So, I started trying to figure out what's going to be bad this time: "Then Jenny made a Curtsshy low, until the Stairs did touch her Dock;" "Dock? That's sailor talk, must mean something dirty," I think to myself. "Then Jockey tuke Jenny by the Nease"; "Tell him to stop groping you, Jenny!" I think to myself.

At some point in the song, I realize that Jenny and Jockey have entered a church. "Well, that seems a rather strange thing to do in a dirty song," I think to myself. I eventually came to realize that they were getting married, and when Jockey "tuke Jenny by the Nease," he was proposing marriage! Now, bad as it might feel to share a dirty story with a Latin I class, interpreting a marriage proposal as a gropefest can leave you feeling rather unclean.
And I'm still not sure what was going on in the song. But I do feel that there should have been some sort of advisory label, "Warning: Some of the songs contained on this lewd album include lyrics about chaste people getting married," to avoid this kind of thing.

How to console someone whose daughter marries a rake

2006-05-08T19:30:00.000-07:00

In the eighteenth century, daughters sometimes have an embarrassing habit of marrying someone of whom their family disapproves. They may even go so far as to marry a rake. By "rake," I do not mean that they tried to marry a field implement. Admittedly, the emperor Caligula may have married his horse Incitatus, and a woman may have married a beloved dolphin in 2005, but eighteenth century daughters tended to stick to their own species and to things living. A "rake" is the term for an immoral, dissipated man.

So anyway, how do you console someone whose daughter marries a rake? Well, I was reading Samuel Richardson's Familiar Letters. Samuel Richardson was also the writer of Pamela and Clarissa, not that that probably carries a lot of cultural significance to you, but there you are. Anyway, Familiar Letters has a rather long title that gives you an idea what it is supposed to be: Letters Written TO and FOR PARTICULAR FRIENDS, On the most IMPORTANT OCCASIONS, Directing not only the Requisite STYLE and FORMS to be Observed in WRITING Familiar Letters; but How to Think and Act Justly and Prudently, in the COMMON CONCERNS of HUMAN LIFE. As you might guess from the caps, there is some serious instruction going on. The letters are going to teach you both how to deal with certain situations and how to write or counsel people going through those situations.

So what do you do if your favorite daughter married a rake? Well, the first thing you should do is chastise him if he has ever prayed for his daughter's health. The dad's brother writes to him, "I would not afflict you [over the marriage], my dear brother, instead of pouring balm on the wounds of your mind. But you will remember [here is the part where I'm going to do just what I said I wouldn't do], that it is scarce two years ago, when you were no less anxiously disturbed on occasion of the violent fever which then endangered [your daughter's] life. What vows did you not put up for her recovery!...And how do you know, that then she was only restored at your incessant and importunate prayers; but that otherwise, God Almighty, knowing what was best for you both, would have taken her away from this heavy evil? This should teach us resignation to the divine will ..." So, now that the daughter's marrying, the uncle reminds his brother that it's really partially his own fault for praying that she wouldn't die when she had a fever two years earlier. Lest we should think that this uncle was an unconscionable jerk, Familiar Letters includes the father's response, "very affecting [are] your just reproofs of my misplac'd fondness for a creature so unworthy. Resignation to the divine will, a noble, a needful lesson!"

Lest we miss the point, the next "familiar letter" is "to a father, on the loss of his son." Even though the son who died was young, he was pretty godly, so far as wee tykes go. The father's friend writes, "I will not, to alleviate your grief, remind you of a topic, which is, however, [what I am about to do anyway, even though I told you I wouldn't,] no less important, than too frequently the case, that he might not always have been so hopeful; but might, as he grew up, many ways have administered bitterness to you. But I think it surpasses all other comforts, even those you hoped for from him, that he is taken away at an age, in which God's mercy renders his eternal happiness unquestionably certain ..." So, if someone's child dies, you tell him/her that the kid would probably have turned out really bad anyway and administered some heavy-duty bitterness, so thank God for killing him early before he could be sent to hell!

I'm oversimplifying things, of course. And I don't doubt that this may have been very comforting to some Christian parents whose children have died. There may also be a place for comforting people by hypothesizing what "could" have happened, that God has a purpose, that you don't have to be concerned about their future salvation. But call me cynical, call me Calvinist, I don't see how it is comforting to envision a deity whose only manner of bringing some potential reprobates into heaven is by killing them off when they are young. If forced to choose, I'd prefer thinking, "My kid was such an Enoch-in-training that God wanted him for His heavenly courts right now," rather than thinking, "My kid was about to begin his reprobate-in-training status, so God struck him dead now. Yay God!" There is much about Arminianism or Molinism that is attractive--it's easier (albeit in my mind, incorrect) to explain the problem of evil by saying that it results from God's granting humanity the "free will" to choose evil. But I find the theodicy that results in these "familiar letters" to be rather disturbing: we justify God in His decree/allowance of a child's death by hinting that the child's exercise of free will would eventually have led to naughty actions of hellfire proportions. God conducted a sort of divine "preemptive strike," if you will. (While Calvinists believe that God conducts a "preemptive strike," it is God putting to death the "old man" ... not the "new kid!" God wouldn't need to send a fever and kill a daughter to prevent her from running off with a rake; He could just change the heart.)

It is interesting to compare Calvinism with the type of Arminian theodicy I am describing here, which I shall call "Insane eighteenth century Arminianism," to distinguish it from modern Arminianism, which tends not to encourage you to rebuke people who have prayed for God to heal their children's illnesses. Calvinists are often represented as being rather suspicious of the human heart--we have copyrighted the phrase "total depravity," after all. And since Calvinism denies that you can "lose" your salvation, it follows that someone who dies in rebellion against God never had a "real" (or at least effectual) salvific experience, even if earlier in his/her life the person seemed to have a sincere conversion, praised God, etc. However, the Arminian theodicy I am describing here might lend itself toward a greater suspicion of an individual's heart, since it construes death as a possible sign that the person's heart was about to go south (perhaps through internal corruption or external temptations), even where there is no evidence of a potential lapse. While Calvinists might be suspicious of a past religious experience on the basis of future reprobate living (the person was never saved), Familiar Letters suggests we suspect future reprobate living on the basis that the person has died, despite a promising life (the child might not have stayed "saved"). While Familar Letters never insists that this hypothesized future depravity is the cause of death, the text does insist we need to keep it in mind as a strong possibility.

Spouses ist verboten

2006-04-30T17:41:00.000-07:00

On Friday night, my wife and I went to an awards dinner for a graduate student teaching award I received. When I first got the invitation, I thought it was only inviting me, not my wife. However, when I was conversing with some friends on the day of the event, they told me that recipients in previous years could bring a "guest"--some people have even brought dissertation advisors. Well, I pulled out my invitation, used my Derrida close reading skills to decide that the text was indeterminate, and called the respective authorities to find out an hour before the event whether I could bring my wife; after all, according to the invitation, it was a "reception," not a "dinner," which suggested a greater degree of informality. The staff member said it was fine, so off we went.

Once we got there, however, we discovered that all the tables had name place cards, and though there was a card for mr. retain personal anonymity person, there wasn't one for ms. retain husband's personal anonymity person. Since I thought it would be impolite to make my wife stand the whole time and was not confident in my own abilities to hold a plate and a glass in the same hand for an hour, I told the happy smiley greety woman of our plight. "Who told you that you could bring your wife?" the happy smiley greety woman said, her smile suddenly betraying some rather menacing big pointy teeth. "Um, a person who works at your office and I thought was trustworthy?" I said, apparently delinquent in the level of scrutiny requisite for confirming a dinner engagement. "I talked to the person today," I added. I decided it might not be beneficial to mention that the conversation took place just an hour ago, but instead to imply that it took place in a distant, sacred primordial past.

"You're not supposed to. We allowed one exception because he is an international student," she said testily. (Thanks a lot, U.S. citizenship! first you get me in trouble in Canada, and now this!) "Well ... I suppose you can sit at that table over there," she finally conceded, pointing in the distance to what appeared to be a desolate land cut off from the fecund Eden-like abundance that overflowed the other tables.

It is rather curious to be at an awards ceremony at which you are seated at the "rejects" table. Do the "outstanding graduate student" and the "stupid graduate student" designations cancel each other out, so you are just plain a normal graduate student? Are you sort of like the character Ignorance in Pilgrim's Progress, who is thrown into hell at the very gates of heaven? What's it all mean? Anyway, there are some decided disadvantages in sitting at the "Misfits" table. For one thing, there is no one else in your department (unless, in this case, you were lucky enough to be in Economics). Also, when they announce, "We will begin with table 10 and go down," you will eventually realize that, since you are the "Rejects" table, you do not have a table number, which presumably means you aren't supposed to eat. (However, since we were already naughty enough to break the rules by bringing a spouse, we decided to break the rules and eat as well.)

There are, however, benefits of sitting at the "Misfits" table. For one thing, it creates a kind of solidarity: yes, we might be from other departments, but we have all gratuitously misbehaved. It was sort of like Breakfast Club for grad school. And the very fact that we were a motley assortment prevented the conversation from becoming too specialized: I mean, sure, the economics guy couldn't help talking about economics, but he referred to the economic number-crunching in Gulliver's Travels in order to assuage my eighteenth-century literature sensibilities. We got to hear more about how other departments functioned--for instance, when the surprized music department student inquired, "It takes you six years to get your degree?" we were able to explain that this was not because we were stupid, and we learned that the music department functions rather differently (if I rightly understand, rather than writing a thesis, they perform a piece of music). And the best part of all was that I could be at an awards reception with the woman I loved rather than merely with colleagues or strangers. (As it turns out, my wife and I were the only people from the English department to stay for the reception, so I really would have just been dining with strangers.)

Anyway, it did make me reflect a little bit on the dinner set-up. I learned that, in years past, they did allow you to bring a guest; this year, they wanted to have the food of better quality, and a consequence is that they could invite only the recipients, not a guest. (Of course, their invitation letter does not tell you that you cannot bring a guest.) Much as I appreciate having better food, I don't think it's worth having to eat it alone. I realize many people aren't married, and having a big meal might be one of the most essential parts of the evening. (Before I was married, one of the features I most enjoyed about departmental talks is that the reception enabled me to indulge in a free dinner, made up of several sizable cookies, cheese, and crackers. Having a free dinner that included more than just the standard cookie fare might have been preferable to being able to invite a guest.) Nevertheless, I think it is more meaningful to be able to share the experience/honor with someone you care about. When I've had papers to correct or had class preparations to make, I have had to give up spending time with my wife (meaning that she has had to sacrifice that time, as well); it seems counterintuitive that an "award" for these sacrifices will likewise necessitate that I give up spending time with my wife, at a fancy dinner to which she is not invited, and on a Friday night, no less.

To the pure all things are pure; or, Roman Holiday

2006-04-28T08:55:00.000-07:00

Watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 has taught me that movies from the 1950s do not always appeal to the most noble of instincts in moviegoers. I still recall a Batgirl movie that included a lot of unnecessary dancing and jiggling that made little tangible contribution to the curtailment of crime in Gotham City. Yet I still tend to presume that the “classic” 1950s movies inculcate family values and/or have appealed to something more enduring than one of the seven deadly sins (which have actually been around quite a long time). And I do have to say that, after I watched Roman Holiday, this presumption remained uncontested: the movie seems like fairly innocent fun. I mean, sure, the main character sleeps at the house of an unmarried man, but she was drugged at the time, and nothing untoward happened.

However, I have to say that I find the original theatrical trailers (available on the DVD) somewhat puzzling. Now, I wouldn’t have been surprised by a trailer that said something like, “Audrey Hepburn is really pretty, come see her get dressed up for a fancy ball.” I find more surprising the actual words of the trailer (imagine a very excited male announcer, crank it up a notch, and you’ve got the voiceover): “Yes, there’s a nightgown scene, and what a nightgown!” Even if the commentator restrained himself from making the compulsory “Hubba hubba” noises, I still don’t think the trailer adequately portrays that this is a movie about a love that transcends time when it announces elatedly that the starlet is going to be wearing a nightie. Despite a number of funny scenes from which to choose, the trailer selects the most potentially scandalous moments of the movie: for instance, it shows Helpburn’s skirt falling off while she’s in a man’s room (she appears drunk at the time), which is immediately followed by the scene in which she is covered in towels from a bath in the man's apartment, and a maid is rebuking her for apparently indecent behavior (no doubt expressing her moral indignation in Italian so we do not know the full extent of Hepburn’s naughtiness). You have to go see the movie in order to learn, in the words of the perky trailer announcer, “how’d this cute little surprise package [Audrey] wind up in Greg’s apartment?”

I don’t mean to suggest that there was no appeal to romance and/or courtly behavior. After all, if you see the movie, you can “share the glory of a romance as radiant as the Roman moonlight,” whatever that means, and you can watch confidently with the knowledge that the whole movie was “lived, loved, and filmed in Rome.” And if you watch, you’ll see that “all the things happened to them that you always hoped for on the happiest day of your life!” The movie is, after all, “The happiest picture you’ve seen in years!” what with two of the characters falling in love and having to live the rest of their lives forever apart (the film ends with Gregory Peck walking out of a press conference alone). I don’t know about you, but the happiest movies I see are those in which the people in love are forever separated. Anyway, there were certainly a number of viewers (and by a number, I mean women) who probably really were in the theater to see “the gayest spree any girl ever had.” But it does seem to me that the trailer-makers were banking on the idea that the men would be going because they would see “what a nightgown!” and the “cute little surprise package” that enjoys acting drunk, dropping her clothes, and taking showers in bachelor’s apartments.

I realize that I am taking these scenes out of context. My point is that the trailers take such scenes out of context. Further, the trailers may actually establish the expectations of the original viewers—the trailers essentially create the context in which many moviegoers watched the movie. “Hey! When do I get to see the hubba hubba nightgown?” we can imagine a hormonally-charged adolescent in the theater thinking to himself. “I wanna see some more objectification of women as cute little surprise packages,” thinks the self-conscious degenerate in the audience.

I do recognize that I am not watching these original trailers with the same sensibilities with which the original audience would have viewed them. For example, perhaps if you wanted to compliment a woman in the 1950s, you would tell her she was a “cute little surprise package,” and just watch the girlish glee ensue. And maybe there was some 1950s fashion I don’t know about, such that the showcasing of girls in their nighties constitutes tasteful art akin to nude modeling. (And as my wife pointed out, the nightgown is only “revealing” in a grandmotherly sort of way. So, there may be an implicit joke, “Ha ha, you want to be lustful? Take THAT, lecher boy!”) And some people may simply go because they enjoy the incongruity/irony of a princess acting regal the moment right before her clothes accidentally fall off. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the trailers perpetuated ways of looking at women and describing them (or at least Audrey Hepburn) that were not admirable. At the very least, it seems that the trailer-makers intentionally invoke scandalous associations. (I realize one could argue that they only invoke these associations in order to subvert them: “See, she is not drunk at all! See, nothing morally suspect happens, you silly double-entendre people!”) It is interesting that, much as we might celebrate the “classics,” we wouldn’t want to see the classics in their original “hubba hubba” context but instead in a context that is divorced from the conditions of historical reception. Things may appear pure to us only because we have taken them out of an original context that could make them seem prurient.

I want a giant regal lion bunny!

2006-04-25T14:16:00.000-07:00

I am sad. With new scientific advances and nobel-prize-like achievements, we have been able to combine chocolate and peanut butter to make the glory that is Reece's Pieces. Yet with all of our expertise, our mapping of the genome, and our good old American know-how about designing animal babies, we have still failed miserably at having a giant bunny that looks like a lion. These two pictures to my left show the hollowness of all American victories: on the far left, we have a regal lionhead bunny, who is, like most of his ilk, small. On our less far left, we have a bunny that has eaten his wheaties but has lost something far more precious, namely, that which he never had, a lion's mane, and all the cuteness that would accompany this accoutrement. I do not care if it is "impracticable" or "contrary to the laws of physics," or if we have "two bunnies whose heart is elsewhere" or "too much male anatomy." I want these bunnies to mate! I want them to make me a super big lionhead bunny!

It's not as if I am asking for a bunny and a lion to mate; I know that they're different species. And it's not as if I'm asking for a giant werewolf baby. Although maybe I should. Nowadays, you don't see many babies that have hairy faces or that are bigger than you. And you don't see many giants that are werewolves. And the problem with giant babies is that they don't stay babies; Rabelais wrote a beautiful story about a cute baby giant named Gargantua whose first precious words were "Drink! Drink!" But then he got old and spoke in complete sentences, and the magic was gone. I want them to make me a giant werewolf baby that will always be a baby and that will always gurgle in sentence fragments. Nevertheless, I am willing to accept that the baby might only be a werewolf during the full moon, so long as it meets the "eternality of babyhood" condition.

But given that I have reconciled myself to the impossibility of a giant werewolf baby, I don't think that a giant lionhead bunny is too much to ask. In the past, I would have thought that a giant bunny would have been but an idle dream and a flight of fancy, or perhaps the feature character in a movie starring Wallace and Gromit. While the two pictures above may sadden us by reminding us of thwarted ambitions and unfulfilled dreams, they must also press us on to engineer a world where such such wonderful rabbits coexist. By "coexist," I mean inhabit the same spatio-temporal location. It is time for the age of the genetically engineered bunny to commence.

Meditations on Toilet Paper

2006-04-24T19:08:00.000-07:00

It is so nice to have my wife back! Since she has been gone, it has seemed like my life has been full of smelling stinky kitty litter that I haven't cleaned or discovering most of the blankets on the floor after several days of not making the bed. One of the beautiful things about being married is that your mate compensates for your many weaknesses ... for instance, I cannot inhabit the same room as styrofoam without shuddering. Several rooms of the house would be entirely off limits if my wife were not so gracious as to respond to my scrunched up face of pain by removing the styrofoam. Anyway, thinking about all of the things my wife helps me out with reminded me of an old essay I wrote and a friend of mine asked me to post ages ago ... it is comforting to know that, when the toilet paper becomes just too disturbing to bear, I have a wife who can purchase it for me. But without further ado, here it is in all of its repetitive glory:

When you and your roommate share certain things (e.g. dish soap), each of you tends to gravitate toward replacing certain items. Paper towels hold a special place in my heart, for instance. My roommate often supplies the toilet paper. I ask no questions, and he has been "on a roll," as it were.

Well, since he has moved out, it has become my personal responsibility to supply toilet paper for myself. A few days ago I went shopping for toilet paper, and was disturbed to see row upon row of several companies who featured baby models in various degree of ecstatic rapture as they clutch toilet paper rolls. It just seemed ... I don't know ... morally wrong somehow. The following reflections are my attempt to articulate what Kurtz, in Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS, could only call, "The horror! The horror!" Though the narrator does not specify what the "image" or "vision" that Kurtz saw is, I can only presume that it was a baby clutching toilet paper, for the reasons that follow.

My disturbance is in no way due to wondering if any babies were harmed in the making of the toilet paper products: perhaps there was no child labor law supervision, and the babies were forced to slave away unendurable hours at posing and practicing their gurgling, I do not know. I prefer to grant White Cloud, Charmin, and the others the benefit of the doubt in this regard, though we must never forget that they are a part of the oppressive hegemonic system, and we do not know what has happened to the baby models who were not so gleeful and gurgly upon command.

No, I do not know what sick practices they conducted on these baby models in order to get them to seem so happy clutching toilet papers: I can only speak on the undeniable effects of such poses on their audience. First, the pictures are unnatural aberrations. We can see how aberrant they are by comparing them to all of our experiences with babies in the past. For instance, let us say that there are two rooms: one in which there is a man with a cellular phone, one in which there is a lion with a cellular phone. If the lion were to pick up the phone and dial CALL-ATT, would we not insist that something unnatural had transpired? If such an action were accompanied by supernatural revelation, perhaps we would say it was like Baalam's ass ... OR LIKE THE COUNTERFEIT MIRACLE OF THE BEAST OF REVELATION! The point is that it would be highly unnatural. So too would it be highly unnatural for a BABY to use toilet paper. Babies are renowned for NOT using toilet paper! The picture is ultimately an undermining of the creational order; if it is evidence of God's wrath for man to love man (Romans 1), so too is a baby's love for toilet paper indicative of unnaturalness. Note that rather than these toilet paper companies representing such a relation as unnatural, they _celebrate_ it! "Be like the baby," they seem to say. "Clutch the FORBIDDEN FRUIT," as it were, the UNCLEAN paper product of a TREE--like the serpent deceiving mankind in its INFANCY. The picture clearly fails to present any message like, "Use toilet paper to make yourself clean so that you can be pleasing to the Lord." Instead, it revels in dirtiness; you would have to pry the dirty toilet paper from the sinner baby's grasping wicked hands, and it would probably cry afterwards, lover of depravity that it is.

I can already hear the apologists of wickedness or those devoid of wisdom and/or spiritual perception saying, "That's not the message at all! They're just trying to say, 'Try our brand, it's so soft, it can make babies happy.'" Typical. Just typical. I suppose Jesus said, "Take up your baby-soft toilet paper and follow me?" Rather than this toilet paper reminding us of the way of the cross, the advertisers inspire us not with a picture of our heavenly reward, but a secularized "easy life" here on earth. Clearly, when we use super soft toilet paper, like Esau, we are in effect renouncing a heavenly birthright for a mess (quite literally) of earthly pottage. Lest you think the Esau analogy does not hold up, realize the situation is even _worse_ than Esau's sin, because sin/uncleanness is most connected not with what goes into a man, but what comes out of him ...

Last, not only does the picture undermine creational norms for babies and support a "health and wealth" gospel devoid of Christian suffering, it also serves to alienate/emasculate men. (I shall not mention that there are some disturbed men out there who read too much Foucault and are scatologically fixated who would enjoy watching babies hugging toilet paper for immoral reasons.) But the very toilet paper undermines the concept of masculinity for _all_ men. Not only does our culture bombard the modern male with messages, "Cry at movies, girls think it's sexy"; he is now supposed to associate his sexiness with a baby clutching toilet paper. Would any woman really, ultimately, find the sight of a man hugging toilet paper sexy? No, but it is just more of the way our society tries to snip off what makes a man a man, trying turn him into a geeky crying wimp pansy, and when girls turn him down for dates, tell him just to go cry some more, and maybe then he'll get a woman. Does the male bachelor searching for toilet paper see any pictures that inspire him to manly feats? We see "Brawny" paper towels, but where have all the brawny TOILET paper rolls gone, long time passing? When will we ever learn ... where is the toilet paper that seems to say, "Try me, assert masculinity, you will cry out your barbarous yawp!" It seems these toilet paper companies envision males making a pleasant, subdued trip to the restroom. Guys know better: the trip to the bathroom is a battle, a scene of struggle and mastery, of groans of pain and cries of triumph. The male, after subduing his vanquished foe, victoriously surveys his handiwork before flushing. All this, and more, of the toilet experience that is masculine is lost with these cutesy toilet paper pictures. The shopping bachelor is reduced to a poor shell of a man who tries to figure out how to position his 12-roll bag of Charmin so no one can see the giggling baby in his shopping cart. Even when he has torn off the wrapper hiding his guilty shame, he still feels that every time he uses the toilet paper, he loses a little piece of who he is as a man--quite literally. Other males know what I am talking about. Regardless of who are my supporters and who are my detractors, I hope they can agree that the issue is of fundamental import, even if I am full of crap.

When the Wife's Away ...

2006-04-21T19:17:00.000-07:00

My wife left for a conference on Thursday, and I miss her. Even the attempt to perform macho activites does not compensate. Even though I have two fellow males in the house, it appears that neither Cricket nor Pippin is the least interested in cards unless they can lie on top of them. Thursday night, I got together to play a game called Arkham Horror--a cooperative game in which everybody wins by destroying the ancient evil, or everybody loses. Well, everybody lost.

When I went to the grocery store to pick up some bachelor food, I decided to treat myself. I was not going to get just any macaroni and cheese, but velvetta! I was not going to get the cheap 10 cent ramen, but I was going to go all out and get the 15 cent kind! Yet even at the grocery store, I was struck with disappointment as I walked by the discount bread section and thought, "We could have some discounted gourmet bread ... but she won't be there, and I do not eat bread in guy meals, unless it is attached to meat."

Last night, I was going to watch Bubba Ho-Tep, which arrived from Blockbuster online and would presumably appeal to my masculine sensibilities, but this dream was ripped asunder by the discovery that the DVD is hopelessly scratched! When I tried to console myself by eating my manly ramen, after I threw in some chunks of bacon that my wife would probably have told me to throw away but which I couldn't get rid of because there was nothing green living on it, I got diarrhea. This did not happen to me before. Has being married made my digestive system soft? Would my DVD player had played Bubba Ho-Tep if there were not cooties around telling it that it should not play such hormonally charged movies?

Dear Canada

2006-04-18T11:46:00.000-07:00

Well, Canada, it's been a long half month. Longer than half a month, in fact, making this the longest half a month ever. But I need to tell you how your television makes me feel.

When I was in my hotel room, I wanted to have a cultural experience, oh Canada, by never leaving my room. I hit the remote control button to expose me to Canadian tv. Why is it that you kept speaking to me in French? Why is it that of the first three stations that spoke to me in English, two of them had on Ophra Winfrey? Were you trying to make me feel at home, or just cheating me out of a cultural experience? Do not judge me by Ophra Winfrey and Dr. Phil. They mean nothing to me. Show me some quality Canadian programming. I did not know, until I saw your television advertisement slogan, that "All Canada is watching Lost." Thank you for exposing me to quality United States programming that I had never seen before. Thank you for telling me which television shows were actually Canadian, since I apparently can't even recognize any U. S. television programs that don't appear on the WB. Thank you for showing me that law lelevision show that was not Law and Order. Thank you for showing me that authentic Canadian programming television show that had the letter Z in the title that featured commentators who watched sketch comedy and then discussed it--honestly, it was really cool, it reminded me of an English class discussion.

Even though I have left you now, I shall always carry with me the experiences you have given: my first experience of watching the show Lost, the feeling of being unwanted because I did not have a birth certificate with me, the feeling of trying to figure out why honey mustard tasted like gravy, and the quandry of how to write my 50th post in such a way that it mentioned Canada.

French Fries Without Gravy

2006-04-14T21:24:00.000-07:00

When I was in Montreal, most available food items would be listed in French, not English, so you do take your life into your hands any time you try to be adventurous. When I saw two different food court restaurants depict french fries with what appeared to be a delicious glazed honey mustard sauce, I figured it must be some special Canadian delicacy. I could imagine friends and family saying, "You went to Canada, did you taste their world-renowned honey-mustard French fries?" So I ordered it. Well, apparently it was not a delicious honey-mustard like substance at all, but ... well, I think it was gravy. And cheese curds. This seemed strange to me. But even now, I'm surprised to report it isn't "bad." After all, there's no reason why french fries without gravy is any more normative than, say, chicken mcnuggets without barbeque sauce. When I visited Rome years ago, it floored me that most pizza-like food items had either dough with sauce or dough with cheese, but precious few seemed to combine them in substantial quantities--if it was primarily a dough item with sauce, they might throw a few stray bits of cheese, at best. So someone from Italy could come over here and say, "What's with all this pizza that has sauce on it? What are these stupid Americans thinking?"

One of the hazards of ordering items in Canada is that you risk looking stupid. Scorning the American chains I saw there (like Subway), I ate at a place called "Harvey's." When I asked the person at the register what the difference was between a "combo" meal and a "trio" meal, the person explained that one was in English, the other was in French. One of the cool features of "Harvey's" is that it's actually like a Subway's--you can watch as your burger is being made, and the person will ask you if you want relish, onions, lettuce, tomato, mustard, or ketchup added to your burger. He will ask you this in French, but happily the lettuce etc. is more recognizable as being lettuce than the honey mustard sauce is at being gravy.

Another hazard of ordering items in Canada is that you risk ordering something you don't want. I'm a big smoothie fan, and happily, the French word for "smoothie" is something like "smoothey." But then the French word for "smoothie flavor" is evidently not spelled "strawberry" or "banannaberry blast" or anything like that, so you have to hope you get something good. I realize I could just buy soda, but I figure, if I'm going to have to pay for drinks, and by pay, I mean get departmental reimbursement, I'm going to have some nice fruity drinks. I also like water ices (kind of like slushes), and when I visited Italy over a decade ago, I learned that granitas were basically like water ices. Well, here in Canada, I saw a coffee shop advertising "granite." Since the picture was of a green thing that looked fruity and not stone-like at all, I figured it must be the same thing as a lime-flavored granita, just that they spelled it wrong. It turns out that "granite" ACTUALLY is "green tea." So, if any of my readers ever want to do a French-Italian-English pun on this thing ("I thought I was ordering a stone!" "I thought I was ordering a water ice!") go right ahead.

Border Control

2006-04-10T12:18:00.000-07:00

We United States types act like the world revolves around us. "Put more barbed wire around that border fence, Darrell," we say to our fence-manufacturing friend Darrell Jimbob Bob. It is no surprise that there are a lot of Mexicans trying to cross the borders, but our own egotism has blinded us to why they are here.

They are trying to get to Canada.

I came to this realization after my wife dropped me off at the airport for the eighteenth century conference I was presenting at. Everything seemed fine: I was there an hour and a half ahead of time, I had my toothpaste, etc. But when I was checking in, the computer told me I needed to have either a passport or my birth certificate ... neither of which was with me. Why did I need one of them? All I was doing was going to Canada, otherwise known as part of North America, to which I belong! It wasn't as if it was the Middle East or something. So, I had to call my wife, leave several answering machine messages, wait a while, realize she probably wouldn't check the messages once she got back, and call her again and asked her to bring my birth certificate.

The whole time I kept fuming, "What self-importance! Why do I need my birth certificate? Do you think someone wants to come to your country just in order to blow it up and/or begin a new life there? I wanna go to the conference!" But then it made me start thinking that many of us do the same thing when it comes to illegal immigrants from Mexico. Many U.S. denizens assume illegal immigrants are coming over to blow us up or to take our jobs, when quite possibly it is just that they want to take Canadian jobs, and we are in the way. (Perhaps they might blow us up so that we are no longer in the way, but I don't think so.) The Canadian government wouldn't make me almost miss my flight for no good reason--there must be some Canadian national superiority that compels people to risk deportation and travelling without birth certificates in order to get there.

Admittedly, most illegal immigrants say that they are trying to get to the United States, not Canada. Yet what better way is there to put Canada off its guard? The naive Canadian official thinks, "Okay, sure, the illegals got into the U.S., but that's where they want to be ... we don't need to worry ... no, we don't need to--ahh, it's too late, AARRRGGGHHHH!!!!" and then, something very macabre and illegal-immigranty happens to this official, all because he did not recognize the early warning signs, such as illegal immigrants saying they wanted to live in the U.S. Luckily, the embassy that made me almost miss my plane didn't fall for such ploys as this one, and threatened to refuse me safe passage to that utopian paradise that is Canada.

Happily, my wife came in time, I had my birth certificate, and I boarded my plane, but it was with a sour taste in my mouth. Canada, that great land of freedom and opportunity, did not want me to stay. It didn't matter how hard my desire to present awesome conference papers or how fervent my desire not to blow the country up, there would be no place for me there. Or for the English language, either.

50th or 51st post anniversary!

2006-04-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the 50th or 51st post! A little while ago, it came to my attention via hindsight that one of my posts was particularly stupid (only one, mind you), so I removed it. How should I think of that post? Has it ceased to be, because it is no longer on my blog? Can it never be erased, since it was once up there in the public view? Is this the 50th post, or the 51st?

Anyway, as I have been looking back at my past posts, it has struck me that, even if the posts are reflective of my personality, they might give the wrong impression. For instance, upon reading my posts, I have noticed a number of entries about teeth: be it a dream about my teeth becoming Jansenists, be it a dream about eating my teeth, be it about visits to the dentist, be it eighteenth century advertisements about teeth, it would seem as if teeth have some special significance to me, when it's simply the fact that a preponderance of teeth-related incidents have recently happened to me. Or people might think that I am obsessed with sexually transmitted diseases, be it antediluvian syphilis angels, Boswell's gonorrhea, or STD ecards. It makes me wonder if someone asked Jonathan Swift, "I just read _Gulliver's Travels_, and I was wondering, how high on your hierarchy of value would you place bowel movements?" he might give a surprising answer, such as, "What are you talking about?" You know, maybe Jonathan Swift wasn't fixated on scatology at all: maybe it's just that, every day he went out on the streets of Ireland for poetic inspiration, somebody threw a bucket of shit on him. After all, in Swift's Landscape, Carole Fabricant writes that "Swift actually lived in a landscape in which excrement was prominent--not to mention highly visible and necessarily obtrusive" (24), so maybe he was a victim of feces, not its proponent. Similarly, it's not as if I was looking for STD ecards; the STD ecards found me. In the sense of not being mailed to me, but showing up on a google search that did not include the letters "STD ecards." Well, actually, I did do a google search with the words "STD ecards," but that was only _after_ I had first read about them, and then I needed to find the website again. Not in order to send anyone an ecard, of course, just to write my blog entry.

Other false inferences people might make from the past 50 blogs is that I am obsessed with cats. I do not think this is the case; rather, I think the cats are obsessed with me. Even just now, as I paused to think of the next sentence, my eyes looking off in the distance--well, okay, the floor--the Pippin cat was watching me. Why? I don't know. You'd think he'd take up a hobby, maybe do a little reading, start his own blog or something, but he's staring at me. So, it's not that I think about him too much, but that he won't leave me alone!

On the basis of these past posts, people might also think that Canada holds a special place in my heart: it is the only thing that I have begun a half-month celebration for, after all! But the very fact that it is a half-month celebration should, in fact, communicate my lack of interest in Canada. It is half a month because I cannot think of anything more to say about it. You'd never see me doing a half-month celebration of the eighteenth century because, as it should be clear, the eighteenth-century is longer than a half-month! We are in fact living in its legacy even now! Much as James Joyce could not escape Ireland, so this blog cannot escape the eighteenth century. (Although it can escape Canada. And so should you, if you don't speak French.)

As I look back on these 50 posts, something that makes me particularly happy is that I feel I have reclaimed the word "pseudoprofundities." My very first post was about how I had coined the word many years ago, googled it, and then discovered that others had taken my word! Even a couple of months ago, I did a google search of "pseudoprofundities," and this blog never showed up! Never! A "Leopoldtulip" google search could not find a hit on this website! Yet just last night, I performed the same google search, and guess what? A google search on "pseudoprofundities" lists this site second, and a google search on "pseudo-profundities" (drumroll please) lists this site second AND this site FIRST! I am winning the war against "the man" and taking back my word! It is not unlike the game Civilization 3, where, after you have built a temple, several turns later, your cultural influence expands, and you get more land! In this case, I am taking over google, one word at a time. Right now, mine is the ONLY website you discover if you google such bellwethers of nomenclature as "educodomophile," "pinguisphobia," and "belbelgbot." Perhaps after this entry, these words will show up on google TWICE! These words are my legacy ... to the world, and to myself.

I do want to soften my burgeoning egotism by admitting that pride cometh before a fall. Just because mine is the only website now listing these words does not mean that some other enterprising person will come along, use those words, and usurp google dominion over them. There is still much work to be done. For just one example, if you google the phrase, "food for thought, sh-t for brains" or "food for thought, shit for brains" without the quotation marks, my blog entry doesn't come up, even though I dedicated an entire entry to this very theme. Nevertheless, as I survey the vast expanse of words and phraseologies which are mine, I am reminded that I am not simply looking back on the past 50 posts, but looking ahead to my eventual cultural dominance.

Canada half month celebration!

2006-04-03T21:28:00.000-07:00

I have just been back from a conference in Canada. It was my very first time presenting a paper at a conference. In honor of this event, we shall be observing "National Half Month Canada Celebration Day!" Uh, I mean, "National Half Month Canada Celebration Half Month!" All entries over the next two weeks will, one way or another, relate to Canada! It may be a mere passing reference to Canada, like, "You wouldn't see that sort of thing, not even in Canada!" or, "That's just the sort of thing you'd expect to see in Canada, only in this case, it wasn't."

Well, I was in Canada, and I saw just the sort of clothing store I'd expect not to see in America. The store was called, "America." Now, technically speaking, Canada is PART of America--just not part of the United States. This is why, when I was trying to explain to the hotel that I couldn't speak French because I was "American," I began to stammer once I realized the potential offense in such a remark. So what does it mean that Canadians call a clothing store "America?" Is it "America" in the sense of including Canada, or "America" in the sense of being the United States? Should I be offended on Canada's behalf? Should I be offended on America's behalf? What makes the clothing distinctively American, anyway? Was it made in America? American clothes usually aren't even made in America! Was it made in the "American style?" I thought we just imitated the French, and much of Canada is French, so does that mean that they are imitating the imitators of themselves?

Kitty Angels

2006-03-28T06:53:00.000-08:00

I compose this entry with a cat on my lap. I'm not even doing anything to Pippin, but he just sits there, purring loudly. If I poke at him, he purrs even louder. If I shoot him with water in the morning because he's been meowing loudly outside our door, a few minutes later he'll be rubbing himself up against me and purring loudly. For Pippin, complete and utter bliss is kind of like that line from the Rubaiyat--"a jug of punch, a loaf of bread, and thou," except for him, it's cat food. It's pretty easy to get him to purr--just touch him. One day, he was snoring, and when I started petting him, he emitted a purr snore. I wish I had it on tape. It amazes me how easily he becomes completely blissful. Most people need the assistance of drugs for that sort of thing.

Well, in my last entry, I suggested the possibility of kitty angels, and right now, my wife and I are going through the last season of Angel. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, Angel is a "vampire with a soul." Most vampires do not have a soul, and Angel is always in danger of losing his if he has a moment of "perfect happiness." The first time he loses it is because he had sex. As the creators refine their formulation, it becomes clear that he does not lose his soul if he has sex with a really skanky evil vampire, and in the fifth season, we learn that he does not lose his soul if he has sex with a really nice girl who is hot but whom he doesn't really love.

It's important for Angel to know what would constitute "perfect happiness," because every time he does lose his soul, people have to try to get it back for him again, some of whom he kills as "Angelus," the vampire without a soul. I am glad that the writers on the show made it not quite so easy for him to achieve "perfect happiness" as simply having sex.

But then, I started musing, what if Pippin became a kitty Angel vampire with a soul, who would turn evil if he had a moment of perfect happiness? For Angel, it must be sex with a hot girl whom he actually loves; for Pippin, it is the merest touch, or the sound of food in his foodbowl. Every time at morning when he was fed, he would become "Pippinus," and start trying to kill us until we had his soul restored. He'd then start purring and rubbing up against us in gratitude for restoring his soul, at which it would depart, and he'd start trying to kill us again in a perpetual cycle. All in all, we're better off that cats don't have souls, since then they'd try to kill us.

The Usual Haunts

2006-03-24T20:02:00.000-08:00

Since we were on spring break last week, my wife and I decided to go to a haunted bed and breakfast. Now you might be wondering (as one friend asked), is the bed AND the breakfast haunted, or just the bed? Well, according to the staff, the ghost does make its presence felt at meal-times, so presumably sometimes the breakfast is haunted too. Although not the banana walnut pancakes. Although they did taste awfully good ... perhaps the secret ingredient is apparition. Anyway, the B & B is part of an old ghost town (no pun intended), and the owners bought the adjoining land to prevent some historic buildings from being demolished. It was rather odd driving through the countryside--at first, I thought everybody was dirt poor and on the verge of death (and perhaps some were), but I discovered when we went to the run-down looking haunted B & B that the dilapidated look was actually supposed to be charming and rustic. Who knew? The house was replete with stairs that were slightly tilted and almost made me fall down, along with a ceiling that ever threatened to make contact with my head. I saw they had a Jane Austen novel out--I started laughing to myself, "Ha ha, they have _Northanger Abbey_ out, Austen's satire on Gothic novels and ghost stories, how clever," only to look and see that it was _Mansfield Park_. Well, after feeling cheated and hollow inside, we went into our room. However, when the time came to leave our room, I discovered I could not find my key; my wife picked it up. Now, it is customary in a haunted house for objects mysteriously to move or disappear, so it seems awfully suspicious that the key disappeared. Clearly, the ghost was trying to keep us out of the room! Or--and perhaps even more sinisterly--it wanted to lock us in so we couldn't get it out! Of course, those skeptics amongst you who are knowledgable about my pants might point out that there's a hole in my pocket, but that's just a red herring.

My sagest piece of advice for anyone who visits a haunted bed and breakfast is not to read books about demonic possession while you are there. My wife thought it would be a great idea if, before we left, we got a nonfictional book offering a "Christian" perspective on ghosts. (It's about a couple named the Warrens; the wife claims to be clairvoyant, and they visit a lot of haunted houses.) You'd think that a title like _The Demonologist_ would signal, "high times and ghouly frolics lie not ahead," and you'd be right. The book was one of the scariest things I have ever read! One of the more cheerful passages remarked that people rarely need to fear overt demonic activity unless they have done something to "invite" that activity, like ... going to a haunted house and trying to communicate with ghosts!

Well, since there wasn't much else we could do at that point except drive home, we decided we'd stay at the room and just not "invite" the ghost. According to this particular B & B, the ghost tended to show up if you turned on the blue lamp to "invite" it, so we resolved not to turn on the blue lamp. Well, as soon as we entered our bedroom, the blue lamp was already on! So what should we do? Turn the light off? Well, according to _The Demonologist_, a doll became demon-possessed because people were paying too much attention to its ghost-related activities--so, if we were superstitious enough to turn the lamp off, that would be an invitation for the demon to possess the lamp! (A side note: the book is really interesting, but frankly, it does seem to give contradictory advice. If you notice a doll that seems to move around, you're supposed to ignore it, or else the demons come. However, another time, if you notice strange things happening but do nothing about it, the demons take that to be tacit permission and do more and more things. AAHHHHHH!!!!!) Finally, we decided that the least invitey thing would be to leave the lamp on and turn it off when it was time to go to bed.

When we went out for a night stroll, a cat joined us and followed us the whole way. According to _The Demonologist_, devils often gain an "invitation" by pretending to be something they're not (e.g. a cute little ghost girl who wants to inhabit a doll), and sometimes they pretend to be cats. So along the way, we were theorizing about how to treat the cat: it was cute, but what if it was Beelzebub, and if I said, "You're so cute, I'd like to take you home," it would say, "I have you now!" You think I'm joking, but this book is so spooky I have discovered superstitious parts of me I have never known! Finally, we decided to test the cat, and say things like, "If your delight is to serve the living God, you are cute, and we'd like to take you home," and that would keep us safe. After all, people have entertained angels unawares, and perhaps sometimes, they were guardian cats.

Eighteenth Century Cockroach Poetry and the Maggot Literary Tradition

2006-03-15T21:37:00.000-08:00

Whine. I want to discover a new genre. A 2005 article by Michael McKeon says that Harold Love just discovered a new eighteenth-century genre called "Clandestine satire." I want to discover a new genre! Now! And in scholarly retrospect it will be seen to be just as important as the pastoral!After I spent some time looking at texts and failing to discover a genre, it struck me it would be easier just to invent the genre and then look for works to fit it. In Labyrinths, Borges comments that "every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future"--that is, we wouldn't see similarities between the precursors if not for the existence of the later writer who united them (in this case, Kafka). It seems that a natural implication is that every genre creates its practicioners, since you wouldn't know how to group these texts together together without already having a genre for grouping them. That means, if I am the person inventing the genre, I am also inventing all the people who wrote in it! Cool! The narcissism is wholly dizzying!

You might remember an earlier blog entry I did on the theological significance of eating dirt, which I was able to compose through the searchable database ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online). Well, I figured I'd do a search on the word "cockroach" and see what came up. Surprisingly, my search pulled up a blank-verse poem called "The Sugar Cane." The poet says in his preface that he was struck with the belief that the wonders of the West Indies, "however rude, could not fail to enrich poetry with many picturesque images." That is, he was intentionally trying to invent a new kind of imagery in poetry, and (let us not miss the significance of this) it involved picturesque images such as cockroaches! Of course, the poet's next words are, "I cannot, indeed, say I have satisfied my own ideas in this particular." Nevertheless, he insists, "I must be permitted to recommend the precepts contained in this poem."

Spanning across the ages, his clarion call to think about cockroaches challenges us to think of them not as pests, but as precepts, the very substance of poetic fancy.Here is his four-line poetic description of the cockroaches: "from their retreats/Cockroaches crawl displeasingly abroad:/These, without pity, let your slaves destroy;/(Like Harpies, they defile whate'er they touch)" (26). We have here a displacement of the epic: the harpies of myth have been replaced by the cockroaches of not myth. Rather than a danger of filthiness swooping down from above, the poem suggests that danger is really crawling slowly from below. "They defile whate'er they touch" has startling implications: the merest touch of the cockroach is full of transformative bug-indued power, forever changing whatever it touches, be it nature, be it poetry itself. Simply by being included in four lines of this poem, the cockroach has touched all of poetry and "defiled" it, permeating it and leaving a mark that not even all the perfumes of Arabia could sweeten. The cockroach, far from being a marginal figure in the history of poetry, has become central to all poetic thought.

Given this centrality of the cockroach, we might expect that the cockroach, or at least other bugs, would make similarly important interventions into literary history. Well, I made an important discovery in this regard by reading the literary critic J. Paul Hunter's Before Novels. Hunter notes that Samuel Wesley (the father of Charles and John Wesley) wrote a collection of poems under the title Maggots: titles included "A Tame Snake left in a Box of Bran," "A Pindaricque, On the Grunting of a Hog," "An Anacreontique on a Pair of Breeches," "On a Supper of Stinking Ducks," etc. Wesley's work was comical, and the work was so influential that in the early eighteenth century, there were frequent references to "maggoty" writing. It even transformed the language: if you look at Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, you'll see that "maggotty" can mean "full of maggots" or mean "capricious; whimsical." Clearly, this Maggot tradition and The Sugar-Cane were compatriots in the creation of a new genre to which all other genres must be subordinate!

I then started thinking ... "maggoty" ... "whimsical" ... my blog ... my blog that is often whimsical ... unawares, had I been participating in the whimsical maggot cockroach tradition without realizing it? All this time I thought I was inventing a genre ... had the genre really been inventing me? The cockroach-hunter had become the cockroach-hunted. It's like in the novel Sophie's World, when the main character discovers she is only a character in someone else's book. I sometimes wonder if Wibbity Wubbity feels that way.

Eighteenth-century Manipulative Advertising

2006-03-11T08:15:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I was reading old eighteenth-century newspapers on microfilm. Literary scholars aren't just supposed to write on "the major text," but to situate it within its broader historical context so you can understand what the major author is responding to. Sometimes, you can hit the jackpot: I was writing a chapter on a novel's response to French Catholicism, and I discovered (from reading contemporary English newspapers) a huge debate on French Catholicism going on at the same time! However, you can also not hit the jackpot, and feel like you have spent a day in the library with nothing to show for it. In order not to feel like I have completely wasted my time, I have decided to blog about the most interesting part of the newspapers--the advertisements.

Newspapers tend not to print the same articles over again. The same cannot be said about their printing of advertisements. Much as our own culture has certain infectious phrases like "Where's the beef?" or "He likes it! Hey Mikey," so too does 18th century culture, such as "WORMS Brought Away ALIVE in the Close-Stool, by Famous little Purging SUGAR PLUMS, 12 d. a dozen." There is even an accompanying little sketch of worms above the advertisement, so you could have a mental image of exactly what was being purged. Even if the 18th century had no tv personality or catchy voiceovers, they did have other printing tricks to get the phrases into your head. It's fun to picture the Sugar plum guy going to an advertising firm and saying, "No, this advertisement just doesn't grab me, I want to see more italics and letters being capitalized."

Perhaps the most manipulative advertisement I discovered in my research was the following on "TOOTHING Children": "A Mother would Never Forgive Herself, Whose Child should DIE purely for Want of so EASY, and so very CHEAP a Thing, Presently to EASE it, and bring it's TEETH Out, as the Little Cordial Pleasant Thing is, to Rub only it's Gums with." Admittedly, this is rather convoluted sentence structure, so I don't know if the typical 18th century consumer could recite the whole sentence from memory. But would he or she really need to? So long as you get the idea that a mother would never forgive herself if her child should DIE because she hasn't bought your product, that's enough. Frankly, this is much more attention-grabbing than the present-day boring advertisements for organ donation, where the cheerful dad says, "Just in case something ever happens to me, champ, I want my organs to help someone else, and maybe that person will like fishing." It would be cooler if the father said something like, "Frankly, champ, if I DIE, I would Never Forgive Myself if I were Contributing to ANOTHER PERSON'S DEATH and behaving like a HeartLESS Slob!"

In 21st century advertising, advertisers sometimes pick a time slot that will target an audience already interested in their product. For instance, an advertisement for Tuck Everlasting (starring an actress from the Gilmore Girls) will be advertised on, surprise, surprise, Gilmore Girls. So too, the teeth advertisement occurs in a newspaper in which people are already attentive to its message. This particular newspaper printed the mortality rate weekly, recounting that, in 31 cases that week, people had died of: teeth. (I don't know what it means to "die of teeth," but evidently, it is more common than you'd think.) It's kind of like a tag-team between the newspaper article and the advertisement: the article says, "Okay, I'll tell them that 31 people died of teeth, then you tell them it could be their babies!"

Despite 18th century advertisers' strengths in capitalization and italics, they had some weaknesses we don't see in modern-day advertising. For instance, consider this advertisement: "SHORT WRITING, Easy, and Useful for EVERY BODY, to Write Any Thing, in Infinite LESS TIME, than By Common Writing. By TWO Principles, which do, so in an INSTANT, Do it, That a great Deal of Time, and Trouble in Writing, is Saved by it." By two questions, which do, so in an INSTANT, ask, what the freak are you trying to say? Who in the world thought it would be a good idea to advertise short, presumably clear writing with writing which was itself unintelligible and circumlocutionary? Now, in the past, I have felt like chiding 21st century advertisers for using the word "lay" wrong or choosing the wrong form of "its," but after reading 18th century advertising, I am impressed by just how much our sentences make sense. It kind of puts the grammatical horrors of text-messaging into better perspective.

My Faithful Achates

2006-03-07T21:16:00.000-08:00

"Why don't you say anything good about Cricket in your blog?" my wife asked me after reading my last cat-oriented blog entry. My wife's criticism made me feel especially conscience-stricken, since after we got married, Cricket seems to have become "my cat," discovering within my lap a certain Je ne sais quoi that my wife's just did not have. Because Cricket grew up with my wife and established bonds with her, it is a special compliment to me, and a testimony to my superiority, that he has chosen to place his affections on me over her, and it is my responsibility to acknowledge his good taste. So here's to you, Cricket, my faithful Achates. This entry will be about how great you are, because you love me.

It is often touching when I'll be taking a bath, and Cricket pushes the bathroom door open so he can jump on the laundry basket and keep me company. However, the most touching moment of all was right after my wife and I returned from Christmas break, and it had been several weeks since we had last been able to see our cats. As all good things must come to an end, I was forced to retire from the reunion in order to visit the bathroom, where I was compelled to offer up some rather odoriferous incense to the porcelain gods. While I was engaging in the sacred ritual, Cricket pushed open the bathroom door. I was a little embarrassed about the olfactory component of my activity, but do you know what? Cricket didn't care. He tried to sit on my lap anyway. Not even wives would display this degree of loyalty!

Given that Cricket often can't bear to use his own litterbox because of the smell, it is really rather touching that he can bear the smell of my litterbox because there is something more important at stake, like the quality of our friendship. An old youth group leader defined a friend as "someone who can tell you when your breath stinks," and this might be true. Yet it seems to me that an even more loyal friend is one who can hang out with you while your breath is stinking (or, mutatis mutandis, when other bits are). It is someone who can look beyond superficial concerns like personal hygiene. It is someone who looks at what is on the inside, not at what has just been expelled.

Our society seems to place on a pedestal those animals who risk their lives for their loved ones. The Lassie who gets help for little Timmy down the well. The Old Yeller who heroically gets rabies and tries to kill his owners. But tell me, is it not more loving for an animal to perform a sacrifice that is ultimately unnecessary? If Lassie did not summon Timmy's parents, Timmy would have died; Lassie had to make this sacrifice if she ever wanted to see Timmy again in non-corpse form. However, if Cricket did not come into the smelly bathroom, I would not have died; I would have eventually come out and petted him anyway. The point is, my presence was so important to Cricket that he would make any sacrifice, however gratuitous and seemingly pointless, because he loved me and wanted to be with me at that exact moment. Whereas the juvenile response would be, "Smelly bathroom, icky!" Cricket responds with maturity and sensitivity, seeing the call of friendship as no less obligatory than the call of nature.

Ancient Extraterrestrial Vultures; or, X-Files season 10

2006-03-03T17:46:00.000-08:00

Thanks to our membership with Blockbuster on-line, my wife and I recently finished the last season of X-Files, causing us to become rather sad. I have caught myself saying, "Honey, did the X-Files arrive?" when what I should have said was, "Did Angel season 5 arrive?" It's not as if Joss Whedon is anything other than genius, so I should not be sad that it is Angel season 5 that arrived, rather than nonexistent X-Files season 10. Nevertheless, I am pining. I miss the high times and frolics watching tales of governmental conspiracies and humans with alien DNA.

Well, I was reading Plutarch's Lives the other day, and behold, it was like watching X-Files season 10! Plutarch was remarking about a unique feature of vultures when contrasted with other birds: "all other birds are, so to say, never out of our eyes;...but a vulture is a very rare sight, and you can seldom meet with a man that has seen their young; their rarity and infrequency has raised a strange opinion in some, that they come to us from some other world" (italics mine). Now, Plutarch was working for "the man"; he received the insignia of a consul and a post as Procurator of Greece under the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian. Given these governmental affiliations, it's awfully suspicious that he would go out of his way to mention this belief in extraterrestrial life only in order to to dismiss it as a "strange opinion." Now, Plutarch's Lives is a big book, so it's not as if he was stuck for material. He must have mentioned it because the matter was of grave importance. Therefore, the only explanation that makes sense for why he mentioned this observation in an already big book is that a large number of people claimed to have seen vultures transform into aliens, and it was imperative that he discredit them. Admittedly, we rarely hear mention of just how much of Plutarch's work was dedicated to perpetuating the governmental denial of extraterrestrial life, which confirms the effectiveness of the governmental authorities in conducting the cover-up.

It is somewhat sad that, with all of Mulder's desperate searching for confirmation in his belief in aliens, he never considered what was right in front of his face: vultures. Or rather, he never considered that vultures were not right in front of his face, because they were, in fact, from another world! To the best of my knowledge, vultures do not show up frequently in the X-Files, which should have been a clue to Mulder. In one episode, Mulder came to suspect that alien colonizers had taken the form of the everyday cockroaches (season 3, I think?), but this plotline was dropped--largely, I think, because that was never the aliens' plan at all. They were going to be vultures! What better way to get human tissue to experiment on than by pretending to be a carrion bird? So simple. So subtle. So avian.

Now, I am not saying that modern-day vultures are the same as their alien prototypes. The aliens are far too crafty to be using the same animals for several millennia. However (and don't miss the significance of this) their strategy is still the same, because they are still alien strategists. The ancient Greek and Roman humans were able to recognize an animal was an alien on the basis of their rarely ever seeing it. That is, the proof that something is an alien is that it appears to be an endangered species. That is how they trick you: they make you think that they are endangered ... when they are really endangering you!

Recognizing this connection between "endangered species" and alien colonization is paramount to stopping the alien threat and to calling the Bush administration to accountability. For too long, environmentalists have played right into the government's hands, saying things like, "We need to preserve these endangered animals from extinction." Instead, we need to say things like, "the government must destroy even more rain forests so that we can annihilate these aliens and preserve humanity from extinction!" Please, we need everyone to get involved. Do it. For Scully's baby.

I Just Can't Reach Them

2006-03-01T08:35:00.000-08:00

On the car radio the other day, Bill O'Reilly referred to his old days as a teacher. He mentioned that, as a result of facing especially recalcitrant students, he learned to be satisfied with reaching 85% of the students and just giving up on the rest. As a teacher myself, I find there is a certain appeal in giving up on 15% of the youth under my charge and leaving them to their doom, especially those who do not laugh at my jokes. But it struck me that that "At least I can reach 85% of them" doesn't work as well when you're talking about smaller quantities, like cats.

We have two cats. 85% of two is a rather weird number. After doing the number-crunching, I determined that if we mess up with one of the cats, we are complete failures, or at least 50% failures. Admittedly, we might have extenuating circumstances, such as if one cat is a "special needs" cat (even though I really don't know how to determine whether a cat suffers from mental retardation, clinical depression, etc.); however, I'm guessing those are rare, so statistically, I'm probably the one to blame. Sometimes, when we have problems like one of them not using the litter, I consider giving one of them to the SPCA, which essentially means sending them off to kitty heaven. (What prospective cat owner is going to go to the SPCA and say, "Hey, I don't want a cute kitten, I want that old-looking cat, the one whose card says that he poops on the carpet!") Regardless of where one falls on the issue of capital punishment, few would be so extreme as to advocate the death penalty for inappropriate pooping.

Now, I'm sure there might be parents out there who would say, "Look how silly it is for this Leopoldtulip guy to worry about cats--have some kids, and then you'll see some real problems!" Such an argument is fallacious. Should the owners of a nuclear warhead say to the third world country, "Man, I face dilemmas every day about whether I should blow other countries up and destroy billions of people, whereas all you have to worry about is petty internal human rights violations?" The nuclear warhead dilemma makes the human rights dilemma no less real or significant. In the case of cats pooping, it is arguably more of a problem than having kids--parents can take for granted that their children will learn to control their waste product disperal, but the owners of cats are not so lucky. Parents can take for granted that their children will learn to talk and will understand sentences like, "Pooping auf dem floor ist verboten," whereas cats will not.

Parents can take for granted that, if they ask, "Why aren't you using the litterbox?" the child will respond intelligibly, "Because I am not a cat." Now, we have two litterboxes: one litterbox is stinky because our cat Pippin doesn't cover up his messes, and the other litterbox is always clean because neither cat uses it. Our cat Cricket invented a third waste dispersal area in the corner near the exercise bike. There is no way of asking, "Cricket, why is the clean litterbox not meeting your needs? What does the exercise bike corner have that the clean litter does not?" I have spent literally several minutes analyzing the granules in the unused litterbox, pondering, "These granules sure look to be above average in quality. What does he see that I do not?" In teaching, we're taught that there are different types of learners: those who learn visually, those who learn by writing something down, by hearing something spoken, etc. Having cats has taught me that there are also different types of poopers, but I do not know how to reach them. The apostle Paul wrote of being "all things to all men, that I might by all means save some." Daily I am learning what it means to be "all things to all kitties, that I might by all means save some from using the exercise bike corner."

The Car Radio

2006-02-27T08:04:00.000-08:00

To the best of my knowledge, no car radio stations provide the type of music I really like to hear: Celtic Punk! Without the passion of the punk, Celtic music degenerates into the insipid and maudlin. I was in a pub in Ireland where a fellow audience member was singing tearfully along with the band, "I'm drunk today, and I'm seldom sober," and much as I can understand that some people may have a sentimental attachment either to their drunkenness or their sobriety, it didn't quite work for me. On the other hand, without the ornamentation and playfulness of Celtic instruments, punk becomes the mindless rage of "Oi!" or "brroorgghh!!!" or whatever the singer feels like grunting. Celtic and punk go together like love and marriage, uniting passion and playfulness. Without the passion of the punk as background music, a graduate student would lack the energy to attack his dissertation, but without the ornamentation of the Celtic, he would be unable to type words like "postcolonial."

Anyway, radio stations do not typically offer me this artistic ideal, so I have tried to come up with alternatives when I'm driving. For a while, I listened to the "Oldies," because they were more enjoyable to modern music. After a couple of years of listening, I noticed a certain pattern: there were never new oldies! Apparently, people had stopped writing them! So, as I had to listen to the same songs over again, I learned the truth of the adage, "familiarity breeds contempt." I dreaded hearing again that the only way to know that he loves you so is in his kiss. In order to distract myself from my inner being crying out, "Please, I can take no more!" I started to analyze the problematic features of the song. I mean, as we know from Kant, it's pretty hard to distinguish between das Ding an sich, the kiss as it is in and of itself, and das Ding an mich, the kiss as it appears to the person. How could this song offer such triumphant certainty and lack of critical analysis! Such superficial empirical claims may have worked in a bygone era, but ours is an era of non-bygoneness! I digress. The point is, the more you have to hear the same songs over again, the more struck you are with just how much they are not Shakespeare, and you become constitutionally incapable of appreciating them for what they are: vapid and meaningless.

After going through a "classic rock" car radio phase, the same problem about no new songs arose. Happily, there was not the same goofiness about kissing--however, there were some moments when the pretentious profundity got on my nerves, as in this Rush song: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill; I will choose a path that's clear. I will choose freewill." I will choose not to listen to this song and read John Stuart Mill instead. And really, what's up with that Styx ballad "Come Sail away," where the guy thinks he's seen angels, and then he realizes they're aliens?

Right now, I am in my talk radio phase. The perk of talk radio is that it can keep me marginally informed about current events, and it lets me entertain myself by detecting logical fallacies in arguments. The drawback in listening to a talk radio station, whether you be conservative, moderate, or liberal, is that you're inevitably subjected to some rather boring topics. I am a graduate student with no money, so listening to NPR's "money matters" and stock analysis is less exciting than, say, crashing my car. I'm also not a big fan of sports (which they offer on conservative talk radio), so I really don't want to have daily updates on high school football students deliberating, "That school has offered me all this money, and that school over there has offered me all this money, so what do I do?" I wish I could say that I listen to both NPR and conservative talk radio to keep informed of different perspectives, but really, it's that I need a backup radio station for when the other is being boring or playing commercials!

Anyway, I heard a comment made by Bill O'Reilly that caused me to re-assess my relationship to our cats. However, that is the topic for the next post ...

TO BE CONTINUED! What will happen to our heroic protagonist? Does Bill O'Reilly cause our hero to get rid of his cats as potential terrorist agents? Tune in next time!

Exploring Ourselves Through Contact

2006-02-24T14:07:00.000-08:00

A friend just called my attention to another blogger's recent parody of a "compare-and-contrast" freshmen comp essay on the movies Curious George and Brokeback Mountain here; I highly recommend it. She also asked me to write a blog entry that includes a similar parody of first-year composition essays I wrote with my wife a few years ago. For your amusement, I am including it below. For their unit papers, all students are supposed to read three essays with three different points of view and essentially put them into dialogue with each other. All of the three authors (E. D. Hirsch in Cultural Literacy, Michel Foucault in History of Sexuality, and Mary Louise Pratt in "Arts of the Contact Zone") were available in the school's textbook reader. An additional freshmen comp practice alluded to in this entry is "workshopping": after students write their papers, they have other students "workshop" them (i.e. read them and make suggestions on how to improve them).

"Exploring Ourselves Through Contact"

Why is it that students don't have cultural literacy today? Why is it that students today don't know how to read, and grow up to be people who don't read? This is a very hard question, and there is no one right answer. But by prioritizing, we can come up with a solution that will make the classroom fun and solve the problem of literacy! By prioritizing, the problem of literacy, spoken of by Hirsch, Pratt, and Foucualt, can be solved!

The solution we are seeking for how to motivate students is simple: sex. Students of all ages like sex, as Foucault says. Sex has a great deal of power that we can utilize in the classroom; as Foucault says, "power comes from below" (169). Too often students are bad or fall asleep in class, because they are bored and teachers don't know how to arouse their interest. Education should be exciting. Pratt says basically the same thing as Foucault: "There were exhilerating moments of wonder and revelation. . . the joys of the contact zone," is how she describes her favorite class (402). I disagree with Pratt, though, in that I think you get the most exhilerating moments with sex. Just think of the improved literacy if sex were taught in the classroom!

I had a teacher in high school who really inspired me. We were not afraid to reveal parts of ourselves in our classroom, even if it was sometimes embarrassing. I think this is what Hirsch is trying to get at with cultural literacy. If everybody knows the same things, you can have unity, spiritually, mentally, and bodily, where everybody can make penetrating insights, both men and women. As Hirsch says, there is a "lack of wide-ranging background information among young men and women now in their twenties and thirties" (275), but if they had shared the contact zone, this wouldn't have happened. In order to communicate, sex must be taught. As Foucault said, "relationships ... are the basis for wide-ranging ... cleavage that run through the ... body as a whole" (169). Both Hirsch and Foucault agree that these things are “wide-ranging,” but I think that Foucault would say to Hirsch that he needs to say that information is power, which is like sex. But I think Hirsch would say that culturally literate people should use Shakespeare because you can communicate a lot with "There is a tide"(275), since four words can say what you'd need 27 for. But I think you can communicate deeply without words at all if you employ the contact zone.

It is never too early to start teaching the contact zone. When Pratt's son Manuel was in the contact zone, he said things were "Grate!!!!!!!!" because "it would let me play with my friends" (400) Think how much playing around we could have if we taught the contact zone earlier! Far more students could be fulfilled and motivated to learn!

Some teachers might not know how to teach the contact zone, which is why we can have night classes for the teachers to get them experienced in the subject, and instructional videos for the class. My teacher made his own instructional video for us, and it was great!

Teaching the contact zone is hard work, but if we have communication between students and teachers, we can do it. Sometimes we might have to keep it secret, since the administration just wouldn't understand, but that's only because they've never felt the "mutual understanding and new wisdom" (402) of the contact zone. Learning can take place outside the classroom too--my teacher told us we could always come to him about our problems, and even after he was suspended from teaching, he let us visit him at the video store he opened, even though we were underage.

I think if Hirsch had read Foucault and Pratt and met my teacher, he would have agreed with me. Really, what we need is to balance Hirsch, Foucault, and Pratt, and teach sex. They're all partly right but none of them can stand alone. Only when people come together in pairs, threesomes, or larger groups can real learning be achieved. This is why I love workshopping in groups. Like with Manuel, I can do so much more when I "play with my friends" (Pratt 400) than when I play with myself.