upgrade to 3.0

content/blog/2002-06-18-opening-day.md

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+---
+title: "Opening Day"
+permalink: /opening-day/
+date: '2002-06-18T11:35:00-04:00'
+tags:
+    - blogging
+    - obsolescence
+---
+
+Here’s the main issue: obsolescence. A forum for exploring it, and for producing it. A space in which to think about the intimate interrelationship of new media and old media, and the ways in which newness and oldness are inevitably predicated on one another.
+
+This is — does it even need to be said? — a work in progress. I haven’t a clue where it’s going, but I’m looking forward to finding out.
+
+

content/blog/2002-06-19-true-confessions.md

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+---
+title: 'True Confessions'
+date: '2002-06-19T10:30:03-04:00'
+permalink: /true-confessions/
+tags:
+    - obsolescence
+    - publishing
+    - research
+---
+
+Okay, time to come clean. I’m in (what I most sincerely hope to be) the end stages of writing a book that focuses on this question of obsolescence, particularly the anxieties that literary culture seems to exude any time it considers its relationship to newer media. In this book — and believe me, the ironies of considering the obsolescence of the book in a book are not lost on me — I focus primarily on the novel’s relationship to television, though (as this site may suggest) my interests are slipping toward the relationship between traditional fiction and the new forms of writing developing on the net.
+
+The thing I’m writing about right now, though, in the book’s conclusion, is the [ Franzen/Oprah](http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/10/26/franzen_winfrey/) dust-up. It seems to me everyone’s got an opinion on this — Franzen’s burdened by an overdeveloped sense of his own talent; Oprah’s similarly guilty of overvaluing her culture-making power; Franzen’s a boor; Oprah’s a vacuum — but few seem to have paid much attention to the fundamental conflict at the heart of the matter. Are the novel and television genuinely incompatible forms? Is it impossible to consider oneself simultaneously a literary intellectual and a fan of the weekly set-em-up and knock-em-down sitcom?
+
+I’ll confess: I love television. And I don’t just mean the highbrow [Sopranos](http://www.hbo.com/sopranos) / [Six Feet Under](http://www.hbo.com/sixfeetunder) / {insert other self-consciously experimental program here} stuff, though those programs seem to wind up my favorites.
+
+I mourned the passing of [Homicide](http://www.courttv.com/onair/shows/homicide/) much as I would if I knew that David Foster Wallace had stopped writing and instead taken up bond sales. Are those two loves so very incompatible?
+
+One last note, while I’m on the subject: While I’m infinitely grateful to HBO for rescuing Sunday evening from the pit of end-of-weekend depression, I beg that someone, similarly, somewhere, find a way to make Friday nights worthwhile again, for losers like me who are too often home with the machine for company.
+

content/blog/2002-06-20-mining-the-backlist.md

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+---
+title: 'Mining the Backlist'
+date: '2002-06-20T10:46:45-04:00'
+permalink: /mining-the-backlist/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+I’m one of those folks whose first introduction to Richard Powers was [Galatea 2.2](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0IBSHWP639&isbn=0060976926), which I suppose is the place that a lot of people start with him. Like [White Noise](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0IBSHWP639&isbn=0140077022) is the place to start reading DeLillo, and [The Crying of Lot 49](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0IBSHWP639&isbn=0060931671) is the place to start reading Pynchon. Some might argue that the drawing criterion is the relative brevity of these entry texts, but I think there’s something more to it than just brevity — it’s the entire project in miniature. Once you’ve read *COL49,* you know something about what Pynchon’s up to that makes it possible to take on [Gravity’s Rainbow](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0IBSHWP639&isbn=0140188592). Similarly DeLillo: reading *White Noise* makes a later reading of [Underworld](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0IBSHWP639&isbn=0684842696) possible.
+
+So with Powers. But there’s this added hitch with *Galatea,* in that the novel purports to recount his publishing history up to that point, following a character named “Richard S. Powers” through his remembrances of the composition of his earlier novels. Does starting with *Galatea* inevitably ruin — or maybe that’s too harsh a word; maybe I just mean “color” — the reading of the previous texts?
+
+I guess I was always afraid that it would, because I first read *Galatea* about four or five years ago, and never read any other Powers. Which is strange for me, as I tend to go on author-binges when I read something I love, and I loved *Galatea.*
+
+So over the last month, I’ve begun making up for lost time, reading the Powers *oeuvre* in chronological sequence. I’ve finished [Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0IBSHWP639&isbn=0060975091), which, as an example of a first novel, so intimidated me that I may never make another stab at the form. Also [Prisoner’s Dilemma](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0IBSHWP639&isbn=0060977086) (which, while deeply moving, I’m relieved to say is my least favorite so far) and [The Gold Bug Variations](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0IBSHWP639&isbn=0060975008). About which I feel unqualified to say anything except wow.
+
+I’m now on [Operation Wandering Soul](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0IBSHWP639&isbn=006097611X), the completion of which will take me back up to my starting point. Do I re-read *Galatea* then? I began this reading of the Powers backlist with a certain kind of “knowledge” about what these novels were up to — but now, with the novels themselves under my belt, will my sense of that prior “knowledge” change? Would that change further readings of the earlier books?
+
+You gotta love a novel sequence with its own built-in recursive loop.

content/blog/2002-06-21-hawaii-is-good.md

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+---
+title: 'Hawaii Is Good'
+date: '2002-06-21T08:43:27-04:00'
+permalink: /hawaii-is-good/
+tags:
+    - travel
+---
+
+for many things. For getting up at 4 am since your body can still be fooled into thinking it’s 9.
+
+For catching up on that [reading](/mining-the-backlist/) you meant to do years ago but could never quite get to.
+
+For keeping abreast of the latest wonders of the [Disney world of multiculturalism](http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/liloandstitch/).[^1]
+
+For remembering all the words to “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” not to mention the complete Eagles and Jimmy Buffet songbooks.
+
+For getting a tan, getting in shape, getting back in touch with the joys of rum.
+
+But not so good for writing. Nope, not so good at all.
+
+[^1]: See, the cute little brown girl thinks she’s adopted a dog, but he’s actually an *alien.* An *evil* alien. Get it?
+

content/blog/2002-06-24-hey-wheres-the-joy-of-cooking.md

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+---
+title: "Hey, Where's the Joy of Cooking?"
+date: '2002-06-24T11:20:12-04:00'
+permalink: /hey-wheres-the-joy-of-cooking/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+In the spirit of two years ago, I’ve recently been directed to this list of [the 100 Most Influential Books of the Century](http://www.bpl.org/research/AdultBooklists/influential.htm). The shift in directive — influence rather than “quality” — from all those other lists that came out in 1999-2000 makes this one a little more interesting. After all, it’s tough to imagine Heidegger, Heisenberg, and Heller coming in immediate sequence on any of those other lists. But the very same premise — as well as some of the selections — leaves me very puzzled about both the criteria and the results. What constitutes “influentialness”? Influential with *whom?*
+
+These questions aside, I’m nonetheless left brimming with observations:
+
+1. There’s a decided pre-1970 bias in this list. A mere 11 books published after this date made the cut.
+
+2. Nothing of influence was published during the 1980s.
+
+3. The only book of influence to be published since 1979 is John Gray’s *Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus* (1992).
+
+4. “Non-fiction” out-influences “fiction” 65-35.[^1]
+
+My favorite part of this list, however, is the ensuing list of “Books that Didn’t Quite Make It.” I think that all canonical lists should now be required to come with also-rans: books that didn’t quite make it onto my syllabus, books that didn’t quite make it onto your exam reading list, books that didn’t quite make it into this summer’s stack of beach reading.
+
+[^1]: Both terms very loosely characterized. Poetry (2) and drama (2) are lumped in under fiction. Autobiographies likewise under non-fiction, regardless of the sanity of their writers. Any errors in categorization are errors of this counter, whose eyes are swimming from staring at the list for so long.

content/blog/2002-06-25-dept-of-musical-revisionism.md

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+---
+title: 'Dept. of Musical Revisionism'
+date: '2002-06-25T10:59:52-04:00'
+permalink: /dept-of-musical-revisionism/
+tags:
+    - listening
+---
+
+Earlier that day, over lunch:
+
+Me (hearing “Born in the U.S.A.” over the restaurant P.A. system): How on earth did those Republican knuckleheads hear this song and decide it was a patriotic anthem?
+
+He: It makes total sense. Their whole rhetorical m.o. involves not fully understanding what they’re quoting, and then completely revising what the original means when they’re found out.
+
+Okay, fine. It’s the same kind of revisions that are worked by television advertising all the time, when a song like [this](http://www.sgi.net/zeppelin/lyrics/songs/04.rar.html) is used to plug a product like [this](http://www.cadillac.com/cadillacjsp/models/deville/index.html). (The revised meaning of which seems to become — what? — I haven’t had sex in years, so I’m buying a really big car?)
+
+But the impulse toward this kind of lyrical revisionism just became too much that night, on our dinner cruise — and yes, yes, the ironies, given the [reading](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0IBSHWP639&isbn=0316925284) I’m doing this week — after a pleasant half-hour standing at the rail, watching Waikiki drift by. As we walked back into the dining room to pay the lovely young man who’d kept us supplied with Mai Tais for the evening, I suddenly felt uneasy, unsettled, nervous, wrong. Took a moment to take stock: no, I have everything I came with; no, I’m not feeling ill; no, there doesn’t appear to be disaster looming just ahead.
+
+It required a few moments to sink in. Literally. First, I noticed the really bad rendition being done by the man at the synthesizer and the woman at the mike. Then, I recognized that this was a bad rendition of a song that I hated in the first place. It’s that whatsername song, gee, you know, the Canadian chick who’s always — yeah, Celine, right. From that movie, you know…
+
+*Titanic.*
+
+I ask you — seriously, tell me if it’s just me — but is this an appropriate song to be playing on board?
+
+Okay, sure, it’s about a love that survives even death, even an icy cold watery death — but see, there’s that whole death part, and the water, and gee, look, we’re on a boat! In the water!
+
+It’s not revisionism. It’s just flat not paying attention.
+

content/blog/2002-06-26-influence-part-ii.md

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+---
+title: 'Influence, Part II'
+date: '2002-06-26T10:38:33-04:00'
+permalink: /influence-part-ii/
+tags:
+    - novels
+    - obsolescence
+---
+
+[Previously](/hey_wheres_the_joy_of_cooking/), on Planned Obsolescence: the book list, not as designator of “quality” or “greatness,” but rather of “influence,” which [one intrepid reader](http://www.wombatfile.com) understood to be the fluidity with which a book’s central concept made itself available to cocktail party chatter.
+
+Now, another [list](http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,711682,00.html), this one voted upon by “around 100 of the world’s top authors,” in an attempt to determine the “most meaningful book of all time.” The winner: [Don Quixote](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0IBSHWP639&isbn=0140440100).
+
+I return to the question of the list today because the [Chronicle of Higher Education](http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i42/42a00903.htm) (sorry, subscription required) reported the same story this week, but described the list as that of “the 100 most influential works of fiction.” So I started thinking that perhaps this list might help me understand this business of literary influence a bit better than I presently do. Are “influence” and “meaningfulness” related? Or is the entire list-making hoo-ha (which frankly I thought we’d seen the end of for a while) up to some other goal?
+
+While I ponder, a few observations:
+
+1. Europeans are more influential than Americans, 2 to 1.
+
+2. Men similarly out-influence women, almost 8 to 1.
+
+3. While the Boston Public Library was not apparently particularly influenced by *Invisible Man,* around 100 of the world’s top authors were.
+
+4. Morrison, yes. Pynchon, no.
+
+5. I’ve read an embarrassing 41 of 100.
+
+A final thought: who drew up the list of around 100 of the world’s top authors, who then drew up the list of the 100 most meaningful/influential books? Could it be argued that the creator(s) of *that* list are in fact the most influential of all?
+

content/blog/2002-06-27-lessons-i-wish-id-learned-sooner.md

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+---
+title: "Lessons I Wish I'd Learned Sooner"
+date: '2002-06-27T12:35:59-04:00'
+permalink: /lessons-i-wish-id-learned-sooner/
+tags:
+    - 'random thoughts'
+---
+
+1. Just because you read *The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn* five years ago doesn’t mean you’ll remember its details during your orals.
+
+2. When told in the early stages of a relationship the excruciating details of your blameless partner’s last miserable breakup, listen closely: you’re getting a snapshot of how it will all end.
+
+3. Your metabolism really does change at 30.
+
+4. A major writing project will always take at least twice as long as you think it will, no matter how you leniently you create the schedule.
+
+5. Cheap sushi is cheap for a reason.
+
+

content/blog/2002-06-28-preparing-for-re-entry.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'Preparing for Re-Entry'
+date: '2002-06-28T10:51:45-04:00'
+permalink: /preparing-for-re-entry/
+tags:
+    - travel
+---
+
+The last day in Hawaii, alas. Packing up the suitcase, hunting for the items lost beneath the bed. Realizing that I only took 8 pictures while I was here, and now this roll of film will languish in my camera until after Christmas, when I’ll finally take it to get developed and will open the envelope of pictures expecting to find only niecelings and nephews in various shades of green and red, only to be abruptly taken back here by the slightly grainy reproduction of the view from my balcony, the sand, the surf, the sunrise on the Royal Hawaiian.
+
+Yes, film. You remember film, right?
+
+Will be back in New Orleans for about a month prior to re-entry stage two — moving back to SoCal — where I’ll have a little less than a month before beginning re-entry stage three — moving back into the classroom. Am hoping that these few Hawaii pictures, and the Puritanesque delayed gratification involved in obtaining them, will provide solace some night, sitting by the light of my little desktop halogen, surrounded by papers on *Native Son* and feeling this sabbatical-won peace to be wholly, completely obsolesced.
+

content/blog/2002-07-01-rubbed-out.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+title: 'Rubbed Out'
+date: '2002-07-01T06:41:31-04:00'
+permalink: /rubbed-out/
+tags:
+    - television
+---
+
+[Entertainment Weekly](http://www.ew.com) recently [reported](http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,262643~3|16070~0~,00.html) on the latest shady doings from the world of *la cosa nostra:* Fairuza Balk, who appeared in [The Sopranos](http://www.hbo.com/sopranos)‘ third-season finale as undercover FBI agent Deborah Ciccerone, tasked to approach Drea de Matteo’s Adriana La Cerva for a little girl-talk, has been replaced for season four by Lola Glaudini, formerly of *NYPD Blue.*
+
+Not such big news: the [two Darrins](http://www.bewitched.net) made this kind of TV-switcheroo years ago, and Agent Ciccerone’s hardly as focal as that.
+
+Except that David Chase et al have taken this replacement to Huxleyan lengths, reshooting Balk’s scenes with Glaudini in the role for the upcoming (August 27) season three DVD release.
+
+Reports suggest that Balk has entered the witness protection program. And about that, we’ll say no more.
+

content/blog/2002-07-02-smooth.md

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+---
+title: Smooth
+date: '2002-07-02T10:39:59-04:00'
+permalink: /smooth/
+tags:
+    - computers
+    - software
+---
+
+Eek! I just downloaded and installed IE 5.2 for OS X, which counts among its improvements “support for the new Quartz text smoothing feature.” And boy, do things look smooth. I’m deeply unsure how I feel about this. For those of you[^1] who don’t/can’t use IE 5.2 (and good for you), here’s a [screenshot](/img/screen.jpg) of the Quartz-ed up site.
+
+What do you think? I’m thinking I may have to sans-serifize things or risk looking too much like a word-processed church newsletter.
+
+[^1]: This assumes, of course, that there is someone out there. Which there is… Right?
+

content/blog/2002-07-02-the-times-roman-they-are-a-changin.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: "The Times(-Roman), They Are a-Changin'"
+date: '2002-07-02T13:52:42-04:00'
+permalink: /the-times-roman-they-are-a-changin/
+tags:
+    - tinkering
+---
+
+Or, Smooth, part two.
+
+After spending a day with the site, and with other sites, and after some extremely useful [feedback](/smooth/), I’ve made a little design revision. Things are still malleable, though, so I’m open to complaints and suggestions.
+
+Now back to work.
+

content/blog/2002-07-03-them-singin-dancin-demons-do-it-every-time.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+title: "Them Singin', Dancin' Demons Do It Every Time"
+date: '2002-07-03T06:50:11-04:00'
+permalink: /them-singin-dancin-demons-do-it-every-time/
+tags:
+    - body
+    - networks
+    - television
+---
+
+Inspired in part by the wonderful [pulchritude](http://pulchritude.blogspot.com), and in part by my own [overindulgences](/hawaii_is_good/), I’ve undertaken a plan of (somewhat) radical detoxing. The most significant aspect of my pretty much semi-annual attempt to achieve a less chemical existence is giving up caffeine, which has the immediate effect of making me feel as though someone is driving a railroad spike through my temporal lobe. Not good when one is frantically trying to finish up work on a manuscript about which one is decidedly ambivalent anyway.
+
+The good news is that, as of last night, about 7:00 pm CDT, after two days of head-splitting and general depression, the pall lifted. Headache gone. Not thinking entirely clearly yet, but no longer feeling quite the same urge to dash in front of a streetcar, either.
+
+What made the difference? Either the simple passage of time, or last night’s replay of the [Buffy](http://www.buffy.com) musical. You decide.
+

content/blog/2002-07-04-sounds-familiar.md

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
+---
+title: 'Sounds Familiar'
+date: '2002-07-04T05:48:31-04:00'
+permalink: /sounds-familiar/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+Continuing the Richard Powers binge, I just yesterday finished reading [Gain](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=66UQJ18C6P&isbn=0312204094), which traces the corporate history of Clare International, a giant conglomerate much akin to the [ill-fated](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=66UQJ18C6P&isbn=0679772677) Beatrice Foods. Remember Beatrice? If not, you’re not alone. The corporation only advertised its existence briefly, during the 1984 Summer Olympics, the resonances of which were particularly alarming considering it turned out that Beatrice was the parent company of *everything.* Then there was that pesky little series of lawsuits, and the conglomerate is no more. (Or at least no more in that form, under that name.)
+
+What struck me last night as I was wrapping up the book, however, was less the Beatrice connection than Powers’ depiction of the Clare response to the onset of the Great Depression:
+
+> By Independence Day, four fifths of the wealth traded on the New York Stock Exchange had vanished into the thinnest of atmospheres. The Jazz Age took a quick refresher course in the imaginary value of equities. Clare’s stock tracked this average drop downward with all the tenacity of a bloodhound puppy. By summer’s end, the worth of the entire, far-flung manufacturing empire was less than the book value of the Illinois factories four years before.
+> 
+> Alone among the corporate brass, William Clare had seen the shape of things to come. The careful financier knew all about bookkeeping by mass hypnotism. Throughout the twenties, he sold off his shares in steady, disciplined lots. By the peak, he’d gotten far more than fair market value for his portion. When all hell broke loose, he dumped the rest of his worthless paper, enjoyed a year of ship-spotting off Nantucket, and returned to business to serve briefly on the board of Gillette just before his happy death as a traitor to his family in 1931.
+> 
+> Douglas \[Clare\] II was less hurt by the plunge in his net worth than by the reception of his monograph, *The Dream of the Romanesque.* Scholars laughed at the work because it was written by a businessman. And businessmen by and large failed to read it because it appeared to be about old stones. Douglas retired from the firm to the Greek island of Soundetos. There, in comfortable if reduced circumstances, he took to financing his own amateur forays into classical archaeology.
+> 
+> Everyone else whom the company bound together went to the cleaners. And the folks in the khaki shirts got cleaned longest and hardest of all. All the sorters and sifters and gauge-tenders and packers and haulers who had been forced into buying company shares at a discount now watched helplessly as their precious nest eggs cracked into the national omelet. Workers who had built their retirements for forty years came up empty-handed, the victims of the distributed pyramiding swindle of capital. (307-308)
+
+Bookkeeping by mass hypnotism, well-timed sell-offs, the pyramiding swindle of capital. But hey, that was then, this is now, right?
+
+Happy Independence Day, all.
+

content/blog/2002-07-05-technologies-wed-like-to-see-become-obsolete.md

@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+---
+title: "Technologies We'd Like to See Become Obsolete"
+date: '2002-07-05T18:09:49-04:00'
+permalink: /technologies-wed-like-to-see-become-obsolete/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+And the wonderful folks helping steer them that way: [Click To Add Title.](http://clicktoaddtitle.com) Genuinely sublime.

content/blog/2002-07-08-july-9-1982.md

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
+---
+title: 'July 9, 1982'
+date: '2002-07-08T05:27:37-04:00'
+permalink: /july-9-1982/
+tags:
+    - life
+    - reading
+---
+
+Tomorrow is the twentieth anniversary of the crash of Pan Am 759, which fell victim to a wind shear during takeoff from New Orleans International, plowing into a nearby Kenner neighborhood, killing eight people on the ground and all 146 aboard.
+
+I know this now because the top story in the Sunday [Times-Picayune](http://nola.com/frontpage/t-p/index.ssf) was a remembrance of the crash, with a focus on the changes that it effected both in the aviation industry and in the town. The aviation industry learned from this tragedy, investing heavily in research toward the development of advanced technologies for the detection of wind-shears and microbursts. Kenner has had a more difficult, more emotional recovery; many people who live there still can’t talk about that day.
+
+I was in high school in 1982, only 70 miles up the road in Baton Rouge, but the distance — both that between the crash and my perceptions of it, and between 1982 and now — is more significant than it is substantive. Just a few days ago, driving past the airport, I remembered the crash, but in a hazy enough way that I wondered for a moment if I had it confused with some other crash in some other city, or even if I’d dreamed some part of the memory.
+
+Sunday’s paper explains to me, though, the chill I get every time I drive past what is now Louis Armstrong International Airport. One of the runways is visible from the interstate, and when planes land on that strip they pass over the cars below by a bare couple of hundred feet. Chilling enough, particularly in these post-9/11 days. But that bit of nervousness has always seemed to have some non-present origin, one that I could never, before yesterday, fully locate.
+

content/blog/2002-07-09-heres-a-question.md

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+---
+title: "Here's a Question"
+date: '2002-07-09T06:42:17-04:00'
+permalink: /heres-a-question/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+So, I’m nearing the conclusion of the conclusion of the book I’ve been working on for the last umpteen years. Which of course doesn’t mean I’m done — there’s still the introduction to be written, and the first chapter to be polished up a bit.
+
+But it does mean that this is the moment at which I’m supposed to be thinking the really Big Thoughts, the what-does-it-all-mean thoughts, the concluding-type thoughts. And I’m totally mired in the shallows, unable to come up with an adequate reason why the argument I’ve spent the last 260 pages making is so bloody important that the future of civilization depends on it.
+
+My argument, in case you’re interested: despite the perpetual hue and cry to the contrary (in which an article every six months or so proclaims the novel a dead form, and the novel itself repeatedly contemplates that death between its own covers), the novel is in fact not obsolete, but rather uses the notion of its obsolescence as a means of creating a kind of cultural wildlife preserve, a protected space within which it can continue to flourish. But the question, to be wrestled with here in the last pages, is the relationship of these claims of the novel’s obsolescence to more general cultural cycles of the birth and death of genres, of styles, and of media.
+
+So let me ask what *you* think: why would it matter if the novel were obsolete? Personally, I’d be crushed if no more of them were made, don’t get me wrong. But is there some particular reason that the novel’s potential obsolescence should trouble us more than, say, the death of the vinyl LP? Or the death of radio drama? Or the death of epic poetry? Is there something special about the novel — not necessarily something that makes it more valuable, but something that makes its (supposed) passing different from that of other cultural forms of expression?
+
+(Any helpful thoughts would be much appreciated, and duly acknowledged.)
+

content/blog/2002-07-10-silence.md

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+---
+title: Silence
+date: '2002-07-10T09:33:46-04:00'
+permalink: /silence/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+Well, I managed to conclude the conclusion in a temporarily satisfactory way, despite the deafening roar of absolute silence on your end. Okay, point taken. I’ll do my own work. Sigh.
+
+Having done so, and not being quite ready to begin the introduction last night, I instead took some time to poke around this web thing a bit, and stumbled upon a reader review of David Foster Wallace’s [Up, Simba!](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005B5EO/qid=1026310317/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-8063349-6775963) that just tickled me to no end. Go read it. It’s the first review.
+
+Oh, heck, I’ll even give you the part that tickled me:
+
+> He teaches at Disneyland, is what I last heard, which may be why I likened his genius to the size of one of those parks.
+
+I’ve decided that it is in the vital interest of the academy’s future to take over the spaces of defunct amusement parks. Classes could be tailored to their environs: poststructuralist theory to be taught on the rollercoaster; the first half of the American lit survey on the log ride; senior seminars in the spinning teacups. And, of course, all creative writing classes will be held in the funhouse.
+

content/blog/2002-07-11-hmmm.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'Hmmm...'
+date: '2002-07-11T06:00:19-04:00'
+permalink: /hmmm/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+I spent a chunk of this past weekend hanging out in my apartment, not wanting to think about either the quantity of work I have to do in the next two weeks or the fact that somehow all of my belongings in this apartment need to transport themselves back to California at the end of that same two week period. When I don’t want to think about the things directly in front of me, where else should I turn but the magic of digital cable.
+
+I finally managed to catch Sofia Coppola’s rendition of *The Virgin Suicides,* based on the Jeffrey Eugenides novel, which I haven’t read. (Eugenides, incidentally, is numbered among the [“New White Guys,”](http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/01/28/books-bonca.php) a putative “group” of writers that includes David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, Donald Antrim, and Jonathan Franzen. I’m suspicious of this groupness, however; DFW was quoted in a *Time* article \[which I can’t link for you as our good friends at AOL-Time Warner charge for access to their archives\] as dismissing the idea by saying “Well, we’re all white males between 30 and 40, at least as far as I know.” None of this is particularly to the point of this entry; I’ve been looking into it for the famous conclusion and I just found it interesting.) The film is odd: oddly paced, oddly structured, eerie in its prettiness.
+
+But the main events of the weekend were the pay-per-viewings of *The Others* and *Vanilla Sky*. And, for benefit of those who haven’t seen them, I’m just going to say Hmmm… on the correspondences. Very intriguing. Very revealing. If you’ve seen them both, follow me into the comments — I’m dying to talk about them. If not, well, hurry up and watch them so we can chat.
+

content/blog/2002-07-12-not-bloody-likely.md

@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+---
+title: 'Not Bloody Likely'
+date: '2002-07-12T06:38:04-04:00'
+permalink: /not-bloody-likely/
+tags:
+    - grousing
+---
+
+Um, hi. I’m trying to get an estimate on a small move.
+
+— *Where from?*
+
+— New Orleans.
+
+— *And to?*
+
+— Southern California.
+
+— *How small a move?*
+
+— I’m in a small one-bedroom, but it’s really sparsely furnished. So not much stuff at all. Like I’m not even taking my bed, right.
+
+— *So…*
+
+— I’ve used some online inventories and they estimate that my stuff would come in at around 1500 pounds.
+
+— *Let’s say 1700, to be safe.*
+
+— Okay…
+
+— *So, if that’s 1700 pounds… and roughly 1800 miles… let’s say 1850 to be safe… and if we add the origin…* \[inaudible mumbling, backed up by the sound of an adding machine\]*… and destination… and* \[inaudible, followed by much production from the adding machine\]*… it comes to right about $1700.*
+
+— Okay, 1700. That’s based on the weight, right? So what if my stuff actually weighs more, or less?
+
+— *Oh. No. This is a binding estimate.*
+
+— Based on…? I mean, you haven’t seen my stuff.
+
+— *Yeah, but I’m giving you the TPG rate. I could give you the 400N, sure, and then we could deal with the actual weight, but then I wouldn’t really be free to discount the price.*
+
+— Mm-hm. And in terms of insurance…?
+
+— *The price includes a valuation of 70 cents per pound per article. You can buy more if you want more, up to $2.50 per pound per article. Or you can get replacement coverage, up to $10,000, for $264 for no deductible, or $60 for a $500 deductible.*
+
+— And what are your windows like for pickup and dropoff?
+
+— *We’ve got a three-day pickup spread. And then there’s a five-day transit time. So counting the actual day of pickup as day 1, the dropoff window begins on day 6 and extends to day 18.*
+
+— Uh-huh. Great. That’s what I needed to know.
+
+— *Call us back when you’re ready to get this started.*
+

content/blog/2002-07-15-academic-obsolescence-indeed.md

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+---
+title: 'Academic Obsolescence, Indeed'
+date: '2002-07-15T06:11:00-04:00'
+permalink: /academic-obsolescence-indeed/
+tags:
+    - novels
+    - obsolescence
+---
+
+Mail is taking a while to catch up with me these days, given that it’s got to go through the postal service, campus mail, my department, campus mail, and the postal service again before it gets to me. So needless to say, I’m a little behind on some things. But I last week received this <a href="">letter</a> \[*Edited to remove link, as target is now long gone. Suffice it to say that this was a link to the Greenblatt letter. –KF*\], which was apparently sent to all members of the MLA.
+
+Having just completed (yay!) a first full-length scholarly manuscript (known in various stages of its composition as My Stupid Book, and at others demarked by other adjectives), I’m uncertain whether to be relieved by the import of this letter — whew! perhaps this manuscript getting accepted or not won’t be the turn of fate that drives my tenure decision — or deeply chilled. Have I spent the last six years on a project that will never see print?
+
+When I’m able to escape my own self-involvement, however, I can see that there are some deeper issues to be pondered here. Is academic publishing obsolete? Aside from those of us still trying to get tenure, will anyone miss it if it is? And if it’s not, how can it escape the fiscal crisis in which it’s mired? Certain refereed journals on the web have begun to make inroads into that avenue of academic publishing, such that having an article in [Postmodern Culture](http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/), say, has the something of the same clout as having an article in [Representations](http://www.jstor.org/journals/07346018.html) would. Can the same be done for the monograph? Will anyone stand — er, sit — for reading a monograph on the web? Or is the scholarly monograph all but dead?
+

content/blog/2002-07-18-yikes.md

@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+---
+title: Yikes
+date: '2002-07-18T06:33:01-04:00'
+permalink: /yikes/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+Should a reviewer of contemporary fiction actually be required to, say, like contemporary fiction?
+
+The question is raised for me by Dale Peck’s [review](http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020701&s=peck070102&c=1) of Rick Moody’s [The Black Veil](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=66UQJ18C6P&isbn=0316578991), steered my way by faithful reader [BT](http://www.wombatfile.com). The review is not so much a review as a skewering, and not so much a skewering as an explosion of bile and vitriol. From the very first line:
+
+> Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.
+
+And a bit further on:
+
+> When I finished *The Black Veil* I scrawled “Lies! Lies! All lies!” on the cover and considered my job done.
+
+If, however, the strongest conclusion that I drew from this review was that Dale Peck really, really, really doesn’t like Rick Moody, I’d say hey, to each his own, whatever. I read [The Ice Storm](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=66UQJ18C6P&isbn=0316706000) (granted, after having seen the movie), and enjoyed and appreciated much about it — for instance, I did not find the novel, as Peck does, to have “a troubling fascination with adolescent sexual organs” so much as a concern with the ways that adolescents’ preoccupation with their own sexual organs is driven by the simultaneously prurient and passionless obsessions of the grownups who are ostensibly raising them — but that’s a matter of interpretation and taste. Peck doesn’t like Moody. Whatever.
+
+But then there’s this, when Peck attempts to figure out how American literary culture can have gone so wrong as to lionize such a pathetic figure as Moody:
+
+> In my view, the wrong turn starts around the time Stephen Dedalus goes to college in *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* and echoes all the way through Don DeLillo’s ponderously self-important rendering of Bobby Thompson’s shot heard round the world in the opening chapter of *Underworld.*
+
+In fact, the article, by its conclusion, comes to damn contemporary writers by association the entire lineage of twentieth-century fiction dating back to Joyce:
+
+> All I’m suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is *Ulysses;* continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid — just plain stupid — tomes of DeLillo.
+
+Peck’s not wholly off base, I think, in his assessment of postmodernism as a “white man’s ivory tower,” or in his suggestion that the dominance of this select group of writers has skewed the contemporary high-literary scene toward sterile experimentation devoid of affect and compassion. But one nonetheless wonders how useful this kind of judgment is in a piece that arguably supposed to tell whether to buy Moody’s latest or not.
+
+So again, the question: should a reviewer of contemporary fiction actually be required to like contemporary fiction?
+

content/blog/2002-07-23-return-of-the-depressed.md

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+---
+title: 'Return of the Depressed'
+date: '2002-07-23T07:51:49-04:00'
+permalink: /return-of-the-depressed/
+tags:
+    - 'general whining'
+---
+
+Okay, I’m not really *depressed* so much as crushed under the weight of the belongings I’ve got to get sorted out and into boxes in the next 24 hours. I’d hoped that, returning from NOLA to SoCal, the long division of my stuff would end. My last move, a year ago, was a sorting into three piles: this stuff goes into storage in Friend A’s extra room; this stuff goes into Friend B’s apartment, where he’ll make use of it for the year; this stuff goes to New Orleans, where I’ll need it. Complex enough, and one would think that this return would be a coalescence, a gathering together of this dispersed flotsam into one centralized pile of flotsam. Particularly given that I am moving into the apartment that Friend B just vacated, and thus 1/3 of my stuff is already there.
+
+Except that the building that said apartment is in is not inhabitable, as it’s in the midst of a construction zone. So I’m going to be housesitting for Friend A for the month of August. So I’ll have access to the A stuff, but no access to the B stuff.
+
+The problem is the NOLA stuff, which is being moved directly into the B apartment, where I will then lose access to it for a few weeks. So I’m having to sort the NOLA stuff into the absolutely crucial, which comes with me in the car (cats; cat supplies; a subset of clothing; other personal items); the crucial, but not for the next week, which will be shipped to the A apartment (computer, printer, a few books); and the rest, which will disappear into the moving truck and apartment B.
+
+Needless to say, the calculus of this move has absorbed all of my available brain space, and is looking to rent out more. So I’m off to pack, and may be out of touch for a bit. I’ll leave you with one brief thought:
+
+[Perdition](http://www.roadtoperdition.com)? Where the hell is that?
+

content/blog/2002-07-24-peck-peck-peck.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+title: 'Peck, Peck, Peck'
+date: '2002-07-24T08:08:34-04:00'
+permalink: /peck-peck-peck/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+A quick update to last week’s [comment](/yikes/) on Dale Peck’s cranky outburst occasioned by his review of Rick Moody’s *The Black Veil*. [Bill](http://www.wombatfile.com) has continued the discussion on his site, usefully reminding us of [B.R. Myers’](http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/07/myers.htm) similar Summer 2001 screed published in the *Atlantic,* and directing us to [Jonathan Yardley’s](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57255-2002Jul11.html) rather dull attempt at same.
+
+Today, [Salon](http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2002/07/24/peck/index.html) gets into the action, with a Heather Caldwell article exploring a number of writers’ responses to the Peck piece and considering what makes for good literary criticism.
+
+Sadly, we are nowhere mentioned.
+
+Happily, the article includes the following quote, from a critic who “trounced Moody’s memoir in another publication” but who feels that the wholesale absence of credit given to the merits of such fiction render Peck’s critique meaningless:
+
+> “You have to reserve some language for Sept. 11, Adolf Hitler or, if you’re discussing art, Albert Speer,” says \[Andrew\] Solomon. “There can be a crisis in literature that warrants this urgency, but this isn’t it. Turning such frantic invective on writing that even in Peck’s view is nothing worse than banal and self-important is extremely irresponsible. I think Peck’s review tends to make literary discourse laughable rather than powerful, ridiculous rather than urgent.”
+
+One salient question raised by this article is what Peck *does* like about literature, and why he feels he must so passionately defend it — a seemingly vital issue to which his anger permits him to give no time. The beauty of the screed is its use of the attack in the service of a higher value; here, there is no higher value espoused. Is Peck then guilty of a variant on the vacuity of which he accuses Moody, Eugenides, et al? Does that emptiness, as the *Salon* article hints, reveal the hidden motives of professional jealousy and infighting?
+

content/blog/2002-08-08-that-i-didnt-expect.md

@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
+---
+title: "That, I Didn't Expect"
+date: '2002-08-08T09:12:28-04:00'
+permalink: /that-i-didnt-expect/
+tags:
+    - grousing
+---
+
+Hi. You guys are moving me, and I’m trying to get some information about where my stuff is.
+
+— *Okay.*
+
+— Today’s the last day of my delivery window. And I got a call yesterday telling me that the driver would be showing up with my stuff this morning, between 9 and 12.
+
+— *Okay.*
+
+— It’s now 2:00.
+
+— *Okay.* \[Faintly disguised annoyance, accompanied by much clicking in the background.\] *Your delivery is complete.*
+
+— What?
+
+— *It says here that your delivery has been made.*
+
+— That’s not possible. I’m standing here in my apartment, where I’ve been since 8 this morning, and my stuff is not here. There has been no delivery.
+
+— *Yes, there has. Your stuff was delivered to* \[name deleted\] *Van and Storage.*
+
+— No. It wasn’t supposed to go there. It was supposed to come here.
+
+— *Well, you need to take that up with the broker. They sent it to* \[name deleted\] *Van and Storage.*
+
+— No. I told them and I told you the address here.
+
+— *Yes, well, it was delivered to* \[name deleted\] *Van and Storage, at* \[address deleted\].
+
+— But that’s my address.
+
+— *What?*
+
+— That is the address of my apartment, where I am currently standing, and where my stuff is not.
+
+— \[Annoyed and befuddled silence.\] *Let me call you back.*
+
+— Okay.
+
+\[A long period of waiting, accompanied by heart palpitations and the serious urge to drink heavily.\]
+
+— Hello?
+
+— *Hi. It’s* \[name deleted\]. *Your driver is on the way. He’s just stuck in traffic.*
+
+— So my stuff hasn’t been delivered after all.
+
+— *No. There was a change of driver, so they marked the stuff as delivered for some reason.*
+
+— A change of driver?
+
+— *Well, yes.* \[Embarrassed pause.\] *The first driver sort of quit.*
+
+— Quit?
+
+— *Yeah. And they had to send another driver out to recover the truck in Vegas. But he’ll be there soon. I promise.*
+

content/blog/2002-08-12-summer-reading.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+title: 'Summer Reading'
+date: '2002-08-12T08:54:26-04:00'
+permalink: /summer-reading/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+Having gotten myself and my stuff by various paths back to Southern California (though I am at a loss to say we all arrived in one piece, as said stuff has yet to be unpacked, and cannot be unpacked until a date by which the promise of moving-company reimbursement will no doubt have passed), and having dealt with the year’s worth of nonsense mail that piled up in the office, and having passed on the manuscript of my Stupid Book to a couple of friendly readers, and having done what organizational tasks can actually be accomplished at this point —
+
+— having done all that, I recognized this weekend that I exist in the blissful and much too rare state of having Nothing in Particular to Do. And thus, I spent the weekend lying around reading summer novels and watching summer DVD releases.
+
+I read one [book](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=66UQJ18C6P&isbn=0316666343) that has topped the bestseller lists for some weeks, which I found moving and fluid, and wildly inappropriate as a birthday gift for the aunt to whom I’d sent it last month.
+
+I read [another](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=66UQJ18C6P&isbn=0375412824), recommended to me by the highest of [authorities](http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/GoodMorningAmerica/gma020613_ReadThis_Packer.html) (authorities whom, it may interest you to know, have now moved on to the [book](http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/GoodMorningAmerica/GMA02087LovelyBones.html) above) but, while the book was a fast-paced, congenial read, it has nonetheless caused a significant revision in my list of the top-ten fictional characters I’d most like to slap around.
+
+I also watched two movies recently released on DVD, [one](http://us.imdb.com/Title?0211915) of which I found thoroughly charming, if perhaps not quite worthy of an entire companion DVD of “special features,” and the [other](http://us.imdb.com/Title?0246578) of which left me with a bad taste in my mouth, the acrid after-effects of a very very High Concept that simply doesn’t pay off (despite a brilliant performance by a former Dancer, of the Dirty variety).
+
+The end result of all of which is more reading, catching up on some [things](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=66UQJ18C6P&isbn=0375724834) I meant to read two years ago, and anxiously anticipating the release of some other [things](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374277826/ref=pd_nfy_nr_b_5/102-2663923-5374522) yet to come.
+

content/blog/2002-08-20-coming-soon.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+title: 'Coming Soon...'
+date: '2002-08-20T15:24:42-04:00'
+permalink: /coming-soon/
+tags:
+    - blogging
+---
+
+I’ve been running hither and yon (mostly yon) these last weeks, and dealing with the complexities of life-in-a-suitcase, and thus failing to resume anything like my normal programming schedule. But I promise, I’ll be back with new things soon.
+
+Like: thoughts about Helen DeWitt’s [The Last Samurai](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0EUEFVAQL7&isbn=0786887001) (which bears no connection to the forthcoming [Cruise vehicle](http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,9574,00.html)), which was pressed upon me by a colleague and which I’ve spent my few available writing hours instead devouring.
+
+And: twelve reasons why I hate Neil LaBute, none of which so aptly or calmly put as [Bill’s](http://www.wombatfile.com/archives/000585.html).
+
+And: an ode to my new [Titanium](http://www.apple.com/powerbook/).
+
+And: a notable absence of whining about the intricacies of my move, which is at last due to complete this Saturday.
+
+All this, and more, in the next few days.
+

content/blog/2002-08-22-the-perils-of-genius.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+title: 'The Perils of Genius'
+date: '2002-08-22T09:37:20-04:00'
+permalink: /the-perils-of-genius/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+No, not my own.
+
+As promised, some thoughts about Helen DeWitt’s [The Last Samurai](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0EUEFVAQL7&isbn=0786887001), from the cover of which one would be hard-pressed to tell that the novel is set in late twentieth-century London.
+
+The novel revolves around Ludo, a prodigious genius cultivated by his brilliant, eccentric single mother, Sybilla. Ludo’s insatiable appetite for knowledge leads him to acquire every new language and new subject that he comes across. He learns to read at 2. He reads the *Odyssey* at 4 — oh, yes, in Greek. He absorbs information on Lagrangian mechanics, number theory, and aerodynamics with seemingly little effort. But the one piece of information he most wants — the identity of his father — is the one that eludes him.
+
+Most commentators on the novel have concentrated upon Ludo’s quest for a suitable father figure, and indeed, the novel seems to foster such a focus, as Sybilla, whose voice begins the novel, gradually recedes into the text’s background (frustratingly, for one [reviewer](http://partners.nytimes.com/books/00/10/15/reviews/001015.15goldbet.html), who dismisses the novel as evidence of a first-timer’s over-ambition). Ludo’s search draws upon the film referenced by the novel’s title, Kurosawa’s *Seven Samurai,* as he constructs a series of tests for each of the potential father-figures he approaches. As both film and novel remind us, however, “a good samurai will parry the blow,” and thus a worthy figure for Ludo’s attentions will foil his schemes.
+
+The title’s focus on the *last* samurai, however, suggests that the quest is not as simple as “a young boy’s search for a father” might make it seem. While each of the men Ludo tests (not counting his actual, biological father, who is of mediocre intellect and even lesser talent) can offer him the kind of intellectual support that can be extended from one genius to another, each has also been irretrievably damaged by his own genius, becoming filled with anger, or ambition, or despair, or madness. In Ludo’s encounter with the last potential samurai, the purpose of this quest for a father resolves into something unexpected: not a search for a male role-model who can lead him into new fields of knowledge and adventure, but rather a search for someone who has faced the perils of genius and found a way to survive. Someone who can give not Ludo but Sibylla the wherewithal to go on.
+
+The novel seems to me, then, in its final chapters, not to relegate Sibylla to the fading background, but rather to investigate precisely, if in a way that can never be wholly satisfied, the nature of her fading, and what can be done to save her. One of the perils of genius, in a world of marketing copy and quickie reviews, is its very evanescence, its etherealness, its tendency to evade the grasping hand like smoke. Like any good samurai, however, the last one can parry the blow.
+

content/blog/2002-08-23-twelve-reasons-i-hate-neil-labute.md

@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+---
+title: 'Twelve Reasons I Hate Neil LaBute'
+date: '2002-08-23T06:26:00-04:00'
+permalink: /twelve-reasons-i-hate-neil-labute/
+tags:
+    - 'random thoughts'
+---
+
+1\. For his conviction that he had the right temperament to succeed in his adaptation of *Possession,* a brilliant novel now stinking up a Multiplex near you: “I loved the parallel stories … really all the things that were in the book interested me. I was in academia. I’ve been an anglophile for a long time. I have always written about relationships and here were two relationships that were very different. So all the elements spoke to me, it just seemed like a natural fit.” (From the [IndieWire interview](http://www.indiewire.com/film/interviews/int_LaBute_Neil_020814.html).)
+
+2\. *In the Company of Men*.
+
+3\. *Your Friends and Neighbors*. (Need I elaborate?)
+
+4\. For saying the following about *Your Friends and Neighbors*: “I think of the movie as a comedy in many ways. I think there are quite a few laughs in the movie. As you’re sitting there watching it, you may think about something beyond that, and feel that it’s got some teeth to it, but I do think it has some bite. But it’s still a comedy.” (From the [Onion A/V Club](http://www.theavclub.com/avclub3404/bonusfeature13404.html) interview.)
+
+5\. For making it impossible for me ever to like Ben Stiller again.
+
+6\. For joking, with regard to *In the Company of Men*, that “I was trying to make a feel-good summer hit (laughs).” (From the [first Salon interview](http://www.salon.com/aug97/entertainment/labute970801.html).)
+
+7\. For single-handedly creating the career of [Aaron Eckhart](http://us.imdb.com/Name?Eckhart,+Aaron).
+
+8\. For my sneaking sense that he would enjoy the fact that I hate these movies so much.
+
+9\. For being a real bonehead about the reaction to his movies: “At \[*In the Company of Men*‘s\] Sundance debut, an audience already on edge over the uncomfortable ending threw its first question at the writer/director: Why is the movie’s victim a deaf woman? ‘And I just, kinda offhanded, said, “Because I always thought deaf people were funny,”‘ recalls LaBute, who, of course, instantly acquired a rep for insensitivity. ‘For a long time, that label stuck — the film’s still called misogynist.'” (From the [Dallas Observer](http://www.dallasobserver.com/extra/labute-1.html).)
+
+10\. For having an insufficient number of [rotten tomatoes](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/p/NeilLaBute-1125185/) hurled at him.
+
+11\. For this assessment of the horrors of 9/11: “I wrote about a sort of flash point I had, where I was standing in line, four days later, in Union Station in Chicago, lugging my bags around trying to get on this train and half-hoping there was a first-class line that I could get in to, and sort of realizing, you know, that we’re back to basics, everybody was just sort of fighting for space. And I had this moment of thinking, ugh, I really don’t like this, it’s really inconvenient what happened. It’s really sad, of course. But it’s rather inconvenient today. ” (From the [second Salon interview](http://dir.salon.com/ent/movies/int/2001/11/26/labute/index.html).)
+
+12\. For the thought, the very *thought*, that he might be involved in the film version of [Angels in America](http://www.hollywood.com/movies/detail/movie/377228).
+

content/blog/2002-08-26-i-need-a-404-page.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: 'I Need a 404 Page'
+date: '2002-08-26T08:12:30-04:00'
+permalink: /i-need-a-404-page/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+like [this](http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/404.html).
+

content/blog/2002-08-29-because-you-didnt-ask.md

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
+---
+title: "Because You Didn't Ask"
+date: '2002-08-29T08:57:09-04:00'
+permalink: /because-you-didnt-ask/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+The Top Five[^1] Fictional Characters I’d Like to Slap Around:
+
+1\. Lily Bart, *The House of Mirth.* First, last, and always. How can she not see the mistakes she’s making? I just want to shake her awake, tell her to snap out of it.
+
+2\. Laurence Selden, *The House of Mirth.* ‘I love her; I don’t love her. I wish I could save her, but what could I do?’ Confirmed bachelor, my Aunt Fannie. Come out of the closet already, Larry.
+
+3\. Carrie Bell, *The Dive from Clausen’s Pier.* The character that [spawned](/summer_reading/) this version of the list. Annoying both in her selfishness and in her inability to stand up for the things she wants, or even to believe that the things she wants might be important. Weak enough to be pushed around by everyone. And crappy taste in men, to boot.
+
+4\. Newland Archer, *The Age of Innocence.*[^2] ‘I love her, but gosh, society frowns upon our love.’ Worse yet: ‘Society once frowned upon our love, but even though no one would mind our relationship now, it would just hurt too much to see her again.’ Please.
+
+5\. Isabel Archer, *Portrait of a Lady.* Okay, the courage of your convictions is one thing. Standing by your commitments, sure. But not getting yourself out of an abusive relationship just because you said I do and a lady keeps her word is just moronic.
+
+[^1]:I am both dissatisfied with the five-ness of this list, when I began with the intent of creating a list of ten, and with the list itself. Contributions, please. How should I fill out the list, and who on the list needs replacing?
+
+[^2]:NB: Archer should perhaps be higher in the rankings because of the multiplication of my desire to inflict violence upon him by Daniel Day Lewis’s portrayal of said character in the Scorsese film.
+

content/blog/2002-09-03-orientation.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+title: Orientation
+date: '2002-09-03T07:16:29-04:00'
+permalink: /orientation/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+Classes begin today, my friends, thus ending the long orientation process that precedes every fall semester. The bulk of our students showed up on campus this weekend. Some had been here longer, of course: a very few were here all summer; another group arrived two weeks ago to prepare for orientation; the Class of 2006 arrived a week ago. But for the most part Saturday, August 31, was the day of influx. Wandering around campus prior to meeting with my advisees, I watched students unpacking computers and stereo systems nicer than any I may ever own, and watched parents rolling stacks of boxes balanced on ergonomic desk chairs across uneven sidewalks toward ranks of newly renovated dorm rooms. And, in watching, could not help but think of the following, which is in all but a few respects wholly applicable here:
+
+> The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags — onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum Dum pops, the Mystic mints. \[Don DeLillo, *White Noise*.\]
+
+This is, of course, the day of the station wagons at the College on the Hill. Here, at the College Just South of the Hill, things are recognizably similar. The technologies have advanced, naturally, replacing albums and cassettes with CDs and DVDs and their immaterial hard-drive equivalents. The saddles are instead represented by mountain bikes, the skis by skateboards, the rafts by roller blades. The most immediately notable transformation, however, is in the day itself; there are no station wagons. Saturday was instead, here, the day of the SUVs.
+
+So, with GPS in hand, or dashboard, or integrated overhead display, our students have gathered their bearings, oriented themselves to the new year. Today we commence.
+

content/blog/2002-09-09-violence-and-the-novel-part-two.md

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
+---
+title: 'Violence and the Novel, Part Two'
+date: '2002-09-09T16:52:57-04:00'
+permalink: /violence-and-the-novel-part-two/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+I’m rereading *The House of Mirth* for class right now, and I’m taking under advisement mariah’s [suggestion](/because_you_didnt_ask/) that I remove Laurence Selden from my list of characters I’d like to smack around. Perhaps she’s right: it seems logical that I make allowances for the novel’s ostensible perspective on its characters, distinguishing between those the reader is meant to like but who are nonetheless so annoying as to drive one to violence (e.g., Dick Diver) and those the reader is meant to view skeptically from the get-go. Like Laurence Selden. A good point.
+
+And yet. Selden’s flaw — his most literal weakness — is his inability to commit to any depth of feeling. Poor boy, wants to live free in the republic of the spirit, and all that. The problem, for me at least, is that he seems to think that he is being brave in this desire for freedom, rather than shrinking in cowardly fashion from human contact. Complete self-deception, in other words. And the cost of that self-deception, for Lily, is high indeed. Take this early moment: having happened upon Lily in a train station, he is drawn to her “as a spectator,” and yet cannot resist getting involved:
+
+> “What luck!” she repeated. “How nice of you to come to my rescue!”
+> 
+> He responded joyfully that to do so was his mission in life, and asked what form the rescue was to take.
+
+That combination of attraction and hesitation, making her — even in jest — his “mission in life” and then demanding to know the particulars of what she needs, presages everything that is wrong with Selden. His ultimate, genuine failure to come to Lily’s rescue when she most needs it is perhaps explicable; he is weak, after all, and it would take a kind of courage that he does not possess to save her. But it’s finally his utter lack of self-knowledge, his determination to understand his cowardice as bravery — epitomized by the novel’s penultimate lines — that carries him beyond the pale for me:
+
+> He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart; since his very detachment from the external influences which swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it more difficult for him to live and love uncritically. But at least he *had* loved her — had been willing to stake his future on his faith in her — and if the moment had been fated to pass from them before they could seize it, he saw now that, for both, it had been saved whole out of the ruin of their lives.
+
+Fated? Willing to stake his future? I doubt both of these conditions highly — had Selden found her alive and well at novel’s end, I can only assume that some other new reservation would have interposed itself between him and committing to her.
+
+All this to say that perhaps it’s not — or not only — the novel’s perspective on its characters that might determine whether or not they’re worthy of being throttled, but — or but also — the characters’ own self-regard. There are those — and Dick Diver and Selden both fall into this category — who seem to consider themselves more sinned against than sinning, when the rest of the text seems rife with evidence to the contrary.
+

content/blog/2002-09-10-today-of-course.md

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+---
+title: 'Today, Of Course'
+date: '2002-09-10T23:00:46-04:00'
+permalink: /today-of-course/
+tags:
+    - watching
+---
+
+Night before last (meaning Monday night, the 9th), I watched Showtime’s airing of [Reflections from Ground Zero](http://www.sho.com/movies/movies_product.cfm?titleid=116902), a series of nine short films produced by graduate students from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. I’m not sure whether it was any of the films themselves, or rather the generally haunting remembrances, or my past life at NYU, or my more personal and present requirement to address the date in a suitably professorial manner (at a faculty-student luncheon at which I’m to appear on an official panel) — whatever the cause, night before last (meaning, as I write pre-sleep, last night) I dreamed of the World Trade Center, over and over.
+
+Dreamed of watching it come down, powerless on the wrong side of the country and on the wrong side of the television screen. Dreamed of searching for a way off of the 104th floor. Dreamed of debris, and panic, and evacuations.
+
+Today is a day I’d rather not acknowledge — rather not, in fact, experience. Rather ignore from a safe spot, with the covers pulled securely over my head. I don’t suppose, though, that any of us have that luxury any more, and that the luxury of covers-over-head is part of what got us into this mess in the first place.
+
+I don’t have anything suitably professorial to greet the day with, no guidance for my students, or even, at a much baser level, for myself.
+
+What I do have is a need to reach out. A quick message, then, for the friends I left in New York, now a shocking four years ago: I miss you more today than ever.
+

content/blog/2002-09-18-me-charlie-kurault.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: "Me & Charlie Kurault"
+date: '2002-09-18T08:41:33-04:00'
+permalink: /me-charlie-kurault/
+tags:
+    - blogging
+---
+
+Planned Obsolescence has been on the road these last five days, and has had only the most tenuous of connections to the Internet. Please forgive our absence; we’ll be back with further ruminations in a day or two.
+

content/blog/2002-09-19-the-role-of-the-book.md

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+---
+title: 'The Role of the Book'
+date: '2002-09-19T08:36:14-04:00'
+permalink: /the-role-of-the-book/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+I have spent much of the last six days cooling my heels through various plane flights (and the inevitably attendant airport delays), dawdling in various hotel rooms, and generally seeking ways to pass the time. My strategies for time-passage have nearly always revolved around books; I tend, for that reason, to travel with an average of more than 200% of my actual per-journey reading capacity, sort of a reading version of the eyes-bigger-than-stomach buffet dilemma.
+
+This week, I managed to make it through most of what I carried, some of which was required class-reading (finishing *The House of Mirth*; starting *A Lost Lady*). My brain has gotten hung up, however, in Neal Stephenson’s *The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer*. There are a number of worthy reasons for this absorption: Stephenson’s voice is simultaneously riotous and accurate, rendering with deadly precision the details of the near-future merger of consumer choice and individual identity and the balkanization of both consumer preferences and residential communities (his invention in *Snow Crash* of the FOQNE — or franchise-owned quasi-national entity — and the “burb-clave” being grand examples). This kind of detail, at once funny and pointed, pushes Stephenson’s work beyond the standard — if you’ll pardon the characterization — adolescent male fantasies of most cyberpunk. If you’ve never read any Stephenson, go get *Snow Crash*. Right now. I’ll wait here.
+
+*The Diamond Age*, however, adds something more to Stephenson’s previous critique of contemporary U.S. culture. Where *Snow Crash* could conceivably be accused of using its hero’s ethnicity in the same Orientalizing manner seen in Gibson’s *Neuromancer* and Ridley Scott’s *Blade Runner*, *The Diamond Age* attempts to interrogate the imperialist relationship between east and west through its representations of 21st century Shanghai, at once inescapably diverse and radically segregated. Moreover, where *Snow Crash*‘s tough teenage heroine, Y.T., could be interpreted as a Buffy-ized version of the ass-kicking, leather-clad objects of male pleasure and terror that pop up throughout cyberpunk (Gibson’s Molly being the ultimate case in point), *The Diamond Age* suggests, both through the detailed development of its heroine, Nell, and through the overwhelming force of the Mouse Army (composed of orphaned girls), an advanced critique of gender relations from the Victorian period forward.
+
+What’s really got my brain hung up on the novel, though, is the role played within it by the eponymous *Primer*. Of the multiple possibilities I’ve encountered for the book’s future, possibilities imagined by writers, scholars, and technocrats alike, the *Primer* is without question my favorite. However much I may have coveted Y.T.’s skateboard, I covet this book more. “Printed” on smart paper, with a high-end rod logic processing system and a deeply interactive structure growing out of a foundation in traditional narrative, the *Primer* entertains, instructs, and nurtures its reader, teaching her not only facts and figures but also how to learn in the first place. The *Primer* guides Nell as she grows, growing with her, responding to the changing circumstances of her life, expanding its genre from traditional fairy tales to embrace a new kind of self-reflexivity in order to teach her the fundamentals of its own programming, and developing an increasingly complex and even porous relationship with the outside world. Stephenson makes an overwhelming case for the power of this book in its heroine’s development, a case that makes me wonder, given the confluence of my own current reading material: could Lily Bart have been saved, like the similarly motherless Nell, if she’d had access to the *Primer*?
+
+Or, acknowledging the uncrossable barrier presented by the technology involved, were there any books, of the old print-on-paper variety, that could have saved Lily Bart?
+

content/blog/2002-09-25-back-to-school.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+title: 'Back to School'
+date: '2002-09-25T12:55:51-04:00'
+permalink: /back-to-school/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+The new season has at last begun, and eager students are buckling down all over campus, absorbing new materials, debating new ideas, and anticipating developments to come.
+
+I’m referring, of course, to the new television season.
+
+I’ve only caught one [new](http://www.upn.com/shows/haunted "Haunted") series thus far this season, and don’t yet have anything worthwhile to say about it. I’m intrigued, however, by the fact that two otherwise very dissimilar [returning](http://www.hbo.com/sopranos "The Sopranos") [series](http://www.buffy.com "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") focus in their early episodes on back-to-school anxieties. Of course, there’s a difference between being depressed and directionless and being a sitting duck for whatever’s coming out of the hellmouth next, but nonetheless: school is apparently, this year, a scary place.
+
+So what new shows are *you* watching?
+

content/blog/2002-09-30-where-theres-smoke.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: "Where There's Smoke..."
+date: '2002-09-30T05:27:31-04:00'
+permalink: /where-theres-smoke/
+tags:
+    - life
+---
+
+Just a few miles north of here — how few can be attested by the near-constant whirring of engines overhead and the overwhelmingly acrid air — the mountains are on fire, and have been for a week. Air quality has deteriorated to the extent that all non-essential outdoor activities on campus have been canceled for the duration. And once again this morning, I’ve awakened to find my apartment filled with the smell of smoke.
+
+Few of you will be faced with neighborhood wildfires, but perhaps you might understand why I’ve recently become obsessed with this [site](http://geomac.usgs.gov "GEOMAC") of late. We’re the Williams Fire, if you want to get the lowdown on our situation.
+

content/blog/2002-10-03-a-farewell-to-ernest.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+title: 'A Farewell to Ernest'
+date: '2002-10-03T17:24:21-04:00'
+permalink: /a-farewell-to-ernest/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+Then in the late summer of that year there was reading, much reading of many books, and many of them were fine books. Some of the books we read were to be written about, and some of the books were just for fun, and some of the books were to be taught. The books were stacked in piles around the house and the office, on the tables and chairs and on the desks, and their pages were dry and white and papery and fine. Many of the books were fine.
+
+The books were rich with ideas; they spoke of women who got in trouble and died, and women who just got lost, and they spoke too of smart, tough girls who saved many lives, some of them their own. But some of the books were not so kind to the women they spoke of, and some of the books were a pain to read, for that reason.
+
+And then in the early fall of that year, as the fire raged in the hills and a dry sooty ash slipped in around the windows and settled over the piles of books, and as the fire began to be brought under control, it came time for us to read a [book](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=0CP0HTKD8F&isbn=0684801469 "A Farewell to Arms") that was not so fine, at least not in our reading of it, and that produced a dreadful loneliness and despair, and we soothed the despair with a fine cold gin martini. Because there are some books to which a reader must bring much intelligence, and if people bring so much intelligence to these books the books have to kill them to break them, so of course they kill them. These books break every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break they kill. They kill the very good and the very gentle and the very smart impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure they will kill you too but they will be in no special hurry.
+
+It was only too late when we realized that we controlled the syllabus. That book is over for us now. We are through. We wish the others all the luck, the good ones, and the brave ones, and the calm ones and the smart ones. But it is not our book anymore. Goodbye to the book.
+

content/blog/2002-10-08-whats-next-postmodernism-the-musical.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: "What's Next? 'Postmodernism! The Musical'?"
+date: '2002-10-08T14:20:43-04:00'
+permalink: /whats-next-postmodernism-the-musical/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+This is apparently the season of the improbable stage production here in SoCal. Two much-acclaimed works of cultural criticism (each with ties to the journalistic tradition, but with very different results) have been set loose upon the stage in L.A. this fall. I saw [one](http://www.marktaperforum.com/taper/current_show.asp?showid=181 "Nickel and Dimed") this weekend, which sadly maintains the self-congratulatory analysis-free (and solution-free) sensitivity to the plight of the oppressed of its originary text. (This production has also led me to the conclusion that the revolving set is the worst catastrophe ever to be visited upon the legitimate theater.) The [other](http://chili.arts.ucla.edu/Default.asp?dTbID=659&page=view "Lipstick Traces"), which originated in New York last year, I haven’t seen, but am somewhat curious about. At least there’s something inherently theatrical about the original text, having performance as its subject, but nonetheless — can the critical import of the analysis of a performance be fed back into performance?
+
+There’s something in this new trend, I think, that bodes well for the future of scholarship. No longer content with the mythical crossover book, which extends beyond its academic audience to reach a general readership, the scholarly author can now have as a grail the sale of stage (or, perhaps, even film) rights to her newest monograph. In fact, I am thinking of taking on as a new project the stage and/or film adaptation of other works of criticism. Any suggestions?
+

content/blog/2002-10-18-fall-break.md

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
+---
+title: 'Fall Break'
+date: '2002-10-18T20:27:04-04:00'
+permalink: /fall-break/
+tags:
+    - reading
+    - watching
+---
+
+Ahhh. A few blissful days to regroup, kick off one’s shoes, sip a warm beverage, grade two stacks of papers, read three books, plan two committee meetings, fly to Albuquerque for a conference, finish the revisions on the manuscript, meet with the architects on the building renovation, and otherwise enjoy a few days of… um… calm.
+
+There’s been very little posting here of late (by me, I mean, not by my faithful commenters), which makes me very sad. The falloff has less to do with the fact that I haven’t had time to write than with the fact that I haven’t had time to get interested enough in anything to consider it worth writing about. And that’s just darned sad. So a moment to follow up on a couple of topics raised by earlier comments:
+
+– Mom was in town this past week, and on Wednesday, we caught an episode of *The West Wing*, the first I’ve seen in just about a year, and can I just say, yawn. Aaron, my friend, you’ve let me down. Where is the pop and fizz of *Sports Night*, both in the dialogue and in the characters? Where is the obsessive treatment of governmental arcana so fascinating in the first years of TWW’s run? Once upon a time, your show managed to be the foremost public outlet for serious political discourse without being preachy or self-righteous; what has caused this vast decline? Is it simply the never-ending campaign trail? Has the Jeb Bartlett I once wanted to be my president gone the way of Al Gore, self-parodying, bombastic, and impotent?
+
+– Having been taken to task for my gripes with Barbara Ehrenreich’s *Nickel and Dimed*, and in preparation for a student reading group of same (itself in preparation for a lecture by author of same, here at the College Just South of the No-Longer Flaming Hill), I’m delving into the book again, this time with a new appreciation (thanks to CSA and BT) for the ways that Ehrenreich herself actually does describe the limitations of both her project and its potential for inspiring social change. You’re absolutely right, CSA, that the book is a wake-up call, and you, BT, are similarly dead-on in suggesting that this wake-up call is aimed at those sitting the ideological fence, closing their eyes to the difficulties of the working poor and persuading themselves that the American dream works, because it’s convenient. Ehrenreich never really makes any bones about the fact that the book is journalism, not scholarship, and as such, I think I ask too much of it to ask for solutions. Part of my earlier aggravation, which was really transformed into high dudgeon by the play — which is in effect an extended monologue by “Barbara Ehrenreich,” supported by a cast of amusing and pitiful workers — has to do with the centrality of Ehrenreich’s voice in the book, the ways that the narrative becomes all about her. But then, this is a larger problem with journalism today, I think: the story, as a friend once observed, now transforms with light-speed into the story of the story, and in *that* story, the journalist is hero.
+
+I think there’s a connection between these two things, but I’m too tired to be able to figure it out right now. Perhaps after a little bit of the “rest” I’m sure to get during my fall “break,” and after a little input from some friends, I’ll take another stab at it.
+

content/blog/2002-10-24-arrgh.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+title: Arrgh.
+date: '2002-10-24T15:49:40-04:00'
+permalink: /arrgh/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+I’ve been gnashing my teeth over a stupid [browser](http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/default.jsp "Netscape, that is") problem, and bemoaning said browser’s total lack of online support, particularly of the discussion group sort, and thinking to myself that gee, I wish I had someone I could ask this question, or some forum in which I could ask it.
+
+Okay, so I’m slow.
+
+Anyway, here’s the issue, and I’m mostly aiming at you multi-browser Mac OS X types. See the link over on the right that reads [Academic Belatedness](http://pages.pomona.edu/~kfitzpatrick/ "Oh, heck, I'll reproduce it here.")? Follow that link, first in IE5. Things should look pretty familiar to you; I’m using a more-or-less identical CSS on that server to that I’m using here. Fine.
+
+Now follow that link in Netscape/Mozilla.
+
+You see what I mean? For some reason, Netscape can’t find the CSS. It’s not as though it can’t *read* it; it reads it fine on this server, and even when I open the Academic Belatedness page from my hard drive, where it sits in precisely the same relation to the CSS as it does on the server, it reads fine there. It just simply can’t (or won’t — perhaps it’s an act of will, designed to make me batty) find it on the server.
+
+Any ideas? As you might guess, I’m clueless, and annoyed.
+

content/blog/2002-10-25-the-news-just-keeps-getting-worse.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: 'The News Just Keeps Getting Worse'
+date: '2002-10-25T10:42:22-04:00'
+permalink: /the-news-just-keeps-getting-worse/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+One day after [Shauny](http://www.shauny.org/pussycat/2002_10.php#002215 "What's New, Pussycat?")‘s outcry against the ongoing horrors of the morning news, there is [this](http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/25/plane.crash.minn/index.html): the death of Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife, his daughter, three staffers, and two crew members in a plane crash in Minnesota.
+
+It’s too awful even to comment upon.
+

content/blog/2002-11-05-none-of-the-above.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'None of the Above'
+date: '2002-11-05T08:02:05-05:00'
+permalink: /none-of-the-above/
+tags:
+    - politics
+---
+
+Have just come from completing civic duty, which is increasingly difficult to imagine has any beneficial effect in the world, given the awful [lesser](http://www.graydavis.com/ "Lesser.")-of-two-[evils](http://www.billsimon.com/ "Evil.") choice before us here today. Thank goodness for the phone calls this weekend from [my favorite president](http://www.nbc.com/The_West_Wing/index.html "Fictional.") advising me in the casting of this vote.
+
+The most important race on the ballot, however, is not this year’s gubernatorial election, but that of 2006, the primary for which is being held today. Proposition 49 — aimed at creating after-school programs for “at-risk” kids (good), but funded in a loaves-and-fishes style, in which no new taxes are raised and no existing programs are cut (puzzling at best) — is the brainchild of [this candidate](http://www.joinarnold.com/ "Lesser, Evil, or Fictional? You Decide."), who everyone openly acknowledges is testing the waters for a gubernatorial run.
+
+And I thought the Gipper was frightening.
+

content/blog/2002-11-11-deconstruction-2.md

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+---
+title: Deconstruction
+date: '2002-11-11T17:23:10-05:00'
+permalink: /deconstruction-2/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+An odd weekend: I made the mistake of reaching for a hairbrush on Saturday morning — I should know better — and was rewarded with a muscle spasm between left shoulderblade and spine. The initial sensation — think cattle prod — was bad enough, but worse was the knowledge (from too many previous experiences) that the next couple of hours would present a gradual stiffening into total immobility and an increasing sense that any movement would cause the ripping of muscle from bone. I tried the hot shower thing, which everyone recommends but which never ever works, and being failed by that, hopped in the car for a quick visit to the good folks at the Urgent Care division of my doctor’s office. I was briefly poked, presumably examined for the signs of jonesing, and given a big prescription for big muscle relaxers, with the express instructions to (a) take them on a full stomach, (b) only take 1/2 of one during the day, and (c) prepare the day’s food in advance of taking the first one.
+
+Well.
+
+Being me, I had plans that could not be disrupted. I did, responsibly, get someone else to drive. And I did warn my colleagues about my newly developed combination of stiffness and stonitude. But I went out nonetheless.
+
+To see [Derrida](http://www.derridathemovie.com "I kid you not.").
+
+Oh, sure, those of you on the right coast have had this odd little biopic for weeks, but this far from the Yale English department, things take their time. So here I am, with a row of folks from my department and a host of other academics and intellectuals and people with very funky glasses frames, watching a documentary about a theorist that becomes a theory of the documentary impulse and of the relationship between documentation and theory. It’s not perfect — at moments, it’s downright annoying — but it’s nonetheless fascinating. Maybe it was the drugs, but I was spellbound. And maybe it was the muscle spasm, but I could not turn away.
+
+In any event, I have a new piece of slang I’d like to promote:
+
+> [**skelaxin**](http://www.elan.com/Products/Skelaxin/ "Skelaxin") (skuh-LAK-sin) *pres. part. of vi* **skelax** 1. chillin, esp. in the company of scholastic acquaintances. *Despite the intensity of the film’s discourse, I was pretty much —.*
+

content/blog/2002-11-25-um-is-this-thing-on.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: 'Um... Is This Thing On?'
+date: '2002-11-25T16:38:24-05:00'
+permalink: /um-is-this-thing-on/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+Remember me? I used to write stuff here, and periodically even had something to say. Alas, in the last few weeks I’ve been transformed into a committee drone, and have been mucking about in a paperwork swamp. Really. If paper could ooze, I’d be covered in it up to my elbows.
+
+In short, once again — and I recognize that this is getting a bit tiresome and repetitive — apologies for the absence. I’ll be back soon. Promise.
+

content/blog/2002-12-30-a-passage-to-mordor-by-e-m-forster.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: 'A Passage to Mordor, by E. M. Forster'
+date: '2002-12-30T18:39:05-05:00'
+permalink: /a-passage-to-mordor-by-e-m-forster/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+Or perhaps *Hunt for the Ring*, by Tom Clancy. Can’t decide which is my [favorite](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=e3006016c005b05fefec1bf6f73d4afa&threadid=138905&perpage=50&pagenumber=1).
+

content/blog/2002-12-30-on-fleeing-times-square.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'On Fleeing Times Square'
+date: '2002-12-30T12:04:16-05:00'
+permalink: /on-fleeing-times-square/
+tags:
+    - conferences
+    - travel
+---
+
+A brief return to the blogsphere, with the promise of more shortly.
+
+Have spent the last four days in the town part of me still considers [home](http://www.nyc.gov "The town so nice, you need a minimum six figures a year to live there."). The cab ride from the airport, in fact, had all the emotional groundtone of the return after long tiresome journey, with heightened urgency due to the five-year duration of said journey. This sense of homecoming was rendered surreal, however, by the fact that the cab took me to an enormous hotel smack in the middle of Times Square.
+
+I’m now really on the way home, post-holidays, post-[Anxiety Fest](http://www.mla.org "the MLA, that is"), and am happily anticipating [blue skies and 70 degrees](http://www.weather.com/weather/local/91711?lswe=91711&lwsa=WeatherLocalUndeclared "Just you don't think I'm making it up."). The [Entertainment Capital of the World](http://www.timessquare.com "Times Square, of course") left me a bit exhausted. The Christmas carols blaring from giant speakers mounted on every corner were only the most literal manifestation of the place’s too-muchness, its utter disconnect from the city I still love, but they nonetheless bade me a fond farewell, wishing for [frozen precipitation](http://guitar.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.geocities.com/etheltheaardvark/letitsnowchords.txt "Let It Snow") as my cab inched away.

content/blog/2003-01-01-farewell-to-the-palindrome.md

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+---
+title: 'Farewell to the Palindrome'
+date: '2003-01-01T09:13:56-05:00'
+permalink: /farewell-to-the-palindrome/
+tags:
+    - travel
+---
+
+2002 ended with a lurch: My flight back west was hung up in Houston for 3 hours due to storms, and so arrived at 1:15 am on December 31, rather than 10:15 pm, Dec. 30. Waited for suitcase, grabbed cab, gave directions to difficult-to-find residence. Which was suspiciously dark. The short of it: construction work necessitating the turning-off of electrical power, which I’d assured would be done no later than 4 pm, Dec. 30, was not done. I was powerless.
+
+So: it was late, I was exhausted, and the best option seemed to feel one’s way bedward and collapse therein, and sort out the pieces by the light of the too-soon rising sun.
+
+Except: the smoke detector above that bed, disconcerted by the lack of power running to it, was beeping. Loudly. Once a minute. Loudly and invisibly, and neck-breakingly overhead.
+
+So: plan B. Feel one’s way downstairs, rifle through one’s suitcase for toiletry kit and pajamas, and drive to hotel for night.
+
+Except: the car remained in a parking lot on the south end of campus, whence I drove to meet the airport shuttle at 4 am, Dec. 18.
+
+So: 2 am, Dec. 31, walk across deserted campus to car, drive to hotel, check in and get blissful night’s sleep.
+
+Except: hotel’s computer system was down, necessitating a 15 to 30 minute wait in the lobby for a room, and the use of one’s full faculties to avoid bursting into exhausted and defeated tears.
+
+So: finally got room, presented hotel bill to maintenance on return to campus, was gratified to find power was finally restored, spent very subdued New Year’s Eve over great Thai dinner, cheap champagne, and Dick Clark, before returning home to collapse exhaustedly into one’s own silent bed.
+
+Except: power outage resulted somehow in shut-down of hot water heater.
+
+I give. Here’s wishing everyone a peaceful, silent, well-lit, and warm 2003.
+

content/blog/2003-01-07-i-never-was-a-technical-guy-and-never-will-be.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: 'I Never Was a Technical Guy, and Never Will Be[^1]'
+date: '2003-01-07T13:50:43-05:00'
+permalink: /i-never-was-a-technical-guy-and-never-will-be/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+William Gibson has a [blog](http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp "Seriously.").
+
+[^1]: Salza, Giuseppe. [“Interview with William Gibson.”](http://www.eff.org/Publications/William_Gibson/salza.interview "Courtesy of the Electronic Frontier Foundation")
+

content/blog/2003-01-08-im-gonna-take-you-on-a-surfin-oh-you-know.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: "I'm Gonna Take You on a Surfin'... Oh, You Know"
+date: '2003-01-08T09:45:34-05:00'
+permalink: /im-gonna-take-you-on-a-surfin-oh-you-know/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+Am happily running the public beta of Apple’s very own browser, [Safari](http://www.apple.com/safari "Safari"). It’s got that groovy brushed-metal iInterface that grace all the hippest iApps, even despite its absence of iNess. It’s light-years faster than IE5, which was released for the Mac approximately a decade ago. And — as open-source supportive as I am — it’s far less clunky than Mozilla. Plus, did I mention its brushed-metal interface?
+
+I am, however, reserving judgment on Apple’s release of Keynote, the presentation software announced, in a head-spinning display of self-reflexivity, in Steve Jobs’s MacWorld keynote yesterday. On the one hand, if one must do presentations accompanied by what we used to call “visual aids,” how much better to create them in an environment not engineered by the Dark Side. On the other hand, what the world needs now is not a happily Apple-y PowerPoint, but *less* PowerPoint. Somebody, please, persuade me that Keynote will be a force for good in this world.
+

content/blog/2003-01-10-the-wasp-factory.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'The Wasp Factory'
+date: '2003-01-10T14:33:09-05:00'
+permalink: /the-wasp-factory/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+I have in the last few days finished reading Iain Banks’s [The Wasp Factory](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=53GEEMNHSE&isbn=0684853159&itm=1 "The Wasp Factory"), and find myself itching to talk about it. This deeply demented little novel was published nearly 20 years ago, but just fell into my path recently. I need advice from Banks fans — where to from here?
+
+I’m also sort of wondering whether I’m a complete idiot for not having seen the ending coming. I mean, I knew something was up — it was all just a little too pointedly odd — but I didn’t know what. And once I read the end, it all seemed so obvious that I was stunned I hadn’t been painfully aware of the truth about Frank all along.
+
+For those of you who haven’t read the novel, I’m working really hard here on not giving it away. But go read it, quick, and come back and talk to me. I’ll be waiting.
+

content/blog/2003-01-15-life-among-the-pre-rich.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: 'Life Among the Pre-Rich'
+date: '2003-01-15T12:57:58-05:00'
+permalink: /life-among-the-pre-rich/
+tags:
+    - politics
+---
+
+Or, [why](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/12BROO.html "NY Times") the Democrats keep shifting rightward in defiance of Marxist theory. With pointed analysis from “the sociologist Jennifer Lopez.” (Via [Arts & Letters Daily](http://www.aldaily.com "Arts & Letters Daily").)
+

content/blog/2003-01-15-you-havent-read-my-book-have-you.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: "You Haven't Read My Book, Have You?"
+date: '2003-01-15T23:23:48-05:00'
+permalink: /you-havent-read-my-book-have-you/
+tags:
+    - internets
+---
+
+Why doesn’t [Booknotes](http://www.booknotes.org/home/index.asp "Booknotes") sound more like [this](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1390395.stm "On the Beeb")? (Via [Bookslut](http://www.bookslut.com/blog.html "Bookslut").)
+
+\[UPDATE: Crap. And here I thought I was asking a [question](http://www.bookslut.com/2003_01_01_archive.html#87495852) that was snarky but at least original. Note to self: read all the way to end of blog entry before blogging in.\]
+

content/blog/2003-01-21-advance-reading.md

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+---
+title: 'Advance Reading'
+date: '2003-01-21T15:53:35-05:00'
+permalink: /advance-reading/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+It’s the first day of classes here at the College Just South of the Hill, and we’re all settling down with piles of books and crisp new notebooks. I’m hoping, this semester, to get some mileage out of those classes here in the land of Obsolescence; you can keep up with the readings yourself by checking out the Academic Belatedness link over there on the right.
+
+So the good news is that we’ve got a clean slate, a new semester, and we’re all pretty caffeinated and rarin’ to go. The downside, however, is that for the foreseeable future, all the reading I’m going to be doing will be re-reading. Honestly, when folks hear I teach contemporary fiction, they inevitably ask me whether I’ve read something I invariably haven’t, because they just don’t realize that I spend the bulk of my career reading the same 50 books over and over and over. (And over.)
+
+This re-reading feels like a particular loss right now, as I’ve spent the last couple of months both catching up on some things that came out last year and even reading a few things that have yet to be released. [One](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0374277826 "The Time of Our Singing") will hit the shelves tomorrow, as it turns out. [One](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0399149864 "Pattern Recognition") will be released next month. [One](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0743244249 "Cosmopolis") not until April. I’ve resisted writing about them to this point, being uncertain about the possible reviewerly embargoes on the texts. For the moment, however, I’ll bid my new reading adieu by making these few (ever-so-veiled) comments:
+
+Each is in differing respects a departure from the novelist’s earlier work.
+
+One brings to fruition two strains visible in the background of much of that earlier work, resulting in a novel of a scope and a sensitivity and a lyricism that one might be tempted to call transcendent.
+
+One shows its author leaving aside the whiz-bang concerns of the past — or the future — in favor of a real engagement with the present.
+
+One recapitulates the process of its author’s career, redeploying many of his earlier work’s set pieces and tropes, but does so with the effect of dismantling that earlier work, suggesting the very different world we live in now.
+

content/blog/2003-01-26-do-androids-dream-of-the-key-to-the-executive-washroom.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'Do Androids Dream of the Key to the Executive Washroom?'
+date: '2003-01-26T14:07:12-05:00'
+permalink: /do-androids-dream-of-the-key-to-the-executive-washroom/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+Spent much of yesterday re-reading [Philip K. Dick](http://www.philipkdick.com/ "'Not associated with the estate of Philip K. Dick.'")‘s [Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0345404475 "Do Androids...?") — though I was re-reading it in [this](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0345350472 "Really, do they?") groovy mass-market edition with the fabulous movie tie-in cover art, which is so thoroughly tied into the movie that the title has in fact been changed to *Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick)*. Love those parentheses.
+
+There’s been all kinds of analysis done on the film’s melding of past and future — a post-apocalyptic L.A. dressed up in 1940s clothing, a sort of noir-punk aesthetic. But the passage of time has done something weirdly similar to the book, I think, which is set in what is now our too-near future (2021, to be exact) but deeply trapped in the ethos of the 1950s. Much of this time-disjuncture revolves around the workings of the offices of the future. One can hardly fault Dick for having failed to imagine the ways that the computer would transform the workplace of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but for a moment so filled with revolutionary possibilities as the late 1960s were, Dick betrays a surprising lack of imagination about the office politics of the future. Sure, Deckard getting his predecessor’s notes on the andys he’s hunting on “carbon flimsies” surprised me for a moment, but I was even more taken aback to rediscover that the San Francisco police department’s second-string bounty hunter has his own secretary. Who’s an incorrigible gossip. Who refers to him as “Mr. Deckard.” Who places his vidphone calls for him. I kept half-expecting him to take a client out for a three-martini lunch and then phone to let the wife know he’d be bringing the chief home for dinner.
+
+The whole weird office-politics thing began to make a little more sense for me, though, when I found [this](http://www.twbookmark.com/books/35/1570420521/ "Time-Warner Audiobooks") audiobook version, read by Matthew Modine and Calista Flockhart. What makes that make sense, I’m not sure. But a universe that contains both Dick and Ally McBeal seems at least internally coherent.
+

content/blog/2003-01-29-information-security-begins-with-you.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: 'Information Security Begins With You!'
+date: '2003-01-29T14:39:56-05:00'
+permalink: /information-security-begins-with-you/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+The [Propaganda Remix Project](http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/PhotoAlbum1.html "Propaganda Remix"). Some of these are fantastic.
+

content/blog/2003-02-19-unplanned-absence-2.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'Unplanned Absence'
+date: '2003-02-19T18:32:44-05:00'
+permalink: /unplanned-absence-2/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+Sorry for the protracted radio silence; we’ve been in the home stretch of a search here, and I’ve been spending an astonishing amount of time going to job talks, conducting interviews, and generally glad-handing about. Then, in the interstices, there’s been that little teaching thing, and sometime late at night, occasionally, preparation for said teaching. So all my grand plans about regularity-in-posting were very quickly abandoned.
+
+As of today, however, the search is complete, and I can get back to something approaching something like a regularly insane schedule. Expect more scintillating book-talk soon.
+
+In the meantime, however, I’ll share with you this tidbit: yesterday in class, we wrapped up our discussion of Bruce Sterling’s [Schismatrix](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0441003702 "Schismatrix") (which is pronounced with a short /a/, instead of like a split-personality version of the Keanu Reeves [movie](http://video.barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?EAN=85392456628 "The Matrix, of course"), as Sterling rather pissily points out in the introduction to our edition), and I was very proud not to have to be the one to point out that the end state of the character Kitsune puts one a bit too much in mind of a giant vagina planet.
+

content/blog/2003-02-24-worst-novel-ever.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: 'Worst. Novel. Ever.'
+date: '2003-02-24T11:26:28-05:00'
+permalink: /worst-novel-ever/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+Gene Weingarten at the Washington Post believes himself to have found “the worst novel ever published in the English language.” Moreover, he has gotten an [interview](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57528-2003Feb11.html "Washington Post") with Robert Burrows, the author of said opus, [The Great American Parade](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0972357505 "Not available at a Barnes & Noble near you"). It’s a shame, quite frankly, because the idea of the parade itself, in the hands of David Foster Wallace, say, or William Gaddis would be a set-piece of beauty. One quickly understands from the interview, however, that it simply was not to be.
+

content/blog/2003-02-27-back-from-the-undead.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'Back from the Undead'
+date: '2003-02-27T16:14:18-05:00'
+permalink: /back-from-the-undead/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+Well, almost.
+
+Oprah’s back, that is; she announced today that the book club will soon be [back](http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=2301008 "Reuters") from the dead. Interestingly, Oprah’s Book Club, Take Two will focus on the much-maligned Dead White Men of the world of “literary classics.” Says Oprah, she “cannot imagine a world where the great works of literature are not read.”
+
+Is it a coincidence that a mere 24 hours earlier, another cultural phenomenon announced the imminent [death](http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=2302077 "Reuters") of its undead realm?
+

content/blog/2003-03-06-whether-you-like-it-or-not.md

@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+---
+title: 'Whether You Like It Or Not'
+date: '2003-03-06T20:06:56-05:00'
+permalink: /whether-you-like-it-or-not/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+The following exchange is available for your further perusal in the most recent issue of [Harpers](http://www.harpers.org "Harpers").
+
+> TOTO RECALL?
+> 
+> From an October email exchange between Holger Turck and EMI Music in Germany. Translated from the German by Ben Ewing.
+> 
+> \*\*\*
+> 
+> Dear Sir or Madam,
+> 
+> Yesterday I purchased the copy-protected TOTO CD “Through the Looking Glass.” The reverse side reads: “It is designed to be compatible with audioplayers, DVD players and PC-OS, MS Windows 95, Pentium II 233 MHz 64MB RAM or higher.” This statement is definitely false.
+> 
+> – In reality, only tracks 1-8 are playable in my DVD player. I don’t own an ordinary CD player anymore, making this CD worthless.  
+>   
+> – In reality, my Macintosh plays only tracks 1-7. Result: the CD is worthless.  
+>   
+> – In reality, my PC would play the CD only if I were to use the software found on the CD itself. I am very careful when selecting the software that I install on my computer, and I refuse to be coerced into using proprietary software. As a result, this CD is worthless.
+> 
+> This is all the more regrettable, as I am a dedicated fan of the group TOTO and own–among other items–all of their albums. It’s a pity that YOU have prevented me from being able to add their most recent work to my collection.
+> 
+> You altogether ignore the simple fact that every purchaser is–by law–allowed to make a copy of his purchased CD. Your behavior is altogether illegal. As a result, I will not purchase another CD that is outfitted with copy-protection from your firm or from any other.
+> 
+> How do you plan to win me back as a customer in the future?
+> 
+> Sincerely,  
+>   
+> Holger Turck
+> 
+> \*\*\*
+> 
+> Dear Mr. Turck,
+> 
+> We will spare ourselves the trouble of addressing those observations in your email which are obviously uninformed. Simply realize: more than 250 million blank, recordable discs and tapes were sold and used this year, in comparison to 213 million prerecorded albums. Even without formal study in economics, it should be clear to anyone reading this that the music industry cannot continue to exist if the trend holds. The widespread copying of prerecorded audio material via the burning of CD-Rs can only be countered one way: namely, copy protection. We fear, however, that all these facts will not interest you in the slightest, as these measures will herald the end of free music, which surely won’t please you at all.
+> 
+> Should you legitimately have a playback problem with the CD that you complained about, we would ask that you specify the exact CD player model for us. The scenario you put forth–multiple players failing to play the CD–can only be the stuff of fairy tales, given our experiences.
+> 
+> In the event that you plan to protest future releases of copy-protected CDs, we can assure you that it is only a matter of months until more or less every CD released worldwide will include copy protection. To that end, we will do everything in our power, whether you like it or not.
+> 
+> Sincerely,  
+>   
+> Your EMI Team
+
+Had this been online, I’d have linked instead of reprinting. I had a brief attack of scruples over this potential violation of copyright, blah blah blah, but it occurs to me that such anxieties about what amounts to fair use (moreover, in this case involving a magazine clearly in opposition to the alarmingly Germanic tactics of EMI) is precisely why fair use has eroded so disastrously in this country. So fight the power, man. Happily, this came to me today via e-mail, so I’m already redistributing a redistribution.
+
+To top it off, I’d be thrilled to get a cease and desist letter — it would mean someone was still reading.
+

content/blog/2003-03-11-meetings-none-of-us-is-as-dumb-as-all-of-us.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: 'Meetings: None of Us Is as Dumb as All of Us'
+date: '2003-03-11T20:55:20-05:00'
+permalink: /meetings-none-of-us-is-as-dumb-as-all-of-us/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+> Perhaps you’re a wholly reasonable person, with the potential to become an irrational fool? Perhaps you’re a team player, with a potentially argumentative loner lurking about inside you? Or perhaps you’re a dreamer, within whom lives a potentially disillusioned grouse, simply waiting to take flight on the wings of bitterness?
+
+If so, [this](http://www.despair.com/demotivators/indem.html "Despair, Inc.") is the company for you.
+

content/blog/2003-03-12-big-readers.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: 'Big Readers'
+date: '2003-03-12T07:30:46-05:00'
+permalink: /big-readers/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+[Book Magazine](http://www.bookmagazine.com "Book Magazine") has released this [list](http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue27/bigreaders.shtml "Book Magazine's list") of “America’s Biggest Readers” (via [Arts & Letters Daily](http://www.aldaily.com/ "Arts & Letters Daily")). Each member of this list of folks consumes up to 20 books a week, with a diet ranging from romances through mysteries to the classics.
+
+Something about this article completely freaks me out. Is it the sense one gets of a kind of impending textual obesity in these folks from the relentless reading-is-like-eating rhetoric (which I’ve of course reproduced above)? Is it the embarrassingly American celebration of quantity over quality? Is it that the nominees for [Biggest Reading Writer](http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue27/bigreaders.shtml#Writer "Biggest Reading Writer") and [Biggest Reader in the White House](http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue27/bigreaders.shtml#WhiteHouse "Biggest Reader in the White House") are themselves such horrifying spokespersons for the literary impulse in this country?
+

content/blog/2003-03-13-who-was-that-masked-literary-researcher.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'Who Was That Masked Literary Researcher?'
+date: '2003-03-13T21:59:33-05:00'
+permalink: /who-was-that-masked-literary-researcher/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+According to [The Memory Hole](http://www.thememoryhole.org/lit/pynchon-boeing.htm "The Memory Hole"), Thomas Pynchon’s lost-ish writings for Boeing, dating between early 1960 and mid-1962, may in fact resurface. These technical articles, circulated internally among Boeing employees and clients, ran without attribution. They still exist in the Boeing archives, however, and according to Michael J. Lombardi, Boeing’s historian (about which, who knew they had one), copies of these publications have recently been given to “a literary researcher” who hoped to divine which were products of the Pynchon pen.
+
+In a particularly Pynchonesque twist, Lombardi cannot remember who the researcher was (or at least “no longer has that information”), but claims that “\[t\]he researcher was going to write a book — so you might want to keep watch for that.”
+
+I am now imagining corporate plot, or mysterious auction, or author in disguise, capering away with the goods. Is there any doubt among Pynchon readers that the true locus of the Boeing apocrypha, like the will of Pierce Inverarity, will never be wholly known? (Via [The Morning News](http://www.themorningnews.org "The Morning News").)
+

content/blog/2003-03-13-why-not-attack-evilania.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'Why Not Attack Evilania?'
+date: '2003-03-13T23:20:15-05:00'
+permalink: /why-not-attack-evilania/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+Whew… the posts just keep coming fast and furious this week. Spring break began for me today (well, yesterday, given that it’s now after midnight) at 5 pm, and I’m just raring to go.
+
+To go to D.C., that is, where I intend to lie around slothfully and read escapist fiction, thus protecting myself from the impending (and, there, surrounding) awfulness.
+
+You’ll note that there’s been precious little here about said awfulness; I find the present state of affairs too depressing to contemplate. Fortunately, someone’s managed to find that happy medium between political relevance and not making me want to hang myself with my dental floss: if you’ve got a few minutes, check out [Bang Zoom TV’s Hercubush](http://www.bangzoomtv.com/hercubush.htm "Hercubush!"). These guys really have all the answers.
+

content/blog/2003-03-25-now-thats-significant.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: "Now That's Significant"
+date: '2003-03-25T17:07:57-05:00'
+permalink: /now-thats-significant/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+Anybody who knows me (or who’s been bored enough to [peruse](/hey_wheres_the_joy_of_cooking/) the [archives](/influence_part_ii/) of [obsolescence](/because_you_didnt_ask/)) knows that I’m a sucker for the book list. Some of those same folks know that I’m teaching a [class](http://pages.pomona.edu/~kf004747/55/) this semester on science fiction.
+
+You can imagine my excitement, then, to discover this list of [the Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years](http://www.sfbc.com/doc/content/sitelets/FSE_Sitelet_Theme_2.jhtml?SID=nmsfctop50&_requestid=461 "The Science Fiction Book Club") (a moniker then qualified by the years 1953-2002, which is good to know), put together by the good folks at the Science Fiction Book Club. Note that the top ten seem to be, in fact, the Top Ten; 11-50 are in alphabetical order by title, which would be a mighty coincidence, if these were actual rankings.
+
+Of these 50, however, I’ve read very, very few. My interests run a bit more to the cyberpunk, on the one hand, and to the feminist/”minority”/queer, on the other, than do the interests of the SFBC. But I’ve thus far this semester taught 6, 8, 30 and 43, and we just today finished up 20 (whew). I suppose I’ll have to spend some of the summer filling in some of my listy gaps. Any advice about the list from the more knowledgable — which books on the list are vastly overrated; which books have been criminally forgotten — would be greatly appreciated. (Link via [defective yeti](http://www.defectiveyeti.com "defective yeti").)
+

content/blog/2003-03-28-dear-waste.md

@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+---
+title: 'Dear W.A.S.T.E.'
+date: '2003-03-28T13:54:48-05:00'
+permalink: /dear-waste/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+In over the [transom](http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu "San Narciso (Pomona) College Pynchon site") today:
+
+> Having looked through a few pages of “Gravity’s Rainbow”, I found to my shock and horror that it was almost as if I were reading the confessions of a sort of Moriarty-type criminal. I believe that this evil man has links to Nazis, such as Nazi ‘scientists’ who were brought into the United States in 1946 under ‘Operation Paper Clip’ and the ‘Invisible Empire’ of the Ku Klux Klan, the militia groups, and possibly Illuminati.
+> 
+> This man is evil. He has personally terrorized me. He is extremely perverse and his evil quite unpredictable. The beginning page and the end page of ‘the book’ seem to me, the confession of a twisted ‘fantasy’ to destroy ‘the Crystal Palace’ — the fall of a crystal palace, but then the reference to breaking glass? — perhaps the ‘Crystal Palace’ being symbolically some sort of skyscraper, and reading the last page, the sort of limerick, “‘til the light that hath brought the towers low” — I thought of the ‘Twin Towers’, the World Trade Center, completed in 1972 and 1973. Page 369 is a limerick about a drug-induced introduction to an Arab ‘jinni’?
+> 
+> I think he even tried to diabolis \[sic\] my own fate through this book — though how he came upon me is a mystery. I’m from the Philippines. What’s interesting is that on one page he writes about ‘something’ rolling about in Malabacat. I don’t know if there is a Malabacat, but there is a Mabalacat in the Philippines near where the US military used to have an air base. Of course, that ‘something’ isn’t me.
+> 
+> Pages 430 and 431 — the most recent edition that costs $16.95 (and that I had to purchase twice, because of having dismissed his diabolicalness, both times, ripping up both copies) and has the rocket designs on the cover, the paragraph in between the pages seem to remind me of the American nazi terrorist threats of the late William Pierce who wrote “The Turner Diaries”. “Depending on what didn’t come from where, you know which factories had been bombed, what railway connectioned severed(?) …”, etc. and seems to be a diabolical promise of the neo-Nazi movement ‘avenging’ the allied bombing of Dresden.
+> 
+> There is a paragraph about ‘The Moss Creature stirs’ and I can’t remember the page that it is on. Then there is a reference to ‘cherry red’. Pynchon seems to be making a joke while at the same time contemplating a diabolical act of evil — ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’, The Rolling Stones, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ with the lyrics “we decided that we would have a soda, my favorite flavor cherry red” — with the end of the paragraph beginning with (Turn? What is turn?), and seems to be a subliminal attempt to try to terrorize Ted Turner, the multi-billionaire.
+> 
+> Pages 413-414 or 414-415, after ‘Victim In A Vaccum’ have particular relevance to me. The paragraph that reads about war starting as a depression. Then the threat of through willful evil, the suffocating or strangulation of a man’s throat, perhaps in his sleep and then the numbers talking about ‘it is isotropically distributed’ and ‘no, this is not a conspiracy’ and ‘it is not aimed at me’.
+> 
+> 2 summers ago, living in a different apartment in the Apartment Complex I am staying at now here in \[name deleted\] Apartments in \[city and state deleted\], I noticed on the air-conditioning unit, an Arcoaire air-conditioning unit (a company of Heil — obviously a Ku Klux Klan-neo-Nazi company), a metal sign that read CASE INDOOR COIL CONTAINS DCATAO24. I could not find a listing on the EPA IRIS website, and indeed had to go to a dictionary and through educated guesswork, thinking of fluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons, I decided to look up Dichloro– and found Dichloroacetic Acid. I looked it up on the Internet and Dichloroacetic Acid freezes below 48 degrees Fahrenheit and I concluded that DCATAO24 must be Dichloroacetic Acid Oxidase 24? and that it might have been isotopic — ‘isotropic’ ha ha ha, perhaps being a pun on TAO, and then of course, not a reference to the Tao Teh Ching, and is there a sick pun on Dow Chemicals?
+> 
+> Also, ‘tao’ means people in Filipino language.
+> 
+> Either way, I have concluded that Michigan Militia and Klan, if not escaped Nazis, were definitely a part of designing the air-conditioning units in the apartment complex I live in.
+> 
+> I am hoping that things are going good for you and your friends. If you believe what I have told you about, please let them know. Either way, please let them know about this e-mail that I have sent.
+
+Consider yourselves warned.
+

content/blog/2003-04-02-simshakespeare.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+title: SimShakespeare
+date: '2003-04-02T09:30:58-05:00'
+permalink: /simshakespeare/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+Yesterday, when our good friends at [The Morning News](http://www.themorningnews.org "The Morning News") linked to this [article](http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,925638,00.html "The Observer") in the London *Observer*, which reports that the Royal Shakespeare Society “aims to prosper with Tempest videogame,” I was stupefied. Flabbergasted. And very, very curious, about which aspects of the play might become interactive, about what that interaction might look like, and about what pornographic imaginary drove the article’s author to suggest that “*n the privacy of a player’s bedroom, the monstrous Caliban could perhaps win the hand of the fair Miranda for the first time.”*
+
+Then late last night, as I was falling asleep, it suddenly dawned on me that I’d been had. I’d been *got*, in fact, by an ingenious April Fool’s joke. I mean, please: how gullible am I?
+
+So this morning, I googled \[tempest videogame\] to see what I came up with, and lo, the article was still there. Dated March 30. Not an April Fool’s prank at all.
+
+And now I don’t know what to think.
+

content/blog/2003-04-03-the-poetry-of-dh-rumsfeld.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: 'The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld'
+date: '2003-04-03T00:00:35-05:00'
+permalink: /the-poetry-of-dh-rumsfeld/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+From [Slate](http://slate.msn.com/id/2081042/ "Slate"). Need I say more?
+

content/blog/2003-04-14-how-you-know-postmodernism-is-dead.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+title: 'How You Know Postmodernism Is Dead'
+date: '2003-04-14T09:20:26-04:00'
+permalink: /how-you-know-postmodernism-is-dead/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+The [link](http://www.english.pomona.edu/pomo/ "Yes, I know it's dead.") will tell you so.
+
+Anyone who can report to me on the whereabouts of my (okay, sure, long defunct, but still) website will be added to the pantheon of Heroes of Obsolescence.
+
+This means you, oh college webmaster.
+
+UPDATE, 3:05 p.m., PST: Forget the college webmaster. The *department* webmaster, on the other hand, is a genius. Thanks, Noah!
+

content/blog/2003-04-23-can-you-hear-me-now.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+title: 'Can You Hear Me Now?'
+date: '2003-04-23T13:45:08-04:00'
+permalink: /can-you-hear-me-now/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+So the antenna broke off of my cell phone the other day, and I’m imagining all that electromagnetic activity, with no other focal point, penetrating my skull and gradually radicalizing all my brain cells.
+
+Couple that with my general desire for a new handheld to replace the old Palm V I’m still using, and it seems to me it’s time for a new PDA/phone combo.
+
+I’m a Mac user, so I’m sticking with the Palm OS options. So what I’ve got in front of me seems to be the Handspring Treo (either the 300, with the Sprint PCS network, or the 270, with either Cingular or T-Mobile), the Palm Tungsten W (with AT&T Wireless), or the Kyocera 7135 (with Verizon Wireless). My current service is with Verizon, and so there’s an ease to the Kyocera — new phone, not new service.
+
+But as long as I’m changing things…
+
+Are there pressing reasons to go with another model than the Kyocera? Are any of the other cellular services better than Verizon? What would I miss by not switching?
+
+Any advice, opinions, or general ranting that can be passed my way would be much appreciated.
+

content/blog/2003-05-01-life-in-the-out-of-the-limelight-limelight.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: 'Life in the Out-of-the-Limelight Limelight'
+date: '2003-05-01T08:05:50-04:00'
+permalink: /life-in-the-out-of-the-limelight-limelight/
+tags:
+    - reading
+---
+
+One of my pals here in the English Department at the College Just South of the Hill was the subject of a [very odd feature](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-apr-27-ca-brown27-story.html "L.A. Times") in this past Sunday’s *L. A. Times*. Needless to say, things have been weird in the hallowed halls this week, not least because of our discovery that we’re in a — and I quote — “geographically undesirable place from which to generate attention.” Because, you know, we’re 35 miles from downtown Los Angeles, and civilization pretty much stops 25 miles out.
+
+I’m not sure, though, whether yesterday’s [correction](http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-a2-correx30.10apr30,1,3496570.story "L.A. Times, part two") makes things better or worse.
+

content/blog/2003-05-02-adventures-in-technology-part-two.md

@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+---
+title: 'Adventures in Technology, Part Two'
+date: '2003-05-02T08:45:17-04:00'
+permalink: /adventures-in-technology-part-two/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+I had a microwave. It weighed something near unto 50 pounds, and it cost me something on the order of $400 when I bought it 18 years ago. (The number of numbers in the previous sentence begins to make this look like a word problem — answer: 44 cents per pound per year!) This microwave was a workhorse, by any standards; never a day’s trouble, still plugging along in its golden years. But it had two significant drawbacks:
+
+1. No turntable. What this meant was that I had to employ the decidedly twentieth-century technology of STOPPING the microwave, OPENING it, and manually TURNING the item being heated in order to achieve anything like a uniform warmness.
+
+2. A mere 600 watts. The implications here are substantive: the average bag of popcorn took 4:30 to pop, rather than the 2:15 of your contemporary microwave.
+
+I’d been thinking for some time about a little update, particularly now that the stores are practically paying their customers to carry microwaves away, but hadn’t ever actually moved on this idea. Then my mother came to visit, and we jointly decided that the time had come. A brief journey to a local [shopping establishment](http://www.target.com) ensued, and a shiny new [microwave](http://www.samsungusa.com/cgi-bin/nabc/product/b2c_product_detail.jsp?prod_id=MW1150WA%252fXAA) (in Medium Size!) was procured.
+
+Brought said microwave home. Placed on counter top. Followed set-up instructions.
+
+Heated water for tea.
+
+Popped popcorn.
+
+Heated water for tea.
+
+Reheated leftovers. (Rejoiced in the speed of reheating and the uniformity of temperature.)
+
+Heated water for tea.
+
+Noticed odd scorch marks on interior facing panel of microwave, as well as what appeared to be a *melted* spot on the corresponding part of the oven door.
+
+Unplugged microwave. Called customer support. Was told “no, ma’am, that is in fact not right.” Was further told microwave was now unsafe for use. Was told that I would receive an e-mail message with instructions for return of microwave to manufacturer.
+
+Waited.
+
+Called customer support. Was asked to verify the model and serial numbers of microwave. Was told that I would receive a letter with instructions for return of microwave to manufacturer. Was told, upon further inquiry, that the process of return and replacement should take around two weeks.
+
+Waited.
+
+Received letter ten days later. Letter includes the following reassurances and instructions:
+
+> We can assure you that the paint peeling, from the inside cavity of your oven, is an isolated incident and is not inherent with this or any other microwave oven we manufacture. In every effort to resolve this matter fairly as possible for all parties involved, we are prepared to replace your microwave with a new one of equal value.
+>
+> Please package the unit in any cardboard box that will accommodate the size and weight. **<u>Insert packing material to prevent shipping damage.</u>** Ship it to the address below (**pre-paid by you**), including the RA# on the outside of the carton for proper routing.
+>
+> \[address deleted\]
+>
+> Upon receipt of the parcel, we will send a new microwave of equal value (determined by current inventory) to your address. This replacement microwave picks up the balance of the original warranty or 90-days, whichever comes first. This offer expires in two months. \[emphasis in original\]
+
+Weighed dollar value of microwave against cross-country shipping costs, as well as possibility of receiving randomly selected and possibly “re-conditioned” microwave with vastly reduced warranty.
+
+Packed up microwave and returned it to local shopping establishment, where it was happily exchanged for an identical microwave.
+
+Have thus far heated water for tea. Will keep you posted.
+

content/blog/2003-05-06-william-gibson.md

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+---
+title: 'William Gibson...'
+date: '2003-05-06T21:29:02-04:00'
+permalink: /william-gibson/
+tags:
+    - blogging
+    - writing
+---
+
+…[no longer](http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,58607,00.html "Wired") has a blog. Or won’t soon, anyhow. Claiming concerns that, as he puts it, “the ecology of writing novels wouldn’t be able to exist if I’m in daily contact,” he’s planning to discontinue the [blog](http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp) he started earlier in the year to coincide with the release of [Pattern Recognition](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0399149864).
+
+This move begs the question: are blogging and traditional writing really incompatible? Can one reside only in the novel or in the network?
+

content/blog/2003-05-27-obsolete-and-away.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: 'Obsolete and Away'
+date: '2003-05-27T08:49:46-04:00'
+permalink: /obsolete-and-away/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+We’ve gone on a bit of a hiatus here, as you can no doubt tell. The hellish end of semester rituals gave way to travel preparations, which gave way to the actual travel. Planned Obsolescence is spending the week in Amsterdam, and will next week be in Prague. We’ll be back in mid-June with newish reports, which will, as is inevitable in these parts, not remain new very long.
+

content/blog/2003-06-16-eerste-things-eerste.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+title: 'Eerste Things Eerste'
+date: '2003-06-16T07:30:27-04:00'
+permalink: /eerste-things-eerste/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+Yes, all you impatient readers (well, [Bill](/obsolete-and-away/)), we’re back Stateside, and mostly recovered from the nine-timezone, two-day, train, plane, and automobile journey from Central Europe back to the Far Southwest. Planned Obsolescence’s European Vacation was glorious in most every way — fabulous food, plentiful beer, kind people, fantastic weather, and all the art and architecture one could possibly require. Pictures of said vacation *may* be forthcoming shortly. I can make no promises, however; living still back in the dark ages of film, I am subject to all manner of variables, including but not limited to the length of time it takes me to bring the film in to be processed, the unknown quality of the resulting images, and the forthcomingness of our good friends at Kodak (or my crotchety scanner) with the images’ digital companions.
+
+Before the images, however, there are the languages. And here’s what I want to talk about first. Now, I’m not exactly a candidate to replace [Bill Bryson](http://www.randomhouse.com/features/billbryson/home.html) as [England’s favorite travel writer](http://www.boston.com/globe/search/stories/books/bill_bryson.htm), but I get around okay. My first trip to Europe was made when I was ten; my last (barring this one) a year ago. However, this was my first trip as an adult (that journey as a ten-year-old was to [Belgium](http://www.kapellen.be/), where the Major Multinational had stationed my father) to a country whose primary language would not be taught in a department of Romance Languages, and my first trip ever to a country whose language bears *no relationship whatsoever* to English.
+
+This sounds like a small point, but it was absolutely stunning to me, to find myself in a place where the three languages I’ve studied and my grad-school courses in the diachronic development (a.k.a. history) of the English language did me No Good At All. My primary concern, prior to the journey, was getting around the Netherlands in the total absence of any knowledge of Dutch, a concern whose primariness I can only attribute to the fact that I was going there first. As it turns out, though, there was no problem, in part because of the astonishing bilinguality of contemporary Amsterdam — which I suppose only stands to reason, given that a significant segment of the city’s population is in the business of catering to the British and American stoner tourists who flood the place all year, but which nonetheless surprised me, as I never encountered a single resident of Amsterdam who wasn’t proficient, if not fluent, in English.
+
+Supporting this bilinguality, though — and thus the fact that I never even needed to consult a phrasebook to find out where the toilets were or how much something cost — is the fact that, once you’ve adjusted to the overflow of vowels, and figured out such little correspondences as the \[lijk\]=\[ly\] thing, Dutch begins to look awfully familiar. Not sure whether the boutique you want to explore is open? The sign reading “geopenned” will give you a helpful clue. Wondering how many days a week the store does business? “Dagelijks” is not so hard to parse. Curious about the headlines? A paper announcing “Toulouse in de greep van seksschandaal” readily submits itself to your self-inflated interpretative skills.
+
+What I had not prepared myself for was the radical otherness of Czech. Granted, English has made its inroads into Prague, too, as it became in the early Havel era the hip destination for the Gen-X expatriate entrepreneur, but step outside the usual tourist pathways and that bit of Western-centrism dries up quickly. And none of my dilettantish linguistic skills served me at all in piecing together information on signs. If you’re looking to buy some groceries, would a sign reading “železárské zbozí” or “obchod s potravinami” seem more likely? If a site is closed “utery” and “streda,” can you go today? Once you’ve managed to find the toilets, are you a “muzi” or a “zeny”? (Okay, that last one is not so much an issue, as most of the toilets you’re seeking are (a) in tourist-appropriate locales and (b) have some manner of international symbol conveying men-ness and women-ness. But do note as well that the above examples offer only an approximation of the actual signs, as Czech is riddled with accents that I cannot persuade my keyboard to replicate. Sensible OS X keeps asking me why I’d want to place an accent aigu over a y, and what on earth a hacek is anyway.) Imagine yourself, finally, in the grip of a minor but embarrassing female ailment, one you’d prefer not to have to discuss with the helpful and kind but quite formal concierge. Would you have any reason to suspect that a “lékárna” is where you need to go?
+
+Anyway, much of my Prague visit was a venture into total, if temporary, illiteracy, a state useful for one who imagines herself a worldlijk literary intellectual to experience every now and then.
+

content/blog/2003-06-17-moving-day.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: 'Moving Day'
+date: '2003-06-17T06:43:55-04:00'
+permalink: /moving-day/
+tags:
+    - work
+---
+
+We’re moving office today, as our building is going to be renovated over the next twelve months. Yesterday, I packed up everything that wasn’t to be moved directly into my temporary office and lugged it home. Today, I’m headed in to watch the movers manhandle my books, and — more importantly — to say goodbye to my dusty and slightly gray but nonetheless palacial and windowed office. The new below-ground antiseptic pre-fab paper-walled digs await. Network and phone service should be operational by sometime mid-day. Wish me luck.
+

content/blog/2003-06-18-but-do-they-play-bar-mitzvahs.md

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+---
+title: 'But Do They Play Bar Mitzvahs?'
+date: '2003-06-18T08:44:44-04:00'
+permalink: /but-do-they-play-bar-mitzvahs/
+tags:
+    - travel
+---
+
+One of the things one does as a tourist in Prague — one of those musts, like visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or seeing the Empire State Building in New York — is to make the across-the-Charles-Bridge and up-the-hill hike to the [Hrad](http://archiv.radio.cz/pictures/hrad1-eng.html), the castle that looms over both the city and all its literary representations.
+
+The spires, interestingly enough, that are so visible and recognizable in the many [postcard images](http://www.aroundprague.com/photo_Prague/PHAHRAD.jpg) of the castle, belong not to the castle itself, but to St. Vitus’s Cathedral, contained within the Hrad’s third courtyard. We took a quick spin through the cathedral, which was gorgeously stained-glass lit but impossibly tour-group mobbed, and then wandered outside and around the perimeter of the cathedral.
+
+We meandered past the massive obelisk (modern, and wholly unlabeled) that stands to one side, and were headed further into the courtyard, when I heard music — oom-pah music — emanating from a doorway on our right. The doorway opened onto a staircase (which, as it turns out, is called the Bull Staircase, and which was designed by the same architect responsible for the obelisk), and it was clear that the music was coming from below, so we headed down to investigate.
+
+It was thus that we stumbled upon a public performance of the Castle Guard and Czech Police Orchestra.
+
+This is a concept, I think, that could quite possibly revolutionize law enforcement in the United States. Imagine: The LAPD Orchestra. The NYPD Concert Choir. The FBI Ballroom Dance Team.
+

content/blog/2003-06-19-harry-potter-mania.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+title: 'Harry Potter Mania'
+date: '2003-06-19T10:30:22-04:00'
+permalink: /harry-potter-mania/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+Yes, mania. According to the [Beeb](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3002520.stm), not only did the [Daily News](http://www.nydailynews.com) violate the strictest of literary embargoes by running a story that contained “excerpts and details” about the imminent fifth volume in the series, [Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?ISBN=043935806X), but a Canadian woman (identified only as “Melissa”) was apparently able to purchase a copy of the book at a local Wal-Mart after the store mistakenly put the book on its shelves several days early.
+
+Fortunately for we poor consumers, the Daily News has been slapped with a lawsuit, and, as the article reports, “Wal-Mart has launched an investigation as to how the books ended up on display.”
+
+The good folks at Scholastic, for their part, are at great pains to explain the altruistic reasons for the embargo, the lawsuit, the investigations, the prosecutions, and so on. As reported by the [Daily News](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/93703p-85018c.html) itself, ” ‘The book was embargoed \[until 12:01 a.m. Saturday\] so all kids would have it at the same time, and not to spoil it for the kids,’ Scholastic spokeswoman Judy Corman said.” And in the BBC story, “A Scholastic spokesman said the company hoped ‘this unfortunate situation will not spoil the surprise for millions of children around the country who have been eagerly awaiting the book.’ ”
+
+Of course, none of this would have anything to do with [hype](http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/93714p-85020c.html), would it?
+

content/blog/2003-06-20-oops-2.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: Oops.
+date: '2003-06-20T09:12:09-04:00'
+permalink: /oops-2/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+I just discovered this morning that I missed my own one-year anniversary; Planned Obsolescence made its inauspicious debut exactly one year and two days ago, broadcasting from the sunny shores of Waikiki.
+
+Here’s the part that makes me want to overlook the milestone: in that year, I seem to have *lost* rather than *gained* a readership. Or I have stunned what readers remain into silence. So I’m left, as one does at such major life junctures, contemplating my options for the future: A massive self-promotional campaign on other sites far and wide? A shift from the dry pseudo-intellectualism of the last year’s entries, which fail either to entertain or to enlighten, to a lurid recounting of personal peccadilloes? Or perhaps — and given my profession, this seems most likely — just a plodding continuation of the current work, but with an attention to the regular publication schedule that was so often let slide this year.
+
+Anyhow, to those of you still frequenting these parts: thanks for joining me. Here’s to more, better, soon.
+

content/blog/2003-06-23-split-decision.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: 'Split Decision'
+date: '2003-06-23T08:29:57-04:00'
+permalink: /split-decision/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+According to the wire services, the Supreme Court has issued a [split decision](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/23/politics/23WIRE-COURT.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1056385412-PKuV7eix3z5teuEIAbgn8Q "NY Times; subscription and annoying ad-viewing required") in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, siding with the law school on the constitutionality of its diversity policy, but declaring the undergraduate school’s admissions policy to be unconstitutional. An overflow of analysis should shortly follow.
+

content/blog/2003-06-24-and-the-winner-is.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+title: 'And the Winner Is...'
+date: '2003-06-24T08:50:24-04:00'
+permalink: /and-the-winner-is/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+I’d promised [some time back](/can_you_hear_me_now/) to keep you posted on my adventures in the land of consumer electronics. After a bit of comparison shopping, both for cell-phone/PDA combo devices and for wireless phone services, I wound up buying the [Kyocera 7135](http://www.kyocera-wireless.com/7100_phone/7100_phone_series.htm) and sticking it out with my friends at [Verizon](http://www.verizonwireless.com). My service is unimproved, except, of course, for having switched over to a plan that gives me more minutes. The phone, on the other hand, is a work of genius.
+
+[PC Magazine](http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1016277,00.asp) recently gave the 7135 their “Editor’s Choice” designation, and while the Mac-bigot in me wants to be suspicious of both their taste and their motives, I have to admit that I’m with them on this one. The phone itself is well-designed, with the standard phone keypad that the Treo is missing, but it’s in the plethora of features that the conjunction of phone and PalmOS bring together that the thing really shines.
+
+The first night I had it, I was sitting in a movie theater with a slew of my students, waiting for the preview screening of [Matrix Reloaded](http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/) to start, and kinda goofing around with some of the functions. I started up the Eudora client on the phone, wondering if I could check my e-mail; forty-five seconds and a few configurations later, my e-mail was merrily downloading to my phone. The cost? Plan minutes. That’s it.
+
+I begin to realize how my geekiness is shining all over that last paragraph, but I’m too enamored of this device to care.
+
+Oh, and BT: it’s got a built-in MP3 player. This, however, is its one true failing: the built-in memory in the thing is too small for any substantive music (16MB), and if you plug in a 64MB memory card, you can almost carry around a whole CD.
+
+The bottom line: I love this thing, but I’m still hoping for the mythical iPod/Palm/cellphone combo device to become a reality. But hopefully not too soon; I don’t want to suffer years of technoenvy until I feel I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of this one.
+

content/blog/2003-06-25-amidst-the-gnashing-of-teeth.md

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+---
+title: 'Amidst the Gnashing of Teeth'
+date: '2003-06-25T11:57:29-04:00'
+permalink: /amidst-the-gnashing-of-teeth/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+I’d hoped to write something of substance today, something considering the impact that the Supreme Court’s Monday half-decision on affirmative action will have on higher education, or perhaps another bit of reportage from the Amsterdam/Prague trip. Or maybe something looking forward to the new projects I’m actually beginning this summer.
+
+Instead, I am tinkering with the site. And tinkering is something I should really not be allowed to do, as we can see from [past](/aargh/) experience. (I’d intended to link to a second bit of stupidity there, but apparently I wisely chose not to broadcast it. Surprising to find myself showing discretion.)
+
+Anyhoo, here’s the newest bit of idiocy: In attempting to install [Dean Allen’s](http://www.textism.com) [Refer](http://www.textism.com/tools/refer/), I’ve been playing with the .htaccess file. <strike>Suddenly, my top-level directory page (which is just a redirect to this page) is *downloading* instead of opening.</strike> \[UPDATE: Fixed.\]
+
+Seriously, try it: <http://kfitz.info/blog/>. The index page is index.php, and I’ve got a line in my .htaccess that reads “DirectoryIndex index.php” — so what gives?
+
+Any insights would be most welcome. And hopefully I can get to that substantive writing soon.
+

content/blog/2003-06-26-hurray-for-the-so-called-homosexual-agenda.md

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+---
+title: "Hurray for the 'So-Called Homosexual Agenda'!"
+date: '2003-06-26T11:02:49-04:00'
+permalink: /hurray-for-the-so-called-homosexual-agenda/
+tags:
+    - politics
+---
+
+And hurray for the Supreme Court.
+
+According to the [New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/26/politics/26CND-GAYS.html "Gotta love that URL") (subscription required), the crotchety ones have briefly emerged from the 1950s to strike down, by a 6-to-3 margin, anti-sodomy laws across the country. Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy argued that gay people “are entitled to respect for their private lives,” and that “the state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”
+
+Now, here’s a sentence you’d never have expected to see attached to this story: “Joining Justice Scalia’s dissent were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.” Boy, I just never saw that one coming.
+
+Scalia is, however, always good for a chuckle; taking the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench, he made a point of noting that “the court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda,” before adding that he has nothing personal against homosexuals.
+
+Now, I hadn’t realized that those homosexual types had an actual [agenda](http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/26643#509447 "MeFi"), but I figure any agenda that keeps Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas out of my bedroom is okay by me. Where do I sign up?
+

content/blog/2003-06-27-actual-book-news-contained-herein.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'Actual Book News Contained Herein'
+date: '2003-06-27T10:47:32-04:00'
+permalink: /actual-book-news-contained-herein/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+Neal Stephenson, author of the riotous [Snow Crash](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553380958/plannedobsole-20), the [envy-inspiring](/po/archive/000039.php) [The Diamond Age](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553380966/plannedobsole-20), and the at times breathtaking [Cryptonomicon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060512806/plannedobsole-20) is returning to the Waterhouse and Shaftoe families for a bit of a prequel. On September 23, 2003, [Quicksilver](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0380977427/plannedobsole-20) hits the bookstores.
+
+A few things to note from that last link: *Quicksilver* will apparently run 944 pages, thus exceeding the heft of *Cryptonomicon* by a full 26 pages. More importantly, however, *Quicksilver* is billed as “volume 1” of [the Baroque Cycle](http://www.baroquecycle.com). Rumor has it said cycle will extend to three volumes.
+
+Which makes it seem possible that, by the time all’s written and printed, the saga of the Waterhouse and Shaftoe clans — and the interconnected history of post-Enlightenment technologies — could run to nearly 4000 pages. Move over, Michener.
+

content/blog/2003-06-27-hey-ive-got-an-rss-feed.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: 'Hey, I’ve Got an RSS Feed!'
+date: '2003-06-27T15:22:05-04:00'
+permalink: /hey-ive-got-an-rss-feed/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+To be found <strike>here</strike>. Who knew. God love [Movable Type](http://www.movabletype.org).
+
+\[UPDATE 5.27.04: post-migration, various feeds are now in the menubar.\]
+

content/blog/2003-06-30-on-not-writing.md

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+---
+title: 'On Not Writing'
+date: '2003-06-30T10:14:53-04:00'
+permalink: /on-not-writing/
+tags:
+    - blogging
+    - writing
+---
+
+I’ve intended for the last couple of weeks to begin writing in here about my new project, or about my intent toward that project, in any event. Or, for that matter, about things I’m reading, things I’m watching, and so on. It’s one of my goals over the course of this summer, in preparation for next year, to find ways to take this site seriously, both as a locus of research and as an avenue for new kinds of writing. I haven’t done so yet, obviously. I’m having trouble getting started, and I’m trying to figure out why.
+
+There are a couple of reasons that I came up with during my weekend ponderings. The first is a pair of unspoken, unexamined guidelines I seem to have set for myself (pretty much unawares) when I started this blog:
+
+1. Don’t write about work.
+
+2. Don’t write about your personal life.
+
+There are extremely sensible reasons for these guidelines: writing about work, for instance, as other bloggers have discovered, is a risky proposition. The good news about life in the academy, though, is that there are very few proprietary secrets that one risks giving away; in fact, a substantive enough percentage of my work is sufficiently personal that, in writing about it, I’d be writing about no one but me. The risk, then, resides in sending ideas out into the world before they’re fully formed, in inviting disagreement with whatever half-baked nonsense I produce. But then: isn’t that the point of an academic blog?
+
+Not writing about my personal life, on the other hand, seems pretty sensible to me, if I intend to take this space seriously as a professional venture. So that guideline will likely stand.
+
+The other major reason for my lack of writerly focus is bound up in the pragmatics of scholarly production: I completed my first book manuscript near the end of last summer, and spent the intervening academic year shopping for a publisher. It’s been a deeply demoralizing process, and I have a nice sheaf now of letters that tell me how smart and interesting my project sounds, but (a) our humanities list has been slashed, and so we can’t take your project on, or (b) the all-purpose ‘your project doesn’t quite fit our list.’ I’m happy to report that one brave press did offer to read the manuscript, and has sent it out to outside reviewers — which is the good news. The bad news is that I’ve been playing the waiting game since March, wondering whether the press will ultimately take the book, and if so, what revisions they’ll want from me, and thus as a consequence resisting getting started on a new project before the old one is safely in press.
+
+So here’s the question: how do you get started? How do you start writing about ideas you’re not yet sure about? How do you start allowing pieces of a new project to be seen publicly when you know they’re unfinished? And how do you start that new project when the previous one’s still lingering in the background?
+

content/blog/2003-07-01-academic-superstardom-and-its-costs.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+title: 'Academic Superstardom (and Its Costs)'
+date: '2003-07-01T09:44:27-04:00'
+permalink: /academic-superstardom-and-its-costs/
+tags:
+    - academia
+---
+
+There’s a fascinating conversation going on in two different posts on [Invisible Adjunct](http://www.invisibleadjunct.com "Invisible Adjunct") ([post 1](http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000175.html "post 1") | [post 2](http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000178.html "post 2")) about the celebrification of academia, and the potential costs of such a star system. IA herself (now that’s an interesting bit of gendering; why do I automatically assume that IA is female? Did I read something on the site that suggested such a pronoun use, or is there something gendered in the hierarchy of academia itself?) has put forward the theory that there’s a distinct connection between the rise of this star system and the parallel “adjunctification” of the academy, and that all of this is connected to the widespread devaluing of teaching at the university level, as well as the fall in the public sense of the value of a liberal arts education.
+
+I want to second this notion, and I know that a number of my grad-school colleagues would do so as well. We were enrolled during a period when our Private University in the Public Service went on a major buying spree, snapping up superstars right and left. With a few notable exceptions, those stars did not teach — or rather, while they did preside over classes, on both the graduate and the undergraduate levels, it was clear that their *raison d’?™tre* at the university was not fundamentally about the students. They led their classes, but had slews of teaching assistants who handled all that messy grading. They spoke occasionally with graduate students, but only those who had already demonstrated their own star potential. They certainly did not Advise. Thus, the burden of real instruction, and particularly undergraduate instruction, and especially the extra unremunerated labor that such instruction brings, increasingly fell upon junior faculty, adjuncts, and graduate teaching assistants.
+
+I find myself in an odd position with regard to this conversation, which I suppose is why I’m posting my thoughts here rather than in Invisible Adjunct’s comments. On the one hand, I’m without question one of the blessed: in a stroke that I can attribute to nothing but stupid luck, I got the job of my dreams right as I was finishing my dissertation, and have been here since. I can sympathize with those whom this system genuinely degrades into a second-class citizenry, but I can never empathize, as I just haven’t been there. On the other hand, I’m employed by a Small Liberal Arts College that is very keenly focused on undergraduate instruction and hands-on (and labor-intensive) interaction with students. We are also very conscious of the decreasing esteem in which such an education is held in the culture at large and very concerned to minimize our reliance upon adjunct labor. (This last should not necessarily be taken as a token of our virtue; an over-reliance on adjuncts can hurt one’s rankings among the other SLACs, a fact never too distant from our thoughts.) Working at a place like this, I have a measure of protection from the colder economic realities experienced at many larger universities, but a deeper investment in and commitment to teaching itself — a commitment that vastly diminishes the likelihood, because of the stresses on my time as well as the assumptions made by many in Research I schools about the lack of scholarly “seriousness” among faculty so committed, of my ever graduating into the realm of the academic elite. (Witness my manuscript-shopping travails in the [previous post](/on_not_writing/). How much easier is it to get your manuscript read when your letterhead says “Research I” than when it says “SLAC”?)
+
+Which is not to say that I’d ever want to be such a Star. I’m committed to the choices I’ve made, I love this place, I adore my students, and I thank my lucky stars every day to have landed here. But it’s hard not to feel oneself a bit preterite-ized when the Elect are given so many demonstrable signs of their Value.
+

content/blog/2003-07-02-future-writing.md

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+---
+title: 'Future Writing'
+date: '2003-07-02T08:38:04-04:00'
+permalink: /future-writing/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+One of the reasons I’m so [concerned](/on_not_writing/) about the relationship between this site and my current scholarly work (or lack thereof) is that my new project (or, as I’m beginning to think about it, my Imaginary New Project \[INP\]) focuses on the relationship between computer technologies and literary production. There’s been a tremendous amount of work done in this field from the computers-and-composition or computer-mediated-communication angle (see, only most obviously among possible links, [Kairos](http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/ "Kairos"), a journal of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy), and with the publication of Katherine Hayles’s [Writing Machines](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262582155/plannedobsole-20), there’s beginning to be interest in such connections in more mainstream lit-crit circles.
+
+What I’m interested in, however, is less what that relationship between writer and computer (or, for that matter, reader and computer) *actually* is than what we *imagine* it to be. How we envision, culturally speaking, the future of literature in the era of the Internet. In that fashion, the project is exploring (will explore) the mythologies, in the [Roland Barthes](http://orac.sund.ac.uk/~os0tmc/myth.htm "Lectures on Mythologies from the University of Sunderland, UK") sense, of the computer age.
+
+There’s a connection to this here blog, though, that I haven’t quite unearthed:[^1] the network — or so runs one of the most common commonplaces — makes possible new “spaces” for writing, new modes of publishing, new kinds of conversation. I certainly don’t dispute that (except for the usage of “space” to describe the virtual, which is an issue I’ll take up at another time). What I’m curious about is the relationship between those kinds of writing made possible in such spaces and the things we currently think of as “literary.” Is literature possible in the blogosphere? Does it currently exist? How will we know it when we see it?
+
+I’m in the bibliography-building phases of this project, you see, so any suggestions (including disagreements, arguments, contradictions) would be much appreciated.
+
+[^1]: I’d apologize for the mixed metaphor, except that it seems more apt to suggest that I meant that connection to be a [rhizome](http://rhizome.org/info/index.php "Rhizome.org") anyway.
+

content/blog/2003-07-03-yes-i-did-go-see-it.md

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+---
+title: 'Yes, I Did Go See It'
+date: '2003-07-03T10:41:27-04:00'
+permalink: /yes-i-did-go-see-it/
+tags:
+    - watching
+---
+
+On opening night. And paid full price, at that.
+
+[Legally Blonde 2](http://www.mgm.com/legallyblonde2/ "MGM"), that is.
+
+A good friend of mine and I have for the last several summers made a point of seeing as many bad summer movies as possible, and particularly those that have some girl-appeal (witness the trip to see [Josie and the Pussycats](http://www.josiethemovie.com/ "Warning: Slow-loading graphics ahead") two years ago. I seem to have blocked last summer’s fare out of my memory). Her daughters, 8 and 13, are at the heart, I think, of *Legally Blonde 2*‘s target demographic, if I can judge by the general composition of last evening’s audience.
+
+And I can’t help but wonder, after having seen the movie, where the girl-empowering notions they’re coming away with originate. The [L.A. Times](http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-dargis2jul02,0,3798873.story?coll=cl-mreview "L.A. Times") review refers to Elle (the Reese Witherspoon character, for those of you who haven’t partaken of the *Blonde* franchise) as an “alpha girl,” though an unlikely one, suggesting that her effectiveness as a character lies both in her personal power and in her nonthreateningness. And indeed, repeatedly throughout the movie we see Elle charm her way into being taken seriously by a slew of Beltway politicos, including the hardened, embittered Congresswoman from Texas and the “conservative NRA spokeman from Alabama” (who is referred to as such no fewer than three times in the movie).
+
+So, message number one: smart is good, but sweet and cute is necessary.
+
+Elle encounters a bunch of opposition in the course of her quest — which quest involves the ever-so-1990 issue of the animal-testing of cosmetics — and in particular from a series of powerful women, including her boss, her co-workers, and the above-mentioned Congresswoman from Texas, who is finally won over only through the uncovering of their sorority-sisterhood, and who then performs the most thorough about-face ever seen in U.S. politics. Elle does get support in this quest as well, but that support comes from a few limited places:
+
+1. Men.
+2. Sorority sisters.
+3. Dingbats.
+4. The style-challenged.
+
+And the message here? Powerful, attractive women cannot be trusted — unless they have also drunk from the sacred cup of sisterhood?
+
+Okay, I’m willing to countenance the argument — which someone ought to bring up about now — that it’s a *summer movie*, for crying out loud, and a sequel at that. It’s not to be taken so seriously as all this. It’s darned entertaining at moments — in fact, the *Times* is not far wrong when it claims that the movie’s “wonderfully wacky absence of logic” is one of its charms. But I couldn’t help but look around that theater-ful of 8-to-13 year-olds and wonder what of all this might wind up internalized after all.
+

content/blog/2003-07-04-independence-day.md

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+---
+title: 'Independence Day'
+date: '2003-07-04T13:08:09-04:00'
+permalink: /independence-day/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+Rather than taxing my heat-cramped brain by attempting to come up with a clever ‘why I’m not posting today’ post, here’s instead a smattering of July 4th postings from blogs around the way:
+
+[Bill](http://www.wombatfile.com/archives/162.html#162 "Wombat File") sends wishes around the globe and urges an expat pal to blow something up (in a wholesome way, of course).
+
+[Meg](http://www.megnut.com/events/007129.asp "Megnut") gives us a few suggestions about how we might celebrate domestically, and notes why.
+
+[George](http://ghw.wordherders.net/archives/000441.html "george.h.williams") reminds us that the nation is largely an imagined community.
+
+And [Fool’s Paradise](http://foolsparadise.org/ "Fool's Paradise") sends a message to the rest of the world. \[Warning: this link will likely only work today.\]
+

content/blog/2003-07-07-on-reading-slowly.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'On Reading Slowly'
+date: '2003-07-07T08:59:28-04:00'
+permalink: /on-reading-slowly/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+This recent post by [vika](http://www.wordsend.org/log/archives/000051.html) has made me uncomfortably conscious of the slowness with which the pile of books I’d planned on reading this summer is diminishing — or, more accurately, the alarming speed with which it’s growing, as the research reading list is getting added to much more rapidly than the actual reading is getting done. To a certain extent, I think, this is to be expected, accounted for under the old “the more I learn, the more I understand how little I know” adage; as one source always leads to many others, research begets research in exponential fashion. Moreover, research always seems to expand to fill the time-vessel in which it’s contained.
+
+But there are other factors in my growing pile of to-be-read material that I find less-than-happy, not least of which is the snail’s pace at which I’m turning the pages lately. The positive explanation for this is that I read more carefully than I used to, and take copious notes, which is a time-consuming process. On my less optimistic days, though, I wind up blaming what seems to me my painfully short attention span: I sit down to read whatever I happen to be working through, get a couple of pages in, and feel the uncontrollable desire to check my e-mail, or my net stats, or these here blog comments. I lack focus, brain divided among too many pieces of reading and writing to keep any in full view for very long.
+
+Is this a symptom of the age, or is this what my eighth-grade English teacher used to refer to as “a personal problem” (as in, “I couldn’t finish my homework, Mrs. Collins, because I had to study for my math test.” “Sounds like a personal problem to me”)? For better or for worse, we all multi-task, and often not all that efficiently — but is my distraction just a part of life in the networked world, or does it reveal a lack of discipline (and one I’d be well advised to keep to myself, at that)?
+

content/blog/2003-07-08-unplanned-absence.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: 'Unplanned Absence'
+date: '2003-07-08T14:07:04-04:00'
+permalink: /unplanned-absence/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+Sorry for the no-update today, folks (as well as for the unavailability of comments earlier in the day); my hosting provider migrated the site to an upgraded server late last night, and we encountered some minor but pesky database problems as a result. All seems to be in order now, though I actually need to spend some time doing that [reading](on_reading_slowly) I’m struggling with. I’ll be back tomorrow with new Thoughts.
+

content/blog/2003-07-09-hype-literary-anxiety-and-cultural-studies.md

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+---
+title: 'Hype, Literary Anxiety, and Cultural Studies'
+date: '2003-07-09T09:16:28-04:00'
+permalink: /hype-literary-anxiety-and-cultural-studies/
+tags:
+    - novels
+    - obsolescence
+---
+
+[Bill](http://www.wombatfile.com/archives/163.html#163 "Wombat File") directs our attention to a pretty hefty [MeFi](http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/26839 "MeFi") discussion of [A. S. Byatt’s](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/07/opinion/07BYAT.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position= "New York Times") rather persnickety thoughts about the popularity of the [Harry Potter](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search?tag=plannedobsole-20&keyword=Harry%20Potter&mode=books) series among adult readers. Byatt seems, in some utterly inexplicable fashion, to blame “cultural studies” for Potter-mania, suggesting that the “leveling effect” of cultural studies is a result of such scholars being “as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don’t really believe exists.”
+
+There’s a lot to argue with there — does the study of the popular automatically suggest a failure in merit? Does an interest in media culture of necessity imply an uncritical celebration thereof? And what on earth does cultural studies have to do with the average Harry Potter-reading adult? — and the good folks at MetaFilter do lots of that arguing. And then some.
+
+What can I bring to the table? First, I have to admit that I have not yet read volume 5, though I did advance-purchase it, and did have a minor conniption fit when I realized that, since I can only receive mail in the office (living in an address-less faculty residence on campus), and since the office is closed on Saturdays, and since we had in fact just moved out of our office and into temporary quarters so hidden from the FedEx guy as to be deemed undeliverable, my delivery would be delayed by Three Whole Days. After some anxious phone calls and some running around on the part of our summer student worker, I got my Harry 5.0, and happily placed it on my desk, where it remains, waiting patiently for me to [finish](/on_reading_slowly/) the other reading I’m doing before plunging in.
+
+In short: have it; dying to read it; have not yet done so.
+
+I am, however, a student of [hype](/harry_potter_mania/), as Byatt would no doubt consider me, and find myself just as suspicious of those Keepers of the Culture who take such apparent joy in pooh-poohing the popular as I am of obviously market-driven cultural phenomena. Which is why I was overjoyed to find [Charles Taylor’s](http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2003/07/08/byatt_rowling/index.html "Salon; subscription or annoying ad-viewing required") article, “A. S. Byatt and the Goblet of Bile.” Taylor has the insight to point out that “nothing deserves our respect (or scorn) simply because it’s popular, no matter how popular,” and to suggest that “the literary novelists who get themselves worked up over popular fiction never stop to consider what it is that readers are responding to except, like Byatt, to put it down to the stupidity of the masses.”
+
+These points bear much in common with the argument of my first manuscript, which I recently laid out in part in [George’s comments](http://ghw.wordherders.net/archives/000445.html "george.h.williams"):
+
+> The title, at least at the moment, is “The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television,” and the central argument focuses on the apparent conviction embedded in the postmodern novel that it is a form under siege, obsolesced by more flashy contemporary media forms.
+> 
+> But what I’m interested in in that manuscript is not whether the anxiety is warranted — whether the novel is in fact becoming obsolete as a cultural form — but rather what discursive purposes the manifestation of such anxiety serves. One such purpose is of course the novel’s own continuation; as John Barth suggests in “The Literature of Exhaustion,” one way to deal with such anxiety might be to write a novel about it. But another such purpose is the intentional self-marginalization of both novel and novelist, such that, as an “alternative” culture, the product and the cultural producer can both benefit from the cachet of edginess — and, not incidentally, appropriate the mantle of marginalization from racial or ethnic or gendered or sexual “minorities.” There’s thus equal parts, in my argument, of nervousness and pleasure in this particular form of anxiety.
+
+Byatt’s somewhat hysterical denunciation of the pleasures of the popular (and, even more importantly, the *critical consideration* of the popular) suggests that such anxiety might be operative not simply across media boundaries but even within the print form. The “serious” novelist feels obliged to create distance between her own work and that of her more plebeian but also more successful competitors (what Hawthorne famously referred to as “that damn’d mob of scribbling women”), hinting that her more difficult texts are happiest in their position on the margins of our culture because the mainstream reader is ill-equipped to understand them.
+
+Such bald elitism is pretty difficult to take; hence the uproar on MeFi, Salon, and elsewhere. But, as Taylor reminds us, there is consolation to be found in the durability of the popular: Leslie Fiedler, in an [interview](http://www.salon.com/books/int/2003/01/02/fiedler/index.html "Salon, again") he gave a few weeks before his death early this year, told of a meeting with a group of “postmoderns” in which he horrified his audience by proclaiming, “Look, let’s be frank with each other: When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.”
+

content/blog/2003-07-10-welcome-sven.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+title: 'Welcome, Sven!'
+date: '2003-07-10T09:12:59-04:00'
+permalink: /welcome-sven/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+I’m assuming, and I think not incorrectly, that many of the folks currently reading my meanderings have read and either celebrated or despised (or some deeply ambivalent mixture of the two) Sven Birkerts’ [The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0449910091/plannedobsole-20). For those who haven’t, a quick (and thoroughly unfair) summary: Books are really, really good for the soul, especially the kinds of books we think of as serious modernist literature, and the world has pretty much gone to hell in a handbasket since the advent of the technologies that are distracting us from engagement with such bound, printed, individualist texts. To quote:
+
+> I do not anticipate a future utterly without books, or bereft of all discourse about ideas, or entirely given over to utilitarian pursuits. No, what I fear is a continued withering-away of influence, a diminution of the literary which brings about a flattened new world in which only a small coterie traffics in the matters that used to be deemed culturally central. (194)
+
+The most telling section of *The Gutenberg Elegies* has long been, for me, the coda, entitled “The Faustian Pact,” in which Birkerts claims to have met the devil, and its name is [Wired](http://www.wired.com/wired/ "Wired") magazine. In the pages of this publication, an unabashed promoter of the ostensible digital revolution, Birkerts finds evidence of “the argument between technology and soul” (211), an argument that can only be resolved in either capitulation (and damnation) or fervent retreat from the contemporary.
+
+With this background, you’ll understand then why I find Birkerts’ most recent [editorial](http://www.bu.edu/agni/essays-reviews/online/2003/birkerts-stage2.html "Agni") in the new online manifestation of *Agni* so riotously funny:
+
+> How do I now justify using and promoting a technology which, just a few years ago, I deplored? Do I no longer deplore it? What can I offer to explain myself? I would say — short answer — that the digital age has arrived and that, at least in immediate retrospect, it has the feel of inevitability about it. Who knew? Well, clearly some people did. They read the signs, trusted that it was our collective will to move forward into connectedness and the radically changed private and public space that connectedness makes inevitable. I’ll admit it took me a while to accept this — not the fact of the technology, but the zeal of people everywhere to embrace it. But I have made my correction; I have accepted that there is now a new way of things.
+
+Is it an admission of error, or merely a capitulation? Is it a move into a truly new medium, or instead a kind of retrenchment of “literary value” in digital form? Is it any coincidence that Birkerts himself refers to this move as a form of “apostasy”? We can all now welcome, it seems, Mr. Birkerts into the new orthodoxy — but it will be interesting to watch in what this new orthodoxy, for him, consists.
+

content/blog/2003-07-11-blogging-and-the-classroom.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+title: 'Blogging and the Classroom'
+date: '2003-07-11T09:48:31-04:00'
+permalink: /blogging-and-the-classroom/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+Since my fantastic [meeting with George](http://ghw.wordherders.net/archives/000462.html "george.h.williams") a couple of days ago, I’ve been thinking more about my plan to fold a group blog into one of my fall classes. George helpfully alerted me to his post on [Conversation as Game](http://ghw.wordherders.net/archives/000371.html "george.h.williams"), which attempts to create a beginning typology of rhetorical moves that take place in public discursive settings, as a preliminary stab at thinking through the thorny question of grading such blog participation.
+
+The class I’m thinking about is, appropriately enough, entitled “The Literary Machine,” and it focuses on the relationship between computers and writing, both as represented in “traditional” print literature (i.e., Richard Powers’ [Galatea 2.2](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060976926/plannedobsole-20) and John Barth’s [Coming Soon!!!](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618257306/plannedobsole-20)) and as enacted in newer electronic-literature technologies. So what I want the class blog to do is both serve as a venue for standard sorts of extra-class discussion — a site where students can direct one another to texts of interest on the web, and where those late-night thoughts about in-class discussion can get an airing — and also function as an experiment in computer-based writing/publishing itself. With any luck, my class (and I) will be able to puzzle through some of the questions I raised [here](/future_writing/) about the new kinds of writing that the blog might help facilitate, and the new directions that the thing we currently think of as “literature” might take in response.
+
+The question: have you had any experiences — positive, negative, mixed — with this kind of blog-experiment that might help focus or guide my fall foray?
+

content/blog/2003-07-11-quick-tech-question.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: 'Quick Tech Question'
+date: '2003-07-11T09:24:14-04:00'
+permalink: /quick-tech-question/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+[Bill](http://www.wombatfile.com "Wombat File") reports that he’s been having some difficulty loading the Planned Obsolescence front page, and this reminded me: back during our [European vacation](/eerste_things_eerste/), I had some intermittent difficulty as well. On my hotel’s Wintel machine, running some recent version of IE, I periodically got the front page loaded only as far down as the right-hand column extends (and thus the older entries in the left-hand column were cut off). It didn’t happen all the time.
+
+Anybody out there having this trouble? Anybody know whether there’s anything I can do about it?
+

content/blog/2003-07-14-lost-in-space.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+title: 'Lost in Space'
+date: '2003-07-14T09:54:51-04:00'
+permalink: /lost-in-space/
+tags:
+    - networks
+---
+
+I’m working these days on expanding a paper I gave at a [recent conference](http://iasa.la.psu.edu/conf2003.html "IASA"), hoping that it’ll transform in the process into a draft of a chapter of the [INP](/future_writing/). This paper focused on Neal Stephenson’s [Cryptonomicon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060512806/plannedobsole-20) and its representations of the geography and geopolitics of computer networks, arguing, in part, that the spatial metaphors used to describe network technologies (most obviously, “cyberspace,” but also myriad others such as the “electronic frontier” and the “city of bits”) have the inadvertent effect of undermining the claims that material, lived spaces make on the lives of those who support the network’s structure.
+
+This happens, it seems to me, in two oddly paradoxical and yet complementary ways: first, as [Wolfgang Schivelbusch](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520059298/plannedobsole-20) argues about the railroad and [Lynne Kirby](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822318393/plannedobsole-20) extends to thinking about film, the development of the twentieth-century technologies of transportation and communication had the phenomenological effects of compressing time and space, bringing once impossibly distant locations into contact. By this argument, it is suggested that network technologies *eliminate* space by making such contact both global and instantaneous; moreover, where there is no distance, there is no difference, as the boundaries and borders that mark the difference between “here” and “there” in the era of the nation-state dissolve in the network’s inclusive embrace.
+
+The other argument is precisely the [Howard Rheingold](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262681218/plannedobsole-20)/[William J. Mitchell](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262631768/plannedobsole-20)/[John Perry Barlow](http://www.eff.org/~barlow/) remobilization of spatiality in thinking about the network itself. By this argument, there is a there there; as Rheingold wrote of the WELL:
+
+> It’s like having the corner bar, complete with old buddies and delightful newcomers and new tools waiting to take home and fresh graffiti and letters, except instead of putting on my coat, shutting down the computer, and walking down to the corner, I just invoke my telecom program and there they are. It’s a place. (9)
+
+Through the simultaneous functioning of these two lines of thinking about “cyberspace,” lived spaces come to be deemed irrelevant and their impingements on contemporary lives are absorbed instead by the network, which seems to create a “space” equally real as and far more relevant than that of physical geography. Stephenson seems to suggest throughout *Cryptonomicon* that we are too quick to dismiss the demands of lived space, particularly given the geopolitical disparities between those who participate in the network and those who construct the hardware that supports it, indicating that the metaphor of the “electronic frontier” is an apt one not because of its spatiality but because of the colonialist impulse sublimated within it.
+
+That’s the paper/article/chapter’s argument, anyhow. I’m left with a few questions, though: is there a way that we can conceive of “cyberspace” without resorting to the spatial? How might we reconceive the structures and transmission of information in (in? Is that another spatializing?) the network without coopting — and thus undermining — the terminology of the geographical?
+

content/blog/2003-07-15-film-theory-has-nothing-to-do-with-film.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+title: "'Film Theory Has Nothing to Do With Film.'[^1]"
+date: '2003-07-15T11:00:48-04:00'
+permalink: /film-theory-has-nothing-to-do-with-film/
+tags:
+    - academia
+---
+
+I resisted posting on this yesterday, in part because I was so angry I couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say. I’m still not sure I can muster a sufficiently articulate response, but I feel I have to take a crack at it.
+
+The [Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine](http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-filmschool28jul13,1,5382396.story?coll=la-headlines-magazine "L.A. Times") this weekend ran a cover article entitled “Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology,” exploring its author’s discovery that “film school isn’t what it used to be.” The article begins with [David](http://us.imdb.com/Name?Weddle,+David "imdb.com") [Weddle](http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/8713/DWeddle.html)‘s shock when his daughter, Alexis (who wants a career in film) gets a C on her film theory final at UCSB. Weddle, determined to uncover the culprits behind this obvious injustice, discovers that the academy has been taken over by jargon-spouting leftists.
+
+Of course, this article is running in a reputable journalistic organ, and thus it must be neutral, even-handed, and fair in its representations of these miscreants. Weddle attempts to squelch his distaste by presenting his quest as a pair of balanced questions:
+
+> Is there a hidden method to these film theorists’ apparent madness? Or is film theory, as movie critic Roger Ebert said as I interviewed him weeks later, “a cruel hoax for students, essentially the academic equivalent of a New Age cult, in which a new language has been invented that only the adept can communicate in”?
+
+All kidding aside — Weddle’s article is so rife with the kinds of anti-intellectualism often found in the mainstream media that it becomes a sort of cliché. (See, for instance, Weddle’s obvious glee upon finding a recent graduate of the UCSB film program who claims to have succeeded as a location scout for the film industry “despite the film theory classes, not because of them.” See also his pleasure in the crafting of his final anecdote: students in Edward Branigan’s theory class dozing off! Doodling! Whispering amongst themselves! All while Branigan prattles on, oblivious!) One seriously begins to wonder how the academy got to be the object of fun that it now is, and why our public relations folks keep *wanting* us to talk to the media, in this environment.
+
+[^1]: Roger Ebert, who would know.
+