The Paperback Museum

The Superficiality of Art

2009-06-13T18:01:00.020-05:00

An academic fashion of recent years has been to understand and theorize what might be called a de-substantialized aesthetics: art that isn't about something but reflects (on) its own form of contentless expression. Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics has made the rounds among grad students trying to wrap their heads around this project. More generally, the "return to form," or the New Formalism, in literary and visual studies has inspired many a dissertation on late modernism, abstract art, the cinema of Antonioni, and the work of Beckett, among other topics. It may or may not be a coincidence that grad students who revel in the New Formalism also tend to be the same hipsters who listen to the notable musical expression of a contentless art, post-rock.

For all of the New Formalism's intellectual cachet, it was difficult for me to find a single source that 1) advanced a coherent point about de-substantialized aesthetics, and 2) actually used the theory to interpret literary and visual texts in a way that was persuasive in its own right. Fortunately, it took just one well-crafted passage from Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips's Intimacies to change all that. The book presents itself as a dialogue between the authors on their respective theoretical engagements with psychoanalysis. Really, though, Intimacies is three parts (i.e., chapters) Bersani and one part Phillips, and it is in Bersani's first chapter that this insightful observation appears:

We might take [Henry James's character John Marcher, from The Beast in the Jungle] to be an emblem of art. Writers, painters, filmmakers frequently move in their late work not toward a greater density of meaning and texture, but rather toward a kind of concentrated monotony that designates a certain negativizing effect inherent in the aesthetic. I'm thinking -- to mention just a few examples at random -- of Turner's nearly monochromatic late seascapes, the almost imperceptible variations within the dark coloring of the walls in the Rothko Chapel, the willed thinness of Beckett's last fictions (especially Westward Ho), the nearly subjectless banality of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet, the relentless reduction of variegated actual behavior to abstract laws of behavior in Proust's La Fugitive, the erasure of abstraction itself in Mallarmé's obsessively present page blanche, and of course the at times staggering thinness of meaning in James's late novels. (25)

Bersani's examples are illustrative, even if you've never seen or read them yourself. Using descriptors like "thin," "nearly monochromatic," and "banal," Bersani gives us an idea of how "concentrated monotony" (and note the multi-sensory meanings of "monotone") advances a de-substantialized aesthetics. In a word, the depthlessness of these works invites the reader or spectator to dwell in the realm of the aesthetic as such.

Consonant with Bersani's exploration of the "shattering" of the ego in gay sex, his proposal in Intimacies is that the superficiality of art negates humans' need to find (deep) meaning in texts. Focusing only on the superficial -- that which is apparent, rather than what we assume to be "actual" or "substantial" -- brackets the ego's desire to appropriate meaning for (self-)understanding. Instead, the superficiality of art says, "Forget the referent (there is no referent) and give yourself over to the object of art itself."

Bersani's thesis compels one to explore the individual artists he names in the passage. Of these, I found the work of English artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) to be the most surprising, not least because he's the earliest figure cited in the passage. Conventionally thought of as a Romantic landscapist, Turner's "late seascapes" are wondrously abstract. Turner's colors assume what I can only describe, synaesthesially, as their own kind of texture.

Landscape with Water (c. 1840-5) concentrates color on one side of the canvas to create the effect of density. Nonetheless, the figure on the left remains obscure, and the haze of colors makes it difficult to discern where water, land, and air begin or end.

Seascape with Storm Coming On (c 1840) is even more abstract, but we can still see Turner concentrating color on part of the canvas to give weight to his vision. Notably, the darkness which lies at the center of the painting doesn't represent something "real"; on the contrary, it acts as a kind of blank focus around which the lighter hues swirl and revolve.

Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands (c. 1840-5) operates in a similar way to Seascape with Storm. The difference is that its blank focal point is the beaming whiteness in the center of the canvas. That whiteness conceals the "actual" sunrise the painting purports to represent, but the effect of its luminosity is to warm the canvas's other colors, softening the browns and blues in a shower of light.

If Turner's late seascapes are emblems of a de-substantialized aesthetics, then Bersani's genealogy can serve as a productive starting point for scholars who wish to work on this topic in a serious and meaningful way. With Bersani, one gets the impression that art is something more than just an academic "object of study" -- it's a wholly engrossing, all-consuming experience of being (or non-being). Badiou and the majority of New Formalists in the academy strike me in the opposite way: they wish to talk theoretically about art, but they evince very little taste for it. "Taste" not in the sense of highbrow vs. lowbrow but in the sense of not seeming to like art, or the experience of art, all that much. Badiou and the New Formalists remain wholly cerebral consumers of art, and in that regard they can never fully give themselves over to its ego-shattering superficiality.

Petey Greene: Radicalizing Racial Discourse

2009-06-09T10:34:00.003-05:00

I just finished watching the PBS documentary Adjust Your Color, on the life and times of Washington, D.C., radio and TV talk show host Petey Greene (RIP). Greene's story is remarkable: an ex-con and hustler turned community activist and self-proclaimed voice for the black community. Especially notable for me was the overlap between Greene's life story and that of the black pulp fiction icon Donald Goines, whom I wrote about last year. Both men emerged out of prison to take advantage of media opportunities that allowed them to address the ghettos out of which they had emerged. (Tragically, both men died young too.)

Here's a clip of Greene's most famous televised broadcast, in which he talks about the politics of black people eating watermelon. It's at once side-splittingly hilarious and dead-on serious. Above all, Petey Greene didn't like anyone -- black or white -- to "front," and pussyfooting around the issue of eating watermelon only distracted folks from consuming a fine piece of fruit meat.

Petey Greene (1931-1984)
From Petey Greene's Washington, D.C.
"Be Yourself" (1982)

Supreme Court Porn

2009-04-23T07:35:00.006-05:00

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in the case Redding v. Safford, which considers the constitutionality of public school officials strip-searching then-13-year-old Savana Redding on suspicions that she was distributing Ibuprofen to her classmates. Redding, an honors student, was doing no such thing -- and the female classmate who fingered her as a suspect had been nabbed herself for possessing drugs. The strip search yielded no Ibuprofen, and because school officials thought Redding was just good at concealing the drug, they had her turn her bra and underwear inside out in front of two female supervisors. The intense humiliation and shame of the episode compelled Redding to drop out of school.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals deemed the school's actions unconstitutional, but according to various news sources, the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to overturn that decision, citing that the harm suffered by Redding isn't compelling enough to render illegal at least this outrageous, police-like action taken by the school.

Since 1985, at the height of the Reagan administration's War on Drugs, the U.S. Supreme Court has been bullish on defending state officials' ability to do whatever it takes to weed out drugs from America's schools. Joan Biskupic of USA Today provides this helpful breakdown of key cases on drugs in school:

• New Jersey v. T.L.O. (1985): The justices uphold school officials' search of a high school freshman's purse after she was found smoking in a restroom, and they establish that public-school searches are covered by the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures.

• Vernonia Independent School District 47J v. Acton (1995): The court rejects a Fourth Amendment challenge in an Oregon case and lets public schools require students to take drug tests as a condition of playing sports.

• Board of Education of Independent School District No. 92 v. Earls (2002): The court allows public schools in an Oklahoma case to impose random drug tests on students who participate in any extracurricular school activity.

• Morse v. Frederick (2007): The justices reject a First Amendment free-speech challenge and allow a school district to suspend a student who unfurled a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner on a parade route in Alaska.

Authorities argued that the message referred to marijuana and conflicted with their anti-drug policy. Lawyers for the school district in the new case from Safford, Ariz., point to the Morse ruling to support arguments about the need to deter drug use.

Based on these precedents, Supreme Court followers expect Redding to lose her case against the school district. The Supreme Court in 1985 was more likely to defend privacy rights than it is today; with the current majority-conservative composition of the Court, it seems most anything will be justified in the name of searching for drugs in public schools.

Dahlia Lithwick of Slate provides some insight into the Court's tone-deafness to Redding's privacy rights, given the Justices' line of questioning yesterday. Ruth Bader Ginsburg seemed to be the only Justice who was concerned about what happened to Redding, casting a skeptical eye on the school's extreme actions to follow up on a dubious tip from a classmate. Ginsburg's male colleagues, however, were less understanding -- worse, they played fast and loose with Redding's shame in order to make perverse, even pornographic, claims about 1) the necessity for school officials to strip-search students for drugs, and 2) the relative harmlessness of being naked in front of others in a school setting.

First, Justice Antonin Scalia educates himself on the new ways in which kids are getting high these days:

Today's argument features an astounding colloquy between Matthew Wright, the school district's lawyer, and Justice Antonin Scalia, who cannot understand why "black marker pencils" are also considered contraband. "Well, for sniffing!" answers Wright. "They sniff them?" asks Scalia, delightedly. "Really?"

Scalia's "delight" is of course premised on his assumption that along with more ways of getting high comes more ways for him to permit the state to intrude on students' privacy rights. In this scheme, a teacher or school official can accuse a student of being a druggie just for carrying around a pencil.

After these pleasantries are exchanged, Scalia gets down and dirty, and his devout Catholicism would seem to be bracketed as he imagines a school official looking into a 13-year-old girl's underwear for drugs:

David O'Neill from the Solicitor General's office tries to thread the needle between allowing schools to conduct daily strip searches for black sniffy markers and chilling the school district's broad power to search for dangerous contraband. He wants the court to impose a higher standard before schools may conduct a strip search but gets into trouble with Scalia, who wonders what happens after "you search the student's outer garments, and you have a reasonable suspicion that the student has drugs." Scalia's almost chortling when he exclaims, "You've searched everywhere else. By God, the drugs must be in her underpants!"

For most people, when we're talking about a 13-year-old girl, the statement "By God, the drugs must be in her underpants!" would be uttered ironically, skewering the fear-mongering logic of the school official doing the searching. For Scalia, on the other hand, the statement is a jokey way of justifying that kind of strip-searching to occur.

As if Scalia's puerile antics weren't bad enough, Lithwick talks about Justice Stephen Breyer's efforts to write off the harm Redding suffered in her experience:

"In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear."
Shocked silence, followed by explosive laughter. In fact, I have never seen Justice Clarence Thomas laugh harder. Breyer tries to recover: "Or not my underwear. Whatever. Whatever. I was the one who did it? I don't know. I mean, I don't think it's beyond human experience."

What starts off as an "innocent's" defense of taking one's clothes off in gym class (ignoring the fact that Redding's experience is hardly comparable to gym class, or that gym class doesn't have its own politics of policing teenage bodies) ends up being a queer fantasia of schoolboys' "harmless" pranks. That Breyer's standard for judging this case is his own childhood memories of being the butt of boys' pranks (he may have been a pranker as well -- "I was the one who did it? I don't know.") is truly unfortunate. I mean, I can stand to appreciate Breyer's queer admission (although he would never acknowledge it as such), but let's be clear: Redding being stripped down by school officials who are on a hysterical and ultimately fruitless search for Ibuprofen is decidedly not the same thing as boys (or girls) horsing around in the locker room.

Lithwick details more boys' club behavior at the hearing yesterday in her article. For all of what the oral arguments revealed about the male Justices' own pornographic imaginations (and I should note that I am a pro-pornography feminist), it's a travesty that their discursive pleasure -- imagining girls being strip-searched, fondly remembering boys sticking things down your underwear, etc. -- is being employed to justify the state's incursion on Redding's privacy, indeed, its invasion of her body. I daresay Redding suffered a second kind of indignity by having to hear the male Justices alternately mock and brush away her claims to being harmed.

Donald Pease: The Cadence of Critical Intervention

2009-04-03T06:32:00.004-05:00

I wanted to share with everyone a recent talk by my former professor and American Studies icon Donald Pease. Titled "August Wilson: The Work of the Humanities after Humanism," Pease's talk outlines the institutional value of the arts and humanities in the university setting. The part of the talk when Pease recounts unpacking his poststructuralist library is hilarious. Also, for those unfamiliar with Pease in person, you're in for a treat: his speech is precisely attuned to rigorous critical inquiry -- at once measured and impassioned, syntactically deconstructionist yet performatively akin to the (black) sermon. I call Pease's inimitable style the "cadence of critical intervention."

Below is a testament to Pease's popularity as a teacher among Dartmouth undergrads. If you've ever taken a class or hung out with Don Pease, there's a way in which the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Big Poppa" is an oddly fitting tribute to the man.

The Sublime Hipster of Ideology

2009-01-20T09:32:00.004-05:00

This little ditty is something of a post-date, given that it initially came out at the end of summer, but I thought it merited posting: Zizek rails against Kung Fu Panda:

If you ask me for really dangerous ideological films, for ideology at its purest, I’d say Kung Fu Panda. I saw it five times because my son likes it. The movie is extremely cynical in that you know they make fun of all this ideology, of Buddhism and these things, but the message is even though we know it is not true and we make fun, you have to believe in it. It’s this split of you know it’s not true but just make like you believe in it.

I think Zizek could have gone further to denounce the actor who provides the voice of the panda, Jack Black. I'm no fan of this guy -- his "comedy" musical group, Tenacious D, is a travesty, and his antics are about as subtle and funny as a Dane Cook set -- and his recent movies are testament to exactly what Zizek is talking about here.

Take the woeful Be Kind Rewind (dir. Michel Gondry), where the "magic of moviemaking" by indie artists in the hipster set is extolled through the most contrived of Hollywood conventions: local boys make good, independent business takes on corporate encroachment, black men (Danny Glover's and Mos Def's characters) lend "authenticity" and street cred to Jack Black's buffoonishness (the gang's last film is a biopic of Fats Waller's life). It's one of those paradoxes of belief where we know that Be Kind Rewind is a (modest) Hollywood production (New Line Cinema) but are supposed to will ourselves into believing that it allies itself with amateurs, bohemians, and outcasts. Race, and specifically American blackness, is one of the primary metaphors that Gondry enlists to suture this ideological link.

Gondry is also the director of the concert documentary Dave Chappelle's Block Party, which I actually enjoyed. But given his use of race and "black music" in Be Kind Rewind, I have to wonder to what extent Gondry isn't just another white hipster boy riffing on African American culture to shore up his own artistic credentials. Need I mention the work of Wes Anderson here? A paper on the circulation of black and brown characters in Anderson's films -- The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited -- has yet to be written.

Worst President Ever

2009-01-20T09:04:00.006-05:00

Slate has published a readable gloss on the political life of Herbert Hoover (in office 1929-1933), who is widely considered to be one of the worst Presidents ever. It was Hoover's misfortune to have the stock market crash just seven months into his Presidency, but it was Hoover's choice to take a largely "hands off" approach to economic recovery and social welfare. Unsympathetic to the suffering masses ("Nobody actually starved," he said) and unwilling to let the government prop up relief programs, Hoover became incredibly unpopular and was booted out of office after one term. It was Hoover's successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who would craft the New Deal as the government's response to the economic downturn.

The article begins with this wonderful, and telling, anecdote:

In 1932, the parents of a 4-year-old went to court to change his legal name. Christened Herbert Hoover Jones in 1928, when the commerce secretary and Republican presidential nominee was a national hero, the boy deserved relief, said his parents, from "the chagrin and mortification which he is suffering and will suffer" for sharing a moniker with the now-disgraced chief executive. His new name: Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones.

Bush, We Bid You A-Doo

2009-01-16T08:20:00.003-05:00

Slate and the BBC have compiled their favorite "Bushisms" over the past eight years, and the results are hilarious...and sad, given that W. was our president for two full terms. The Republicans' strategy of celebrating W.'s willful ignorance as some kind of "folksy," from-the-gut authenticity now lies in tatters.

Here are some of the best Bushisms out of the bunch:

"I want to thank my friend, Senator Bill Frist, for joining us today. He married a Texas girl, I want you to know. Karyn is with us. A West Texas girl, just like me."
Nashville, Tennessee, 27 May 2004

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
Washington, D.C., 5 August 2004

"Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat."
Washington, D.C., 17 September 2004

"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"
Florence, South Carolina, 11 January 2000

"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."
LaCrosse, Wisconsin, 18 October 2000

"I understand small business growth. I was one."
New York Daily News, 19 February 2000

"Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."
Poplar Bluff, Missouri, 6 September 2004

"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."
Washington, D.C., 12 May 2008

The Back List in Print

2009-01-15T09:00:00.006-05:00

The University of Minnesota Press has launched a new series of books -- based on its extensive back list, going all the way back to 1925. Minnesota Archive Editions (MAE) is a collaborative venture between UMP, Amazon.com, Minneapolis-based BookMobile, and Google Books. As some industry news stories point out, MAE allows consumers to access rare, out-of-print titles from the publisher's archives 1) at next to no cost to the publisher, and 2) through digitized distribution channels that maximize profit for the intermediaries.

This initiative is the latest example (in a long, long list of examples) of what Chris Anderson has called the "long tail" of technology-mediated, consumer-oriented economics. Anderson's basic thesis is that digital information technologies have streamlined and made hyper-efficient the old distribution networks of bringing commodities from the factory to points of consumption. Today, at minimal cost to the producer (who agrees to digitize his wares) and with the simple click of a button (on the consumer's end), we get books, movies, and music downloaded onto our computer or delivered to our door. The so-called long tail suggests that this relatively cheap method of distribution makes "low" demand for products still profitable for the producer because it doesn't cost him much to make his goods available to consumer niches.

Although MAE doesn't promise to be the next iTunes, it's sure to fascinate the academic world with its back list, and will likely turn a modest profit from scholars and intellectuals purchasing previously out-of-print titles. I myself am looking forward to the reprinting of Charles Wharton Stork's Arcadia Borealis: Selected Poems of Erik Axel Karlfeld (1938).

Fußball Ist Geil

2009-01-09T20:18:00.003-05:00

The winter break is over, and that means European league soccer is returning to action this weekend. I thought I'd celebrate with a fantastic YouTube find.

This clip (~1970s) from a West German television program features the (at the time) latest soccer-themed high fashion. The elite soccer league in Germany is called the Bundesliga, and the clothing on display in this broadcast is inspired by the colors and designs of Germany's most famous clubs (Schalke, Hamburg, Dortmund, etc.). All I can say: Wow.

A Porn Bailout, or, What Would Richard Shelby Do?

2009-01-09T09:01:00.005-05:00

Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, has been bullish in opposing any form of government bailout for the auto industry. His logic is of the typical free-market, survival-of-the-fittest ideologue. But what would Sen. Shelby say to a proposed $5 billion porn bailout? Alabama is conservative, redder-than-red territory, no doubt, but surely many of his constituents can fess up to not wanting to see the American porn industry go down the tubes.

Larry Flynt, head of Larry Flynt Publications and its flagship publication Hustler, and Joe Francis, of Girls Gone Wild, have been working on a bailout proposal for U.S. porn. Gonzo news source TMZ already tracked down a few Congressmen and one Senator to get their take on the proposed plan, and the signs don't look promising. Still, Flynt is determined to relieve some of the burdens from the porn industry: "People are too depressed to be sexually active...This is very unhealthy as a nation...It's time for Congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America."

Overseas the idea of a porn bailout has been met with more welcoming arms. The BBC brought a porn director on air to discuss the actual economics of the industry. Diversification in these tough economic (but bewilderingly hyper-technologized) times seemed to be his Plan B, in lieu of a government bailout of porn.

Following this take on Flynt and Francis's announcement, an Australian writer noted that there would be valuable economic lessons to learn from the U.S. government underwriting porn: "If the porn industry can be saved, the financial sector could be taught Porn Economics, the idea of sales of something people actually want, for the purpose of profit, as distinct from Subprime Economics, the sale of sexless garbage nobody ever needed for the purpose of destroying the global economy."

Back in the States, at least one independent businessman supports the proposed bailout. Glenn Wilson of Shreveport, Louisiana, says sales have been declining at his sex stores, Fun Shop Too. According to a local news source, Wilson would welcome a porn bailout in the hope of sparking sales.

In more promising news, one writer and sex activist notes that, even though the porn industry may be flagging at the moment, independent sex workers are likely to survive the recession without too much trouble. In surveying prostitutes' and escorts' success as advertisers, Carol Forsloff sees a canny ability to navigate tough economic times with drive and gusto -- and a theoretically inexhaustible set of "goods." Forsloff concludes, "So while the boys are asking for a bailout, the women carry on as business women with advertising and the like. The fact that they advertise widely, on their backs, on street corners, in phone directories and on the Internet, likely shows they are better prepared than Flynt and Francis."

I suppose if Richard Shelby and his colleagues reject Flynt and Francis's appeal for a porn bailout, they can always turn to the example of independent sex workers as people who are weathering the recession in the most innovative, business-savvy ways.

On Technocratic Style

2009-01-03T19:43:00.006-05:00

Apparently Louis Menand of The New Yorker has already written a review-cum-farce about the issues of writing with Microsoft Word that I've taken up here and here. "The End Matter" deserves a complete reading, but here are some highlights:

On Word:

First of all, it is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program. Its terribleness is of a piece with the terribleness of Windows generally, a system so overloaded with icons, menus, buttons, and incomprehensible Help windows that performing almost any function means entering a treacherous wilderness of pop-ups posing alternatives of terrifying starkness: Accept/Decline/Cancel; Logoff/Shut Down/Restart; and the mysterious Do Not Show This Warning Again. You often feel that you’re not ready to make a decision so unalterable; but when you try to make the window go away your machine emits an angry beep. You double-click. You triple-click. Beep beep beep beep beep. You are being held for a fool by a chip.

On Clippy, Word's late Help icon, an eyeballed paper clip:

[I]f, God forbid, you ever begin a note or a bibliography entry with the letter “A.,” when you hit Enter, Word automatically types “B.” on the next line. Never, btw (which, unlike “poststructuralism,” is a word in Word spellcheck), ask that androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets.

On the Chicago Manual of Style's somewhat curious advice about punctuation:

Some of the advice is frankly a matter of taste. “An exclamation point added in brackets to quoted material to indicate editorial protest or amusement is strongly discouraged, since it appears contemptuous,” the authors counsel. “The Latin expression sic (thus) is preferred.” First of all, the reason the bracketed exclamation point appears contemptuous is that you use it when you wish to express contempt. There is nothing wrong with contempt. Second (which Chicago insists on, although generations of pedants have believed “secondly” to be the proper usage), sic is a far more damning interpolation, combining ordinary, garden-variety contempt with pedantic condescension. Elsewhere in Punctuation, the instructions are sometimes the reverse of enlightened. What could the authors possibly have been thinking when they committed the following sentence to print: “The semicolon, stronger than a comma but weaker than a period, can assume either role [!]” ?

Does AutoCorrect Correct AutoCorrect?

2009-01-02T10:01:00.007-05:00

The answer to the question posed in my title is, Yes, it does. Which is to say, the word "AutoCorrect" is included in Microsoft Word's database of words that are deemed legitimate words in the English language, and therefore not in need of squiggly-red-line correction as you type it in a document. Try it for yourself: compare AutoCorrect with LoobyBooby or HarlemGlobetrotters. AutoCorrect is given the green light, while the other two are stopped in their tracks with the iconic red line. HarperCollins -- the publisher -- is, like AutoCorrect, deemed to be legitimate.

I've written elsewhere on this blog about Jacques Derrida's efforts to figure out AutoCorrect on his word-processing program (whether Derrida was using Word or not is debatable -- but it's highly likely that he was). More recently, Chris Wilson has written an article about Word's sluggish updating of its word database. Because Microsoft employs human-supervised editorship of the database, the process of including new words in it is slow and uneven. Wilson suggests that Word adopt a Google way of analyzing the correct spelling of words algorithmically, based largely on the recognition of frequently used words (and their [mostly] correct spellings) online.

We aren't there yet, of course. Which leaves open the possibility to experiment with words (mostly proper nouns) that you think may or may not appear in the Word word database. If you come across a "legitimate" word (using your own defintion of "legitimate" -- it can come from academese or it may be something more befitting of the Urban Dictionary) that has yet to be registered in the database, accept it into your own Word program for Microsoft to consider whenever it uploads user information.

Here are a few approved (+) and unapproved (-), or yet-to-be approved, word combinations that I came up with:

Jacques Derrida (+) vs. Alain Badiou (-)
Frantz Fanon (+) vs. Gayatri Spivak (-) (most South Asian names were rejected)
Blackburn Rovers (+) vs. Wigan Athletic (-)
Radiohead (+) vs. Wilco (-)
Ryan Vu (+) vs. Gerry Canavan (-)
Motherfucker (+) vs. Mofo (-)

Still Reading Milton after All These Years

2008-12-30T11:36:00.003-05:00

I continue to be impressed by Stanley Fish's commitment to Milton studies, even as his academic star-power takes him to the heights of institutional authority and public intellectualism (via his very popular New York Times blog "Think Again"). His reflections on a quatercentenary Milton conference over the summer manage to make a highly specialized academic field accessible to lay readers interested in understanding what all the fuss is about (and why they should care). The piece is also a fine condensation of the central argument of Fish's definitive tome on over forty years of Milton scholarship, How Milton Works (2001).

More recently, Fish wrote on a new prose translation of Milton's Paradise Lost, by the Canadian Miltonist Dennis Danielson. Through line-by-line comparisons of Milton's poetry and Danielson's prose, Fish suggests that the inquiring, interpretively rich poetic voice of Milton is replaced by Danielson's (necessarily) reductive, interpretively blunt prose voice. Without dismissing Danielson's efforts as a fellow Miltonist, Fish makes clear that this new Paradise Lost is best read as an interpretation of the epic poem rather than as a substitute for it. And indeed much can be gleaned from Danielson's work, from a pedagogical point of view:

The edition is a parallel one — Milton’s original on the left hand page and Danielson’s prose rendering on the right. This means that you can ask students to take a passage and compare the effects and meanings produced by the two texts. You can ask students to compose their own translations and explain or defend the choices they made. You can ask students to look at prose translations in another language and think about the difference, if there is one, between translating into a foreign tongue and translating into a more user-friendly version of English. You can ask students to speculate on the nature of translation and on the relationship between translation and the perennial debate about whether there are linguistic universals.

In other words, teachers can subject Danielson's interpretation to a classroom interpretive inquiry of their own -- in which case it should be made clear that students are reading Danielson reading Milton. Perhaps such an effort would be best suited for a graduate seminar, or a practicum on Milton's language and various editions of Paradise Lost.

Like his literary hero, though, Fish is a brilliant wordsmith, and there's a hint in the piece that Fish would prefer to go to the source itself (Milton's poetry) for interpretive exercise. Note that the piece is titled "'Paradise Lost' in Translation," which is at once a literal rendering of what Danielson has done here -- translating the poem into prose -- as well as a figurative play on the word "lost": "paradise" (the interpretive "paradise" of the infinite potential of asking questions through Milton's poetry) being "lost" through Danielson's translation.

The Joy of Sex Redux

2008-12-29T22:21:00.008-05:00

Ariel Levy (of Female Chauvinist Pigs fame/infamy) has written a droll review of the new edition of the bestselling how-to manual, The Joy of Sex. Originally published in 1972 by a British physician, The Joy of Sex was the Baby Boomers' middlebrow foray into the sexual revolution -- a handy, "mature" guide to making love with just the right amount of risk and set against the backdrop of normalcy.

Levy's review offers a helpful biography of the book's quirky author, Dr. Alex Comfort (ahem), whose Polaroid-captured lovemaking sessions with his mistress served as the basis for the illustrations in the book's first edition. The online version of the article also features a slide show of some of these illustrations, as well as their more progressive counterparts in the pro-woman Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971) and the new edition of The Joy of Sex.

I've done my own research and found websites devoted to the illustrator for the original book, Chris Foss. It turns out Foss, although best known for his work on The Joy of Sex, is also a well-regarded illustrator of science fiction book covers.

You can find examples of his colorful work here and here. Foss has even done a bunch of covers for French sci-fi books. All of which is to say there's something to be written about illustrators' role in the burgeoning paperback print culture of the 1960s and '70s. After all, like Foss's beautiful covers for Asimov and Le Guin, isn't part of the joy of reading The Joy of Sex taking in the how-to pictures?

Finally, the gem of the bunch: Foss's cover for the British edition of J. G. Ballard's High-Rise (1975). Here we seem to have the best of both worlds: sex and futuristic death.

Palin's Conduct a "National Disgrace"

2008-10-14T10:23:00.004-05:00

Christopher Hitchens is at best a moderate liberal but perhaps more accurately seen as a centrist, Samuel Huntington-type: a political secularist who firmly supports the grand, civilizational struggle against "radical Islam." Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw his endorsement for Barack Obama on Slate.com.

It's true that Hitchens musters a sort of qualified praise for the Democratic ticket ("the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience"). But the British-born, Oxford-educated Hitchens is unqualified in his disdain for the McCain-Palin ticket. Here's the magazine critic's assessment of Palin's cross-country rallying over the past couple of weeks:

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

Ouch! As if that weren't bad enough, Hitchens has a few choice words regarding Palin's doing McCain's "dirty work" on the campaign trail:

[Last week's debate showed] Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.

One gets the impression from these passages that Sarah Palin -- who she is, what her function seems to be in this race, how she's carried herself since being nominated the Republicans' VP choice -- stands in Hitchens's mind for everything that's wrong with the Republican party today. Whereas selecting the infinitely more qualified Joe Lieberman (whom I disagree with fundamentally on the political issues but recognize as a capable and "experienced" leader) might have swung Hitchens toward McCain's camp, it's been Palin's selection that has left him wondering whether the Republican party is even invested in retaining its diminishing credibility to the American public.

I would point out that the Republicans' credibility has long been in tatters, not least because of the profound ideological gerrymandering that's gone into over thirty years of constituting the so-called "Southern Strategy." That method of wresting working-class whites in the South (and other agricultural/postindustrial regions in the US) away from the Democratic party has been responsible for the most horrifying and divisive political maneuvers in the past century: Willie Horton, "welfare queens," Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill, and anti-Arab sentiment. These discourses fall squarely on the shoulders of the Republican party, and Sarah Palin's career as a VP candidate is built on its foundations. Her entrance into the national political arena should come as no surprise, then -- it's the absurd yet unsurprising culmination of years of Republican ideological warfare in the form of moral haranguing, religious crusading, and racist/sexist scapegoating.

Despite Hitchens's shortsighted view of the situation, let's hope his wish that the American people will pronounce a resounding verdict against John McCain and Sarah Palin comes to fruition.

Zizek Gets It Right?

2008-10-14T09:27:00.003-05:00

I'm not one to recommend Slavoj Zizek's online missives to people, but I thought his October 9 article from the London Review of Books struck some pretty sensible chords. In "Don't Just Do Something, Talk," Zizek critiques the government's $700 billion bailout plan by exposing some of the myths that have surrounded its labored passage. I find his points persuasive -- I daresay reasonable -- given the bizarre political configurations that have emerged to support/oppose the bailout. Zizek does well to parse how these political configurations have congealed around the question of whether or not the government should use taxpayers' money to "save" Wall St.

On the supposed "socialism" of the bailout plan:

If the bailout plan really is a ‘socialist’ measure, it is a very peculiar one: a ‘socialist’ measure whose aim is to help not the poor but the rich, not those who borrow but those who lend. ‘Socialism’ is OK, it seems, when it serves to save capitalism. But what if ‘moral hazard’ is inscribed in the fundamental structure of capitalism? The problem is that there is no way to separate the welfare of Main Street from that of Wall Street. Their relationship is non-transitive: what is good for Wall Street isn’t necessarily good for Main Street, but Main Street can’t thrive if Wall Street isn’t doing well – and this asymmetry gives an a priori advantage to Wall Street.

On how the US is already "socialistic" (not a model of free market capitalism) in terms of underwriting our agricultural economy at the expense of poor, Third World agricultural economies:

There is nothing new in strong state interventions into the banking system and the economy in general. The meltdown itself is the result of such an intervention: when, in 2001, the dotcom bubble burst, it was decided to make it easier to get credit in order to redirect growth into housing. Indeed, political decisions are responsible for the texture of international economic relations in general. A couple of years ago, a CNN report on Mali described the reality of the international ‘free market’. The two pillars of the Mali economy are cotton in the south and cattle in the north, and both are in trouble because of the way that Western powers violate the same rules that they impose so brutally on Third World nations. Mali produces cotton of the highest quality, but the US government spends more money to support its cotton farmers than the entire state budget of Mali, so it is small wonder that Mali can’t compete. In the north, the European Union is the culprit: the EU subsidises every single cow to the tune of five hundred euros a year. The Mali minister for the economy said: we don’t need your help or advice or lectures on the beneficial effects of abolishing excessive state regulations; just, please, stick to your own rules about the free market and our troubles will be over. Where are the Republican defenders of the free market here? Nowhere, because the collapse of Mali is the consequence of what it means for the US to put ‘our country first’.

On why the market is never "neutral" and demands to be tarried with politically:

What all this indicates is that the market is never neutral: its operations are always regulated by political decisions. The real dilemma is not ‘state intervention or not?’ but ‘what kind of state intervention?’ And this is true politics: the struggle to define the conditions that govern our lives. The debate about the bailout deals with decisions about the fundamental features of our social and economic life, even mobilising the ghost of class struggle. As with many truly political issues, this one is non-partisan. There is no ‘objective’ expert position that should simply be applied: one has to take a political decision.

In the 1992 election, Clinton won with the motto ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ The Democrats need to get a new message across: ‘It’s the POLITICAL economy, stupid!’ The US doesn’t need less politics, it needs more.

Visual Studies

2008-09-26T06:30:00.006-05:00

TGIF! What better way to start off the day than with some mind-bending tricks o' the eye? Here's The Whitest Boy Alive's "Golden Cage."

My fvarotie eexricse etnials maknig snese of mxied-up wrods wohse frist and lsat ltetres are the olny tihgns wihch hlep the mnid to fgirue out eaxclty waht tehy say.

Domino's: What Else Can You Fit on a Pizza?

2008-07-22T02:12:00.002-05:00

From the Onion News Network: "Domino's Scientists Test Limits of What Humans Will Eat."

Domino's Scientists Test Limits Of What Humans Will Eat

The sad thing about this piece is that commercials for actual Domino's pies are interspersed throughout the parody -- can you tell what's real and what's fake?

To be fair, I delivered pizza for Domino's in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college. At the time, I really needed a summer job, and Domino's was the only company that would hire me for such a short period of time. I was so thankful that I did manage to consume some Domino's products while I worked for them. Though I would prefer not to touch the stuff today, I do remember the Literature Program at Duke opting for Domino's during our undergraduate major meet-and-greet event. I may have eaten a slice or two of the pepperoni, and even then I felt as though I had been consuming more grease than meat. And needless to say, we didn't get many undergraduates to sign up for the Literature B.A. that afternoon.

Obama's on Their Side

2008-06-25T22:13:00.009-05:00

Compromise, negotiation, tact... or is it pandering? The contest for President of the United States has begun in earnest. One sure sign of this is Barack Obama's values-laden politicking in recent weeks. Exhibit A is the following national campaign ad, which, as John Dickerson points out, is desperately intent on portraying Obama as being "just like one of us."

It's unfair of me to take Sen. Obama to task for trying to appeal to white Americans, and particularly to those who self-identify as reasonable, average folk. Clearly he's got to reach out to as many people as possible if he's to have a chance of winning the November election. But maybe it's too bitter a pill for me to swallow to see that 1) the aforementioned ad needs to be whitewashed (including mention of Obama's African father) in order to appeal to these demographics, and 2) Obama has to deploy an all-American, up-by-the-bootstraps life narrative in order to appear as an upstanding (black) candidate.

We can talk about this being merely a strategic effort to win votes, a pragmatic acknowledgment that a black liberal from Chicago needs to downplay his blackness and political beliefs in order to have a real shot at the Presidency. My question, though, is whether there's a point at which this effort at reaching out actually begins to chip away at the principled political vision that Obama has placed at the center of his campaign. In other words, how far are Obama and his supporters willing to go in order to convince folks that he's their candidate? Does Obama continue to try to sound as though "he's on their side," in complete alignment with their core values, or does he ask the tougher questions of what those values mean in everyday life, why people hold them dear, and what the best policies to nourish those values might be.

Perhaps Obama's perceived misstep of referring to white working-class Pennsylvanians as "bitter" came closest to asking the sorts of questions I outline here. Of course we all know how that turned out -- it almost cost him the Democratic nomination. So maybe the practical, give-and-take approach is the best route to take.

But then consider Exhibit B: Obama's reaction to the Supreme Court's bare-majority decision yesterday which says that the death penalty is a form of punishment that is incommensurate with the act of raping a child. The case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, featured a 43-year-old man who was sentenced to death in Louisiana in 2003 for raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter. Writing for the majority (which included Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) was Justice Anthony Kennedy, again the crucial swing vote between the liberal and conservative blocs on the Court.

Unsurprisingly, the dissenting Justices accused the Court's opinion of being too "sweeping," effectively outlawing the death penalty in cases which don't involve the murder of the victim(s). Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the decision prevented states from applying the full force of their capital punishment measures "no matter how young the child, no matter how many times the child is raped, no matter how many children the perpetrator rapes, no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how much physical or psychological trauma is inflicted, and no matter how heinous the perpetrator’s prior criminal record may be." Adding a questionable sense of morality to this litany of legal oversights, Republican Presidential candidate John McCain bemoaned the decision, saying, "That there is a judge anywhere in America who does not believe that the rape of a child represents the most heinous of crimes, which is deserving of the most serious of punishments, is profoundly disturbing.”

I've come to accept such reactions as the Supreme Court rounds out its docket for the year and announces its major decisions. But Barack Obama's response to the case surprised me. In a move that has got some people saying Obama wanted to avoid a Michael Dukakis-type gaffe on the issue of capital punishment, Obama said, "I disagree with the decision. I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes. I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime." Obama concluded by suggesting that if a state passes a law which levels the death penalty against such a crime, then that state should be allowed to impose it. This strong-armed states' rights position is unusual territory for Obama, and as enough commentators have pointed out, it locates his position squarely in the same camp as the conservative Justices.

Perhaps Obama achieved his goal in "disagreeing" with the Court's opinion in Kennedy v. Louisiana. Surveying readers' comments on several news websites, I've seen a smattering of, "This is the best thing I've heard come out of Obama's mouth," and, "Up to now I wasn't convinced, but Obama's got my vote after this." There have also been responses like my own, which basically say that Obama has been giving up too much by currying favor with the "values" demographic -- social conservatives, people of faith, law-and-order types. Unlike the folks "on the fence," though, those of us who object to Obama's stance on the case are unlikely to cancel our votes for him because of it. The issue is one among many, sure, but we also realize, to some degree, that Obama isn't addressing his reliable base in making such reactionary comments; he's talking to people "on the other side."

Like Justice Kennedy and yesterday's majority, I believe that the administration of capital punishment in this country is already fraught with arbitrary decision-making and line-drawing. But unlike the dissenters, John McCain, and Barack Obama, I would argue that allowing states to pursue the death penalty in non-murder cases extends, rather than narrowly limits, the reach of these arbitrary decrees. Who, after all, determines the degree of a crime's "heinousness," its relative "sadism," its offense to what's good and pure? If you ask me, any form of rape is "heinous," regardless of the age of the victim. In fact, we actually lose a great deal of footing in our fight against sexual abuse and gendered violence by conceding that the rape of an 8-year-old child is somehow more dastardly than the rape of an adult woman. Rape is always, under every circumstance, a heinous crime.

Acknowledging this does not compromise the Court's stance on capital punishment. It brackets the moralizing fetish of the sanctity of the American child, articulates the broad political goal of fighting against sexual violence in all forms, and recognizes the Court's decision as a pragmatic solution to the problem of capital punishment -- because it's such an arbitrary and imperfect punitive measure, the most our nation is willing to grant certain states is the ability to execute convicted murderers. In contrast, McCain's and Obama's responses effectively legitimate the death penalty in this Louisiana case on the grounds of a moral judgment -- we know a crime that merits capital punishment when we see one. (The dissenting Justices' opinion avoids such bald moralism and sticks to calling the majority opinion "sweeping," which is in effect a legal, not a moral, critique.)

Barack Obama's few weeks of being the presumptive Democratic nominee for President has energized this country's electorate in a way that we haven't seen for close to fifty years. His candidacy still holds forth a lot of promise. But I'd be lying if I said that his campaign ad and his response to Kennedy v. Louisiana didn't disappoint me. The greatest political orator of our generation no longer seems to be speaking to me.

Habeas Lives

2008-06-23T09:38:00.006-05:00

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court split 5-4 and declared unconstitutional the Bush Administration's refusal to grant detainees at Guantanamo Bay the right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention. The decision has been seen as a crucial victory in the piecemeal process of reestablishing of the rule of law in this country, where George W. Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress has made a mockery of the Judiciary branch of government to fight the so-called "War on Terror."

The Court's decision, Boumediene v. Bush, split along familiar lines, with the staunch conservatives, Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, making up the dissenting four. Anthony Kennedy, as is usually the case in the composition of the current Court, was the crucial swing vote who sided with Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer. In a move seen as fortifying their position over and against the dissenters, the ranking majority opinion Justice, John Paul Stevens, assigned the writing of the Court's opinion to Kennedy himself.

The only points I'd like to stress about this victory are that 1) the decision upholds habeas corpus as an uncompromisable constitutional right, which means that 2) no amount of fear-mongering and threat-issuing on the part of our government can extinguish a person's ability to question the government's policies and actions, which brings us back to the fact that 3) the preservation of that kernel of freedom which is preserved in habeas corpus is one of the touchstones not only of American law but also of American civil society. Between preserving that right and denying it in the first instance is the thin line between nominal democracy and actually existing fascism.

Anyone who reads this important decision cannot help but notice that while the majority speaks mostly of the rule of law, the preservation of our rights, and what the Constitution means in these exceptional times, the dissenting opinions of Justices Scalia and Roberts ring of partisanship, politicking, and the very fear-mongering that the Bush Administration has been guilty of since 9/11. Roberts says that the Court's opinion will open it up to "charges of judicial activism." As his extreme deference to the Executive branch of government (and, when conveniently in place, a Republican-controlled Legislative branch) has consistently shown, it's utterly impossible for this Chief Justice to conceive that the President himself has been the activist here, brushing aside the law in a fearsome consolidation of statist power.

In the same vein but in a tone befitting his hysteria, Antonin Scalia pipes in with, “[The decision] will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed... The nation will live to regret what the court has done today." The Justice's emphasis in his dissent isn't so much on the law but on the Executive's claims that detainees are terrorists or terrorists-in-waiting, and thus have no right to habeas whatsoever. Scalia's ludicrous scenarios play out in the blighted field of his imagination, as they have done with so many people in this country since 9/11.

The Supreme Court is barely hanging on to a conscientious, pragmatic majority these days, and if the likes of Roberts and Scalia had their way -- if, that is, a President McCain would be able to replace Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and possibly Souter with three candidates of his choosing -- then we can look forward to a government that pays lip service to checks and balances, a civil society that legitimates its Orwellian measures of control through its own terroristic (psychological or otherwise) devices.

An Insightful "Conservative"

2008-06-22T10:03:00.010-05:00

Jon Swift is the alias of a blogosphere humorist who describes himself as a "reasonable conservative who likes to write about politics and culture." Of course, like the "real" Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the Englishman of letters known especially for his biting satirical wit, this self-description is but a ruse. Jon Swift skewers conservative ideology and media talk by pretending to be their staunchest defender. Swift takes his cue from The Colbert Report -- addressing contemporary politics and news events -- but his writing is smarter, and more subtle, not unlike the work of the real Swift.

Jon Swift's tagline motto is: "Since the media is biased I get all my news from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Jay Leno monologues." And indeed most of his writing is devoted to pointing out the illogic of much conservative mass media. (His tagline itself is illogical -- the mass media is biased, but in his favor, and Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Jay Leno [whom I agree is both desperately unfunny and the biggest, dumbest misogynist on television] lie not at the margins of the public sphere but precisely in its center.) A recent post retains Swift's satirical tone while making fun of the mass media's lionization of Tim Russert, who, it should be said, did much to actually lower journalistic standards for public-interest inquiry of politicians and political institutions.

These observations aside, I was introduced to Jon Swift's world by virtue of his celebrated Amazon.com reviews. Back in 2006 Jon Swift posted reviews of books by the likes of Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and David Horowitz. These books -- hardly worth the paper they're printed on -- spewed far right-wing ideology like it was gospel and participated in the Republicans' drumming up support among its base in preparation for the 2006 mid-term elections. Well, Jon Swift took these folks to task not by dismissing them out of hand but by approaching them from a ridiculously literal, arch-conservative perspective. It was a performance befitting Jonathan Swift's classic essay "A Modest Proposal" (1729), which suggested that the Irish might alleviate their economic woes by selling children born into poverty as food for the rich.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon removed all of Jon Swift's reviews. Thankfully, he kept back-ups, and his complete archive of reviews can be found here. Notice that he begins each review with, "I have not actually read this book but..." Which, at least for me, captures the essence of so much that's wrong with the arch-conservative mindset (or, for that matter, any extremist political ideology which is less attuned to actually existing socioeconomic conditions and more interested in defending its theoretical coherence).

Jon Swift gets the tone right here, and that's what makes his voice so effective, and at times so laugh-out-loud funny. My favorite review has got to be his take on Mark R. Levin's Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America. Levin is one of those conservative legal commentators who willfully ignores the Court's demonstrable conservative bent, as well as the fact that Republican-appointed judges make up the vast majority of federal court appointees, to lambaste the few (remaining) "liberal" social measures that the Court has protected. Levin has to blind himself to all of this as he puts the Republican machinery of fantasizing that liberals control everything (the media, the courts, etc.) into full gear. Levin's book is the definition of spin in legal circles.

Jon Swift's review doesn't explain these things to us, nor does it seek to. In fact, the review doesn't say much about anything... except for the movie Men in Black. Titled "I love Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones," it reads:

I have not actually read this book but I love the movie with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. I thought it was very funny and very imaginative with all of the alien creatures. I don't remember the movie saying anything about the Supreme Court but I know they often change books when they adapt them into movies. Even though I agree with everything Justice Scalia says he does sometimes seem like an alien from another planet, which I mean in a good way.

That barb against Scalia is even funnier upon realizing that, for the arch-conservative, reading Levin's book is precisely akin to watching Men in Black -- neither says "anything about the Supreme Court." They do, however, put on a good show.

Sex Work: Economies of Gender and Desire

2008-06-21T05:01:00.009-05:00

Announcing a new course to be offered at Duke University in Fall 2008.

Sex Work: Economies of Gender and Desire
Women's Studies 150S/Cultural Anthropology 180S/Literature 124S/Sexuality Studies 120S
Tu Th 2:50 PM-4:05 PM (Friedl Bdg 126)
Instructor: Kinohi Nishikawa

The phrase “sex work” strikes most of us as paradoxical, confusing what we imagine to be an act of intimacy and pleasure with the banality of a nine-to-five job. Indeed, from prostitution to “exotic” dancing, sex work is seen as breaching important social divisions between labor and leisure, public and private, necessity and desire. It’s likely because of this confusion that our culture casts opprobrium on those who work in sex trades. Exotic dancers aren’t paid entertainers but bad mothers (Striptease). Prostitutes don’t negotiate the sex trade but are entrapped by it, never to escape (Born into Brothels). Female porn actors do what they do not because they want to do it but because they’ve been raped or abused as children (Howard Stern). In sum, mainstream culture slings personal attacks against people whose labor threatens the way we perceive the social order.

This course examines sex work as a particular form of gendered labor. Our aim is to understand sex workers as workers and to figure out what it is about their labor—“selling” embodied fantasy and desire—that disturbs citizens of modern capitalist societies. To this end, we will analyze the significance of sex trades operating as variable economies, at turns local (urban prostitution) and global (sex tourism), regulated (pornography) and criminalized (sex trafficking). We will also consider why the exchange of women’s bodies is important for the management of power in the sex trade and in modern capitalist societies more generally. Finally, we will attend to the views of sex workers themselves, for their experiences suggest it is still a relative luxury in this world to be able to separate one’s body or “intimate” sphere from the means by which one earns a living.

This course presents both transnational and U.S.-based case studies of sex work in prostitution, exotic dancing, and pornography. In order to foreground interdisciplinary dialogue of sex work issues, these case studies are illuminated by a variety of texts, including ethnographies, movies, investigative accounts, government reports, and memoirs by sex workers. This course fulfills the University research (R) requirement and would appeal to students from women’s studies, anthropology, public policy, sociology, and history, as well as the humanities.

Texts may include: Alexa Albert, Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women; Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic; and Iceberg Slim, Pimp: The Story of My Life. Films may include: Lilja 4-Ever (dir. Lukas Moodysson); Working Girls (dir. Lizzie Borden); and The Girl Next Door (dir. Christine Fugate).

Assignments
Three 4-5 page essays that respond to assigned texts in Units 1, 2, and 3.

Term Paper
8-10 pages in length, on a topic of the student’s choice. The term paper must integrate original and/or archival research into analysis of any topic related to the course.

Grade to be based on
Class participation 20%
Essay #1 10%
Essay #2 15%
Essay #3 20%
Term paper 35%

Against French Universalism

2008-06-20T10:39:00.010-05:00

The Times has published an interesting piece on the (re)birth of black political consciousness in France in the wake of Barack Obama's victory to become the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nominee. Writer Michael Kimmelman interviewed blacks living in Paris who have used Obama's campaign to make the case that it's high time for the French to have a public conversation about their vexed racial history and current race- and immigrant-oriented fears. For a nation that has long prided itself on forging a "color-blind" or "race-neutral" society, black French citizens like Patrick Lozès are saying, "[W]e’re blind in France, not colorblind but information blind, and just saying people are equal doesn’t make them equal."

From a purely electoral standpoint, the numbers seem to speak for themselves: "[O]ne black member representing continental France in the National Assembly among 555 members; no continental French senators out of some 300; only a handful of mayors out of some 36,000, and none from the poor Paris suburbs." Add to this the fact that people of color constitute the majority of the poor and working-poor classes in France. Many of these people live in the impoverished banlieues of major French cities, and it was in one such banlieue, Paris's Clichy-sous-Bois, where an eruption of urban violence in the fall of 2005 forced the French to confront the reality of social inequality in their country. (It led to a lot of reactionary, law-and-order-type rhetoric too -- like the chorus of white French politicians who denounced French hip hop artists for inciting the violence.)

All of this did not come as much of a surprise to people of color living in France. When you're forced to swallow the bitter pill of assimilating into a social order which recognizes itself as "universal," you're likely to see things -- elisions, erasures, denials -- that white citizens are loathe to admit. The right-wing, anti-immigration nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen is considered to be a political anomaly in France, and yet as recent as 2002 Le Pen made it to the second round of the presidential race, having commanded close to 17% of the national vote in the first round.

Even more prescient was the fact that, earlier in 2005, the government passed a law which sought to recast educational curricula on French colonialism in a "positive" light. Article 4 read that "School programs [should] recognize, in particular, the positive character of the French overseas presence, notably in North Africa, and give the history and the sacrifices of the French army fighters from those territories the prominence they deserve." Perhaps more than anything else, the tone-deaf revisionism of this piece of legislation (tone-deaf, that is, to actually existing postcolonial minorities and their needs, educational or otherwise, in contemporary France) forcefully suggests that France pursues a policy of racial, class, and immigrant discrimination all under the veil of "color-blindness."

Given this recent history, one wonders whether Obama's campaign really is the primary motivation behind Lozès and others' work. A new millennial black political consciousness has been on the rise since at least 2005. While certain aspects of this political project are, shall we say, race "positive" (or positivist: a politics stemming from racial identity), as Kimmelman's gloss on négritude makes clear, the project is equally committed to a progressive, structural critique of French universalism. Novelist Léonora Miano notes, "French universalism, the whole French republican ideal, proposes that if you embrace French values, the French language, French culture, then race doesn’t exist and it won’t matter if you’re black. But of course it does. So we need to have a conversation, and slowly it is coming: not a conversation about guilt or history, but about now.”

Despite white French politicians' unwillingness to acknowledge their racial past and present, smart, edgy, and talented French hip hop artists are at the forefront in making race, immigration, and social inequality important topics for public debate and cultural activity. In a twist to the post-riots backlash against French rappers, we are now seeing similar artists insist on the hypocrisy and blight of universalism. And they're articulating this critique not in the lofty tones of politico speech but in their own words, based on their own experiences, from the standpoint of universalism's unacknowledged others. One artist Kimmelman mentions is the aptly named Youssoupha (you suffer), a Senegalese French rapper whose music translates the social disenfranchisement of people of color into political art. There's no better way to end this post than to serve up a couple of Youssoupha's songs, participating as they do in constituting a new black French political subjectivity over and against an exhausted, untenable universalism.

"Ma destinée"

"Babylone zoo"

Euro 2008 Clearinghouse

2008-06-20T09:08:00.004-05:00

We're in the midst of a pulsating Euro championship in Austria/Switzerland, and there's a lot of good stuff out there being posted on the teams, players, languages, and eye candy involved. Slate has published an inventory of the best Euro 2008 soccer blogs, and it's no surprise that the English press, whose national squad are not involved in the tournament, are some of the liveliest of the bunch. Finally, you've got your recently published books on the world's game: David Goldblatt's magisterial history The Ball Is Round, Grant Farred's paean to Liverpool FC Long Distance Love, and Chuck Culpepper's Bloody Confused!, an American journalist's tale of leaving the sorry US sports scene behind to experience the brilliance of English football for a year. Happy reading, all, and here's to the Oranje winning the Euro championship!

How Mike Gravel Lost the Democratic Primary

2008-06-17T12:51:00.004-05:00

Well, technically he became a Libertarian. This and other fun facts/memories can be found in Slate's eight-minute slam-bam review of the Democratic presidential primary race.

Highlights include:

*Hillary Clinton's tearful plea in New Hampshire: "I just don't want to see us fall backwards"
*Barack Obama's Somali garb photo
*John Edwards's speeches about his father and the mill he worked in
*Bill Richardson's beard

The Gutenberg Remedies

2008-06-16T17:28:00.005-05:00

Michael Agger has written a droll piece on online reading practices, summarizing research done by the eminent Web theorist Jakob Nielsen. Its title, "Lazy Bastards," is a bit perplexing, although here Agger is only following Nielsen's lead in calling online users "selfish, lazy, and ruthless." We are "information foragers" who sniff around for only what interests us, skimming as we go along, and using the Internet to confirm preexisting beliefs. This last point is my paraphrase, but it captures Agger's pithy statement that "If you don't see what you need, you're gone."

Contrast this to what Nilsen calls "ludic reading," or reading textually -- that is, reading in print. According to him, ludic reading -- what Barthes might call engaging in the "pleasure of the text" -- is medially more suited to print culture rather than the Internet. Agger's gloss of Nielsen's view posits that ludic reading is characterized by the following:

* When we like a text, we read more slowly.
* When we're really engaged in a text, it's like being in an effortless trance.

Well, sure, but I can point to examples of this in online reading practices (Nielsen is anti-blogging, but not all blogs are created equal -- there's some great material out there), just as much as I would argue that certain print reading practices actively disengage the reader from "play" (sifting through a novel for quotations to write an academic term paper).

The problem, it seems to me, stems from Agger's and Nielsen's limited definitions of "reading" and "text." Neither can account for alternative reading practices online (what I would call an "active dwelling" through digital media and design [the interplay of images, color, font, and text]), and neither can account for a view of textuality that doesn't fall into the modernist trap of a privileged dwelling in "difficult" literature. (Incidentally, hard-line defenders of print culture in the Age of the Internet also tend to err on the side of literature's salvific, sustaining qualities for the soul; see especially Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies.)

Insofar as this rather traditional view of what it means to read text in print (ludic, pleasurable, etc.) informs Nielsen's formula, I'd say that his theory of online reading practices remains similarly constrained. Against the backdrop of modernist self-involvement in the text, Nielsen is able to posit that the attention span of your average online reader is effectively nasty, brutish, and short -- a veritable postmodern vacuum of context and illumination. There's great heuristic value to this modern/postmodern analytic, it's true, but as a guiding framework (even if not explicitly articulated by Nielsen), it fails to account for actually existing reading practices both online and in print.

A Looming Aide

2008-06-12T21:25:00.006-05:00

Here are my and Lorien Olive's (of Roadkill Politics) comments on this article from the Times, about Barack Obama's top aide (and Duke graduate), Reggie Love. The article strikes both of us as trafficking in stereotypes about black masculinity in describing the invaluable work that Love does for Sen. Obama; but we advance different interpretations about how, exactly, it does this. Send us your own thoughts on this and Lorien's blog.

KN: After reading the story and giving some thought to its title, I remembered the author mentioning that Love is 6'5'', a good three inches taller than Barack Obama. The title likely references this fact, but that doesn't necessarily make the use of the phrase "loom over" judicious: it still rings of someone figuratively "pulling the strings," and it no doubt reduces Love's complex personal story to his height and athletic build.

For me, the undertones of sexual tension between Love (oh, what a name!) and Obama are expressed most clearly in the author's extensive description of their sports/workout routines. There are the basketball games on primary days, the morning hours spent at the gym, and a rather admiring description of Love's athletic prowess (benching x number of pounds). But more than all of this, I found the description of their end-of-a-campaign-day routine of watching SportsCenter on ESPN to be most intriguing. The prose almost makes it seem as though Obama and Love share a hotel room when they "unwind before bed" and watch ESPN. The detail of Obama flossing his teeth while lying down and watching TV is almost too intimate, a touch of voyeurism that happens to be mediated through Love's eyes.

To be fair, this homoerotic bond over sports is not particularly shocking -- with its attendant locker-room antics and penis/sex metaphorizings, this bond is probably the most common form of homoerotic male bonding that our culture affords. This fact makes it difficult for me to determine whether the author's description of Love is any more racialized than other accounts of tight-knit male-male work relationships. I suspect that it isn't, with the caveat that Reggie Love's body is given an inordinate amount of attention in the piece, and usually at the slight expense of Obama's body (Love is taller, stronger, and more "fit," according to the author). Now this dynamic -- comparing black bodies as though they were specimens of athleticism and not political power-brokers -- is most certainly racialized, and that's where the real problem of this piece lies.

LO: Yeah, I agree, but I think that it is the special attention to the body that makes the piece carry a suggestion of carnality. Maybe I just haven't paid enough attention in the past, but I don't remember any other personal assistants being popularly known as "body men." Maybe they are by campaign insiders, but this is the first time I have ever heard that term in the mainstream press. Also I think that even if bonding over sports is a pretty typical thing to discuss, there is something that just didn't feel quite right about how the article describes their relationship. I mean it would be like if they ran an article about Hillary's "body person" pampering her, giving her manicures, and unwinding with a romantic comedy every night. Or McCain's "body person" giving him an enema, a sponge bath, and playing a game of Scrabble with him before bed. Anyway, I just don't hear any other stories that are similar to this one in relation to any of the other candidates, so maybe that's just sort of what makes me suspicious. I also don't like the way that they downplay the work that he does, as if the only thing that a former (black) college athlete could contribute to a political campaign is the equivalent of a butler or low-level service worker. This seems to, perhaps unintentionally, emphasize the hierarchy between educated, light-skinned, elite blacks such as Obama (who is exceptional somehow) and other blacks who do not share his unique cultural/ethnic background who will continue to be confined to service, sports, and entertainment roles, despite the possibility of having a Black president. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it, but I think that this is also what unsettled me.

Roadkill Politics

2008-04-18T21:01:00.007-05:00

Lorien Olive has started a new blog that tackles recent political news stories from a white working-class perspective. It's called Roadkill Politics, and as Lorien makes clear in her first post, she started her blog in response to the controversy surrounding Barack Obama's comments on the "bitterness" of white working-class voters in Pennsylvania, leading up to that state's important, possibly decisive, Democratic primary on April 22, 2008. Where Hillary Clinton and a number of commentators have criticized Obama for his supposed elitism, Lorien sees an opportunity to engage with white working-class politics -- not as a liberal or populist sound byte but as a complex, multifaceted domain of interests which usually gets reduced to the low expectations of the redneck or hillbilly bumpkin. Indeed, in Lorien's words, politics-as-usual "reduces [working-class whites] to a voting bloc to be stereotyped and wooed for the political purposes of individuals, a practice that has been and continues to be used to address all marginalized populations in this country, and is equally despicable in its every iteration."

In a more recent post, Lorien takes on Hillary's staged camaraderie with the very working-class folk whom she had accused Obama of denigrating. Lorien asks whether Hillary's performance of having shots with "the guys" is itself a demonstrable form of denigration (via pandering). Between Obama's ruffling some feathers with his comments and Hillary's insincere identification with working-class folk, I'd say at least Obama gives us a set of political questions to debate and work through -- whereas Hillary leaves us with a bad episode of Roseanne.

In another post, Lorien deconstructs bloggers' comments on Michelle Obama's presence on the campaign trail, which range in racist content from patronizing liberalism to vilifying condemnation. Lorien critiques bloggers' comparison of Michelle Obama to Omarosa (of Apprentice fame), suggesting that an old stereotype from the halcyon days of radio (Amos 'n' Andy) is in wide circulation these days among those who feel threatened by the figure of the "uppity" black woman. Here Lorien's thoughts on the intersection of race, class, and gender in American politics and culture remind me of the work done by Stuart Hall during the dark days of Thatcherism and Hortense J. Spillers' radical and much-understudied political essays "Inauguration Day 2001" and "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date."

Check out Roadkill Politics and have fun perusing Lorien's thoughts on sundry political topics. It's an engaging read, and you're sure to find lots of stuff in there to mull over, say amen to, and otherwise engage with as a politically curious person.

The Discreet Charm of David Souter

2008-04-13T09:26:00.004-05:00

I'm currently reading Jeffrey Toobin's excellent book on the U.S. Supreme Court, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. In addition to providing keen analysis of all the major Supreme Court decisions that have been decided over the past twenty years, Toobin recounts some truly entertaining yarns about each justice. To be sure, there were some real characters on the Rehnquist Court -- from the regal Sun Belt grande dame Sandra Day O'Connor to the pugnacious Italian bulldog Antonin Scalia. But I was surprised to find mirthful hilarity in the stories Toobin recounts about the Supreme Court's most reclusive Justice, David Souter.

Nominated to the Court by President George H.W. Bush on July 25, 1990, Souter was replacing the seat vacated by liberal Warren Court icon William J. Brennan. The former New Hampshire Supreme Court justice was confirmed by the Senate 90 to 9, despite the fact that many Republicans had reservations about Souter's conservative credentials. Souter left little in terms of a paper trail to give conservatives a solid idea of how he would vote on the most important issues for their base.

Souter ended up being a massive disappointment for the Republicans, and he will be perhaps the last justice to make it onto the Court without being subjected to an ideological litmus test (which effectively guarantees that a nominee will vote according to the party -- Republican or Democratic -- line). On all the major social issues, including abortion but also affirmative action and gay rights, Souter has consistently voted with the meager "liberal" bloc on the Court (consisting of Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer). Although many Republicans cast Souter's jurisprudence as a "betrayal" of their party, in fact his tenure on the Court can be seen as fitting into the classic New England Republican mold: supporting a robust federal government, keeping church and state issues distinctly separate, and defending individual civil liberties against repressive state measures.

That Souter should remain true to an "older" ideal of Republican politics (before the South- and Sun Belt-led hijacking of the party to serve evangelical, power-hungry interests) is perhaps unsurprising. For Souter leads a simple, almost ascetic life as a 68-year-old bachelor. Unconcerned with the trappings of modern technology, Souter has written only with a fountain pen in his professional work and was once given a television set but never plugged it in. Toobin rightly characterizes Souter's manners as reflecting the "habits of a gentleman from another century" -- namely, the eighteenth century inhabited by the likes of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. At the Supreme Court, Souter usually leaves the lights off in his office and reads briefs by sunlight. And he eats the same thing for lunch every day: an apple, including the core and seeds, with a cup of yogurt.

Toobin relates two stories about Souter that I'm compelled to share with you here. They reveal a dry wit and measured personality that seem out of step with his own party's current ideological partisanship and Manichean "good versus evil" worldview. They reveal what I'm calling the discreet charm of David Souter.

On bachelorhood

[Sandra Day O'Connor] had a...direct agenda with Souter. She wanted to get him married off. According to her biographer Joan Biskupic, O'Connor boasted about her matchmaking skills, claiming she had once been known as the "Yenta of Paradise Valley," her posh neighborhood in Phoenix. She invited Souter to many of her parties, including one, early in Souter's tenure, that featured "Fajitas and frivolity...Dress: Country Western or Effete Eastern." Over the years, practically everyone Souter knew in Washington, including First Lady Barbara Bush, tried to fix him up. None succeeded. One of his fellow justices once prevailed on Souter to take a woman out to dinner, and she reported back that she thought the evening had gone very well -- until the end. Souter took her home, told her what a good time he had, then added: "Let's do this again next year."

On being mistaken for Stephen Breyer

It was...a running joke at the Court that outsiders frequently mistook Souter and Breyer for each other. No one could really understand why this happened, because the two bore little resemblance. One day when Souter was making his usual solo drive from Washington to New Hampshire, he stopped for lunch in Massachusetts. A stranger and his wife came up to him and asked, "Aren't you on the Supreme Court?"

Souter said he was.

"You're Justice Breyer, right?" said the man.

Rather than embarrass the fellow, Souter simply nodded and exchanged pleasantries, until he was asked an unexpected question.

"Justice Breyer, what's the best thing about being on the Supreme Court?"

The justice thought for a while, then said, "Well, I'd have to say it's the privilege of serving with David Souter."

Scalia Q&A: Idiots, Hecklers, and Bad Jokes

2008-04-04T07:42:00.002-05:00

I found this clip of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia responding to audience questions at an event in which he was talking about the role of international law in U.S. courts. As a practitioner of interpretive originalism, Scalia is vehemently against either the direct quotation or even the faintest consultation of international law to help decide U.S. cases.

The clip doesn't include Scalia's talk, but it picks up with Q&A and highlights Scalia's skirmishes with a handful of foolish, tasteless, and otherwise dim audience members. I'm a self-identified progressive, and goodness knows Scalia is in desperate need of public intellectual skewering. But this? These "critics" -- all of them college-aged, it seems -- crack terrible jokes (about Dick Cheney's hunting incident), speak as though they were forcing their words through a meat grinder, and are clearly uninterested in engaging in civil, public debate.

The worst of the lot, the first questioner, prefaces his question -- "Do you support Carl Schmitt's dogma of the unitary executive?" -- with a rambling and pompous "introduction," in which he mistakenly refers to the Justice as "Anton Scalia." When the Justice asks him if he has a question to pose, the guy says, "Plato has a question for you." This bespectacled dodo is later escorted out of the room after heckling Scalia one too many times.

Black Pop I: Tyler Perry, Candy Licker, White Boys on the Down Low

2007-12-20T00:40:00.001-05:00

Three recent articles from Slate.com on black cultural politics:

1. Wesley Morris on Tyler Perry's appeal to black moviegoers, and particularly black women. Thoughts on what "niche" audience-marketing enables and forecloses in social relations and media criticism. Perry's revival of 1940s Hollywood melodrama and his refining of what might be called a "self-help" aesthetic: according to Morris, black women tell him "[Perry's] films give them hope for true love and greater success."

2. Benoit Denizet-Lewis on white men's identifying themselves as being on the Down Low. Thoughts on why white men are drawn to the Down Low -- a hypermasculine, possibly misogynist, discourse of homosexual disavowal and male privilege, of having one's cake and eating it too. Another twist to our current understanding of the DL, with white men taking up what Nelson George would call "everything but the burden."

3. Brendan I. Koerner on the history of black pulp fiction and mainstream publishers' current fascination with so-called "street lit." Review of black pulp fiction's rise with the likes of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines at Holloway House. Review of black pulp fiction's revival in the form of street lit, independently published books of ghetto life, in the 1990s. Analysis of street lit's mainstreaming, beginning with Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever in 1999 and reaching a new level of notoriety with Noire's Candy Licker in 2006.

Interesting side-story about Koerner's tracking down the "real" identity of Noire, whom he believes to be middle-aged black romance writer Tracy Price-Thompson. Whether or not that's true, the mysterious "urban" pseudonym points up black pulp fiction's/street lit's investment in the idea of keeping it real.

I'm a 'Baller

2007-12-09T03:50:00.005-05:00

Footballer. I'm a footballer. Or at least that's the dream I'm pursuing in signing up with an intramural indoor soccer team here at Duke. I responded to a mass e-mail calling for people who'd like to join a squad that needed players. Even though I haven't played soccer regularly for years, I knew this league was just for fun and recreation and so had nothing to lose in taking the plunge.

Our captain, Michael Albert, is a guy from the Business School. Our team consists of men and women from all over the graduate and professional schools and even includes a few undergrads. Because we were sort of thrown together at the last minute, Michael gave us a team name befitting our ragtag grouping: Identity Crisis.

I've written before about my abiding love for the game, especially as its played in the English Premier League. Even without cable since coming back from Peru, I continue to follow all the fixtures online and to obsessively track players' progress through my online Fantasy Football game. Well, the rec league at Duke has given me my first real opportunity to combine my fandom and vicarious knowledge of the game with sustained physical activity -- actually getting out there on the pitch and playing some football.

Not a very physical player the last time I put on the cleats and shinguards, I was a flatfooted defender in the years I played soccer as a kid. Since then, I spent several years as a competitive swimmer and water polo player, struggled through surgery in high school and college, took up tennis and racquetball, and, most recently, turned to long-distance running. Overall, I became more of a physical presence in my sporting pursuits, strengthening leg muscles through individual activities (swimming, running) and developing a sense of movement, strategy, and team-play in the other sports. While most of my footballing tactics will be derived less from experience and more from electronic observation (Fox Soccer Channel, 4thegame.com, YouTube footballing highlights, the aforementioned Fantasy game), I'm ready for the challenge of indoor soccer.

As I prepare to take to the field (or the IM gym's floor, as it were), I hope to mold my play in the style of my footballing hero, the Basque Spaniard and Liverpool midfielder Xabi Alonso. Known as a "deep-lying midfielder," Alonso is not a holding or purely defensive midfielder per se (such as Chelsea's Claude Makelele or Milan's Gennaro Gattuso) but a playmaker who creates space for himself -- and thus his passes and long-range shots -- just behind the attacking midfielder (in Alonso's club, this would be the legendary Steven Gerrard). Milan's World Cup champion Andrea Pirlo is perhaps the world's best-known deep-lying playmaker. Other notables include Barcelona's Xavi and Roma's Daniele De Rossi.

The deep-lying midfielder is not a standout defender. He's an offensive threat who distributes passes from the defense up to the attacking midfielder and, of course, the striker(s). In addition to being an amazing passer, he'll try his luck with long-range shots and will, on occasion, venture into the penalty area to follow up on scoring plays (or, alternately, defensive mistakes by the opposition). You can see the range of Alonso's skills, typical of the deep-lying midfielder, in this video:

Having said that, I'm probably overstating my case when I say I think I can play this position in our rec league. For one, I lack the basic, day-in-day-out skills of a regular football player. And there's no doubt the deep-lying midfielder must possess a high degree of technical skill in order to be effective at his position. Furthermore, though I consider myself to be a decent passer of the ball, I'll have absolutely zero experience playing with my team before our first match. This is a bad omen, I know, but what can you do when the league starts during finals week? Finally, it's worth noting that indoor soccer takes place in a relatively small, enclosed space (where side walls are inbounds); the deep-lying midfielder works best when there's more space available and when his vision can open up defenses and pick out the free player. Indoor soccer simply doesn't allow for that degree of open play.

Enough fantasy strategizing for now. But on to a related topic about fandom and identification. It has occurred to me that even though Alonso is my idol, when I do take to the gym floor in my blue Target-bought kit, I'll bear a resemblance not to him but to some other Premier League footballers with whom I share certain features. Phenotypically, I may have more in common with Eintracht Frankfurt's Naohiro Takahara or Tottenham Hotspurs' Lee Young-Pyo. I don't recognize myself in them, however. Something about my mixed ethnic heritage makes me look more like:

Arsenal's talented left back, Frenchman Gael Clichy

Manchester United's sidelined defender Mikael Silvestre, another Frenchman

Former Villain and current Bolton sub Gavin McCann (a holding midfielder)

Theo Walcott, Arsenal's young forward and one player on whom England is hinging its hopes of national football revival (after crashing out of Euro 2008)

Bolton's substitute goalkeeper, Ali Al Habsi, from Oman

Liverpool's stalwart shot-stopper Jose Reina

And yet another goalie, and perhaps the closest thing I have to a doppelgänger in the Premier League, Everton's and the US national team's Tim Howard

Vote for your favorite candidate for my lookalike, or tell me I'm crazy with all of my choices. I'm an aging athlete, I know, and some of these lads are in the prime of their careers. But I figure it's never too late to start.

On Misplaced Hatred

2007-11-29T12:29:00.001-05:00

[This is a response I wrote to Audre Lorde's "Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices," a poem assigned in the online course my friend Alexis Gumbs is teaching: "To Be a Problem: Outcast Subjectivity and Black Literary Production." In conjunction with this post, please read Alexis's comments on sexual violence against black women, "To Be Game."]

The language of this poem is extraordinary. It raises the voices of the dead, so to speak (thank you, Sharon Holland), to create an impression of mourning that's at once singularly personal yet all-too-familiar to victims of sexual violence. I can understand why Lorde might have revised this poem upon hearing it performed: this impression of mourning is as much aural as it is visual, and it's important to try reading parts of "Need" out loud to dwell in its beautiful sadness.

I was particularly affected by Pat's words on p. 11:

What terror embroidered my face
onto your hatred
what ancient unchallenged enemy
took on my sweet brown flesh
within your eyes
came armed against you
with only my laugther my hopeful art
my hair catching the late sunlight
my small son eager to see his mama work?
...

I need you. For what?
Was there no better place
to dig for your manhood except in my woman's bone?

On the same page Bobbie says: "We have a grave need for each other / but your eyes are thirsty / for vengeance / dressed in the easiest blood / and I am closest."

These verses speak back to those perpetrators of sexual violence who refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Men must be confronted with the bruised, battered, bloodied flesh that is the outcome of their sexual aggression. In a sense, they must "own" that aggression by bearing witness to its horrible consequences.

At the same time, Pat and Bobbie acknowledge the psychic wounds that fuel the illogic of sexual violence against black women. The idea of "misplaced hatred" (12) resonates throughout Lorde's poem. An "ancient...enemy" is projected onto the black woman's body, and violence is done to that body out of fear, anxiety, self-loathing, and "terror."

Who or what is that ancient enemy? It's not just racism Lorde is speaking of here: it's a radical dehumanization, through racism but also through heteronormative patriarchy and capitalism (which breeds male insecurity and compensatory measures to escape "lack"), of the social and psychic life of black people. This is a problem of black people's oppression tout court as it's tragically played out in the sexual dehumanization of the black female body.

There's a "grave," or urgent, need for black men to realize this problem and to join their sisters in resisting racist-sexist structures of capitalist domination. But that collaboration recedes from the horizon when intergender need is literally taken to the grave -- when black women aren't fellow strugglers and insurgents but are the objects of putatively male needs: sexual gratification, domestic control, and violent, phallic sublimation.

Lorde's troping on the idea of "need" is tragic and visionary. It captures a powerful social dynamic -- a problem of racial, gender, and class politics as they inhere in rape-murder -- and provokes us to ask other questions. What happens when we say -- to lovers, friends, comrades, companions -- "I need you"? Do we really mean it? In what ways do we mean it? On what, or whose, terms?

Or do you say

...you need me you need me you need me
a broken drum
calling me Black goddess Black hope Black
strength Black mother
yet you touch me
and I die in the alleys of Boston...

Derrida Tarries with AutoCorrect

2007-11-18T17:08:00.003-05:00

In reading the essays and interviews that comprise Jacques Derrida's Paper Machine (2005), I came across a delightful anecdote about the confrontation between philosophical writing and new technologies of writing and inscription. This from "The Word Processor":

In Circumfession I also gave myself the somewhat random constraint of a software program that, when I got to the end of a paragraph of such and such a length, roughly twenty-five lines, told me: "The paragraph is going to be too long; you should press the Return button." Like an order coming from I know not whom, from the depths of what time or what abyss, this slightly threatening warning would appear on the screen, and I decided to come quietly to the end of this long sequence, after the breathing space of a rhythmic sentence, which did have punctuation, as if rippling with commas, but was uninterrupted, punctuated without a period, if you like -- so submitting the fifty-nine long sentences to an arbitrary rule made by a program I hadn't chosen: to a slightly idiotic destiny... As you know, the computer maintains the hallucination of an interlocutor (anonymous or otherwise), of another "subject" (spontaneous and autonomous, automatic) who can occupy more than one place and play plenty of roles: face to face for one, but also withdrawn; in front of us, for another, but also invisible and faceless behind its screen. Like a hidden god who's half asleep, clever at hiding himself even when right opposite you. (22)

Derrida elaborates on his anecdote by considering how the computer -- this medium of "word processing" -- becomes an Other to our consciousness. In contrast to writing with a stylus or on a typewriter, writing on a computer entails addressing an Other who knows what you are going to say in advance: "you have the feeling that you are dealing with the soul -- will, desire, plan -- of a Demiurge-Other, as if already, good or evil genius, an invisible addressee, an omnipresent witness were listening to us in advance, capturing and sending us back the image of our speech without delay, face to face -- with the image rendered objective and immediately stabilized and translated into the speech of the Other, a speech already appropriated by the other or coming from the other, a speech of the unconscious as well. Truth itself" (23).

Word processing's immediacy, its seamless ability to add or erase data with a stroke of the keypad, its virtuality -- all these give Derrida the impression that there's a "demon" (23) at work in the computer apparatus, some unknown entity which exerts its magic on us, making us think the words we type on the screen are really, truly our "own." In fact, the demon's trickery makes our writing seem less familiar, more fixed in time (immediate) and space (there, on the screen, "in" the machine). Writing on the computer alters the texture of textuality itself:

The text is as if presented to us as a show, with no waiting. You see it coming up on the screen in a form that is more objective and anonymous than on a handwritten page, a page which we ourselves moved down. So from bottom to top is how things go: this show happens almost above us, we see it seeing us, surveying us like the eye of the Other, or rather, simultaneously, it also happens under the eye of the nameless stranger, immediately calling forth vigilance and his specter. It sends us back the objectivity of the text much faster, and so changes our experience of time and of the body, the arms and the hands, our embracing of the written thing at a distance... That doesn't mean that it perverts or degrades the sign, but it renders other our old sorting out, our familiar altercation, our family scene, if I may call it that, when the written thing first appeared. (24-25)

The Demiurge-Other: a demon that, at least to my mind, would mimic what we say as we write on the computer. Yet, in a strange way, his act of mimicry would precede the act of writing; that is, the text which appears on screen would seem as though it should've always been there, with or without our conscious writerly attention. So it's mimicry with a difference: fidelity to language that has already been worked over by the word-processing apparatus.

Between 1997 and 2007, successive versions of Microsoft Office gave a face and a name to the "internal demon" of word processing. Derrida's comments appeared before the arrival of Clippit, or Clippy, but, just as with his sentence's truncation by AutoCorrect, it wouldn't be unfair to speculate that he would've engaged the much-maligned Help icon by simply shrugging off its "slightly idiotic destiny." Clippit, after all, was only the goofy, literal expression of the processes of technological inscription that had already taken root in our writerly beings.

Farred on SportsCenter

2007-11-17T16:41:00.001-05:00

I just discovered Gelf Magazine's interview with Duke University Literature professor Grant Farred on the current state of ESPN's SportsCenter. It's a pretty entertaining read, with Farred coming up with some good one-liners about the qualitative demise of America's original televised sports talk show. Regarding SportsCenter's putatively dumbed-down programming these days, Farred intones, "Proliferation is the death of intelligence."

For a related story on the death of intelligent sports news media, see Josh Levin's "What's Wrong with Sports Illustrated" on Slate.

Frivolous Suit

2007-11-17T10:59:00.000-05:00

This is a long overdue follow-up to my post "A Dirty Shame," in which I introduced the case of a Washington D.C. administrative law judge, Roy Pearson, who sued his dry cleaners for $54 million over allegedly missing pants.

It turns out that way back in June a Washington judge dismissed his case. The BBC story on it doesn't specify on what grounds the case was dismissed, but its corresponding video feature (see link to the right of the story) features a U.S. law expert claiming that Judge Pearson was a "pariah" in legal circles and that his job was seriously under threat.

Those words proved to be true enough, as it was recently discovered that Pearson had not been reappointed as a judge when his term expired in May. (The delay in the report had to do with the AP's request going through the motions of the Freedom of Information Act.) While this may be proper punishment for Pearson's outrageous abuse of the justice system, it's but temporary relief from the kind of self-serving legal logic which allowed Pearson to bring forth his suit in the first place. "Satisfaction Guaranteed," we recall, was the very thing Pearson claimed he didn't receive/experience when his pants were "lost" and then compensated for with a lot of money.

Death of a Pugilist

2007-11-11T08:07:00.000-05:00

Of the several amusing stories about the life of Norman Mailer, the confrontational don of postwar American letters, in the BBC's obituary for him, I found these to be notable:

Mailer's obsession with masculinity and violence often got him into trouble. He once beat up a sailor on a Manhattan street because he believed that the man had questioned the sexuality of his dog.

In 1971, he head-butted his fellow writer Gore Vidal before a television chat-show after Vidal had written that "there has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression".

In addition to being a respected novelist and biographer, Mailer was a boxer, womanizer, social commentator, and newspaper man (he co-founded The Village Voice). His was the voice of the insurgent American male who saw his "status" as a man socially and culturally diminished in the years following the war.

Critics usually point to his influence on literary contemporaries such as Philip Roth and John Updike. But it seems to me Mailer's shadow is also cast over the work of filmmakers Woody Allen and Terence Malick (notably The Thin Red Line), as well as the "ethnic" writers Ishmael Reed and Frank Chin (in his public dispute with Maxine Hong Kingston). There's also Mailer's contribution to hipster culture, "The White Negro" (1956; reprinted in Advertisements for Myself in 1959). From the beatniks to the Beastie Boys, Mailer influenced generations of disaffected white youth who found soulful expression in cool "black" pose.

Norman Mailer was a figure who, although his books may have fallen out of favor in recent decades, embodied the voice of the modern American man in all his contradictions: bullish yet victimized (by women), brash yet fundamentally insecure.

Who Needs Cup o' Noodles?

2007-10-26T10:38:00.001-05:00

Samiha alerted me to this News & Observer article about a Duke undergraduate whose extracurricular culinary pursuits have attracted the attention of foodies and health officials alike. Senior history and economics major Bryan Zupon runs Z Kitchen out of his campus apartment. Zupon serves delicious, full-course meals to friends and "like-minded foodies." He has state-of-the-art cookware and utensils which allow him to venture gourmet concoctions like poached duck breast in a foie gras butter.

A recent menu, as reported by the N&O, went something like this:
*Shrimp, Nueske bacon, avocado mosaic, tomato-cumin chutney, mustard, Sichuan peppercorn, Old Bay
*Red snapper, braised fennel, candied olive, raisins, passion fruit vinegar
*Sam Mason's pork belly, miso-butterscotch, snow peas
*Duck breast poached in foie gras butter, crispy skin, mushroom ragout, sage, black truffle-lemongrass emulsion, grains of paradise
*Beet, chevre, pistachio, green peanuts, orange blossom honey, ginger-pear, Manni olive oil, Maldon salt, grated chocolate
*Homeland Creamery blackberry ice cream, sesame chocolate, roasted-pickled apples, roasted pineapple

Word of Zupon's gourmanderie spread quickly, and soon Z Kitchen was "booked" every weekend during his junior year. This September, Zupon was the subject of a glowing New York Times story, in which the author wrote about her visit to Z Kitchen, dining on fare that "wouldn’t be out of place in New York or San Francisco." (The story includes the recipe for red snapper with braised fennel and candied olives.)

Zupon's problem now is that Durham County officials suspect him of illegally running a restaurant out of his apartment. Because Z Kitchen hasn't been inspected or taxed as a restaurant, charging his guests for the food he serves would land Zupon in some trouble. (It may not have helped that the Times write-up actually states that Zupon is "running a restaurant.") While Zupon claims never to have charged money for his work, he does accept donations or contributions to offset the cost of buying ingredients.

As of this writing, Zupon continues to cook out of Z Kitchen. His website, zkitchen.net, seems to be temporarily down. At any rate, it's a good story, and I can only hope that I'll be invited to dine at Z Kitchen before Zupon graduates this spring.

Facebook Revolutions

2007-10-25T09:25:00.002-05:00

Marvel at the snatch-and-grab that is, and will no doubt continue to be, corporate investment in Facebook. The BBC announced today that Microsoft won a bidding war with Google to invest $240 million in the three-and-a-half year old company, in exchange for a not insignificant 1.6% share. Based on these numbers (1.6% = $240 million), the story rather speculatively calculates Facebook's worth at an astonishing $15 billion.

The BBC goes on to state 15 useful, sometimes obvious reasons why a mega-corporation like Microsoft would want to invest in the world's premier social networking website. Here are my favorites:

2. The average user spends 3.5 hours a month on Facebook - more than the average user on rival MySpace - which is increasingly attractive to advertisers.
I personally know people who spend this much time on Facebook every day. I shall not name names here, but let's just say I now know why the United Nations has a reputation for not getting anything done.

3. Facebook is the current Web 2.0 darling - popular with ordinary users and "tech heads" alike.
I don't know the lingo: 2.0, tech head, whatever. I do know I'm a half-Luddite when it comes to technology: happy with the tools, functions, and gadgets I possess and know well but averse to "new" and "innovative" commodities that I'm told I simply "must have" in order to be "cool" or "with it" or "in touch." I still resent those moments when friends had the audacity to criticize me for not having a cell phone -- as though they had to put up with some sort of unfortunate handicap on my part. I'm happy with my mobile now, but it's not like I was dying without it.

At any rate, this is an interesting point: Facebook appeals to techies and non-techies alike. For me, it's not just that Facebook's applications are efficient and easy to use; it's also that the website's text and interface are "easy on the eyes," designed with the student or working professional in mind. MySpace, by contrast, has turned into a gauche, untidy, bloated mess of advertising, videos, and "personalized" text; every page is a new adventure, and usually a new set of buttons and images and objects to navigate or avoid. MySpace has no common "language" to speak of -- it's become so "user-friendly" that any semblance of communicable text is lost between a set of five or more "friends."

4. US research reveals that Facebook users come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college than MySpace users - increasing that attraction for advertisers.
But of course my rant above probably boils down to this revealing fact: though by no means from a "wealthy" family, I do have the education, leisure time, and cultural capital to appreciate certain aspects of Facebook -- design, clarity, efficiency -- over and against those of MySpace. Rather than feel "guilty" about this fact, I'd like to think through the implications of Facebook's class differential and, more broadly, theorize how and to what effect capital identifies virtual spaces of consumption. These spaces are variable and differentiated; they may be porous, or they may not. However one pursues these questions, it's important that we remember Facebook's isolationist "origins": it began as a virtual complement to Harvard's freshman facebook, print copies of which had been a new student's guide to everyone's hometown, campus location, and hookup potentiality (the last based on a choice high school photo -- gah!). They had actual facebooks when I arrived at Dartmouth in the fall of 2001 -- are they still around at "elite" colleges and universities, or has Facebook replaced them too?

9. According to a report, 233 million hours of work are lost each month in the UK due to staff looking at social networks. Advertisers can now target people when at their desks.
See comment about UN workers above.

14. Facebook is the acceptable face of blogging - you can reflect your life and personality online without being seen as a "blogger", which often carries a geeky stigma.
Well, this can go both ways -- too little information on Facebook leaves you in the doldrums (see those who still have the question mark as their profile picture), but too much can make it seem as though you only knew how to communicate in spaces of virtual sociality. I've been told that my practice of posting numerous reviews of books and movies on Facebook (and Amazon.com) is odd. What makes me want to offer criticism in these virtual spaces? What do I get done here that I may or may not be able to get done in "real life"? Do I expose myself to be averse to face-to-face interaction by channeling a portion of my intellectual energy into Facebook -- or this blog even?

All good questions, the answers to which aren't forthcoming any time soon (if ever). I suppose the only thing I can say right now is that I'm aware of the existential tension between my virtual self and my Being as such. I realize that, even though virtuality is definitely a part of my Being, it doesn't exhaust or define who I am in a strict sense. I mean, have you seen my Facebook profile picture? When have I ever looked so cool in real life?

Erotic/Oblique

2007-10-24T11:23:00.000-05:00

Read Bruce Chatwin's essay on English artist Howard Hodgkin (from the collection What Am I Doing Here) and discovered this kernel of insight at the end:

...Howard's pictures have always been, more or less, erotic -- and the more erotic for being inexplicit. He seems incapable of starting a picture without an emotionally charged subject, though his next step is to make it obscure, or at least oblique. Yet is not all erotic art -- as opposed to the merely pornographic -- oblique? Descriptions of the sexual act are as boring as descriptions of landscape seen from the air -- and as flat: whereas Flaubert's description of Emma Bovary's room in a hotel de passe in Rouen, before and after, but not during the sexual act, is surely the most erotic passage in modern literature.

My friend Lindsey and I had a conversation about erotic art in relation to her reading of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, which she found decidedly non-erotic. Something about repetition, ritual, and the banality of it all -- Sade's directness.

If memory serves me, I think Lindsey did, in fact, mention Flaubert as a literary erotist (to cite the first English translation of Bataille's term -- erotism, not eroticism), capturing in Madame Bovary the peripheral lines of desire that tease our fascination with Emma. Flaubert, then, and not Lawrence, does this to us.

Obliquity and erotism: pulsion, torsion, and the unknowable object of drive. Attention to detail. The sensuousness of form.

I wish, in Chatwin's brilliantly meandering final passage, he had written, "whereas Flaubert's description of Emma Bovary's room in Rouen, before and after, is surely the most erotic passage in modern literature." The "r"s rolling together, a pause to note the obliquity of erotism ("before and after"), and the brave concluding statement of fact. No need to say, much less italicize, during -- we know what's come in between before and after.

Fanon and "Minor" Differences

2007-10-17T15:21:00.003-05:00

[This is a response I wrote to Frantz Fanon's essay "The Fact of Blackness," a text assigned in the online course my friend Alexis Gumbs is teaching: "To Be a Problem: Outcast Subjectivity and Black Literary Production." In conjunction with this post, please read Alexis's very helpful introduction to Fanon, "To Be Open."]

I reread Chapter Five, “The Fact of Blackness,” in my tattered copy of Black Skin, White Masks with your words and questions in mind. One item that struck me was the variance in Fanon’s use of the term “minor.”

At first Fanon uses the word to describe the ontological security of intraracial fraternity: “As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others” (109). Here Fanon sets up his profound analysis of interracial angst (the black man’s being as defined through the white other) by suggesting that intraracial fraternity doesn’t produce the visual torsion or traction that’s required of the “racial epidermal schema,” a kind of degree-zero Difference in social relations.

A little later Fanon will extend the logic of this insight by making the somewhat remarkable claim that the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews was but an instance of “little family quarrels” (115). Again, intraracial relations — even an event as disastrous as the Holocaust — doesn’t quite get at the Difference Fanon is illustrating here.

Toward the end of the essay, when Fanon launches a brilliant critique of Sartre’s prefatory remarks to Black Orpheus, the term “minor” is brought up once more. But its usage here is distinct from its previous usage: “[I]n the paroxysm of my being and my fury, [Sartre] was reminding me that my blackness was only a minor term… Without a Negro past, without a Negro future, it was impossible for me to live my Negrohood. Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned” (138).

Fanon is of course objecting to Sartre’s subordination of lived, embodied blackness, or negritude, to the abstract idea(l) of the proletariat (132-33); he rejects Sartre’s dialectic of White and Black (anti)theses resolving themselves “in the night of the absolute,” or the Marxian notion of class struggle (133). White and Black are NOT coeval theses, Fanon suggests, and racial-epidermal Difference is irreducible to Hegelian-Marxian dialectics. He notes acidly, “Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (138).

Fanon’s critique of Sartre is astute, I think; indeed his tormented, autobiographical essay might be read as an example of precisely how embodied blackness anxiously exists (vis-a-vis the gaze of the other) in a conflictual state of self-objectification. “Consciousness of the [black] body,” Fanon writes, “is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness” (110). Whites don't suffer from such extreme psychic abjection because they needn't recognize their subjectivities through the eyes of others. Under colonial regimes of domination, whites are always already afforded a first-person ("I") consciousness.

And yet, to return to Fanon’s first usage of the term “minor,” I wonder if the concept of intraracial fraternity might not be productively critiqued. What’s obscured by referring to intraracial conflict as “little family quarrels”? Is it possible to theorize Difference intraracially?

Fanon himself would provide one answer to these questions in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. There he devotes many pages deconstructing the social position of those “natives”-turned-state administrators in postcolonial African countries. This professional class of Africans — the national(ist) bourgeoisie — effectively prolongs colonial domination by securing wealth for their caste and exploiting the labor of the black masses. Reading “The Fact of Blackness” in light of this later, more explicitly “revolutionary” work, one wonders whether intraracial difference might not produce a “racial epidermal schema” of its own based on postcolonial variations in caste, color, literacy, and education.

Black feminist literary and cultural critic Hortense Spillers provides another answer to these questions with her idea of the “intramural” in black diasporic cultures. In any number of her essays, especially “Black, White, and in Color, or Learning How to Paint: Toward an Intramural Protocol of Reading,” Spillers shows how sexual difference interjects an irruptive “cut” in the black cultural imaginary. Indeed Spillers’s analytic allows us to see how race itself is differentially embodied across genders. Intraracial fraternity is thus a social fiction that papers over the very real ways in which Woman is relegated to a “minor” position within that discourse.

*****

Thank you, Alexis, for giving us the tools with which to engage critically with Fanon. My rereading of “The Fact of Blackness” is inspired by the animating spirit you display in responding to our posts.

Improper Color

2007-10-17T11:33:00.000-05:00

My Finnish friend Lissu, who's working at the United Nations this fall, sent me this unintentionally funny website by the United States government. It guides prospective applicants to the government's Diversity Immigrant Visa Program (DIV) on how to compose an acceptable application photograph. Now the DIV is interesting in that it operates on a lottery basis; according to Wikipedia, "The Act [legislating the DIV] makes available 50,000 permanent resident visas annually to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States." So clearly one of the things the program is looking for is "diversity" among immigrants themselves -- a veritable rainbow coalition of those desiring a Green Card.

But as you can see on this website, the DIV's imagining of diversity comes across as offensive in its effort to manage politically correct images. We have subjects of different hues and colors represented here, which is the liberal multiculturalist gesture. Yet the DIV's articulation of how not to compose an application photo turns these very "diverse" subjects into stereotyped caricatures of themselves.

Here's a "well-composed" photo of one applicant:

And here's what not to do: No Retouching

Do:

Don't do: Glare on Glasses

See what a slight tilt of the head can do to your photo?

And, perhaps most egregious of all, Do:

Don't do: Improper Color

The effect of these "do not do" images is to render the rainbow coalition into a melting pot o' ridiculousness. The DIV might have relayed the same information without using such loaded images -- so obviously pc-conscious that they become parodies of themselves when re-figured by clownish scribblings and inept lighting. Lissu probably put it best in the subject line of her e-mail when she scoffed, "Yeah, 'improper color.'"

Lost Luggage Graveyard/Sale

2007-09-26T15:20:00.003-05:00

The BBC reports on the final resting place of Hoggle, from Jim Henson's legendary fantasy film, Labyrinth (1986). Turns out he got lost in air transit and then, once found, was never claimed by his Muppet owner(s). Hoggle now lies in the museum of Alabama's Unclaimed Baggage Center (UBC), the bizarrest of bazaars: a warehouse where the contents of lost and unclaimed baggage are up for sale to thousands of discriminating buyers and junk collectors. One can only hope that lost toiletries aren't also included on the UBC's sales racks.

It is the warehouse of the lost and never found, the final destination of airline luggage that goes missing in the US and is never reclaimed.

The centre's collection of goods often throws up surprises

The building is situated on the edge of the sleepy town of Scottsboro in Alabama.

It does not seem like the kind of place that would attract a million visitors a year, but bargain hunters from around the world converge on the centre every day, eager to see what treasures the Unclaimed Baggage Center has uncovered.

It is a company that buys all the lost and unclaimed luggage from airlines across the US and then sells on everything from clothes to expensive jewellery at discount prices.

"When they come in, we always tell people to plan a few hours to go on their treasure hunt," says Brenda Cantrell, the centre's marketing manager.

"Dig through it, have fun with it, you never know what you might find."

Sight unseen

The luggage is only sold to the Unclaimed Baggage Center once 90 days have passed, and the owners have not been traced.

Worldwide 30m pieces of luggage went missing last year

They receive it, sight unseen, and then unpack, sort and display the items inside the warehouse that is the size of a city block.

For the most part that means clothes, rows and rows of them, but it also means some very unusual and valuable items, sometimes sewn into the linings of cases or hidden in crates.

"We had a 19th Century full suit of armour, an underwater camera from Nasa, Egyptian artefacts and props from movies," says Brenda as she proudly stands next to a display case that holds a puppet from the Jim Henson film, Labyrinth.

He was discovered staring out at the staff in a packing case back in the 1980s. His name is Hoggle and he now resides in the centre's museum along with a set of bagpipes, and ancient maps of Afghanistan.

Over the years, shoppers have made their own special finds.

One woman discovered $1,000 (£500) hidden in the lining of a case she bought for pocket change, while another found out that the glass vase she had bought as a trinket was actually worth a small fortune.

Hoggle is not for sale

"I was here Friday, Saturday, yesterday and today and I'll probably come back tomorrow," says Abby Gentry-Benson, who is festooned with diamonds, silver and gold jewellery all purchased at the Unclaimed Baggage Center.

Abby, who describes herself as a Chanel No. 5 girl, has been coming to the warehouse for more than 30 years and bought most of her jewellery for around half-price.

Her entire collection is worth a great deal, and she feels no guilt that many of the items were possibly heirlooms or precious keepsakes.

"Most of the pieces that people have lost, they got the insurance money from and have bought something to replace it. Somebody like me that loves it and cherishes it every day, it's got a good home you know."

Finders keepers

Over in the sporting goods and electronics section there are piles of mobile phones, ever popular iPods, golf clubs, a ukulele (with one string), and even a shotgun that was misplaced by one careless owner.

The chance of securing a bargain is a big draw

Steve Mare and his mother-in-law have flown all the way from Texas just to visit the warehouse.

"Both of us had heard about it for years and we wanted to come and see what bargains we could find," says Steve, who is looking for a new suitcase.

The Unclaimed Baggage Center started down the road in a shack, when the founder began the business by buying lost luggage from the Greyhound Bus Company.

In those days things were literally thrown onto a table and people sorted through, in search of a bargain.

But now the centre is one of Alabama's top tourist destinations proving that "finders keepers, losers weepers" is a big attraction for those in search of a new suit of clothes or a suit of armour.

Ethics of Facebook

2007-09-26T14:01:00.000-05:00

Reihan Salam's article on Slate, "The Facebook Commandments," offers up a mirthful helping of social networking dos and don'ts.

On declining an unwanted friend request:
"Assuming there will be no social fallout, just ignore it. They probably won't notice, particularly if we're dealing with a promiscuous friender. (You know, the kind of person who thinks, 'I need to break 700 friends so I can rid myself of my crippling sense of shame.' Trust me, it won't work.)"

On discreet de-friending:
"[W]hat if your so-called friend scans through their friend list and notices that you've gone missing? First off, anyone who is policing their Facebook account this rigorously is morbidly obsessed and thus best kept at arm's length. If she confronts you about it, the best strategy is to plead ignorance: Perhaps the site's massive growth has led to some unexpected technical difficulties? Re-friend, then wait at least six months before trying another de-friending."

On having the right number of friends:
"While college kids can get away with huge numbers of friends, the geezers among us should be a little more selective. And by 'geezers,' I mean everyone born before Ronald Reagan's first inauguration. A group of 150 Facebook friends, right around Dunbar's maximum network size, will let you feel comfortable about broadcasting your status, whether it's 'Reihan Salam is triumphantly pumping his fists' or 'Reihan Salam is slowly dying of dengue fever.'"

In a related story, the BBC reports on the massive amount of time wasted on Facebook by office employees. Apparently, 233 million hours are lost each month in the UK thanks to online social networking. Note, of course, that the study from which this figure is cited was conducted by one Peninsula, an "employment law firm." Wonder who they're representing.

Troll 2: If She Wants Me, Yeah

2007-09-24T19:10:00.002-05:00

Today's dose of hilarity comes courtesy of Beta-Unit Productions' mock trailer for one of the worst movies ever made: Troll 2 (1990). The trailer casts this D-grade horror flick as a droll family comedy, à la Little Miss Sunshine. I think you'll find the tone of this video -- from the opening "dramatic" montage to the lighthearted turn in soundtrack with Belle & Sebastian's "If She Wants Me" -- is executed with great aplomb.

Nishikawas in History

2007-09-18T10:34:00.003-05:00

My friend Exequiel "Che" Lopresti recently e-mailed me with this "fun fact": "Did you know that the biggest Japanese 'Ace' of WW2 (you know, top-gun fighter pilot) last name was Nishikawa?" I had not known this -- in fact, I know very little of my Japanese ancestry. I'm a sansei, or third-generation Japanese American. Though most sansei are close enough in age to their grandparents (issei) to retrieve knowledge about Japan and their family from them, mine passed away long before I was born (my father, a nisei, was born, in Honolulu, in 1927). So, I was left asking, Who was this pilot Nishikawa? Where was he from? Did he, in a fateful moment of irony, participate in the Pearl Harbor attack? Where does his body lie now? And how did my Argentine friend Exequiel hear about him?

I of course sought answers to all these questions on Wikipedia.com -- my first source of all information, broad and obscure. Without any first name to go by, I simply typed "Nishikawa" into the Search panel. I came up with the following "hits," the great Nishikawas in history:

Takanori Nishikawa (b. 1970), Japanese singer and actor. He performs as T.M.Revolution, or TMR, which is supposed to stand for "Takanori Makes Revolution." Takanori is a major figure in J-pop, or electronic-syrupy-teenage-love-style Japanese pop. Here's what he looks like:

Are those hints of Liberace I see on his poofed-out shirt? Maybe it's more Maxwell Demon from Velvet Goldmine. At any rate, there's Takanori for you, in all his glittering glory.

Heren Nishikawa (b. 1946), Japanese actress and TV celebrity. I can't make heads or tails of the English-language Wikipedia entry on Heren, so I'll quote liberally from the entry, as of today's date:

"Though the American runs in her blood, Heren has no native English."

"She is well-known as the wife of Kiyoshi Nishikawa, one of the splendid entertainer of owarai and manzai." [Oddly, there's no English-language entry on Kiyoshi.]

"Heren was born in Kyoto on the 6th October, 1946. She hasn't revealed her father yet, and after the marriage, she is referring her first name was derived from Helen Keller, her father admired."

"In 1963, Heren's stage debut as a dancer in Yoshimoto Kogyo was held. Her purity and eagerness was beloved and immediately became one of the leading actresses in Yoshimoto New Comedy with the stage name "Heren Sugimoto.'"

"In Japan we have the tendency to regard women with her child and without her child as different social status. Heren still has the actorship or presentership on the TV program mainly oriented to housewives or aged girls." [In these last two quotations, "purity" and "oriented" were actually hyperlinked in the original.]

Given the pluck and circumstance narrative of her rise to fame, her unusual namesake backstory, and her current appeal to "housewives or aged girls," I'm thinking Heren is Japan's answer to Oprah Winfrey. Any help here?

Lane Nishikawa (b. ?), American actor, filmmaker, playwright, performance artist -- and fellow native of O'ahu, Hawaii, to boot. Here's a still of Lane from his most recent, award-winning independent film, Only the Brave:

Most of Lane's work focuses on Asian American history, culture, and identity. Only the Brave is the third movie in a trilogy about "the unparalleled courage of the Nisei soldiers who voluntarily fought in World War II while many of their families were imprisoned in internment camps back in the States."

This guy seems really interesting. He grew up in San Francisco, attended at San Francisco State, and created his own degree in interdisciplinary studies to reflect his interests in theater, Asian American history, and political activism. He's even an accomplished poet who once performed in front of 3,000 inmates in San Quentin. A distant uncle, perhaps? I should look him up the next time I'm in the Bay Area.

Nishikawa Sukenobu (1671-1750), "often called simply 'Sukenobu,' was a Japanese printmaker from Kyoto. He was unusual for a ukiyo-e in being based in the imperial capital of Kyoto. He did prints of actors, but gained note for his works concerning women. His Hyakunin joro shinasadame (Appreciating 100 women), in two volumes published in 1723, depicted women of all classes, from the empress to prostitutes, and received favorable results." Here's one of Sukenobu's beautiful prints, titled The Doll Ceremony:

I have to say I'm drawn to Sukenobu's decision to represent women of all classes in his print series. What lies behind his fascination with the courtly and the "base"? Styles of dress and spaces of intimacy? The differential hierarchy of social strata, on the one hand, and the gestural equivalence of feminine form on the other?

*****

After all was said and done, I didn't end up finding the elusive fighter pilot "Nishikawa" on Wikipedia. Perhaps he hasn't made it onto the English-language site yet. Maybe Exequiel encountered a typo in a historical footnote.

Whatever the case may be, I'd like to think Exequiel had it wrong -- that Nishikawas tend to be lovers, not fighters; artists and dreamers rather than kamikaze pilots. That's the genealogy I'm hoping to inhabit myself.

[For the late Itsuko "Sue" Nishikawa, benefactor, church leader, and infinitely generous soul. She was my aunt by marriage and is fondly remembered.]

Love and Loss with iTunes Shuffle

2007-09-11T17:35:00.001-05:00

Most of you know by now that I'm living without cable for the first time in my life since college. And unlike my experience at Dartmouth -- God knows what I spent my time doing there -- the fact of not having any television outlet whatsoever weighed heavily on me earlier this summer as I struggled to deal with the fact that I couldn't watch my Premiership football, my random, lazy-afternoon MTV eye candy, and C-SPAN's coverage of colorful characters like Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV).

The truth of the matter, though, is that I got used to not having cable rather quickly because I learned to focus my media hunger on the Internet and on iTunes. This blog and its featured ramblings on sundry topics are proof positive of the former. As for the latter, I need only direct you to my user profile at the website last.fm: I've advanced my music literacy by picking up on the tastes of friends, both "real" and virtual, and by borrowing CDs from two Durham institutions, my friends Sara and Samiha. Emily also was a huge help with her gran mixto of music which she sent to me via post from Seattle.

At any rate, my digital music archive has swelled to over 7,000 songs (thank you, external hard drive!) because of these efforts, and I've spent most of my time at home and in cafes listening to my iTunes... like, constantly. And when I'm not listening to my iTunes at home or in cafes? I'm working out at the gym, listening to my iPod Nano.

Having listened to so much music -- from so many different genres, and of varying quality, too -- over the past three months, and having tried my hand at creating playlists for others on my own, I've realized a deep, abiding truth about the human condition: modern music is invariably about love or loss or, quite frequently, an admixture of the two. That's it: love loss, loss love, the loss of love, the love one realizes in loss, and so on. Variations on these themes are infinite, of course, and I'd venture the claim that there's something about the modern human ear that demands a certain fidelity to love and loss.

A method of testing this hypothesis came upon me quite unexpectedly this afternoon as I sat in Durham's Broad Street Cafe working on a paper on my laptop. I had switched the "Shuffle" function on in my iTunes so that the program would select random songs from my archive to play. I listened to several songs in succession until I heard the unforgettable opening guitar riff to the Smashing Pumpkins' ballad "By Starlight." The song brought me back to my adolescence and conjured the ghost of my first love: an older girl named Elena who, among other things, introduced me to the Pumpkins and, not coincidentally, gave me my first kiss. The memories came flooding back into my consciousness, and I was so overwhelmed that I needed to find the lyrics to this song online so that I could not only hear but read the poetry of my feelings:

By starlight I'll kiss you
And promise to be your one and only
I'll make you feel happy
And leave you to be lost in mine

And where will we go, what will we do?
Soon, said I, we'll know

Dead eyes, are you just like me?
Cause her eyes were as vacant as the seas
Dead eyes, are you just like me?

And all along, we knew we'd carry on
Just to belong

By starlight I know you
As lovely as a wish granted true
My life has been empty, my life has been untrue
And does she really know who I really am?
Does she really know me at last

Dead eyes, are you just like me?
Cause her eyes were as vacant as the seas
Dead eyes, are you just like me?

I've been advancing the theory that the Pumpkins' masterful double-album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995) constituted the (not unwelcome but properly mournful and in search of a "new" sound) death of grunge for years. "By Starlight," then, is the pitch-perfect, mid-'90s admixture of love and loss. Billy Corgan's haunting, nasally voice is a cagey foil to the lover's "speech" (his coos, his sweet nothings), and the chorus -- "Dead eyes, are you just like me?" -- serves up a deliciously morbid lament to/of love.

After hearing "By Starlight," I was in the mood for something a bit more uplifting -- after all, I was trying to work on a paper here and didn't need the image of Elena dancing around in my head. Well, wouldn't you know it? As if it had read my thoughts exactly, iTunes Shuffle somehow managed to select Marvin Gaye's 1964 hit "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)" as the next song. I couldn't have chosen a more sugary-sweet and tonally uplifting song from my collection to follow up "By Starlight." Here's a reminder; we've all heard this before:

How sweet it is to be loved by you
How sweet it is to be loved by you

I needed the shelter of someone's arms and there you were
I needed someone to understand my ups and downs
and there you were
With sweet love and devotion
deeply touching my emotion
I want to stop and thank you baby
I just want to stop and thank you baby

How sweet it is to be loved by you
How sweet it is to be loved by you

I close my eyes at night,
wondering where would I be without you in my life
Everything I did was just a bore,
everywhere I went it seems I'd been there before
But you brightened up for me all of my days
With a love so sweet in so many ways
I want to stop and thank you baby
I want to stop and thank you baby

How sweet it is to be loved by you
How sweet it is to be loved by you

You were better to me than I've been to myself
For me, there's you and there ain't nobody else
I want to stop and thank you baby
I just want to stop and thank you baby

Was there ever a case when this song didn't bring a smile to somebody's face? It's irresistible! How'd my iTunes know?

Well, I'm not sure it "knew" anything except in following some randomizing algorithmic pattern. Still, the experience was touching, not only because both songs were about love but also because the first, about a certain lovelornness, had been tonally tempered by the second, about joyful, ecstatic love, seemingly by chance. And more: the first reminded me of Elena while the second (I haven't mentioned this yet) reminded me of happier moments with someone I had spent time with at the end of the summer here in Durham. But -- the final, fatal twist -- but I instantly realized that this second "love" was something that in fact didn't exist anymore -- I had come to experience it as a loss only recently. And so the randomized movement goes: while I was tonally sailing along from starlight to sweetness, I was affectively drawn from fond memory to a sunken heart.

I'm left, then, now, and leave you, with this:

sickly sweet
a heart in the wrong
a longing for better times

"Killing Me Won't Bring Back Your Goddamn Honey"

2007-09-10T12:57:00.001-05:00

Recommended by Ryan over at American Stranger, some unintentional comedy courtesy of the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man. The director and screenwriter, Neil LaBute, who also directed the impressive In the Company of Men (1997) and the droll Nurse Betty (2000), gets it oh-so-wrong here. Stick with the blunt observations on contemporary American masculinity, Neil!

To be fair, though, he's working with Mr. Ghost Rider himself, Nicolas Cage. Is is just me or is this guy becoming a parody of himself the more he bags leading, "action-packed" roles? Oh, Nick, can't you go back to being lowly Ben Sanderson from Leaving Las Vegas (1995)? Hmmm... probably not, considering National Treasure III: Breaking the Bank is on the horizon.

We've Got More Maps

2007-09-05T14:50:00.002-05:00

Maps For Us is lighting up the Internet with hilarious contributions to the education of our country's map-deprived children. The site was started in response to Miss South Carolina's jumbled call for "education... such as... for the children" at last week's Miss Teen USA pageant. The video for that insightful analysis can be found in an earlier post, We Need More Maps.

Anyone can submit a map for the editors' consideration, it seems. The current postings range from the esoteric (Neo-Copernican Map of Chronological Cosmology) to the practical (Map of Coffeeshops in Amsterdam), from the highs (Map of the U.S.S. Voyager Flight Path) to the lows (Map to Booty Call -- Birmingham, MI). Here are some of my favorites from the ever-growing bunch.

Map of Africa (Or Maybe South America) Made of Dirty Laundry on Mattress

Map of Asshat Neighbor's Place and His Eleven Cars

Map of Chong's Buffet

Map of Escape Plan in Case of Zombie Attack

Map of the Board Game Clue

Map of the U.S. Uterus

Engels Leren?

2007-09-05T08:41:00.001-05:00

Many years ago, when I was still in college, my friend and hallmate Jon Arbeit sent me this now-classic clip of a banned Dutch commercial. I'm feeling in a particularly nostalgic mood today, so I'm posting it here for your viewing enjoyment.

More on the rap duo that created the single "Fuk U in the Ass": The Outhere Brothers.

Cruising or a Wide Stance?

2007-08-30T09:26:00.000-05:00

Slate's popular Explainer column presents a few clarifying points about Sen. Larry Craig's (R-ID) indiscretions in a men's bathroom stall at the Minneapolis airport in June. Take a gander at the experts who contributed to the column -- you'll have to read on to draw the connection between U.S. Senate history and colorectal advice: "Explainer thanks William Leap of American University, Don Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office, and Robert Theobald of Comprehensive Colorectal Care."

We Need More Maps

2007-08-28T12:47:00.003-05:00

Miss South Carolina outshines them all at the Miss Teen USA 2007 competition.

It's funny to see Mario Lopez try to keep a straight face after listening to thirty seconds of such incoherent babbling. Is it just me or does she refer to Iraq as "The Iraq"? Perhaps she meant the Sudan.

To Be a Problem

2007-08-27T14:27:00.001-05:00

My friend Alexis Gumbs is offering a free online course with the support of community and Duke University resources. Riffing on Du Bois and looking forward to the next generation of queer black radicalisms, the course is titled "To Be a Problem: Outcast Subjectivity and Black Literary Production." The syllabus includes readings and related media by Paul Beatty, Michelle Cliff, Toni Morrison, The Roots, Natasha Tretheway, and other artists and dreamers.

Like my own work on black pulp fiction, Alexis is concerned to retrieve the historical and cultural frames that enable what might be called resistance publishing -- creative acts of black radical meaning-making. Where my archive tends toward masculinist stories of life on the street, Alexis's is decidedly feminist, queer, and self-consciously political. Despite these obvious differences, our work has something vital in common: a desire to recover and reinvent radical strands of late-twentieth-century black social imaginaries. Ours is a literary-materialist project of great historical depth and infinite utopian-imaginative potential.

Alexis's decision to offer this course online is an act of radical pedagogy. It's truly the first step we, as scholars, can do to honor what black radicals and activists have always pushed for: bringing knowledge, resources, and opportunities of learning to the people. I encourage you to visit the online version of "To Be a Problem" here. If you'd like to participate in the online discussion of course materials, please read Alexis's introduction (copied below) and get in touch with her ASAP.

**********

Welcome! This is the online home of a course entitled To Be A Problem: Outcast Subjectivity and Black Literary Production. As Audre Lorde, June Jordan and Fred Moten teach us, all knowledge belongs to the people. This is an effort to steal the force out of mechanisms through which the private University privileges itself as a site of "knowledge production". Since we all know that learning happens everywhere this FREE online version of a course that will be taught this fall at Duke University invites you to participate in an interactive process of reading and creating. Look for bi-weekly posts on the materials listed and weekly writing assignments. Please read and write along with us. (Take advantage of this opportunity to havethe infinitely-divided attention of a queerblackradical nerd for three months!) If you'd like to participate please send your email address and a sentence about your intention to brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com.

Ishmael Reed on PBR

2007-08-22T11:39:00.002-05:00

From Reed's otherwise mediocre novel Reckless Eyeballing (1986):

He couldn't understand why Paul sneered at Pabst. If you ever examined the can or bottle closely you could see the reproduction of the medals the beer had received in international competitions with other beers.

Two Jennas, One Bush

2007-08-20T12:28:00.001-05:00

The Triangle's own News & Observer blog Bull's Eye reports that Jenna Bush's father-in-law-to-be is a Durham native. I admit that when I read the headline for this entry, I immediately thought it was referencing porn icon Jenna Jameson, not Jenna Bush. Perhaps it was the use of the word "daddy-in-law." (As in "sugah daddy"?) Or maybe I was grasping for a more interesting subject than the daughter of our current president. (Jenna Bush is one of those girly girls who strikes me as neither Lindsay Lohan "mean girl" nor Anne Hathaway "girl with class" -- she's just... blah, nothing to write home about.)

So Jenna Bush is getting married to the son of a North Carolina/Virginia Republican politician. Big deal. Let's get back to Jenna Jameson.

Now I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised after reading Jameson's autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Pornstar, around this time last summer. Published in 2004 by the controversial HarperCollins imprint ReganBooks, which was discontinued by the publisher in 2007, Jameson's book is probably the most engaging tell-all sex memoir to appear in U.S. bookstores since the publication of Linda Lovelace's Ordeal in 1980. The book became an instant bestseller and confirmed Jameson's stature as the world's most recognizable porn star.

How to Make Love follows the classic sex autobiography script: from (childhood) innocence to adolescent folly to hitting rock bottom and, finally, on to that exemplary moment of redemption -- seizing control of one's life, owning one's sexuality, and marrying your co-star. What makes Jameson's autobiography so intriguing is that it knows the conventions and serves them up with equal parts salaciousness and knowing self-parody. It should come as no surprise, then, that in between descriptions of various sex acts and drug-induced episodes of criminal activity, Jameson's memoir is divided into six "books," all of which are titled after a quotation from Shakespeare: for example, "The World's Fresh Ornament" (Book I), "An Imperfect Actor on the Stage" (Book IV), "The Gentle Closure of My Breast" (Book VI).

As I fondly recall How to Make Love on this steamy end-of-summer day, I can only speculate that the soon-to-be Mr. and Mrs. Henry Hagen (does he at least go by "Hank"?) wouldn't know how to make love interesting (much less like a porn star) even if the manual were to fall in their laps. Cheers, then, to Jenna Jameson for being as bad as she wants to be. Whatever your moral or spiritual views of pornography, there's no denying a certain savvy, even maturity, about Jameson that contravenes the (effectively) arranged marriages that flourish among America's wealthy elite.

Introducing Donald Goines

2007-08-08T09:16:00.000-05:00

I recently wrote a brief review of Eddie Allen's Low Road: The Life and Legacy of Donald Goines. The book is a solid biography of the man seen by many to be the father of African American pulp fiction, the cheap, mass-market paperbacks whose hard-boiled stories of the street and life in the ghetto were penned by former hustlers, pimps, and "users" themselves. The history of the rise of black pulp fiction in the 1960s and '70s is the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation at Duke University.

National Public Radio host Tony Cox interviewed Allen about his book and Goines's life (and tragic death by shooting) back in 2004. Follow this link to access that interview and to get a taste of the kind of writing Goines spawned in his brief but shockingly productive literary career (16 novels in five years).

He Lives

2007-08-08T08:44:00.003-05:00

Regarding the Morse v. Frederick student free-speech case I commented on the previous post, I thought it'd be relevant to post a picture of the actual "speech" in question. Here's Joseph Frederick's inimitable "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS":

Although both the opinion of the Court, penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, and the dissent, written by Associate Justice John Paul Stevens (and joined by Justices Souter and Ginsburg), were dismissive of the banner's "seriousness," I consider Frederick's banner no more or less "serious" than the 1980s "This is your brain on drugs" ad campaign or evangelical church signs that announce, "Jesus: Coming Soon" (and other such soundbyte-secularizations of the Second Coming). Drug (or "war on drugs") and religious discourses in this country have always mixed the high-falutin' with the (unintentionally) ridiculous, promoting "noble" causes through the basest of rhetorical methods.

The only thing Frederick was guilty of was making fun of the faux seriousness with which we approach drug and religious discourses in this country. His banner was pure parody and intentional spoof, and in that sense was smarter than what the Justices were willing to grant it.

Originalism's Dead Letter

2007-08-08T07:08:00.004-05:00

An article on Slate.com by Doug Kendall and Jim Ryan scrutinizes recent opinions written by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas and finds that the self-proclaimed originalist is not as principled as his judicial philosophy would seem to demand. In Kendall and Ryan's analysis, Justice Thomas applies the doctrine of originalism neither coherently nor consistently but partially and selectively.

In two important cases from last term, Morse v. Frederick and Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., Thomas at once denied a student's freedom of speech in a public high school and asserted a corporation's freedom of speech in sponsoring ads (past a deadline established by the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act) during a public election. The problem is that in one case, Morse, Thomas invoked the "Founders" to declare that "they" never thought of granting students First Amendment rights in public schools, while in the other, FEC, Thomas concluded that corporations held the same free-speech right as individuals (though not students in public schools), despite the fact that the Founders' generation was more inclined to believe that corporations are, in Chief Justice John Marshall's words, "an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of the law."

Kendall and Ryan do a masterful job of deconstructing Thomas's "logic" here. By originalist standards, the second opinion, FEC, is downright unsupportable. The texts of the earliest constitutional law in the United States nowhere grant corporations -- which did exist at the time -- the same rights as individuals. A corporation was considered a legal fiction, not a living, breathing citizen like you or me. And yet the professed originalist, Thomas, somehow managed to overlook that body of textual evidence in supporting the majority decision penned by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Associate Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Alito.

Even in Morse, where Thomas applied schoolboy historicism to say that the Founders never granted students free-speech rights (public schools didn't exist at the time), Kendall and Ryan point out that a bonafide originalist reading might have yielded a different result. Originalism, they argue, doesn't simply ask, "Did the Founders knowingly and intentionally formulate this or that right?" Rather, originalism inheres in a fidelity to textual meaning -- a way of reading the Constitution in its most robust and principled form. A true originalist, Kendall and Ryan posit, would argue that "the meaning of the text... must be paramount over the subjective expectations of any individual, whether alive or dead."

Originalists say they are merely reading the Constitution to the letter. Kendall and Ryan suggest they aren't: those like Thomas are intentionalists (my term), not originalists -- they don't actually read, or interpret, the Constitution but rely on the dubious assertion that because certain things didn't exist in the eighteenth century (like public schools), the Founders couldn't possibly have legitimated any constitutional "right" relating to them. This "argument" is so facile it's insulting to anyone forced to listen to it. "Didn't exist, so couldn't have been" -- like a kid sticking his pointer fingers in his ears and singing, "La la la la la," to drown out his interlocutor's more persuasive claim.

By now it should be clear that originalism doesn't read the Constitution to the letter -- it renders the Constitution a dead letter, a document that, in itself, is utterly meaningless, because, remember, it's not what the text says or means but whether or not this or that existed when the Founders actually lived. Thus, with the passing of the Founders, so went all of our rights.

All of which is to say that Clarence Thomas is neither an originalist nor a particularly good jurist. For between his intentionalism in Morse and his outright business-friendly partisanship in FEC, it's clear that Thomas is nothing but a results-minded arch-conservative who hands down incoherent but consequential decisions on the U.S. Supreme Court. His supporters will congratulate Thomas on his courage and consistency, but if one were to take the time to read and compare his cases alongside each other (as Kendall and Ryan do), one would be hard pressed to find a shred of recognizable constitutional insight in them.

Bergman with Antonioni

2007-08-01T23:24:00.001-05:00

Celebrating the life and work of two European masters.

Ingmar Bergman July 14, 1918 - July 30, 2007

"Rock Star" (Slate.com)

BBC Obituary

International Herald Tribune Obituary

Michelangelo Antonioni September 29, 1912 - July 30, 2007

"Hold That Shot" (Slate.com)

BBC Obituary

International Herald Tribute Obituary

Keepin' It Real?

2007-07-25T12:42:00.003-05:00

Cora Daniels's incisive new book Ghettonation laments our society's increasing tolerance for low expectations, signaled by the way the ghetto has been transformed from an actually existing place into a mainstream lifestyle or "mind-set." The ghetto (noun) remains a site of racial oppression and economic poverty for some, but for the vast majority of Americans "ghetto" has come to mean a way of doing things, a style, an adjective used to describe the qualities (or lack thereof) of someone or something -- as in, "That's sooo ghetto."

Daniels reminds us that most Americans are not concerned in the least with alleviating the depressed socioeconomic conditions that characterize minority-dominated ghettos in our inner cities. Rather, in a perverse, consumerist twist (or collective "fuck you" to those actually languishing in ghettos), "ghetto" has become sheer mask and performance, a way for people of all races and classes to "play" poor and black.

One example of such playful, anti-materialist spectacle stands out in Daniels's research. It is Gizoogle.com, which translates any website address you enter into its search engine into "ghettospeak," an urban, rap-inflected, and decidedly raced ("black") slang. (A more "neutral," race- and class-variable "dictionary" of youth and urban slang is the user-edited Urbandictionary.com.) This is how the website translates two passages from my previous posts:

Me: I wonder what the implications of such overseas profitability are for domestic jobs. It's true that U.S. corporations are profiting from high sales in Europe and Canada, but I'm not sure if that necessarily translates into more jobs or better employment conditions (e.g., wages) for employees of those corporations.

Gizoogle: I rappa what tha implications of such overseas profitability is fo' domestic jobs n shit. It's true tizzle U.S. corporizzles is profit'n fizzle hizzy sales in Europe n Canada, but I'm not sure if T-H-to-tha-izzat necessarily translates into mizzy jobs or playa employment conditions (e.g., wages) fo' employees of those corporizzles fo' sheezy.

Me: But then Bauerlein makes this unusual concession: "The problem isn’t the inclusion of sociopolitical forensic per se. Rather, it is that the selections fall squarely on the left side of the ideological spectrum. They are all more or less radically progressivist. They trade in group identities and dismantle bourgeois norms. They advocate feminist perspectives and race consciousness. They highlight the marginalized, the repressed, the counter-hegemonic."

Gizoogle: But then Bauerlein makes this unusual concession n shit: "izzle problem isn’t tha inclusion of sociopolizzles forensic per se. Brotha it is that tha selections fall squarely on tha left side of tha ideolizzles spectrum , chill yo. They is all more or less radically progressizzles. They trade in group identities n dismantle bourgeois norms . Nigga get shut up or get wet up. They advocate feminist perspectizzles n race consciousness. They highlight tha marginalizzles, tha repressed, tha wanna be gangsta."

Admittedly, Bauerlein's stodgy prose is made so much more amusing by this translation. I especially love that it automatically translated "the counter-hegemonic" to "tha wanna be gangsta" because the latter, in fact, captures the precise meaning of the former with its ironic undertone. Bauerlein, of course, is taking critics to task (unfairly, I think, but still...) for appropriating a kind of counter-hegemonic "cool," which is, in a different context, something like a gangsta pose.

At any rate, you can see how the mainstreaming of ghettospeak can be utterly entertaining, often hilarious, and yet remain troubling somehow. Just what kinds of assumptions are we making about race, class, and even gender when we "playfully" submit to talk like this? Who are we trying to be -- what are we trying to say about ourselves -- when we end every other sentence with "fo' shizzle"? From whence this desire to call a close friend or confidant "my nigga"? All of which is to ask, What histories do we elide in such flights of raced fancy?

Whose ghetto is this anyway?

I'll Show You My Exchange Rate If You Show Me Yours

2007-07-24T23:20:00.000-05:00

Here's a fine article from Slate.com on the economic implications of a weak U.S. dollar. Its author, Daniel Gross, points out that a weak U.S. dollar has meant an increase in tourists who visit the States to take advantage of comparatively cheap (with regard to other developed countries) goods, services, and investments (including real estate). Gross writes, "The money tourists spend helps put a dent in our chronic trade deficit. So do exports, which, thanks in part to the weak dollar, soared 11 percent between May 2006 and May 2007. For the first five months of 2007, the trade deficit actually fell 7 percent from 2006."

Gross also reminds us the weak dollar has benefited those U.S. corporations that rely heavily on foreign sales:

If you—or your mutual fund—own shares in large American corporations, you're a winner in the weak-dollar sweepstakes. Based on data culled from 238 constituents of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index, S&P analyst Howard Silverblatt concludes that the typical member of the index garnered 44.2 percent of its sales outside [emphasis mine] the United States in 2006. Translating cash received from those sales into weaker dollars puts some fizz into earnings. Last week Coca-Cola's stock bubbled to a five-year high after it reported a fantastic quarter. Foreign sales accounted for 65 percent of Coke's beverage business. Other ur-American companies profiting from this trend include McDonald's (65 percent of sales overseas) and IBM (56 percent).

So if U.S. corporations are able to produce goods that sell comparatively higher in Europe than they do in the States (again, owing to the weak dollar), then Coke and its internationally friendly ilk are not terribly troubled by the current state of the U.S. dollar.

I wonder what the implications of such overseas profitability are for domestic jobs. It's true that U.S. corporations are profiting from high sales in Europe and Canada, but I'm not sure if that necessarily translates into more jobs or better employment conditions (e.g., wages) for employees of those corporations.

One thing is for sure: there's no better time (or excuse) for all my European and South American friends to come and visit me in Durham, North Carolina -- especially Durham, where you can buy a pack of Camel Lights for under $3.50; you can buy a decent used car for under $3,000 (as I did recently); and you can order, until 3am, 7 days a week, a meal "tray" consisting of a burger, two sides, and a drink for $3.99 at our local drive-thru, Cook-Out.

Or: you can meet in Hawaii when I visit my family in December.

Strokin'

2007-07-23T12:30:00.003-05:00

For your viewing pleasure, I present the music video for Clarence Carter's 1991 cult hit, "Strokin'." Featuring the immortal lines:

The other night I was strokin' my woman
And it got so good to her, you know what she told me?
Let me tell you what she told me. She said:
"Stroke it Clarence Carter, but don't stroke so fast
If my stuff ain't tight enough, you can stick it up my..." WOO!
I be strokin'!

I Heart Fernando Torres

2007-07-22T11:47:00.001-05:00

In eager anticipation of the start of the 2007/08 English Premier League season on August 11, I've been doing some online research on recent summer acquisitions by English clubs. In particular, I've been reading up on El Niño (The Kid), Fernando Torres, a superstar striker from Madrid and lifelong supporter of his local club, Atlético Madrid. Up until last season, the talented 23-year-old had only played for Atlético, both on its youth and senior teams. But the great English club Liverpool, which is coached by a Spaniard (Rafael Benítez) and features superstar Spanish playmaker Xabi Alonso, recently signed Torres away from Madrid for a whopping £20.2 million.

I remembered Torres as the flashy, tattooed youngster who made quite the impression at last year's World Cup finals in Germany. Torres scored three times during the qualifying stages of the tournament (once against the Ukraine and twice against Tunisia). He celebrated each goal with a trademark gesture of dropping to his knees and raising his arms to the sky. The gesture almost tricked me into believing Torres was some Polynesian seafaring god.

Torres was unlucky not to see Spain get past the now-revered plucky French side, led by Zidane, which eventually lost the tournament final to Italy.

Torres's record as a goalscorer at Atlético is no less impressive, amassing 82 goals in 214 appearances. For his pace, determination, and finisher's touch, Torres has attracted the attention of Europe's biggest clubs, hoping to lure him away from Madrid. But prior to the summer, Torres remained loyal to his local team and was seen as being an outstanding player on a consistently mediocre squad.

All this made me excited to see some footage of Torres's best goals from his years at Atlético. Naturally I turned to YouTube as my primary source of bootlegged, independently edited videos of great footballing moments. All I had to do was type Torres's name in the search engine and a list of results appeared almost almost immediately.

I had fun skimming the highlight videos, all of which showcased Torres's undeniable talent. But after watching several of these, I began to notice a recurring theme: along with the goalscoring, Torres was being celebrated for his equally undeniable hotness. The editing of these videos underscored his boyish good looks, displayed both on and off the pitch, and the soundtracks sometimes featured pop hits that were gushingly fawning, as in this example:

That was Avril Lavigne's "My Happy Ending," for the record. "You were everything, everything that I wanted / We were meant to be, supposed to be, but we lost it / All of the memories, so close to me, just fade away / All this time you were pretending / So much for my happy ending."

Watching this particular highlight video, which was posted on April 14, 2006, I couldn't tell if this fan was heartbroken (as the song in toto suggests), smitten (as certain lyrics could suggest), or just plain awestruck (the lyrics don't matter here; it's more about the depth of feeling Lavigne expresses in her singing).

Whatever the case may be, I have to say: I was taken in by this video. I was absorbed. I too began to realize that Torres was "hott," so to speak. (That's an added "t" for emphasis.) I don't know whether it's the beauty of the goals, the brashness of his youthful masculinity, the adoration he commands among the faithful. But this independent video-maker surely did the trick in turning me on to Torres.

Realizing this, I recalled that, in truth, most of the Spain national team from World Cup 2006 was quite good-looking. Not least was the versatile, long-haired defender Sergio Ramos, who had a great tournament until he ran into a France side that put three past Iker Casillas to move on to the quarterfinals. Here's a picture of Ramos at a press conference:

Ramos plays in the center of defense for giants Real Madrid (Madrid's big Other club). For a central defender, Ramos is unusually spry and a fine goalscorer. He's likely to figure as one of Real's mainstays as the club rebuilds over the next several years.

So after watching the Torres videos, it shouldn't be a surprise as to what I did next. I searched for "Sergio Ramos" on YouTube and the item at the top of the list was this:

Note that this video makes no pretense of being a highlight reel. It is an unabashed, adoring tribute to Ramos-as-hottie. No football footage; just photographs and stills of Ramos in all his beauty. And the soundtrack is the song "Everytime" by Simple Plan: "Everytime I see your face / Everytime you look my way / It's like it all falls into place / Everything feels right." These guys make Avril Lavigne sound like William Blake!

And yet. And yet I have to admit that there was something endearing about this video too, something that was just ecstatically passionate about its love for Ramos. (The video was, as its end credit notes, made by one "Eleninha.") It thus became clear to me that this video only literalized what the Torres ones kept mostly subtextual: whether male or female, real or hyperreal, fans have a passionate attachment to (sports) stars, and especially attractive Spanish footballers, that's expressed as a celebration of skill, determination, brashness, youth, and the male body all at once. These videos were, and are, technologies of desire.

Importantly, such desire does not have a proper "sexual" referent: "straight," "gay," or what have you. This is, rather, unbridled, object-confused desire; a confusion of desire. What do we find appealing about these sportsmen? Exactly what attracted me to Torres and Ramos? Again, a field of possibilities arises: technique, command, charisma, but also facial features, hair, and muscle. The "proper" response, then, might be: "All of these, and more."

**********

As if fate had been standing over my shoulder, looking at my laptop screen, I came across this video shortly after watching the Sergio Ramos tribute. Considering all that's been said here, I can only describe this as that final turn of the screw which seems to unlock the mystery of my desire for Torres and Ramos, only to shroud it with yet another veil of indirection.

I present the bilingual masterpiece: "Fernando Torres and Sergio Ramos: Which One Would You Choose?" (They are, it turns out, not just teammates but best friends.)

[Alvaro Jarrin briefly indulged my fascination with the Spain national team last summer. Maria Vaalavuo talked to me about her crush on Italy's Fabio Cannavaro on our travels during the Peruvian summer. I thank them both.]

Memories from EPL 2006/07

2007-07-21T00:32:00.000-05:00

Football365.com's end-of-season awards came out in two installments in May, but I accessed them only recently through a link on BigSoccer.com. This huge online community of football, or soccer, fans throughout the world has provided me a great way to indulge my passion for the game, especially now that I don't have cable (Fox Soccer Channel). Thanks to Justin Izzo for pointing it out to me.

At any rate, here are a few of my favorite stories from the English Premier League 2006/07. (The "awards" are but named placeholders for recounting the previous season's highs and lows, oddities and surprises.)

Description Of The Season
*Winner: "I nearly swerved off the road. I yelled down the phone. I was so incensed. I was trembling with anger. I couldn't believe what I had heard" - Ashley Cole recalls his reaction to Arsenal offering to increase his wages to a paltry £55k per week.
**Runner-Up: "No maturity and respect, maybe difficult childhood, no education, maybe the consequence of that" - Jose Mourinho puts Footballer of the Year Cristiano Ronaldo in a different perspective.

Jose Mourinho Quote Of The Season
*Winner: "I always knew one day I would not be a champion" - Jose reflects on a strange year.
**Runner-Up: "It is like having a blanket that is too small for the bed. You pull the blanket up to keep your chest warm and your feet stick out. I cannot buy a bigger blanket becuase the supermarket is closed. But I am content because the blanket is cashmere. It is no ordinary blanket" - Jose refuses to be downcast by January's injury crisis.

Villain Of The Season
*Winner: Graham Poll. Wrecked more decent matches than a Fifties chaperone.
**Runner-Up: Cashley Cole. The embodiment of everything that is wrong with modern-day footballers.

Injury Of The Season
*Winner: Preston winger Simon Whaley being ruled out for the rest of the campaign after attempting to heed a call of nature in the middle of the night during a mid-season training trip to Spain. Unfortunately he banged into a coffee table in his hotel room, which in turn resulted in the marble top of the table falling off and breaking his toe.
**Runner-Up: Everton's Tim Cahill suffering knee ligament damage after being inadvertently fouled by team-mate Lee Carsley in a match against Aston Villa.

Best Goal Of The Season Which Didn't Win The Goal-Of-The Month Award
*Winner: Thierry Henry's double act with Cesc Fabregas at Blackburn in January.

**Runner-Up: Matt Taylor's 40-yard volley against Everton a month before.

New-Fangled Sitting Position Of The Season
*Winner: The Eggert Magnusson - in which the sitter disappears lower and lower in his seat at the same rate as his side slide towards the bottom of the table before only the top of a shiny head appears, like the top of a boiled egg above the cup.

Money-Maker Of The Season
*Winner: David Beckham after signing a four-year deal with LA Galaxy worth a reputed £128m.
**Runner-Up: Alan Pardew, who reaped around £2m in compensation upon being sacked by West Ham in December and then signed a £4m contract with Charlton two weeks later. It's a tough life at the bottom of the table.

Politics in/and the Humanities

2007-07-16T20:05:00.003-05:00

Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein has written a piece for the online magazine Inside Higher Ed titled "An Anti-Progressive Syllabus." Bauerlein complains that the humanities today are characterized by partial, polemical discourses on social theory and politics. English departments, for one, have replaced disciplinary study of "actual" literary texts with anti-discipilnary models of social and cultural criticism (this is also the argument of Bauerlein's 1997 book Literary Criticism: An Autopsy).

Bauerlein surveys the literary theory anthologies he's been exposed to as a student and then as a professor of literature and concludes: "The problem lies in the sizable portion of the contributions that bear a polemical or political thrust. These pieces don’t pose a new model of interpretation, redefine terms, outline a theory, or sharpen disciplinary methods. Instead, they incorporate political themes into humanistic study, emphasize race/class/gender/sexuality topics, and challenge customary institutions of scholarly practice. When they do broach analytical methods, they do so with larger social and political goals in mind."

But then Bauerlein makes this unusual concession: "The problem isn’t the inclusion of sociopolitical forensic per se. Rather, it is that the selections fall squarely on the left side of the ideological spectrum. They are all more or less radically progressivist. They trade in group identities and dismantle bourgeois norms. They advocate feminist perspectives and race consciousness. They highlight the marginalized, the repressed, the counter-hegemonic."

Bauerlein's solution to this putatively "radically progressivist" slant in the humanities? Not to question the role of sociopolitical commentary in humanistic inquiry but to forge a reprensentative "range" of political viewpoints in the humanities curriculum: to wit, merely adding to our syllabi texts by conservatives and neoconservatives like F. A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, Francis Fukuyama, Irving Kristol, and even the loathsome, scholar-hating David Horowitz. (The full list of readings may be found in the link above.)

Confused? I was, upon first reading this decidedly partial piece. On the one hand, Bauerlein bemoans the humanities' drift toward sociopolitical commentary in the wake of 1960s and '70s social movements and the culture wars of the 1980s and early '90s. The basic point of his book Literary Criticism is to caution scholars against such "excesses," in part because they run roughshod over disciplinary methods of inquiry. I'm far from agreeing with Bauerlein on this point (I'm a self-described interdisciplinary [Bauerlein would call me anti-disciplinary, I'm sure] researcher myself), but I do respect his intellectual beef with those who use research objects (literature, history, etc.) to confirm or academically legitimate their political beliefs.

Where Bauerlein's essay loses me is this idea that somehow assigning conservative and neoconservative authors will "correct" the "imbalance" that he claims is endemic to the humanities curriculum. Bauerlein offers a set of materials that he says will correct "liberal bias" in the universities. But note: by saying these specific texts and authors will do this or that for humanities scholarship, Bauerlein is no better than the political propagandist who tells us exactly how to read. This is unapologetic, dogmatic prescription: "Gramsci on Tuesday? Try some Hayek over the weekend! A unit on Angela Davis and social activism? We'll be looking at David Horowitz for an 'alternative' viewpoint next go-around. Trust me: with this regimen, you'll feel politically balanced by the end of the term."

Nowhere in his piece does Bauerlein acknowledge that the academy, and humanities departments in particular, are among the preciously few spheres for funded, dissident critical thinking in this country. Not once does he question exactly why the likes of Hayek, Strauss, and Fukuyama are taken seriously as shapers of public and foreign policy (often to disastrous ends, as we can see with neoconservatism's flirtation with evangelism in George W. Bush's war in Iraq), whereas Marx, Gramsci, and feminist philosophers are taken seriously only in the academy.

What I'm trying to say here, in response to Bauerlein's reading list, is that 1) there are very good reasons -- historical, political, social, financial -- why there appears to be a so-called "liberal bias" in the U.S. academy, and 2) no sort of dogmatic political prescription (left, right, or otherwise) belongs in a classroom setting. Bauerlein is guilty of the very thing he purports liberals of perpetrating. A though I'm a liberal myself, my principles bind me to persistent critical thinking in my pedagogy, and I hope never to sink so low as Bauerlein's "fair and balanced" (Fox News, anyone?) syllabus.

Resign

2007-07-11T18:51:00.000-05:00

On July 3, 2007, MSNBC political talk-show host Keith Olbermann demanded that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney resign.

This clip has been making the rounds online. There is a flurry of mixed metaphors here, but it's the most biting and impassioned critique of the administration I've seen in the mainstream media.

Handcuffing Scooter

2007-07-11T14:46:00.001-05:00

In all the hubbub generated by President Bush's commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence, I found Michael Kinsley's opinion piece "The Lying Game" to sound a balanced, well-reasoned argument. Kinsley begins by drawing a comparison between Libby and former President Bill Clinton's impeachment over lying about the Monica Lewinsky affair. The comparison is unusual in that most (conservative) critics have referenced Clinton not because of Lewinsky but because of the eleventh-hour pardons that Clinton granted to rather unsavory business-type criminals. The comparison is thus really between Clinton and George W. Bush.

But what Kinsley wants to show is that Clinton and Libby both found themselves facing what he calls a "perjury trap": an impossible choice between either lying under oath or "truthfully" answering questions that should not have been asked in the first place. Per Clinton, "He could lie under oath, and be impeached or worse, or he could tell the truth, and embarrass himself and his family, and probably still be impeached or worse." What Kinsley is asking is this: why was Clinton put in such a bind in the first place, when his "offense" was in essence a personal one and (most of us will agree) neither a political nor a security risk in the least. Of course, Newt Gingrich's Republican-controlled Congress thought otherwise, and their rabid, wasteful pursuit of Clinton's sexual peccadilloes was part of a larger smear campaign to discredit the leader of their Democratic rivals. Recollecting that sordid, sorry episode in our political history, I think a lot of us have been left asking, "Impeachment and millions of taxpayer dollars over what?!" How silly.

Kinsley's explanation of Scooter Libby's perjury trap is more complex. Unlike Clinton, Libby was indeed involved in a political and security brouhaha (or cover-up) that had grave implications for U.S. foreign policy: he was "part of the cabal that was conspiring to discredit [former ambassador and Iraq war critic Joseph] Wilson and, more generally, to convince people that Iraq was strewn with nuclear weapons." Although not a major player in that "cabal," Libby's involvement in the process is undeniable, and he merits no sympathy for contributing to the Bush administration's political cover-up and quashing of dissent in the lead-up to the Iraq war.

Despite all of this (and Kinsley makes known his own distaste for Bush, the war in Iraq, etc.), it's Libby's fate to have been handcuffed by a perjury trap that bore some resemblance to Clinton's high-profile case. Either Libby could have lied and committed perjury (which, like Clinton, is what he ended up doing) or he could have told the truth and basically admitted to leaking government secrets to journalists. In both cases, Libby is screwed. He'll go to prison for lying or he'll go to prison for leaking government secrets.

Kinsley's point rests on the notion that Libby's trap is no more acceptable than Clinton's: both were faced with impossible choices, and both were asked questions they shouldn't have been asked. After all, the very press corps that wanted to break the story about the White House leak also wanted to protect their First Amendment "right" to keep their sources (even for government secrets) secret. Kinsley writes, "It takes two to leak. How can it be fair that one party to the leak doesn't even have to testify about it, because leaks are so vital to the First Amendment, while the other party might go to prison for it?" If Libby was posed with a lose-lose situation, then, the news media had a win-win one: Libby was at once gagged (not revealing the actual source for the leak) and held up as an example of this administration's nefariousness.

If Libby had revealed the source of the leak (and who knows if he knows), it would've been seen as a huge blow to the freedom of the press. If he lied about his involvement in the leak (which, again, is what he ended up doing), he would be caught and vilified for taking part in the WMD cover-up. So you see, the news media didn't really want Scooter to talk; they just wanted him to play the role of the fall guy to a tee.

In the end, Kinsley basically wants to point out that the news media had a huge role to play in the Plame-Wilson-Libby fiasco. He wants us to ask questions of the press and not just of this goober named Scooter. Call it an open secret: the press has always been complicit in the affair; there would've been no leak if the news media didn't want it in the first place. So why (just) blame Scooter?

I tend to depart from Kinsley's opinion piece over whether questions about the Plame leak "should" have been asked in the first place. I believe they should have been and that we're better off because they were asked. What Kinsley doesn't seem to acknowledge is that all the confusion surrounding the leak (and yes, the press was knee-deep in the muck) brought to light a deeply troubling, even treasonable, manner of conducting political business by the Bush administration. We are talking about nothing less than the calculated cover-up of information and quashing of dissent which would have challenged the Bush administration's rationale for going to war with Iraq. This stuff is a far cry from a blowjob in the Oval Office. This was and is a matter of war and peace.

And so even though Scooter found himself handcuffed by the situation presented to him, it has to be said that it was a situation that called for direct, public scrutiny and nothing less. The gravity of the leak -- the security-threatening uses to which it was put -- merited, in my opinion, putting the squeeze on Scooter. Perhaps contrary to Kinsley, then, I am willing to distinguish the relative importance of some perjury traps from others. Clinton's trap was a waste of time and taxpayers' money; Libby's revealed something inherently wrong with the way our government has been operating under George W. Bush.

So yes, the news media had their cake and ate it too. But Scooter got his just desserts.

Cameron Got Served, or, Sendero Luminoso Revisited

2007-06-25T09:36:00.002-05:00

On her recent trip to Peru, Hollywood starlet Cameron Diaz was called out for committing a fashion faux pas that left the actress grasping for humanitarian words of apology.

While touring the famed Inca ruins of Machu Picchu, Diaz sported an olive-green bag that featured a red star and the phrase, "Serve the People," in Chinese characters. This phrase is known to be one of the hallmark slogans of Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party.

The problem? News sources say that Peruvians are especially sensitive to such symbology because it is reminiscent of the bloody guerrilla war that the Maoist group Shining Path, or Sendero Luminoso, waged in the country throughout the 1980s and up to the early '90s. Close to 70,000 people are thought to have perished as a result of the war, but news agencies have omitted the fact that Sendero Luminoso is said to be responsible for 31,331 of those casualties. According to Human Rights Watch, government security forces were responsible for a third of the killings; the remaining deaths are mostly unattributed.

Without condoning the actions of Sendero Luminoso, I think it's important to properly frame the statistics people are citing with regard to the war. It's clear that both the group's actions and the Peruvian government's response to those actions were reckless and drastic -- together they had the effect of making paranoia and violence a part of everyday life. Indeed the war created the social conditions for what the anthropologist Michael Taussig calls "terror as usual."

Diaz, we know, was unaware of this significant aspect of Peruvian history. A Peruvian civil rights activist (on whom news agencies rely to voice the collective opinion of Peruvians who are or would be or have been offended by Diaz's bag), Pablo Rojas, is quoted as saying: "[The bag] alludes to a concept that did so much damage to Peru, that brought about so many victims... I don't think she should have used that bag where the followers of that ideology did so much damage."

Rojas is entirely justified in making this statement, but it seems to me the lack of world-historical knowledge Diaz displayed is hardly unusual for the privileged tourist who travels abroad. I dare say that most American travelers to Peru know next to nothing of the country's history, recent or otherwise. Diaz (who grew up in Australia) is your average tourist; it's her celebrity (cameras focused on her) and pseudo-political chic (where political symbology and slogans are now marketed for fashionable consumption) that led to this cultural misunderstanding.

Rojas's actual target of criticism, then, is not Cameron Diaz the "person" but Cameron Diaz the star-image. The blame for this episode of cultural insensitivity might be equally shared among Diaz's entourage: her publicist, her fashion consultant, her image-makers. Note how the olive-green bag is meant to complement Diaz's "backpacker look": loose clothing, a hat to shield her face from the sun, and what appears to be a hemp bracelet (or one made of a similarly organic material). The only flourish I can detect in these photos is a purple scarf (or two?) rolled around Diaz's neck. At any rate, the bag's political sloganeering is but one fashionable element in a complete celebrity package.

Perhaps blame should also be attributed to the brichero, or "native" tour guide, who appears next to Diaz on Machu Picchu. Note the designer sweater and unsullied jeans -- this guy really came prepared.

The brichero's beaming gaze and I'm-all-ears stance say it all: entranced by Diaz's beauty, that inimitable smile, that aura of Hollywood celebrity, our guide likely didn't even notice the remnant of Maoist symbology that emblazons the bag in question.

Absolut Showdown

2007-06-22T09:53:00.002-05:00

The BBC reports on a brewing conflict in the European Parliament: the "vodka-belt" countries (the Baltics and Finland, Denmark, and Sweden) want Parliament to accept a stricter standard for what can be counted as "vodka" in the spirits market. They're pushing for this in response to the wine-producing countries of France, Italy, and Spain (with Britain thrown in there for good measure -- goodness knows no good wine is produced there) increasing their stake in the vodka market, despite producing the spirit from such non-traditional ingredients as sugar beet, citrus fruit, and grapes. The vodka countries' representatives insist that the overall quality of the spirit is diminished when other countries veer away from using traditional ingredients such as potatoes and grain. As one Finnish representative put it, "[The vodka belt countries] produce 70% of the EU's vodka, and we consume 70%, so we know what we are talking about."

An interesting aspect of this battle is how the voting blocs cross traditional Eastern and Western European political alliances. The wine countries are of course solidly Western European. But the so-called vodka belt pairs former communist states such as Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania with the equally vodka-loving Scandinavians; their bloc is also supported by Hungary and Slovenia. The battle over how to define "authentic" vodka-production is thus a matter of who's doing the drinking.

How the votes will fall is hard to predict. Acknowledging the split votes based on region, agriculture, and drinking traditions, another Finnish representative makes the astute point: "This is a battle of the vodka belt against the wine belt... In between lies the beer belt, which will get to decide."

Shock & Awe

2007-06-19T11:44:00.002-05:00

The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled on a case that concerns the right of suspects who led police on car chases to pursue lawsuits against the police. The case, Scott v. Harris, involved a Georgia teenager, Victor Harris, who led police on a high-speed chase after he was asked to pull over for speeding. When Harris was deemed to be posing a threat to other motorists and law enforcement officers, Deputy Timothy Scott used the so-called "PIT" maneuver -- precision intervention technique -- to spin Harris's car out of control. Because Harris was going at such a high speed (in excess of 100 mph), his car went airborne, flew down an embankment, and crashed. The accident left Harris a quadriplegic.

As it passed through the lower courts, the case simply asked whether it was valid for Harris to pursue legal action against Scott for the specific action he undertook to terminate the high-speed chase. The 11th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Harris could, in fact, take legal action against Scott. But by a vote of 8-1 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Scott did not violate Harris's Fourth Amendment right to resist unreasonable seizure, and thus had no grounds to file a lawsuit against Scott. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion of the Court, and Justice John Paul Stevens filed the lone dissent.

Although the outcome of this case didn't come as a surprise to many, considering the today's Court's conservative bent, what did strike a chord was the great degree to which the majority relied on the police videotape of the chase to frame/ground its decision. Indeed Justice Scalia writes, "Far from being the cautious and controlled driver the lower court depicts, what we see on the video more closely resembles a Hollywood-style car chase of the most frightening sort, placing police officers and innocent bystanders alike at greater risk of serious injury." The videotaped evidence was so transparent to the majority that Scalia went so far as to say, "[Harris'] version of events is so utterly discredited by the record that no reasonable jury could have believed him... The Court of Appeals should not have relied on such visible fiction; it should have viewed the facts in the light depicted by the videotape."

According to Scalia's logic, Harris was so clearly running amok that he effectively forfeited his Fourth Amendment right and in a sense "forced" Scott to undertake the PIT maneuver. Had Scott not engaged the tactic, who knows what kind of ball-of-flame Hollywood pyrotechnics might have occurred? The opinion is clear: "Respondent intentionally placed himself and the public in danger by unlawfully engaging in reckless, high-speed flight; those who might have been harmed had Scott not forced respondent off the road were entirely innocent. The Court concludes that it was reasonable for Scott to take the action he did. It rejects respondent’s argument that safety could have been assured if the police simply ceased their pursuit. The Court rules that a police officer’s attempt to terminate a dangerous high-speed car chase that threatens the lives of innocent bystanders does not violate the Fourth Amendment, even when it places the fleeing motorist at risk of serious injury or death."

Stevens, in a dissent he read out loud at the announcement of the decision (which is a rare tactic employed by dissenting Justices, reserved only for their most serious grievances with the majority opinion), rued how his colleagues had been taken in by the shock and awe of the videotaped evidence. Without in the least bit condoning Harris's action, Stevens focused more narrowly on the (Fourth Amendment-specific) question of whether the police actually took stock of their options in this pursuit, which the lower courts had suggested wasn't as "life-threatening" as the majority made it out to be. "I can only conclude that my colleagues were unduly frightened by two or three images on the tape," Stevens writes.

Acknowledging the novelty of the Court's consideration of videotaped evidence in this case, it's important to point out that Stevens, the oldest and most senior Justice (he was President Gerald Ford's appointee and, unfortunately for conservatives, has proven to be one of the Court's most liberal jurists for three decades and counting), actually provides the most reasonable view on how to "read" such material: not taken in by "two or three images on the tape," Stevens urges viewing the entire six-minute "chase," in context, because it shows that Harris may not have been driving in a manner so reckless that it merited the use of deadly force by the police. Stevens's direct and passionate dissent moves away from Scalia's "shock and awe" approach to the videotape to point out that what few cars were on the road at the time of the chase (late at night) might have pulled off to the side not because of Harris's recklessness but because of the flashing police lights and blaring police sirens that followed closely behind Harris's car. Stevens also points out that the prosecution's attempt to theorize what Harris might have done had Scott not ended the chase is pure speculation and not necessarily supported by the evidence of the tape.

Stevens thus summarizes his dissent in these forceful terms: "Relying on a de novo review of a videotape of a portion of a nighttime chase on a lightly traveled road in Georgia where no pedestrians or other “bystanders” were present, buttressed by uninformed speculation about the possible consequences of discontinuing the chase, eight of the jurors on this Court reach a verdict that differs from the views of the judges on both the District Court and the Court of Appeals who are surely more familiar with the hazards of driving on Georgia roads than we are." Stevens, we might paraphrase, wanted to defer to the lower courts for assessment of the "facts" of this case, which would include assessment of the relative merits of the police's decision to use deadly force to end the chase. Stevens's fellow jurists, on the other hand, abstracted the car-chase images from their context, much as the shock-and-awe TV program World's Wildest Police Videos does with its car-chase sequences (heavily edited, of course, to maximize the sense of danger these motorists pose to the public).

The Court's decision in Scott v. Harris is thus a significant blow to local, context-specific determinations of Fourth Amendment rights. It replaces conditional approval of the police's use of deadly force with an abstract defense of deadly force in all situations where the police themselves determine when a suspect poses a threat to society. The circuitousness of that logic -- where the police act on a determination that the police make -- refuses to grant any suspect the leverage to defend himself against accusation that he posed a deadly threat to society. Stevens's view wanted to do nothing more than grant Harris the chance to contest that serious, enormously consequential claim. That this claim was apparently self-evident to the eight other Justices after watching this Cops-style video is troubling.

The American Creed

2007-06-17T12:35:00.001-05:00

While living and traveling in Peru and meeting people from different cultures and backgrounds, I was led to reflect on what might be described as the "character" of the American people. I wasn't forced by my friends and acquaintances to "defend" what it means to be an American; rather, conversations about European politics (Finnish parliamentary elections, the French presidential election, etc.) and Peruvian development inspired me to compare American attitudes toward government, education, and civil society to those of other nationalities. It was an open debate.

My Finnish friends in particular provided me with an interesting set of ideas about government, education, and civil society that stood in contrast to what I think is the predominant "American" view of such things. Finnish students and professionals alike remarked that while their country's very high taxes are at times a personal nuisance and too often mismanaged, the common, public good that those taxes ultimately serve is worth 1) the nuisance, and 2) the effort to reform government to become more fiscally efficient.

The socialist-style Finnish system applies a graduated income tax to its citizens so that the wealthy are responsible for paying more taxes (relative to their income) than the poor and working classes. And to be sure, there's the usual discontent among the middle and rich classes about social welfare -- the perception that many poor and working-class Finns don't do their part in finding gainful employment or in trying not to live off the state. Despite these very real social and economic problems, however, my Finnish friends told me that most well-off Finns continue to believe that it's ultimately a good thing to buttress the country's infrastructure and social networks with their taxes.

Hearing this made me ashamed to be an American. I knew instinctively that such a view of the common, public good was/is utterly foreign to the vast majority of Americans. Perhaps it wasn't always so. Or maybe this has always been the case in a country that prides itself on its individualist ethos and cult of self-determination. What I do know is that the American creed of every man (or: nuclear family unit) for himself was perfected during the Reagan Revolution, the late-'70s to mid-'90s social and political movement that, among other things, valorized private enterprise and unfettered capitalism at the expense of public institutions, social welfare, and, specifically, the very idea that the country's tax burden would be shared by all citizens.

One truly sad result of this long period of dismantling the bonds of our civil society is that many well-off Americans actually feel victimized by the government when it tries to raise their income tax (which of course is modest compared to those paid by citizens in other "First World" countries). Even worse is how well-off Americans tend to feel victimized by the poorest sectors of society -- those who don't earn a living wage, who need to work three jobs to make ends meet, and need I mention "illegal immigrants"? The poor: whom the well-off characterize as morally and culturally deficient leeches, in so many words. The poor: whose socioeconomic poverty is somehow their fault, and theirs only.

It's this cult of victimization that's uniquely American, it seems to me. The well-off Finns have their complaints, sure. But at least many of them are able to distinguish a problem of social inequality (the poor needing help and the state mismanaging the system that distributes "help" to the poor) from a basically personal feeling of resentment, which, as Nietzsche reminds us, is the other face of self-righteousness (the poor are themselves deficient and so offend "me" by taking "my" money).

But why take my word for it? Durham's weekly news magazine The Independent cites this quotation from a recent article in the daily newspaper The News & Observer:

"The last thing I want to do is put more money into education, because I don't want to pay for something I never use."
--Bob Williamson, 46, a childless real estate executive from Wake Forest, quoted in an N&O story about how a majority of Wake County residents who don't have children oppose new taxes to help the schools keep up with growth.

So goes the American creed.

[For: Katri, Maria, Tiia, Lissu, Laura]

Almost Infamous

2007-06-06T07:36:00.003-05:00

The BBC's Matt Frei wrote a humorously observant article on this week's prominent celebrity jailings. Paris Hilton checked herself in at a Los Angeles county jail to serve 23 days for multiple DUI arrests. For his politically motivated "outing" of Valerie Plame, Scooter Libby was sentenced to 30 months in jail and ordered to pay $250,000 in fines. Paris and Scooter will serve time for different offenses, then, but it may become apparent that they share a peculiar quality among fallen celebrities: the ability to use the media's fascination with their infamy to orchestrate their resurrection.

As a celebutante, Paris has from the very beginning endured waves of criticism, attack, and targeted vitriol. Her incarceration is perhaps seen by many as the capstone to a profoundly reckless "personal" life -- one spent sun-bathing in the ego-feeding limelight of the public's mass-mediated attention. And yet Frei makes the point that Hollywood jail-time has the potential to redeem a fallen star's cachet: "It is the preparation of a new role and the script is predictable: the contrition, the return journey to honesty, the charity work, the book deal, the vegetarian recipes, the jailhouse fashion line, the cult of self-improvement lapped up by the attendant media, a stint squirming on Oprah's couch." When it comes to stars, we seem to take (perverse) pleasure in seeing them fall, repent, and eventually rise again.

Scooter's case is more complicated, owing to his being on the side of an unpopular administration and the figurehead of a disastrous, win-at-all-costs, war-mongering ideology. He is a minor figurehead, yes -- a bobblehead, if you will. But Scooter is a necessary figure; his crime is a discrete, punishable component of what is in fact a mind-boggling galaxy of Bush/Republican foreign policy foibles.

Will Scooter have the same chance at redemption that Paris surely will? It depends. He could fade into obscurity after he finishes serving his sentence, electing to quit this media/political business once and for all. (A Paris Hilton sans fame and/or infamy is quite unthinkable, on the other hand.) Scooter could also remain indefinitely infamous should Bush grant him a presidential pardon. Or he could go the way of so many former criminals and victims: becoming a Hollywood writer/producer. Scooter has already made clear his hope that his soft-core pornographic novel The Apprentice will one day be made into a movie.

If Scooter does get to make his movie at some point in the not-too-distant future, perhaps his path will cross Paris's once again and she'll get to play the leading lady (or mistress). Now that would be a Hollywood coup worth Netflixing.

The Task of the Reviewer

2007-06-05T09:52:00.002-05:00

I began posting book reviews on Amazon.com about a year ago to kick-start the process of writing on a daily basis. My dissertation had suffered long periods of dormancy, and posting book reviews was just one of the ways I thought I could teach myself how to enjoy writing -- any form of writing -- in view of schedules and deadlines.

I was also spurred to enter that virtual universe of Amazon.com reviewing after reading Michael Eric Dyson's contribution to the New York Public Library's series on the seven deadly sins: Pride. I maintain that this is a dreadful piece of writing. I found Dyson's book to be at once self-indulgent and hollow: brash and condescending without any hint of self-reflexive criticism. A good third of the book is devoted to Dyson's own career, and he betrays not an iota of irony when he takes two former students to task (he basically insults them in prose) for supposedly being disruptive in one of his classes. As you can see for yourself, my review reflects my very low opinion of this book.

But having had some familiarity with the defensive nature of people's responses to Amazon.com reviews (especially when it comes to political and social commentary), I added a closing paragraph to my review that revealed my stakes in critiquing Dyson: a progressive myself, I believe public-intellectual showmanship by the likes of Dyson does a disservice to progressive critical thinking. It brings our discourse down to the level of a polemical shouting match, and it touches on only the most superficial layer of social and political understanding (e.g., Dyson hails Halle Berry's and Denzel Washington's winning Oscars as being "good" forms of pride, over and against the KKK's "bad" form of pride).

The very next review I wrote, on Herman Grey's Cultural Moves, was just as critical, but this time I approached my argument from a more "academic" perspective. I again revealed my stakes in this act of criticism: as someone thoroughly invested in black cultural studies and African American cultural production more generally, I think Grey's sociological determinism seeks not to understand black arts on its own terms but to regurgitate the theoretical point that black arts is always "different" from presumably "white" hegemonic cultural production. Cultural Moves, for me, is a book of academic navel-gazing and not a sincere effort to think about what black arts might mean for its actual practitioners and receivers.

So you can see I've been very careful with how I approach reviewing on Amazon.com. I'm keen on making critical points, but I'm also aware of the various audiences I'm addressing -- I try to inaugurate a conversation between me and them that makes clear my position (with which they may or may not agree) and my investment in making that position. To be sure, I apply such a degree of care to books that are explicitly "about" social and cultural affairs: Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, to take the most recent example.

Having explained all that, you can imagine my surprise when someone took the time to send me a message, via Amazon.com, to let me know she finds my reviews heinous:

"Hi,
You gave Fukuyama's (!) book 5 stars essentially saying, 'hey please, come line this reactionary's pockets with money' - and Rachel Roy etc. - and you gave Herman Gray's book ONE star? Ugh! Must you review? - can't you go join some neocon think tank or something and stop ruining people's ratings with your lame criticisms? Better yet - write your own book for critique. Thank you."

Well, there goes "writing for an audience"!

First, I'm not sure exactly what this person meant by adding "Rachel Roy etc." (i.e., Rachael Ray) to the mix in such an offhand manner. Is Rachael Ray a political "reactionary"? Or does this person take issue with Ray's admittedly populist (heaven forbid "mainstream"!) approach to home cooking? (There are longstanding debates on Amazon.com about Rachael Ray's "dumbed-down" approach to cooking, with elitist "foodies" taking the masses to task for their lack of "taste," in both senses of that term.) Whatever the case may be, I can only imagine this person was attempting to flash her liberal, hipster, and/or anti-mainstream credentials by denouncing my positive reviews of Rachael Ray's cookbooks.

More important, however, is her claim that I'm somehow a political reactionary myself for giving Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads a positive review. Now the full text of my review clearly states that what I appreciate about this book is the candor and intelligence with which Fukuyama critiques the problem of George W. Bush's war-mongering and interventionist attempt to "spread democracy" the world over. It's Fukuyama's contention that the philosophical roots of neoconservative thinking insist strongly against such interventionism. (And so unlike other Amazon.com reviewers who seem to think Fukuyama is defecting from neoconservative principles, I actually point out that he's lambasting Bush for not holding true to them.) My review clearly states that I disagree with philosophical neoconservativism but that I appreciate the critique of Bush Fukuyama is able to mount in its name. Fukuyama's is a well-reasoned argument, in my estimation, and one way, out of many, of trying to work through the implications of Bush's disastrous, pig-headed foreign policy.

If there's anything I'm guilty of, at least based on my review, it's the belief that the project of democratic reform must first take root in the actual communities supposedly in need of democratic reform. This is the belief, over and against interventionism, of the need to buffer civil society with strong institutions and shared power structures. It's a belief shared by conservative realists, liberal socialists, and NGOs alike. Now it may not be the "utopian" post-power structure that many of my colleagues in graduate school advocate for, but it is, in my opinion, a real, viable alternative to the pressing issue of U.S. imperialism acting under the guise of "spreading democracy." Where I differ radically from Fukuyama, then, is in how "institution-building" as such is conceived: I reject neoconservative principles and support Western European-style socialism, where civil society is strengthened by the state not letting market capitalism run roughshod over the interests of the people, especially the poor and working classes.

Of course I doubt my critic actually read my review: it seems she only compared my star ratings among books (especially Herman Grey's, for whatever reason) and made up her mind that I belonged in a "neocon think tank." As for her claim that my review "line[s] [Fukuyama's] pockets with money," I would simply point out to her that if one were to live life divesting from supposedly reactionary causes and businesses, we'd have to give up most, if not all, of the commodities and amenities that infuse modern society. It's not just Fox News and Wendy's I'm talking about here. I also hear the Coors family is rather conservative (that's an understatement, by the way), and who really knows what Whole Foods is up to these days (for the record, I like Whole Foods)? (On Whole Foods and this ideology of "organicism" in our supermarkets, see Michael Pollan's widely celebrated The Omnivore's Dilemma.)

In the end, I'm quite happy to have provoked a response from my critic. I doubt she'll ever want to hear what I have to say here, but then again critical debate in general is somewhat lacking on the Internet, owing to the medium's immediacy and tendency to evoke knee-jerk, defensive responses. Perhaps we'd do better speaking in person.

As for my future as an Amazon.com reviewer, I'll carry on just as I have carried on: making critical points, saying what I liked and disliked, reviewing books both popular and obscure, "academic" and mainstream, and always being wary that I'm writing for an audience.

The one thing I will refuse is heeding to some sort of ideological litmus test, of which my critic and many of my professional colleagues are equally guilty. For my critic, I'm not liberal or progressive enough. For some of my colleagues, I'm not radical or "utopian" enough. My task as a reviewer is not to meet any ideological standard that demands an "enough." It is simply to be this: insistently and self-reflexively critical.

Good Bye, Wojciech Jaruzelski!

2007-06-04T11:58:00.001-05:00

The BBC and other news agencies reported that a Polish man, Jan Grzebski, woke up from a 19-year coma and was shocked to discover that communism had fallen in his native country -- only to be replaced by a rampant market economy.

A former railworker, Grzebski was hit by a train in 1988, just one year before elections in Poland made it the first post-communist eastern European country. For 19 years Grzebski's wife Gertruda tended to his health in the hope that he would someday awake from his comatose state.

When Grzebski did emerge from his coma, he found himself in a Poland utterly transformed by the "collapse" of communism. He told Polish TV, "When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere...Now I see people on the streets with mobile phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin."

What I like about the BBC's coverage of this amazing story is that there's a hint of irony in the way it highlights Grzebski's reflections on post-communist Poland. As far as I can tell, it's the only "western" news agency to quote Grzebski saying, "What amazes me today is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning...I've got nothing to complain about." Communist habits die hard? Or is it that Grzebski, by virtue of historical accident, has been afforded keen insight into our contemporary market-mediated condition? What's the point, he seems to ask, of so many consumer "choices" if we're becoming increasingly unhappy human beings -- people who don't appreciate the fact of life, the gift of consciousness, itself?

Grzebski's story is an interesting counterpoint to German director Wolfgang Becker's 2003 movie Good Bye Lenin! There a GDR, party-leading mother falls into a coma shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. When she awakes several months later, her son concocts a plan to protect her fragile heart: pretend that the GDR still exists and that communism hasn't been supplanted by market capitalism.

The scheme is admittedly hilarious in theory, but I found the jokes wore thin after a while. Hiding the Coca-Cola billboard directly across the street from his mother's window takes a bit of slapstick skill, yet the son's hijinks, for me, tend to underscore the mother's seeming anachronicity -- her being anti-modern, "not with the times," a remnant of the GDR/communist past. I would thus describe Good Bye Lenin!, produced in the now unified Germany, as a decidedly West German take on the former East German situation.

Jan Grzebski's story encourages us to do something different: rather than ridicule his communist leanings, his seeming anachronicity, we'd do well to take heed of his modest observations on contemporary life. His clarity of vision is not a joke -- it's a gift.

Dr. Strangeblog

2007-05-31T17:24:00.001-05:00

My friend Justin Izzo alerted me to a bizarre court case from Boston, Massachusetts, where a pediatrician on trial for malpractice was caught blogging about the proceedings -- or, more specifically, a fictional trial that bore a striking resemblance to his own -- under a pseudonym. The doctor's blogs on the trial were so revealing, and opinionated, that, once the prosecutor "outed" him in court, he was forced to settle the case out of court or face a now highly suspicious jury (of whom, unsurprisingly, the blogs are highly critical).

The Boston Globe (via Boston.com) relays the story of Dr. Robert P. Lindeman, of Natick Pediatrics, who was sued by the parents of Jaymes Binns after Jaymes died from a severe condition known as diabetes ketoacidosis. The Binnses' case rested on the fact that Dr. Lindeman had failed to diagnose their son with diabetes six weeks before he died.

Throughout his trial Dr. Lindeman kept a blog, now taken down, in which he commented on his case using the pseudonym "Flea," a nickname supposedly given by surgeons to pediatricians in training. Globe writer Jonathan Saltzman points out that "In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing." He had also given the character based on the Binnses' lawyer the name "Carissa Lunt" -- which, it goes with saying, is vulgar yet sooo Ally McBeal. Perhaps most important, though, Flea had steadily garnered sympathy for his side of the story (in this fictional case) among the many visitors to his blog.

When news of the blog reached the prosecution, I imagine they recognized it for what it was: a damning indictment of the doctor's character, regardless of his "intentions" in writing it. Shrewd, flippant, a self-styled victim: Flea may have had a sound case to make, but his attitude left much to be desired.

For example, in one quoted passage from the now-defunct blog, Flea writes, "We've said it before, and we'll say it again: If the basis of this case is that Flea is an arrogant, uncaring jerk who maliciously neglected a patient, resulting in his death, the plaintiff will not win, period...As much of a cocky bastard that Flea may appear in the blogosphere, the readers who have a personal acquaintance with the real 3-D doctor understand how such an approach cannot succeed."

And yet it did succeed -- the prosecution was able to cast doubt on Lindeman's character -- precisely because "Flea" and "the real 3-D doctor" turned out to be the same person, the same "cocky bastard." Here Lindeman's metacommentary doesn't realize its own ironic condition of possibility: that forcefully stating the difference between Flea and the "real" doctor only serves to underscore their inextricability. (You know the type: "Really, I'm not like that -- in fact, I did it just to remind myself how different I really am!") This rhetorical move amounts to Lindeman denying his very real investment in Flea as both a cathartic release and an agent, however modest, of public opinion.

I don't know the details of the malpractice suit against Dr. Lindeman, and so I refrain from judging his "character" based on the Binnses' claims. Furthermore, I don't even have that strong of an opinion about his decision to publish a blog about his case. It may have been an ill-considered decision with regard to "winning" the case, but I don't think Dr. Lindeman did anything ethically dubious -- it was at most a costly strategic error in legal maneuvering (and public relations).

I'm writing this entry, then, mainly to draw further attention to this dynamic of virtual embodiment -- how what we know as a "real" person is becoming increasingly figured as a networked, virtual entity. In this case, a man's inhabiting the blogosphere to reflect on his "real world" situation ultimately confuses the two, rendering them inseparable. That "he" (Flea, Dr. Lindeman) continued to maintain their separation was not so much an act of deception as a lack of perspective.

"Dr. Lindeman is Flea": this is what the prosecution said. But the situation seems to me more complex: Dr. Lindeman and Flea, the "real" world and the virtual, are each other, and though Dr. Lindeman's very real pocketbook will take a massive blow from the settlement, Flea will always have his secret desire. Of Ms. Lunt, Flea ruminated, "Wonder if she's a pillow biter, too?"

O Captain, My Captain

2007-05-16T17:03:00.001-05:00

The 2006-07 Barclays English Premiership season ended last weekend. Manchester United captured its ninth title since the formation of the league in 1992. Two-time defending champions Chelsea came in second, with Liverpool and Arsenal rounding out the top four. Watford and Charlton endured shambolic seasons and were relegated to the drop before the last day of action; Sheffield United joined them after a 2-1 home loss to Wigan on that last day.

In our fantasy football league, Blue Devils United, hosted by the official website of the Premiership, Justin Izzo came in first by the slimmest of margins: 8 points. The final table looks like this:

1. Duke United FC Justin Izzo 1944
2. Young Boys Durham Kinohi Nishikawa 1936
3. Durham Hamnets Rod Frey 1793
4. aljarrin Alvaro Jarrin 1638
5. The Hurt Enver Casimir 1263
6. toon army mike league 1190
7. Epinal FC Pablo Perez 1175
8. Phillies Finest Julie Mikolajewski 1103
9. toon army mike leitner 1003

My personal stats read: #11 in the Peru league (where, at my peak, I ranked as high as #2) and 20,235 out of 1,272,176 users overall.

Justin and I were neck-and-neck for most of the competition. We traded turns leading the league until April, when I made costly errors in transfers, captain-selection, and starting 11-selection. Justin's strong performances during that month, owing mainly to his shutout-prone defensive lineup (and most especially Liverpool's Jamie Carragher), allowed him to secure first place for good. I managed to scrape my way back into the competition in the last few weeks, and though a strong Arsenal showing at Portsmouth on the final day could've seen me slip into first, a 0-0 draw with the south coast team meant that my much-admired midfielder Cesc Fabregas didn't pick up the points I needed to achieve that.

For not being a regular Premiership follower, Rod Frey finished a respectable third. If he had had the time or desire to make transfers on a weekly basis, he could've well challenged for top spot. Portsmouth goalkeeper David James was probably his key asset all season.

Alvaro Jarrin came in with the disadvantage of not having regular access to the Internet for the first several months of the competition. His moving to Rio de Janeiro for his anthropological fieldwork meant that his starting 11 (and captaincy) remained relatively static for a lengthy period of time. In fact, Alvaro didn't make his first set of transfers until December 1! But once he got that valuable WiFi in his apartment, Alvaro surged into fourth and consistently produced numbers that challenged Justin's and my own. A Chelsea fan, Alvaro had a great run with the trio of Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba, and Michael Essien.

I learned a lot of things about the nature of online fantasy sports gaming by participating in this season-long league. From a technical standpoint, I got a feel for the wide range of strategies these gamers employ to maximize points from a determinate set of conditions: a maximum of three players from one team, a starting 11 that had a minimum of three defenders, and a designated captain who would earn you double the points for that gameweek. I also learned the extraordinary value of saving one's "free transfer" gameweek for when one really needs it. I stupidly used mine very early on in the competition, making only three transfers (where one would already have been "free" anyway) when Bolton seemed to be in a good run of form back in November. Of course all extra transfers thereafter cost me dearly: 4 points per second transfer per gameweek. In total I lost 36 points from extra transfers this season, 32 of which came after I used my free transfer gameweek.

I also learned the necessity of getting "more bang for your buck" from players who don't hail from the big English squads. Indeed one of the key elements of online fantasy sports gaming is knowing not only which teams are in form and which aren't but also which players are in form and which aren't. At first I stuck by players from traditionally strong teams such as Chelsea and Arsenal. And though it's probably a good idea to stick with defenders from the strong teams (because it's usually the strong teams that can keep the most clean sheets), strikers are a different story entirely. Though hailing from mid-table teams, the likes of Blackburn's Benni McCarthy and Middleborough's Yakubu/Viduka pairing scored goals aplenty -- it's just that their teams also let in lots of goals, often in losing efforts. And despite his team's disastrous defensive record, letting in 111 goals, more than any other team, Tottenham's Bulgarian striker Dimitar Berbatov had an outstanding second-half to the season, sometimes garnering 10 to 20 points per gameweek. The lesson here? It's probably a good idea to spend good money on a strong defensive lineup. But it also makes sense to shop for bargain strikers (and attacking midfielders), several of whom are likely to come from teams that don't do (nearly) as well as the Manchester Uniteds and the Chelseas.

Finally, and in my opinion the deciding factor between my season and Justin's, is the role the gameweek captain plays. As I said before, a captain's point total is doubled for the gameweek. At the beginning of the season, it was difficult to determine just which players would score the goals, make the assists, and earn the bonus points that are the stuff of good captains. I stuck by Arsenal's Thierry Henry for at least two months, in part (I admit) because of his formidable reputation as a striker who can score multiple goals in any given game. What we know now is that Henry endured a subpar season because of niggling injuries and, more important, the fatigue that set in after France's epic World Cup 2006 run. Justin was more daring and figured out early on that Manchester United's Portuguese midfielder Cristiano Ronaldo was producing consistently excellent displays.

And indeed Ronaldo and Chelsea's midfielder Frank Lampard emerged as the two best candidates for holding gameweek captaincies for the majority of the season.

One week Ronaldo would score a goal and make two assists; the next Lampard would essentially equal that tally. And vice versa. The bonus points came flooding in as Ronaldo and Lampard were consistently named most or second-most valuable players for the games they played in: Ronaldo ended up with 36 bonus points for the season; Lampard with 23. Only Cesc Fabregas beat Ronaldo in bonus points with an amazing 54 at the end of the season. The young Spaniard didn't score nearly as many goals, though, and ended up finishing with 182 total points to Ronaldo's 244. Lampard finished with 202 points.

Soon Justin and I were trading the lead based almost exclusively on whether we chose the "right" midfielder (Ronaldo or Lampard) for a particular gameweek. On the few occasions that I happened to stray from this pairing, I suffered the consequences: Arsenal's Robin Van Persie played a full 90 minutes against Sheffield United and not only didn't score but received a yellow card as well; he got 1 point, and I got 2.

While the Ronaldo-Lampard strategy worked for several months, I now realize it became almost too routine, blinding me to other captaincy possibilities, particularly late on in the season when Manchester United and Chelsea rotated their squads more regularly and their star midfielders were given much-needed rests. In the final double-fixture gameweek (where some teams play twice), for example, I stuck with Ronaldo as my captain. While he earned 8 points in his first match, he didn't even play in Manchester United's second, as the team had already secured the championship and wanted to give the usual benchwarmers a chance to prove themselves. Berbatov, meanwhile, earned an impressive, and potentially (for my season) decisive, 19 points between Tottenham's two matches.

All in all, though, this season's competition was totally fun and utterly absorbing. Bourdieu reminds us that the logic of practice (where a specific maximization of interest [or points] always takes place within determinate conditions, as in a chess game) is such that you don't get a feel for the game unless you throw yourself, head first, into it: you learn, in other words, by doing. Better put, the learning is in the doing. And so for now I'll take comfort in his advice, which is also a theory, and simply say that I'll be back next year.

Izzo, between the World Cup and the Premiership this past year, you and I are tied, 1-1. (There is, Bourdieu might add, a certain amount of shit-talking in any game.)

To Have and Have Not

2007-05-15T21:53:00.001-05:00

Three passages from Ernest Hemingway's 1937 novel To Have and Have Not: potent examples of how literature can appeal to visceral experience, to the body's being-in-the-world, and of how language, crafted just so, can move us in powerful ways.

1. Hemingway describes Harry Morgan leaving his wife, and her bed, for the last time:

She watched him go out of the house, tall, wide-shouldered, flat-backed, his hips narrow, moving, still, she thought, like some kind of animal, easy and swift and not old yet, he moves so light and smooth-like, she thought, and when he got in the car she saw him blonde, with the sunburned hair, his face with the broad mongol cheek bones, and the narrow eyes, the nose broken at the bridge, the wide mouth and the round jaw, and getting in the car he grinned at her and she began to cry. "His goddamn face," she thought. "Everytime I see his goddamn face it makes me want to cry." (128)

The cadence of Harry's footsteps is matched by the cadence of Hemingway's prose, ambling, patient, "moving, still..." When Harry grins, and his eyes meet hers, the sentence stops to devastating effect: still, now, Marie is brought to tears by his quiet strength.

2. Helen Gordon gives her husband Richard a tongue-lashing during a lover's spat:

Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have. And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love. Your kind of picknose love. You writer. (185-86)

Repetition and description, to have and have not, a game of adding detail and subtracting sentiment. With that devastating final insult: "You writer."

3. An anonymous "sixty-year-old grain broker" endures a sleepless night worrying that his tax-evading past has finally caught up with him. During the Great Depression, he was thankfully not one of those "have-nots"; their fate he imagines like so:

Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up. (237-38)

Damning irony, again pointed up by way of Hemingway's style: the measured repetition of "some" in the first three clauses giving way to a prolonged, wandering discourse on "those" (repeated twice) quintessentially American instruments of dream-brokering. To have and have not.

Hemingway wants you to feel his writing in your bones. He wants you to experience his words.

Special thanks to Ursula Grisham, fellow CSI enthusiast and Dartmouth (soon-to-be) grad, for letting me borrow her copy during the two months we lived together in Lima.

The Midwich Cuckoos, or, A Confusion of Thoughts on Reproduction, Evolution, and Reading

2007-05-13T12:10:00.001-05:00

I just finished reading a great science fiction book, John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos. Originally published in 1957, the novel was later adapted into the movie Village of the Damned (1960). It tells the story of how a small, sleepy village in England is "invaded" by unwanted "Children," beings who have an enormous capacity for learning and who are intent on dominating their bewildered hosts.

The Children are, we might say, forcibly born to the village's women -- the story begins with a mysterious "Dayout" in which the lives of Midwich's inhabitants are brought to a halt, an invisible forcefield is set up around the village, and the women become pregnant overnight. Wyndham was no feminist, but there are kernels of a radical critique of reproduction (heterosexual or otherwise) in the way he explores the community's reaction to the mass insemination. Mrs. Zellaby notes to her husband, "It's all very well for a man. He doesn't have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he's always on the outside. He can never know what it's like, even in a normal way -- so what sort of an idea can he have of this? -- Of how it feels to lie awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used? -- As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator..." (71-72). Mrs. Zellaby's pregnancy was forced upon her, to be sure, and yet the language here is slippery enough, I think, to suggest that she's touching on a more common sentiment, or malaise, or dread, that might be characteristic of "carrying child."

Once the Children are born, the villagers soon realize that they can't escape them -- that these beings exert a pull on them that doesn't allow them to leave Midwich. When people try to leave town by car or foot, there's a point at which they are compelled to turn around and come back to the Children. Even more sinister is the fact that any harm done to the Children, whether intentional or not, is redoubled and thrown back at those who committed the harm. Early in the story, one Mrs. Welt accidentally pricks her baby with a pin. Soon after, "the baby had just looked steadily at her with its golden eyes, and made her start jabbing the pin into herself" (83).

This deliciously sadistic pulsion defines the novel's narrative arc. It also helps explain Wyndham's choice of titles. In one of Mr. Zellaby's many discourses on the Children, he claims that they bear some resemblance to the apparently vicious nature of newly hatched cuckoo birds: "Now, the important thing about the cuckoo is not how the egg got into the nest, nor why that nest was chosen; the real matter for concern comes after it has been hatched -- what, in fact, it will attempt to do next. And that, whatever it may be, will be motivated by its instinct for survival, an instinct characterized chiefly by utter ruthlessness" (89). And indeed once the villagers accept their lot as trapped hosts for these Children, the question becomes, How to get rid of them? This question allows Wyndham to delve into matters of evolutionary theory: he's interested in imagining what humans might resort to when confronted with beings that are paradoxically more advanced (they are highly intelligent creatures) and less mature (they are nonetheless "children") than they are.

I picked up this book from my hostel in Huaráz. I began reading it there and finished it here, a month later, in Lima. I'm writing about it in this blog to register some of the themes (reproduction, evolution) that piqued my interest as a reader. But just what kind of reader am I? Under what circumstances do I read? Why this book, in Peru, over the Easter weekend, and not another? Are the comments above of an academic nature, or are they things someone who reads The Midwich Cuckoos for "fun," while backpacking, might reflect on as well? Who "owned" this British edition of the book (a handsome trade paperback whose cover features the haunting stare of a baby set above the gray bar that signals it to be part of the Penguin Classics series) before leaving it at the Benkiwasi hostel? Did he or she retrieve it from some other traveler, from some other hostel or book exchange, in South America? Is English even the first language of this imaginary traveler? And what will happen to this book now? Who will read it next as I leave it somewhere in Lima, sometime next week, when I pack up my things and return to my "grad student" life back in the States?

Reading and experience, reproduction and evolution, dry British humor and quiet British terror. The other day, a fellow traveler from Seattle, Emily Jump, and I had a wonderful conversation over Mediterranean food about reading both within and outside academic contexts. We talked about the pleasures of reading for "fun" -- that is, reading for experience, reading as an exercise of the imagination, and not reading as a means of reducing literature to hyper-specialized academic prose. But Emily also took care to recognize that we possess the education and wherewithal ($) to "enjoy" literature of a certain type. Which is to say that even our leisurely enjoyment of literature is always already conditioned by a certain educational background and a certain privileged interest in reading as a practice. And so ultimately we, Emily and I, move between the desire to read beyond what we already know and the acknowledgment that our reading practices will always bear the trace of a certain privileged "appreciation" of what literature can do -- how reading books can take us beyond what we already know.

A classic double-bind? Not necessarily so. I, for one, have come to appreciate deeply the possibility of reading with an eye toward experience and understanding rather than as a means of confirming what I think I already know. Yes, Emily and I are both highly educated people. We enjoy good books. We read some books that academics read. But we resist (and here she's got a head start on me) processing what we read through a self-defined "intellectual" lens -- reducing what we read to a preconstituted "theory." We don't (like to) read as professionals, in other words. Or, at least in my case, being an academic isn't mutually exclusive (I hope!) with one's appreciation for experiential reading. The issue I have with the academy is that most professional literary critics will never admit to the inherent hermeticism of their profession (though they like to claim that all other professions are hyper-specialized).

So there's a profound difference, a valuable difference, between ways of reading among highly educated subjects. Where acknowledging one's position of privilege becomes important is precisely at the point where it's most tempting to judge the way "other people" read. These "others" could include educated people who critique academic professionalism, but they more often encompass the wide swath of readers who don't read books, or who read romances and crime fiction exclusively, or who (worst of all, in some circles) read "middlebrow" books usually associated with sentimental femininity and (therefore?) a complete lack of "taste." While attesting to her own tastes (for good books that a college graduate like her can appreciate), Emily took care to point out that her preferences didn't at all imply judgment of what other people read. People read for different reasons, and these reasons are conditioned by factors such as educational background, disposible income, access to literary resources, and so forth. Thus, to dismiss or even condemn (see certain critics' shrill responses to Oprah's Book Club) certain forms of reading on the grounds of taste confuses a personal "choice" for the divergent and variable social conditions of reading.

Small wonder that Emily has been my best dissertation-interlocutor (even considering the brevity of our conversation over late-lunch!) during my time in Peru. After giving her a layman's rundown of my topic, Emily basically said, "So you're arguing that black pulp fiction made (the practice of) reading a book interesting, worthwhile, and affordable for a community of traditionally overlooked readers." The ethical and political implication of which is: we bracket judging the content of these books in order to understand that their popularity suggests profound truths about racial and economic inequality in the United States.

Emily stated her interpretation of my "point" in such a clear and efficient way that I felt embarrassed revealing how long it's been taking me to finish writing my dissertation. What good reason did I have for taking so much time when the elements of my thinking were so easily communicated over kebabs that afternoon in Parque Kennedy? Was my block a matter of laziness, confusion, needing to read more, needing to research more, or simply being unable to write "academically" about books, people, and themes of the "street," those arguably at the furthest remove from the ivory tower?

One thing I do know is that my craving for new experiences, experiences beyond what I think I already know, is incentive enough for me to commit to finishing my doctoral degree by March of next year. The question remains whether and how I will manage to write the Experience of black pulp fiction in an academic dissertation.

Violence & Attention

2007-05-08T07:39:00.001-05:00

My friend Jorge Riveros forwarded me an opinion piece that was published in the Washington Post shortly after what's come to be known as the "Virginia Tech massacre." In "What the Killers Want," novelist Lionel Shriver reflects on Cho Seung-Hui's demand for media attention in an almost unprecedented display of posthumous self-indulgence and terror.

As you can read for yourself, Shriver's basic claim is that violent acts like Cho's are, in part, made possible -- even encouraged -- by a media culture that feeds off sensationalism and extorts emotional baggage. It's a culture that capitalizes on shock and awe even in the midst of tragedy. It's a culture that somehow validates "being seen" at any cost. Shriver writes, "In an era that has lost touch with the distinction between fame and infamy, so driving is the need to be noticed -- for any reason -- that even posthumous attention will do."

What I like about Shriver's piece is that it doesn't shy away from asking tough, critical questions about the way we've received news about this no doubt horrific event -- how it's been framed, in what ways we are led to crave more information, and so on. Of course it's not that we shouldn't receive news about unpleasant events at all; the issue, rather, is how to avoid legitimating (by consuming) the very culture of media sensationalism that contributed to Cho's belief that he really could be a quasi-martyr. Much attention has been given to the influence violent Japanese manga and the South Korean film Oldboy might have had on Cho. But perhaps the better analogy is to Oliver Stone's satire Natural Born Killers, in which a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde go on a killing spree that the media covers obsessively and effectively wants to go on.

Shriver is less convincing, I think, when she says there's absolutely nothing that can change this culture of media sensationalism. It's highly unlikely (a "pipe dream"), she says, that the media will cease giving "blanket coverage and banner headlines" to these killers. And because, thankfully, we don't live in a police state (though the post-9/11, Patriot Act States would seem to challenge that assumption), the simple fact of the matter is that "Whenever we walk out the door, we take the chance that malice will rain on our heads."

It may be the case that nothing can change the media's voracious efforts to "grab" the audience's attention, no matter what the cost. But if this is the case, it seems to me much more effort should be put into media education -- that is, learning to observe, consume, and participate in media as critical subjects. A key component of this type of knowledge, I would argue, is the Marxian/Debordian understanding that consumer society renders us alienated subjects and has the potential to exhaust our ability to rely on ourselves, and each other (i.e., human contact), for emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical sustenance. Whenever we don't feel sustained in our human relationships, we turn to sundry consumer outlets -- not least mass media -- to again feel whole, or perhaps to be distracted for a while, or even to replace that lack with a fleeting desire (i.e., shopping).

In Cho's case, it's clear he had found "real life" to be so harsh and unwelcoming that he accepted he had no other choice but to stage a (posthumous) media frenzy that would grant him the attention he so desperately sought. Cho was, in short, a thoroughly alienated soul. Further pathologizing him as a "wacko" or "kook" or even a "South Korean," not American, national ("It's not us, good heavens!") neglects Cho's rather common affliction: wanting to be wanted in a hyperreal world.

A Dirty Shame: Partial Law & Strict Interpretation

2007-05-07T09:26:00.003-05:00

My friend Tyrone Kapricorne brought to my attention a lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., that exposes the corruption of the American legal system by frivolous, "bad faith" torts. Most amazing (aside from the amount of money being requested in damages) about this suit is that it was filed by a D.C. judge himself.

You can read about the suit yourself in this article by AP writer Lubna Takruri. The suit was filed by one Roy Pearson, an administrative hearings judge for the D.C. circuit. Two years ago, Judge Pearson brought several suits that needed to be altered to a dry-cleaning business owned by a Korean immigrant family, the Chungs. When one of the judge's pants went "missing" a few days later, Pearson set in motion a series of events that culminated in his $65 million suit against the Chungs.

Now at first Pearson demanded that the Chungs reimburse him for the price of the suit (of which the pants was a part), more than $1,000. But one week later, the Chungs recovered the pants, without any damage, and simply wanted to return it to the judge. Pearson refused to accept this and, after several months of rejecting settlement offers by the Chungs (as much as $12,000!), instead filed his lawsuit.

How Judge Pearson arrived at the extraordinary figure of $65 million is too complicated (and too loathsome) for me to summarize here. So I'll defer to Lubna Takruri's excellent account:

Because Pearson no longer wanted to use his neighborhood dry cleaner, part of his lawsuit calls for $15,000 — the price to rent a car every weekend for 10 years to go to another business.

...

But the bulk of the $65 million comes from Pearson's strict interpretation of D.C.'s consumer protection law, which fines violators $1,500 per violation, per day. According to court papers, Pearson added up 12 violations over 1,200 days, and then multiplied that by three defendants.
Much of Pearson's case rests on two signs that Custom Cleaners once had on its walls: 'Satisfaction Guaranteed' and 'Same Day Service.'

Based on Pearson's dissatisfaction and the delay in getting back the pants, he claims the signs amount to fraud.

Remember, of course, that the pants were found, without any damage, by the Chungs only a week or two after they had presumed it had gone missing. And remember that despite Judge Pearson's clear unreasonableness, the Chungs were willing to pay as much as $12,000 to avoid going to court. The pants in question have been hanging in the Chungs' lawyer's office, untouched, for over a year. Amazingly, Pearson now claims this pair is not his, even though the inseam measurements match his own and the ticket matches his receipt.

How, then, are we supposed to judge the actions of Judge Pearson? In what ways can we understand law, and how it works, when one of its own administrators (or "interpreters") is so clearly intent on bending words and provisions and clauses to suit his personal needs? To what extent do Judge Pearson's actions reveal a larger culture of toxic litigation in the American legal system? And how uncommon is his strategy of reading, or interpreting, the law among supposedly impartial, freestanding judges and justices in a country that prides itself on having a legal system in which "justice is blind"?

Note Takruri's gloss on the reasoning behind Pearson's lawsuit: his is a "strict interpretation" of D.C. consumer law. For those unfamiliar with contemporary ideologies of legal interpretation, the "strict reading" of law is championed mainly by conservative judges who base their decisions on "literal" or "originalist" readings of legal documents. Pearson is a classic literalist when he argues that the Chungs' signs did not accord with the service he received -- he was literally "not satisfied" by his service (i.e., the Chungs couldn't guarantee his satisfaction), and though his pants were eventually recovered, this happened too late for "same day service" to apply here. And then of course we have Pearson's calculations, which inflate his assumed damages to extraordinary proportions and continue to assume that he is "damaged" every day that goes by without his pants being returned to him.

This case is a travesty, to be sure, but Pearson's legal ideology is in fact not at all uncommon. In addition to numerous judges at the state and federal levels, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court espouse extreme forms of literalism and originalism in their readings of the U.S. Constitution. For Scalia and Thomas, if the "framers" of the Constitution didn't intend something -- protection of certain rights, let's say -- in their writing up of that document, then it cannot be defended as constitutional. Scalia and Thomas have lambasted abortion rights and affirmative action policies, for example, for having no foundation whatsoever in the framers' understanding of what could be protected by law in American society. In their view, abortion is legalized by a radical reading of the Constitution's protection of "privacy" and affirmative action, which gives minorities an "unfair" advantage over whites, amounts to reverse racism and discounts the Constitution's understanding of "equal protection." Scalia defends his strategy of reading in an eloquent yet troubling book, A Matter of Interpretation. (Chief Justice Roberts is also by and large a literalist. Though I haven't the time to research his decision online, Roberts's tenure on the D.C. Circuit Court saw him uphold some form of harsh punishment for a girl who ate french fries in the subway when the subway's policy was that no food was allowed there.)

Given this thumbnail sketch of strict interpretation, what's revealing about the Pearson-Chung case, at least for me, is the way Judge Pearson's recourse to literalism is so clearly linked to a perverse pleasure in exercising power and making the law do what you say it does. I would go so far as to argue that Pearson's bad faith is in fact symptomatic of the literalist legal position: if your reading can be said to accord precisely with "what the law means" (or "what the framers intended"), and if there's an absolute coherence of your position and what you say the law says, then you confer upon yourself the authority of what Derrida calls "the force of law." You are the Law. This is the literalist ideology, and if you ask me it's not terribly different from the fundamentalist's claim that, knowing exactly what God means or intends, he acts in the name of God, with the force of God behind him. This is the literalist ideology, and it breeds hatred, disillusionment, and bad faith.

Pearson's case will be heard by D.C. Superior Court Judge Neal Kravitz on June 11 of this year. If you wish to help support the Chungs in their defense, please visit the Custom Cleaners Defense Fund.

Politics & "News": Update on Hawaii's SCR 83

2007-04-18T10:09:00.001-05:00

My friend Matthew Lopresti wrote me a few days ago to update me on the status of the Hawaii State Legislature's SCR 83 (see my previous post for information on this resolution). Unfortunately, SCR 83 didn't make it to committee, even though the state senator in charge of the committee, Clayton Hee, seemed to be in support of having the resolution heard among his colleagues. According to Matthew, the issue was that not enough people had written to their state senators (and not just Sen. Hee) about the resolution. This, at least, is what Sen. Hee relayed to Matthew once it became apparent that the resolution would die in the back rooms of our capitol.

Yet in his note to me Matthew raises a crucial point: how could broad-based support for SCR 83 be effected if mainstream media outlets refused to cover this piece of legislation until it became "newsworthy"? On the one hand, SCR 83's fate in committee was premised on public awareness (support, rejection, debate) of the issues. Yet our dominant media outlets, which are still largely responsible for shaping public awareness of the issues, wouldn't talk about SCR 83 unless it reached the floor of the Hawaii State Legislature.

It's a classic double-bind: without public support, a bill dies; but a bill won't be picked up by the media (which, again, shapes public opinion) unless it makes it to the floor. See how it works? It's suspicious-sounding all around, as though both politicians and the media were in cahoots as to what issues actually get heard by the public. Look at it this way: if the only bills that make it to committee/the floor are ones that supposedly have broad-based support anyway (without the media's attention), exactly how/where is genuine public debate of the issues happening? Where, in other words, are the outlets for bold pieces of legislation that seek to foment public debate of the issues?

Based on his experiences with SCR 83, Matthew frames the problem this way: "So, one thing I've learned from this is that things at the Capitol work with some degree of reverse causation. A bill or resolution is only heard in committee if they know it is going to pass on the floor. I was foolish enough to think (and believe what I was told) that if we can just get it heard, there can then be debate on the floor, in the media, and in the community - since the media said they would only cover the story to inform people about SCR83 if the committee was actually going to hear it. I was thus duped into thinking that local media was actually concerned with serving the betterment of democracy by informing the people of ways they can have a voice because I'm sure they were 'in the know' that if its heard in committee, its passing is already a foregone conclusion - hence my rant on the blog about their only concern being sensationalism."

Nicely put, and I'd simply stress Matthew's point about systematic (i.e., bureaucratic) political work being a foregone conclusion, a consensus-assuming practice that passes itself off as democratic deliberation. Note also, of course, the mainstream media's role in the matter: in lieu of coverage of such items as SCR 83, we've got "human interest" pieces and "health tips" and "market watch" and sundry forms of "news" that really only confirm "your" individual tastes and "your" individual lifestyle. News, in other words, has become a passing conversation with your friendly next-door neighbor: a pleasant little diversion; not the stuff of open, deliberative debate.

Hawaii's SCR 83 & Anti-Faculty Sentiment

2007-04-15T14:10:00.001-05:00

A good friend of mine, Matthew Lopresti, a philosophy Ph.D. candidate and instructor at Hawaii Pacific University, recently helped spur discussion in Hawaii's State Legislature about a resolution that would ask the U.S. Congress to consider impeachment hearings against President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney. The text of the Senate Concurrent Resolution 83 (SCR 83) can be found here.

SCR 83 was introduced by Matthew's state senator, Les Ihara, a Democrat serving the Kapahulu, Kaimuki, and Palolo districts in Honolulu. SCR 83 has garnered some national attention through the Internet, but mainstream media outlets--even local outlets in Hawaii--have been mostly silent about the issue. Matthew has been tireless in his efforts to spread the word about this important piece of political expression; this past Friday the 13th was the deadline for the Hawaii Senate's Judiciary Committee to decide whether or not to consider SCR 83. Although I'm not sure about the outcome of that Committee's meeting on Friday, I will post an update as soon as I get the facts.

According to Matthew, online responses to his political work have been almost entirely negative. On one Hawaii-based political blog, Matthew has been attacked not simply for his editorial letter in support of SCR 83 (as far as I know, this letter was the only "coverage" that SCR 83 received from the mainstream media) but also for his status as a teacher and scholar at a university. It's this latter form of attack that continues to concern me as someone who believes scholars should not shy away from making serious intellectual and political contributions to/in the public sphere. One commentator, without so much as addressing the merits or demerits of SCR 83, claims that university professors should not have tenure, and that they "should be held accountable and responsible for everything they say." Another, writing as an "HPU alumni [sic]," claims s/he's "deeply disappointed that a Hawaii Pacific University Professor is behind this ignorant Resolution." And "kapena" goes so far as to say, "I am aware of people like you in academic circles who think and truly believe you have a more learned opinion than the rest of us...just because you're employed at an educational 'place of learning.'"

Wherever they come from (I'm not quick to assume these are "just" reactionary conservatives we're talking about here), I think responses such as these index increasing suspicion of the role and purpose of higher education in U.S. society. In fact, quite often these attacks have very little to say about the topic at hand. Rather, they are more insistent in pointing out two things: that university faculty 1) have an elitist, "liberal" bias against the will of the majority of Americans, and thus 2) should not involve themselves in social and political affairs beyond academia.

The first claim confuses "liberal" political soapboxing with what I conceive as the intellectual practice of critical thinking. Needless to say, the claim doesn't have an adequate answer to intellectuals' demonstrated commitment to critical thinking, even under seemingly "friendlier" regimes of power (i.e., the Clinton era, "blue" states or districts, etc.).

The second claim expresses the somewhat dumbed-down fear of higher education itself: whom it serves, what it's meant to provide, and so on. It seems to me the real threat of professors' social and political expression in the public sphere resides not in their particular "liberal" beliefs but in the very fact that higher education could mean something beyond what the corporate university is supposed to legitimate: the paying customer, or student--his/her professional drives, his/her "sense of self," his/her readiness to enter the "real world." So it seems to me that as more and more professors move between the academic and public spheres (not least aided by the Internet), there are those who will insist that faculty shouldn't express what they believe (and, goodness knows, even go so far as to say that what they believe is related to their vocation of critical inquiry) but should only serve their disciplines and their charges (i.e., students) in the disinterested realm of scholarly professionalism.

Duke faculty, graduate students, and instructors are all too familiar with these sorts of issues, particularly given the fallout from the Duke lacrosse case (which topic--the fallout--merits a very long blog entry of its own). I raise the issue here, in view of Matthew's participation in the SCR 83 push, in order to highlight how common anti-faculty sentiment really is in our country. What's this sentiment about? Is it unique to our polarized political times? (I happen to think aspects of it are unique, while others have been exploited by reactionaries many times in the past.) Why is intellectual public culture so much at odds with certain people's understanding of the mission of higher education? What's the relationship between anti-faculty sentiment and American institutions' taking up various modes of privatization (from profitable online course programs to lucrative endowment deals to scientific copyright contracts...)? At least this scholar wants to keep the conversation going.

Dwelling in Colca Canyon

2007-04-03T10:07:00.001-05:00

Almost two months ago now, I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to travel to Arequipa, Peru, a city in the mountains in the southern part of the country. I made the decision on a Monday afternoon and left around 8:00 that evening. I accompanied my friend Maria, a Finn I had met two days prior at a big lonche at Jorge's apartment (and then Huaringas Bar and then Yakana disco...).

Traveling to Arequipa involved a very long overnight bus ride down the Peruvian coastline, and it took over 12 hours. I'm just thankful I had Maria there for company and conversation. We talked about the recent Finnish parliamentary elections (held just the day before), what on earth I was doing in Peru, and our common interest in good movies and great literature. It was a pleasant evening after all.

Our arrival in Arequipa went without incident. Maria and I ended up at a hostel, The Tourist House (!), close to the Plaza de Armas. (Little did we know that also staying in the hostel were our future hiking friends Lea, Tabea, and Piotr.) Other than wolfing down a huge chifa lunch, of which Maria ate more of her plate than I did, our Tuesday was mostly uneventful, as we went in search of a good tour to do for the rest of the week.

The next day Maria and I embarked on a three-day trek of Colca Canyon, a long, deep crevice in the Andes that is itself a six-hour bus ride from Arequipa. Depending on which guidebook you read, Colca is considered the deepest or second-deepest canyon in the world. Maria had heard many good things about the trek, and without much else to see or do in Arequipa, the trek seemed the perfect activity for us to do together.

The first day of hiking involved descending the canyon, with our guide, at a brisk pace. About an hour into the hike, my thighs started to ache from all the braking and pivoting they had to do going down the steep path. Surprisingly, this pain didn't become a source of frustration for me. I noted how my legs and torso were working together to balance my body and full backpack on irregular terrain. I realized I was reawakening sinews and joints in my body that had laid dormant in city life. It felt strangely exhilarating to be reminded of my body -- its agility and strength -- in this way.

It was nearing dusk, and after four hours of hiking, Maria and I arrived at a little hut at the very foot of the canyon, near the intersection of two rivers ("Llahuar" in Quechua). Maria and I changed into our bathing suits and spent the early part of the evening relaxing in a freshwater spring. We then enjoyed the meal our guide prepared for us: fresh trout from the river and several cups of the altitude-adjustment tea mate de coca. That first night was tranquil and clear: Llahuar has no electricity, and the skies above it aren't obscured by the pollution one finds in Lima. Before we went to bed, Maria and I stood outside our hut and could make out the universe of stars above us.

The next day began bright and early with Maria and I winding our way east from Llahuar to an "oasis" -- a cluster of huts surrounded by swimming pools, where hikers can rest before embarking on the arduous trek back up the canyon. At the oasis Maria and I met up with hikers who, the previous night, had stayed in the villages east of Llahuar (the trek to which was an hour shorter than ours). So now our hiking group consisted of at least 12 to 15 people. Some folks had to take donkeys back up the canyon; one left two hours in advance to walk up at her own pace; and Maria and I started the ascent with the rest of them.

The first hour of the hike saw our group ascend the rocky, zig-zagging path in intense heat and at a relentless pace, as we all wanted to make it back to the top before sundown. Three of us broke away broke away from the group. For a while, we were directly behind two local children who were wearing worn-out sandals and carrying large travel suitcases on their backs. But their pace, intuited from years of experience and calibrated to their small frames, proved to be too brisk for us. We eventually lost sight of them as they scurried up the sheer face of the canyon with goods to deliver to the village.

Into the second hour, I moved ahead of my hiking buddies and was the first to arrive at an old Andean woman selling snacks, drinks, and fruit at a natural pause in the path. I waited for the others to catch up with me. I asked the woman how much a bottled water costs; when she said S./4, I feigned shock, declared my knowledge of fair prices, and was able to negotiate a S./3 price. Referring to myself as "El Chino" -- my nickname back in Lima -- came in handy once again.

Before moving on to finish the last leg of the hike, the old woman, perhaps charmed by my friendly negotiation, asked our little group what each of our birthdays are. When she came to me, something about September 5 struck a chord with her, and she took out a bag of powder, put some in her hand, and told me to blow on it, out towards the cliff, as hard as I could. Without hesitation, I did that. From what I could piece together with my rudimentary Spanish, I think I may have warded off the rains for at least a little while.

Soon I arrived at the top of the canyon, exhausted and drenched in sweat. My body heaved a sigh of relief as I surveyed the spectacular depth of Colca Canyon. I savored every drop of fresh, cold water that ran down my throat. My now deeply tanned skin reflected the rays of the blazing sun overhead, and I somehow didn't bother to find shelter in the shade. The other hikers trickled up the path over the next hour. We regrouped for the short walk back to Cabanaconde, the lone village with electricity in this vast area.

As the group trudged back to the hostel, I reflected on how profoundly removed I felt from the technologies of mediation that punctuate postmodern society. I realized that the trek allowed me to connect to the earth in a way that questioned the extent of my dependence on electronic mediation in "normal," everyday life. Far away from e-mail, websites, blogging, television, DVDs, iTunes, and so on, I felt free to accept the earthy reality of aching muscles, sweat-stained clothes, and mud-caked sneakers (yes, sneakers: I did say that I left for Arequipa on a whim). The experience made me ask, "How am I being mediated here? Am I at all?"

I'm not a romantic when it comes to the idea of "nature," but I am a romantic when it comes to experience. Colca Canyon was, for me, a defining romantic Experience, following Emerson. It subsumed my body to the laws of nature, the laws of gravity, and the laws of time in a way that sustained my whole being.

As I write this, though, sitting at the dining room table in my apartment in Miraflores, I find myself wondering whether such Experience is possible in my everyday "networked" life. That is: whether such dwelling may be found online. I admit that the vast majority of my electronic intake and communication is of the humdrum, non-Experience sort. Yet, as just one example, writing this entry has not only been a personally meaningful experience -- it's also had the uncanny effect of reminding me of the power of my body to take in the natural world. Writing this on my laptop, then, at home, and using my wireless connection has given me the kind of moment's pause that is perhaps a precondition for what Emerson called Experience.

This might be better illustrated by a coda to my account of hiking Colca Canyon. Relieved, drained, and reconnected after our hike up the canyon walls, our group settled in for a big dinner at the hostel. Around a long table, Maria (FIN), Paul (IRL via ENG), Tabea (GER), Lea (GER), Piotr and his friend (POL via ENG), and Alice (FRA) ate, talked, and argued (about soccer and the movie Babel), the day's journey slowly fading into memory.

When dinner was over, the question of what to do next arose. One thing led to another and bottles of pisco appeared with our names on them. Our hosts graciously cleared away the tables and created a makeshift dance floor. Our local guides then brought out the party-makers: pirated DVDs of '70s and '80s dance music videos, from disco to Milli Vanilli. In the mood for celebration and delighted by the selection of one-hit wonders ("She Drives Me Crazy"), home-country favorites ("99 Luftballoons"), and karaoke-inducing hits ("Superfreak"), the lot of us drank and danced the night away, fixated on a small-screen television, in our hostel, in a small village that was the only beacon of light in the wide expanse of Colca Canyon.

Making Meaning with New Media

2007-03-11T11:47:00.001-05:00

How have new media phenomena like YouTube changed the way people interact with so-called "old" media? I'm fascinated by the ways in which Internet- and software-savvy people make and re-make meaning out of "what's presented to them" in media such as radio, television, and film. If, for example, a longstanding assumption in television studies has been the originary "encoding" of meaning by the television production apparatus (studios, corporate sponsors, directors and producers), how does the Internet allow users to not just "decode" televisual meaning but alter the terms by which code as such plays out in multiple media? In other words, after the rise of YouTube, is it possible to even speak of an originary moment of encoding that elicits practices of (audience) decoding? Or is it that YouTubers practice modes of encoding themselves -- ones that might be even more potent, durable, "popular," etc., than their small-screen counterparts?

These questions extend the pathbreaking audience-reception work of scholars like Stuart Hall and Henry Jenkins (who, it should be said, is actively pursuing new media inquiries that relate to his earlier scholarship). But there's also a general cultural awareness that things like YouTube are fundamentally challenging the encoding/decoding model of networked communications. "You" (you users of Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, etc.), after all, was Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" for 2006. Much has also been made of the fact that the best clips from Comedy Central's The Daily Show enjoy a "life" on YouTube that lasts well past the show's television broadcasts. And who could forget the Samuel L. Jackson vehicle Snakes on a Plane? It's been said that this movie's trailer, which was widely circulated on the Internet and which featured hilariously farcical dialogue about "motherfuckin'" snakes being on "motherfuckin'" planes, was the primary force behind its relative theatrical success.

Part of the mission of The Paperback Museum is to note the sundry social and cultural consequences that flow from unprecedented user "control" over old media "texts." For it cannot be taken for granted that such "control" is in fact "real," available to everyone, or properly "free" from the hierarchical constraints of old media consumption. Wary child of consumer culture that I am, I cannot fully give myself over to the rhetoric of consumer "choice" in certain realms of new media association. What are we "choosing" when we supposedly seize control over how we consume media? Why is making meaning for "ourselves," with the help of new media technology, such a seductive concept in our day and age? Are there ways in which even that act of personalist meaning-making is being commodified and put into the service of what might be called the "hidden hand" of new media regulation?