New Blog at New Domain
A Slow Motion Move
Happy Thanksgiving
David Horowitz: Verminous Anti-Intellectual Hack
Incompatible Cleansers
Falcon & the Sailor Boy
Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork
Oregano, Thyme, Savory, Peppers & Potatoes & Plato
Feeling a Draft
Militant Christianists
Inculcating Christianist Ignorance
Agent Orange Reparations
Nancy Bauer (A Slow Motion Move)
jd (A Slow Motion Move)
Nancy Bauer (A Slow Motion Move)
Pascale Soleil (A Slow Motion Move)
MJ (David Horowitz: Verminous Anti-Intellectual Hack)
alan (Happy Thanksgiving)
Dan Biston (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
jd (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
Dan Biston (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
jd (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
New Blog at New Domain · 12/07/2006 11:41 AM
My new blog can be found at:
http://sharpsand.net
please update your bookmarks & slide on by.
Click Here to go there now.
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A Slow Motion Move · 12/03/2006 01:23 PM
As I noted in the update to the last post, I have become disenchanted with the voice I had fallen into on this weblog. I suppose everyone needs an outlet for their various angers & I suppose a weblog is as good an outlet as any, but I have grown weary of rehearsing others’ perfidy & my own angers. It is time for a change.
It is also time for a change of technology. I can’t complain about the basic functionality of Textpattern, but it is more difficult for a technical dunce like me to use that several other options. Back in the 80s it was considered very cool for guys like me to do the maintenance on our VW Beetles ourselves. I had the Idiot’s Guide to VW Repair & I really tried to do the work myself, but I hated it. I wasn’t any good at it & it filled me with anxiety to, say, set the timing myself. When I was finally making enough money to buy a car with electronics I couldn’t adjust, I happily made the move to hiring a professional mechanic for all except the most minor problems. And these days I don’t even change my own oil. And that is how I have come to feel about blogging. I just want to put the key in the ignition & go.
The easiest solution, of course, would be to just fire up a Blogger site (that’s how I began five years ago) or use one of the other hosted services. WordPress looks like an attractive option. I could have a blog hosted on the WP server in two minutes. I am vain enough, however, to want my own domain. To that end, I have been looking around for a WP template (I think I’ve found one that will work) & I’m now looking for someone to set it up for me. Yes, I could probably set it up myself & I even got a friend who can hack any software you can name to send me instructions for doing it myself, but sitting down to begin, I just got that whole VW repair feeling again.
So I’m exploring a couple of possibilities. I thought I had someone to do the work & help me customize a new site, but that deal fell through. There are a couple of students at the Clarkson Open Source Institute who have helped me before, but I don’t like to impose on them.
I am also changing blog hosts. This is a fairly counter-intuitive decision. Because I came very early to Textdrive, I have lifetime hosting. I don’t have to pay another cent as long as TXD is in business, but the truth is, I have grown disenchanted with the Textdrive attitude. Every time over the last year that I have had an interaction with a Textdrive staff person, whether in the formal ticket system or on the forums, I have gotten the feeling that helping me was just a terrific pain in the ass. Even the mildest complaints are treated like a personal affront. Textdrive is no doubt a great service for all those people who want to tune up their own VWs, but there is real disdain there for those of us who don’t.
I have opened an account at Bluehost, where the people I have dealt with have so far been helpful & enthusiastic. That’s right, I am leaving effectively free hosting & willingly signing up to pay for new hosting because of customer service. Not technology, just plain old customer service. I’ll continue to use TXD as a place to park files & maybe I’ll bring my blog back someday — I’ll leave this one here as an archive — but for now I’m going to Bluehost.
This is a good time to reconsider the technology I’m using, in any case. I want to change the direction of my online writing. I’m not exactly sure what that direction will be, except that it will have a different feeling that what I have been doing recently in this space. I want to praise more than I denounce & though I don’t want to give up being critical, I want that criticism to be grounded clearly in positive values. I actually have something of a talent for insult, but insult is a tool to be used sparingly. My recent writing here has made me feel itchy & sick. Time for a change of scene. Now, if I can just find someone to tune up the VW for me, I’ll be driving over the hill.
Comment [4]
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Happy Thanksgiving · 11/22/2006 05:57 PM
I’ve been so sour & dyspeptic here recently that it is a pleasure to wish anyone & everyone a happy Thanksgiving. Since our dining room floor is not laid down yet — part of the great kitchen remodel of ought-six — we are driving up to Ottawa with friends for a leisurely late afternoon meal. I have been working on said dining room today, sanding & prepping for paint, so Carole & I are going to catch dinner at a newly reopened Indian place in Potsdam tonight.
Update: I no longer like the person — or persona — who has been writing this weblog lately. I’m going to take a vacation. Sometime after the first of the new year I will think about whether I want to continue here, or begin at another address. I have vaguely in mind something more like a commonplace book. Too much poison in the world already without adding to the venom.
Comment [1]
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David Horowitz: Verminous Anti-Intellectual Hack · 11/22/2006 12:55 PM
If anyone were ever inclined to take anything David Horowitz says or writes even this least bit seriously, this ought to cure them. Surely he is the most disingenuous & intellectually dishonest man in the country. (And there is plenty of serious competition for that particular honor.) After being completely shut down by the unanimous vote of a committee of the Pennsylvania State Legislature — a committee controlled by Republicans — this is the best Mr. Horowitz could come up with:
Asked how he could claim victory when the legislative panel had worked so hard to identify student victims, and failed, Horowitz offered more stories of students who were being hurt. He said that he had spoken to a dance student who was upset about her paper’s grade and that he had encouraged her to file a grievance. She didn’t want to. Horowitz acknowledged that there was no political issue in the paper, but said her reluctance to go through the grievance machinery showed the problems that students face.
I have half a dozen students at any given time who are “upset” about a grade, so obviously I discriminate against conservative students. And furhtermore, my university, by Horowitz’s logic, ipso facto, has inadequate grievance procedures.
After the damning example above, Horowitz accuses Bloomsburg University Political Science professor Diana Zoelle of giving “a test in which students were forced to explain why the war in Iraq is wrong, with the implication that their grade would be lower if they did not back that position.” It comes as no surprise, really, that there was no such test question & that Horowitz never actually checked out what he had “heard” about the professor. This is McCarthyism plain & simple. Horowitz would be a comical figure if he didn’t have such wide influence. He is a serial liar who counts on the ignorance & prejudice of his conservative audience to maintain the illusion that he is anything more than a verminous little political operative. That he is taken seriously == except as a threat to academic freedom — is evidence of how debased American political discourse has become.
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Incompatible Cleansers · 11/20/2006 10:11 PM
Reading the NYRB just now, I almost swooned when I saw that Charles Simic had reviewed Donald Hall’s latest book. It was as if I had mixed incompatible cleansers when cleaning the bathroom, releasing a poisonous gas. [Unfortunately, you have to subscribe to the electronic edition of the NYRB to read the review online.] It is quite an astonishing piece of work. I’ve long thought of Hall as a rustic pre-Modernist of the sort celebrated by the New Formalists, what with all their cultural nostalgia; and I’ve thought of Simic as a soft surrealists hated by the New Formalists for his lack of concern with coherent narrative structures. There is an essay by Mark Jarman, I think, that takes Simic to task for lack of rigor & for being, I don’t know, vaguely un-American. So reading a review in which Simic praises Hall just upsets all the settled categories of my poetic existence. I suppose that’s a good thing, but somehow I don not feel grateful. I feel instead as if I am about to swoon.
What the hell ever happened to the New Formalists & Expansive Poetry, anyway? With any luck, they have gone the way of the Republican Congress. The cultural balance is delicate, though — either institution could swing back into power. Vigilance, my friends.
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Falcon & the Sailor Boy · 11/20/2006 09:22 AM
Took half a dozen students to the opera night before last. Clarkson is located in Potsdam, New York, in close proximity to the Crane School of Music, which produces a lot more concerts & musical productions than I can ever keep track of. Sadly, since I moved to the country, I hardly ever manage to go back into town (14 miles) for an evening event. I stuffed six freshmen into the Pathfinder, which is two more than the law allows, & drove from one campus to the other so we could see The Falcon & the Sailor Boy, the libretto based on a story by Isak Dinesen. Thanks are due Randy Lamson of Clarkson’s Student Life office for getting all of us free tickets.
It was a good production technically, the pit orchestra particularly excellent. Half the students with me had played in high school musicals of some sophistication & they each remarked on the quality of the playing. My students all had a good time — I think Ti, who claims he listens to nothing but heavy metal, was the most exuberant — & I enjoyed the production, too, though with reservations. The sets were ingenious & the dancer who represented the falcon throughout the production was quite beautiful — she managed to be birdlike without any embarrassing attempt to be overly naturalistic. As noted, the musicianship was good & that goes for the singing, too. Not big, but adequate. The acting was a little predictable, though enthusiastic.
Unfortunately, the libretto & the score — obviously, the heart of the matter — were not up to the potential of the folk material on which Dinesen based her story. Musically & lyrically this opera takes a mysterious & fairly dark story about a young sailor who accidentally kills his friend, another sailor, & turns it into something closer to musical comedy. The killing, in the opera, is presented as simple murder, which is completely out of character for the young sailor. Unfortunately, this is such a bad piece of stagecraft, that one is left suspended in disbelief through the rest of the production.
Main problems: The libretto is prosy & too long; the music, for all its rhythm changes, would be melodically comfortable in the 19th century; nothing happens in the first act (this could have & should have been a one-act composition); the use of Danish folk materials was obvious & heavy-handed — people keep breaking into dances, which is of course the convention, but here the convention might have been modified to good effect. Perhaps the central issue was that The Falcon & the Sailor Boy followed the conventions rather than the story, resulting in a superficial treatment of what might have been profound.
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Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork · 11/17/2006 12:26 PM
Note [11/23/06]: The most recent news on the incident from IHE here. It seems increasingly clear that, for all their bobbing & weaving, the police chief, the acting chancellor, & the cop himself are blowing smoke. I continue to be taken aback by some commenters on the earlier thread, who: 1) Are apparently willing to give up liberty for safety; 2) are ignorant of even the most basic facts of American history, to say nothing of the tradition of dissent & civil disobedience; 3) believed that the job of the police is to “maintain order”; 4) excused the cop’s over-reaction by saying, in one way or another, “the police have a tough job”; 5) by creating a fantasy of danger against which “we” must be protected; 6) a casual acceptance of violence as long as it is directed against some other while at the same time reacting hysterically to non-violent resistance to authority. Welcome to the compliance society.
Note [11/20/06]: See this post by Mark Kleiman, who teaches at UCLA.
Note [11/19/06]: here is a link to more information on the tasering incident. I cannot help but think that chancellor Abrams is going to have to get down off his high horse. It is certainly true that there are many Americans who hate disobedience & love compliance — who would kiss the end of the nightstick before the cop brings it down on their face — but in the end enough of us will be disgusted by this psychotic strain in the culture that the torturers & their assistants will not prevail. Maybe. I hope.
Last night, I posted a link to a video of the UCLA student being tasered in the library because he refused to show his ID when asked for it by a campus cop. I took the post down this morning, because it was just an expression of blind rage. I have posted some comments in a discussion thread at Inside Higher Ed following a news item on the incident. While most of the posts are pretty rational, two guys — I assume they’re both guys — BD & Craig C, are really astonishing. Craig C., in particular, seems to believe that UCLA regulations trump the US Constitution & that last week’s elections “showed disrespect for authority” (apparently) because Americans voted for Democrats. Furthermore, that vote, according to Craig C. will encourage students “push the envelope” & resist authority. Like many right-authoritarians, Craig C. has conjured a fantasy of “rapists,” “urine stained vagrants,” “drunks,” & “fifth-year undergraduate miscreants” who regularly threaten the patrons of Powell Library at UCLA. I wonder if Craig C. has ever been to Powell, or to UCLA, or to Los Angeles? My wife used to work in the other big library on the UCLA campus & though it was a few years ago, she hadn’t noticed hoards of street criminals moving into the library at night. BD, in the comment thread, simply writes so incoherently it is difficult to follow what he means. Like many on the right, fear drives such fantasies, but people do act on fantasies & these dark visions of an authoritarian America are warrants for right-wing terrorism & police terrorism under cover of law. What’s next, boys? Death squads sweeping through campus? That where the logic leads.
Later: It is also remarkable how illiterate the right-wing authority worshipers are in that thread & at IHE generally: funny how intellectual failures like to hang around educated folk & spray their spit around.
Still Later: Someone Named Russ Moore posted the following:
Just because you’re a minority doesn’t give you the right to resist the campus cops. Those guys are there to protect us, and EVERYONE ON CAMPUS should show their ID when asked — I do. Does being a minority mean that everytime you’re approached by a cop mean is unwarranted?? He was resisting the security guards and they had every right to taze him. I would hope he would learn something from this, but he won’t. So taze him again. And again. And again until he learns. Geeez, what a world.
The voice of the American police state spoken by one of its own browshirts. Russ More would have fit right in over at Abu Graib. Hell, maybe there’s a job for him down at Gitmo.
And this, from someone who signs himself “davidpaul” & who in an earlier comment says he is considering a career change to become a police officer:
You see, people in Washington D.C. who are elected to be there ESTABLISH laws. The same thing goes on in California, on a State level. Well guess what? President Bush, and Governor Shwartzenager (hope I got that spelling right) aren’t going to walk the beat at 11:00 pm to be sure everybody is obeying the law.
No, States sit down, and establish minimum requirements for people that they want out there walking the beats, to ENFORCE the laws that they have established.
When you see an MIB (as you lovingly call them), you are to treat them as if it was the President, or the Governor standing there, because in essence, they are.
If you show an attitude of overall disdain for the Police, you simply do not respect your elected leaders, and the laws they have established.
In American, this is government of the people, by the people, FOR THE PEOPLE. The laws that these police officers were enforcing at UCLA were for the protection of the people present.
Now that’s what I call a deep theoretical understanding of American democracy.
Anyway, this is what I wrote in my final comment at IHE:
Mike & Dave & Craig C. & now davidpaul all say the student got what was coming to him. I remember when, in 1970, a lot of the good citizens of Kent, Ohio, wrote letters to the editor of their local paper saying that the four students shot dead by guardsmen, also, “got what they deserved.” You can read the letters in the Library of America’s Reporting Vietnam (vol. 2). They’re chilling.
The only response to the people named above is ga-ga disbelief at their ignorance of the Constitution & American traditions of dissent. Freedom is inconvenient & troublesome. Because if you want freedom for yourself, you have to grant it to “fifth year undergraduate miscreants” & all the other unpleasant riffraff who who make the lives of real Americans so difficult.
My God, if Thomas Jefferson could hear these police state groupies drawling sanguinely about “disrespect” & being “uncooperative,” he would weep in despair. Yes sir, those American revolutionaries who rebelled (remember, “rebellion never pays”) against the British should have just gone along in order to get along. That Boston Tea Party thing? That was just so rude! Not to mention the destruction of property. Let’s just erase that history. Some Americans, by the evidence of this discussion thread, love authority more than freedom. A whole lot more. When that attitude dominates, we will no longer have anything that looks like any America I know. Maybe we’re already there.
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Oregano, Thyme, Savory, Peppers & Potatoes & Plato · 11/16/2006 10:33 PM
We have oregano & thyme growing in our yard as perennials & I always harvest a bunch in the fall & dry it for winter use. I dry the herbs by cutting the stalks into three or four inch lengths & shoving them into brown paper bags: within a week you can start giving the bags a shake to get the leaves to fall to the bottom where you can easily harvest them. We don’t have enough room or, actually, the right sort of site, for a real vegetable garden, but this year I planted a bed of various peppers, mild to hot, which we used fresh in the late summer. As the first frost approached, I cut all the peppers & brought them in the house to dry. The easiest way to dry peppers, for us, is to tie them on a string & hang them near the wood stove, but I bet the warm air register from your central heating system would work nearly as well.
I do most of the cooking around here & on nights when I don’t feel like doing much we often have “breakfast for dinner,” which means home fries & eggs. (Language note: Growing up in California, I would have called the potatoes hashbrowns despite the fact that they retain a cubed shape & are not grated or smashed.) I cube the potatoes in into a pyrex bowl, add salt & olive oil, then microwave them on high for six minutes, pausing at three minutes to give them a stir, which prevents clumping. In the old days before we had a microwave (we were late adopters), I would have parboiled the taters. I dump the potatoes into a preheated nonstick pan — there should be enough oil in the bowl that you don’t need to add more — & let them brown slowly. About halfway through this process I add whatever herbs & spices I’m going to use & let everything get nice & melded together.
I didn’t learn this method from a book or even from another cook, but from eating at what we all called “the Greek place” on University Avenue in Seattle when I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s. There, you could get a plate of sliced potatoes that had been baked, then fried & dusted with oregano. Add a bowl of soup & a beer & you had lunch for under two dollars. Those were the days. I loved those potatoes & when I began cooking for myself I found a way to recreate them without a deep fryer. I also make a version of this dish using left over baked potatoes, but I don’t like it as well.
Anyway, tonight’s herb mixture was particularly wonderful: oregano, thyme, a stove-dried bird pepper, & a few shoots from a little pot of winter savory growing on the kitchen window sill. I chopped everything up fine & sprinkled on the potatoes as they browned. The result was very satisfying. The pepper hit is more subtle than you get with commercial red pepper flakes. Not that there’s anything wrong with (reasonably fresh) red pepper flakes.
So next year I have decided to grow peppers in pots in every sunny corner of the yard. My current small supply is not going to last till Christmas, alas. One of the great pleasures of living here on the river is that I can tend these plants. I’m not a gardener, really, but a kind of caretaker. Well, I couldn’t stop the thyme & oregano if I wanted to, now that they’re established. And given the circumstances here, on this little acre, I don’t want to be a gardener. I’m happy that I can have these perennials to cook with.
I suppose all this rusticity is a little fake, considering that both Carole & I earn our livings by professional academic jobs. But Horace wasn’t exactly a simple farmer, now, was he? But then, the farmer, grubbing in the muck, less often has the opportunity to experience the pleasures of the table; the wage slave experiences such pleasures even less often than the farmer. (Note: I live in a place where there are actually small farmers managing to make a slim living.) Tonight’s dinner of potatoes has got me thinking about what counts as luxury & the difference between luxury & pleasure.
My freshmen have been reading More’s Utopia this week. With this text, I tend to focus on themes rather than details: the consequences of draconian punishments, rhe reasons for having laws, the implications of deciding to organize a society one way rather than another way. For out discussion a couple of days ago, I made copies of that section from The Republic in which Socrates says to Glaucon, in effect, “Oh, I get it. You’re not interested in the ideal state, you’re interested in the luxurious state. Well, that will require an army.” The ideal state would be ruled by a kind of unmilitaristic caste of Spartans & presumably everyone else would emulate the philosopher-king’s plain way of life. My less thoughtful students, when asked about their own notions of an ideal society, simply produced gated communities protecting luxury for the few; my more thoughtful students struggled to figure out how to have reasonable pleasures while managing some kind of justice.
It’s a dilemma for their teacher as well. I could accept being a philosopher king, or perhaps I’d settle for being an unacknowledged legislator.
Comment [2]
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Feeling a Draft · 11/14/2006 11:26 PM
There’s an anecdote in Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination about Katherine Anne Porter writing entire stories in her head & revising them mentally as well, so that all she had to do is sit down & type out the final draft. The inventor Nicolai Tesla is said to have been able to invent a mechanical device in his imagination, set it running, then come back later to check on how it worked. Yesterday, driving home from work, I composed a poem. It was only five lines long. And I still had to do four written drafts before I got it right.
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Militant Christianists · 11/14/2006 10:04 PM
There was some skepticism in the comments on my previous post about my sanguine attitude toward home-schooling Christianists. I’ve just read this essay by Kathryn Joyce in The Nation & I must say it give me pause. The people Joyce describes are hopelessly delusional, but probably ought to be considered a threat to American secularism.
Isn’t it intellectually lame that a Holocaust denier like Charles Provan would have to depend on three verses from the Hebrew Bible to support his Christianist understanding doctrine that contraception is sinful? Where is his New Testament source? How does his Holocaust denial square with the radical Christianist right’s obsession with supporting the the Israeli state? That he also utterly misreads the verse about Onan simply confirms his inability to make fundamental distinctions about the actual world, as opposed to his fantasy. The language that these people use is so disconnected from reality that if it were not protected as religious speech they would be in danger of being declared mentally incompetent. That guy’s dream about an angel pointing a sword at his dick pretty much establishes the truth of Freud’s notion of the castration complex, or whatever he called it.
They are so delusional that one cannot help but think their poor ability to deal with reality will doom them to irrelevance. If you think like a cartoon character, the real world is going to be a challenge. Actually, I’ve met cartoon characters who have more subtle thought processes than the people Kathryn Joyce describes in the Quiverfull movement, whose name would have been impossible prior to Freud, by the way. According to Joyce, these are not socially or economically successful people. Are the children raised by working class Christianists, kids who will grow up in or near poverty, going to become “mighty warriors” for Christ in American political institutions? How many of those children will actually grow up to attend Patrick Henry College? Precious few, I’d wager. (Though those few will bear watching: they are tomorrow’s domestic terrorists.) The militancy of the Christianist right is no joke & it has been around for a long time. I remember singing “Onward Christian soldiers / Marching as to war / With the cross of Jesus / Going on before” in Sunday school fifty years ago.
Still, let’s do a thought experiment: 100 years in the future the Quiverfull movement has taken over the United States, turning it into a veritable Handmaid’s Tale, teaching creationism in the schools & enforcing a strict Christianist theocracy. (There will be schools, instead of home schooling, because the government will be a Christianist government that outlaws the Darwinist heresy.) Now, imagine that nation competing with the Chinese. I’d bet on the Chinese. The Chinese are interested in science. A Christianist US, even should it come about, will be a third world country. Maybe American capitalism has become so weak & degraded that it will allow the Christianist movement to take over, but I don’t think so. I’m not predicting an American secular-humanist paradise, mind you. I think there is a good chance that in a hundred years the US will be ruled by the Carlyle Group, but that’s another discussion.
Update: Digby & Tristero have posts on this subject at Hullabaloo, each with long comment threads.
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