Erg.  That was surely the most grinding week of the semester.  Conferencing with all my rhetoric students in the morning and afternoon, and grading in the evening the papers to be handed back the next day.  Grade and discuss.  Grade and discuss.  With some occasional car-fixing errands in the late afternoon, and some reading and planning for my fiction class jammed into the cracks. 

But now, it’s done.  And I have time for a quick posting or two.  I must say that this week has been more than enough to inspire serious second thoughts in me about the whole academic project.  So much effort into the grading and conferencing, for such little recognition!  There are no classics of paper-grading.  My graded papers will not likely find themselves canonized and anthologized in the “Best American Paper Comments, 2004″ edited by John Updike.  Alas.

So, last week is gone.  And all that’s here now is an ickily warm Halloween weekend. 

But there is some good news.  My voip phone is up and running well so far.  My car has been somewhat repaired.  After getting the distributor fixed I drove the car home, where it promptly died again.  I had it towed to a new mechanic (who like the last one told the the problem was likely the distributor).  I had him replace the engine computer with the one I snagged from ebay, and the car to started right up.  So there.

Last weekend also I caught a couple neat spectacles.  Stanley Fish and Ann Kaplan came to town to debate with Cary Nelson on “The Future of the Humanities.”  Fish (is this man ever right about *anything*?) not only launched into a defense of a strictly apolitical humanities, but announced that if he were Cary Nelson’s Dean, he’d fire Nelson on the spot, for a classroom exercise in which Nelson said he substituted the names for Iraqi citys for Vietnamese ones, when introducing some anti-Vietnam War poetry from the 60’s.  (Fish recapitualted agruments you can find in the NY Times essay he published back in June).

Fish made a spectacle of himself and made useful discussion difficult.  He said some silly things about Samson Agonistes, too.  I may hunt down his article on the subject, although my dissertation studiously avoids Milton. 

The most interesting material from the talk came by way of reference to Bill Reading’s book on The University of Excellence, which seemed pretty useful. 

But more eloquent than Fish et. al. on the subject of the post-human and the post-humanities last weekend was the show I caught last Sunday by Captured by Robots!.  While the academics bemoaned the university of meaningless excellence, JBOT and his robotic captors delivered the post-human excellence via a gang of threatening robots and projections of sadly disturbing exercise tapes from the late 80’s.

The show was not musically amazing and was kind of frightening to watch.  JBOT’s band and captors are robots, which he must control (or, erm…be controlled *by,* I mean…) and speak for while playing his own instrument, making witty remarks, dealing with semi-heckling audience participation, and occasionally noting that “no, really” he *was* looking for a place in town to sleep for the evening.  He was good, vamping aptly, even if the whole thing had a kind of nervous tight-rope quality to it. 

The Humanities Lecture and Captured by Robots! exhibited the same eviscerated human figure,  surrounded by gleaming machine that present a hostile and meaningless excellence.  It was JBOT though, who’s entrails were literally hanging from his body,  who tightrope-or-no seemed to have more fun.

*-”Crudesence,” it seems to my surprise isn’t actually a word.  But it sounds good.  Not of course to be confused with “cruentation”–the bleeding of the wounds of the dead, that occurs when the murderer is brought near the body of his victim.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 30th, 2004 at 2:54 am and is filed under general, meta-artsy, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.