I rather unceremoniously abandoned this little blog for a while, heading home for the holidays.  I’m back now, here in emptied out Champaign, trying to quickly piece together the next chapter of my dissertation, which is being a bit more recalcitrant than I’d expected — mostly because my initial outline for this chapter constructs it as a transition to a chapter that I’ve cut from the project.  So I’m needing to re-assess the list of texts I’m examining.  I’ve also been re-reading The Ticklish Subject, and a bunch of secondary criticism.

Released into this oxygenless environment, I slam back into the substance of my dissertation like a probe from Deep Space 2, hitting the Red Planet, with all of my sensors on, only to discover that the surface is rather harder than expected.  Yet the shattering impact is just what I’d been wanting.  Ok, and maybe I’ll yet transmit something back.  A dire warning perhaps about hard surfaces and sticky tar-pit metaphors…

A further note:  I’ve used the TDQ downtime to tweak my numerical replicant-detector (this was a big hassle, actually).  You’ll still need to enter a code to post comments, but cached code images should no longer pose a problem, codes are no longer case-sensitive, and the troublesome “O” has been removed from symbolic lexicon.  If anyone has trouble commenting, do please let me know.

Further note two:  Guess who was lucky enough to receive a digital camera for X-mas?  Expect multiform instances of visual beauty here at TDQ in the near-near-term.

The above image, from DigitalGlobe depicts Kalutara, Sri Lanka, shortly after it was hit by the tsunami.  Huge spiriling eddies appear where the water from the wave drains back into the ocean, carrying human beings, perhaps.

I wrote and accidentially deleted a medium-length set of thoughts about this image and Susan Sontag.  You can probably guess what I would have said however, about this view from above provided by a space-based technology of domination; and about viewing human suffering though various lenses of distance.  If you can’t guess, you can probably make up something better.

Oxfam is providing disaster relief.  Moreover they seem generally an excellent charity.  Though my montly paycheck only rarely covers my expenses, I do think I will at least try setting up a small monthly donation to Oxfam.

New documents obtained via foia by the ACLU indicate that Bush personally Authorized torture.  Of this sort, at least, and possibly worse.  [via Kos]

This is interesting — the first FBI report linked to above refers repeatedly to an “executive order” issued by the president.  But some quick Google-searching doesn’t produce any obvious refrences to an order that might be taken to authorize some forms of torture.  Aren’t executive orders as such a matter of public record?  One might hope that the press will persue the question of whether such an order exists.

UPDATE, via UPI:

“The FBI agent was mistaken regarding the existence of an Executive Order on interrogation techniques. No such Executive Order exits or has ever existed,” a senior administration official told United Press International.

I must admit that the existence of an executive order authorizing torture does seem a bit too good to be true.  But then, what gave this unnamed FBI “on-scene commander — Baghdad” the very strong impression that such an order had been issued?  I suppose he just happened to independently dream-up the idea that this torture had presidential approval?  Hmm.  What active imaginations these FBI fellows have!  Looks like we’ll see lots more on this….

Ambivalent Imbroglio reminds me that I need to put my little troubles of the day into some kind of perspective.   

Phone troubles and traffic tickets may annoy and distract me — but today’s big event is that today Famous P (friend and sometime commentator here at tdq), and his parter-in-crime had a kid!  Or, I guess, they *still* have her — that kid — to be precise about it.  This is great news(!) — although as I emailed Tom this afternoon, I am already intimidated by the coolness of this child, who not only has two fiercely cool and brilliant parents, but who I think will be pre-loaded with musical taste cooler that I’ve managed to acquire in 32 (almost 33!) years. 

So congratulations to Tom, Jen, and Exene.  My suspicion is that these folks had better be worried–with families like Tom and Jen’s around, the forces of fundamentalist conservatism may find their full quivers not quite full enough.

Actually, a nice place to grade during the day here in Champaign is the (newly remodeled) Esquire.    While across the street at veryhip Cafe Kopi the usual suspects engage in a life and death struggle for tiny dimly-lit tables, I can stroll into the mostly empty Esquire during the afternoon and easily snag one of the gigantic oak-table booths that they’ve just installed.  Around me wraps an unobstructed panoramic window view, with warm sunlight illuminating my table, though large South-facing windows.  I can order good cheap bar food (including, now, pizza), and a coke, and sit there all afternoon, and they’ll keep on filling up my coke (Pepsi, technically) as long as I care to hang around.  Plus, free peanuts, if I want them.  It’s quite cool, usually.

Today it was somewhat less good than usual.

Around 4, as I was getting ready to head out, I heard and saw an older couple gazing out the window, saying odd things, like: “Oh, so *that’s* what it looks like!”  This couple must have been easily impressed, as it turned out that what they were ohhing and ahhing about as they blocked the side exit was the Champaign City government’s latest brainstorm, which is, this:

I was momentarily relieved to note that the boot-admiring older couple was gazing at somebody else’s booted up car, before I figured out that my car too was sporting the orange iron shoe of justice.  This is especially sad as the car is barely mobile when bootless.

I left the bar via the other door and did a little lap around the block, rather than interrupt the boot-gazers. 

Aside from racking up $115 dollars in parking tickets (or $150, including $35 for the booting), how else have I lately exhibited my outstanding life-skills?  Well:

I inadvisably put my voice-over-ip cable modem and router together, one atop of the other, because the two boxes, with their flashing lights, looked cool that way.  But by doing this I think caused the router’s insides to melt, and it is now dead (as is my phone).  Or perhaps the poor brave little box died more spontaneously.  Who can say?  I will have to ask its gentle router soul, should it and I meet in the great hereafter, and beg forgiveness if appropriate.

Thinking about my resume, as well as about some of the issues I’ve from time to time mentioned here on TDQ, I’ve submitted a session proposal for a small and  somewhat relaxed teaching conference they hold  each year around here.

The proposal goes like this:

(Post-)Theory in the Classroom

In public universities and colleges, teachers of literature and composition cannot assume that students (even those within liberal-arts curricula) will be acquainted with contemporary or past theories of meaning and interpretation.  Though introductory level classes may afford little time for reading critical theory, instructors have often felt it useful to introduce theory to the classroom, to provide a conceptual context for classroom interpretation and writing.

The long “post-Theory” moment, as proclaimed by Terry Eagleton and others, problematizes the brief introductions often used to introduce students to critical theory — summaries of critical theory that present a familiar (and inert) five-theory rubric.  In the wake of theory’s purported demise, and the presumable obsolescence of such handy but reductive rubrics, how can the concerns of theory be addressed in classes not principally devoted to the study of meta-representational concerns (if they should be addressed at all)?

This informal talk and discussion will concern these issues generally, and the conceptual opportunities presented by the “post-theory” classroom, considering as an example a teaching taxonomy and approach adopted in one “writing about literature” class, that connects the concerns of literary and critical theory with the philosophical and religious language of moral action and belief—an approach that seeks to bring the practical and ethical consequences of interpretive theory into sharper relief.

So, how’s that?  The “(Post-)” is a wry but fond little good-bye gesture of course.  The gist of what I’ll say is that while reductive rubrics are hard to escape in introductory courses, we can at least come up with some more interesting ones, and ones that can themselves serve to better articulate more particular questions.  That is, we can avoid presenting students with the standard textbooks primers on:

1) Formalism/New Criticism
2) Marxism
3) Psychoanalysis
4) Feminism
5) Deconstruction

Or minor variations thereof.  (These kind of lists appear in “writing about literature”-type books, and are less common in writing texts — so what I’m saying here applies more to lit classes than to writing ones.) 

We can come up with some alternative rubrics — ones that more coherently express a “teaching the conflcts” kind of approach.  I used one last semester that recasts the concerns of theory in terms of ethics, and I’m planning a further revision for the Spring.  Fun stuff, I think. 

Well, it’s been a while.  In the last week or so, I withdrew myself for the most part into my little Prospect Avenue nautilus shell, and worked on the dissertation and a bunch of end-of-the-semester stuff.  So although I’ve just received a bunch of papers, I am at least no longer behind with regard to teaching.  More importantly, however, I finally turned-in the dissertation chapter I’ve been working on forever, so that over break I’ll be able to work on my chapter four (of five) — a chapter I’m thinking should go quickly, being the most traditional lit-critty of my five chapters.  Chapter three took an inordinate amount of time to write — perhaps because of my own nervousness about the argument of this chapter.  It contains what some might feel is a kind of facile and speculative attack on some very canonical notions.  I just have the feeling that it will be a pretty disagreeable chapter to many–which is perhaps the main reason that it took me so long to finally wrap-up a chapter that has been pretty much finished since the summer.  I’m quite anxious to see what my advisor thinks of it.  I may also give a copy of it to one of my favorite professors, to who’s beautiful work my dissertation is (in part) a rather disagreeable reply.  She’ll no doubt be aghast.

I must say that I do *like* my dissertation insofar as it deals with issues and questions that have preoccupied me since childhood, and since it has interesting political and theoretical  implications, and since it is foolishly ambitious.  This past chapter (about which I’m most nervous) looks at three rather obscure texts to reconfigure this canonical beast.  In  a similar wise, my next chapter will provide a firmware update for another old thing.  While I should perhaps be especially trepidatious about the Shakespearean critical thicket, I’m instead quite looking forward to writing on actual drama (!); and I have an over-arching thesis that I think people will find credible and nifty.  This will be the only chapter to include much reading of fiction per se: a chapter that will let me loose on some stories — which attract my attention like a rabbit attracts the attention of my family’s Golden Retrievers.* 

So I sent this last chapter off two days ago, staying up late into the morning to complete it, forgetting that Harvey was scheduled to appear at 7 am, along with a plumber and a carpenter, to fix my shower and sink.  So yesterday I had a new oak cabinet and stainless steel sink installed in my kitchen — a thing of beauty.  Seriously, it looks great, and if any tdq’ers can remember my old sink, it was a decrepit rusting painted over cast-iron monstrosity.  Truly disgusting.  So I am presently in love with my new sink, which seem to produce a whole new kitchen really.

The new shower, alas, is not so lovable.  Clearly I got lucky with the sink, because Harvey and his amateur repair people are not deeply devoted to interior design.  The new front shower wall they installed is covered, front and back, with a kind of white plastic sheeting that I’ve previously seen used only in meat-cutting facilities and perhaps in the showers of the nastier instances of the KOA Campgrounds to which I was ritually subjected as a child.  So I’m not sure what to do about my bathroom’s new meat-packing decorative theme.  Alas.  Perhaps from now on I can just shower with the neat hose spritzer-thing attached to my beautiful stainless steel sink… ** 

* - Golden retrievers, which my family (really my mom, mostly) trains and sometimes breeds are a lovely but confused variety of dog, having been selectively breed to have an especially strong “chase” instinct, but an especially weak instinct to kill or eat the things they retrieve.  This results in them occasionally transporting around uninjured but very unhappy squirrels and rabbits, who also appear to be kind of unclear about the whole situation.

** - Points will be taken off from any well-meaning witty persons who feel compelled to remind me that I need to be moving outta here and getting a non-rented nice sink and shower of my very own.  Duly noted, people.  Jeeze.

Also, over the last two weeks, I have been the subject of repeated robot attacks.  Which is to say that nasty blog-spamming bots have posted ads in the “comments” section of my older posts — mostly about various medicines and on-line poker places.  Due to this robot infestation, I’ve installed Gudlyf’s excellent Authimge hack, which now requires comment posters to enter a code number along with each post. 

This CAPTCHA (”Completely Automated Public Turning test to tell Computers and Humans
Apart”) approach to spam will I hope keep the ravenous bots at bay for a while.  I hope that anyone who might want to comment at tdq in the future will be tolerant of my efforts to verify that you are indeed a sentient being.

Yes I’ve been MIA for a bit; but I should be posting some more meaty things again soon.

In the meantime, you might consider some alternative radicalisms.  For instance:

The Full Quiver movement

and, related:

The Prarie Muffin Manifesto

[via an excellent new-to-me blog: King of Zembla]

[also new to me: The Daou Report — a very cool blog aggregator thing, with left on the left and right on the right, and news in the middle.]