No legitimate time to write, you see.

Yesterday, sitting in Cafe Kopi, I wrote up a lovely narrative post, all about my day in downtown Champaign.  The books I bought, the meal I ate, the vibe at Kopi — all-in-all, a rich and oh yes delicious sensory experience of downtown Champaign.  But I deleted it.  Or I hit a control key that made my browser go back a page, before I’d submitted my post to memory.  So it’s gone, gone forever and no use mourning either.

Today is less pleasant.  No browsing in Main Street Books, no picking up sentimental lovely pocket versions of Hesperides and excerpts from Lord Clarendon’s history of the Civil War.  No browsing the pulp fiction, or eating a perfect little hamburger at the New Merry Ann’s diner. 

No, today I’m having my car looked at by Toby Drollinger, who is the smart mechanic in town.  Now really, he’s taking advantage of me, since it should be quite obvious that my car has a leaky head gasket, which causes it to stall once the engine gets up to temperature.  But since I really do want an expert opinion on the thing before I trash it, or assume that its simply undriveable for more than seven and a half minutes at a time.

So here I sit in the Aroma Cafe, chatting with a friendly medievalist and reading revenge tragedies.  Just now looking at the Jew of Malta.  The afternoon, really, is not so bad, I guess.  The medievalist is really pleasant, and the Jew of Malta makes for good reading.  But I can’t held but be disgruntled about my no doubt expensive and pointless automotive post-mortem, or about the fast dwindling time left to assemble my classes for next semester and get a good start writing on this next chapter.

Possible solutions:  Some of this type stuff.  If the the car’s head gasket or engine block is cracked, it must be a small crack, since the car drives ok til it gets hot.  So before throwing the car out, I’ll try one of these snake-oil products, and see if it might just possibly possibly seal things up.  Of course it will never work, but it will be fun to try one of these for experimental purposes, if nothing else.

The dissertation maybe requires a similar solution.  I’ve been making outlines of my notes,  and annotated lists of texts I’m using, and diagrams of ideas, and so forth.  But this chapter needs a quick cheap start, and I think I’m just going to pour some engine block fix into the oil intake, step on the gas, and see how far I can make it into actual composition before the chapter sputters out, or fails catastrophically.  We’ll see.

Additional note:
A number of hits today from TheYankeeRacers, where an intrepid explorer posted a link to my post re The Life Aquatic.  It seems like a fine place to discuss the Anderson’s films, etc., although there is unfortunately a lot of discussion as to whether LA is supposed to be mostly a “film-within-a-film” made by a presumably deranged Steve Zissou.  This doesn’t seem like the very most productive line of discussion.  But still, lots of interesting stuff there.

More madness:

It sounds preposterous to talk about criminalizing women who suffer miscarriages, but one Virginia legislator is proposing just that.  HB1677, “Report of Fetal Death by mother, penalty” is a bill introduced by John A. Cosgrove (R) of Chesapeake.  Cosgrove’s bill requires any woman who experiences “fetal death” without a doctor’s assistance to report this to the local law-enforcement agency within twelve hours of the miscarriage.  Failure to do so is punishable as a Class 1 Misdemeanor.

Details here.

Events in the United States seem too depressing and far gone to discuss.  The Bush administration clearly intends to do away with social security , Alberto Gonzales, a Bush afmin. lackey who authored the egregious memos suggested that the Bush admin. can engage in torture,  has been nominated for and will be confirmed as the U.S. Attorney General.  He should be being tried for war crimes.

As the Washington Post reported last week, the Bush admin has sought to keep terrorism suspects, uncharged, in its offshore penal colonies for life, seeking “lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts.”

The obscence war in Iraq continued to be a disaster, in which the U.S. is trapped.  Clearly the calculation was that the US would set up in Iraq a puppet government in Iraq reliant on the US for protection and therefore an agent of US policy, whomever was elected.  (and Iraq was to be avatar of free-market capitalism, as Naomi Klien pointed out a while back).  But have you noticed how the US has changed its policy of “we don’t do bodycounts” to a policy of frequent bodycount announcements,* in an effort reclaim its status as brutalizer, rather than victim?  Bush realpolitik has proven impolitic and unreal in both its consequences and assumptions.

Yet it’s hard to know whether or how much to blog about such things.  The election of George Bush seems to make reporting on atrocites and injustice irrelevant.    As one sharp and widely circulated image by David Rees put it:

And I think Rees is right.  The exposure of Abu Gharib, and of Bush as a torturer seem to have increased his popularity.  Many and maybe most Americans like the idea of Bush as a man who will go fuck with those we are afraid of.  And the more anti-US hatred he inspires in the world, the more we’ll need a man like him to pound the bootheel of democracy on faces of those who despise us.  History reminds us that brutality sells.

But none of this is stuff you don’t already know.  So I won’t comment here at tdq on everything that perhaps I should.  If we’re all headed for the rapture, I don’t think anything said or unsaid here will make much difference.

Speaking of which.  A warm welcome back to the arms race.  Wherever have you been?

Yesterday was rainy and miserable.  Today the world is covered by frozen water.

Heheh.

Hmmm.  So is it better to post nothing, or some brief balderdash?

Balderdash it is!

The weather has lately been horrid.  Windy and rain at just above freezing for a couple days.  I wish it would just ice up and be beautiful.

I have yet to hear from any of the few people I know who attended MLA this year; I do hope the job-searchers I know there have fared well.  Michael Berube has some choice comments re the usual world-weary and wearying NY Times MLA article, and is none too happy about a small journalistic ambush that apparently befell him.

John and Belle host a somewhat interesting thread about Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academia, which I happen to have been reading, (its first chapter is available on line) .  Graff’s sentiments, and Amanda Anderson’s forthcoming ones (I magically foresee) are not unrelated to my own thoughts on reintroducing argument (and the classical liberalism that argument seems to imply) to the literary classroom.    That’s what I was getting at in some earlier post re Allan Bloom.  And I’ll be thinking about this, too for my session on post-theory in the classroom.  You should see also the very interesting post re Bloom on the Blog of Douglas Anthony Cooper — one of Bloom’s former students.

Graff’s book has been talked about a lot, and is generally agreeable, if (so far, at least) a bit inattentive to the corporatism of the American University.  He also appears to believe that the words “roach motel” will be the salvation of the profession.  But it’s late, so I’ll leave that part for later.  There’s also an interesting article on the perplexed humanites in the Chronicle.

Here’s hoping that everyone at MLA found gainful employment, and that the future of the profession was finally discovered.

I’ve just discovered some old Grenadine and Club Soda in my apartment.  Grenadine is I am told made from Red Currants and pomegranates, although the #1 ingredient in the Rose’s Grenadine I have here seems to be Corn Syrup.  I will however choose to overlook the corn syrup and regard the stuff as a magical distillation of fruit from the Goblin Market, and enjoy it properly as such.  It’s pretty too.

Anyway, Ive seen few interesting films lately, and should comment a bit on them.  Most especially I wanted to say a little about The Life Aquatic — the new Wes Anderson film, especially since lots of people seem to have quite disliked it.  These people are sadly confused, or missing the point.

There are some bones one could pick with this film.  It’s not perfect.  I’ll leave it to others to complain however, and concentrate instead on the film’s conceptual mission.

LA returns, like The Royal Tennenbaums to the ’70’s — a decade I’ve been lately thinking about.  It represents my earliest vague childhood memories.  I remember a cynical 6th grader–Shawn Metcalf, I think–who wrote “70’s Nostalgia, stop it NOW!” in my 5th grade little “yearbook.”  I’m not sure what Shawn had against the 70’s, but his response was not been atypical — for many the 70’s quite quickly became a decade to pick on.

In TRT, we see a “family of geniuses” oddly stuck in the 70’s, operating still as their child selves; in LA, Anderson is more interested in why it might be worthwhile to keep the headband on. 

There were many terrible conditions and events in the (American) 70’s; however there were qualities too, some of which deserve to be remembered.  A nation that adored Charles Schultz’s Peanuts (as Jonathan Franzen notes) notes was different and in some respects better than the one around today.  Can anyone imagine Jimmy Carter winning election now?  Or M*A*S*H* or All in the Family, or even Little House on the Prairie making it onto the air today?  The decade appreciated earnestness and Goofiness in ways that now appear impossible to recover.

I think LA is an attempt to salvage, or at least remember, one notion from the 1970’s that has very nearly vanished: adventure.  “Adventure” can imply Knights or Alan Quartermain or etc.; but in the 70’s, there briefly existed a genre of science adventure that has largely vanished.  In the wake of Vietnam, the people in the US imagined ways to exist — as a male, usually — that didn’t valorize combat or aggression, but teamwork and resourcefulness.  The results of this were  children’s television programs and toys that put forward the idea of adventure as an appropriate activity for men and women.

Programs like Johnny Quest, or Space 1999 capitalized on this ethos, but for my money it’s best represented in the early series of Action Figures, known as “The Adventure People.”

EvilRobots.com gets it almost right:

In the late 60’s/ 70’s/early 80’s, the people at Fisher Price decided to make action figures that did not carry weapons or fight, so they created the Adventure People. These figures were made to save people and have adventures. Hence the name. The figures were supposed to go to work and hang out with their friends, enjoying the freedoms all Americans cherish - the freedoms GI Joe and Star Wars figures protect!

Here for example is one cool Adventure People set possessed by my much-envied cousins and not me:

The adventure people didn’t come with a team of enemies, a merchandising plan, or even names.  You had to make up stuff for them to do.  So they were strange and fun to play with.  And the LA is all about this notion of adventure, and this kind of play.  As you watch the second half of the film, it should be quite clear that what’s happening is in large part an homage to the improbable imagination games of childhood, as childhood existed in the 70’s.  The story blends into the backyard adventures, and a question is posed as to whether the potentially ridiculous ethos of adventure championed by The Adventure People, Jacques Cousteau, and (I think) Carl Sagan is still viable, or incorporable into adult life after the millennium.

Don’t you think?

Memberships (SGCA) now available.

Pleasant New Year’s get-together at Steve and Tracy’s last night.  Saw Rob H. there, who’s dropped into town, and met numerous fine folks from Oregon and Chicago.  Very little wild debauchery, but that was ok for a change.  I hope that you too, dear reader, properly enjoyed the coming of the new year.

I hereby resolve to get this horrid dissertation finished!

As I mentioned earlier, someone gave me a camera.  Two day ago I venured to campus to return some dvds and mail a letter, but *everything* was closed.    No library, no post office, no student union, *nothing.*  So I wandered around a bit with my little camera taking pictures.  And thanks the the glorious obscurity of this here low-bandwidth website, I can post a few of them.

For example….

So I went to the post office.  Which was closed.  In the corner of the weird old building that houses the postoffice (and math department) is the world’s lonliest gargoyle.  There are none of his kind elsewhere on campus, and the bitterness of his situation is quite evident from his expression:

As you pass the bitter and somewhat insectoid gargoyle, you arrive at the Engligh building, and the tower which houses my office:

They say that the English Building is haunted, especially the third floor.  I must say that I have never seen this ghost in the vicinity of my third floor tower office.  And I must therefore speculate that the ghost may inhabit the secret *fourth floor* of the building, where no one is allowed.  But we will not investigate this area of the building today.  Today we enter the building, passing my favorite telephone:

And head into the basement.  Down the stairs, and a few twists and turns later, we exit the remodeled region of the building, and enter a forgotten corridor:

We pass through the big metal door, and into this second corridor, only to find ourselves at the end of our journey:

Room 13 of the English building — leading not to the sealed fourth floor, but to the network of tunnels (nearly ten miles of them) that spiderweb out beneath the university.  It may be that any ghost or other presence detectable in the English building finds a point of contact here.  But this is our Ultima Thule.  Beyond this point we should not go, even if we could!