So when is a cheeseburger an emergency?

[warning: this is a sound file!]

I’m back now from spring break and have been for a few days.  Teaching’s been going well–had fun discussing John Barth’s “Night Sea-Journey” outside on the Quadrangle yesterday, despite some guy wandering around nearby in a chicken costume.

Over break I tried to dissertate but produced stuff I now renounce, or will at least move somewhere else in the chapter, and briefly went up to Chicagoland.

I spent sometime in Chicago itself, fixing up an apartment in my Grandmother’s old apartment building.  (I still had primer from this in my hair as of yesterday).  My grandmother now lives in a new but isolating little house in Northwest Indiana.  While she’s near one of her two daughters there, I do feel bad that this new quiet space is a pretty inhuman one for her to occupy.  If you call her (which I don’t do as often as I should, in part because she seems uncomfortable with long phone calls), she’ll tell you herself that she’s lonely.

She has no stairs to deal with, but the place reminds me of the basic nastiness of Northwest Indiana.  What gets me about the place is its deliberate Republican ugliness.  The place is designed entirely for cars, so you get long straight street populated by strip-malls.  Big signs crowd the roads, usually in disrepair, while every street is accompanied by an open ditch rather than a storm sewer, and huge gaggles of wire dangle across the road every which way.  There are no public spaces, and older semi-urban areas are depressed and destroyed.

What gets me is that this ugliness is such a direct reflection of a stupid ethos.  It’s not really that NW Indiana is especially poor, it seems.  But it’s full of people absolutely determined to avoid thinking about the big picture.  People take pride in driving large well-polished vehicles.  Houses sit on quarter acre lots (each secreting its waste in a private septic tank).  But the total effect is one of nastiness and alienation, in which people have managed to acquire a possession-set that indicates status, but where the whole community looks like garbage, and nobody feels too worried about the shittyness on the other side of the fence.

Anyway, so my Grandmother not does not live in her old building, but now occupies a perfectly nice little house on a curvy road with 500 other perfectly nice identical little houses.  I do know that my aunt will make sure that she’s well looked after, but I’m just not sure that Northwest Indiana is place that, really,  any human being should be. 

So on Saturday, I primed and sanded and painted and cleaned my grandmother’s old apartment.  My mom and my brother were there, and we had a good time.  I’m not sure now often I’ll be seeing that building in the future, where I spent quite a bit of time as a kid.  Oddly, I think I’ll miss it more than my mom, who grew up there.  For her the mostly Polish South Side neighborhood was generally despised.  Or rather, just not valued.  No parks, no playgrounds, just working class bungalows  and shops extending endlessly and drearily out from around Midway Airport.  So it’s easy to see how the suburban dream — a detached house with a bit of grass around it, was for her much to be preferred.

But there’s something nice about the West Lawn area of the South side of Chicago–the proximity of human beings, the cool comfortable attitudes of most of the people who live there; clearly it’s a neighborhood like you’d never find in NW Indiana or much of US suburbia.  While the overflying jets of Midway Airport keep the 61st street neighborhood in a kind of time-capsule, discouraging development and change, I do hope that a bit more green space finds its way there, sometime before too long.

Alas, its easy to waste time with a new mp3 player.  Which file compression format sounds best to my ear?  Can I tell the difference between q5 and q6?  And how good did that CD sound in the first place?  Should I realgain this?  Lame it? or what?

Well, for now I’m uging Ogg Vorbis at q5.  Which is either overkill or not good enough, depending on my mood.  How round or full does this sound sound, I ask myself? I’m most suspicious of long slow notes–like the piano chords at the beginning of Liz Phair’s Canary.  They seem more telling that the cymbals and such that are usually looked to for faliures of sound encoding. 

But the Rio is small and works beautifully, and any sonic flatness is small enough for me to thinking might be just my imagination.

And, if I needed any further convining as to the righteousness of the machine, I can look to the Rio’s demo song — its song number zero, as you can see it displayed on the unit’s LCD screen in the post below.  That’s right — it’s Public Enemy’s 2002 Riovolution.  I’d never even heard it before playing the Rio.  But you should check this track out.  And ask yourself whether Apple’s 1984 revoltion against Big Blue could ever have culminated in lyrics like this.

A late late start today.  And then not much of a start, either.  Still the chapter is underway, however haltingly.  Which is good.  For now tonight, let me do a little tech. blogging.

FamousP asked a couple days ago whatever happened to my free ipod plan.  Well, he was quick enough to catch a post I briefly posted here about how one can get a free ipod.  Turns out there’s a quite legitimate offer whereby if you can get five people to try some “trial offers” and etc, you can get yourself an iPod for nothin.  It seemed like a good idea.  But it is a pyramid scheme, and sometimes people do have problems getting credit for offers, and I didn’t too much like the idea of pushing product onto my friends and family, even though I certainly wouldn’t look down on anyone taking advantage of this offer.  You can go get a free iPod if you’d like at freeipods.com.  (Or better yet at http://www.freeiPods.com/?r=16132147, I suppose).

So, ethical concerns were one problem.  The other, I realized, was that I didn’t really want an iPod.  It’s not just that the contrarian in me hesitates to invest in the same product that every single one of my students sports, along with those white earbuds.  But also, I really don’t like Apple.  This will scandalize FamousP and Ambimb and other good people maybe, but really they’re just a buncha miniature Utopian monopolists.  Apple is the most closed-source Empire you’ll ever find — a company that lost-out because they wanted to lock their users into both hardware and software more tightly than even Microsoft could imagine.  Which is why the music files you buy on itunes will only ever play on Apple-branded music players.  Ick.  So, no, no iPod for me.

Instead, the Rio Karma — a machine of true beauty.  It can save and play files in Ogg Vorbis — an open-source file format that not only offers the best available file size to sound quality ratio, but that has a Gormenghastian name that’s impossible to resist.  And it kind of *looks* like a player that would favor a format with such a name, doesn’t it?  Like an old Saab 900, its design prefers the strange to the elegant in a most sympathetic way.  A 20 gigabyte player, it can cross-fade and play tracks w/no gaps in between them, as with classical stuff, etc.  It’s got a highly adjustable equalizer and sound controls and playlisting systems and such.  Better battery-life, too.  And, since Rio is discontinuing the line (getting ready to introduce a new model), you can pick up one of these for less than $200(!).  (More info on the Karma at this enthusiastic but badly-written review).

I’ve been watching my FedEx tracking page for the last couple days.  It’s supposed to be here tomorrow, and I must admit to some Christmas day anticipation.

Is the Karma a perfect machine?  Not quite.  You can’t buy an in-line or infra-red remote for it.  And their Hitachi hard-drives haven’t proven to the be the most reliable of man-made devices.  But I’ve got me a three-year add-on warranty, so I’m not sweating the reliability too painfully.

Ok.  Gonna go write a little bit more, before going to dream some little consumerist dreams.

I’ve written little today, and now I’m called to go get a drink.  So naturally no dissertation blogging for y’all tonight.  But tomorrow.

In the meanwhile (and by way of foreshadowing), you might pause to consider the extraordinary, long, and fatal career of one Ms. Marie Tussuad.

At a high school at the Red Lake Indian Reservation, in Minnesota.  10 Dead.

But did you see this Google cache of the shooter’s ideas on Native American Nazism?

The last book Hunter S. Thompson and his wife read together was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — a novel that Thompson particularly appreciated for its sense of humor.  Which is interesting to look for. 

However it’s been Evan Wright’s Generation Kill that’s most influenced my latest reading of HoD.  Wright’s book tells the story of a generation of video-game playing kids penetrates the Darkness of Iraq, bringing to it the familiar violence of the video screen.  The video theme is minor in Wright’s book, but the Heart of Darkness trope is larger and difficult for Wright to avoid. 

So, I’ve been thinking about video games, mathematics and war.  I’ve blogged about this before, but I’ve continued to think about this, all the same.  The connection between numbers and violence.

In Heart of Darkness Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, describes the experience of the colonizer:

“He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.  And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him.  The fascination of the abomination [ . . .] Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this.  What saves us is efficiency–the devotion to efficiency.”

“Devotion,” of course, in the devotional sense.  Marlow’s adventure into Africa soon brings him to the figure who serves as the gate-keeper of the operation, the Company’s Chief Accountant.  Who amid the sweltering heat, human misery, and general disrepair of the outer station wears “a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots.”  Conrad writes “He was amazing, and had a pen holder behind his ear [ . . .] this man had verily accomplished something.  And he was devoted to his books [. . .] making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions.”  Again with the devotion.

In his office-shack is a dying man.  The Accountant: “The groans of this sick person,” he said, “distract my attention.  And without that it is extremely guard against clerical errors in this climate.”  “Clerical” errors — get it?  Just like Kurtz.

All this reminds me of the picture you’ll see at the top of this post. It’s from the old FPS Unreal Tournament, and it shows the view of a combat area as the Redeemer.  The Redeemer is a enormous weapon one can find in this game.  When you fire it, you *become* the projectile, and the world adopts the red Terminator hue.  Numbers scroll furiously across the screen as you move rapidly, smoothly, towards any target you might choose.  Your journey will culminate in a brilliant white spherical shock wave that will obliterate every living thing thing anywhere in the vicinity.  Becoming the Redeemer can be for some players, quite a rush.  One writes:

I really enjoy chasing people with the Redeemer [. . .] I just like to see the futility in people’s faces as they run and try to dodge the Redeemer. The feisty ones try to shoot it. That’s when they die.

Of course the characters in Unreal Tournament have no facial expressions, and “The futility in people’s faces” is an artifact of the poster’s own imagination.

But this desire to drive such futility into the faces of one’s enemies by achieving an ecstatic union with efficiency itself, that would unleash the very power of number upon one’s foes is an old but persistent dream.

All of this is to direct your attention to this, which I think will show you the future of combat.  There’s a new Chief Accountant in town.  A perfect display of technological racism.

See also this New York Times article, the title of which couldn’t be more perfectly chosen.

Today is Sunday, and I’m done with the Week Before Spring Break, which consisted of grading marathons to return papers that I couldn’t bring myself to mark until I could hear the sound of the deadline rattling down the grooved guillotine towards me.

I’ve taken a few days to relax and recover, before turning my attentions to my dissertation, to which I’ll be able to pay proper attention this week.

I plan to do only some light blogging this week, but I have an idea:

Since I’ll be dissertating this week, I’ll do some dissertation blogging.  But I don’t really want to post that stuff publicly.  These post will be either for my eyes only, or for the eyes of anyone who already knows me, who wants to sign-up for a TDQ user account by using the ‘register’ link at the bottom of the nav bar at the right hand side of the screen.  Once you sign-up, if you’re someone I know, I’ll change your user level so that you can view protected posts.  TDQ should set a cookie on your machine so that you’ll only need to login once to view protected posts.

Sorry to any TDQ readers who don’t happen to be known to me, but I’m a little secretive about some things, I guess.  I’d just email user id’s to friends, but I don’t want to presume that anybody actually reads this thing, since it’s mostly a little dark corner of trivialities.  So, if anyone registers, they’ll be able to get a better sense of my work as it’s been progressing.  On the other hand, if nobody signs up, that’s ok too, and I’ll just figure you didn’t read this post or aren’t interested in the minutiae of some early modern religious gobbledygook–and really why would you be, after-all?

Famous P.  sends me an article on people who spend way too much time working on Wikipedia.  Ordinarily, I’m an admirer of the great wiki from a distance only.  But as it happens I did today get caught up in its multiform horrors. 

If you’re bored, you can take a look at the Wikipedia articles marked for deletion.  A long list of entries, too trivial, stupid, or confused to stay in the encyclopedia, each begging for mercy on the chopping block.

But some writers of such articles are more persistant that others.  One determined ex-Marine has certain ideas about ancient Greek philosophy and politics that he champions against all the world, usually in a semi-coherent way.  Today, I got bogged down by one of his horrible articles, that is marked for deletion.  Would you like a sense of this fellow’s approach to his subject?

Not only am I a Doric Greek, but I have been trained as a soldier all my life and did six years in the USMC. This is my ethos. Most of you have been brought up in democracy, liberalism, modernism which colors and influences your thought. I have done nothing but read about the Greeks all my life. I have read Werner Jaeger, Kitto, Hamilton, Muller and others. I know ancient Greek culture, though I am not a Greek linguist whatsoever, but I do know Ancient Greek culture and because I have the same lifestyle and was trained as they were, I know from whence they speak.

Right.  Anyhow, the writing instructor in me couldn’t resist offering suggestions on how to repair this mess, despite the fact that I know nothing nothing nothing at all about “Vanavsos”.

Can you possibly imagine a greater waste of time?

My knowlegde of HTML is almost negligible, and the fact that I would even consider messing with the CSS code here at TDQ is evidence of my sheer stupidity.  By any reasonable account, I should be running this on Blogger, LJ, Diaryland, etc.  But for $35 to visaweb per year, I do get my own beautiful domain name, and some neat tools.  And I avoid the fate of bloggers who use the big Blogging sites, and who have lately been complaing about changes at Google that have tended to push search results from the big blogging services far down the list of hits from Google searches.

On the other hand, I find my website getting more and more hits from Google searches.  For example that TDQ is now the number one hit for the word “Boujiyah.”  Hoorah!

The sticky little server on which I run things has caught a number of hits resulting from Google searches, which perhaps capture the unconscious of the Googling world.  Here’s what I’ve got so far, in this first week of March:

illi carre 3
rapture ready 2
reverse racism our sister killjoy 2
naiomi klein 2
boujiyah 2
bigboys 2
the goblin market imperialism analysis 1
howard hughes drove car up wall 1
betsy hart documentary 1
ideas for livening up a birthday party and dance 1
want to be a suicidegirl 1
bigboys video clips 1
the church militant 1
andrew Ó baoill 1
girls using electronic toothbrushes to masturbate with 1
teaching metods for ages 3-4 1
cucumbers and loose masturbating 1
washburn d 48 1
shite in iraq 1
politics and jamaica kincaid s a small place 1
which is more secular sunni or shite 1
dodge colt ecu 1
artsy eyes 1
why do some men have dark balls 1
cassini huygen heroic 1
shite coalition elections iraq 1
a small place jamaica kincaid themes major points 1
112 1
team zissou action figures 1
rescue procedures twilight sleep endoscopy 1
horrific words and descriptions 1
all about the praying mantis articles written by 6th graders 1
stone philips video clips 1
jamaica kincaid a small place 1
eye shapes descriptions 1
how is a schatzki s ring fixed ? 1
funny firefighter video clips 1
all asian mails of factory engineers 2005 1
sniper army commercial 1
heart of darknesss conrad is the film true to the novel 1
bekinsdale 1
link bmrybbr7aw4j www.crimethinc.com/ 1
life and debt how to improve jamaica s economy 1
downtown champaign loft 1
allan bloom sexist 1
dabate kerry and bush 2004 1
george wallace segregation yesterday  1

I pray that the fondest wishes of all these searchers were satisfied here at TDQ.  But what, I wonder, does it all mean?  What truth is whispered by these queries?

A late start today, after the first night of good sleep I’ve had in maybe a month or so.  Having guests stay over is usually pleasant since they and you can stay up late drinking wine and discoursing profoundly.  But having tired guests over to stay, I’ve discovered, is even better.  They stop you from reading and playing music and staying up til two or three, and nudge you into bed at a reasonable hour.  And you wake up around eight-thirty or so, having slept more than you thought possible.  Fantastic.

Anyhow, I’d better be off and do some grading.  After my guests left for a breakfast that I decided I had neither time nor money for, I accidentally switched-on the TV, and ended up watching the university basketball team for the first time this season.  They lost, of course.  Although my students will be glum come Monday, this probably will not  make it any easier to find grading space at local drinking establishments when the local heroes are playing. 

Also managed to watch some of the usual political shows this morning, and turned up a new-to-me website I thought I’d clue you into.  Curious about John Perkins’s new Confesisons of an Economic Hit Man, after seeing him interviewed on PBS’s NOW, I was interested in reading some reviews re this book before taking a look at it over at Borders.  Perkins was the chief economist at a strategic-consulting firm that worked with the IMF and the US Government to structure deals that would keep developing countries in debt to and under the thumb of the United States.  It sounds like Perkins may be able to provide a kind of operative insight that is harder to come by in the more familiar Chomskian critiques of US economic policy. 

However I must confess to looking at Perkins through somewhat narrowed eyes, given his oeuvre, which includes such titles as: Psychonavigation: Techniques for Travel Beyond Time, and various other new-agey things unpalatable to this somewhat cynical reader.  The reader reviews at Amazon were as usual worthless (”He speaks truth!” v. “He fails to grasp the sublime truth of economics!”),  and I wanted to read some better informed thoughts on Perkins’s book.

Well, I had little luck.  While the book has bene selling like ipods, major reviews seem yet-to-come.  But while looking for such reviews however, I came across Metafilter.com, which is a new Rotten Tomatoes-type review aggregator that also includes reviews for Books.  Pretty cool, although they’ve only got reviews for a couple hundred books up so far.  Something you might bookmark, along with Bookslut and Bookmunch, etc., to keep your finger clamped on the pulsing pulse of the contemporary book-scene.  Or something like that.

From NPR:

The Department of Homeland Security is experimenting with a controversial new method to keep better track of immigrants who are applying to remain in the United States. It is requiring aliens in eight cities to wear electronic monitors 24 hours a day.

The ankle bracelets are the same monitors that some rapists and other convicted criminals have to wear on parole. But the government’s pilot project is putting monitors on aliens who have never been accused of a crime.

So far, the Department of Homeland Security has put electronic monitors on more than 1,700 immigrants. Victor Cerda, director of Detention and Removal Operations at Homeland Security, says the anklets will help prevent tens of thousands of immigrants who are ordered to leave the country each year from “absconding” — going into hiding to avoid deportation.

Hmm.  With the help of Google Maps, GPS, and Duracell, maybe these can be used to adminster electric shocks when the subject deviates from the route between home, LaborReady, and Wal-Mart.  Ah, Progress!

The announcement that Paul Wolfowitz is being positioned to become the new head of the World Bank has the feel of a revelation — so unreal as to forestall the possibility of response.  A plan to elevate the main architect of The Project for the New American Century’s published plan for global domination to the leadership of the organization charged with the development of emerging economies seems literally breath-taking.

Wolfowitz and his allies in the Bush administration seem now to have improved on the old insight that War is “the continuation of policy by other means.”  For this administration, it policy that’s the continuation of war.  This observation that helps make intelligible the bizarre methods of the Bush admin., and it’s adroit use of speed, distruption and “shock and awe,” as both military and political tools.

You don’t need to be conversant with the work of Paul Virilio to recognize in the nomination of Wolfowitz a kind of battlefield strategy familiar to anyone who’s kept an eye on events in Iraq.  This kind of strategy has an affinity with the “Hypermodern” — a terms that denotes first of all a movement in Chess from the early part of the twentieth century.  GM Richard Reti shocked the world in 1924 by defeating Jose Capablanca in a game that vindicated the belief of the Hypermoderns that it was possible to win by eschewing the orthodox practice of trying to occupy and dominate from the board’s center squares at the beginning of the game.  Power could be ranged around the periphery, such that the opponent who manages to occupy the crucial center can be forced to sacrifice material and eventually position though a complex series of exchanges in whcih the center is controlled from the periphery.  (You can watch the brief, decisive Reti/Capablanca game unfold here, if you like).

Hypermodernism also placed new emphasis on old principles , stressing “that the loss of tempo is tantamount to the loss of the game” and so forth. 

Rumsfeld’s military and its actions in Iraq are surely Hypermodern, in the tactical sense stressed by Reni, and with regard to the media effects stressed by Virilio.  Reading Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (and more on this book later), one is struck by the related strategy perused by the Marine Recon unit with which Wright is embedded, which is to just drive “balls-out” into Iraq, moving rapidly and directly into ambushes, city centers, and so forth.  While the men of 1st Recon found this bewildering, the logic of it gradually becomes clear–and it’s the same logic being used theater-wide.  That is: don’t occupy the center, rather disrupt it.  And have enough force projected from the periphery to control what happens in the aftermath.  So, break Iraq, and have enough money and guns and influence directed at it so that it subsequentlt takes shape as we’d like.  Will this work?  Maybe not.  Hypermodern lines of attack are less effective when the opponent knows enough to avoid rushing into the deadly center you’ve prepared.  Indeed the US  seems to be finding itself more frequently positioned on those center squares, and it’s still quite  early in the game.  In any case the U.S. media here is almost useless, as it is unable to report meaningfully on the complex reconstuction of Iraq through which the real outcome of the conflict will be decided.

But if politics has become an extension of hypermodern war, what would that mean?  What would  characterize a hypermodern politics?  Seeing the potential nomination of Wolfowitz today drives home that this administration is embarking on a kind of policy version of 1st Recon’s reckless assaults.  The idea of avoiding the center of the board or Iraq is to avoid becoming a target  of attack and to facilitate disruption that well-placed forces can use oppritunistically to control the outcome.  Similarly, in a political sense, this administration has responded to attacks and potential scandals not by stonewalling like Nixon, or responding quickly like Clinton, but with each scandal to moving quickly to do something even worse. 

When accused of advocating torture, nominate the chief torturer to head the justice department.  When accused of being a domineering power, nominate the most theorist of tyranny to run the World Bank.  This strategy — an “extreme” strategy, in some critical vernaculars — is also a shameless one, and I’ve been thinking of shamlessness since hearing some good talks on the subject earlier this week.  It seems that in Wolfowitz, we perhaps have not the ascendancy of Leo Strauss’s Machiavellian politics, but its evanescence into a politics where the wrongdoings of the prince are not hidden from the people, but concealed by the exposure of still more wrongdoings, until the steady rhythm of scandal drives the public into accepting as normal previously unconscionable actions and beliefs.