Man, I can’t stand ‘em.  What’s up with this latest fashion trend?

(If you ask me they’re all just playing spin the pudding).

I’m back from Thanksgiving, back from my first day teaching, back from the Kenneth Burke talk, and am now relaxing comfortably in my living room, watching Charlie Rose interview Mark Warner, and wearing my optically questionable new glasses.

Since it’s just too painful to devote one’s full attention to Charlie Rose, let me explain a little about the hand grenade you see above.  It may quite possibly be real.  Then again, it might not be.  It might be merely a training grenade.  I don’t know what would happen if you pulled the pin and let the handle fall open. 

The picture is from the basement of my Grandparents apartment building on the South side of Chicago, which I visited over thanksgiving break with my mom.  This building, a small apartment building with four or five units is where my mom grew up, and was a looming, somewhat terrifying presence in my childhood.  For years I would dream about this door, and the things that might be behind it.  On Saturday, for the first time, I walked through it and explored the apartment on the other side.  It was just an apartment.  On the other hand, my mom told me about the two women who had lived there when she was a child.  One was a old Lithuanian woman, and the other was an Irishwoman who burned to death in the apartment from smoking in bed.

My Grandfather was a very fun, and sort of whimsical guy.  At his cottage in Wisconsin, he liked to make odd shaped pieces of wood into little animal decorations, or to make things that looked sort of like faces into creatures with expressions that seemed fitting.

And he’d tell stories–0r, not stories, exactly—rather just little lies.  The sand dune down the road was “bear mountain;” the cheap plastic bow was made of whale-bone.  And he was always plying you with little questions or puzzles he picked up from who-knows-where. 

Just super fun.  But.  But he was also a watch commander on the Chicago police force.  And, cheerful though he was, it was always clear he viewed the world as state of nature, and most people as on the take.  One had a sense he’d seen a lot of bad things as a police officer in Chicago in the 50’s and 60’s.

He was also a collector and a pack rat, and a hider and locker-up of things, and the basement of the apartment in Chicago is a warren of tunnels and door and cabinet and boxes of stored stuff.  And I went through this for a few hours with my mom, finding things like the hand grenade, vacuum tubes, and ammunition you see about above.  Also stacks and stacks of self-teaching books on all subjects, police manuals, and church missals and devotional statues and cards.  I found the head of the infant of Prague that for years stood guard over the family burial plot in the big Chicago Lithuanian cemetary.  The infant’s head is the about the size and shape of the grenade.

Two final things:
1) I found many treasures, including a ream of police reports from the 60’s, a bunch of World War II memorabilia, and an old Victrola.  I did not find the final goal of my search: an iron  meteorite the size of a grapefruit that I believe is hidden somewhere in the basement.

2) There is a basement apartment in the building.  It is a nasty apartment, with a secret exit into the basement area.It has been uninhabited for years now.    But perhaps twenty years ago, it was inhabited by a person I knew only as “the recluse,” who only came out at night and did not work.  When he finally left, it became clear that he was not sane.  The hundreds of bottle of Prego tomato sauce piled in the apartment—the stack of wadded up tissue rising to the ceiling—the crazed obscenities scrawled upon the walls.  These details I learned about for the first time just  this weekend.  They may be true, or not.  I don’t know what would happen if you pulled the pin.

You can see more of the apartment here.

The U.S. Army’s chief theoritician of honor kills himself, or is murdered, in Iraq.

I’ve barely mentioned the grad strike at NYU here at TDQ; however it’s been brought to my attention that the current president of the NYU grad union is a former student of mine.  While I take all the credit for this that I can manage, it still is not so much (it was quite some time ago).  Still, I must say that this is even better than my student who ended up as Miss America a couple years back.

We here at TDQ naturally view NYU and Washington Square as the symbolic epicenter of the Progressive Humanities.  All good wishes to the grads at NYU, who have been striking now for a long while.  Here’s hoping that labor-friendly New York City helps bring the NYU admin to its senses in a Champaign minute.

What is the meaning of the mysterious appearance of His image?

Don Rumsfeld was all over the Sunday talk shows this morning, though it’s hard to figure why they bring this guy out, except perhaps for his entertainment value.

How about next week they talk with the producer of this?

Glasses, (probably pretty much the same as my old prescription), after my vision plan discount: 157 dollars.

Getting my car un-booted: 165 dollars.

Having them put another parking ticket on the car as soon as they unboot it: Priceless.  Or 15 more bucks.

“WHERE IS THE DEMON?“

Things were different when I was a kid.  To wit: The Blizzard of ‘79, (which I survived).  In fact the Chicago area saw amazing quantities of snow from when I was 8 or so, til I was around 12.  And ever since, it’s been these unfortunate melty little winters.

Another unfortunate change has been the transformation of Marriot’s Great America north of Chicago, into Six Flags Great America.  MGA was a theme park, in which all the thrilling rides and attractions were located within six themed areas, each representing a different part of the U.S. , from the Yukon Territory to Yankee Harbor.  Since being purchased by Six Flags, however, the place has become junky, and the careful theming has broken down as corporate things like “Batman: The Ride” have invaded and colonized New Orleans Square and so forth.  A fallen world in Gurnee, Illinois.

The very coolest part of the prelapsarian Marriot’s was The Demon.  A seriously fast and loopy rollercoaster, the Demon was not only a technological marvel, but masterpiece of theming, with tunnels filled with strange psychedelic lights, and a vast concrete wasteland built-up surrounding it.  The whole region of the coaster was supposed to be inhabited by the demonic presence pictured in the above sign, depicting an evil being lurking in some kind of storm pipe.  Notice the pool of blood collecting below the pipe.  Waiting for the Demon, the line wound through a strange landscape, while an eerie phantasmagoric soundtrack wailed in the background.  What cooler thing could there be for a confused and imaginative child?

Of course such things are impossible now.  Terrified Christians long ago caused all the demon iconography to be removed, the pool of blood to be filled with dirt, and the eerie soundtrack to be permanently switched off.  It’s been more than a decade since the Demon’s eyes looked out from across that pool of blood.

But I have recently discovered that a former employee of Marriot’s Great America has just posted this ten megabyte mp3 of the complete Demon soundtrack to a Great America fansite.  And it’s amazingly cool to listen to–genuinely scary and also full of the goofy humor of the late 1970’s.  Imagine me as an obsessive nine or ten year old keying into this.  It’s pretty unique, really–only 25 minutes long, but designed to loop endlessly for the benefit of those waiting in line, it’s the sort of thing that one would listen to now and again while talking with friends and experiencing a bit of fear as you get ready to be launched out onto the tracks.  Listening to this tape in line, under those circumstances, it would be almost impossible to hear the thing all the way through, really picking up each word.  This soundtrack is designed to weave in and out of your consciousness, as you wait in nervous anticipation for your encounter with the DEMON.  It was interesting comparing the acutal words of the tape to my recollections.

Listen at your own risk.  Extra points for going the full 25 minutes.

Finally, a happy postscript: last Halloween, Six Flags decided to open its gates on Halloween, perhaps for the benefit of the gothy young Renaissancers from across the way.  And guess who, for one night anyhow, was back?

I’m not sure whether some readers of TDQ might be expecting to see me this year’s MLA.  But if you are, you shouldn’t be.  Because, once again, I’m not going to be on the market.  I need the year to finish the diss (I have only one more chapter to do), and to send out an article and present at a  conference or two.   

“Why,” you may very well wonder, “is this fine person taking so long to finish his dissertation?”    A few reasons.  Lots of teaching, a somewhat sprawling project, and my own distractability are all somewhere in the stew.  But another legume, that more recently got thrown in the pot, is a certain disillusionment with the profession of English.  I’ve been coming to realize that the time and circumstances of my early exposure to the profession of English were sort of anomalous.  As an undergrad I was able to catch some of the foment and excitement of Theory before its decline was universally celebrated.  And when I came to graduate school, profs. like M. Berube set the tone for a department that was fun, smart, and politically engaged.  It was both cool and fun, in those days to be or aspire to be, to be a public intellectual.  Grad students were rock band members and political organizers, unionists who fought the power of the big UI, engaging in dramatic acts of civil disobedience and sticking it to the you-know-who.

But the department, and the profession seems different now.  Throughout the public sphere theory of all kinds is written off, and evolutionary psychology stands astride the world like a giant colossus, producing works of supreme critical ugliness.  And nowadays it’s hard not to notice how the world of new professors differs from that of the graduate student.  Junior professors don’t occupy buildings; they grovel for tenure.  They’re forced to.  This much-discussed and very stupid article, for example, reminds me of the obligation of new profs to submit the stupidest whims of senior faculty. 

The prospect of going elsewhere to teach a lower grade of student, and submitting myself to the process of tenure review can seem sometimes less than appetizing.  So I think that part of me is, to be honest, quite happy to stand with the virtuous pagans in this strange outer circle at the edge of the profession.  Lately at academic talks, the not-very-sub-text of many questions  seems to be the asker’s own suitability for tenure.  And the tenured do not always seem so illustrous either.  When I went to a talk a couple weeks ago, one very prominent psychoanalytic feminist literary critic was asked whether her talk on the ethics of close reading might have special application in the case of women.  She replied that, well, she could say that it did, and that once-upon-a-time she might have said that it did, but that she could no longer make such a claim “with a straight face.”

Well, fine.  Be a feminist or don’t.  Either way.  But don’t tell me that it was all just a farce; that you didn’t mean it.  That it was all just about getting tenure and getting to sit at the table with the cool kids at the MLA convention.  Because that’s how I’ve lately been starting to see the whole enterprise.

This is a short post, a nothing, a stub in the cruel language of the Wikipedia.  I’m out grading and will be most of the night in a desperate attempt to return at least two sections worth of papers to their rightful owners tomorrow.  The rest will need to wait til Monday.

But let me make a note or two concerning the beauty of the idea of Santiago de Compostela.  I was talking with a friend the other day, about what would be a nice tattoo to get.  I was saying that I’d sort of like to get a scallop shell put on my body.  It’s the old iconographic sign for the pilgrim—the person taking the world ’round about themselves a little too symbolically.  A person making a Pilgrim’s progress of some sort, to a dark or celestial home.  Who construes it all as a story, in the high Munchausian sense.

I love that old pilgrim scallop.  To the modern American eye, it looks for all the world like the insignia of the Shell Oil Corporation.  And it always pleases me to look at the glowing Shell signs dispersed along the highways, as markers of a lost pilgrim track.

This all occurred to me when I was reading a long time ago about Pilgrimage in Erasmus’s rather forgotten treatise on the subject.  And so, when the other day I was mentioning my tattoo idea to a medievalist friend, she was shocked to discover my ignorance on the subject: to wit, that that I had forgotten the proper source of the Shell as an image of pilgrimage (an association it never lost, even when it became a symbol of pilgrimage more generally).  The source, discussed by Erasmus but forgotten by me is of course the beautiful cathedral at Santiago Compostela, situated at what had been for the pre-Christians the Western edge of the earth, where the souls of the dead would gather before making the journey across the unknown Atlantic.  St. James of the Field of Stars.  One of the great pilgrim destinations of Europe, its visitors would buy and take home with them thousands and thousands of the tiny of scallop-shells that wash up on the shore near the cathedral.  The roads to Compostela for hundred of miles are marked with shells, to mark the routes of pilgrimage.

One more place that must if possible be visited before the big final trip to Mecca.

[one more pretty picture]

So I’m sitting now in Cafe Verde, and there is one other person in the place.  She is sitting by the window, holding a copy of “Great Monologues” and reading them out loud, to herself. 

Ok, so reality tv shows are a guilty pleasure of mine.  Particularly interesting but guilt-inducing are programs like Wife Swap and Trading Spouses.  Unlike, say, Elimidate, these shows seem to stick quite closely to their original gender formula in which each week two families switch moms. 

The reasons it’s moms that switch are interesting to consider.  Of course the “wife swap” expression expresses or seems to express a notion of the wife as a thing to be traded.  It also reflects a persisting pattern in which it’s the men who are supposed to be breadwinners, and the women homemakers, who can exhanged since it can be presumed that they share common occupation or skill-set as “wife.”  In short, it’s bad, and in a number of ways.

But still.  I’m not exactly a regular viewer, but several times I have see one of these shows, and they’ve generally been interesting, as people with very different sets of life habits and cultural expectations try, suddenly, to operate as a family.  Sometimes the results are unhappy, but most often, living with a family, or a mom, from a very kind of family produces surprisingly postive results.  The whitebread family that learns to dance.  The disciplinarians who learn to draw and put on puppet shows.  The endlessly working mother who learns that some “me time” at the spa just might worth insisting on.  Lots of such revelations through this show.

Anyway.  All this just to introduce this sorta freaky clip of one mom expressing a few reservations about her host family.  Is it disturbing, infuriating, or funny, I wonder?  I can’t decide.  But I guess the moral is that FOX can be counted upon to prefer spectacular human embarassment to subtle and postive encounters with other ways of living, even if it means painting their predominantly Christian audience with the crazy brush.  Yikes.

So, today, the world gets points since two library books I thought I’d lost were returned to me.  But it loses points becuase it seems I may be having trouble with my car again.  Big “time to go get a new car”- type troubles, I’m afraid. 

But I could be wrong and will have the thing towed and checked-out by somebody, perhaps on Monday.