The Truth of Fiction Evokes Our Common Humanity

At commondreams.org, I came across this timelyessay by Susan Sontag, who died Dec. 28. I first encountered Sontag's work in grad school. Her book On Photography was required reading in my Pop Culture class. It was one of the few intelligible books I read in that year and a half of academic hell, and I have learned much from her work.

Sorry about all the dead people

This is not a forum for discussing Jim's deep thoughts on tsunamis. I won't be blogging on early warning systems and seismic technology, nor will I be debating the quizzical stinginess or profound generosity of the American consumer, whom some of my students have referred to not as customers, but in a creatively apt mispelling, as "costumers". No, I won't be comparing shallow, unfeeling costumers to the disemboweling sorrows of penniless parents on far away Asian shores. Their suffering is real enough, as is my empathy. One small observation: the farther away the tragedy, the less tragic it appears, and the easier to dismiss for people dead to themselves. This is wrong and symptomatic of larger troubles with the human soul, yet it is typical, consistent behavior, even in America, land of the free and home of the brave. When people die, part of you dies with them. I didn't learn that one from television.

Today, I scanned some morning TV, and picked up some scenes as they washed over me. Crawling headlines report 40, then 50 thousand dead. Looping images recoil as I hop from channel to channel: surging saltwater; cauldrons of briny death somehow minimized on the 35 inch screen; buses upturned become toy buses tossed against ramshackle tin houses; TV shrinks the disaster to its own proportions, wraps the bodies, shrouded or exposed in clammy rigor mortis poses, laid out by dozens, hundreds; bulldozers clearing mass graves. Here are the pockmarked faces of survivors. The face of a blonde haired two year old motherless Finlander, spoken of by plastic newsmouths as the veritable signature image of the tragedy: an odd representative, this boy's face who must convey the death of so many Asians to the unfeeling white Christian multitudes, as that unwitting, grimy faced GI was made to bear the weight of Mission Impossible in Falluja; a UN rep in soundbite space, pointing a finger at the West; a broad faced Colin Powell, whose face fills the screen with defensive, posturing fatness, as if his face is pressing against the camera lens, squashing it with volume, his mouth pulling open at the corners to let out dissumlating blather, his eyes spinning like swirling marbles; callers on CSPAN; a FOX morning news lad slamming the UN for its stupidity; Matt Lauer striking sympathetic faces going into the news; coming out, Matt Lauer smiling and interviewing a male fashion designer; a supermodel with a broken pelvis who clung to a palm tree for her life; more pancake announcer-beauties grimacing, then within seconds brightening like their shiny perfect hair. Diane Sawyer with a green tophat upon her head. Commercial spots entering on cue. Tony Danza crooning beside a grand piano in a parking lot, surrounded by middle class women in department store sportswear. Anchors from CNN who have jumped to MSNBC and look different in the MSNBC light, in the MSNBC set, from the MSNBC angles. Everywhere on every channel are people with forced smiles. The day wears on and the tally moves to 60,000. Wall Street resumed its rally, and consumer confidence jumped sharply.

At the north pole, God and Jesus and Santa Claus were kicking back tallying Christmas returns, logging lives saved and heathens lost, occassionally glancing up at the TV to catch an update, debating the finer points of laissez faire economics and hands-off ominipotence. When Rudolph came in, he blew his red nose, cursing the wicked weather and what it was doing to his sinuses. He wondered aloud how soon it'd be before some moron in the lower 48 would appeal to divine providence in all this, the hidden hand of the market and the hidden hand of God, hand in hand with the devastating hand of Mother Nature, who was also present, warming her icy hands by the fire. "Yes, they'll say, it's all part of God's plan for mankind!" quipped Rudolph. Uproars of laughter resounded across the room.

Cursed are the peacemakers

Slacktivist has returned to his insightful critique of the Left Behind books. In today's installment, slacktivist: L.B.: Cursed are the peacemakers, we crack the Antichrist code. If your name is Nicolae Carpathia, and you're for peace, disarmament and multilateralism, you must be in league with the devil (or at least John Kerry).

W is for War Crimes

This Washington Post editorial states the obvious with refreshing clarity: your American military is systematically torturing prisoners, and your American govrenment has systematically lied to cover up the extent of abuse.

a holiday season haiku

stringing christmas lights --

evidence of squirrel

on the porch railing...

pellets of shit

Guide to the Logical Fallacies

In a darkening world drowning in floods of coercion and crass manipulation, it may be quaintly academic to speak of logical fallacies, yet Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies is an old site worth revisiting, if only to remind ourselves that human minds once attempted to think with consistency and accuracy. In a future composition class, I'd like to craft an assignment wherein the students must apply one of the fallacies to the rhetoric of advertising, PR, politics, journalism, or religion, that they might begin to understand not just that these discourses can lie and mislead, but how.

Buy Blue

At Buy Blue , you can compare retailers' political leanings. Consider boycotting those who give money to blood sucking conservatives.

high minded

"What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience, to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry." -- Basho

Writing about sex ... badly

Tom Wolfe wins the Literary Review's Bad Sex award for 2004. Aside from Wolfe, several ample, buxom, and voluptuously profane samples of bad sex writing finalists are available for your onanistic perusal.

Works Cited

God bless my students. You've got to love the way they mangle their Works Cited pages. I am not the pedantic sort, so while teaching the basics of proper MLA formatting, I rarely groan with anal retentive fury when they inevitably make a mess of things. Instead, I smile and remember that I too was once a freshman -- clueless, preoccupied with matters more organic, impulsive, hormonal, and soulful than the exacting standards of academic documentation. I dutifully identify mistaken patches and hope that, in time, they will develop a higher awareness of good MLA style before graduation. From the current batch of research papers, I have logged many variant titles used on the Works Cited page. Our benchmark rule is to place an underlined title Works Cited centered at the top of the page. Now, onto the creative violations, with commentary in brackets:

• no title [The vanishing act: "Works Cited has left the building..."]
  
• Works Cited (not underlined) [the slightest of oversights...]
  
• Work Cited [the "all is one" version ... works gone singular, monotheistic documentation dogma?]
  
• "Works Cited" [ironic quotation perhaps?]
  
• Work Sited [work was seen, located, left uncorrected]
  
• WORK CITED [aggressive declaration in ALL CAPS]
  
• WORK CITED PAGE [in case you forgot what that thin surface of dried pulp was in your hands]
  
• Sources Cited [alternative word choice]
  
• Bibliography [old school word choice]
  
• References [unreformed APA student who refuses to cross over to the humanities dark side]
  
• Works Citied [metropolitan version, perhaps a metrosexual flourish?]
  
• Work's Cited [errant possession]
  
• Woks Cited [oriental cooking version, and my current favorite]
  

I'll Be That Girl

Duffy and Page of the Barenaked Ladies are great at writing nerdy, bouncy pop songs with deep-hued undertones. Take for instance, "I’ll Be That Girl" from the album Stunt.

Words & music by stephen duffy & steven page

If I were you (and I wish that I were you),
All the things I’d do to make myself turn blue
I suppose I’d start by removing all my clothes,
Tie my pantyhose around my neck

I’ll be that girl -- and you would be right over
If I were a field, you would be in clover
If I were the sun, you would be in shadow
And if I had a gun, there’d be no tomorrow

If you will not have me as myself,
Perhaps as someone else
Perhaps as you I’ll be worth noticing
Then even a eunuch won’t resist
The magic of a kiss from such as me

I’ll be that girl -- and you would be right over
If I were a field, you would be in clover
If I were the sun, you would be in shadow
If I had a gun, there’d be no tomorrow

It’s time to kick off your shoes,
Learn how to choose sadness
It’s time to throw off those chains,
Addle our brains with madness

’cause we’ve got plenty of time
To grow old and die
But when at last your beauty’s faded
You’ll be glad that I have waited for you

When you’re done
With being beautiful and young
When that course is run, then come to me

I’ll be that girl -- and you would be right over
If I were a field, you would be in clover
If I were the sun, you would be in shadow
If I had a gun, there’d be no tomorrow

By turns quirky, light, yet the song is laced with black comedy and dark, ironic inversions. It's like Dylan in "Positively 4th Street", singing "I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes...." Same idea. Only here, the Ladies want to salvage a love song out of the roleplay wreckage. Good stuff.

Anti-ad browsing tip

If you haven't replaced Internet Explorer with Firefox, please do so right away, then come back to this website. It's widely known that Mozilla browsers do a great job blocking the popup ads. Just go to Tools/Options/Web Features and click it on. But here's another nifty trick I learned. Under Web Features, if you click on "Load Images" and click on "for the originating web site only". You will find that slow loading ads from sites like doubleclick won't load. For those of us on ancient hardware, this is a blessing. Try it out. Go to your favorite webmail site and watch the banner ads vaporize.

Follow the bouncing degrees

Saint Nate is hot on the trail, outing phoney baloneys with degrees from diploma mills.

Meanwhile, in Ohio...

Here's an OK update at The Free Press on electoral shenanigans in buckeyeland.

Shortcut to fresh literary produce

Ploughshares, the literary journal has archived a bunch of their content for free perusal. Alas, they don't have everything linked. What led me to the site was ahunt for the original 1982 publication of Raymond Carver's "A Small Good Thing" in Plougshares. Unfortunately, none of Carver's stories are linked. Rats. There are, however, plenty of other excellent writers' works available, which makes the Plougshares site a bountiful resource for supplementing my required lit text.

Literary DNA

The Paris Review - Interviews has more than 50 years of literary wisdom to share. I'll likely be using this site with my Intro to Lit classes in the Spring.