Happy New Year

Perhaps the most difficult thing about being a professor is the final grades of fall semester. For me, there's no getting around the fact that my judgment ruins a fair number of people's Christmas. The joy and relief of being finished with a semester, and the long slog of grading final papers, is always tempered by the plaintive emails and meetings with students who will suffer rather harsh consequences from--in almost every case--their inability to simply follow directions or consistently submit even substandard work.

Intellectually, I can acknowledge that I don't fail people in my course; they fail themselves. Yet for some, the material results are sometimes devastating. The student who cannot graduate. The athlete who will lose a scholarship. The stakes are depressingly high for some, and no matter how often I remind myself that it is the student's responsibility to manage that risk, the solitary, quiet moments inevitably bring to mind imagined conversations with parents, blank stares at a mirror wondering what in the hell they will do next.

Tim Russert, Unemployed in the Afterlife, Finds Heaven

It's nothing like the representations earthside.
No clouds, no glittering showers of gold sunbeams.
Rather, it's very functional, as one might expect
processing so many souls.
We queue up on smooth concrete, stained a pleasing green.
The walls, also concrete, are smooth and cool.
They tower a bit much, but alternately suggest
confident authority. A well-run bureaucracy.
It reminds me of Switzerland.
At my window--a nice granite counter--
the woman regrets that there's little call for
relentless interrogation.
"Deception, equivocation, prevarication...
these rhetorics are without force, I'm afraid.
Truth is the norm."
She suggests oral histories, many stories to be documented.
I leave with a Marantz PDM 670 recorder.

Birthday

I turned 39 this last week. One more year to churn out all those things I wanted to do before I am 40.

In a nice moment of synchronicity, the copy of Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers arrived. I'm one of the contributers. Although I wrote the essay almost four years ago, it was nice to see it finally in print. It made me feel a bit nostalgic for the time when I worked at that level.

Actually, it was more like an ex-smoker getting a whiff of a smoky bar. I read my essay (which was like reading for the first time, since it had been so long since I'd looked at it) and a few others. What I came away with was how much I wanted to get back to that peak level of thinking. I've been doing some work since leaving my small college: book reviews, an interview, clever emails. Yet nothing has been on the level of the academic essay or, should I ever get back to speed, the book. I miss that in more ways than I realize. Especially when I think that I left my job because I wasn't doing what I wanted to do, nor being paid enough to compensate for the lack of real thinking.

I was probably wrong on that count. As you don't miss what you've got until it's gone, I realize now how great my experience was at my little college. But then again, I don't miss the poverty and the rather predictable, and bland future that it promised. I think we made the right decision to leave, but I still haven't found the intellectual outlet I need. I'm still want for the very thing that pushed me out of Nebraska.

That said, I did have a nice weekend at a posh resort, with wine, swordfish and crisp sheets. It was a good place to turn 39.

Now back to finishing that novel before next year.

Why I'm Voting Republican

It's OK to vote for Obama because he's black

cieux.autres@gmail.com has sent you a link to an article on Salon.com:

"It's OK to vote for Obama because he's black"
I'm voting for Obama because he's qualified, charismatic and progressive -- but his blackness seals the deal.
By Gary Kamiya

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/02/26/obama/index.html

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Your friend's message:

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Sent on Mon, 25 Feb 08 19:48:45 -0800 from IP: 68.110.71.108

10 Signs A Book Might Be Written By Me � ReadingWritingLiving

I saw this at ReadingWritingLiving and as usual, can't resist a meme--especially as I slowly write a novel.

In no particular order...

1. It will seem highly derivative of Pynchon, Powers, and whomever I happen to be reading the day I wrote that chapter.

2. There will be an architect in it.

3. Tangents will take over any plot line before finally circling back round.

4. The character names will either be grotesque or ridiculously banal.

5. The narrator will insist on narrating about the landscape ad infinitum.

6. There will be lists and lists and long lists.

7. There will be long stretches of non-fiction that will make the reader wonder what happened to the characters.

8. Someone will likely take a pot shot at religion.

9. The boy will get the girl. Unless he doesn't.

10. It won't be finished.

Re: [learningexpedition] Re: Park Day -- Granada, 2/19/2008, 1:30 pm

Okay,

Here's my plan.  We need to get centrally located, all of us in one compound.  We stake out one of these apartment complexes going condo in the Scottsdale area.  Then, when these fat cat capitalist realize that the crappy housing market has made their business plan a complete mess, we move in with guns.  And we don't even need big guns.  They'll be so demoralized that squirt guns with black paint will get it done.

After we secure the area and evict all the lawyers, restauranteurs, and periodontists, we lock down any entrances with abandoned Hummers.  We throw up those long skinny succulent things that people use as fences.  Ocotilla or something.  Plant them all around the complex, and then dig a moat behind them.  Just like Robinson Crusoe only deeper.  And put dead cactus in the moat.  And maybe a javelina or two.  How do you spell javalina?

We slap up solar panels on the roof, cause you know they'll come after us by cutting the power.  Water will be okay because these places have pools (ref. Hotel Rawanda).  This will hold us over until the monsoon when we can replenish.

No one's going to attack in the day.  Too risky to Scottdale's image. But at night we put the teenagers in corner units, like gun towers.  They never sleep anyway, so they'll have the night watch.    We'll make it a project. They can learn basic trig. through firing angles, physics by analyzing bullet rotation and drift.  History, we'll look at the great sieges of history--Masada, Fort Apache, Waco, Ruby Hill, Stalingrad, Die Hard.  During the day, the can write poetry and read the Charge of the Light Brigade.

We outfit the cars a la Road Warrior.  We've probably got half a dozen mini vans that we can convert to tankers.  My Civic we'll soup up with nitro so we can create diversions.  Call it the Phasar or something cool like that.  Anyone named Max gets a free shot at driving it.

Securing the center, we all have easy access to El Dorado, Chaparral, Train Park, Papago, Chesnutt, the dog park, the new park, spring training, the new water treatment plant, Motorola, the CAP, Kazmirez Wine Bar, and the library.  Any one of which we could occupy and hold indefinitely. 

Who's with me?

Cieux



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Valentine's Day

My online classes had an assignment due on Valentine's Day, so I jokingly suggested that for extra credit they should tell me why the holiday should be abolished.  Instead I got this.

http://www.newsday.com/video/?clipId=2194360&topVideoCatNo=94932&c=&autoStart=true&activePane=info&LaunchPageAdTag=homepage&clipFormat=flv

And yes, I choked up, but only just a little bit.