If this works, I should have a new comment doohickey.
(Where's our good friend modus ponens when I need him, dammit?!)

Taught my second GRE class today. My teaching instincts are starting to come back, and I felt very good up there today. I like my students, and as far as I can tell they like me and are satisfied with the course so far. I still have timing issues--we ran long for a second straight session--but I'm hoping that works itself out, and if it doesn't, well then at least it's better than having content issues.

DEK and I went to see Confessions of a Dangerous Mind after class. OK, it's far-fetched and probably a bit over-directed (if you can find a scene with normal lighting, you're doing better than I am), but I loved it. Amazingly fun movie experience. Best last line of a movie I've seen maybe ever, or at least since the last time I watched Casablanca. The only downside is that the song "Palisades Park" is totally ruined for me now. For life.

From the Grad School Ruins Your Life File #37:
Dad and I watched Barbershop last night, and I thought it was very funny, especially the scenes revolving around the stolen ATM machine, which were excellent slapstick and physical humor. So, then, why did I spend the latter part of the movie and a good while afterwards thinking about Jurgen Habermas? The short answer, of course, is the subtitle above this paragraph. The longer version is that Jurgen Habermas is the pre-eminent thinker behind the idea of the public sphere as a literal place where ideas spring up for a modern, Enlightenment community because of the possibility of unfettered free thought. Habermas in particular studied 18th-century European coffee houses as a place where the intelligentsia would meet to discuss and advance political ideas.

So what does this have to do with a contemporary slapstick African-American comedy? As it turns out, Cedric the Entertainer's main serious speech toward the end of the film on the value of the barbershop in the African-American community very closely mirrors Habermas' ideas about coffee houses. Cedric says that barbershops have been the place in African-American ghetto communities where men could congregate and really say what they felt about anything and anyone, away from the measured tones required toward mainstream culture, and where constructive and public-yet-private self-criticism in particular is possible. Admittedly there is something a bit sexist about this (though Toni Morrison's Jazz in particular shows a similar dynamic in beauty parlors), but I can't help but feel that there's something to it. I'm not sure how many institutions like this we have in our culture, and Cedric's speech really makes it clear what is at stake when they are threatened with extinction.

Jesus do I need to start dating or something....

You can throw out the record books when Andre Agassi faces Rainer Schuettler. I thought Schuettler was a no-name journeyman, but then I found out that he once won a Qatar Open. You can find the Qatar Tennis Federation here. Anyone have any thoughts on why men's tennis might be struggling?!?!

My first Kaplan GRE class last night went off without a serious hitch, though it was fraught with minor hitches, most of them related to the fact that it was about 2 degrees outside and snowing. Also, I wasn't planning on the 15-minute logistical course intro from the center manager, so I had to squeeze for time, and as a result I managed to flub the very first problem we did. After that, though, things settled down and I think everything went fine. I have six students, three of whom are international students, so unfortunately my powers of pop culture reference will be effectively neutralized in the classroom. Then on the way home, I felt like James Caan at the end of the real Rollerball as I drove amongst the scattered carnage on interstates 70 and 79. At one point I wasn't even sure if I was looking at the aftermath of a three-car accident or a two-car accident and a distinct one-car accident. Bad times.

I've really gotten to the point with The Onion where I don't read many of the stories and editorials, because a lot of them simply reiterate the joke of the headline a number of times. However I'm glad I read the Muppets editorial this week, if only for the quote: "I am trying to contain my Don Music-like frustration at your arrogance." Those of you who see me in person can count on that dropping into conversation at some point, for better or worse. What I do read every week without fail is The Onion in History. Anyone who has spent substantial time reading 50+ year-old newspapers (i.e. people with advanced degrees in history) would tell you that it is pitch-perfect almost without fail week in, week out. This week's highlight: Lenin's sympathy with "the Russian soldiers who died by the Kaiser's hand in the winter of 1916, many from anus-related injuries."

Finally, one of the things I've done to keep warm is put together a CD of music I associate with L.A., specifically new wave '80s music that received heavy airplay during '80s shows on STAR 98.7, which I listened to frequently. I post the playlist here, knowing the horribly mockery that this might--and by all rights should--subject me to:

• "Goody Two Shoes" by Adam Ant
• "Suddenly Last Summer" by The Motels
• "Major Tom Coming Home" by Peter Schilling
• "A Million Miles Away" by The Plimsouls
• "Anything, Anything" by Dramarama
• "Hold Me Now" by Thompson Twins
• "Wouldn't It Be Good" by Nik Kershaw
• "The Promise" by When In Rome
• "Forever Young" by Alphaville
• "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran
• "Opportunities" by Pet Shop Boys
• "Life In a Northern Town" by Dream Academy
• "Let Me Go" by Heaven 17
• "Back on the Chain Gang" by The Pretenders
• "Pretty in Pink" by Psychedelic Furs
• "Lips Like Sugar" by Echo and the Bunnymen
• "Brand New Lover" by Dead or Alive
• "A Little Respect" by Erasure

No, I swear, I'm not gay, no, seriously, stop laughing at me!!

I stopped watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for about two years, and I've started again this season. Now I wonder how I ever could have stopped. The reasons I love Buffy, and the reasons why Anya is one of the great supporting characters in TV history are summarized by this quote fro last night's episode: (Context: She's telling a potential slayer why she should be happy about this new calling.) "Now you're part of something larger. It's like being swallowed......by something larger."

I finished Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian earlier today. This is one of those books where you can feel its greatness even while you are completely distasteful of the experience of actually reading the thing. This book falls solidly in the revisionist western genre; no one wears a white or black hat, everyone's racist, everyone's violent, nobody's likable, and most everyone dies. The body count of this book is astronomical. This is not one of those books that reverses dichotomies either--the Mexicans and Indians are no worse, but no better than anyone else either.

I love the revisionist Westen movie genre--some of our truly great movies are films such as Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. And the New Western History is a significant development in American historiography. This book is very much in that vein--though as literature it's also very flowery and ponderous--but I wouldn't recommend it unless you really want to devote your undivided attention to it for a while, and you have no squeamishness about constant brutality.

Starting tomorrow I'll be teaching my first GRE class for Kaplan; wish me luck...

I'm basically just posting to test something out. (With a bit of luck, the red area in the left-hand column will now say something other than "This is where you stick random tidbits of information about yourself". Finally.) But since a smattering of content is always good, check out Ted Barlow's blog, particularly the week of January 13-17, which was devoted exclusively to political and media-related light bulb jokes. Very good times, folks.

I had dinner last night with the Infield-Harms who were in town for a long weekend from Madison, Wisconsin, where they report it has been consistently warmer and less snowy than here. Grrr. But it was a very nice time, over quality Mexican food. Most of my conversations of the "intellectual community" type nature lately have been online or via phone, so it was very nice to have one face-to-face with dear friends. I was also reminded of my rule of Mexican food, how you can tell something with some level of authenticity from something utterly devoid of it. (Yes, I'm looking at you Taco Bell and Chi-Chi's, and yes I also realize that post-modern and post-colonial theory teaches us that "cutural authenticity" is a highly problematic concept, and yes I still realize that grad school ruins you for real life.) It comes down to one thing--pork. If you can order pork (pork barbecue does not count), then it is a real Mexican restaurant. My carnitas burrito was very tasty.

While I'm on Mexico and authenticity and intellectual community and whatnot, my latest read is Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr. The backstory to this book may be as interesting as the book itself--heiress to the enormous Huntington railroad fortune goes back to school to get a writing degree from Stanford as a senior citizen and publishes a first novel in her 70s to wide acclaim. The book itself is about a middle-aged California couple who decide fairly abruptly to move to rural Mexico and try to re-open the husband's grandfather's old copper mining concern. We are told right from the start (page one, in fact) what is going to happen--the business proposition will be successful, but the husband will be given six years to live and will prove that prognosis to be accurate. So the book's quality will rest not on plot and suspense, but on character and style.

While I've talked before here about how my thinking is heavily influenced by post-modernism and thus a recognition of multiple epistemologies, when it really comes down to it it turns out I'm very much a rationalist--tolerant of other ways of thought and critical in many ways of unbridled rationalism, but ultimately choosing the rational most of the time. Given that, I tend to be annoyed by a particular literary device prevalent in a lot of writing by white people about white people in Third World countries. That is, the writing wherein the locals' customs and beliefs never succeed in influencing the white (usually American) outsiders, but we as readers see the uncanny mystical forces looming constantly and ultimately, inevitably, winning. The "gypsy curse" is a common way this plays out--authors don't include gypsy curses that ultimately prove completely wrong. I like this kind of writing when it delves into the beliefs and (especially) practices of the locals to show that they aren't just mystical, pre-modern savants but are actually people living in the real world whose apparent mysticism is at least partly a cover for closely guarded local knowledges that do make sense if you know how to interpret them. Perhaps another way to think about this is in terms of this question: Are the locals fully developed characters, or are they just local flavor?

When it came down to it, I felt like this was really Sara's (the wife's) story and the locals by and large were just local flavor. I don't want to say they were pure stereotypes or to put a racist reading on the Mexican characters, because I think Doerr presents them as a wide range of human character archetypes; but I do ultimately fell as if they were archetypes without much depth. Sara is a solid and somewhat memorable character, the book is breezy and the prose flows, and I give Doerr credit for not making Americans good guys and Mexicans bad guys or vice versa. But ultimately I was hoping for a bit more--maybe in particular something about the ways that having foreigners living among them changed the local villagers and changed the foreigners as well; instead I felt that they lived side by side and had contact, but didn't really affect one another on a meaningful level.

On today's games, it seems that Oakland and Philly are almost universal consensus picks, but it's worth noting that it's been six years since both home teams won the conference championship game, and it's been 9-10 years (I'm not sure about Dallas/Buffalo II) since both number one seeds advanced to the Super Bowl. Just something to think about, in case you have any inkling that Philly might suddenly get cold or Oakland might suddenly get old.

And if the Eagles and Raiders do have a Super Bowl XV rematch next weekend, maybe we can finally get Harold Carmichael on the cover of ESPN The Magazine...

OK, not a doozy of a review as promised yesterday, but still a doozy of a book. Thomas Pynchon writes two kinds of books: (a) crazy-ass paranoid books in a fun, rollicking style, and (b) crazy-ass paranoid books in an unreadable style. It turns out that Vineland falls into category (a). Through characters such as a hippie burnout, his daughter, a government goon, and a super-ninja white-chick, Pynchon tells the story of post-World War II American social history--the sex, the drugs, the TV, the music, the politics, and most emphatically the paranoia. I can't even begin to give you a digest version of what goes on here, but from the beginning to the end I was completely enraptured. In Vineland everything is a drug--drugs, of course, but also power, TV, quests, love, lust, etc. Appropriate, then, that I found it thoroughly intoxicating.

No blogging for several days now. I guess my mind has been busy with other things such as watching football, wondering about my future, and thinking up about a million and a half Pete Townsend/"My Generation" jokes.

I saw Adaptation on Saturday, and it played with my head a bit too. I don't know if it's as mind-bending as Being John Malkovich was, but it is pretty trippy. Chris Cooper's is one of the most unique characters I've seen on celluloid in a long time, and while it's a bit of a cliche I'll still say that I admired Nicolas Cage taking the risk of playing the Kaufmans, so very different from his typical roles. I was even a bit discombobulated for a while after seeing it, to the point where I couldn't even really get into the Steeler game for about a half, which is odd for me. Also, it had some moments where I was the only one in a somewhat crowded theater laughing--moments I always enjoy--in this case, some funny meta-commentary basically on what's going on in the screenplay as it's happening in the movie. I particularly enjoyed the screenwriting teacher interrupting a long voiceover narration with a harangue against the use of voiceover, leading C. Kaufman to wonder (in voiceover) whether he should use voiceover.

My weird discovery of the day: the Bud Dwyer fan club. DEK and I were just joking after the Steeler-Brown tilt that Butch Davis' press conference might have a Dwyerian feel to it. Also, I realize the cool parts of the Internet are the parts where someone has taken their lifelong, or at least long-term, obsession and turned it into something fun for others to look at for ten minutes. In that vein, courtesy of TopFive.com's links of the day: TV Crossovers and Spinoffs; note in particular the utterly freakish Group 2.

I haven't posted much personal in a while, and I'm not sure how much I want to right now. I decided a while ago that I really wanted to focus on getting a job in DC, but all efforts in that direction have led not much of anywhere. I'm trying to decide whether I need to throw myself into the fire, try to get some family support to just move and then find work, or whether that just has even bigger disaster written all over it. The problem is that I've convinced myself that the only reason I'm not getting the DC-based jobs I apply for is that I'm not local, but I don't really know if that's true or not. I'm also starting to realize that living at home is not going to make me have a sudden nervous breakdown--it's just going to continue to push me further into low-grade depression, angst, and sloth. This is not good, but the lack of sudden impending crisis keeps me from taking any drastic measures. It also doesn't help that one voice in the back of my head keeps saying that I never should have left L.A. and thus I should try to go back, but that's just not feasible at all right now, and also I don't know whether I really miss L.A. or just a particular time and set of circumstances and people there that are no longer in place. What this adds up to is a big ol' case of option paralysis, combined with my propensity for inertia; maybe I just need to read Generation X again! Sadly, I don't think my answer is going to be that simple.

No book review today, as I still have 40 pages to go, but tomorrow or Thursday I should have a doozy of one--possibly the best novel I've read since Infinite Jest in '97.

The latest book I finished was Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. This book was exhibit two of how graduate school in the humanities ruins your life. (Exhibit 1 came while watching football last weekend when I deconstructed a not-particularly-noteworthy commercial in about 5 seconds and then explained it out loud for a minute and a half--and did so without really trying.) All I could think about during this book were the strange echoes of eugenics, "scientific racism", and racial physiongnomy that kept popping up--as they will in books from the 1920s--and I could never drown this out long enough to just enjoy the book. The alternate explanation is that the book just wasn't that enjoyable, which is also possible. And part of it is probably that I have very little interest in reading about Catholic faith. Still, I loved My Antonia, so this was a big disappointment. I just don't think Cather understands the place and times (New Mexico in the 30 years after Guadalupe Hidalgo) to the same degree she did the Nebraska prairie of her own youth. Perhaps if you've never read anything about downtrodden, oppressed people this book will have something to say to you, but since grad school screwed me up for real life by making me read that sort of thing for four years, this book didn't tell me much, and I felt like there were a few things I could tell it.

As for the new job, not much to report really. So far so good, but next week the deluge will start. In the meantime, I'm stuffing envelopes, typing, copying, filing, blogging (ok, not technically in my job description), and teaching myself the parts of Microsoft Office that I don't already know.

I started the new temp assignment today. I am the secretary for the Secondary Education Department at California University of Pennsylvania. This could be a very long-term assignment, though of course I am looking to escape for a real job in a real city ASAP. But it looks like I'll be here in the meantime. I don't know exactly how sick the person I'm replacing is, but I heard the voicemail message her husband left the department to report her absence, and the gist of it was:
"Hi, This is x; y is in intensive care and has been for several days. She's had a lot of internal bleeding and they're having trouble stopping it. Once she starts to recover, she'll have to be at home for three or four months, and then she'll have to go back in for surgery to get her colon put back in. Etc..."
In other words, long-term assignment. It's very very uncomfortable knowing that the only thing that would abbreviate the assignment is the non-zero chance that the person I'm replacing will die, and thus they will actually hire a full-time person. There is also a non-zero chance that I would be that person; I'd still look for a better job, but at least I'd get benefits while I looked.

Sadly, there is no D-Mart, but there is a Subway.

As for the actual work, it's very light right now as I get settled in, but next week the semester (i.e. the chaos) begins....