overease

Virginia.

Coming up: two one conferences in two weeks, one of them in another country; prospective student visiting; new class with overflowing enrollment due to rock star co-teacher, great topic, and own inability to say no to students; multiple reading courses also due to said inability; administrative hiring decision to make; grant proposal to submitboyfriend to pay attention to; edited volume introduction to finish writing; papers from last quarter still to return; letters of recommendation to write; um... blog to keep up with?? Yeah.

I know it's spring when Slim the cat looks out the window and makes her little bird call. "Eh'-eh'-eh'." It's impossible to write phonetically. It's like the meow has curdled and broken up in her throat. The question is, is she trying to attract the birds by imitating them? Is she JUST SO EXCITED at seeing the birds that she can't help but cry out, but knows at the same time that she has to be quiet if they're going to come near, so she tries to quash the cry? She wasn't even at the window this time--she was on the ottoman looking up at the windows above the mantel. Maybe it was the sun she was greeting, not a bird at all.

Now she's sitting on my lap right now as I balance my laptop precariously on the end of my knee. With both paws and all her weight, she's trying to hold down my right arm as I try to type. She's purring like a lawnmower.

It's nice that spring is coinciding with school starting up again after the all-too-short "spring" "break." If it weren't for the nicer weather, I don't think I could bear it.

How the right's morally absolute, pro-life-at-any-price approach works in practice.

Not only did Tom DeLay agree to pull the plug on his comatose father, he was then a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the maker of equipment that failed (the apparent cause of his father's accident). Yes, one of those "frivolous, parasitic lawsuits" that raise insurance premiums and "kill jobs."

I've been trying to formulate a partial response to the "women and politics" question that's been all over the blogosphere these days. Where are the women opinion writers in the MSM (mainstream media)? Where are the women political bloggers? I think we've dispatched the second question; they're here, and they've been here for a while. I'm going to talk here about the narrow spectrum of political discourse that's available in the American MSM, and I'm going to talk about it as if the blogosphere is the same. They're not the same, but even though blogs are more diverse in certain ways, they reflect the same narrow spectrum partly because of money; the average income of people who read and write blogs is just a hell of a lot higher than the average American.

Along with the "quota of one" mentality, there's the fact that many intelligent and politically aware women and people of color are just too far to the left for the narrow MSM spectrum. What are the options for marginalized groups in this society? Either despair, or try to imagine a kind of society that's totally different from what we're living with now. Neither attitude is likely to get you published in the MSM. The world we live in now is considered the only reasonable answer by the white-upper-class-male-dominated discourse, whether it's center-left, center-right or libertarian. If you divert from it even a little, you are by definition unreasonable. Reason equals capitalism; or rather, reason equals our current brand of capitalism. The orthodoxy is that capitalism is not only inevitable, but the only economic system appropriate for a democracy. Because capitalism is about freedom, see?

Yeah. It's about the freedom of corporations to use governments to their own ends. It's about the freedom of corporations to manipulate the news, and, possibly, the vote. It's about the freedom of corporations to pay starvation wages all over the globe and force countries like the US into a race to the bottom. It's about the freedom of corporations like Halliburton to steal our tax dollars. It's about the freedom of corporations like Shell to hire thugs to murder activists. It's about the freedom of corporations like Bechtel to declare a monopoly on collecting rainwater in Bolivia.

And it's about my freedom to buy stuff.

It's not about my freedom to choose to breathe clean air or drink clean water. It's not about my freedom of speech. It's not about my freedom to have a public sphere free from buying and selling in which civic discourse can flourish. It's not about my freedom to organize a labor union.

The MSM discourse is Candidean: this is the best of all possible worlds, because it is the one we have, and anyway, anyone who proposes any changes to capitalism is unreasonable. A lot of journalists have taken Economics 101, or the equivalent, and so what they know about economics is this oversimplified version of classical liberal economic theory. When Adam Smith formulated the invisible hand, he was dealing with a completely different society; what we have now is nothing like early modern capitalism. Yet everyone seems to have accepted the dogma that markets necessarily work to create the best possible society. It's circular reasoning: free markets create the best possible world, thus, this is the best possible world. Never mind that we don't actually have free markets. Any complaints you may have about this society are out of the bounds of reasonable discourse -- by definition. With the fall of the Soviet Union, there's no longer any even symbolic space of critique of capitalism. So we've accepted not only the idea that capitalism is inevitable and inevitably universally victorious, but the picture of "human nature" that this gives: the central rule of human nature is maximizing personal benefit. Hence the inability of Republicans to comprehend how senior citizens could still be opposed to doing away with social security when they're being promised that their own benefits won't be tampered with. Hence the rejection of anything that questions the idea of "human nature."

It almost seems as if, ever since we redefined corporations as persons, we've actually redefined our notion of human nature to model it on the behavior of corporations. I don't actually know very much about this, so readers, please correct me if I'm wrong, but according to the film The Corporation, corporations are actually required by law to maximize short-term gain for shareholders. So we require the behavior of corporations to be as much against the general public interest as possible, and then we claim that this is how humans behave by nature, so any efforts at organized social change are contrary to human nature -- hence lacking reason.

What's the answer? I don't know. But now that this debate has brought new attention to women political bloggers, we might consider using the slightly bigger platform to develop an alternative vision that's not simply reactive -- a picture of the world we would like to inhabit.

And then there's the other option: despair. This is just to reiterate something that Feel Tank Chicago has already said. But maybe depression, at least sometimes, is a form of resistance to the view of human nature that says it's all about maximizing personal benefit.

I remember thinking this a few years back. My pet goat. Election 2000. Elian Gonzalez. Disney's Celebration. Tourist shootings.

Now Terri Schiavo.

What the $%@^&* is going on in Florida? Is it a mirror of American insanity, or is it just living its own peculiar insanity?

***Note: I am not saying that everything that comes from Florida is bad. I am saying that everything bad comes from Florida. Hyperbole, yes. But can anyone dispute it?

Magical Trevor is back. He may have been back for a while, I don't know, 'cause nobody told me.

I don't have a whole lot to say today...just go read this article!

Republicans want to take over the cities now.

In which we learn that the main problem with the way cities are run these days is that the welfare queens (yep, they're still populating the fantasies of wingnuts, long after the death of welfare) and the schoolteachers--terrorists, remember?--are raking in "great rewards" from graft.

Gosh, it wouldn't be casino operators or real estate developers or major league team owners or anyone like that getting handouts from cities? Nah.

Speaking of secondary issues (in re: this on women in the Middle East)...

It used to be city air that made you free. Now it's a shopping bag with a New York address. Look! Woman in burka with Saks bag. She must be free now. In fact -- we have freed her! She doesn't hate our freedom! Especially since she gets to enjoy watching scantily clad Western concentration camp victims* -- I mean models -- I mean tourists -- frolicking in her country. They love us models in her country. Oh wait, it's HER country that's the victim of OUR occupation and torture camps? What country? Never mind. One of those Arab places. It's so exotic. Buy some clothes.



*Yeah, I'll admit, I haven't quite worked out the right tone here. Don't mean to trivialize the Holocaust. But see, I don't think I can avoid the reference, since somewhere in between "Stadtluft" and "Einkaufen" there was "Arbeit." And hell, the models do look pretty darn starved...

Last week, within the course of three days, three separate people approached me with stories that necessitated giving them money. The first had lost his wallet. He was, he assured me, a UPS driver and needed to get the bus home. The second had had her purse stolen. She had no food to give her children and had to be at work in an hour and a half and cereal was 5 for $10 so that meant $2 for one box and it was pre-sweetened so that would help, and so she just needed to scrounge up enough to buy a box of cereal for the kids and maybe some milk. The third had just had his toes removed and needed to hustle (his word) money to get the bus to his mom's house. He showed me his foot. He did indeed have no toes. I didn't believe that he had just had them removed, but I did feel bad for him. Unfortunately, all I had was $20 bills, because I had just given all my change to the lady who needed the $2 box of cereal.

Even if I don't believe the stories, I believe these folks are in need of money, and I usually give them a little. I give it to them so as not to look them in the eye and tell them I don't believe them and that it's because they look poor or desperate. I give it to them because they've told me a plausible story and it's too humiliating to me and them to claim not to believe them.

But still: Three in as many days? Has someone recruited a bunch of people to do this kind of work? Am I looking like a particularly good mark these days? Or are there actually more homeless people around desperately scrambling for a little loose change?

I've got it; it's the solution to everyone's problems. We just need to allow Terri's parents to clone her. They'll get a new daughter -- brain intact and everything. They'll even catch the bulimia before it becomes a problem this time, 'cause they'll know it's coming. The cloning process can't cost a whole lot more than the taxpayer money Congress is already spending on this, can it?

OK, OK. It's really sad what's happened to Ms. Schiavo, but it's nauseating (Kevin Drum is right for once) what the U.S. Congress is putting us all through over her.

"Americans think death is optional." I first heard this phrase in a radio interview with Jane Walmsley, but apparently it's an "old saying" (at least according to a 404'd page of the Beloit Daily News).

I love my cats, but if people are going to spend $50,000 and wreck the lives of numerous other animals in order to have a clone of a dead cat, because they can't stand not to have [what they imagine to be] THAT VERY SAME ANIMAL, I suppose it should not surprise me that Terri Schiavo's parents can't let go. If I were them I'm sure it would have taken me a long time to let go. Maybe it would have taken fifteen years. I don't know. Here in America, we spend obscene sums of money to keep bodies alive that in any other time or place could never have survived. How did people, how DO people, in those other times and places deal? Here in America, we think we can buy our way out of tragedy. We think it is such an outrage when we are bombed on our own soil that it is right and just that we must multiply the outrage against innocents many, many times "in return." We have become Nietzsche's Alexandrian culture: a stale, ossified people who kill because they can't bear the thought of death. We have no sense of tragedy--which is our tragedy. It means we blind ourselves to the beauty and fragility of life. Hell, maybe even the sanctity of life. The sanctity of life does not mean preserving alive a brain-dead shell.

I can't help thinking about the people dying in Iraq, kids growing up in poverty here in the US, and all over the world, and the only thing Congress can think to do to "affirm life" is demand that a person in a persistent vegetative state testify before them. Maybe it's because they identify; their own brains have also turned to fluid. Maybe it's America that's a persistent vegetative state.

But leaving that aside, what I want to know is this: are they doing this mainly to attack abortion rights? Or are they doing this mainly because they will not rest until our courts are a wholly owned subsidiary of Creepo DeLay & Co.?



Addendum: I JUST LEARNED that the Senate voted unanimously for this obscene intervention.
OK, OK, they weren't all there. Further note: Actually, only three of them were. Good grief.
But still.
Have they no decency?

U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney spoke at the University Church in Hyde Park last night. She's a fantastic speaker, not to mention a very courageous politician, and there was a big, diverse, and responsive crowd.

I learned a few new facts.

--Did you know that only 11 of 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus supported the reinstatement of Rep. McKinney's seniority when she was elected again in 2004 after having been defeated by crossover Republicans in the 2002 primary? Reinstating seniority is a standard practice when a member is returned to Congress, and this was a decision of the Democratic Party; the Republicans had nothing to do with it.

--Did you know that when armed thugs attacked and burned Jean-Bertrand Aristide's church in Port-au-Prince in 1988, they did it on September 11? (This was mentioned by a questioner who also implicated the CIA in the attack. Interesting, to conspiracy theorists, since Salvador Allende was also assassinated on the eleventh of September, in 1973.)

--Did you know that the enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act will expire in 2007 if it is not renewed? Then we'll be in really deep trouble.

McKinney also talked at length about her questions about September 11, 2001, most of which also appear in this transcript of her questions to Donald Rumsfeld et al.

I also heard some people in the next pew talking about an activist friend of theirs who is 105 years old, and worked with both Al Capone and Paul Robeson. Wow.

McKinney was going to have to go back to Washington today to vote on the Terri Schiavo thing. As I made clear (below) I can't even begin to deal with this issue dispassionately. The actions of the congressional Republicans are almost more disgusting than I would have believed, even of them.

An announcer on WBEZ just stated that Chicago police said that 1000 people marched in the protest in Chicago yesterday and that 5000 marched in protests nationwide.

Um....?

Why don't the fuckers "uphold human dignity and affirm a culture of life" in Iraq?

Omigod. Check this out.

It's a pretty well-designed parody site about how Kerry supporters are all communists.

I discovered this while trying to find the origin of the term "capitalist running dog" which I'd mentioned in conversation with Goatdog recently, while mulling over the term "pig dog." Dogs, all dogs!

Speaking of running, they have running discussion implicating George Bush in Kennedy assassination. They also avoid all use of articles in imitation of, I guess, Russians.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I've been following all the hullaballoo in the politics blogosphere about whether there are any women writing any political blogs of interest, which is a pretty depressing discussion to have to be having. I have some thoughts of my own about the closed system of blogosphere discourse and its center-left-libertarian slant, which I will attempt to share with all two or three of my own readers (hi there, you, you and you!) in a long post to come -- soon. But as one symptom of this, I notice that none of the sites I tend to read have made any mention of the second anniversary of the beginning of the US war in Iraq.

So, here, I make note of it. I commemorated the event by going to the "huge" anti-war protest supposedly taking place in Chicago. I was feeling pretty depressed this morning as I dragged myself downtown. I couldn't get anyone to go with me. I have a lot of work to do and didn't really feel like going, but I thought I'd feel worse if I didn't go. See, it's all about feeling bad. Why so much negative affect associated with these events? Is it because we go through daily life partitioning away the sheer awfulness of this horrible, illegal war, and it's only in protests that we realize a) just how awful it is and b) just how little we can do about it? Anyway, by the time I got to Bughouse Square I had worked myself up into a lather of political depression. The march was starting in the Gold Coast, where extreme poverty and extreme wealth rub shoulders, which made for an especially depressing approach: the smell of human urine mingling with Chanel. I was hoping to run into people I knew, but nobody seemed to be around; there were maybe 100 or so people standing around the park, looking gray and bedraggled. Earlier that day I'd exclaimed blithely that there was no chance of rain; now it was starting to look like snow. There were more people on the way, but I didn't know that. All of a sudden, from out of the blue, came the Human Television Network, the folks who brought us the bicycle-mounted TVs with creative Bush clips ("terrorism. terrorism. terrorism.") at last year's protest. This year, however, they were with a marching band. An acquaintance of mine was with them, and when I said I was feeling depressed about the protest, he said, "why not join us -- here, take a flag!" I donned a red workshirt and picked up a green flag and joined the color guard. We marched in loose formation with an improvised twirling routine (everyone took turns leading the march, and we were a little rag-tag -- we weren't all always in time or in formation -- but, I think, pretty impressive all the same). Suddenly, I wasn't depressed. Why? Well, it was so darn much fun. It helped to be in a group, but it also helped to be part of something that shows the world that it's the right and not the left that's full of sour, dour, self-righteous angry assholes. It's the much-vaunted (in my activist art readings) carnivalesque. And it made me happy (not to mention tired--good tired). Maybe the left can be cooler, and more fun and joyful, and politically acute at the same time. Depressed? Try joining the color guard.

So, in all the time I've had this blog I've never noticed the felicitous homophony of its title with a certain set of organs existing in the human (but not only human) female. I was so hung up on the fact that originally I'd wanted the title "over easy" and it was taken by someone else on blogspot who was, scandalously, making no use of it. Sheesh. It even fits with the "egg" theme. Speaking of which--whatever happened to "egg, the zine," you may ask? It went the way of my free time.

I'm planning a few new substantive posts, I promise. Whenever I get that free time back.

Wolfowitz at the World Bank??? What next -- drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Oh, wait.

We in the Feel Tank are mulling over whether to produce a "sorry everybody"-style website full of people shunning the Butcher of East Timor. Or, we considered calling for an end to this sort of foreign aid that leads to brain drain of our best and brightest. Let's bring him back to academia! (Surely some university can come up with a cushy non-teaching post for him, freeing him from the chore of influencing young minds.)

I dunno. I think we need to fine-tune the rhetoric. Suggestions welcome.

Howard Dean says the Democratic Party needs to "embrace pro-life Democrats." Great. The party can't embrace a more populist platform because its corporate paymasters won't have it, so it sacrifices women instead.

I know this is extremely pedantic, but I just have to get it out of my system. I've been irritated lately at all the people I see in visual arts fields trying to press Emmanuel Levinas into service for a visually-oriented ethics because of his emphasis on what he called the "face to face." Levinas was actually a fairly anti-visual philosopher. He used the term "face" mainly as a metaphor for speech. Why he chose that metaphor is odd and interesting and worth discussing, but you can't just claim that he was in favor of a visual encounter as the ground for ethics. That may be your idea, but it wasn't his: for him the responsibility for others is about speech and reason, not vision. So here are some quotes from Levinas's Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (you can tell where he got his own writing style from!), Duquesne University Press, 1969. Maybe someone somewhere will google Levinas and find this and find it useful.

"The calling in question of the I, coextensive with the manifestation of the Other in the face, we call language." (171)

"Transcendence is not a vision of the Other, but a primordial donation...The 'vision' of the face is inseparable from this offering language is. To see the face is to speak of the world. Transcendence is not an optics, but the first ethical gesture." (174)

"The face, preeminently expression, formulates the first word..." (178)

"the welcome of the face which language presupposes" to be distinguished from "the look" (189)

"It is art that endows things with something like a facade -- that by which objects are not only seen, but as as objects on exhibition...But in it is constituted the beautiful, whose essence is indifference, cold splendor, and silence....[The transcendant] is the face; its revelation is speech." (193)

"Inasmuch as the access to beings concerns vision, it dominates those beings, exercises a power over them. A thing is given, offers itself to me. In gaining access to it I maintain myself within the same. The face is present in its refusal to be contained...It is neither seen nor touched -- for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object..." (194)

"The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation..." (201)

"This attestation of oneself is possible only as a face, that is, as speech." (201)

"Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse to words takes place already within the primordial face to face of language." (206)

"If the face to face founds language, if the face brings the first signification, establishes signification itself in being, then language does not only serve reason, but is reason." (207)

This week I went to my first meeting in weeks at a local antiwar organization I've been sporadically part of for a few years. This is an interesting group--eclectic, erratic, multigenerational, dependent on the labor of people with time: retired and unemployed folks, some students, people who work odd hours. I like that it's a kind of oddball neighborhood group. I've never been able to put as much time into it as I would have liked, although I've also always had the feeling that I would be very frustrated were I to get too invested. I've sometimes gotten very frustrated that we insist on being polite to people who rant on and on about things that are incidental to the group. But we do. This week a woman was there who discussed her theory of how poor countries need Shedd Aquariums to relieve some of the pressure of the water that causes tsunamis, and how she was writing up a proposal to this effect and was hoping that people would take up her proposal. Something about praying the rosary was in there also. Anyway, now it appears that she wants to put "homelessness and unwed mothers" on our next agenda. She's not on the email list, so her proposal was forwarded by another group member who ran into her. Another new member chimed in that she would really like to discuss "homelessness and unwed mothers." I objected strenuously to the term "unwed mothers" at some length in a response: this usage is classist, (hetero)sexist and potentially racist. Now I'm suddenly wondering in what ways the group has changed in the time I've been gone. There was a big interfaith meeting organized by some group members that may have brought in some of these new members; or maybe they've been coming for some time (it's been a few months since I've been there). Is the group being hijacked by people with a religious agenda? There was one guy there I thought might be a cop; is this group really significant enough to be infiltrated? Am I getting paranoid? Is this just the normal evolution of any leftist group that insists on a principle of openness? Is this an argument against my feeling (see below) that Space X should be more open to chance encounters?

Today I took my students to an alternative "art" space. I put art in quotes because the people who run this space do all kinds of other things besides what's recognizable as art. Let's call it Space X (names changed to protect the innocent). We had a long and interesting discussion about what goes on there. My students were asked to think up new ideas of projects or events that could use Space X. The students immediately hit upon the issue of relations with the immediate geographic community (as opposed to a larger arts and intellectual community, dispersed throughout the city, that makes use of the space). The neighborhood Space X is in, like many neighborhoods, is undergoing gentrification in a pretty intensive way. Some of the events and workshops they hold attract local people; some don't. In the middle of the discussion an older African-American woman (the group inside was mostly, but not all, white) knocked on the door and asked why it was always closed and why there was never anyone in there, which was interesting, because the impression I get from the organizers is of a vibrant space where there's always something going on. But her perception was that she walks by every day, during the day, and there's never anyone there. And it's a storefront space, so she expects it to be open. Open to what? She went on to say that her son had been in prison for sixteen years and she wanted to talk to someone about it because he was about to get out. One of our hosts, Marianne, told her that Space X would be open to the public on Friday evening and that she could come back then.

I wonder: is this a missed opportunity? A missed chance to have some dialogue with someone in the community -- under a different definition of community? To see what it is she thinks Space X is actually for? It's not necessarily the responsibility of the organizers to invite her in and have a talk with her about her son, or whatever. Maybe she was confused about what the organization could offer. It's not a counseling service or a community organizing headquarters or a job program. Now, I'm sure things would have been different if my class hadn't been there -- our hosts would have invited her in for a chat. Then again, Space X doesn't keep regular hours, so if my class hadn't been there, nobody would have been there. But when we open up the definition of art to include all kinds of things, why not unexpected dialogue? And how can we allow that to happen?

I'll tell you, it is really weird to hear one's own voice come out of the radio. I only got to hear a single sentence of the broadcast this morning, because I had to go to a meeting. I'm not sure I can bear to download the segment. But I am assured it was actually on. Someone I met at a lunch meeting today said, "Hey, weren't you on public radio this morning?" (A grad student. Remember, I said only grad students listen to this program...) Now I am experiencing that same nervousness as when I was being interviewed, only worse: I can succumb entirely to nervous anxiety because I don't have to use any of my adrenalin to actually perform.

It took me a while to take note of this, but it's my year now, so I'd better make good use of the next 11 months.

The following are the top ten searches in my "friendster" network.

1. free tarot readings
2. wet hunks
3. tips on flirting
4. height and weight calculator
5. zodiac love match
6. korean singles
7. Manolo Blahnik
8. jewish single
9. how to win an ex back
10. custom sweatshirts

Um, so how many people I know (or people who know people I know) are actually doing the search "wet hunks"? Are these really the ten most frequent searches, or are they just the ten most recent? Is this even for real? Or is this just a marketing strategy generated by friendster?


P.S. OK, maybe the latter, and I guess it's not a ranked order. It says "popular searches," not "ten most popular." I reloaded, and the following list popped up:
1. free mp3 songs
2. polyphonic ringtone
3. zodiac love match
4. motorola razr
5. body language flirting
6. love spells
7. nokia 6230
8. adidas shoes
9. gifts for women
10. louis vuitton bags

I am all set to get my one minute of fame this Friday (at least that's the plan as of now) when a segment in which I am interviewed about an exhibition I helped curate is supposed to air on the local-interest mid-morning show of the local public radio station. Note qualifiers. We're not talking prime time here.

Thank goodness this was taped and not live. But let me tell you something about being taped for the radio: have water with you. With all the talks I've given you would think I'd be used to the physical effects of nervousness. But a roomful of people is nothing compared to tens of thousands of transmitting devices. (With any luck, those transmitting devices are not connecting to ears. Who listens to public talk radio at 10:37am? except maybe grad students? note to anyone hoping to listen: I don't know the actual time it's supposed to air.)

So, my mouth was like an ad for baby diapers. My mouth was its own private Sahara. We were taping in the museum, so I couldn't bring my water bottle in with me. Every time I got to stop talking as the interviewer asked a question I had to make frantic efforts to produce saliva. (Sorry if that's too much information. You may be aware that bodily fluids are an academic specialty of mine...)

Part of the reason for this experience might be that I've been taking small doses of a new medication. Silly me, I didn't stop to check whether "dry mouth" is a side effect. The last time I was on a medication that of which "dry mouth" was a side effect, I told the doctor that it dehydrated me. "It's not dehydration, it's DRY MOUTH," he snapped back.

On the radio, remember, your voice is the only thing you can use to make a meaningful contribution. I had worried that my throat might be a bit scratchy. I was assuming, incorrectly, that the sound emerging from my throat would actually make it into the open air. If your mouth is so dry that your lips are sticking to your teeth and your tongue is glued to your palate, this is a problem.