All Is Telling

Re: Hello !

2011-12-11T08:03:00.001-05:00

Reply this week

On Wednesday, July 13, 2011, Bougreau Stephane <Stephane.Bougreau@fr.gt.com> wrote:
> Hi Peter
>
>
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> Are you fine ? What's about your thesis.
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> I hope your exam is now behind you and you can enjoy your vacations with Coni and children in you new home.
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> Peace
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> De : Pete Rorabaugh [mailto:prorabaugh@gmail.com]
> Envoyé : lundi 16 mai 2011 15:55
> À : Bougreau Stephane
> Objet : Re: Hello !
>
>
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> Hi Stephane,
>
> Things are going well, but the last several months since we talked (in December) have been really packed. I have been writing continuously to complete my dissertation (thesis). I finish this week, then I have 3 weeks of a waiting and a defense (which is a meeting where I answer questions about my project).
>
> Coni and I found a house wanted to rent, got married, and moved in with the kids over the last 2 weeks.
>
> So, all of this together has meant that I have been very busy. I apologize for not staying in better contact. In another week or two, after I sent in my final draft, I will have a much more normal schedule.
>
> How are all of you guys?
>
> Peace,
> Pete
>
> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 1:52 AM, Bougreau Stephane <Stephane.Bougreau@fr.gt.com> wrote:
>
> How are you ?
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> What's new about you and your family ?
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>
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> Peace
>
>
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> Stéphane Bougreau
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> Associé
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> Membre français de Grant Thornton International
>
> E     stephane.bougreau@fr.gt.com
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> T     +33 (0) 2 99 84 28 28
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> P     +33 (0) 6 10 19 69 32
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> W     www.grant-thornton.fr
>
>
>
>
> --
> Pete Rorabaugh
>
> Brittain Fellow
>
> Georgia Institute of Technology
>
>

Twitter

2010-10-20T10:45:00.002-04:00

Tying the blog to my incipient Twitter account, which I guess is kind of like going fully public online. I expect to keep lurking in the shadowed alleys of Facebook avoiders. Even online communities have their margins and outliers.

Twitter: @allistelling

2010-08-17T10:23:00.001-04:00

Georgia Tech bathrooms smell refreshingly like Necco wafers sometimes. How?

Ha Ha Tonka cancels solo tour dates after Mar. 3

2010-02-26T00:20:00.001-05:00

It's not bad news, except for those of us who will miss them (read: me and some other Atlantans on Mar. 5). According to their manager, the folk-rockers have signed on to play on a different tour that will give them more exposure. More on who you can catch with Ha Ha Tonka as details are released.

Surfer Blood at Criminal Records, Atlanta, Feb. 19

2010-02-19T19:13:00.003-05:00

Unfortunately we missed the actual show at the Drunken Unicorn. You can watch video clips below for the following songs (or pieces of songs) at the mini-show inside Criminal Records, Little 5 Points:

Floating Vibes
Swim
Twin Peaks
Take it Easy

Surfer Blood seemed young, fresh, and charmingly unprepared for the kind of attention that the media machine is throwing at them. Their percussionist has the most interesting and developed stage presence, but you can't tell much from a short, free record store show. I will pay attention to their next effort because I still can't get a couple of their guitar hooks out of my head.

You can see clips from other shows I've seen in the past year on my YouTube channel, here.

Surfer Blood washes into Atlanta this Friday

2010-02-16T11:31:00.003-05:00

Surfer Blood, from West Palm Beach, FL, is touring behind their debut album Astro Coast, released last month. They will be playing the cozy Drunken Unicorn in Atlanta this Friday, Feb. 19.

Surfer Blood has filled an interesting niche in my music diet for the last couple of weeks. Though they garner comparisons to Weezer or Built to Spill, they scratch the itch left by Ambulance LTD, whose first LP several years ago left me dazed and satisfied for months. They build nicely layered, thick, sound walls and smart concise hooks. They have passed our immediacy test, remaining equally interesting to me and my three children (whose musical tastes are diverse). Check out their single "Swim" here; everyone writing about them calls it anthemic, and I can't disagree. My favorite track, however, is "Floating Vibes" because it's rich in surf punk reverberations. Pitchfork's review of the album is here.

Next week's music post will more than likely about Nneka's "Concrete Jungle," released two weeks ago. With comparisons to Tracy Chapman, Lauryn Hill, and Neneh Cherry, I just could not resist pulling it down from Emusic today. Here is a New York Times review of a recent performance.

Snow in Atlanta . . .

2010-02-12T13:52:00.002-05:00

. . . is like a fish that needs a bicycle. Or something.

Doc Chey's opens in Grant Park today!

2010-02-08T15:15:00.002-05:00

Peace, love, and noodles for all!

Madeline, Ha Ha Tonka, and some musico-literary analysis on the way

2010-02-05T10:14:00.004-05:00

Madeline - WonderRoot, Atlanta - this Sunday, Feb 7

Madeline Adams and the White Flag Band are touring behind a new EP. Madeline herself has several solo albums and has been performing live music since she was 15. She hails from Athens, GA, and builds sweet folk melodies with intimate and sometimes serrated lyrics. I have made vigilant attempts to feminize my music catalog over the last three years. She is ranks in the top three, next to Thao and Kimya Dawson. I am excited to see her this weekend.

Ha Ha Tonka - The Star Bar, Atlanta - March 5

These guys are an eclectic mix I have been digesting and re-chewing for months. I grabbed their first album off of Emusic just because of the cover art, the title (Buckle in the Bible Belt) and 2 of the 30-second track previews. Since then, my oldest son and I have become strong fans. Their newest album, Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South, is richer and more mature than the first. The band's songs are powerfully literary; they construct the rare experience of a unified aesthetic product. As the concert grows closer, I plan to post short pieces of scholarly reflection on a handful of the newer songs, maybe one per day for a week.

For anyone who needs an introduction, Ha Ha Tonka have live sessions you can listen to on Daytrotter and HearYa. The narrative of their time in the HearYa studio and Woody's excitement about introducing his son to the band struck chords with me.

When you least expect it . . .

2010-02-05T08:45:00.002-05:00

. . . the carpet-raptor may strike. Ouch!

At the end of kid-times this week, we have lots of things to remember: roller-hockey gear inauguration, KNEX dinosaur set exploration, Pop-Pop's 4 hour wooden owl project, peer-tutor success, sloppy joes, Astro-Boy, reading together at night, earlier bedtimes, chocolate-covered pretzels, awaiting Doc Chey's openingin the 'hood, and the Avett Brothers (again).

Rise and shine wood-chuck chuckers . . .

2010-02-02T11:42:00.002-05:00

. . . put on your booties, 'cause it's cooooold out there.

You want a prediction about the weather? You're asking the wrong Phil. It's going to be cold. It's going to be gray. And it's going to last you for the rest of your life.

Just a quick blog tribute to one of the 3 best comedy movies of all time. Where do you see yourself in five years?

Snow mountain and my dad's rapier wit

2010-01-31T18:20:00.000-05:00

Here's what you find at Snow Mountain, all of which is machine-fabricated, for $25/person:

Snow Mountain is really a way for Stone Mountain, Georgia to make money when it's cold. Today, my Dad said, "You know what that is," gesturing to the Stone Mountain carving:

"It's the biggest second place trophy in the world." Sharp, that one.

J.D. Salinger's passing and cultural shadows

2010-01-28T15:00:00.000-05:00

J.D. Salinger has passed away, and the New York Times obit is here.

What I have read on Salinger over the years makes him out to sound like a rather ornery person to deal with, raising the issue that art does not necessarily inform character. Of course, the harder someone tries to stay away from public attention sometimes, the more ways culture finds to tell the seediest stories.

Who, other than Salinger, gives English teachers more of an in-class rush than the analytical moment in Catcher when we can break down the meanings of Holden Caulfield's name during the rye field dream sequence? I have done it several times, and, though it's cheap thrills, it always gives me chill bumps.

Here's a quick brainstormed list of figures, actual and fictional, who bear the stamp of Salinger's influence:

Thomas Pynchon - Reclusive novelist
Cormac McCarthy - Nearly reclusive novelist, reforming a bit as of late
Max Fischer - Prep school flunky, hypocrite barometer, and genius in Rushmore
William Forrester - Reclusive fictional novelist in Finding Forrester

Help me make a more comprehensive list. Who else?

The Lovely Bones . . . review on the way!

2010-01-26T12:21:00.002-05:00

AiD 3: Partial Faiths provides more than a partial boost

2010-01-25T23:51:00.001-05:00

Adventures in Dissertating, Ep. 3:
In my rodeo-roundup of library books today to fuel the completion of my introductory chapter on (Augustine, Kenneth Burke, sermons in American novels, Greek and Roman rhetoric, and postmodernism) a bunch of stuff, I came across this gem of a book from 2007:

Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison, by John A. McClure.

Is it is the most promising academic treatment of some of my subject matter since The Rites of Identity (which marries the work of Ralph Ellison with the theory of Kenneth Burke). After a cursory and breathless read of the introduction, I am excited about McClure's use of and constant redefinition of postsecularism. Here are some sharp excerpts:

"These novelists [Morrison, Erdrich, and DeLillo, to name a few], whom critics often relegate to separate domains within conemporary fiction, are all thinking in the narrative mode about postsecular movements and possibilities that the theorists and sociologists treat more abstractly. All of them tell stories about new forms of religiously inflected seeing and being. And in each case, the forms of faith they invent, study, and affirm are dramatically partial and open-ended. Tey do not provide, or even aspire to provide, any full "mapping" of the reenchanged cosmos. They do not promise anything like full redemption" (ix).

And . . .
"Certain features are constant across the field of postsecular texts. The partial conversions of postsecular fiction do not deliver those who experience them from worldliness into well-ordered systems of religious belief. Instead, they tend to strand those who experience tem in the ideologically mixed and confusing middle zones of the conventional conversion narrative, zones through which the conventional protagonist passes with all possible haste, on his way to a domain of secure religious dwelling. And yet the postsecular characters depoisted in thse zones do not seem particularly uncomfortable there nor particularly impatient to move on to some more fully elaborated form of belief and practice. In a similar manner, the break with secular versions of the real does not lead the postsecular narrative to the triumphant reapprearce of well-mapped, familiar, religious cosmos, as it often does in conventional narratives of conversion . . . One does not sense, in spite of the dramatic instability of the worlds thus defined, that either the novelists or their characters are anxious to 'straighten things out.'" (4).

And finally . . .
"I want to sketch out a map of the broader postsecular movements with which [postsecular fiction] is engaged. These movements -- including the explosve growth of fundamentalism and the pneumatic forms of organized religious practice, 'New Age' experiments in alternative spiritualities, and the turn toward religion in certain philosophical circles -- all reflect a strong but selective disenchantment with secular values and modes of being and a determination to invent alternatives. The novelists whose work I explore share this disenchantment and determination: they seek at once to evaluate the culturally dominant modes of postsecular innovation and to develop their own religiously inflected alternatives to secularism. With what specific practical and theoretical projects, then, are contemporary postecular novelists in conversation?" (7).

What projects, indeed. How about a rebuilding of the ethos and formalized structure of the Christian sermon to create newly charged postsecular sermons that continue the tendency of American novels toward the "sermonic urge", evident in the fiction of Ellison, Updike, Morrison, Erdrich, and McCarthy? Thank you, Mr. McClure.

By the way, you know you're an egg-headed geek when language like this has the effect on you that Indiana Jones did, when you were a kid. Sheesh.

AiD 2.5: Fresh meat for the research machine . . .

2010-01-25T18:47:00.003-05:00

. . . but they're so pretty, so maybe I won't eat them.

Music Monday: Hear Ya and Daytrotter are indie radio

2010-01-25T08:52:00.002-05:00

I grew up, like most people older than 22 or so, learning about new music by listening to a 20th century device called the radio. Radio in the car, radio at home. They even, at one point, made a radio that you could carry around and listen to in privacy; it was called a Walkman. I remember that in elementary school, Casey Kassem was my guide to what was popular.

Later on, in high school, I wanted to listen to what was important so I went backwards to The Beatles, The Clash, Paul Simon, Bob Marley, The Rolling Stones, and Run DMC. I left the radio behind; now my choices were fueled by word of mouth and album reviews.

In college, I settled on the rubric that I have kept, in various forms, ever since: "what is new and fresh that I can eventually see live?"

The music-blog-cum-studios Hear Ya and Daytrotter have become, if not how I always hear about new music, at least the way that I am introduced to new sounds. I never read blogs before I started a blog. Now I regularly digest bands by listening to the streaming MP3s or downloads these sites offer. If I like it, I buy it, somewhere, because I am still picky and guilty about listening to something more than a couple of times for free. Finally, writers on both Hear Ya and Daytrotter have mentioned the joy of introducing their children to the music they love, a passion that I share.

Hear Ya is a well-styled blog because it is streamlined, has a consistent editorial voice, and demonstrates impeccable taste (mine, by the way, fails on at least two of these accounts). The work of the site is compiled by several writers in different cities and one studio (in Chicago) where bands who have garnered Hear Ya favor are invited to play. The most enjoyable part of keeping with Hear Ya, for me, is that the main writer, Oz, poses interesting questions on the music he's spotlighting. Good music writing can seem like a close cousin of thorough literary criticism with a more populist edge, and Oz's writing in particular achieves this quality. He and Hear Ya have introduced me, in the last six months, to the Avett Brothers, Surfer Blood, and Justin Townes Earle, while supporting already-interests in the Rural Alberta Advantage, Port O'Brien, and Ha Ha Tonka. Also, Oz just moved to A-town, so we may even bump into each other at a show.

Here is a link to Hear Ya's top 25 albums of last year. It's quite a list.

Daytrotter's site has a more academic and aesthetic feel, though it's also a blog/studio collaboration where musicians are invited to come play songs that are then posted on the site. The band art on Daytrotter is beautifully consistent, florid, and iconic. One day, I want Daytrotter original paintings in my house of my favorite bands. "This is the Daytrotter Room," I will say, nonchalantly, as my guests gawk at the beauty and significance of the images and sounds there collected. Sometimes I enjoy the Kerouac-ian introductions the site gives the bands; sometimes they are a bit wordy. But Daytrotter promises to "contribute to the musical landscape, not just toss it around like a used book or a stolen pick-up line," and I will keep paying attention to the bands it chooses and the music they make there because it's always rich.

Kudos to Daytrotter for engaging, some months back, my open-heared love of Thao and the Get Down Stay Down. Here's a link to her session last year and here's a link to the Rural Alberta Advantage's session.

Twitter, Cicero's advice for Obama, language wars, and Patti Smith's "Augustinian" memoir

2010-01-20T08:59:00.002-05:00

Twitter isn't something I take interest in, except to review what massive volumes of people are tweeting about in order to take the pulse of trends and news. I have never received one; I have never sent one.

Today's article in Forbes on political oratory, Obama's Afghanistan speech, and the rhetorical genius of Cicero may be the first piece of writing that ever made me interested in Twitter. Author Trevor Butterworth does not praise Twitter's functionality but suggests that, even in the sound-bytten Twitter-age, we can continue to attend to style, arrangement, and diction. Amen.

Butterworth's pulse rises when he chastises journalist and writing guru William Zinnser's claim that the Latin root words of English are the "bad guys" and the Anglo-Saxon ones are the "good guys." Butterworth writes that "This, to use an apt Latinism, is illiterate," and proceeds to school Zinnser in his folly.

As a sidenote, I have not read Zinnser's piece in its entirety yet, but it looks plenty interesting. You can find it here. How can we not pay attention to people picking fights about language? I am expecting that most writing teachers, or college instructors in general, would be plenty curious to read an article titled "Writing Good English" published in The American Scholar, whether they agreed with it or not.

What gem-like properties we may find in this essai in Forbes on what Cicero may teach us about speeches and tweets . . . 118 characters -- my first (imaginary) tweet. Super.

Also, rock-n-roller Patti Smith's memoir of her young adulthood with artist Robert Mapplethorpe looks delicious, as reviewed on the Barnes & Noble website, here. The book is called Just Kids, and, according to reviewer James Parker, describes "two strange Catholic children, quite un-at-home in the world, treating each other with heroic tenderness, heroic generosity."

Smith was interviewed on Terri Gross's show last night, and her description of Mapplethorpe as a young guy was beautiful. Smith's 46 minute interview on Fresh Air and a fetching picture of her are available here.

Tower Tuesday: The adjunct caste system

2010-01-19T18:27:00.002-05:00

This article, from The Chronicle of Higher Ed, discusses the evolution of the economic and academic tier system inside higher education. One's economic stability (or instability) as an individual, it argues, contributes to whether one has free time and funds to go to conferences that, ultimately, make one a better professor. Adjuncts who are trying to break into full-time faculty positions may be economically prevented from attending conferences, even ones at which they can interview for the faculty jobs they so highly prize, by the fact that their pay is so low.

One of the comments on the article reads this way:
"Looks like we have reached a tipping point, finally. It wasn't too long ago that Mr. Croxall's paper would have been considered career suicide. Admin would have viewed him as a petulant whiner. "Take it or leave it" would be the official response. He would have been ignored or shunned by his peers (other contingent faculty), who had hope still that things would get better, at least for them. The appalling statistics can no longer be ignored. Folks have been silent too long--universities can no longer claim to be forwarding social justice when contributing to increased social injustice for the majority of its faculty."

As someone who has taught as an adjunct and a GTA for the better part of six years, I can attest to the economically abysmal conditions that exist for higher ed teachers who can't break into full-time faculty positions. The systemic answer is: "You chose this for yourself -- with all of that schooling, you could have been a lawyer or a doctor." And that's true. There is a difference, though, between hitting the top of the economic food chain and finding yourself, in a professional sense, at the bottom.

Admittedly, the increasing difficulty new PhDs are having finding their first job has contributed to my less than rational malaise about completing my dissertation. I don't know whether that's just personal reflection or a trend felt by others.

Adieu, one day, to the Regents' Exam?

2010-01-15T14:35:00.006-05:00

The Board of Regents of Georgia's public university system will now allow universities to petition to opt-out of the Regent's Exam. To petition successfully, a university will have to show the BOR it has an alternative measuring standard in place. The Regents' Exam is a reading comprehension and essay test that has been in place in Georgia since 1972 and that most folks at GSU have been wanting to give the boot for years.

Read the formal BOR announcement here.
Read the AJC article here.

When/if it happens at Georgia State, will it be good riddance? Will its erasure create new problems?

Puzzling . . .

2010-01-15T14:17:00.001-05:00

. . . why is the coolest thing at the Imagine It Children's Museum this tile pattern on the bathroom floor? A) It's really quiet in there. B) No unchaperoned kids are throwing sand at you. C) All of the above. D) I'm old.

I thought I was taking my kids to the dentist . . .

2010-01-14T16:28:00.002-05:00

. . . but the Yanni, the flower arrangement, and the hushed conversation convinced me I'm in a funeral home.

The Black Keys' mutant music; Vampire Weekend and the uncertainty of immediate gratification

2010-01-14T11:44:00.001-05:00

This should be a Music Monday, but I missed the mark. Better late this week than delaying another week. Next Monday, I can be more on top of Tune Mountain.

I have slowly digesting all of The Black Keys' albums, but I really like them. I can close my eyes and remember all of the reasons, as a high school student just opening up to new genres, why I loved Robert Cray, B.B. King, and Robert Johnson. Maybe these guys have the same experience. Maybe The Black Keys are a mutant lab generation of Kurt Cobain crossed with John Lee Hooker.

Both Spoon and Vampire Weekend released albums this week, and Spoon's went up as streaming free downloads on NPR's site before the official release. Vampire Weekend did the same thing on its MySpace site. Now, I know that Radiohead kind of lead this online free/pre/release rampage with In Rainbows, and I know that streaming something is different from giving it away, but I am still not sure how I feel about. Here are a few quick thoughts.

As a consumer, I feel like I have too much freedom. Yes, I said too much. I know it's strange. I am thinking of the medival-sounding article I put up several months ago from the former Duran Duran member, lamenting the old days when the release of an album or appearance of a band meant something exclusive, something you really had to get stirred up for. Now, bands I have enjoyed in the past release relatively hyped albums, and I just feel . . . eh. I will get to soon. I will listen to that album for free at some point this week . . . or next . . . if I like it, maybe I will download it. Maybe I will borrow it from someone else.

Now there are still artists for whom I will stand in line to shell out duckets sight unseen for an album or a show (if the duckets exist). The Decemberists, M. Ward, (recently promoted), The Avett Brothers, Thao, the Rural Alberta Advantage, Mos Def . . . um, David, Byrne, Paul Simon, and Tracy Chapman (yes, I am old). But beyond that, the second tier just stays interesting. Like a set of clothes that can just be changed.

Is there less magical mystery to music that is quickly and freely delivered? If so, does that make me the most underground capitalist ever. Yikes!

All is Telling on the interwebs

2010-01-10T12:53:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I feel like I am juggling too many balls with the blog, that I need to scale back because, as a whole it's not that enjoyable. It's too much jigsaw.

Then again, I like jigsaw!

HearYa is a music blog I have been following for several months. Its main editor Oz linked to my review of the Avett Brothers show because he is also a big fan. I should definitely show you his; you can read it here. Honestly, it's a much better review -- more thorough and with more background about the band. Great job, Oz. Here is a link to his discussion of whether the Avetts have become "mainstream" and how feels about it.

DIYFather, to which I sometimes contribute my parenting articles, posted my review of Where the Wild Things Are from two months ago. You can see the review on DIYFather here. Their site is also advertising a new website geared for the single parents called iSingleParent.com. I have not had time yet to check it out, but plan to.

I hope to get back to Music Mondays tomorrow, perhaps with some lines about The Black Keys, who have recently earned my curiosity. I will start (Ivory) Tower Tuesdays with an article from the Chronicle about the abysmal state of affairs for adjunct profs in the humanities.

AiD, Ep. 2; Fr. Mapple, the sermonic urge, and so-called postmodernism

2010-01-10T12:51:00.001-05:00

Adventures in Dissertating, Episode 2:

Yesterday and today's writing took me from the Augustine-Kenneth Burke section of my introduction, through a brief introduction to sermons in American fiction and postmodern theory. This week, I am fleshing out the cannonical American fiction sermon section, spending time with Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, Huck Finn, and The Scarlet Letter. Please, webpals: feel free to jump in to suggest important novels with sermons that you think I may be missing (prior to 1950, at this point)!

I am working steadily on the right language to describe the boundary-moments I am most interested in: how Augustine drags rhetoric into the Christian sphere; how Christianity transitions from illegal minority sect to the empire's religion . . . and compare them to . . . how traditional fictional sermons in American novels changed after the (arbitrarily drawn, at this point) 1950 boundary of postmodern thought, and why studying these changes are worth any academic energy at all. They, of course, are important; it's just the justification part that is tricky so far. Maybe mostly because I have not written the example chapters yet to arrive at my conclusion.

The last day of writing has been spirited but different. Yesterday day was thorough, included lots of citation and opening books. Last night/this morning has been machine-gun typing with lots of mental notes, like: I'll look that up later, I know where it is. I think I started to see, for a short time, where I was going more clearly, so I had to get there before the end of the weekend.

AiD 1.5 or Chew small bites thoroughly

2010-01-05T14:56:00.001-05:00

Adventures in Dissertating, Ep. 1.5

After my first diss. discussion meeting, some reflections to remember:

1. I can assume that my readers don't know a ton about the history of sermons or their history in American novels. Explain it; don't assume it.

2. Break things into pieces. If my introduction should be 10 pages (on the weird magic formating I use to trick myself), then 3 to Augustine, 3 to Burke, and 3 for American fiction might be useful.

3. If chewing into the introduction does not work right now, pull back and start in on one my novel chapters. If I do this, I would pick McCarthy or Updike.

4. Having a meeting forces a bit more writing.

Completing Augustine and transitioning to Burke, first draft style, in the next day or two.

Music Monday: The Avett Brothers in Atlanta, 1/1/10

2010-01-04T23:04:00.003-05:00

The Avett Brothers played Atlanta's Fabulous Fox Theater on Jan 1, and sad I was thinking I would miss it. These guys are a fraternal fusion of bluegrass and punk rock, but I fell for their music too late. Their first Atlanta Fox show sold out quickly and tickets were pricey. But then, we won 15th row tickets. Sweet joy.

Sally Ford and Langhorn Slim opened -- curious and interesting, respectively -- and then the curtain went down. Since we are used to playing beer bottle soccer at the usual venues where we take in shows, this was strange. When it finally went up, the Avett Brothers were chewing into their first tune, pumping their variously-sized stringed instruments, bathed in red. A Decemberists-looking pirate ship backdrop hung behind them.

Both Seth and Scott Avett define an animated on-stage presence that punctuates their folksy roots music. Seth's lanky frame, long hair, and goatee channel a kind of Dave Grohl-ishness and Scott's full-bodied singing appears elastic.

The Avetts' voices were slightly more gravelly than expected, but it WAS New Year's Eve the night before. Their harmonies were still consistently resonant. Scott's masculine twang and Seth's smoother, higher sound complement each other perfectly on their records, and the same vocal chemistry was present live.

The majority of the band's songs came from its last two albums -- last summer's I and Love and You and 2007's Emotionalism. You forget, listening to the Avett's toe-tapping, pretty tunes that they have the power to explode live. Particularly "A Caroline Jubilee" and "Kick Drum Heart."

However, the brothers' best songwriting happens on songs that are neither foot stompers or slow ballads. Songs like "Shame," "A Perfect Space," and "January Wedding" were delivered beautifully and simply with strong crowd participation. Another emotionally beautiful song, "If I Get Murdered in the City" silenced the entire theater with its evocative final verse, and prompted riotous applause at its conclusion.

Sometimes the show wasn't terribly precise, with tunings and organized crowd-sing-alongs sometimes dragging on a bit long. The delivery of "I and Love and You" was cliched, though it's a satisfyingly complex song. But the Avetts are amazing songwriters, singers, and multi-instrumentalists, and they put on an exhilarating show. Seth told the crowd, close to the concert's close, that he expected to see "each and every" one of us at every Avett show this year. I can think of worse ways to spend 2010.

Adventures in dissertating: a skeleton, St. Augustine, and intersections

2010-01-03T22:45:00.001-05:00

First, a welcome back to you (or to me). As the snow globe flurries have settled from Christmas and New Year's, I dug my plow into some dissertation writing this week. I drew lots of diagrams on a paper napkin on Jan. 1 in a revised explanation of my topic. The napkin has operated as a mental outline over the last couple of days as I have planned out the composition of my first chapter. So, welcome to one of the first posts from the dissertation adventure trail of 2010 . . .

In building a lens through which to examine the uses of sermons in American fiction, we must pay attention to several things: ancient rhetoric, the history of the Christian sermon, the development of the sermon in the U.S., the use of sermons in canonical American literature, and, finally, what those sermons have looked like since 1950. This serves as a rough chronological "skeletal" system for a study of post-1950 sermons in novels.

The theoretical system requires attention to cultural, historical, and linguistic boundaries and the motivations and results for crossing these boundaries. Boundaries to consider are between ancient pagan societies and early Christian ones; between 19th century Christian culture in the U.S. and 20th century secular, academic culture; between modernist American novels and so-called postmodernist American novels; between Cicero and Augustine; between Huck Finn and Invisible Man; between critical theory and theology.

Last tidbits from today: Augustine is my focus; reminded of the importance of Giles Gunn and Adolf von Harnack; new word today . . . hierophant.

Goodness v. Godness

2009-12-09T10:17:00.001-05:00

Religion, morality, language, and science have always created an interesting intersection for me, and plenty of other thinkers are analyzing the same 4-way stop. Here are some examples:

"It Seems Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality" by Marc D. Hauser explores the genesis for the acting rightly and hypothesizes that it is natural tendency.

"Satan, the Great Motivator" by Michael Fitzgerald analyzes the economic affects that believing in God and Devil have on various cultures.

Is Christianity Good for the World by Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson charts the aerobic atheism v. Christianity debate these two thinkers took on the road. I am in the middle of reading it now. It's short, so I will probably be finished in about 14 days.

Finally, a billboard near my apartment that has been up for several weeks reads: "Even in Hell there is Compassion." The billboards exist in Memphis, New Orleans, and Atlanta sponsored by The Compassion Project, a public art initiative intended to spark discussion of the religious (Hell) and spiritual (compassion). On the website you can leave a written comment or call in to leave a comment on voicemail (that then gets uploaded to the website). Several current posts praise the billboards, but another one threatens to "press charges" against them because they are "wrong."

The Road, 2012, and the parental urge

2009-12-08T18:37:00.000-05:00

Over the past two weeks, I took in the lastest round of cheery holiday apocalypse movies: The Road and 2012. First, you may want to check out this piece of curious cross-film comparison. I had personal reasons to see each and here is my quick and dirty analysis.

Cormac McCarthy's 10th novel, The Road, lauded by Oprah, awarded the Pulitzer prize, and optioned out for movie release within 2 years of his previous novel (No Country for Old Men), is like a icy cold jump into the void. It is not an action movie; there are no sexy bad guys (like No Country) and there are no gut wrenching chase scenes (like No Country). In The Road, Aragorn and his otherworldly son soldier through a desparate mission to find warmer climes. No living thing exists, save for a few human beings and one beetle, and the landscape exhausts your ability to name different shades of gray. Gun-metal Gray. Frozen-beard Gray. Dirty-sock Gray.

The film adaptation is as faithful to the novel as No Country was (thank you, John Hillcoat). Dialog is sparse, hunger and desolation abound, and you start warming your hands instinctively in the movie theater. If you are parent, you feel an even more intense pang, and it's a question most readers discussed after the book came out. Could you do this for your child? The man's commitment to delivering his son to a less hostile environment is juggernaut-epic, and Viggo Mortgenson solidly delivers the father's robotic commitment to species survival. He serves a gentle, mothering role sometimes too, but by the end of the movie his attempts to secure his son's protection in the face of absolute depletion are terrifyingly automated. He has become a computer function, or a biological one, that will serve its purpose until the plug is yanked. Ultimately, the film is disturbing, apocalyptically barren, and beautifully dark. It is not Hollywood.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have 2012, a film that tests the boundaries of computer graphics and believable narrative. John Cusack tries to save his two children, ex-wife, and her husband from being buried under one planet's-worth of ground. A host of things happen that one could never in her wildest dreams imagine (like the floods, earthquakes, and monument topplings), but you can witness them on the YouTube trailer. However, on that trailer, you don't see China shift 1000 miles to the south, you don't see the disgustingly sacchrine plea-for-humanity speech given by the President's surrogate, or the sneaking of a zen monk aboard a multi-billion dollar project designed to keep all of the rich people safe.

I went to see these films for two main reasons: loyalty and angst. You may already know that Cormac McCarthy, in my opinion, is the best living American novelist. Maybe the best ever. My dissertation covers his work, my shelves are full of his books and books about his books, and any film adaptation of his work is a must-see for me, whether it's good or bad. Thankfull this one was amazing. I won't heap the same kind of praise on John Cusack, but if I had a movie industry doppleganger, it might be him. Sometimes we think and talk alike, we have grown up in the same era, gone through some of the same changes, and he has been in some great movies. 2012 is not one of them; it is the worst movie he has ever been in, and maybe is one of the Top 5 Worst Movies of All Time.

How does angst relate? Truthfully, I just wanted to see all of these things break: the skyscrapers, the monuments, the culture, the language, even the earth itself. Perhaps these movies cap off a particularly angry period in my life or satisfiy a suppressed interest to watch things destroyed. Clearly, we have it in our culture, as 2012 made $65 million in its first weekend, just in the U.S. At the end of both movies, a good one and a bad one, the parental urge remains after everything else has been burned or starved or flooded away. That's comforting; kind of. One final thing . . .

Look at the dads in these two films:

Remember: sometimes the apocalypse requires a hood and sometimes it's friendlier to wearing a tie.

Parking lot purgatory

2009-12-02T14:31:00.002-05:00

Though I've taken a week off from blogging, I have lots of places to begin (The Road, dissertation ideas, and parenting pieces). For now, here's the car line at Catholic school.

Safety first

2009-11-26T15:45:00.002-05:00

The new "in-thing" this Thanksgiving is being sick, so grab your SARS masks, Swine Flu anti-venom, and slice up the bird.

Armistice

2009-11-25T12:57:00.002-05:00

I have waited a long time to write about the most intense challenge in my life over the last several years. I may write about the specifics of that another time somewhere else, but it seems important to reflect on what happened while I was waiting for it to be over.

I have had three different jobs, have slept in at least four different houses, and have been on three different health insurance plans. Other things have happened, too – I have made or re-made three sterling friendships, gained confidence acquiring new skills, and rediscovered a cultural environment where I feel more at home. I found someone who cares about me like no one else ever has.

This last part is a key point that took a while to understand. As a passionately independent person, I have never had the feeling that I ever needed anyone. Often, this inclination has had negative consequences. Regardless, people around me could be there or not depending on their preference or mine, but I have never wanted to rely on anyone. I have heard from multiple people that this means I need counseling for, but to me it seems rather self-preservative. If you depend on someone emotionally, on some level, he or she always holds the key to your satisfaction. People are often disappointing each other, so why not operate on a level where you take the good with the bad but can always walk away clean.

The relationships I have built over the last two-plus years have consisted of mutual enjoyment, trust, community, and commiseration. Ironically different from the kind of community I sought in different church communities, my urban family has supported me through my changes, my extreme feelings of failure, minor tragedies, mistakes, and triumphs. We support each other and enjoy each other's diversity. It's not a centralized community, but rather like a social octopus, with a couple of stable legs that are often picking up new people and ideas.

The closest of these relationships, the one with my partner, significant other, co-captain (however one wants to define these things), becomes more secure, comforting, and loving as time goes on. I said at the beginning that I didn't believe in romantic love anymore, that the only relevant application of the word applied in a Gandhi-Buddha sense. Love of everyone, the Oversoul (thanks to Emerson for the concept). She changed my mind and has patiently stood aside while I went without sleep, got sick, ate too much fast food, argued too much, and forgot important errands.

My blood family has offered support and encouragement to me through the process as well. From sending messages of support and embracing me in a knowing way, to listening to me spin out the tale. In particular, my mother and father have demonstrated the patience of three Jobs and, more importantly, the ability to listen and understand someone with whom you don't immediately agree.

My three beautiful shooting stars have been by my side the whole time. True, sometimes adult concerns and debates needed an appropriate editing-out, but they have shown me joy, wonder, forgiveness, and belief that I sometimes forgot existed in the world. My beliefs about larger questions have changed significantly in the last two years, but they have been the root which I use to discern goodness and truth. I read several years ago that having a baby was like hiring a zen tutor for 18 years – one that can teach you patience, sacrifice, mystery, etc. They have not failed me in this regard, and they continue to be my strongest connection to something I can only describe as holy.

If you are wondering, no, this is not the speech I am offering upon completion of my Ph.D. That one is still a ways off. But the pen, above, was the instrument that closed this chapter of my life today. It was disorienting, exhausting, and pugilistic, but it is over.

Parental fragments

2009-11-24T12:12:00.005-05:00

My recent priority of media digestion means that I skim, as fast as I can, any articles that (1) seem culturally aware and (2) mention my media triumvirate: debates on belief, parenting narratives, and independent music. Today, the Internet chefs produced a feast of parenting morsels including bad parents, boyhood studies, and the praises of being bored. Here are my parenting fragments for the day:

Time's most recent cover story, "The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting," is here.

I am reminded of a college-student acquaintance of mine who was recently expelled from his dorm for behavior un-befitting of a freshman in a drug-free zone. Now he was having to move all of his belongings back to his parents' house. Someone else close by said "That's not too bad. Maybe there really aren't any consequences for you!" He shot her a look. "Yes there are! I don't want to be there through all of both breaks! That's like torture." (I paraphrase; freshman men do not speak like this). Is it overparenting when you take your nearly-grown kids back after a mistake?

"The Puzzle of Boys," an academic review of gender-anxious psyche books in The Chronicle of Higher Education is here.

Yesterday on the phone my son was talking about how great the next couple of days would be. "I can be on the computer all day for, like, two days!" I was shocked. "Really? Doing what?" I asked. He rattled of the names of the couple of games he was looking forward to playing. I thought: I give these guys, an hour of "screen time" on a weekend day, and we don't have a television feed. How does he think he is going to play on the computer all day? I realized how much time we spend playing cards, building Legos, drawing, and reading together, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Then, I inoculated myself for the free-time debates that might arise in the next five days.

My guide and commiserator in the adventure and tragedy of (half) single-parenthood, Sandra Tsing Loh's newest article in The Atlantic, "On Being a Bad Mother" is here. I adore her honest self-exposure and the portrait she draws of her girls.

A friend-of-a-friend and a parent of a 9 year-old regularly watches The Family Guy with her daughter along with some other adult-themed programs. She purchased a book for her daughter attempting to introduce her to sex education, maybe something like this. Her daughter handed the book back to her, saying "Mom, this is inappropriate." Where have the permissive part and the authoritarian part of culture caught each other in the neck to produce this result?

Music Monday Annex: Avett Brothers meet Funny or Die

2009-11-23T20:50:00.001-05:00

Please. If you have a moment, watch this Avett Brothers video which is embedded in a hilarious faux-home-shopping-network sketch. This piece of entertainment is a genre blending gem!

Music Monday: Web tools for feeding your music appetite

2009-11-23T10:31:00.002-05:00

New technologies abound for music lovers who want to sample exotic new genres or bands they have always heard about but never obtained. Here are some web tools that have changed how I access music over the last two years of my musical re-awakening.

eMusic
I never liked Napster or its variations. I was late to the iTunes/iPod/iHaveStuffYouDon'tHave party, so I just avoided it. However, in 2007, when I was given 50 music credits on eMusic to start an account, I was immediately impressed. The music is less popular (eMusic can only get the rights to distribute music that is not major label), experimental, wickedly diverse, and wrapped in tons of great text. eMusic's reviewers recommend things that I really like, they evaluate music honestly (unlike most commercial venues), and the fans write prescient text about albums as well. Also, songs work out being about half as expensive as iTunes. When I buy music from iTunes, I feel like I am buying a coffee at Starbucks, even if it's really good. When I use my subscription credits every month at eMusic, I have the feeling that I am buying music closer to the source because of the independent ethic of the site. If you want me to send you some free credits to try it out, let me know!

My favorite new music from eMusic in the last two years: the Rural Alberta Advantage and Thao.

iTunes - the program not the store
Yes, it took me years after iTunes existed to learn that I did not have to have a Mac to use it. However, those darling Apple program developers -- it was less than a year between my first of iTunes and my first purchase of a Mac. The ability to analyze, collect, and store music in the iTunes program is fantastic. Mostly everyone knows this already, but iTunes is free to download and to use in playing and organizing digitally stored music, you can go here to grab it for free.

My favorite use of iTunes: the ability to make a getting-ready-for-school-in-the-morning playlist for each one of my kids.

Mojo
I keep wondering how Mojo is legal. When I try to log in to the server and it's down (rare), I always think, well, the music police must have gotten to them. But it always comes back. Mojo is a free program that one user downloads onto his computer, creates a profile, and then logs into the Mojo server where she can find other listeners. If you download Mojo and download it too, then we can both log onto the server at the same time, friend each other, and listen to AND download each other's music straight out of iTunes. Mojo tests my digial music ethics statement, which is becoming rather puritanical, because I am not sure how I feel about getting something I really like for free.

N.B.: The main Mojo site is currently unavailable this morning as I write, but it will be back up at some point. You can download the software here.

Music blogs
Since starting my blog a month ago, I have come across hundreds of music blogs and only a handful that I enjoy. Most of them are listed to the right as links, but primarily I like JP's blog, HearYa, Radio Exile, 17dots, and Daytrotter. These hubs are great for learning about albums that have just released (so I can turn around and download them on eMusic), artist-team ups that happen (Monsters of Folk), freshly announced tours, new bands worth sampling, and making connections with similar music palates.

Most recent knowledge gained on a music blog: one of the reviewers on HearYa just moved cross country from somewhere in California to Atlanta, my hood.

Recently I have been using another site called LaLa. I will have more to say about it in a couple of weeks when I have really worked it out, but the concept seems pretty fresh. If you give it a peep, let me know what you think.

Happy music digestion!

A holiday of imperial expansion ...

2009-11-19T22:43:00.002-05:00

... is somehow excused by turkey-craft this cute.

Things you get when you turn 10

2009-11-18T21:31:00.003-05:00

My daughter's first decade is in the bag. May I finish my diss. before she's 20.

Ditch the couch and find your mouse.

2009-11-18T09:09:00.003-05:00

Clay Shirky, a writer, teacher, and Internet theorist, published the text of a speech he gave, "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus," on his blog last year. It's true; I have a passion for trio-list titles.

Shirky analyzes the "cognitive surplus" of societies and contrasts the differences in how free time has been used in the Western world in the Industrial Revolution (gin), the mid-20th century (television), and our current era (participation). Because the speech is cultural critique, because it provides a re-vision of history, and because hits its climax with a narrative that involves kids and culture, I excerpt it here.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

Shirky tells a great story that supports an interesting theory. All is telling.

Malcolm Gladwell, racism, and the attack of the comments

2009-11-17T13:03:00.000-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell is interesting. Uncompromisingly so. His recent book, What the Dog Saw, drew a salty review from Steven Pinker at the New York Times earlier this month. In reviewing Gladwell's blog today, I came across his response to Pinker. He coyly accepts Pinker's title of "minor genius," but then recounts Pinker's citation of a blogger named Steve Sailer, whom he dismisses as a closet racist marauding as a statistician.

What happens next is something I have only recently learned to appreciate. The compliments pile on Gladwell, but then Sailer shows up to start battling it out with his own justifications. He posts four times in two hours! Long posts, too.

Kudos to Gladwell. I don't think he will miss the irony of a "minor genius" able to start a roiling blogosphere cage fight over football quarterback stats.

Newsflash

2009-11-17T11:16:00.001-05:00

DIYFather.com, a paternally oriented web collective, published one of my previous posts yesterday. You can go directly to the article here.

Music Monday: LaLa Music, the Avett Brothers, and Norah Jones

2009-11-16T11:18:00.041-05:00

Thanks to my cousin Tim for introducing me to LaLa. Once you create a free profile for yourself, somehow this site allows you to stream-on-request lots of music, entire albums at a time. Between us, we can't figure out how their business model works, but for now, it's amazing. So far, with my not-terribly-obsure-but-certainly-not-commercial tastes, I have found everything on LaLa that I wanted to peep while at my computer.

I spent the last week listening to . . .

The Avett Brothers

I couldn't go anywhere online without having this band recommended to me because of other preferences (probably M. Ward, the RAA, and the Jayhawks. The album's title track, "I and Love and You," is quiet and haunting. At first singer xx's voice reminded me of xx from The National (not encouraging), but it worked on me. The lyrics are sound.

I And Love And You - The Avett...

I expect to spend time this week listening to . . .

Norah Jones

Her new album, The Fall, released this week has been a long time coming and finds her collaborating with Will Sheff and Ryan Adams. Norah has never disappointed me. I also didn't know, until press for this album, that she's such a fan of Tom Waites. More and more reason to keep listening.

Underployment, its misgivings, and the skin of my teeth

2009-11-16T11:15:00.001-05:00

As an academic, or a critical thinker anywhere, it's important to define your terms (see recent post here). Recently I found a lengthy post on dealing with unemployment on Moose in the Kitchen, skimmed it, gave it a comment vote of confidence, and digested it later. Having been severely busy but underemployed for close to two years now, I have some seasoned reflections.

It is true that having a family makes you look at the possibility of poverty differently. When I was fresh out of undergrad working my first couple of jobs, being poor was nearly a point of pride. I am, on some days, a closet socialist. If that sounds too noble, I'm at least a material minimalist. I prefer experiences much more than things. However, being responsible for the success, happiness, and occasional enlightenment of beautiful, small, innocent creatures, makes you downright terrified about being without money.

More on single-parenthood, the divorce process, and academic paralysis in another post. Here are some ways I have been able to make (or imagine that I can make if I really need to) money since I voluntarily left my last post that included health benefits, seasonal vacation time, and the socially-frilly though confidence-inflating title of "real job".

Elance: I have looked hard at it for months. I don't do well jumping into things that I don't know; I have to build familiarity. However, it appears that someone who can write, edit, program, design, translate, or provide other corporately valuable skills, could make go of things there. I will be throwing my hat in the ring shortly. Currently they are hosting a competition themed around "The New Way to Work" that sounds pretty interesting.

New Media Consultant: For the last several months I have worked with the textbook company Bedford/St. Martin's on its online course space for composition instructors, CompClass. This has meant many things, but among them: providing curricular support for instructors new to using the tool at my university, promoting its use to new teachers, writing chapters for a "Best Practices" guide, and serving as a test user for the newest generation of the space. Because I bill consulting hours, I can complete the work more flexibly than if I were having to show up at a desk every day.

Scriptwriter: I have written about this briefly before, but I have been working with a co-author on a script, spanning half of the 20th century, about the bootlegging and outlaw culture of a small town in North Georgia. The meetings have reawakened a passion for script work that I developed years ago as a creative writing student and launched us both on an exciting project. I won't have any official news about marketing the script until it's finished next spring.

Freelance editor: I served as the editor for a self-help book being published next year through Author House. They appear to provide other freelance opportunities that I have yet to pursue.

In my memoir and culture writing, I am trying to stay flexible, relevant, and grounded in narrative. As a freelancer, I just want to keep the lights on, gas in the tank, and food in all our mouths. As far as my research, I just want to make a lightening rod argument about the place where art, religion, and history mingle.

Five for Friday: Scary (Lego) things

2009-11-15T08:17:00.002-05:00

N.B. -- I came across this article on the 15 best villains of all time on Digg this morning. Interesting to note that there's no crossover.

I asked my 4yr old for some help with my Friday list. "What are the scariest things you can think of from movies or stories," I asked him. Here's his list and brief explanations. It speaks highly for Lego's ability to stay relevant to kids that a picture of everything he named was available in a Lego image format. Here's the list, not in any particular order:

1. The Joker

"The Joker is scary is because he tries to get Batman and because he was trying to get Robin. The Joker has a gun and a poisonous gas box, so he is dangerous."

2. Mummy

"The Mummy is scary because it has big shoes, and it tries to get people."

3. The Wampa

"The Wampa is scary because it tries to eat people. Luke Skywalker hurt him in the ice cave, but he is still scary."

4. Ghost

"Ghosts are scary because they say 'Boo.'" My daughter added that it's also scary that no one has ever seen them before.

5. Vampire

"Vampires are scary because they have sharp teeth and they can try to bite you."

At this point he began losing interest because it was his turn to play Wii.

Vocabulary. Definition.

2009-11-12T23:23:00.001-05:00

Recession. Somehow, for most of the last month, I have been carving out a little time for narrative, media, photo, or "other" blog postings and, in the last two days, it just hasn't happened. So, today, we are experiencing, officially, a recession.

Blogdrawl. This is what happens when you have developed a habit of thinking, reading, doing, or taking a picture of something interesting and posting about it, and then, for a couple of days, you can't.

Illness. And not the hip-hop kind. Everyone is sick: 2/3 of my children, myself, my upstairs neighbor, and all those people I ran into at the health center (coincidence?).

Bills. I dread them, but then face them head on, like a kid throwing himself into waves at the beach. "Take me down," I yell, with a mouthful of salt water while I swirl in the aftermath and barely find my footing. "I dare you."

Google Analytics. Replacing my morning cup of coffee. How can you learn that much information about something so narrow for free? And where do all of the one page views from other countries come from? They really mess with a writer's sense of audience.

Work remotely. What I want to do, for an organization or company that values self-education, literary interpretation, parenting commentary, album and concert reviews, and facilitating cultural exchange.

Joho. The person whose band I listened to with my daughter today, with huge smiles on our faces.

Sleep. Period.

Being home sick from school . . .

2009-11-12T11:00:00.002-05:00

. . . means you have a lot of cursive "P"s to catch up on.
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Danger!

2009-11-11T01:21:00.002-05:00

No, I have not suddenly decided to review thrash-metal albums from the 90's.

I went to the doctor today and wanted a photo momento. Ever think about how the international BIOHAZARD icon is not that scary . . . but just a bunch of circles? It could be just the stains of a four cups of coffee on a orange table cloth.

Telephone narratives introduced and explained

2009-11-11T00:51:00.000-05:00

Originally this post appeared right after Telephone narrative, pt. I several days ago. Its purpose was to concretize my commitment to spin a story out of a telephone conversation for each one of my children this week. I have reset it, and the first narrative, so that they all appear together for your reading enjoyment.

To know why I did this, please refer to one of my reading file stories, "The internet is killing storytelling" by Ben Mcintyre in The Times. I have become quite attentive to articles about how digital media and online habits are affecting our culture. I wrote these posts not to prove Mcintyre wrong, but to make sure that I am staying true to one of overarching goals on this blog: to tell back life in stories.

But here is some information you should know, that provides more depth: I am divorcing and my children are with me half of the time (seven out of fourteen days, to be exact). Remaining a parent, under these conditions, makes our telephone conversations like the fruit that gets pressed on the spike to make juice. If I squeeze it hard enough, I will get the sweetest, largest beverage. With every question, every detail, I squeeze and twist harder.

So, hearing their stories gives me, for part of the week, their tell-able past. It's a past that I cannot have but can at least hear told, so I cling to their stories.

Telephone narrative, pt. I

2009-11-11T00:43:00.000-05:00

I spoke with my children tonight on the telephone, and it reminded me of how each one of them has become a story in his or her own right.

My oldest son told me: "Dad, I got a battle scar today," and launched into the story of his topple-over on a bicycle and resulting elbow scrape. In order to explain the cause of his fall, he had to engage physics by describing an unusually high elevation between the asphalt on the street and the concrete of the curb. "You know that little lip," he said, "between the road and the curb? Well, on this particular road, the lip was higher than normal. Like, when you are riding toward it, you need to hit it straight on, and not at an angle. My tire slipped over it and kicked the wheel out from under me. I scraped up my elbow pretty badly, but guess what? I did not cry at all." To which I added, strangely nostalgic for his less macho-self, "you know what? Sometimes it's ok to cry, I mean, if it hurts really badly."

He was so strong in his description, a physical, concrete presentation of events. I got the picture that he just wanted to sketch it out: the difference between the two patches of road, the angle of the tire, the torque of the wheel. It was a narrative of physical detail that left emotion in the dust. It was a narrative of growing up. He is a great storyteller, my son. I want to hold him close to me and remind him of the reason that we tell stories to each other -- to explain things that are confusing, or troubling, or terrifying, or beautiful. To assemble and order them. To distance ourselves from the actual past and strengthen our present selves with a tell-able, ordered past.

Telephone narrative, pt. II

2009-11-11T00:41:00.000-05:00

On the phone tonight, my youngest recounted to me the expected events of the next couple of days. "Tomorrow, after pre-school, I go to . . . and then, I go to . . . and then I come to your house!" He often does this, and it illuminates another habit of his: stating questions as facts. His logic works like this: if I say something that is wrong, Dad will correct it; if I say what I think is going to happen, or what I want to happen, and he does not correct me, then I can expect that thing.

It keeps me on my toes because I can't let a statement slip by that has an unplanned or incorrect event without negotiating with it. Here's another example: after dinner, I will have ice cream and candy for dessert. False. You will have one or the other. Crisis averted; because he is fine with amendments in the planning stage. It's just that when he thinks he knows how something is going to go down, he does not adapt well to being disappointed. Just like teaching, it's all in the planning.

Here's another beautiful linguistic trick he has developed, in addition to the several words that we have made up over the years for a various things (na-na for milk; babababika for a really serious tickle session). I call it the mathematical equation: tomorrow(x)=event. If something will happen tomorrow, he says "tomorrow." If it will happen the day after tomorrow, he says "tomorrow-tomorrow." We can go on like this through most of the week, because, to him "tomorrow-tomorrow-tomorrow" can mean much more than "that happens on Saturday."

Telephone narrative, pt. III

2009-11-11T00:40:00.002-05:00

I grilled her hard today. She was home sick, my daugher. I told her that I needed her to tell me a story on the phone, so I could complete my telephone narratives. She is usually like an anthology, but sick, at her mom's house it went like this:

How was the sleep-over on Friday? Good.
What did you guys eat? Taquitos.
What was in the taquitos? Chicken.
You really don't have a good story in mind right now, do you? No.

So, I am taking another route. Here is a story that we built together, all four of us at various times, but, in the beginning, it was mostly me and her. I will write it with her as a children's novel one day, but maybe we will serial it, Dickens-style, on here first.

Three girls are new to an elementary school, and because they feel like social outcasts, they take to sitting next to each other at the sandbox during recess every day while everyone else plays. Sometimes they talk; sometimes not. Every day they sit in the same place. Eventually they notice that their feet have made nearly permanent indentions in the sand, which is fine. Normal. Boring. Until one girl experiments with wearing two different shoes one day to "trick" the sand, but as the trio walks up to the box, the shoe outlines in the sand correspond to the mismatched shoes and her own place on the bench. Somehow, the sand knows something. They experiment further, trying to switch their order right before they approach their sitting place, but the sand is always ready for them. This is weird, but does not compare to the inexplicability of the designs that begin to show up around one pair of shoes at a time: an eyeball, a question mark, a dotted line. The girls learn that not only do the designs in the sandbox foretell their choices, but they can sometime predict the onset of certain temporary abilities that cannot be explained. Or mentioned to adults.

See there, my beautiful daughter. You did have a story in you today. We just had to get it from the archive.

Cultural criticism from Duran Duran

2009-11-10T13:40:00.003-05:00

A mental congress is going on in my mind in response to "Is the internet stifling new music?" on BBC News by John Taylor, the bass player of Duran Duran. While I simmer, give it a look. Like with most pieces of culture worth digesting, I immediately think one thing which eventually morphs into something less passionate and more developed. Let me know what you think, especially whether the author's description of contemporary trends in new music consumption relates to your own or not.

Just take a minute to remember . . .

I am always hungry like the wolf for new music. Yes, I went there.

It's good to see you.

2009-11-10T01:09:00.003-05:00

Thao rocked the Earl, with a collection of new songs and old ones. By old ones, I mean songs from her first album last year. More of a review tomorrow. Man, she can throw that hair around and twist like a snake preacher.

Music Monday: Ha Ha Tonka

2009-11-09T10:46:00.004-05:00

Ha Ha Tonka released its second album, Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South, a couple of months ago. It's fetching. I am digesting it slowly after downloading it from eMusic, and I like its initial impact. The real test will be whether my oldest son sinks his teeth into it. Ha Ha Tonka's Brett Anderson has a unique alternative to a Southern drawl and the band's songs capture an O'Connoresque failed and beautiful landscape. I grabbed their first album last year on the strength of the title alone: Buckle in the Bible Belt.

From the Spin magazine review:
What do Sherman, Thoreau, Dostoevsky, and the Holy Ghost have in common? All pop up on Ha Ha Tonka's second album and, in large part, define its contours. Novel Sounds is violent, literate, unapologetic Southern rock.

HearYa's high praise and live session for Ha Ha Tonka available here.

Special note: tonight is Thao in Atlanta. Maybe Music Monday will spill over to tomorrow with pictures.

Where is my mind?

2009-11-09T10:08:00.003-05:00

An article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Ed. last week comparing faculty environments to Fight Club. It's witty and critical.

About the author, we learn that "Adam Fulton is the pseudonym of an assistant professor at a university in the South." He could be right next door, couldn't he?

My response, appended to the article on the Chronicle website:
Faculty Club indeed. It should be no surprise that Tyler Durden is the sexy researcher and "the narrator" (Ed Norton) is the lowly teacher in this metaphor. Thank you "Adam Fulton," for ripping yourself away from your support groups and pulling back the veil for us. At first it was a frustrating experience, but I was humming "Where is My Mind" by the time your essay concluded.

Bootlegging and Health Care

2009-11-08T12:17:00.002-05:00

Script-writing meeting today, to make up for our lost one on Tuesday. No pawn shop pictures this time, but maybe Tuesday. Added some interesting essays and blogs to the list on the left. I will digest them and post some tonight.

Also, it looks like the House of Reps. finished a health bill last night. I will be reading the buzz on it today. Here it is in the New York Times.

myfavoriteshirttoday.com

2009-11-07T14:40:00.001-05:00

Yes, that is Keyboard Cat.

Five for Friday: accidents, gratitude, the Loh-Down, time travel, and some more flags

2009-11-06T09:48:00.029-05:00

Five unexpected things that happened this week:

1. My youngest son's potty accident as we were walking out the door to school this morning. That may not seem like a big deal (and really, isn't; he's 4), except that our school mornings are like a finely-oiled military machine. From 6am to our 7.24am departure, all four of us have jobs and every job is important; even if the job is "eating bananas." And from 7.24am until drop-off #2 forty miles away at 9am, there's not much room for flexibility. Coming back to the apartment for a quick change threw me off. I ended up leaving a couple of important things inside in the ensuing costume reconstitution. Ultimately, not a big deal, just a slice of life item.

2. The help I was able to give a friend in need this morning. Refreshing! It's hard to ask for help; it would have been hard for me if the roles had been reversed (and believe me, tomorrow they could be). In that human moment , I was grateful for being in the right place at the right time.

3. Being overcome by Sandra Tsing Loh's article in The Atlantic (my original post here). The more I think about it, the more it feels like no one else can understand exactly what Loh's writing about except me. I don't like article's sub-headline ("The author is ending her marriage. Isn't it about time you did the same?"), but the realizations she presents on her own identity, parenting, and other people's marriages, are markedly similar to ones I have had over the last two years.

4. My oldest son's new story idea. It's about an orphan who lives in or near a cemetery and his three companions spread around the globe who are enlisted in an ancient struggle to save the world. It involves elemental powers, time travel with keys, and a gristled old Asian sensai who directs the action. Killer stuff.

5. Picking up a reader each from Guatemala and New Zealand. Again, I am blissfully ignorant about how these counter statistics work, but don't think I don't geek on that kind of connectivity.

Some quick responses . . .

2009-11-05T14:50:00.006-05:00

. . . to The Atlantic's feature on 27 Brave Thinkers. How many of them do you know?

McFate:
Interesting. Learned something new. Not sure I buy it yet.

Parker and Stone:
Brave? Really? I thought cursing and making fun of people made you cruel, no matter how intelligently you did it. I vote this duo off the Brave Island.

Nader:
I have been saying this for years. Twelve of them, to be exact. Proof that the margin affects the center.

Stanley Fish and the Conservatives, the Dark Side, and Jeff Lebowski

2009-11-05T10:51:00.005-05:00

Catching up on Stanley Fish's education blog entries at the New York Times, I came across "What Should Colleges Teach?"

Leave it to Fish to make an argument, introduce an organization which praised his approach (the American Council of Trustees and Alumni), and then spend the remainder of the piece disseting his agreement and dissent with the group's ideas. It's challening to say "thanks, but," and Fish does it well, making his conservative point while critiquing ACTA's Conservative agenda.

I have an ambivalent orientation toward Fish. As an early graduate student, I reviewed Fish's Professional Correctness (1999) for a bibliography class. I fought with it and with myself (for liking it) the entire time. In fact, when reading Fish, I often feel like Anakin Skywalker listening to Palpatine's seductive logic about the Dark Side in Revenge of the Sith.

Fish's recent post turned me inward to critique my own course this semester, an intro composition course themed on Teaching and Learning for freshman interested in becoming educators. We spent a considerable amount of time reading education theorists and debating public school policy, while also practicing memoir, analysis, and observation essays. Is the course trying to do too much? Fish argues yes; sometimes I think I agree with him.

To pop-culturalize my relationship with Fish once more, reading him often reminds me of one of my favorite lines in The Big Lebowski. After Walter makes a logical but melodramatic point, the Dude says, "No, you're not wrong, Walter. You're just an ***-****."

Exquisite

2009-11-05T01:07:00.004-05:00

Sandra Tsing Loh's article "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" in The Atlantic several months ago, which is part divorce memoir, part marriage book review, and part cultural critique, is like the most exquisite scene in a beautiful horror movie: finely wrought, terrifying, and without a piece straw out of place. It sparked quite a reaction, mostly, it seems, a backlash against Loh. If my dissertation wants to be this blog's meta-narrative, then this piece is one of the stories lurking in the shadows.

Up and down

2009-11-05T00:07:00.004-05:00

No pawn shop pictures yesterday; script meeting postponed.

After a chain of monumentally frustrating events, I had to tie on my running shoes and hit the street. At the end, I ran up this hill five times. There was a lot of steam.

Dreams, The Road, and a poor, shivering version of myself

2009-11-03T16:47:00.004-05:00

Last night, I had a dream: I was so poor and hungry that I scoped out a grocery store and hid inside when it closed so that I could eat at night. Yes, I became a nocturnal-grocery store pilferer out of poverty. I think it looked a lot like the Whole Foods in Buckhead.

Another dream in another head, featuring me last night: I just took all of my stuff and disappeared. Went away. Forever. That would be weird, and a lot like giving up, considering recent circumstances.

Apparently, in more than one head, there's a concern that I will fall to ruin, starve, freeze, and/or disappear. Now, am I terrified recently of poverty, hitting the streets, and complete national and international economic catastrophe and cataclysm? Yes (bring on The Road!), for sure. But the real-world me will live.

Thanks for the inspiration Lacunae.

The poor, dream-world me. I hope someone is going to take care of him. Am I supposed to?

Claude Lévi-Strauss dies at 100 in Paris

2009-11-03T14:56:00.003-05:00

Lévi-Strauss exerted an enormous influence on the humanities over the last forty years. Nearly anyone pursuing a graduate degree in English, Philosophy, Religious Studies, History, or Anthropology (the list goes on) has had to wrestle with his ideas a bit. His obit by Nadim Audi in the New York Times today made me think about how much began and ended between Sir James Frazier (The Golden Bough) and Lévi-Strauss.

It is appropriate on All is Telling that I recognize the connection between story-telling, interpretation, religion, myth, and anthropology. The obit concludes with:

“Mythologiques,” . . . ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.

Also, a French intellectual trivia factoid for you:

From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

स्वागत!

2009-11-03T10:17:00.003-05:00

One of our newest readers is apparently from India.

He or she could be an appreciator of indie-rock, a Ph.D. student in American Literature, or a fan of sunrise pictures, Chuck Taylors, bonzai trees, or debate. Welcome! Pass on All is Telling to all of the Indian Subcontinent.

Or it could be a bot. In which case, I would like to say: 00110110001010001.

Music Monday brings you . . . The Clash: Sandanista

2009-11-03T09:07:00.002-05:00

My Five for Friday list last week inspired the idea of Music: Monday. Problem was . . . I was so busy yesterday.

Over the last several weeks, I have been re-digesting The Clash's 1980 uberalbum Sandanista!. When I was initiating myself into Clash-cultdom as a high school sophomore, I ran all of their albums through the processor and loved this one. While London Calling is The Clash's best rock album, Sandanista! is like the poor bespeckled cousin in the corner whom no one understands . . . but has the deepest reggae in his heart. When I downloaded the album (who knows where my cassette dub from 1989 went to?) three weeks ago, I did myself a favor. By the way, do you know that eMusic has some of its catalog set to download at reduced rates? There are 36 songs on the album, but it only cost 12 song credits. eMusic is the jam.

Sharing the music with my kids has been a blast. You may know by now that I see one of my jobs as a parent insuring that my children grow up to have "good taste" in media rather than "pop taste." I have had them on a steady diet of important cultural digestion from the 80's for about two years now (more on that later). I introduced them to London Calling several months ago and my 11 yr. old son, in particular, loves it; some of the tracks went on his birthday CD, which is high praise. As we have been listening to Sandanista!, I have pointed out how extreme of a transformation the band went through from LC in 1979 to S! in 1980. My youngest just likes it when Joe Strummer mutters little words at the ends of choruses in "Hitsville," like "remember".

Finally, I came across a "Exploring Rock's Cliche's: Sandanista! as single LP" from Setting the Woods on Fire (thanks for the JPG above, Paul!), an interesting looking blog that's apparently on hiatus. Paul's idea in the post is that, for posterity, we could trim down Sandanista!'s enormous six-album size to one digestible LP by threshing out the lesser creations. I like his choices and the idea in general; it's super listy, a la High Fidelity. However, the album's experimentation was so extreme and important that I just feel bad skipping a track, almost sacrilegious.

Bootlegger body count, Celtx, and Javier Bardem

2009-11-03T08:35:00.002-05:00

Today is Script Day; I spend most of every Tuesday contract-writing on a movie script that my co-writer hopes to sell or produce when we are finished. Later I will post a photoblog from her pawn shop where we have our meetings. When my German pal Joho was in town, he almost shifted around his schedule one day just to accompany me to a Tuesday meeting. "Are you really that interested in our script?" I asked. (He was.) He shrugged a bit and said, "Well, yes, PLUS I want to see the inside of a real American pawn shop!"

The script explores the lives of whiskey bootleggers, hoodlums, and, later, drug dealers in the North Georgia mountains from the 1930s to the 1980s. Every piece of the script has its seed in a story that my co-writer was told as a child growing up there. It begins in 1934 with a young whiskey maker's murder-suicide of his family in protest against being sent to federal prison.

I fell into the project accidentally, but the confidence that my co-writer maintains over the work we have produced is contagious. Several months ago, the only thing I could offer were writing talents and an organizational framework. However, I found an online program called Celtx, which facilitates the writing and planning of several audio-visual media forms -- radio play, film, stage play, comic book. It's free online and comes with a script sharing component and access to an online independent film community.

I may write more technically about Celtx and how it works in another post. Suffice it to say that it has made our process more efficient. Less time formatting the script (one of the things Celtx does) and more time writing the gritty dialog. In our film, we want to capture the structure of The Godfather, the language of Sling Blade, and the tone of No Country for Old Men. Just getting the ultra-creepy-sexiness of Javier Bardem in one scene would be an additional success.

Yes, we are shooting high.

The Tyranny of Email, Google's new Wave, and spontaneous combustion debates

2009-11-02T09:32:00.001-05:00

Ben Yagoda wrote a thinly-veiled-slap of a review of The Tyranny of E-Mail in the NYT's Book Review last week. Sure I want to read the book now, whether Yagoda liked it or not, but that's what makes strong reviews. If the ideas are interesting enough, you want to read it, see it, or hear it because the reviewer gave it enough thought just to try it out.

Favorite moments from the review:

One of Yagoda's personal grudges against email: "It is responsible for the the emoticon."
Yagoda's use of "fixing to." Of course, in Atlanta, we are much more prone to hear "fixin tuh," but who cares.

After looking over a recent invite to preview Google's new Wave application, Yagoda's debate with Freeman seems even more relevant. Wave will be the devil incarnate to Freeman, if Yagoda's read him correctly. As with the my post on Tyler Cowan's article, I think both sides of the debate may be right, by degrees.

What about a new feature -- spontaneous combustion debates -- in which I would put two articles, essays, or posts together and moderate them like a referee? I would also pronounce a judgment. Yes, that's like judge and jury. May the best rhetorician win.

Three out of four cool girls . . .

2009-11-01T22:23:00.003-05:00

. . . prefer Chucks. My daughter and her dancing pals before the parade.

test

2009-11-01T13:13:00.000-05:00

test

In which I try to determine what I am doing and why

2009-10-31T01:24:00.003-04:00

Keeping a blog is new to me, but not to the rest of the world. I have probably spent as much time critically reviewing blogs over the last two weeks as I have writing. Why am I doing it? As I approach my 50th post in two weeks, here are some answers.

My understanding of blogs has developed considerably. I used to think about them as the online version of the journal I used to keep next to my bed. Good blogs are not like that, for three reasons: digital media, audience, and narrative. Digital Media: To this forum, I can link to anything on the Internets; that does not just change what I write, but how I think about writing and what I do while I am writing. Audience: No one reads those old black and white comp books of mine, or they shouldn't. In theory, someone is reading this (you are, maybe) and that impacts composition. Narrative: All good blogs build the frame of a larger story or at least an ethos.
I am picking up freelance writing and editing jobs lately and having a blog allows me to showcase the range of my writing proficiency easily.
Stories swirl around in my head like that cotton candy machine at the fair. I just have to put a stick in the opening, and they start coalescing, clumping, and changing. I knew from the beginning that taking one of my favorite lines from my favorite novel (Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing) would be fruitful, but after a couple of days of writing and talking about writing with friends, I realized that I really need a place to capture these stories in my head. There are lots to come: like when I cut myself with a razor while shaving, on purpose, and how I got paid, as a child, to protect a spy in the Smithsonian museum. Or about the three girls whose footprints always stay in the sandbox together and take on a life of their own. Or friends I have lost or shucked. Or how I think my life is, by an accident of metaphysics, connected to the life of Ben Folds. Some are true all the way through and some, by only being thought, are even truer.
I need to write my dissertation. I will tell you what it's about later; I promise. Have you ever read any Lyotard? My dissertation might become the metanarrative of the blog. In that case, let's hope postmodernism never happened, because, according to Lyotard, metanarratives go away. If there's a "totalizing metanarrative" I want to keep, it's completing my Ph.D. Maybe writing every day, even informally, will help the formal stuff along. See my first post about completing my diss. Update: no writing since then.
Whether it's a good one or not, the details of my life make up an unusual story. My interests and experiences connect me to other groups of people (music and movie fans, parents, academics, the religiously curious, urbanites, naturalists), but no big dotted-line surrounds them all. Some of my experiences might be helpful or entertaining to an eclectic variety.
I learned how Google enables me to take a picture with my cell phone, textualize it, and immediately post it to the blog without sitting down at a computer. I adore this feature and use it frequently. My photoblog entries are like eyeball postcards.

Maybe that's it. If you are reading, at least now you know what I am trying to do. Compelling blogs are like comic books . . . serialized with good art and cliffhangers. However, that does not make me a hero. I'm not an innocent bystander, either.

Let the wild rumpus start!

2009-10-31T00:19:00.007-04:00

Those may be the most memorable words I have ever read aloud as a parent.

That is Max Records, who plays Max in everyone's favorite story about a boy who dreams he is a king.

Tomorrow I am headed to Where the Wild Things Are with my two oldest (9 and 11). I already saw the movie -- on opening night. I am that kind of fan of an assortment of things (Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Cormac McCarthy, lots of musicians). I was really excited about the film. For once, I thought, an indie-kids movie.

I was disappointed. In Spike Jonze's adaptation, Max ceases being "Everykid" and becomes something darker. As much as I support exploring alternatives to cinematic "stability", Where the Wild Things Are wanders too far into the forest and does not really want to come home.

As a literature and writing teacher, I have used Sendak's book in conversation and in class to discuss psychoanalytic criticism. Most of the psychological world recognizes that large bodies of water represent an unconscious or mystical experience. This is probably because of the unfathomable (sorry, I know this is painful) depth under the ocean that we know exists but cannot access. The ocean, in a dream, is like the closet that we shove all of the emotions we need to keep but can't find room for. Eventually we know we are going to have to clean that place out. In both the story and the film, just such a body of water separates the real world from the wilder one.

Max, the story's young protagonist, has plenty that needs cleaning. In the film he has a new backstory, immersed in the pathos of abandonment, isolation, anger, and gender confusion. In the book (do you remember?) he was just a kid who chased his dog around with a fork. Movie Max has a lot more on his plate and, subsequently, a lot more to deal with when he crosses the water.

Spike Jonze and crew have done an effective job reminding fans of the book about detail: Max's name carved in the boat, some key quotations, and the final supper scene. However, the fact that Max needs some serious therapy before, during, and after his trip disturbs the film for me. Here is the central question: is it easier to think that Max's destructive and dictatorial urges hide inside all of us, or to diagnose the Wild Things dream as the ramblings of a semi-neglected and borderline schizophrenic kid? The book leans more toward the former, and the movie toward the latter.

It reminds me of the quandary that the movie Falling Down created for me. At the end of that Michael Douglas modern dystopian classic, the protagonist is colored as a mental patient who needs his meds. Ok, fine. But didn't I sit through the whole film relishing his destructive break-down? Didn't I want to have the same experiences too? It just made it too easy when the film made him "crazy"; it would have been better if he were just like one of us, making the choices that most of us only dream about.

Wild Things's Max is a solitary figure, and rightly so. He has to become isolated to give us the terrible beauty of his vision. I just wish that the film left us with the feeling that we are all Max, battling those demons and keeping those voices (mostly) quiet in our heads. Crazy-ing up Max is a scapegoating move.

Still, my oldest two want to see it. They are old enough, and we are going, if just to have something to talk about. Exploring the effects of art is one my favorite things about parenting. They always teach me something; most people who want to have a serious conversation about anything do, as well.

Five for Friday: Google, Singents, Bridget vs. Max, scary aliens, QVC

2009-10-30T14:18:00.007-04:00

Funny this week . . .

1.While playing Spades at night with my kids and Clo-Show, I was looking up something Internetishly on my phone. My daughter says, "What are you doing Dad? Play a card." Without looking up from his hand, Clo-Show mutters "He's googling how to count."

2. My shower idea that someone who is a single parent, but half of the time, is a Singent.

3. My youngest son's fascination with the part of Bridget and the Gray Wolves, in which the little girl commands her pack of wolves to find their trees and have a pee before bed ("they obediantly found their pee trees").

N.B. Bridget and the Gray Wolves is an interesting feminine version of Where the Wild Things Are. She may be a little bit cooler than Max. At least less destructive and a better imaginary parent.

4. My oldest son's question at the costume store: "Is this alien too scary?" It was; but awesomely so.

5. My mom's comment, while donating a QVC faux animal-skin coat to Halloween costuming, "would you wear this?"

Why can't grown ups have socks this cool?

2009-10-29T15:17:00.003-04:00

I am dying to know.

2009-10-29T14:20:00.001-04:00

I am sure there is something I am supposed to get here. I know who my German reader is. But Canada and Thailand? I am too curious. Will you email or comment? Please? I am curious to see how and when and why my thoughts are going international.

This is also a good time to say that I have hit 50 viewers. Interesting. I promise I have only accessed the blog from 37 different computers, so that means 13 real people!

I am thinking some today about balance. If you are coming back on a semi-regular basis, let me know which posts you like most. I cataloged everything yesterday, so pick your favorite. I have lots more stories to tell, but I can bend them just like a balloonist.

Critical pedagogues of the world, unite!

2009-10-28T14:06:00.003-04:00

Jamie Littlefield, of selfmadescholar.com, wrote on 4 Ways to Recognize a True Teacher several months ago. I just came across it today.

I can see by Jamie's reading list that we have a confluence of influence. As an M.Ed. student I was trained in the culture of critical pedagogy by at least one professor and fed a steady diet of Freire, McLaren, Macedo, Kozol, and Gatto. I learned, as maybe she did, that free thinking, peer-making, and instilling autonomy does not go down to well in any authoritarian institution. Inevitably, I have been complemented for my work in three public high schools while at the same time finding the work environment and orientation to the student professionally untenable.

Jamie has efficiently nailed several qualities of mystical teaching. I may or may not achieve them in my university classrooms, but I certainly aim for them. She observes that valuable teachers teach us how to think, not what to think. This is reason why my favorite students end up being the ones who challenge me. At least in the humanities, argument is the algebra we use.

It reminds me of my obsession over the past few years, in both my dissertation and my teaching, over the difference between content and methodology. As a literature teacher (I am looking forward to my first lit class in a while this spring), I want to instruct students on a method, or methods, of interpretation. Everyone else makes fun of how much English departments like to use the word "hermeneutic", but here it suits my needs. I am not too concerned about what conclusion an undergrad arrives when she takes apart "Young Goodman Brown" or Beloved. What I care much more about is how clear is the method she used to get there.

Quintillian was saying similar things at the end of the Roman Empire, when he handed on a twelve volume treatment of education that ended up being the model that Europe used for centuries afterward. Institutio Oratoria was not Quintillian's creation; he just documented what he saw going on around him to great degree. What you take from that picture is a thorough understanding of the fluidity of language and, consequently, knowing, and how important it was (and is) for a student to be adept at intellectual methods rather than intellectual facts. In fact, unless we plan on coming to the end of knowing, the facts will always change, but the best methods will continue to provide fruit or evolve into stronger ones (like the transition from text-only research to researching digital media).

I don't know if Jamie was headed in this direction, but she sure pointed me there. Attention to method, language, research, interpretation . . . these are the trademarks of the most powerful kinds of knowing. Making fans and creating drones, as Jamie writes, does not get us there. In a certain sense, teaching a student to observe, identify, and solve one problem, with an meta-critical attention to his process, enables him to use that method with any related problem in the future.

That's why I don't care if we get every "classic" read in my American Literature semester in the spring. Doing the literary dance really well through a handful will be enough.

I said I would come back to this article. It had me thinking all evening. After dishes, signing school notebooks, cleaning out folders, and getting lunch ready for tomorrow, I am just able to wedge it in before my shower.

The tribe comes home . . .

2009-10-28T10:52:00.003-04:00

. . . today. Writing; pause. Organizing, drawing, hugging; engage.

Are knock-knock jokes funny?

2009-10-28T10:38:00.002-04:00

Two men are having a debate on the comedic value of knock-knock jokes. One is 34 years old, and has taken the stance that knock-knock jokes are not funny. One is 3 years old, and has taken the stance that they are.

In his arsenal, the younger debater, who loves owls, knows the following knock-knock joke:

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Who.

Who who?

Is there an owl in here?

However, he keeps it to himself until, as the argument hurtles toward its conclusion, the younger of the two produces his trump card. He draws his opponent into the following exchange:

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Who.

Who who?

[smugly] That's right.

The older man falls to pieces with laughter. He has been championed. The younger man returns to his crayons.

A telling

2009-10-28T09:52:00.002-04:00

As, perhaps, people stumble backward into reading All is Telling, I will tell a story.

A boy decided, after a long struggle, that he was unhappy. He couldn't put the disparate pieces of his life together in a sensical way. As an only-child, he grew up accustomed to his only company and goals, but the choice-web of his life grafted new ones to him. Now he had academic, parental, and martial concerns. The first two were vibrant, fluid, and alive. The third one was paralyzed.

Against his own instincts and upbringing, he separated and began the process of divorce. He was accused, at times, for deciding to leave his children as well, but this was not true. Keeping them as close to him as was fair and possible became his passion. He was not a terribly schedule-oriented person; he became one when it was required. He continued, as best he could, to keep up with the pressures of teaching, research, laundry, diet, and grooming. Some of these fell by the wayside occasionally.

He has survived a two-year divorce negotiation that felt more like a war. He is beginning to think dissertation again. His income is a fractured patchwork of freelance projects, teaching pay, and loans. Somehow, he has arranged it so that his parenting time and work time is separate. His life is buoyed by the weekly arrival of his children, the beauty of a new relationship, and tightly weird urban family.

He enjoys rock shows, handcrafted art, profound movies, frisbee, Legos, drawing, reading aloud, singing, studying and arguing. You may not know him, but you could.

He will thrive. Also, he lives in New Mexico.

Picking fights with words

2009-10-28T09:11:00.005-04:00

Specifically, for Kinkos from a Wikipedia entry on weird plurals in English:

The plural deers is listed in some dictionaries,but is widely considered to be an error.

Like Bill Murray said in Rushmore:

Take dead aim on the rich ones, get them in your cross hairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything, but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget.

Thao Knows Better in Atlanta, Nov. 9

2009-10-27T13:16:00.003-04:00

Thao Nguyen returns to Atlanta soon to tour behind her sophomore studio album, Know Better, Learn Faster. We saw her at the Earl last time, and she signed a ticket stub for my daughter who really wanted to be there, but was too young.

I hope to grab a picture or a chat with Thao when she's here. She's academic-folk, I think, so maybe we can solve the health care, education, or mortgage crises together. Probably not, though.

Here's how I first fell in love with Thao's performance style in a little video of an NPR appearance.

And here's an article in Pitchfork, which is the best review I have seen so far of the new album. I can't get the opening line of one of the songs out of my head . . . "Everybody, please, put your clothes back on. We must see what the trouble was for."

Created twice, Elaine Pagels, and some help from you

2009-10-27T11:43:00.003-04:00

I had a debate last night and now can't for the life of me find a resource that I like to peg to either side. Can you help?

The meat of it is this: there are two different creation story frames in Genesis, one taking place mostly in Chapter 1 and the other in parts of Chapter 2. The order if events is different, as are the tone and conclusion of each story. Either this is significant, from the perspective of belief, or it is not a big deal, so went the conversation.

Elaine Pagels has plenty to say in her books (specifically Adam, Eve, and the Serpent) and so, interestingly enough, does Wikipedia (see here). However, I was surprised at how few credible, academic treatments I could find on either side in a couple of Google searches.

I need to burrow into the library databases now, but I would prefer to link to something everyone can see, access, and debate.

Balance . . .

2009-10-26T13:03:00.003-04:00

. . . is really important if you work in the circus.

Wrestling with bears is difficult.

2009-10-25T15:46:00.003-04:00

I feel like I have been doing it all day. By wrestling I mean thinking; by bears I mean troubles. However, I did come across this quote in an essay titled "Think Again: God" by Karen Alexander in Foreign Policy this month.

We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere.

It reminds me of the Kenneth Burke scholarship I have read in the last three years, and it makes the case for an approach to belief that is actively curious and academic rather than dogmatic.

The road to Halloween . . .

2009-10-25T15:36:00.006-04:00

. . . is paved in pumpkin seeds.

Why does the Rural Alberta Advantage hate deer?

2009-10-23T10:45:00.009-04:00

We traveled to see one of my indie-rock favs, the Rural Alberta Advantage, some weeks ago. The RAA sprung out of nowhere when eMusic chose their debut Hometowns as a recommended album last year (interview here). Nils, Amy, and Paul play guitars, hand-held percussive instruments, a sonorous tom-tom, and a blazing hot set of drums. Here they go, in Athens, Georgia, September 09:

They put on a phenomenal show. I can't wait to see what a second album does to their sound.

On the dreary way back home, out of the mysterious liminal space by the side of the road, came three snarling harbingers of destruction to spread enmity and chaos. One of them looked like this:

It attacked my car.

Yes, it was a deer. No, there was nothing else I could do -- there was forest on one side and another terrified driver on the other. I just had to grit my teeth, say a prayer, and barrel in. We caught her somewhere near the shoulder.

This tumultuous midnight rendez-vous did $2,100 worth of damage to my ride. I have been driving a lame rental car for a week while the body work was being completed. Today, I gladly return the Vanillamobile to its keeper and break Veronica, my pumpkin sweetheart, free from her prison. Peace out, Sonata:

What we learn here is that the Rural Alberta Advantage is behind a forced deer extinction across this country. You'd think they would like the furry guys, being rural and all. Really, I love you RAA.

Listen to some RAA on HearYa.

Internal vs. external

2009-10-22T23:23:00.003-04:00

Today was a Dad-day: rhythmic, energetic, scheduled, and extroverted.

From drop-off one at 8am to drop-off two at 9am; from pick-up one at noon to pick-up two at 3.30; from breakfast to lunch to dinner; from playing kickball outside to playing cards before bed, parenting is my tether to concrete and simple beauty. And real work, not the theoretical kind.

A Starbucks refill

2009-10-22T11:23:00.004-04:00

A couple of days ago, I wrote a casual post in which I made an invisible connection between Starbucks and Melville's Moby Dick. It was just an easy guess, but I got curious. Read Erik Neu's posting here. He got curious about the same thing and did the research.

Even more interesting than mythbusting the origin of the Starbucks name is Neu's comment at the end:

"Voila, the brain connects up a plausible, internally consistent explanation; better than the original, except that it isn't correct." In a footnote he extends his idea: "This reminds me of something I read recently, can't remember where, that fiction is more satisfying than reality, because fiction requires itself to be consistent."

How appropriate for All is Telling?

Gen-Y critique; don't look

2009-10-22T10:50:00.003-04:00

Mark Bauerlein, an Emory English teacher, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last month titled "Why Gen-Y Johnny Can't Read Non-Verbal Cues." It provies an interesting counterpoint to Cowen's article referenced yesterday.

I am not sure I agree with the bulk of Bauerlein's assertions, but I have started telling texting-students to put away their phones in class.

Who spilled cotton candy . . .

2009-10-22T07:38:00.003-04:00

. . . this morning, all over the sky? Thank you.

A flux-capacitor moment

2009-10-21T23:32:00.003-04:00

There is this kid; really he is a guy. He starts work on an advanced degree in something related to the humanities. He follows all the rules, completes all of the initial work. He is teaching all the way through it. He takes the tests and does really well. Then comes the hard part -- the research and writing project. To some people it just seems like a really long book report. To others, it takes on a more esteemed term -- dissertation.

On this root, though, he stumbles. In losing his balance, a whole bunch of other things topple out of his hands. His hands representing control. Control representing responsibilities. Suffice it to say that, his life becomes perilously close to the street. Divorce, foreclosure, disgrace. He lives lean and snarls back at the world because he has learned real hunger. There are bright spots, angels, totems, guides that keep him refreshed and hopeful. They are real; not imaginary. He trudges on, but he loses his academic way.

When all of it seems for naught; when the government wolves come crying at the door; when he has forgotten how to earn real money because so much of it has been loaned to him; with no warning . . . he starts again, the academic thinking. The research thoughts start flowing. His ideas, formed years ago while pondering the topic from the more insulated and idealistic promontory of the classroom, have become like diamonds. The pressure made them lucid, precise, and valuable.

You can see where this is going.

He starts to write, and also to write about the writing. It's the ultimate postmodern frame, writing about the writing of a piece of writing. All of the ideas . . . sermons, American fiction, Greek and Roman rhetoric, Kenneth Burke, the linguistic turn, the Invisible Man, Baby Suggs, and Sherriff Bell . . . start to coalesce. Writing about how the writing is going helps, somehow. And it becomes a story that is just too compelling not to take to its conclusion.

Would you pay attention to it? I hope so.

This story came to me in the shower and was, probably, the fruit of an earlier discussion. Thanks, Clo-Show. I didn't even have to borrow your shoe for a picture.

i-Multitasking, or my imagined debate with Tyler Cowen

2009-10-21T09:02:00.002-04:00

Tyler Cowen, whom I hop-skipped to via Arts & Letters Daily, argues interestingly for multitasking, online culture, and reduction in the status of the printed word in a new article "Three Tweets for the Web." I especially like his comparison of cultural delivery to long distance romances and marriages -- you used to have to work hard and travel far distances to "get culture" but now it's always there when you wake up in the morning. This also made me think of my new (scary?) habit of checking email on my phone before I get out of bed.

As ambivalently pinioned as I am between classic ideas of culture and postmodern pastiche, I want to argue against Cowen. In most places, I can't. I think the only red flag I can let myself raise is . . . is all culture good for us? I don't think it is. If it's being delivered to us in staccato bursts from all sides, where do we get the apparatus we need to thresh, interpret, and select.

I think I know what he'll say. "I wrote 3000 words on the benefits of quickly digesting culture, and you wrote a three-paragraph blog post siding with 'taking your time'. Who wins?"

Arborictory!

2009-10-20T18:04:00.001-04:00

Why I like the Roos. This tree probably predates the Civil War. Maybe even the Peloponnesian War. It's good to be home and thinking sometimes of angels.

New meaning to "old school."

Hope at the Roos

2009-10-20T17:51:00.001-04:00

Quite some conversations today, deep catching-up ones.

In one I learned from an old friend this story:

A woman gets cancer. She is told she has a year to live. She gets illuminated by bird-watching and sets out to spend the rest of her days just doing that, bird watching. Eventually, she dies -- eighteen years later, after traveling all over the world watching birds -- by a bus. It's a book published this year called Life List. She beat the odds.

In another, I learned from another friend this story:

A woman is afraid she will never forge the right connections, never make her relationships work. She is broken, she worries.
A man says to her, "You aren't."

"How do you know," she says.

"Your cats," he says.

He goes on to explain that sometimes he looks down at this dog, before they go to sleep at night, and is overwhelmed by his love for the animal. So much so that it keeps him from sleeping. And the woman's love for her cats, he says, is proof that she can do that with a human being.

I was feeling overwhelmed. Now, I am less so.

Random people leaving from D.C.

2009-10-19T14:03:00.002-04:00

Proof that I'm in an airport. Where they are all going will they be hugged or alone?

Why I don't dig suits . . .

2009-10-19T08:27:00.002-04:00

. . . because everytime I put one on I'm losing someone.

Brand central

2009-10-18T14:42:00.002-04:00

A tender moment with Starbucks. Do they own our very souls? What would Melville say? Everyone has a White Whale. Does yours drink Starbucks?

Edward Andrew Orr (1916-2009); Part III: Dear Eddie

2009-10-18T01:36:00.000-04:00

I never called you Eddie in real life, but when you shuffle off this mortal coil, the rules change.

You were quite a character who made an impression on everyone. You were, in my mind, an eternally happy person who was never hesitant to laugh or be silly. When I was 6 or 7, we played two games together when I had sleepovers at your house. In the first game, I played SpiderMan and you were the Hulk. Basically, it was a wrestling game.

Then, as I was going to sleep, you would lay with me in the bed, and we would pretend that the dark room was made of candy. You would say, "That lamp over there, the shade? It's made out of marshmellows." I would say, "Those little lumps on the ceiling are white jelly beans." It would go on for hours. Do you remember?

The only nobility I could ever assign to the game of golf came from you. Until you moved to VA, it was a constant in your life. We met you at the clubhouse after a round for lunch; you drove me around on the cart; we dined at the fancy restaurant for members on special occasions. Everyone always said that, with the way you played, the way you swung the clubs, it did not make sense for you to be very good. But you were. It was like you made up your own rules about how the game worked. Good job.

You and my father and my two uncles were all in the military. I am not. However, I will always understand something unique about the country because of all of your examples. For all my anti-establishment leanings, I will always have respect for soldiers because, in my mind, they could all be you.

You ate, talked, and laughed like someone in love with life, someone for whom it is a joy to be alive. Thank you for that. It was contagious.

It might have been difficult to let your son and daughters take care of you in your final years. You were not someone used to needing things from other people. You did it with grace, but, sometimes it was probably difficult.

Over the last several months, from what I saw and heard, you had a standard chorus. Whenever you felt it well up, or during moments when you could not understand the conversation going on around, you would say "I am happy to be here with everybody. I just want you to know that I love all of you; I am the luckiest guy in the world. God has really blessed me."

You went back to Normandy as an older guy, to retrace your steps liberating France. You traveled to Ireland to stomp on your old ancestral haunts.

Your heavy New York accent, and the lighter one that my aunt and mom still have, are soothing. To this day, running into someone with a New York accent at a store or a restaurant makes me feel a little at home.

You loved music, movies, and culture. You passed it down to all of the grandkids in different ways. When BDP and I stayed up late tonight playing silly clips on the Internet and new tunes to each other, some of that sense of appreciation had its seed in you. I remember fondly going to a two movies in the theater with you: Michael Collins and We Were Soldiers.

As a kid, I thought you were a genius; maybe you were. You were a crossword ace and had an encyclopedic knowledge of history. You always seemed smarter than all of us around you, but humbly so.

You had a charming smile and the most endearing laugh. From low in your belly. You were quick to touch people -- a hand on the shoulder, a hug, or a squeeze of the hand.

Ultimately, strangely, maybe I did not know you. You were probably so much rounder of a character than I could ever imagine as your grandchild, who didn't see you all that often after I became an adult. I am sure you had failings, griefs, regrets. I know that you made dynamic changes in the relationships with your kids as they became adults, becoming more sensitive and expressive. In some ways, I will only know you as the strong and comforting cardboard cut-out that I saw during most of my youth. I wasn't your peer or your confidante. No moment ever came where the generational wall came down and you shared any deeply vulnerable side of yourself.

I am telling you something, though: that super hero version of yourself is best thing you could have given me. If I hit your mark, or even close to it, when I am 60 and beyond, I will be a great success.

While I know that the writing I have done over the several days has been an attempt to navigate through your passing, it has not worked all the way. On one hand, I am at peace with your departure. On the other, I will always, always miss you.

Grandpa, a tout a l'heure. Je t'aime.

A toast

2009-10-18T01:33:00.002-04:00

I had a re-run of Thursday night's Jameson toast tonight with BDP. Tomorrow, I shop for new suit pants.

Grandpa's Obituary in the Washington Post

2009-10-17T20:51:00.000-04:00

You can see it here.