Pedagogue or Panderer?

Well, first let me say that I am working on my "My First Jew" essay that I promised you earlier in the week. It's just that when one is serious about a topic, one hesitates, rewrites, backfills, stares out the window as the light dies in the west. In short, in the case of this absent essay I am violating the blogger's oath, which is not the famous journalist's creed of "I write better than anyone who writes faster and faster than anyone who writes better" but the more pedestrian "I write faster than anyone who writes better and.... Well, not really. I just try to write really fast."

But time for a post to fill the void. Last week I noticed a flyer on the wall near my office on the 5th floor of USF's own University Center posted by an SFSU graduate student named Danielle -- I think she just slipped in and taped them up -- asking 18-20 year old women who are currently enrolled in college if they have taken a virginity pledge. The flier offered a $20 amazon.com gift certificate for taking part in the study, which is apparently part of a master's thesis.

At the bottom of the flyer were those things for which there is no name. I mean, that little fringe of tabs that contain contact information that can be ripped off singly. You know what I mean. You print or write a "stack" of contact information across the bottom of a piece of paper, the baseline of each info bit perpendicular to the bottom of the piece of paper, and then cut between each info bit with scissors. I know you know what I mean. There needs to be a word for this.

I noticed on each flyer that some of these tabs had been ripped off. That suggested to me that some members of the USF community had experience with or knowledge of such pledges.

So I created the following class assignment:

The Virginity Pledge

Assignment for Wednesday, September 28. We will collect shared data that we will draw on for a story due Monday, October 2.

Interview Checklist

Name, age, place of residence, major, marital status for each interview subject.

Question 1: Have you ever taken a virginity pledge?

Question 2: Have you been asked?

Question 3: If asked, what did you respond? If you have not been asked, what would you respond if asked.

Question 4: Why?

Question 5: Ask at least one follow-up question of your own choosing. Try to include at least one exact quote.

Each reporting student is responsible for three interviews: two USF students, plus a USF professor, administrator or other staff member. Exactly what you ask your third source is optional. Use your own judgment.

The idea was that we would get more than 30 interviews, discuss those interviews in class, come up with ways of focusing possible stories based on those interviews, all the while understanding that we might well need to acquire additional information through research or interview to make it possible to create a newsworthy focus for our stories. In any case, each student must write a story. And the student interviewers were required to tell their sources that the story might be published. Nothing is as vacuous as an interview elicited by a student who says, "This is just for a class."

Class discussion was pretty good. The assignment provoked some good questions about interviewing and about generalizing from such a limited sample, some good "teaching outcomes," as we like to say.

But here's the thing. I am catching some some criticism from some folk in the university community who were interviewed or who talked with those who were interviewed -- or who were contacted by those who were interviewed; FYI; you know -- who thought such questions were too personal. I concede I'm paraphrasing here, but some thought the assignment was kind of a cheap trick as well as an invasion of privacy, a violation of the sanctity of the workplace, the point of which was inviting students to engage in prurient speculation about the sex lives of others. Such "opinion dredging" was superficial and, even when placed in the context of recent studies about the efficacy of such pledges, likely to produce trash journalism.

I'm on a bit of a high horse here, a friend said, but this is a very silly and useless exercise, she said.

I'm writing so fast here, omitting and oversimplifying. Here we definitely have The Blogger as Captain Kirk: "I need Warp 7, Scotty, and I need it now." And Scotty gives him Warp 8!

But I am curious if any of my readers, particularly the faithful B. Lundigan, think this was, indeed, a stupid assignment?

My First Jew

Usually I don't do coming attractions, but I'm working on a reaction piece to George Allen's angst over his Yiddisher mama.

I'm delving deep, people. Wait and wonder.

A Classic Column That Resonates *Because the Renovation of Campion Hall is Underway* and I Shall Have a Nice Office: No More Catacomb!

Friday, October 22, 2004

Stand By Me

Unless you want to sit there staring up at my double chin.

Yesterday, for the first time in months, I interrupted my sabbatical and returned to the beautiful USF campus to pick up my mail and sniff around for trouble -- marital, financial, intellectual, anything to feed the gossip jones that distinguishes humanity from brute creation.

And there -- no one had told me! -- in my office to my astonishment was my stand-up desk that *adjusts through the power of electricity* to a variety of heights conducive to a healthy back, i.e. conducive to fewer early mornings sitting on the sofa when it hurts too much to sleep watching some black-and-white semi-classic on the Turner Movie Channel while the pain eats at my hip socket.

In fact, it is referred pain from a nerve being pinched somewhere in my lower back, but understanding that displacement doesn't pull the teeth of the pain. They are very sharp teeth.

I thought, "With a marvelous adjustable desk, maybe I will come into the office occasionally to work now!"

And then I thought.

No.

I disapprove of people on sabbatical who come into the office. You waste commute time, you divert yourself and you divert your colleagues. Your sunny freeloading presence brings them pain.

They say that when Stanley Fish was chair of the English Department at Duke University he was "good in the halls," meaning he moved from one informal group to another, wheedling and intimidating. A colleague on sabbatical who comes into the office becomes all too easily a Cancer in the Halls, walking around with his cup of coffee, loitering here, lounging there, thinking about thinking about thinking ... about.

So, I'll stay away, though if I had a big nice office I would be tempted. One reason I am so delighted with my new desk is that my office is really pretty miserable. Forget the sabbatical. Time to talk about The Nitty 101 and The Gritty: A Seminar for Majors. All the offices for the liberal arts faculty on the 5th floor of University Center at the University of San Francisco are pretty miserable. Every other floor is fine: nice coffee spot on 1, impressive cafeteria and dining hall on 2, big study area on 3, bunch of meeting rooms on 4.

But somewhere back in the day somebody ran out of patience or kindness or imagination and went medieval (architecturally speaking) on the posteriors of the liberal arts faculty.

Our offices are small, about 10 by 10, and the partitions are so thin you can hear your next door neighbor rethink her paradigm. The whole floor has a plenum, a space above the dropped ceiling that is filled with, oh, residue. Since the 5th floor tends to be too hot, most of us move a couple of acoustic tiles in the dropped ceiling. My wife, who is an architect, says that is equivalent to snorting asbestos -- though we've never run any tests, so accept her statement as the rich and colorful hyperbole it was intended to be.

One hopes.

I have one of the better offices. I have a window, which I can open. I can see beautiful St. Ignatius Church. On warm days I can look out at the students on the grass south of Harney Plaza and see them nuzzle one another.

But pity the young faculty, mostly untenured and filled with dread, who get the inside offices. No window, no nothing, no hope except the death, retirement, madness or disgrace of the old parasites under whose thumbs they labor, or the abject failure of the young comrades with whom they drink, love and play academic musical chairs since not all of these young faculty will be left sitting at the end of the academic day.

As I said, most of them are untenured. The untenured need to hover, to stay in the vicinity of power, to work not only doggedly but also conspicuously. From the point of view of optimal mental health, what these youngsters need to do is cut a class, throw off their clothes and run naked into the surf and swim out out far out and tread water and look at the clouds until human voices wake them and they drown hahaha.

No one ever got tenure thinking jokes about T.S. Eliot. T.S. Eliot is not a joke. Somewhere back in the catacombs on the 5th floor of University Center someone -- some rival -- is not only rethinking the paradigm, she is shifting it. And if you were there, you could hear the scraping three or even four offices away.

I can speak frankly about the UC gulag only because it too shall pass and soon. Each man kills the thing he loves the coward with a kiss, the brave man with a yadda yadda yadda. I'm joking here, people. A fine new liberal arts building is being planned with every convenience and excellence, so benevolent and thoughtful is the USF administration, and the glory of that building and those offices shall shine all the brighter because we shall, until the day we die, remember what it was like to live like a dog in a kennel while giving our students a really fine education.

Now you see how intensely delighted I am to have my adjustable desk. When circumstances are hard, we need sugar for our tea and butter for our bread, and my new desk is sugar and butter. My physical therapist says that human beings -- speaking spinewise -- were meant to run and jump and tear with their teeth the living flesh from the bones of other animals. They were not meant to sit and bend over their paperwork. With my wonderful new desk, I will be able to grade 20 30 40 50 papers at a time. I will assign so much work no one will take my classes and ... I guess, I'll write letters to the editor. I'll do something.

They also serve who only stand and think and think and think some more about a new a better a carpeted and air-conditioned paradigm with a view of all the pretty children killing time.

Addendum 2006: Do androids dream of electric sheep? This is what they dream of.

Pretty Clever. Pretty Damn Clever. Or To Put It Another Way: I Have Written Words

One thing young journalists -- and bad journalists of any age -- can't seem to resist is the over-generalized lead:

President Bush gave a speech or Bush talked about Iraq.

Life is short, and words are precious, but how do you make that point to students in their first reporting class? That is, how do you make it sooner rather than later? Well, here's my latest handout.

On Being Specific/Robertson


You ask me for a job recommendation, and I write:

I have had many students. Edith Eastman was one of my students.

Edith Eastman took my reporting class.

Edith Eastman wrote stories while in my reporting class.

Edith Eastman did homework while in my reporting class.

Edith Eastman said things about journalism while in my reporting class.

A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist visited our class, and Edith Eastman asked her a question.

A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist visited our class and asked Edith Eastman if it was all right to look through people’s keyholes to see what they were doing, and Edith Eastman answered the question.

When I asked Edith Eastman if it were all right to steal stories from other students, she answered the question.

Over the years, I have hundreds of students. A few are wonderful, some are very good, most are average and some are terrible. Let me assure you with absolute confidence that Edith Eastman fell into one of those four categories.

You ask me to say something about whether or not you should offer Edith Eastman a job. My answer is that I think she would like to be offered a job.

Clayton, Jackson and Durante. And Robertson.

As I get deeper into the semester in feature writing, it's natural that I begin to imagine what metaphor best describes my teaching style. That's one of the pleasures of feature writing. Metaphor assumes a more prominent position in the writer's toolbox.

So what metaphor for the way I present? It's not preaching. It's not hectoring. It's not begging, tin cup in hand, though sometimes that's what it feels like.

What it is without a doubt is vaudeville -- broad, old-fashioned, certainly repetitious given the fact that I have performed these same tired routines in so many desolate tank towns in so many shabby performance palaces as long past their prime as I am. (Note to self: figure out how to cross out previous phrase and sub, "taught these same courses in a variety of academic settings.")

It's a kind of friendly comedy, but there is some art in it, and some substance, too, just as the old joke "Take my wife. Please" explores the nuances of meaning possible in the colloquial imperative as well as the degree to which misogyny is the default setting in American life.

Today in feature writing, I was preparing the students for the restaurant review, a little assignment I see as a kind of treat, a reward for more intellectually strenuous assignments during the first month of school.

(I'm not saying it's easy to do restaurant reviews. I'm just saying a clever student can turn a review into an essay on anything from neighborhood history to modern sexual mores -- what does he/she expect in return for paying the check? -- to agricultural practices during the Peloponessian wars, just as a clever person can turn a book review into a clever discussion of what the clever person believes, the book be damned.)

So I have fun talking about all the ways students can unpack this gift of an assignment. Somewhere near the litany's end, I suggested they might interview a waiter after the eating and observing are done, to find out the inside scoop on doing the job. Turns out one of my students has worked in food service and he said his inside secret -- something I didn't know -- was that he and his coworkers get so tired of the same old jokes from the people they serve. People impose their little jokes on a captive audience, just like teaching.

He does a lot of catering. You're carrying in a case of booze, my student says, and every other guy says, "Just take it on out to my car." He shared a couple others. I don't remember them.

I said, "Oh yeah, that reminds me of that stale old joke. 'Hey, the guy says to the waiter. 'What's this fly doing in my soup.' And the waiter says, 'The backstroke.'"

My student said, "I've never heard that one before. That's pretty good."

Ancient evenings. Vaudeville.

Maybe One of the Viruses Will Rat Him Out

Killer Bacteria Hunted in Calif., the USA Today website headlines.

(Headlines as a verb. I descend into despicable journalese. Shame, shame.)

You know some dyslexic Republican staff intern sees "E. Coli outbreak," stops reading, says with growing excitement, "If the first name of this guy is Ernesto, I think the congressman should issue a press release."

I'm Nobody, Who are You? Oh, You're Somebody Looking for Somebody. Sorry.

Two frantic phone messages and an email from an eminent journalism scholar demanding my presence at a top-level journalism conference because of my wonderful book on Stephen Crane.

My expertise, my erudition, my lambent style march before me proclaiming my worth.

Except that's another Michael Robertson. It's not me.

Make that It is not I. I won't be your sad clown, Mr. Big Shot.

And, no, I can't point you in the right direction. I'm the dirty analogy guy and don't you forget it.

Hello? Hello?

P.S Pretty funny. In the first version of this, I spelled eminent "imminent." I must have been thinking about war with Iran.

They Want What So Many Want: For Me to Shut Up so We Can All Get Some Sleep. Oh, and an A.

If you have wondered what the young journalism students of the mid Left Coast are thinking, you need look no further.

Metaphor Morning

A metaphor morning. Crisp and bright, that feel of early October back East, one of those days you loved when you were young because the world was dying and, after dying, coming back to life. The realization was what we used to call a cheap thrill.

They say kids like horror movies because the terrors allow them to encounter death at its most cruel and irrational and irresistible and then overcome it. That is, the kids overcome because when the movie is over – and the sequel be damned – they are still alive and well, ready to buy the world a Coke. That the fantasy is fantasy reinforces the reality. We are alive and likely to be for a good while longer. When you are young one is one and two is two but another 40 years of life is forever.

Interestingly, the math doesn't change much until you hit 55 or so.

Same thing for meeting the Fall when you are young or even middle-aged. We will die. But not now. But as I said, once you creep past middle age….

Enjoy the coffee. Go to the ballgame. Grade the stories and worry a little less why your suggestions are either ignored or misunderstood. Worry less about the quality of the suggestions. It’s not life or death.

Life is life. Death is death.

Hoo-ha! Don’t apologize about rediscovering the obvious, to yourself or anybody. Advise all to read Flannery O’Connor's “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

P.S. appended somewhat later in the day: My link was simply to the first page I could find that gives some sense of the plot of the story. (Link in haste; repent at leisure.)

I would interpet "Good Man" in quite another way, a very literal way and not nearly so hopeful: I just saying knowledge of imminent death changes the way you look at things, which does not mean it's a better or wiser perspective. I think I preferred Granny as bitch, but that's just me.

As for the fact she wrote stories that can mean in so many ways: That's just Flannery O'Connor, girl genius.

I Retreat from the Current Unpleasantness with a Memory of: Paris

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Hemingway Lived in Paris, I Just Remembered

When I read Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" back there in high school, I was much impressed by the idea of sex that "made the earth move" -- a phrase that considerably oversells the virtue of having sex on the cold hard ground -- and the insult, "I obscenity in your mother's milk."

I have spent my whole life trying to escape a tendency to read everything in the most literal way. At 16, I naturally assumed that turn of phrase was the literal insult: I OBSCENITY in your mother's milk. Yeah!

I thought perhaps Spanish Republicans were naturally delicate in their expressions or had a rhetorical preference for indirection -- how did I know? I just know I thought it was a very elegant kind of insult, richly vague, leaving the nature of the defilement to the robust imagination, of which I had one.

Don't recall when I finally got the fact this was just Hemingway placating the censors, a simple euphemism that everyone else immediately decoded. It spoiled the insult, it really did.

I am thinking about this because of the bottle of wine my wife and I drank when we were -- I probably haven't mentioned this -- IN PARIS LAST WEEK. Eydie read in one of her food magazines about the Jules Verne restaurant, which is located about a third of the way up the Eiffel Tower, right inside it, wouldn't kid, shouldn't kid, couldn't kid you.

Three months ahead we reserved for lunch. I will not talk about the view. I need not, since you will see at least one splendid picture when we have the slide show to which you all are invited, though may I suggest you reserve early, since the midnight show can be a little raucous and the snacks damp.

The three-course pris fixe meal (52 Euro; $64.06 Yankee) was delicious, and the waiters came at us in waves, fawning and tres gentil -- perhaps I do look like the diseased Jerry Lewis -- BUT BUT BUT the sommelier, oh the sommelier.

I have a theory about myself among the Parisians. This theory arose not exactly because a series of events occurred while I was in Paris that demanded a unifying idea or at least a hypothesis but because I wanted to be able to say, "I have a theory about myself among the Parisians." That strikes me as an elegant thing to say, pompous perhaps, but it gets the point across that I HAVE BEEN IN PARIS. First came the idea of having a theory and then came the actual theory. First the vessel and then the content. You get it.

Again: I have a theory about myself among the Parisians. It is that while I am in Paris, each day someone will cheat me to one degree or another and each day I will embarrass myself to one degree or another.

So, we are at one of view tables in the Jules Verne restaurant located in the Eiffel Tower looking down on Paris. The waiters have been solicitous. The sommelier approaches. He says something. I panic. I blurt out, "I don't speak French."

My wife says, "That wasn't French."

Abashed, I stare at my plate and mutter, "I guess I don't speak English either."

I look up. The expression on the sommelier's face! He thinks I have said that he does not speak English.

Zut! Alors!

I attempt to reconcile with the sommelier. We are having a fishy dish and a vealish dish. I throw myself into the sommelier's capable hands: A red? A white certainly?? I wave my hand over a list of suggested wines.

"That!" he says, pointing.

I wonder -- "Red, white...?" He shrugs.

The wine arrives. It is red, somewhat fierce, perhaps of a depilatory nature. It meets the food, wrestles the food to the ground, kicks the food in the ribs.

Ah, some of the legendary French rudeness?

I can only hope that I am worthy of the legendary French rudeness. Into my mother's milk pours the legendary obscenity of the kind that can happen only -- and did I mention that this was happening...

Was it Marseilles? Might have it been in sunny Provence? The moment had a hyphenated feel. Perhaps Alsace-Lorraine?

I think not. I believe it was -- sometimes memory she plays you the trick. I am almost certain it was ....

In ParisParisParisParisParisParis.

Why I May Yet Die in a Bad Place

I aggregate a handful of favorite political blogs. They are my liberal touchstones, my lamps in the night, my whatever gets me through the night. One of them -- I've already forgotten which one; I race through them in a blur of hope and fury -- pointed me toward an article by the supposed "reliable pundit" Charlie Cook in which he notes that political watchers over 40 are more optimistic about how the Dems will do this fall than political watchers who are under 40.

I won't go into his reasons. My point is simply that, as emphatically over 40 as I am, I side with the boys and girls in this instance. I don't have that much confidence that the Dems will do well, certainly not well enough to take back the House. Indeed, I always have a little feather of dread tickling away. I am thinking that given the fact that there is a hard core of Americans, maybe three out of ten, who self-describe as born-again Christians and who support George Bush with virtual unanimity, well, you add to them those American voters who are consumed with fear and those American voters who are willfully ignorant (and don't forget the rich and/or cruel), well, you just might get our voting our way into something very like a fascist theocracy, even if the margin is 51-49 or 52-48 (or, if the Supreme Court is feeling frisky, 49-51).

You might get ChristoFascism.

I fear this down in my bones. I cannot assign a probability to it. It is the nature of fear to elude computations of probability.

I fear it because I was once a ChristoFascist. What it is is that I Remember Mama, and I Remember Daddy. It's all anecdotal, but at the end of the day life is anecdotal, though the scientists have the good sense to measure and organize those anecdotes into some semblance of reality.

By any standard of superficial decency and everyday politeness, my parents were nice people. They were benign, not perfect on race but better than my friends' parents, not harsh, not brutal, pretty haphazard in keeping an eye on what we kids did or didn't do, which gave us some freedom, more probably than I chose to exercise.

But when I think about them today as they were then, the memory is frightening. If my father were alive -- Mistah Jimmy, he dead -- and my mother were in possession of even a sliver of her former faculties, they would be powerful George Bush supporters. They would be serene in the face of war and grasping oligarchy because they would consider it just good common sense that you should vote for a good Christian man like George Bush.

And if I tried to make an argument with them on their own terms -- more fool I, of course -- they would not be interested in any of my arguments why Bush is not a good Christian man because I am not a good Christian man.

I was a good Christian boy, though. I hated Kennedy the Catholic because, as my dad explained, the Catholics were stockpiling guns in the basement of their churches. JFK flew into Roanoke, Virginia, in the fall of 1960, and we were let out of school and bussed to the airport rally as a civics experience and I wore a Nixon button as big as a pie plate.

Oh my. I remember how secure I felt as a child, being right, knowing better, not having to figure anything out. I was so sweet, and so very arrogant.

I think these thoughts because I just stumbled across a line from Robert Browning I've been looking for for years. It's from "Abt Vogler," which is a dramatic monologue, and thus we take such speeches as manifestations of character, not necessarily as Browning's own idea. But that is not the point. I was raised by people to whom it was mantra, anthem and marching orders.

But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome:

Or to update the sentiment:

Reason away, bitches.

You are so going down. God said so. I think He said so.

Or maybe it was just a ringing in my ears.

Nah, it was God.

Six Ways of Looking at an Elevator

For those of you who wondered how my feature writing students did with their elevator riding assignment from last week, follow the yellow brick link. (Which is red because yellow don't read, paisan.)

And as for my "master teaching" boasting, yesterday I jumped one of my feature writing students in class because he was staring at something on his computer screen. Clearly he had sneaked online and was watching porn or rock videos or the latest scores or myspace slumber parties.

But what he was looking at was the cursor. He was moving the cursor around an empty screen. The cursor was more interesting that I was.

Goldfish Redux

We had that party I wrote about last week -- the one in prep for which I ate a mound of goldfish crackers, that mound somewhat bigger than my head -- and the evening was one of those sociological moments that validate the sporadic hardheadness of the soft sciences.

Think sociogram.

That is, of those invited, everyone higher in the department hierarchy than me found pressing reason not to show their hard New England faces -- think dream date with Ethan Frome -- and everyone with less status, or at least less time on the books, showed up. What this meant was that everyone who showed up was delightful, so you had indignation and compensation for that indignation in tandem. Also, at the last minute we called several friends to pop over and stick their heads in the dike -- didn't I say the theme of the event was mixed metaphor? -- so a good time was had.

But the crowd *was* small.

Which meant.

Leftover.

GOLDFISH CRACKERS.

This morning after my third fistful I put the remaining goldfish crackers in the metal bowl with the coffee grounds and the eggshells, a fruitful glop intended for the compost. And then, seeing I could still possibly grab some goldfish from the top of the pile, I poured water over the lot.

Didn't William Burroughs do something like this with his heroin? Well, *something* like this.

He Said She Said They Said. I Don't Recall if I Said.

If I were currently wearing my scholar hat and my special scholar jock strap and carrying my bag of magic scholar beans, I would spend some time over the next week raking through what the "prestige" newspaper columnists write tomorrow, which is 9/11, about, you guessed it, 9/11

Two possible responses: write about it or don't.

Two possible responses from the second category: Don't write about it but point out that you are not writing about it, or just don't.

Two possible response from the second category of the second category. In a day or two respond to letters and emails asking why you didn't write about it and also why you failed to note that you weren't writing about it -- are you stupid or what? -- or don't respond to those letters and emails asking the aforesaid question.

In other words, in this age of interaction with and response to readers -- in this age of feedback, of two-way communication -- refrain from taking your readers in your powerful arms and rocking them to sleep by answering their plaintive questions.

I suppose I could break the second category of the second category of the second category down into yet two more categories, but as I said:

No special jock strap. No magic beans.

Saturday Cat Blogging

Here's a beautiful cat.

In our long lives, Miss Edith and I have known only one ugly cat. His name was Pepe Roche (pronounced row-shay). But Kitty Medora loved him dearly, so who were we to stand in the way?

Jaws: A Fish Story

What a mistake. Exactly 180 degrees of mistake, meaning totally total wrongness.

But first the background. Costco is the background. At Costco it sometimes seems everything comes only in the huge sizes, sizes fit for just two things: having a party or surviving the long horrid aftermath of nuclear war for as long as possible until your stuff runs out at which point the living envy the dead.

In fact, that may be the nicest thing about having a party.

(About nuclear war the less said the better. Unless Bush decides we need one, of course.)

If you are having a party, you can in good conscience buy the 12-pack of canned oysters or the big box of Beers of the World.

When I come to Costco I do not want to be like some poor Soviet immigrant from the bad old days, venturing into a temple of American commerce and weeping at the plenitude.

I want to buy, and I want to buy and use so that I can come back and buy more. That's why I like a party.

As it happens tomorrow we are having a party. It is the Welcome Back Media Studies Department party. It is the first month of school. The Media Studies Department apparently feels it needs to be welcomed back, and it's my turn in the barrel.

It will be a good party but not a great party. Small departments like ours have good parties, really pretty good parties.

Because there is always a floor show.

The untenured faculty will manifest varying shades of caution in dealing with the tenured faculty. Some few untenured faculty as a matter of principle will display incaution. Such ones are wild and free, like free-range chickens, and their future prospects are just that bright.

They may even affect the obstreperous. Squawk. Peck at something.

But I need not speak of them because you will not be hearing much of them in the future, not here or elsewhere.

The tenured faculty will either stroke the untenured faculty in direct proportion to their demure behavior or try to get them drunk in the hope they will leap upon the table and shimmy and squeal, and thus be at the mercy of the tenured faculty.

All in good fun, of course. Whatever the circumstance, the untenured faculty are at the mercy of the tenured faculty. So you see why it will be a good party.

But why not a great party? You need a really big department filled with far more fools and rogues and roues than inhabit our collegial little unit to have a great party. Back in my days at North Carolina State University in its English Department -- of which I have warm memories in the sense that I like to imagine my former colleagues roasting in Hell -- we had some great parties. The untenured faculty were many and stood in great shoals and drank and drank, relying on one another to drag away any whose mouth seemed inclined to fly open if some fey greybeard wandered past wishing to talk of Milton.

Nothing like that at our little party. We are damn good people in Media Studies.

But we are not perfect. Some of us make mistakes, as in my case when I bought the huge box of cheese-flavored goldfish-shaped crackers at Costco on Thursday and made the tactical error of opening it up this morning, just (you know) for a little carbohydrate pick-me-up. The cheese-flavored goldfish-shaped crackers are each no bigger a dime, no not even that big. You remember the old French centime? About that big. And only five calories apiece. You could look it up.

But look not for the cheese-flavored goldfish crackers themselves.

That Bible verse: "Something something Rachel weeping for her children something something, but they were not."

Those cheese-flavored goldfish-shaped crackers. You would be astonished how many of them were and how many now are, well, quite simply....

Not.

Not any more.

Geneological Field Research: Not a Pretty Picture

Brother Greg Pabst writes from Las Vegas, where he is attending an American Advertising Federation meeting.

This is the most pointless place I've ever been in. What happens here stays here, and should.

However, there is one interesting event. I'm at the pay phone (yes, they still have them here - I suspect that's the only way they pry your last fifty cents out of your desperate fingers) calling my loyal spouse, complaining about my sorry lot. When appears a wedding party. The impressively large bride is all in white with some modern reflective material sewed on (or glued to) her snowy raiment.

Trailing behind, two witnesses clearly fully in their cups and following is a knave in full Scottish rig and kit, shoes laced to his calves, kilt and a cloth rakishly flung over his shoulder, puffy white shirt and a jaunty tam.

Their accents all betray tongues trained to speak English as the English, or their nearby neighbors. do.

I describe this scene to my wife. Which clan, ask she? Black Watch says I. That's not a clan it's a color! offers my life helpmate.

So, as they stop to weave a bit and mumble to each other near me I ask, what's the clan?

Robertson, says the wee man (newly married to the twinkling giant) as they make a right turn to the elevators, and vanish.

My live-and-in-person private CNN report to my consort crosses the desert at the speed of light, arriving on the Pacific coast in a half-trice, and the moment passes with the same flickering velocity.

How can I ask for more than that? I, like Simeon, can now die a happy man.

I've seen The Robertson Clan colors paraded with pride in the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas Nevada, 89109, AD 2006!

Almost makes the damn trip worth it. I sense the ghost of Hunter Thompson nearby, promising another trick or two. Too bad I'm beyond the drug thing...
Greg

On the Other Hand, Gertrude Stein Said There's No There There.

The Noble Order of the Garter -- a British thingy you can look up here -- has for its motto Honi soit qui mal y pense which means "Shame upon him who thinks evil of it," which means: 1) You have a dirty mind; 2) This isn't junior high school, little mister.

But every copy editor and teacher of copy editors knows that a copy editor must have a dirty mind. It's de rigeur, one might say, as I maintain a high cultural tone for one last moment before I hit the lever and this string of bon mots goes right down the crapper.

So today we have this headline in the Chron:

Marketplace finds lesbians an attractive, but elusive, niche
Still, target group seems ripe for growth


And here from dictionary.com.

niche  /nɪtʃ/ Pronunci

1.	an ornamental recess in a wall or the like, usually semicircular in plan and arched, as for a statue or other decorative object.

2.	a place or position suitable or appropriate for a person or thing: to find one's niche in the business world.

3.	a distinct segment of a market.

4.	Ecology. the position or function of an organism in a community of plants and animals.

–adjective

5.	pertaining to or intended for a market niche; having specific appeal: niche advertising.

–verb (used with object)

6.	to place (something) in a niche.

So that's the situation. It is conceded I am a filthy old bugger. Defense counsel so stipulates. But the art of any kind of writing is imagining the full range of interpretations that are possible given the fluidity of meaning -- and there's your postmodern moment for the day -- and deciding how whatever you write may be perceived by your intended audience, or by some portion of that audience, and then concluding if the proportion and intensity and corrosive effect of likely (or even potential) misapprehension is of sufficient size to cause concern given the parameters of the publication ....

Well, you get my point. I think the head in question is a bit of a howler. But don't go by me. I am one of those guys who prizes Chaucer for the fart jokes.

There's Gulag in My Blood

You may recall my recent disappointment at the fact the DNA test I got through National Geographic because it stopped tracing my ancestry at about the time of the advent of the most recent ice age. That would be 10,000 years ago.

However, there was a link at NG allowing NG to send its data to the an organization called Family DNA, and I've gotten some interesting results, to wit:

12 Marker Y-DNA Matches
Exact Matches
Country (Number of Entries)	Comment	Your Matches
British Isles (503)	-	1
England (9355)	-	5
France (1150)	-	7
Germany (4187)	-	1
Great Britain (652)	-	1
Iceland (128)	-	1
Ireland (4980)	-	5
Italy (1021)	-	1
Nicaragua (3)	-	1
Northern Ireland (205)	-	1
Poland (1031)	-	1
Russia (1749)	Native Siberian	5
Scotland (4000)	-	17
Spain (1036)	-	1
United Kingdom (3140)	-	1

Now I am not exactly sure what a 12-marker match means. It suggests shared ancestry, but it's not clear to me how far back. And the "country of origin" in the foregoing table simply means the self-reported country of origin. I reported Scotland because of the last name and the family tradition, but who really knows? All that said, I apparently am related to Native Siberians. I am not quite clear about who the native Siberians are. But look: Five matches.

I like having either Native Siberian blood or Native Siberian connections. Maybe I will probe further and maybe I won't. As the late great Herb Caen said, "Check it and lose it."

My connections based on a near miss, 11 out of 12 markers on the Y-chromosome, are even better. I suppose it means my ancestors got around. And that makes me feel good.

Of the immigrants, by the immigrants and for the immigrants: That's me.

One Step Mutations
Country (Number of Entries)	Comment	Your Matches
Australia (113)	-	3
Azerbaijan (5)	-	1
Azores (44)	-	1
Bohemia (60)	-	1
Bosnia (17)	-	1
Brazil (33)	-	1
British Isles (503)	-	6
China (654)	Uygur (Central Asian origin)	1
Cuba (65)	-	2
Czech Republic (103)	-	1
Denmark (317)	-	2
England (9355)	-	124
England (9355)	Isle of Man	1
France (1150)	-	16
Germany (4187)	-	31
Great Britain (652)	-	9
Greece (283)	-	2
Holland (99)	-	2
Hungary (354)	-	4
Iceland (128)	-	2
Ireland (4980)	-	60
Ireland (4980)	County Longford	1
Ireland (4980)	Donegal	1
Ireland (4980)	Ulster	1
Italy (1021)	-	8
Lithuania (341)	-	2
Mexico (361)	-	1
Netherlands (502)	-	3
Northern Ireland (205)	-	3
Pakistan (50)	-	1
Peru (22)	-	1
Poland (1031)	-	2
Polynesia (97)	Polynesian (European admixture)	1
Portugal (228)	-	10
Puerto Rico (134)	-	1
Russia (1749)	Native Siberian	6
Scotland (4000)	-	52
Shetland (137)	-	1
Sicily (130)	-	3
Slovakia (202)	-	1
Spain (1036)	-	10
Sweden (602)	-	4
Sweden (602)	Wermelia,	1
Switzerland (528)	-	5
Syria (126)	-	1
Syria (126)	Arab	1
Turkey (94)	-	1
United Kingdom (3140)	-	36
United States (521)	-	2
Venezuela (13)	-	1
Wales (746)	-	18

I am He. I am the Master Teacher.

The assignment today in feature writing: Each student is assigned a different campus elevator in which to ride up and down for half an hour and then write about it. This is a sensory exercise, a concentration exercise, an ease-in-public exercise and an overheard-dialogue exercise. It also reminds them that, as Tom Wolfe recommended, a feature writer should always get there a half-hour early and lounge about.

But is it a useful exercise? Is it merely an elegant conception? The results will tell us that. Oh, next time I do it I'll get drama students to "stage incidents."

This is a good job. High school students would eat me alive.

Okay, I've Smelled the Flower. Now What?

I heard indirectly that an old friend had a seizure. Having had a seizure, he had a CAT scan. Having had a CAT scan, he was told he had a brain tumor. Having a brain tumor, he had surgery. Having had surgery, he woke up, which was good. Having awoken, he couldn't move his right side, which was bad and still is. Every day he is getting better (I hear indirectly).

One thing I tell my students is that an aspect of being a journalist is that you become a reflexive interviewer. You just naturally ask questions even when you are off the clock. It's good at parties because it makes it less likely that you will just stand there silently. You will seem nosey, it's true, but at least you will seem interested. You won't be popular, but at least you aren't inert. You aren't argon. You aren't neon.

You may push a little too hard and ask a question that's a little too personal, forgetting that you are not at that moment a representative of a potential 6.5 billion readers who need to know or want to know or don't object knowing, or if they do object can just turn the page, still feeling somewhat grateful you are on the job and putting your beak in.

(About those 6.5 billion potential readers. We'll sort out the number of English speakers and the number of those with Internet access later on.)

But what do you say to someone you consider a dear friend who you really have neglected to ring up for much too long when he is dealing with an honest-to-god dread disease? It would be easy to get clinical, which is what a reporter is supposed to do. Or sentimental if you are a broadcast journalist manque.

If I were in that situation, I would want a friend to say.... I have no idea. Well, I'd want a friend to say something.

Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop? I'm Still Waiting on the First Shoe.

You all know that my ultimate oracle on what will happen in the congressional elections this fall is the Iowa Electronic Market. There is hot air, and there is cold cash. To have an opinion about political futures over at the IEM, you gots to lay down the ready. This, as past results show, produces that most difficult of all prognosticatory feats: accuracy. (I've written about this before. As Casey Stengel said, "You could look it up.")

Anyway, your Charlie Cooks and your Stu Rothenbergs have been saying for some weeks that it's looking pretty good for the Dems. I interpret their remarks to mean they think it's probable the Dems will take the House. But the IEM has actually shown declining confidence that the Dems will do so. Until the last 24 hours. IEM investors are moving a few of their bucks toward the Dems.

Why would this be? What happened? With some frequency, when the graph moves at the IEM, you can guess at the external cause, perhaps the release of a batch of new polls or the war between Israel and Lebanon or the Lamont victory in Connecticut. But I see nothing to explain this latest move. Unless that is the explanation. Nothing happened.

That's how I look at the Fall elections. Unless the Bush administration creates some kind of crisis, blowing something up or (cynic that I am) allowing something to blow up, of course the Repubs lose. But the Repubs are very bad people -- bad people in a fallen world, which is very bad indeed -- and I expect they have some political equivalent of the roofie, the date rape drug, up their sleeve.

But the closer we get to the election without the Repubs concocting an incident or pulling out some doctored photo of Nancy Pelosi in flagrante with Angela Merkel, the better I feel about the simple facts on the ground prevailing. But to be honest I still don't feel that much better. If you put a gun to my head and made me bet a thousand bucks, I would bet the Repubs hold.

The Repubs really are like something out of H.P. Lovecraft, their only advantage being its easier to pronounce their names.

Was Marc Antony Caesar's Sock Puppet? Discuss.

I am reading on my favorite liberal blogs that some nameless blogger for some nameless online magazine -- all this "nameless" business coming not from my contempt for him or it but from simple laziness in looking it all up -- has lost his gig because of sockpuppetry. That is, he pretended to be someone else and posted nice things about himself and unkind things about those who posted unkind things about him.

If it were worth the trouble -- if anyone other than Geraldo, Prince of Crackers, were commenting on my posts -- I suppose I would gin up some phony identities and praise myself or even damn myself in weird self-satirizing ways that would cause you to hate the commenter.

That would be much more subtle.

Of course, it would be wrong.

But I best not get too self-righteous. Back in my Atlanta Magazine days -- buckle up, children; the way-back machine is going way back, nearly 30 years -- I decided that the magazine needed a monthly contest involving some sort of wordplay. I wanted the magazine to be more like the New Yorker, or what I though the New Yorker was. I initiated these contests, and almost no one entered, though we would get one or two legitimate entrants each month, which enabled me to give away the one or two prizes I made available. I think I coaxed one of our friendly advertisers into giving away a couple free-drink coupons.

But a laundry list of contestants including only one or two entries made participation in the contests seem a little thin. The Atlanta editor at the time was a legendary local journalist with a drinking problem that was more than legend. It was impressive enough without embroidery. His, uh, preoccupation was one reason I was able to waste valuable space on my little contest. This editor had several imaginary friends; that is, in a playful way he liked to menace those who disagreed with him with visits from Balls Lundigan and/or Overcoat Charlie.

I think I have this right.

So to swell my list of contest entrants I would make up funny responses and credit them to Mr. B Lundigan of Smyrna and Mr. O.C. Charlie of Sandy Springs. Month after month. I wonder if people wondered why these two gentlemen chose to persist in entering a contest in which they always fell just short of a prize?

I suppose I thought it was all an inside joke that devoted readers would get. Anyway, look for Mr. B. Lundigan to weigh in here soon, as soon as I can grease up my hand and whack my conscience smartly in the vicinity of its super ego.

Snakes on a Campus

We talked about this in feature writing, about how working in the features section of a newspaper or in the Lifestyle section of a magazine is a kind of "Pirates of the Caribbean" thing. Much of the fun comes from the fact that, as opposed to the sour folk down at the other end of the room, a big chunk of feature writing is all about fun.

Conceiving of it. Inducing it. Simulating it. Wrapping the bolus of death and disaster up in a sugar shell so that it goes down easy.

One of the techniques of gaffing an audience is the creation of a topical headline that draws on something that is inherently light and amusing in the first place. And one way to do that is through back formation: You imagine a head and then brainstorm the story that might sit under it.

Thus: Snakes on a Campus.

Who would these snakes be? Professors who are not just bad but somehow treacherous, too? All those heartbreakers of either sex who leave you sitting by the phone? But no one sits by a phone today. The phone sits by them, or rides along.

But you get the idea. The students were shocked. Perhaps, they thought their professor was being something of a reptile himself, just a little too cold-blooded, you know?

On This Date Two Years Ago We Were Readying to Depart on a Tour of Scandinavia with my 93-Year Old Mom-in-Law

And here's a post from somewhere in the middle of the journey.

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Somewhere in Norway

I am paying to post this and that, like the imminence of death, sharpens the mind. This trip is about mom: Does she have the stamina to make it? Three days ago on the cloudy fjords we were beginning to doubt it, but Eydie gave her a laxative that stimulates the smooth muscles and Eydie has concluded that the brain, like the intestine, is a smooth muscle. The jokes that will someday flow from this statement warm my heart.


For whatever reason, mom has perked up. My theory is that her difficulty in moving rapidly and thinking clearly make her think about death, whatever else she is thinking, so she is somewhat depressed. Naturally, her daughter thinks about her mother thinking about death, which is not the optimum mood stimulant. I am just my natural morose self!!! As for Norway, you are all inivited to come see the slides, most of which have been shot at glacial shutter speeds. That explains Munch -- it was all his mental shutter speed.

Meanwhile, I gather that Kerry continues to trail. Never mind, John! I will soon be back with a headful of ideas stimulated by a certain smooth muscle....

Update two years later:

1) Moms Landrith didn't die during the trip. About a year ago her Florida docs -- where it's literal hot weather 12 months a year but always metaphorical autumn, the old folk constantly dropping from life like withered leaves, so death is thick on the ground -- diagnosed her as having scarring of the lungs. Now she lugs an oxygen bottle about. She's 95. She may make a hundred.

2) It took us more than a year to pay off the loan we took out for that damn trip. Not so much complaining as asking for credit. Metaphorical credit. No more loans, please.

3) That nice Kerry fellow lost. If the election were held today, he would win. Bush has heaped error on error, creating problems and then proceeding to compound those problems. I hate living in a time in which one may take a small pleasure in knowing that one won't be around for the worst of it later. No. That's the wrong end of things. I wish I could be around longer, Living Treasure that I am, to help clean up the mess. Go for 95! Dream of one hundred!