The Fist Unclenches

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Had a big meeting yesterday to deal with unresolved issues, murky futures and personal grievances. Given the anxiety I had going in, I'd say the meeting was an 8-out-of-10 rather than the minus-2 I anticipated. So: good news; hope.

The possibly odd thing is how let down I feel this morning. I don't feel relieved or encouraged, though I "think" both feelings if you get my drift. But down in my viscera: a void, a slouching, a lethargy.

Hmmm. I need to do some grading. That will stir the blood.

A Sour Prediction. A *Dour* Prediction

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Today I will vote yes for all the Cal save-the-budget props on the principle that when you combine the agony of getting the last flawed budget deal through the California legislature -- 1/3rd of the Repubs, plus one equals stalemate -- with the willingness of those Repubs to push off a financial cliff for partisan advantage, well, there are degrees of lousy. I'll take what's on the table.

But it looks as if all the important propositions will lose. And I'm thinking all those who think we can play chicken with the legislature are wrong.

I would be so glad to be wrong.

More Important than Cats

Yeah, and harder work, too. This guy is a good guy in the only way one is ever good: by doing something good and then doing something else good.

Etc.

I'm challenging myself here.

Tales of the Kitty

A hed that should be followed by a TK, for 'to come.'

Sometime this summer or fall, probably after E. gets back from her semi-annual trek to Florida to give a break to the sister who watches over Moms Landrith, we will get that basket of kittens we have been talking about ever since Oliver died in bed beside me during her Xmas trek.

I'd like a couple kittens with attendant mom. I want kittens one more time, but I dislike creaming off the cute and fuzzy and leaving mom to be executed. It's rather like what happened in Argentina when the junta killed the lefties and took their babies for adoption into their own homes.

So it will be a package deal, one last sequence of cats owned from cradle to tomb. And after that? Let's imagine we live another 20 years in decent health, sanity and finance. That's the point we'll go catless to the pound and ask for an older cat who's moments away from death. So we die in our sleep six months later? Kitty can lick our faces and then eat our noses until someone checks us out -- if anyone ever does.

Kitties have moved to the top of my Thought Queue because Brother Michael Tola pointed me at this story in the Chronicle about a vet who runs a cat shelter for cats too mangy or sick or irritable to be adopted -- to be *immediately* adopted. But a little TLC, and here's your baby.

I'm stupid about cats. It would be better if I were stupid about Rwanda or Somalia, but you can't always choose your stupid. I won't consider going to that apparently hilarious and provocative Berkeley Rep comedy The Lieutenant of Inishmore because cat murder is what drives the plot, and apparently faux dead cats are a key prop.

What will we name our new cats? It's not like naming babies, where you plan ahead. I'm not saying the cat brings its name with it, but it brings its unique catness, and in the moment catness connects with circumstance, producing a name.

Back in '71 Marty Loftis told us about a dream she had. I think it was Winn-Dixie or maybe Piggly-Wiggly -- proud regional grocery chains -- that was running a 'name the elf mascot' contest, the winner of which contest would get free groceries, always valuable to young academics.

Marty had a midnight inspiration, jumped up and wrote the inspiration down (as one should). In the morning she examined what would, she had been so certain, would be the prizewinner.

Beanscorn.

She told us the story, and thus Kitty Beanscorn got his name. It was 35 years ago, give or take a month, that he was run over in front of our house on Dogwood Lane in Raleigh, North Carolina, dragged himself 20 feet into the neighbors yard and died. Which is where I found him, still (as in quiet) in the grass.

Give me five minutes to recall that day to E.'s memory, and I bet I can make her cry, if only by example.

Existence Before Essence: A Teacher's Motto

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There is no such thing as a bad semester -- I mean, if no one slashes your tires or eggs your house and especially if you don't get a certified letter from the dean or arrive to find the locks changed on your office door.

No, of course, a semester could go wrong in some operatic way suitable for description in recitative. But I've never had one go bad in any of those ways. USF students are many things and one of them is: nice.

I'm talking about a very pleasant place to teach. Here at USF, typically, you come to the conclusion you've done a decent job. You have your notion -- your inner checklist -- of what good work is, and most semesters enough of the kids do enough right for you to conclude there's no disconnect between your goals and your methods.

Also, you've had enough satisfied classes, as measured by the multiple-choice tests the university mandates at semester's end (and pretty much ignores once you're tenured and promoted) to recognize the superficial signs of satisfaction that predict a good score on the "money" question: Overall, do you consider this instructor a good teacher? (rate 1-5)

But here's the good part. Sometimes, you conclude that the kids didn't learn what you wanted them to learn and/or, moreover, they understood what they didn't understand and resented you for their failure. Either or both. Either they and you are dissatisfied, or just you. And that's okay -- as long as it doesn't happen semester after semester. Your *baseline* must be success, most of the time.

If a class goes bad, in a weird way it can be exhilarating because perpetual success is boring and stultifying. (And possibly delusional. I know I may sound somewhat boastful and self-serving here. A former student reads this and replies: What? It's a wonder I didn't kill you with my bare hands, old man.)

I've had some long and interesting conversations this semester with Nick the Student, who would really like to see tenure abolished because he says too many of his teachers are in a kind of comfort zone because their lives are devoid of pressure.

I tell him good teachers create their own discomfort zone. Sometimes you conclude you tried something new, or perhaps hung onto something stale too long. And it just didn't work. Suddenly your next semester becomes much more dramatic, your next class an arena in which you have something to prove. You become the hero of your own epic, reading new books, planning new activities, doing that most daring of all pedagogical acts: drastically revising your syllabus.

It never gets boring. When I first came here nearly 20 years ago, I taught the media management class. I did the classic thing. I found two pretty good books on the topic and assigned the lesser and taught from the better. One of the suggested exercises to illustrate how one should manage was to give a student a waste basket and a bunch of paper wads and tell the student her/his task was to make a game of tossing the wads into the waste basket.

The idea was that the student would begin either by dropping the wads into the basket or by going to the other side of the room and playing long toss, but that finally she/he would settle on a midpoint where she/he was successful most of the time but not all of the time.

And when I did the exercise in class, that's how it played out. Constant success was boring. Too much failure was distressing. That's how to design tasks for subordinates, the text said.

I think that's why I enjoy teaching. It's how I choose to frame the task. Call me Dr. Goldilocks. The porridge is neither too hot nor too cold. It's just right.

Berkeley Poetry Slam: Haiku Review

Anyone Can Twitter. It Takes a Man to Blog.

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Sitting in class watching the reporting students work on their final. What a Twitter this would make if there were any need to Twitter it, which there is not given the fact all 13 of my students are here working away.

Of course, the deans might like knowing where I am, but I think the GPS strapped to my leg has that covered.

USF Makes the Bottom of a Weekly Standard Article Fretting about Obama's Honorary Degree From Notre Dame

An essay worth thinking about.

My not being Catholic shouldn't mean I just stand by and smile when these controversies arise. Most of the time, I'm proud of how USF deals with the contradictions in its philosophy/theology, noting that such contradiction is inherent in all the religious systems I am familiar with. But, as I said, I'm not Catholic.

The conclusion of Joseph Bottum's essay, which first appeared in the Weekly Standard.

Any Catholic with an ounce of awareness knew this fight was coming. The ordinary Catholic Church and the Catholic colleges were bound to clash, and it's a little unfortunate that it actually spilled into public view with a visit of the president of the United States to the campus of Notre Dame. A better place to make all this public might have been the Sacred Heart University dinner this spring, which honored the pro-abortion activist Kerry Kennedy. Or the Xavier University commencement, which is honoring the pro-abortion political strategist Donna Brazile. Or the University of San Francisco graduation, which is honoring the pro-abortion district attorney (and prominent Proposition 8 opponent) Kamala Harris.

- snip -

There are reasons, however, that the struggle over Catholic culture broke into open battle over a visit of Barack Obama to Notre Dame. In part, it's simply because Obama is the president and a whole lot more prominent than Kerry Kennedy or Donna Brazile or Kamala Harris. But in greater part, it's because Notre Dame is, well, Notre Dame: home of the gold dome, the basilica, the grotto, and Touchdown Jesus. If Georgetown doesn't appear Catholic to ordinary Catholics, that's just Georgetown.

But if Notre Dame is shaky--if the most identifiably Catholic place in America doesn't seem Catholic--then the old connection between Catholic culture and Catholic institutions and the Catholic Church really is broken beyond repair. And where will Catholics send their children to school then?

Kos Obscenities in the Mother's Milk of Newspapers and 'Sense of Community'

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I don't agree with him completely, since I think for some people -- and not only the rich and powerful -- newspapers provided a sense of local identity, if it was only Herb Caen nattering on about cool grey fog and local drink menus. Let us not deride the great middle class and its wish to know, to belong, to understand. To some degree, newspapers focus our interest on things local and do create some commonalities.

To which I imagine Kos might say bullcrap, because he does say:

That "sense of community" thing? It never existed. Newspapers have always served the wealthiest members of their communities -- the people that will buy the stuff that advertisers were peddling. So ethnic communities have always been underserved. In San Francisco, Asians make up over a third of the population -- the largest single ethnic group in the city -- yet the San Francisco Chronicle doesn't have a single Asian columnist in its stable. Do you think the Asian community sees the Chronicle as a member of its community? Of course not. And given they were traditionally a relatively poor immigrant community, the Chron had little interest in engaging that part of the city.

All around the country, you see the major metro dailies completely ignore entire chunks of their cities. Why do you think the New York Times writes story after story after story talking about those poor unemployed Wall Street types no longer able to buy caviar or $800 doll houses for their daughters?

The reason alternate media has taken off was because the traditional media didn't deliver a product people wanted. If people felt a "sense of community" from their newspaper, perhaps they may have stuck with the product. But they don't, hence it's easy to toss it aside for the countless alternatives at the public's disposal.

More More More on the Treachery of the *Mostly* Reliable Source

E-Media Tidbits Home > Online & Technology > E-Media Tidbits Will Sullivan A group weblog about the intersection of news & technology Posted by Will Sullivan 12:30 PM May. 8, 2009 Hoax Leads to Questions about Journalists' Use of Wikipedia A 22-year-old student in Dublin, Ireland, recently set up a Wikipedia hoax that led several major United Kingdom news outlets to publish a fake quote after they used the socially-curated encyclopedia site to get information about French composer Maurice Jarre, who died in March. The hoax was left unnoticed for weeks. Genevieve Carbery of The Irish Times reported this week: "The quote ... was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after [Jarre's] death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London I! ndependent, on the BBC Music Magazine Web site and in Indian and Australian newspapers.

Oh You Bitch Goddess Wikipedia

Wikipedia for Journalists & Bloggers

View more presentations from StevenWalling.

A Day for Us

A's-Jays yesterday afternoon, Dvorak's Stabat Mater as performed by the Berkeley Community Orchestra and Chorus at St. Joseph's the Worker Catholic Church last night.

I'd seen the A's lose before but never heard the Dvorak. E. seldom gives herself a full day of pleasure. I do my best to revel for two, of course.

Today I Was the Hooky Monster

Covered Andrew's Pop Music class this morning, where a doughty youth talked about the Clash's "London Calling" during which disquisition he asserted (to which I said: maybe?) and then illustrated (well why didn't you say so?!) that the eponymous album cover is a conscious ripoff of Elvis Presley's first album.

Pink and green lettering? Same layout? A-plus, little brother, and adequate compensation for having to admit, if only to myself (oh; and to you, dear reader) that I know eff-all about The Clash other than that there was -- and for all I know still is, in some obscure Vegas lounge -- such a thing.

And there was a video! I do love a video.

This selfless act of inter-generational cooperation did not take too long, and I hit the neighborhood around a quarter to one and thought, in the spirit of inquiry, to see how long the lines were at Grand Lake Theater for the first showing of the new Star Trek movie.

There were no lines.

I stopped and checked with the box office to discover the movie had only been going for five minutes, and as the nice lady said, "It starts off slow."

And two hours later here I am. I had a good time. Having enjoyed the original series -- which I now find unwatchable, except as camp -- and many hours of the many subsequent series and movies, and always finding them an easy diversion from the pain of thinking, I am pretty much an easy mark for the brand.

I had read that the new movie used the old time-travel gimmick to reset the premise, to fudge the back story of Kirk and Spock so that we can start anew -- more movies, more series, more lunch boxes, more doctoral dissertations.

I, for one, didn't think the evolved premise -- which if we imagine it as a companion animal would be warty, hairy, somewhat cockeyed and certainly walking with a limp -- had enough of an explicit back story to need fudging.

Is it the fanboys and all those Star Trek novelizations, which have created a detailed history of people and times, any violence to which would cause a psychic tremor in all the basement and garage apartments of America where lurk the Nation of Trek?

I don't care enough to find out. Make it so Number One. Heh heh.

Turns out I liked the movie just fine. Boy Kirk may be Kirk Lite, but William Shatner was Kirk Marbled, as in pass the ham. This new captain is energetic and engaging, and not some big mope like whatsisname in the first-shall-be-last Star Wars trilogy.

New Spock just loves his mom and will bop you if you diss her. (It's a plot point.) Okay I like that. What would have been weird in Nimoy Spock -- too much mother lovin' past a certain age, and you're suddenly in Anthony Perkins territory -- does no violence to my notion of how Spock developed emotionally.

Here's a spoiler. Stop stop stop. New Spock and New Uhuru get busy, which works for several reasons, not the least of which is my hitherto unsuspected satisfaction at seeing New Kirk not get the girl.

New Bones is an actor I must put a name to, Karl Urban, the New Zealander of LOR fame. He can do nervous, testy and mildly comic. Who knew? Who knew he would settle for so subordinate a gig?

New Scotty I'll also put a name to: Simon Pegg of That Zombie Comedy. (Which wasn't the name. But close enough for zombie work.) I'm not quite sure how to put this. Pegg is genuinely funny, as in droll, understated when appropriate. I think maybe there's some *acting going on,* not enough to set a cast precedent, happily.

Much noisy and occasionally confusing hurtling through space and blowing up of things -- including the planet Vulcan, giving Spock an edgy kind of "Last of the Mohicans" vibe. (But nothing homoerotic. No none of that; cf. Spock and Uhuru getting busy.)

Some plot nonsense as the mechanisms and motives of the vengeful time traveler -- the deux ex machina, the mcguffin -- emerge, though that's the kind of analysis one does not pursue. If you are lucky enough not to see the holes in such popular entertainments, what a blissful myopia it is. Don't open the drawer and drag out the magnifying glass.

Oh. Old Spock shows up, although looking somewhat dessicated, and I swear his false teeth click. I took pleasure in his presence not for reasons of continuity or nostalgia but just because at 78 he's still coherent and continent enough to get through 45 seconds of dialogue without calling for a potty break. He's a ruin but a noble ruin, lean and vaguely Roman, suggesting in some sense I can't quite put into words that seriousness is afoot or perhaps merely underfoot, rubbing against our ankles.

I shudder to think of them dragging Shatner back on screen to bless his earlier self, Shatner, who at this stage of his life looks like an unholy amalgam of himself and the Pillsbury Doughboy.

You can't go home again, not if you can't fit through the door.

Post Prandial

A pleasant meal for the Media Studies majors, though not as raucous or emotional as some I've been to. The question is: Does the reality of the job market mute the mindless hope to which all graduates are entitled, college or otherwise?

Back in '66, we had a nice little war, getting worse, so let's not pity the young too much. What I tell them and what I mean with all my heart is that there's a decent probability they'll live to 150, which means (among other things) they will have a decade or two to focus up and get serious. Bartend now, save the world or make a billion later.

To which advice, if I were a kid, I would respond with a polite nod and a renewed determination to figure it all out as soon as possible. If the old man is right, I'll take the 2060s off.

Having Plenty to Say Doesn't Mean You Say It

Cover of Lady's Not for Burning

I have posted -- really posted -- very little lately. It has been a difficult semester in many ways, and talking about it publicly wouldn't help. Oh my no.

Is anonymous blogging cowardly? Maybe. But certainly therapeutic.

In happier news, tonight we have the annual dinner for Media Studies seniors at the Villa Romana in San Francisco. That's where we had it last year, and I thought it a big success. I don't think students want their senior years to dribble away in a series of fragmented moments. This will be a pause, a signpost. Friends will be embraced. Faculty will be honored.

The last week of my own senior year of college went by well enough without such a moment, I recall. From one point of view, that last week was one big moment, a great holding of breath. E. and I had been secretly married for six months, and if that fact had emerged, even at the last minute, I would have been tossed out of school, and my lovely fellowship at Duke lost as well.

You may say: secretly married? Expelled??!! There you have Whooping Jesus Bible College in a nutshell, and why my memories are less than fond.

I'd already been expelled once my senior year, for having a roommate whose oil lamp set the room on fire. Not ciggies. Certainly not the dopeawanna, of which I knew nothing. It was just an oil lamp that turned over on his desk when we were out of the room.

What I remember -- my signpost -- from those final days is the night before graduation. (E. was driving in from Detroit the next day; we would announce our marriage to our parents in the parking lot outside the gym immediately after I had my degree in hand.)

Carl Haaland suggested we drive down to Ball State in Muncie to see a student production of Christopher Fry's "The Lady's Not for Burning."

In his car. In that vintage Volvo. I considered him quite the sophisticate.

I remember the play and then the drive back through the dark Indiana countryside afterwards, remember it so clearly. Carl and I talked about the future, and its uncertainty, but also how it was going to be okay, Vietnam or not. (As it turned out, Carl went. I didn't.)

I thought about telling him E. and I were secretly married, but ... no. No point showing off, and he was a pretty religious fellow, Volve or not, maybe more than he let on. Still, this conversation, this good fellowship, has to mean something, I thought, because this is a moment meant to mean.

But it didn't. Fifteen years later, after I had got the rest of my degrees, lost a job, moved around, come here to work for the San Francisco Chronicle, I got a note from Carl. He and his family were going to be driving through, from Arizona on the way to Oregon, and he wanted to stop by.

I wrote back saying he was so very welcome. As long as he didn't talk about Jesus. Because I didn't talk about Jesus anymore. And I never heard from him again.

Preparing to Go to a Poetry Slam, We Watched These Videos

Bi-Racial Hair (embed disabled)

Ballyard

Pandemic? I Borrow from Daily Kos

WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl noted yesterday that the public may misunderstand the word "pandemic." The term refers to where an illness spreads, not its severity.

My Bookcases Have Arrived. My Pictures Are Hung. I am Ready to Entertain Callers.

The Chronicle Tour: Yes, There Were Neutron Bomb Jokes

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I thought the Chronicle tour yesterday was a success, if only because the students must have thought, "With all these empty cubicles, there must be room for me."

Actually, the nightmare vision of holes in the fabric of the newsroom was a little misleading. We showed up at 11 a.m., and things are busier 3p-11p, when the business of putting the paper together gets serious. But a lot of familiar faces were absent -- Rubenstein, Rubin, Carl Hall, Bonnie Lemon, Tom Meyer, plus all those who came after I left in '91 who have since moved on.

The highlight of the tour was an impromptu rant from living legend Carl Nolte (USF, class of Cambrian Era) who more or less told the kids that, lacking a business model, journalism was something they needed to put in their rear view mirrors. Our guide, the wonderful Nanette Asimov, listened for a bit and then gently disagreed, suggesting quality journalism would find its way -- e-paper, anyone? -- and that people would want it, that some "monetized" delivery method would emerge. She told the kids not to give up, not just yet, not if journalism was something for which they had Passion.

The ever cheerful Kevin Fagan wandered over and shared his impatience with the self-styled "journalists" who cluttered the weird press conference he'd covered the day before at which a woman announced her dad was the Zodiac killer. But covering the various loonies was so much fun, he manifested, and God knows he's done enough good grim work to justify his pleasure in the occasional loon-fest.

His contribution to the discussion was more one of mood: Who knows the future but so much fun in the job today.

I don't know what the kids thought. They'll tell me on Tuesday. If they show up.

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Tomorrow the Reporting Class Tours the Chronicle

We've been doing this for nearly 20 years, since I came over to the university for all sorts of reasons, one of which was that I had spent six years (three of them full time) getting the darn Ph.D. back in the day, and it chapped me that it had all been a waste.

Other than self development, of course. I really did enjoy reading all those books.

In one way, taking the kids to the Chron was a little like returning to Duke, having the sense that here was something that had existed before me, that did more good than harm, that would go on doing more-good-than-harm long after I had passed.

Oh yes, the hallowed halls -- actually an open-office newsroom -- of the Chronicle. I liked to imagine a student of mine somewhere down the line working at the Chron and finding some relic of my days there, and thinking of the old man suddenly (for the first time in years really) and in some vague way being grateful -- for me, for the paper, for whatever I said that did no permanent harm.

This is not going to happen, or if it happens, it will be in a contracted space and radically altered platform laboring under a different vision and little patience for what we used to do when the Chron was a great mosaic of the good, the bad and the foolish-by-design.

The Chron was a pretty good newspaper, you know, with lots of goofy where everyone else went for stuffy and, in my opinion, all the better for the playfulness.

Then, it got serious and now it's getting steamrolled, which has nothing to do with all the rethinking that went into calming it down, which change was well underway before I left.

I used to miss the Old Chronicle, but now it looks as if I'm going to be missing the Chronicle Period. A man should not outlive his nostalgia. I think that's what I'm saying.

Postscript: Hey, look! An interactive map of newspaper woe.

Us and State Farm

Now it begins. E. talked with an SF person today, who was surprisingly skeptical of E.'s account of my Lady Wife being smashed into on the Fairbanks Grade-- oh yes, my wife, the Susan Boyle of drivers suffering underestimation when it comes to the quality of her driving.

Break into a couple bars of "Thunder Road," E.



You learned on a stick. Your mama drove her 'stang from Columbus, Ohio, to Roanoke, Virginia -- over all those twisty mountain roads -- in record time back there in '66, and the ignition doesn't fall far from the compression.

You are from Dee-troit, Mitchigan, and if you had been a biker chick in the original Road Warrior, Mel Gibson would have had a severely truncated career.

So I just spent a couple hours laboriously sending SF the photos of the scene and the aftermath. We are dealing with a young fellow who was not operating his vehicle at safe residential speeds.

It hurts me to say that, but it's true.

Little O Meets Big O: I'd Like Some of That Sugar, Also

From Baseball Prospectus, where Nate Silver once roamed.

The White Sox learned this past week that it's good to have fans in high places, as they received a private tour of the White House this past Monday during an offday between road series with the Rays and Orioles. President Barack Obama, of course, is a big White Sox fan.

White Sox reliever Octavio Dotel seemed to have the best time of all while meeting Obama, and he even asked for and received a hug from the President. "This is a guy I've been following," Dotel said. "It's exciting to see him. He's such a powerful man. I never met him before, and it's really, really neat to be around him. Just to be that close to him and have that chance, I saw the opportunity to ask for a hug. He said, 'of course.' That was really nice of him."

The White Sox brought Obama plenty of gifts, including a black White Sox jersey with his name and the number "1" on the back, a dozen autographed baseballs, t-shirts, and caps. The White Sox also were allowed to see some parts of the White House that aren't shown on public tours. "We got to see everything," Dotel said. "All we needed to see is where he lives. I'm telling you, it was great. He knows a lot about us. He's a big fan. I can tell he really enjoyed [the visit]."

Let's See How State Farm Handles This One

I wrote yesterday about E.'s collision. Since it happened near the house, after her call I trotted down and took some pictures. Talk about a CSI moment.

When I downloaded the pix to my laptop and did some cropping, it became clear that E.'s uncertainty about exactly what happened resulted from the fact she was the whackee, not the whacker. In short, she was overtaken by a speeding youth who tapped our car, jerked the wheel hard right and ran off the road, through some plants and over some chunks of concrete and onto the sidewalk, all of this uphill.

Physics doesn't lie -- though, as in the case of quantum physics, it tells some rather puzzling truths. But in the macro world, Newton's laws still keep things simple.

At any rate, if I can figure out how to obscure license plate numbers, I may post the images. They tell a tale.

So now we shall see. Will the State Farm adjuster measure up to the task? Stay tuned.

Before Susan Boyle There Was ... Gomer Pyle

Fender Benders Are Inevitable. Acknowledging That is the Beginning of Wisdom

Image by wili_hybrid via Flickr

And E. just bent some fenders. He was making a right turn. She was making a left turn. Since this was close to home, E. called me, and I came scampering, camera in hand.

I'll say one thing for E. The other driver got the worst of it; that is, his car did. Also, some plants were crushed where he pulled off the road.

E. was very calm in the aftermath. She was on the way to her acupuncturist. The other driver was a kid. I believe his Saturday was dented worse than his car, though he was also near his home, so his mom and dad came out, and everyone was nice because everyone was relieved.

Also, everyone was insured.

I am, as I sometimes am, reminded of a poem -- Hardy's "Convergence of the Twain." Can you guess the twain?

I

   In a solitude of the sea
   Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II

   Steel chambers, late the pyres
   Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

   Over the mirrors meant
   To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls -- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

   Jewels in joy designed
   To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

   Dim moon-eyed fishes near
   Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?". . .

VI

   Well: while was fashioning
   This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

   Prepared a sinister mate
   For her -- so gaily great --
A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.

VIII

   And as the smart ship grew
   In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

   Alien they seemed to be:
   No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.

X

   Or sign that they were bent
   By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI

   Till the Spinner of the Years
   Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Well, in this case were are talking about a Chrysler product and, I
think, a Camry. Two households were jarred. That's all. And I go: whew.

Code Talking: The BCL (Beloved Commissioner for Life) of the PF Finley Memorial Fantasy Baseball League Sends Out His 'News and Notes'

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I could be posting. Instead, I josh with 'the boys' in an act of manly bonding.

BCL and his lady went to the A’s fireworks game last night to see Cahill, his backup P, pounded, but the fireworks were great, and the crowd did the wave for an entire half inning, which might have been a record….Russ and Bob doing well early, Russ riding N. Cruz (6 dings) and A. Hill (5 dings) while Bob’s got three no-name pitchers (Romero, Davies and Gallaraga) who are smoking (something?)….Brad is deeply in the toilet awaiting A-Rod’s return, but the question is how deep is too deep? But that team B.A. of .227 is going to adjust up, A-Rod or not….Paul is changing his team name to the Decompositions….last year’s champion J. Pressman is holding his Maine League draft today; BCL missed phone connections yesterday because of the A’s game and thus the BCL’s brain remained unpicked, so Good Luck, JP….Peter is leading the league in K’s, everything else on his team a crapfest…who did Berger actually pick in the final whiparound? Somebody in the minors; I’ve already forgotten who; I’ll get back to you on that…before you push Matt down and try to take his candy, recall that Sabbathia always looks lousy in April and then rules the world…Tola is clam-happy as Masterson gets the starts in Boston while Dice-K heals, but Escobar has had a setback, so that may be a wash…league still undecided about what kind of plant to get for Chef Peter; he prefers outdoor evergreen while Russ and Bob prefer stolen-from-the-cemetery…Paul has five guys on the DL; I’m going to have dinner and drinks with his future mother-in-law to see what can be done

The Brilliance That is Nate Silver

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If Texas exercised its right to break up into five states -- which right, unlike secession, it actually has -- this is what Silver says it might look like, and this is how such a split might affect national politics.

That's Not an Ivory Tower. That's an Outhouse

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Wandering around the web trying to get my mind around one of those trendy theoretical constructs that I tend not to take seriously because I seem to have gotten by most of my life with an attitude more than an actual philosophy -- though I understand most attitudes are a kind of trickle down from the status quo and thus we all have a philosophy, which we possess as naturally and unconsciously as bad breath.

I'm not trying to boast here.

But now I'm following links and staring into tangles, and I'm suddenly thinking that we academics in the softer of the liberal arts don't live in ivory towers, which imply a royal condition and/or being a trapped princess. We are like the Amish, sturdy and misunderstood, working with the oldest of tools, all those words we use to scrape at the rocky fields. We understand the power of manure. We talk in the old language of ideas, and fewer and fewer people understand us and fewer and fewer care.

I'm broadly generalizing here about our quaint unworldliness and our fierce clan loyalties. Chemistry and business school and so on, not so much, of course. But the rest of us: The world drives by and laugh -- or, worse than that, condescend. We are kind of quaint, you know.

I haven't quite worked this analogy out, obviously. It's just that today I'm in a bit of a horse and buggy mood.

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I Get a Link! Work-Friendly and Work-Angry

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From Work-Friendly


Over coffee last week, a guy I know was describing his separation from a startup. At first he called it “friendly.” When we went into more detail, he elaborated with “Well, it was only work-friendly.”

I just found myself using work-angry in a post, and it took me a second to figure out where it came from.

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This Was No Accident. He Was Forwarded to Death.

I recall the old Disney film "Tron," in which the hero is sucked into a video game, the special effects so crude by modern standards but so smashingly Freudian: Dream Works? Yah, your dreams work .

Of course, there was many a novel before and many a novel and film since in which someone is sucked from this world into some smaller simulacrum and some metaphorical statement about the nature of reality is worked out. (Being drawn into an actual dream world -- Render, the Shaper! -- reduces the distance between thing and thing represented to minimal distance, I'd say. But it's all the same message, the same terror, the same comfort.)

Anyway here I sit advising students, and any free moment between advice I've been using to kill emails. So I imagine a novel and/or movie in which the hero is drawn into Microsoft Outlook, which is at first a benign world but where soon the emails breed like rabbits or rats and gradually crush him to death.

That's the image I like. He turns away. He looks again: More. More. Always more. They are like crack babies, the crack babies of the digital world. Attention must be paid.

Does this cut against my recent argument in favor of accepting in good spirit irrelevant emails from friends? Of course not. It's the legitimate stuff that's overwhelming. I need to starting getting up at 5 a.m. and getting my hands bloody.

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Tomorrow the Teacher is the Student in Arts Reviewing/Reporting

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I have a hole in my claims to be a Rockin' Renaissance man; that is, I don't rock. Not even a little.

I won't call myself a Musical Illiterate, since my impression is that many fans of popular music aren't that well informed about the specifics of the craft and/or art of what they enjoy.... Okay, of course, I *am* a musical illiterate. It's just that I am also -- in comparison to everyone else, it seems -- a Musical Indifferent. I mean, I like music. I'm not tone deaf. I don't turn away in disgust. I tap my foot and bob my head. I have quite a few classical CDs and quite a few jazz CDs, though we don't listen to them that much. Actually, I haven't put on a music CD since Christmas when we listen to all the wonderful holiday dreck.

I don't have any music on my IPod. Though we have symphony seats on and off and though occasionally we go to a jazz club, music remains something I *intend* to get into.

I really like "Lament for Beowulf." It's literary, and it's loud. My wife says my tastes in classical are vulgar, 19th Century, Russian for Chrissake.

As for rock/pop/rap whatever. Pretty much indifferent. In the car, I roam the dial, find a song to listen to, enjoy it very much -- and when it's over keep looking for NPR.

So now deep in the semester finally we will do a music review. I told the students: Tomorrow, you bring a favorite music review of some music you really like. (We've done that before with films, TV, drama, the visual arts.) But when class starts I'm just going to sit there. You go up to the front of the room -- one? ensemble? -- and explain to me what it's all about. Because I really don't know. And there's no point in my being ashamed.

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Working Very Hard Not Writing

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By which I mean writing in the head and not writing down.

Writing down is dangerous since who can resist the temptation to share the well-shaped sentence? Indeed, my succumbing to the temptation to share is responsible for this recent spate of "not writing."

Those for whom this blog is a sea anchor, a last hope of salvation -- a toothskin of hope, as it were -- when the storm of life is fierce and a safe port is far away will recall my post last week about being asked none too gently to quit forwarding emails to a certain person. I suppose the forwarding of non-essential emails (or that most elusive category, the *possibly useful* email) is a little bit like a dog raising its head for a nice ear scratch.

Sometimes you are ignored. Sometimes you get a kick.

Some people -- powerful people; purpose-driven people, whose lives are hectic with accomplishments -- don't like distant acquaintances forwarding them emails that are not of fierce and specific relevance to their lives *right that moment.* But it had never occurred to me that anyone of my acquaintance was that powerful, important and/or purpose-driven! I thought they were more in my category: plugging away: doing one's best, often ineffectually; always having time to stop and smell the flowers, possibly even to go to sleep among the flowers.

(But then you might wake up 20 years later, unmoored and adrift in time. There is a deep capitalistic truth in "Rip Van Winkle.")

Anyway, I have never asked anyone to stop sending me emails. (I am a great scratcher of the ears of companion animals, some of whom shrink from me.) Some forwarded emails I just ignore and then later on, using the "from" function on Outlook, I will take on a dozen at a time, glancing at some, discarding others without a look. (But those from my Sissy I dearly love. You keep them coming, dearest sister.)

I concede that I *do* rely on correspondents to use the "subject" line purposefully, so that emails, forwarded or otherwise, are not neglected beyond their shelf life. A student became quite distraught a couple of weeks ago when I kept ignoring his emails with "Hi, Dr. Robertson" in the subject line. No clarity and thus no urgency, little buckaroo.

Back to my point. I've gotten several "directive" emails of one kind or another in recent weeks, instructing me to quit sending emails or, almost schoolmarmishly, announcing some righteous action touching on some mistake I have committed. But none of these emails included the phrase, "asking for your thoughts."

These emails have not necessarily brightened my day. So I ignore them and write something in my head, starting it on the right side of my brain and then forwarding it to my left. And then I let it fall into the dead letter box of short-term memory (wherever that is located).

And then I guess the rats eat it or something. Because when I come looking for it a day later, I can recover neither the emotion nor the language. The world may thus be deprived of some wit and wisdom, but the world must grit its teeth and bear up.

Work Work Work. We are Busy. We Must Work.

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Lines come to mind from Browning's "The Grammarian's Funeral," that tribute to the true scholar.

Long he lived nameless: how should spring take note
Winter would follow?
Till lo, the little touch, and youth was gone!
Cramped and diminished,
Moaned he, "New measures, other feet anon!
My dance is finished"?
No, that's the world's way: (keep the mountain-side,
Make for the city!)
He knew the signal, and stepped on with pride
Over men's pity;
Left play for work, and grappled with the world
Bent on escaping:
"What's in the scroll," quoth he, "thou keepest furled
Show me their shaping,
Theirs who most studied man, the bard and sage,--
Give!"--So, he gowned him,
Straight got by heart that book to its last page:
Learned, we found him.
Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead,
Accents uncertain:
"Time to taste life," another would have said,
"Up with the curtain!"
This man said rather, "Actual life comes next?
Patience a moment!
Grant I have mastered learning's crabbed text,
Still there's the comment.
Let me know all! Prate not of most or least,
Painful or easy!
Even to the crumbs I'd fain eat up the feast,
Ay, nor feel queasy."

Why the Internets are the Best of All Possible Tubes

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Princess Sparkle Pony.

From the depths she rises to taunt me.

More Email Etiquette: The Kiss Off

Have you ever wondered how to deal with someone who sends and/or forwards you too many emails?

A former -- very recently former -- correspondent shares his secret:

please remove me from this email distribution. i have work to do.
and i am sorry, michael, but i do not have time to read every thought that occurs in your mind

Damn, I gots to slow down.

We Want Kittens

From "I Can Has Cheezburger"

Nuthin' Says Busy Like a Week without Posts

And since posting is about halfway down my list of things to do, that means many other things that might tip the balance in the struggle for peace and justice have also been ignored. Just a brutally busy week. We did go to the hospital to visit the woman who cleans for us sometimes.

Stomach cancer. Damn. She doesn't have a lot of English, and we have almost no Spanish. But I know what dolor means.

Actually a Bit Frightening. Glad Kos is Trying to Laugh These Bag Boys Into the Shadows.