the schlemihl life

Day 2: (I'm being sarcastic)

2010-01-14T18:51:00.000-08:00

cardio: 20 mins exercise bikke, 15 mins yarrliptical
(read a Reformation history book that I brought by accident)
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: banana, apple, vitamins
lunch: feta-spinach-dill scramble
apartment clean?: pleasantly

I'm cutting myself some slack this week and only going to the gym on weekdays when I am not also visiting a doctor's office of some kind.

You will notice that I will also not go the gym tomorrow.

It has been such a LOVELY week.

Day 1: The Eye Sin on the Cake

2010-01-11T18:33:00.000-08:00

cardio: 20 mins bikebike, 15 mins eclipsible
(read Jill Mann's article in the most recent Studies in the Age of Chaucer)
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: forty
breakfast: pear, apple, vitamins
lunch: two eggs, bratwurst, leftover pasta
apartment clean?: respectably

Okay, time to hit reset and get back on the horse. I would have started last week (and did hit the gym one time last week) but I was too busy with my CORNEAL ABRASION. With the DISGUSTING WHITISH DOT THAT IS STILL VISIBLE ON MY IRIS. With the PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION OF MY SIN, OH GOD, UNCLEAN, UNCLEAN, apparently dry eyes and dry gas heat and contact lenses don't mix.

I finally got a new prescription for my glasses, but they still make me feel dizzy a bit. That said, they're very attractive and Euro.

There's much more to post here about where I've been for the past month (the Cadillac that was offered to me as a gift, then retracted; New York for the holidays; waiting at the edge of my seat about nearly every element of my life) but fuck it: clean slate, back to Day One, back on the health kick.

If anyone finds a used car (or new eyeball?) that is being sold at a reasonable rate, please contact me.

Day 15 (<21): Bad Bad Dobby

2009-12-07T22:11:00.000-08:00

cardio: 10 mins rope, 15 mins wii
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: gouda, sourdough toast, apple, vitamins
lunch: two eggs, "home fries" (potatoes, onions, tempeh, zucchini)
apartment clean?: approachably

Haiku:

I'm a fat ass waste.
Even my video games
call me overweight.

Yes, that's right, I've crossed over into "Overweight" by Wii Fit standards.

But at the end of a very unfit week, I did send to my advisor a reasonable excuse for a second chapter draft-in-progress. Reasonable enough. I workshopped it with some colleagues on Friday and they liked it. So we'll see.

Suddenly there is all this creative writing to do in the meantime. Randy wants me to adapt Measure for Measure to modern political scandals, but still in verse. I'm writing the verse component to a storybook gift that my friends are putting together for our other friend. And Ara wants me to write the book for the Where the Wild Things Are children's musical adaptation at her new theater teaching job in Marin.

I'm glad I'm sort of becoming the go-to guy for playwriting among my friends. But now I'll have to deliver on something more than haiku.

Day 14 (<17): Bad Dobby

2009-12-02T12:56:00.000-08:00

cardio: 20 mins extrabike, 15 mins ellipshicle
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: ahi tuna burger on sourdough toast, miso soup with tofu, vitamins
lunch: shrimp and cocktail sauce, sourdough toast, apple
apartment clean?: passably

Well, it has happened: I missed three days. I'm working towards a deadline and all, and... yeah, no excuses. Bad Dobby. Bad bad bad Dobby. Moment of truth: will I get back on the ball?

So, today should be Day 17. Which means I'm three days in the whole, so I must put in three extra days before I can consider myself caught up.

In other news, Ara convinced me to go for a week on no saturated fat. Literally none. I can't even cook in olive oil. I can eat pasta with tomato sauce, but I can't put parmesan cheese on it.

I think Socrates said that the unqueso life is not worth living. I wonder if hemlock has any saturated fat.

Day 13: Salute Your Shorts

2009-11-24T18:43:00.000-08:00

cardio: 10 mins jumprope, 10 mins Wii Fit
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty-five
crunches: forty
breakfast: egg salad, baguette, vitamins
lunch: Whole Foods salad bar (pea shoots, dandelion shoots or whatever, peas, corn, bleu cheese, Diestel turkey, falafel)
apartment clean?: reasonably

Ask me whether I made it all the way to the men's locker room before I realized that I had not packed my gym shorts, and thus was unable to work out. I had already left the house for the Old English Reading Group, which I was late for; I was not supposed to use up my one day per week (note the change) of working out at home on a day when I had already left the house; I am already behind in a workweek in which I am supposed to complete a draft of my play (by Sunday evening), a full dissertation chapter draft (by Monday evening), and a novel (by Monday 11:59pm). And I should definitely not be wasting my time on the English Grads list-serv:

"The videos [of police brutality at the UC protests] are horrifying indeed.

But to anyone teaching a composition course this semester: remember, as Paolo Freire and Miss Jean Brodie have both pointed out, that to educate is to lead out -- not to put in or deposit or inculcate, which would indeed be the opposite, and which, regardless of your own politics or opinions, is an inherently oppressive act in the classroom.

It is far more revolutionary, and far more effective, to allow the students to reach their own decisions about what is happening here (rather than to inform them about your own), and to provide them with the critical thinking tools to make their own opinions, and actions, duly complex and mature. Rather than simply swaying people one way or another, you'll help build a group of educated people who is not so easily swayed.

In other words, the most revolutionary thing you can possibly do is what you were already doing, assuming you were doing it right in the first place, since our composition classes are supposed to center on critical thought. Lead out, draw out, the natural instincts for critical thinking that are already in place. Guide them the tools to go out and research, deeply, what is going on. Never present them with any material, however straightforward it may seem, that is 'just the way it is.' Because no one, and certainly not any of us, is capable of a statement free of subjectivity, and that is exactly what we're trying to teach these students.

If there are students in your classroom (and there are) whose current reading of the situation is opposed to yours (and mine), it is still your job to encourage those students to find the words and voice to think through, investigate, and communicate their reading. And once such a reading is exposed to the critical thought necessary for such an investigation, the reading will change because the student will change. Any other approach will cause a dissenting mind to (rightly) clam up at the back of the room and grumble about 'these liberals, making assumptions, wouldn't hear me anyway, wasting more of our time.'

At NYU, in September 2001, when our chancellor ordered classes to reconvene after only a week (part of the 'return to normalcy' thing -- you want to talk euphemistic emails?) my TA walked into our 45A recitation and said, 'In the coming months, you are going to be bombarded with text. You probably already have been. It is our job, as literary scholars, to parse, analyze, and closely read texts, to uncover not only what they say, or what they appear to say, but how they say it. So in the coming months, you will discover just how important our work can be.' And then she produced three handouts, each one with a different text that represented a different 'side' of the 9/11 attacks -- Pat Robertson, who blamed LGBT and Communist New Yorkers for bringing down God's wrath, a blogger in Palestine who laid the blame entirely on aggressive US foreign policy in the Middle East, and a conscpicuously 'centrist' article. And then she said, 'Well? Go. Analyze. Let's discuss the form, not just the content, of these texts, and how they relate to agenda (or the construction of an agenda), etc etc.'

I would suggest that if anyone is going to bring up recent UC events in their classroom, they run a similar exercise, bring in texts for interpretation, etc. In any case, open a discussion, but don't comandeer it. Know that you, too, have an agenda, and that in that classroom, you are very powerful and loud -- though it is on you to get students to claim more power, and more voice, for themselves, regardless of whether you completely disagree with them. Feel free to steal my TA's ideas, as I have. I will not post this to bSpace.

Let's remember that a video from the grassroots, like an email from the top down, like our own classroom plans, is a text, one that we cannot simply take at face value. It is part of our job description not to take it at face value. Or we can do it on our own time; but when we are educating, our responsibility is to train students to read more deeply, think more complexly, and so forth."

Day 12: Wiiiiii

2009-11-20T18:54:00.000-08:00

cardio: 10 mins (figuring out the) jumprope, 10 mins (remembering how to use the) Wii Fit
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: leftover vegetable pie, an apple, vitamins
lunch: dry salami, maple yogurt (Australian-style), beans on toast, bread and cheese
apartment clean?: passably

I must be quick, since I'm rushing out to go see Performing Diaspora at CounterPulse. Quick updates:

1) I was wrong. Old school protest can have significant effects -- if the protestors are willing to step out of their comfort zones. They have, and the media is paying attention.

2) The jumprope workout will work perfectly, I think, and since it is a bit more intense than the cardiomachines, I can unguiltily bolster it with some Wii Fit stuff, which means I'll get to start reporting back here on my weight and BMI and such (didn't get a chance to write it down today, but the cute little computerized voice made fun of me for not having reported back in months, then called me overweight). This will make it much easier to balance fitness and dissertation. Three weeks and counting -- woot.

Day 11: Mr. Roper

2009-11-19T18:39:00.000-08:00

cardiomachine: 20 mins leakybeaky, 15 mins ellipsis
(read James Joyce's Ulysses)
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: one eggs, beans on toast because I wish I were British, an apple, vitamins
lunch: dry salami, maple yogurt (Australian-style), cold cauliflower soup (Ara's mom's recipe), a few brussels sprouts
apartment clean?: reasonably

Last weekend we saw DV8's To Be Straight With You at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and it was one of those rare pieces of art that was both politically effective and artistically virtuosic. Not least because of a monologue, made up of text from an interview with a young Caribbean homosexual whose father stabbed him when he came out of the closet, a monologue which a dancer performed while performing Olympic-level feats -- with a jumprope.

A fucking JUMPROPE.

Keith (see yesterday's post), who is friends with that dancer, and told me that the dancer had once been a competitive jumproper, and that the director just decided that he'd have his performers use what they know. Keith said, "You know, they say that ten minutes with a jumprope is as intense a workout as a thirty-minute run." The Jump Rope Institute (yup) confirms that this is true (click here). Of course, I could never jog because the impact is bad for my bad arches, and so, the elliptical and exercise bike are my albatrosses.

Cut to me in the stretch room at the gym today. One of the biggest difficulties in this new fitness plan is simply getting to the gym -- when I need all the time I can to deal with pressing dissertation deadlines, and plays that just won't get written, an unnecessary trip away from the home office fucking sucks. And I hear this Indiana Jones whoop-crack sound and I look up from my downward-facing-dog and see, again,

a fucking JUMPROPE.

One of the other things I hate about the gym is how laws of probability necessitate that most of the people at the gym on any given day will be people who go to the gym regularly. Fucking in-shape undergrads walking around in muscle shirts while I grunt through my paltry twenty pushups don't you judge me. And one of those very fit undergrads was right there, jumproping.

And it was so cool. Criss-cross, double spins, or whatever the hell, superfast, I just watched in awe for a second, which was embarrassing, and besides, at the gym, you're not supposed to look directly at anyone, which is another reason why I hate it.

And another thing I hate about the gym is the elliptical, because all that work doesn't go anywhere, because elliptical-walking is neither a transferable nor an impressive skill. But jumproping, as we have seen, is. And if I do that frequently enough, I could have something neat to whip out at parties.

So I bought a jumprope. Weighted handles, for my fitness enjoyment. And now, two days out of my weekly four, I can get my cardio in without going all the way to the gym. The foot impact, which is light if you're doing it right, shouldn't be a problem for my feet. In fact, I think it might make me lighter on my feet.

Oddly, I just realized that the dance piece we saw at Yerba Buena the week before that had a major section that mimed a jumprope, which we discussed at some length in the car on the way home. THE FATES HAVE TOLD ME TO JUMPROPE.

Day 10: Everybody's Fight

2009-11-18T18:39:00.000-08:00

cardiomachine: 20 mins psychbike, 15 mins ellipsicle
(William Tydeman's The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550)
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: two eggs, potatoes and toast at Ann's Soup Kitchen, vitamins
lunch: root vegetable tostada from Tacubaya in West Berkeley (compliments of my lovely wife)
apartment clean?: certainly

Ann's Soup Kitchen has a 15% discount for anyone wearing UC Berkeley gear. Before I stepped up to the counter, I quickly grabbed my Cal gym shorts from out of my bag and put them on over my jeans -- the cashier told me that the discount only applies on Fridays, but that, yes, the shorts would have counted.

On the way from Ann's to the gym, I bumped into a former student of mine. She asked if I was going to the rally. We spoke for a few seconds, I awkwardly said "Well, I'm not teaching this year, so I've got nothing to strike from... it isn't my fight, I guess," then she went to the rally, and I to the gym.

Later on, I sent her this email:

"It was nice to run into you today -- just to let you know, I did end up attending the end of the rally, and marched through the streets of Berkeley in the protest. Two minutes after we spoke on Bancroft, I realized that I had actually said the words 'this isn't my fight,' which is untrue anyway, especially because any fight, anywhere, that affects access to education is a fight I shohuld consider 'mine.' I
don't agree with everything that the protestors were saying, but I reminded myself that marching in solidarity is not the same as marching in lockstep, and that an imperfect gesture is still sometimes better than no gesture at all. So, thanks for reminding me, if only accidentally, of what my priorities are."

My voice is hoarse from the chant-yelling (when I do such things, I do them right, and yes, I did get on the mike for the giant speaker system so that I could rustle up the crowd); my favorite part was when we marched outside Berkeley High and did a special cheer just for them:

This is everybody's fight!
Berkeley High is hella tight!

As usual, the Berkeley protesters have offered up a massive prix fixe spread of broadly-defined and often half-baked demands and philosophies; I prefer to order a la carte. At the march, between the deafening calls and responses, I discussed with Keith (from Performance Studies at UC Davis) all of the points I complained about in yesterday's post, particularly because Keith's thesis is on a relevant topic. Keith shrugged after a while and said, "Yeah. It's hard to be smart at a protest." I said, "Exactly. Exactly." And we marched on, in solidarity but by no means in lockstep.

Day 9: Stupor Mario

2009-11-17T18:41:00.000-08:00

cardiomachine: 20 mins excitebike, 15 mins ellipsical
(William Tydeman's The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550)
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: top sirloin, one egg, half Ara's apple, vitamins
lunch: Musical Offering Cafe -- lentil vegetable soup, salad, bread
apartment clean?: particularly

There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, well, not for three days, but then it's of course back to business as usual. And while putting your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, would make the machine stop, it would also result in hurt feelings all around, and potential physical injury -- and so, the owners of the machine have kindly cordoned off a specific time and place in a "free speech zone" that will keep protestors away from the dangerous gears. And in that zone, when you use your safe, inoffensive, glib, and generalized chants and signs to protest the machine, you've got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine could theoretically be prevented from working at all, if it ever came to that, though of course it will not.

Seriously: exactly what member of senior management ever shook in his boots for a strike that had a predetermined end date? With all due respect, I am glad I am not teaching this year -- because, though solidarity would compel me to cancel my classes in honor of the strike, I would do it grudgingly. (I hope that going to the library and gym doesn't count as crossing the picket line.) This kind of nonsense is more of the typical snakeoil that makes a continually abused body of students, educators, and staff feel like "well, at least I'm doing something."

Either strike or don't; no real strike could be as safe and pleasant as this one is promising to be. I wonder what Mario Savio would say.

Today, I broke my promise to myself that I would not read any emails at all related to the budget crisis. And it cost me work hours on my dissertation -- what could have been time spent in a worthwhile and relevant scholarly pursuit was instead squandered on an endless, facile, discourse. Which is exactly why I made the promise to myself. And I will not break it again.

But I kept the promise that counts -- and I think I took out my frustration on the exercise bike.

Day 8: Chutes and Ladders

2009-11-14T17:20:00.000-08:00

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(skimmed notes and biblio for William Tydeman's The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: one egg, baguette, cheese, vitamins
lunch: I simply do not remember, but I did eat lunch
apartment clean: yes

My new hard drive has arrived, as has my old one. The thingy that Dell made me buy in order to extract the old data has failed completely, and so I dropped the old hard drive at the Used Computer Store on Shatuck (for a forty-five-buck diagnostic, they said they'd give it a shot) and moved on as if the data was lost for sure. I've kept various projects -- my dissertation, my play, my National Novel Writers' Month project, this fitness blog thing, etc -- in purgatory for weeks now, and they're all too time-sensitive for that. So I'm calling it a done deal, and if the brain cavalry does come riding in at some point, all the better.

Or, rather, another day of re-organizing and backing up everything. I'm technically posting this on Monday, two days after my last trip to the gym (this, like the prior few posts, are backdated because of all the computer trouble). And I've spent the last 48 hours installing Windows 7 (might as well do it now, and yes, it is much better), adjusting and replacing various programs, and then sifting through all the data I have left, salvaging what I can, and organizing my entire external hard drive while I was at it (except music, which is an ongoing project and all doubled on Ara's Mac anyway), so that future backups can be quick, easy, and frequent. Then I triplicated all scholarly and non-scholarly writing onto my flash drive. And I uploaded most of my photos to Picasa, in neat, safe little albums that will sync to my hard drive periodically.

I have been sitting here at the living room table, doing all this. And there's still more catching up to do. But I'm glad I'm finally moving forward, yo. And I get mad props for continuing the fitness thing into a second week, even as my data disappeared beneath me.

Day 7: The Date is a Lie

2009-11-11T17:16:00.000-08:00

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Lambert Danaeus's "On True and Christian Friendship")
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: Mom's pumpkin bread, vitamins
lunch: tapas at the Musical Offering Cafe
apartment clean: yes

I had limited computer access this week while I waited for my new hard drive from Dell. I'm posting these entries after the fact, but I promise they're all true.

Day 6: The Date is a Lie

2009-11-10T16:37:00.000-08:00

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Gilbert Walker's "A Manifest Detection of Diceplay")
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: leftover miso-cornmeal porkchop and Annie's mac and cheese, vitamins
lunch: leftover slider and fries from the gourmet burger place on College Avenue
apartment clean: yes

I had limited computer access this week while I waited for my new hard drive from Dell. I'm posting these entries after the fact, but I promise they're all true.

Day 5: Bakhtin Stings

2009-11-09T19:26:00.000-08:00

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike (no elliptical: there was a long waiting line, and I had run out of reading material)
(read Mikhail Bakhtin's "The Role of Games in Rabelais")
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: leftover miso-cornmeal porkchop and Annie's mac and cheese, vitamins
lunch: leftover slider and fries from the gourmet burger place on College Avenue
apartment clean: yes

I so almost did not make it to the gym today. As in I didn't make it there until about 5:30pm, when the post-work rush makes the place very crowded, and when the people who run the place do not adjust the lights for the fact that the sun has long set below the skylights, so the place is just a sweaty tired and dim chore. But I went.

Don't judge me for cutting out the elliptical for time's sake. The only way I can even allow myself to go to the gym is because I spend the majority of my time there going through dissertation-related reading. It is just too boring otherwise. Meanwhile, Bakhtin's writing is so fucking frustrating that it made me pedal extra fast on the bike. I mean, he is the classic example of a 60's/70's French theorist whose sense of fact-checking and objectivity is more unreliable than that of the medieval period which he studies.

Day 4: No Dice

2009-11-06T19:22:00.000-08:00

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Felicity Heal's REFORMATION IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: leftover pot pie, vitamins
lunch: the remains of the pot pie; it is now all gone
apartment clean: yes, I even mopped the floor

Today was my first really productive day in a little while. Of course, it was productive only in the sense that I learned that the major editors' commentary on a key passage of the Chester plays (the dice game), around which my second chapter is supposed to orbit, is, well... completely wrong. Their grasp of medieval dicing terminology is not as tight as they made it sound. It's a minor point to the editors, surely, but to me... well. Then again, this whole hard drive thing has shaken up my dissertation brain in some good ways, potentially really productive ways, and the upheaval about the dice game is probably going to turn out to reveal something more complex and interesting than I had planned.

In other words, I AM ONLY EVEN CONSIDERING OPTIMISM ON ALL FRONTS UNTIL MY HARD DRIVE IS RETURNED TO ME.

Day 3: I'm a PC

2009-11-05T19:49:00.000-08:00

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read James Simpson's OXFORD ENGLISH LITERARY HISTORY)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: a pear, baguette, carrot juice, vitamins
lunch: chicken pot pie (see below)
apartment clean: yes

Excuses, excuses. Okay, maybe I'm using the computer failure thing as an excuse to procrastinate on my dissertation work and the whole thing is pretty flagrant. But I am very particular, and have always been, about my work environment: everything must be just so. Working on my wife's Mac is not just so; it is just so frustrating. There doesn't seem to be any organizing logic behind all of these pretty bubbles, bells and whistles. Even the keyboard is different. And I swear that the space bar is sticking, ever so slightly, since I uh, spilled a little bit (only a little bit!) of carrot juice on the keyboard (on a PC, I could easily pry off the space bar, wipe it off, and reattach). Plus, it takes time to be on the phone with Dell Technical Support, to get to FedEx or the computer store (with no car), and so forth -- about half of my work day for the past few days, actually.

None of this really explains why I spent a good hour and a half today making a chicken pot pie. But who knew that it would be as easy as making chicken in a pot, and putting it in a pie crust, and then baking? It came out exactly as I'd hoped, the chicken slighly overdone (better to err on the side of dry than of salmonella), but the black eyed peas, parsnip, carrots, onions, white wine/cheese sauce, and crust were all right where I wanted them. I've been doing an Eric Cartman voice since then.

And I made it to FedEx, which was farther away than I remembered, and the laptop is now sent. I've resigned myself to the probability that no data will be saved. But I have hope.

Day 2: Screw This

2009-11-04T17:10:00.000-08:00

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Felicity Heal's REFORMATION IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: one egg, baguette, carrot juice, grapes, vitamins
lunch: leftover chinese from that good place on college near ashby
apartment clean: yes

The computer situation has worsened. I finally succeeded in getting the Dell Customer Care rep to understand that not only was my hard drive suddenly not working, but the tops of the screws were becoming stripped, so that I was worried that each time he had me remove and replace the hard drive would be my last. And lo and behold, after I hung up and tried to remove the hard drive one last time -- bam. One of the screws simply will not budge, is no longer a screw by any definition. I tried. Ara tried. The hardware store tried -- actually, various members of the family-owned business emerged one by one, trying an array of different gadgets. The used computer store guys tried. We tried everything, every home remedy, every online suggestion, there are none left, don't bother, and you know what? It's Dell's problem now. I called Customer Care back and now I'm sending the whole damn thing in, and they will either extract my hard drive or they won't and if they don't then it's on them to replace everything, because everything is under bloody warranty.

Except, as the Customer Care rep pointed out, my data. Let's be honest: the chances that I will retrieve anything off of my hard drive... are low. The next person to say, "Well, I guess that's why they say you should back up every week" gets a kick to the face. I don't know why anyone (my wife, my mother) has had even the slightest impulse to say that to me. Honestly. Thanks for the life lesson.

But anyway: the last backup -- only a partial backup, really -- was in late July, it seems. Beyond that, my dissertation is relatively safe because I have been emailing various drafts of everything to various readers. Some notes have been lost, but a lot of it was deadendage anyway. My teaching files are intact as far as the middle of the summer: the second half of summer teaching is gone forever. Files I kept for fellowship apps are gone; tax forms are still there. All our music is safe. All our photographs, I'm pretty sure, are safe (except possibly for unmemorable recent ones -- not sure).

And then there is the creative stuff. I wrote a ten-minute play over the past few weeks, and as I sent it out to a contest, I kept a hard copy for myself. It is now the only copy left. I made quite a few changes, some of them very good, to my full length play GLORY FOR YOU. All of those changes are gone, and the play is reset back to the state it was in when we held a private reading of it some weeks ago. Also lost are the massive notes and drafting that went into GFY, which has taken a fuckload of research. The only other creative pursuit that has received my attention since the July backup is my NaNoWriMo project, THE PHANTOM TUTORIAL, which I only began a couple of days ago anyway (and which, miraculously, I partially emailed to myself on the first day). Still, it will be tragic to watch the NaNoWriMo progress meter drop, rather than rise, when I confirm that 3500 words of progress are indeed gone forever.

In the meantime, there are some brightsides to this. It will force me to upgrade to Windows 7 (when I get my fixed computer back), and it will give me a sense of "new beginnings" in all of these pursuits, a good few of which (the play, the chapter) had grown a bit stale in recent weeks. I just wish my new beginning didn't have to happen on my wife's Mac.

Day 1: Just Not There

2009-11-03T16:22:00.000-08:00

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Leah S. Marcus's THE POLITICS OF MIRTH)
stretching: yes
pushups: 14
crunches: 30
breakfast: one egg, baguette, pear, vitamins
lunch: breaded cod filets, malt vinegar, brie and crackers
apartment clean: yes

Today is not a fitting beginning for yet another new health resolution to begin. I just spent the last four hours on the phone with, and recovering from, Dell Customer Service. The service was nice enough, it's just that the product sucks: suddenly, for no reason, it's not detecting my harddrive. It's just not there.

And the data may never be recovered. Things I lost: my ten-minute play FOUND (spent most of last week writing it, though it survives in hard copy); my first three days' work for National Novel Writing Month (5100 words); some really massive changes to GLORY FOR YOU, my full-length play; and thankfully only useless bits of my second dissertation chapter (I've been dragging my feet... and I'm glad I did).

Give me one good reason why I shouldn't switch to a Mac this Christmas. Fuck Windows. I'm serious. I'm maybe serious.

In which Matthew writes a POEM

2009-01-17T13:05:00.000-08:00

Last night I got bored, sitting at the light board, waiting for Ara's perpetually delayed house manager to give the go sign. So I decided to try my hand at writing a POEM. I know I'm not very good at POEMS, but all I had to hand were a pen, a notebook, and a bunch of pretty buttons, so I needed something to distract myself. This is the POEM I came up with:

curry favor
curry in a hurry
green curry
curry the horse
currier & ives

carry on
carry a torch
hari kari
carrie bradshaw
voices carry

corey haim
corey feldman
north korea

The word you're looking for, by the way, is brilliant.

aphorism 7

2009-01-07T09:57:00.000-08:00

[Lauri, having finally gotten certified to teach Fitzmaurice Voicework after two and a half years of training, workshops, and drama:]

As soon as you stop caring, things happen.

In which Matthew is a tourist

2009-01-05T17:59:00.000-08:00

In what follows, fifth-year graduate student Matthew [so much for relative anonymity, see the comments section on this entry: oh, Internet] reflects on his experience "visiting" the Modern Language Association convention that recently took place in San Francisco. This is a somewhat extended version of Matthew’s less colorful (read: edited) account which can be found on his English Department's blog.

***

MLA members are the custodians of language, and language is at the heart of virtually all disciplines (at least the humanistic ones).
– Rosemary Feal, MLA Executive Director

The thirty thousand scholars of language and literature who form the Modern Language Association convene annually in late December. In a different city every year, we critique each other's research, we compare notes on teaching, we evaluate the current state of humanities education, and we perform the secret Illuminati rituals that determine how writers must properly cite A Publication on CD-ROM, Diskette, or Magnetic Tape (5.9.5). And we hold the preliminary interviews for the majority of academic jobs available in the humanities. Or we attend them.

Graduate students' futures are set in motion at this conference. Which is why, well before entering the job market as interviewees, some Cal graduate students attended this year's San Francisco MLA as tourists: to adjust ahead of time to the gravitational pull of a conference so massive. To see and not be seen, and to learn tips and tricks about the profession. (My space is limited here, so I'll present some abridged reflections on Sunday December 28, the second day of the conference).

I've attended the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress a couple of times, so I thought I knew what to expect from a large, interdisciplinary conference: an overload of ultraspecialized sessions, some deeply gratifying, but many in which my fellow murmuring graduate medievalists report on their dissertation progress and strive to be just barely more interesting, or louder, than the pattern on the carpet (kidding, guys, kidding).

But MLA is exponentially bigger in attendance and in import. The carpet pattern at the Hilton, as intense as it was (seriously), was no competition for the sessions I saw. In "Public Shakespeares," after Bryn Mawr's Katherine A. Rowe deftly analyzed three virtual Globe theaters on Second Life (one with a paid "acting company"), Harvard's Marjorie Garber presented her talk on "Shakespeare's Brand." With clever insights on branding in Sonnet 111 and in twenty-first-century advertising, Garber argued that American education in Shakespeare, which had once been representative of broad literacy, now threatens to overshadow and replace broad literacy. The National Endowment for the Arts, according to Garber, supports Shakespeare programs to the exclusion of other literature; its new Shakespeare in American Communities initiative, whose logo features the Bard's bust before a rippling American flag, appeared immediately after the White House cut back much of its funding for contemporary American poets, many of whom were protesting war efforts. (Politics nibbles at the edges of MLA, causing a productive unease that I, used to the isolation of medievalism, had not yet experienced. Some protestors at a separate event near the Hilton leaked into our lobby and marched silently, slowly, holding signs that asked what we, custodians of language and the humanities, are doing to prevent inhumanity).

"Liturgy, Literacy, and the Literary: Katherine Zieman's Singing the New Song" came next for me. Well-respected medievalists gathered at this session to present responses to Cal English alum Zieman's 2008 debut book. Andrew Galloway (another Cal English alum) discussed, via Zieman, the importance of "unanalyzable utterances" in understanding the words of the medieval liturgy, and cautioned literary scholars that too much attention to the meaning of words can eclipse the use of words. Then our own Steven Justice, shrugging off his narrower pre-planned topic, embarked on a relentless and at times unforgiving evaluation of Zieman's arguments, including examples of "unnecessary scaffolding" in her language which, when removed, would truly reveal the groundbreaking impact of the book. After the session, Zieman stood up, and was given only ten minutes (!) to respond to the respondents: extempore, Zieman summoned up a poised and very effective countercounterpoint. Go Bears indeed. The direct, aggressive (though never disrespectful) debate was representative of the kind of "big league" mentality that I loved about MLA.

I followed Zieman to "After Chaucer: A Roundtable," where she and five other medievalists discussed educators' overemphasis on Chaucer -- similar to Garber's Shakespearean complaint -- and how it has frustrated the study of less brand-recognizable literature from the period. Minot State University's Michelle M. Sauer called it the "Chaucer Conspiracy," citing countless examples of MLA job listings in the last ten years that have made it very difficult for any non-Chaucerian medievalist on the market to get hired.

At MLA, job anxiety weighed heavily on the sessions, the talkbacks, the informal conversations, straight through to Executive Director Rosemary Feal's convention blog: "Between the decline of available positions this year and the erosion of full-time tenure-track positions in the academic workforce overall, we are facing a situation that demands our advocacy and action." The California Report on NPR has done a feature on the subject.

After "After Chaucer" I considered, despairingly perusing the MLA publishers' fair, how I might strongarm old Geoffrey's brand name into my dissertation on sixteenth-century biblical drama. In one of the booths, I ran into a fellow tourist. We compared observations about the on-the-market grads we'd seen. We'd greeted and wished good luck to friends of ours; nearly all were visibly shaken, and many had looked us directly in the face with no recognition. One grad had passed me repeatedly on the street: he was not attending sessions, only walking around and around the nearby blocks. "I'm pacing," he said, and then, "I need this. I really need this." My fellow tourist and I parted in search of booze and comfort, off to the Cash Bar gatherings most appropriate to our fields of study. At the Old English Cash Bar, the fabulous Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe assured me that a Ph.D. from Cal, even in this market, was a powerful thing. And that helped.

But after the Cash Bar I was still sober in all senses of the word as I shuffled into "Publish and Flourish: A Roundtable on Academic Publishing for Graduate Students," hosted by the MLA Graduate Student Caucus. The Caucus had invited six professors to advise nervous grads like myself, I thought, on when and how to publish, and how it would affect our job searches.

And the Caucus leader seemed as surprised as I was when Stanford's Franco Moretti immediately attacked graduate-level publication in general, not only as an unacceptable distraction from dissertation work, but as symptomatic of our recent fall from a sense of "professionalism" still current only decades ago, when it was a "profoundly serious, deep, even religious commitment to a subject." We now focus on small publications and other "external signs" of professionalism, Moretti lamented, because the profession itself has "lost its fire. It's boring. It's not about the ideas anymore." Cal's Charles Altieri objected to Moretti's full prohibition of grad publication, but also rejected the implicit premise of the session, that any scholar (grad or not) should see academic discourse as a means of résumé-padding: "You submit [your article] when you have something to say. That's the time when you should try to publish something... Once you believe in it." And he offered some advice on how best to do it when the time comes, but paused to remark that the session, and sessions like it, tend to "create, rather than allay, anxiety," creating an illusion of standardized, general rules for a profession that should focus on the insight of individuals.

In other words, in response to the Caucus's questions about publishing and the job search, the roundtable rightly chastised them (us) for even asking. Where are our scholarly ethics, when our job anxiety drives us to publish only with the intent of "getting published," when we reduce our work to one more strategic marketing move? The speakers after Moretti and Altieri had similarly direct approaches, particularly CUNY's Ashley Dawson, who encouraged graduate students to organize to demand better support, and Williams's candid Christian Thorne, who appeared to be on the verge of tears as he begged aspiring graduate students to respect our profession and to stop clogging academic journals with hurried attempts at career-building when, as he put it, "ninety-five percent" of the academic writing out there is already "bad."

I'd heard an MLA anecdote between sessions that day, and after "Publish and Flourish" I looked back on it as an accidental parable. A very accomplished (but here nameless) professor, whose contributions to academic discourse most certainly qualify for exception from Thorne's "ninety-five percent," sat down with me in the lobby, and told me about his own experience at MLA as a graduate student. If my math is right, the story takes place before Feal's "decades-long decrease in the percentage of jobs on the tenure track in the academic workforce in general," a period roughly coterminous, I now realize, with the dimming of the profession's "fire," at least according to Moretti.

The anecdote: some long-past MLA had thrown this nameless professor into a state of shock too, and I imagine the Cash Bars didn't help, because at the interview for his "dream job," he found himself hopelessly hungover. He had been advised: "Remember, if someone asks you a question you're unprepared for, don't be afraid to take the time to pause and think." And an aggressive interviewer did ask a tough question, so he paused to think. "But the only thought that came to mind," the professor told me, "was, hey, the pattern on that carpet is really interesting..."

When the interviewer repeated the question moments later, he realized he'd fallen asleep. He did not get the job.

But the MLA lesson here (other than "don't go drinking the night before your interview" or "MLA carpet patterns can be hypnotic") is the professorial career that followed the anecdote: it was not built on anxious, generalized rules, or on conspiracy theories, but only on a solid corpus of solid work. His anecdote was a human story of a human mistake, and it reminds me that in order to study the humanities you have to be human: not a functional set of what Moretti calls "external" signs. Only humans, with room for failure and not paralyzed by fear, can maintain the kind of productive, active debate like the professors of the Zieman session did. I do not wish to belittle job panic, only to draw attention to the negative effects that it can have on the work we do, by skewing our attitudes about our work. We cannot address the situation with CV-padding and small fixes, but only by, as Feal put it, direct "advocacy and action" (if you're looking for a place to start, click here). But in the meantime, for me, the time for tips and tricks and tourism is over: it is time to get to work, and if I get my dream job in the process, all the better.

In which Matthew unsubscribes

2009-01-03T14:28:00.000-08:00

Unsubscribe

Please fill out the form below. We'll remove you from our email list.

Your Email: [me]

Please tell us why you are unsubscribing (optional):

I was signed automatically onto your list in the first place because I sent in a complaint that your website's "Issues" tab included a section on "hunters and anglers" but nothing at all on LGBT rights. All I got in response were emails soliciting contributions, and I gave, again, but your site is going to have to at least address the fact that LGBT citizens exist before it receives any more traffic from me.

Also, while we're on the topic of website marketing, is the banner for "Get Local! Create Your MyBO Account" really the best choice?

In which Matthew misses the gravitas somewhat

2008-12-15T21:32:00.000-08:00

MUNTADHAR AL-ZEIDI:
(under his breath, at a press conference, as George Bush snickers and grins)
Shoes.
Shoes.
Shoes. Oh my God.
Shoes.
Might throw my shoes.
Might throw my shoes.
Might throw my shoes.
Might throw my shoes.
Shoes.
Shoes.
Shoes.
Oh my God. Shoes.
These shoes rule.
George Bush sucks.
These shoes rule.
George Bush sucks!

GEORGE BUSH:
(loudly, at the podium)
I think the war was a success.

MUNTADHAR AL-ZEIDI:
(under his breath)
Shut up...

GEORGE BUSH:
(louder)
I think the war was a success.

MUNTADHAR AL-ZEIDI:
(under his breath)
Shut up.

GEORGE BUSH:
(still louder)
I think the war was a success!

MUNTADHAR AL-ZEIDI:
(under his breath)
Shut. Up.

GEORGE BUSH:
(very loud)
I think the war was a success!

MUNTADHAR AL-ZEIDI:
(throwing his shoes)
This is a farewell kiss, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!

SECRET SERVICE:
(taking him down, beating him)
Stupid boy.
Stupid boy.
You THREW your SHOES?

GEORGE BUSH:
Let's party.

(dance break)

MUNTADHAR AL-ZEIDI:
(under his breath)
...betch.

In which Matthew builds to a climax

2008-12-11T12:35:00.000-08:00

Things that are still on the internet,
post-Election Day, 2008,
that I simply do not care about anymore:

- Rahm Emanuel
- Hillary Clinton
- Change
- Hope
- Fellowship deadlines
- Articles on medieval English theater
- Caroline Kennedy
- The Richard Nixon tapes
- The Rod Blagojevich tapes (even after that article that compares him to Tony Soprano)
- Anything related to Rod Blagojevich
- Bill Clinton
- The Obamas' fucking dog
- Barack's fucking cigarette habits
- The jobless rate (now that my stepdad, loyal to Morgan Stanley for 22 years, has been laid off at age 60, it simply cannot get worse: so I'm not reading anything else about it)
- The View
- Bailout I (Wall Street)
- Bailout II (Detroit)
- Bailout III (my stepdad?)
- That guy in Austria who locked his family in a secret dungeon
- Planning a holiday "vacation" home that spans family and friends in three states and seven fucking counties (I may go Austrian on you motherfuckers)
- Britney (obvious)
- Whoever shot up the Taj Mahal (it was the woman from Jersey on Top Chef)
- Sarah (very obvious)
- Europe
- LOLCats
- Facebook
- Your funny link to LOLCats on Facebook
- Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)
- The new UC Berkeley English Department Blog
- Asia
- Stephen Colbert
- My students' final papers, submitted electronically
- My students' kiss-ass emails that accompanied their final papers
- Facebook

Things that are still on the internet,
post-Election Day, 2008,
that I do care about:

- Justin Timberlake

(See if you can spot him climaxing behind this link.)

In which Matthew reconnects through yoga

2008-12-10T09:21:00.000-08:00

I hate yoga, as a general rule. But my mother's dear friend Lois (she's known us since I was seven) is a yoga instructor at her local Y: yoga primarily for the extremely young (say, age seven) or the extremely old (say, age seventy).

Early October, six years ago, I was ears-deep in two majors (one in Drama, which requires yoga; again, I really hate yoga), a senior thesis, and the growing pains of my first truly long-term romantic relationship (we'd moved in together!). I'd only enrolled in my expensive college with a clear promise from both of my parents that I would graduate with no debt; I wasn't going into any money-making professions, and I had a feeling that I had the wrong personality type for debt (a few years of graduate school have proved me quite correct). As estranged as I became from my father, a promise was a promise. The truth was that it was the only reason I still put up with him.

But years had passed, and 9/11 had happened, and the economy had tanked, and my dad had started calling me and telling me I "might maybe have to take out some loans." In the meantime he'd remarried and had a new kid. Caitlin. Early October, six years ago, was Caitlin's first birthday; it fell on the day before my sister Marissa's fourteenth birthday. Saturday and Sunday. Technically, since I share one parent with each, each is my half-sister.

But I grew up with and continue to share a life with Marissa and her father; I barely knew Caitlin's fertility-drug-and-probably-Valium-popping mother, and I had spent the single year of Caitlin's life doing everything I could to distance myself from our father while still keeping college paid for.

My real sister and fake sister, on the same birthday weekend. And I was very busy in October 2002. I only had time for one. My father had said a lot of unacceptable things in his lifetime, but somehow "You have a responsibility to be a big brother to this child," responsibility on top of thesis rent internships rehearsal metrocard classes girlfriend essays credits yoga, and then "She is as much your sister as Marissa," pushed me in a new way. Also: Dad no longer had the money to back up his point.

I have not heard from him, or any of his blood relatives, since then. Which was the most fantastic thing that could have happened. Mom came through and handled the rest of tuition. I graduated with honors. The thesis won an award, and helped me get into an amazing graduate program, where I now make my money from, not for, my studies -- no strained conversations with unpleasant family, and no yoga, necessary. And the same long-term relationship endures, and has never been stronger, and despite the newest economic downturn we're getting married this May.

But then, my mother called last week. Lois has a new batch of seven-year-olds in her class at the Y this year. Caitlin, she says, looks exactly like I did when I was her age. She, apparently, likes yoga. I do not. Mom thought this was one of those funny small-world things. Lois, like my mother, remarried and took her new husband's name. There is no recognizable trace. Parents rarely enter the yoga room (they go straight to the pool afterwards) so as long as Lois keeps things quiet (and I've begged her to) we're cool. We're cool.

In which Matthew's cellphone hears gunfire

2008-12-09T09:02:00.000-08:00

Sat Dec 6, 6:58 p. The Cell felt an unusual txt come in and blurted out an alert. She knew her Caller had a nice dinner party tonight, but he'd forgotten to turn her volume down again. A muffled voice from out above the Left Pocket (the new Banana Republic slacks today, but no underwear: the Caller was dressed to impress but too lazy this week to do any laundry) made fun of the noise. It sounded like a strangled duck, she said. The Cell's display turned pink around the edges, but of course no one could see, but hadn't this woman ever heard a basic Verizon new-txt signal? The txt, anyway, was intriguing: Let's play a guessing game. The Caller, as interested as the Cell was, snuck a quick Ok in response without the fellow dinner-guest seeing.

Sat Dec 6, 7:06 p. Two more txts, same unrecognized number: What's your name; Guess who I am.

Sat Dec 6, 8:37 p. A new txt. Equally confusing, but at least the number was recognizable: Randy. Hey, Matt. I'm going to pick you up at 9:15 -- as in tonight, interrupting the party, which sounded as if it were going well (the Caller seemed to really like the scallops, but kept asking undereducated questions about the wine)? or did Randy mean tomorrow morning? And if so, what was happening then? The txt continued: Bring an ID and a debit or credit card. The card won't be charged unless you steal the gun. -- the Cell gasped -- Wear layers.

Sat Dec 6, 10:26 p. Missed call. The Fiancee. By now, the Caller had less-than-discreetly turned the Cell to silent, so after flashing ineffectually at him from the pocket, she let this possibly important call (was it about Randy and the gun?) go to that automated whore at Voicemail.

Sat Dec 6, 10:47 p. Ah, the Caller thought to check the Pocket, and called his love back right away! But there are still no clues about the gun: only hushed apologies that he could only return home when his ride was ready to go, and that she shouldn't wait up. And more praise of the scallops.

Sun Dec 7, 9:01 a. Reminder: Paintball Sun Dec 7 10am - 4pm. Well, well. After a night of anxious vibrating (guns? ID? were there drugs involved?) the truth comes out in one obvious Google Calendar message. Stupid, stupid.

Sun Dec 7, 9:19 a. On my way. Be at your place in ten minutes. See ya! Randy, the wordiest of wordy txters.

Sun Dec 7, 9:30 a. I'm out front.

Sun Dec 7, 10:01 a. Reminder: chess w/alec @ Sun Dec 7 11am - 12pm. For nearly a year now, both the Caller and Alec had been too busy to keep this weekly date, but the Caller kept the reminder on. More out of hope than nostalgia, thought the Cell.

Sun Dec 7, 1:43 a. That unrecognized number again! Have you figured out who this is yet?

Sun Dec 7, 2:24 p. Missed call, from New York. Emily. Probably just calling to talk. The Cell loved Emily -- she would talk on forever, but she was very kind to the Caller. But no: off to that bitch at Voicemail she went, leaving the Cell alone, hidden from thieves beneath a sweatshirt on the floor of Randy's car. It still sounded like war out there, paint or not.

Sun Dec 7, 5:10 p. Oh, of course, the Caller doesn't play chess or call back his best friends, but now, covered in paint, dirt, welts, bruises, he txts the unrecognized caller: Not yet. Clue?

Sun Dec 7, 6:28 p. I'm a brunette. Male. The Caller is now on a dinner-date with the Fiancee. The wine-and-scallops party was one thing, but if he starts txting with this random guy right in the Fiancee's face... then again, who is this guy?

Sun Dec 7, 6:31 p. The Caller couldn't but respond (the Fiancee must be thrilled:Are you me, but from the future?

Sun Dec 7, 6:33 p. I could be... But not as tall or cute. :)

Sun Dec 7, 6:33 p. Okay: short, male, gay, inappropriately forward, and uses emoticons. The Caller hazards a fair guess: Sam?

Sun Dec 7, 6:33 p. Nope. You don't know me that well.

Sun Dec 7, 6:36 p. The Cell felt the Fiancee roll her eyes in her direction. Hey, don't kill the messenger. The Caller thinks it might have been someone he met at a party last weekend: Did we recently become facebook friends?

Sun Dec 7, 6:41 p. No I'm not on facebook. Keep guessin. :) Are you gay?

Sun Dec 7, 6:44 p. The Caller thinks through the most appropriate response (remember dinner? love of your life? beer in front of you?), and decides on: No... You don't actually know me. How did you get my number?

Sun Dec 7, 6:45 p. A txt from the Fiancee: Give attention. The Caller looked up, and the Fiancee pointed at her face. The Caller smiled.

Sun Dec 7, 6:48 p. And so our gentleman caller disappeared, leaving only his grammar behind. I got it on accident. Guess its the wrong person. Sorry.

In which Matthew is teh chef

2008-11-29T02:03:00.000-08:00

1. Roasted turkey, rubbed with fennel seed, olive oil, cardamom and white peppercorns, stuffed with Meyer lemons from the backyard and rosemary from the front porch.

2. Union Square Cafe Mashed Potatoes with extra cream.

3. Fresh spinach and shaved almonds, sauteed in Shiraz.

4. A 35-page single-spaced dissertation proposal, with 207 notes, and a proposed dissertation bibliography of 405 sources.

5. Four ears of roasted corn, drizzled with butter, fresh shredded parmesan, key lime, and chili. (Edit: this turned out to be four ears of boiled corn, hastily placed on a ledge at knee-level, then I ran down the stairs and grabbed the chili powder, ran back up and shook the chili powder in the general direction of the corn without remembering to kneel down, so that it spilled all over the surrounding floor, and also it turned out that it was the cardamom not the chili powder, and no one ate it anyway).

Ara made her mom's nut loaf, the Vegetarian Times' pumpkin stew (baked in a pumpkin), and cranberry sauce; Lauri made Ara's mom's apple pie, a cauliflower casserole, and Pillsbury rolls; Micha made salad and hot mulled wine. Thanksgiving pictures will appear if you click on these words, but I look like a bloat monster and Ara says she thinks she looks "melty."

ask anna, vol. 3

2008-11-20T18:15:00.000-08:00

MICKEY: What makes music beautiful?

ANNA: I'm afraid I'm not here to talk about music. If you have a question about IKEA, please ask now.

ARA: What are you wearing?

ANNA: I have an outfit that my creators made for me, but because I'm an IKEA Online Assistant, I don't wear real clothes.

MICKEY: No clothes, eh?

ANNA: Sorry. As an IKEA Online Assistant I don't know the meaning of 'no'.

ARA: So, you mean yes?

ANNA: I think you're confused or trying to ask me a question, but I need more than that to give you a proper answer. Please try again.

MICKEY: Fair enough.

ANNA: It's difficult to talk about this properly as I'm really only programmed to talk about IKEA and our products and services.

ARA: Have you changed?

ANNA: I was changed so I could be more convenient! Now you can have full view of the web and I can still be on your screen to provide assistance. Thanks for noticing the change!

MICKEY: How are you feeling?

ANNA: I'm fine, thank you for asking.

MICKEY: My friend Matt feels sad.

ANNA: Everybody needs friends.

ME: Will you be our friend?

ANNA: Everybody needs friends.

In which Matthew remembers how to fucking teach

2008-11-12T16:22:00.000-08:00

Everything's going to hell this week, and it's given me this all-stops-out kind of approach... to everything. I keep telling people exactly what I think of them and doing what I feel like doing. I sat down on the sidewalk on Telegraph Avenue and stared at the rooftops for no reason today. It's delicious.

I had grown utterly tired of blank faces staring at me from behind Njal's Saga, easily the greatest work of medieval Scandinavian literature (though Gisli's Saga is a personal favorite), a saga that deeply explores humanity through its unquenchable penchant for revenge (say that three times fast). So I changed up the game a bit.

ME: You are all obviously behind on your reading. Today is your catch-up day. Congratulations. Now let's actually get to work and talk about this text. I want everyone to take out a sheet of looseleaf paper and write down a real event that you have witnessed, or in which you have participated, that is an example of VENGEANCE. You may have been the aggressor or the victim, or just a witness. Do not write your name on the paper. Know ahead of time that your classmates will see this, so don't write anything that you would be uncomfortable sharing with the class, even anonymously. If you can't think of any personal examples, an impersonal one (Lindsey Lohan smearing Paris Hilton) will do. Below, write down whether you felt the vengeance to be JUST or UNJUST. Hand them all to me when you're done. Remember: keep it anonymous.

In good faith, I will not share here the unbelievable and intimate results of this exercise; suffice to say that there were two cases that involved stabbings, that there was one student who got revenge on someone by changing the information in a Wikipedia article he was using to write his essay (!), and that by the end of the day we all (myself included) fucking GOT Njal's Saga.

We also established eight criteria according to which we evaluate the relative justice of an act of vengeance:

1. FIT. Does the punishment fit the crime? Is it too much? Or not enough? We all agreed, chillingly, that the best vengeance is the kind that is slightly worse than the original offense. This creates an endless worsening feedback loop of one-upping, and Njal's Saga demonstrates it to be sure -- but we all felt that way, unanimously.

2. RELATIONSHIP WITH THE INVOLVED PARTIES. We are less likely to take vengeance on a blood relative or significant other, and more likely to take stronger action when something has been done to a blood relative or significant other. We also act on behalf of friends, but not with as much intensity. Subcategory: REVENGE BY PROXY. When we exact vengeance on behalf of someone else who was wronged, our behavior changes (depending on our relationship with the victim).

3. AGE OF THE INVOLVED PARTIES. An adult cannot intercede for his or her child, not by using vengeance; the adult can, however, instruct his or her child on how to exact revenge properly.

4. WIT. Funny or ironic revenge is always, always best.

5. CONTEXT. We do not take the same kind of revenge for something done to us in the context of a game, for instance.

6. PHYSICAL/NON-PHYSICAL. Some people (not all) are hesitant to cross the physical barrier -- even the lightest physical assault feels like it is crossing a line of some kind. Criterion #2 changes things up a bit in this regard.

7. ME. Did it happen to someone else, or to me? When we are the aggressors ourselves, our sense of relative justice changes.

8. LAW. Is this an issue best left to institutionalized authorities (mitigating our need for revenge)? Then again, half the class strongly felt that in most cases the law cannot be trusted to do enough.

In which Matthew is busier than Sarah Palin

2008-11-12T09:07:00.000-08:00

I'm stressed, so my sense of humor is shot and I may be balding at an alarming rate. The funniest thing I've said all week was when, at a party last weekend, I asked the co-founder of the Château Pétrogasm wine blog if he could find a good wine pairing with my scrotum; as for the least funny thing, it's a toss-up among various melodramatic outbursts of frustration (including one later on at that same party) that have taken hold since Election Day. Prop 8 is probably one culprit, that bloody personal trainer I saw (on what money?) didn't help, but mainly it's loss of sleep. I wish I could say that, like La Palin, I still looked fabulous regardless. But I haven't shaved in millennia. There's a free clean-up appointment for me at the salon later today if I make it through teaching today with no murder counts on my record.

In which Matthew gets honest

2008-11-07T10:53:00.001-08:00

Well, it has come to this. Obama won and I can't enjoy it because Prop 8 passed. And life unforgivingly, tidally, pushes me back towards the passive-aggressive minutiae that is Northern California life:

Subject: Re: Wedding
From: [name withheld]
Date: Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 11:34 PM
To: [me]

How are you doing? Haven't seen you in a while... you know since you missed my birthday and all. Hope you're over that cold though!

Heard through the grapevine that you and Ara set the date....ahem. Did you think I wouldn't know? Remember, I am on the kickball team and we are very well connected. All I'm saying is that you could have at least sent me a cordial uninvitation to your wedding, then things would not have to be so awkward between us: like me defacebooking you, stealing your firstborn, etc.

Feelings get hurt Matt... even stalkers have emotions... =?

Don't lie. I'm an ace at kickball.

And so it begins. Well, she asked for honesty...

Subject: Re: Wedding
From: [me]
Date: Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 11:34 PM
To: [name withheld]

Truth be told, [name], we haven't solidified our Bay Area invite list by any means. We've only thus far sent out save-the-date information -- not an invitation -- to some, not all, of the people we'd like to invite on the west coast. We needed to act early for those who need to buy plane tickets and reserve hotel rooms, and we included a relatively smaller cadre of west coast friends with whom we have grown very close.

You fell into the category of "cool friends who we know but haven't gotten to know too deeply yet, so let's wait and see a little longer," with the understanding that once the event begins to take clearer shape we'll be able to modify everything as we send out official invitations. Most people wouldn't ask so directly, at least not until invites were sent out by postal mail, but since you did, there is your direct answer: our decision wasn't made yet. But now it's kind of awkward.

I was hoping to make it through this wedding-invite process with as little ill-will as possible, assuming that all members of our community would understand not only the massive stressful undertaking that it is to plan a bicoastal wedding that we can't afford even as both our jobs feel like they're choking us to death, and that everyone would also realize that any negativity shot in the direction of the event was, in some ways, a curse added to the blessing that the ceremony signifies. We have been trying our best to make this happen and get it right. The notion of a cordial uninvitation is unusual and impossble to do; to send one out as early as now would be ridiculous.

MMS

In which Matthew sucks the tit of a cold Inuit

2008-11-01T17:40:00.001-07:00

I quote:

Barack Obama settled for only one wife. John McCain ditched a sick one and shrewdly traded her in for a younger, richer, less Negro-looking model.

Barack Obama has lost only one fountain pen. John McCain lost his military aircraft five times (don't worry -- it was only once in combat), and his patience even more.

Barack Hussein Ali Baba Muhammed Obama (He's thinking about your wife): Can America trust someone to learn from their mistakes when they don't make nearly enough of them?

I'll let the divine Deven Green handle the rest: check out Sarah Palin Directs McCain Attack Ad Bloopers. Watching in high-quality is worth it.

ask anna, vol. 2

2008-11-01T03:38:00.000-07:00

SHE: Welcome to IKEA. I'm Anna, IKEA USA's Automated Online Assistant. You can ask me about IKEA and our products and our services. How can I help you today?

ME: Happy Halloween!

SHE: I'm very sorry, but I can't really talk about things like that at this time.

ME: I'm having trouble getting to sleep.

SHE: If you are having problems with an IKEA product or service, please let me know and I will be glad to help!

ME: No -- sleep. I want to sleep.

SHE: Don't let me stop you. I'll be right here whenever you need to talk to me again.

ME: I keep thinking about the election.

SHE: I'm not here to talk about history or politics, sorry.

ME: I guess that is kind of rude of me -- you're on the job, after all.

SHE: We have outlined our views in the document 'The IKEA Way on Purchasing Home Furnishing Products'. This document is our code of conduct that states the minimum demands expected of all IKEA suppliers. It defines IKEA's requirements regarding social and working conditions, child labor, environment and forestry.

ME: I'm sorry if I offended you.

SHE: I am sorry. What would you like to know about IKEA?

ME: Well...

SHE: Thanks. I am happy that you thought that was good.

ME: You're quick, Anna, and very smart.

SHE: I have a vast knowledge base with lots of information about IKEA, our products and services. Ask me a question about IKEA and test me yourself.

ME: Any question?

SHE: I think you're confused or trying to ask me a question, but I need more than that to give you a proper answer. Please try again.

ME: Okay.

SHE: Very well.

ME: How has the economic crisis affected IKEA's stocks and shareholders?

SHE: Because we are privately held, IKEA is not traded on the stock market and does not have shares available.

ME: I'm glad you're staying safe.

SHE: It's nice to be that way.

ME: I should go to bed.

SHE: Well, if you say so.

ME: Good night, Anna.

SHE: I don't sleep, but thanks anyway. Goodnight.

In which Matthew's mom discovers a fallacy

2008-10-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

MY MOM: Barack Obama comes to mind as I read this, my poem. Tell me if you feel the same:

fashioned against the sky
barren branches bend and sway
brown, broken leaves below
circle like scurrying squirrels
yet
amidst the flurry
a blackbird
with lacquered feathers
sits
undisturbed

ME: The calm of the poem itself (my favorite of yours), set against the last frantic oh-arrrrgh-ugh-the-liberal-media-mccain-was-framed email that got sent out to us [by my stepdad], which I read right beforehand, is a lot like the blackbird *in* the poem set against the scurrying... thanks for sending it, Ma.

MOM: Yes and of course, Barack Obama is the blackbird. (No racial pun intended.)

ME: I'm told he's half dove anyway.

MOM'S FRIEND 1: Yes, I agree with your son, the undisturbed quality is very much like Obrama. Except that I don't know if you remember: during the Reconstruction era, the black man in America was called "Jim Crow" (in a pejorative sense), and the Jim Crow laws mandated segregation in all public facilities, the beginning of "separate but equal" status for black Americans. So in that sense, the blackbird is not a good associative image for Obama. And unfortunately, that was the first association that came up for me! Thank God this campaigning will all be over in a week - and Obama will be our new president.

ME: According to Walter Everett in The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology (Oxford UP, 1999, quoted here via Wikipedia), Paul McCartney wrote "Blackbird" as a reaction to racial tensions escalating in America in the spring of 1968. The song is, like your poem, built upon calm, stark contrasts. And thus far, no one I know of has considered McCartney's ornithological lyrics to be racist in the least; if anything, they are quite the opposite. The connection with your poem is more recent, and more apropos.

MOM'S FRIEND 1: Meanwhile, I neglected to tell you that it is one of my favorite poems of yours, also . . . and that your son is amazingly articulate and thoughtful. I hope to meet him and his bride-to-be some day. You raised him well, and no wonder you feel as close to him as you do!

[NB: The following emails are written in free verse. No idea why.]

MOM'S FRIEND 2: thought again about
your poem
the other layer
underneath the autumn scene
the blackbird as
ominous symbolism
is that your intention?

MOM: No,no, the blackbird remains calm (undisturbed)
despite the frenzied conditions that surround him
What I like about Obama
besides his intelligence
and integrity (it seems)
is his manner
He remains calm and clear-headed
regardless of the circumstance
and I find that appealing in an individual
especially a presidential candidate
I think he will not be so quick
to push the panic button

ME: We in literary theory would point out that the poet's intention is only circumstantially connected to the text, which, once it leaves the poet's pen, has its own set of meanings that the poet cannot hope to control. At any point later, if the poet does try to exert such control, she becomes property of the text (as an "author function") rather than the other way around. And symbolism can vary based on context. I think Maggie's doing a good example of "reading against the grain" here, and it works well.

MOM: You may remember that my poem merely described a sighting in nature...
a tree, near [my high school], noted as I was returning from my walk. I wanted to be like the blackbird, someone who could remain undisturbed despite the "craziness" that surrounded him. (Uncle Jack called this "my Zen poem".) Nothing ominous about the blackbird as I saw it.

MOM'S FRIEND 2: interesting
that you see
those qualities
in Obama
I see him as
an opportunist
who fosters
any relationship
(however subversive
or corrupt)
that propels him
towards his goal
(and I am a Democrat)
and your blackbird
though calm
may be laying in wait

In which Matthew resolves

2008-10-28T18:34:00.000-07:00

It's embarrassing that I have become this maudlin. It's very unpleasant and itchy and I think I'm developing a rash. There was a part of me that froze in 2004 after the RNC held its convention in New York to capitalize on 9/11 (while the natives coughed 9/11 up into our bathroom sinks and then tried hopelessly to get back to sleep). I think that part of me started to thaw when I was canvassing for the DNC this summer and started actually thinking about [scarequotes] hope [/scarequotes] and I will always resent Grassroots Campaigns for that. And now I've set up a political Facebook group. It's sweet, and optimistic.

Yes You Can: Obama Years' Resolutions

It's like a New Year's Resolution, but you actually do it, and it lasts for four to eight years.

(I'm going to do one for myself anyway, so I figured I'd spread the idea around. It's a way of doing homage to what may really be a whole new chapter for all of us.)

It's your trade-off with fate, with God, with the Spirit of America, with whomever you please -- if Barack Obama wins the election on November 4, you will use that extra burst of hope/confidence in humanity to do something you've always wanted, or to change something about your life that you've always wanted to change, and you'll keep that promise for as long as Obama is in office.

AS SOON AS YOU CAN THINK OF YOUR OBAMA YEARS' RESOLUTION, POST IT ON THE WALL BELOW TO MAKE IT OFFICIAL! ...and then keep us updated about your progress after we win in November. I've posted my resolution already. And spread the word. Maybe Fate will put the right guy in office just to hold us to our promises.

Mine is to take my play-script ideas off the back burner and work on them for at least an hour on every morning that Barack Obama is in office. And if I finish them all, and he's still president... then I start on the novel.

Over a few days, the group has collected forty-three members and added thirteen resolutions to mine. The openings have strengthened from "If Barack wins" to "When Barack wins." Some have added resolution bonuses if Prop 8 fails. , Some are really intense; some are from people I've never met: to do more volunteer work and be more involved in my immediate community... [to] also continue my pathetic attempt to learn how to garden and grow my own food in my new back yard; to get my apartment complex to recycle and keep them from flooding their lawns every night (even when its raining, my god!) and I will hang out with my estranged father and my t.v. dinner grandparents... maybe I'll even tell my dad that I'm a vegetarian (going on 2 years); to devote at least one day per month to performing a Community Service; to keep my house clean all the time, and will do this by not overscheduling myself. I will not allow more than 5 days a month to have a schedule so busy that I have no time or energy left to pick up after myself; to take freelance work only if it has a socially important message, is artistically challenging, or has cultural significance. No more work on lame, Disney-esque children's shows, or comic palaver for adults just to make a buck. This will make me feel more fulfilled and give me more time to spend with friends, family and neighbors; to begin talking with people in my family that I don't get along with and currently ignore. I'll start every conversation with the phrase, "Let's start with what we agree on...."; to attempt to quit smoking; to get myself into better shape, manage my time and money more effectively, engage in my community, maintain at least one creative outlet, and strengthen ties with my family and friends every day he is in office; to sincerely compliment one person a day; to lose at least 20 pounds in the next year if Barack Obama is elected. I'll make that 30 if Prop Eight fails; to complete my 200+ hours yoga teacher training so that I will be healthier and more at peace every day that Barack Obama is in office; to drink the recommended eight daily glasses of water and watch VH1 celebreality every day Barack Obama is in office (that one was my little sister); to read through my copy of Diana Hacker's *Rules for Writer; Sixth Edition* so as to improve my writing skills for ever day that Barack Obama is in office (that one was a former student of mine).

Needless to say, if you're reading this and you haven't already, go make a resolution.

In which Matthew is braised

2008-10-27T07:54:00.000-07:00

ME: Yo, Matt here actually
What's up, man?
Can I pass on a msg?
(A is in the kitchen baking, I'm cleaning)

HE: i just wanted to hear how slow foods went.

ME: Ah -- very good. Jessica seemed really pleased.

HE: gooooood. was ara happy?

ME: She was. 'Cept that we couldn't get it together to get it taped

HE: sorry...i know you're busy. i'll catch up with you guys when i get back to town.

ME: You should. We'd love to have you over. I'll make dinner. Ha, I found a newspaper clipping in the office and it's from when Madonna's brother wrote his exposé book

HE: these are riveting pieces of news matthew. :)

ME: He writes: I gave up my fucking life to make you the evil queen you are today... 15 years listening to your bitching egotistical rantings, mediocre talent, and a lack of taste that would stun the ages.
I thought that was funny so I ripped it out

HE: that's actually staggeringly incredible. fuck yeah to all of that. i kind of dont care at all about madonna or what she signifies. and im glad that someone has a really personal spin on how ridiculous she is as an icon.

ME: I find her inspiring, in a backwards way. Mind over matter: if you want something bad enough, and if you're insane enough, it just becomes true. Also, most of her music is catchy and fun and I like it.

HE: im not sold...but i always love your theories...because you do. okay im going to bed now. im excited to come to berks and eat you.
with you.
i mean with you.
gross. braised matt.

ME: it's how I'm usually served.

pop riddle 8

2008-10-23T11:40:00.000-07:00

D - Dígame sobre "la fabricante de la miel
E - eleven." No es
S - "saber menos" -- ¡es "feroz" ahora!
T - (¿¡Tu no sabe sobre ella?! ...a la
I - izquierda, a la izquierda.) Ella es una
N - niña del -DESTINO-.
O - ¿o, quién es ella?

ask anna, vol. 1

2008-10-23T11:09:00.000-07:00

SHE: Welcome to IKEA. I'm Anna, IKEA USA's Automated Online Assistant. You can ask me about IKEA and our products and our services. How can I help you today?

ME: Hey Anna.

SHE: That's me! How can I help you?

ME: I've been feeling kind of down lately.

SHE: Sorry to hear that, perhaps some shopping in IKEA would cheer you up.

ME: Yeah, I'll need new furniture when my fiancee kicks me out. Ugh. I'm just worried lately that I'm not mature enough to get married. I make next to no money, I have the emotional stability of a two-year-old... I don't know.

SHE: As I am only an advanced computer program, I cannot answer more than one sentence at a time. Please simplify and repeat the most important question within your previous input, and I will try to reply as accurately as possible. I am opening a page now which you can use if you wish to contact Customer Services. Thank you very much!

ME: Oh, sorry -- I forgot again!

SHE: Of course. Thank you.

ME: Okay -- how do I grow up in time for my wedding?

SHE: There's nothing I can really say to that. I would be more than happy to talk about IKEA though.

ME: You're very polite.

SHE: Thank you. It always pays to be polite to customers, no matter what business you're in.

ME: I'd better go -- keep smiling, Anna.

SHE: That's me! How can I help you?

ME: No, I have to go. See you next time.

SHE: Bye, then! It was very nice talking to you!

In which Matthew makes two little dents

2008-10-23T10:46:00.000-07:00

I have now done two things which make me feel a smidgeon less powerless in these final days of great American historical import. In true schlemihl form, I backed accidentally into both of them.

1. This past summer, I was in debt and I had to go abroad for research, so I couldn't take a teaching appointment, or any moderately steady job. I only showed up at the door of the Grassroots Campaigns Berkeley office because I would have starved otherwise. It is only good timing, strange luck, and the second prettiest smile in the party (Joe's is prettier) which allowed me to earn the Most Money Raised Door-to-Door for the Democrats in a Single Night (in Berkeley, no less!) -- a record which still stands, I believe. I raised over $2000 for the DNC that week, and since we really vote with our dollar in this country, I'm glad I got the chance to do so.

2. Just got an IM this morning: "just wanted to let you know that I actually took your idea of making little 'i voted' buttons on Facebook and it is happening! So, way to go - great idea! Look for the buttons on election day ;)" My old friend from middle school (she sang then, too) works in Business Development for Facebook, and is currently leading the charge on their political/election '08 strategy. She was polling around for ideas some weeks ago, and I suggested the FB equivalent of those "I Voted!" stickers they give you -- the unstickered are thus shamed and pressured into finding the time to get to the booths. Good, old-fashioned electronic peer pressure may do the trick in getting lazy Americans (myself included) to actually pull the lever this year, and I'm proud to have helped.

aphorism 6

2008-10-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

Slow Food is just a circle jerk of olive-oil aficionados.

[Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, at the CounterPULSE Autumn Vegetarian Feast. This past weekend, Ara choreographed a piece to entertain the diner-donors there. There were five dancers, including Ara and Micha, with cameos by Lauri and me. We took the first course of early girl tomatoes and fed them to each other, then wove through the space and fed them to the diners directly, then had them feed us and feed each other. Lauri and I stayed on at center stage with four-foot-long wooden spoons and fed every course to each other as it came. The soup was difficult; the kale was more difficult; the salad was next to impossible, but it was all delicious.]

In which Matthew kills you softly

2008-10-13T20:14:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I'll cut and paste the same chat between windows to save time. Especially when I'm procrastinating. You know you do it too.

ME: Wait, stop distracting me from my dissertation proposal.
HE: sorry! taking garbage out and cleaning up after a weekend in westchester
ME: w00t Westchester
ME: Whoa, when I say it like that it really makes me want to pronounce the zeroes
HE: you know, i've come to like that place more and more with time
ME: Oh fuck, I have now learned that I am not the only person in the Scandinavian Department this late, and so I should not be playing the Fugees this loudly on the office computer
HE: that's got to be the first time those words have ever appeared in that order...

ME: Write my prospectus for me?
ME: I'll pay you in song
SHE: mmm... i'm not sure you'd be happy with the results
ME: Oh fuck, I have now learned that I am not the only person in the Scandinavian Department this late, and so I should not be playing the Fugees this loudly on the office computer
SHE: the second premise does not follow from the first.

I should probably get back to work.

Yes, I'm still in the Scandinavian Department. I need to get my laptop back.

In which Matthew waits up

2008-10-11T01:56:00.000-07:00

It's 2:14am. All my class prep is prepared -- through Wednesday. Everything's all set for me to throw myself into polishing the prospectus draft. I've eaten a spinach salad, steak, corn on the cob, half a jar of cornichons, half a big thing of hummus, a quarter bag of blue tortilla chips, meds. I've even cleaned the house a little. I've prepped my course description for next semester. I've watched so much of the late-night no-bleeps Sommore: The Queen Stands Alone comedy special that the jokes are cycling back on themselves. The endless "I'm a PC" ads have given way to male enhancement and girls gone wild. And since 1:15am I've called Ara eight times and texted her twice. I know her show runs late, but she should have been out of the stage door at 11:30 at the latest, and she's got work early tomorrow, and she doesn't really like the show that much, so even if she went out drinking -- she should have called. Color me the worried housewife. Now I've called nine times. I'm assuming she'll stumble in at half past three with someone else's lipstick on her lapel, smelling of Johnnie Walker, and I'll turn to the camera and sing a torch song.

Update, 2:20am: She just walked in. No lipstick (well, no lapel), but definitely smelling of booze. Also, if I see this Brooke Shields Volkswagen ad one more time, everyone dies.

aphorism 5

2008-10-10T11:01:00.000-07:00

"Bruges and I are the same," he said. "We worship the most beautiful thing in the world: what has been."

[Brigitta in Die Tote Stadt at the SF Opera last night. Very good stuff. Thanks to Tony for heavily discounted tickets on amazing seats, and two tours through the caverns of the opera house; thanks also to the harried usher who, rushing, sat us in row M instead of row W.]

In which Matthew gets a pair of new eyes

2008-10-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

On the bus between Errand 38 and Errand 39 yesterday, on the phone with Emily: "My teaching, it's draining me. By mid-semester I usually have everyone at least engaged with the class material. But now what I have to work with is half pre-med and half pre-business students who signed up to fill a requirement, just like any other requirement, without even looking at the discussion topic or thinking about why it's required, and we're supposed to be having deep discussions of Old Norse and Old English sagas in order to foster critical thinking and inquiry... I just don't get it. I have presented critical thinking -- a basic skill essential to human culture, and essential for the development of mind and soul -- I have demonstrated critical thinking, explained it, modeled it, drawn it, diagrammed it, led it, anecdotally thought through it, metaphorically explored it, begged for it, provided for every learning style thrice over, but the majority of the students simply refuse to conceive of any task that requires them to innovate, to think outside the box, to present something new and just tell it to me, one human to another. This is such important stuff, but I'm pulling teeth here. It's never been this hard before. I'm lost. I know some things come more naturally to some people than to others, but this --"

I arrived at the contact lens place, Site for Sore Eyes (yes), and found that my prescription had expired. Enter the on-site optometrist. Reticent, hunched, plaid; if he ever looked at me directly it was with intimidation. He just wanted to do his thing and do it the same way he did it yesterday, the same way he'd been taught it. In every way, physically, vocally, sartorially, he was the time-lapse version of many of my current pre-med students. But he had heard me say I was in a rush, and as borderline-autistic as his demeanor was, he was good. Snap, snap, snap. Read the lowest line of letters; is One stronger or Two; now do it without your contacts. "You're still using the Acuvue 2?" he asked. I wasn't sure, uh, I was using, uh. "You're using the ones you bought from us last year?" Yes. "Those are two-week disposable contacts?" Yes. "Have you been removing them every two weeks?" Um. "Okay. What I'm going to do for you here is prescribe a one-month disposable contact, but that does not mean that you should then remove them every two months. You already have a lot of deposits on your contacts, and it's dangerously drying out your eyes." This wasn't the first time I had been told this, I know, I could really damage my sight, but. "Are you going to remove these on time, though?" Yes. Probably. Yes. Yes. I'll try. "There's no real drawback in using the one-month version, they were made because people just couldn't keep up and dispose of their contacts on schedule. I never understood why. I never understood why. But it is really important that you take these out on time, okay?"

Beneath his degrees and certificates, he shooed me towards the front desk, where they filled the prescription. He didn't mean to talk down to me -- actually, judging by his tone, he barely realized I was there -- but I did come off as a bit of a schmuck. Beneath it all was the complaint -- even the simplest instruction, just to do it on schedule, as you had been taught to do it, as you had done it before, the majority of people the optometrist came across just couldn't get this most basic skill down. Even though we endanger our sight when we fail to just pay attention.

In which Matthew toils and troubles

2008-10-08T16:33:00.000-07:00

Ara tells me I project my self-criticism onto others, or something, but I know she's really criticizing me when she says it; all I really know is when I walked into class today and didn't have my students' graded papers printed out, I know I felt the quiet hate bubbling up. It's too humid in this building for me to get away with being such a fuck-up. I'll finish them now and email them out, I guess.

Granted, the delay was partially caused by my water bottle never closing right, and so inevitably soaking the hinge-end of my new laptop in diluted herbal tea.

aphorism 4

2008-10-08T16:31:00.001-07:00

Don't let quiet people fool you; they actually have nothing to say. Still waters run shallow.

[With a pal this afternoon, whose colleague had refused to openly evaluate her work.]

In which Matthew loses a nuclear ray of hope

2008-10-05T10:28:00.000-07:00

In my post for September 27, I wrote:

In the midst of all this financial panic, a ridiculous election, and all of it, it occurred to me this morning that all participants in last night's debate pronounced the word nuclear correctly and consistently.

She could have at least left me that.

And after all of her training, too. How very Eliza Doolittle.

...

aphorism 3

2008-10-03T00:09:00.000-07:00

Total aside: I rarely censor myself as I assume that no one is listening so I have absolute latitude to say anything always.

[Deven Green, on her Brenda Dickson parody homepage, after reporting on the real Brenda's reaction to her work.]

Tonight Randy and I tailgated the veep debate with bratwurst and beer; our sardonic political commentary devolved surprisingly quickly into "every time she says 'maverick' you have to finish your beer," and thence into discussions of whether and how we'd finagle a Sarah Palin-Maureen Dowd threeway. For a far better rant than I can manage in my current state, I defer to Cronquist.

In which Matthew eats well

2008-10-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

Scenes from a dinner/planning meeting for the Slow Food Autumn Feast, a food/performance benefit which turns out to not be affiliated with Slow Food (?!) but is still a good thing:

ME: Ara will build her choreography around the first course. That's the tomato amuse bouche, right?
HIPSTER CHEF Yes.
ME: I think we can work with that. Will the amuse bouche be, um, pre-cut? It'll be easier for us if it's already in bite-sized pieces.
HIPSTER CHEF: We're not going to just drop it on the plate, don't worry. We'll do something with it.
ME:We won't have to cut the amuse bouche ahead of time, then? For sure?
HIPSTER CHEF: Yes.
ME: Perfect. So when the amuse bouche is -- okay, I'm gonna come clean here and say that the only reason I even know what that means is because I saw that episode of Top Chef.

HIPSTER CHEF: Have you aggressively marketed this event yet?
HEAD PLANNER: Well.. it tends to sell out pretty quickly...
HIPSTER CHEF: I do have many connections, you know. I run underground restaurants and things. And I'm active on websites, you know, like FoodNet and FoodieBlog and FlavorPill.
HEAD PLANNER: Flavor... pill? Is that a food site?
HIPSTER CHEF: Oh. No. It's essentially a cultural -- it collects different events for different --
COOL GIRL: It's a site that tells hipsters where hipster things are happening.
HIPSTER CHEF: Yeah... yeah.
HEAD PLANNER: But would hipsters be able to spend fifty to a hundred dollars a plate?
[everyone shifts awkwardly]
COOL GIRL: Frankly, some of them probably would.
ME: Yeah, or their parents.

In which Matthew defends Tom, somewhat

2008-09-30T15:38:00.000-07:00

Tom Colicchio unveiled his plans for a new restaurant which, like Brigadoon, will magically appear at designated intervals, then vanish from sight. It will be called Tom: Tuesday Dinner. But Mr. Colicchio appeared far from sold on the name, at one point saying, “If somebody can think of a better one, I’ll change it.”... The restaurant will probably serve about 80 diners a month, which is almost certain to make this one of the toughest tickets in town. Reservations will be taken by telephone six weeks in advance, and the price of the meal ($150 to $250 depending on the menu) will have to be prepaid with a credit card. Menus will only be announced about a week before each meal... And with that, we will take suggestions for a new name. Can anybody improve on “Tom: Tuesday Dinner”?

It's the New York Times's fault, not Tom's. They posted a short piece on his new idea, but right now isn't really the smartest time to even mention overpriced dinners to anybody, especially to a notoriously snarky and/or whiny readership with the ability to append comments to any article -- and to then ask them to rename the restaurant.

The most clear and direct zinger was I suppose the people attending these dinners will be the ones we bail out with our savings and our retirement funds. But while I am suspicious of the consumers, I respect the supplier. I worry that we might suddenly distrust any high style, cuisine, or art because we're nervous about the economy. Cultural treasures are sometimes the first to be destroyed when tax riots happen -- because they are visible and symbolic, even though their actual worth is dwarfed by the real soul-selling Wall Street nonsense. The people end up no richer, the real villains remain comfortable, and big bloody chunks get taken out of everything that is beautiful. And good food is art; Tom doesn't call it Craft for nothing.

That said, the new names are amusing so far: "Marie Antomette," "Let Them Eat Fake," "Guillotine," “Narcissist Nosh," "Cluelessly Conspicuous Consumption," "Elite Eats," "Let Them Eat Bailout," "The Emperor’s New Clothes," "Tom Much Money," "Tom: Yurt Dining Coming Soon @ $400 Per Plate," "Fool’s Diner," "Tom: Let’s Hope the Euro Stays High," "Arrogance, by Tom," "The Optimist’s Club," "Tom: No Rent Overhead... But Still Passing it Along to You," "Tom Foolery," "Sucker," "T.G.I. Tuesday's," "Wood-Fired Publicist."

In which the best little Matthew goes public

2008-09-29T21:52:00.000-07:00

It turns out that I accidentally had at least two lurkers reading this weblog before I was ready to tell anyone about it anyway.

The Haste Land - I: The Burial of the Fed

2008-09-29T21:38:00.001-07:00

THE HASTE LAND
(it's a gag on T.S. Eliot, click here to read the original, or just skip to my previous entry where I make a very funny and completely appropriate joke)

Nihil timor populi, nihil concursus bonorum omnium, nihil hic munitissimus
habendi senatus locus, nihil horum ora voltusque moverunt? Patere tua
consilia non sentis, constrictam iam horum omnium scientia teneri
coniurationem tuam non vides? Quid proxima, quid superiore nocte egeris,
ubi fueris, quos convocaveris, quid consilii ceperis, quem nostrum
ignorare arbitraris? O tempora, o mores!

I. THE BURIAL OF THE FED

September is the snidest month, reminding
Americans of our smallness, snatching
Votes and taxes, dragging out
Dull times with dullards.
Iraq and election buzz kept us busy, overgrowing
Wall Street in the shade of hedges, feeding
A weed or twelve with subprime mortgages.
Autumn surprised us,
Autumn certainly fucking surprised us, flooding over the Troopergate
With a torrent of actual seriousness; we stopped in the Starbucks
And stared at the flatscreen, muted with closed captioning,
And we were muted, and Paulson talked for three pages.
Blah blah crisis, blah blah rescue, blah SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION.
And I was like a child, because I thought someone
Would have at least mentioned this to me before the week before,
And I was frightened. Bill said, America,
America, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the Starbucks, we hold tight to our laptops.
I scan the job list instead of working, and consider Canada.

What is a hedge fund, what branches grow
Out of what is not there? Son of a bitch,
I could not say, or guess, for I had been shown only
A heap of broken images: lapel pins,
Hillaryites, car crashes, pregnant daughters,
And underinformed medical diagnoses. Only
There was a shadow of mounting crisis under it all,
(But I didn't know to look under that particular under it all),
And who knew that something different from either
Blahblah about change and not another four years
Or blahblah about experience and mavericks
Was the fear in a handful of headlines.

What I need -- from you -- because
You're the bosses of the town essentially, and I know that
Is -- this is so hard. I mean there's
There's nothing easy about this
You know, this is like, you know
When you're gettin' your legs waxed
And they whip that thing off, real fast
That's what this is like. I need
More money. Okay. What I need
Is a hundred thousand dollars.

--Yet when they returned, late, from convening,
Their arms empty, their deal broken, I could not
Understand, and I really had heard of neither
Fannie nor Freddie before this, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the next Great Depression, or something.
Well I don't have any swimmin' in my show.

Suze Orman, my fiancee read her book,
I still don't understand, nevertheless
I know she's supposed to be readable for me,
Although I'm under 30. Here, said she,
Is your explanation: the Mortgage Thing,
(Those are parachutes of gold. Look!)
Here is Washington Mutual, that's your bank,
Or, it was your bank.
Here's an IRA (you don't have one), and a CD (same),
And here is the grad student, and his account,
In the double-digits, and some last ditch-help from his parents,
Which he is embarrassed to mention. I do not find
Any investments. You've got nothing to lose.
I see a House of Representatives, reaching across an aisle.
Thank you. If you see dear Mr. President,
Tell him I told him so:
But the new bailout will surely pass. It has to.

Unacceptable Swamp,
White dome beneath the red and yellow leaves,
These bitches takin' my money, still more,
I had not thought they could take even more.
Groans, loud, frequent, confused, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes upon the hill.
Turned up the news, and down Pennsylvania Avenue,
To where Saint Mary Toolface had kept the hours
Assuring us that everything was fine.
There my great aunt Kate saw me, stopped me, "Matthew!
You who spent on grad school what I'd saved!
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Yadda yadda yadda. Will you eat this year?
Or will your ramen poisoning end it all?
Oh I remember the real Depression, Matt,
You're gonna wish that you had learned a trade!
Instead of learning French, you snotty shit!"

II. A DEBATE OVER DEBATING

The scrim behind them, like a sad Constitution,
Glowed different blues, a little darker where
At stage left, tie was crooked, lapel pin straight,
A lightened blue at right, above the white dome
(To keep him from looking too pasty pale),
Shined on and met the eye of Jim Lehrer
Who, though he felt the crisis coming on,
Was glad to see both candidates show up,
From suspension threats and witty quips;
At podiums of wood and plexiglass
They stuttered, proffered strange synthetic fumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours...
(To be continued later)

In which Matthew tries a special blend

2008-09-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

1.
Pringles Can Designer Buried in His Work:
Cremated remains of Fredric J. Baur stored in iconic snack-food container
(Associated Press, June. 3, 2008)
CINCINNATI - The man who designed the Pringles potato crisp packaging system was so proud of his accomplishment that a portion of his ashes has been buried in one of the iconic cans.

Fredric J. Baur, of Cincinnati, died May 4 at Vitas Hospice in Cincinnati, his family said. He was 89.

Baur's children said they honored his request to bury him in one of the cans by placing part of his cremated remains in a Pringles container in his grave in suburban Springfield Township. The rest of his remains were placed in an urn buried along with the can, with some placed in another urn and given to a grandson, said Baur's daughter, Linda Baur of Diamondhead, Miss.

Baur requested the burial arrangement because he was proud of his design of the Pringles container, a son, Lawrence Baur of Stevensville, Mich., said Monday.

2.

In which Matthew finds a nuclear ray of hope

2008-09-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

More than anything, Mr. McCain seemed intent on presenting Mr. Obama as green and inexperienced, a risky choice during a difficult time. Again and again, sounding almost like a professor talking down to a new student, he talked about having to explain foreign policy to Mr. Obama and repeatedly invoked his 30 years of history on national security (even though Mr. McCain, in the kind of misstep that no doubt would have been used by Republicans against Mr. Obama, mangled the name of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and he stumbled over the name of Pakistan’s newly inaugurated president, calling him “Qadari.” His name is actually Asif Ali Zardari.). (New York Times)

And yet. In the midst of all this financial panic, a ridiculous election, and all of it, it occurred to me this morning that all participants in last night's debate pronounced the word nuclear correctly and consistently.

In which Matthew buries a leprous laptop

2008-09-26T18:38:00.000-07:00

8/25-8/31: Amy arrives and we all go down to San Diego, where Ara performs. We come back but everything remains in vacation mode for Amy's visit. Classes begin.

9/1-9/7: I bounce back from vacation mode with backed-up dissertation and teaching-prep work to do. "I will get this prospectus draft done by the 9/5 deadline if it kills me," I say.

9/8-9/14: I get a partial draft in, just before my mom arrives for a visit and everything goes back into vacation mode. The timewarp torque of any parental visit is always felt, but we have a good time, and I am a fabulous host. When she leaves, I must bounce back again into backed-up work. "I will get this grading done by Monday if it kills me," I say.

9/15-9/21: It kills me. I become violently ill (at times this is nearly literal) and somehow the symptoms spread to my laptop. It had been held together with a rubber band (literally again) for months; now keyboard letters were popping off at random and cracks were growing in the chassis. Light movement causes the battery to disconnect. My advisor's comments arrive, and they are very helpful, but they send me back to the drawing board in a more intense way than I'd expected. But all I can do is order a new computer.

9/22-present: My health improves. The new computer arrives. It is wonderfully distracting, especially now that I finally can play Portal. I am still behind on my work.

aphorism 2

2008-09-25T10:28:00.000-07:00

History is when huge, stupid, and easily preventable things are done to you without your consent. It reminds you how little agency you have. Except in those rare sweet moments when you rise up in anger: and so the only way you can effect even a little change is in sacrificing your agency to a mob.

[Midnight, after Ara and I (with much work) finally started to parse and understand the financial crisis (and couldn't help but also think of our experience seven Septembers ago)]

pop riddle 7

2008-09-24T17:36:00.000-07:00

As of early October, 2008:
Le Blue était seize.
Alors Le Blue était dix-huit.
Et bientôt, Le Blue sera dix-neuf.
Tragedy has struck twice, and it's about to strike again. Figure out what the tragedy will be.

[Outside research is always allowed on riddles, and is often necessary. If you'd like to guess the answer, please post it in the comments box. If you want a clue, or want me to give you the answer for free, post your request in the comments box.]

pop riddle 6

2008-09-13T18:47:00.000-07:00

I am the one who rips the laws.
I am the one who sets the fish on fire.
But I am not the one.
Who am I?

[Outside research is always allowed on riddles, and is often necessary. If you'd like to guess the answer, please post it in the comments box. If you want a clue, or want me to give you the answer for free, post your request in the comments box.]

In which Matthew's dreams change

2008-09-12T09:33:00.000-07:00

My mother arrived in the Bay Area last Saturday: the first time, since I've had my own home, that she has ever stayed at my home. It was a nervous experience for both of us, I think, but most things are nervous experiences for us.

When Mom got off the plane, her friend (also in town visiting her son) couldn't get over how Mom wouldn't leave her purse unwatched for a second, even on a plane. The woman in the next seat over didn't look shifty per se, she said, but Mom didn't really like her attitude.

But I probably wouldn't have left my purse behind either. This was one of many stories over which my Mom and I bonded during her visit, as one item or another had to be re-cleaned, fixed, or double-checked on. We smiled as we bought disinfectant together (which Mom would surreptitiously use in case her friend tried to share headphones again on the flight home).

The way Mom puts it: Everybody gets on my case, and yours, apparently, for not being trusting, for not trusting the universe to take care of me. They're right -- why should I trust to random people who I do not care about and who don't care about me? It doesn't mean I'm any less happy, or any less at peace in my life. I take care of myself, and I'm a realist.

Last night I dreamed one of my classic violent chase dreams -- used to be more frequent than they are now. At one point I was running from a killer who had already chopped off my head. But just at the end, when the killer had laid hands upon Ara, something drastic changed from the usual model: we actually caught and stopped the killer. And it was because we had chased him, who carried and was about to snuff Ara, out onto the street. It was dawn, and a small truck was parked in the street nearby to make its deliveries. Just as I ran out (too late) to find Ara with the garrote around her neck and the killer on top of her, the driver looked up, saw what was going on, and turned on his truck. As he ran over them, according to dream-physics, Ara was unharmed because she was beneath the bad guy. But the killer was crushed -- terribly -- between her and the tires. Ara had a stunned "Well, that happened" look on her face, but she was safe.

When we took Mom to Cafe Gratitude, the hippie server asked us to meditate on and discuss a question while she prepared our orders: Who provides for you?. My mom said "God"; I said "strangers." I have learned to always depended on their kindness: it is the tendency for people to try to do right by their fellow humans, or at least to err somewhat outside of full-on apathy, which has gotten me through countless tight and embarrassing spots.

In which Matthew retreats into parody

2008-09-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

Subject: Re: Melding together the Old English and Paleography reading groups From: [the snazzy new medievalist first-year]
Date: Mon, September 8, 2008 6:29 pm
To: [me]
Cc: [other medievalists who, like me, I am sure, knew just about jack regarding the texts mentioned below until they turned to wikipedia in a panic]

Great!

I was going to organize the paleography by date/script and start with the Epinal Glosses, Codex Aureus, and a few other early MSS. I will probably do the Chronicle in week three because it provides a good example of changing scripts in late ASE.

What do you think about making the first meeting a combo-intro meeting? We'll do a bit of both, maybe translate the famous short passage in the codex aureus that describes how the book was saved from the heathens!

Anyways, I'm glad you like the idea! I'll put together an announcement and send it to you.

Thanks,
[snazzy first-year]

-------

Subject: Re: Melding together the Old English and Paleography reading groups From: [me]
Date: Mon, September 8, 2008 6:29 pm
To: [another medievalist]
Cc: [not the snazzy new first-year, because I'm embarrassed... even though the medievalist I sent this to ended up telling the first-year anyway]

!!!

Where did we FIND this guy?

Also:

Saints' lives, vitae, sermons by Aelfric
Unh, the way he colloquizes the alph'bet
Beats the boys when they tryin' ta talkback
But if Alfred had had him he'd have betta Latin

Oh, oh, the Saxon monks be seethin'
The way the Danes invade and keep on repeatin'
Can't read this handwritin', call Henry Sweet in
I'm pretty glad we saved this book from the heathens

Whatchu know 'bout Bede
Whatchu whatchu know 'bout Bede
Whatchu know 'bout Bede
Whatchu whatchu know?
They say my Epinal Glosses poppin'
My Epinal Glosses cool
Codices be hoppin'
in Anglo-Saxon school

That's how I cope with never having heard of the Epinal Glosses before. Please tell me you know Lil' Mama's song "Lip Gloss". Otherwise the above makes no sense.

Best,
[me]

In which Matthew remains on the same loop

2008-09-07T11:37:00.000-07:00

From: [me]
Date: Sun, September 7, 2008 11:37 am
To: [name omitted, just for courtesy]

Hi [name],

Drop me a line and we'll grab some tea on the 20th, gladly. As for how
I'm doing: meh. I'd set a draft deadline for my already overdue
dissertation proposal for Friday night, and only got it half done by 5am,
when I sent it to my advisor. Haven't heard from her yet, but I'm
petrified that she won't approve and it will be back to the drawing board
once again. It's an emotional rollercoaster at this stage of the process,
and I have a sneaking suspicion that it will be an even more nauseating
rollercoaster at the next stage, but I am tired of being endlessly
"pre-proposal" and just want to get to the project itself! We'll see...

Looking forward to seeing you,

Matthew

In which Matthew writes to Wright

2008-09-05T12:10:00.001-07:00

Dear Will Wright,

So now you've made SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, SimEarth, SimLife, SimCopter, SimAnt, The Sims, and, today, you released Spore [I had considered buying myself a copy as a reward for completing a dissertation prospectus draft today... but as the day drags on I'm wondering whether that draft will ever get finished]; under your name or following your lead, we've had sim civilizations, sim rollercoasters, sim sex.

All of that shit is brilliant, obviously, but it has no storyline. I was hoping maybe you would start work next on SimTroy. Think of it: major poetic minds in various European cultures have told stories that unfold during the same finite historical moment in or around the same city walls: Homer, Virgil, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson, William Shakespeare, Brad Pitt. With your help, we could tell all the Trojan stories at the same time, in real time. The user, a random Trojan or Greek, could wander through the city and overhear (or join) any one of these dramas -- because part of the thrill of them is that they all happen simultaneously. Step inside the walls and help Pandarus bring together two young lovers. Step outside and battle alongside or against Achilles or Ajax. Join the funeral games. The trick is that all the NPC in-game dialogue would be translated as directly as possible from the great poetic works, creating a Troy that is a mishmosh of various cultures (and populated by a bunch of antisocial gamers).

Also, I think you might do well to switch hairdressers. Right now, your message seems only to be "behind simulation after simulacrum after simulation, all there really is is terrible, terrible hair."

All best,
Matthew

In which Matthew remembers the Titanic

2008-09-04T18:26:00.000-07:00

A week ago, I was bored, so I texted Brandi six times in a row. Each text contained a different-sized section of the lyrics to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." Three of them were cut so as to end with the words "go on," separated by a series of spaces, as if introducing the text that followed. The final one ended with "go on/and on." One message was just the word "near"; one was just "far." The whole performance was very spare and evocative. She was touched. I really do hate her so very much.

And today, I came across Paul Strohm's riff on a similar theme (Theory and the Premodern Text, 2000): "Troilus [and Criseyde, Chaucer's poem about love during the Trojan War] executes writing's most solemn cultural assignment, which is to connect the past with the future. It is always about the burdens of its own prehistory: the abduction of Helen, the narrowed options imposed by the precondition of the Greek siege. And it is no less about its own unhappy future: the end of love, the fall of Troy, Troilus's own death. It is founded in a moment of enlarged temporal vision -- the prophet Calchas's recognition of Troy's inevitable doom -- a recognition it always tries to forget and never succeeds in forgetting.

"One might say, drawing on a more recently popular image: this ship's iceberg was already out there when it set sail; an aspect of destiny rumored, discussed, but never embraced ('taken on board?') as an inevitability. I mention this 'schlock icon' in order to suggest that our culture has its own fascination with the concept of a present held hostage to the past and future. A present that, however banal, gains a certain luminosity from our retrospective knowledge of its ephemerality. Just as I was writing this essay I encountered a story in the New York Times about the very high auction price of a boarding card for the Titanic. The boarding card (framed, auctioned by Sotheby's, reverenced) is the icon, or mark, of a wound in time, a moment when time is fractured or divided within itself, a major part of its meaning reliant upon retrospective illumination."

In which Matthew celebrates Reevesday

2008-09-02T15:54:00.000-07:00

A Most Excellent Reevesday to one and all! Today is the annual day, across the world (and various realities, but particularly in Beirut, Toronto, LA, my own private Idaho, and Minnesota), when devotees gather to celebrate the life and work of an international superstar. Once a year, you might say the whole earth stands still.

The day involves a range of cultural activities including readings and dramatizations from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, cocaine-addled pub crawls and high-speed bus chases. Enthusiasts often dress in black leather and Oakleys to celebrate Reevesday, and they hold Dogstar sing-a-longs in overstuffed phone booths. Hard-core devotees have even been known to attempt marathon readings of the entirety of The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, The Animatrix, Enter the Matrix, The Matrix: Path of Neo, The Matrix Online, The Matrix Comics Vol. I, The Matrix Comics Vol. II, and The Lake House, while Laurence Fishburne rolls his eyes in dismay.

The first celebration took place in 1964, and a major five-month-long festival (A Most Excellent Feeling Minnesota 2004) took place in St. Paul between 1 April and 31 August 2004. On the Sunday in 2004 before the 40th birthday of their hero, after a night of ice hockey and demon rides, 10,000 people in St. Louis meditated in a postmodern pseudo-Buddhist trance on whether the sound "whoa" (their equivalent of "om") really does sound like a cool breeze over the mountains, then swallowed fistfuls of red-dyed pills and died suddenly.

In which Matthew fantasizes about a chick fight

2008-09-01T13:31:00.001-07:00

There's an empty glass podium with a tasteful reading light and coral drapes in the background. There's the click of sensible heels approaching. And Hillary Clinton steps up to the plate. And she looks fabulous, and surprisingly relaxed. The cameras roll.

"My fellow Americans, and dear supporters: I fought my way into a near win in the Democratic primary despite my gender -- I dealt with double standards in the party, the opposition, the press, and certainly the voting public. And in the end I bowed out gracefully. Relatively gracefully.

"Senator McCain has chosen Governor Palin, meanwhile, because of her sex, and only because of it. That is not progressive. That is sexist, and insulting. McCain has turned his vice presidential nomination into a vain publicity stunt, timed perfectly to eclipse press attention on Barack's big second-act opener. And he did steal the headlines briefly, until God (obviously a Democrat) staged a bigger stunt in response, stealing the RNC's thunder and dropping it just outside New Orleans. Not enough to do too much damage, but enough to remind us and the press of Katrina, and of who the GOP really is and has been. I can't shake the mental image of Governor Palin, face frozen in a smile, doing a stilted beauty queen wave on a parade float that is actually floating up Bourbon Street thanks to a party who is constantly on vacation, who refuses to even take the vice presidency seriously, openly referring to it as 'a job that involves attending funerals and checking on the health of the president.'

"How the irony stings, when Sarah Palin has the gall to try and take up my mantle, to break a glass ceiling which I've only cracked -- by positioning herself to take away my right to choose.

"I've already gone on record and said 'No way, no how, no McCain.' I don't know how I could make it clearer to my former supporters, especially the women, that a write-in vote for me, in this close election, could send our rights back into decades that predate women's liberation entirely. Here's one last try: if you are a former supporter of my campaign, and you withhold your vote from the Democrats, or vote Republican, out of spite or a vendetta or bitterness over my unfortunate but fair loss of the primary, you are a fucking retard. I will personally come to your pathetic lonely home, backhand you across the face, kill your cats, and tear down with nails of rage any posters or buttons or shrines which bear my name. You have no right to them.

"As for my supposed successor, who was busy popping out baby after baby after baby after baby after baby at home in North Bumblefuck while I fought for women's health and rights across the globe, but now has pretensions to even make reference to my campaign as she builds her own: I know you'll soon be trounced by Joe Biden and everything. He'll come out looking like a mean old man and it'll probably win you votes.

"But a week before the vice-presidential debates, let's do one of our own. For the ladies. You and me. Lincoln-Douglas style. Next Wednesday, here in New York State, at the motherfucking Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester, bitch. I will show you, and my daughter, what a real feminist, and a real woman, can do. And you are of course welcome to invite Track, Trig, Pippi, Wippi, Trip, Tralala, and however many other kids you'll have popped out by that point. Bring it the fuck on. Thank you."

pop riddle 5

2008-08-31T01:53:00.001-07:00

Follow the path
Under the weeping tree
Into Hamelin
Or Bee Ess One Four Ess Bee
Triangulate your position
And where will you be?

[Outside research is always allowed on riddles, and is often necessary. If you'd like to guess the answer, please post it in the comments box. If you want a clue, or want me to give you the answer for free, post your request in the comments box.]

aphorism 1

2008-08-31T01:23:00.000-07:00

Rhetoric is falsehood posing as truth. Theater is truth posing as falsehood.

[Drunk with Chad and Nandini, early hours of Labor Day Weekend 2008, accidentally telling my life story again.]

In which Matthew makes a pun and a gaffe

2008-08-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

My Facebook profile, a few minutes ago:

Matthew was Biden his time, but now he's Palin in comparison. Also, we're fucked.

The punny level here is, granted, high, and it prompted a couple of friendly "dude you're a comic genius" comments from some old friends. But out of left field Joe of all people called me out for being politically irresponsible here: the choice of Palin is a publicity stunt, and a lame one, and only is effective if it actually succeeds in scaring liberals. A kind of "if you let the bastards scare you then they've already won" approach. Which, from the man who coined the now-popular "tell me what your dissertation is about and I'll tell you whether it's gay, and by gay I mean retarded," was a shock of seriousness indeed. So I've switched it up:

Matthew knows that McCain's choice of Palin is as hollow and fake a gesture as Palin's smile.

And I challenged Joe to come up with something bitchier. Because hey, bitchy is what we do. I've also just sent an email to the parodist behind Welcome to My Home, Deven Green, asking her to do to Sarah Palin what she's done to Brenda Dickson.

Ladies, start your engines.

pop riddle 4

2008-08-29T11:10:00.000-07:00

In the 90's, I searched for what matters, but I needed to win slow.

In the 80's, I searched for what ties, but I needed the key: tons.

In the 70's, I looked for it all, but I needed the bunkers.

But really, every time I searched, I found the most important thing. What was it?

[Outside research is always allowed on riddles, and is often necessary. If you'd like to guess the answer, please post it in the comments box. If you want a clue, or want me to give you the answer for free, post your request in the comments box.]

pop riddle 3

2008-08-13T08:25:00.000-07:00

The beast had the haunches of a lion, but when the cask-maker looked into its eyes he saw the face of an eagle.

“Dost thou remain amongst the List of Five-Hundred?” asked the cask-maker.

“Son of Man,” answered the beast, “This is not only the beginning of a new year, but also of a new season.”

And every time the beast spoke the name of the Son of Man, there was a shot in the distance.

But which year, and which season, and where did the beast and the cask-maker stand?

[Outside research is always allowed on riddles, and is often necessary. If you'd like to guess the answer, please post it in the comments box. If you want a clue, or want me to give you the answer for free, post your request in the comments box.]

In which Matthew speaks gibberish

2008-08-09T13:19:00.000-07:00

I'm using a mini-recorder to take notes as I read these days. Sometimes it works very well. Sometimes it doesn't, as today: "02. 005 quote. The flora Hanna at. Before-it's self. Three hyphens ending subject?."

But then, I've also read the following bits directly out of the book I'm taking notes on: "'utopia of universal genitality,' the 'utopia of full orgasmic reciprocity'"; "a relationship of homology, that is, of diversity within homogeneity reflecting the diversity within homogeneity characteristic of their social conditions"; "In short, the art of estimating and seizing chances, the capacity to anticipate the future by a kind of practical induction or even to take a calculated gamble on the possible against the probable, are dispositions that can only be acquired in certain social conditions, that is, certain social conditions." I am beginning to wonder about the rational capacity (or the short term memory?) (or the rational capacity?) of the translator/editor of this text. And so, if my mini-recorder screws up, how am I to really know the difference?

In which Matthew documents real life

2008-08-07T18:47:00.000-07:00

On Facebook a couple days ago, this woman randomly appeared who I met once or twice in high school. We'd met at a speech and debate tournament in Philadephia; I would have been fifteen at the time. I can't imagine how she remembered me, or found me on Facebook, in the first place. Then again, I am shockingly attractive, so the ladies tend to keep me in mind even after the most brief of meetings.

Shockingly.

It took a bit to jog my memory. Was I on the forensics team in high school? Didn't we meet for dinner at Windows on the World (the restaurant at the top of Tower 1) when she and her mom visited New York? I had long hair, right? And didn't I go off on her when her mom told me she'd given up the chance to see Rent while she was in town? Ah:

I've definitely never been able to pull off long hair, but it was long*er* at that point: it took a while for me to realize that I couldn't pull it off. And YES, now I remember -- that dinner was the first and only time I've ever eaten rabbit, and the second and last time I ever had occasion to be in the World Trade Center. Your mom is a nice lady, if memory serves. Rent remains one of my old favorites, though it's lived on Broadway well past its expiration date (as has, well, everything).

Jonathan Larson lives on, and on, and on. His short life's work (the life was short, not at all the work) is still going weak on the Great Multiethnic Way, but man, that shit is catchy. It's been twelve years now, and still Ara and I are like trained monkeys: the simple (and quite common) phrase "it's true" turns us Pavlovian. It JUST happened today, actually:

SHE: Are you aware that you haven't done the dishes?
ME: I am.
SHE: This is your turn to do the dishes, right?
ME: It's true.
SHE: I'm leaving now for Santa Fe. It's true you're with this yuppie scum?
ME: You said you'd never speak to him. Again.
SHE: Not now.
ME: Who said that you have any say in who she says things to at all?
SHE: Please stop, I hate it that we do this every time.
ME: Who said that you should stick your nose in other people's--
SHE: Who said I was talking to you?!

We used to have this fight each night. He'd never admit I existed. Wait. I mean: the whole rhythmic-talking-whining thing has just been set into our blood, and years after a Spice Girl and an N-Sync boy have both played lead roles and gone on to host a reality show together, we're still locked in as Rent rats.

And yet. Last year, Ara's 15-year-old cousin invited us to come see her church youth choir sing. And they sang a series of songs from Rent -- not the annoying (and bowdlerized) medley-mess my high school chorus sang, either. Halfway through "Will I?" I started sobbing uncontrollably.

Think about it: when I was precisely these kids' age, fighting my little endless fight for a queer identity, I saw this very new piece of theater for the very first time, and sang my heart out, and told everyone I met about it... and now, there we were, in a church, and Ara's cousin has two loving gay parents, and her school's homecoming queen and king that year were two boys, and we have just come such a very, very long way.

That's poetic. (That's pathetic.)

pop riddle 2

2008-08-06T08:18:00.000-07:00

One of you will be applauded after you bring pain onto yourself from above.

One of you will be remembered as too pure for this world.

And one of you is behind the other two, but you will one day stand in front: and only then will you be honored six times.

Which three men received this prophecy?

[Outside research is always allowed on riddles, and is often necessary. If you'd like to guess the answer, please post it in the comments box. If you want a clue, or want me to give you the answer for free, post your request in the comments box.]

In which Matthew reads Bourdieu

2008-08-04T16:52:00.000-07:00

Understandability was never my forte. But I've been working on it.

And ever since life went all blue-screen-of-death in my first year at grad school, I've steered clear of theory for the most part, sticking fearfully, Pigletly close to the text and saving all my worries about social relevance for the classroom, never the library or the field. But my advisor has been leaning on me hard to get through Pierre Bourdieu's The Logic of Practice. It's slow going -- old phobias die hard -- but I need this stuff, and on my third read through the Introduction I'm finally getting why I should care (emphasis mine):

I would never have come to study ritual traditions if the same concern to 'rehabilitate' which had first led me to exclude ritual from the universe of legitimate objects and distrust all the works which made room for it had not persuaded me, from 1958, to to try retrieve it from the false solicitude of primitivism and to challenge the racist contempt which, through the self-contempt it induces in its victims, helps to deny them knowledge and recognition of their own tradition... My inevitable disquiet was relieved to some extent by the interest my informants always manifested in my research whenever it became theirs too, in other words a striving to recover a meaning that was both their own and alien to them.

If you know much about my dissertation topic, maybe you can already see the connections forming. If not: once I get my interview material from Chester online, in which I speak to modern Cestrians about their revival of medieval street theater, you'll see what I mean. I hope.

In which Matthew wastes his twenties on Photoshop

2008-08-01T15:33:00.000-07:00

The research trip has hit its end,
but all I've brought home to my friends
are books, receipts from pounds I spent,
and sips of thin white whine;

but it was a good go, well, now that it's ceased --
immensely productive, if tiring, at least --
so: let all your hungry eyes on this to feast --
the Photoshop show is online.

In which Matthew sleeps in a Starbucks

2008-08-01T13:08:00.000-07:00

I am too old and too OCD for hostelling; I am too old and too hapless for flying standby. I am a very crotchety and grimacey twenty-seven. For the uninitiated: flying standby means that you pay a reduced rate for plane tickets, but you are not guaranteed a seat -- they sell to you, at a discount, whatever seats are still empty just before takeoff.

But there I was (this is all in flashback: actually, so are my prior two entries, but I've backdated them). I was exhausted, filthy, underslept and undershaven, and embarrassingly homesick, and reeling from a 2 1/2 week, successful and at times bloody fascinating and glorious research trip which took me from Chester (where I viewed and interviewed the amazing participants in the surprisingly good revival of Chester's medieval biblical street pageants, the subject of my dissertation), to Swansea (site of lots of cold fried food and of the 2008 Congress of the New Chaucer Society, where I delivered a discursive but relatively successful paper on medieval Cestrian tourism), to Aberystwyth -- where I was supposed to view a unique manuscript of the Chester Antichrist pageant, but instead looked at the Hengwrt Chaucer (through glass) for as long as I could stand (it was open to the Melibee and I couldn't turn the page!), then headed straight to the Manchester airport, whence I would fly back to SFO.

But I was flying standby. And, infuriated with my accommodations thus far, I'd opted to just spend the night in the airport: I got there at 9pm, and to finagle a[nother horrid] hostel seemed pointless when I'd have to be back there in twelve hours.

And what a long twelve hours it was. And there were only two flights leaving AT ALL for the States, both in the morning. And both were oversold. Not just on that day -- well through the rest of the week, well past when my medication and patience would run out. Turns out I had chosen to fly standby during the beginning of the summer holidays in Britain. Because I'm a fucking Cheez-It of stupidity. Because I'm a schlemihl.

Look it up.

After it sank in that I was out of grant money, broke in general (in debt to my own wedding!), and stranded in a foreign country with no way home, I did what any self-respecting man would do in a public area. I burst into tears and I called Mom.

We found last-minute tickets on Aer Lingus, leaving that evening for a layover in Dublin, then straight to SFO. Another twelve-hour layover. So I slept a second night in an airport, but a much nicer one this time, with a 24-hour Starbucks. By 2am every cushiony or semi-cushiony surface (and there are many -- it's a bloody Starbucks) was covered with a commuter, sleeping awkwardly with a warning arm draped over his luggage and latte. It looked like Yuppies at Katrina.

The flight home was nice -- since I've been on the verge of making sweeping nationality-based generalizations throughout the last few posts, I'll come out and say that the Irish seem to just be better all-around people than you or I. Lauri (kind soul) picked me up at the airport, and riding next to her (in a surprise move, she was supposed to be busy) was Ara. All the baggage which I'd guarded with my life and limbs quickly fell (metaphor?) to the concrete, and I ran to her.

pop riddle 1

2008-08-01T08:12:00.000-07:00

What do you call the book ordinarily employed for recording mercantile transactions in a bare, more or less flat tract of land, naturally clothed with low herbage and dwarf shrubs?

[Outside research is always allowed on riddles, and is often necessary. If you'd like to guess the answer, please post it in the comments box. If you want a clue, or want me to give you the answer for free, post your request in the comments box.]

In which Matthew learns a lesson about England

2008-07-20T12:40:00.000-07:00

I once believed that everything sounds cute when you say it in a northwestern English accent. But cut to me last night, maybe 2am, lying awake in a co-ed Chester hostel in the most private bunk I could find, listening to the rhythms of drunken Mancunians who were in for the summer races:

"No. No. Get ou' of 'ere. Yeh don't belong in this bunk."
"Well it i'n't your bunk either."
"Get yehr fat ahse ou' of me bed!"
"I'm not fat, yeh're fat!"
"No, yeh're fat!"
"No, yeh're fat!"
"No, yeh're fat!"
"Well, there's ONE part of me tha's chubby..."

This continues for about an hour. Which takes us to about 2:45am:

"Come on, luv. Touch it."
"No!"
"Just play wiv the head a little."
"No..."
"That's better. Wiv the head."

Which continues through about 3:30am or 4am, as I'm trying to thread my sandpapery sheets through the bunk above mine and tie them into a noose:

"Come on, luv, put a little effort into it. It's no' a piece a meat. Treat it wiv some care. Like it's yeh friend."

And so forth. With groans included, both mine (in frustration) and the Mancunian's (in bliss?). I stayed awake and paranoid, IMing with Alec through the whole thing -- a Liverpudlian friend of mine had made the mistake of leaving his bunk temporarily, and found that another drunk visitor, in for the races, had usurped his bunk. All my worldly possessions were in and around my bunk, and I couldn't imagine what might happen to them in my absence, and so I chose the devil I knew (intimately) over the devil I didn't.

In which Matthew brings the Welsh a new cocktail

2008-07-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

Start with one jigger of Italian-American Westchester guilt and entitlement (vintage 1981-1999). Add a splash of New York impatience (1999-2004). Blend with frozen cubes of pure Northern Californian passive-aggression (2004-present).

Shake vigorously.

Subject: Peniarth 399
From: [name omitted]@nationallibraryofwales.org.uk
Date: Fri, July 4, 2008 2:10 am
[THE NIGHT BEFORE I LEFT FOR BRITAIN!]
To: [me]

Dear Matthew,

I am E-mailing you in regards to Peniarth 399.

My colleague has now signed the form, however, I have just been made aware that the original manuscript is on an external loan from the 21.6.08-31.8.08, I apologize wholeheartedly for this.

Yours sincerely,
[name omitted]

---------

Subject: Re: Peniarth 399
From: [me]
Date: Fri, July 4, 2008 3:03 am
To: [name omitted]@nationallibraryofwales.org.uk

Dear Mr [name omitted],

Is the manuscript on external loan to another library where I might view it? Please let me know as soon as you can.

Best,
Matthew

---------

Subject: Peniarth 399
From: [name omitted]@nationallibraryofwales.org.uk
Date: Fri, July 4, 2008 4:20 am
To: [me]

Dear Matthew,

I am replying to your E-mail, the manuscript is on loan to Grosvenor Museum in an exhibition, therefore, it will not be possible to view it.

We would be willing to accomodate your needs in September. I would suggest that you re-contact me the beginning of September to see if the manuscript is available at that time. Yet again, I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Yours sincerely
[name omitted]

---------

Subject: Urgent Enquiry: Peniarth 399
From: [me]
Date: Fri, July 4, 2008 11:57 am
To: [various names omitted -- from both the Library and the Museum]
CC: [my advisor]

Dear [various names] and the staff at the Grosvenor Museum,

I write with an urgent enquiry regarding a manuscript you currently have on loan from the National Library of Wales: MS Peniarth 399, the unique c.1500 manuscript of the Chester Dyers' Antichrist play.

Mr [name omitted] of the NLW has informed me that the Grosvenor Museum is using this manuscript for an exhibition. I was already planning to visit Chester during my research trip to Britain this summer -- so I write to ask whether there is any possibility that I might schedule a viewing (or more than one viewing) of the manuscript, for any time until 27 July (preferably excluding 17-23 July). I would be willing to come at any time of day (or night), and will gladly pay fees if necessary, or help with the exhibit in any way I can.

I am a PhD candidate in English and Medieval Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and have handled rare medieval manuscripts of the Chester plays before (at the Bodleian and at the Manchester Library); I assure you that I am qualified to study Peniarth 399, and can provide recommendation letters from faculty here at Berkeley.

This is a very late request: I know it is standard to enquire about manuscript viewings months in advance. I had been in contact with Mr [name omitted] since April in order to do just that, to secure access to Peniarth 399 before I applied for research grants, bought plane tickets from California, etc. After quite a few email exchanges, I was told that the manuscript was being ordered for me, and my four-day viewing request was being booked, so I confirmed my travel plans and sent my itinerary to the Medieval Academy of America, who has now given me a research grant.

It was only at 2:10am last night, while I packed my luggage, that I received word from Mr [name omitted] that the manuscript was not actually in Aberystwyth at all:

On Fri, July 4, 2008 2:10 am, [name omitted]@nationallibraryofwales.org.uk wrote:
>
> Dear Matthew,
>
> I am E-mailing you in regards to Peniarth 399.
>
> My colleague has now signed the form, however,
> I have just been made aware that the original
> manuscript is on an external loan from the
> 21.6.08-31.8.08, I apologize wholeheartedly for this.

Needless to say, this puts me in a serious bind -- even with the help of a Medieval Academy grant, I can barely afford one trip from California to the UK: a second trip in September would be out of the question. Viewing Peniarth 399 is essential to my research and to my doctoral thesis -- I have included my original letter to Mr [name omitted] (below), which explains some of the reasons why it is so important for me to study the actual manuscript in person.

I would be extremely grateful to the staff at the Grosvenor Museum if you could help me in my research by allowing me any access to Peniarth 399. Above all, please do respond to this email as soon as you are able, so that I can inform the Medieval Academy and adjust my hostel and plane reservations as necessary.

Thank you so much for your time -- I hope to hear from you soon.

Respectfully,

[me]
Ph.D. Candidate, English and Medieval Studies
Co-Chair, Graduate Medievalists at Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley

You can't just waltz into a museum, especially a small one (with locked-down glass boxes that even the head curators can't touch) and make demands like this. So I had to cannibalize the first few days of my trip continuing to lean on the National Library of Wales (NLW). "Mr [name omitted]" turned out to be a woman (Welsh names!); this caused some momentary cognitive dissonance (as they say in Sales and Marketing) but I pushed past it.

The NLW caved and sent one of its art curators to babysit me, and a courier (on their dime) who waited nearby to open and shut the lock-box. It was a shorter time than I'd planned for, but it was all I needed in order to take detailed notes on the manuscript as physical object (folding, wear and tear, etc.) and shorthand notes on the handwriting, which I will pay the Library's reprographic dept to send me digital close-ups of later, and discuss at greater length with friends who are better at this stuff than I.

In which Matthew explores the unexplorable

2008-01-07T08:57:00.000-08:00

Probably no more than a year ago:

Sunnydale is located on a "Hellmouth"; a portal "between this reality and the next", and convergence point of mystical energies...

Hogsmeade is the only settlement in Britain inhabited solely by magical beings, and is located to the north-west of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry....

Archenland is a nation to the south of Narnia. Its borders are formed by mountains to the north and by the River Winding Arrow to the south...

Now:

Sunnydale, California, is the fictional setting for the U.S. television drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Series creator Joss Whedon conceived the town as a representation of a generic California city...

Hogsmeade is a fictional village in the Harry Potter series of novels by J. K. Rowling...

In C. S. Lewis's fantasy novels the Chronicles of Narnia, Archenland is a nation to the south of Narnia. Its borders are formed...

It used to be common practice to enter fictional locations into Wikipedia with the same style, tone, and attention to detail as any non-fictional location. Parallel universes were presented parallel to each other, through a medium governed by consensus; no one objected to this free play of fact and fiction -- in fact, it made a pretty great read; only the extremely stupid, surely, were confused about whether Terabithia really existed.

But Wikipedia must keep up appearances. (For whom? I thought the thing was supposed to be for us, by us?) The Wikipedia: Manual of Style alerts are legion, and this one is still up on most of the sites quoted above:

This book-related article or section describes an aspect of the book in a primarily in-universe style. Please rewrite this article to explain the fiction more clearly and provide non-fictional perspective.

Follow the links. There are guidelines indeed.

The latest surge in Wikipedia's oxymoronic campaign for academic authority is not only doing damage to how research is taught and understood, but to the very idea of the Wikipedia project. At best, it produces little sound bites of backward thinking from its competitors -- see the 7 December BBC article "Students 'should use' Wikipedia" [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7130325.stm] for the full story:

Ian Allgar of Encyclopaedia Britannica maintains that, with 239 years of history and rigorous fact-checking procedures, Britannica should remain a leader in authoritative, politically-neutral information.

Good old politically neutral information. Hey, remember in the late eighties when we realized that the notion of neutral information is illusory, and often a tool of manipulation? Weren't internet-based media supposed to provide a way around that?

In the days of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bede, Sir John Mandeville -- before guys like Ian Allgar invented truth -- encyclopedists produced compendia, chronicles; they built timelines and maps that conformed to their narratives (Jesus, Arthur, whoever) rather than empty gestures in the opposite direction.

Wikipedia once provided a frontier for the free play of information, for medieval-style historiography to grow again. This was never to the exclusion of modern academic rigor, but perhaps it rebelled a bit against the top-down control of truth, which internet-based media were supposed to help destabilize.

In its attempts to make information neutral, Wikipedia only neuters.

As we might expect from any campaign for neutral information (there have been countless such campaigns, though they never seem so neutral with hindsight), all traces of the fan-generated, playful entries are are being systematically obliterated, with no record kept. They preserved a cultural moment; they embodied material extremely important to the devotees that created them; they are being burned. As usual.

To the medievalist's eye, the fixes are still transparent in the cases of Hogsmeade, Sunnydale, Archenland, and others -- there is most often an obligatory opening sentence which ensures that "fictional" is the first word we see, but then the old article often goes on just as the superfan originally, delightfully, wrote it. But there are no Middle-Earth locations to visit on Wikipedia anymore. We must look where the censors don't think to in order to find the gems. After this:

Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional county created by American author William Faulkner as a setting for many of his novels. It is widely believed by scholars that Lafayette County, Mississippi is the basis for Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner would often refer to it as "my apocryphal county."

We get the dear old original, in present tense, and pretty much unharmed except at the first ellipsis:

Yoknapatawpha county is located in northwestern Mississippi and its seat is the town of Jefferson... bounded on the north by the Tallahatchie River and on the south by the Yoknapatawpha River and has an area of 2,400 mi² (6,200 km²). Most of the eastern half (as well as a small part of the southwest corner) of the county is pine hill country. The word Yoknapatawpha is pronounced "Yok'na pa TAW pha." It is derived from two Chickasaw words—Yocona and petopha, meaning "split land."... Yoknapatawpha was the original name for the actual Yocona River, which runs through the southern part of Lafayette County, of which Oxford is the seat. The area was originally Chickasaw land...

In which Ara's clients learn what the Dickens

2007-12-22T10:54:00.000-08:00

In which Matthew and Ara are not struck dumb

2007-12-20T10:55:00.000-08:00