Just saw the news that Albert Hofmann died. It’s amazing that Hofmann was 32 when he first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide while working for the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Sandoz, and 37 when he became the first human being to ingest LSD-25. Hofmann had been working with various ergot derivatives when he accidentally synthesized a substance that would change the course of history in the 20th century. If you haven’t read LSD: My Problem Child, you should. It is a document of primary importance for the understanding of 20th century scientific development – the flip side and hidden twin of the Manhattan Project in more ways than one.
Just as a side note, Henry Luce, founder of Time Inc. and really the father of modern conservatism much more than Buckley, took LSD-25 often with his wife, playwright and congressional representative Claire Booth Luce. He even pushed (so to speak) stories on the “miracle drug” on his editors at Time and Life. He also took psilocybin mushrooms with R. Gordon Wasson, who first brought them to the United States after trips (so to speak) to Huautla region of Mexico in the early 1950′s. Wasson was an amateur mycologist and an investment banker at JP Morgan; like Luce, he was a staunch anti-communist.
I don’t wanna think about those things anymore. – Broken Social Scene, “Superconnected”
So I was going to write a post about some of the reality TV I’ve seen lately, largely about the connection between the house flipping shows and the credit crisis. It was going to be your fairly run-of-the-mill pomo argument collapsing culture and economy. So, Flip this House, the various home redecoration shows, and others of that ilk are themselves operating as a kind of productive base rather than functioning as a cultural superstructure. They don’t – you know what’s coming – “represent” or point to anything outside themselves; rather, they are directly deployed as forces pushing the economic phenomena that led to the mortgage crisis, etc. It’s an easy argument to make, not terribly original, and (of course) true. House flipping reality shows produced the very sorts of speculative relationships operating economically in the US housing markets. Blah.
For some reason, I’m more taken with Supernanny. I’m about to put on my parent cap, but I’ll try not to engage in parental gnosticism, since I know that pisses off booga face, and I don’t want to do that. But this show is really something else. The premise is so absurd that it would constitute an affront to your dignity. A dysfunctional American family residing in a cookie cutter home in some godforsaken treeless suburb of Dallas, Tuscon, Knoxville, or Cincinnati is in desperate need of help. (Indeed, the houses and general appearance of these families are so similar from episode to episode that if you told me the “house” was a set, I’d probably just shrug). The children, usually a brood of kids under 8, are completely out of control, and the parents are weak-kneed imbeciles unable to crack the whip. What to do? Import some foreign labor, of course, in this case, a Cockney accented (Mary Poppins, you know?) “Super Nanny” who will get the situation under control. Yes, you want to cringe. But it’s strangely compelling, for a few reasons.
First, the nanny – called “Nanny Jo,” is goddamn right about 98% of the time. The stuff she comes up with actually works, and makes sense, and fits so lovingly and tenderly into our sense of order, discipline, and control that you want to embrace it with your whole body and soul. If you’ve ever lived through a two-year old’s forty-five minute full out tantrum, you want to run to her, for real. At a very fundamental level, then Supernanny is about carving a sense of order out of a familiar chaotic scene. That it comes with rigorous “time out” policies and an East End sensibility is only gravy.
Second, the show satisfies a deep longing for superiority. The parents are total fuck-ups, so – as a parent – you sit there and shake your head and say stuff like “That type of shit would never happen in my house,” and “What the fuck is wrong with these people?” My usual comment is “My father woulda kicked my ass if I tried to pull that shit.” Also true: he would have.
Supernanny, in this sense, is really like the parents’ answer to the childless twenty-somethings sitting in judgment in restaurants. We still get to judge, see, and we’re probably even worse than the yelpers, because we know what we’re judging. The show teaches you that it really is almost always the parents’ fault, just so long as it’s other parents. In this sense, it’s quite brilliant. Parents of small children still have the residual of their life before kids, and they still have something of that desire to judge, though conditions make it hard. So they judge other parents, and quite ruthlessly. But this makes them feel a little guilty. But if it’s on television, and a whole cultural apparatus and even the Nanny Jo herself has already adjudicated these people terrible and blameworthy, well, then it ain’t so bad. This is broadcast bad conscience in a pure form, and it is well and truly delicious.
Finally, the show is engrossing because at least one of the parents is almost always suffering from what I take to be a fairly serious case of clinical depression, though this is never explicitly mentioned. But it is hinted at, which makes the whole thing at once horrifying and amusing.
Next time, I’ll write about how Top Chef is causing the global rice shortage. Fun stuff.
There’s nothing I love-dread more in sports than a Rangers-Devils playoff series.
Growing up a Rangers fan in the 80′s meant taking a lot of shit. The Rangers had not won a Cup since 1940, and the drought had reached that turning point where it had taken on the character of destiny: you were the sad sack losers who were fated to get that close and blow it, a la the Red Sox Curse, or Chicago’s own loserdom over at 1060 West Addison. To make matters worse, the upstart Islanders had just won four straight Cups, and threatened a fifth until a couple of young guys named Gretzky, Messier, Kurri, and Fuhr put an end to all that.
Now, every kid in Queens (ahem, well…) was either a Rangers fan or an Islanders fan. If you were an Islanders fan, you practiced chanting the numbers “Nineteen Forty” with maximum obnoxiousness. If you were a Rangers fan, you practiced kicking those kids asses, but secretly finding that unsatisfying. What wasn’t on the radar during those years was the almost meaningless entity across the river known as the New Jersey Devils. All that changed in the late spring of 1994.
The Rangers had the best record in hockey, boosted by trades that landed most of the old Edmonton Oilers dynasty in blueshirts: Messier, of course, but also Craig MacTavish, and Esa Tikkanen. They also picked up a couple of guys from the Blackhawks named Brian Noonan and Stephane Matteau. With the lines firm, the Rangers embarrassed the hapless Islanders in the first round, sweeping them soundly (6-0, 6-0, 5-1, 5-2), with the final indignity being the packed crowd of Rangers fans waving brooms at the Nassau Coliseum for the final blow-out. The Rangers then won three more games against the Capitals, losing only one, and thereby finishing off the Caps in 5. The city was now primed. People were paying attention. Could this be the year? Could the chants of Nineteen Forty finally be finished?
Across the river, another kind of playoff was developing. The Devils, fronted by the then twenty-one year old Martin Brodeur, waged an epic battle with the Buffalo Sabres in the Conference Quarterfinals, a series that went seven games and included a quadruple overtime nightmare that the Sabres manged to win. The Devils barely survived. The next series was equally harrowing: the Devils went down 0-2 to the Boston Bruins, than managed to pull back the series and win in six. The stage was set.
When the puck dropped for game one, everyone I knew had found some way to watch. The Rangers lost the first game in double overtime, but that was alright, because this was our year, and the Devils were nobodies. That Jacques LeMaire had basically reinvented the game with his version of the neutral zone trap was largely unrecognized, and Brodeur’s greatness had yet to be really tested in the playoffs. The Rangers stormed back to win the next two. The first game was just a bump in the road. But then it wasn’t. The Devils tied up the series, and then came into the Garden and snatched another game. And the chants of “Nineteen Forty” started to grow louder on the streets, and in the minds of fans. Again? We’re going to lose again? To the fucking Devils?
Then something very weird happened. Before game six, a game that promised yet another ignominious exit from the playoffs, Rangers captain Mark Messier did what you’re never supposed to do. He guaranteed victory. Where most fans would get behind such a gesture, Ranger fans just groaned. If your team is fated to lose, Greek tragedy style, the last thing you want to see is the hubristic moment that presages the fall. Guaranteeing victory? Nineteen Forty…Nineteen Forty… We sat in Steve’s car listening to the game, me, Steve and George the Greek. It was a rainy, miserable night, or we would have been sitting outside. The Rangers went down by two goals, playing like absolute shit for the first thirty minutes of the game. It was over. It was all over. Nineteen Forty…Nineteen Forty. Rangers coach Mike Keenan called a time out, and said nothing. A few minutes later, Messier dropped a pass back to Alexi Kovalev, who scored. Then Messier scored. Then Messier scored again. Then Messier scored again, on an open net. Guarantee. Hat trick. Game 7. Madison Square Garden. (The mythic status of the Messier Guarantee in the New York sports imaginary is exemplified by the relative corniness of YouTube videos on the subject).
It was a Friday night, I think, and we were hanging out at the park. Somebody had brought a radio, and we were listening to the game. Brian Leetch scored early: 1-0. Could this be it? Then nothing happened. Second period: nothing. Third period: nothing, nothing, nothing. As the minutes ticked down, more people started to gather around the radio, then more. Three minutes, Rangers up 1-0. Two minutes, Rangers up 1-0. A crowd now, huddled around a radio in a park in Queens. One minute, fifty seconds, forty seconds, thirty. But since destiny has that way, it was going to sap the maximum hope out of us before it snatched it away. With 7.7 seconds remaining in the deciding Game 7 of the 1994 Eastern Conference Finals, the Devils Valerei Zelepukin scored, tying the game and sending it to overtime. A universal groan from the City of New York. Steve said “Let’s go,” and a few of us went back to his place to watch the disaster unfold on TV.
Because it was assured that the Rangers would lose now. You don’t win after the other team ties the game with less than ten seconds left. Especially not if you’re fated to lose. But we picked up some beer and sat in front of the TV and watched, waiting for the dreaded moment: Devils score, Devils win, Nineteen Forty…Nineteen Forty… The first overtime period came and went, and nothing happened. We sat in silence, drinking. The second overtime began. Every time the Devils were in the Rangers’ zone, we cringed. Every shot was catastrophe. I think a Devils shot hit the post. Richter threw his glove at another. We cringed. Oh.
Then the puck was in the Devils zone. Devils defenseman Sergei Fetisov picked it up and tried to clear. Fetisov was on the old Red Army teams (indeed, he was on the 1980 Russian team that lost the “Miracle” game in Lake Placid). They were trained to play aggressive defense, one feature of which was passing into the neutral zone even it meant going cross-ice. This is an inherently risky move, since there tend to be more bodies that might block your clearing attempt. A more conservative play is always to clear up the boards, but it lowers your chances of converting directly to an offensive footing. But the Russians were trained to pass when they cleared, even cross-ice. So Fetisov tries to clear. Tikkanen knocks it back before it leaves the zone and it trickles to the corner. Scott Niedermeyer tries to collect it for the Devils, but Ranger Stephane Matteau is a little faster to the puck. He gathers it up and brings it behind Brodeur, who’s a little slow getting to the far post. So here’s one of the classic calls in the history of hockey, if not all sports:
Pandemonium, hugging, craziness. Impossible. Out on the streets, the city was going nuts. People were literally running out of their houses and apartments in joy. We went back to the park and it was a huge party. The chant of Nineteen Forty was still there, since the Rangers would still face the Canucks for the Cup, but for that night and a few others, it was supplanted by another mantra altogether: Matteau, Matteau, Matteau…
I offer this Great Moments in Sports History, of course, because the Rangers finished off the Devils tonight in the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals. They beat ‘em 4 games to 1, with considerably less drama, but it doesn’t fail to evoke those heady days of 1994.
While searching for a restaurant for our rare Saturday night dinner without babygirl I came across the Yelp listing for our usual Friday night dinner with babygirl. I love this place. It’s a block away, the food is decent and most importantly it’s “family friendly”.
I think the demographic of the average Yelp reviewer must be somewhat different from the average customer of Rockwell’s Neighborhood Grill, since most of the reviewers complain about unruly children and the most of the customers are unruly children.
This bothered me at first. Not because the yelpers didn’t appreciate the joys of dining with toddlers. It’s certainly their right to want a relaxing and romantic atmosphere for their first date. It was the fact that most of them blamed the noise not on the children, but on the parents. One attributed the joyful noise of a rambunctious two year old to “lackadaisical parenting”. Another complained about the horror of watching a young father entertain his babe with a balancing act involving a “tippy cup” and his head. I was offended as a parent. How dare these young singletons question my parenting skills? Don’t they have any idea how hard it is to keep a two year old from jumping out of her chair at every opportunity.
Then I realized. No, they didn’t. And I hadn’t either. I remember life before babygirl when I would seethe in resentment at the toddler on the other side of my booth banquette who just wouldn’t sit still. I would judge with much prejudice the parents that dared to bring their baby to my local beer garden. I would imagine my future kids, sitting quietly with their coloring books, reacting immediately to my firm but loving instructions.
But then I had a kid of my own and realized that it’s not the parents fault. It’s just kids.
If the truth were know then no one would have children. So please continue singletons. Give me the dirty looks when babygirl has a tantrum over “a tiny bit chocolate” in the check out lane. Judge away at the pure and loud delight babygirl displays when eating a bright blue lollipop. But blame me, please. The future of the species depends on it.
But if it so happen, that being met, they passe their time in relating some Stories, and one of them begins to tell one which concernes himselfe; instantly every one of the rest most greedily desires to speak of himself too; if one relate some wonder, the rest will tell you miracles, if they have them, if not, they’l fein them – Thomas Hobbes, De Cive
The Number 1 reason not to talk to strangers in airports.
There was actually a lot of great stuff in New Orleans. Some kid EVAK basically killed the French Quarter, but unfortunately I didn’t capture much of that. Yes, I know now that I had a cellphone in my pocket the whole time, but I was in the French Quarter, and other things were occupying my mind. I did get some stuff while I was dry enough to think about it, though.
ISTO GOOSE Freight Train, New Orleans
RADID BSMZ Freight, New Orleans
DEPHO Freight, New Orleans
VENTO tag on wrecked building, off Canal Street
ASHER marker tag, in the bathroom of some damn bar or other…likely on Decatur.
Now that Part 1 has managed to alienate everyone in my field (as part of my unending quest to begin a second career), it’s time to turn to the Top 20 CCCC Presentation Mistakes, Part 2. Just so you know that I know, this list demonstrates that I am a remarkably ungenerous jackass who probably doesn’t belong in any teaching situation, since the cynicism disease has apparently eaten my nurturing gene. Or something. I get it. And yet, here we go:
11. The Concept Stew – This presentation is usually not bad, and can’t really be characterized as a “mistake.” It just is what it is; I’m just still trying to figure out what it is. The Concept Stew is really a content issue, and goes something like this:
We all know X set of concepts that we usually use to think about Y subject. Definition of concept X1, definition of concept X2, definition of concept X3. These are derived from acknowledged theorists in our field. However, they are actually inadequate for thinking about Y because blah blah blah. Luckily, these other people in a thoroughly unrelated field have developed Z set of concepts that might help us. Definition of concept Z1, definition of concept Z2, definition of concept Z3. Look what happens when we apply concept Z1-3 on Y case study A. We should consider using these Z concepts to think about Y in the future.
There’s something endearing about The Concept Stew, and I’ll admit that I’ve done a bit of stewing myself. It’s even lovely, and often smart, and it’s far better than almost anything else on this list. I guess my only complaint is that it seems pretty easy, and that Z set of concepts often fits so neatly that it seems suspicious, a level of suspicion that generally increases with the distance of rhetoric and writing instruction from the field that produces the Z concepts. I’m quite sure that the economic concept of the information cascade has rhetorical cognates, so to speak, so it’s not clear why we need one and not the other. That and nobody ever follows through on the use of Z concepts but perhaps the presenter, which makes it essentially advertising.
12. The Technophile – I see you there messing around with your brand new MacBook Pro. You’ve got the A/V hook-up working, and you’re testing out the video. You even brought those portable speakers so that we hear the audio clearly. Good. I’m the last person to complain about a little tech stuff at the presentation. But why, why I ask you, must the video be longer than your explanation of why I’m supposed to care about it? Why must it be a video that I could have easily seen by checking my Digg RSS feed last week? What does it tell us about writing, rhetoric, communication, language, or culture? Let me explain something to you, friend. At its very heart, our entire profession is predicated on the notion that the thing does NOT speak for itself. Like, ever. By the “thing,” I mean your video of the guy riding the BMX bike around a city I presume to be Miami while Biggie’s “Juicy” thumps in the background. Prefacing the video by saying “I want to show a video of vernacular literacies” doesn’t help me. You might be awed by the multimodality of it all, but I’m here wondering why Christmas missed us. I’m perfectly happy to see kickass demonstrations of what the MacBook can do. There’s an Apple store on Michigan Avenue. Hell, there’s one in Skokie.
So, this year I went to the “big” conference in my field, here in New Orleans. Every year after this conference, you get a debate of sorts on the field listservs, and it always goes like this: Do you prefer when people read their papers or speak them without reading? Or, do you prefer some other more discussion-based presentation? Advocates for whatever position – call them readerly, speakerly, and teacherly – present their cases, some counterarguments ensue, and the then the whole thing dies, only to be replayed in more or less the same form one year hence. It’s a pointless endeavor, as is so much. I thought I’d try an equally pointless classification of the different presentations, so here are the Top Twenty CCCC Presentation Mistakes.
I will, of course, have to present two caveats. First, many of the presentations I saw this year were very good. This is a list of problem presentations, not a list of all presentations. Second, I have been guilty of one or more of these myself. Maybe even most people have. Take it in the spirit of fun and don’t go getting all sniffy. Without further ado:
1. The Professional—The Professional is in some ways the best kind of talk, in the way that the high-end hit man is somewhat admirable. Or, like the Terminator is kinda cool. The Professional is written and read, but aims toward very speakerly prose. The presenter has picked it over and revised it 30 times for short sentences and clear signposting. If you look at the actual paper, it includes speaker-cues like “Slow Down Here,” and “Emphasize this Point with a Gesture,” and other such stage directions. In terms of delivery, the Professional is almost always delivered from the podium, at a steady and naturalistic rhythm, with some painfully transparent attempts at voice modulation (“Emphasize this Point with Voice Modulation!!!”). It never, ever goes overtime, because it has been practiced in front of a mirror 300 times, and timed to the half-second. Content-wise, the talk is meticulously crafted, going something like this:
Scholar Muckity-Muck 1 has written that such-and-such, while Scholar Muckity-Muck 2 has added blah blah blah, but very few people have considered yada yada yada, which is a problem (for knowledge) because yada yada. I will discuss a completely unmemorable case study (see accompanying handout for quotations) that allows us to think of this neglected yada yada yada thusly; then I’ll make some very obvious inductions thereto, because this research, while methodologically perfect, lacks any manner of creativity, courage, or insight. Thank you.
After listening to the Professional, you feel a mild glow of pleasure/pain. You learned nothing, and likely even got stupider, but at least you weren’t abused in the process.
2. The Excitable Speech—The Excitable Speech is largely a graduate student operation, although you’ll occasionally see very senior scholars do it as well. All but the most pathologically earnest junior faculty are far too jaded to give the Excitable Speech. This version of the conference presentation requires that the speaker have an almost preternatural interest in a relatively mundane subject; this level of interest requires that the subject matter be described in a manner that would make a Revival Tent preacherman blush, like “Ohmigod can you believe how cool and complicated this all is? I mean, can you believe it????” A few years ago I saw a woman gushing about the historicity of citation systems or some other such obvious notion. Apparently, the Chicago Manual of Style has not been a perpetual presence on the Earth since Creation. Who knew? The speaker’s fetish for the subject, needless to say, almost never translates, so the surfeit of enthusiasm just seems embarrassing and weird. The Excitable Speech will tend to go over time, but luckily, the graduate student’s advisor is sitting in the now largely uncomfortable audience with a hook, frowning, and will pull the excitable speaker down for a gentle, head-patting, talking-to later.
3. The Library Database—The Library Database is not so much a scholarly presentation as it is a piece of conceptual art. It asks a basic question: How many proper names of people in my field might I fit into my 20 minute talk without merely reading a list of names? Given such a question, most reasonable people would err on the side of fewer names; the Library Database rather shockingly errs toward more names—tending toward the limit of the list. Still, the presentation is impressive, simply because the Library Databaser must include a near infinite variation of signal phrases, since using “according to X” 150 times would give up the game.
4. The Body Poet – The Body Poet presentation involves a thoroughly quirky performance during which the speaker flails about or otherwise makes gesticulations similar to some sun worship ritual. Under the cringe-inducing impression that academic prose is “too rational and tied up in Western metaphysics,” the speaker has instead opted for a weirdly arranged set of poetic vignettes that also involve The Body ™, it being well-known that Western metaphysics has ignored and debased The Body ™ as a general proposition. Therefore (although the speaker will never use this hideously linear term), the speaker will “foreground” The Body ™ through the presentation, and depend on the variable associations of the audiences’ own Bodily experiences, since the space between the speaker’s and audience’s “differently located Bodies” is where “meaning actually happens” anyway. Perhaps not surprisingly, the “content” of the presentation—supposing we were authorized to accept such a loaded and conflictual term—generally involves an experimental class that the speaker taught, and the ideological baggage that caused his or her students to absolutely despise it.
Hanging in Nawlins. Haven’t been here since 2002, but it all seems very familiar. I make a point of never leaving the tourist areas, under the belief that most tourist cities have a primary tourist area, and then a secondary tourist area designed to provide tourists with an authenticity experience by which they can claim to have left the tourist area. Of course, we have friends who lived here in Nawlins, and would show us the real non-tourist stuff, but then we would simply be playing out the authenticity bit in another way. Ah well.
What I should really do if this Seven Red was honest is tell you what I think about these sorts of conferences. But as careful readers will have noticed, Seven Red is terminally dishonest, despite the usual draw of telling it straight under a cloak of anonymity. Well, some of Seven Red. One third of Seven Red may not even believe in honesty, full stop. babygirl is such a liar. Why then am I wasting time writing this post when I could be drinking a hand grenade and otherwise playing out the obnoxious role assigned to me in the Nawlins drama? Because we do not believe in honesty, but we do believe in killing time between sessions. And, more importantly, to announce a special: Graffiti Fridays, Nawlins. That’s coming tomorrow. There’s actually lots of good stuff here, and it must be shared.
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