Bullied by China

Reporters sans frontières charges that in launching a censored version of its search engine, Google has fully gone over to the dark side: "The launch of Google.cn is a black day for freedom of expression in China" [compare Reuters coverage]

Hoopty Rides

Hoopty Rides is one of my favorite blogs -- since my own writing might be a little spotty lately, I want to send all you to Mr. Jalopy. Not only is he a fantastic garage sale maven, his blog has great pix and great stories -- read the one about his friend Junior and his deep desire for a Playstation.

I often get car advice from this obsessional old car restorer, much to the surprise of my spouse who finds me indifferent to most automobile obsessions. Yes, I bought the beige Camry -- it looked gold five years ago, and no, I can't really say I am a car fetishist at all, -- it's the writing on hoopty rides that doees it for me every time.

I live vicariously through its fantastic sense of useless, strange and repairable objects. I grew up in a family of people who bought junk, but didn't love it.

As Bush goes up to make his State of the Union address, I'll be trying to avoid major media outlets. There is only so much lying and hand-wringing about lying a person can take. I'll be looking for stealth poetry in the world and in the writing of Walter Benjamin and this week, Christopher Prendergast, who was a prof of mine once upon a time and whom we are reading in my grad seminar.

bye for now!

keep it neutral

Decorating choices in the OC favor beige, off-white, white, cream, "popcorn," bone, sand, "almond white," moon white," butter white, and other poeticizing names for the colors featured in this picture of neutral perfection. Is this color to which Switzerland aspires? We couldn't of course call any shade featured "light brown" because that would be of course too literal. It would be rude. If you want to maximize resale value, on your property, these homeowners are obeying the injunction to keep it neutral!

My eyes hurt from looking this image: note the glass coffee table supported by curved steel legwork. This innovation is considered the height of tastefulness around here. I've been looking on craigslist OC for used furniture and there are a lot of glass and iron and tables. Don't ask me why people like them so much.-- I would have to take a shot in the dark and say that suburbanites like to think that table center pieces defy gravity -- they float more than they are supported.

I've decided that the names given to these colors without color are the kinds of "stealth poetry" and Spam Lit described by Mark Dery , but that actual interior decor cannot live up to the comic subtleties of color nomenclatura.

Color me neutral is also a political statement....

Latest from :Rate Your Students

Rate Your Students: Bursting with Love - or Maybe Turkey - Someone from Minnesota Finishes a Set of Essays: "As a group, you're lazy, unmotivated, and you are eager to lie to my face about the most minor of matters. You treat me with such casual disrespect - tardiness, phony stories about missing class, casual plagiarism - and yet you - and your parents - expect me to treat you like rare geniuses in my care." writes an untenured assistant professor from MN.

Ouch!

I remember that feeling of total dismay when I started teaching at the University level. And I remember senior faculty divided into two camps -- the caring camp who said to me, "don't expect too much, they work 20 hours a week +" and the old fart camp, "now in my day, harumph harumph, we could make crew and conjugate Latin verbs about rowing crew at the same because we lived in RESIDENTIAL COLLEGES."

I would think that somehow neither of these attitudes were quite right -- but that I was fighting a losing battle in trying to dissent. I tried to come down hard one semester at Minnesota and my teaching evaluations showed it. Then my senior colleagues tried to admonish and mentor me at the same time about my teaching abilities. It totally sucked!

Abramoff and Medicare:Conspiracies too obvious to mention

At Crooked Timber, we get an eyeful of the fake grassroots lobbying organizations that covered for big pharma during the Clinton years -- The United Seniors Assocation included "among other GOP political operatives, Jack Abramoff." This is a direct quote from Hacker's and Pierson's Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy.

One the one hand, one is heartened by the making of such connections on any public forum such as a popular academic blog commenting on a book published by Yale University Press that ranks in the 6500's on the Amazon. That's respectable, but will hardly give the frigging Da Vinci Code a run for its money. You want intrigue, you want morality play?

On the other hand, one despairs before the spectacle of conspiracy and complexity and its ability to deaden the people's capacity for comprehending political and economicy conspiracy in all its gritty vulgarity. Cut to: Abramoff going from one corporate feeding trough to another, drawing upon his best Beverly Hills High bonhomie in order to promote business friendly legislation and make a mockery of democratic process at the same time. The United Seniors Association was about as grassroots as the UCLA Alumni Group hunting down liberal professors.

usage normalization

Usage for this blog shows some normalization - after a very suspicious spike in Nov 05 to 8185 average daily hits (1349 files or 7141 pages served a day, to 354 daily visitors), we now proudly bar the identified abuse, and just as proudly serve about 3817 hits per day (1428 files, 2658 pages on average each day, for 182 visitors). Nevertheless, there is some unhealthy interest in old logs, so I had to remove them...

UCLA Alumni Group of One Is Tracking 'Radical' Faculty - Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times reports that a UCLA alum and member of the Republican Party is trying to encourage "free speech" on campus by paying students to collect incriminating course materials on their professors. $100 a pop to all cash-short liberal-hating necons.

However effective this spurious campaign of vigilantism might turn out to be, it just goes to show that conservatives are the REAL militants when it comes to suppression of dissent.

But I hail them, I just wonder why they don't all go to Oral Roberts University where they will find many like-minded profs and students....

Perhaps in the end they demur from attending conservative Christian universities because of their dismal academic ranking. Ironic isn't it that in the liberal biased elite universities where conservative students chafe at left-wing conformism, they are receiving a university education they wouldn't if they really put their money where their mouths were and paid the fundies their tuition.

Might it actually be true that secular, liberal institutions make better univerisities?

Educational Reform

Here is a government paper about the history of American High School educational policy. One will be able to grasp quickly that the vocationalism of American education policy arose out of attempts to reform an academic curriculum no longer suited for what we would call the "diverse" student body of the turn of the century.

What this did was create a de facto two track system in high school education: 1) the first was geared toward college prep and focused at least until recently on humanities and academics, Geeks, first generation immigrant students could sometimes break through into this layer, but it has become increasingly the purview of private schools, where you can get a progressive, liberal and academic education to the tune of $30,000 a year 2) the second was formed by the Life Adjustment Movement and geared toward the great majority of American students who were presumed to need training in worthy home membership (domestic consumerism), social life (accepting the pecking order of jocks and beauty queens above the peons who served and admired them) 3) vocational training since they were not going to go to college.

The two track system has gotten blurred, with college becoming increasingly "vocationalized." But the instrumentalization of education has been performed in the name of democratization. This division of students into college preparers and life adjusters is a strategy of administration. But what we've seen is that the culture of job training and vocationalism has become ascendant. I think I had students at Minnesota who were ashamed of being academically serious.

RMP is a Kvell Fest: thumbs up to Yiddish Prof

Even though this student misspelled mensch, I can tell he learned a lot of Yiddish! But then, Yiddish spelling is extremely elastic...so for those schana madls, guys and goys who are in classes with meschuggeneh (spelling?) professors making your lives unbearable, don't just sit there in the dark, gather up those tchotchkes you wear around your necks -- oy, you call them Ipods?? and get off your tuckuses and get outta there. Take Yiddish! (thanks Jost!)

Profs bite back

Rate Your Students responds to Rate My Professors .

The first blog has no advertising and is skeletal compared with the sheer scale of RMP -- where you can take potshots at your profs while ranking them on their sex appeal. Many profs garner no more than one or two ratings, either raves or vitriol.

Some have debated the accuracy of RMP as evaluations and found it to be statistically skewed. Mmm, yes indeed.

Rate Your Students also has the feel of a forum for ventilation, but I don't think the criticism is sharp enough. It's a start. Of what I'm not sure.

NYU Graduate Students on Strike

At Michael Berube read the update from the ground of the NYU graduate student strike.

The NYU administration has proven itself extremely effect at hiring its way to national prominence, but what Michael Cohen describes is a familiar condition of higher ed: fragmentation and isolation and competition between departments a lack of space for intelcetual exchange outside of job talks...but what is interesting is that he makes the association between this kind of alienation and a certain strategy of management to "divide" and rule more ruthlessly.

One of the most striking and contradictory things about NYU is the benign neglect in which its Art School lingers, and the money making machine that it has become. Housed in the School of Nursing and Education, its full time faculty are as rare as polar bears on the equator -- administration knows that it has a long list of recruits, artists willing to take on part-time and adjunct teaching jobs with no benefits, even as the quality of its students keeps improving because well -- it's an art school in New York.

But the fact of the matter is, the Union-bashing on the part of the administration is part of "a larger pattern of "managerial behavior" all too familiar to anyone who has worked at a place where inscrutable decisions are made from the top down and employees are a captive audience to a rhetoric of 'excellence" that has all too little to do with their working lives.

FREY STYLE --

A Million Little Lies appeared on January 8, 2006 on The Smoking Gun website, questioning the veracity of James Frey's bestselling memoir A Million LIttle Pieces . The Smoking Gun set off a firestorm of defensiveness on the part of Oprah's world and the publishing industry's apologists who have nothing against the use of hyperbole if it sells more books. Smoking Gun's investigations into Frey's confessions of alcohol and drug induced wrong-doing found that his infractions were far less serious than Frey let on. Frey implicated himself, for example, in the deaths of two young women when he had nothing to do with it.

Write a memoir Frey style and your teenage shoplifting can become a crisis of kleptomania that puts Danny Ocean to shame while your youthful sexperiments are rewritten as your career as a porn star.

I've not read Frey's memoir, but it seems that he is an effective writer: Oprah's and the public's desire to be "moved" by writing was more than adequately fulfilled. Hence the problem with such forms of literacy to begin with.

As some have said, like Phillipe Lejeune have naively asserted autobiography and memoir are sealed by a contract between writer and reader to tell the truth, or at least, to be authentic. This contract has been overwritten by the bestselling wannabe memoirist's contract with his potential readers: to provide the requisite amount of terror and pity that used to be desired effect of tragedy. What this story makes obvious is that the spectacle of suffering and addiction has been fully commodified, largely due to the efforts of Ms. Winfrey herself. A mode of reading produced James Frey, as much as it did Frank McCourt, whose horrific reconstructions of poverty and misery in Ireland raised the hairs on my neck even as I wondered how he could possibly have remembered conversations he had as a child of eight, nine, ten or eleven. The scenes he painted of his mother clutching a cold dead infant in their filthy bed still haunt me, even as I cast a skeptical eye on McCourt's photographic memory of deprivation and poverty.

But empirical verifiability be damned! Frey, it is reported, is suing Smoking Gun for what, for accusing him of libelling himself?

Birth Control Outlawed

Only kidding!

But I think, that instead of counting on Dems to filibuster Alito's nomination, and sit at home writing pathetic messages to my senator to vote against him, I have decided to get pro-Active on my post-Alito strategy.

First -- set up an underground railroad to Tijuana for contraceptives and abortions -- find reputable doctors over the border and pharmacies and begin training runs. Pinatas fillled with condoms?

Second -- open my heart to unexpected surprises -- like Leo coming home with a pregnant girlfriend in say ten or twelve years! For me, grandmotherhood may come sooner than expected as conservatives turn back the clock on modernization and impose laws forcing us all to enjoy recreational hunting while they manage to criminalize recreational sex.

But on a more serious note, go here to read about the fact that Alito's greatest impact on the court may not be on the issue of Roe vs. Wade, but on the question of executive power for which he has demonstrated the greatest complaisance. The Right has groomed a whole phalanx of judges who deem it correct to tolerate illegal acts as long as they emanate from the body of the President while demonstrating the greatest severity with regard to ten year old suspects who should be legally, according to one of Alito's famous dissenting decisions, strip searched.

It's an ugly future if Alito becomes a Supreme, and we must be prepared.

Authoritarian capitalism in China

The China Path written by Robert Reich observes that in China, dynamic free markets don't need democratic institutions, putting the lie to the truism that if you give them capitalism, democracy must follow. Or else, it must mean that democracy Bush style will come to places like China: it will be a democracy complete with shadowy oligarchs, rampant political corruption, bureaucratic incompetence and intense profiteering, no social safety nets and poor federal disaster management as well as total abuse of the ecosystem.

Growing divide between rich and poor? We've got it too! Let a thousand McMansions bloom? Check it out!

Dreaming of the Perfect Infant: R.I.E. and the Modernist Baby

RIE is a system of infant education helps raise "authentic" infants. I have yet to see an INauthentic infant. Try to think about the cultish language of this infant education system, so popular with upper middle class parents on the West Coast. It will never be a mass movement - it offers itself up as an exclusive kind of avant-garde child-rearing theory.

What would an INAUTHENTIC INFANT be? Babies actually seem PERFECTLY incapable of artifice. I've seen fake people, religious hypocrites, stylized fashionistas, power hungry academics pretending to be "good"... Everyone has seen a used car salesman, lying through whitened teeth, but I have never seen an inauthentic baby. RIE sets up a fear of something that doesn't exist - what if my baby learns to be fake? Fakeness according to RIE seems to be anything not "inner-directed" - so the entire thing is about destroying the ground of inter-subjectivity in order to allow the authentic self to bloom, ex nihilo.

According to R.I.E. manuals of infant education, an adult is never supposed to reward an infant for an accomplishment. I who have been saying "good job!" to Leo could very well be guilty of child abuse since I am giving him positive feedback about his achievements.

The technique of imposing a regime of radical inhibition upon adult behavior seems a hyper-rational fantasy of the domination of fantasy that should be seriously criticized as a way of making other parents feel inferior. It's very popular in LA, and friends of mine swear by it... For fear of alienating them, I've kept my mouth shut, but for the sake of critical thinking, I can't keep my mouth shut any longer. I hope they will still be my friends after reading this, if they end up here.

RIE has taken Rousseau and turned him into Mao. Rousseau was a brilliant writer, but a madman! Don't ever forget that - read the original idealization of childhood, Emile, by one of the foremost deadbeat dads in history if you absolutely have to indulge in these bourgeois fantasies of "making" the perfect child.

Accordingly to RIE, children are seen as radically autonomous beings and should not respond to the need for approval from adults, eradicating, super-ego, ego ideal and ideal ego all at once for a kind of unbelievable ideal of "inner-directedness" inherited directly from Calvinist forefathers and their idea of individual initiative and autonomy.

Children are supposed to be "self-learners" treated respectfully as agents when they themselves experience their bodies as fantastically enjoyable, torturous partial objects of pain and delight. So don't ever pick them up! They might not be ready!

The insane thing about this system of infant education is that it is all about adult re-educaation. In this sense it aspires, like the Cultural Revolution, to remake human nature from the ground up.

I'm not saying we should be making infants run the 500m and spell "Constantinople," but just as at the other end of the spectrum, parents try to jump start education by playing language pedagogy tapes on a pregnant woman's stomach, the practictioners of RIE (pronounced rye) are just as optimistic that the perfect child can engineered through the absolute effacement of parental expections and spontaneity in order to produce a perfectly self-enclosed monad that is remarkably in line with the ideological formations of late capitalism that assign absolutely no value to either unconscious, fantasy or a contradictory but productive inter-subjectivity.

Once again, the avant garde of the advice industry proves that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!

I, Blogger? or Academia and its Discontents

I began blogging with wild dreams of creating my own readership, striking at the heart of academic and political forms of corruption. I wanted to be the Jon, let's say Jan Stewart of the academic scene. My second novel had just been unceremoniously dropped by its erstwhile publisher. My sense of outrage about local and global dishonesties in and outside of academia had been growing sharper and not duller with the weight of the passing years. I didn't really know what I was getting into, but during the 2004 Democratic Convention, I kept in touch with what was going on through live-blogging and was thus initiated into the insane discussions on Kos and Pandagon.

Now that I've been doing this for more than a year, I've realized that my blog "lacks focus." That is, I'm not publishing the results of sustained academic research here. It has become more of a critical diary, and one that I have been committed to more as a writer than a computer geek.

I had wanted to reach a different readership - one that was thoughtful and willingly to be persuaded, to laugh, to join me in mocking the woeful inadequacy of what has been portrayed as "political" thought. I wanted to be judged by my abilities as writer and satirist alone. I intended to hide neither behind the sanctimony of my good intentions nor behind loyalty to the particularity of the literary object or a strict discipline. I had no more faith in Zizek's lacanopunditry as I did in the dreams of post-colonial critique of the "West" as an external object.

I am deeply committed to psychoanalysis, but not to its instrumentalization. I feel as if I have to explain myself because I've put up my own pubs on the sidebar to celebrate not the New ME or the New Year, but to give my readers a sense of what I've done. Ever since my exchange with Daniel Pinchbeck, I've realized that I can't assume anyone knows about my other writing. And since he is content to smoke hallucinogens rather than read other scholars that might blow his mind -- not me so much, but Howard Caygill, Samuel Weber, Miriam Hansen, I've decided to make it a little easier for those of you looking for an intellectual high to access some of the stuff I've brewed over the years.

Science gets Cute

Finally some scientists discover the laws of cute - only about a decade behind the cultural theorists - read up on the Cute Factor, complete with built-in orientalism and other prejudices... awww!

2006 predictions: UNCENSORED, UNCUT, UNREASONABLE

If you need a pick me up after these predictions for 2006 at Treehugger , then read mine. They're much less grim, because they're based completely on fantasy...

The optimist in me predicts:

1. In 2006, after the majority of Americans absorb the growing disparity between the wages of our corporate overlords and our average selves, as visually rendered in the comments from xrepub's diary at at Kos , we will revolt. White collar and service workers will unionize and organize walk outs, job slowdowns and stoppages at all of the nation's major corporations -- from dot coms to brokerage houses. SEIU, or the service workers international union will get the message out that ALL workers should feel solidarity with ALL other workers. We will demand nationalized healthcare so that we are not held hostage to our jobs. Americans all default on their credit card payments, sending shockwaves through the financial and real estate industries. People start having block parties.
2.High School seniors all over America will refuse to take the SAT examination, citing Educational Testing Services' violation of anti-trust law and denouncing its intransparent test development processes. Seniors will refuse to submit themselves to the regime of social and economic triage.
3. As a result, African-American students will come to a new consensus about the importance and meaningfulness of academic achievement not bound to a regime of testing. Students will demand better teachers and a reform of the social studies curriculum that gives short shrift to any meaningful sense of American history and the civil rights movement.
4. Cultural Studies scholars will realize that they can no longer rely on words like "anxiety" to characterize the crises of modernity.
5. Paris Hilton will gain weight after going through rehab.
6. People will stop buying Real Simple because they will have realized that the simplest way to simplify is to cancel decorating magazine subscriptions!
7. No student of mine will ever again try to negotiate for a better grade on the basis of two extremely faulty lines of reasoning: 1) s/he has to get into med/law school 2) the class covered material that was at once too complex and too confusing so that s/he never knew what I wanted to see on the final exam.

Channeling Hardt and Negri, I predict:

1. The multitude will start making computers and Ipods out of clay, weaving Operating Systems into dvd's made of flax, and bartering them at swap meets, bringing Apple, Dell, Microsoft AND Google to their respective knees.
2. American soldiers in Iraq will put down their arms and organize cultural and performing arts centers throughout Iraq, after having studied - seriously studied! - Arabic literature.
3. Christian fundamentalists will read Empire and put down their Bibles forever.

But the pessimist in me predicts:

1. The corruption of our corporate overlords continues apace, and their abuse of power within and without the halls of government will go largely unpunished and unpublicized. Dick Cheney will continue to make a lot of money for himself and his undisclosed locations.
2. Your average Chinese peasant will not make very much money at all and strike out for the city to find a job in manufacturing, making herself another member of the exploited classes, bettering her lot only slightly while living in what are quickly becoming environmental disaster areas. After working as a housegirl, on the assembly line, she may either suffer an on the job injury or be recruited into prostitution if she is good-looking. This same scenario will repeat itself all over the world.
3. The Iraq insurgency will not make a lot of money, but it will continue to do a great deal of damage.
4. Hillary Clinton will revise her position on abortion.
5. Jon Stewart will start dying his hair.
6. Basic Training will become the new Pilates.

Breaches of Privacy

The New York Times offers a contradictory picture of Americans' attitudes about invasions of privacy. Young people, it is said, who blog about their latest hook ups on line would seem indifferent to the recent incursions upon our right to privacy.

The reason that it is important that a democratic government respect the privacy of its citizens has to do with the importance of dissent in the public sphere. Private life, an invention of the 18th century bourgeoisie privileges intense relationships, letter writing and the cultivation of domestic pleasures and interiority that are not political, per se. There actually is no democracy without protection of the rights of citizens against government surveillance and censorship.

The chilling effect that the NSA domestic surveillance has upon the climate of dissent in the US should be obvious, but as we have seen, the freedoms Bush pretends to protect are highly abstract. In times of war of course, there is greater tolerance of government incursions, and of course, we are in a state of perpetual war.

Constant surveillance is supposed to make us more safe -- and in the case of reality television, more famous.

CARdamom - re: McSweeney's Internet Tendency

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Lists reminded me how much I love lists and inspired me to post the list that we have developed during our lengthy sojourns in So Cal traffic: a list of car names - after the silliest SUV, the Porsche Cayenne: wouldn't you rather drive an Aston Martin Allspice? Or the...

Audi Anis
Bentley Basil
BMW Bay Leaf
Cadillac Caraway
Chevy Chive
Chrysler Coriander
Citroen Cilantro
Dodge Dill
Ford Fennel
Geo Garlic
Honda Jalapeno
Hummer Habanero
Hyundai Honey
Jaguar Juniper
Jeep Ginger
Kia Clove
Land Rover Lavender
Lexus Lemongrass
Maserati Mint
Mercedes Marjoram
MG Mace
Mitsubishi Mustard
Nissan Nutmeg
Opel Oregano
Peugeot Paprika
Pontiac Parsley
Saab Sage
Saturn Saffron
Scion Sugar
Seat Sesame
Subaru Cinnamon
Suzuki Salt
Toyota Thyme
Volvo Vinegar
VW Vanilla