rap sheet of gnomic compressions
Hang your head and put on your black beret: the infuriating, impish, and dazzling Jacques Derrida has passed away.
His was the first really tough and rewarding writing I encountered in graduate school, and like a lot of other people, I think I really learned how to read from him. I’m sure there’ll be many remembrances and encomia in the next few days; I just think of that passage about “the shadow of the book, the third party between the hands holding the book.”
It may be that she’s trying to keep it quiet, since she’s (ahem) passing a significant milestone, but I hope you’ll go on over to Clancy’s site and wish her a happy birthday.
You didn’t really think you could keep it quiet, did you, Clancy? 😀
(p.s.: On that big milestone birthday, I’ll again offer the hope that folks might go out and rent the cheesy sci-fi classic Logan’s Run — but, hey, if not, cake’s a good thing too. Best wishes, Clancy!)
Things I achieved this weekend:
Things I’m still working on:
Updates to follow as events warrant. Yes, I know it’s riveting stuff. Stay glued to your monitors, folks.
My name’s Dick Cheney, and I’m here to tell you that it’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating.
Let me be a little more explicit, so you liberal whiners will shut up. If you assholes don’t vote for me and George, I’m gonna make sure terrorists bomb your fucking house. You got me, fuckface? You vote for Kerry, your family’s gonna get capped. That’s not a threat, that’s a promise, you sniveling liberal turd. You think we can’t do it? Doug Feith and Richard Perle ran the 1980s Afghanistan resistance, you forgetful fucks. They trained Al Qaeda. How hard do you think it is to put an RPG through your bedroom window? How hard, asshole? Huh? I’m talking to you.
Think we won’t. Go ahead. We got the Diebold electronic voting machines on our side, baby. We know where you live. We find out you didn’t vote for us, we got plenty of time to come visit you at your place of work. Loosen some lug nuts, cut some brake lines. Vote the wrong way, you might accidentally step in front of a bus. Do you get the message, you pansy-ass liberal fuckwads? Do you know how to vote now, or is there still some part of “hit” and “devastating” that you don’t understand?
My name is Dick Cheney, and I approved this announcement.
You know, the one about the river in Egypt. Yeah, I think I’m in denial about the semester starting next week, and so I’m avoiding anything scholarly or pedagogical in favor of the personal- and family-oriented. To that end, here are three more pictures: Dad, Mom and Dad, and me and David.
Found out today that some advice I offered helped a correspondent get a university rhet/comp job, which is a terrific feeling. Thanks for asking, L, and for giving me the opportunity to be of help: you’ll be awesome, I’m sure. And you’ve put a grin on my face that’ll be hard to get rid of.
I’m home again and sleepless, after having flown the redeye back east from Seattle. Got into Dulles at six in the morning to change planes, and realized that I was too awake to sleep away the time to New England, and too sleepy to read anything academic. I found an open bookstore in the airport, and browsed dazedly backwards through the alphabetic shelves. Nothing, nothing, nothing: I was disappointed to find that Dulles, a DC-area airport, had no George Pelecanos titles, because Pelecanos is one of the absolute best crime writers working in the genre, and it helps as well that his writing is so concretely grounded in the DC area, where I grew up. I would say that Pelecanos is a guilty pleasure, but there’s nothing guilty about the pleasure I get from his books, his verisimilitude, his skillful rendering of places I know, his grasp of the way that Washington, DC embodies so many of the racial and racist conflicts that go to the heart of American culture.
For those who don’t know: Washington, DC has more citizens than the state of Wyoming, yet is forbidden from having any sort of voting congressional representation, because the city is predominantly African-American and Democratic, and Senate Republicans block any attempt to put two more seats into the Senate. So the citizens of DC have no vote in Congress, and hence the slogan on their license plates: “Washington, DC: Taxation Without Representation.”
Anyway: my mom, who lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, and ran the Silver Spring library, introduced me to Pelecanos, who also lives in Silver Spring. For my birthday, she gave me a copy he’d signed of Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, and I was hooked. Even if you don’t like crime writing, he’s as fine a writer as you’ll find, with his attention to nuance and setting, and the moral ambiguities of his characters.
But, well, yeah: the airport didn’t have any of his books. So I scanned up the shelves until I got to ‘C’, and there was Bernard Cornwell and his Richard Sharpe series. My dad loves the prolific Cornwell, and I’ve often given my dad Cornwell novels twice a year, one for his birthday, one for Christmas. Cornwell writes well-researched historical fiction, and while his characters are more cardboardy good-guy bad-guy than Pelecanos, it’s still rollicking good fun, and a hell of a lot better than the godawful Tom Clancy. The Sharpe series details the career of Richard Sharpe, an enlisted English rifleman who receives a battlefield promotion to officer’s rank in the early part of the nineteenth century, and as you might guess, it finds its termination at Waterloo. Sharpe encounters detestable superior officers, gets laid a lot, and helps win battles, all with supreme historical verisimilitude, and like I said, it’s great fun. So I picked up Sharpe’s Eagle in a $4 TPB edition at the airport, and had devoured it by the time I got home.
Maybe I should set myself a reward system: for each dissertation chapter I finish, I get to blow a day on a Sharpe novel. Sound reasonable?
Sure, I had to hustle some, but I got to the airport with 55 minutes to spare. Easy through the counter check-in, smoother than boiled okra through security, and then it’s kick back and wait at the gate.
And wait.
And wait.
We start to figure something’s wrong when it’s twenty minutes before departure and we haven’t started boarding. The announcement comes: the flight to Philadelphia’s cancelled and we need to re-book.
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I did several JSTOR searches today, looking for how often people in English and in composition and rhetoric talk about economics. In JSTOR (which should be available via your nearest academic library, if not your community library), I searched for the word “economic” in the title and abstract fields for the journals College English and CCC. Results: two hits, both for College English. One an article from 1947, the other an article from 1977. Apparently, we only talk specifically about economics once every thirty years or so. Next, I searched for the word “economic” in the full text field for the journal CCC. CCC articles tend to run between 4000 and 7000 words. Volume 1 of CCC was published in 1950; since then, there has been a total of 3070 articles (or, very roughly, 16,885,000 words) published in the journal’s pages. In that time, compositionists have used the words “economic” or “economics” 207 times. (For much cooler wordcount fun, go check out wordcount.org. 4808 1427!) This gives me some additional information about the contours of economic and class discourses in English and composition; my next step will probably be to do the same sort of thing with The Bedford Bibliography.
In other news, Zeugma’s new favorite game is upstairs-downstairs. She loves being out on my second-floor little deck behind the kitchen, being able to watch the birds that come to the birdfeeder up close, and she wants to go outside every chance she gets. So I’ll go out there with a book and the laptop and do some work and make sure she doesn’t go down the stairs. Only lately she’s gotten quick and bold. She’ll dart around me and down the steps, then dash across the lower deck (the flower shop and restaurant use it) and up the other stairs to the bigger second-floor deck on the other side, behind my bedroom. I chased her a couple times, with her looking back every few steps to make sure I was following, and she was delighted to find that the other door led back into the bedroom. (It was a better option for me than carrying her, fussing and wiggling and clawing, back down and back up the deck stairs.) So now it’s a game: pick a time when Dad’s not watching, dash down the steps, let him chase you up the other steps and let you back into the bedroom, and then run around to the kitchen again.
OK, I can indulge that, at least for a little while. The problem came the other night, when I was refinishing some furniture and had the sliding door in the kitchen cracked for ventilation.
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