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Thursday, March 04, 2004

Blogorama

Part of the fun of blogreading, I’ve learned, is the sheer metonymic skid involved.  A system of differences with no positive term . . . hey!  this means the blogosphere is structured like a language!  I feel a Theory coming on!  Terry Eagleton, this one’s for you!  No, wait a second.  Hold that order.

Maybe I should put this another way:  blogs lead to blogs lead to blogs, and sometimes you make new friends and bump into old ones.  For instance: University of Chicago physicist Sean Carroll has a new blog, definitely worth checking out.  It’s called “Preposterous Universe,” and Sean should know, because he’s a cosmologist.  (I had a brief fling with astrophysics as an undergraduate and just loved it-- not only because it’s managed to figure out where we live and roughly how most of the neighborhood works, but also because at its bizarre theory-edges, the field is willing to entertain completely weird-ass possibilities like Dirac’s Large Numbers Hypothesis, never mind the existence of antimatter and the eleven-dimensional strings wound up in Calabi-Yau spaces . . . hey, wait a minute, there is such a thing as antimatter!  And maybe string theory really works!  Hey, it’s a preposterous universe out there.  Go ask Sean about it.) Also, the very funny and very smart Roger Ailes gave me a shout and a blogroll link on his “enemies list” (that’s irony, I think-- unless . . . unless . . . unless he really is that Roger Ailes, and wouldn’t that be terrible?).  Thanks, Roger.

Then there’s a pair of fine, fine critics and very Bad Subjects with blogs-- Charlie Bertsch and Steve Rubio.  These guys rock.  Just one thing, Charlie.  Back on February 29, apparently, you wrote

Late Night Louisville

Many of the bars here stay open until 4am.

How can Kentucky have a more civilized “beer o-clock” than California?

And what were the chances that I would be discussing Habermas’s theory of communicative action, particularly the paradoxical temporality of his “ideal speech situation,” at 3am?

I’m not sure why you’re so surprised by this.  The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was itself based on a number of Habermas’s 4am bar-conversations-- sure, when the book was published, J?şrgen claimed he was talking about “coffee houses” instead, but come on, we all know what he really meant.  The theory of communicative action, and the “paradoxical temporality” of which you speak, is built on the premise that certain kinds of potentially (mutually) transformative modes of reciprocal recognition can be realized only in public institutions that create the conditions of possibility for direct, face-to-face interaction.  And these would be?  Hello?  Maybe places with pool tables and juke boxes, hm?

So in the end, this one’s for you, J?şrgermeister, dude.  Stop by these sites and say hello to everyone-- I’ll get around to updating the blogroll when I get back from Atlanta.

Posted by Michael on 03/04 at 03:50 PM
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Hitler/ bin Laden ‘04

I didn’t say it-- U. S. Representative Tom Cole (R- Oklahoma) did:

Republican Congressman Tom Cole claims a vote against the re-election of President Bush is like supporting Adolph Hitler during World War Two. It’s what he said recently before a meeting of Canadian County Republicans.

U.S. Representative Tom Cole might have stirred up Democrats by saying a vote against the re-election of President Bush is like supporting Adolph Hitler during World War Two. Or supporting Osama bin Laden now. “If George Bush loses the election, Osama bin Laden wins the election,” Cole is quoted in this week’s edition of the Yukon Review which covered the recent meeting of the Canadinan County Republicans where Cole was a speaker. The newspaper says Cole claims if Bush loses his re-election bid, the enemies of the U.S. will interpret it as a victory for bin Laden. No comment so far from Oklahoma Democratic party leaders to see if they think Cole is comparing John Kerry to Adolph Hitler or Osama bin Laden. In the Yukon Review article, Cole is quoted as asking what Hitler might have thought had Franklin Roosevelt not been re-elected in 1944.

If Bush loses the election, bin Laden wins the election?  What dimension did this guy come from?  First of all, a vote for Kerry is not a vote for bin Laden-- it’s merely a vote for someone who has long been a close associate of bin Laden.  Yes, there’s a possibility that Kerry might appoint bin Laden as his Secretary of State or Defense, but no, when you vote for Kerry you’re not electing bin Laden directly to the Presidency.  So let’s get that straight.  Second, it makes no sense at all to ask Oklahoma Democratic party leaders if they think Representative Cole is comparing John Kerry to Hitler or bin Laden-- quite clearly, the good Congressman said no such thing.  He merely said that voting for Kerry is like supporting Hitler or bin Laden.  And third, just because voting for Kerry is like supporting bin Laden, that shouldn’t be taken to mean that bin Laden supporters are voting for Kerry.  Al-Qaeda’s official position on the 2004 race is already a matter of record, although apparently some bin Laden supporters are holding out for Roy Moore, on the grounds that they would prefer to “vote their consciences” rather than support the “stale duopoly” of American politics.

Posted by Michael on 03/04 at 07:44 AM
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Wednesday, March 03, 2004

Exactly how is the economy like a Faulkner novel?

Via Salon’s “War Room” blog (some scrolling required), I came across this quote from a recent Los Angeles Times story:

“The economy now is very much like a Faulkner novel,” said Rob Koepp, a research fellow at the Milken Institute, an economic think tank in Santa Monica. “You have competing and schizophrenic versions of reality. But it’s one reality.”

Apparently, Mr. Koepp is thinking of The Sound and the Fury or (even more likely) As I Lay Dying.  But what about Sanctuary?  You know, where Bush’s economic team is Popeye and you’re Temple Drake?

In other news: I haven’t been able to do any serious blogging for the past few days, but here’s an update.  I’ve been madly trying to finish an essay for an academic journal (can’t say which one, don’t want to jinx myself), and just turned it in yesterday.  On Friday I head down to Atlanta for the Modern Language Association’s conference on Disability Studies and the University-- the very first conference of its kind in the humanities.  The lineup, by the way, is terrific.

But the really good news is that I got a book proposal accepted-- for a book based on my December 2003 Chronicle of Higher Education essay on dealing with an outspoken conservative student in the classroom.  The book will be titled Liberal Arts:  What Really Happens in the Literature Classroom and Why, and I’ll be writing it all summer.  Meanwhile, I’ve just learned that my edited collection, The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, featuring essays from Rita Felski, John Frow, Jane Juffer, Jonathan Sterne, David Shumway, David Sanjek, Barry Faulk, Irene Kacandes, Steve Rubio, and Laura Kipnis, will be out in October from Blackwell (it will also have a brilliant jacket design).  And I’ve begun work on a book for NYU Press that I’ll finish over the next 15 months, tentatively titled The Left at War.

Many, many thanks to the legions of outraged conservatives who generated so much interest in my Chronicle essay.  Folks, you’ve done me another good turn, and I won’t forget it.  Remember, the book is called Liberal Arts.  I’d start ordering it from Amazon right away if I were you-- along with The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies and The Left at War.

Posted by Michael on 03/03 at 06:49 AM
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