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Tuesday, March 09, 2004

Conference final

Well, the Disability Studies and the University conference rocked.  Fine presentations, fine facilities, much camaraderie, and a lively sense of what to do next.  In the next few weeks I might post my own paper here, but in the meantime I have to rewrite it and make it longer so that I can present it at Columbia the week after next, and maybe at Ohio State in April.  In the meantime I have to give a talk to the Down Syndrome Association of Greater St. Louis.  No, most of the time I’m not this busy travelling; on the contrary, most of the time my life is every bit as boring as I said it was back in my second post to this site.  But this month is an exception.  It’s hard to travel when you’re teaching MWF, anyway, and the tiny turboprops give me backaches, dropsy, psoriasis, vapors, and mossy teeth.

One of these days I want to put together an academic conference that addresses the phenomenon of academic conferences.  It will be called “The Longer Version,” and will be distinguished by three features:  one, every paper will have a respondent who, instead of waiting for the paper to end, will simply snort, harrumph, and blurt “I think not!” at random moments during the paper.  Two, questioners will be required to begin all questions by saying, “this is really more of a comment than a question-- I wonder if you could say more about X,” on the condition that X was either unmentioned in or tangential to the paper itself.  (Questions must be at least three minutes long.) And three, every speaker will be required to answer these questions by saying, “I actually address this question in the longer version of this paper,” regardless of whether there is a longer version or not.  (If the conference proceedings are published, they will consist only of sections of papers that were cut for time during the actual conference.)

Actually, one of the reasons the Disability Studies conference was fun was that the Q and A parts of the conference really were full of Qs and As.  Amazing but true!

Posted by Michael on 03/09 at 05:54 AM
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Thursday, March 04, 2004

Fear of a queer constitution

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to rise above satire in my posts about the right’s opposition to gay marriage (here and here)-- it’s just that when I come across certain culturally conservative positions in their violent death throes, I find that ridicule is sometimes the emotionally safest response I have.  If I were gay, chances are I’d be more inclined to engage the issue more substantially, and object to-- among other things-- the serious limitations entailed in most contemporary thinking about forms of companionate coupledom.  Safer for me, I suppose, to imagine my Mullah/Senator Rick Santorum showing up in New Paltz, New York asking for permission to marry his dog.

Fortunately, I have some brilliant queer theorist friends and the technological capacity to link to their latest work.  Check out these two essays-- one by Robert McRuer, the other by Lisa Duggan.  You’ll be glad you did-- and you’ll be both smarter and queerer for reading ‘em, too.

UPDATE:  Oops, forgot to explain that headline.  From the closing grafs of McRuer’s piece:

It’s ironic that the culture has increasingly and quietly assimilated queer cultural and relational forms even as we have been surrounded by loud cultural conversations about the need to protect the sanctity of heterosexual “marriage.” In the face of this irony, LGBT folks could, perhaps, push for a constitutional amendment to keep straight people away from our sacred institutions. . . .

I didn’t want to leave the impression that on the subject of gay marriage, I was the Satire Guy and Bob was the Straight Man.

Posted by Michael on 03/04 at 04:59 PM
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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?ºrgen 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?ºrgermeister, 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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Sunday, February 29, 2004

One ring to bind them all, etc.

I was intermittently watching the Oscars tonight, and only now-- after two full years of Lord of the Rings effusions and effluvia-- did I realize how weird it is that one of the stars of a movie whose prominent characters include Bilbo and Frodo is named Viggo.  All right, go ahead, laugh at me for not catching this earlier in the sunspot cycle.  It’s happened before-- honest to God, it wasn’t until 1986 that I realized that Adam Ant was adamant, and if you’ve ever gotten a joke nine or ten years after it was told, you’ll know how I felt back then.

Still, I might as well admit that Viggo Mortensen made for a fine, world-weary Aragorn, and that it’s a good day whenever an Ex of Exene Cervenka hits the big time.  On the other hand, in the course of composing this post I’ve learned that you can order the One Ring online, and call me old-fashioned and insufficiently geeky, but I just think that’s wrong.

Posted by Michael on 02/29 at 06:31 PM
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