Jena

Here's John Mellencamp's reaction to the events in Jena.

(Hat tip to The Other Liberal Professor.)

There's where I made my mistake...

(From Overheard in New York):
I Can Hear Fame Tapping at My Chamber Door

Gym rat: So, don't tell a lot of people, but, um, I write poetry.
Friend: Oh, yeah? Since when?
Gym rat: Since we was in English Lit. That Edgar Allen Poe guy -- man, he really expired me to be a writer. I got lots to say.
Friend: That's cool.
Gym rat: I just hope it's easy to get published and shit.
Friend: Should be, should be.
Gym rat: Or maybe I should just go on Def Poetry Jam. Anyone can do that shit.

Overheard at 44th & Park

Grammar Issues

This one is for The Other Liberal Professor.

(You might have to scroll up -- Link was loading funny when I tried it.)

That Thing We Wrote

So over at the Shady Grove it's time to vote on the contest entries -- go here to see the deal. You can get entered to win a prize just by voting, apparently. How cool is that? Also, you will make the kid happy if you just read our entry and tell her something about it. (Not that she's ego involved or anything!)

So check it out, will you?

Still Sick

I have lost my voice, always a problem for a professor who talks as much as I do. How I will profess today I do not know.

I'm also running a nasty fever, and coughing this spectacular cough. I sound like a TB victim. This is perfect for Victorian Lit, which I am teaching today, except for the not being able to talk bit.

Anyway, here is a comic I found deeply amusing, in lieu of anything with more depth.

Reading Middlemarch With the Plague

Been sick as a dog the last few days -- nothing serious, some sort of body-aches/upper respiratory gizmo that had me bunked and moaning for about 40 hours, miserable and grumpy.

This has left me unable to do anything but read all weekend -- that's when I felt well enough to read -- I couldn't even write, which you know I'm sick if I can't make it to the computer for my daily three or four hours at the screen; all I did was read Middlemarch and sleep.

Yes! It's Middlemarch season again. This is such a fine book. Even when you're running a fever of 103 and hallucinating a bit (i kept hearing people singing and alarm bells going off yesterday) or maybe especially when you're hallucinating a bit, how do I know, but this time, my sixth or seventh time through the book, I'm seeing things I never did before -- well, for instance, I knew that "the web" was a huge metaphor Eliot was working with, but not until this time did I see how thoroughly it works. Everything anyone does in that book connects to and effects the actions of a dozen other characters, usually in ways those other characters *never* see or understand, and often with immense (and sometimes tragic) effects.

Way back when Bulstrode does not tell his "rich widow" that he's found Sarah Dunkirk, for instance, her long-lost daughter -- look what far-ranging effects that one action has, on not just Sarah, but on Will Ladislaw, her son, obviously; and on Casaubon and Dorothea's marriage, which, if Casaubon had not been supporting Will, as he was, would not have taken the turn it did; and on Lydgate, the trouble he gets into, which he would not have, had Bulstrode not been trying to hide his wicked ways; and on Dorothea, since if Will had not been around, why, she would not have fallen for his pretty eyes and impetous temper; and on Rosamund, since the destruction of Lydgate is her destruction as well, though she never knows or recognizes that.

None of them, except Will and Bulstrode, know anything about what happened with Sarah Dunkirk, and WIll knows very little; but it shapes all their lives. This, as we can tell from that last paragraph, is Eliot's point. We're an interactive web. You think your actions effect you alone? Well, they don't. And they don't stop effecting the world, maybe forever, and in ways you may never understand.

This is such a brilliant book. Why did they make me read The Scarlet Letter in high school, will someone tell me, when this was available?

Q.E.D.

Also? EW.

The kid has been hanging out in my office Tuesday afternoons before she goes to her drama class -- Tuesdays are a nightmare now, since she goes from school to drama class to aikido, so that she's in school to some class from seven-forty in the morning until seven at night -- anyway, she's in my office from 3.10-3.40, her only break, looking at my computer, and she says, scanning my favorites button, "What's this mean? Lunatic Right Wing Blogs?"

"Just what it says," I say. "Those are the lunatic right wing blogs I read every day, just to keep up on what the Right Wing is thinking about."

"Why do you think they're lunatics?"

"Well, let's have a look, will we?"

So we did. And this is what came up.

Also others like it.

My poor child. She might never be the same.

Hey!

That White Bear! She blogs again!

And she just sort of slipped it past us!

That AWB!

Living in America

Over here on Angry Bear, the economics blog I like best, Cactus shows us what Democrats V. Republicans do to the income levels here in America.

It's a fine post, with nice graphs. Here's the bit I found interesting:

...JFK/LBJ came out tops, followed by Clinton, then Reagan, and in fourth, Ike, with a big gap between each one. The rest of the Presidents all had negative growth… GW was the least offensive of these, followed by Nixon/Ford, then GHW, and Carter brought up the rear. Despite Carter's dismal performance, on average, the Democratic Presidents did better than the Republican Presidents.

But while that shows how much income for the representative American earner has changed over time, it’s not an end-all be all measure. It would be nice to know how much this person takes home after taxes. And because some Presidents drove up the debt (cough cough, Reagan, cough, GW), a smart person knows that they have to pay more in taxes some time in the future in order to pay for that debt.

There's more. Go see.

Not Even U.S.A. Police

But still disturbing.

More Victory in Iraq

We're dealing with some terrorists now!

And if you didn't see this study that came out a few weeks ago, which, no shock, the right side of the blogosphere spit all over, it's worth at least thinking about.

I'm not actually interested in whether it's 100,000 dead or 300,000 dead or a million dead.

What interests me in this deal is we've now spent a pile of years killing a pile of people, many, perhaps even most of them, civilians, and to this day no one, including Mr. Bush, can say why we are doing it.

How about we stop?

American Blood

Over at Crooked Timber, a lengthy thread has emerged over Fred Thompason's remark about Americans having shed more blood in defense of liberty than "any other combination of nations in the history of the world," which isn't just silly, it's appalling -- and calculated, of course, since it was part of a stump speech.

He's appealing to his far-Right base, those ill-educated home schooled crowd who have only been taught that America! Is! Great!, not any actual facts, or about anything anyone else in the world might have done. Those folks are quite ready to believe egregious nonsense like that, and like this, which was at World Views lately:

The American idea itself as well as great social changes -- the abolition of slavery and segregation, for example -- proceeded from a Christian worldview.

Which again -- no. But because these folk have been home-schooled and raised on Right-Wing lies, they swallow it. And when other posters point out that they're wrong -- no, those who founded America and wrote the Constitution were, in fact, deists and Enlightenment thinkers; no, in fact, they wanted America not to be a religious but a secular state; no, really, read Fredrick Douglas, it was slave holders who were Christians, well, that just can't be true, it was Christians who preached segregation, no, that's not the case.

Paperback Swap

This is cool.

It's a site one of my students hooked me up with -- you send people books you don't want, and get credits for doing so, and then you can get people to send you books you do want, for free, basically. (You do have to pay the postage to send books out.)

When you sign on and post nine books, you get three free credits up front.

I've been messing with it for a few weeks now, and it works just like it says it does. The kid has gotten two free books by Allan Ahlberg that we've always wanted and never been able to find, I got a mythology text I wanted to look at for my summer I class (which I probably could have gotten free from the publisher, but didn't have the patience to try that), also a mystery novel I've been wanting to read for awhile, I'm waiting on another book I wanted to read -- it's all good!

If you're as book-starved as we always are, or a poor student, you might have a look.

Yom Kippur

It's Yom Kippur today.

You know me, I'm a total atheist, so while I'm all for keeping holidays, for cultural reasons and (mainly) because some of them are fun, I'm also totally opposed to keeping any holiday or cultural tradition that makes my child cry.

Which this one, at least the way mr. delagar was insisting on keeping it, was doing.

It's a day of reflection, a day when we're supposed to look back on the past year and forward on new year, considering what we got wrong and how we might get things right, so okay, that sounds fine, except for how she's nine, and she can't really be expected to do that, and nothing else, all day long.

"I can't read books tomorrow?" she asked woefully. "I can't draw? I can't go to the library? I can't play with my pop beads?"

"Tomorrow is not a day for playing!" mr. delagar thundered.

She burst into tears.

At which point I had to bite my tongue hard to keep from intervening. Because, you know, if I had wanted a fundmentalist for a husband, I would have fucking married one.

Where did this guy come from?

Good Question

Pam Spaulding, over at Pandagon, asks it here:

Why haven't you heard of the Jena 6?

I was talking about them a few days ago and mr. delagar says who?

"The Jena 6," I said. "Down in Jena, Lousiana. You've heard about them? Kids who wanted to sit under the white-only shade tree....?"

"Oh, yeah," he said. "I think I might have read something about that in the New York Times..."

But he didn't remember anything at all about the story, which, you know, what?

Today the Day of Action for the Jena 6, for what good it seems to be doing.