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Today:
I set to work at last on the rest of the applications. Still to go: University of Stillanother State, Dead White Man University, Notastate University.
I calculate that I have written precisely .5% of my term papers, due 14/01.
I get my hair cut.
I ponder the possibility of submitting not a paper on my More book, but rather a title, an epigraph, and a series of excellent footnotes.
A man in Pakistan shoots Benazir Bhutto in the neck and blows himself and twenty-odd others to smithereens. The Conscientious Orientalist is shocked. I, as usual, am not. I wonder, irreverently, if I would be able to call her brave if I did not think her beautiful. I wonder if I would be able to call her brave if she were not a woman.
My father outdoes himself, astonishes me, by referring to Pakistanis (all of them) as “barbarians.”
I watch a televised crowd carry Bhutto’s coffin, hundreds or thousands of people, yelling and weeping and shaking their fists. I wonder whether our American culture would not be improved by a greater proclivity for yelling and weeping and shaking of fists. I watch the fires and the crowds, and listen to my father’s voice, “fucking barbarians.”
Tomorrow:
Home to the 42nd Street library. Hope to get that word count up to, say, 15%. Polish that Stillanotherstate application; click “submit.”
To the Morgan Library, to gaze lovingly at old things, be overawed as I always am that it was once possible to obtain those books as a private collection.
Reunite with the Progressive Schoolteacher, the Rhetorical Tranny, the Foucauldian Bombshell, the Boy Lawyer.
Go, in general, about my business.
My life, by any standard, is a quiet one. My world, miraculously, is at peace. The universe is capable of astonishing incongruities.
La douce France has outdone herself yet again.
A basic post-colonial inventory, to situate us:
Item: One (1) human head. Mummified. Provenance: New Zealand.
Item: One (1) patrimoine national français. Gloriously preserved. Exquisitely curated. Contents: châteaux, medieval armaments, lighthouses, churches, monasteries, stolen Maori human remains, etc. Provenance: ci et là, eh beh je sais plus mais c’est beau, hein?
Item: One (1) insane, self-righteous, paranoid-nationalist ministre de la culture. Provenance: Toulouse / one of François Fillon’s many deep, dark closets.
French Debate: Is Maori Head Body Part or Art? [NYT]
Rouen n’en fait qu’à sa tête [Libération]
Thing is, one of the many insidious things about colonialism is that it causes people to traffic in human remains. And then to put stolen remains, like this mummified Maori head, on display in museums. And to call those stolen remains part of one’s own “patrimoine national.”
One of the many insidious things about European metropoles’ tendency toward post-colonial oblivion is that those practices don’t get revised once the whole colonial project has been soundly denounced by basically everyone.
Now, it’s true that there are bits and pieces of Barbaric Peoples all over the damned place in museums in the west. (Interestingly, though the NYT claims there are 30 Maori heads in the Museum of Natural History, it’s not possible to find them through the museum’s website. “No, no, no heads here!” Says the site. “Pretty photographs and mildly condescending language in abundance, but nope! No actual heads! Move along, move along!”)
But we all love France, reader, because really, only in France could the minister of culture get away with freezing a city tribunal to insist that a mummified head (a human head, reader. a head. that once belonged to someone.) should not be returned to its Antipodean home, on the grounds that such an “atteinte injustifiée au patrimoine national” might set a dangerous precedent that would cause the historic and artistic centers of France to dissolve.
… I had written additional commentary. But it is completely unnecessary, I realize. Atteinte! Injustifiée! Patrimoine fucking national! Is anyone else snarfing her coffee / falling about / trying not to burst into horrified, humiliated tears?
Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance, bercée de tendre insouciance, je t’ai gardée dans ma tête mummifiée… Douce France… la la la…
– I have discovered Radio 3. Thanks to Crispinella for the tip on Doctor Faustus tonight, which led me to discover weekly live Evensong, which led me to discover the Early Music Show, and ultimately just to keep the radio on all the time. Bless the BBC.
– Frank Rich, as usual, makes more sense than anyone else at the goddamn New York Times.
– I held until quite recently a semi-solid notion that literary publications will necessarily swing left-of-center, intellectually as well as politically. Not, apparently, so. Mouse, meet the TLS! Slightly trivially to the main thrust of my violent reaction to this paper, I’m still reeling from Adam Bresnick’s characterization of Milton’s Satan as “the very type of the terrorist [...] the avatar par excellence of the festering Bin Ladens of the world.” Now, I haven’t read Paradise Lost, and yet I know that’s shitty reading, that’s how shitty it is (Flavia, help me out here) — and that’s before we get into the xenophobia inherent in the assumptions about what a “terrorist” is, or in the term “festering,” with all its evocations of dirt and disease, the Vague But No Less Threatening Third World… stop me, reader, before I continue to waste energy shredding up this review’s ridiculous little paean to white male humanism.
– I’m in no position to evaluate George Packer’s assessment of the American occupation of Iraq in a recent New Yorker, but the following formulation voices something I’ve been feeling as incoherent distress, and have been unable to articulate: “In Washington, the debate over the war is dominated by questions about troop numbers and timelines — that is, by immediate American political realities” as opposed to Iraqi ones. “The country seems trapped in an eternal present, paralyzed by its past mistakes.”
– Anyone who says Web 2.0 isn’t having an impact on how those of us who are addicted to it engage with the world is completely full of shit. Before I had my coffee this morning, I formulated in my little brain an entire response to / hesitant endorsement of the first few pages of Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity… and I imagined it in the form of a blog comment. Now (embarrassingly past noon), I’m only halfway through my coffee, so I’ll leave this to you: if Empson had a blog, what would be its title?
– Et enfin, Marcel Marceau! Un p’tit adieu alors, tendre et silencieux.
Sometimes, when I think about wanting to become an academic, I just simply start spluttering: “What… what the… just LOOK… I mean, fucking… what’s with, how can… pfffblahhh?!”
A rough translation, anyhow, of anxieties regarding publishing nightmares, job market nightmares, teaching nightmares, institutionishness nightmares — in short, too much responsibility with too little stability guaranteed in return. Just what, mouse, do you think you’re getting into?
And then on occasion one comes across things like this: the Rutgers faculty union has negotiated a serious, potentially seriously tenable long-term deal, with the serious possibility that other faculty unions might take the hint and emulate it. You know, the faintest glimmer of a hint of a notion of actual change in the stability department.
And little M.A. students everywhere smile their little smiles of relief and go back to more urgent, more localized fretting.
Way to go, Rutgers – faculty and administration alike.
(Thanks to Dean Dad for the heads-up.)
It’s been a good week — Jerry Falwell kicked it, Wolfie finally effing resigned, and I discovered that Phyllis Schlafly managed to find time in her busy puppy-strangling schedule to deliver an anti-intellectual tirade so cognitive-dissonance-inducing that she spontaneously combusted.
I can’t decide whether Ann Coulter’s insane salute to Falwell is the cherry on top or the ultimate buzzkill.
I think my friends believe that the story of my introduction to her diabolical pith is a fabrication built to lambast Coulter for being, um, the biggest rabid hosebeast in the history of the universe. But the story is true.
One day in the fall of my frosh year in the Petri Dish, in my sunny, happy little cell of a dorm room, I got an e-mail from a good friend at another school, saying “Oh man check this lady out,” and linking Coulter’s column. Reader, I was enchanted. I shook myself silly with laughing and pounding on the desk. It was the best lefty satire I had ever read. I tracked down everything of hers that I could find, and read it all with glee. It wasn’t until two weeks later that I happened to mention to another friend that I had discovered a miraculous new source of mirth and had the following life-altering, mind-blowing, totally unassimilatable sentence thrown at me:
Dude, Ann Coulter is for real.
Guess what, reader? Ann Coulter is still for real, and commemorating Jerry Falwell by spewing racist garbage in a public forum. For her sheer sense of the a propos, a round of applause for the old girl.
(Courtesy of Wonkette.)
You know things are bad when the lead story in one of a nation’s most powerful newspapers is an effort to convince people that a victory for the lead candidate in that nation’s upcoming election won’t cause widespread riots.
That’s right: French people are worried that before the man running on a security platform even begins to exercise the duties of his potential office, he may become his own greatest security threat. And they’re not wrong.
Jesus lap-dancing Christ, I can’t wait until this is over.
Okay. So, it’s late (a little). And I’ve had a coupla beers. Nevertheless, I think I will stand by the following statement in the morning:
I hereby endorse Mike Gravel for president.
Yes, Mike “Queer Love Bomb” Gravel.
Mike “Dude, You’ve, Like, Out-Kuciniched Kucinich” Gravel.
Mike “Crazy Old Coot, Yes, But Crazy Old Coot For The Left” Gravel.
Mike “Bring The Fun Back To The Fringe” Gravel.
For President. Let the people decide!
I have been, err, abstaining from recording here my anxieties regarding the second round of the French presidential election, which will take place this Sunday.
But today, Jean-Marie Le Pen outdid himself, calling on all those who voted for him in the first round to “abstain” from voting on the sixth. That’s right: si vous ne pouvez pas voter pour moi, mieux vaut ne pas voter du tout. Just in case you were under the impression that fascism is good for democracy, Le Pen is here to demonstrate that, after all, no. It’s not.
In his speech he accuses the Parti Socialiste (PS, represented by Evita Perón — I mean Ségolène Royal) and the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP, represented by Nicolas “Hose the Arab scum!” Sarkozy) of hijacking French politics and marginalizing France’s political, well, margins. Even if you don’t understand French, watch the video to get an impression of his persona. In addition to his usual Evil Turtle aspect, Le Pen here displays his Petulant Fascist Child side — he didn’t get what he wanted, so now he’s throwing a tantrum. What he wanted was, at best, a repeat of the 2002 election in which a divided left produced a right-wing second round, with Le Pen facing off against Jacques Chirac (who subsequently won the presidency by the biggest landslide in the history of the Cinquième République). A nice consolation prize for poor little Jeannot would have been to maintain his usual 15-18%, the figure at which his party, the Front National (FN) has stabilized in regional elections in recent years.
Unfortunately for the FN, that nasty Sarko shamelessly (on that point, at least, I agree with Jeannot) stole his votes and he scraped a measly (to him) but terrifying (to us) 11%. Now, in a way, it’s a shame that Le Pen couldn’t get over himself and endorse Sarko, who has been happily riding the FN’s magic carpet of anti-immigrant invective — such an endorsement might have done more harm than good to le petit Nicolas, and thus boded well for France.
Instead, Le Pen is asking his electors to disenfranchise themselves voluntarily in this second round. Don’t get me wrong. I sincerely hope that none of Le Pen’s supporters will vote on Sunday, because if they vote, they will vote massively for Sarkozy (though to my startlement I read a report stating that 16% of those who intend to vote intend to vote for Royal). I am merely astonished that Le Pen openly acknowledges his desire to shut down all public discussion, and if he can’t do that, to remove himself and all his followers from that discussion. Today’s declaration is, in effect, a call to abstain from democracy as it is defined by the République, to abstain from the culture of debate that the Parti Socialiste, Royal, Bayrou, and Sarkozy have, more or less willingly, embraced.
You’re perhaps thinking, “Okay, yeah, so what do you expect from a fascist?” Anything and everything, including today’s speech. But I never cease to be astonished that the French electorate supports this man in such tremendous numbers. Of course, his supporters will tell you, “He’s not a fascist; he’s an extremist.”
Comme on dit dans le sud, ohputainmerde.
1. The Supreme Court ruling on Gonzalez vs. Planned Parenthood and Gonzalez vs. Carhart:
I am as frightened and enraged as everyone else is. I am also in awe, yet again, of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I don’t know what else there is to say.
2. The Virginia Tech killings:
I think Horace’s post on academic freedom and the dangers of pathologizing students is very apt. Universities, even and especially primarily undergraduate institutions like my little alma mater, are at risk as it is of returning to operating in loco parentis. Adding “security” questions into the bargain will only alienate students from faculty and vice versa, and both from their administrations. Good pedagogy and healthy relationships do not stand up under the influence of mistrust and paranoia. It is not VT’s fault that a very troubled individual shot dozens of innocent people to death. Universities are not and should not be equipped to deal with massacres, lest it lead to the kind of fight-fire-with-fire mentality exhibited in this outrageous Daily News opinion piece. So let us mourn, continue to love each other as well as we know how, and, in the immortal words of Crosby, Stills and Nash, teach our children well.
3. The French présidentielle:
I took a vow months ago not to speak, write, or converse in non-verbal signs or grunts about this topic. If you’re desperate for my opinion, it is well summed-up by the image that decks the cover of this week’s Economist. Monday will teach us things, and then we will be waiting again, perhaps to learn more, or only to shake our heads, on May 6. We cannot know, because the French electorate is notoriously unpredictable. My guess? Nicolas Sarkozy is simply going to be the next Président de la République, and all we can do is cross our fingers and hope he knows what he’s doing. In the words of a famous French comedian from the banlieue: “Nicolas, je connais plein de jeunes des banlieues qui vont voter pour vous, et vous savez pourquoi? Parce que comme ça, au moins vous ne serez plus au ministère de l’intérieure.”
4. The American presidential:
I re-take my French oath. Foutez-moi la paix.
5. Imus:
Hooliganery notwithstanding, Tenured Radical still has the best take on this I’ve yet seen. And Gwen Ifill remains high on my list of heroes.
There. I did it. I commented on Current Events. Your regularly scheduled narcissism, snark, conveyance of senses of superiority and other items totally irrelevant to your life will continue shortly.
