Jon Cogburn's Blog

Nausea type sublimity and scholarship

My friend Robby Burleigh had a bit of an existential freakout the other day. He was sitting in a Perks cafe in Baton Rouge preparing a class when a graduate student in English he knows plopped down next to him and began reading a much thumbed through edition of Eudora Welty.

Robby had a vision of all the dissertations, monographs, and papers written about Eudora Welty. And it made him feel physically ill.

When he described it to me I thought of the time I saw a 60 Minutes special about the production of cigarettes, and how sickened I was when I saw these gigantic machines funneling millions of cigarettes into boxes then cartons. If you smoked a tiny fragment of all those cigarettes you would feel horrible.

This kind of existential freakout is something like the Romantic era notion of the sublime, which was supposed to happen when you lose yourself before the immensity of something beautiful and overwhelming like an oncoming tropical storm or mountain peak (having been through Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav I can tell you that Kant really is correct when he says you only get the sublime when you know that things are going to be fine; otherwise it just sucks).

But sometimes the sheer quantitative immensity of something that can be counted produces a kind of nauseau, and Robby had this at the thought of all of the discrete bits of Eudora Welty scholarship. What hope did his friend, or anybody for that matter, really have for saying anything new and worthwhile about Eudora Welty? What a joke! But then human agency disappears and you lose yourself in becoming just another Eudora Welty writing machine, just part of this immense nauseauting pile of scholarship.

Today's Chronicle has a really sobering article on this issue. Mark Bauerlein looks at publication statistics to argue that the reign of "theory" came about precisely because professors had to publish but just about every worthwhile bit of exegesis one could do about just about every worthwhile author had been done.

The elevation of the critic from expositor to performer had its philosophical rationales, to be sure. But it also happened at an opportune moment. For something besides theory also made it an undesirable aim to get the meanings and representations of the work right. It was that in the preceding 35 years, the works of hundreds of artists, writers, and thinkers had already undergone thousands of examinations.

And the elevation of the critic as not merely an expositor but as a "theorist" whose reading are the real text (think reader response theory) was an amazingly successful strategy for professors to still be able to publish even though all the good expository work for the overwhelming majority of worthwhile writers had been done. Here's one of the moments of nausea type sublimity:

over the past five decades, the "productivity" of scholars in the fields of languages and literature had increased hugely: from approximately 13,000 publications to 72,000 a year. Consider the output in literary studies. From 1950 to 1985, 2,195 items of criticism and scholarship devoted to William Wordsworth appeared. Virginia Woolf garnered 1,307, Walt Whitman 1,986, Faulkner 3,487, Milton 4,274, and Shakespeare at the top, with 16,771. Type any major author into the MLA International Bibliography database and more daunting tallies pop up. In each pile lies everything from plot summaries to existentialist reflections. But for all practical purposes, such as teaching an undergraduate class, they impart the meanings and representations to the full.

As a result:

Theories and valuations that displaced the meaning of the work and prized the unique angle of the interpreter didn't just flatter the field. They empowered novices to carry on. The long shadow of precursors dissipated in the light of creative, personal critique. The authors studied might remain, but there were new theories to rehearse upon them and topics to expound through them, controversies in which to "situate" oneself, and readerly dexterities to display.

It was liberating and enabling, as subsequent outputs show. From 1986 to 2008, Wordsworth collected 2,257 books, chapters, dissertations, etc. Faulkner came in at 2,781, Milton at 3,294, Whitman at 1,509, Woolf at 3,217, and Shakespeare at 18,799. The model worked—astoundingly so. Degrees, grants, jobs, tenure, and raises rested on those publications, and if older criticism answered questions about the meaning of Paradise Lost, well, other questions had to be found.

But now the same thing has happened with "theory."

Something happened, though, in the process. As striving junior scholars and established seniors staged one reading after another, as advanced theories were applied and hot topics attached, the performances stacked up year by year —and seemed to matter less and less. Look at the sales figures for monographs. Back in 1995, the director of the Pennsylvania State University Press, Sanford G. Thatcher, asked who reads those books and revealed in The Chronicle, "Our sales figures for works of literary criticism suggest that the answer is, fewer people than ever before." Sixty-five percent of Penn State's recent offerings at that point sold fewer than 500 copies. A few years later, also in The Chronicle, Lindsay Waters, an executive editor at Harvard University Press, said his humanities monographs "usually sell between 275 and 600 copies." In 2002 the Modern Language Association issued a report on scholarly publishing that cited editors estimating purchases of as low as 200 to 300 units. Remember, too, that standing library orders account for around 250 copies. (That's my guess—also, a few librarians have told me that the odds that such books will never be checked out are pretty good.)

Why the disjuncture? Because performance ran its course, and now it's over. The audience got bored.

For decades the performative model obscured a situation that should have been recognized at the time: Vast areas of the humanities had reached a saturation point. Hundreds of literary works have undergone introduction, summation, and analysis many times over. Hamlet alone received 1,824 items of attention from 1950 to 1985, and then 2,406 from 1986 to 2008. What else was to be said? Defenders of the endeavor may claim that innovations in literary studies like ecocriticism and trauma theory have compelled reinterpretations of works, but while the advent of, say, queer theory opened the works to new insights, such developments don't come close to justifying the degree of productivity that followed. Also, the rapid succession of theories, the Next Big Thing, and the Next … evoked the weary impression that it was all a professional game, a means of finding something more to say.

At what point does common sense step in and cry, "Whoa! Slow down! Hamlet can't give you anything more." The system has reached absurd proportions. Better to admit that books by M.H. Abrams, Hartman, and a few others covered Wordsworth's poems for most practical purposes several decades ago, or that Joseph N. Riddel (my adviser) unveiled the enigmatic lyrics of Wallace Stevens well enough in 1965. Hundreds of excellent books and articles on Henry James have seen print and amply render the meaning of his oeuvre. Further additions to the 6,000-plus items that have been published since 1950 are, to be blunt, in nearly every case unnecessary.

Unfortunately, Bauerlein's solutions to this problem of "oversaturation" feeds into the hands of the educational industrial complex:

One, departments should limit the materials they examine at promotion time. If aspirants may submit only 100 pages to reviewers, they will publish less and ensure that those 100 pages are superb.

Two, subsidizers should shift their support away from saturated areas and toward unsaturated areas, in particular toward research into teaching and even more toward classroom and curricular initiatives.

It's hard for me to believe that anyone who has ever taken part in a "curricular initiative" could write something like that without suffering some kind of Stockholm Syndrome. The reality of his suggestions would be just wasting more time jumping through infuriatingly stupid hoops designed by education school types. No thanks.

I think the real solution to the problem of "theory" is coming from people who take are hooking up traditional problem spaces in the language departments with approaches and issues from other departments both in the social and life sciences.

Also we should humbly accept that most scholarship is not going to be that important. That's the one way I think analytic philosophy is pretty good. Everybody is just doing their little part, and your little part might not come to anything in the broader dialectic. O.K. I can do that and go teach my classes. In a Nietzschean fashion, the question should be whether the background of mediocrity is such that an atmosphere exists that is conducive to the few bits of greatnes that is the most any generation can reasonably expect.

human beings really are foul creatures

Right HERE there is discussion of evidence that the guy on the left, in the picture below, ate the guy on the right for lunch. This really freaks me out.

Neanderthals survived with tools for something like two hundred and seventy thousand years. From everything we know about them, they were pretty decent chaps. But they only went extinct thirty thousand years ago.

Homo sapiens have been around about two hundred thousand years years; meaning that Neanderthals predated us by one hundred thousand years, and we overlapped for about seventy thousand years.

I wonder at what point in the relationship they become lunch?

Maybe it's a good thing that the space program's pretenses to interstellar travel died with the rest of humanity's great dreams (communism, robot servants, hovercars, etc.) in the 1980s. I mean, we probably would have just eaten whatever space aliens we found.

If this seems implausible, note that homo sapiens of thirty thousand years ago were no different from homo sapiens of today, and that a neanderthal child looked like this.

 

[That's from some anthopologists in Zurich.] When you reflect on the fact that our ancestors could have looked at this creature and reached for a bottle of Catsup, then the idea of a very angry Santa Claus up in the sky preparing a flood starts to make some sense.

Or maybe it's the other way around. That only a sentient species that could eat another sentient species would be capable of worshiping a creature that would send such a flood.

Reverse Ouroboros

How do we know that the Ouroboros is not in fact vomiting himself into existence?

Have you ever seen one in the flesh? Or even a moving picture of one? Though I guess they could reverse the film to confuse the issue.

instance of cool "wordle" utility applied to this blog (click for bigger view)

extended existential freakout

Today was one long existential freakout.

In yoga class this morning the  person next to me was chewing gum the whole time. I don't know what is more inimical to the point of yoga, noisily smacking gum while doing it, or being so bothered by someone noisily smacking gum that your blood pressure goes up while doing it. In both cases you are conspicuously failing to instantiate Patanjali's extraordinary promise of liberation through stillness.

Then right outside the yoga studio there was a big Lamar Advertising billboard that touted the virtues of advertising in something called "The Sunshine Pages" (it's some kind of yellow pagey thing). Still traumatized by the sounds of the inside of my yoga friend's mouth, I thought something to the effect of, "If advertising in the Sunshine Pages is so great, why do they have to use the billboard," not even realizing that advertising for the Sunshine Pages in the Sunshine Pages is equivalent to believing the Bible is true because the Bible says so. Some days my fancy book learning avails me nothing.

Then we went to the mall to get haircuts.

Is there anything more forlorn than all those kiosk things selling useless crap in between the stores? I was taking a stroll while Emily got her hair cut and the kiosk people kept importuning me like prostitutes in Amsterdam's red light district. O.K. So I guess there is one thing more forlorn than all those kiosk things selling useless crap in between stores. But I had not taken a wrong turn on the way to the Van Gogh museum; I was just trying to walk around the mall while my wife got her split ends taken care of. I did not want skin care products, holographic pictures, jewelry, smokeless cigarettes, air-brush tatoos, remote controlled miniature helicopters, a shoulder massage, or Rosetta Stone software, etc. It all looked alien and vaguely threatening (because it all is). But my wants were immaterial; all the depressing kiosk people kept trying to lure me in over and over again until my walk became the stations of the mall. However, instead of scourging and what-not there was the forced joviality of saying, "No thanks," and again and again watching the depressing kiosk person's hopes get gradually more crushed by life.

And all the benches had these little sqwauking computer screens advertising a contest where you fill out a form and put it in an enclosure and you get contacted about being a model. I couldn't block out the burbling, and my tinitus driven ears did what they always do when there are barely audible voices, refusing to tune it out, instead attending to it and trying to figure out what is being said. So I went up to the stand and bent down to the screen, to listen to the pitch about how modelling is a lucrative career that just might be right for me. But then I was in the way of a pimply high school kid who was trying to submit his little form.

I could see the excited imaginations on his pock marked face. Him, pulled out of obscurity in Baton Rouge to walk the runways in glamorous company in all the great cities of the world. But reality painfully contradicted his fantasy. I saw him years from now standing by a kiosk and bothering shoppers. He thought he was a top model in training, but he was really a kiosk person in training.

What was I to do?

I bowed my head and headed back to the salon. Emily's hairdresser let me slump defeated into one of the unused barber chairs. I'd moved up in the world. When I was a kid they'd have to put a board on the arm rests so my head could reach the barber's hands. Not any more.

 I read Heidegger.

And only what is unmeaningful can be absurd.

Heidegger had never been to the Mall of Louisiana, but it still made sense.

Valentine's Day themed freakout in cafe today

One of the weird things about becoming middle aged is that I almost never care about eavesdropping on other people's conversations anymore. Maybe you reach a point where you've heard just about every permutation on what people have to say to one another.

But then it becomes just that much more irritating when you can't get away.

Today while trying to work in a cafe I overheard a guy on a cellphone trying to get a warehouse to hold off on delivering something until Valentine's Day. I initially thought that that was kind of sweet. But I started to lose sympathy for him when I realized he was trying to get the UPS warehouse to keep it for an extra week. Why didn't he order it later? Or why couldn't it just be an early Valentine's Day present for his wife? Then I lost all sympathy. He'd been haggling with the UPS for about ten minutes when it became clear to me that he'd bought his wife a humongous flat screen television set. He was so proud of himself that he was bragging about the graphical resolution on the set to the poor UPS help person.

I don't know. I don't want to go around judging other people's relationships. . . but a humongous T.V. for Valentine's Day? And then bothering UPS for half an hour because it's so important that it has to arrive on that day? And he was so proud of himself. I absolutely and completely loathe having scabs of my time peeled away by things like dickering with people over the phone. But he was really happy about it, bragging about his damned humongous television set and how surprised his wife will be.

I didn't get too angry though. I was, in fact, happy not to be him. Though dumbfounded, at least I was not clueless and surrounded by people wishing me ill. Maybe I get enough of that in the classroom.

deep thoughts

I had a big epiphany in yoga today. I realized that the point of yoga isn't to have big epiphanies, but rather to just basically feel O.K.

Later on I realized that that's why the overwhelming majority of people do the overwhelming majority of what they do; everyone's just trying to achieve the state of basically feeling O.K.

I don't know why human beings make such a hash of it. A priori, it does not strike me as too much to aspire to.

Yes, yes, all of our ridiculous vanity and destructive stupidity is ultimately rooted in the desire to basically feel O.K., but I can't help it. It still doesn't seem like too much to ask.

Lord of the Pies

While riding my bike home yesterday a group of people on the corner hailed me. I slowed down, and one of them yelled, "Where Pighead?"

It really threw me off. They were friendly people, and the mood was one of festive camaraderie. It made me sad that they had confused me with someone else. I was depressed yesterday after a departmental meeting (with the exception of church, yoga, and classes, all meetings involving more than three people end up depressing me; I don't know if this reflects the specific meetings I've been attending, or speaks to something more general about humans in groups). In any case I wanted to stop and tell my new friends where Pighead was. But I couldn't, I don't know Pighead.

I should have said, "I'm sorry, I don't know Pighead," or "You've got me confused with someone else," but instead I just pursed my lips, raised my eyebrows, looked up, shrugged my shoulders, and pulled my head back. The benefit of that gesture is that it is indeterminate between not knowing who Pighead is and knowing who Pighead is but not knowing where he is. It's less embarassing for everyone concerned.

another vow to the Gods of the Rock and Roll pantheon

It is clear that I am now allergic to moral outrage.

Unfortunately for me, this is one of those dangerous food allergies. That is, just being around moral outrage does not mess me up that much, but when ingested it is increasingly toxic. And there are dainty plates of it everywhere for my delectation: in committee meetings, other people's offices, in the classroom, outside my house, on the internet. . .

There are no clinics for this allergy. And I don't have a space suit, bubble, or futuristic protected chamber where everything is white and plastic, and oxygen hisses in and out.

I do have Christianity, yoga, and Rock and Roll, as well as the hard resolve to remove everything that make me most indignant from the conversational table.

hunka, hunka, hunka, hunka, hunka. . .

It's long been my fantasy to learn state of the art turntable skills so that I could loop the part of Elvis' "Burning Love" where he says "hunka, hunka." I would run it on an infinite loop so that it just said "hunka, hunka, hunka, hunka, hunka. . ." in perpetuity. And then I would have NASA put that on the computer chip and send it out of the solar system, so that aliens can continue to enjoy it long after humans have gone extinct.

This fantasy took a bit of a hit today while wandering the aisles of our local Whole Foods store. While looking at an enormous wheel of Parmesan cheese I thought to myself, "That's a hunka cheese alright" (I always think that). But then I realized that a hunka hunka cheese is actually less cheese than a hunka cheese! Say I had a big hunk of organic, hypo-allergenic bathing soap that I had to divide between twelve people. I'd divide the original hunk into twelve hunks, so each disciple would get a hunk of a hunk of soap. But each one of these would be one twelfth the size of the original hunk of soap. In fact they may be so small that it might be false to say they themselves are hunks of soap.

So we now face the very real possibility that a hunka hunka burning love might in fact not even be a hunka burning love, but just a small fraction thereof. But what would that say about Elvis? And (even more damning) the society that put Elvis up on such a high pedestal?

I never heard the rooster crow, but did happen to see some grass fed, free range chicken corpses. And then, in the way of true doubters everywhere, my faith in Elvis this Sunday morning was actually strengthened. O yeah of little faith, do you not remember the miracle of loaves and fishes?If Jesus Christ himself can take twelve loaves and feed multitudes, then surely there is so much burning love in this universe that one can iterate the "hunka" operator indefinitely and still have Elvis amounts of burning love.

Now, go and sin no more. Rock out instead.

simple question

At some point in life, vacations end up being a lot more work and stress than one's normal job.

Does this reverse itself as you get older again? Dear God I hope it does.

Nun for you!

Another bad dream last night.

In this one I was called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee and subjected to hours of abuse by angry Representatives. Instead of accusing me of being a secret communist though, they accused me of being a nun.

"Are you now or have you ever been a nun? Are you aware of any secret nun agents who have infiltrated philosophy departments in the United States?" Etc. Etc. They were very angry.

I tried my hardest to convince them. I pointed out that I wasn't Catholic, and that my lifestyle made it clear I'd never taken vows of poverty, chastity, or obedience. But nothing convinced them. A drunk Republican yelled at me that even if that was true it would only establish that I was not Dominican (the other orders apparently take different vows). I explained that if I lived according to "papal enclosure" rules I wouldn't be able to attend academic conferences (though again, many nuns don't live according to those rules). I tried to explain the difference between a "nun" and a "religious sister"  (the kind of vow one takes and the focus of good works), but nothing I did established my innocence in front of the United States government.

In fact non-ignorance always made this kind of thing worse; the less illiterate I proved myself to be, the more it convinced them that I was a nun or some kind of nun secret agent. How could somebody possibly know this stuff if they weren't really a nun?

And clearly, there was something wrong with me. Why wasn't my head filled with sports and reality television trivia?

At the apex of the dream I absolutely cracked. It began with the admission that, like nuns, I prayed for peace (the drunk Republicans screamed and banged their shoes on their table at this) and for the poor. Then it just snowballed with me admitting more and more nunish things I did until it reached the point where I gave them names of several academics I know who are or had been secret nuns. I was crying in the dream, and in the underdetermined way of all dreams, it wasn't clear whether I really was a secret nun and naming my comrades, or whether I was just naming names of innocent people so that I myself wouldn't face jail time and blacklisting. And I don't know which would have been worse. . .

Will the people I named now have the same nightmare as a result? Will they get called in front of the committee and threatened until they crack and name names? What if some of them don't crack? Will they then have dreams of being ostracized, fired, and jailed? Will an Edward R. Murrow come to their defense and convince the good citizens of Morpheus' American Empire that the real enemy is us, our asinine Representatives who accuse good men and women of being nuns without any evidence? Or are there to be no more Murrows, and we are all now damned to a world of dreams where the worst of us can gain power and money by exploiting unfounded, nebulous fears and the resentment of the ignorant? I shudder.

two freakouts on the UCO campus in the sunshine

When I'm coming down with a mild cold the most minor dissonance can wreck my serenity.

Yesterday was a beautiful day even by spring-in-Edmond standards. The sky was almost the color of Indian jewelry. Though it was not windy on the ground, the clouds continued a stately procession across the sky, many doing the cloud equivalent of the slow exercise of the elderly San Fransiscan Chinese

For an hour or so I sat by the artificial lake on the UCO campus reading Bulgakov, thinking about what makes good writing good, and enjoying the planet. At the UCO lake there are four or five adult Canadian geese with strange iridescent highlights in their plumage. They sun themselves and swim around in the lake. This day there were also eight tiny goose chicks (goslings?) following two of the geese (their parents?) in another stately procession. As a new parent myself, and a fellow child of God, it was amazing to watch. One led the chicks to a place where water runs over rocks and watched them carefully as they drank, bathed themselves, played their somewhat inscrutable, yet gentle, goose games. The other goose (the first one's spouse?) stood guard the whole time, keeping an eye on everyone. It was a perfect moment.

But then across the lake these undergraduate males started hooting and hollering about something. "Whoo! Yeah!" etc. . . followed by whoops of forced laughter. I couldn't tell what they were so excited about, but I knew in my heart that teenaged perpators of genocide made the same whoops the world over and throughout all history. They kept laughing and screaming and it made me deeply ashamed to be human. I could tell the goose on watch duty was becoming incredibly anxious and I wanted to tell him that it was going to be alright, but it really wasn't. There he was, being the best Canadian goose he could be, but surrounded by humans doing hideously lousy jobs at being humans. It was bone-weary sad.

Then as I was about to cross a street on the way home it happened again. This elderly black woman was waiting to turn left in her ancient Econoline van. She looked over at me as if to say, "I'm sorry I'm pulled so far forward into the pedestrian crossing." We smiled at each other and I began my traversal behind her van. But then I heard, "Fucking hurry it up already!" and then almost jumped out of myself from a car horn. The hurry-man was of course male and he drove a new jeep with his cigarette bearing arm hanging out of the window. He was healthy and privileged, and in his ecosystem the old black woman and me only existed as creatures to serve him or get out of the way. He didn't look enraged, just inhuman (or all too human, when I think of the geese). He kept screaming obscenities and of course I did the dysfunctional thing I almost always do in such circumstances. I froze in the middle of the street. The only way I got myself moving again was by making the sign of the cross. I don't know if he saw it, and it really wasn't a very nice thing to do, sort of the Christian version of giving him the bird.

I trudged home.

I wish I could say I've been making prayers for all of the impatient people, the rude people, and the geese, the goslings, and drivers of rusted out old vans too. I wish I had been praying for the sick, the prisoners, the heartbroken, the meek and weak. . . But I've really just been playing with my dog. He really likes it when you throw a tennis ball. You can do it like a hundred times and he never gets bored. Neither do I.

more Daves

For some reason, I am perpetually doomed to be outclassed and out-cooled and sometimes pummelled in my dreams by people with the first name Dave.

This time I was at a party for the University of Central Oklahoma undergraduate philosophy conference and Dave Eggers was there. It made me real nervous and I went over to try to tell him how much I liked A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Believer magazine. I was trying to say something interesting about the last sentence-paragraph of the book, comparing it to the last paragraph of On the Road, but in the dream I couldn't really express myself.

Eggers said, "Man, you're not real good at making party small-talk are you?"

And I said, "It's just that you reach a certain age and it's hard to get interested in what anyone has to say and even harder to say anything yourself. You've heard it all and don't want to contribute to the redundancy."

Eggers said, "Well I've heard that one before," and then walked away.

Crap. Predictible Cogburn flameout around one of my favorite public intellectuals. At least he didn't beat me up though.

Success Dopplegangers

One of the pitfalls of our increasingly inter-connected world is that we are all doomed to be haunted by dopplegangers who are vastly more successful than ourselves at the tasks nearest and dearest to our hearts. And I don't mean being haunted by someone who is just more successful in your field; I mean someone who is more successful in actualizing your very specific life goals. Examples:

Past Success Dopplegangers
In high school and college I tried to play music equally influenced by blues and punk, and often it was just me and a drummer. Then along come Jack and Meg White and do this vastly better than I ever could. In graduate school I (with my friend Eric Ward) tried to harnass the early Bowie's specific form of dystopia in a way influenced strongly by Nine Inch Nails. Then along came Marilyn Manson who did this vastly better than I ever could.

Present Success Doppleganger
In philosophy I've long had two goals: (1) use my linguistics training to make non-trivial suggestions to outstanding philosophical debates, and (2) philosophize about my cultural practices, especially video games. Then along came Peter Ludlow (who, by the way, is a real mensch) doing this better than me.

Future Success Doppleganger
I've long wanted to write an accessible book that incorporates zany philosophy of language views in a way that has cultural and meta-philosophical relevance. Mark Silcox and I are almost finished with such a book (or at least with the version that gets initially sent to Routledge). A priori I know that the book will not have a smattering of the cultural or philosophical cachet that Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. And this is not because he hit the zeitgeist at the right time. Rorty was a much better writer and philosopher and the book deserved the influence it had.

If anyone feels like sharing their success dopplegangers, that would be cool. Again, they have to be doing something very specifically analogous to what you have been doing. It's better if you didn't know of their work when you undertook your project (by this criteria Rorty is not a good example for me).

For what it's worth, I think that everybody has to just try to learn from their success dopplegangers and not be upset about it. Very few people are even competent at very much of anything, and somebody is going to be better than you at anything you do. Our hyper-connected society rubs our face in this, and I hope the result is not that people stop trying. I'm not sure culture would have produced a Jack/Meg White, Marilyn Manson, Peter Ludlow, or Richard Rorty if a lot of people weren't doing analogous things. So just being part of the millieu is important too.

another day, another nightmare

Last night I dreamed that the universe was addressing all of humanity.

The five or so billion of us were sitting in one of those big lecture halls like when Fidel Castro gives four hour speeches, but instead of Castro's grandfatherly, bearded visage it was the whole universe up there on the podium. And it was really pissed off.

It kept saying things like, "You guys are my eyes and ears over there. Most creatures would be happy to be the universe's eyes and ears. It's an important job, the pay is good. The benefits aren't great, but who's complaining in this economy?  Hunh?  Plus, the cost of living is low..."

Humanity really misjudged this part of the speech; we all thought the universe was making a joke.  Everybody laughed sycophantically as we had been taught when Dear Leader cracked funny.  But this just angered it further.

"Jesus Christ!  Do I have to do everything myself?  You numbnuts wouldn't know reality if it hit you in the face!  String theory? What the hell is that? If I'd wanted ten dimensions I'd have ordered Chinese food!"

Here humanity compounded its sins, for this was actually the universe's attempt at humor, albeit one that didn't make any damn sense.  I think the universe realized it was losing our sympathy maybe?  In any case, nobody laughed after the attempted joke.  Not good.

"You dumbasses need to get back to work!  Jesus Christ.  Whatever happened to competence!  The Milky Way used to be a haven for competence, and now we've got this?  What is this deconstructionism?  Deconstructionism Shmeconstructionism!" 

We stared at it terrified.  What if it banged its shoe on the podium, but its shoe contained our galaxy?  This has been known to happened.

"You make me sick!  Whatever happened to the New Critics?  Those guys knew how to read a damn book. Is that too much to ask?"

In my dream this kind of thing went on for hours.  Mostly the universe complained about how movies and music used to be a lot better than they are now.  At some point in the speech I realized that it obsessively follows all of those horrible awards shows (Grammy, Academy, etc.); not only did the universe complain about the declining caliber of winners in the last few decades, but it also critiqued the production values of the awards shows themselves (e.g. "you call that a dance number?").  And it kept going on about Judy Garland's last, tragic performance at Madison Square Garden.  Humanity found this mawkish and embarrassing.

It made me sad on multiple levels.  Why did reality give a crap?  I don't care about the Academy Awards, so why should the universe?  This being said, I couldn't help but feel that there had to be at least an element of truth in everything it said. 

Lucky for us, it never go angry enough to bang its shoe.  I kept thinking the universe would get more cheerful, announcing how with its guidance and various worker-heroes we had made glorious progress on the five year plan in spite of provocateurs like Derrida and film makers like George Lucas.  It never did though; it just kept yelling.  We didn't even get a show trial, even though humanity longs to see broken and now repentant Derrida and Lucas sitting handcuffed in the docs, the universe's prosecutor telling us lurid tales of sin and corruption. But nope, all we got was the incessant complaining.

All five billion of us in that hall tried to look resolute, as if we were going to do a better job from this point onwards.  But when we realized that there would be no show trials, in our heart of hearts we all just wanted to get out of there and go ride some bumper cars.

night of the living Davids

My deep and abiding hatred of all forms of transportation with the exception of walking and the French rail system always leads me to have horrible nightmares the evening before travel (later today we drive to Broken Bow, OK to share Thanksgiving with my Dad's Uncle Rupert, who raises fighting roosters and sells them for a good chunk of change to people in Mexico; I'm not kidding, I'll post some pictures when we get back).

Last night's was a doozy. It involved not being able to check in to the Francis Drake hotel in San Fransisco during an American Philosophical Association meeting.  The woman at the desk wasn't able to work the keypad because of these grotesque really long fingernails, I mean as long as Howard Hughes' were when he was holed up on a closed off floor of that Vegas hotel during the last phase of his madness (which also involved collecting his own waste in big glass jars that were then set up artfully around the room).  She kept having to start over.  In the dream this somehow telescoped into thirty minutes, at which point the time for presenting my paper had passed.

All of that would have been fine, but somehow the long fingernail woman knew I'd missed my paper presentation and she kept insisting that my department would not reimburse me now, so I couldn't check in.

I was too polite to point out that it was all because of her fingernails, so I didn't know what to say.

But at that point I saw that David Bowie (David Bowie!) was in the lounge area, and I took a desperate gambit, "Hey, hey, see David Bowie over there. I used to play guitar for him."

She was too cool for this though, "Sir, lots of people have played guitar for David Bowie; that's hardly reason for me to let you check into the Francis Drake."

I was sure that the wonder-working powers of Mr. Bowie would get me through this though.  I hailed him like an old friend, confident that he'd recognize me as a humble foot soldier of Rock, and in the ways of all great generals through history, help me out of this bind.  George Patton did the same kind of thing for his men.  So did Caesar.

And I think I would have gotten the divine intervention, but the Bowie I got was the shell-of-himself-Bowie that surfaced after the release of Aladdin Sane, the very same Bowie whose months long diet of cocaine and milk left him skeletal and insane (he was only later to exit the Los Angeles valley of death by taking bosom buddy Iggy Pop to Berlin).  In my nightmare Bowie kept pinching his nose and rubbing his gums, and somehow I knew that he might begin a horrible duet with Cher. 

But instead of going sub-par Lawrence Welk on me, Bowie just poked at me with his walking stick and said, "No dice Cogburn."  He turned to the desk clerk and told her, "I've never seen this man before in my life."

I was disconsolate, but felt better when David Chalmers began to check in on my right.  I was about to hail him when he turned around and punched me in the face really hard.  As I lay on the ground, looking up, he said, "I heard that song you wrote, mother******!" before kicking me in the ribs really hard.

I tried to give as good as I got; from the floor I said, "You're not the most important philosopher from Generation X.  You're not even from Generation X, look at your damn hippie hair!"

He leaned over and slapped me across the face.  It hurt, and if it wasn't a dream I would have wet my pants at that point.  Chalmers made a fist, shook it at me, and glowered through what I now realized to be in fact heavy metal hair.  I will never make that mistake vis a vis David Chalmers ever, ever again.

"First, unlike me, the hippies had long scraggly bangs that got in their food as they ate.  Close inspection reveals my coif to be cropped in front.  If you were a better philosopher you would have noticed that.  Second, the whole point of Generation X is wearing your hair," and then he started kicking me again and again to emphasize each word, "Any!" Kick! "Way!" Kick! "You!" Kick! "Want!" Kick! Kick! Kick!

I wanted to argue that he was fraudulently wrong.  Wearing your hair how you want was the hippie ethos, and all the heavy metal kids like Chalmers had just got that one wrong.  Pace Chalmers, "The whole point" of Generation X is being so horribly deformed by overexposure to situation comedies and game shows as a small child that you end up not even suspecting just how awful the Star Wars movies are.  How could the man who'd distinguished between the hard and soft problems of consciousness miss that?  How could anybody?  But I was in too much trauma from Chalmers' cowboy boots to insist on anything.

But things got worse.  Through my post Chalmers beating reverie I looked up only to see the two Davids walking away arm and arm, and Bowie was now an amalgam of all of his greatest moments.  He was wearing the dress from The Man Who Sold the World/Hunky Dory era.  He was in Aladdin Sane Zigster makeup.  His teeth were capped beautifully from his post Let's Dance era.  And he'd picked David Chalmers over me. 

O.K.  I should have known better about the hair thing.  I'm willing to admit that.

But who could have predicted that David Bowie had such an abiding interest in two-dimensionalism and the extended mind thesis?  And so little interest in anything I might have to say about Dummettian anti-realism, the Lucas-Penrose argument, or the metaphysics of video games?  My world had collapsed all around me, and there was nothing to do but weep.  As they walked away I heard Bowie say to Chalmers, "So what's it going to be tonight old chap?  Philosophy or music?"

But then through my veil of tears I saw David Lewis (David Lewis!) checking in.  But instead of awe, I tried to score cheap points off of his metaphysical status.  "Hey! Hey! He's not even alive!"  Given the level to which I'd sunk, perhaps it is better that nobody listened.  I grew more disconsolate.

Then my friend David Merli was checking in.  This cheered me up, until I saw he had that Aladdin Sane lightning bolt tattooed across his face.   Merli was in on it!

Richard Montague stood in line behind Merli, "Hey! Hey! He's dead and his name's not even David!"

"Shut up you little worm!  I had it legally changed in Nevada!"

I couldn't win.  The Davids had taken over the American Philosophical Association, and they were not to be messed with.  If David Chalmers could administer such a horrendous asswhooping, how much worse would it be to tangle with an undead Richard (now David!) Montague.

I slowly drug myself into the cold San Fransisco street, sitting on the pavement with some punk rock kids who'd never even heard of the Dead Kennedys.  Inside the Drake everybody talked about philosophy and rocked out while I contemplated life among my new friends under our new David overlords.  I would have to get used to the fleas.  Yes, that would suck, but the thing was I still had my brain.  I still had my brain.

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kid, in fact it's cold as hell

So Emily and I are all finished with our childbirth class.  It was pretty helpful in that we know more of what to expect.  In the second to last class we watched videos of four different births involving different levels of anaesthesia: two "natural" childbirths (given its prominent use by left-wing Puritans, I object to this word in most contexts, and certainly in this one; nothing is more natural than humanity's centuries long noble quest for better and better forms of anesthetization), one attempted "natural" childbirth where the mom progressively gave up and finally availed herself of the full panoply of drugs, and a c-section.  I managed to watch all of them without getting sick like I did during that where-do-we-come-from video in my tenth grade biology class at Jefferson Davis Public High School in Montgomery, Alabama.  It's good to know that I (or at least my vomit reflex) have matured somewhat since then.

Some people get more focused during stressful times, and I do this during the most stressful times (like when faced with the logistically difficult task of stopping the bleeding after partially severing my left index finger with a manual saw).  But anything less than that and I'm just the opposite.  I notice more and more minutiae until my consciousness is a pretty crowded place.   If I didn't have a small bladder maybe this would make me a good spy (I assume spies have to be able to hold it for a long time while for example being smuggled in a trunk in the baggage hold of a train; and I can't even imagine James Bond saying "Oh man, I have to pee like a racehorse; hey c'mon pull into that McDonalds"). 

Since all of the birthing tapes we watched were filmed in the late seventies or early eighties, the hairstyle, clothing, and mannerisms were frankly bizarre.  The best one was the unmarried New Jersey couple (this is the one where she abandoned the desire for naturalness five hours into the ordeal).  The expectant mom had feathered hair of the type that is sprayed back into two wing looking appendages, and the expectant dad had a miniature version of the same hair cut but with a squirrelly looking guido mustache, gold chain, and wife beater shirt to complete the look.  During the whole thing he was reading auto-trader magazines and trying to get permission from mom to buy a 70's era muscle car or motorcycle.  In between contractions the mom would, in her absolutely beautiful New Jersey accent, say things like "No corvette!  No corvette!" or "No motorcycle for you!  I'm having a baby here!"  It was a wonderful piece of cinema verite that I recommend to all people of refined taste.

Only about half the people in the class were married, and about third of the expectant fathers weren't there.  This, I gather, is why the non-pregnant person was referred to as the "coach" during the classes; it made me feel weird.  For one thing, with the noble exception of professional wrestling, in my heart of hearts I think college and pro sports are a complete waste of time and resources.  As a proud nerd, I am and will always be on the getting-picked-on-in-high-school-but-ultimately-doing-something-more-meaningful-than-sales side of this culture war.  For me and all of my fellow nerd soldiers, the word "coach" conjures up bad memories from junior high school (most of us got out of high school sports by some combination of joining the marching band and spurious medical excuses).  In my junior highschool all grades would be in the same gym class, and as there were no social promotions this meant in seventh grade I had to play dodge ball with people who had failed ninth grade twice.  Needless to say, I don't want to be a "coach" of any sort, and I actually found myself looking at the other members of our class and thinking things like, "If you two palookas would just get married, and if you slept with men worth a damn, then we could all just be Dads or Husbands."  I feel bad about this.  I love Jesus, and don't think he would have thought these things.

One more note about effect of rampant bastardy on American civilization-  Most of the fathers who had the basic decency to be there seemed sort of half-formed to me.  They wore baseball caps and those shorts with all the pockets in them.  They chewed gum and drank soda pop from fast food places.  They bounced their legs incessantly.  This really started to bug me during the most gruesome film, one of the "natural" births.  [Note- don't read this parenthetical remark if this kind of thing gets you sick- The baby's head got stuck in the birth canal of the clearly highly educated 1970's mother.  Then, while the bearded Joy-of-Sex looking 1970's father kept encouraging her to breathe in that infuriatingly dopey everything's-groovy way of people like that, the doctor performs an unannounced episiotomy right in front of the camera with what looked to be a pair of garden clippers and then proceeds to grab the baby's head and start pulling.  Duuring the whole thing the vapid father kept saying, "You're doing great, honey," as the mother screams in absolutely skin-crawlingly hideous agony.]  Anyhow, my thought was that since so many fathers today don't cowboy up and take responsibility for their errant seed, maybe this allows those of us that do to be bigger jerks.  Maybe all these guys could present themselves as adolescents because at some deep level they feel like the mother is just lucky that they are hanging around, so why d'ya have 'ta bother me allatime when I'm trying to watch the damn game, and, Jesus Christ, buy some damn chips next time you go to the store, etc. etc.  This thought depressed me, but did get me through the next two films.

Somehow the happy endings to all the films prevented me from going into a full-fledged existential freakout.  In my experience, human beings are very much like Winston Churchill's characterization of the United States.  The great man said, "You can always count on the United States to do the right thing, after exhausting all of the other options."  My fellow gum smacking, leg bouncing, baseball cap wearing, soda pop guzzling, sports team shirt wearing coaches were all going to be fathers soon.  And I noticed something else that happened at the end of these films; when the baby was finally handed to its 1970s parents, me and the fellow coaches all cried a little bit. 

Then I realized something that is probably obvious to normal people.  In a month or two all of us were going to be propelled fully into adulthood whether we wanted to or not.  My fellow coaches might stare at me across an abyss of a-literacy, television obsession, and for some of them jobs that actually involve doing something more useful than producing journal articles nobody reads, but they were going to be good dads, and for those of us on both sides of the abyss, that is the most important thing in the world.  The evolutionary advantages of big heads and walking upright (and the resulting small hips) has left human beings with an absolutely hideous birthing process, revolting and dangerous.  Nonetheless, even though in this respect we are much less fortunate than our fellow mammals, the day of the birth will still be the best day in the lives of all of the coaches and moms in the room.

Music to read this post by- Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Tiny Dancer, and Rocket Man.   Elton John at his peak could pour an insane amount of feeling into a song.  It can assuage your misanthropy. 

existential freakout in the Denver airport

Last week on the way home in the Denver airport I was pretty stressed out.  I had just come through Seattle, where they've now followed Atlanta's suit by installing non-directional Bose speakers so there is no way to escape Big Brother blaring CNN into your skull (the noise even penetrates 30 db blocking ear plugs).  Add that to everything else that is horrible about flying today, and then add to that what the complimentary cheese and fruit plate was doing to my dig estive tract, and J. Cogburn was a not a happy camper.

So I was in no way prepared to find myself the only one of four people in a Men's bathroom not talking on a cellphone. When I went in to the bathroom there were just two of the cellphone people, one standing with his elbow on the paper towel dispenser, one standing over the urinal, both blabbering away inconsequentially.  Nearly doubled over from a fruit and cheese induced cramp I hobbled into a stall, only to have a third cell phone person enter the stall next to me, talking on the phone the whole time. 

If this wasn't bad enough, there were several performative contradictions in the guy's conversation.  He kept blabbing about how his relationship with "Jess" was nobody's business but his own, and how Jess had no right to tell anyone, including his interlocutor "those things."  After several minutes of overhearing him, I had gathered that the problem was both extremely embarrassing and of a medical nature.  It made me really nervous that the next guy who came in would catch the third cellphone jerk's disease from the toilet seat. 

That's when I started to have a freakout.  What if these people were the first wave of an advancing army of cyborgs, come back from space to colonize what is left of the old style humans?  After all, talking on a cellphone while defecating is exactly the kind of thing that a cyborg would do. 

I though of our dismal future then, or rather the dismal future of all old-style humans like me.  The cyborg colonization would not be military, but rather economic and cultural.  I saw then an impoverished future where earth was essentially a reservation for old style humans who are reduced to sending their leaders off planet to beg for financial help.  I saw a future where old style humans make no holographic picture shows themselves, but avidly consume the junk holograms foisted on us by the cyborgs.  I saw that our book and music output would diminish, old style human publishing companies purchased and shut down by their cyborg competitors.  I saw a world where all fashion is dictated by cyborg whim, and began to fear when I left the stall everyone would be wearing block robot suits made out of cheap cardboard.  I saw a world where eating is something furtively done in dark corners because to eat food is to admit that you are not one hundred percent cyborg.

I might have cried for the lot of humanity, but my flight actually left from Denver on time, so instead I just drank a beer in first class, cautiously appraising our new lords and masters as they boarded the plane, some of them blabbering into phones actually attached to their cyborg heads.

Mitt Romney's Soul

Rows of folding metal chairs line up on a linoleum floor, ready to march.  Fluorescent lights buzz overhead as if angry to be attached to such cheap acoustical tile, angry to shed light on these vomit colored walls, angry to be witness to this chicanery.  A technician taps the microphone on the stage, testing it.  "THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP."  He smiles and nods each time.  Four Russian women by the folding tables go to work creating little culinary murder scenes on already soggy paper plates, not stopping until each holds one pork chop, one lump of potato, and one slightly congealed bit of boiled and mashed up vegetables.  Soon the old people will enter, shuffling over to the folding metal chairs, and then slowly chew the tasteless food with their mouths open.  A person on stage will tell them what they want to hear.