Does anyone "do" theory anymore?

Depends on what you mean by "do," I think--with a wink to my favorite ex-president--and also on what you mean by "theory." But the answer is more or less, "no," no one does theory, if by "theory" you will allow me to mean something a little bit different than it usually does (and the same for "does," I guess). I'm also not sure--even though I love theory and lots of the people who did it--that this is such a terrible thing.

Let's call "theory," in the academic humanities at least, the thing that all of a sudden beginning in the late 1960s in France and in the early 1980s in the United States and the UK opened up an enormous network of possibility within literary-philosophical thought. The experience of theory had to do with the rapid enlargement of the field of intellectual play, bringing into the discipline(s) a number of new objects of study and new methodologies for studying them. Theorists, at least under this definition, were largely those who opened those fields of possibility up, and they were abetted by a number of translators, both literal and figurative, who were able to teach others how to read and think through--through not in the sense of through and beyond, but in the sense of a modality--this new material called theory.

Once the fields opened up, of course, then you could spend lots of time--and people did--going backwards to theory's sources, from Derrida, say, not only to the Greeks (who everyone knew about anyway) but to Saussure or Levi-Strauss or Heidegger or Nietzsche or Husserl, and so on. "Theory" thus expanded significantly to include a number of thinkers and writers who had no idea they were part of (or were going to be part of) "theory" when it came to be called theory. Many graduate and undergraduate theory surveys begin with Russian Formalism, but when Russian formalists were doing what they did, they weren't really doing theory, at least not self-consciously--it's only within the frame of theory that they came to be seen as the first step in a larger story. (Some courses on literary theory begin with Aristotle, and this is another, longer story in which earlier texts that don't seem to belong to "theory" proper are put back into a theory-based framework as a gesture against the fetishization of the new--but I would argue that in those courses "theory" actually doesn't mean what I mean by "theory" here).

What this means is that very few people ever actually "did" theory, in the sense that they created the opening through which others could move into new worlds of thought. Much of the work of "doing" theory after the initial creative stroke of possibility (not insight, I think) was either to spend time translating or explaining (here think of Eagleton or Culler or any of the many many introducers), or in exploring some new part of the new space carved out by theory (so that you get a feminism inflected by theory, a Marxism inflected by theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and so on). Many of these explorations effectively allowed people to approach doing something like what I mean by "doing" "theory"--the work of Judith Butler, or Gayatri Spivak, can be said to be so creative as to shape large new spaces within theory, or even to push the boundaries of the new theory-space into new realms. At the limit, then, between "inventing" something new and "applying" something old to something new you find people who come so close to doing theory that they might as well be doing theory.

In the sense in which I'm talking about theory, then, very few people ever "did" it, and most of those who did were "creators of a discourse," the category Foucault uses in "What is an author?" to describe people like Freud or Marx who opened up new modes of thinking. They have now been folded into theory (any theory survey will include them and probably Nietzsche), but this actually subsumes them under a category to which I don't think they properly belong in any historical sense.

After the first doers of theory (who are "first" only in the sense that they make something visible first, but whose visibility can then often be traced back past them into earlier centuries--think of the ways in which Chaucer can be made, after theory, to produce all the insights of theory avant la lettre, as it were, or in the case of Derrida, the way Laozi can be made to do the same thing)--after the first doers of theory, then, you might think of a second class of people who are doers of theory, prime, in the sense that they take the insights of the first group and push them into areas that the first group has not yet thought of or imagined. Probably there's a continuum all the way down from there, ending with some graduate student in the early 1990s writing a paper that "deconstructs Henry James," or "does a Marxist reading of Shakespeare," or whatever (this was me, so please don't think I'm making fun of anyone).

Is anyone still doing theory, then?

There continues to be a clear interest in having more people do theory, and especially of having another French person come and give us something new to think about. I take the fashionable rise and fall of certain French figures--Levinas, Bourdieu, Badiou (still rising), Auge (rising?)--as the mark of a theory-hunger around the academy. Sometimes this theory-hunger is easy to make fun of, since it really seems to believe that theory has to come from France...

Obviously, people like Butler and Spivak are still doing theory, though I would argue that neither of them is doing theory as much as they were earlier in their careers, when their insights were devastatingly able to generate entire "discourses," so that it would make sense to say you were doing a "Butlerian" reading of something. Spivak is a tricky case because I think her writing has yet to be fully grasped in all its complex greatness, but you get the idea.

There are academic superstars, though only a few, who seem to be doing theory. Zizek is a good example here, but Zizek isn't giving anyone a program, and "theory," at least as I'm using it here, is distinguished from great intellectual work primarily through its ability to generate a program. About the only two people I can think of even attempting to generate a program these days are Franco Moretti, who has done so in a series of articles published in the New Left Review, and Bill Brown, whose opening essay to the Things special issue of Critical Inquiry (now published as a book) approaches the programmatic. The interesting thing about Brown's own work, for instance in A Sense of Things, however, is how astonishingly modest and subtle it is. Its readings, unlike its introduction, do not betray programmatic ambitions, and this strikes me as very admirable. After that... lots of people are applying new general paradigms (cosmopolitanism, globalization, transnationalism, to give three names for a mode that seems increasingly valuable and necessary) but none of those paradigms is associated with a name, nor is any of them more than the forced intersection (call it interdisciplinarity, if that helps) of previously insulated realms inside theory in order to produce complexity, the necessary third stage (after ground-clearing, and self-critique) in any theoretical moment.

(later edit: I forgot Agamben, whose work feels very theory-like, though it seems to have trouble generating much traction, except around the human-animal nexus, which is one of the places where a lot of interesting work is happening.)

The strange corollary to all this is that, since theory allowed people to become famous across fields and disciplines, now that almost no one is doing theory anymore, almost no one is more famous than they were 10 years ago (even Butler and Spivak are less famous than they were 10 years ago). Brown and Moretti and perhaps Zizek the exceptions, but beyond them, there are a bunch of people who are well-known in their fields (the best people in the 18th century, etc.) but who have no broad reputation outside of them. This wreaks havoc on anyone trying to organize an interdisciplinary speaker series, by the way, since it's very hard to find speakers who will attract broad audiences unless they do theory, and the well is running dry. Other than that, it's not terrible, of course, just the way things are.

Beyond all those people, of course, are still plenty of people for whom theory was and remains important, who continue to "do" theory but only in the minor sense that their work is unthinkable without theory, and that they in using theory continue both to produce theory-use as a methodological model, and to occasionally unearth small corner of the space opened up in the initial theory-moment (oh, ok, I'll say it: they invaginate new spaces). And then of course there are the people who are glad it's all over, for various reasons, some good and some venal.

If you think about theory this way, New Historicism, as the last recognizable movment in theory, is actually also the end of theory as such--Minerva's owl, as theory liked to say. The need to generate a programmatic statement, even reluctantly (as Greenblatt did), is very much a theory-need, and the desire to produce a journal that would articulate that program is also, it seems to me, only possible in a world driven by programmatic thinking (that is, the world of theory). New Historicism's victory over theory--that is, the degree to which historical work has become so completely fashionable as to be nearly invisible, and the number of people for and places in which history is always the final answer to an interpretive question--is thus a victory that emerges from inside the cultural language of theory, but which in establishing itself also managed to destroy the possibility that it could be responded to in the mode of theory... it did this by frequently proclaiming that it was not, in fact, a theory, but rather a set of linked questions, which of course it was. In my deconstructive reading of New Historicism, then, it's the apotheosis of theory precisely because it leads to theory's "death."

Lately I have been running into people who feel depressed by the current state of affairs.

They feel that the theory revolution for which they fought so hard in the 1980s--and which they felt like they had more or less won--has been relegated to the ash-heaps of history. Yesterday at a party someone I like and admire, upon hearing me say that I sometimes consciously mimic Jameson's prose style, responded, with genuine horror, "surely you don't do that today?!" Well, sadly for both of us, I had been talking about the writing I'd done Friday. I'm of course happy to do what I do, but the ash-heap feeling hit me pretty hard at the time.

But is there really anything to be depressed about? In the end, not really, at least not in the long run. Theory was good, but of course it couldn't last--however infinite its promises may have seemed, what remains once the excitement dies down and the territory is more or less mapped is the hard work of continuing to work without the big project to guide you. But someday in the future there will be a new "theory," though it will not be the same as our theory; at some point some new insight or set of insights will inaugurate a new, exciting era in which everything we've known seems wrong, and all kinds of work becomes not only possible to do but impossible to live without.

Those who are caught in that initial moment will feel like their world has been turned upside down; they will prosletyze, they will translate, they will shine this new theory's light into the dark corners of the space it discovers and/or invents. From this future vantage point the triumphs of our theory will seem, surely, limited and provincial; some generous souls will presumably recognize in the advent of their new theory the loss of the perspective made possible by ours.

And some of those folks will go back and read the people the theorists of their day were reading, and will trace the history of their theory backwards to a set of writers whose connection to this new "theory" was invisible to them at the time; the role of these writers will be to have been precursors for something they couldn't recognize or imagine, but which nonetheless thanks to the insight of the next creator(s) of discourses will become recognizable and imaginable through them. Those old writers will turn out, belatedly, to matter more than they know, to have written the thing that made it possible to write the thing that made it possible to see.

And perhaps many such texts are written, not just one or two of them, but fail, for the lack of the right reader, to become one origin of an origin for a new theory. Perhaps their authors will not even recognize that which, in their own books, might come in another era to be readable as the opening to a new universe of thought, this future as invisible to them as it will be visible in the future. Perhaps, but perhaps not--and how will you ever know?--you're writing one of those books right now. The obligations would be startling.

“Twin Cinema” is a strong contender for album of the year and my current pick from the fraction that I’ve heard. Broadly speaking, it is in the tradition of late Beatles studio-powered symphonic pop. The songs emphasize catchy melodies, tight structure and complex harmonies, but they balance their sweetness with hard drums and guitar; critics like to call this genre Power Pop.

Flipping through a book last night I came across a picture by Jacques-Henri Lartigue that I love. It is his first picture of his cousin Simone, who he’d go on to photograph for years. She is standing on a beach, grinning. Something is cupped in her hand (a sand crab? a fistful of gravel to hurl at the boy behind the camera?) and she is wearing what is now an utterly ridiculous bonnet (likely, though, the height of upper middle-class kid fashion in the early 1900s). A big wet dog stares at her. An adult, wading the shoals in the distance, ignores them.

The thing that strikes me about the image is the way Simone’s expression works to defy the “pastness” of the picture. Her outmoded clothes speak of her times, so do the color and quality of the image. Even the breed of dog places the image in the past (it’s something big but not a Labrador, the breed of the moment, at least in the U.S.). Her smile and gesture, on the other hand, belong to our time, or also to our time. She grins unconscious of a pose that might be appropriate to having one’s picture taken, unconscious in this moment of the photographic and physical conventions of her age. That expression bridges the gap between her and me. (It also helps that her seven year old cousin is equally unconscious of the conventions of photography as he takes this snapshot with his new camera.)

Many of Lartigue’s pictures connect in this way because many of them are family snapshots. He used his camera to record the light moments of family life, and so his photographs stand apart from the anonymous lot of old photographs by famous photographers. They also stand apart from a lot of old family photographs that depict the ancestors solemnly recording their existence for future generations.

Here’s Simone some years later:
 

 
And his brother Zissou:
 
 
His pet cat, Zizi, photographed when Lartigue was about seven years old:
 
 
And a man with his dog:
 
 
As I was thinking about Lartigue, I remembered that somewhere in On Photography Susan Sontag had complimented him. The way I’d remembered it, he was the only photographer anywhere among the 200 plus pages of that book to earn her approval. Alas:

Sontag only tolerates Lartigue because he trained his very offensive weapon, the camera, on his own people; and that not even by choice, but because as a kid he couldn’t travel much beyond the borders staked out by his own family. For Sontag, every photographer is the tourist who finds strangers bizarre and amusing, the tourist who never bothers to learn the local customs or get to know the people. Lartigue just gets off on a technicality.

I’ve written a little before about the popularity of news photos that depict strange bodies and tried to offer a more hopeful reading of the fascination with such images, a way of thinking about that fascination that doesn’t confine us to the baser levels of human nature.

This all is still more-or-less a thought in progress, but it seems that maybe that some of that particular fascination is working in Lartigue too. His pictures connect not only for the reason that the people in them manage still to look like real people, individuals with unique character rather than anonymous figures lost to the past, but also because he was interested in something that continues to be really compelling – the look of bodies that test convention and the look of bodies testing the limits of physical space.

As last week’s piece by C Bush reminded us, people are interested in zombies, especially relative differences in their speed. In this, I’m no exception, but while other readers responded in comments with the speed of . . . well, a fast zombie, I’ve been slowly lurching my way toward today’s post.

We’re pleased that you’ve chosen to visit our informational webpage. Bourbon Dynasty (France), LLP, has often been the target of malicious journalistic attacks over the years, and we take this opportunity to set the record straight.

I pulled an all-nighter to write my first college English paper, on an electric typewriter. The paper was on Beowulf and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. I got a disappointing B on it. But it wasn’t just a B. It arrived with the phantom of another grade; for my professor had blotted out the + or – next to the B with such thoroughness that no amount of holding the paper up to the light could determine whether she had demoted or promoted the paper from its initial assessment. For many years afterward, until I came across the essay again while packing for a move, I recalled the grade as a B-. I had graded myself down out of a sense of failure.

Last week, I returned the first batch of essays to my students, giving them their first grade in my class (and since they’re all freshmen, possibly their first grade in college). I dread that moment in the semester when the honeymoon period comes to an end. Before that first grade, everything is potential and possibility. We have animated discussions in class; everyone’s on board with arguable thesis statements and the importance of analyzing evidence; everyone’s eager to impress me and each other. The stories with which we begin are enigmatic, ripe for interpretation. Even when they write their descriptive drafts with messy structures and undigested examples, they get ample feedback from me and we meet for a one-on-one conference, so it’s kind of like a do-over. The time between the draft and the final version seems to stretch out into the bright future of promised happy endings.

When the grades—mostly B’s and C’s—are handed out, when the coaching ends and the judging happens, there’s a distinct change in our relationship. Precisely because of the extensive coaching that precedes the judging, the shift is painfully palpable. There’s no teaching assistant to blame, no big lecture hall of 200 students to serve as a buffer; if the students can’t hide, neither can I. On the day I hand them the papers, I have to brace myself for that inevitable loss of innocence. It can be a difficult process of adjusting to new expectations, especially for students who have been so praised and rewarded for their efforts all through high school. But as much as I wish the honeymoon could last, I know the grades mark a necessary transition. The real learning can’t begin until the grade concretizes the stakes and gives them a measure of the distance they must travel. Still, I hate it when it happens right in front of me—I want students to leave as soon as I give them their essays, but some of them always linger and do the flip then and there, scanning the stapled sheet at the back for that letter, and then struggling to keep their poker faces and avoid eye contact. The suspense is too much, the knowledge can be crushing.

In grading that first stack, I’m bracing myself not just for that moment in class, but for everything that will follow: the challenge of continuing to motivate, to push their thinking, to demand ever more complex skills, to make them believe in the process. As I’ve written here in an earlier post, there are broad categories of students I’ve identified in my years of teaching, and the way the students respond to the evaluation of their first performance is a good indication of which category they fall into. I’ve got a good bunch of kids this semester, I think. As far as I can tell, they seem to have bounced back and are still engaged, still willing to try, though they might like the course just a little less. I tell them not to fetishize grades (even though I know they will), I tell them if they focus on learning, the grades will follow, I tell them that they’re being evaluated on one performance and that they are expected to improve, I tell them I grade the words on the page and don’t factor in mushy criteria like “effort.” I don’t know how much any of this sinks in. I’m sure they wish I would grade them on effort because they all worked so hard, not realizing the condescension built into such a practice.

This year, I’m not only grading my own students’ essays, I’m also helping new faculty with their comments and grades, making sure the grades are normed to the standards that we’ve set in the writing program, and that their comments are appropriate in tone and focused on the big issues of thesis, analysis, structure, rather than sentence-level correctness or style. To ensure a consistent quality of feedback, we recommend that instructors reflect back the student’s main idea, point out the main strengths of the essay, and then, explain the 2 or 3 weaknesses of the argument, with specific suggestions for improvement. The opening lines might look something like this:

If the structure is predictable, even formulaic, the details of the comments give students a sense that the instructor actually read their essays and took their ideas seriously. It’s a laborious process, producing this feedback, but because such extensive responding to student writing is one of the cornerstones of the program, and it helps with consistency and fairness in grading, we insist on it.

But it takes a while to internalize the standards and feel confident that one’s evaluations are right, and the grades, fair. There weren’t any big discrepancies in the grades; for the most part, everyone was on the mark, if a little uncertain. What’s interested me in this mentoring process is how often instructors wanted to fall back on the criterion of “effort” to evaluate an essay—not so much in wanting to reward effort and bump up a grade, but in wanting to penalize a student for lack of effort. They would enumerate the essay’s obvious weaknesses, and then add, “and I also just felt like this student didn’t try” or “I don’t think they put the work into this that I wanted them to.” Perhaps it was a way to alleviate their discomfort in giving the essay a lower grade. Or, an expression of genuine disappointment that the student didn’t fulfill the promise of their draft as the instructor had hoped. I discourage them from saying anything about “effort” in their comments or using that as a criterion for grading. Because you simply can’t know for sure, I say, and telling them they didn’t try might feel like an accusation. Why invite the adversarial tone?

The difficulty of grading is that the students are tied up in their work, and it’s hard for us to separate the two. We can’t like all our students, we’re influenced by the subtle dynamics of classroom interaction—who talks more? Who seems more interested? Who says clever things? Who emails questions and comes to office hours? And of course, our egos are tied up in their work as well—we want to transform their writing, and by extension, them. Behind the complaint about lack of effort is the fear about our own failings—why didn’t I inspire you to try harder? Why didn’t you listen? Why don’t you like me?

The longer I teach, the more I aim for a kind of ego-less teaching. I still laugh and joke with my students, and I still want to inspire them. But I try not to take anything personally. If a student resists, I don’t imagine that he is resisting me, but rather the prospect of trying something new and failing. If I take myself out of the equation, I find it easier to be generous and more patient with them. Some students still get under my skin, sometimes I still have the “Dead Poets Society” fantasy. Reality usually reasserts itself.

The day I hand back the first essays is still unpleasant; there’s just no way around it. But I don’t agonize as much as I used to the night before. I wonder if my professor agonized over that B. She was a seasoned teacher already, so I doubt it. Still, now I appreciate the deliberation that went into that little blot of ink.

If you were to ask an average American to name one contemporary architect, it is likely that Frank Gehry would be that one. After his successes with buildings like the Guggenhiem in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Gehry has become an architectural star with his own identifiable brand, or signature look. The problem I have is that when viewing Gehry’s buildings in all of their glittering complexity, somehow I am dissatisfied. The buildings are beautiful, sculptural monuments, and yet I am left wanting.
 
Recently, I had the good fortune of viewing a lecture by Jim Glymph, co-founder of Gehry Technologies and one of the partners that make up Gehry Partners. Glymph’s lecture clarified how the firm moves a design from concept to built form. It also inspired in me several thoughts that go a long way in explaining my dissatisfaction with Gehry as an architect.
 
On their website Gehry Partners announces that every project undertaken by the firm is designed personally and directly by Frank Gehry. According to Glymph, during this design process Gehry avoids giving architectural shape to things until it is necessary. He waits for inspiration to come while working with program-block study models, continually rearranging spaces looking for their optimum relationship. Gehry discusses these options with clients until one day something clicks. Again according to Glymph, what you want to "achieve is the client as a non-architect, sitting around and looking at piles of crumpled paper and have intellectual conversations about them." The goal of this process is to bring the client on board with the decision-making. Once it is necessary to move into architectural shape, Gehry generates hand-drawn sketches. He brings a sketch to the point where he sees everything he wants in it and then translates the sketch into a model. Gehry Partners then digitize the physical model, and it is refined in the computer. The partners transfer these refinements to the physical model, and the process is iterated as long as is necessary for the design to be considered “done.”
 
This process is revolutionary in several ways, but most strikingly in its effects on building fabrication. Because the shapes that Gehry prefers are not easily modeled in typical architectural modeling programs, Gehry Partners began using CATIA, a NURB-based modeling program developed by the aerospace industry. CATIA is CAD-CAM software. In other words, it is not only a design medium but can give computer-driven fabrication machines instructions for building the necessary parts of a design. DIGITAL PROJECT is Gehry Partners’ proprietary name for their modifed CATIA based program. They use DIGITAL PROJECT to make a “master model,” which is a complete digital model that forms part of the contract documents. The master model incorporates the actual structural steel shapes, helps to coordinate the mechanical systems, analyzes the design for repetition of parts and other cost-cutting measures, and can even tell the fabrication machines how to craft each piece of stone, steel or cladding. Another important strength of this method is that it creates a single three-dimensional model that every one can reference. For example, in the case of the Disney Concert Hall, it was not necessary to use a tape measure on-site during construction. Instead, workers used laser-surveying equipment, and took the "ideal" placements directly from the master model. This last advantage significantly cuts down the change orders during construction that are a major source of cost overruns in a typical project.
 
In all of these ways, DIGITAL PROJECT and the Gehry Partners design process are inspiring. So much so that if I am not careful the excitement I feel for their process can make me forget that I have a problem with their product. Why is it that the process Gehry Partners use, and the meaningful revolution that it suggests for the discipline of architecture, is not reflected in the design of the buildings that they create (excepting that it is expressed generally by the fact that cad-cam fabrication is the only practical means to create Gehry's structures)? I think the answer lies in several comments Glymph made regarding Gehry’s role in the design process. Glymph explained that although Gehry translates his sketches into hand built physical models, the digital processes are overseen by the partners. This bifurcated process has enabled the firm to “introduce the computer without interfering with Frank's traditional process that he has used for the last 30 years." In other words, Gehry as master designer is insulated from the revolutionary processes that create architecture from his designs. As the creator of the Gehry brand, Gehry has become the signature designer in his own firm. His pursuits and questions remain on the abstract level, while the innovative and exciting integration of fabrication with design, the quality that makes Gehry’s architecture revolutionary on more than a cosmetic level, remains unexpressed. Because Gehry has been able to maintain his traditional design processes, a rupture exists between the designing and making of his forms. This breach is further revealed in a causal use of materials (as in the Walt Disney Concert Hall where stone was replaced by metal without significant rethinking of form), and in the undeveloped potential of the structural details that are arguably the most articulate and expressive areas of Gehry’s complex geometries.
 
These realizations have made me ponder whether or not, contrary to the opinion of Philip Johnson, Gehry’s buildings embody those qualities that distinguish truly great architecture. I wonder if his buildings will stand the test of time. Specifically, I think they lack the legibility and signification that traditionally great designs possess. From his process, it is obvious that Gehry places great importance in the program interrelationships, but the expression of any power or social relationships that are significant to Gehry and/or the clients are lost in the final form of the building because the shape isn't legible. Even more than illegible, Gehry’s buildings are un-imageable. Not only are visitors denied the ability to read meaning within the architecture, the geometric complexity of Gehry’s designs denies a visitor’s ability to create a lasting particular image of the building. This is the gap that the three-dimensional process leaves, it is streamlined and fast, but it also prevents the development of clarity which the generation of two-dimensional drawings brings. Two-dimensional drawings do take effort to create and understand, but these efforts offer a payback. Drawing is not merely documentary. It is a tool for analysis that requires an architect to filter out excessive or superfluous design moves in favor of a legible structure. Scalar drawings distill selected relationships within design and force them to be more clearly expressed. Yes, drawing favors certain types of relationships and makes others difficult to analyze. But, because the generation of a two-dimensional drawing is an exercise in legibility, it also ensures a building’s potential to express meaning. Without a similar system of distillation, architecture can become little more than bricolage. It is the pursuit of meaning that transforms architecture from a craft to a fine art, but without legibility meaning can not exist. This is why Gehry's buildings disappoint. Their beauty and seemingly impossible construction promise to say something profound, and instead they say little at all. Gehry creates pretty architecture, but without something deeper behind it, pretty things are mere ornament.
 

Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was pushed out of the top box office slot this week by The Fog, a remake of the 1980 John Carpenter film of the same title. Rotten Tomatoes shows that 95% of critics give a positive rating to the former, 3% to the latter –maybe the most dramatic shift in the tomatometer’s relatively brief history. Both are horror films, just in time for Halloween. The Wallace and Gromit movie isn’t really a horror film, of course, more of a light-hearted spoof of one, but horror fans will attest that the genre, if that’s what it is, more often than not involves a little self-mockery and a wink at the audience. Arguably the best horror films of the last twenty years or so have been either self-referential (Wes Craven’s Scream series), mixed with another genre (Silence of the Lambs, a crime/suspense film; Alien, benefiting from science fiction art decoration; The Sixth Sense, almost a horror version of an after-school special: sensitive boy learns to cope with divorce), or openly and deliberately comical in their intensity, as in The Evil Dead films, the second of which is the source of my title. For those who don’t know the movie, one film student site provides a nice summary of the relevant scene:

Horror can be a hard genre to like, one that only periodically crosses over into the mainstream. Surely horror films make up more than their fair share of all the films ever made that are lacking in what people used to call “redeeming" qualities. When a horror movie is bad, it’s very bad (unless it’s very good), but when it’s good it’s as if the medium of film and the art of cinema were invented for no other purpose.

Most of the milestones of the genre have been remade or prequelled in the past 5 years: The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead (released the same year as Shaun of the Dead). . . As far as I know, most of the recent remakes have been bad, and not in a good way. But to say that remakes are generally bad misses the point: horror movies are always remakes or sequels. They cross genres to produce monstrous hybrids, return to the scenes of crimes over and over again. They are compelled to repeat, to repeat compulsively, to stab a little more than is really necessary, to add another “surprise” recovery by the killer, to give a monster a son, or a bride, or a long-lost cousin from space, or the future, or the past --it really doesn’t matter. Horror keeps trying.

Like comedy, frights are mostly about timing: not just the timing within the film, but the timing of the film. All appearances to the contrary, horror films are profoundly historical. The ones that become classics do so not because they transcend their eras, but because they are able to horrify as period pieces. This is why even though sequels are generally inferior to originals, they are still usually better than remakes. Unlike in popular music, where I would say that the cover is generally stronger than the second-rate knock-off, with the horror film you are often better off going with the knock-off: it is a better imitation precisely because it is a superficial one.

But horror films are historical in any number of senses. They give a telling account of the technical history of the medium and of the language of film. They offer one kind of record of the limits of public taste and, yes, of collective fears, although generally in ways that are much more oblique –-not to say subtle-- than is usually recognized. Horror films also tend, I think, to be very much tied to the history of particular lives and to succeed or fail accordingly. They are neither for children nor for adults. They are initially approached with a sense of discovery and of total wonder, as if they provided a way to look behind the door, into the closet, and under the bed of every adult who ever lived or ever will. They are of course for adolescents and of course mostly for boys, which is why they, as we like to say, get old. As Halloween approaches I find myself a little sad, but not horrified, that I just can’t enjoy them like I used to. Losing Innocence isn’t so bad; it can be harder to lose Experience.

My students and I talk a lot about "ideology" lately. They are writing research papers in which they are required to come up with a conspiracy theory (or simply a reading of a thing or event against the mainstream accepted narrative). I asked them for suggestions of a film we might watch later in the term. Overwhelmingly, I got requests for--you guessed it--Conspiracy Theory, starring Mel Gibson. A close second was everybody's favorite ideology-in-a-box movie, The Matrix. But this morning--in a computer lab because I am tragically without computer this week due to a laptop meltdown--I came across this article about Ferrets watching The Matrix. Apparently,

(P.S.: When I watch The Matrix, I think I lose 20 percent of my brain.)

Well, I want my students to use all of their brains, so thank god for this study. Too bad there isn’t a comparable study for Bladerunner. I bet that would get their little ferret brains going.

But back to the papers themselves. It’s striking that pretty much all of my students are doing projects that criticize American culture. I want to think this has nothing to do with me, because so far I have stayed away from direct political engagement in the classroom (except that day we spent the whole hour talking about Vietnam). I suppose I did start off the topic of a research paper by telling them what I wrote my research paper on back when I took freshman comp---a 12 page persuasive essay about why America should switch to the metric system. I wrote angrily about “American exceptionalism” and “xenophobic science.” It was very, very nerdy. And probably very, very poorly written.

But you can’t argue (well, maybe you can, but I hope you can't) that I run a classroom in which I take the traditional liberal-democrat-intellectual stance and ask them to copy it. For example, a scene from class this week:

So I encouraged them to not take a shot at Bush, or the oil industry, or big tobacco, but rather PBS, PETA, Meals on Wheels. Thinking through that critique may be harder, more creative (and probably funny). And because it’s a lighthearted assignment I know--or I hope--that a student blowing the whistle on PBS being behind some massive conspiracy, doesn’t mean any of us will actually stop watching. Just like my student writing about MacDonald’s admitted her research made her hungry.

Only one student took up this challenge. His hypothesis: certain non-profit, cultural and humanitarian organizations are directly responsible for the imbalance in power between conservatives and liberals in the United States. “So, a conservative has 200 bucks, right? And he goes and invests it on Wall Street, and doubles or triples his money. Ensuring his dominance in politics. A liberal takes his 200 dollars...and invests it in an NPR tote-bag.”

For the most part, my students focused on major corporations or more abstract things like the SAT or fashion industries. For instance, I learned yesterday that Microsoft and Apple are trying to polarize the world in order to stage a (literally) bloody brand war in the future.

“That’s good, Student Z. I would think about how Apple or Microsoft users describe themselves, using words like ‘die-hard’ and ‘loyalist.’ And you might think about whether or not people are likely to own an iPod and a PC, or if people really don’t cross the brand lines. For instance, I use Apple products exclusively.”

“Yeah, and that’s why you can’t answer any of our emails on time this week.”

Somewhere in the mid-1990s I ended up with free tickets to a Cake show for calling in and answering some radio question incorrectly. This was in the era of Cake's one-hit single, "Rock n Roll Lifestyle," which was possibly their worst song ever, but made it onto playlists at "new rock" stations all over the country.

The audience at the show consisted of about 28 actual Cake fans, me and my friend Brent, and two drunk fraternity boys (and likely New Rock listeners--probably the sort of people who thought Candlebox was awesome) who shouted "Rock n Roll Lifestyle!" at the top of their lungs between every song, even the songs that came after the band played "Rock n Roll Lifestyle." This was, I suppose, one version of that lifestyle.

In any case: what completely blew me away was the band's as-yet-unreleased cover of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive." I'm not great at describing music, but I remember just feeling completely astonished by Cake's version of the song, which opened up an old favorite into a completely new, much darker iteration of itself.

I've always liked good cover songs for that reason, and have always especially liked covers that find some darker, grimier material in an original pop song. Sonic Youth's remake of "Superstar" from the If I Were a Carpenter album, Richard Thompson's version of Britney's "Oops I Did it Again" (on 1000 Years of Popular Music), and Goldfinger's "99 Luftballoons" are classics of the genre.

The startling success of Cake's "I Will Survive" seemed to spawn a rash of punk covers of 70s and 80s pop songs, including some pretty neat ones (The Ataris' of "Smooth Criminal") and then just a bunch of songs that sounded like the original songs but louder or faster--a trend Me First and the Gimme Gimmes rode through at least two albums, each song more mediocre than the next one. Along the way people started remaking hip-hop songs; I liked very much Dynamite Hack's sweet, nostalgic remake of Eazy-E's "Boyz-N-the-Hood," and Richard Cheese (the brains behind Lounge Against the Machine) has some nice covers, though some of them tend to be gimmicky (my favorite Richard Cheese moment: in his cover of Blink 182's "What's My Age Again?" he turns "What the hell is A.D.D.?" into "What the hell is add?").

Covers seem to be a relatively recent phenomenon--or at least a sense of the "remake" or new arrangement as a particular genre of music feels new, quite different from either the classical tradition of rewriting scores for new (groups of) instruments, the blues tradition of remixing and remaking the same songs with new lyrics (or the same lyrics with new songs--you can follow lines from Skip James into other blues artists, but also in one verse of the Greatful Dead's "I Know You Rider" and some song by the Bassholes), or the jazz standards tradition, in which the balance between "original" and "remake" is such that there's very little to separate them (I maintain that you can tell a lot about a person depending on whose version of "Lullaby of Birdland" they prefer, Ella Fitzgerald's or Sarah Vaughan's). In covers the sense of originality is strong enough to make the cover feel very much like a reading or a translation, one for which the original version exists always as a powerful shadow presence against which the cover defines itself.

It's that strange relation, with the cover revealing something that the original never knew about itself, undoing the original while doing homage to it, that I like so much, partly because it resembles my preferred politics of literary translation (in a word: undomesticating).

With some hope that you will like the same thing, dear reader, I enclose, while apologizing for the clumsy guitar strumming (to paraphrase everyone's favorite snaggle-toothed Alaskan), with this entry a copy of my cover of a recently popular pop song. Happy listening.

Dylan doesn't need shades to hide behind anymore; he can hide behind his eyes, their hooded, shrewd look. His once-goofy humor is now so dry it's imperceptible; it lurks in a missed beat after saying that his first girlfriends “brought out the poet” in him or that he saw Joan Baez on TV and thought “she might need a singing partner”; it is cryptically or covertly or hermetically lewd. He loves leather now, sings its praises in “Highlands,” wears it even on 60 Minutes; it's the thick skin he needs to face the eternal realm of idiocy and a reminder to himself that he was young once, famous, a rock star even.

Dylan's rock stage persona is twitchy and vatic. He doesn't control his eyes for the camera and sometimes has to look down at his guitar. At best it could almost work as a kind of Framptonesque starchild pose. If they weren't his songs you might say he's butchering them but really he's trying to keep them alive through variation and rawness. He mostly ignores the audience, but I think he does it from shyness as much as contempt. Maybe he's trying to remember all the words. His face is skeptical, a paralyzed mask of fame like Warren Beatty's; he's met a lot of dangerous weirdos and can't afford to let down his guard.

The Dylan paradox is that despite the intensely personal nature of his songs you can never get a read on him as a person. This is partly because he isn't pretending to be your boyfriend or your buddy like everyone else on TV. In the context of people who telegraph their emotions and talk with their hands, you're either a salesman or an enigma. In Part One of Scorcese's documentary, there are only three real glimpses of him: when he is hanging out with his band and freaks out after getting a death threat, when he is leaving a concert and yells at the fans who booed him, and earlier when he plays Newport in 1963, surrounded by friends and seemingly happy.

Scorcese makes two decisions I can't sign off on. The first is that he tries to break Dylan down into influences and crams in too much social context (just as he did in the weak third act of Gangs of New York). We don't need to hear about the atom bomb and Lee Harvey Oswald tonight. The second is that instead of publicly canonizing Dylan as is his due, he sneakily tries to expose the nature of genius with the inclusion of unflattering details that suggest he was a pathological liar, he stole some records from a college friend, he was always supremely ambitious and given to manipulative mindgames. In the same vein we are given Baez's reductive claim that the apocalyptic-revolutionary hymn “When The Ship Comes In” was written in anger at a rude hotel clerk.

Biographers and critics are excluded from this republic, for better or worse. John Cohen of the revivalist New Lost City Ramblers provides some great commentary, as does Izzy Young, who ran the New York Folklore Center. Greil Marcus and Christopher Ricks are thanked with the interviewees in the credits but do not appear, so I assume they're holding hands on the cutting room floor.

Scorcese plugs Dylan into the same old story of a nobody's meteoric rise to fame. Perhaps no one can tell the real tale, the inner story of what he felt he wanted, what he did to get what he wanted, what he got and then how he felt about it after he got it. No one would believe it, no one's ears could even hear it.

Part Two focuses on Dylan dropping folk for “rock” (actually a kind of electrified honky-tonk country blues which he refines into something haunting and carnivalesque) and topical verse for “surrealism” (grotesque would be the more accurate term). He doesn't want to be a preacher with “twenty pounds of headlines stapled to his chest”; instead he chooses for a time to speak indirectly through images which are ugly and strange. (Or, as he would claim, to let such images speak through him.) The show's version of events collapses what was really a two-step process, first moving from protest to love songs and from the political back to the personal, and only then from the lucid to the mysterious and visionary.

The real context for Dylan is not music but literature, not these meshuggeneh Clancy Brothers or Pete Seeger, not Lou Reed and Neil Young, not the Gershwins or even Ginsberg and Kerouac, but Whitman and Yeats, whom he consistently approaches. Again and again we see people overcome merely quoting a favorite line from one of his songs.

Dylan's greatness and genius is intimately tied up with his lack of self and his anti-intellectuality. He describes one industry honcho, John Hammond, by saying he was “kind of like a Damon Runyon character--is that the word?” What word is he asking about, character? Past 60 he is still acting as if he only read books because there happened to be some in the houses of friends he crashed with.

But as the photos show he writes on a typewriter not a guitar. That's all the proof I need he's one of us.

Following the flow of news images on-line, I thought I’d begun to notice two related trends in recent months. Of the AP, AFP and Reuters images that appear along with news stories, an increasing number seem to be more clearly editorial than usual and more clearly and more often critical of President Bush. Beginning (in my memory, at least) with the images of a haggard and stunned looking man descending the gang plank to tour a Katrina-damaged delta, and coinciding with steadily decreasing approval ratings over the last few months – news photographers, editors and news outlets haven’t lately been kind to W.

Among these images, the occasional funny face:

This image ran with a caption noting the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that puts Bush’s approval rating at 39%. (What the caption doesn’t say is that, in one of his frequent moments of Oval Office whimsy, Bush is doing his best Gary Coleman: “what-choo-talkin’-‘bout-Cheney?”)

Some of the more subtly incriminating images reveal the extent to which Bush’s encounters are staged, and the distance he maintains from the people of his own country and others:

 
 
 
But by far the strangest image I’ve seen of the president, perhaps ever, is the “Left Behind” photo.
 
 
The picture itself is highly unusual. While it seems likely that Bush would be standing in front of a chalkboard while speaking to parents, teachers and students about his “No Child Left Behind” act, the words “left behind” aren’t written in chalk; they’ve been airbrushed, in negative, with the use of stencil, on something that aims to look like a chalkboard. So the event looks staged. But the picture is also much grainier than the average digital news photo; it looks as if somebody’s put through it a couple iterations of the “sharpen” tool. The picture itself looks like a fake.
 
Apparently, though, it’s an AFP file photo taken by photographer Paul Richards. The caption that accompanies the image reads:

Though the picture was taken in January 2004, it has been called back into service to illustrate the recent findings of a congressional investigation. When paired with this caption, the words “left behind” (excised from the “no child” either in the camera or later in the file) seem to refer to the ethics the Bush administration left behind in promotion of their “key education initiative.” Enough has been made about the children, teachers, and school systems the act leaves behind by not allocating the funds necessary to adequately meet the act’s requirements, however, to suggest that connotation too.

The more I look at this picture, though, the more I think of Bush “left behind” in terms of the divine rapture and the enormously popular Christian book series that chronicles an imagined version of the second coming – the Left Behind series.

The first book in the series, Left Behind, begins with the worldwide rapture of good Christians: “In one cataclysmic moment, millions of people disappear, throwing the world into instant chaos.” The next eleven books chart the progress of sinners and non-believers to figure out what’s happened, survive earthquakes, plagues, painful sores, rivers of blood, and the antichrist (one Nicolae Carpathia, “indwelt by Satan himself,” and – judging by his name, a Russian. Perhaps remnants of the cold war linger after all … sadly though, not the useful ones). The books allow devout Christian readers to thrill to the sinful, faithless exploits of those God leaves behind, all while having their own values, stalwart but perhaps too boring for fictionalization, confirmed.

In the wake of Bush’s supreme court appointments the fundamentalist Christian right has felt that their man in Washington has left them behind. Meirs, a stealth nominee, has no record to show just how she may vote; despite Bush’s exhortations to just trust him, despite even James Dobson’s assurances that Meirs is on their side, fundamentalists remain wary. This image could then work for them, much as the Left Behind books do, as a consoling and vindicating expression. The man who feels himself, presents himself, so much on the side of the one true God, is just another of those left behind.

One the one hand, this is another contribution to M Massino’s gleaming pile of mixed metaphors (although I guess it’s really more of an abandoned metaphor, since we get one “hand” and then just a second “part”).

On the other, it’s a highlight from President Bush’s tele-conversation with the troops in Iraq this morning. If C Bush correctly identified the staggering, world-changing lies of the administration as likely candidates for number 1 on the top 10 list of reasons to regret Bush’s election, later in the conversation there’s something I’d like to see somewhere in the top 250:

When Bush says “interesting” and “Saddam” near each other, he means to be clever. As in:

Interesting.

(Incidentally, the last time the White House has an official record of Bush talking about "stomping grounds," he was referring to the Reagan administration stomping around the White House:

For Bush, leaders stomp.)

As far as one can tell, “interesting,” means “revelatory of my domination of Saddam Hussein.” (In a fashion similar to the way in which “Darth” means “In.”)

I find it interesting, but in a different way that our President means it, that the White House is having some trouble slipping propaganda past a mainstream media that has, over the past few years, pursued stories with the vigor of a yellowjacket in a 40-degree chill.

Later in the day, at the White House press briefing, the reporters were pelting the press secretary with questions like this one, which started the briefing:

Perhaps more surprising is the AP article which followed, getting wide circulation (online at least). The story – accompanied through affiliated outlets by video from ABC News – emphasizes the rehearsal of questions and responses in a way that undercuts not so much the basic truth of the ideas passed back and forth as the status of the event itself. Like revealing that “Amazing Discoveries” isn’t a real TV show, but just an invention of the infomercial.

It stands to reason, then, that the most damaging revelation, would concern the key moment in the teleconference least dependent on a question of fact:

Knowing that Sergeant Lombardo “looked familiar” from the rehearsal of the teleconference rather than Bush’s triumphant-in-defeat moment with the bullhorn in NYC does sort of take some of the punch out of that moment of 9/11 = Iraq War magic. (So, perhaps does Sgt. Lombardo’s slip about New York, which seems to indicate momentarily that either a) we are fighting them “here” rather than "there," after all (There’s fighting in the Adirondacks?) or b) a heretofore unknown annexation has just handed Gov. Pataki a bigger problem than the state budget.)

It is as if the media slip-up of leaving the cameras rolling during the rehearsal creates the occasion for some critical response to the message itself – a condition that seems to testify to the hyper-self-conscious narcissism of the Washington news media. And, it’s no doubt true that the story disrupts the President’s aura only after it's been pretty well disrupted.

But, as long as the President’s still using soldiers to try to make real a lie about Iraq and 9/11 that the administration has supposedly sworn off telling, I suppose we should be glad for any occasion on which the press shows some signs of life.

I was feeling nostalgic for the Cold War the other day. Those Russians, they were good for us! Americans looked up into the sky one evening to discover they had been scooped. A little beeping ball of steel, made in USSR, was orbiting our planet for purposes few of us had stopped to consider. Before you could say “Laika,” science education had become a strategic resource.

The other day, sitting at the local Barnes & Noble café in the mall (yes, I live in the suburbs), I caught sight of a display that I hadn’t seen the last time I was there. It was an entire bookcase full of “Chicken Soup for the ______ Soul” titles. Somewhere in the recesses of my memory, I knew that the original Chicken Soup book had been a big deal, but not being much of a self-help book buyer, I didn’t pay much attention. But this display of over a dozen titles took me a bit by surprise in their strange variety:

Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover’s Soul
for the Military Wife’s Soul
for the Nurse’s Soul
for the Horse Lover’s Soul
for the Jewish Soul
for the Recovering Soul
for the Preteen Soul, 2
for the Teenage Soul
for the Teenage Soul, III
for the Pet Lover’s Soul
for the Golden Soul
for the Nature Lover’s Soul
for the Cat and Dog Lover’s Soul
for the Woman’s Soul
for the Father and Daughter Soul
for the Volunteer’s Soul
for the NASCAR Soul

So many Souls in need of Soup. The redundancies in many of the titles and the bizarre juxtaposition of group identities begged for a good joke or two. I couldn’t quite bring myself to pick up a volume, but later, my curiosity got the better of me and I went online. Apparently, since the 1993 publication of the original title, which became a phenomenal bestseller, the Chicken Soup brand has grown exponentially. There’s an elaborate web site with news of the latest titles not found at the B&N—65 titles and counting, over 80 million copies sold.

<%image(20051011-SoupySalesCD.jpg|205|206|Soupy Sales)%>

Something else I didn’t know before going to the web site is that although the books are technically “authored” by Jack Canfield and Mark V. Hansen, motivational speakers and self-help gurus, the ideas for the inspirational stories or the stories themselves are solicited from the millions of readers who buy these books. The web site allows readers to submit stories or ideas for new titles, and even to join focus groups (the “test center”) to give feedback on projects currently in development. And not only are there the expected licensed products associated with the registered trademark (including pet food and music compilations), there are now travel guides and a healthy living series under the brand. In short, the whole thing is a marketing juggernaut. And just to give the inspirational kick to the story of how it all started, the web site points out that the original manuscript was rejected by over 140 publishers before being picked up by a publisher who “caught the spirit.” Follow your dreams, people, follow your dreams.

The “Story Guidelines” link makes explicit what a glance at the titles suggests—a successful Chicken Soup story “is an inspirational, true story about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. It is a story that opens the heart and rekindles the spirit. It is a simple, inter-denominational, living art piece that touches the soul of the readers and helps them discover basic principles they can use in their own lives.” Make it vivid, make it emotional, and above all, make it feel good—the operative word, it seems, is “goosebumps.” More interesting than the list of the desired qualities is the list of what a Chicken Soup story is NOT: “about politics or controversial issues”; “a sermon, an essay, or a eulogy,” and so on.

I could go on. There’s nothing like coming upon entire worlds of cultural experience that I never knew existed to make me feel estranged from America, looking in from the outside in both fascination and horror. The sudden reality of this other world, with its highly articulated system of values that are unquestioned and unquestioning, makes me doubt that I ever knew anything about this country or its inhabitants. I had a similar feeling when I learned what a huge economic and cultural phenomenon scrapbooking was. According to Wikipedia, “this hobby has surpassed golf in popularity”—let that sink in for a minute. Does that not blow your mind? (By the way, Chicken Soup for the Scrapbooker’s Soul is now in development, so submit your stories now).

But what’s wrong, one might ask, with people sharing stories and feeling good about themselves? Isn’t there a kind of democratic ethos at work here, a collective grassroots effort that harnesses the energies of people who want to reach out and inspire and connect? I’m sure that many people do find comfort and inspiration in these books, and of course, it must be empowering to have a story or book idea accepted (and writers do get paid for any submissions that get published). It’s a form of interactive direct marketing whose appeal on both ends is easy enough to imagine.

Still, the whole thing creeps me out, and I’m trying to figure out why. For one, there’s the “violence of enforced happiness,” as my husband put it. The affirmation industry doesn’t leave much room for complicated or conflicted feelings in the face of hardship or adversity. It’s a collective act of repression—anger, jealousy, bitterness, resentment, frustration, boredom are allowed to make an appearance only as that which gets stamped out or expunged by the miracle of life and love.

But what bothers me more than the desire for the neat answer and happy platitudes that seems to drive the enterprise is how efficiently those behind the Chicken Soup brand exploit this need and how vigilantly they control its message. Maybe I’m just rehashing Marketing 101, but the great big gap I perceive between the promise and the product gets me down. Plus, the “guidelines” to which all stories must conform and the long development process each title undergoes (3-4 years on average) reinforce my sense that the collective efforts of contributors do not affect the brand; rather, the brand repackages contributions to a uniform standard.

To push the food metaphor of the brand a little, Chicken Soup for the Soul Enterprises, Inc. seems to be selling junkfood through the medium of books, and passing it off as healthful and nutritious. As the ad copy at the B&N proclaims, “Nourish your spirit!”; “Have an extra helping of goodness to nourish your heart!”; “One serving isn’t enough!” But if the books are so nourishing, why do we need another 101 stories that say essentially the same thing about being a Golden Latino Nature Loving Soul? Why does the soul remain so hungry? I can’t help but imagine millions of readers filling up on one Chicken Soup title after another and becoming spiritually obese and still vaguely unsatisfied. Such obesity would be both a symptom of deeper spiritual malaise and itself a condition that, like its physical counterpart, exacts its toll. Here, I do not mean to suggest that moral culpability lies with the individual readers for turning to these books for affirmation and comfort or for wanting to tell their stories of inspiration. Rather, to follow E Hayot’s piece on what it would mean to think about fat not as an “individual problem but a social and economic one,” I’m suggesting that there may be a “culture of spiritual obesity” in which the affirmation industry, like the food industry, is part of the “large-scale reproductive nature of the problem” (E Hayot again), perpetuating compulsive, compensatory habits that aren’t really good for us. The problem in this case, I suppose, is the idea that we can find answers in simple, platitudinous stories or that if our lives were more like Hallmark cards, we’d be so much happier. The active denial that these books seem to encourage is, I think, what creeps me out. And we don’t need to go far to figure out what might be being denied. The publisher of the Chicken Soup books, Health Communications, Inc., has another imprint, Hazelden, whose titles name what Chicken Soup can’t cure.

Nothing seems to make liberals angrier than all the lies told by the Bush administration. I’ve had more than a few sleepless nights and bellyaches myself over the past five years, but it’s worth noting how often it tells the truth, even if sometimes it sort of mixes up the names and dates and places and stuff. At times it seems that the administration’s strategy of accusing the enemy –be it John Kerry, Cindy Sheehan, or a levy—of doing exactly what it itself has done is so consistent and so precise that their own statements read almost like a kind of nervous confession.

The other day I printed out the transcript of Bush’s October 6 speech on the state of the war on terror. Before I got around to reading it, however, I spilled White-Out all over it. Hmm. Still, it made for a pretty interesting read. I think Bush is really coming around.

Then there was this bit, which I guess is about America. This must just be his way of saying "Bring it on!"

This term I'm teaching an English course on Science. It seems a little odd, and it appeared that way to my students at first, but I’ve found that the science world provides just as much room for discussions of ethics and subjectivity, supplies a way to talk about the individual and the writer, even the passive voice and thesis statements, as any more humanities-focused topic. An analytic approach to science invites the critical thinking I would want a student to take away from freshman composition. We tend to think about how science, which is often separated from or seen as transcendent of human affairs, functions in culture. How could we read against the grain of technological determinism and see the social implications of direct current and alternating current? What is the role of the individual in the creation of a novel versus the solution of a mathematical equation? Where do objectivity and progress separated from the human lead us?

At this last question my students thought for a moment and shyly raised their hands. “The atom bomb.” “The gas chamber.” Good.

That said, we also talk about how cool science is, all the time.

I’m also taking two courses in which the concept of “progress” and “modernity” come up frequently, and present myriad problems. One of the problems with studying the "modern" is that there is something "modern" about every time period. It's essentially a diectic. The problem with studying “Modernism” is that you have to deal as well with “modern,” “modernity,” and that evil thing, “modernization.” So many questions in seminar. Is this modern, is that modern? What do we do with societies that have not industrialized? What is an "alternative" modernism? Yikes. Because of all this intellectual labor this term, I was delighted to come upon an October 5th article by Jason Szep of Reuters about recent Nobel Prize winner Richard Schrock that nicely tied together many of the things I’ve been lately pondering.

Richard Schrock (MIT) was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry this year for the development of the “metathesis” method of organic synthesis. He shares the prize with Yves Chauvin (Institut Français du Pétrole) and Robert H. Grubbs (Caltech) for their research into the manipulation of a chemical reaction (metathesis) by the use of catalyst molecules. Their refined version of the process is used in the industry for both more efficient and more environmentally friendly fuels, synthetic fibers (including plastics and clothing), and pharmaceuticals.

Szep’s article focuses on the formative moment in Schrock’s scientific life: when his older brother Theodore gave him his first chemistry set, “whose explosive solutions and puzzling directions ignited a passion that culminated with the Nobel Prize.”

Most fascinating are the comments Szep includes from Schrock:

Beautiful. Before discovering science, Richard Schrock was decidedly primitive. Building huts in the woods "or something." After the chemistry set is introduced, he sets out on a path of development (a loaded term right now) that culminates in one of the most valued cultural achievements.

But there are stages in between:

Schrock’s recounting of his development from pre-chemistry set (which he received at age 8) to Nobel Prize replays a typical timeline of civilization driven by scientific progress. We have three moments: the pre-rational "out building huts in the woods," the fascinating and magical stage of alchemical transformation, to the hard science discovery of an ultra-efficient process that nabbed him the Nobel Prize.

Funny, also, that Schrock notices that “making things blow up” is an early, undeveloped stage of the scientific mind. I would argue, though, and my students frequently return to this idea, that science, as it serves the government, the military, etc., is still largely valued for its ability to explode things. And that’s where a lot of the money is.

October 4, 2005

Dear Mother,

You were here on Earth before me.

When I came out from between your legs you were twenty-seven years old. Nineteen seventy-two. I am older now than you were then.

If I knew you now and you were twenty-seven, I might say to you, Wait. This is too soon for children. Why the rush? What about your career? Is this decision compatible with your feminism?

You went on to get your Ph.D. while working fulltime. I was eleven or so. I told one of my classmates, When your mom gets her Ph.D. it means she never has time to play with you.

Mother, this is very complicated. It has taken me a long time... it is taking me a long time to recognize you as human.

The first time I heard you swear, I was ten. You had come home in the dark with my father. I snuck out of bed, hid in the kitchen, jumped out at you.

The first time I saw you cry I was eleven. You were in the bathroom of our apartment.

When I was nineteen or so I included my father in a list of people I admired. I pointedly did not include you. You asked, Eric, why don't you twist the knife in my back one more time?

That was not the last time I twisted the knife.

Every act of aggression comes in proportion to the revenge it takes for an earlier wounding. That is, we only retaliate insofar as we feel hurt. You can measure the hurt by the degree of retaliation. This means that the ethics of any act of aggression can be calculated, as long as the degree of hurt can be definitively ascertained. Unfortunately, the degree of hurt is subjective and not, therefore, definitively ascertainable. And so we go on arguing.

When we were 10 and 6 you took us to the swimming pool every day for a summer.

You paid for everything.

You don't believe that you have an unconscious.

Mother, it is, it seems to me, difficult to have a mother--probably to have parents in general. They tend to have expectations of you. At least, to make this more personal, you have tended to have expectations of me. This is--if I try to think clearly about my various aggressions--some unconscious or barely conscious, lame and imperfect legitimation.

Here's something: when I was fifteen you referred to me as "obese." I have not yet forgiven you.

At the job interview in 1976, you were pregnant with my sister. The chair of the board asked you how your pregnancy would affect your ability to perform the work required for this position. You said, I am happy to tell you, Mr. Moss, that this is not a permanent condition.

Motherhood, however, is.

Mother, what do you really think of me? What have you thought of me this whole time?

Mother, today you are 60 years old.

Mother, you knew me before I knew myself.

Mother, I love you, but I have also been so angry at you.

Mother, we both know it hasn't been all wine and roses.

Mother, what are you getting out of this relationship?

TV writers particularly lamented the rise of reality TV, since it put them out of a job. The good news for them is that this trend too is passing and scripted drama is making its comeback. The new trend in network TV is what I call the Long Arc series (though I think the suits are still using the old catch-all term "high concept"), shows whose individual episodes are often a little weak but which keep you watching by an addictive season-long storyline.

The best example of this new genre is ABC's "Lost." "Lost" is a terrible show, but it is crammed full of enticing mysteries, the main one being whether the survivors of a plane crash will get off the remote island on which they now find themselves. "Lost" seems to have been created as a direct response to "Survivor," the imagination struggling to reassert its rights over the realm of fact. They like desert islands, we'll give 'em desert islands!

“Alias” is arguably a long-arc show but I think its appeal was less the ridiculous contortions involving the Rimbaldi artifact (Rimbaud + Da Vinci = Rimbaldi, right?) and whose mom killed whose dad and more the glam action sequences: put on this tiny dress and this red wig and go get that disk! "Alias" is part soap and psychodrama, part caper show in the tradition of "Mission: Impossible" recast for the era of the sexy female action hero, following in the who-says-you-can't-have-it-all footsteps of La Femme Nikita and Buffy. These are heroines who can both rescue and be rescued, though I often think someone should do a count of exactly how many times they do each to see if they really are good role models for empowering girls.

This summer I somehow got drawn into the latest offering in this vein. “Prison Break” is first and foremost a long-arc show. A brilliant engineer whose brother is wrongly convicted and sentenced to execution decides to rescue him by committing a crime that will put him in the same prison and then breaking out. Will they be able to escape? For a few weeks it seemed to be on every time I turned on the TV, too tired for one of my serious NetFlix picks. Having missed the pilot increased the challenge of following the story and made me more forgiving.

The other aspect of the show worth commenting on is that it is super-gay. Of course, no prison drama would be complete without the threat of homosexuality. Fear of anal rape is the symbolic basis of our criminal justice system, otherwise prison might sound like three hots and a cot, same as the army and a whole lot safer these days. "Prison Break" splits homosexuality into the "bad", represented by the lewd and sinister rapist Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell, a lean, swishing, drawling white supremacist who can't stop licking his fingers and goateed lips, and those appealing homoerotic elements which can be safely smuggled past the inhibitions of the hetero male: devotion between brothers, the sadism of guards, a tragic inability to connect with women, muscular hypertrophy and the right underwear to go with it.

The show just keeps growing on me; Episode 6 left me genuinely impressed and I'm revising this upwards as I'm watching number 7.

At first I had taken "Prison Break" for a typical example of the current popular post-CSI fare, shows which get by more on high production values than writing, and which suffer from an absence of any real characters. Much of the dialogue is spoken in such a monotone as to be almost unintelligible.

What is this contemporary degree zero of characterization? At first, you take it for the hastiness of cheap hackwork. On reflection, the possibility emerges that it is a new noir style, an update of the hardboiled exterior, the male emotional exoskeleton toughened to the point of paralysis and now generously applied to both sexes. The hardness might be a dim idea of scientific objectivity, or corporate professionalism raised to the nth degree.

It is also possible to put a broader political interpretation on it. It reminds me of movies like "Starship Troopers," the most fascist film I've ever seen, in which the collectivist enemy is reduced to bugs to be exterminated, or "Independence Day," whose characters are all such stereotypes that they seem to be arguing for the extinction of human individuality altogether. The political meaning of individualism and anti-individualism is always ambiguous; both can be right-wing or left-wing. Here the lack of individuality feels covertly reactionary.

Maybe in a couple years there will be a CSI everywhere there's a Hard Rock Café and after having a burger under a certified Elvis guitar you will go home and watch a show about a corpse found in a glamorous locale you wish you had the time and money to visit. With its lurid world of rape reenactments, gross-out butchery in the morgue room, sudden volume spikes and fast camera cuts racing along bullet paths and through colons and such, the CSI franchise is a big step down from its nobler precursor Law & Order, whose special effects consisted largely of a two-beat sound that ended scenes.

In the eternal race to the bottom, CSI is currently beating out Law & Order and its tawdry sex-crimes spin-off by almost two to one, roughly the same ratings lead that Fox News has on CNN. Neither of these shows has any long arcs or even ongoing relationships between characters but viewers keep coming back for more. Whatever trends come and go, it's safe to say the detectives will always be with us.

This year I faced wandering into the new fall television season as I usually do – showless and alone. Desperate Housewives had ceased to compel my interest. Watching Arrested Development unfold its absurd tricks is a pleasure every time, but the show has never been something I exactly looked forward to. It lets me marvel at it for half an hour, but since I don’t have to worry about the characters or how they’ll extract themselves from some crazy situation, I spend no time thinking about the show after it's over.

So, what did I do? Research. I read about TV shows, mostly at Flow, and decided to make mine Lost. The writers there seemed to approve: one said it (along with Jack and Bobby) is a rare show that makes a space for the debate of progressive and conservative values, another said “it’s the best show on American network television” (a bold pronouncement, delivered in bold type).

Currently, I’m making my way through the DVDs of season one and am taping the current episodes to watch after catching up to them. It’s not exactly what I’d wanted (a regular show – scheduled relaxation!) but I’m happy enough. The DVD for works so well for television – no commercials, the instant gratification of having 4 or more episodes back-to-back, and the picture quality far outpaces that offered by our rabbit ears. What seems most appealing about the show itself is its concentration on characters that (to this point) are fairly complicated, the way their stories are revealed slowly in accreting flashbacks, and also the way it plays with genre. Lost leaves open the question of whether the world it has created is one where miracles happen, or one where conspiracy, alien intervention, or pure coincidence happens.

Having gotten my feet wet, I checked back in at Flow to see what if anything was new, and found that the most recent articles seem to fret over the show’s serial form. They’re worried whether its central mysteries can last.

and:

 
The problem they sketch out is one of the withholding of knowledge and audience fatigue. How can a TV serial keep the audience happy? Presumably by solving mysteries and giving the audience closure. And then how can the show keep the audience interested in watching (more important from the show’s perspective keep itself going and from the network’s perspective keep selling ad time)? Presumably by delaying resolution or piling on new mysteries.
 
Put to the screws, I doubt that many people actually want closure from a TV show. It’s plot, it seems, that engenders the death drive (the vulgar, un-careful reading of the death drive that stops at “things want to die”). Wanting to know what happens next, wanting all of the mysteries to be solved, viewers secretly end up longing for the end of the show (maybe it’s a tele-cidal or seri-cidal impulse). But that can’t be what viewers really want. (I take that back – viewers can’t want that unless their show has so seriously hobbled itself, like The X-Files did, that they want it to die and put everyone, including the show, out of their misery.) The real pleasure in watching TV, it seems to me, is the painful suspense of not knowing what happens, and of working out scenarios and theories about what might happen and why it might happen. Of course, the show has to be good enough in the first place for viewers to care about what happens.
 
It is a tough dilemma. But if DVD sales of TV shows begin to outpace advertising revenue (and I have no idea how likely that is) TV just might begin to change. In the time it takes for one good show to (inevitably) exhaust itself and languish, infuriating and alienating viewers, writers and producers could offer multiple mini-serials. This truncated serial could last two or three seasons on broadcast TV and then just stop – before they answer all the questions, before they solve all the mysteries, prolonging the pleasure of not-knowing at a point when the audience still cares to know.
 
** Stay tuned (in true serial form) . . . Next time on printculture: S Shirazi with more on TV, serial form and Lost.

A couple of weeks ago, via the magic of the internet, I was listening to a local AM radio broadcast of an Ohio State football game. Though they were fairly clearly en route to a win versus San Diego State an observation by the broadcast team’s sideline reporter - former OSU quarterback Jim Karsatos - revealed a source for concern.

Karsatos: I’m so frustrated. We’re dancing with them when we should be punching them in the mouth!

(That “quote” is, admittedly, from memory, but I’ll stand by the key elements – frustration and the distinction between dancing and punching in the mouth.)

As football fans would recognize, the charming phrase to “punch someone in the mouth” can be used with a relatively specialized football meaning. Namely, it refers to running the ball more or less straight up the middle of the field as opposed to passing the ball or running the ball out toward the sidelines.

One way of looking at Karsatos’ lament, then, is that it is a figurative expression of a fairly specific point of football strategy. I.e., he believed Ohio State would be more successful running the ball straight at the middle of the San Diego State Defense, rather than trying to beat them with plays to the outside of the field.

If this is correct, though, shouldn’t we expect – when strategy dictates more passing or plays to the outside of the field – to hear a report in which the sideline reporter demands angrily: “Why are we punching them in the mouth? We should be dancing with them!!” Not, as they say, bloody likely.

So far, this is generally a rumination on the discourse of sports broadcasting, but it leads to something that might at step toward answering E Hayot’s call for “serious formal work on sports.”

While sports have general associations attached to them – football as a whole is taken to be more violently masculine than baseball, say – the punch/dance space within football is a useful reminder of the degree to which particular performances and strategies within sports can shape a variety of socially legible experiences.

It is the case, for instance, that a straightforward running play in football looks quite different (in person or on TV) from a pass or lateral run:

At the snap of the ball, do the offensive lineman surge forward, initiating contact with the defensive players (this would be mouth-smashing), or do they stand up and retreat backward, absorbing and redirecting the on-rushing defense (“Why are they dancing?”)?

Running plays are quick to unfold – their success or failure is apparent with a speed that feels almost instant as the offensive line either has or hasn’t created a lane through which the back can run. Passing plays, on the other hand, are punctuated by discernable segments, the quarterback drops back and surveys the field, then – in a moment of pregnant tension that shares something with a basketball shot, perhaps – the ball is in the air, then, it arrives at its destination to be caught, dropped, knocked away or intercepted. On television – the means by which I imagine most people enjoy a football game – this tension is augmented by the scale of the screen in that the player to whom the quarterback is throwing the ball is generally off-screen at the moment the ball takes flight.

In an aesthetic space, these differences are surely interpretable. And I would venture to say that as it circulates through, in the surplus of language we can see the aesthetic reception of the difference between smashing teams in the mouth and dancing with them. As it has evolved over the decades, football is currently more dancing than ever before – especially at the college level. So, if there is masculinist pressure toward smashing, it seems to face a tough opponent in its cousin Practicality.

All football plays, of course, require feats of strength, balance and speed – but there is a difference in how things look that gets mapped on to the meaning of the game beyond the game itself. The prevailing pressures to win first and foremost are such that we’re unlikely to get much explicitly aesthetic or cultural accounting of players’ or coaches’ strategy. But it seems of some interest – hopefully these notes start to sketch out the rudiments of what could be really interesting work – that the rules and responsive strategies of football translate into movement and spectacle that can both establish and threaten the implicit male subject that it centers for teams, players and fans.

Otherwise, who could possibly care whether one bunch of strangers beats another bunch of strangers in a made-up contest?

I went to grad school where I now teach—after a decent interval of fifteen years spent on the opposite coast. Let’s call it Saint Elihu’s. The major buildings here are in archetypal Collegiate Gothic form, with plenty of carved stone and leaded-glass windows. Gateways and mantelpieces are loaded up with the heraldry of self-praise.