Mushin-Sho

I begin with Benedict Anderson and Salman Rushdie for reasons I have already articulated.  

Moving to Tropic of Orange will bring us back to the Americas and continue the magical-realist writing style. Yamashita’s Americas, however, include no white-male perspective, despite the use of seven character perspectives. If Saleem Sinai drives toward nationalism despite innumerable fissures, both in his own body and in the society he attempts to represent, then Tropic is a rejection of Saleem’s mission. That is, the book’s fragmented and marginal perspectives never allow one to settle on a single story of the nation. We are, instead, given multiple, semi-autonomous storylines; they are threads that sometimes knot together and sometimes just rub. This formal layering of narratives and narrative styles––the shift in prose structures in remarkable––performs a critique of the drive toward the national story generally, while also taking on NAFTA specifically. Indicting the Trade Agreement for maintaining systemic poverty, Tropic rejects one’s ability to think the nation without locating it in a transnational world system. I am not sure I would trust my ability to communicate all of this to my students, but I have our Detroit surroundings as a tragically ready example.

If I have succeeded in the past two sections, then transitioning into Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient should not be too disconcerting, despite shifting in time to WWII and the location to an Italian villa. There are, at least at present, two key thoughts I want to continue into this book. First, I want to continue to think through marginal spaces, those disavowed, even temporarily, by all nations. The title character was once a desert explorer whose friends were limited to those interested in the same work. These associates, however, belonged to many different countries, all allegiances to which were forgotten in that arid landscape. Such unacknowledged spaces, then, need not simply be tragic if we can see their ability to create bonds among different peoples. The hospital/ villa in which the story is told performs a similar role. Secondly, we can use Ondaatje to think through how a seminal event in American history, WWII, and the dropping of atomic bombs, can be written through a marginal perspective. I am thinking specifically of Kip’s reaction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We will, hopefully, be able to tie space and narrative perspective together to see the forgotten stories of WWII and write the spaces left in its wake.

Finally, and perhaps most adventurously, I want to bring my students to Murambi, The Book of Bones, a narrative about the Rwandan genocide. Saleem, and his drive to write a nation, will have become something of a punching bag by this point. The aim now, however, will be to recover that project in the guise of this statement: If we posit the Rwandan Genocide, through Diop’s text, as a misrecognition of fellow citizens, then perhaps more nationalism isn’t always a bad thing. We must be careful here not to slip into a sloppy relativism (“nationalism is sometimes good sometimes bad”) and consider how group identity is formed in the text. Is there a Hutu nation posited?  How does the “Hutu” identity come to be historically, and how do its militant advocates narrate it?

I offer this book as the final one despite, or probably because of, my own investment in it; I will be writing a paper on the text, which is to be delivered at NEMLA. For the class, however, I want to channel my student’s emotional investment into a greater intellectual sensitivity. If the class has been successful, then we will have to think Diop’s text through an attention to Anderson’s argument, layered and disjunctive narrations, marginal spaces and their colonial inheritance, and our transnational connection to butchered children.

    The class will begin with a short story from Zora Neal Hurston in order to foreground the relationship between language and identity. By situating her in the Harlem Renaissance and the rise of Black letters more broadly, we will ask why she chooses to use black vernacular in her writings? Specifically, what are the political limits and enablments of such an aesthetic practice?
    My polemical aim is to place alternative vocabularies and grammatical structures in conversation with “Standard English,” hopefully denaturalizing the latter. Given that the class is for Education majors, my goal is to make these future teachers reflect on their profession so that what they teach is neither given nor unsullied by political implications.

    The second round of reading will be the introduction to Anderson’s Imagined Communities. This is an obvious starting place for thinking about how national identity is thought. (I concede that a proper examination of “nationalism” could/ should begin with earlier writings, but I am limited by the potential reading difficulty of such texts and, more importantly, my lack of comfort with those materials–––recently ordered edited collections and readers on the topic should help my understanding). After discussing Anderson, however, I am unsure how to order the texts and what follows is an attempt to think through my options.


Within National/ Continental boundaries:
    

    Midnight’s Children: Considering Anderson will be fresh in our minds, Saleem’s psychic connection with his nation-state seems like a good starting point. We would be forced to think through the ‘birth’ of a nation, and national consciousness, and the violence proper to such an event. Indeed, the simultaneous arrival of East and West Pakistan may help me disenfranchise the nation as the natural telos of particular spaces and their constituents. (Perhaps assigning the film Gandhi will help build an affective relationship to India and its struggle for independence. Perhaps too, America’s founding fathers can also be rethought as the “revolutionaries” they were in these conversations). Saleem’s psychic ability also has the merit of attempting to unite an incredible range of languages, classes, religions, castes, and political situations. His endeavor’s problems and successes should help us approach a central problem of national identity; how are multiple realities framed so that fellow feeling and even solidarity is possible?
    (A secret benefit for me: I am working on a paper about Midnight’s Children and will have recently finished it when this unit begins).  
    At a very practical level, the girth and difficulty of Rushdie’s text will scare off those looking for easy ways to fulfill credit requirements. Also, saving a text of this magnitude for the semester’s end, a possibility if I organized the readings temporally, will add lead weights to our legs as we try to sprint to a finish.


Third Section: Thinking Modernity and the Colonial Project:
    

    The political reading for this section is yet to be determined, although Said, Bhabha or Lenin would do well.
    Henry James’ short story “The Real Thing” will introduce the aesthetic readings for this section. The narrative, as I will frame it, helps understand the political and social ruptures created by modernity. Most importantly, I am concerned with a disappearing aristocracy, the flow of peoples across borders, the reevaluation of Englishness (or the metropole more generally), and the ways one can represent such changes. All of these issues are available in James’ story and will set up Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness well.
    I will use Conrad’s work to demonstrate the logic and vocabulary of the colonial project. In terms of nationalism, I will probably frame this as both the (English) civilizing mission and defining the Self in opposition to the Other. Following James’s work, we can also see how colonial administrators and the goods they are pillaging/ exporting belong to a rising middle class, defined both economically and culturally. Administrators, like Kurtz, can have bright futures by helping manage the periphery and their success will allow them comfortable living when they arrive home. Moreover, the goods they procure, ivory in this case, are part of consumption practices based on imports that are alive and well today. Finally, I would like to assign “Apocalypse Now” to bring the discussion “home.” Putting Iraq, Vietnam, and the Belgium Congo into conversation should be an interesting way to interrogate notions of ‘national progress’.
    We can also use this conversation to discuss the value and limitations of comparisons, both the ahistorical models deployed in mainstream media and the historically grounded analysis modeled by the class.
    On consideration, perhaps a reading of “race theory” or the “hierarchy of nations” from the late 19th/ early 20th century will give us a taste of the intellectual milieu in which these texts operate. Then again, I have to keep in mind that the class’ reading level and my own desire may not synchronize.


Fourth Section: Expatriate/ Comparative Nationalisms
    

    Again, I am uncertain which political text to use or if there should be one at all. Although the frame for the class is nationalism, I would like to provide my students with narrower and historically particular lenses through which they can read the text. Considering the primary reading for this section is Claude McKay’s Banjo, I would do well to get advice form Af-Am specialists.
    So, Banjo: I’m excited about teaching this text because student perspectives will help me think through the work. Amongst the many strands to be teased out, first is the return to a focus on language. Like Hurston, McKay’s language vocalizes a particular political project; returning to this issue will be particularly interesting after reading Conrad and interrogating colonialist vocabulary. Second, there are voices for diasporic consciousness within the text, many of which are Garveyite; the “race man” then envisions solidarity along particular lines but, according to a few voices in the text, the ultimate aim is to create an independent nation. Here is an opportunity to compare race solidarity and nationalism.
    Thirdly, Banjo also questions how marginalized peoples relate to different nationalisms. The protagonist vagabonds (itself an interesting term) are expatriates of various nations or colonies and are bombarded by French citizens deluded with their own claims of tolerance. These claims cannot be entirely dismissed but, like the condemnation of American culture that accompanies them, cannot be swallowed whole either. Exploring the tension between these competing visions will, I hope, provide us with a transnational perspective that holds multiple nations and multiple modes of unity in view. Again, I am interested in foregrounding the various Americas the text offers, including different understandings of the United States (“United Snakes” according to one character) and the “Americas” writ large––Ray, after all, is West Indian.

The text of a class presentation by Shashi Thandra™

     The multiple threads that knot Henry James’ The Real Thing together cannot be unraveled easily or without an arbitrarily chosen starting strand. Let me then begin by outlining some of the material social conditions within the text before moving on to a more aesthetic formal reading.

    The absurdly named Mr. and Mrs. Monarch’s arrival at the narrator’s studio points to the drastic social mobility and individualism signaled by modernity. Their status as “Lady” and “Gentleman” is no longer a stable predetermined given, but rather subject to the same flux as other characters. This social flux, in turn, combines with the density of city life, London in this case, to force the mixing of various social ranks. The narrator’s studio becomes a contact zone where old aristocracy in the form of the Monarchs meet the working class cockney Miss Churm, the recently arrived Italian Oronte, and incisively unproductive Jack Hawley. Common to all, however, is their relationship to the narrator, a relationship predicated on another entailment of individualism, namely labor power. As Singer states, “Whatever the reality of material compulsion, they were at liberty to sell their labor on the market, entering into contracts independently and voluntarily” (Singer 31). Within the rise of mature capitalism, these contracts were impersonal, with nonspecific others, such as the ultimately anonymous narrator.  This situation is foreign to the Monarchs as evidenced by their awkward negotiations with the narrator, and ultimately revealing itself as the shock of equality to Mr. Monarch and his efforts to secure employment. “There are thousands, as good as yourself, already on the ground” (James 15).
    The ground itself becomes compressed in the narrative, through the mention and use of transportation technologies such as the train and omnibus. Moreover, the arrival of Oronte and the voyages of Jack Hawley hint toward the rapidity and relative affordability of travel. These material circumstances provide ground for the constant arrival, stasis, and departure of characters in the narrative. For the purposes of this presentation, I want to morph these themes into a theory of time, focusing first on the Monarchs as representations of a past historical moment. 

“But, somehow, with all their perfections I didn’t easily believe in them. After all they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of my life was the detestation of the amateur. Combined with this was another perversity––an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they were or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question” (12).

    The Monarchs are professional aristocracy but amateur models of a historical moment that has already passed. As living monuments to that past moment, however, they are real, which is precisely what makes them useless for the narrator-artist. If one envisions the Monarchs as a historical archive, as historical data available in the present, their uselessness takes on another dimension; their literal and figurative bankruptcy can only be undone by their value for representation. Our narrator’s preference for the represented subject, although posited as a perversity, is the inevitability of accessing the past only as a representation. Indeed, he begins to envision them as such from the moment of their arrival. “The defect of the real” is that it raises the “profitless question” of facticity, which is subordinate to the concerns of the present. In other words, the value of a representation of the past is not in its factual faithfulness but rather its ability to serve the present moment. One can then be sure of things that appear precisely because one is sure that they are representations.
    The narrator’s moment requires figures for a book and the Monarchs’ realness doesn’t translate into, and in fact hinders, their representability. Mrs. Monarch has no variety, is “insurmountably stiff” and rather pleased with a self-identified facticity, that “she was the real thing.” The narrator-artist’s attempt to contort and reposition cannot repress the ‘real,’ and she ultimately cannot fit adequately within the representation’s frame, always coming out “too tall” (21). As a metaphor for the historical archive, Mrs. Monarch and her stiffness allude to the ultimate incomprehensibility/ unrepresentability of a past ‘real’ and its perpetual bankruptcy if it cannot be molded for present use. Beyond this metaphor, Mrs. Monarch specifically and the Monarchs generally stand in as premodern subjects who have not adapted to the fundamental plasticity required by modernity, a plasticity that is given voice by our narrator.

“I adored variety and range. I cherished human accidents, the illustrative note; I wanted to characterize closely, and the thing in the world I most hated was the danger of being ridden by a type…I might only be a presumptuous young modern searcher, but I held that everything was to be sacrificed sooner than character….It couldn’t be everybody’s––it might end in being nobody’s” (22).

    The narrator-artist’s notion of “character” seems to point toward a unique individual “essence” but is rather the plasticity of modern subjects, as exemplified by Miss Churm and Oronte. The former is characterized positively as having an “inexplicable talent for imitation” and negatively as having “no positive stamp” (22). In contradistinction to Mrs. Monarch, Miss Churm does not bear the mark of the ‘real’ and so can “sit for characters that had nothing in common with each other” or her (23). Her point of pride is demonstrated in the narrative by her ability to represent a Russian princess and Artemisia, the love object in an acclaimed novel series (38). The name Artemisia itself is the phonetic equivalent of combining ‘art’ and ‘amnesia’, which in turn doubly signals the necessary plasticity of ‘character’ required in representation specifically, and modernity generally. Even more plastic, however, is Oronte.
    His arrival is the kind of “human accident” valued by the narrator, one that bespeaks a heroic dimension to the plasticity of the modern subject. Oronte’s “dumb, dog-like fidelity,” his “innocent impudence” and “manner of a devoted servant” almost instantly make pictures (27). One of these pictures envisions Oronte at St. Peter’s, an instant transport that places his actual journey from Italy in sharp relief. More than sudden changes of location, however, Oronte is able to communicate his desires, acquire employment and perform his duties without language, demonstrating infinitely more plasticity than the Monarchs. Indeed, it is precisely this “uncultivated, instinctive” plasticity of the “bright adventurer” that allows him to represent the novel series’ hero, Rutland Ramsey (27).
    As a brief aside, and for my own intellectual interests, Oronte’s migration also becomes an instant “assimilation;” he becomes an Englishman as soon as he dawns the clothes of one. That is to say, he is instantly ‘home.’ Moreover, Miss Churm’s ability to look Italian when called upon seems to negate the necessity of ‘real’ border crossing because the representation of such is equally valuable to the present. From another angle, we could say that Miss Churm and Oronte demonstrate the ‘character’ performance that is citizenship. But, I digress. Let me return to the original metaphor framing this reading. If the Monarchs represent a historical archive rigidly imposing itself as ‘real,’ then Miss Churm and Oronte are the malleable present. Beyond their relative youthfulness, the hero and heroine are a metaphor for the temporal present precisely because they are ‘characters,’ infinitely plastic and representable. Explicating this, however, requires an examination of the narrative’s form.  

    Two formal qualities will be briefly analyzed here: 1) The narrative is framed as a memory, within which are indicators of the temporal distance but ultimately eluding specificity. 2) Within the narration there are tangential moments, drifts to other spaces that imbed us further in an ambiguous past.
    The narrative is a recounted memory whose temporal distance from the narrator’s “actual” moment is impossible to determine. Phrases such as “in those days,” ubiquitous use of the past tense and the lack of dates yield an ambiguous orientation vaguely pointing to an unlocatable past; we can, however, note that the narrator has acquired the contract for the Rutland Ramsey series during the interim (26).
    Other narrative clues point also point toward time passing, the most notable of which is the narrator’s trip to Italy. When Oronte arrives, the narrator remarks that he “had not then visited his country’ (26 Italics mine). Although the “then” of his comment establishes Oronte’s arrival as temporally prior, it does not help us gauge the temporal distance in any specific way. Such travel in the premodern period would require a great amount of time but, as has already been mentioned, emergent technologies, themselves rapidly developing, greatly reduced travel time disabling our temporal orientation in the narrative. Moreover, the “then” implicitly points to the “now” the narrator ‘actually’ occupies as he tells the story; however, our inability to locate the “then” with any specificity negates the search for the “now.” Indeed, the narrative flow itself negates the “now.”
    When Mr. Monarch first asks his wife to show how “smart” she is, the narrator-artist is immediately “reminded of an incident” in Paris, in which his friend, a dramatist, is approached by an actress who begins to audition for him (8). The narrative tangents for a mere two sentences here but breaks continuity in at least three different ways. Most obviously, we are spatially dislocated from London to Paris. Second, the art form shifts from the illustrative to the dramatic. (One could easily argue that this is in fact a juxtaposition meant to illustrate the former’s performative needs). Thirdly, the moment is a temporal break that places us doubly in the past; that is, within the narrative as memory, we are placed in another memory, all without being able to locate a stable present. [A more explicit example of this is the opening two paragraphs of section II]
    Finally, I want to argue that the narrative form––the impossibility of locating a “then” and “now,” and the temporal ruptures within it––combined with the plasticity of Oronte and Miss Churm, points to the absence of an immediate “now.” Rather, we have degrees of the past. The illusion of a present is actually the immediate past that, like Oronte and Miss Churm, is a ‘character’ without essence but infinitely plastic. However, this ‘character’ is only useful, it only ‘works’ literally and figuratively, if it is represented.  

    I was almost laughing, despite being adrenalized, because the muggers used such a classic script and played it like so many of the dress rehearsals at the dojo. Indeed, the gun and knife defense seminars had prepared me well for the language, the sight of a gun and the body movements. However, I was completely unprepared for the post mugging moment-of-truth.
    Walking up to my apartment I reviewed the incident, realizing with a surprise that I had stayed calm enough to ask questions, gauge distance; then, I wondered if I should call the police. The fact that they took my phone momentarily annulled that question but another deeper ‘logic’ announced itself with disturbing clarity. “What’s the point?” I thought to myself. “What am I going to say? Um, yes officer it was a black male with a gun. It’ll be a useless drop in the bucket, a drop that will vanish without distinction because it would be all too similar to hundreds of other cases in Detroit.” Within a few minutes my roommate came home and insisted that I call the police, which I did.
    The next day, I asked my students if my thought, my reason for not calling the police was racist. Only a few answered yes, partly, I think, because they didn’t want to accuse their just-mugged-teacher of racism. My own answer to that question, however, is a resounding “Yes!” The thought was absolutely racist, but one that demonstrates the power of ‘naturalizing narratives’ and the intersection of structural and cultural discourses.
    Most broadly, I began by naturalizing Detroit and armed robbery, understanding the latter as the inevitable consequence of living here, indeed even an occasion that marks one’s official entry to ‘Detroit-ness’––a perverse loss of virginity. Criminality here takes on spatial dimensions as inherent to deindustrialized urban centers generally, and Detroit specifically. Spatial logic, however, is a deliberate political construction, as Thomas Sugrue’s text so wonderfully demonstrates. The contradictory drives of New Deal policy toward home ownership and public housing framed an intense race conflict that ultimately led to the containment of Black urban residents in specific areas. Such strategic segregation of Black citizens into dilapidated housing in turn “proved” that Blacks could not be trusted to take care of their homes, that they would ruin whatever neighborhood they entered. Racist structural policies fed cultural “scientific” (observable) proof of Black ‘moral’ inferiority, which fueled policies; no origins, no simple cause-effect relationships, only circles of political violence. Indeed, my thoughts after the mugging made much the same logical circle, relegating the incident as merely the lived observation of an already given criminality.
    “The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him” (Foucault 219-from the Reader). Spatializing criminality simultaneously racializes it because criminal acts-deviance-delinquency are understood more broadly as the inevitable outcome of one’s ‘biography.’ At a very crass level this can be stated as “what else will a poor black urban youth do?” Rap culture, ‘gangsterism’ and such are prominent cultural discourses, often taking the form of ‘biographies’ that themselves ascribe race and place to criminality; that these ‘biographies’ are historically situated in segregationist political practices is conveniently absent. The intersection of the cultural and structural is precisely in the biography, which is then ‘naturalized’ (and demonized) as the cause of criminality.

My initial thought, to not call the police, performed an a-historical conflation of race-space and biography, melting all three into the mugger as a ‘natural’, inevitable product.

    Dull gray skies join earth in mists covering Detroit’s post-industrial flattened landscape. Allergy season has announced itself in grand melancholy with two weeks of rainy dullness and heavy sinus congestion. The medication has left me unable to concentrate or write with any sense of confidence. Meanwhile, the blank white document winks menacingly at the end of every written word, challenging, laughing and mocking my momentarily paralyzed writing.

That paragraph died there, trapped somewhere in my body’s infinite mucus production which has drawn energy away from all higher brain functioning.

    After conceding to my body-mind revolt and returning home, I watched Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight. The film is a beautifully constructed polemic against the American “military-industrial complex,” the term that articulates the film’s central thesis. Although the film includes many voices, from Richard Perle to an Iraqi shepherd, there is little here that will surprise any Leftist. However, the film makes several important moves that are becoming tropes both in my thinking and my teaching.
    The film opens with a clip of President Eisenhower’s farewell address that warns against the costs/repercussions of developing an immense military capability. Eisenhower’s address is repeatedly invoked throughout, using various clips while repeating others. His warning, given in 1961, is immediately juxtaposed with clips of GW Bush, Clinton, Reagan and other recent leaders’ call to armed intervention. The shifts, the cuts, from a blurry black and white past to the HD present represent a central trope in my thinking and teaching; contextualizing the present through multiple historical narratives. When Vietnam comes into focus as a particular example, a retired New York police sergeant’s own experience of the war is deployed to particularize the experience. His profound self-awareness of those moments as a helicopter gunner, of dealing with people’s lives, is suddenly held in tension with abstract dehumanizing; “they were just objects, you know.” The particularity of his narrative, and the additional depth it provides relative to a major but fading American memory, is both complexified and made present by our knowledge of his son’s death in the 9/11 tragedy. Placing multiple intersecting, overlapping historical narratives, themselves ranging from the abstract to the particular, in relief and in conversation with the present is, for me, an important cognitive/ pedagogical project.
    A simultaneous and coterminous move, one already alluded to, is from the hyperlocal to the global and back; hence globalization studies. The film does this with great generality, as the world map simply becomes a two- dimensional surface for the deployment of American power. I took this to be a brilliant performance of the very thing being critiqued. However, the film does provide a brief but detailed history of the US helping place the Shah in Iran, backing Saddam Hussein to limit the Iranian revolution and then demonizing him as the greatest threat to ‘the civilized world.’ More importantly, the camera metaphorically and literally zooms in on Iraqi corpses produced by American bombs. Tears and nausea intersect here as the melted paled toes of a jean-clad body form the stack’s apex. Bleeding children and tearful parents open an internal space for testimony from Iraqi doctors and morticians on the absence of military victims.

    My intention was to broadly characterize my project as shifts between the microscopic and the telescopic, but that explication will have to wait till tomorrow; perhaps the highest complement I can offer this film, or any project, is that I am emotionally drained from engaging it.

 

For those who are attempting to make the movement of infinite resignation, of letting [them] go, here is a quote that I found timely. Courtesy of Gwen, this is a brief excerpt from an intro to Thich Nhat Hanh and Buddhist philosophy; this article, like the quote from Said, will lay foundational principles in my Fall and Winter classes.

“The elements that make up the world are patterns of dependency and interweaving. In other words, they are relationsips. When we are fully aware, we see that there are only relationships. All relationships are patters of interaction. So they are, by definition, dynamic; they are patterns of change. There are no individual things, but only ongoing processes. These processes are made up of other, constantly changing processes. All of reality is combinations of patterns of relationships in process.”

…and a part of that process is loss…

 

These are two ‘sonnets’ I wrote four years ago, when I was approximately 19-20ish. They were wriiten for Barrett’s class, for a paper that attempted to think through Ted Berrigan thinking through Shakespeare, and a really fucked up relationship I had at the moment.

38
Masked marauders rape eternity in an instant
Bass lines soothe perfumed down
As Divine love is dragged into drains.
flee into invisibility
I remember why it’s called an Eternal quest
I wish it had rained.
Why couldn’t you be? A dream
As the rain kept off for our garden voyage
It saved my eyes from truth.
Sense gives, senses ride, and I dive
shine behind the darkness of closed eyes
And guides to the death of I.
The movie, the dream; light a dreamed movie
 to watch when you’re raped blind.


10
Dream unravels longing,  
Guides to the death of I.
Control + (s)aved
Immortality of death
I forget to remember; a Dream
The waning beating source
Sunk in your murk
Why so much damn dimness?
The raped undead, battling Non-sense
in walks across rainy gardens,
Was lost in our youth.
Eternal light in artful eyes
Fruitlessly thriving in Divine love.
Her clutch feigns direction
Beware the ephemeral, or forget: dream.

There is an uncanny pleasure in watching someone you admire fulfill your admiration, confirm their greatness and your ability to appreciate it; thus it is for me with Said.

“Texts are protean things, they are tied to circumstances and to politics large and small, they require attention and criticism. No one can take hold of everything, of course, just as no one theory can explain or account for the connection among texts and societies. But reading and writing texts are never neutral activities: there are interest, powers, passions, pleasures entailed no matter how aesthetic or entertaining the work. Media, political economy, mass institutions––in fine, the tracings of secular power and the influence of state––are part of what we call literature. And just as it is true that we cannot read literature by men without also reading literature by women—so transfigured has been the shape of literature—it is also true that we cannot deal with the literature of the periphery without attending to the literature of metropolitan centers.” –Said, Culture and Imperialism 318.

I am going to offer this quote at the beginning of every semester I teach from now on; it will be my own little pledge of allegiance, my pledge of politicization-subversion–deconstruction if you will.

At the very brink of pedagogical sanity, the loss of belief in students’ abilities, in my efforts to ‘teach’ anything, come the student comments that save me from myself. During a recent meeting, a student said that the class has politicized his worldview, giving him both an alternative narrative and a critical apparatus/ space form which to examine the world.

    Another student, a former Marine with four frontline tours in Iraq, whose presence drastically changed in-class dynamics, told me today that our class has significantly changed his perceptions about American foreign policy, the Iraq war and his roe within that frame. The student said that he often discusses ideas from our class with his military friends and (former) superiors: dehumanization, the (possible) complicity of language in that process, and (his favorite) the Derridian dictum “as soon as you have the concept of the One, you have violence” (thanks Ken).

    Complements such as these deserve more than my usual response to them; a smiling nod and “I’m glad to hear that.” Unfortunately, I am terrible at accepting emotional complements, at other human beings stating that I have/ or had an internal impact on them; the possibility is paradoxically what I live and strive to achieve but one that is impossible to face in the moment of manifestation. Complicating matters is a tiny tyrannical voice demanding spiritual perfection, complete humility, and the rejection of self-aggrandizement. Then, Thich Naht Hanh’s soothing grandfatherly voice reminds me not to do violence to the emotional upheavals but let them float on breath’s stream. He also tells me it is ok to post the complements on my blog as long as I perform the, now canonical, postmodern meta-self-reflexive gestures.

  

“At a certain point, one loses the ability to distinguish between teaching and research; the dualism is a false one. Teaching at its best is a constant process of researching materials and ideas. Shared research is teaching.” ––Gregory Semenza, Graduate Study for the 21st Century

    Although I am all for destroying false dualisms, it seems to me that the distinction between research and teaching is quite vivid in early teaching experiences, namely graduate school. Interestingly, a professor recently advised me to never put my teaching ahead of my research, saying (quite rightly) that the profession simply does not value one’s teaching nearly as much as the writing. At its best, the desire to be a good teacher is (in the professor’s words) a “good person’s problem,” because it is fueled by the desire to educate, share and make a difference in people’s lives. At worst, teaching becomes another excuse to avoid the exhausting work of research and writing. My motivation wavers between these two extremes and is always in conflict with an insecurity driven overachiever mentality, which does not allow for anything less than excellence in all endeavors/ projects. However, I have definitely begun to incorporate my own interests and areas of research into my classroom; unfortunately, that practice has left my class lacking direction. This monologue is an attempt to catalogue my own pedagogical practice, flush out the too unconscious frame and its attendant gaps.
    I can broadly categorize my scholarly interests as Globalization studies grounded in issues of alterity. The impact of this broad focus (if it can be called a focus) in my classroom is simultaneously destabilizing and invigorating. Given a broad range of interests and concerns, there is too much material to taken in, make sense of, or even cover; this, in turn, can quickly deteriorate into a lack of orientation, of specific goals, and/or a general sense of disorganization. Conversely, laying out a field of sources, issues, and concepts can also be a wonderful way to garner student investment simply because they are forced to choose and make sense of the material according to their own predilections. I would like to believe that students enjoy the freedom and want to take charge of their own education; however, I also realize that Intro Comp is not an elective and is seen, at the outset, as a hoop to jump through. The logic of this pedagogical practice is grounded in my own (ongoing) experiences as a student/scholar; I teach how I learn.
    The drive toward destroying the false dualism between teaching and research is complicated by differences in the level of commitment and ability between teachers and students. This is not an effort to create a crude hierarchy that places instructors as the talented and invested few who must somehow break through apathetic students. Rather, it is an attempt to think through the instructor/ student dynamic given certain conditions, at least as I have experienced them. Since I have already mentioned something of the tension in my class content, let me say something about specificities of the form and their connection to a difference in ability. Training in various fields has augmented a natural propensity to shift from the abstract to the specific and back again. Throughout my day, I constantly examine various situations or experiences as symptoms or effects of larger abstracted phenomena, while also observing the subtle contours and shifts that particular experience has on those same abstractions. I often do the same in my classroom. That is, I spend a great deal of class time laying out various abstract concepts or connections often leaving my students in the difficult position of seeing/ making the connection with their own lived experience.

Excuse me; my research is on the other line.
    

    I apologize to my readers who were expecting another post yesterday on the ongoing reading and project work but I failed to mention an addendum this initiative; be open to the impromptu. That is, from far too much experience with the guilt and pain attendant in any deviation from a given plan, I have decided to include the unexpected in my plans. Yesterday, although I did not write my intended post, I had a wonderfully helpful, productive and simply fun conversation with Kristine; thus, in the great Western tradition of philosophy, I blame the woman for not being faithful in my promise. But I did get to eat from the knowledge tree.

    While I am aware of my own hyper self-criticism, I notice that my writing has taken a turn for the worse. Actually, it has taken a Wile E. Coyote kind of leap into the canyon. There is a general lack of sophistication but more importantly, writing for the moment is not the aid to cognition it normally is. In lieu of brilliance, let me attempt a moment of transparency with all the idiosyncrasies and clouded insanity that make up my half articulate thoughts.

    I showed Hotel Rwanda to both my classes today, which means that I had a double dose of the film’s beautiful, utopic melancholia. The film will function as a preface for our turn toward the international generally and Africa specifically. I have also narrowed the focus of our attention to language and its role in creating the self/ other binary that implicitly grounds too much violence in the world. These two turns, toward the international and toward language, were the substance of my introduction to the film, along with a brief Wikipedia article situating the 1994 genocide. My real desire was to say unequivocally, “If you don’t shed a tear during this film, you have no soul;” a thought that, for obvious reasons, never found expression.
    The film is profoundly interesting to me for a myriad of reasons: its ability to launch me into a meta awareness of the human condition, to evoke a visceral reaction and the attendant investment from my students, and (perhaps at the intersection of the two prior feelings) its capacity to shift energetically my focus from the day-to-day minutiae to the larger telos of my scholarship. The tears, the empathy, feelings of powerlessness, admiration of human selflessness and the desire to articulate the only phrase that makes sense even as you recognize its utter banality and meaninglessness, “But they are just other human beings like you;” the film forces all this on me. I am thrown into a violent negotiation with my spirituality, attempting to understand the real-unreality of genocide, to engage a universal solidarity with the intensity of human suffering but hold it in tension with disengagement, an aloofness that dismisses it as an ultimate reality or end. I want to slap God and sit in meditation for several hours. The euphoria of seeing “the killers” gunned down by the Hutu army shocks me with my own immature humanity and my Gandhian/ Satyagrahan sensibilities scold me for it. Is that student crying? They better be.
    Last semester, when I first showed this film in a class, I had to spread the viewing over three-days because of the short class period. After each day, I would see my students hurriedly pack up their bags, leaving me alone to dismantle the equipment and wonder if the film had no affect for them. In discussions about the film, many students admitted to tearing up and explained their rapid departure as a defensive move to prevent embarrassment. The conversations were so intense that I could feel the waves of panic, disgust and epiphanies as students discussed policy decisions that must evaluate the relative worth of each human life. Although the quality of papers improved only marginally, often parroting the critiques I offered, the investment in the conversation and the vehemence with which they wrote changed drastically. Teaching the film was, and is, a centering experience that allows an incredible alignment of pedagogy, scholarship and extra-academic idealistic aims.
    
I am running out of energy; writing about these experiences is emotionally taxing.

    Let me say, however, that at the deepest state of melancholia is a profound joy that recognizes, and empathizes with, a core human experience that all have shared. In this joyous sadness is the seed of a renewed awareness of my place and role in the world, a renewed desire to be of some service. Sharing this sadness with my students, glancing through the same rusty frame onto the ever-jarring images of violent, ephemeral humanity to find the beautiful within it, is the most positive thing I can do.  

    There is a thin line between irony and stupidity; I crossed that line in my last post by announcing my desire to leave the autobiographical then writing a detailed personal account of my martial arts experience. In my defense, the post began as an attempt to ‘take inventory’ (Said’s phrase) of my pedagogical roots and trace their growth to my current classroom situation. With that said, let me continue on with that project.

    I was so invested in that environment (the dojo) and its particular code of etiquette that I no longer know if it synchronized with or took over my personality, which itself balances a particular formality with casualness; learning that will take more introspective time than I care to allocate at the moment. What is obvious, however, is that these first pedagogical lessons significantly influence my teaching now.
    As I have said in other posts, I attempt to make the classroom a safe-haven where the most poignant issues can be discussed without all the censoring required in everyday experience. This desire is obviously predicated on my own desire to discuss these issues and engage my students in the highest level of criticism/ deconstruction each can achieve given their ability to connect and my ability to communicate. However, for these discussions to be truly open and comfortable, I consciously strive to create an informal atmosphere marked most obviously by the tone and level of vocabulary used; showing Chris Rock specials and Family Guy episodes also contributes to this.
    I stand at the intersection of the formal qualities of my classroom and its content, attempting to balance critical rigor and a casualness that disarms enough to bring real material to the surface.

    Aside: I wonder if one could productively think of humor and informality in the classroom as a kind of archival pedagogy. That is, ‘casual pedagogy’ creates an atmosphere where students are more willing to both introspect and share opinions or experiences in discussions, making the classroom a sort of living collective archive. Although one would have to be careful not to envision students as flat surfaces to be read, the benefit could be a more engaged experience, a classroom that is simultaneously constructing and deconstructing.

    In order to hold myself accountable and to strengthen the power of my promises, I am announcing the beginning of a two-month long initiative to post new writings five days a week. Although my previous month long trial was both successful and helpful, I found myself drifting far too often into biography; I enjoy writing about my life happenings and offering some analysis of them but I want to focus this initiative much more.
    Mondays and Thursdays will be dedicated to writings on pedagogy both in terms of practice, i.e. my class successes and shortfalls, and theory. I am happy to say this will be greatly informed by discussions with Gwen, Justin V, and Cara as we venture to create service learning courses for the Fall and Winter semesters. These discussions, and my writings on them, should have the added benefit of acquainting me with the various strands of critical pedagogy and open a space to think through my place in relationship to those ideas.
    Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays will be dedicated to reflections on current readings and projects. Saturday will be only real off-day because I teach all day Wednesday and usually spend much of that evening after classes checking my second class’ work. Regardless, on with the project!

    The balance or tension between authority and openness is a crucial one within my pedagogical practice. During my tenure at my old martial arts school, I had the opportunity to teach classes for several years under the careful guidance of Sifu (head instructor/ Teacher). This first venture into a mass teaching setting (I had been a tutor for several years already) was initially an emotionally draining experience with far too many lows for the number of highs. I began helping with kids’ classes and quickly discovered how much energy it takes to motivate young children and be patient with early teenager attitude. The great benefit of this experience, however, was the ability to call forth a great deal of sincerely positive energy, despite whatever happened earlier that day. This early form of “professionalism” also formed what has become a guiding pedagogical principle; I must be what I want from my students: energetic, engaged, creative, focused et al. (I realize how hopelessly naïve or even silly this may sound to some of my colleagues; regardless, this has been a working principle that has garnered great results). A year before I left the Dojo, my daily schedule would normally include teaching several classes to both kids and adults (at separate times). At the peak of my investment in that particular environment, and under that particular teacher, I was one of the top 5 instructors for a school of nearly 500.
    Teaching adults, much like the kids, required a great deal of energy and enthusiasm, but also an interesting balance between openness and a purposeful distance. For the kids, my playfulness and humor was always tempered with a firm disciplinary presence that is implicit in their perception; we were nothing short of superheroes. Adults, especially those with cars, houses, kids my age, and the like, had no such impression of us (instructors), except perhaps the knowledge that we were talented in the art. The respect had to be earned slowly; a part of this process involved creating a “fantasy,” a distance that did not engage in ‘get to know you’ conversation. During our teaching, we were instructors first, (highly talented and motivated) students second and always approached as authority figures; the formality of the environment, the detailed etiquette and ranking system all contributed to this.
    To be continue tomorrow morning…

Despite substantial cognitive breakthroughs and a reawakened desire to write, I have bare little to articulate in this space. Perhaps it is the abundance of material rather than the lack of it that has contributed to my recent stagnation. Given that this post is an off-the-cuff writing moment, let me briefly list some of the more interesting life happenings.

New roommate; one who is actually more anal about organizational logic and cleanliness than I am–Woo hoo. He actually arranged a plate of oranges into a square accented by apples at the midpoints to form a semi-pyramidal structure––we’re going to get along just fine.

Thinking through Service learning projects for the Fall and Winter semester in coordination with Gwen: leaning heavily toward an transgenerational archival project that would engage 3010 honors students and the Detroit senior community at Hannan House; debating the efficacy of using comedic material in this setting.

Despite three unresolved projects, including a Master’s thesis, I am feeling surprisingly good and engaged about my work; this, I realize, could be one of those strange manic moments in which the melancholic ground of Being is momentarily suspended, giving way to joy, purposiveness and the enigmatic rumblings of groundless love. Also, this could be me attempting to exercise an atrophying linguistic flair; either or.

And now, a pretty picture entitled, Shadows of thought: Ruminations on cosmic universality, sub-nuclear particularity and dinner.

 

Scary:
Genuinely feeling like you’re going to die; hospitals; naturalizing life experiences and implicitly rejecting an outside….Sincerely having the thought, “sure she’s cute but what’s her family like”…yikes…

Beautiful: Engaged 1020 students who almost forget that you’re there because they are too busy disagreeing and debating each other.          

One student opened our class discussion with a vehement dismissal of Chris Rock’s humor as misogynistic, treating women as sex objects who have no being outside of pleasuring men. That opening carried our class into an investigation of Rap (which I clearly differentiate from Hip Hop) and the politics of listening to “just the beat,” i.e. ignoring the lyrical content. Many said that club rap, namely artists like Lil’ Jon, aren’t at all interested in lyrical content the same way Mos Def, The Roots and the like are. However, I complicated the picture by asking if we can similarly dismiss Comedy’s political content because it too uses an equally disarming structure of address, a move they were less willing to make because of Rock’s charged delivery. 

    Returning to the misogyny question, a student commented that indeed men do see women simply as sex objects because some women present themselves that way. Catching the stereotype in play, we reversed the power dynamic in play by asking if such a characterization of men, by Rock, is as problematic as his alleged misogyny. A moment the class pointed to as evidence of his misogyny, his claim that he would have had sex with his wife’s friend, turned into evidence of a deeply prejudiced view of men as slaves to their penis.     

    This conversation alone would make for a good class, but one clever student turned the critical screw once more to say that Rock ultimately denigrates women through his simplistic view of men. That is, the sexual objectification of women reinforces their understanding of men as libidinal machines and their relation to men as one predicated solely on sexual desire, a cycle that damages both women’s experience of the world and themselves.

    Good stuff!

p.s. This is my first broadcast from my shiny new laptop; Say hi everyone!

Also, my writing is clearly suffering from post-episodic neuronal misfiring; God save the queen!!…wait…that doesn’t go there….

The discussion of Zizek’s article “The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape” went fairly smoothly in both classes. I was pleased to see my students pick up on Zizek’s insightful, but rather counterintuitive, case for the racism of post Katrina New Orleans reportage; “Even if what I am saying is factually true, the motives that make me say it are false.”

More interesting, however, was the conversation following my declaration of the course’s thesis statement, also found in Zizek’s article. “Of course, we never openly admit these motives. But from time to time, they nonetheless pop up in our public space in a censored form, in the guise of denegation: Once evoked as an option, they are then immediately discarded.” I claimed that comedians, specifically those artists we are concerned with, foreground the perverse logic of prejudice and push it to an absurd max. Enacting what I called the politics of absurdity, comedy pushes us into the “blank zone that offers itself as a screen for the projection of our fears, anxieties and secret desires.” However, through its structure of address (humorous, hyperbolic, cartoon animation etc), comedy simultaneously calls attention to the fantastic logic of its representations and the stereotypes grounding them. These formal features intersect content precisely through the wide range of subject positions that are caricatured (i.e. no one is safe). By offending us through a hyperbolic representation of our lives, cultures, heritage etc., we realize that all such representations are hyperbolic and efface the infinite particularity of a given person’s experience.

However, my students rightly offered the following critiques, which I left for them to answer:

Do people in fact take shows such as South Park, Family Guy et al., as a critique of our prejudices?

Do such shows instead propagate those very prejudices?

Does comedy offer a mode of empathy? (The moment we’re offended, we realize what it is to be offended and/or offensive)

Does it offer a release valve on societal pressures, or does it exacerbate that pressure? What are the political ramifications of either option?

Many thanks to my students for stimulating these thoughts and a special thanks to the ever-helpful KFD.

            My overall plan for my courses is to juxtapose very serious readings with comedic texts (shows, specials etc) to examine the intersections and chasms between them. I’ve begun the semester with two short articles, one on Affirmative action and the other on the socio-political state of black men, and clashed them with a Family Guy episode in which Peter learns that he has a black ancestor. Moreover, he learns that his wife’s extremely wealthy family owned his ancestor, prompting him to ask for reparations.
            For anyone familiar with the show, or others like it (South Park, Simpsons etc.) you need not be told that the show handles this material with little tact. Rather, we are beaten with blunt comedy.
            Understandably, some of my students had visceral reactions to the show finding it crass, simplistic, and a serious issue’s reduction into dirty (non) humor rubble. My question to them specifically and the class generally was simply, why make a show like this? Once we flushed out the basic supply/ demand economic incentive the broader question became what makes such shows possible, viable as entertainment, and even demanded as such? (FG was actually cancelled after they aired a show called “Wish upon a Weinstein” but because of its cult hit status was brought on again to produce new episodes)
            I dare not offer any answers to these questions lest my student’s take on my reading as their own and parrot it to me in their papers. However, I do want to clarify and emphasize why it is that I want to push these issues in my classroom.
            My interest is two fold. First, I genuinely (if naively) believe that the classroom is one of the few places left where such issues can still be discussed, argued, and flushed out without recourse to verbal or emotional violence. Secondly, comedy (broadly defined) has been a crucial medium for the exploration of social contradictions, foregrounding their absurdity while simultaneously calling attention to its own structure of address.
            My dear offended students, don’t shy away from the subject or its mode of delivery but put that energy into your writing, focus it to negate each text’s ideas through rigorous examination and logical dismantling. After all, being offended or even bothered by anything presented is, to me, a firm affirmation that some political neurons are firing.

This is a hilarious addendum to Sarah’s post about my wrinkle free clothing. I asked my students if my wardrobe helped establish authority, presence, respect, distance or anything else that a young teacher would need. One student wrote this wholly embarrassing note:

I think earlier in the class you asked if your attire helped you establish authority, and I’d say the GQ look does help, initially. Since you’re young I believe it’s harder for you to establish authority, and the clothing does help. But after we got to know you it wasn’t necessary. By then it was only good for a few laughs because you’d often come into class with about 3 layers on, sweating your ass off.

 

…yes…embarrassing…and admittedly I sweat easily, but also steam cleaning par exellance!

I will share only a couple of highlights from what has been a long and curvy day.

First:         I didn’t necessarily like the way my syllabus played out the last month of the semester. So, as I have often done with my class, I subject them to the same pressures that I face. That is, I had them collectively create a month long syllabus.
    Our deliberations first turned to the particular subject matter. Although some were excited to explore my “Comedy as theory” syllabus, we decided to focus our attention on international issues. Ruminating on the limited and too worn path of critiquing U.S. foreign policy, we chose instead to focus on Africa, a continent whose many particularities have been totalized in America’s blind gaze.
    We’ve decided to use three films only the first of which we will spend class time watching: Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardner, and Lord of War. Augmenting the filmic texts will be one article on the (mis)use of Jihad in the ‘Muslim world;’ my hope and current aim is to extrapolate from this particular piece the various ways war can be legitimated.
    I was really pleased with the class’ construction of the syllabus, although, I made sure to note that there was no hundred percent consensus. I pointed this out to them to foreground both the broader proverb that one cannot please everyone (although I try damn hard), and particularly note that despite all the enthusiasm for any particular syllabus there will always be those who simply don’t care. Additionally, in foregrounding these traits as well as reminding them that I am all too aware that they see the class as a hoop to jump through, I hope to actually generate more interest by putting the onus on them to make it interesting, challenging and satisfying. We shall see.

Second:     A geeky digital moment that launched me into the abstractosphere.
    I was at the library copying various research articles when my OneCard ran out of money. So, I whipped out my laptop, connected to the library’s wireless network, accessed my OneCard account online, put money in through my credit card, and was back copying within two minutes. Whoa…
    I don’t have the gift of prose to properly convey the strangeness of the moment, which in critical memory, is heightened by the fact that “copying” itself is an amazing phenomena. Oh, Benjamin where art thou?
    Adding to the weirdness, I hope to get a handheld digital scanner soon so that I will not need to photocopy pages but instead make them available digitally, with the added perk of making articles subject to the computer’s internal search engine.

Now, if you will excuse me, my pocket protector is leaking. (Can they leak?) Whatever. Insert clever closing line here.

I have just finished grading student papers. To celebrate, I have commissioned from myself the following poem:

(Standing ovation)

Thank you all, however, I would be disingenuous if I were not to credit my muse, No Fear Shakespeare.

I have spent so much time reading today that all the words have acquired a blurry glow making them indecipherable, even more so if I try to focus. Hmm…could this be a metaphor for graduate life, close reading practices, Derridian deconstruction, or perhaps just a bodily clue telling me it’s time to end the work day?

…I also had a dream that I was a white dragon that turned into a cherry blossom tree…very Kurosawa…

 
Regardless, I have two things to offer for the day. 1)An image from NyTimes arts section that I will call,  Mission statement…

…and second is my proposal for the “Tutor Institute,” a local event attended by a few surrounding universities…should be fun:

Our efforts to be great tutors and teachers are often directed outwards, directing students toward goals that are often not their own. Training and experience help us realize that we must empathize with a given student’s particular level and expectations, pushing them, but not projecting on to them. Unfortunately, little is said about how we are to achieve this kind of empathy.

This brief presentation shifts the focus from student to tutor asking how we can take control of the thoughts, desires and goals we have for our students and maintain the clarity necessary for successful sessions. More specifically, we will explore the connection between breathing, thoughts and empathy through direct practice with techniques.

I’ve just received my summer class schedule and am preoccupied with creating the “Comedy as Theory” syllabus even while working on my seminar projects. I chose to take on a two-course load over the summer for two reasons stemming out of Semenza’s Graduate Studies for the 21st Century. The first is to prepare myself for the same responsibility in the Fall term, which of course will be joined by my seminar coursework. The second, and more interesting reason, is to emulate/ simulate the conditions of future professorships.

Semenza’s book is enormously helpful in contextualizing the graduate career both in the microcosmic day-to-day realities and political pitfalls one faces and in the broader academic career that these moments prelude. In the R1 professorship that we aim for, the normal/ ideal teaching load is 2/2 (two courses per semester) that is meant to be a generous invitation to conduct serious ongoing research, despite the fact that teaching two courses is at least 40 hours of work per week. Regardless, my own summer ambitions include finishing my Master’s thesis and perhaps doing campus visits to potential transfer locations. The research for the paper, however, has to be done in conjunction with the teaching load, just like a real tenure track professor. Woo hoo…all grown up…

More interestingly, although this post tastes like vanilla to me, is conceptualizing the syllabi for the summer. I’m interested in continuing the current engagement with a wide course of issues, particularly as they effect urban settings like Detroit, but am thinking of framing the course in terms of resistance rather than exploration/ description. Although my current class’ readings are chosen and arranged to present a range of arguments and perspectives, having students extrapolate from them specific points, their own stances on those points and demonstrate these arguments through artifacts might have been asking too much. Our class discussions and their own artifacts have been great but I don’t think that I gave them enough to ground resistance/ re-cognizance on. This is where comedy/ comedians would be helpful.

(more…)

There are a few threads I want to pursue because no single one can hold my floating attention at the moment.

Teaching: My class recently completed their large group papers yesterday, climaxing in a class ‘Museum Day,’ during which they set up their artifact projects and explored other group installations. I was very pleased with the way their projects were set up, using all four laptop screens given to them and interfacing digital and physical materials in interesting ways. Some wanted to play music as a soundtrack to their installation, but since these setups were to be directly reflective of what they described/ used in their papers, new items couldn’t be added. I’ve been disappointed in the lack of music and video clips in student projects but am both sympathetic to the initial strangeness to this kind of work and hopeful that the artifacts will be more dynamic in the last phase of class.

Although I have been aware of this particular neuroses, I was surprised to find myself foreground it to my students; I refuse to let them think that my class is ‘easy.’ They all attested to the difficulty of the project and papers thus far with a majority voting for “interesting hard” not “annoying hard:” my own terms. Obviously, the course will refine itself but students are freely delivering interesting feedback, which I’m happy to add, is one of the great advantages of being a young instructor with a casual classroom.

Home: My parents just returned from a trip to India, the highlight of which was their video of my home village, Sankapelli. This tiny, poor, rural space sustained so many summer vacations in my childhood and even the greatest birthday party I ever had. I was carried from our house to the beach atop my then bodybuilding cousin, and cut a specially made cake in the shape of a car surrounded by closest family, extended members and neighbors. For my brother and I, there is no place on the planet feels more like home, tragically and beautifully so.

Writing: I’ve decided to reinitiate my daily post writing for the duration of the break. There will be so many books, articles, and primary materials absorbed which, without a regular mode of exploration and expunging, will lead to intellectual indigestion and a lot of hot air.

Other thoughts have been stopped by Don Cherry and Wings hockey…

Here is the link to the article that got me thinking of a new project.

Potential paper title: The affective power of idiocy or, regurgitation that makes you vomit.

Here is one notable quotable moment:

While he was governor, Mr. Bush befriended a number of prosperous Indian doctors and businessmen, all Republicans, who captivated him as embodiments of the American dream and contributed handsomely to his campaigns.

One of them was Durga Agrawal, the founder of a Houston-based company, Piping Technology and Products, who was born 60 years ago in a village in central India without electricity or a water supply. Mr. Agrawal went to high school 14 miles away and returned home, by bicycle, only every three or four months. He went from there to the University of Delhi and then to the University of Houston for master’s and doctorate degrees in industrial engineering.

“I really admire the professors in this country,” Mr. Agrawal said in a telephone interview on Friday. “We foreigners come, and they pour their hearts, souls and minds into us, and we do not speak like them, but they educate us.”

This is probably just some of that hostility I mentioned earlier; otherwise I might have an actual response to this. Maybe. However, the possibility does exist that Mr. Agrawal’s comment is, in fact, simply the regurgitation of neo-con-imperialist rhetoric on benevolent mastership; this expectoration is powerful enough to actually inhibit certain brain functions such as thought.

There were two interesting pedagogical moments today, one of inspiring genius and the other a tragicomedy. Judging from the previous sentence, I think I’m becoming a kind of literary drama queen. Regardless; on to the episodes.

During class discussion, I told my students to take special note of a rhetorical strategy that the author was using. He had brought in a powerful counterargument from a very noteworthy source before moving on to decimate it in the paragraphs that followed. I asked my students to do something similar in their own group papers, to bring in the best counterargument they can think of and negate it with their own. They all nodded understandingly but one student made this astute observation;

“Oh, like Eminem does in that final rap battle in 8-Mile”

At first, I dropped my head in a kind of resigned disbelief but then realized the brilliance of his connection and…

“Absolutely, just like that. Tell us how he does it.”

I wrote a paper on the movie in my undergraduate times and am strongly considering showing the scene in the next class. I love my students (yea, I said it…kiss off).

Moment two:

This is a tragicomedy. I went to a coffee shop today to meet up with the wonderfully insightful high school student I tutor regularly. The opening conversation drifted to the Olympics, how the women figure skaters despite being (pusedo) scantily clad are not the “intended audience,” an inspired euphemistic term for…well…the obvious. We did agree, however, that a particular Norwegian skier was absolutely gorgeous; funny, because I actually blogged about her.

“Yea, she totally look likes a young Sharon Stone!”
“Who’s Sharon Stone?”

I was stunned. This young hormonal lad had never heard or known of Sharon Stone? How could this be? I simply had no conceptual framework to understand this moment; I was baffled and strangely angry. The realization that this was my first “generation gap” moment struck me, pissed me off, awed me then lit a lamp of empathy for all my professors who make historical references that fall on deaf ears; theirs (now mine too) is a passed historical present, a historical absent, only supporting rather than fully inhabiting the now’s culturation.

“To be (15), or not to be (15), that is the question”