Chin / Progress

The Judgement
Progress. The powerful prince
Is honored with horses in large numbers.
In a single day he is granted audience three times.

Commentary
Progress means making advance. Clarity rises high
over the earth. Devoted and clinging to this great
clarity, the weak progresses and goes upward.
Hence it is said: "The powerful prince is honored
with horses in large numbers. In a single day he is
granted audience three times.

The Image
The sun rises over the earth:
The image of Progress.
Thus the superior man himself
Brightens his bright virtue.

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With her talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Mary managed to be in Dublin today, just in time for some riots. They were fairly small and contained, however, and she and her friends are fine. Tomorrow she is off to work on a cattle ranch outside of Belfast for two weeks. And of course, nothing bad ever happens in Belfast...

Conference Roundup

My conference went pretty well. My paper was fairly well-received, I think. Giving a paper at these big conferences is often anti-climatic. Beforehand, you visualize all these scenarios where famous senior scholars quiz you on minute details of your presentations, and you spend hours trying to think up snappy replies. In reality, you get one or two questions about some insignificant detail, and that's it. Still, I think people were pretty receptive. They laughed at my jokes, at least.

Friday night I had dinner with an old family friend--my grandmother's boarding school roommate, as I said earlier--who is the grande dame of Nashville society. It was pretty amazing, and involved a gigantic mansion and a butler, but I'll leave it at that. Afterwards I went out with her grandchildren to the Bluebird Cafe, a famous little bar in Nashville that is a forum for up-and-coming country songwriters to show off their tunes. Friday nights they have a regular residency with these four guys who have been playing together there for twenty years--the only one I had heard of was the songwriter Don Schlitz, who has written songs for Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kenny Rogers, Johnny Cash, and others. The bar is a tiny little place that seats about 50. There is no stage, just a little clearing in the middle where the four musicians sit in a circle facing each other. They play their own tunes, chat, tell jokes, and it is a very entertaining few hours.

Today was a whole range of papers to see. A really good one about the fifties child star Brenda Lee was probably my favorite. Then tonight, the graduate students all hit the karaoke night at the hotel. Hearing a grad student sing a song that he is writing his dissertation about? Good times. And there was even a Very Distinguished Senior Scholar listening to all of us from the corner of the bar. Afterwards, suffice to say, I cannot say I really know Very Distinguished Senior Scholar all that well, but I can say that I have done shots with him.

Looking forward to coming home tomorrow!

Dingbats

Fascinating! These things are all over California.

It is always interesting to see how different regions build mass amounts of housing for the lower-to-middle classes. In Philadelphia and Baltimore, they tend to be very small, two-story brick row houses. In Boston you have the wooden triple-decker duplexes. San Francisco has the small, modular suburban-style home that span hundreds of blocks in the Sunset and the Richmond. New York... I'm not sure what the New York equivalent is. The older big tenement buildings of lower Manhattan are kind of the equivalent, I suppose, but the more direct correllation might be those ugly brick houses in Queens. (Think of where George Constanza's parents live on Seinfeld.) Washington, D.C. never had an industrial base, so it doesn't really have these working class habitats. Instead Northeast and Southeast DC have lots of dreadful post-war housing projects and apartment complexes that started decaying about a month after they were built.

Incidentally, I arrived safely in Nashville. Jet lag is unfortunately having its way with me, hence me blogging instead of sleeping. Wish me luck for tomorrow!

Nashville Bound

After a busy couple of days, I am about fly out to Nashville, to give a paper at a conference. This will be my first time in Tennessee, and my first real stay in the non-coastal south The best part of this trip is that I am going to be having dinner one night with my grandmother's old boarding school roommate/mother's godmother/daughter of the man who owned the Grand Ole Opry. Fun! And then afterwards I'm accompanying her grandchildren to some sort of country music concert. Fun again!

OnDemand Ate My Life

Over the summer, my faithful cable provider began a new service called "OnDemand." I think it is supposed to compete with TiVo, although it functions somewhat differently. Rather than recording TV to a hard disk, it lets you access a library of free television shows and movies. When you are watching them, you can pause and rewind just like TiVo.

Anyhow, the upshot is that now I have available to me, for free, the entire first five seasons of The Sopranos. The last two days, Mary and I have watched dozens of hour-long episodes. And now that she has flown back to England, I am still watching them. Luckily, only two more episodes and then I run out.

Diploma

Earlier this week I was walking by the main administrative building here, and I realized that I had never picked up the diploma for the master's degree I earned last spring. So I went in, and with the flash of a student ID got it. It's quite nice. Not as snobby looking as Wesleyan's, but definitely much nicer than Brandeis's. The best part is that it is signed by Governor Arnold.

It gets me thinking about the value of graduate degrees, however. For so many people, having a master's degree is the main barrier to a comfortable middle-class life. There are so many people out there who slave away for years earning a master's, attending night school, taking off time from work, taking student loans. And here I am, picking up a second master's degree for practically nothing, in a field where it means almost nothing.

No great point to be drawn from this, but it feels weird.

Unsurprised

This last Thursday, my partner paid me a surprise visit from England. Well, it was supposed to be a surprise, but literally about half an hour before she showed up at my front door, I suddenly figured out the ruse. The key was that I had come home earlier than I had planned to, and phone her at home. Her roommate picked up, and said that Mary had gone to bed early. I knew that was impossible, so my mind started whirring.

We've been busy ever since. Saturday night was my roommate's birthday. We've had big parties for her every year on her birthday. The first year, it was a gigantic blowout that lasted all night long--for most people, at least, I passed out on my floor partway through. Last year was very sedate, with almost everyone gone by midnight. This year was a perfect medium--fun, lively, and with a diverse crowd of people.

Just got back tonight from having dinner with friends in the valley. A very nice couple. One is a farrier, the only woman farrier I hvae ever heard of. She is a tough cookie, with tattoos up and down her arms, a garage full of motorcyles, and a thick Kentucky accent. Her partner is a petite little woman who is the daughter of a porn producer and a former Miss Teen California. (I think, I always lose track of which beauty contest is which.) Only in LA!

Supporting NYU Grad Students

I urge anyone who is in the position to do so to support the NYU graduate students on strike. The history of labor relations at NYU is too long and complicated to go into here, but even just a little bit of research will show the callousness of the NYU administration towards those who do the majority of the teaching at a very privileged, and very expensive, private university. Beginning this quarter, the administration has "terminated the fellowships" of striking workers. As Bitch Ph.D. points out, they have to use that awkward terminology because if they were to simply "stop paying" the strikers, that would be admitting that the graduate students actually are employees who do work for the university. Can't have that. We graduate students are just lucky for the privilege of working our butts off for our "fellowships" that put us below the poverty line.

Bah humbug.

Dear Rich People

Giving money to the arts is good. Giving money to education is good.

However, there are more effective ways of funding both the arts and education than giving Princeton and Yale $100 million each.

Just saying.

McCarthyism Redux

There has been much discussion in the press the past week about the Bruin Alumni Association. The BAA is, of course, part of a nation-wide conservative movement in the past few years which has been agitating against what they see as liberal bias in academia. This is nothing new, of course. In many ways, we can trace the beginning of modern conservatism to academic politics: it was William Buckley's 1951 book God and Man at Yale which kicked off Buckley's career, and gave rise to the National Review. And even Buckley's book was rooted in the context of post-war McCarthyism, which began in the late forties with the Alger Hiss case. One of the key features of the hostility towards Hiss was a general suspicion of the highly-educated, often academic, men who Franklin Roosevelt had surrounded himself with in the 30's and 40's, of which Alger Hiss became the prime example. The Republican Party very effectively managed to convince the public that to be academic was synonymous with being soft on communism.

Since then, this mythology of liberal bias has often invigorated other conservative movements. In the 1980's, the Dartmouth Review served as an incubator for conservative intellectuals like Dinesh D'Souza. In the 1990's, the campus culture wars over identity politics and sexual expression nearly destroyed the NEA and the NEH. In the past few years, the main domestic battleground over the Israel-Palestine issue has taken place on college campuses. And we shouldn't forget that our current president's own reactionary and anti-intellectual conservatism was formatively shaped by his undergraduate experiences at Yale.

So, this whole history noted, I'm still not sure what to make of it. I am not at all worried about the Bruin Alumni Association. Its leader is this young kid, a recent graduate, who is quickly managing to alienate other conservatives, especially conservative academics. It only takes five minutes on the organization's web page to see that he is just in search of attention, that he is more interested in being the next D'Souza or Horowitz then actually creating change at UCLA. The BAA is destined to self-destruct.

I still wonder, however, about the form in which these movements take place. A few observations, just to see if I can make anything out of it.

1. The leaders of these movement are all men. I have yet to hear a single quote in the press from a woman, or read a single article in the campus conservative paper by a woman.

2. It tends to be very small groups of men. One never gets the sense that there is a large silent majority backing them up. I imagine that at UCLA, we are talking about no more than a dozen people actively involved, out of 24,000 undergraduates.

3. These men are often, but not always, white. The exceptions are important to note. One of the leaders here at UCLA, a kid who started his own conservative newspaper that features a regular professor profile titled "Nut of the Month," is Armenian American. Many of those involved are Jewish, radicalized, I imagine, by the Israel/Palestine issue. I am not quite sure what to make of all this.

Certainly, it is worth noting that here at UCLA, the targets which the conservatives have attacked most viciously are Latino and African-American student groups. The Bruin Republicans lead a horrible campaign last year against MEChA, the largest Latino student group, claiming in all seriousness that MEChA was plotting to overthrow the country. They attack student of color groups rather than attacking, say, the Bruin Democrats, or labor groups, or anti-war groups. So much so that in the last student elections here, the Bruin Democrats shamefully teamed up with the Bruin Republicans in an attempt to limit the power of student of color groups. As I say, I am not sure what to make of all this exactly, but race is playing a large role.

4. It is easy to spot that the campus conservatives have adopted the rhetoric of identity politics. They talk about discrimination, about victimization, about being unfairly singled out and punished for who they are. This tactic is extremely effective. I don't think it actually works as they intended--nobody feels sorry for some privileged white boy. But it has completely destroyed the efficacy of that rhetoric, and those of us who care about the issues raised by identity politics have not yet found a new mode of organizing.

Phew! Suffice to say, this all worries me.

Other interesting takes on the BAA:

• Michael Bérubé has a typically amusing and trenchant post about the BAA.
  
  
• The leader of the BAA has always been a jerk. Confirmed by his former classmate.
  
  

zzzzzzzzz-pft!

Kyle Gann says that this British commercial for Honda is proof that the 60's avant-garde has hit the mainstream. (He thinks Pauline Oliveros, it reminds me more of Robert Ashley's "She Was a Visitor.") Fredric Jameson would probably see it as proof that postmodernism is inextricably tied up in late capitalist commodity culture.

Decide for yourself.

Caffeine

I have often bemoaned the fact that there are not enough coffeehouses in my neighborhood. (In fact, I could have sworn I blogged about this problem once, but I can't find it now.) There are only a few places nearby, most of which either don't have comfortable seating (the assorted Coffee Beans) or are Starbucks (unacceptable). There is the Buzz chain, two of which are within walking distance, but they tend to get crowded really fast and don't have comfortable seating either. Then there is Insomnia, which is a good ol' fashioned independent coffeehouse with raggedy old sofas to sit in, ordinarily just my kind of place, but it is always crammed to the gills with people writing screenplays. Plus, it's a little too far to walk comfortably.

In the past month or so, however, not one but two new places have opened up nearby. My favorite is The Grounds. Free wireless, excellent and cheap coffee, and almost always empty. Except on Saturday nights, which I rather disastrously learned are Queer Comedy Nights. (If the link apears to take you to a florist, that's because The Grounds not only sells coffee, but fancy floral arrangements.)

The other place is a Peet's, which I'm sure my parents will get a kick out of. Haven't been there yet, but I am excited, and not just because apparently Katie Holmes goes there.

Sigh.

For those of my loyal readers who breathlessly follow my academic career, I regret to announce that I am having to postpone my special fields exams until the beginning of next quarter. If this were an anonymous blog, I would spill forth the details of why, but alas, it is not.

It actually isn't a big deal, logistically speaking--since I am all ready for the exams, I will just start writing my dissertation proposal now, so that once the exams are done in early April, I will be able to submit my proposal to the faculty tout suite. Emotionally speaking, however, I was all pumped up with adrenaline, ready to conquer the exams next week. Now, I just want a nap.

Sad But True

The next time you picture England as a land of cozy pubs, where a pint or two for lunch is a lovely tradition, an enlightened country free of repressive attitudes towards alcohol, remember that this New York Times article is completely true.

Instrument(al) Rationality

Some of you may have heard of the plight of the Audubon Quartet. If you haven't, their web site has a list of news articles discussing the situation. The New York Times had a good one, but is unfortunately only available for a fee.

In essence, this is what seems to have happened: the Audubon was a well-known and successful string quartet. They had done well in international competitions, recorded quite a bit, and had a pretty cushy residence gig at Virginia Tech. Over the years, however, conflict grew between three of the members and one violinist. Eventually, they kicked him out of the group. He retaliated by suing them for breach of contract. A judge ruled in his favor, and against the other members of the quartet, and ordered them to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Because they were of course unable to pay, the judge ordered their instruments to be repossesed.

It's a tragic situation, but also telling. It's a perfect example of that classic concept of "instrumental rationality." The drive for efficiency, under capitalism, doesn't just stay in economics. It reaches into every corner of society. These lofty concepts that we have of "art" and "music" are nice and all, but the fact is, they don't have a place in late capitalism. The institutions, large and small, that make up classical music, are not run rationally and reasonably. They take into account fundamentally irrational things like "creativity" and "taste." It's the fact of living under late capitalism that rationality must be expanded into ever last corner of society.

People who find this case to be tragic usually lay the blame on the judge, who seems to be something of a philistine who didn't appreciate the subtle dynamics of classical music. That's true, but the fact is that if the case had been more of a sympathetic judge, it would have only been a temporary win. That more "cultured" and appreciative judge would have just been a residual trace of a past culture. Don't blame unappreciative judges and mercenary musicians, blame economic liberalism, and its unprecedented and unchallenged sway over our politics right now.

I feel nostalgic for the failing institutions of classical music. I like the music, and I appreciate what those institutions have done. But they are on the way out. Instead of trying to revive cultural institutions of the past, I think it is important to create new ones, and see if they can take us somewhere different.

And we're off!

It's been so long since I've posted, Blogspot forgot my password. Sigh.

Unfortunately, it is unclear how much I will be able to blog in the coming month. I start taking my Special Fields exam in a little less than two weeks, which is freaking me out quite a bit. Plus, lots of other things going on: all those conference papers to finish, a recalcitrant Echo issue to put to bed, a severely messy room, various personal dramas, a new course in an outside department to begin taking, and a new unfamiliar subject matter (The History of Jazz) to begin TAing.

Okay, deep breath. Start with the messy room.

On the Road Again

Phew!

I write this from the living room of a friend in Scranton, Pennsylvania. What a weird city this is. It is an old steel town, very blue-collar, but making a very interesting economic transition in recent years, with a combination of white collar jobs (especially insurance) moving into the region, and increasing residential development as inexpensive central Pennsylvania becomes attractive to lower-middle-class folks who work in New York City.

The family I am staying with is gigantic--the mother was one of twelve children, and she had nine herself, the youngest of whom is my friend. Scranton is still an insular little city for the most part, and therefore everyone, and I mean everyone, is related to one another, or went to school with one another, or spent a night in jail with one another, and so on.

Mary and I traveling around the eastern seaboard courtesy of Zipcar, a cute little service that lets its members rent cars by the hour, or the day, very inexpensively. Not only that, but our car for this trip is a Mini Cooper convertible, brightly painted gold with Zipcar logos all over it. We make quite a scene on the road.

Tomorrow to Philadelphia!

Here We Come a-Wassailing

Saturday night was one of our department's lovely traditions: a caroling party. There were christmas lights, a tree, heavily-fortified mulled wine, and a solid three hours of singing. All of which goes a long way towards making life seem, briefly, a little more like Christmas. Not a small task in Los Angeles, and in grad school.

Houston, We Have a Problem

Somehow we seem to be missing five midterms. As in, the students took them, hand them in, and now we can't find them. Not good. Not good at all.

What do we do? Make them re-take? That's not a good solution. Do we not count that as part of their grade? That makes the final weigh a lot more than is really fair. So do we give them a little extra credit bonus? Argh!

In moments like these, I'm glad to not be the overall authority figure in a classroom yet.


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Update: Found them!

Calm Before the Storm

Things have seemed rather busy this quarter. But as I start to pencil in things for next quarter, I am now realizing that it is going to be a doozy.

Late January: Special Fields exam, and defense.
February 16: Fly to Nashville, present paper.
March 3: Present paper here in Los Angeles.
March 15: Fly to Chicago, present paper.
Throughout: Research and write a disseration proposal!

Probably should have gotten more work done this quarter while I had the chance.