Sweaters: Day 2

B got this one for me for xmas a few years ago. I wear it whenever I feel like painting the town brown: all the time.

Sweaters: Day 1

This sweet vintage sweater-vest was passed down from B's dad to her brother A, who stopped wearing it at some point and put it in a box, which was subsequently moved to B's dad's airplane hangar, where I found it about 2.5 years ago. Today marks its inaugural voyage on the SC campus, for my third European intellectual history discussion section. It made the discussion of Freud extra-lively.

Et Cetera and So On

...yeah, yeah, narcissism and blogging, gee whiz but everyone I know is witty and articulate, but the point is:

RENT GHOST RIDER (or, you know, netflix it or steal it or something) AND GET LOADED AND WATCH IT. IT IS DUMBER, HARDER-CORE, AND FUNNIER THAN VAN HELSING, even.

It's a recipe for a hilarious 2 hours. Cook it on up, fool.

Narcississimo

Let's call it like it is: blogs and flickr and networking sites, the stuff of the already-boring term web 2.0, are pretty self-involved. You talk about yourself, you take pictures of you and your friends, you create exhaustive lists of things you like, you post it online, you sit around waiting to see if anyone comments on it and thereby validates your PG-13 exhibitionism.

Traditionally, the best of the blogosphere and its cousin-technologies are considered to be sites that index information and opinion from elsewhere or generate original content: people like Fosco and his LOLTheorists, Mike and his music criticism and pop theory, and K and her funny crazy online crap exposés. And I am down with these people, believe you me.

For the rest of us, who usually just post bite-sized memoirs and their equivalent, what I find interesting is the relative success or failure ratio. Examples:

• Kungfukitten posts almost exclusively about her own life and times. Thanks to her effervescent wit and skillful prose, it's almost always brilliant and funny and touching and totally worthwhile.
• The academia bloggers like the scourge of the bourgeoisie can mix up a frothy batch of personal anecdotes and larger concerns about the state of education and social justice and it totally works.
• Folks who are about posting funny crap and venting after bad days like Bahleedat are providing a valuable service in the context of my morning blog-reading and coffee-drinking routine. Which is to say, all day, every day.
  
• No Therapy is, I'm convinced, the most important writer of consequence currently living in an apartment in NYC, and her best work is on her blog. Check out today's entry.
  

My point: there's something to be said for the inherent narcissism of blogs. If you're lucky enough to know smart people, even when all they're doing is rambling about themselves, it's usually interesting and funny. The same goes for flickr and its equivalents; I am perfectly happy to look at self-portraits of my friends, so long as they take the time to make funny faces, wear rad clothes, or just look pretty.

So! While this is all obviously a big masturbatory gesture of self-justification, I'd like to think it's also a big masturbatory gesture of OTHER PEOPLE justification! Next up: a thrift-store sweater fashion show.

Sigmeund Freud: Hilarious Man

I read Freud's "Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" for my TA class earlier this afternoon. It'll be great stuff to talk about with the students - Freud's assumptions and, ahem, neuroses totally overshadow any actual insights he might have had about this poor kid he was "curing." I suppose this is a further example of how I'm becoming a worse and worse historian the longer I'm in this business; I just want to make fun of people (read: Strindberg and Freud) in the past for being conceited, misogynistic fucktards.

That said, check out this beautiful Freud quote:

"The two thoughts then act towards each other much like the two needles of an astatic galvanometer."

I made that into my e-mail signature for school.

In other news, I had a rollicking good time playing 5-dollar buy-in poker w/ a crew of well-dressed kids last night. I totally WON 5 bucks! I mean, 5 more bucks that I originally invested, even! I put up a few pics on the flickr site. In doing so, I hit my 200-picture limit, since I have a free account. Now I'm really, honestly debating what to do. Is it worth it to spend the 25 bucks for a pro account for a year? I kind of doubt it. The thing is, I assume that the only thing that happens on my flickr site is that people who are on my buddy list look at new pictures I put up as I put them up; almost no one goes through and looks at the older ones.

So: those of you that dabble in flickr and/or those of you that just e-stalk people on flickr, what do you think? Is it worth money to have an entire online picture gallery, or am I correct in assuming that the only action my pictures are likely to get is during their first few days/weeks online?

I Won't Actually Kill Them

The problem with the situation with my neighbors (the ones in the apt. below us who run head-first into the walls until 4:30am every couple of nights) is that I can't actually kill them at this point - I've said and posted too much already, and it wouldn't take a Gill Grissom to figure out whodunit.

I bring this up because I had my first 8:00am discussion section this morning, something that ought to be a crime against humanity, God, me, and fuzzy kittens, and my neighbors were in FULL EFFECT last night. The section ended up being amazingly positive, considering. I think it's all about solidarity: I made it clear to the students that we were all in it together and that all we could hope to do was make it suck as little as possible. Also, talking about Nietzsche after getting about 3 hours of sleep is just about right; he makes a lot of sense then. He's the kind of theorist that should be read in trying circumstances.

What else? How about some quotes that come to mind:

• "If I had brought my tambourine, I could do the tarantella and demonstrate to all of you what an erotic dance it really is!'"- Professor B.T., to the European Intellectual History students.
  
• "When Nietzsche said that God Is Dead, was he really sure?" - Anon., student.
  
• "Love can't buy you money." - Lemmy, Motorhead.
  
• "I'll see YOU at Stacycon 2000!" - Weiland Smithers.
  

Oh, also, check out this NY Times article on what it's like to be a graduate student. It's pretty right-on. Interestingly, it's really written with the humanities in mind moreso than the sciences, something you almost never see in mainstream media.

Maybe I should read something now.

Pedagogically Yours

I had what was probably the most enjoyable and successful discussion section of my meager academic career today. I more-or-less memorized 25 names, we discussed methods to make sections suck less than they usually do, and we talked about Nietzsche. I left feeling happy and hopeful, not miserable and despairing. Weird.

A conversation ensued with K in the bunker a bit later, which leads me to post about three things to do with teaching:

- I enjoy it more than I enjoy research. A lot. A whole lot. I get to do a lecture on the existentialists, May of '68, and my usual bullshit later this term and writing it has been a relaxing, enjoyable thing, free of all the usual stress on convention and citation that surround academic writing. Likewise, I really, sincerely enjoy talking about history with smart kids. I realize how spoiled I am being here, where more kids are more smarter(-er), but frankly, I still enjoy talking about history even with the dumb ones.

- On a related note, I'm terribly resentful of the fact that the central problem with getting an advanced degree in history, especially in European history, is identifying a topic. Writing, research, references, all of that's important, but what makes or breaks you coming out of the gate is whether or not you really have something substantive and innovative to write on. It's like turning over rocks in a field that's been gone over a million times already, trying to find a new kind of bug, and all you find are pill-bugs and daddy long legs....(ok, this analogy is not so great.) My point is that teaching is its own justification and really, when it comes down to it, HISTORY of all things lends itself to being TAUGHT rather than being RE-WRITTEN again and again.*

- I developed my pedagogical technique and philosophy while at UO, and it was there waiting for me, a year since I've taught anything, when I started up today. Here it is: don't bullshit your students. Don't invent busywork. Don't keep them there for the whole time if you don't have anything to talk about. I swear, it works great.

* Please, fellow academi-dweebs, don't remind me that it's important for new approaches and perspectives to come into play with history-writing. I know that. I'm just expressing my frustration at how the process works for 90+% of us, rehashing the same old crap using a slightly modified tone and theoretical underpinning.

Just don't feel like getting problematized tonight. Man, that sounds dirty....

Like a Day Job, Only Far Weirder

It was a good, good thing to work at a normal job for four months. It reminded me of what the rhythms of the working week are like, particularly the blank space in the day after you get home that represents the sum total of your free time. Also, it reminded me of how fast time goes when you're doing the same thing every single day. Mostly, I'm glad I did it because it makes the return to academia easier: if I just work 9 - 5 like I did all summer I'm OK.

I realized that I've been lying down on the blog-job when it comes to list-making. Here are things I'm liking so far being back:

• The performative aspect of leading discussion sections. Technically, I haven't had one yet. But I'm sort of perversely stoked to start tomorrow; I suppose I like the captive audience. *cough* ATTENTION WHORE *cough*...
• Coffee + sweaters + hats + my new bag + the bus = an aesthetic of sorts!
• I'm sorry, but I like working in the bunker. Sure, it's subterranean and freezing cold and lacking in natural light, but since no one else can stand it, it's kind of like my own personal gigantic underground office!
• Being nervous all the time keeps me on point.
• I'm getting a PHD in an ewok village. That, objectively, is neat.
• Finding out that it's ok to say Habermas was full of it, as long as you can say why. Can you imagine?! Habermas: dead wrong! Amazing!
  

I'm sure this evening's relatively good mood will vanish soon enough, so I have to kind of hi-five it as it goes past. Up high, bitch!