Culture Wars: The Nuge

Thinkin' about The Nuge again.

So: like most graduate students, I am a big fan of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations on the Travel Channel. He goes interesting places, he says funny stuff, he dines on tasty-looking food. A season or two ago, he went through the southwest and ended up in Texas, hanging out with rocker Ted "The Nuge" Nugent on his crazy shooting range / ranch / animal-preserve-so-the-nuge-can-shoot-them / bunker-dwelling-psycho compound / practice space.

The whole point of the episode was Bourdain's quest to hang with red-state America and to prove that cultural bridges exist between all of us as Americans, whether we welcome Democratic control of congress and the white house or, as The Nuge puts it, we think that a Democratic government would be a "target-rich environment." In other words, the episode was a light-hearted celebration of compromise and mutual understanding, a rebuttal of the notion of the culture wars that separate us. Bourdain goes to Texas specifically in the name of conciliation. In his crypto-lefty politics,* conciliation, compromise, and communication are all positives.

What pisses me off about this kind of project is that you aren't going to see The Nuge renting a hybrid and visiting Manhattan or Portland or Santa Cruz, eating a bunch of tempeh, and volunteering at an animal shelter. Intransigence, inflexibility, and hostility to the opposition are right-wing values, something that probably peaked in the first few years after the Iraq War started, when dissent was basically treated as a form of treason. This comes out in Bourdain's interactions with The Nuge over and over; Bourdain's subtext is something like "ha ha ha, I may disagree with you, but these are darn good ribs, thank you for welcoming me into your lovely militia compound" and The Nuge's is something like "ha ha ha, I would like to shoot everyone who disagrees with me."

Thus, like most of my fellow tinhorn academic lefties, I'm very ambivalent about Obama's decision to try to reconcile partisan politics rather than press his advantage while the Dems have congress and the white house. I know that his attitude about most things, like ending the Iraq War, nationalizing banking, and so on, are more rational than anything the Republicans would come up with. I worry that by trying to work with everyone, Obama is ultimately catering to people who would like nothing less than to see him "fail."

* He alludes to his own lefty politics, but I've never seen or read any evidence of them. It's like he's too embarrassed about his own beliefs to actually let anyone know what they are.

My New Motto

Ok: all of you dingbats who STILL don't read Achewood need to get with the program. Proof positive is today's (comic) strip. For me, a defining excerpt:

Ace of Grades. After seeing Motorhead, what, four times, and being a graduate TA for, what, four years, at last I've found my motto, my personal family crest, my literary calling card. This is the most important thing to happen to my career since caffeine.

Text

Damn.

KFR has been pretty text-heavy of late, Kanye West videos notwithstanding. This is due to the fact that I do not spend enough time pooping around on the internet to scrounge up funny pictures, nor am I comfortable taking tons of pictures myself while about my quotidian routine. You, my loyal half-dozen, suffer the boring-ass consequences, and for that I am sorry.

Re: text, two things.

1. For fun, I've started reading Beauvoir's The Mandarins*. For me, Beauvoir is and always has been one of the dynamic existential duo. She was a philosopher who also happened to be a novelist. I've never read any of her stories before; I've used her philosophical essays (Second Sex, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Pyrrhus and Cineas) and her autobiographies in writing about her life and thought on the one hand and existentialism and politics in general on the other. It turns out...she was a damn fine novelist! Who knew?! The Mandarins is her fictionalized account of the elite intellectual circles in Paris right after the Liberation from the Nazis in '44 and so far I've found it to be a pretty gripping exploration of sex, death, cocktails, despair, and the quest for existential authenticity. Nice!
2. This dissertation thing is just out of hand. In my mind, I can see where everything is supposed to go. I have my big framing arguments, I have the books and articles I've read that I need to work through in the body of the writing, I have ideas about how to work in historical context. But damn if I can get more than a few paragraphs out each day.

On an unrelated note, it was 70-something degrees today in SC. I saw the first "yep, there's gonna be water rationing" article headline on a local rag yesterday. I'm still not all worked-up over it, but having never lived in a place with water-rationing before, I'm a little trepidatious about how it's going to work. Do we start bathing in gin?**

P.S. The extra cup of coffee I had today during section kind of messed me up. This is like your best friend breaking your collarbone and stealing your woman. What the hell, coffee?!

* I'm reading it in English. I just can't be bothered to read it in French.
** Hope hope hope.

Let's Get Petty

Three things today:

1. My homie V sent me a link to this handy thing to see how much state employees make. This allows those of us who study and work at a UC school to find out exactly how much the profs and faculty make. My fellow Californians: indulge.

2. I had a negative experience the other evening after a certain lecture. I asked a question and got a bizarre, mean-spirited response. This made me think about that awful pettiness that lurks in the souls of academics, the house of cards built up over a lifetime of study consisting of equal parts of erudition and jealousy and, above all, the vulnerability almost every academic seems to feel about his or her little intellectual fiefdom. It reminds me of the famous thing Kissinger (supposedly) said: "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

3. I don't have to deal with it as much as a some people do, but I hate anonymous snipey comments on the internet. It's so cowardly, so mean-spirited, so small of someone to be insulting without having to deal with the consequences. I come from the school of "being afraid someone is going to beat you up for being a jerk," and I often wish computers had spring-loaded punching things for firing back at cowardly internet commentators. Thusly: on the rare occasions this shit happens to me, I'm just going to delete it. I'm going to delete it all to hell.

Items! Hot Off the Skiddle!

Item 1! Following the timely intervention of my internet buddy Count Fosco, please take 1.5 minutes to watch this rather bizarre video by hip-hop-cum-electronica impresario Kanye West:


A message from kwest on Vimeo.

I can't improve on Fosco's Write-Up of the video, but I would still note that what this really reminds me of is when my friends and I were about 14. For a class project involving architectural models, a group of my friends created "The Tom Selek Memorial Building, In the Heart of Costa Rica!" It featured "The Leather Dome: A Dome of Leather, With Nightly Def Leppard Laser Shows!" and "The Grease Vats: Bathe in Grease!" and "The Imagination Dock: Pretend You're Somewhere Else!" Don't forget that "The Backwards 'S' Stands for 'Quality'!"

In other words, when you're already rich and famous and bored, your sense of humor may shift to the kind of nonsensical cultural melange of clever high-school freshmen.

Item 2! Everyone ought to read Savage Love every single week. I agree with 90% of his advice and he's almost always hilariously on-point. Also, it's nice to read about people and their completely retarded sex problems.

More to the point, following Obama's use of Rick Warren at the inaugaration, Dan Savage ran a contest for a definition of "saddlebacking" (from Warren's Saddleback Church or Ministry or Temple of Doom or Mountain of Power or whatever...) After tallying the votes, the result is in:

"Saddlebacking: sad•dle•back•ing \ˈsa-dəl-ˈba-kiŋ\ vb [fr. Saddleback Church] (2009): the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities."

Well played, Mr. Savage. I'm doing my part to up the google page rank of the definition site.

This makes me think of my blessed (ha, ha) youth. Simply put, none of my homies got pregnant, because all of my homies were raised in a left-leaning, educated environment with real sex education and we all knew that sex was a good thing but that teen pregnancies and the HIV were bad things. Hence, trips to Planned Parenthood at 16 for the free condoms.

Meanwhile, the Palin children are out there spawning and getting dumber by the generation.

Grad School? Really?

Discussion sections started for the course in which I'm one of the TAs last week. This one looks really good - all but two or three of the kids are history majors, many with a European history focus, and they seemed pretty together during our discussion. Somehow, in the course of the introduction ("Name, major, and any connections you have to France and/or French history! You in the stupid coat! You're first!")* I had occasion to ask how many of them were planning on going to graduate school at some point.

21 out of the 22 kids that were there think they're going to graduate school. What. The. Fuck.

There's something about this particular university, the UC to the SC, that seems to inspire every undergraduate to think he or she is a budding academic. None of them have any idea of what grad school actually entails, nor how to get into a decent program, and least of all why anyone should want to be a grad student.

In the ensuing chat I had with K, she pointed out that most undergrads who like school and think they're good at it think that "really liking history (or lit, or philosophy, or break dancing, or whatever)" is enough of a reason to want to pursue a doctorate in it. And it's totally NOT, guys.

Therefor! In an explosion of creative procrastination, I wrote a document I intend to distribute to undergrads I work with who claim they want to go to grad school. If any fellow grads feel like wasting a few minutes looking over it, feel free to give me suggestions on modifications/additions/deletions in the comments or via e-mail.

So here it is: so you want to go to grad school.

* I didn't really make fun of their clothes. Oh how I wanted to, though.

Now We're Having The Fun!

From my morning skim through the New York Times:

I think this is where The Beatles were from.

Bwah! I am scary Congoles rebel leader! I have a hat!

From the land of my ancestors. Spanker Lane edges out Crotch Crescent by a nose.

Also, from my homie C's Flickr Site, my favorite picture of me from last weekend:

Dissertationaly Useless

Clumsy analogy drawn from my adolescence:

My dad and I went backpacking quite a bit when I was in my late teens. We were sort of minor mountain-baggers: we'd hike out to some remote spot in the Cascades and climb as many mountains as we could in a few days. The biggest one we climbed was Mt. Jefferson, a respectable 10,000+ feet.

What I remember about climbing that bastard (the mountain) was that I'd look up at a spot that didn't look that far away and say "Okay. We are going to climb up to there and then rest a bit." Five rest-stops later, we'd finally get to the spot. And, the whole time, the summit never seemed to get any closer.

My experience with dissertating thus far is similar in that the end never seems any closer and the baby steps always end up being shorter than I'd hoped. I try to squeeze out a few paragraphs of writing, read an article, and make it through a few pages of the interminable phenomenological treatise (the IPT) every day, while keeping up w/ TA duties. A lot of the time, one or more of those tasks just doesn't happen.

Annoyingly, the one thing I think I'm good at (writing academic prose) hasn't been coming together as I'd hoped. The stuff I've written is pretty clumsy, and I'm not nailing down the concepts in Gorz's thought like I'll need to. On the up side, following a meeting with him last week, I decided that my audience is this guy, because he's both well-versed in the milieu in which Gorz wrote and will deliver punishing blows of critique when necessary.

The fun never stops.