Practicing Resurrection

blog rec

2005-10-26T09:26:00.000-04:00

As the paucity of my posts here may suggest, I enjoy reading blogs much more than I enjoy writing one. On that note, I'd like to recommend a great blog that I stumbled across recently: the Faculty Blog at the University of Chicago's Law School. There are some seriously heavy hitters in the legal profession linked, if only tangentially, to U of C's law school, and they rotate in and out on the blog with a wide variety of posts. Recent topics include genetic testing, the authority of the special prosecutor in the Plame case, Hussein's trial, and the rise of Google, to name just a few. For the political science-minded out there, there's an ongoing series of posts from Martha Nussbaum on Hindu-Muslim clashes and their ramifications for democracy in India (which might be especially interesting for you UNC folks given the work of our own Jeff Spinner-Halev). At any rate, check this one out; it's a very interesting read.

Oh, and I especially recommend Strahilevitz's review of Loewen's new book on sundown towns and his related paper "Exclusionary Amenities in Residential Communities".

University of Chicago Law School's Faculty Blog

the search for a truly scary movie

2005-10-20T16:58:00.000-04:00

(es+u+cs+t) squared + s + (tl+f)/2 + (a+dr+fs)/n + sin x - 1

Where:
es = escalating music
u = the unknown
cs = chase scenes
t = sense of being trapped
s = shock
tl = true life
f = fantasy
a = character is alone
dr = in the dark
fs = film setting
n = number of people
sin = blood and guts
1 = stereotypes

That, according to a team of British researchers, is the formula to mathematically calculate the scariness of a particular film.

The formula combines elements of suspense, realism and gore, plus shock value, to measure how scary a film is. Researchers spent two weeks watching horror films like The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs in pursuit of the formula. The model focuses on three major areas: suspense, realism and gore.

Factors considered include the use of escalating music, the balance between true life and fantasy, and how much blood and guts are involved.

As suspense plays such a pivotal role in the success of a scary film, its elements - escalating music, the unknown, chase scenes and a sense of being trapped - are brought together and then squared. Shock value is then added.

In addition, the experts say a film needs to be realistic to be truly frightening. Accordingly, they tried to balance out the parts which made a film either too unrealistic or too close to life.

They then looked at how many characters were in the movie, assuming audiences empathise with a smaller number of people.

The team at King's College, London also took into account the darkness of the film's setting.

Now, I don’t disagree with the elements that this team of researchers included in their formula. On their own, they all seem to make sense. But there must be something amiss in the way that they combine those elements because, after viewing and coding a large selection of films and then plugging the numbers into that formula, they come up with The Shining as the most frightening film ever.

I’ve seen The Shining, and I don’t find it scary. At all. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a pretty good movie – it’s just not scary. The best I can give it is a “kinda creepy.” The empty rooms, Nicholson’s performance, the stillness and quiet, and those two little girls all make it vaguely unsettling in a way, but it’s not anything that I would give a second thought to when turning out the lights and climbing into bed at night. For that kind of effect, you need a legitimately scary film, and in my book, The Shining ain’t it.

So what is?

I’ve been giving some serious thought to that in the last week or so as the Halloween season gets into full swing. I’d like to go out and rent a few genuinely frightening films, brew up some apple cider and bake a couple of pumpkin pies, and settle in for a night of getting scared witless. Problem is, I don’t know of any actually scary movies.

The problem with formulas like the one above is that what is truly horrifying or frightening varies from person to person. No two people are scared in the same way by the same thing. What might cause one person to jump out of their seat (my wife, for instance) may cause another person to yawn and glance at their watch. I must have a decidedly different than average take on what constitutes horror, because when I scan the various lists out there of the top ten scary movies, I don’t find anything that I really consider to be scary. Some of them I don’t even consider to belong in the genre of scary movies at all.

With that in mind, let me try to give some idea of the things that raise the hairs on the back of my neck. In doing so, I’ll of necessity be highlighting some of the things and movies that I don’t find scary at all.

I’ll begin with the latter. First off, let me say that haunted house movies are simply not scary. I’ve seen The Haunting on many of the top ten lists, often in the top five, and I just don’t get it. I can say from experience that this is a film more likely to bring laughter than chills. The same goes for most other movies I’ve seen where a house or the spirits that haunt it is the primary antagonist. I don’t care if it creaks, groans, mysteriously closes doors, generates cryptic writing, features bleeding walls, or folds in upon itself, a house just ain’t scary. Well, let me qualify that: a house can be scary if you’re actually the one in it, but no filmmaker has yet succeeded in making a house a frightening thing on screen. Put me in a supposedly haunted house in the middle of nowhere by myself at night, and I’ll most likely run screaming into the wilderness or hang myself from the rafters before five minutes have passed. But put on a movie where people wander around a house hearing things, getting trapped, and reciting cheesy dialogue, and I’ll want to hang myself for a different reason. This is where the realism factor comes into play for me; there just isn’t enough of a chance that the events that play out in “scary house” movies might actually happen for me to find them frightening.

Then there are the movies that I don’t consider to be scary movies at all. Chief among these would be The Exorcist and The Silence of the Lambs. I think these are both terrific films, well-acted and well-written and generally very competently directed. But they’re not scary. I don’t even think they’re intended to be scary. I tend to think of them more as psychological dramas with a few somewhat frightening moments. Whatever scares they provide are simply icing on the cake, pleasant surprises that, while great in and of themselves, don’t constitute the purpose of the films. I think a truly frightening film needs to have scaring the viewer as its primary goal, and these films don’t fall into that category.

Also, slasher flicks aren’t scary. Watching some mindless drone (Jason, Michael Myers) wander around with a large knife and inexplicable powers of immortality and teleportation isn’t scary. It’s annoying. And it gets old really quick.

Perhaps it would be easier if I list what I actually find frightening. When I was a kid, the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series scared the bejeebus out of me. Particularly those stories that fall into the “urban legend” camp. The most frightening of these for me is the story of the babysitter who receives phone calls from a creepy voice that says things like “I’ll be there soon” and “won’t be long now”. Everybody knows this one: the calls are coming from inside the house! The kids are hacked to pieces and, depending on the version, the babysitter may or may not make it out. There’s a variation on this featuring a kid who comes home early from school to an empty house except for the family dog, who seems to be having trouble breathing. Turns out he’s choking on the fingers of an escaped lunatic that’s hiding in the attic. “High Beams” scared me; to this day I check my back seat when getting in the car alone at night. I also got freaked out by the story in which the girl gives a stranded grandmother a ride only to find out that the old woman is actually an escaped serial killer in drag with a purse full of instruments of torture.

What frightened me (and in some cases still frightens me) about these stories was the feeling that they could actually happen. Every time I came home from school to an empty house or was home alone while my folks were out the babysitter story would run through my head. I’d get a baseball bat and walk around checking all the dark corners and under the beds, then sit huddled in the living room trying to think about something else. Unfortunately they don’t translate well to film. They’re short stories, and they derive most of their scare from the creation and maintenance of tension and suspense that a feature-length film can’t really deliver. The film Urban Legend is a great example of the absolute wretchedness that results when a filmmaker tries to take a series of unconnected frightening events and weave them into a coherent story. Things that were frightening by themselves in short story form became laughable in the hands of a second-rate director and a cast of teen actors.

So what are some movies that I’ve seen that have really scared me? Off the top of my head, I can’t really think of any. There were parts of The Blair Witch Project that I found scary, mostly because of the realism involved. Event Horizon was scary, and I remember being scared during parts of The Ring. I’ve seen the first twenty minutes or so of Night of the Living Dead, and I remember that being creepy and seeming to have the potential to be scary. That scene on the moors in An American Werewolf in London freaked me out. But for the most part I haven’t seen many movies that I would say really scared me at the time and stuck with me afterward. My only hope is that I haven’t made much of an effort to really find and watch scary movies, so I figure there’s got to be some good ones out there that I just haven’t seen/heard of yet.

I realize that there’s not much a connecting theme here in terms of what I find scary and what I find laughable. I guess it’s better to say that it’s not the premise of a movie that makes it frightening or not in my book. I’m willing to believe that there could be an actually scary movie about a scary house. It’s just that it hasn’t been done well yet. What really makes a scary movie succeed, in my mind, is good filmmaking, good dialogue, and good acting. You can take the most horrific premise imaginable and turn it into an inadvertent comedy by hiring a poor director, throwing in a few cheesy lines, and casting a group of wooden actors. Conversely, you can take a concept that on its face doesn’t seem scary and turn it into a truly frightening film with the right combination of music, good directing, and solid writing and acting.

During the past few days (in my off-work hours, of course), I’ve been searching for some movies that do just that. Here’s the few I’ve found so far that, based on reviews I’ve read, hold some promise for being actually scary:

A Nightmare on Elm Street (the original)
Night of the Living Dead
Carnival of Souls
When a Stranger Calls
28 Days Later

What's missing from this list? What are some movies that have kept you up at night or made you look over your shoulder or under your bed? What are the really good scary movies out there?

from the front lines

2005-10-18T09:40:00.000-04:00

Her eyes well with tears as she tells me about another of her organization’s members, a man who had been suffering intense and chronic pain from a tooth that had nearly rotted away. This man had no insurance and could not afford a dentist bill, and was on the verge of pulling the tooth out himself when this organization, a local nonprofit, was able to offer him some part-time work that supplied enough money to have the tooth extracted. It is another in a string of similar stories that I have heard already this day, and it is beginning to be too much. She can barely speak at this point, her voice choked with emotion, and so I suggest a break. We could both use one.

Later, after our meetings have concluded, she drives me around the area to help me get a sense of the living conditions there. We drive past a series of trailers, which she refers to as the “nicer homes” in the community. “Most people live in more dilapidated trailers or in very old houses,” she notes. “There’s one of our members’ houses over there. There’s no floor on the inside and he can’t afford to get it fixed. He lost his arm in a machinery accident several years ago, and then his wife died. He lives there with three kids and tries to keep things together on about $8,000 a year. It isn’t easy.” No, I don’t imagine it is.

It isn’t all bad news, though. We stop by a crafters cooperative that has organized local craftspeople and helps them get their products to market. “This place has kept several families afloat already this year. People around here are just trying to pay their bills and keep the lights on. They have to work several jobs in order to do that, but this cooperative is helping to ease that burden somewhat.” Amazingly, she seems hopeful. I ask a few questions, but mostly I just listen. “Come on,” she says, “I’ll show you the business area.”

Blink and you’ll miss it. Literally. She points to our left. “There’s the only grocery store in the county. Over here these businesses have closed. Shops come and go here, mostly because people can’t cope with being in the red for the first couple of years. They get through a year, maybe 18 months, and then have to close their doors. Then someone else comes in and the same thing happens again. Entrepreneurship isn’t easy when the labor market for your customer base is so uncertain.” We drive past a couple of shops, a restaurant, and then we’re out of the downtown area. We pass an old building with a few cars in the parking lot. “That’s the satellite of the county community college,” she says. “Some of their training classes have been a lifesaver for folks here. If we didn’t have that, even more people would need to leave to look for work and education. With land prices going up and people tempted to sell of old family plots, and nothing to keep them here…we’re losing a culture, a history. We’re losing our way of life.”

We drive on in silence for a time, then turn sharply up a steep hill. The engine groans and she shifts into a lower gear. I worry that we won’t make it up the slope, but the car gives a mighty effort and we finally crest the hill in front of a cordoned-off memorial, in the midst of which sits a large cut stone surrounded by flowers and native plants. “That’s where Junaluska’s buried,” she whispers. We get out and walk over to the memorial. The air is cold and long shadows have begun to fall. It’s getting late. “Junaluska was a Cherokee who lived with his people in these mountains. He fought with Andrew Jackson for a time and even saved his life in battle. They had a bond, or so Junaluska thought. When Jackson became president he ordered the removal of the Cherokee, the beginning of the Trail of Tears. Junaluska and his people were forced out to Oklahoma. That’s really the history of our area right there. Betrayal. The county government has abandoned us, the old jobs are gone. We get something going and then it’s taken away. People lose their houses, houses that have been in the family for generations, so that a road can be widened. The jobs where people have worked for most of their lives leave, and there’s nothing to take their place. There’s a real sense of…I don’t want to say hopelessness…but our people have been betrayed so often it’s tough for them to feel optimistic about life here. We work hard, bust our tails, and then it crumbles out from under us. The county abandons the local school, or a program that was helping us on our feet gets cut. I’ll be blunt, ‘cause I’m too tired not to be: under the previous administration, we were just getting back on our feet. Now I have to choose between buying groceries or gas every month. Maybe I’m talking out of school, but…” I assure her that she’s not.

As we drive down into town the conversation winds it way back to the work of her organization and other groups, of the grassroots efforts that are keeping these communities going. We talk about development strategies, exchange ideas of where to go next. The car pulls into the parking lot of my hotel, and the discussion falters. I suggest what’s gone unspoken through much of our visit, the idea that lurks beneath the surface: that we are fighting a losing battle. We consider that for a moment, then dismiss it. We don’t want to believe it. We can’t believe it. The engine idles softly. We sit in silence, staring out the window, as the sun sinks behind the slopes.

working, running, drinking...

2005-10-13T21:20:00.000-04:00

That pretty much sums up my life here lately. Work, both remunerated and domestic, has been intense. We've got a rather important and large-scale annual event coming up at the ole daily grind that is demanding most of my time, and the home improvement activities continue apace. The grass in the back yard is coming up nicely, thank you very much.

More enjoyable has been the continued running in preparation for the upcoming half marathon in Wilmington. My running group ran a 10K in Carrboro a couple of weekends ago and, while I'm still experiencing some suffering from that event in the form of shin splints and general all-around soreness, we were all pretty happy with the results. My finishing time was 55:21, which is just below a 9-minute-mile pace. Given that I was shooting to finish in just under 60 minutes, I was pleasantly surprised to shave nearly 5 minutes off that projection. I paid for that quickened pace later, though, and my training runs are just now getting back up to speed. It was good to get a race under my belt so that I can more accurately guage how competition and the race-day atmosphere affects my running. Now I know that the excitement causes me to run faster than my target pace, which is good, because I was completely out of steam by the end of the 10K, which is just shy of half the distance I'll have to run in November. Getting out of the gate too quickly for the half marathon will likely mean that I won't be able to finish the race.

Afterward we hit Weaver Street for that classic post-race meal: beer and eggs. I'd like to recommend Young's Oatmeal Stout for that post-run drink; it's a meal in itself. We sat on the lawn for a while, enjoying the first genuinely cool day of the season, and then got burgers and fish over at the Spotted Dog. Then it was on to the Ale House to catch the Yankees-Red Sox end-of-season series and to have a few more beers. Running and drinking, as I said.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the visit of an old college friend a couple of days later. Jennifer from DC stopped by for a brief stay on her way to conduct some interviews at a prestigious private school down the road. We had some great food, including BBQ at the Q-Shack and country cooking at Mama Dips, hit a local pub, and went shopping down on Franklin Street. All in all a good, if too short, visit.

Drinking continued Wednesday night down at the Southend Brewery in Raleigh. We went down partly for drinks but primarily for the open mic night, at which our good friends' band, The Gravy Boys, was performing. You'll recognize most of the band members from the shot of my running group above. The Gravy Boys are mostly a cover band, drawing heavily from bluegrass, folk, country, and classic rock, but they also have a very good (and growing) repertoire of original songs. So good was their performance at this particular open mic night that they were approached by the manager for a series of regular shows. We had some beers and enjoyed their take on The Weight, Don't Think Twice, It's Alright, and a few other standards.

Saturday saw more of running and drinking, though fortunately very little work. Saturday morning's 8-mile run was one of the worst of my life, both due to the distance, lingering soreness from the 10K, and one of the most sickeningly humid days in recent memory. All that was forgotten, however, as we watched the Dawgs handily dispose of Tennessee at Rocky Top. During my sophomore year of college I, along with several of my dormmates, bleached my hair, dyed it red, and painstakingly painted my face with red and black for that year's much-anticipated matchup with the Volunteers between the hedges. I'll never forget being heckled by Tennessee fans, on our home turf, as we trudged back to the dorm after being soundly beaten that day. As we watched the Dogs hand it to them on Saturday (despite a couple of junk touchdowns by the Vols), I wished I could be there in Knoxville to give an earful to those sorry, misguided scrubs. Watching on TV, though, was pretty satisfying as well.

phoning it in

2005-10-07T16:45:00.000-04:00

I feel the need to update the site, but I lack the motivation and the requisite caffeination to write a real post, so I'll leave you with what amounts to the blog equivalent of "phoning it in": a list of the three items recommended to me to purchase by the computer models over at amazon.com:

Recommended for you: The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation, by Alexander Roadie
Because you purchased: Ferguson: An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought), by Adam Ferguson.

Recommended for you: Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, by Henry Brady
Because you purchased: Subversive Institutions: The Design and Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics), by Valerie Bunce.

Recommended for you: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, by Sidney Mintz
Because you purchased: High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink Collar Identities in the Caribbean, by Carla Freeman.

Once again, Amazon isn't even close to the books I actually have my eye on right now. That's not to say that I don't find the items recommended intriguing, it's just that they're not on my list to get to anytime soon.

What would be great is if Amazon could more accurately predict what I'll want to read in the next few months by utilizing a more complex formula for making recommendations. It needs to more heavily weight items I've recently purchased versus more dated purchases and to incorporate into the mix items that I've placed on my wishlist (again weighting the most recent items more heavily). An even better model might incorporate blogs I read, magazines I subscribe to, or media that I most frequently consume. If Amazon got a little more sophisticated, it could tell me what I want to read before I even know it.

Which, while admittedly ultimately undesirable, would be kinda cool.

oh gosh, dontcha know

2005-09-21T10:52:00.000-04:00

In about an hour I’m heading to the airport to catch a flight to St. Paul, Minnesota, where I’ll be attending a training session at the Northwest Area Foundation for a pilot community development and poverty reduction program. While there I’ll also be meeting with a representative of Minnesota’s Community Capital Fund to discuss the possibilities for establishing access to resource pools and gap financing for rural development projects. This trip kind of fell into my lap at the last minute, so I’ll be spending most of my time prepping for meetings. However, this will be my first visit to the Twin Cities area (and quite likely my only one), so I’d like to get out and see a bit of the city, maybe visit a jazz club, and at the very least find some good food (is there any food that Minnesota or the northern mid-west is known for? Didn’t think so…). I’m scheduled to fly back Friday night, so if you don’t hear from me over the weekend, I’m most likely lost in the Twin Cities, probably futilely attempting to find my way through the skyways, or I’ve accidentally driven to Canada and can’t get back into the country. Given my navigational skills, that’s not as unlikely as it might seem.

November 1st

2005-09-15T10:23:00.000-04:00

As I’ve noted before, I’ve been in a bit of musical limbo lately regarding the kinds of music and the artists that I listen to. Whereas I used to buy new records with great gusto, I rarely make any new album purchases these days. It’s a combination of fiscal restraint, a quarter-life musical crisis, unintended detachment from the music scene, and who knows what else. While that situation looks to continue for the foreseeable future, it will be pleasantly disturbed by a couple of new releases on November 1st.

First up: Wilco’s live album. Having seen them in concert five times now and twice with the new lineup, I’m not expecting any surprises here: just some rollicking rock-n-roll songs slightly stripped down and reworked from the studio releases. The track listing is what would be expected, although it’s notably light on material from Being There and Summerteeth. Still, this should be a good one.

And then, more interestingly, there’s the new album from Sun Kil Moon, Mark Kozelek’s follow-up to Red House Painters and a band I’ve mentioned here before. The new album, Tiny Cities, features Kozelek reworking 11 songs by Modest Mouse. Yeah, Modest Mouse. If you’ve heard his album of AC/DC covers, you’re already aware that the songs will sound radically different than their original incarnations. Should be interesting.

If these are the only albums that I get this Fall, it’ll be a damn good season for music. Hopefully there’ll be some other fine releases as well.

the cult of physicality

2005-09-12T21:09:00.000-04:00

Physical fitness is a cult.

I know this because I was inducted over the weekend. Oh sure, I'd dabbled in physical fitness before. I'd even taken part in a few of their rituals, always slipping out the back door when things got a little intense. But this time that was not an option; this time I was with others who would not let me escape. Like religion, physical fitness can be done alone, but it is infinitely better when done with others. At its best, it is a fundamentally communal activity. This weekend I participated in it with a group of runners and, like a poor frat pledge about to get hazed but unable to avoid his fate, I had no escape. Yet when it was over, when the dust had cleared, when the paddling had ceased, I was left with a startling revelation: I liked it.

I've been preparing for some time now to run a half marathon this November. I got into running slowly, reluctantly even, but I've come to appreciate it over time. As short, painful runs became long, painful runs and finally long, tolerable runs, I began to get some pleasure from the activity. It is a great feeling to be able to exercise some control over your body, to be able to tell it to shut up and do what you want. Or at least, I imagine that it will be a great feeling once I'm finally able to do that. So much of running is a mental game, and one that I am still learning how to play. It is a battle with oneself, a constant test of one's limits and capabilities. One can only do it by oneself for so long, however; a group is needed to sharpen that competitive edge, to push the participants to greater heights, to keep them motivated and committed. So on Saturday morning, I awoke at 7:15, pulled my bike from the storage shed, and slowly pedalled it to my friend Bill's house. From there we drove over to Duke trail, where we managed to wrangle a parking spot from some rowdy Virginia Tech fans before meeting up with the rest of the crew that we'll be running with between now and that second weekend of November. We chatted for a few minutes, waiting for everyone to arrive. As we did so, numerous runners passed by our huddle, their faces intense, sweating, completely involved in the activity. When they passed other runners they would wave or give a slight head nod, occasionally referring to each other by name. New to the trail myself, I began to realize that these people all knew each other, that they passed each other on the path several times a week, perhaps even every day. They were brothers and sisters in physical fitness solidarity, clad in similar equipment, each familiar with the same set of aches and pains, of mental and physical hurdles, of elite running shoes and moisture-reducing shirts, of marathon schedules and carb-loading and plantar fascitis. They wore heart rate monitors, memorized training schedules, had freezers full of ice packs, kept journals that included details about their sweat rate, and battled iliotibial band syndrome. And I was about to become one of them.

As I loped along the trail, struggling to keep pace with my companions, counting the mile markers and dreaming of completing the day's six-mile requirement, I wondered why I was doing this to myself. I thought of slowing to a jog, then a walk, and then making my way back to the car. But then I looked around at my companions, and at the runners we passed along the way, and I felt that unmistakeable sense of belonging, of communal suffering and communal triumph. When we completed the run, we gathered again to talk about our training, the best running shoes, ways to combat shin splints, and the pros and cons of energy gel packs, and I realized that I knew the jargon, that I could carry on these conversations, and moreover, that I enjoyed doing so. And that's when I knew that this cult was for me. I don't know if I'll stay for long, but for now at least, they've got a new convert.

The Battleship Half Marathon follows a 13-mile course through the streets of Wilmington and takes place this November 12th. I'll post a weekly update between now and then to keep folks updated of my progress (or lack thereof). Don't expect information about my sweat rate, though - at least not yet.

are you writing from the heart?

2005-09-10T00:13:00.000-04:00

Oh great intentions
I've got the best of interventions
But when the ads come
I think about it now

In my infliction
Entrepreneurial conditions
Take us to glory
I think about it now

Cannot conversations cull united nations?
If you got the patience, celebrate the ancients
Cannot all creation call it celebration?
Or united nation. Put it to your head.

Oh great white city
I've got the adequate committee
Where have your walls gone?
I think about it now

Chicago, in fashion, the soft drinks, expansion
Oh Columbia!
From Paris, incentive, like Cream of Wheat invented,
The Ferris Wheel!

Oh great intentions
Covenant with the imitation
Have you no conscience?
I think about it now

Oh God of Progress
Have you degraded or forgot us?
Where have your laws gone?
I think about it now

Ancient hieroglyphic or the South Pacific
Typically terrific, busy and prolific

Classical devotion, architect promotion
Lacking in emotion. Think about it now.

Chicago, the New Age, but what would Frank Lloyd Wright say?
Oh Columbia!
Amusement or treasure, these optimistic pleasures
Like the Ferris Wheel!

Cannot conversations cull united nations?
If you got the patience, celebrate the ancients

Columbia!

I cried myself to sleep last night
And the ghost of Carl, he approached my window
I was hypnotized, I was asked
To improvise
On the attitude, the regret
Of a thousand centuries of death

Even with the heart of terror and the superstitious wearer
I am riding all alone
I am writing all alone

Even in my best condition, counting all the superstition
I am riding all alone
I am running all alone

And we laughed at the beatitudes of a thousand lines
We were asked at the attitudes
They reminded us of death

Even with the rest belated, everything is antiquated
Are you writing from the heart?
Are you writing from the heart?

Even in his heart the Devil has to know the water level
Are you writing from the heart?
Are you writing from the heart?

And I cried myself to sleep last night
For the Earth, and materials, they may sound just right to me

Even with the rest belated, everything is antiquated
Are you writing from the heart?
Are you writing from the heart?

Even in his heart the Devil has to know the water level
Are you writing from the heart?
Are you writing from the heart?

- Sufjan Stevens - Come on! Feel the Illinoise!

I'm really digging this album lately. I just found out, too late, that he'll be at the Cradle later this month; the show is sold out. Perhaps I'll sit on the curb outside and listen for a few escaping strains. The guy is nothing short of prolific. Great album. The song titles alone are impressive.

mindfulness...

2005-09-09T09:49:00.000-04:00

"There are three types of people in the world. What three? One who is like carving on a rock, one who is like scratching on the ground and one who is like writing on the water. What sort of person is like carving on the rock? Imagine a certain person who is always getting angry and his anger lasts long, jut as carving on a rock is not soon worn off by wind, water or lapse of time. What sort of person is like scratching on the ground? Imagine a certain person who is always getting angry but his anger does not last long, just as scratching on the ground is soon worn off by wind, water and lapse of time. And what sort of person is like writing on the water? Imagine a certain person who, even though spoken to harshly, sharply, roughly, is easily reconciled and becomes agreeable and friendly, just as writing on the water soon disappears."

- Anguttara Nikaya

I've been carving on a rock lately.

"keeping everything moving, everything static"

2005-09-02T16:44:00.000-04:00

I just wrote a fairly lengthy post that I ended up scratching; it was titled "Hurricane Katrina and the Consequences of Voting for the Contemporary Manifestation of the Republican Party." You can pretty much guess where that was going. If not, your sole source of information on the unfolding tragedy must be Fox News or worse. Hell, even the McPaper, USA Today, had a pretty damning series on the whole thing.

I decided that the post was too caustic, borne as it was of so much frustration and anger and despair, not just at what's happened in New Orleans and surrounding areas but at the whole of the past 5 years and at what's coming down the pike.

However, if I'm going to scratch posts that are too virulent, too impetuous, then I'm not sure what the point of this whole blog thing is to begin with. Part of the reason I don't post that often is that I'm not sure what I'm trying to do with this medium. Perhaps some of my fellow bloggers can offer advice in that regard.

I'm about to head out and get to work on prepping for the big move tomorrow. We closed on the house on Wednesday and have been moving items over the past couple of nights. Last night we were there til nearly midnight; I vacuumed each room meticulously, using all the tools that came with the vacuum cleaner to extract every piece of loose material I could find from the carpet fibers, and then Ash came along behind me with a steam cleaner that we borrowed from some friends to give it the final touch. The place still smells a bit like dog, but now it's more like a dog that just got a bath. It needs some airing out, but should be fine after that. I pick up the moving truck at 8 in the morning and am just hoping I can find enough gasoline to fill it up and get it back across town when we're done. Next time you hear from me, I'll officially be free of the apartment life - for the foreseeable future, at least.

Have a great Labor Day weekend, and Go Dawgs!

gone, like a fifth of gin...

2005-08-05T17:43:00.000-04:00

Off to the beach for a much-needed respite. I know it seems a bit early for a vacation (I've only been on the job here for 7 weeks), but this trip has been planned for nearly a year, and it falls at exactly the right time. A beach house with three other couples, including a couple of excellent cooks, and a handle of just about every liquor you can imagine; stretching out in the sun with a good book by day, eating and drinking well into the night...Yes, this is much-needed. The last few months have caught up with me, and I'm looking forward to a break.

I am stumped, however, as to what to read on the trip. Nothing in my not-too-shabby book collection is calling out to be read, demanding my attention. I checked this out from the library, I've been wanting to get to this for a while, and I just got the new edition of this in the mail recently, so I've got a few options available, just nothing I'm really excited about. Of course, I won't get too upset if I end up just lounging on the beach and swimming in the ocean all week. That's not too bad of a Plan B.

Our House

2005-07-27T19:47:00.000-04:00

For the past month or so, Ashley and I have been doing the househunting thing. It's a process that practically begs to be blogged about, but between actually looking for a place, trying to educate ourselves about the process, attending a couple more weddings, and struggling to beat the learning curve at my new job, I just haven't found the time to write a post about it.

And now, it's too late. Last Tuesday, we made an offer on a place, and by Wednesday evening, after a bit of back-and-forth, we were officially under contract. Today was the inspection, and everything went swimmingly. Aside from a couple of small repairs that need to be made, the house is in great shape, which is good news considering it was built back in 1987 (I know that's not that old, but you should've seen some of the other late-eighties places that we saw).

During the first couple of weeks, we saw a lot of houses, and we hated a lot of houses. Typically we'd pull into a neighborhood, and it would feel wrong even before we saw the house under consideration. After looking at a few places, our agent came to understand that my opinion of a house could be gleaned from my facial expression upon walking in the front door. Ashley was more charitable, but out of the 25 or so houses that we saw in person and the hundreds that we viewed on the web, there were only two we would consider living in, and we had quite a few reservations about those. Those mixed feelings were rendered moot, however, as those two places were snatched up within days of our viewing them. It seemed that our differing preferences and the housing market itself would take a long time to be reconciled.

And then one morning, while leaving yet another uninspiring home, Ashley and our real estate agent stumbled across a quaint little place that was for sale by owner. The owner was outside doing yardwork and agreed to show them around the place. I toured it the next day, we drew up an offer the following afternoon, and we were on our way.

As anyone who's been through the process knows, it doesn't take long to figure out what you want, what you're willing to live with, and what you absolutely can't abide. We knew pretty quickly what we wanted, and we recognized it when we finally saw it in this house. It's in an older neighborhood, built when trees and varied facades were still in vogue, and it's got a nice-sized yard with quite a bit of greenery and privacy. It's two-story, four bedrooms, two baths, some hardwood floors downstairs, front porch, with a screened porch out back. No garage, but there's a fairly spacious storage shed around the side. But as much as we like the house, I'm almost more excited by the location. It's in Durham and not far from I-40, so it'll shave 15-20 minutes off my commute and 20-25 minutes off Ashley's; there's a shopping center within one mile that has a nice Italian place, a Mexican place, and a pub; it's in a neighborhood that has a 12-mile network of jogging trails; and, best of all, the entrance to the neighborhood intersects the American Tobacco Trail. I can hop on my bike, hit the trail, and be in downtown Durham within half an hour, which we means that we can now bike to Durham Bulls games, The Regulator, and Elmo's. And several of our good friends live just a couple of streets over.

Assuming everything continues to go according to schedule, we should be moving in at the end of August. There are no pictures on the web, but we took quite a few during the inspection today, which you can see by clicking on the picture above. They're clearly not of professional quality, and the place was a bit messy, as the current owners have a two-year old and are in the midst of moving to Tennessee, but they'll give you a good idea of what we're so excited about.

some questions for pharmacists

2005-07-26T09:37:00.000-04:00

You’ve no doubt heard that some pharmacists are refusing to fill birth control and morning-after pill prescriptions based on ethical and religious views. It seems that some state legislatures are now considering whether or not pharmacists can be required to dispense medication if it goes against their beliefs or moral frameworks.

Now, to my mind, pharmacists have no right to choose at will which prescriptions they will or won’t fill. At the very least, it seems to me, they have a moral and ethical obligation to meet the needs of their patients. If you can get a prescription for a drug, then you ought to be able to get that prescription filled at any pharmacy you choose. Allowing pharmacists to elect not to fill a prescription because they don’t believe in its telos seems to me to be a step down a path that we as a society would be better off not taking. Of course that’s all just personal opinion and not based on any knowledge of pharmacists and their trade or of the legal aspects of this, so I am appealing to you pharmacists out there for your opinions and understandings of the issue. But first, a little personal anecdote to illustrate why the implications of this trouble me.

In the Fall of 2003, I was embroiled in one of the more difficult periods of my graduate school career. I was a teaching assistant for the first time and had three seminars that required a slew of papers and an outrageous amount of reading. In short, I was highly stressed and wasn’t getting much sleep. I began to develop a collection of bumps on my left arm and a shooting pain whenever anything came into contact with the skin on the left half of my torso. Come to find out, I had shingles (which, as you may know, is a form of the herpes virus). To treat it, my doctor prescribed Valtrex, which is probably best known from those commercials with the sappy music and people running on the beach proclaiming that genital herpes will not keep them from playing Frisbee with their dog. Now, suppose my pharmacist refused to fill my prescription for Valtrex based on a mistaken belief that I had a sexually transmitted disease, and that I was therefore a promiscuous slut who had casual sex with any person or farm animal I could get my hands on: should I have to drive from pharmacy to pharmacy inquiring as to each pharmacist’s ethical and religious beliefs in order to get my prescription filled?

Republican Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave says yes. We shouldn’t allow a “matter of convenience” to trump a “matter of conscience”. Perhaps it is only a matter of convenience for those of us who live in communities with a Walgreens and CVS on every corner (although I think it’s a bit more complicated than that). But what of those who live in small towns where there’s only one pharmacy, or in rural areas where one must drive several towns over to get to the only pharmacy in a 100 mile radius? Is it really only a “matter of convenience” for them? And besides, how are we to know which pharmacists will fill which prescriptions? Do I have to drive to every pharmacy around, begging to have my prescription filled? Or will pharmacies be required to post signs outside their businesses: “Doug works Mondays and Thursdays from 8 to 6 and has philosophical reservations about the following medications.”

Of course, I really have no reason to worry about whether or not my prescription needs will be met: this is primarily an issue of women’s rights. Were I a woman, I might have an anecdote like the woman on NPR this morning who was ridiculed and refused treatment by a pharmacist for seeking to have a birth control prescription filled. You can rest assured that a bill requiring pharmacists to fill all prescriptions they are presented with would be passed in a flash if some rogue pharmacist somewhere was refusing to fill an order for Viagra. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t all be concerned about this.

So some questions for pharmacists: are the ethics of filling prescriptions something that is addressed in pharmacy school? Should pharmacists be required to fill all prescriptions that come their way? Do pharmacists take the Hippocratic oath, and if so, how does that factor in? Is there any sort of pharmacist creed or ethics handbook that deals with this sort of stuff?

the restoration economy

2005-07-21T17:33:00.000-04:00

I had the opportunity yesterday to attend a presentation by the author of this book, and I was very much impressed and intrigued by what he said and the discussion that followed. The basic thrust of his argument is that much of the world has reached the stage where a choice must be made between restoration and decay. Many nations and communities have advanced from a “pioneer” model (think sprawl) based on expansion and attendant depletion and devitalization to a stage of conservation and maintenance. Finite resources make continued expansion more difficult if not impossible in some areas, and focus has shifted somewhat to a certain type of conservation. We’re thinking more about how to consume fewer resources, to pollute less, and how to limit sprawl. This stage, however, is insufficient and unsustainable; it only slows the deterioration and depletion. What is needed, and what is rapidly coming into existence, is an economy based largely on restoration: redeveloping brownfields, repairing and restoring ecosystems, renovating water and sewer systems and the built environment. What is needed is a concerted effort at resurrection. This effort is already underway, and it is uniting a diverse group of actors, from environmentalists and venture capitalists to nonprofit and government leaders. It is something that nearly everyone can get behind, it has powerful ramifications for economic and physical health, and it is surprisingly profitable: conservative estimates put the worldwide restoration economy at $1-$2 trillion annually. The book provides interesting examples of restoration projects that are taking place in various parts of the world and offers guidance on how to make your community a part of it. I’ve not finished it yet, but I feel comfortable, based on what I’ve seen so far, recommending it to those of you interested in issues of community and economic development. There’s some really fascinating stuff here.

the continuing decline of my music collection

2005-07-10T20:17:00.000-04:00

I'm sipping coffee in Borders, where I've been for almost the past three hours. It doesn't feel as if it's been nearly that long. I lose myself in bookstores the way some people lose themselves in - well, whatever it is people lose themselves in. It's never long after Ashley leaves town before I find myself wandering the aisles of a Borders, picking up books I'd like to read, thumbing through them, and then placing them back on the shelf. I always bring a book or my journal with me, but I rarely acknowledge their presence. Rather, my time is spent browsing, sampling books and albums that I never seem to get around to buying. I don't know why that is. Well, I do know why when it comes to books: I know I don't have the time to read them, or I have other things that I need to read first, and I've become fairly self-disciplined at not buying every book that catches my eye. But with music, my fiscal discipline is more puzzling. I used to buy albums with reckless abandon, which in retrospect probably wasn't the best idea. A lot of albums from those days have been sold at used-record stores or forgotten along the way. The ones that remain tend to bring a grimace to my face when I occasionally run across them in a box at the back of my closet. But in many ways, I wish I could recapture a bit of that recklessness. Record prices today are simply too expensive (and my internet connection too slow) to permit unfocused experimentation, which is unfortunate. I'm reluctant to buy an album unless I know beforehand that it's great, or at least very very good, and even then I often am unable to complete the act. I'll carry it around the store for awhile, then set it on the shelf and head quickly for the exit. I am, it seems, incapable of an impulse buy. Each purchase must be very carefully considered. Research must be done: what do the commenters and reviewers at Amazon have to say? What about the good folks at Rolling Stone, Magnet, or No Depression? By the time I'm done weighing the decision, the desire and opportunity to buy the record have passed. This reluctance to make anything other than a fully-informed decision when purchasing an album is perhaps the biggest obstacle to expanding my music selection. Well, that, and the fact that I'm no longer certain of my tastes when it comes to music. The two feed each other, and my music collection starves.

There are a number of ways out of this dilemma that I've explored, but none are particularly satisfying. One option has been the local library's music stash. I've been pretty regularly checking out albums from the Chapel Hill public library and copying them on my computer for the past six months or so. While this has increased my supply of music, it hasn't done much for the diversity of my selection. My choices tend to be limited to classic jazz albums, original cast recordings, and the occasional Beatles record. This is not exactly pushing the boundaries of my aural soundscape. The other option is downloading (legally, of course) songs off the internet. This allows for fairly low-cost experimentation, but it has several inherent problems. First, it forces a choice of only one or a couple of songs from an artist, which means that if you choose poorly, a promising band or artist could be prematurely written off based on insufficient exposure. Second, and perhaps this isn't a problem for some people, it divorces a song from its place within the larger thematic concept and flow of the album from which it is drawn. I tend to find sequencing to be a key feature, particularly on really excellent albums, and the process of plucking a song from its intended place in the track ordering fails to acknowledge that importance. Besides, I like to have the packaging of an album; the artwork and the liner notes, if any attention is paid to them by the artist, can often enhance the listening experience. That seems to leave only the option of actually buying an album from the store, an option which, for a variety of reasons (not least of which being our household budget), simply isn't very attractive to me right now.

Is there an alternative I've not considered, some low-cost, low-risk way to both broaden and expand my music collection? Or is there simply no substitute for buying an album, even when you're not very certain of its quality or fit with your tastes, and spending time exploring it, opening yourself to it, and allowing for the possibility of occasionally getting very minimal return on investment? I tend to think the latter.

the content of consciousness

2005-07-07T22:38:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting in near-total darkness, the room illuminated only by a few flickering candles, the remnants of a tropical storm falling noisily beyond the glass of the sliding door that leads to the patio. To my right sits a bottle of Blue Moon's version of hefewiezen. The sounds of Van Morrison's latest album, Magic Time, drift softly in the background. I am content.

Ashley is up in Michigan for Sunni and Dan's wedding reception and, if truth be told, I am glad to have some time alone. It's not that I don't want to be with Ashley that makes me value this time; rather, it's just a penchant I have for solitude. Being alone on occasion with only my thoughts, good music, and a bottle or two of suds is something I will always appreciate. We all need to recharge now and then, and this is what works for me.

Van Morrison's new album is great - soulful, bluesy, and world-weary yet hopeful. He's got one of the all-time great voices and an appreciation for older forms of music that results in songs that are at once new yet familiar. Some lines that resonate with me lately:

You've got to fight every day
to keep mediocrity at bay

and:

Every day, every day, it's hustle time, hustle time
Every day, one more, one more mountain to climb

The lines are sung in more of a matter-of-fact way than in a despairing mood. "This is how life is", he seems to say. We needn't lament it, but neither should we shrink from it. It recalls Dylan's lyric from "Buckets of Rain":

Life is sad
life is a bust
All you can do
is do what you must
You do what you must do, and you do it well
I'd do it for you, honey baby can't you tell?

I've always found sentiments such as these to be more life-affirming than anything having to do with rainbows and lollipops. I guess you might say I prefer Sisyphus to Howdy Doody, or Pooh to Tigger. An honest hopefulness, even if difficult to sustain, is infinitely better than a deceptive, blind delirium. As Jung said, there can be no birth of consciousness without pain.

Speaking of Jung, I've found the Portable Jung reader to be very good bathroom literature of late. There are quite a few gems in there, quite a few thought-provoking tidbits that can provide something to ruminate on throughout the day.

I've also been enjoying Northern Exposure episodes over the past couple of weeks. I ordered Season 3 as a reward for finally landing a job, and I've now watched all 23 episodes. I'd have to say that it's my favorite television show of all time. I watch The Simpsons when I want to laugh, but I watch NX when I want to feel glad about being alive. There aren't many other television shows, or any that I know of, that are capable of engendering that sentiment.

I'll leave you with this:

"The intuitive is never to be found in the world of accepted reality-values, but he has a keen nose for anything new and in the making. Because he is always seeking out new possibilities, stable conditions suffocate him. He seizes on new objects or situations with great intensity, sometimes with extraordinary enthusiasm, only to abandon them cold-bloodedly, without any compunction and apparently without remembering them, as soon as their range is known and no further developments can be divined. So long as a new possibility is in the offing, the intuitive type is bound to it with the shackles of fate. It is as though his whole life vanished in the new situation. One gets the impression, which he himself shares, that he has always just reached a final turning-point, and that from now on he can think and feel nothing else. No matter how reasonable and suitable it may be, and although every conceivable argument speaks for its stability, a day will come when nothing will deter him from regarding as a prison the very situation that seemed to promise him freedom and deliverance, and from acting accordingly. Neither reason nor feeling can restrain him or frighten him away from a new possibility, even though it goes against all his previous convictions."

- Jung, from "A General Description of the Types"

One wedding and a (metaphorical) funeral

2005-07-06T19:49:00.000-04:00

Well, the tumbleweeds have been blowing through this blog for quite some time now, and I've been faced with the question of whether or not I should simply go ahead and let the thing die a somewhat dignified death. For now, I think not. There are still quite a few things I'd like to do with this medium (including my own site design), but they'll have to be put on hold for a while. In the meantime, I'd like to get my posting back up to somewhat respectable levels. The rub with blogging and journaling is that, if you let too much time elapse between posts/entries, there forms a backlog of things that you want to write about that is so immense, you end up never writing again because you simply can't address it all. Rather than fall into that trap, I'm just going to avoid posting about most of what's happened in the past month. Or, rather, I'm going to briefly and inadequately address some of what's happened and then hopefully elaborate on a few aspects in future posts.

First, one of my absolute best friends, Carr, got hitched. Carr and I were casual acquaintances in high school and became close friends in college at UGA. Since we've been friends he's introduced me to great music, entertained me with epistemological debates, challenged me in a way that only great friends can, listened to me recount fears and hopes, called bullshit on me when necessary, shared a basement room that can only be described as revolting, and told me the best joke about beef stroganoff that I've ever heard in my life. He and Tiffany, also a great friend of mine, have been together since anyone can remember, and it was a great privilege to be a part of their wedding and to see all of my old friends again. As I said at their rehearsal dinner, it is a very special and strong relationship that can endure the trials of high school, the transition to college, and the general anomie of the journey into adulthood; Carr and Tiffany's relationship has not just endured these things, it has flourished throughout them. I count myself fortunate to be a small part of their lives.

More pictures (though not very many) are here.

As for the funeral, well, that would be my life as a graduate student that was officially laid to rest. I applied for and was granted a leave of absence, so the possibility for resurrection is always open, but the stone that now seals off that aspect of the last three years is one that I'd rather not see rolled away any time soon. My ties were the program were completely severed when the book review wrapped up its stint at UNC and was sent on its way to Indiana University last Monday. After the last box was packed, we made for Acme and a celebratory bottle of wine. It was somewhat bittersweet: I was leaving the program, Dustin was moving to Syracuse, Erin was going on the job market, Greg was returning to his job at UNCG. But I was tired of working two jobs at once, and ready to sever the last of my connection to UNC. I'll miss the people I worked with, but not the work. That is true as well of graduate school in general.

To balance things out, I've begun my new life working on public policy and economic development issues at The Agency. I won't elaborate on that now, except to say that it has been keeping me extremely, extremely busy. I'll have more to say soon about the transition to the working world and what exactly it is that I'm doing.

Oh, and Ashley and I have begun the process of searching for a house. We've secured a real estate agent, met with several lenders regarding mortgages, toured many properties, and came within an inch of making a formal offer on a place just a couple of days ago. I have plenty more to say about this as well, and a lot of advice to solicit from my friends more experienced in this department, but for now I've simply got to get myself out from behind a computer screen.

gainful employment

2005-06-05T10:43:00.000-04:00

Have you, dear reader, grown weary of dropping in here only to be faced with yet another angst-ridden post chronicling my struggle with graduate school and my search for alternative and more fulfilling career paths? Well, rest assured, I have grown weary of writing them. And for every post that appears here, there are pages upon pages of journal entries and hours upon hours of mental wrangling with these subjects that you, mercifully, are not exposed to.

If you are indeed tired of such struggles, I have good news: last Thursday, I was offered (and I accepted!) a position with a community and economic development agency in Raleigh.

"The Agency" is a non-profit working to develop, promote, and implement sound economic strategies to improve the quality of life of rural North Carolinians, with a special focus on individuals with low to moderate incomes and communities with limited resources.

I don't know exactly what I'll be doing there as of yet. I do know that I'll be working in the areas of community and workforce development, grants administration, and policy prescriptions and analysis. It is essentially my dream job at the moment, albeit one for which I don't feel entirely qualified. The Agency's work is at the intersection of government, private, and non-profit economic development initiatives, meaning that I'll have an opportunity to be involved in negotiating the interests of all three sectors while working to make tangible improvements to economically stressed or depressed communities. I am extremely interested in the issues that The Agency addresses and in the type of work involved, and the overall mission comports well with my political and social philosophy. I don't think I could have found a better position or a more attractive place to work, and I definitely couldn't be more excited about getting started. It feels unspeakably good to have a resolution to the last three years of turmoil and uncertainty, and to have those years justified at the same time.

What it all means for this blog is uncertain. Certainly my posting has been less than prolific of late, so it would be difficult for my posts to decline in quantity. I will no doubt have less time to devote to blogging. There will be a steep learning curve for me at The Agency, as I do not have the background in public administration that it would be helpful to have for such a position. I'll have to pick up quite a bit rather quickly, which means much of my time will be devoted to learning as much as possible as quickly as possible about a wide range of issues. And I'll also be continuing to work at the book review through the end of the month in the evenings and on weekends, so free time will be difficult to come by for a while. Given all that, I expect the blogging will slow considerably for the next couple of months. At the same time, however, I will have more mental and emotional resources to give to writing than I have had since starting this blog, given that those capacities will no longer be consumed in struggling with existential quandaries. And I may want to write about some of the issues that I'll be now working with on a daily basis. So it is conceivable that my blogging will actually pick up a bit; it's really too soon to tell on that front.

Never fear, however. I will keep up the writing, and I don't think for a moment that this development will mean that angst and existential crises will be entirely banished from my life. There will still be plenty of grist for the mill, and I hope to begin writing and thinking again with renewed vigor and purpose. So continue to drop in, and thanks for walking with me through the past few difficult months. You have been greatly appreciated.

the unbearable lightness of being

2005-05-20T08:57:00.000-04:00

The job search continues, with few tangible results. I've been to a couple of interviews, have one looming in the near future, and have several things floating out there in the ether. I am casting a wide and somewhat unfocused net; there are approximately three to five paths that I am considering, each fairly radically different from the other, each with its own set of pros and cons. This is a critical juncture for me in many ways; it is perhaps my last opportunity to choose from significantly different alternatives, my last and best chance to consciously will a particular identity. Assuming I am able to find a position with career potential (as opposed to something just to pay the bills), I will be committing to a particular professional trajectory for the foreseeable future. In political science circles we refer to this as path dependency, which is just another way of saying that past practices significantly determine future outcomes. For example, choosing to pursue a masters degree in political science constrained the realm of feasible choices from which I am now able to select; opening one door necessarily closes several others, or pulls them to to such a degree that moving through them becomes a practical impossibility. I currently face those three to five doors with the knowledge that stepping through one means perhaps permanently closing the others at the same time that it means I will face a different set of doors in the future, and that is a sobering reality. I feel the weight of this decision more acutely than any other, yet I am also aware that quite a bit of it is determined by things beyond my control: the labor market at this particular historical moment, the need to remain, at least for the time being, in this narrow geographical area, etc. It is, as you might imagine, quite a maddening situation, and I look forward to its resolution. Yet at the same time, I fear it.

"Here, then, awaiting our study, lies man's authentic 'being' - stretching the whole length of his past. Man is what has happened to him, what he has done. Other things might have happened to him or have been done by him, but what did in fact happen to him and was done by him, this constitutes a relentless trajectory of experiences that he carries on his back as the vagabond his bundle of all he possesses. Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being. In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past. The experiments already made with life narrow man's future. If we do not know what he is going to be, we know what he is not going to be. Man lives in view of his past.

Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is - history. Expressed differently: what nature is to things, history, res gestae, is to man."

- Jose Ortega y Gasset, "Man Has No Nature"

welcome to the desert of the real

2005-05-18T11:34:00.000-04:00

For those with any serious interest in writing, blogging is an almost irresistable medium. As proof of which, allow me to welcome the latest victim of blogger's siren song, my good friend Ryan, to the endeavor.

I've known Ryan all my life; through various twists of fate we managed to live in close proximity as we traveled from North Carolina to Georgia and back again. He was one of the few people that Ash and I knew when we moved to the Triangle nearly three years ago and, while he has since moved on to the sun-drenched southern California coast, we remain in close contact. In spite of his penchant for Duke sports and being a former Blue Devil himself, he has one of the keenest intellects I've ever known and a proclivity toward deep thought, as well as an appreciation and talent for great writing. He's the kind of person you'd want to meet for a drink, the kind of person you'd want to share your deepest thoughts and preoccupations with, the kind of person whose deepest thoughts and preoccupations you'd like to hear. Now you can:

The Benediction of Water

The Simpsons

2005-05-15T21:34:00.000-04:00

From tonight's episode, after watching a foreign film:

Bart: I was so bored, I cut the ponytail off the guy sitting in front of us. (Holding the ponytail up to the back of his head): "Look at me, I'm a grad student! I'm 30 years old and I made 600 dollars last year."

Marge: Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life-choice...

Indeed.

so, what do you want to do this weekend?

2005-05-12T12:44:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was Wednesday, which means, among other things, that the latest issue of The Independent appeared in black metal bins throughout the Triangle some time around five o'clock. The Independent is great for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it's free, and while I enjoy the articles and features, the first thing I do when I crack it open is to peruse the listing of upcoming events to find out what I'm going to be doing over the upcoming weekend. I usually find five to ten really interesting things going on and then winnow out those that conflict with my schedule or modest means (read: poverty) until I am left with one or two things that I can actually make it to. And now, in what will perhaps become a regular feature here at PR, I bring that process to you in all its mundane glory. So without further adieu, here are a couple of interesting things in the Triangle that I'd like to make it to in the next week:

Friday:
- Mo Rocca reads from his new book at the Bull's Head (5 pm). Free, easily accessible, and likely pretty damn funny - this one seems doable.

Saturday:
- World Fair Trade Day at Ten Thousand Villages (all day). "Presentations by local fair trade activists, artisan demonstrations, coffee samplings from Larry's Beans, a galimoto obstacle course for kids, and world music performers Teresa Fernandez and Silvano Cesares." Free music, free coffee, and an obstacle course that I will be crashing - it seems likely that we'll make it to this one as well.

- Sarah Shaber reads from Tar Heel Dead: Tales of Mystery and Mayhem from North Carolina (11 am at McIntyre's in Fearrington). It's always fun to go out to Fearrington, and Allen and Sons BBQ is just down the road. I think I can talk Ashley into this one...

- Caffe Driade - Italian wine tasting with live music (5-9 pm). Sounds great, but at $10, I can hear my wallet groaning. Still...

- Chicago Tenant at De La Luz (8 pm). "If you're into the leading edge of jazz, heads up. You're not going to see a touring ensemble this amazing in a while. Led by German saxophonist Peter Brotzman, the Chicago Tenant boasts some of the best reed and horn players around...". Cutting-edge jazz, yes; potentially high ticket price, no. This one's a longshot.

Sunday:
- ReelPolitik at Ringside (8 pm). "Screening of energy/natural resources documentary Kilowatt Ours plus discussion with Dennis Markatos-Soriano (Projects Director, SURGE) and Sam Hummel (Environmental Sustainability Coordinator, Duke)." Interesting doc, $5 suggested donation; I think I can swing that.

Ongoing:
- Dine Out and Help the Homeless. "During May, wine purchased through Restaurant Starlu's Bottles of Change program will benefit Genesis Home, a transitional home for homeless families in Durham. For every glass or bottle of selected wines sold, Starlu will donate a portion of sales to Genesis Home." A chance to get some wine and to send some money the way of a very worthy recipient and the place where my good friend Ryan used to work.

That's it for now. We'll be lucky to make it to a couple of these, but usually hitting one or two is well worth it. Should be a good weekend.

give me the splendid silent sun

2005-05-10T23:18:00.000-04:00

Ashley is feeling very depressed, and I am feeling very unhelpful. She's down in large part due to her job situation, and I am not exactly thrilled with that part of my life myself. I have little substantive advice to offer or encouragement to give. One of the great things about being married is that there is someone there to help cheer you up when you're feeling bad; the converse of that is that there may be someone there to pull you down when you're feeling good. And if you're both stressed or anxious or feeling particularly out of sorts, well, the prospects aren't good. One's gray mood tends to compound the other's. That's where we seem to find ourselves for the moment.

In better news, we have Ryan Adams tickets, and Pete is having a get-together.

"It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?"

- Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

2005-05-04T22:04:00.000-04:00

Ashley and I spent last weekend back in Atlanta for a couple of major events in our families: my sister's wedding and our niece's second birthday party. They were every bit the festive family affairs you might expect, and they've left me more cognizant of my age (in a good way) than I've ever been before. Seeing your only sibling starting a new family or your in-laws adjusting to being grandparents tends to focus your thoughts on your own place within the families of which you're a part. For me, that place is one of transition, awkwardly caught between the changes of my own family, of the family I've married into, and of the family Ashley and I are in the process of creating. It's like giving birth and being born all at once, and it's every bit as disorienting, frightening, and exhilirating as that implies.

For this past weekend, though, it was a time of happiness, of wistful remembrance and hopeful expectation. A time of celebration. My sister married a wonderful guy, and my niece turned two: the beginnings of two lives full of promise and potential. I am looking forward to being a part of those lives, and to having them be a part of mine. Congratulations Carrie and Marc, and Happy Birthday Autumn!

See pictures from Carrie and Marc's wedding here...

...or pictures from Autumn's birthday party here.

seven sovereign sheikhdoms

2005-04-27T10:55:00.000-04:00

The inevitable has arrived, as it so often does. I dialed the phone on Sunday evening expecting to hear the cheery voice of my good friend Garett on the other end, but I was instead met with the news that he has been deployed to the United Arab Emirates for the next four to six months. He was told he was going, then told he was staying, and then given less than 48 hours to prepare before he was whisked off on a military transport last Thursday. No word yet on how to get in touch with him, on exactly how long he will be gone, or on whether he'll be kept in the UAE for the duration or moved to less friendly environs; I'll post an update if I become aware of any of these things. In the meantime, we wish him safety and a speedy return.

a very sincere conversation

2005-04-24T15:40:00.000-04:00

"In the important questions of life, we are always alone. Our deepest inner thoughts cannot be understood by others. The best part of the drama that goes on deep in our soul is a monologue, or, better to say, a very sincere conversation between God, our conscience, and our self."

- Henri Frederic Amiel

aporia

2005-04-14T01:16:00.000-04:00

I like Kunstler’s diatribe for its bombast, not for its scholasticism, and I think his use of hyperbole hints that he’s not going for a peer-reviewed publication here (I’m not aware of any “zillionare” athletes). “McHouse” is a neologism that is likely employed in a myriad of ways, and I’m not exactly certain how Kunstler meant to wield it here; it’s not my term, but I infer from contextual clues that he’s referencing generic, rapidly-produced tract housing. And natural gas, while volatile of late, was relatively cheap until recently. I agree, however, that Kunstler erred here. All of that, anyway, is not really the point of his piece, or at least not of my thoughts on these issues. I reproduced it here because it led me to spend my morning thinking, which rhetorically bombastic pieces have a somewhat unique ability to do. We often need a shock to rouse us from our torpor, to make us pause and think, and that is valuable even if the end result is only to reject the initial analysis.

I myself am not a doomsday prophet; note that I make no dire predictions about our fate as a society. I only point out that failure to consider the consequences of our actions renders us less able to shape and control that fate. Just as I am skeptical of Chicken Littles, I am also skeptical of grasshoppers who seek nothing but self-gratification while the ants make preparations for the future.

I agree that alternatives to our predicament are not readily apparent or particularly feasible/appealing, and in fact I said as much in my post. I do not pretend to have all the answers, or any answers, and nor do I condescend to those who, like me, desire a comfortable existence in our current environment. That said, I am a sentient being, somewhat well-informed, and I cannot help but note that there are what must at least be described as (in the most generous of analyses) potential problems on the horizon. The rapid industrialization of underdeveloped nations poses a problem for global warming, natural resource depletion, and any semblance of global “stability.” The rise in pollution-related diseases poses a problem. The continued overconsumption of energy resources poses a problem. Species depletion poses a problem, as does deforestation, environmental contamination, etc. Rising bankruptcy rates pose a problem, as do increased working hours, declining rates of saving, the decreasing value of the dollar… The effects of these problems are not abstract or remote, but can be quantifiably measured in our quality of life, overall health, and financial and environmental stressors. The standard of living that we in developed nations enjoy is not sustainable, and no rational person can claim that it is. Change will come, and while that change need not be disastrous, there is no reason to assume that it will be just one more step up the ladder.

Blind faith in progress, hubris in fact, is a key cause of civilizational collapse. And the recent rise of right-wing neo-Luddites and religious fanatics in this country ought to caution us against passively assuming that science and technology will hold sway. We are faced with a collective action problem that can only begin to be addressed by government imposition of things like pollution controls and fuel-efficiency standards. When the current administration in the world’s lone superpower scoffs at global warming and considers evolution “just a theory”, we would do well to reconsider the natural supremacy of rationalism and scientific progress. We would do well to recognize that, for the time being, the sorts of cooperative efforts necessary to confront those “potential problems” are unlikely to emerge. We would do well to look at our own lives and to try to influence those things over which we have some control.

Those individual efforts are what I am primarily interested in here. I do not mean to suggest that altering our behavior is easy or that I have been successful in doing so. I do not mean that we should feel guilty about the way we live; our society does not give us many choices in that regard, or many easy choices, at any rate. I do not mean to implicate my friends who are forced to negotiate longer commutes than they would like or who are rightfully excited about their first homes. I do not mean to suggest that I do anything other than struggle unsuccessfully with the standard of living issues that we are rapidly forced to confront. I only mean to point out that real problems exist, problems which we are better served to face now than to put off until another, perhaps too late, day. I only mean to say that, yes, I occasionally worry about/ponder the future of contemporary society and my role in that future (and I do so without suicidal tendencies or chronic unhappiness). I only mean to suggest that these are things we ought to think about as responsible human beings. I only mean to communicate to you, my occasional readers, that I struggle with how to live and what to live for, and that I value your advice on the matter.

I do not believe that the doomsday scenarios are inevitable. But I see no reason to believe that progress is, either.

hubris

2005-04-13T12:03:00.000-04:00

"I notice lately that there are two kinds of hubris operating among the "forward-thinking" classes in America (which is to say, those who are thinking at all). One I call techno-hubris. It represents the idea that there are really no limits to our powers of innovation and it is obviously the product of our experience in the past century, especially of our victory in World War Two and of the 1969 moon landing. The other kind is organizational hubris, the certainty that we can organize our way around the oil bottleneck, global warming, and population overshoot. What both modes of thinking have in common is that neither recognizes the probability that we are moving into a period of discontinuity, turbulence and hardship. Both modes of thinking assume that we can negotiate a smooth transition from where we are now to a new-and-improved human condition.

There is a remarkable consistency in the delusional thinking at every level of American life these days. When Americans think about the future at all, they seem to think it will be pretty much the way we live now. The buyers of 4000 square foot McHouses think that they will be able to continue heating them with cheap natural gas, not to mention commuting seventy miles a day. The stadium builders assume that major league sports will continue just as it is today, with chartered jet planes conveying zillionaire athletes incessently back and forth across the continent. The highway engineers and the municipal planners are focused like lasers on providing more roads and more parking spaces for evermore cars. The architects are designing more skyscrapers, despite the decrepit condition of the electric grid and the frightful situation with our depleting natural gas supply. We're so confident, so sure of ourselves.

When you combine the seven deadly sins with high technology, you get some really serious problems. You get turbo-sins. It's dreadful to imagine what goeth after turbo-pride."

- Jim Kunstler, in the Clusterfuck Nation

I know most of us grew up in the ‘burbs, playing in cul-de-sacs and driving everywhere, first shuttled by our parents and then in cars of our own, commuting vast distances and not really giving it much of a second thought, and I know that for many of us it’s tough to imagine that life was ever any different, that there ever existed any alternative way of organizing our communities and our lives. At least that’s how it was for me, anyway. And now we are reproducing that lifestyle, getting houses of our own and driving everywhere, and while that’s perhaps subconscious on our part, there isn’t much of an alternative; we’re priced out of the cities, there’s little to no public transport, and the places we need to go are separated by sizeable distances, distances that, if we tried walking or biking them, would probably get us killed. It’s tough to imagine an alternative because we’ve never really seen one.

We hardly need to look back very far, however, little more than half a century, to see that it was not always this way. In fact, we need not look back at all, but simply around us at the ways in which other countries (or some experimental communities here in the U.S.) are grappling with these problems. The problem is, a workable solution, even one as simple as driving less, would require a radical reorganization of our lives and communities, one that we can’t achieve individually and one that many today refuse to even consider as a possibility. New urbanism is great and all, but it’s catching on too slowly and it’s only part of the answer. Suburbanism itself has to be redefined and largely abandoned, and most of us can’t imagine what that looks like; we were raised thinking that it’s never been any different, and too many today are proclaiming that it never was and that it never needs to change.

Is the way we live now unsustainable? Will the lives of our children be radically different than the ones we grew up thinking were the norm? Most definitely. The longer we refuse to recognize that reality, the more we lose our ability to shape that future. And the greater the burden that our children will have to bear.

The Southern Part of Heaven

2005-04-06T14:50:00.000-04:00

I am now almost fully recovered from the festivities of Monday night, or enough so that I can at least post a few comments and pictures here before the game recedes too far into the past. Although my interest in sports has waned considerably in the past five years or so, to the point of being nearly nonexistent, my support for the Heels has survived more or less intact, ingrained as it is into the code of my DNA. Growing up in North Carolina in the 80s, I was forced to choose my basketball allegiances quickly and to stick by them. If sociologists are looking for the formation of in-group/out-group biases at a young age, they can do no better than to look at children who are reared in the heart of ACC basketball country: parents dress their kids in team colors and send them off to school to band together with their compatriots and to ridicule the poor souls who happened to be dressed in the wrong shade of blue or (God forbid) in red or black and gold. Home economics projects involved stitching the mascot of your team onto a pillow, television sets were wheeled into classrooms during the ACC Tournament, grades seemed to be a direct result of whether or not you and your teacher shared an affinity for the same team, and friendships were formed solely on the basis such allegiances.

My mom went to Western Carolina and my dad to Clemson, so there was no family legacy for me to draw on in choosing sides. Some uncles had gone to State, but that rivalry was never very salient in the circles in which I ran. Allegiances were sharply divided along Duke/Carolina lines, and you gave yourself wholeheartedly to one while developing an intense loathing for the other. The reasons I chose Carolina are no longer clear, or important. I’d like to say that I went with the public over the private, with the North Carolinians over the carpetbaggers from Jersey, but in reality it was probably based on who my best friend liked or my predilection for Carolina blue over the darker, more adulterated shade of the school down the road. Regardless of the reason, once the choice was made, there was no turning back. I got Carolina blue t-shirts, Tar Heel trading cards, a blue and white basketball with a ram emblazoned on it, powder blue Chuck Taylors, pennants, posters, and whatever else I could get my hands on. Friends who liked Duke were properly discarded, former enemies who pulled for the Heels were now counted as allies, and the obsession was on its way. It survived a move to Georgia and my induction into Bulldog football as well as the loss of Dean Smith, and its only real test was, ironically, my return to North Carolina to study at that hallowed campus. Guilt by association nearly undid my allegiance to Carolina basketball, as my frustration with the PhD program was transferred to UNC as a whole and everything associated with it. I finally had a chance to go to Carolina games, to be a part firsthand of that community, and I found that I wasn’t all that interested. In the past year, however, as I’ve made a gradual move away from the program, life has returned to the dormant obsession. Tar Heel paraphernalia has reappeared in my life, and hatred for Duke, which never went away, is raging fully once again. And the team, as if responding to my renewed faith and what promises to be my final year at the school, pulled off a sweet championship victory on Monday that seemed to redeem both their struggles and mine over the past few years.

We took in the game down on Franklin Street, arriving around 5 to throngs of people and to restaurants and bars already filled to capacity. The biergarten at He’s Not Here still had some room, so we crowded in, found an empty bench, and promptly began drinking. Many Blue Cups of beer later and the game was on, a blur of cheering and screaming and drinking, and then we were out on the street, embracing strangers and starting fires, yelling at the night sky and reveling in the anonymity and license that a huge mob affords. It was around this time that, if your phone number is recorded in my cell phone memory, you may have received a drunken call with the voices of screaming jerks at the other end. In fact, I’ve been told that some of you received more than one of those calls. Apologies, my friends, but I wanted to give you a taste of what we will some day soon experience on a winter evening on Broad Street, perhaps this coming season but certainly in the near future. After wandering the street for an unspecified amount of time, we wound up at Linda’s with more beer and several baskets of cheese fries, finally making our way home sometime after 2. Then came Tuesday morning and the painful realization that I am indeed getting older, that I can no longer handle ill-advised amounts of drinking, but that realization was quickly dashed by the remembrance of why I was in that state, of the return of the Heels to glory, and a smile crept across my face. It's been there since.

2005-04-06T14:47:00.000-04:00

It all began innocently enough...

2005-04-06T14:46:00.000-04:00

Our perch for much of the night

2005-04-06T14:45:00.001-04:00

2005-04-06T14:45:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:44:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:43:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:42:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:41:00.001-04:00

2005-04-06T14:41:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:40:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:39:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:37:00.000-04:00

Victory!

2005-04-06T14:36:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:35:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:34:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:33:00.001-04:00

2005-04-06T14:33:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:32:00.000-04:00

heading for the streets...

2005-04-06T14:29:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:28:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:27:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:26:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:25:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:24:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:23:00.000-04:00

Winding up the night at Linda's (this thumb's for you, Jeff)

2005-04-06T14:22:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:21:00.000-04:00

Colleen is also guilty of making the celebratory phone call

2005-04-06T14:20:00.000-04:00

Much beer was spilled that night...

2005-04-06T14:19:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:17:00.000-04:00

2005-04-06T14:16:00.000-04:00

The only shot of one of Linda's legendary fries.

The last couple of weeks...

2005-04-01T00:58:00.000-05:00

...in a nutshell. Details coming soon...

Chatham County Line

2005-03-15T02:29:00.000-05:00

Oy. Just wrapping up what has been a very long, tedious, and frustrating day. Not the way I wanted to start my spring break, but at this point in my career as a student, spring breaks have lost most of their meaning and potential. The only thing that differentiates this week from any other week in this semester is that I didn't have to sit through a three-hour seminar today; otherwise, it's business as usual.

Things should improve now that Monday is behind me. I don't usually take the weekend off, but this past weekend the weather was simply too nice to sit in front of a computer or hunched over a soon-to-be-obsolete work of social science. A little taste of Spring, and much needed, though the rest of the week promises a cold, gray vengeance. Ashley and I spent Friday evening at the bar at The Spotted Dog, she sipping a glass of wine and I working on a pale ale, both of us sharing the crab dip and black bean nachos while NC State scored a surprising victory over Wake Forest on the monitor overhead. There's no such thing as a bad choice at The Spotted Dog, either from the drink list or the food menu, and while it's a tad pricey, we felt justified by the good tax return news we'd gotten earlier in the day. Saturday morning was spent sleeping in a bit and then soaking up the sun and warmer temps on a jog through the surrounding neighborhoods. We got back in the afternoon and had just enough time to fix a dinner of pork chops, butternut squash, and salad before a couple of friends dropped by to share a few pre-concert drinks.

That's right, pre-concert, for Saturday evening marked our first foray to Cat's Cradle, and we couldn't have picked a better show through which to get acquainted with the venue. It was a cd release party for Sarah Lee Guthrie (Woody's granddaughter, Arlo's daughter) and her husband Johnny Irion, but it was the opening acts that stole the show: Chatham County Line and the incomparable Kevin Kinney (of Drivin n Cryin fame). Chatham County Line adheres to the classic bluegrass custom of huddling around one microphone and using carefully-choreographed moves to accentuate the music and the playing talents of each member. Upright bass, banjo, fiddle, and lyrics touching on the Tennessee Valley Authority one moment and bacon in the skillet the next - it doesn't get much better than that, and CCL executed it flawlessly and with a nice Appalachian flair. It was a foot-stompin' good time, nicely complemented by a small and receptive audience and cheap beer from an ice-filled metal bucket - things you can't get at the bigger concert venues and the Ticketmaster tours. Not that I don't enjoy seeing Wilco or U2 or Dylan at a big stadium show, but the best concert experiences by far are those at small, smoky clubs with cheap covers and cheaper beer, where the barrier between performer and audience is broken down almost to the point of nonexistence. Saturday night was one of those shows.

Kevin Kinney came on following Chatham County Line, pulling an old metal folding chair almost unnoticed up to the microphone and launching into a soft acoustic tune. He's definitely getting older, and his voice would only permit him a few songs, but when he sang "Sometimes I Wish I Didn't Care" to the fiddle accompaniment of CCL's John Teer, I got chills. He's got one of those great, distinctive voices, raw and plaintive, and when he sings you believe it. Not so with Sarah Lee and Johnny - their performance was disappointingly anticlimactic, and they felt inauthentic, put on, as if they were only affecting the folk aesthetic as opposed to living it or taking it seriously. Everyone came out for a long, winding jam-session performance of Indian Song, however, which was a nice end to an overall great show. Definitely check out some of the songs on Chatham County Line's website, and keep an eye on their tour dates to see if they're heading your way; it's live music at its best.

Sunday morning, beautiful and warm, found us eating breakfast on the lawn at Weaver Street, basking in the sunlight and chatting with friends. We got some work done midday and then went over to a friend's place to grill out and to enjoy the waning hours of warmth. We sat around the table talking for a long while, and by the time we left it had begun to rain and a chill was setting in. Then came the Monday bleakness, but it finally has passed, and Spring is finally, if only tentatively, in the air. If the warmer temperatures bring more days like this past weekend, then things are definitely looking up.

Reading and Listening

2005-03-07T23:22:00.000-05:00

I've had neither the time nor the disposable income to spend on all the books I've seen lately that I'd like to peruse or on experimenting with some new music selections to add to my outdated collection. Most of my time is spent on the book review or the job search, and for the past couple of days I've been tied up hosting a prospective member of next year's incoming graduate cohort. This particular student hails from San Diego and is looking to study political theory here at UNC. She flew in on Thursday for the visitation weekend, which has grown to include barhopping downtown, a couple of nice (free) dinners, and a party at Pete's place, in addition to the usual meet-and-greet with professors and current grad students. I spent much of the time trying to diplomatically answer questions about the program, carefully choosing my words in an attempt to be as even-handed as possible about what has really been a joyless experience for me. I think I did a pretty good job of honestly answering her questions, qualifying my own personal experience, and generally encouraging her to give it a try. I told her most of the things that I wish I knew coming in, and then I told her that even if someone had told me those things, I still would've had to have come and figure them out for myself.

Playing host and giving such a measured performance was fairly exhausting, so that by the time I dropped her and another prospective off at the airport on Saturday morning I was ready for some R & R. For me that means a good book and some good music, so I decided to clear a little time on Sunday to partake of both of those.

Ashley got this one for me for my birthday. I've been interested to know more about Obama since his masterful speech at the Democratic National Convention, and so far this book has almost lived up to that spectacular standard. He's got a great writing style, and his intelligence and passion really come through. I'm not that far along in it yet, reading it mostly on bus rides around town, but I feel confident in recommending it highly after making only a small dent in it. This guy will be president, it's only a question of when.

I got tipped off to this by cyanbane's site and his great music selections, and I used a little birthday cash to pick it up on Sunday. The sound is an amalgam of David Gray, John Mayer, Dean Wareham, and maybe a little Spain thrown in. That's not to say it's derivative, just to give an idea of the sound. A slight country groove with solid lyrics. I've been listening non-stop since yesterday and will probably keep it up for a while.

Get your hands on these if you can - you'll be more than pleased. Hopefully I'll have more suggestions soon.

Dead Man (still) Walking

2005-03-05T16:11:00.000-05:00

It may appear that I have been neglecting this blog of late, but in fact I have been engaged in a lively discussion in the comments section of a recent post on the death penalty. At the risk of beating a dead horse, and in an attempt to keep the life of that discussion going, I am moving it out of the obscurity of the comments section and addressing some of the issues that have been raised below. If you’d like to see the debate leading up to this post, click here. If you’re weary of the subject, simply click that little “X” in the upper-right-hand corner of your screen and come back later in the week.

Now back to the discussion:

It’s certainly true that the phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the Constitution; neither does “freedom of association” or “separation of powers.” Whether or not these sentiments are implicit in the language of the Constitution, however, is another matter. Many feel that they are; Thomas Jefferson, for example, understood the Constitution to provide exactly that “wall of separation between church and state”. Here we see the problem of strict constructionism or originalism: the language of the founding documents is so vague and malleable that interpretation and consideration of shifting contexts must take place. If the only basis for jurisprudence is the explicit language of the Constitution, then the Brown vs. the Board of Education ruling never happens, and we’d have gotten our educations in segregated schoolrooms. Take the phrase “cruel and unusual punishment” for instance. This is a phrase begging for interpretation, demanding to be negotiated in the shifting moral and social contexts in which we live. The recent Court decision abolishing the execution of juveniles determined such a practice to violate that stricture against cruel and unusual punishment. Did something change regarding the way in which juvenile executions are carried out to warrant such a ruling? Of course not. Rather, a majority of the Court determined that a shift in the societal conception of “cruel and unusual” now classifies juvenile execution as such a practice. Perhaps this isn’t the way in which we want questions of law and justice to be decided, but it’s difficult to imagine a feasible alternative. Many think that the wisdom of the Constitution lies in exactly this malleable language, this requisite interpretation and reinterpretation.

It’s difficult to discern any logic in the way in which the Court has interpreted and applied the first amendment. But if you think about, the Court has operated in the same way that most of us do in our everyday lives. We don’t lay down a code of conduct at birth or after passing through adolescence and then adhere to it strictly for the rest of our days. It would of course be impossible to address every conceivable situation in which we might one day find ourselves. Rather, we stumble along, using experience to inform our moral and philosophical frameworks, to which we make constant alterations. Consequently, we often end up being hypocrites or holding contradictory and conflicting viewpoints. We are inconsistent, sometimes illogical, and rarely if ever completely rational actors. We make mistakes, and we try (or should try) to learn from them. I can’t imagine any other way to live, nor would I want to. Who wants to have all the answers?

Still, most of us try desperately to impose some order on our conflicting views, to justify them so that they make some sort of overarching conceptual sense. We don’t like to admit that we are hypocrites, that we don’t have it all figured out, and that we can’t always logically explain why we feel and believe what we do. Uncertainty is disconcerting, and most of us don’t deal well with it. Nevertheless, we are all embroiled in it.

So let me say up front that I cannot satisfactorily explain why I believe the death penalty to be morally and spiritually wrong, even in a case where guilt is certain and the crime is abominable.

I can make a very strong case that the death penalty in practice is unjust. I cannot make so strong a case that it is unjust in the abstract, or at least, I cannot appeal to the same sorts of evidence and authority that I can when dealing with empirical reality. If I want to say that capital punishment as it is practiced today is unjust, I can cite statistics regarding its haphazard application, or point to documented instances of woefully inadequate legal representation. I can reference calculations of its expense, studies of its failure to deter crime, or interviews with people who have been released from death row after their innocence was finally determined. There is evidence that most of us agree is applicable to questions of the death penalty as it exists in practice. Standards exist upon which we can debate and evaluate such evidence, and meaningful rational discussions can be had.

There is no such consensus on what sorts of evidence might show that the death penalty is unjust in the abstract, that it is poisonous to the executioner as well as the executed, and that it should not be available in the repertoire of punishments and sanctions that society avails itself of. We can essentially prove that capital punishment is unjust in practice; we cannot, or at least I cannot, prove that it is unjust in a moral sense. My views on the matter are informed by a variety of philosophy and theology and by a lot of difficult and personal reflection. But for every philosophical or religious text that I can cite in support of my anti-capital-punishment stance, one can be cited in favor of such practices. I know of no religious or philosophical tradition that is consistent on this point. We cannot appeal to the Bible or the Qur’an or the Bhagavad Gita or any other sacred text, because they are not consistent on the matter. What we can do is to try to determine what the most important aspects of a religion or a moral framework are and use them to help us decide. We can try to get a sense of the general thrust of the religion or the value system, of what it privileges, of what it elevates and what it considers of lesser importance. It is not, I think, a matter of relativism or pure subjectivity. We may very well be able to find textual support for something, but we can also step back and judge somewhat objectively whether or not it contravenes the general theses that the text as a whole advocates. Can I open the Bible and find support for the death penalty? Sure. But if I look at the teachings of Christ, I cannot reconcile them to capital punishment. Now, my beliefs on the matter come not just from Christianity but from a variety of religious traditions and moral arguments. I believe that capital punishment is vengeance masquerading as justice. I believe that it appeals to the baser aspects of our nature. I believe that we are called to love our enemies, and I believe that the death penalty is completely devoid of anything that can remotely be considered to be love. I believe that refraining from killing someone who offends us or who transgresses our mores requires us to show a kind of compassion and mercy that we ought to encourage in ourselves and in others. I believe that capital punishment further damages the communities that it is sometimes purported to heal, in many unquantifiable ways. I believe that it sanctions killing as a viable and sometimes necessary response, and I disagree vehemently with that notion. I believe that it is an affront to God as well as to humanity, that it in fact denies or negates God and humanity. I believe that to describe it as animalistic does injustice to animals, who do not kill for vengeance and self-satisfaction. I believe that to kill, even or perhaps especially for retribution, is to permanently damage one’s soul. I believe, fundamentally, that it denies the possibility of redemption, and I believe that it is only that possibility that makes life meaningful. Now, can I “prove” these things? Can I make you believe them? Can I bring to bear on this discussion of the death penalty’s justice in the abstract anything like the evidence that I can martial to support its unjustness in practice? No, I cannot. People will always disagree about what justice is in principle, because we all appeal to different sources, different experiences, and different worlds in doing so. Some consensus can likely be achieved among some segments of a society, but it will probably not be based on any entirely logical and non-contradictory moral framework.

Perhaps that gives some idea of why I find capital punishment to be in direct conflict to my moral conception of justice, and perhaps it also explains why I have not attempted to answer Justin’s question on the matter more concretely. I don’t want to get into a debate over exegesis or conflicting statements made in a religious canon or in the work or life of an individual. I cannot reconstruct how I have reached my current conclusions on the ethics of the matter; I cannot force anyone else to subject their thinking on this to the furnaces of doubt, and although I can highly recommend such an endeavor, I cannot guarantee that doing so will help to resolve the contradictions of belief that we all struggle with when attempting to determine how we want to live and what we value. In fact, dragging our notions of morality into the harsh light of day will probably only compound our confusion. It is only in doing so, however, that we move closer to the truth.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

2005-02-24T20:25:00.000-05:00

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

- Wendell Berry

treating God as a fool...

2005-02-24T02:09:00.000-05:00

“This has to be said; so be it now said. Whoever thou art, whatever in other respects thy life may be my friend, by ceasing to take part in the public worship of God, as it now is (with the claim that it is the Christianity of the New Testament), thou hast constantly one guilt the less, and that a great one: thou dost not take part in treating God as a fool.”

- Kierkegaard, Attack Upon Christendom

Tonight I attended a forum on interfaith responses to the death penalty that featured a panel composed of Marshall Dayan representing Judaism, Peter Wright representing Islam, and the inimitable Stanley Hauerwas (who once made the comment “I’m a pacifist because I’m a violent sonofabitch) putting forth a Christian point of view. The panel was sponsored by the Campaign to End the Death Penalty in NC, so that ought to give you an idea of the general slant of the conversation, and just to get the disclaimers out of the way, let me be clear up front that I am opposed to the death penalty on just about any grounds you can think of, be they pragmatic, moral, or spiritual. However, the forum was far from an exercise in preaching to the choir. I don’t go to these sorts of things unless I feel I can learn something, and tonight was an enlightening experience.

The forum opened with brief statements from each of the discussants on the place of capital punishment in their respective religious tradition. Peter Wright began with a rather glib explication of the four schools of thought on Islamic law that compose the Sunni Muslim juristic tradition. The foundation of the Muslim philosophy of being-in-the-world consists of an imitation of Muhammad, a philosophy which, if perfectly practiced, would mean the absence of crime, and thus the absence of punishment. This juristic, moralistic theory was crafted by Muslim scholars and imams in the classical period and went hand-in-hand with a political philosophy that advocated a minimalist state that provided for protection from outside forces as well as the basic material needs of the Islamic community. The rest of governance would take place in mosques and individual communities. A death penalty was prescribed for specific crimes, but ideally would never be put into practice. As history attests, things have played out rather differently than the ideal. The important thing to note, however, is that there is a highly articulated juridical tradition in Islam and in the Qur'an that advocates mercy and that focuses more on the repair of society following the commission of a crime than on punishment of the criminal. The family of a victim of a capital crime would traditionally be consulted before punishment, and could then choose between execution, monetary compensation, or forgiveness as means of restoring justice to the community. The Qur'an encourages forgiveness as the ultimate response.

As Marshall Dayan noted, the first murder in the Judeo-Christian tradition did not result in the death penalty for its perpetrator. Rather, God placed a mark on Cain that would actually prevent anyone from killing him, so that he might have to live with his crime. Some argue, along with Alan Dershowitz, that God’s conception of justice evolved over time to eventually include the death penalty as a legitimate punishment and as a part of the new covenant between humanity and God following the flood. The Talmudic tradition, however, had difficulty reconciling the emphasis on love of neighbor, atonement, and turning away from sin with the prescription of death for what, in retrospect, hardly seemed capital offenses, but also with those that more legitimately seemed to fall under that category. To resolve this dilemma, the rabbis constructed an elaborate system of laws that essentially made it impossible for the death penalty to be applied in any case, in part out of deference to their faith’s emphasis on love and atonement, and in part because of their skepticism regarding the kind of certainty that is required for the application of capital punishment. All of this, however, has historically been largely a theoretical argument given that Jews have rarely been in the position of being able to wield political control over their own communities.

Here Hauerwas interjected in his characteristic way that “The Jews didn’t need to kill anybody, because they had the Christians to do it for them!” Christians should be non-violent, Hauerwas explained, because they are told to turn the other cheek, to be merciful, and to love their enemies. Such practices simply cannot be reconciled with execution. Christians should practice nonviolence in their daily lives and should certainly not make use of violence in the furtherance of state power. Again, history gives us something quite removed from the ideal. The Constantinian settlement, the fusion of Christianity with State (Roman) power, resulted in even more schizophrenia in the tradition and led to repeated attempts to justify state-sponsored instances of violence and repression using Christian theology. Theory was perverted to align with perverted practices, and incalculable damage was done to the Christian tradition.

Hauerwas then endeavored to make clear the distinction between more pragmatic arguments against the death penalty and the Christian arguments against it. Typical arguments made by those opposed to the death penalty fall along more pragmatic lines: failures of the criminal justice system, the haphazard imposition of the death penalty, usually along lines of class and race, its failure to serve as a credible deterrent, its considerable expense, etc. These are all quite valid and damning arguments, but tend to give the impression that the death penalty is wrong because the system is broken. Fix the system, and then the death penalty will be legitimate, is what these arguments seem to imply. Here is where moral and religious convictions come into play. Something is needed beyond purely practical arguments if the death penalty is to be unequivocally opposed.

To illustrate, Hauerwas noted that the death penalty is tied to the wrong type of crime: murder. Murder is generally an act of passion and impulse, and thus considerations of the consequences do not come into play. Even where a murder is most calculated and planned, the commission of the crime and the feeling of being able to get away with it take precedence over any possible consequences. Hence capital punishment’s notorious inadequacy as a deterrent. If we really wanted to make capital punishment effective, Hauerwas argued, we would impose it for, say, stock fraud. Execution of Enron board members or Martha Stewart would most certainly result in a reduction of instances of stock fraud. “Well, that doesn’t seem right,” some will say, but why not? White collar crime is often more damaging and costly to the community than is murder. “Still,” some say, “it doesn’t seem fair.” And here we get down to what the death penalty is all about: vengeance (not deterrence, and certainly not rehabilitation). Vengeance against those who commit the most heinous of crimes. The death penalty is thus a means of restoring order to a world that has been thrown into disorder by the commission of a physically violent crime. It is a way of attempting to restore order; that is the only argument for it. And Hauerwas, like many of us, finds that to be a persuasive one. So why not implement it? Because Jesus says we can’t.

In the Christian tradition, the cross is the final sacrifice, the end of our need to impose order and justice in the world. In attempting to be the ultimate arbiters of justice, humans not only routinely screw it up, we also act contrary to the will of God. In attempting to impose order in such a violent, final way, we contribute to chaos. Spiritually, morally, we do not have the right to take another’s life, and thus we cannot cede that right to the state. We cannot have the state act as a proxy for us in this matter, because we cannot rightly do it ourselves. We cannot cleanse our hands of the blood that results.

This has been an extremely cursory discussion of these three traditions’ positions on the death penalty, and certainly obscures many of the complexities of the debate. However, some idea can be gleaned of the overwhelming antipathy toward the death penalty that these three traditions exemplify in theory. So what of the actual practice? Where do these faiths stand on what can be done about the abuse of capital punishment in the world today? Each of them supports activism to reform and eradicate the practice, but it is up to us to find the best way to do that. A moratorium is a great first step; even better would be some movement toward the above-mentioned state that provides for the basic material needs of a society, thus eradicating much of the material basis for criminal activity. And of course, something needs to be done to address the racial and socio-economic inequalities of the criminal justice system. But what I am primarily interested in here is the profound need for some moral, ethical discussion of capital punishment among people of faith. The absence of that discussion speaks to bankrupt status of much of what masquerades as contemporary religion.

Very little is going to change while the death penalty retains its popularity, and that popularity, as Stanley Hauerwas so aptly put it, is “a sign of the deep, deep immaturity among the American people, and among Christians.” This brings the conversation around to where I have wanted it to be all along: to a discussion of contemporary Christianity in this country. What is needed, Hauerwas suggested, is nothing less than a complete renewal of the Christian church, broadly speaking. “We need fewer Christians,” he argued, because most Christians in America today don’t have any idea what Christianity is; “It would scare the hell out of them.” The best example of this is George W. Bush, the man who has so much popularity among contemporary American Christendom. Hauerwas commented that he doesn’t doubt that Bush is a sincere Christian, “but that just shows how little sincerity has to do with being a Christian.”

What is lacking in this country is an awareness of the fact that being a Christian and being an American are not coterminous. Christianity in America today no longer challenges its members to be Christians; it simply asks that they be good Americans, as that is defined by the leaders of the movement. It asks that they revel in their superiority and material comfort. It requires no real sacrifice, no real knowledge of what Christianity is and means, because that would in fact “scare the hell out of them.” Thus we are left with the James Dobsons and the Bob Joneses, with the Left Behind series, with sex scandals, with sexism and exclusion, with John Hagee, with stadium churches and demagogues, with a purportedly Christian Administration that could not, in fact, be less so, with sycophants and power-mongers, with the warping of Christian thought and practice to feed state power and perversion along with individual greed and hubris.

We are left, in other words, treating God as a fool.

My question, then, is where are Christians and other people of faith in all of this? What are the responsibilities of Christians specifically in standing up against the false prophets of Christianity in America today (and modern Christendom is rife with them)? Is it enough to step back from such misguided communities, to simply cease joining them in treating God as a fool? That is what I have been doing, and it feels inadequate. It is also counterproductive, at least in the sense of promoting the kinds of conversations that need to be had, including but ranging far beyond discussions of capital punishment. But what is to be done? In some ways this beast must consume itself, and it will. What masquerades as Christianity in America today is a cancer; how long will God tolerate it?

My intention here is not to implicate all of contemporary American Christendom, only to implicate most of it. I have met many Christians who are appalled with the state of much of Christianity today, and I count myself among them, but they seem to be largely scattered and leaderless. The public face of Christianity in America is an ugly one, and it is representative of real communities. It isn’t just a façade or an affectation of a few power-hungry souls; there is something frighteningly substantial to it. However, there do exist some legitimately Christian communities out there. It is to them that responsibility for reforming the religion must fall. How can it be done? Is it already underway? And how can I get involved?

The Proud Highway

2005-02-22T00:59:00.000-05:00

Disturbingly, several of my favorite artists and writers have committed suicide lately. Spalding Gray. Elliot Smith. And now, Hunter S. Thompson. I don't really know what it says about them, or about the world in which we live, but I do know that all our lives were richer with them here and that we've all lost something with their deaths.

In memoriam, I am including the text of an editorial that Thompson wrote for his high school paper back in 1955. He put this philosophy down at age seventeen and spent the rest of his life trying to live up to it. I'm tempted to say he succeeded, but then, who knows what it means to truly live?

"Security...what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it merely another word for rut?

Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and initiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders. His ideas and ideals are those of society in general and he is accepted as a respectable, but average and prosaic man. But is he a man? Has he any self-respect or pride in himself? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realizes that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar? If he thinks this is all well and good, fine, but think of the tragedy of a man who has sacrificed his freedom on the altar of security, and wishes he could turn back the hands of time. A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better. What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes?

Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men had sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must be laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a tread-mill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.

As an afterthought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who stayed securely on the shore and merely existed?"

- Hunter S. Thompson, from The Proud Highway: The Fear and Loathing Letters, Vol. 1

have a good time

2005-02-22T00:36:00.000-05:00

Yesterday it was my birthday
I hung one more year on the line.
I should be depressed,
My life's a mess
But I'm having a good time.

- Paul Simon, Have a Good Time

So my birthday was actually a few days ago, but the rest of that lyric applies quite well to where I'm at right now. Partly as a means of staving off that depression, partly because of my birthday, and partly because of an amenable confluence of events, Ashley and I spent a long weekend hanging out in Charleston and taking in the Wilco show Saturday evening in Myrtle Beach, pictures of which should appear below. We left town early Friday morning and rolled into Charleston around lunchtime, equipped with a few maps from the visitors center and a long list of good eateries courtesy of Cameron. Given our limited financial means, we eschewed visiting the plantations or taking one of the many walking tours and settled for strolling aimlessly around the city, eating seafood, drinking coffee, visiting the fudge store, roaming through shops, and spending an ill-advised hour listening to animatronic pirates discuss the history of old Charles Towne. It was a good time, though I'd have to say that of the coastal southern cities, you just can't beat Savannah. Saturday afternoon we made our way out to Sullivan's Island and the Isle of Palms before traversing the extremely bland hundred or so miles of SC Highway 17 into Myrtle Beach. We arrived at the House of Blues in time to grab a bite at the bar and to get a spot about five feet from the stage for the show. Wilco put on a fantastic concert, including a second encore that lasted a solid half-hour. These guys are really at the top of their game right now, making fanstastic, challenging music and obviously loving every minute of it. If you're not listening to them yet, you're missing something special. We got out later than expected and made the long trek back to Carrboro, arriving at our apartment complex at 5:30 Sunday morning, where we promptly passed out. I'm still feeling a bit sleep-deprived, but it was absolutely worth it. The elastic doesn't spring back quite as quickly now that I've passed into the dark half of the twenties.

Yes, I've now reached the ripe old age of twenty-six, and I've got no idea what I'm doing with my life. But I'm figuring it out, I think, and I am most definitely having a good time.

Picture Test

2005-02-22T00:32:00.000-05:00

Looks like great weather, but it was quite blustery and damn cold in the shade.

2005-02-22T00:28:00.000-05:00

2005-02-22T00:26:00.000-05:00

Somehow we failed to get pictures of the many opulent houses that can be found throughout the city. Here you can make out a bit of one through the trees. Old money goes a long way...

2005-02-22T00:22:00.000-05:00

Rainbow Row

2005-02-22T00:18:00.000-05:00

Shadows in the park

2005-02-22T00:16:00.000-05:00

2005-02-22T00:14:00.000-05:00

2005-02-22T00:11:00.000-05:00

Charleston is filled with beautiful churches and graveyards.

2005-02-22T00:06:00.000-05:00

2005-02-22T00:04:00.000-05:00

2005-02-22T00:02:00.000-05:00

Swamps are fascinating places.

2005-02-21T23:59:00.000-05:00

2005-02-21T23:56:00.000-05:00

These pictures are always fun to take, and occasionally turn out okay.

2005-02-21T23:50:00.000-05:00

We met some guys from Clemson, one of whom had smuggled in a small camera. This pic is of frontman Jeff Tweedy.

2005-02-21T23:49:00.000-05:00

2005-02-21T23:48:00.000-05:00

lovers of solitude

2005-02-17T08:14:00.000-05:00

"On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is the measure of what spirit there is. 'Utterly superficial nonpersons and group-people' feel such a meager need for solitude that, like lovebirds, they promptly die the moment they have to be alone. Just as a little child has to be lulled to sleep, so these people need the soothing lullaby of social ife in order to be able to eat, drink, sleep, fall in love, etc. In antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages there was an awareness of this longing for solitude and a respect for what it means; whereas in the constant sociality of our day we shrink from solitude to the point (what a capital epigram!) that no use for it is known, other than as a punishment for criminals. But since it is a crime in our day to have spirit, it is indeed quite in order to classify such people, lovers of solitude, with criminals."

- Kierkegaard, in The Sickness Unto Death

Exit, Voice, or Loyalty?

2005-02-15T19:40:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, when there is nothing left to which to lend your loyalty, when your voice cannot be heard above the din, you've just got to get the hell out. I took my first decisive step out the door of the PhD program this afternoon. Gathering my courage, I met with my advisor and informed him of my decision, long in coming, to exit the program following completion of this semester.

It hit me last week as I was studying for the theory comprehensive exam. There I was, leafing through my books and papers and devising a strategy for studying for the beast, when it occurred to me that there was no possible way, no realistic chance on earth, that I could be prepared to take the comp in six weeks. It just was not going to happen. That's not really a problem if I intended to come back next year, but it does frustrate my plans to go ABD after this semester. As I thought about it, though, I realized that my inability to be ready for the exam is not really the problem, but rather a symptom of the problem, which is that I really don't care for this path at all. It's that simple. I've known that for a long time, but I struggled to enjoy this, wanted so badly to like it, that I shut out that reality and tried desperately to cultivate some attachment to this profession, in part because I've wanted to be a college professor for so long and in part because I never gave much thought to what else I might do.

But sitting there, overwhelmed by reality, realizing that I could not be prepared for the comp, I knew that I could not go on in this way. My ambivalence about the program since before I even began has prevented me from giving myself to it fully and making the progress that I need to be making. I constructed the veneer of a successful grad student, but there was no underlying foundation to support it, and that fact had to eventually become clear. The emperor truly has no clothes.

As that realization sunk in, I descended into a state of despair. The day was overcast and gray, so that when I turned off the light in my office I was left in a state of near-total darkness. I opened a bottle of beer, put on Time Out of Mind, and lay on the couch. Hours passed before I was able to shake off the torpor just long enough to get some dinner and watch a movie. After that I went to bed, thoroughly drained and dejected.

When I awoke the next morning, however, I felt great. Everything told me that I had made the right decision. I could breathe deeper and easier, freed from an invisible weight that had been slowly suffocating me for the past two years. I am still fairly young, my impending birthday notwithstanding, and I have much energy and faith left to give. I can no longer abide losing these years following a path I see no reason to be treading.

It remains to be seen if I can find a vocation into which to channel that energy and passion, but I look forward to immersing myself in the search. I know now that I cannot find it here.

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."
- Nietzsche

Scrambled Eggs

2005-02-13T20:01:00.000-05:00

Friday afternoon came mercifully this past week, dissipating the schizophrenic haze that I’ve been struggling to operate in and bringing with it the prospect of downing more than a few malty beverages at my favorite dive. It was a much-needed respite. Ashley and I headed down to Franklin Street around nine, walked briskly across the quad in the February chill, ducked out of the wind and into the smoky environs of Linda’s, and slid into a booth where Bill was patiently waiting with three glasses and a pitcher of Yuengling. The night passed slowly, carried along by the pleasant buzz of conversation and the clinking of glasses, taking with it the debris of doubts and uncertainties that were a regular feature of the previous few days and leaving in its wake a sort of calm and acceptance that feels like resignation but that simultaneously transcends it. I am sometimes amazed at the power that good friends and pleasant conversation wield over the forces of modernity that threaten to consume us. Nights such this past Friday help to reaffirm that strength.

They also sometimes furnish an episode of juvenile behavior that serves as a welcome reminder that I am not yet fully an adult whose youth has been entirely sapped. Like most sensible human beings, I am often struck with an insatiable desire for breakfast foods following a night of not-quite-moderate drinking. Not your healthier variety of breakfast foods, mind you – Special K and orange juice need not apply – but the greasy, fried, artery-clogging variety served at the all-night waffle joints of dubious sanitary quality that populate the southeast. Scrambled eggs. Fried bacon. Hash browns. Something resembling grits with a giant pad of butter floating in them. Week-old coffee. You know of what I speak. If there is one blemish on the town of Chapel Hill that stands out above all others, it is the glaring absence of a 24-hour establishment that can meet such late-night dietary needs. Should you develop a craving for fried goodness past the witching hour in this town, your only choices are driving to Durham, standing in line at Time-Out Chicken, or cooking it up yourself. We opted for the latter.

The local Harris Teeter, capitalizing on the late-night dining lacuna, is of the 24-hour variety, so we made a slight detour on our way back to the apartment. Since I was the one with the craving, I went in to roam the aisles while Ashley waited with the car. Now, I wouldn’t say I was drunk, but I also wasn’t entirely in command of my faculties, either. My gait was a little uncertain, my eyes slightly unfocused, my speech perhaps a tad bit slurred. Think Otis on The Andy Griffith Show. In my haste I nearly collided with the sliding doors before they were fully opened, drawing the attention of the Harris Teeter personnel gathered at the front of the store. I attempted to gather myself, gave them a smile and a nod, grabbed a basket, and headed for the dairy section. In a sense, you’re setting yourself up for a certain clientele when you choose to remain open past the dictates of a normal circadian rhythm, but these particular employees in no way deserved what they got that night: a hungry, mildly inebriated jerk. I stopped along my route to grab some hash browns from the frozen food section and then made my way over to the eggs.

In my defense, what happened next could have been avoided were there not such a cornucopia of egg varieties available for public consumption. The egg section is capitalism at its finest, a vast wall of possibility and selection. Would you like six eggs, or the full dozen? A composite cardboard carton, a plastic container, or the Styrofoam packaging? Brown or white? Medium or large? The cheaper and less humanely obtained eggs, or the free-range, hormone-free variety? The plethora of choices is paralyzing. To complicate matters, I’m ever-so-slightly obsessive-compulsive, and nowhere are those tendencies worse than at the grocery store. I cannot take the first box on the shelf, and I cannot abide any packaging that is slightly dented or torn in any way. Labels must be intact and perfectly symmetrical. Combine all of these factors with my slight intoxication, and you’ve got trouble.

The exact sequence of events that followed is not entirely clear to me even now. I knew I wanted the farm fresh eggs, but the package directly in front of me was not completely pristine, so I reached for the carton a little higher up, and in so doing dislocated a dozen eggs from their place on the shelf. As I moved to catch them, I sent another carton tumbling from its perch. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion: I saw the packages spring open, watched in horror as the creamy white ovules loosed themselves from their housing, and barely moved out of the way of the splattering yellow yolks that sprayed the speckled tile of the Harris Teeter floor. The entire spill seemed to take an eternity. When it was finally over I looked around, grabbed the nearest carton of eggs, and strolled off as inconspicuously as I possibly could. Moving quickly and walking in anything but a straight path, I grabbed the remaining necessary ingredients and headed for the checkout. But before I could escape, I realized that I had forgotten to get the Monterey Jack cheese, a staple of any good breakfast burrito. To reach it I would have to pass back by the aisle of spilled eggs. Gathering my courage, I made my way back to the dairy section. No one had yet discovered the spilled eggs, and the mess was beginning to smell. As I passed by I called out to no one in particular: “Boy, somebody sure made a mess back here!” I then grabbed a block of cheese and made a beeline to the U-Scan machines, desperate to avoid any human interaction.

But I wasn’t free yet: I still had to negotiate the treacherous U-Scan machines, sometimes difficult even for the soberest of persons, and particularly troublesome for someone in my condition. I fumbled for my VIC card, passing it over the scanner repeatedly before it mercifully registered. I could feel the cold gaze of the cashier assigned to oversee the self-checkout section: surely he had seen me spill the eggs and was just waiting until I paid before absconding with me to some interrogation room to await the police! Nervously now, I passed items over the scanner and into the bags as quickly and discreetly as I possibly could. Suddenly the machine blared at me: PLEASE PLACE THE ITEM IN THE BAG! I was starting to sweat. My fingers were shaking. Was that egg on my shoe? I contemplated leaving my groceries there and making a mad dash for the car. Finally everything had made its way successfully from one side of the scanner to the other without the need for any cashier assistance. DO YOU HAVE ANY ITEMS UNDER YOUR CART? No, no, just let me get out of here! DO YOU HAVE ANY COUPONS? I was officially freaked out by this point. Somehow I scanned my credit card and made some sort of sufficient mark on the signature pad. Dizzy from the paranoia over the eggs and the lingering Yuengling in my bloodstream, I attempted to make some kind of dignified exit; it was not to be. I slowly gathered my bags from the counter, a task which I made much more difficult than it should have been. Then, tottering, I reached for the basket in order to return it to the stack by the door. At this point the cashier intervened: “We’ll take care of that, sir” he said in a tone of condescension mingled with contempt. I suddenly felt like the total jerk I had been since setting foot in the store. Lowering my head, I gathered my bags and stumbled for the parking lot. It was not my finest hour.

I wish I could tell you that those breakfast burritos were worth the indignities I suffered that night in the Harris Teeter, but when we arrived back at the apartment I put everything in the fridge, headed for the bedroom, and promptly fell asleep, my breakfast craving never to be satiated. Sure, we ate them later, but it wasn’t the same. And I think I may no longer be welcome at the Harris Teeter. But, hey, at least I’m not too old to make a fool of myself – that’s something, right? Right?

Book of My Nights

2005-02-09T07:42:00.000-05:00

I don't write about politics here because I want to have an area of my life that politics does not infiltrate; I want to maintain at least one pure sphere, one realm untainted by the messy give-and-take, or the give-and-give as it has been of late. But since November, I have shut politics out of not just this blog but every area of my life. I've been unable and unwilling to engage. I've needed to, and still need to, recenter myself. Occasionally I will stick my head out from my hole to confirm that things really are as bad as I thought, and on those occasions I will see my shadow, realize that winter isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and sink back into my cave. I have quite a bit of cleaning to do there.

Part of that cleaning entails, as you know, finding a vocational track with which I am comfortable. I am approximately 90% certain that such a track will not take me further down the PhD path. However, I am enrolled for the rest of the semester, and I need to stay on the good side of my professors for that time, so that means that I need to continue jumping through hoops for the next couple of months. The most difficult of those hoops is undoubtedly the Political Theory Major PhD Examination scheduled for late March. 2 days. 4 questions. Countless pages of rambling, groping arguments. The first day will confront me with a variety of questions from two sections: 1) Philosophical and Methodological Issues, and 2) Chronology, Categories, and Concepts. I'll choose one from each section and then proceed to embarass myself attempting to answer them.

Questions from Section 1 tend to be sweeping inquiries into the nature and purpose of political theory and interpretation. For example: "Paul Ricoeur once wrote that nearly all human behavior was 'meaningful action' that can be 'considered as a text.' From this, he concluded, 'the methodology of text interpretation' is 'a paradigm for interpretation in general in the field of the human sciences.' His claim raises questions fundamental to both the history of thought and the explanation of human behavior. In this essay, discuss when and how methodologies of textual interpretation are appropriate as models of social inquiry generally and when - if ever - they are not. Illustrate your argument using examples drawn from the history of political thought." Oh...okay... Actually I am probably most prepared for the questions from this section. Section 2 gets a bit trickier, however.

This section has in the past included questions about the history of particular concepts, prompting one to give etymological histories of such ontological categories as "the individual", "society", "economy", or "the state", or of concepts such as "liberty" or "reason". Hmmm... Example: "Benjamin Constant asserted 'we can no longer enjoy the liberty of the ancients, which consisted in an active and constant participation in collective power. Our freedom must consist of peaceful enjoyment and private independence.' Write an essay on the history of 'liberty', explain how your reconstruction supports or challenges Constant's assessment, and illustrate your claims by drawing on the history of political thought." A "history of liberty"? In four hours? No problem... The thing with unfocused questions such as these is that you have a bit more freedom in how the answers are structured, but no real way to ensure that you've addressed all the salient points. I really enjoy these kinds of questions. Really.

I won't tell you about Day 2 yet. I've got to leave you wanting more, right?

Now, there's some question as to whether this is a hoop that I really need to concern myself with jumping through. If I don't plan to come back, why put myself through this? Why not simply explain to my advisor that my disposition and interests are taking me down a different path? Because, dear reader, I am haunted by that 10% or so of my will that tells me to keep my options open, that perhaps I'll decide to continue on this path after all, that there's no reason to shut that door before another opens. I am hounded, in other words, by indecision. Always have been, no doubt always will be. I know of what the bard wrote: "And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action." And so I must make things more difficult than they would otherwise have to be, crippling and incapacitating myself with the "pale cast of thought," waiting for tragedy to ensue.

All of this is just to say that I am a bit busy of late, and that the things I am busy with require so much of my mental capacities that I have nothing left with which to furnish a few thoughtful or entertaining words here on the blog. The alternative is to post about the events of my day, something along the lines of "Got up. Turned on TV. Charlie Gibson made me want to vomit or punch something, so turned on NPR. Showered - ran out of hot water. Made coffee for Ash. Ate breakfast. Read Deleuze and Guattari for a while. WTF? Got a cup of coffee - first sip singed tastebuds. Took the bus downtown. Tripped on a brick. Went to work. Worked. Left work." You see where this is going, and so I'll spare you such details. However, writing anything more measured and introspective than this is going to be difficult for the foreseeable future, and so I'll have to reevaluate what the purpose of this blog is going to be during that time.

In the meantime, and to conclude this lengthy post, allow me to make a recommendation. If you've not read the work of Li-Young Lee, you should. Book of My Nights and/or The City in Which I Love You are excellent places to start. If, like me, you're attempting to recenter yourself, this poetry can help, and help is always needed in such an endeavor.

"In the martial arts there is a thing called ton jin; it is about two inches below your navel. That's your center. A lot of the masters say that you can tell by the way a person stands if that person's ton jin is present or not. One of the hard things to get beginning students to understand is that if all your attention is on your ton jin, then all your kicks and your punches and your moves are very spontaneous. But if your attention is on your opponent, then the chances of getting hurt are greater....If I locate, let's say, God in my ton jin, if my attention is all on God, my center, then all of my actions are activism. They are the deepest form of activism, a centered activism. Because it seems to me if I'm not centered and I participate in activism, I might contribute to the world's demise more than I know. I'm not saying activism isn't good. I just don't think that's the primary circle of encounter; that's the secondary circle of encounter. The first circle of encounter is with your ton jin. If you keep that circle whole then all the other circles come out of that."

- Li-Young Lee, interviewed by Poets and Writers

bring us songs of calm

2005-02-04T07:26:00.000-05:00

Around this time last year, I was struggling with writing my thesis and searching for some music to help me out in that regard. I typically write to jazz, particularly the more frenzied variety, to the Chieftains, to club music, or to music by members of the Buena Vista social club. It needs to be upbeat and either sans lyrics, or in a language that is unintelligible to me; nothing is worse than looking back over a paper and noticing a lyric from a song that has crept its way in. But while up-tempo music is great for writing once the thoughts have been largely formulated, it tends to be an annoying distraction when the thoughts are still gestating in my head, struggling to make themselves clear. Such music then goes from facilitating to obfuscating in a flash.

For those times when I need to sit and think, whether with a beer or cup of coffee, I need music that lurks in the background but that occasionally breaks through the clouds of my thoughts to help stir the mix, to dispel the mist for a moment so that an idea can take shape. I need something that is appropriately downbeat while I'm brooding yet periodically punctuated with something more uplifting for those heady moments when the seed of a good thought begins to sprout. For me, sitting in my office last year, ingesting caffeine pills and poring over Walt Whitman's entire oeuvre, desperately attempting to piece together an argument and struggling to ignore his injunction to "let the paper remain on the desk unwritten" and to "sail pathless and wild seas", I found that perfect album in Sun Kil Moon's Ghosts of the Great Highway. It has the right mix of songs and evocative lyrics that are great for sitting up late, struggling with ideas or thoughts that will not let you rest. It also has that rare quality of being appropriate for any season, so that I was able to use it as a crutch through late winter, as inspiration in the spring, a co-conspirator in the summer, and a knowing companion this past fall. Gentle Moon will always remind me of driving in New Mexico at night, Lily and Parrots of seeing Kozelek at a solo show in Atlanta, Pancho Villa of warm days and cool fall evenings when things, if only briefly, made some sort of sense. And, of course, the album as a whole is inextricably linked, for better or for worse, to those angst-filled evenings spent hunched over a computer and searching for inspiration. It kept me going, and it got me through; I am forever indebted to it for that.

Almost a full year has passed, and I've found nothing to take its place or, rather, to serve the same purpose for this new year. No album or artist has yet emerged that I feel could get me through, as it were. And so I turn to you, dear reader, for advice and direction. Any suggestions?

Just Work

2005-02-02T10:39:00.000-05:00

Apologies for my absence lately, if you've noticed it. As the semester progresses, so does my workload, though it's not directly related to coursework. What's kept me away these past few days, however, has been not work, but a much more pleasant endeavor: spending time with family and friends. Last Thursday I drove out to Greensboro to meet up with my good friends Wes and Kristine, who had been in Winston Salem for the last of Wes' residency interviews. We had coffee and caught up a bit, as we've not seen each other for over a year and a half. Visits with old college friends happen less and less frequently these days, a fact which should not be surprising, I suppose, but is still more than a bit disconcerting. Not only do I miss spending time with them and knowing what's happening in their lives, but it is also a sign that we are all slowly but surely getting older. We've all scattered out a bit and have become invested in jobs and families, which is of course natural and exciting but also bittersweet. So I am grateful for opportunities such as last Thursday to sit and chat and reconnect. Friday found Ashley and I heading back to Atlanta and arriving in town just ahead of a storm that coated the streets and trees with an incapacitating layer of ice. My parents were hosting an engagement party for my sister and her fiancee, but were forced to move it to Sunday due to the storm. It all turned out well, however, and we made the return trip that evening, getting back into town just after midnight.

Work called immediately upon our return, and I have half-heartedly answered. Rather than serve as a teaching assistant this year, I have been working as an editorial assistant at the book review for the APSR journal Perspectives on Politics. It's been a great opportunity to get to know the discipline better, and it also allows me to spend a lot of time with books, which are a perhaps unhealthy fetish of mine. It is also less stressful than TA-ing, and these days less stress is a God-send. A few days ago a book crossed my desk that held obvious appeal for me in my current state: Just Work by Russell Muirhead.

If you're at all interested in any of the issues regarding work that I've raised on this blog, I strongly encourage you to give this book a read (it will also give you an idea of the work that political theorists can do, and of why I find theory such an appealing alternative to much of the work done in political science). The double entendre is intended: Muirhead is addressing the tension between the desire for work that fits our conception of the good and the necessity of work, any work, to meet our basic needs. As I've struggled with my occupational choices lately, some people have offered advice that runs along the lines of "work is just a job, just something to do to make money so that you can do the things you really want to do; just find something that doesn't take over your life and that pays well enough to allow you to spend your free time searching for self-fulfillment." This is an appealing argument, especially in the face of a labor market that does not offer obvious opportunities for work that comes with both the possibility of self-actualization and pecuniary compensation. Yet this argument is ultimately unsatisfying, and Muirhead does an excellent job of explaining why:

"We often experience work as disconnected from such ideals as justice or freedom, and more like a necessity we would be better off without. In the face of the everyday difficulty of work, in defiance of the distractions we daily seek, we might say: just work! In this tone, the injunction to "just work" demands that we suspend doubt and dissatisfaction, and reconcile ourselves to what must be done, to the task at hand. At the same time, work demands too much and its connection to our identity is too profound to conceive of it only as the dictate of necessity, a strategy for survival. Richard Sennett, for instance, has illuminated the way work's predictability and the accumulation of skill offer - or, if they are absent, corrode - the basis for a unified identity over a lifetime. For us, work is rarely just work in the dimunitive sense of being only work. It is not something that we can confine to a small and insignificant part of life. And (at least in America), we tend to take work seriously, too seriously to simply suspend deeper evaluation.

Exactly. We can't simply treat work as a means of procuring income without sacrificing an opportunity to more fully realize our true selves. Back to Muirhead:

"This raises important questions. What should we expect from work? Should the promise of work be restricted to its instrumental value - to the wages it brings? Is it right to invest work with the deeper promise of fulfillment? The answer to these questions depends not only on our taste and experience but also on the way we understand what it would mean for work to be fulfilling. This book argues, in short, that work is both fulfilling and just when it fits us."

Presumably the rest of the book is going to address exactly what he means by "fit". I'll keep you posted, but go out and read this book if you can. Unlike most works of political science, this can probably be found in the big bookstores, although probably not in the "Political Science" section; that's reserved for the blathering idiocy of the punditocracy, with the occasional academic work thrown in simply to fill shelf space. Try the "Philosophy" or even "Sociology" section, grab some coffee and a comfortable chair, and read this book. If you're struggling at all with these questions, I think this book can help. I'm tempted to finish it up now, but work, the "necessary" kind, is calling.

Insomnia

2005-01-25T04:23:00.000-05:00

For some reason I am completely unable to sleep. Last night I lay awake for an hour or so before finally drifting off, but tonight it just wasn't happening. What do you do when you can't sleep? You're supposed to get up and be productive right? So I got up, scrambled some eggs and fried up some bacon, poured a glass of orange juice, and popped in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I'm sitting here now, bathed in the dim light of an old lamp, the smell of bacon lingering in the air, with the movie playing softly in the background and the computer glowing optimistically in front of me. I'm hoping that the therapeutic properties of writing might help ease my passage into unconsciousness, but if that doesn't happen I'll simply brew up a pot of coffee and get an early start on the day. What follows will be a random stream of whatever pops into my head, so bear with me.

I'm not really sure why I can't sleep. It's true I've got a lot on my mind right now, a lot of things that I feel I need to get done, but I've been way more stressed out than this before and sleeping was never a problem.

This film is fantastic; it raises a lot of fascinating questions. Is there something that binds us beyond shared memories or sheer chance? Are we destined to meet the people that we meet, fated to have relationships with them? If you wiped out all your memories of a friend or a lover, would you somehow find your way to them again? Or would you simply fill that void with other relationships? Do we ever really change, or do we just make the same mistakes over and over again?

This Beck song from the film is great. Is it only on the soundtrack? I have a sudden urge to listen to Russian folk music.

My favorite team, the Eagles, have finally made it to the Super Bowl, at just the exact point when I could not possibly care less about sports. I have no grand reason for my complete lack of interest in sports - I'm not particularly peeved about the hockey strike or doping in baseball or Ron Artest or anything else. I've just lost interest. Ash and I went to the Carolina basketball game on Saturday night, and while it was fun, it didn't make me want to follow them any more closely or watch their games on television. It's strange because I was a huge Carolina fan growing up - I had posters and sports cards and knew obscure biographical details of even the benchwarmers. My obsession survived the move to Georgia and even going to college at a different school. There were times during my freshman year when I wouldn't speak to my friend Ryan for days following the Carolina/Duke game, Blue Devil that he is. But when I actually became a student here, my interest began to wane. In fact, this past Saturday marked the first Carolina sporting event I've been to since I started here. I just simply could not be less interested. So of course this is the time that my team, the Eagles, would choose to play to their potential and make it to the championship game. No doubt I'll watch the game, or at least have it playing in the background, but it'll probably be profoundly boring and I'll end up leaving in the middle of it to do just about anything else. So that probably means that the Eagles will win.

This part in the movie reminds me of that really bad Stephen King miniseries The Langoliers, where those tremor-type creatures come along and eat elapsed time and they have to fly the plane back through whatever tear in the space/time continuum that they accidently flew through. Why is it that so many bad books and films revolve around a tear in the space/time continuum? What is it about the space/time continuum that a tear in it results in such terrible fiction?

Clementine works at Barnes and Noble. Of the two big bookstore chains, I'd have to say I prefer Borders to B&N. Having worked at both, I can definitely say that the work environment is superior at Borders. They're far less corporate-minded than the folks at B&N. I can also say that these stores are the places where creative, intelligent, interesting people who are just ever-so-slightly lacking in ambition or direction go to languish in a state of torpor for the rest of their lives. If you work at one of these places for longer than ten months, your chances of ever leaving plummet to nearly zero. Everyone who works there is either in grad school, dropped out of grad school, or is applying to grad school. Or thinking of applying to grad school. If you look closely at them, you can actually see the motivation leaking from their bodies, like perspiration. There's something about the insulation or the lighting at those stores that actually leaches ambition from those who work there. I experienced it myself, and barely made it out. I still suffer relapses.

Okay, the film is wrapping up and I'm still awake. I guess that means I've got to go be productive now. I'll brew up a pot of hot buttered rum coffee, crack open some books, put on a little Coltrane, and likely drift off to sleep just as the sun begins to peek through the trees. Or maybe I'll watch the special features first.

"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd."

- Alexander Pope, from Eloisa to Abelard

Winter Wonderland

2005-01-19T12:15:00.000-05:00

The snow is coming down, people. From my office on campus I can see the Bell Tower, now covered with a light dusting of white, and the walkway between the library and the dining hall where students scurry along, covering their heads with notebooks and shielding themselves from the wind. Today's flurries aren't expected to stick around for long, as the weather front from whence they come is hitting hardest just north of here and should be out by day's end, but the ground is already coated and the view is spectacular. I'm going to finish up my work, and then I'm going out to play.

Leavers

2005-01-15T14:08:00.000-05:00

On the way to Atlanta for the Thanksgiving break, Ash and I stopped at a strip mall just off I-85 somewhere in South Carolina to get a break from the road. We stepped into a discount bookstore and began browsing the shelves, looking for anything that jumped out at us. One book that literally leapt out at me - it fell off the shelf as I was pulling out another book - was Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. I was interested in the premise and had begun to skim the introduction when I came across this passage about reading:

"I say to these students who have to spend a year, two years, writing theses about one book: 'There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag - and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is a part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vice versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you. Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down - even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written - and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this - are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men; it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the truth in words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book, or one author means that you are badly taught - you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need: that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people.'"

I bought the book on the strength of that passage, and I've not been disappointed. The introduction alone is worth a close reading. One other passage that connected with me was this one:

"As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already molded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don't wish to subject themselves to further molding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won't be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave - that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn't like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed - yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive."

This interests me because I am most likely to soon join the ranks of the leavers. Many of the more interesting people I know are leavers in this sense: forced out of institutions that they thought they could change or carve out a niche in, searching still for some work "where they won't be divided against themselves." I admire them, for I think that in such situations it takes more strength to leave than to stay. What is the answer here? Leaving is a luxury with a finite time span. At a certain point, if we hope to have families that we both support and rely on, we cannot leave without great risk to not only ourselves but those that we love. Yet staying is a tricky thing as well. We think we can change institutions, or maintain our beliefs of what is important and true in the face of great institutional pressures, but I think that such a belief is naive at best. I can already feel myself succumbing to what the academy tells me is valuable, and I am not sure I am strong enough to assert my interests and beliefs, to give them primacy over these others that I am being told to accept, for much longer. I think it is very difficult to live one way in your public life and to live another way in private, and even if it were easy, I don't think it would be advisable. We either adjust our beliefs to accord with what we do every day, or vice versa. This all disturbs me, because I can feel that I don't have much time left to find some vocation that fits with my beliefs and principles before more practical concerns begin to hold greater sway. I know we would all like to think that we have forever, that it is never too late to change a path or a career, but I just don't see that to be true. Life isn't that simple, isn't that easy. I think this quote from a Chomsky interview says it well:

"You begin to conform, you begin to get the privilege of conformity. You soon come to believe what you're saying because it's useful to believe it, and then you've internalized the system of indoctrination and distortion and deception, and then you're a willing member of the privileged elites that control thought and indoctrination. That happens all the time, all the way to the top. It's a very rare person, almost to the point of non-existence, who can tolerate what's called 'cognitive dissonance' - saying one thing and believing another. You start saying certain things because it's necessary to say them and pretty soon you believe them because you just have to."

Am I wrong about this? Which is more difficult, leaving a bad situation or staying? Is it better to fight against the odds and risk losing when what you lose is your very self than to say "this fight is not worth it" and walk away?

Mr. Tambourine Man

2005-01-13T16:37:00.000-05:00

I just became aware of this album, the sixth in the bootleg series, although it's been out since March, and I'm already factoring a trip to the record store into my schedule for tomorrow. Given my lack of disposable income these days, I rarely buy cds, and when I do, I try to avoid buying anything by an artist whose work I already have. However, I do make an exception for some performers, and Bob Dylan is certainly one of those. While his studio albums are great, the live recordings of the bootleg series showcase the complete Dylan, the full "song and dance man." According to the description of this concert by an Amazon reviewer, this is the kind of Dylan show that I've been hoping to experience each time I've seen him, but that he just isn't likely to produce at this stage in his career:

"Another thing that stands out is how different these performances were from all subsequent Dylan performances. Dylan seems positively jovial throughout the show -- giggling, making jokes, introducing songs, playing with and teasing his audience. This is a stark contrast to the cynical, aloof Dylan that was on display in Don't Look Back, only a handful of months after this concert was recorded. It will also be a genuine shock to anyone familiar only with Dylan's current concerts, in which he talks to the audience only in order to introduce his band -- if, indeed, he does so at all. There are several reasons for this. Unbeknownst to the audience, Dylan's most recent acoustic album -- the then-three-months-old Another Side of Bob Dylan -- was to be his last. Dylan was only a few months away at this point from recording his first mostly-electric album, Bringing It All Back Home; soon after, he would both bring the electricity to his live shows and abandon the protest movement to focus on personal narratives and surreal esoterica. He thereby received almost constant vicious criticism from the folk crowd, producing in him a cynicism that would lead to his writing of Positively Fourth Street and spill over both into his live performances and his public persona. What we have on display here is a mostly untainted Dylan -- cheerful, exuberant, and even seemingly happy. Throughout the album, he clearly holds the adoring audience in the palm of his hand: they hang on to every word -- words which, by the way, they clearly know better than even he does -- and he plays them to the hilt. The album also offers a fascinating glimpse into a bygone era: a time of unparalleled and long-lost intimacy between performer and audience. The atmosphere gives off a mental picture of Dylan on a small stage singing songs requested by his friends -- despite the fact that this was a showcase concert at a major venue."

Sounds fantastic. It should be a great companion to Chronicles: Volume One, which I've been reading lately. I read Howard Sounes' biography of Dylan a few years ago, and while it was informative, I didn't feel it gave any real insight into Dylan himself; it was more of a collection of facts and hearsay. Chronicles, however, is Dylan's own words, and you can feel the man himself coming through. Here's what he has to say about the years following the concert at the Philharmonic:

"I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses. Even the horrifying news items of the day, the gunning down of the Kennedys, King, Malcolm X...I didn't see them as leaders being shot down, but rather as fathers whose families had been left wounded. Being born and raised in America, the country of freedom and independence, I had always cherished the values and ideals of equality and liberty. I was determined to raise my children with those ideals.

"A few years earlier Ronnie Gilbert, one of The Weavers, had introduced me at one of the Newport Folk Festivals saying, 'And here he is...take him, you know him, he's yours.' I had failed to sense the ominous forebodings in the introduction. Elvis had never even been introduced like that. 'Take him, he's yours!' What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn't belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world. I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. I'd left my hometown only ten years earlier, wasn't vociferating the opinions of anybody. My destiny lay down the road with whatever life invited, had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilization. Being true to yourself, that was the thing. I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper.

"People think that fame and riches translate into power, that it brings glory and honor and happiness. Maybe it does, but sometimes it doesn't. I found myself stuck in Woodstock, vulnerable and with a family to protect. If you looked in the press, though, you saw me being portrayed as anything but that. It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat - someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn't the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was - a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn't a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad."

He may not have been a preacher performing miracles, but his work comes damn close to that. What time does Schoolkids open?

Happiness

2005-01-11T20:42:00.000-05:00

I caught a fascinating episode of The Charlie Rose Show last night. The first half of the show was a discussion of the Palestinian election, which was very interesting but, in accord with my self-imposed moratorium on writing about politics, won't be discussed here. The second half featured "a discussion about the science of happiness" and is, truth be told, the segment that I was most interested in. The current issue of TIME magazine features a series of articles discussing the neurobiological basis and psychology of happiness, and the issue was the impetus for the segment on Charlie Rose. The panel included an editor of Time, a Princeton economist, and a couple of psychologists, one of whom was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose work I've been interested in since I was first introduced to it in Jim Dowd's Personality and Social Structure course at UGA.

Csikszentmihalyi's most famous work, and the one that he's been building off of since, is Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. The flow state that Csikszentmihalyi describes and studies is similar to what we might think of as being "in the zone." A person experiences a state of flow when they are completely immersed in a particular task. All external stimuli fade to the background save those related to the activity at hand. Thinking and doing are merged into one movement, and everything occurs naturally, almost effortlessly. Any task that is sufficiently challenging and engaging to the person performing it can induce a flow state; it can come from good conversation, reading a book, shaping a piece of pottery, playing a sport, even entering computer code. Watching television cannot induce a flow state, nor can any other primarily sedentary activity: our minds and/or bodies must be engaged at a high level. The basic idea is that engaging in activities that are challenging to us is an integral component of achieving satisfying experiences, and thus gaining some measure of happiness.

Other aspects of the conversation considered work and its effect on overall happiness. The workplace environment and the level of engagement that the work commands seem to be the key factors affecting happiness in the workplace; one of the findings of an article in the Time feature is that a major determinant of happiness at work is whether one has a best friend on the job.

In the discussion and in the articles available on Time's website, it seems the key factors affecting happiness are engagement and expectation. If your job, your friendships, and your relationships are engaging and challenging, then you are likely to be happier than the average. Also, if you don't expect too much of your job, your friendships, and your relationships, you are more likely to experience happiness.

All of this is interesting, but it skirts the issue of what happiness is, exactly. If it is simply a chemical reaction in your brain, then it seems that anything can make you happy that simulates that reaction. In that case, it seems that the factors mentioned above amount to simply fooling the brain into thinking it's happy, in doing something to create a chemical process that produces feelings of happiness. If you take a pill that makes you feel happy, are you in fact happy? Most of us would say no. If that is true, though, then we have to ask whether performing an action that reproduces that chemical process is really making us happy. If I find a job that is engaging, regardless of what it is, and I lower my expectations of life to an appropriate level, will I then experience happiness, or simply a chemical representation of it? Is whatever reproduces that chemical process a valid path to happiness? If not, why not? Is happiness completely subjective?

Pilgrim at Yadkin River

2005-01-11T11:09:00.000-05:00

Last Friday, rather than put in a day of work and study, which would have been the prudent course of action, I opted for a day of hiking and wine-tasting with friends in the North Carolina countryside. It was the right choice. As I noted recently, the weather here of late has been unseasonably warm, with temperatures hovering in the mid- to low-60s range and the sun blazing down from cloudless skies. Unfortunately this turn of good weather did not hold for our hike, as it was cold and overcast, but the time spent outdoors and with friends was a more than sufficient counter to the pale white sky and the light rain that fell for much of the day.

We left early, around 8, stopping along the way for biscuits and juice at Bojangles, which usually produces food that would not be out of place on a list of crimes against humanity, but on this day was actually quite tasty. It took around an hour and a half to reach our destination of Pilot Mountain, which some of you may know as Mt. Pilot from old episodes of The Andy Griffith Show. The parking lot at the trailhead offered some great views of the surrounding countryside, which I know so little of even though I've spent nearly two-thirds of my life in this state. I hope to make excursions like this one a more regular occurrence in the coming months in an effort to get to know the state a little better, to make it a part of myself and myself more a part of it. It's difficult to say how much longer we'll be here, and I've learned in the past year not to trust my prognostications on the subject, but it's likely that we'll call this area home for some time to come, so I'd like for it to feel a little more like home as well.

The hike was relaxing, not very strenuous, which was appropriate for the day. The trees were all bare, their naked fingers reaching toward the sky, ominous yet eerily peaceful. We hiked down along the most prominent feature of the mountain, a rocky outcropping crowned with evergreens, the side of which was scarred with striations and graffiti that marked the passage of time. After an hour or so we switched to a trail that followed along the banks of the Yadkin River. It was at that point that a light rain began to fall, reverberating loudly off the dead leaves that littered the forest floor. The sound of splashing water alerted us to a massive buck that was involved in crossing the river, bounding up out of the water with immeasurable strength, his body struggling against the current. Finally victorious, he disappeared from view into the trees that lined the opposite bank. Matt and I took photos, but they of course failed to capture the scene. The trees were largely dormant, but the forest was buzzing with life: squirrels and birds could be heard making their way, and raccoon tracks were visible along a dry creekbed. It was good to be outside and communing with nature somewhat. I felt alive.

After breaking for a lunch of peanut-butter sandwiches and trail mix, we made our way back to the car and headed for a couple of the surprisingly many wineries that populate the state. The few that we visited did not compare to the ones Ash and I toured in Sonoma last summer, but they were beautiful in their own way, and they had some fairly decent wines available for tasting. Not being an oenephile or a wine snob in any sense, I'm not sure I can really appreciate the tasting experience. I don't know what makes a good wine or understand the complexities of different varieties, and while I'd like to be more knowledgeable on the subject, it's not terribly high on my list of priorities. In the film Sideways, which Ash and I saw on Saturday and which I highly recommend, two friends take a trip to the California wine country to celebrate one's upcoming wedding. One of the friends is a complete wine nut, someone who says things like "quaffable, but hardly transcendent" after sampling a wine and who can detect even trace hints of a scent or flavor in a glass of vino. His friend would respond to his criticisms by shrugging his shoulders, knocking back the full glass, and saying "I don't know, it tastes pretty good to me." I'm much closer to that end of the wine-drinker spectrum. We had an $8 bottle of Syrah with dinner Friday night, and for now that's more than good enough for me. However, I do know enough about wine and have sampled enough to know that no North Carolina wines are going to be confused with any of the better European or Californian wines any time soon. That said, I think it's more than worth it to spend a day exploring some of the wineries here, if not for the wine itself then to experience a bit of the variety of the state and its people.

I am attempting to experiment with posting photos here, so with any luck a few pictures from the hike should appear below. The poor weather and my lack of photography skills conspired to prevent any really great shots, but for the sake of experimentation I'll put a few of the better ones here.

2005-01-11T11:06:00.000-05:00

The Yadkin River and one of its denizens

2005-01-11T11:05:00.000-05:00

Sort of creepy, no?

2005-01-11T11:01:00.000-05:00

Overlook from the area near the trailhead