Still breathing, just lazy

OK, so I haven’t posted in a full month, and I feel properly chastised. I’m in a posting slump, which I hope to pull myself out of. I’ve had a couple of ideas for longer posts running through my head, but haven’t really had the time/energy to sit down and work through them. I have however started writing one, so expect something substantive in the next few days. In the meantime, I’ll catch you up. Here is how March panned out:

• Went to Barbados for a week at the beginning of the month. Yup.

• If I’d been more blog-assiduous, I’d have posted a celebration of Jon Stewart ripping Jim Cramer a new one. Brilliant. If you didn’t see it, here’s the link here.

• While the contrast between Barbados and St. John’s weather was just as stark as you would imagine, the weather for the remainder of March was actually relatively pleasant. Which has me wondering if the other shoe is set to drop in April.

• U2’s new album=yummy goodness. While No Line on the Horizon isn’t the boys’ best outing, there’s a remarkable texture to the songs that has me finding new stuff with each listen. My current favourite track (it changes day to day) is “Breathe.”

• I didn’t teach on April Fool’s day this year, which made me sad. I usually manage to pull one over on my students. Last year I distributed an exam rubric with sample questions that would have confounded Einstein’s literary equivalent. This year I had to settle for convincing a former student now abroad, as we chatted over Facebook, that they’re building a nuclear reactor in Holyrood.

• Speaking of April Fool’s, Car & Driver magazine posted a joke article claiming that Obama was ordering GM and Chrysler to cease and desist any involvement in NASCAR. This in itself wasn’t that funny. What was funny was that Anne Coulter read this and immediately wrote a column attacking Obama for dictating business policy. Mmmmm, that’s good fact-checking.

That’s it. More later.

Being an expert, sort of

One of the weirder aspects of this job is that sometimes you get called from out of the blue and asked to offer “expert” commentary on topics that—more often than not—you have just a passing familiarity with. This happens because the university keeps a list of professors and the various topics they might pronounce upon in the event that a journalist wants an “expert” opinion for a feature he or she is writing.

I’ve been called a few times on a variety of things, but this is the first time someone was routed to me this way. I was interviewed by the TV show Books into Film two and a half years ago about Nick Hornby novels (I think because someone doing an internet search found that I taught High Fidelity on a popular culture course at Western), and a blog entry ranting about potholes prompted a call from the St. John’s Telegram by someone doing a story about potholes. But this was the first call I got based on my stated areas of expertise here at Memorial.

This time, the subject was Facebook—specifically, a feature about Facebook on the occasion of its fifth anniversary. Seeing as how we don’t yet have a Media Studies or Communications program at MUN, I guess an English professor with a secondary interest in media (or who has, at least, taught media studies courses in the past) will have to do.

I am, of course, hardly an expert on digital technologies of communication, unless you count the final chapter of my undergraduate thesis in which I talk briefly about the internet as a postmodern labyrinth apropos of cyberpunk novels. My entire expertise vis a vis Facebook is that I'm a subscriber. That being pointed out to the reporter however, I did gamely offer intellectual-esque commentary. The article is here, but if you just want to read my sound byte:

“One of the greatest appeals is being in contact,” said Chris Lockett, English professor at Memorial University in St. John’s. “One of the appeals about Facebook specifically, too, is that it does sort of cross issues of time and space, so what a lot of people talk about, both positively and negatively, is once they go on Facebook they find themselves quite suddenly in contact with people they hadn’t spoken to or thought about in years. You don’t necessarily talk to them on a regular basis over Facebook, but you do get this constant stream of information in the news feed over what they’re doing and what’s going on. You get a sense of other people’s stories in a very passive way — you don’t have to go out and look for them.”

I don’t know why the reporter needed to have a professor to say something that is essentially common sense, but then I guess that’s what I do—give my “expert” imprimatur to stuff you already knew.

I’m thinking of having that put on my business cards.

Friday miscellany

1. My friend Jason’s Facebook status update sums it all up for me: “Jason is boggled that even as our laissez-faire partisan neighbours to the south managed a recovery package in days, all our morons managed was a time-out. With pay.” At a moment like this, it strikes me that doing nothing is about the worst thing a government can do. Even an election would be preferable. Not very, but still.
   
   
2. Everything I have predicted about the course of events since the coalition became a gleam in the Opposition’s eye has been wrong. I was thinking I should just stop prognosticating, but when the G-G gave Harper permission to dissolve Parliament, I came to the conclusion that I simply don’t possess an irrational enough mind to see into the crystal ball of our federal politics.
   
   
3. In happier news, the semester is over and I will be winging home to Ontario in slightly less than two weeks. This was a good semester, and after the perfect storm that was my fall term last year, it felt like a walk in the park. I actually managed to get some of my own writing done, which felt so decadent that I had to remind myself that that’s technically 40% of my job description—40% research, 40% teaching, 20% administration. The problem was that this time last year the math was more like 40% research, 40% teaching, 60% administration. Which is what happens when you leave the math to English professors.
   
   
4. Forty-six days of Bush's presidency left.
   
   
5. It occurred to me recently that I came roaring back to my blog after a two-month absence largely on my obsession with the American election. And now I’ve been going on about Canadian politics. Not wanting to turn this into an exclusively political blog, I shall do my best to reinsert more literary and personal stuff (i.e. things I actually know something about). That being said, this essay is one of the smartest things I’ve read since Obama’s election, and articulates some of the things I’ve thought way better than I ever could.
   
   
6. Teaching this term was a joy. I had two classes, my standard 20th-century U.S. fiction, and a fourth-year seminar on American Lit after 1945. In both cases, I decided to mix things up a bit by giving each course a specific theme rather than just doing a typical survey. In the case of the former, I decided to take advantage of Obama’s candidacy and focus on novels dealing with issues of race and identity; in the latter, we looked at post-9/11 fiction. The 9/11 course, while interesting, was a bit tougher—because, as it turns out, most novels written about September 11th really suck. At the same time however, we did Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is an utterly fantastic read and helped balance out stinkers like John Updike’s Terrorist. In both classes, though, I had some amazing students … which really is the rule rather than the exception here. I am consistently impressed and often blown away by the students I have; it’s quite the privilege.
   
   
7. Speaking of, my student Emily introduced me to the genius that is the comedy of Dylan Moran, who you may remember as the irritating David in Shaun of the Dead. His stand-up is brilliant: the following clip in which he expounds on the nature of Irish vs. English sensibilities, and Protestant vs. Catholic had me laughing so hard I was close to asphyxiating myself:
   
   

Saturday miscellany

• I recently discovered that Obama's new Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was the model for the character of Josh Lyman on The West Wing. That's kind of cool; what blows my mind is that his brother Ari, a talent agent in L.A., was the inspiration for the character of Ari Gold on Entourage. All of which leads me to the conclusion that you really don't want to fuck with this family.
  
  
• And so it begins: today I went into Shopper's Drug Mart for some odds and sods, and had the pleasant experience of hearing U2 on the store soundtrack. As if to make a point to me specifically, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" was cut off before it finished to be replaced by Neil Diamond singing "The Little Drummer Boy." Seriously? Seriously ... and once again the consumerist powers that be renew their assault on my sensibilities in their yearly attempt to make me loathe Christmas before December begins.
  
  
• I've decided to found an advocacy group for the abolition of lotteries. Not because they feed people's gambling addictions (which they do), or because low-income people spend a disproportionate amount of their wages on them as compared to high-income people (which they do), but because I invariably end up behind them in the checkout line as they have their two-dozen or so tickets checked by the clerk, and then take their sweet time deciding whether to take their meagre winnings in cash or more tickets. The madness must end! I must be allowed to buy my toothpaste with dispatch!

Wassup? ... parte the seconde

Remember that Budweiser ad where all the friends are calling each other and yelling "Wassup?" into the phone? Remember how incredibly irritating that got? Especially when it went into its predictable popular culture half-life and everyone you knew was yelling "Wassup??" at you until you started feeling vaguely homicidal?

I blame Budweiser, because the ad was based on a short film that made the festival circuits, and had it not been picked up as a beer ad it might have remained a subcultural phenomenon (with a revival after the rise of YouTube, to be certain).

Several days ago, the original cast of the original film short posted a "sequel" on YouTube. And speaking as someone who went twitchy for many years on hearing "wassup?", this is really worth a watch ....

Things I considered posting these last two and a half months

Oops, there went a week without a post. Did I worry you, my last three or four readers? Well, I won't make extravagant promises about returning to the old frequency with which I posted once upon a time, but I'll try to maintain a minimum of one post a week. Hopefully that will get me back into the blogging habit.

At any rate, my online silence didn't come about for lack of postings. Quite frequently topics presented themselves to me, but as a result of busyness, ennui, or simple laziness -- all coupled with the blog-killing tendencies of Facebook (damn you, Facebook!) -- these posting ideas receded into the horizon of my thoughts, finally becoming old news-enough that it felt odd to waste electrons on them.

So here's the Coles Notes, then -- all the stuff in a nutshell that was on my mind since the beginning of April. There's more than this, actually ... these are just the greatest hits, as it were.


1. Puffins, Icebergs, and my Mom.

My lovely mother visited me for a week in mid-May and was treated, much to my chagrin, to some of the most frigid May weather I've ever experienced here. She was also treated, much to her delight, to the biggest crop of icebergs in recent memory. Everywhere we drove, as long as we could see the ocean, we could see icebergs. To cap it all off, we drove down to Ferryland one day (the weather had mercifully warmed somewhat), and walked the trail past a massive grounded berg; and then drove to Bay Bulls and took the O'Brien's boat tour to get up close and personal with the ice ... and see puffins. Which, I must add, are the most comical of animals, even edging out penguins and ducks. Watching them try to take off from the water and end up skipping like stones while trying to get their speed up counts as one of the most hilarious experiences of my life.



2. My Father, the (Not-so-Ancient) Mariner

While my mother was visiting the Rock and bundling up against the cold, my father was in St. Maarten in the Caribbean preparing to sail with some friends to New York City. A friend of my parents, a member of the same yacht club as them, has been tooling around the Caribbean with his wife on their 36-foot sailboat for a few years. Unfortunately, the wife's health has deteriorated, precluding further shipboard life ... leaving the husband with the task of bringing the boat home. Enter my dad and two other sailor friends, who agreed to help. For somewhere in the neighbourhood of four weeks they sailed north, with a stop in Bermuda, braving everything from Coleridge-esque doldrums ("Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, / 'Twas sad as sad could be, / And we did speak only the break / The silence of the sea") to a few genuine Atlantic gales. Said my father when all was done, he was happy he was able to do this ... and now, he'll never do it again.


3. The Endless Democratic Primary

Yeah, I'm not saying any more than that. I'm just happy we're on to the next stage.


4. My First Time as External Examiner

Back in, oh, April I think, I got an email from Kristen saying that Tim Blackmore -- a friend, and professor of Media Studies at Western in the faculty she works in -- had been casually asking her about when I might be visiting London this summer. I had just booked a flight for late June, but she couldn't remember the dates exactly, so she suggested I email him directly. This I did, telling him when I'd be in town. And received this response, in I think minutes (those who know Tim will recognize his markedly calm and retiring manner): "AHA AHA!!! I want to borrow you, son, for a verrrrry important, important I say, defense! (Some Foghorn rolled in last night)."

The long and short of it was, Tim needed someone as an external on a Masters thesis he had advised, and given that there is no money available for Masters' externals for travel &c, the fact that I would be conveniently in town anyway rocketed me to the top of the list (hey, it's an honour just being nominated).

I was, needless to say, quite delighted to be asked -- it was my first external examination, the thesis looked cool, and I was happy to do a favour for someone I hold in high estimation both professionally and otherwise. The thesis in question, "Augmented Ability, Integrated Identity: Understanding Sapienism, Adaptive Technology, and the Construction of Disability," was written by a quite remarkable student named Jeffrey Preston, whose muscular dystrophy has confined him to a wheelchair since a young age. Did I say confined? I mean he has been liberated by his wheelchair, a technological device that gives him a freedom of mobility he would not otherwise have. His thesis very thoughtfully reconsiders the cultural values and stereotypes attached to disability, and focuses on the way in which dystopian narratives of technology actually contribute to the negative perception of such devices as wheelchairs. Suffice it to say, it was a remarkable piece of work for someone that early in his academic career.


5. Rachael Ray: Terrorist

This one's my favourite.

You are probably familiar with that annoyingly saccharine Food Network personality Rachael Ray; what you might not know is that she's a terrorist sympathizer. In addition to her other (too many) appearances on television, Ray has been schilling for Dunkin' Donuts. In an ad for some iced coffee product or other, she is wearing a patterned scarf. Conservative pundette and blogger Michelle Malkin -- who now has the dubious distinction of being slightly more insane than Anne Coulter -- posted on her blog that the scarf in question is in fact a "keffiyeh" of the sort routinely worn by Arab men (Yasser Arafat would be the most obvious example here). OK ... I can see the resemblence ... but Malkin, making with the insane, goes further to note that this is an example of "jihadi chic" and "hate couture," and that she hopes Ray's fashion choice "was spurred more by ignorance than ideology."

Seriously? Seriously. Malkin later defended her comments by claiming that western designers have deliberately marketed such scarves as statements of solidarity with Palestinians. Even if this is true -- and I deem it highly suspect -- the easy conflation of Arab=terrorist, or sympathy with Palestine=support of Hamas is rhetoric of the worst, and laziest, kind. As one person commenting on this idiocy mildly observed, "what about all the Arab men who wear the keffiyeh who aren't terrorists?" Let me dig that particular ration out of my notes .... (Incidentally, once of my students wore a nearly identical scarf to class this week. I congratulated her on bringing America one step closer to destruction).

What makes matters worse is that, in an act of cowardice that makes the Lion in The Wizard of Oz look like John Wayne, Dunkin' Donuts pulled the ad. I wish we had one in St. John's so I could boycott it.

Falling back into bad habits

OK, so I fell off the wagon blog-wise over the holidays this year. It was inevitable, though, given the huge volume of nothing I was managing to do while back in Ontario ... inactivity of that scale and scope really takes concentration.


So to sum up my holidays: Christmas? Excellent. Santa? Generous. Weather? Cold. Fireplace? Warm. Booze? Plentiful. Food? Yummy. TV? Lots. Family? Lovely. Niece? Adorably hilarious. Nephew? Laughing. Girlfriend? Beautiful. New Year's Resolutions? Yeah, right.


That's about it. I'm currently dotting my t's and crossing my i's for my first few classes and so will cut the first post of 2008 short, but not without posting this brilliant photo of Morgan posing with my brother's new Guitar Hero hardware.



Morgan, we who are about to rock salute you.


Happy new year, everyone!

Facebook killed the radio star, um, blogger ...

OK, OK ... So much for a more active and updated blog. I will eventually get back onto a regular posting schedule, I swear! But for now everyone will have to be patient, at least until I get the Intertubes connected at the new house.

That being said, here's a short update on my life the past few weeks:

• I have moved into the new house, though because the school year has started in earnest, I'm still more or less living out of boxes. Why did I think the beginning of September was a GOOD time to buy a house?
• Classes are good. This being my third year, I now go up to a full teaching load -- so I have three courses this term. Though two of them are courses I've taught before (FINALLY, I get some repeats) so at the least the prep routine is not dire.
• The third class is a graduate seminar, which is my second now. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.
• Clarence spent twelve hours being utterly freaked out by the new living space, then discovered my narrow, steep stairs. Tearing up and down them at full speed is his new favourite thing, and I've nearly died when he's been underfoot several times.
• The faculty union and the administration have a tentative agreement, which means we won't be going on strike, and we're looking at an actual substantial pay raise (there's also something in there about needing to publish five books to get tenure, but I didn't really read past the $$$ bit). Woot, indeed.

That's it. Don't I lead the most spectacular, exciting life? I'll post pictures of the house once I've cleared out the boxes ... so, some time around May.

Also, I'll add something just for fun. In my grad seminar yesterday, we were talking about bad poetry, and it turns out my students had never heard of the illustrious James McIntyre, the famed "Ingersoll Cheese Poet." McIntyre, a resident of southern Ontario in the late nineteenth century, turned his finely honed poetic sensibilities on many topics, but had a peculiar affinity for cheese-related themes. On break, I went to my office and printed out his masterpiece, which I then read to the class. I nearly made it through, but lost it on the final verse. So close ...


Ode on the Mammoth Cheese

We have seen thee, queen of cheese,
Lying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze,
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

All gaily dressed soon you'll go
To the great Provincial show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.

Cows numerous as a swarm of bees,
Or as the leaves upon the trees,
It did require to make thee please.
And stand unrivalled, queen of cheese.

May you not receive a scar as
We have heard that Mr. Harris
Intends to to send you off as far as
The great world's show at Paris.

Of the youth beware of these,
For some of them might rudely squeeze
And bite your cheek, then songs or glees
We could not sing, o' queen of cheese.

We'rt thou suspended from balloon,
You'd cast a shade even at noon,
Folks would think it was the moon
About to fall and crush them soon.

More of McIntyre's brilliant verses can be found here. I think McIntyre made that common mistake in interpreting the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the cheesemakers, for they shall be called the Sons of God."