The Salt-Box

There’s no easy way to say this: A & I went see Neil Diamond’s concert Thursday night. (Here’s the Courant’s review; the WFSB news producer liked the show.) It’s safe to say we differ on the Diamond: A has strong associations with his songs from her youth; I tend to loathe those songs. We both, though, have liked the Rick Rubin-produced efforts, especially the first such album, 12 Songs.

There’s no way to talk meaningfully about the concert without talking about the crowd. I’ve never knowingly been in the room with someone who thought that “Love on the Rocks” or “Forever in Blue Jeans” or “America” was a good song–but there were thousands of such people (not! A! I will defend her honor . . . !). The intense affection of the crowd toward such dreck–much less toward “Sweet Caroline,” which moved the crowd into arthritic raptures–was alarming.

It was also clear immediately that the crowd, by and large, didn’t know his Rick Rubin-produced material. Most of the audience chanted gleefully along to Diamond’s older material, but greeted the songs from the last two albums politely but without recognition. All the better for them, then, that Diamond stayed largely within the orbit of the 1970s and 1980s.

Diamond’s performance was solid enough, I guess, especially if you like the older songs. (A, for example, thought it was a fine show.) I will say that if you’re not Johnny Cash–that is, you’re not really looking to reinterpret your old songs–then Diamond has chosen the course of honor: Play the songs as if you believe them. (Rather than, for instance, smirking/winking your way through them.) And so Diamond sang his sentimental heart out. God bless him.

More interesting, perhaps, were the last two songs–“Man of God” and “Hell Yeah”–which together showed that Diamond didn’t learn a damn thing from Rubin, though perhaps he should’ve. On 12 Songs, “Man of God” is a solid enough Diamond song, largely because it’s producer-imposed restraint keeps it from collapsing into treacle. Live, Diamond plays it like a “Heartlight”-era song, full of brass and crazed backing vocals and other additions. It utterly ruined the song.

By contrast, for “Hell Yeah,” Diamond drops everything away and largely plays the song as recorded on the album. Hearing it at the end of the show, after all those ludicrous, bombastic arrangements, and especially after the wrecking of “Man of God,” however, the song plays as impossibly tragic: This is the singer/songwriter/performer I could have been, but still can’t trust myself to become. It was riveting.

(And then the first encore was “Cracklin Rosie,” which was fine . . . but then came “America.”)

This is Kate Summerscale, describing textile factories in Trowbridge in 1860:

in the morning the machines would start to pound and whirr, and the air would thicken with smoke, soot, the smells of urine (collected in tubs from public houses and used to scour wool) and of the vegetable dyes streaming into the river Biss.

God love Victorian ingenuity.  I wonder what was the going rate for a tub of urine . . . money really does flow freely in a pub.

After a brief hiatus to get caught up in my project of re-reading Freud volume by volume, the PsychoSlut column is back in the August issue of Bookslut, reading The Psychopathology of Everyday Life:

My five-year-old memorizes song lyrics like they’re the plans to the Death Star. When he locks onto a song, he’ll insist on starting over if he gets even one phrase wrong. The sentence, “Start this song over, please,” is perhaps the most dreaded in our household, though we also find it charming that he can sing along to songs as different as “Iron Man” and “One Week,” or to music ranging from nerdcore rap to Arcade Fire or Flogging Molly or Kimya Dawson.

But there is one song he can’t get right, even though he intellectually grasps what the lyric is. The Hold Steady’s “Ask Her for Some Adderall,” opens this way:

If she asks don’t tell her that I’m living hand to mouth,
Don’t tell her that I’m sleeping on your couch,
If she asks just tell her that we opened for the Stones,
It’s her favorite band, except for The Ramones.

Eliot knows this song by heart — correctly working out the names of drugs like Adderall and Klonapin, and character names like Charlemagne, Holly, and Gideon. But that opening couplet gets him every single time. Here’s his version:

If she asks don’t tell her that I’m living hand to mouth,
Don’t tell your mom that I’m sleeping on her couch.

This mistake cracks us up every time, because it neatly captures two key aspects of our (still fairly guileless) kid: First, in his mind, “don’t tell her” obviously refers to a mom. Relatedly, the extent of his deceptiveness so far is on the order of “don’t tell mom/dad.” He’s not much of a liar yet. And second, a key article of faith in the boy’s code is that you cannot admit to being tired, and especially to needing a nap. That would be beyond the pale. He associates “sleeping on the couch” with napping — when he was transitioning off of daily naps, sometimes he’d take his nap on the couch, because that would guarantee it was a “short nap,” as opposed to an “epic” nap. So, “Don’t tell your mom I’ve been sleeping on her couch” can be translated as, “don’t tell mom I need a nap.”

As always, read the whole thing!   Next month is Volume VII, which includes such goodies as the Dora case and  Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

Bad:

Nader Saleh, landlord of the Robert E. Sheridan apartment building at 75 Martin Luther King Drive, said Tuesday that he has been battling a bedbug problem in about a dozen rooms in his building for six weeks.

It’s one of several buildings across the city suffering infestation, health officials say.

Worse:

Health Department officials said Tuesday that they have been responding to more than double the usual amount of complaints this month for uncut lawns, bugs, rodents and assorted blight, most of it attributable to foreclosures and banks not attending to their vacant properties.

One property owner whose uncut grass and debris is providing a safe haven for rodents is none other than the city of New Britain.

Even worse:

A convicted sex offender was charged with attempted murder and first-degree assault Saturday after he repeatedly stabbed a city resident in what his public defender said may have been a dispute over $10 in crack cocaine.

This story reminded me of the time I was foreman of a jury in Chicago, and the cops were able to follow the attacker from the scene of the crime to his bedroom because he was dropping money as he ran: “Officers who were trying to figure out where the victim was followed a trail of blood from the parking lot to the [attacker’s] uncle’s apartment and then discovered the kitchen of the residence was filled with blood.”

To recap, though: A bug-infested, trashy place where you can get stabbed over a $10 crack deal.

Obviously it’s not really so bad.  For example, there are a lot of fun activities loosely associated with Parks & Rec.  For example,  registration for New Britain Youth Soccer has been extended through this weekend, with registrations being taken at Willow Brook park on Saturday from 2-4.   Judging from the preliminary numbers at the most recent meeting, this is going to be a big fall!  (Not so big: poetry workshops.)

This fall semester will mark, if my math is correct, ten years that I’ve been teaching courses of my own design.  (For one previous year, I taught composition courses from a department-chosen text, hewing closely to model department syllabi, culminating in a department portfolio review.  It was a great experience, and I learned a lot, especially from Donna, who supervised my TA support section–but it wasn’t my own show.)

A lot’s changed in 10 years: I went from being a doctoral student, to a post-doc, to an assistant professor, to an untenured associate professor, to, finally, being a tenured associate professor.  I’ve gotten some recognition for my teaching, and have good evaluations.

What hasn’t changed is the gnawing anxiety of imposter syndrome.   (Wikipedia says that it “is not an officially recognized psychological disorder”–and let’s hope it stays that way!) I still open most student e-mail with a clutch of dread that, finally, I’ve been found out.

Today, for example, a very loyal and devoted student got in touch and asked to meet to discuss a “favor regarding this fall’s cyberpunk class,” in which he’s enrolled.  By chance, I was on campus and was able to set up a meeting a couple of hours later.  I spent the ENTIRE two hours speculating about the nature of the favor: “Stop clowning at the front of the class.”  “Stop passing yourself off as knowledgeable about the internet.”  “Try delivering actual content for a change, instead of focusing on teaching methods for reading and writing.”  Seriously.  Two hours of this, in preparation for a meeting with a student who’s taken ~12 credit hours with me already, and even written a testimonial for the local teaching award.

What was the actual favor?  Special pleading for a fellow student, a cyberpunk devotee, who wants into the class.

On the one hand, I would be grateful if this would stop, or could be contained.  Maybe half an hour instead of two hours, for a start.  But, on the other, I’m pretty certain that this syndrome–like the intense nausea I tend to feel about many classes near the end of the semester–is the source of whatever strengths I have as a teacher.  It’s all about the gap in my mind between the class that I know I can teach, and the class as it actually went.  I know that that gap can only asymptotically diminish–for one thing, it’s not up to me alone: students play a role!  But the gap reminds me that the class could always be better, and should always be better.  (I don’t want to be too pollyanna-ish about this: My usual end-of-semester nausea can have real repercussions.  For example, it’s very easy to get frustrated with a class that doesn’t seem to be going well, allowing myself instead to get sucked into thinking about the new semester.)

Ira Glass has a *great* video about this (via, like most good things about work/productivity and related issues, 43folders), arguing that one’s failure, especially self-perceived failure, is in part a function of what gives you a voice, and so you just have to push through it.  So, here’s to another decade of feeling miserable about my ability to reach students!

So, the boy has been reading the all-ages Marvel comic, X-Men: First Class: New Beginnings, which collects issues 1-4 of X-Men: First-Class. In issue 4, “Seeing Red,” the X-Men and Dr. Strange travel to another dimension in order to return a demon that’s been tormenting them on Earth.

Here’s the moment where Jean Grey opens a portal to the ruby realm to banish the demon:

Tell me that’s not a Goatse joke. (Click here for work-safe Goatse explanation; and here for a *very* NSFW archive of the famous Goatse image.) What I particularly like is Professor Xavier’s mental projection: “I am guiding you to the rift. Pull it open.” Just in case the allusion was at all ambiguous.

Well-played, Marvel.  Well-played!

Motoko Rich’s NY Times essay about the old books-vs-web chestnut, “Online, R U Really Reading?,”
has generated a fair amount of attention.  While I don’t usually agree with Laurie Fendrich about a lot, her conclusion is correct:

A new elite — a new oligarchy, if you will — consisting of people who are equal masters of both Web and book reading will emerge.

The people who can move fluidly from Facebook, realpolitics.com and Twitter to War and Peace and The Origin of Species may end up being a small group, but they’ll be an elite and powerful group that will present a new and daunting challenge to everybody else.

What frustrated me about the article was the way it doesn’t seem to recognize the convergence of views between some defenders of reading and the (usually teenaged) skeptics.  Here’s one of the teenagers:

In a book, “they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed,” Hunter said. “Online just gives you what you need, nothing more or less.”

To an English professor, such a perspective amounts to functional illiteracy.  After all, all those details–how the story is told, or the argument made–add up to style, to literary language, to the entire mode of knowing the world entailed by metaphor, irony, catachresis, and other tropes.  Even in nonliterary contexts, as Mark Bauerlein has pointed out, such a perspective reduces history to information, with the counterintuitive effect that–to adopt the student’s language, you actually get less of “what you need” online, because there’s less internalization.  (One of the Very Truly Awesome ironies of Bauerlein’s article, which is entitled “The Fate of History in a High-Tech Time” is that the URL renders it as, “the fate of history in a hi-tech time.”)

But it’s really hard to blame teenagers or students for all of this when you get so-called experts speaking so contemptuously of reading and print culture?  Here’s Rand J. Spiro:

Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”

Honestly, this is just stupid.  No one reads “in a line,” except in the most literal or typographical of senses.  Everyone goes forward and backward through a book, either physically or in their mind, even when reading the most linear of arguments.  And what does it even mean to say that “the world doesn’t go in a line”?  The last time I checked, time’s arrow still only points in one direction.

What’s most frustrating about such arguments, however, is that they implicitly feed into the point of view that books have a lot of extraneous detail.  Whatever scaffolding the book provides, whatever analytic purchase it gives us, is just so much distraction from reality.  That’s no way to think of reading.

By way of a conclusion, here’s a famous passage from Dickens’s Oliver Twist, in which he defends his melodramatic approach to plot construction.  Like the critics of print culture, Dickens holds up “real life” as the ultimate aesthetic touchstone; however, unlike them, he further recognizes the ways “real life” is already aesthetic, and that the imaginative associations and projections we make when reading can help us to gain fresh insight into ourselves.  Such insights aren’t reducible to information, though they may, in the student’s words, be “what we need.”  Here’s Dickens:

It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger, drawing forth her dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard, and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle; where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places, from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually.

Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning-weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on, which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.

The boy found this picture–it’s my ID card for the British Library in the summer of 1999–a few weeks ago, and for a minute or two couldn’t figure out who it was:

 

For reference, here’s a pretty recent picture:

We’ve been laughing about this all July.

You can see me talk–*very* glibly, and mostly to undergrads–about Lost Causes: Historical Consciousness in Victorian Literature on our campus’s “Central Authors” television show here.  (Scroll down to November.)

I hadn’t really noticed this formally until yesterday, but apparently once you follow someone in Twitter, all their previous updates are retroactively incorporated into your timeline, as if you had been following that person forever.

That’s a slightly puzzling behavior: Usually, if I follow someone, it’s because I’ve already looked at their profile and checked out their updates.  I don’t really need to have their old tweets spliced into my timeline (for one thing, I’m probably not going to see them anyway, because I’m not looking for their posts there–after all, I wasn’t following them).  It also slightly falsifies the idea that this is *my* timeline, because new people are constantly being introduced into it.

Also, and admittedly this is an unusually specific concern, it shifts the burden to me to keep track of when I started following the person.  For certain teaching-related uses, that’s a bit irritating.

(I Am Not a Programmer, but doesn’t this also contribute to load issues?  Every time high-volume posters get followed, the server has to dish up all the posts they’ve ever made.  Seems unnecessary.)

As always, you can find me on Twitter here.