Just a few miles north of here—how few can be attested by the near-constant whirring of engines overhead and the overwhelmingly acrid air—the mountains are on fire, and have been for a week.  Air quality has deteriorated to the extent that all non-essential outdoor activities on campus have been canceled for the duration.  And once again this morning, I’ve awakened to find my apartment filled with the smell of smoke.

Few of you will be faced with neighborhood wildfires, but perhaps you might understand why I’ve recently become obsessed with this site of late.  We’re the Williams Fire, if you want to get the lowdown on our situation.

The new season has at last begun, and eager students are buckling down all over campus, absorbing new materials, debating new ideas, and anticipating developments to come.

I’m referring, of course, to the new television season.

I’ve only caught one new series thus far this season, and don’t yet have anything worthwhile to say about it.  I’m intrigued, however, by the fact that two otherwise very dissimilar returning series focus in their early episodes on back-to-school anxieties.  Of course, there’s a difference between being depressed and directionless and being a sitting duck for whatever’s coming out of the hellmouth next, but nonetheless:  school is apparently, this year, a scary place.

So what new shows are you watching?

I have spent much of the last six days cooling my heels through various plane flights (and the inevitably attendant airport delays), dawdling in various hotel rooms, and generally seeking ways to pass the time.  My strategies for time-passage have nearly always revolved around books; I tend, for that reason, to travel with an average of more than 200% of my actual per-journey reading capacity, sort of a reading version of the eyes-bigger-than-stomach buffet dilemma.

This week, I managed to make it through most of what I carried, some of which was required class-reading (finishing The House of Mirth; starting A Lost Lady).  My brain has gotten hung up, however, in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.  There are a number of worthy reasons for this absorption:  Stephenson’s voice is simultaneously riotous and accurate, rendering with deadly precision the details of the near-future merger of consumer choice and individual identity and the balkanization of both consumer preferences and residential communities (his invention in Snow Crash of the FOQNE—or franchise-owned quasi-national entity—and the “burb-clave” being grand examples).  This kind of detail, at once funny and pointed, pushes Stephenson’s work beyond the standard—if you’ll pardon the characterization—adolescent male fantasies of most cyberpunk.  If you’ve never read any Stephenson, go get Snow Crash.  Right now.  I’ll wait here.

The Diamond Age, however, adds something more to Stephenson’s previous critique of contemporary U.S. culture.  Where Snow Crash could conceivably be accused of using its hero’s ethnicity in the same Orientalizing manner seen in Gibson’s Neuromancer and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, The Diamond Age attempts to interrogate the imperialist relationship between east and west through its representations of 21st century Shanghai, at once inescapably diverse and radically segregated.  Moreover, where Snow Crash‘s tough teenage heroine, Y.T., could be interpreted as a Buffy-ized version of the ass-kicking, leather-clad objects of male pleasure and terror that pop up throughout cyberpunk (Gibson’s Molly being the ultimate case in point), The Diamond Age suggests, both through the detailed development of its heroine, Nell, and through the overwhelming force of the Mouse Army (composed of orphaned girls), an advanced critique of gender relations from the Victorian period forward.

What’s really got my brain hung up on the novel, though, is the role played within it by the eponymous Primer.  Of the multiple possibilities I’ve encountered for the book’s future, possibilities imagined by writers, scholars, and technocrats alike, the Primer is without question my favorite.  However much I may have coveted Y.T.’s skateboard, I covet this book more.  “Printed” on smart paper, with a high-end rod logic processing system and a deeply interactive structure growing out of a foundation in traditional narrative, the Primer entertains, instructs, and nurtures its reader, teaching her not only facts and figures but also how to learn in the first place.  The Primer guides Nell as she grows, growing with her, responding to the changing circumstances of her life, expanding its genre from traditional fairy tales to embrace a new kind of self-reflexivity in order to teach her the fundamentals of its own programming, and developing an increasingly complex and even porous relationship with the outside world.  Stephenson makes an overwhelming case for the power of this book in its heroine’s development, a case that makes me wonder, given the confluence of my own current reading material:  could Lily Bart have been saved, like the similarly motherless Nell, if she’d had access to the Primer?

Or, acknowledging the uncrossable barrier presented by the technology involved, were there any books, of the old print-on-paper variety, that could have saved Lily Bart?

Planned Obsolescence has been on the road these last five days, and has had only the most tenuous of connections to the Internet.  Please forgive our absence; we’ll be back with further ruminations in a day or two.

Night before last (meaning Monday night, the 9th), I watched Showtime’s airing of Reflections from Ground Zero, a series of nine short films produced by graduate students from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  I’m not sure whether it was any of the films themselves, or rather the generally haunting remembrances, or my past life at NYU, or my more personal and present requirement to address the date in a suitably professorial manner (at a faculty-student luncheon at which I’m to appear on an official panel)—whatever the cause, night before last (meaning, as I write pre-sleep, last night) I dreamed of the World Trade Center, over and over.

Dreamed of watching it come down, powerless on the wrong side of the country and on the wrong side of the television screen.  Dreamed of searching for a way off of the 104th floor.  Dreamed of debris, and panic, and evacuations.

Today is a day I’d rather not acknowledge—rather not, in fact, experience.  Rather ignore from a safe spot, with the covers pulled securely over my head.  I don’t suppose, though, that any of us have that luxury any more, and that the luxury of covers-over-head is part of what got us into this mess in the first place.

I don’t have anything suitably professorial to greet the day with, no guidance for my students, or even, at a much baser level, for myself.

What I do have is a need to reach out.  A quick message, then, for the friends I left in New York, now a shocking four years ago:  I miss you more today than ever.

I’m rereading The House of Mirth for class right now, and I’m taking under advisement mariah’s suggestion that I remove Laurence Selden from my list of characters I’d like to smack around.  Perhaps she’s right:  it seems logical that I make allowances for the novel’s ostensible perspective on its characters, distinguishing between those the reader is meant to like but who are nonetheless so annoying as to drive one to violence (e.g., Dick Diver) and those the reader is meant to view skeptically from the get-go.  Like Laurence Selden.  A good point.

And yet.  Selden’s flaw—his most literal weakness—is his inability to commit to any depth of feeling.  Poor boy, wants to live free in the republic of the spirit, and all that.  The problem, for me at least, is that he seems to think that he is being brave in this desire for freedom, rather than shrinking in cowardly fashion from human contact.  Complete self-deception, in other words.  And the cost of that self-deception, for Lily, is high indeed.  Take this early moment:  having happened upon Lily in a train station, he is drawn to her “as a spectator,” and yet cannot resist getting involved:

“What luck!” she repeated.  “How nice of you to come to my rescue!”

He responded joyfully that to do so was his mission in life, and asked what form the rescue was to take.

That combination of attraction and hesitation, making her—even in jest—his “mission in life” and then demanding to know the particulars of what she needs, presages everything that is wrong with Selden.  His ultimate, genuine failure to come to Lily’s rescue when she most needs it is perhaps explicable; he is weak, after all, and it would take a kind of courage that he does not possess to save her.  But it’s finally his utter lack of self-knowledge, his determination to understand his cowardice as bravery—epitomized by the novel’s penultimate lines—that carries him beyond the pale for me:

He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart; since his very detachment from the external influences which swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it more difficult for him to live and love uncritically.  But at least he had loved her—had been willing to stake his future on his faith in her—and if the moment had been fated to pass from them before they could seize it, he saw now that, for both, it had been saved whole out of the ruin of their lives.

Fated?  Willing to stake his future?  I doubt both of these conditions highly—had Selden found her alive and well at novel’s end, I can only assume that some other new reservation would have interposed itself between him and committing to her.

All this to say that perhaps it’s not—or not only—the novel’s perspective on its characters that might determine whether or not they’re worthy of being throttled, but—or but also—the characters’ own self-regard.  There are those—and Dick Diver and Selden both fall into this category—who seem to consider themselves more sinned against than sinning, when the rest of the text seems rife with evidence to the contrary.

Classes begin today, my friends, thus ending the long orientation process that precedes every fall semester.  The bulk of our students showed up on campus this weekend.  Some had been here longer, of course:  a very few were here all summer; another group arrived two weeks ago to prepare for orientation; the Class of 2006 arrived a week ago.  But for the most part Saturday, August 31, was the day of influx.  Wandering around campus prior to meeting with my advisees, I watched students unpacking computers and stereo systems nicer than any I may ever own, and watched parents rolling stacks of boxes balanced on ergonomic desk chairs across uneven sidewalks toward ranks of newly renovated dorm rooms.  And, in watching, could not help but think of the following, which is in all but a few respects wholly applicable here:

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus.  In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories.  The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts.  As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum Dum pops, the Mystic mints. [Don DeLillo, White Noise.]

This is, of course, the day of the station wagons at the College on the Hill.  Here, at the College Just South of the Hill, things are recognizably similar.  The technologies have advanced, naturally, replacing albums and cassettes with CDs and DVDs and their immaterial hard-drive equivalents.  The saddles are instead represented by mountain bikes, the skis by skateboards, the rafts by roller blades.  The most immediately notable transformation, however, is in the day itself; there are no station wagons.  Saturday was instead, here, the day of the SUVs.

So, with GPS in hand, or dashboard, or integrated overhead display, our students have gathered their bearings, oriented themselves to the new year.  Today we commence.