One day after Shauny‘s outcry against the ongoing horrors of the morning news, there is this:  the death of Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife, his daughter, three staffers, and two crew members in a plane crash in Minnesota.

It’s too awful even to comment upon.

I’ve been gnashing my teeth over a stupid browser problem, and bemoaning said browser’s total lack of online support, particularly of the discussion group sort, and thinking to myself that gee, I wish I had someone I could ask this question, or some forum in which I could ask it.

Okay, so I’m slow.

Anyway, here’s the issue, and I’m mostly aiming at you multi-browser Mac OS X types.  See the link over on the right that reads Academic Belatedness?  Follow that link, first in IE5.  Things should look pretty familiar to you; I’m using a more-or-less identical CSS on that server to that I’m using here.  Fine.

Now follow that link in Netscape/Mozilla.

You see what I mean?  For some reason, Netscape can’t find the CSS.  It’s not as though it can’t read it; it reads it fine on this server, and even when I open the Academic Belatedness page from my hard drive, where it sits in precisely the same relation to the CSS as it does on the server, it reads fine there.  It just simply can’t (or won’t—perhaps it’s an act of will, designed to make me batty) find it on the server.

Any ideas?  As you might guess, I’m clueless, and annoyed.

Ahhh.  A few blissful days to regroup, kick off one’s shoes, sip a warm beverage, grade two stacks of papers, read three books, plan two committee meetings, fly to Albuquerque for a conference, finish the revisions on the manuscript, meet with the architects on the building renovation, and otherwise enjoy a few days of… um… calm.

There’s been very little posting here of late (by me, I mean, not by my faithful commenters), which makes me very sad.  The falloff has less to do with the fact that I haven’t had time to write than with the fact that I haven’t had time to get interested enough in anything to consider it worth writing about.  And that’s just darned sad.  So a moment to follow up on a couple of topics raised by earlier comments:

–Mom was in town this past week, and on Wednesday, we caught an episode of The West Wing, the first I’ve seen in just about a year, and can I just say, yawn.  Aaron, my friend, you’ve let me down.  Where is the pop and fizz of Sports Night, both in the dialogue and in the characters?  Where is the obsessive treatment of governmental arcana so fascinating in the first years of TWW’s run?  Once upon a time, your show managed to be the foremost public outlet for serious political discourse without being preachy or self-righteous; what has caused this vast decline?  Is it simply the never-ending campaign trail?  Has the Jeb Bartlett I once wanted to be my president gone the way of Al Gore, self-parodying, bombastic, and impotent?

–Having been taken to task for my gripes with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, and in preparation for a student reading group of same (itself in preparation for a lecture by author of same, here at the College Just South of the No-Longer Flaming Hill), I’m delving into the book again, this time with a new appreciation (thanks to CSA and BT) for the ways that Ehrenreich herself actually does describe the limitations of both her project and its potential for inspiring social change.  You’re absolutely right, CSA, that the book is a wake-up call, and you, BT, are similarly dead-on in suggesting that this wake-up call is aimed at those sitting the ideological fence, closing their eyes to the difficulties of the working poor and persuading themselves that the American dream works, because it’s convenient.  Ehrenreich never really makes any bones about the fact that the book is journalism, not scholarship, and as such, I think I ask too much of it to ask for solutions.  Part of my earlier aggravation, which was really transformed into high dudgeon by the play—which is in effect an extended monologue by “Barbara Ehrenreich,” supported by a cast of amusing and pitiful workers—has to do with the centrality of Ehrenreich’s voice in the book, the ways that the narrative becomes all about her.  But then, this is a larger problem with journalism today, I think:  the story, as a friend once observed, now transforms with light-speed into the story of the story, and in that story, the journalist is hero.

I think there’s a connection between these two things, but I’m too tired to be able to figure it out right now.  Perhaps after a little bit of the “rest” I’m sure to get during my fall “break,” and after a little input from some friends, I’ll take another stab at it.

This is apparently the season of the improbable stage production here in SoCal.  Two much-acclaimed works of cultural criticism (each with ties to the journalistic tradition, but with very different results) have been set loose upon the stage in L.A. this fall.  I saw one this weekend, which sadly maintains the self-congratulatory analysis-free (and solution-free) sensitivity to the plight of the oppressed of its originary text.  (This production has also led me to the conclusion that the revolving set is the worst catastrophe ever to be visited upon the legitimate theater.) The other, which originated in New York last year, I haven’t seen, but am somewhat curious about.  At least there’s something inherently theatrical about the original text, having performance as its subject, but nonetheless—can the critical import of the analysis of a performance be fed back into performance?

There’s something in this new trend, I think, that bodes well for the future of scholarship.  No longer content with the mythical crossover book, which extends beyond its academic audience to reach a general readership, the scholarly author can now have as a grail the sale of stage (or, perhaps, even film) rights to her newest monograph.  In fact, I am thinking of taking on as a new project the stage and/or film adaptation of other works of criticism.  Any suggestions?

Then in the late summer of that year there was reading, much reading of many books, and many of them were fine books.  Some of the books we read were to be written about, and some of the books were just for fun, and some of the books were to be taught.  The books were stacked in piles around the house and the office, on the tables and chairs and on the desks, and their pages were dry and white and papery and fine.  Many of the books were fine.

The books were rich with ideas; they spoke of women who got in trouble and died, and women who just got lost, and they spoke too of smart, tough girls who saved many lives, some of them their own.  But some of the books were not so kind to the women they spoke of, and some of the books were a pain to read, for that reason.

And then in the early fall of that year, as the fire raged in the hills and a dry sooty ash slipped in around the windows and settled over the piles of books, and as the fire began to be brought under control, it came time for us to read a book that was not so fine, at least not in our reading of it, and that produced a dreadful loneliness and despair, and we soothed the despair with a fine cold gin martini.  Because there are some books to which a reader must bring much intelligence, and if people bring so much intelligence to these books the books have to kill them to break them, so of course they kill them.  These books break every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.  But those that will not break they kill.  They kill the very good and the very gentle and the very smart impartially.  If you are none of these you can be sure they will kill you too but they will be in no special hurry.

It was only too late when we realized that we controlled the syllabus.  That book is over for us now.  We are through.  We wish the others all the luck, the good ones, and the brave ones, and the calm ones and the smart ones.  But it is not our book anymore.  Goodbye to the book.