George recently issued a plea for bloggers to make full-text RSS feeds of their sites available, such that folks who, like him, are hooked on Bloglines and other newsreaders can properly keep up.  I’ll confess to not having checked out my feeds to see if they’re full-texts or not, since the migration, but I promise to do so right after I issue my own plea:

Dear Folks I Read Regularly (Which Category Includes Pretty Much Everybody Listed Over There on the Left):

See how in my blogroll some links have little dashes around them, and others don’t?

The ones that either right now or otherwise sometimes have dashes are the ones that ping blogrolling.com when they update.  The little dashes let me know that there’s recent content, and that I should go check it out.

Unfortunately, many of you don’t ping blogrolling.com on update.  What this means for me, personally, is that I never really know if you’ve updated or not.  Without that indicator, I sometimes forget to check.

Yes, I could go the George route and switch over to a newsreader, which would keep me abreast of new content as it rolls in.  But I’m personally addicted not simply to your sage words, but also to the look and feel of your site, and so prefer to read at the source.

Please, then, do me the enormous service of setting your blogging software up to ping blogrolling.com when you update.  In Movable Type, this is a piece of cake: under “Weblog Config” click on the “Publicity / Remote Interfaces / TrackBack” link, add http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ in the text box, and save your settings.  In ExpressionEngine, go to “Default Ping Servers” under the Admin panel, and make sure blogrolling.com is there—and then make sure that the box is checked on the “Edit entry” page when you update.

Everybody else, alas, is on their own—but it oughta be pretty easy to figure out.

Remember, whether you blogroll or not, pinging blogrolling.com lets those of us who do keep up with your always intriguing work.  And no, I’m not just sucking up.

Your pal,

KF

So, being the registered lefty and the media scholar that I am (though which was more dominant at this precise moment is open to some debate), I went out this weekend to see Michael Moore’s newest, Fahrenheit 9/11.  You may have heard of it; it seems to be getting a little press these days.  Largest box-office gross last weekend; largest grossing documentary of all time.  Annoying little attempts by Republican groups to get the Federal Election Commission to pull the plug on the film’s advertising after July 30.  With all the press, and the slew of reviews and counterattacks that I knew were coming, I wanted to make sure I saw the film as soon as possible after its opening, to try to see it as clearly as possible.

How clear that viewing was is, well, unclear.  I saw the film in West Covina, which (a) is still in Southern California, so only so right-ward leaning, but (b) is no Santa Monica.  The crowd seemed pretty mixed—plenty of academic-looking folks, but plenty of just plain folks, too.  The theater, on Sunday afternoon, was all but full, with only scattered single seats remaining.  And the audience was largely very involved, gasping at key moments, laughing at others, and, as I’ve heard similarly reported by friends both locally and around the country, bursting into applause as soon as the film ended.

But I got the distinct feeling that the film was preaching to the choir.  And that some members of the choir, in fact, to judge by reviews ranging from Chuck’s to David Denby’s, find themselves disturbed by the easiness, the superficiality, the—to be frank—cheap-shot nature of much of the film’s critique.  It’s certainly true:  the image of Paul Wolfowitz combing his hair with a generous helping of his own spit, the speculations about what Dubya was thinking during those seven minutes in front of the Florida schoolchildren, the Bonanza parody—all these (and more) are cheap shots indeed.  Personally, though, I’m not bothered by their cheapness; after years of Rush Limbaugh and his descendants, after the hypocrisy of an impeachment carried out against a man who got a blow job by men who fathered illegitimate children and left their wives for their secretaries (all the while preaching family values to the rest of us), after enduring an unending slew of cheap-shots from the right, I’m more than happy to countenance some coming from the left.

What leaves me less than thrilled with the film’s line of critique is what Chuck refers to as its “scattershot” nature.  There was a guy who was in the MFA program with me a bajillion years ago, who was famous within the program for once having said in a workshop, by way of explaining how a particular piece of fiction worked, “See, it’s like, over here you’ve got a dot.  And over here, you’ve got another dot.  Know what I’m sayin’?” This strikes me as a not-inaccurate rendering of Moore’s method in the film:  he never really connects the dots, but instead plots them, one after another, followed by a bit of wink-wink-nudge-nudge that suggests a causal relationship between the dots without demonstrating conclusively that such a relationship exists.  If the film were really a documentary, that might be an issue.

The fact is that it’s not.  It’s an extended editorial, a polemical meditation on the ways that privilege has been wielded to keep the American public ignorant, afraid, and disempowered—and as such, it’s my hope that some of its viewers, those who might have been inclined toward apathy, who might have assumed the outcome of the next election was already determined and so not bothered to vote, might be compelled to get up and do something.  It’ll be some time before we know if the film has had that result.

In the meantime, of course, it’s producing attacks from the right that are, in their usual fashion, personally directed at Moore, ranging from that of the only slightly unhinged-sounding Christopher Hitchens to the forthcoming book (and I’m not linking to it, but you can find it on Amazon) Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man.  Some things never change.

But administrations can.

Ah, one of those moments at which I know that my life has meaning, because all my usually scattered interests seem to be connected by what one of my trippier college pals insisted on referring to as “tendrils”:  In today’s New York Newsday, Scott McLemee reviews Dale Peck‘s new book, Hatchet Jobs.  According to McLemee, the primary effect of the book, thus far, has been “to provoke debate over just how seriously one must take a man who poses on the cover of his own book holding an axe in the posture of a dyspeptic lumberjack.”

Live by the hatchet, die by the hatchet, I always say.  Overall, McLemee’s quite even-tempered in his assessments of Peck’s histrionics, managing in fascinating fashion to compare Peck to a mid-tantrum adolescent and T.S. Eliot in practically the same breath:

If [Heidi] Julavits [of The Believer] prefers commentary on books to be the finger-painting of the mind, while [Sven] Birkerts wants culture to be as sober and edifying as an adult-education course, Peck seems to split the difference—making it a gesture of adolescent self-definition, an effort to get as many eyes as possible in the shopping mall of American culture turned in his direction, if only by name-calling in a loud voice. Even when this is entertaining rather than just annoying, the last thing you want is for anybody else to imitate it.

But the demand for attention is only part of it. The adolescent’s performance of self also involves the assertion of an authority that isn’t really available, except from the imitation of role models. In Peck’s case, the model seems to be T.S. Eliot—an incongruous thing, unless you can imagine Eliot swearing like a pirate. But in those moments when Peck’s bad-boy identity has been momentarily sedated (when he is not, for example, suggesting that what David Foster Wallace really needs is to be sodomized with some vigor), his critical voice takes on the tones of someone trying very hard to attain the gravitas of Eliot, circa 1920.

And thus is the literary world connected:  Eliot, Peck, Birkerts, McLemee, Julavits, and my pal down the hall, all interlinked in some proto-blog of reading and writing about reading and writing.  No wonder literary scholars have taken to the blog form; it’s a literalized version of the link-and-comment we’ve been up to all along.

I’ve been too busy hyperventilating over the financial machinations that have taken over my life of late to post this in anything like a timely fashion, but it turns out that I’ve got 6 Gmail invites to distribute.  If you want one, comment below (with your email address), or email me at kf AT plannedobsolescence DOT net.  Friends and regular readers will get priority, but after that, it’s first-come, first-served.

[UPDATE, 6.27.2004, 8.34 am:  I’ve still got 5.]

[UPDATE, sometime after that:  Invites gone.  I’ll post again if I get more.]

It’s been an eventful couple of weeks around here; I’ve gotten settled into my new office, I’ve been hard at work on projects both new and old, and, in my spare time, I’ve begun the process of buying a condo.*

Probably needless to say, the last item on that list is absorbing the vast majority of my time of late.  This is my first foray into home-ownership, and I’m finding every aspect of it alarming.  For instance, did you know that:

1.  With a 30-year mortgage, it is entirely possible that I will still be paying off the condo when I retire?  (This first is purely hypothetical, of course; given the typically delayed entry of a Ph.D. into the job market, the less-than-embarrassing salary drawn by an academic, the state of the economy, and the projected future of Social Security, I expect to work until I die.  In fact, I kind of imagine that last event occuring during some protracted committee meeting, but that’s another story.)

2.  In the Southern California real estate market, it is possible to buy a condo with perhaps 25% of the square footage of my parents’ home for something on the order of 125% of said home’s current appraised value, even despite said home’s coveted address and non-backwater locale?

3.  When purchasing a new condo, everything you might actually want in it decor-wise constitutes an “upgrade,” despite the already exorbitant cost of the shell?

There are more things I’ve learned over the last few days, but my head is still too spinny to remember them.  I’ll post more as things clarify, which I hope will be soon.

—-

* I was going to link to the developer’s site here, but have thought the better of it; I’ll wait until after the closing before I start naming names.  Regardless of my freaked-out state, I still want this place, and don’t want to screw it up.

Heavy sigh. I’d missed the last episode of Season 3 when it first aired, so I caught that one for the first time Sunday before last. Moving right from that episode into the first episode of Season 4 was pretty dramatic; as opposed to our pals at The Sopranos, I don’t think Alan Ball et al are ready to give up the ghost. I’m excitedly looking forward to the rest of the season.

(And how exciting is it that Season 2 of The Wire is now in the pre-Six Feet Under slot, as last season’s Six Feet Under was in the pre-Sopranos slot? This seems to hint at a forthcoming Season 3…)

Less because stuff like this happens, than because some day it might work:  via XX, a plan to turn South Carolina into a Christian theocratic nation-state:

A Texas group wants conservative Christians to move to South Carolina — 12,000 at a time — to form a biblically inspired government and secede from the United States.

Decrying a national tolerance of abortion and gay marriage, and the teaching of evolution, ChristianExodus.org hopes to achieve a majority of like-minded Christians in the state by 2016, the planned year of secession.

Scholars say the group is symptomatic of an alarming rise of separatist sentiment that is particularly strong in the South.

But local government and Christian leaders are less worried about the group achieving its goal of independence than by the movement’s impact on South Carolina’s image.

“Doesn’t South Carolina have enough problems already?” asked the Rev. Joe Darby, pastor of Morris Brown AME church in Charleston, when told of the group. “Groups with strange opinions and strange beliefs pop up every once in a while. … I would tell these people to re-evaluate their faith and get a life.”

Things are looking pretty good, from where I sit.  I’ve settled into my new office, which is small by the standards of our building, but huge by any reasonable standard, and which has both north- and west-facing windows (giving lots of sunshine and cross-breezes) and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.  The new locale has even inspired some actual work today; I’m happy as a clam.

To top it all off, I just received an email message, the details of which I won’t reveal—but I will say that the message contains both good news about my new project and a potential opportunity for my old, and so I’m feeling all-around pretty optimistic this afternoon.

I’ve decided that there needs to be invented some sunshine-oriented version of “when it rains, it pours.” Is there such a phrase?  Or are we so much more cautious with our optimism than with our pessimism that no one has tempted fate by imagining that good things might also come in threes?

We’re moving out of our temporary digs today, at long last.  (For temporary office space, where we were was more than adequate, but:

1. We were in the basement, and thus had no windows at all.
2. The office suite had an HVAC system of such intensity that we were at times vacuum-sealed into the building, and could only open doors with great effort and to the accompaniment of a giant sucking noise.
   
   1. This also meant that doors throughout the suite did not close so much as slam.
3. The walls framing the offices were pre-fab, and hollow, and thus there was no such thing as a private conversation.
   
   1. In fact, the weird airflow through the hallways meant that any conversation taking place in any hallway could be heard in excruciating detail in every other part of the suite.
4. Did I mention the no-windows part?  The result of this was that I too frequently had no idea when it would:
   
   1. start raining, or
   2. become nighttime.
5. Really, all of the above would have been completely fine, except that we were down there for a year.

I’m happily ensconced in my new office, but it’s just me and the furniture and the laptop in here now; the rest of my stuff should be showing up sometime this afternoon.  Much unpacking will ensue; more posting will follow.

Undoubtedly, you’ve been there; you’ve done that.  But who couldn’t use a reminder:  McSweeney’s Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush is cumulative, growing by the day.

Go there again.  Do that one more time.