If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d be completely flipped out by this.

Guess it’s a good thing I’m not.

[Courtesy of my old pal Marc.]

Via Unfogged, George Saunders’s manifesto of the PRKA, or the People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction:

At precisely 9 in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one. At 10, Phase II began, during which our entire membership did not force a single man to suck another man’s penis. Also, none of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place. No civilians were literally turned inside out via our powerful explosives. In addition, at 11, in Phase III, zero (0) planes were flown into buildings.

Read the whole thing.  What the world needs, I think, is a little more reluctance.

Friends:

For the last three months, I’ve manually pinged blogrolling.com every time I’ve updated, so that the old URL (plannedobsolescence.net/po) would show as updated in your blogrolls.  That old URL, however, redirects to the top level URL (plannedobsolescence.net), where this site is now published, and where my blogging system’s automatic pings indicate.

This post will represent the last time I’ll manually ping blogrolling.com after updating.  If you want to keep abreast of whatever nonsense I produce in the coming days, please update your blogroll to the new address.

Many thanks,

KF

Over the last several days, I’ve been madly building this semester’s course websites, and remembering, once again, why I adore Liz Lawley.

I’ve branched out a bit, this year; I’ve got the standard courseware blogs up and running, but I’ve also integrated the building of a wiki into one class.

It’s been two solid days of installing and coding.  I must leave the computer, now.  But more soon, on fascinating topics, I hope.

My good pals at Salon are holding a Be Bush’s Speechwriter contest, in which one can win a year of Salon Premium (plus other valuable prizes!) for writing the best 500-word acceptance speech for W. to deliver at the upcoming RNC.  The deadline’s tomorrow at 4.00 pm, PST, so you need to get a move on (get it?) if you want to win.

In order to prime the pump, Salon has posted the speech Joyce McGreevy would like to see him give:

I’m George Bush, and I’m reporting for—I’m making a report. When you make a report it is a reported entity. I ascended this country as a young man, and I will suspend it as president. (Applause.)

I want to thank everybody who’s here. And I want to thank ‘em right quick for everybody who’s not here. Some people don’t think like us. They wear T-shirts with bad words on them. That is my name on those T-shirts. I just want to reach out to those people and say, You know, we all have a obligation to vote. But that doesn’t mean you have to.

Me, I’d just like to hear him lay it all out, plainly and clearly, with no sugar-coated obfuscation:  ‘Gay people disgust me, those minorities have gotten totally uppity, the only bit of the environment I care about is in Crawford, freedom means freedom for me to do whatever I want, and the problems of the poor are not my problem.’ I don’t need him to be a moron; all he has to do is be honest in order to lose a big chunk of the middle.

So if you could hear W. say anything (but don’t have time or the inclination to enter the contest), what would it be? 

I’m sitting in an airport lounge, using the stupidly expensive wifi to post this entry, not least because it’s distracting me from the fact(s) that:

1.  I’m still a year older today, but the celebratory part is over.

2.  I’m leaving R. here for four weeks, as I head home without him.

3.  Pretty much immediately upon my return home, the mad dash to the semester’s opening begins.  Summer, it seems, is officially behind us.

That said, it was a pretty good one, and the long weekend in the DC area was lovely—good birthday, good time with R., good end of summer festivities.  A few images from yesterday’s trek through Georgetown, on my way to a very nice lunch with Scott McLemee (thanks again, Scott!):

First off, this is what one sees immediately upon crossing the Key Bridge Virginia-ward (”Welcome to Virginia!  Now Slow the Hell Down”):

Next, looking toward Georgetown, I’ve decided that what the College Just South of the Hill is missing is a great facility for its crew team.  Well, and a crew team.

Well, and a body of water.

Finally, for the moment (my flight beckons), something for the future Lance Armstrong in your life.  (You can’t quite tell from the photo, I’m afraid, but the shirt is teeny, and is hanging from the handlebars of the smallest bike I’ve ever seen training wheels on.)

More from home.

Of course, the builders of my new condo complex poured most of their attention for the first several months of construction into the buildings that house the models; of the loft-style buildings, two are complete. My building constituted the sixth release of properties for sale, and was, as of June 26, in this state:

My building is the middle one of the three; my apartment is on the at-this-point nonexistent third floor. The word from the builders is that they’re going to be sufficiently done, such that they can get a certificate of occupancy (the famous “C of O”) from the city, such that we can close, in November/December. Since the outset, though, I’ve been planning on something much more akin to January, as they don’t seem to be progress with terrific speed. Here’s the place on July 3, which is, granted, only a week later:

The third floor has begun taking shape. I’m gratified to see that already my balcony can support a hefty load of two-by-fours; I like stability in a balcony.

The rear balcony also seems nice and supportive, though of smaller loads.

The pace of construction appears to have picked up a bit while I was in Hawaii, I’m pleased to say, though I’m still a little dubious of the 2004 closing. Next week: where we were last week.

I left SoCal on Thursday, headed to DC for a little birthday-related celebration activity.  Between the day of flying (in which one gets up at what R. refers to as zero-dark-thirty, gets on a plane, deplanes and runs across an airport to one’s already-boarding second plane, deplanes, drives into town, eats dinner, and goes to bed) and the day of recovery, the posting thing has been not happening.  I’ve been playing with my pal’s Optio S4i, though, and am so pleased to present you with The View From Here:

It’s easy to forget, in the Brown State (brown hills, brown fields, brown air), how ungodly green many places on this continent are.  The change is refreshing, if brief.  More soon, I hope.

This one’s particularly aimed at all you Mac geeks out there:  My Powerbook (running 10.3.5) has suddenly started assigning bizarre icons to new documents.  For instance:  if I download a JPG, the PB assigns it an iPod icon.  I downloaded a new copy of GraphicConverter, and the PB assigned the disk image the Activity Monitor icon.  What gives?

There has been a series of conversations of late, both here and elsewhere, about the nature of academic work, whether sparked by anxieties about the impending end of the summer, or by the perception that we in the academy have the luxury of having summers “off”, or by the conviction that many, both inside and outside the academy, neither understand what a scholar does or how an English department works.

To a certain extent, I think these posts and conversations have been driven by something inculcated into all of us in grad school, something I first noticed while working on my dissertation.  For a group of people who are constantly besieged by the mistaken perception that we work very little (”you’re in the classroom for what, like six hours a week?  Sounds cushy”), we have a damned hard time stopping work when we need to.  And, even more insidiously, we have a very circumscribed set of notions about what counts as “work.”

There are things that I know count:  teaching, preparing to teach, administrative duties, and research.

But that last is more specific, at least as we unconsciously understand it, than it would seem.  “Research,” when we want it to count, really refers to the act of writing, producing ideas that are at least semi-original and turning them into pages of new, original text.

There’s a whole cluster of things that don’t seem to count, for whatever reason, at least not to my academic superego.  For instance:  I’m working on an anthology project this summer, and have been madly editing texts and writing headnotes and annotations.  Despite the production of new, original text, this doesn’t count, to some part of me, because the ideas aren’t really my own.

But there are more extreme cases.  I came to this whole realization about the ridiculousness of our “counting” mechanisms when I was writing my dissertation, because the only days I felt like I’d accomplished something were the days I’d produced pages of text.  The interminable weeks of reading and thinking required to gather the ideas to produce those pages somehow didn’t count, as though I’d spent those weeks sitting in my underwear watching the all-Law-and-Order, all-the-time channel.  Even now, reading doesn’t seem to me to count as work, and particularly not the reading of novels, and particularly not the reading of new novels, which is as wrong-headed as it can be, given that my appointment is specifically in the field of Contemporary American Fiction.

(Actually, I’m jointly appointed in Media Studies, and don’t get me started on the anxieties involved in thinking about my film and television watching as work.)

My goal this summer, and continuing on into this first year of my post-tenure life, is to liberate myself from this utterly repressive academic superego, to say—reading the new Neal Stephenson novel COUNTS.  My bloody anthology COUNTS.  And, most importantly to me, yes, dammit, writing this blog entry COUNTS.  And reading other blogs COUNTS.  All of these things are necessary to stimulate the thinking that can produce the ideas that might someday result in new original text in peer-reviewed journal article or book form by yours truly.  The latter cannot happen without the former, and thus the former must be made to count.