b l o g o s

time warp

This morning on my run, I saw a guy struggling to push his dead car in the opposite direction, so I tied my running buddy Tillie to a tree and jumped in to help only to be informed by the out-of-breath fellow that he didn't "believe in making females work." "Call me old fashioned," he added while heaving. To which I responded, "well, then, it's time for a little lesson" and started pushing anyway.

A bit later a colleague and I had a lunchtime appointment with a downtown publishing business. So I met her at her parking garage and we drove to lunch.    Our hosts wanted to show us around their office, and so we took a little tour. The place was cool--it kind of looked like the warehouse in The Office, except, alas, no Darryl, and no big scale for the entire staff to weigh themselves collectively (JM and I just watched this season's premiere).

But then we went into the office part, where my colleague and I sat on one side of a big desk. There were two of these big desks in the room, and I kept thinking something was off, until it hit me: these desks didn't have computers on them. No power strips or a/c adapters or cleared-away spots to suggest the use of laptops either. Nothing. Just a phone, pictures of family members, and horizontal blinds. I felt like I'd stepped from an episode of the Office to an episode of Mad Men, only without the martinis for lunch. 

flash

It's discombobulating enough to come out of an animated science-fiction movie set seven or eight hundred years in the future into the brightness of the now. But to have that movie snap off mid-credits because a massive thunderstorm is rolling by, and to walk out into the generator-lit hallway with an alarm blaring and teenaged movie workers dashing around asking each other what to do, this is another thing altogether. It was, in two words, and to invoke my friend e!, cuckoo bananas.

JM and I were on a little date, and the plan had been to head to Luna, the fancy and tasty tapas place in Champaign. But alas, we did not make it there, because the storm that sparked pandemonium in the movie theater was about to do the same on Neil street, the main road that connects the movie theater to Luna.

Let's just say that yesterday I learned some things. First, flash floods: now I see what all the fuss is about. This shit is dangerous and it happens in minutes. Second, I respond well in a mini-crisis, or at least I did in this one. I became focused and deliberate and drove us off the flooding Neil street, sneaking past a stalling mazda, into the parking lot of a small business called i-power, a place that appears to sell nutrition supplements and whose workers were gawking at the street outside. At that point, for about a hundred-yard stretch of street, the water was rushing above car wheels and rising fast. JM was sweet and encouraging while I maneuvered the car. He is so g.d. awesome. (But I knew that.) I also learned that there is such a thing as "high ground" here in the flatlands. We snaked around the building next to the train tracks--this was higher ground, and then up into the furthest north-east parking space. Even higher.

Other cars kept driving through the water, each one creating a dirty wake, the shore the middle of a parking lot. Later when the water got even higher, SUV drivers charged through, fast enough (I swear) to pull a water-skier. And so the other thing I learned, though this shouldn't have surprised me, is that people can be really fucking stupid. Driving into water in a mid-sized sedan while construction cones are floating past? Not a good idea. When their engine dried out a little, the stalled mazda people tried to make it back out of the parking lot, only to reconsider and stall again, across two lanes of traffic. The woman parked next to us got out of her car and began obsessively flattening the median bushes with her sandal, presumably to clear the way to drive over all that concrete into the AAA parking lot, which was on even higher ground.  When we got out of our car to peer down the street, a man in a black slicker asked us the best way to get to the other side of campus. Later, across the street at T.G.I. Friday's, where we rode out the storm, and dinner, we heard that a kid had to crawl out his back window. His car was still sitting there, askew, the water lapping his door handles.

ha! and wha? best and worst quotes about the spitzer swan dive

Seth Greenland, writing for the Huffington Post: "Frankly, I am amazed he got his wife to appear with him at the news conference, given the media frenzy. If I recall, James McGreevey, the part-time homosexual former Governor of New Jersey had his wife glued to his arm when he faced the media during his excoriation. Do these guys drug their spouses? My wife would knee-cap me."

A response from Spitzer's brother Daniel Spitzer, a neurosurgeon, is quoted in the Wall Street Journal: "If men never succumbed to the attractions of women, then the human species would have died out a long time ago."

media blitz v. media retreat

When we got our NYT on Sunday, I was shocked--shocked!--that there wasn't a single story on the shootings at NIU. I know they produce the paper in advance, and so I hadn't expected there to be new news, mind you, only some kind of report. In talking about this with John and his mom (who visited this weekend), I decided it had to be because unlike the VaTech shooter, this guy didn't make his own PR machine and have it delivered.

Thankfully, IHE has a short piece today about the disparity in coverage on school shootings, and how disparate coverage correlates to race and region and also other factors such as the slowness of the news week, etc. It's also true that the Va Tech tragedy took more lives.

Some think that viewers and readers are becoming inured to school shootings, and maybe that's partly true. But now I'm wondering whether what we have here isn't just a case of a story fizzling because it doesn't immediately and resolutely open up other issues. The Va Tech shooting, you'll remember, opened a whole slew of issues about gun control, mental illness, teachers' responsibilities, creative writing-as-warning sign, etc.

But Steve Kazmierczak is no Sueng-Hui Cho. Or at least the stories are quite different. By all accounts Kazmierczak was mild-mannered and smart and worked hard in school. A long time ago he spent a year in an institution for "unruly behavior" and according to his girlfriend had been taking prozac. Aside from the weird stuff that Kazmierczak mailed to his girlfriend, including an upbeat and encouraging note about her future with lots of cheerful exclamation points, there isn't much of a story here, except one of befuddlement. And befuddlement is not an occasion for arguments.

      

thoughts with NIU

Not sure what one is supposed to say after another hideous and terrifying campus shooting like the one that happened at Northern Illinois yesterday afternoon. As with the Va Tech shooting, I've spent the morning reading account after same account in disbelief. And we just received an email from our chancellor telling us that the gunman has been identified as a student from here at the U of I. Sympathies to our friends in Dekalb.

a conversation about "old age"

During the normal course of trick-or-treating, a band of girls, age 13 or 14, rings the doorbell. One of them is wearing a banner that gleams "MISS UNIVERSE 1987." This confuses me.

Me: Miss Universe, 1987?

MU1987: (rolls eyes) I'm supposed to be dead.

Me, finally noticing her death makeup and silver-streaked hair: Oh. But that was only 20 years ago. Did you die in a freak accident?

MU1987: panics.

MU1987's friend, some sort of sexy superhero: Yeah! That's only 20 years ago! (slugs the dead MU1987 on the arm)

Me: here, have some more candy.

dear person sitting behind me at the tea shop whose laptop keeps yelling "You've Got Mail!" in AOL's distinctively cheerful computer-man voice, circa 1997:

Are you fucking kidding me?

Sincerely yours,
the person in front of you

file under signs of bad

1. a gigantic high speed industrial fan directing air away from the women's room at the train station
2. the words "ladies and gentlemen" over the loudspeaker on the train
3. men who, upon seeing that I am traveling alone, offer to help me with my (tiny) bag. wtf? (I admit this isn't bad as much as it's just plain weird, especially when, while standing, as I was each each time a (different) man offered assistance, I can see the tops of everyone's luggage on the overhead rack--including theirs.)
4. the words "did you ever watch Benny Goodman?" from a fellow passenger, who is trying to reach over me to plug in his laptop

5. a waiter who sits down at the table with you to take your order. (though hell, maybe his feet hurt.)

metaphors, only slightly stirred.

Earlier today, as I lay on my back in the thinly-curtained physical therapy room, neck in a heat wrap, wondering what the inventor of drop ceilings had against the world, three people--a PT patient, a physical therapist, and the PT patient's companion--conversed on the other side of the curtain. Apparently the PT patient's doctor wants him to switch PT clinics so that she might better keep an eye on his therapy. I followed the exchanges just fine until they started speaking in some mysterious boat code.

PT patient: "I don't want to switch boats in the middle of the river, you know?"

physical therapist: "Yeah. That ocean thing doesn't work."

PT patient's companion: "Yeah, 'cause sometimes then you're left without a proverbial paddle or a boat."

little does anyone know

The movie "Stranger than Fiction," in addition to Will Ferrell, the main character who is, well, a main character, also features Dustin Hoffman playing an English professor, a literary critic who has taught an entire course on the phrase "little did he know." Hoffman's character is busy--teaching five courses in addition to advising doctoral students (!) and serving as the faculty lifeguard (JM's favorite feature of the character's c.v.)--all the while writing about what the script rather ineptly calls "literature theory." Hoffman's character ends up being the most hubristic of the bunch--even, in the end, more hubristic than the omniscient narrator/author (Emma Thompson)--because unlike her (the author), he (the critic/theorist) believes a masterpiece is worth dying for.

At the end of a typical week, this character with his five-five/doctoral advising/lifeguarding load would have given me a good chuckle. And it did that, but this has not been a typical week, and so there is, it turns out, a rather dark side to the portrayal of Hoffman. In the aftermath of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, one can't help but notice one of the minor characters--in fact a whole set of minor characters--in the media blitz has turned out to be English professors. For the most part, the writing teachers who had Sueng-Hui Cho in class have been presented in a sympathetic light, as people who encouraged him to seek counseling and even contacted the authorities.

But there's a darker, smaller response to their efforts, found in the comment section of The Chronicle's news blog's brief report entitled "English Professors Formed Task Force to Help Cho."

In response to the piece, some rather ill-informed commenters claim, variously, that the English profs were "out of their league"; the department "punching way out of its weight class" by taking the matter into their hands (ftr, these folks fail to realize that the very point of the task force was to help get Cho professional help by those qualified, but that gets clarified by other commenters). One commenter who calls herself Kelly and is--or claims to be--"a scholar and clinician who has published extensively in the areas of social deviance, criminal justice, and the personality of psychopathy," lashes out at the English profs with comments like these:

"It does not surprise me, nor does it surprise any of my colleagues (some of whom have been on interviewed [sic] in the national media), that an English Dept. had the hubris to imagine it could somehow keep an eye on Cho."

"Kelly" goes on to ascribe partial blame to the English department for its "hubristic" behavior, for what she reads as the professors' collective belief that a task force replaces mental health care (again: no VTech English prof that I've seen interviewed ever purported to believe in such a replacement). Now, it's tempting to shove aside Kelly's response as one among a thousand desperate and blaming responses--and for the most part that's what I choose to do.

But I am pretty interested in the particular conception of English professors that Kelly holds and that she obviously hasn't just conjured out of the air. It is a conception that the makers of "Stranger than Fiction" toy with--that Hoffman's levity depends on--and it is one I have encountered in countless campus or mixed-discipline meetings: the overly-confident, overly-favored, underqualified English department, the place where 'expertise' is at worst not expertise at all and at best irrelevant. Sometimes it's what people say, as when a classicist once said "how is it that the ENGLish department gets all the students? what do THEY offer that we don't?" Or the paleontologist who asked me "what do you research in English, METAPHORS?" But most times it's how they say it--"The ENGLish department"--as if the enormity of the egos can only be balanced by the wispy triviality of its subject matter, the stressed ENG by the lightweight "ish," held together by the stretchy, gummy L.

And while the cultural conceptions of English professors is pretty far from the most important issue to come to the fore last week (see this post for my thoughts on that), Kelly's and others' finger-pointing arguments rest on some troubling misconceptions about what we English professors do and who we think we are.