JACKSON, MI--So I'm about 400 pages into Gone With the Wind, and if anyone had ever told me I'd be this hooked on a Southern Romance/epic, I'd have laughed. It's tough to get past the way Mitchell describes the blacks (with all the "capering" and "gleaming teeth smiling in pleasure" I just about want to retch), but overall I can't put it down. Every time my aunt and uncle come into a room, I'm reading this damned book. Last night, for dinner, they fed me meatloaf made with sawdust, to see if I'd notice, and all I said was, "Can you believe Rhett ran off to join the army? What a turd."

Of course, while not reading or socializing, I'm doing work for the upcoming school year. And, as always, my mind keeps pushing it away, like a kid pushing away a plate of vegetables. So as I read this book, it occurs to me, What would the same story be like if told from the blacks' perspective? I could do what John Gardner did to Beowulf with his novel, Grendel. I could win the Pulitzer! I could be famous! Let me get right on it.

Scratch that. Already done: The Wind Done Gone was published in 2001. Back to work I go.

Somebody needs to give Bill O'Reilly a reading assignment.

From Kirk Russell's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Elliot:

Any informed conservative is reluctant to condense profound and intricate intellectual systems to a few pretentious phrases; he prefers to leave that technique to the enthusiasm of radicals. Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time.

See that, Bill? Talking Points that spoon feeds us a few phrases (ego-inflated rather than pretentious, I suppose) are for spaghetti-kneed liberals. Oh, the irony is delicious.

Oh wait, Bill, I know what you'd say. You'd remind me that the following sentence in the passage I've truncated reads:

As a working premise, nevertheless, one can observe here that the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity. Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors (this phrase was Strafford’s, and Hooker’s, before Burke illuminated it); they are dubious of wholesale alteration.

So, does that fit into Scalia's "original intent" framework? Doesn't that pretty well kibosh the revisions made to Article I, Section II of the Constitution? Or the 13th, 19th and 21st Amendments, right? Aren't those alterations that could be classified as "wholesale"?

I'm obviously not directly addressing Bill here. But if I were, Bill and I might agree on Russell's final point:

[Conservatives] think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine.

So...there you go. Just like we can't pack everything up in Iraq in a suitcase and Fed Ex it over here, so we can't fine-tune our laws and liberties to fit a particular agenda...any agenda.

(Note--this whole post exploded over a segment I can't find online, which makes me feel somewhat ridiculous, and a homework assignment about conservatism, which I have abbreviated here. Indulge me.)

Some freeloader is eating all my food and babbling about concerts and suburban festivals. Get him the hell out of here.

We would have made the Styx concert at Summerfest if we'd left on time. Or earlier. Or if Tso hadn't pissed away the afternoon "working late" (i.e. boozing it up at a company picnic). But that didn't happen. So, no Styx at Summerfest this year.

Foreigner--eh. They were on stage about forty-five minutes. Ten minutes longer than they needed for all their greatest hits.

That left Def Leppard. Who rocked.

They were on stage for about an hour and change. Only one song post 1989 (thankfully, no "Let's Get Rocked). Below: Def Leppard rocking it with "Foolin'."



Below, Def Leppard rocking with "Animal."



If those pictures were at all legible, trust me, you'd be impressed. As it is, I have to admit, they look more like a light wave vomiting.

Even more impressive--some stroke was passing out free tickets to Tesla's July 13 show at the Rave. For free! Like he was worried they wouldn't be able to pack the place. Puh-leeze.

I called Kim immediately after procuring said tickets:

Me: Hey, baby! Guess what I got for free just now?
Kim: Tesla tickets.
Me: (beat) Yeah, that's right! How'd you--
Kim: They suck. They're probably worried they won't be able to pack the place.
Me: Uh, well...you want to...
Kim: Hell no. I'm going to stay home and clip my nails.

Loser. Doesn't know what she's missing.

The sight awaiting our return home last night after a couple of martinis. Photo courtesy of my brand-spankin' new phone. Mess courtesy of weak-ass shelves and tank veterinary books.

I have returned.

"Enjoy yourself, bitches. It's a celebration."

--Dave Chapelle

This blog will be calling in sick for a week or so. Save my place at the watering hole and don't tell my boss where I am.

OK, OK, I'll admit it...I checked into the Paris Hilton thing.

I saw the "Breaking News" icon on Google during my routine search for young women in prison and heard about Friday's whole "she's in prison!" "she's out of prison!" "no, wait, she's back in prison!" tragedy. Then I found the online petition to let her go (signed by a multitude of fans who make up in love what they lack in grammar and logic). Then I found her myspace page, with another petition signed by well-wishers and "haters" alike. Then I found the Paris Hilton Prison Diary. It's not the Onion, but it's not bad when laughing at another's plight.

Even the New York Times covered the debacle. But they also brought up the Libby trial and what is, in my mind, the greatest judicial billet doux this millenium has seen thus far:

Also on Friday, the judge who sentenced I. Lewis Libby Jr. to prison this week issued an order dripping with sarcasm after receiving a supporting brief from a dozen prominent legal scholars, including Alan M. Dershowitz of Harvard and Robert H. Bork, the former Supreme Court nominee.

The judge, Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court in Washington, said he would be pleased to see similar efforts for defendants less famous than Mr. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

"The court trusts," Judge Walton wrote, in a footnote longer than the order itself, that the brief for Mr. Libby "is a reflection of these eminent academics’ willingness in the future to step up to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions."

"The court," he added, "will certainly not hesitate to call for such assistance from these luminaries."

--NY Times.

Oh no he didn't! Well, it might not be Atticus Finch, but he still just made my Heroes List.

Things I didn't know about Nixon until finishing Ambrose's third volume of his biography:

--Nixon sold his New York townhouse in 1981 to the Syrian ambassador's office of the United Nations. A company involved with this arm of the UN was involved in selling uniforms to Romania, and uniforms and helicopters to Sadaam Hussein. Nixon may or may not have profited on these sales; as of 1991, Ambrose couldn't be sure.
--Nixon gave two speeches as per his resignation: one was on August 8, 1974, where he formally announced his resignation (without admitting any specific wrongdoing on his part), and one on August 9, to his family and staff, where he made his famous "deepest, darkest valley" comment. Apparently, his family and not a little of his staff was pissed that he'd arranged for the entire thing to be broadcast; in the speech itself, Nixon claimed the whole thing was not set up in advance.
--Oliver Stone must have used Ambrose's work more extensively than I thought. Of course, I suppose he could have gotten some of the dialogue directly from the tapes themselves ("Like the Germans...shoot[ing] down one villager until the rest talk" (sic)..."I really think that's what we're going to have to do..."), but other lines are from Ambrose's own observations: "Eight words back in 1972: 'I covered up. It was wrong. I'm sorry.'" Stone takes Ambrose's sentence and changes it to "I was wrong" and then delivers the line to Haldemann (played by James Woods).
--Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon more out of concern for his own administration and political future than out of worries about tearing the nation apart. I guess I should have figured that out on my own.
--Nixon spent time in W.C. Fields' former Bel Air home at a party. I think it might have been the same house Fields fell down a flight of stairs without spilling any of his drink (as per Carlotta Montijo's autobiography, admittedly problematic).

There's other stuff, but it escapes me at the moment. Volume three sticks in my head better than the others, probably because the last 100 pages covers 17 years and as a result can't be as in-depth; probably because this was the volume I was waiting for all along, with all the Watergage dirt and the resignation itself.

From Cisco: Texas kids protest not being able to walk graduation due to failing state tests.

A perfectly fair and reasonable complaint. Until you take a look at the picture:



Note to Texan adolescents: You're not exactly helping the team out here!

SKOOL--It's funny--the last day of school, and I can't concentrate on any work in
front of me. That's hardly unusual. What's unusual is *why* I can't concentrate.

The kids are feeding me energy. This is not a "good" kind of energy, i.e. something that makes you knock down the walls you've come across, climb the metaphorical mountain, fight the good fight. This is the kind of energy that causes me to see how many times I can spin around in my chair. The kind of energy that causes me to lead a class of 07 graduates in a rousing chorus of Kum By Ya. And especially the kind of energy that makes me bounce my rubber ball off opposite walls in one throw.

I should be paying the district today for the privilege of being a teacher on the last day of school. It's just like being a kid, as long as you forget that you were ever responsible for anyone's education.

I must have this. What's $150, anyway?

I hate Mr. Roma

I'm having another professional crisis. And I blame one Rick Roma of the history department.

It's perhaps an inopportune time for plaudits, as President Bush uses the ruler of No Child Left Behind to whap the collective knuckles of my school district, but for once, the president isn't the reason for my reticence to accept praise. This time, it's a colleague.

Rick Roma. He sucks.

He's single, late-thirties to early forties, constantly gushed over by students and faculty alike. We're of a similar build and height, we both wear glasses, and we have a lot of students in common. They leave his class able to cite differences between European and American law without even cracking open a book. They send him cards from college. And you know what he says in return? "I'm just doing my job."

The nerve of that bastard.

Anyway, the last night of layout had my seniors in tears. Normally they're in tears because of an extendd run of late nights, bad food and even worse company. This time, they were crying because they didn't want to go. And they told me so. "I don't want to graduate--this is so much fun." "You've changed my life. You really have." "Thank you so much for everything."

Well, I'm not one to accept compliments. I thanked them, sure, but in the back of my mind, I was thinking, "Roma probably gets more compliments for doing the lit mag. If I were Roma, I'd be getting seniors dedicating their first novels to me by now."

Then my state-award-winning editor gifts me with a wind gun. I don't know what the real name for this marvelous contraption is, but in layman's terms, it's basically a gun that compresses and shoots pressurized air with all the precision of a sawed off shotgun. I've used them before--if you're good, you can blow someone's hat off their head from fifty yards away. Me, I can ruffle a phone book while sitting at my desk.

Okay, so it's a touching gift, but Roma would have gotten a perpetual wind machine. And a solar-powered gyro-thingee to work it automatically, made by a student whom he taught physics in his spare time. The jerk. I hate his guts.

This is the self-deprecation that runs through my mind when students and faculty are trying to congratulate me. After everything was over and I was done negating the compliments, I schlepped off to the banquet.

I won't go into the banquet in detail. Suffice to say, certain students perform at a considerably high level, and they ask teachers to attend this honorary banquet with their parents to show their gratitute. They pick a teacher who "had significant influence on them." I was chosen by a kid in my afternoon literature class. Bright kid, pretty quiet but friendly, good sense of humor, good writer (a self-confessed "synonym junkie," he makes a sesquipedalian look like positively economical). I started to swell up a little when his parents told me his accounts of my class (no need to go into it all here, but rest assured, I come off as a god)...and then I saw Roma two tables over. Three or four students had invited him, that's how popular he is. The jerk. What a jerk.

No matter. I was being honored. I got my picture taken, got a nifty certificate, shook a lot of hands and did some home-fried politicking with the parents and faculty. On my way out, I stopped in front of a mirror to straighten myself out, and there was Roma, right beside me, combing that luxurious mane of hair and flaunting his utter lack of fear of a receding hairline.

"Have a good night," he said to me. "Congratulations."

Can you believe the condescending attitude? What a jerk. He can go to hell. Good thing for him I was on my way out anyway.

So, Roma, if you're reading this (and I know you are, you smug bastard), I'm warning you. Stop fucking with my triumphs. Eat your humble pie and stay away from my business. Or I'll corral the several knuckle-draggers that aren't failing my classes and tell them to go to work on that big ugly head of yours.

I'll see you at the scholarship banquet tomorrow. Stay out of my way.

JibJab's "What We Call the News". My views on cable news 24-hour stations not having enough news to fill 24 hours a day are on record. Good to see them annotated.

More exercises today. Plus, along with waiting at the pharmacy for the back pills, I'd guess I've spent more time working on my physique in the last three days than I have the last three years. It's beginning to show, too. All I have to do is straighten myself out and let the sound of the cracking of my vertabrae lull me to relaxation.

I like having pills, though. I doubt I'll use them, but now I can growl at my students: "I'm either going to kill you or myself. Where the hell are my pills?" and actually mean it. (I used to growl, "Where the hell is my flask," but stories started getting around, so enough of that.)

Karl Rove raps at the Correspondents' Dinner. The Times says this cockiness is in spite of the recent brou-ha-ha over Libby's conviction.

I say this is yet more evidence that white people shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a microphone when hip hop is playing, especially not while wearing tuxedoes and sporting glasses and a bald spot.

Step One to Back Problem Recovery: Admit you have a problem.

Step Two: Do something about the problem.

Step One, as it turns out, was a piece of cake. The doctor made me walk on my toes, lie on my back and do a couple of knee bends. He then recommended me for physical therapy.

It took me a few weeks to actually get in there because of late nights with the newspaper, grading essays, global warming, insurance runarounds...oh hell, mostly it was dread. Dread over what I knew would happen.

I got right in there around 6:45 and was sitting on the examination table shortly afterwards. The therapist did some stress tests, then asked me to stand.

That's it. Just stand, like I would normally stand.

Her eyes rolled like marbles. Apparently, my posture sucks: I've adopted the Al Bundy life-has-defeated-me slouch for so long, it's putting pressure on my upper back. I'm supposed to square my shoulders and tighten my abdomen to improve my posture while standing. She said this is the intended way the body is to stand. To me, it feels like I'm imitating George Reeve in Superman.

So now I'm supposed to do a series of exercises every day that aren't even exercises. Ab tightening, back-stretching and other routines designed to improve flexibility and loosen/strengthen my ligaments. They aren't particularly grueling, but they take about a half hour to do. Yes, I've been doing them and everything, and I've been hating every minute of it. It's not so much the effort. It's the fact that, were someone in shape to watch me, they'd fall over laughing.

If my brother were to scoff, that would be one thing. But when a mid-twenties physical therapist with a potbelly of her own watches my leg tremble while doing a leglift and has to put a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing, you know you've hit some kind of bottom. Bottom, here I be.

Confessions of an (un)aspiring novelist; Cholera in a time of (love?)

All week long, all I could think about was spring break, and now that I'm here, unlike other years where it's felt like charging headfirst into your favorite bar, surrounded by friends and dollar-a-pint prices, this time it's more like getting into a hot bath after a day working out in cold weather. Muscles relax. Blood pressure decreases. I wound up canceling my plans (yes, I'm the only person alive who has to call in sick for a party), watched TV for an hour (of all things, Scrubs episodes I already have on DVD), read for two hours and was asleep at nine a.m. Up this morning at 4:30, finished the book, made coffee and stared out the window impatiently, waiting for the newspaper. My old man, I do take after.

I do have a checklist, of sorts, for the next eight days. Projects and papers to grade, lesson plans to prepare, etc. But there are a few books to read as well. In a fit of ill-advised ambition, I offered my sophomores extra credit to read and review James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me over break, then realized I'd have to read it myself. No matter. I'm a fan of revisionist history. Every time Rush Limbaugh or Anne Coulter sounds off about "liberals who want America to fail," I have to wince and shrug embarrasingly. No, I want to tell them, it's not about wanting your country to fail. It's about wanting the people who "run" your country to fail. When a president goes to war because God told him to, when an administration congratulates itself on a "reasonable proposal" by offering members up for testimony without oath, and when think-tanks doing precious little thinking give shitty advice on Capitol Hill, I find myself waiting for the fifth act, when hubris is punished and, if the righteous don't prevail, at least they get to say, "I told you so." I've been able to say such words to several people lately, but have gotten no joy out of it. Maybe when and if Patrick Fitzgerald goes after President Bush, I'll be able to crow a little.

But I digress. Before I can tackle Loewen and how my history textbooks got it all wrong, I had to finish Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. I stumbled across the book in a Salon.com article reviewing books about how to read, and I picked it up more or less on a whim. I've read two Smiley novels, and neither made much of an impression on me. However, I've come to realize this had less to do with her writing style than it did with my attention span--I read both of them in grad school, on off-hours not spent studying or grading undergraduate themes, and just seeing her name and recognizing her cadence brings back some of those memories. Smiley's meditation on the novel and the novelist is a tad circular since she constantly brings up the same novels as examples, and she is fond of pointing out that (maybe) novelists are good at their craft because of their inability to engage successfully within their own social circle. But I could listen to her go on about the particulars of novels for twice as long as she does in the book. I like how she points out that most, if not all novels are destined for some level of failure, whether through the passage of history or the disparity of today's multimedia audience, and I respect how she willingly offers herself up for sacrifice by walking us through the composition and editing of her novel Good Faith (which I have not read).

What's probably the most alluring part of the book, though, is the last two-thirds, where she offers encouragement to would-be novelists by reminding them to write to please themselves rather than get rich and famous, and where she offers her own two cents on one hundred novels she read over a two- or three-year period. I've only glanced at a few of her reviews, and I plan on only skimming the rest, but I have to admit, I'm a sucker for reading about reading. Nick Hornby does it in The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt; Jonathan Franzen bemoans both his own and the public's lapses in novel-reading in How to Be Alone, and while I have yet to finish it, Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading is no less intriguing for its social commentary about why we read and why we read what we read than it is for its insights into the psychology and even sexuality of reading (did you know your eyes are skipping all over this page even as you follow the words? or is that because you found some porn somewhere and are getting distracted? come on, share the wealth, asshole).

Gulity confession: I used to want to be a novelist. Sometimes, in spare moments, I still do. I've started maybe a dozen novels in my lifetime. Some fought for existence heroically, uttering strangled last words melodramatically on a death bed. Some came into existence, chuckled contemptuously at the lot that had been cast at them, and died without a murmur. The example that sticks in my head most vividly: in the summer of 1998, while working for a mosquito management company, I spent days trudging through forest preserves and suburban back yards spraying larvae and thinking up third-rate horror stories. One tried to become a book about a vampire who tries to give up blood drinking by switching to substitutes, only to have his possessive witch of a mother trick him into backsliding with a girl he's trying to start an affair with. I was smoking fairly heavily at the time and unsure of the teaching credentials that I was shopping around the state, and figured, way way in the back of my mind, that this could be a means to avoid the drudgery of work, of an alarm clock and a briefcase filled with essays on Why My Parents Don't Understand Me. What's always precluded me from pursuing a career in writing has been twofold: I find myself questioning why I want to do it in the first place, and I wrestle with the guilt that comes with struggling valiantly over something so middling while working in a profession that, by necessity, demands creativity, innovation and dedication. Elmore Leonard wrote some of his first work by hiding it in a desk drawer while at his office job. Geoffrey Chaucer was a civil servant his entire life; The Canterbury Tales were more of a hobby. Were I to do likewise, my students would be watching a lot more movies, and I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Every time I sat down to write something halfway decent, Jack Roeser would leap up in my head, chuckling over how well-paid I was and how many kids would never learn to write coherently because of a middle-of-the-road drama about an alcoholic ex-priest visiting his home town.

Then along comes Smiley with words of encouragement, arguing that a finished first draft of a bad novel is in itself a success, that only through looking at the trees at first can one eventually see a forest. "Just write," she seems to be telling me. "The worst that can happen is you won't finish it, and that's already happened, what, a dozen times?"

Well, don't sit by the phone, Reading Public. "Write a novel" is on my list of Things to Do Before I Die, and I'll most likely get to it before long, but I'm still in the process of deconditioning my must-publish attitude towards the whole thing. I'm also having way too much fun reading novels, not to mention histories, biographies, essay collections and, yes, even the occasional student essay.

Among the pile: Maugham's The Painted Veil. I picked up a copy at Target on an impulse (and before anyone gives me any static about that, let me just point out that there hasn't been an independent bookseller in my neck of the woods in years, and that I regularly frequent the Chicago bookstores, not to mention independent sellers on line) and read it over the space of a week. I like Maugham. I don't know why, but I do. Of Human Bondage is a book I'd love to teach, although I have no idea how I'd go about doing it. Maugham has symbols, foreshadowing, style and substance, but it's all just so there. Things just happen. I think it was Jane Smiley herself who wrote the foreword to the Bantam edition, in which she points out that the progression seems more an afterthought, as if it's an excuse to watch the protagonist struggle with his passions, his lack of money and his ostracism. My cup of tea. The interior conflict has always been something that, when executed well, I can eat for breakfast.

The Painted Veil is different, though. Kitty Fane is caught in an affair with a big-talking diplomat, and in a fit of passive agressive punishment, her husband Walter, a doctor, takes her with him to treat cholera victims in an epidemic sweeping through rural Japan. Kitty is superficial, but changes when exposed to true suffering, true love, and the example of the Catholic church as it treats cholera patients, and she learns to see her husband through her new eyes. The ending could have been melodramatic, but Maugham does a better job wrapping up Kitty's journey of self-awareness than he does Philip's in Of Human Bondgage--she's lost too much and made too many mistakes to have a happy ending, but she can at least step in a new direction, and it's from there that I derived the most enjoyment.

Unfortunately, the one factoid that kept running through my head while reading was Maugham's homosexuality. Critics, I believe, keep returning to that as an explanation for his treatment of women: they're either complete and utter bitches, like Mildred Rogers, or confused yet immoral roundheels, like Kitty (and is it any accident that she's named after a slang term for either a prostitute or a vagina? I doubt it). So I was preconditioned to be skeptical of her portrayal, and I think I bought into it. Leafing through the pages once again, I still can't see deep pathos on her part, just a matter-of-fact account of her second thoughts and self-ruminations, almost as if she's going through the motions of having a soul.

But then, pathos in fiction has never been my strong suit. Like Eleanor of Acquitaine, I am not moved to tears, but I should at least be able to recognize when I should be so moved. It's something to work on, I guess. How else could I write my own deathbed scene, many years from now? "As the life left his eyes and his head slumped on the pillow, she felt as if she were floating over him, untethered, free yet precariously so, like a balloon drifting into the atmosphere, at risk of popping because of the inverted atmosphere." Sure, that will do the job just fine. God, I could have gotten a paper graded in the time it took to write that. Damn you, Roeser, you win this round.

NYC-49th and 6th-TROPIC zone bar is a lounge-type place with pounding yet manageable disco music, plenty of space, and waitresses in string bikinis. Journey's End turned out to be an outstanding play chronicling the pathos of the Great War. But it didn't have any waitresses with string bikinis. So I think it's only fair to turn my attention back to the excellent service I'm receiving.

I like this blackberry. This could be a problem.

NYC-88th and 1st Ave--Blogging from Matt's Blackberry. He tells me it's a work-related device, which means it's not to be used frivolously. So hopefully, this is costing his shit company money, and I'm getting the bastard in trouble.

46 degrees. Off to Battery Park. Then Broadway, then the bars. As the Black Keys sing, You just got to be.