Denunciations and Survival

Grossman's Life and Fate often refers to them: wives denouncing husbands, husbands wives, friends friends, colleagues colleagues, and so forth. Once you disappear into the prison system--the Gulag--it didn't matter how you got there: the system was designed to produce a large number of prisoners, who were then slowly starved to death. Sometimes spouses were jailed for not denouncing each other.

Here is the U.S. we have a different system designed to produce prisoners--poverty. We don't need denunciations, just desperation. We already imprison more people here than in any other country in the world.

It may not be fate that determines where you end up in human society--more likely chance.

Yet on occasion human kindness actually manifests itself. Only the most ruthless system can completely eradicate that. Pity, compassion, concern--it's not always easy to obliterate them. It can be done: lock some people into a room and feed them inadequately and eventually everyone will be turned into selfish monsters.

Perhaps the best you can hope for is to try to avoid, if possible, someone else's brutality, something that usually finds its victims close by, convenient.

Books: Life and Fate

I've been reading Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, his massive, sprawling novel of the Soviet Union in late 1942, when the battle of Stalingrad was raging. Of course, individuality in character is almost nonexistent, what with the cast of hundreds. But the real interest is life under an insane dictatorship: naturally people say, in response to someone being arrested, that "they never arrest innocent people." The same thing could be said today, here in the U.S. I can't help but recall the insane conversation I had with a friend from graduate school, undoubtedly a Communist of some sort, about the Soviet Union. When I asked her if there was anything wrong with the Soviet Union--remember: this is in the 1980s, the desultory Brehznev Era--she, with great difficulty, said that maybe they had some problems with women's equality. I said that, were the Communists miraculously to assume power in the U.S., we would be the first people to be arrested--no question about it. Anyone who questions the prevailing wisdom is seen as a malcontent. And, yeah, apparently we have denunciations at the place where I am privileged to teach. And naturally the novel includes instances of arbitrary arrest. And science is dictated by commisars who have no knowledge of science. A new theory in physics may not conform to the Leninist notion of material reality. On a less brutal scale, to be sure, we do the same thing here: certain axioms are given, never to be challenged or questioned. And, yeah, we tend to place mediocrities in position of authority, so that idiocy is made to seem like wisdom, incompetence achievement. Fortunately, we can depend on their laziness--it's too much trouble to make a great effort to dominate others--to completely eradicate the life of the mind. In the novel, a moronic notion of ideology--and a moronic ideology--rule. Here, money is the sole value. Whoever has the gold makes the rules.

At any rate, Grossman's novel, while not great, is probably better than the previous novel I read, Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle, which, while amusing at times, ultimately fell flat on its face. Hip hop novels, of which I've read two, need to have certain basic characteristics: a nerd-like main character and a hip patter. "Negro, please" is the basic joke.

True freedom is a fragile thing--not to be scoffed at or trifled with.

Creativity and Imagination

So I'm driving and listening to some idiotic discussion on NPR on creativity and imagination in which some fool is discussing how to encourage creativity and imagination in your child.

The reality is this: there are a few people who seem to have been born with an aptitude for creativity and imagination, and occasionally they get the chance to make use of that ability. Most people simply are not creative--or their idea of creativity is essentially banal or mundane or cliched. It's even possible that those people who are born with creativity can improve their ability at school--although, in many ways, the best thing that could be done for someone creative is to make his or her childhood miserable, alienating, isolated, awful. Then he or she will have something to write about. And it may be that, within the ranks of the truly creative, there is a hierarchy--some with creativity to burn and others with an occasional moment of the authentically creative.

And what about someone like me? Does it take creativity to recognize creativity? Or is that some lower order of the creative?

Most students can barely understand the idea of metaphor--and even if they do understand it, most of those can't seem to figure out why it's so important.

So when we have literature classes in school, we essentially teach them in the worst circumstances: we grade the students, when, for the most part, their inability to understand literature is simply a reflection of the fact that few people are truly creative. Even a monkey can be fascinated by bright lights. Little wonder our literature classes are stupifyingly boring.

Discourse in the Nazi Academy

Heinz Hoeppner, head of the Central Resettlement Office in Nazi-occupied Poland, sent a memo to Eichmann in which he writes the following:

"It would be sheer fantasy to discuss further organization in these intake areas, since fundamental decisions must first be made. . . . [I]t is essential that we be totally clear from the outset as to what is to be done with these displaced populations that are undesirable for the Greater German settlement areas. Is the goal to permanently secure them some sort of subsistence, or should they be totally-eradicated?" (quoted in Mazower, p. 208)

The question: how similar are the bureaucratic memos written today in some obscure office in Washington?

The Two Sides

One side argues that it has the right, say, to smoke cigarettes anywhere it wants. Or to pollute as much as it wants. Or to exploit others as much as it can get away with. And so forth. The other side argues that second-hand smoke limits the rights of the first side--one right is harming another right: here, the right to survive or the right to be healthy. And any moral system that has any meaning would have to say that the second side is the correct one. Yet who wants to inhabit a world in which every action is under surveillance, every gesture judged and weighed and found wanting? The current "debate" over health care reflects these two sides. One side wants to gamble--why should someone be forced to get health insurance? The other side says that, ultimately, others must then pay for the health care the first side refused to get. I say: gamble away. But if you need health care and you can't afford it, then you must pay the consequences. Ambulances and hospitals must refuse those who lack the moral imagination to see that their irresponsible actions still exploit others. You don't agree that the government funds Medicare? OK. But you can't have Medicare unless you do. And you have to acknowledge it beforehand--not in an emergency. Let's actually live according to the social Darwinist rules of the right.

Youth and Incivility

Sure, I, too, was incivil. An idiot. So here's my public apology for any rude, insensitive ways that I insulted others.

Corporate Dominance

We were talking to a just retired medical doctor yesterday, and he said that he was much happier after he retired from a job that he depised. He said that many doctors he worked with were filled with rage and bitterness. He mentioned that, around 1990, something changed in the medical profession, and doctors, who has once been at the center of medicine, suddenly became employees. Hospitals started buying up small clinics, and doctors, who had been working 80-hour weeks, started to want to work 40-hour weeks--and so the clinics lost money. The doctors also lost prominence: now MBAs from health care management started telling them what to do. The most important thing was patient happiness, and if a drug addict wanted Vicodin or Oxycontin and was turned away (and then complained), that was a problem. So the doctor was called on the carpet. Of course, I saw the parallel to higher education. Faculty governance began to evaporate at around the same time. All of these highly educated people suddenly found themselves locked out of decisions, their opinions and knowledge useless. What became important was student retention and student happiness (especially as certified on student evaluations). High grades and dumbed-down classes became our narcotics--what we could hand out cavalierly to encourage student happiness and retention. The corporate conquest of the academy was completed. Now, I, too, am just an employee. My degrees and experience mean little, if nothing, to the corporate surrogates who run our institutions. And then, bewildered, they wonder why we don't identify with our institution. Who would?

The year (more or less) of the change intrigues me. Was the cause, then, the collapse of the Soviet Union? Were the people there essentially held hostage so that corporations couldn't operate with impunity? And then, lacking even a corrupt and monstrous alternative, did the corporate managers feel empowered to remove the last vestiges of faculty governance?

The Liberal Wing of the Nazi Party

I finished Mazower's book, and I was interested in at least two things: the existence (not just a Pynchonian joke) of a liberal wing of the Nazi party and the seamless movement by any number of mid-level technocrats from the SS bureaucracy into the postwar West German state. The liberal wing espoused the idea that it would be better to work captive populations to death as opposed to immediately exterminating them. The mid-level technocrats offered knowledge of town planning and European identity to the anti-communist fervor of the late 1940s and beyond. The Nazis' main mistake? To treat some Europeans the same way that Europeans had been treating colonial subjects for 450 years. Otherwise, they weren't that much different than, say, other Europeans.

So the hopeless and pointless choice: Hitler or Stalin? And the third way--Anglo-American "liberal" plutocracy--doesn't seem so great either. A system that encourages financial geniuses to dream up ever more sophisticated financial instruments for fleecing fools and then suffer inevitable "crashes" doesn't strike me as a sane way to function. Yet the cycle has begun again. When will the next economic crash occur?

The Banality of Academic Evil

So, of course, I'm reading Mark Mazower's Hitler's Europe, and I'm reading about the academic discussions in Germany about how the Nazis should rule Europe (and associated topics like who should be considered a German, etc.). And, naturally, I understand how the academic world works--there's a larger "paradigm" that marks the boundaries of appropriate academic discourse. On rare occasions, someone writes something that's outside this paradigm and it gets published: but, in general, everything is within the bounds. You want discussions of how to mercilessly treat the untermenschen? We can do it. It doesn't really matter who is in charge: the academic animal can adapt to almost any kind of research needs. There's a group psychology in the academy. The very thing that I would like to believe--the academy as a site of intellectual freedom--is one of the bigger lies. So, yeah, I'm disappointed. In the ever diminishing humanities, this reality exists, although most of the academy is now centered in the social sciences and business. When I was at Wichita State, I applied for a non-tenured award for scholarly achievement. I had published a number of articles. But who won the award--some stooge from the business department who had published one article. I had an inkling then about the realities of the academic world. I'm more certain now.

Yet What About Boredom?

After the tumultuous events of the mid-20th century--mass murder and such--is it so surprising that some people opted for boredom, the flat banality of the suburbs? Yes, Skokie was dreadful: it sucked the life out of people. But what alternative? Perhaps avoiding attention, especially in a world in which attention means harm and trauma and pain, is the only strategy worth anything at all. What's so bad about being Portugal--off the radar screen, so to speak?

Democracy and Stupidity and Election Day

I'd like to think that democracy is a good thing, yet so many people are clueless about the the world--they live in a delusion, an infantile fantasy world. Recall that the Germans elected Hitler. Here, because we have been so far away from the rest of the world, we've been able to survive idiots as leaders--and mete out vicious harm on the hopeless minority groups: indigenous people and their descendants, blacks, immigrants, anyone perceived as different or vulnerable. I recall once going to a Catholic wedding and seeing the eucharist and thinking, no wonder they despise(d) the Jews, those who refused this communion. It would have taken an astonishing, mostly impossible courage and moral imagination to resist the demands of the church hierarchy and accept others not in the religious community as human. And this from people who, in Protestant America, themselves were often despised and destroyed. I'm reading David Mura's Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire. He went to my high school, maybe in the class a year or two ahead of me, and writes about the secret, hidden world of suburban Japanese Americans. In Skokie, I had grown up thinking that no one on the planet could have lived in a more boring, less potentially "novelistic" environment. I should have known better: I should have known about the rage and frustration that existed behind closed doors. Joyce should have clued me into that--the lives of quiet, often inarticulate desperation. Of course, there were many (are many) who live in a kind of oblivion, idiotically unaware of what their society inflicts on others or even delighted by it, yet any society will inevitably produce some, a few, someone, who are (is) aware of the brutality, who live(s) with the knowledge of terrible crimes (the Holocaust, Japanese internment, slavery, systemic discrimination, thwarted hopes and dreams, just the generalized stupidity of massive bureaucratic organizations, the clumsy, callous pain meted out on defenseless, unknowing people) that have been committed, continue to be committed. Can we have democracy and obliviousness? If someone doesn't know--can't know or won't know--should he or she be allowed to vote? Hitler wanted to kill Jewish women and children because he didn't want their descendants trying to gain revenge. (I'm not even talking about the crime of killing anyone--men, women or children.) And sure enough, he was able to locate enough others who, for whatever reason--racism, fear, routine, indifference, sadism, nihilism--decided to kill defenseless others. The idea that the Jews offered a threat! A people without weapons, accustomed to take whatever punishments those in power decided to inflict, a hopeless minority (some peasants in small villages, others sophisticated urbanites--it didn't matter)--these are the people he sees as the direst threat against Germany! He might as well have accused falling leaves of betraying the nation: they presented the same level of danger. And then, of course, whoever survived turned into fanatics themselves--in different ways, of course. The Jewish Century looks at three examples: the socialists in Russia who themselves became the victims of a lunatic, the capitalists in America who through education and perserverance climbed into the middle class, and the nationalists in Israel who must see virtually anyone as an enemy. Revenge, indeed.

Stalingrad

I read Antony Beevor's book on Stalingrad. The callousness towards life on both sides astonishes me. There was one moment when, to combat cowardice, a Russian commander shot every tenth soldier. Behind every unit was another unit making sure that the first unit didn't run away. At one point the German soldiers saw that they had just shot at a boat of women trying to get away--and they felt bad about it! Hours before they had been shooting and killing women and children. The soldiers also looked around the steppes and thought--this might be a good place to have a farm. After they were surrounded, they thought--the Fuhrer (I can walk!) will rescue us. There's hope and then there's delusion. But perhaps the kind of delusional beliefs found among the Nazi soldiers parallel the everyday delusional beliefs among people today.

Books

I just finished reading Van Vogt's awful The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The human scientists aboard the exploring spacecraft do astonishingly idiotic things, suggesting that the crew is actually a group of 12 year old boys. They take anti-sex medicine and, in one episode, are attacked by an alien who captures them to implant eggs in them (the worst nightmare of pre-adolescents--turned into females). One of them, a Nexialist, always figures out what the crew should do, although he's constantly bickering with the idiotic interim commander.

At the same time, I've started to read Pessoa's incredible The Book of Disquiet. From the introduction written by the interestingly named Richard Zenith:

"The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfillment never measures up to what we imagine. . . . How is it done? By not doing. By performing our daily duties but living, simultaneously, in the imagination. Traveling far and wide, in the geography of our minds. Conquering like Caesar, amid the blaring trumpets of our reverie. Experiencing intense sexual pleasure, in the privacy of our fantasy. Feeling everything in every way, not in the flesh, which always tires, but in the imagination."

And now from Pessoa himself--writing under one of his heteronyms, Bernardo Soares:

"I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't now where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social center, for it's here that I meet others. But I'm neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing--for myself alone--wispy songs I compose while waiting.

Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I'm given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book or travellers can when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don't read it, or are not interested, that's fine too."

Students

As I am now a minor official of the hegemonic state, part of my job is to inform future cubicle workers about how they will never be members of the educated, technocratic elite.

Today I tried to inform my students that pronoun agreement was important--that there are people out there (not just English teachers) who actually know something about grammar and who make judgments about people based on their writing ability and their knowledge of grammar. Is it true anymore? Perhaps not. Still, is there any way to respect the language and its logic? Is representing the educated elite the only way to stand for clarity and humanity in language? One side of me wants to agree with my students, ignorant as they can be, that it's all right to rebel against the arbitrary strictures of grammar. Yet another part of me wants to insist on the logic of grammar (and I'm not talking about the prejudices of style--splitting infinitives and the like). The corruption of language by the state and its advertising minions depresses me. I like the ambiguity of metaphor, the possibility of disordered creativity found in the oddities of language. Yet I also like the purity of grammar, the way that logic informs a sentence. Either language has meaning or it doesn't. Either it reflects the world--and tells the truth about the world--or it doesn't. Orwell comments in an essay that he had the capacity to face unpleasant facts. He also decried the corruption of language. Put them together.

The Academic System: Smart People Do Dumb Things, but Dumb People Rule

Some people, with some justification, are suspicious of smart people, yet they often do not have the same suspicions about dumb people. And, oddly, dumb people tend to rise up in institutions, particularly academic ones. We now have administrator generators in graduate education programs. It used to be that administrators came from marginal academic areas like Speech. Now they emerge from college administration programs. My last encounter with my current avatar involved a discussion about student evaluations: we now rely on them to tell us if an instructor is doing a "good" job--turning teaching into a consumer product. This adminstrator told me that the student evaluations were the only way to see how we compared to other schools. Education as a competitive sport? I don't care how I compare to other schools--or even other teachers. If a teacher has knowledge and believes in it, then there is a good chance that he or she will be able to impart that knowledge to others. That is what we must believe in. At best, students can have only a vague idea about how well an instructor knows his or her field. The best way to evaluate each other is to have a colleague sit through a term, but, obviously, we can't do that. Instead, we undermine our status and transform ourselves into articulate sales personnel. What a ghastly mistake student evaluations have been--another idiotic legacy of the 1960s. Of course, I question those mandarins who arrogantly insist on pompously intimidating students, but we disrespect teachers by insisting that their knowledge is meaningless. And, yes, smart people can do dumb things, but now our lives are directed by an administrative caste that is oblivious to what a college, any college, needs or ought to be. Little wonder that students come into the academic world with a sense that their instructors are servants.

Teaching Today

At times, teaching itself can be rewarding, especially in those few moments when, despite a culture that actively encourages stupidity and indifference, even a "studied" indifference, younger students actually respond to something that I say. Most of the time, they, like my colleagues, view me as a lunatic, an eccentric, or, even more often, a bore. And at those times I ask myself, what awful crime did I commit in a previous existence to merit such a hell. A student asks me why she didn't get an "A" on a paper if she did all that was asked in an assignment, and I tell her that, while she believes she did everything on the assignment, her work still didn't have as much quality as I was looking for. Only in a society that sees writing as a form of filling in blanks can such a notion thrive, can the idea of quality evaporate. But perhaps I, too, am a parody of the intellectual. The cynical idealist--the oldest cliche on the planet. I can't go on. I'll go on. Go on?

Human Stupidity

There are, of course, many examples of human stupity. Smoking is one of them. Subsidizing tobacco farmers and then spending a tremendous amount of money for drugs that help people stop smoking is another. And killing in the name of religious faith is another. And giving any kind of credence to right-wing media clowns is another. And being happy to die for one's country is another. And believing that our brief moments on this planet are meaningful is another. And if human beings are, to a large degree, stupid, then how can we have a meaningful democracy?

I'm reading Arturo Escobar's Encountering Development in which he discusses how development policies towards poorer parts of the globe are a form of colonization, which they undoubtedly are. Yet he is forced to criticize nutrition programs and health-care programs. Without question there's a massive development infrastructure, with many a public and private bureaucrat scurrying toward yet another conference on how to drag the apparently undeserving billions out of poverty. and without question whatever has been done has resulted in a global catastrophe--there being too many people who profit from this infrastructure. Yet those nutrition programs? There can be principled critiques of neo-colonialism, and yet, despite all that, some people do genuinely try to offer selfless help to others. Must we condemn all efforts to do so?

Democracy

If I have a value, it's a belief in democracy. But, of course, it's a nuanced belief. I'm fully aware of Walter Lippmann's critique of democracy in which an ill-educated, ill-informed citizenry tries to make decisions on challenging, complicated issues. The current health care "debate" ought to make this problem clear. Or sometimes people bemoan the lack of an adequate scientific education in America, especially when the ignorant offer their opinions on evolution or climate change. But it's not the fault of science education: it's cognitive dissonance. They just don't want to believe in these things and no amount of education is going to change that. Yet Lippmann's advocacy for the idea of a technocratic elite making decisions for people is equally problematic, since such an elite inevitably starts to make decisions that favor itself. Intellectual or technocratic elites can't help but become nomenklaturas. At the same time, I believe in a reasonable level of discrimination. I despise discrimination based on meaningless characteristics--like skin color, gender, religion, wealth and so forth. And I especially despise those who discriminate against others who have been denied the opportunity to educate themselves. So, for example, a racial discrimination that argues that one group is inferior because of its ignorance is an outrage, particularly if the discrimination itself is responsible for that ignorance. Yet I have no problem with discrimination when it's directed toward those who have had the opportunity to educate themselves but decided not to. So I'm intolerant of fools. And the problem is how to reconcile the vast swathe of fools who inhabit this country with this belief in democracy. I cringe when I hear some bombastic politician refer to the ingrained wisdom of the American people. As an uninterrogated assumption, it appalls me. All too often Americans have shown a lack of wisdom.

So what we need is a wise democracy--perhaps an impossibility.

A Literary Perspective

"When literature was in question my brother considered even a European, or rather a world, war to be just literally a bloody nuisance interfering with his work. . ." (184).

Stanislaus Joyce, on James Joyce, in His Brother's Keeper

How else to view the endless wars and stupidity?

Back to Agoraphobia

By the way, Howe is mainly discussing Dickinson's poem, "My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun."

The poem narrates the poet imagining herself as a gun, out in the "Sovreign woods," the great, all-powerful outdoors, killing but unable to be killed, controlled but deadly, in short, an insane poet. But let's say that there are two kinds of poets: again, the agoraphobes and the claustrophobes. Dickinson is the agoraphobic type. The claustrophobic type is, say, T.S. Eliot, who is oppressed by rooms and narrow streets. Eliot, too, is insane, but has a controlled insanity.

Can there be a healthy poet? Maybe William Carlos Williams, who dealt with illness yet wrote about the power of words and things--and words as things: "This is just to say."

And my interest in Baroque music? The claustrophobes of composition, especially with their mathematical precision. Order relieves the pressure of oppressive rooms and narrow streets, yet it's a fool's paradise. Order is an illusion.

Corporate Persons

The former Solicitor General of the U.S. says that "Corporations are persons." It's perhaps the only metaphor used by the fanatical right wing. But let's say it's true--then could corporations be executed? Could they be jailed? Do they have the right to vote (I mean directly)? Could they hold a seat on the Supreme Court? Could they marry? Could they get drivers licenses? Could they die?

More Agoraphobia

Susan Howe (My Emily Dickinson) on Emily Dickinson and others:

"Jonathan Edwards, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson looked into the core of eternal destruction. They greeted what they saw with affirmation and elation" (114).

"Dickinson was expert in standing in corners, expert in secret listening and silent understanding. Bristling with Yankee energy, chained to an increasingly demanding agoraphobia, she moved through that particular mole of nature in her--she studied Terror" (116).

Which explains why I like open spaces, long vistas, the room to breathe and maneuver. I, too, have stood in corners: but what interested me were the walls, not necessarily the actions contained within the walls.

So I misread Dickinson all the time: I am interested in misunderstanding her metaphors: the woods aren't "Sovreign" to me.

Airplanes

Today, I'm flying back to the great Northwest, even though I have difficulty believing that planes can actually fly.

You might imagine that flying is not my favorite activity.

Emily Dickinson was an agoraphobic--she feared the great, empty wilderness (read universe) that surrounded her. So have other Americans.

I seem to have a more European sensibility: maybe that explains my attraction to places like Alaska. Open spaces.

O The Irony

O the irony. I need, unfortunately, to state the following: Read everything as if it were in quotation marks--even this. Yeah, yeah, what about the previous entry in which I chastised Albert Goldbarth for using quotation marks: but there he employed them around only one word, while here (there, here: fort da!) everyting is equivalent--the most democratic attitude in the universe.

I've been traveling: hence the lacuna in entries. Now I'm in Chicago--OK, really, Northbrook. Yesterday, I was in Indiana. The strangeness of time and place. The oddities of experience and event. My friend in Indiana said that my basic, core belief was that everyone was insane.

No disagreement there. Yet it was in response to a comment--remember the quotation marks--that I had no core beliefs. So both are true and not true. In a hundred years, in fifty, will anyone care?

More important: does anyone care now?

Claustrophobia or Agoraphobia

Is the universe too full or too empty? This is, of course, a conceptual, not a scientific question. Is the world too much with us, as Bill Wordsworth suggests (and he was talking more of the busyness of the world, not its oppressive physical structure) or are we isolated in an incomprehensibly large cosmos, both on the macro and the micro levels: claustrophobia or agoraphobia? Let's say that there are two kinds of people (the joke: there are two kinds of people--those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don't): claustrophobics and agoraphobics. (Limiting? Of course.) I'm a claustrophobic: I feel the weight of the world, even the cosmos. Others I imagine feel the terror of emptiness. (And others just don't think about it--or employ a fantasy religious text to salve their fears.)

Or is that just one more illusion: an aristocracy of the terrified--an imagined elite of thinkers? Oh yeah, the world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. (And nada to those who don't think or feel.)

Yeah, Rog, you think too much: go drink a beer. leer at cleavage, read the sports page. What would the nihilist do?

Do?

Belatedly he answers

HAMMOND Some two months after the City Council's appointments to the Port Authority came into question, Council President Dan Repay said the group is still awaiting a legal opinion from Roger Berger, council attorney.
Repay said he did not expect the council to appoint anyone to the Port Authority seat vacated by former Councilman Ernie Dillon, now a county councilman, until Berger comes to a conclusion.
"In everyone's interest, it would be best that they wait until we have a firm legal opinion," Repay said. * * *
Repay said Berger had contacted several sources and gotten conflicting information.
"He's hopefully close to rendering an opinion," Repay said.
The council is expecting a letter from Berger with not only his own interpretations and recommendations, but those of others, he said.
Repay could not say whether Berger had contacted the office of Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter.
Carter spokeswoman Staci Schneider said in January that Berger, as the attorney for the appointing body, would have been directed to the attorney general's Dual Office Holding Guide, a lengthy document prepared for officeholders and their attorneys. Any interested parties could file a petition in court for a judge to make a determination.

I say no. No, in cosmic thunder.

A Most Literary Entry

"In a small town in Scotland they sell books with one blank page hidden someplace in the volume. If the reader opens to that page and it's three o'clock in the afternoon, he dies."

-Julio Cortazar, "The Instruction Manual"

What is the most frightening part of this quotation? The small town in Scotland.


"It's a mistake
to believe that anything's 'solid': really matter
--us, a pebble, a Happy Meal toy, a stadium--is emptiness
in emptiness, a field of unthinkable quark existence."

-Albert Goldbarth, ". . . a museum, of sorts, for errors."

Here? The quotation marks around solid. They give it away--put the lie to the lie of emptiness, for if you can imagine that a word can be ironized or emphasized, it means that you value something more than something else: some emptiness is more meaningful than another emptiness. And that's a no-no for nihilists. It's always location, location, location: the oxygen around me is important, more important than the oxygen around you. Call it the proximity factor. The town in Scotland--it doesn't matter which town--is somewhere, a location, a place, and at the very moment I am opening up that book around 3 o'clock in the afternoon, someone else is walking by, in a hurry, to meet someone else, not noticing the stark surprise of my collapse. I used to be frightened of "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality": but that's not right. There's always too much reality, in this place, now.

All About Me!

Writing a blog is, naturally, an arrogant act of hubris and narcissism: it's all about me! Me! Me! No, it's not about you. It's about me. And, natch, it's public in a mostly meaningless way. It's not quite Twitter, which is even more trivial, but it's close.

So I intend to write about me--my thoughts about me, my life, my world, my universe. No readers? No matter! And as soon as I figure out something to say about me, then I'll write about it and post it. Until then, any of you out there is that vast, meaningless "community" called cyberspace who has nothing to do (evidenced by your pathetic reading of this blog and possibly by your pointless response to my meaningless blather), I await your attention.

The Very Idea

The very idea! One day, after I commit the heinous act which will bestow notoriety on me, then, and only then, will my billions of readers know the power of my deathless prose.