nothing like more debt, but there are some invitations and opportunities that are not to be passed by, such as presenting for the Association of Cultural Studies in Istanbul and a potential side trip to Iran.
Added on 3 May 2006: Check out the story Anuj found in The New Yorker.
On Apr 29, 2006, at 11:56 PM, Chris Boulton wrote:
AMHERST, MA, April 29 - In a stunning turn of events, Brett Ingram cast the deciding vote in the GSS elections yesterday. Mr. Ingram's ballot, marked with his signature uppercase 'X,' pushed the GEO-endorsed slate of candidates over the top of a hotly contested election. Turn-out was high. But in spite of 600 voters (up 250 from the previous year) coming to the polls, in the end, it all came down to Brett. Elections observer George Liu was there. Marveling at Mr. Ingram's insouciance in the face of such a historic moment, Liu concluded "Never before have I witnessed such exquisite suffering on behalf of suffrage. But one thing is certain: that old curmudgeon carried the day with his vigorous exercise of the franchise." One minor annoyance for Brett; one giant leap for the Graduate Student Senate.
read second paragraph email conversation with non-god dated Apr. 29 2006."
you have to trust that no matter what happens you will get through it, that it's just what's meant to be - not because it's fate but because that's the way it is/was. so you invent your story about it in a way that cultivates the kind of human be-ing to which you aspire. it ain't easy and it ain't fun when things don't go as we desire but, somehowsomeway, if you can hold fast to any kind of belief that sustains you then you can get through.
Of course, immigrants seeking to become US citizens should learn the national anthem in English but why does this preclude an interpretation? All kinds of folks LOVE American Sign Language interpretations of the national anthem, does the Deaf community's desire to embrace patriotic sentiments in their own language minimize their integrity?
The assertion from the right that concepts of national identity and multiculturalism are somehow naturally in conflict is a lie. These notions are being used in political debates for the agenda of maintaining economic power.
because working alone leads to bad decisions. :-( Al Franken was terrific and I really wanted to be interpreting. But I'm not an exhibitionist. Truly. It is not fun or fulfilling to interpret for an audience of non-deaf people. The feedback, the interaction that makes it communication doesn't happen. People like it, yes, but they don't understand it!
It didn't help that I was scheduled to work solo for 90 minutes. It's a long time, longer than I usually do since that good ol' repetitive motion injury, but I considered that the energy of the event would keep me going. However, not without an audience!
I probably won't get to meet him, but I'm sure I will enjoy interpreting Al Franken in Brattleboro today. Gotta love this job!
I also like interpreting public events, because I think the rules for talking about them are somewhat different than the intensive confidentiality that is absolutely vital for most other work. I would still regard any private/professional conversations as confidential (among stagehands, say, or members of the audience with staff or performers or other members of the audience, etc.), but those things that occur on stage, in public, and for the public open up a space for some commentary.
ps: the cows are on the march!
Copied from the April 26, 2006 6:31:55 PM EDT email newsletter of the Graduate Employee Organization (emphasis added).
2. GEO Election Results:
-------------------------
Following the elections on April 18th and 19th, the following candidates were declared elected:
President - Srinivas Lankala (Communication)
Vice-President - Jeremy Wolf (Political Science)
Secretary-Treasurer - Mandy Cheung (School of Education)
Members of the Steering Committee - Jason Rodriguez (Sociology) and Anna Curtis (Sociology)
The new officers will be inaugurated at the last membership meeting of this semester on May 10th at 6 pm.
A long time ago (!), Donal got me into the Department of Communication here at UMass.
and the rest of you are LOSERS! Who says the Black Eyed Peas are better than bowling? The Blog Victim won three of four games, but if I won the last game by 64 pins....setting a new personal best (!) of 158...who's the better bowler? BV approached his personal best. Alas. He fell short by one. 1. That's o-n-e pin. Even then, his margin of victory was only 71 pins. Oh. So much for Blog Gossip. :-/
After he won that game, he speculated about his character, pondering (out loud!) whether he was the kind of person to celebrate a victory by continuing to crush his opponents or . . . (he left the rest unsaid. Hmmmm.) Let me just note the margin of loss progressed from six pins, to eleven ("I just have to knock 'em out, at least a spare") to the aforementioned seventy-one. And this, after saying "the house of the straight-shooters" held no enmity, blaming all of that on those who aspire to spin. Having been so soundly pulverized in the third game, you must imagine that I was pleased by the spread after my turkey (another first!) in the last game when the score showed me with 122 (7th frame) and BV with 37 (5th, b'cuz he had a strike in the 6th and hadn't yet bowled his 7th). NO DOUBT that was the largest spread of the match and yes, thank you, I'll just take my bows. :-0
Hope May 1 is a big day.
TIME carried a review of this bestseller, which has apparently built it's success on word-of-mouth from the African-American pulpit. As Pyro was saying the other day, bemoaning the effectiveness of the political Right where are the institutional equivalents of the Christian church for the left?
Who's studying? I mean, come on. Only one incomplete to go and some paperwork to file: mere commitment to a date.
I listened to these on tape driving back and forth to Manchester. the crazed by Ha Jin was odd and I finished it long enough ago that the brilliant thoughts I had about it's possible metaphoricity between a literature professor gone (seemingly) mad and the student protests at Tiananmen Square which result in a graduate student's descent (?) to militancy are no longer accessible to me in any kind of detail. What struck me as odd, I think, was the amount of detail provided by the graduate student, Jian, as he tries to fill in the gaps of his professor's hallucinatoric ravings. The narrator's tone struck me discordantly as well, almost comforting? Whether or not it was deliberate, the calm and somewhat puzzled auditory expression complemented the bizarre unfolding of events.
Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer, was chilling in a different way. If every moment of our lives could somehow be framed in the life and death terms imposed by extreme sports, would society be substantially different? I respect the raw and scathing honesty with which Krakauer lays bare his unwitting complicity in an effort to come to terms with an unfolding of events that smacks of fate.
This is too creepy for me to imagine, but I guess if you want some kind of ultimate symbolism you can grow a wedding band from an extract of your jaw.
The NY Times reports on public radio and the web.
One of my students recently asked where we can get news with context. NPR is a good beginning: Tell Them Public Matters.
A blog: Blackfive which includes a link to Sgt. Hook's after-action-review of the first MilBlog Conference.
A broadcast: Unitarian Universalist sermon on Evolution: The Issue Behind The Issue, which Steve Edington claims (quite contemporarily) is the importance of story.
A film: Thank You for Smoking, which presents argument as the essence of story.
All that's left is to make sense of "the story," the telling of the story, and the story behind the story.
The Junior Writing class wiki is turning into something hot. :-)
"Writing, like fornication, should use proper technique, should serve a functional purpose," explains Craig.
Speaking of technique, some of us have been experimenting with poetic license.
We've a month left to really whip it into shape, but there are some compelling things posted, including two critiques of the recent Tent State University.
I haven't bragged on my students for awhile now, but it isn't because I haven't been proud.
In the UNH-Manchester intro course on Mass Media we had a grand round of Jeopardy to finish off a sophisticated (technologically and intellectually) presentation on The Torino Olympics. This following two other impressive performances by a team comparing Mary Tyler Moore with Desperate Housewives in Female Image: Past and Present and another team investigating copycat violence, Monkey See, Monkey Do?
We had an awesome paper (which I hope to be able to post, ahem!) and discussion regarding the movie, Crash: does it anaesthetize white/caucasian viewers? Even if not, does it still generate more narcotizing dysfunction than movement toward social justice?
Another terrific discussion was inspired by the team that presented a media analysis of three different tv stations' coverage of Jill Carroll's release. (I'm hoping this info is going to be transferred into the class wiki for all to be able to revisit...hint hint!)
Kirk, our resident alternative (?) news guru, responded to a question about where folks can get news that provides more than "just the facts" by softly chanting, "BBC, BBC." :-) (Which I listened to on the drive home, and want to buy this recently released "sounds of rarest wildlife" CD.) Kirk's official turn is coming up in a couple of weeks.
There were many moments of levity tonight, including the slip in the Jill Carroll presentation about "How To Get a Hostage Killed". Of course, I heard the slip as eerily reminiscent of a veiled threat on my own life...
"a heart-shaped leaf" - this must be the image of the 19 folks who converged on the bowling lanes tonight in honor of Luscious' 72nd birthday and JC's successful dissertation defense. Or, perhaps it was merely a reference to the (gendered) fashion observation that "all the women are wearing green, almost," "except," adds a graffiti-ghost, "those who are wearing red. and blue. if not yellow."
Bowling was merely filler for the real show tonight. CAKE! There was a profusion of cards and well-wishing, such that a portrait of (the back of) JC's head) as he sets off on his new life wound up in Luscious b'day card, and a birthday memory for Luscious wound up in the blog notes. The negotiations for a trade-off to mask the first error resulted in an "economic metaphor showing the capitalist ideology of the contemporary global village": "What are you gonna do in return?"
Competition spun down the lanes and among onlookers. Strikes by the following were witnessed: Siri, JC, Greg, Rajiv, Linus, Darpan, Zeynep, and Alenka. LB too but barely - according to the "if its not blogged; it didn't happen" rule, a group cheer indicating a possible strike doesn't verify the strike; however an actual eyewitness strike did (eventually) occur. Four doubles were thrown tonight, by Luscious (as usual), Cata (in the 10th frame!), dadofzeynep (officially, Nejat), and yours truly. :-) Zeynep, having waited 15 years to beat her dad at bowling, soundly pounded him 132 to 100 in the second game. No one set any records tonight, although I came close, falling short by four measly pins. I had a 93 in the fifth frame bowling right-handed; compare that with the 95 total I had in the game I bowled as a lefty. (Then it started to go downhill. Not as severely as Linus though, who cooked our breakfast in the first game and fizzled like a fire in the rain during the second.)
Meanwhile, JC continued the streak of his good day, pummelling his opponents by 30 pins. Alenka, Maja, and Jake all tied at 106, doing some threesome kind of thing? Then there was a flask going 'round one of the other lanes, and a backpack sounding suspiciously full of empty bottles....a rowdy encounter between Anuj and Rajiv which paled in comparison to the lunge and knock-down between Lava and Linus later. What was up with the testosterone tonight?
Don's creativity of JC (a bald head morphing into a bandanna-covered hairy head) inspired additional artwork, including this pregnant duck. ("Duckness" is obvious; you might have to stretch to glean the pregnant part.) It's unclear if this sketch is an actual portrait or an amalgam of the clutch of us nondescript types. Did I mention Darpan got confused about the sport of the evening? It may all have been some kind of discharge for the real, poignant details of JC's defense, in which some of the beneficiaries of his community work on fair housing expressed their gratitude for his work above and beyond the call of academic scholarship.
Kinda gives ya a nice warm, heart-shaped leafy-feeling, doesn't it?
This Escher, drawing hands, is too cool for school.
So is the info on the ogee and ogive, with accompanying picture of the Church of The Holy Cross at Caston in Norfolk (scroll down a bit).
I was actually hunting for a short SF story by Norbert Weiner but can't locate it. He is famous for inventing the term cybernetics, which besides its technical and industrial uses has also been applied in systems theory and group dynamics.
Once upon a time there were bowlers.
Actually, bowling has persisted and I've even been there; just behind the times with the blogreports. And this after folks started inquiring and/or commenting about these posts in particular! (I guess I'm still not very audience-friendly.) :-/
Why what? Why bowl, when the most one can say about an evening's effort is, "that was an odd ball"?
Two weeks ago (!), Luscious bowled with a calf injury. No, not a baby cow, he twisted something in his lower leg playing basketball. His injury did not lead to the worst bowling of the evening, however. That honor fell to Dan, who was bolluxed, boogered, and otherwise convinced he should have stayed home to watch DVDs. "It is nice," he conceded, "to see Luscious suck." As it turned out, "only Steph" had a decent night, although Lava pulled off a right- and left-handed combo score of 161. (He does pay me to write nice things about him.)
Maja was prepping for her defense the next day (which she passed with roaring colors), Mafu and Angie dropped by for a quick hello, and the Hungarian (as he was introduced!?!) on the team rolled a couple of muffie games. There is one enigmatic scribble I can no longer decode:
What is my "x"?
I await the answer with suspence.
VPP and I had a lengthy discussion about the rash of vicious and hateful posters to the blog of the white man, Kevin Ray Underwood, who brutally murdered and violated a ten year old girl last week in Oklahoma (reported by CNN).
It led us into a conversation of the concept of valence, which is an element in group relations theory.
What launched us was the apparent data from the guy's blog that he was surrounded in his life by the kind of people now posting vitriolic comments to his blog. Perhaps, he acted on a surplus of the hatred around him that somehow built up in him beyond the point of his ability to suppress?
I have a hang over. It's the fault of those dang Nepalese! I didn't have that much wine; I think it was the apple tobacco. Or perhaps it was the time warp to 2063 B.S.? (No, that's not what you think, it's Bikram Sambat.) (Which may or may not be the same as the Vikram calendar, which describes the four eras of Hindi temporality.)
Supposedly the flavored tobacco smoked through a hookah is a traditional fixture among folks gathering just to chat. I smoked more than the last time (and I'm not a smoker). The truth is, I'm no longer in my twenties, or even early thirties! Can't party so hearty anymore. sigh I had to leave before the promised 4 am meatballs and music.
One of my students caught me out yesterday. He'd just announced he would miss class on Thursday because it was Passover, and I'd hesitated. I could fudge, and say I hesitated moreso because of the two additional students who immediately chimed in that they would also miss class, sensing a run on an easy excused absence. (Indeed, another student then announced, "If they're not coming, I'm not either!")
I caught and corrected myself, but there it was, the truth of a stereotype hanging out there for all to see. This young man, to all visible clues an African-American, is also Jewish. Duh! It's not like I don't know the fact that the largest percentage of the world's Jewish population is of a skin tone other than pale pinkish-white! Yet my personal demographic exposure, combined with common US mass media representations, set me up for a textbook case of momentary essentialization.
How embarrassing. This NPR broadcast on Blacks, the Jewish Faith and Hanukkah addresses the "misperception that black people are not Jewish."
I'm thinking I won't be in town for this conference
hosted by the Media Giraffe Project, but the wiki looks like it might develop into a useful resource.
My peers are more critical than me. I thought it was pretty good, but they lamented it's predictability and (hello?) the amount of violence.
I was intrigued by the relationship between a man who has reinvented himself and a woman who has to reconcile her attraction to this man with a past she abhors.
Otherwise, it was predictable. There were also several loose ends not pursued and/or left untied. "Half-assed," was the assessment of the clerk at Captain Video. Then they (my friends?!!) tried to blame me :-0 only because Munich was out, there would have been too much thinking involved with Good Night, And Good Luck, and Jarhead didn't grab their interest. Maybe they regret passing up the opportunity to watch Jesus Christ Superstar?
There was the colleague I saw this morning who didn't moderate the emphasis: "You look like you could use a cup of coffee."
The professor who took pains to express in several different ways what I "need to understand."
The lecture that included details about the despicable events at Duke over the weekend.
The cartoon drawn for me by a student mocking my emphasis on parsimony in writing. I forgot to write down the sentence reconstructed to correct a dangling modifier. :-( It referred to "festering trolls in the basement" and was a genuine collaborative effort, with the adjective, subject, and location (I think) all supplied by different individuals. More of this!
The idea for a SNL skit on a PR firm specializing in dissertation titles for graduate students.
Finally, there were blini. (Delicious!)
Hilarious! Thanks Viveca, for sending the link.
Looks like C-SPAN2 will air his keynote address at UMass' Communication in Crisis conference this Sunday at 1 pm EST on the program Book TV, and again at 11 pm EST.
Last week at bowling I set my personal best: 153, setting up a tie with Zeynep.
However, I couldn't bask in the glory too long because of this
and then its revision . . .
I'm not sure of which to be most afraid?
This story was shared by Matthew to the social justice listserv. The line that jumped out at me reads:
"After all, aren’t we holding, for many years now, conventions of corruption, violence and impunity in a society which has made forgetting the best tool to survive?"
So I joined up and get 'reminders' at various intervals regarding things I want to do. Today's reminder is "play more" - and I do do this a fair amount, but of course there are always spontaneous moments when it can be squeezed into the middle of other things. :-) I took a moment a look at one of the other 72 people who have also said they want to play more. mittenimraum's list includes two items which more than 3000 people want to do:
see the northern lights
kiss in the rain
Yea, sounds good to me! :-)
Not a pacifist, Hedges has spent 20 years as a war correspondent in theatres (not his term) in Central America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. He warns of the dangers of falling for the myths of glorification and neglecting the hard truth that everyone touched by violence suffers after effects. One of the most disturbing elements of his speech today at Holyoke Community College was his reminder that huge portions of the public were complicit with the Bush Administration's headlong rush. He told of being booed and nearly physically shoved off the stage at a college commencement speech in May of 2003.
I've looked at his book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, on a few different occasions. After hearing him speak I am convinced this is a necessary read.
On a personal note, as I'm wont to do, I was struck by the distinction Hedges drew between friendship and being comrades. This is quoted from prep materials provided in advance for the interpreters:
"Friends, as J. Glenn Gray points out in his book, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, are predetermined. Friendship takes pace between men and women who possess an intellectual and emotional affinity for each other. Many of us will admit that we never really had a friend, and even the most fortunate of us have very few. But comradeship, that ecstatic bliss that comes with belonging to the crowd in wartime, is within our reach. We can all have comrades."
News from Belarus, where (as Mark Miller ironically pointed out) democracy is actually being fought for: Belarusian Mass Media Online. Includes a link to Belarus indymedia but the English version doesn't seem to be operational today.
Posted on Sun, Apr. 02, 2006 by the Miami Herald
IMMIGRATION
Thousands across U.S. march over immigration
Continuing protests and marches across the nation are injecting the debate over immigration with passion and perspective.
Associated Press
The immigration debate continued to roll across the country Saturday. Residents in cities from Miami to New York to Contra Mesa, Calif., added their voices to the thousands who have spoken out against congressional attempts to reform immigration laws.
None of the protests drew crowds like the 500,000 people who marched in Los Angeles last weekend, but the sentiment was just as resolute.
