Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

You can contact me at ivan812 AT gmail.com

Tenure Bleak House

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A poignant tale about a comp lit professor denied tenure in 1976 and still fighting it:

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i08/08a00104.htm

From the issue dated October 17, 2008

The Tenure Lawsuit of a Lifetime

By ERIC KELDERMAN

Joseph M. Hayse’s three-decade quest for tenure is littered with bodies. It has outlived the careers of most of the people involved — and several of the people themselves.

In 1979, Mr. Hayse filed a lawsuit against the University of Kentucky that has turned into a legal Ping-Pong match anecdotally described as the longest-running court battle in the Bluegrass State, and perhaps the lengthiest tenure dispute in the country.

On paper, at least, Mr. Hayse, 71, has won favorable court rulings from the state’s circuit, appeals, and supreme courts. But he has not won tenure, and his suit lingers on. So does his anger at the university.

“I just hate to let them off the hook,” says Mr. Hayse, who retired in 1999 after nearly 21 years in a state-government job….

Mr. Hayse, so far, is winning the war of attrition. The dean who was found to have improperly denied Mr. Hayse’s tenure applications died more than a dozen years ago, two of the university’s general counsels have succumbed during the long-running dispute, and the university’s president at the time of the original suit is now deceased. Two other presidents have also come and gone: Both are retired…

Can’t help but think of Dickens’s Miss Flite waiting to release her birds on the day of judgment.

Catchiest Album of All Time?

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Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals may be the catchiest workout/dance album of all time.  It’s almost an unfair contest, in relation to normal music, since the GT guy just steals the catchiest hooks from pop music of the last few decades and (brilliantly) splices and sutures them together so it all functions as an apotheosis of the form of the mixtape.  I liked the last album but found it comparatively resistible compared to this one, which is unceasingly fun, smart and hooky.  When I put it on, it had C&I shaking their booties on the dance living-room floor within seconds, but some of the lyrics are not so appropriate for the Pre-K set so I had to take it off.

Each track contains a dozen or more samples — some of my favorite mashups include:

Soulja Boy “Crank That” + AC/DC “Thunderstruck” + Journey “Faithfully”

Pink “U and UR Hand” + Underworld “Born Slippy” + the Cure “In Between Days” + Thin Lizzy “Jailbreak”

R. Kelly “I’m a Flirt” + Fleetwood Mac “Gypsy” + M.I.A “Boyz” + Rock Ross “Hustlin” + David Bowie “Rebel Rebel”

Tag Team “Whoomp! (There it Is)” + Big Country “In a Big Country” + the Velvet Underground “Sunday Morning” + the Cardigans “Lovefool” + Edgar Winter Band “Free Ride” + Timbaland “The Way I Are”

Yo La Tengo “Autumn Sweater” + Metallica “One” + Carpenters “Superstar” + Lil Mama “Lip Gloss”

There’s a particular wit produced by the combination/integration of some of the whitest music of all time (e.g. the Velvet Underground, the Cardigans, Yo La Tengo, the Carpenters, Journey, etc.) with recent hip-hop.  [There’s an implicit joke made about this, I think, in the Procol Harum “Whiter Shade of Pale” + Blackstreet “No Diggity” mix.]  I was listening to it on the elliptical machine yesterday morning, surrounded by sloowly exercising retirees while watching Sanford and Son without sound on the Y television, which added an extra frisson of je ne sais quoi.  (The plot had something to do with Redd Foxx bringing home a bunch of seemingly homeless men who grabbed sandwiches from the kitchen table — did not really understand what was going on but was impressed by the grittiness.)

You can get the album here on emusic.  (Email me if you’d like an “invitation” to try Emusic which gets both you and me 50 free downloads, or I guess I only get them if you stick with it for more than a month.) I think it’s also free on the Illegal Art webpage.

Who looks more Presidential?

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I had noticed this moment during the broadcast, but had not quite realized how very nuts McCain looked.  (As George who sent me this put it, still photography can be so cruel.)

Also, now that I have a post on the debate going, can I just say that if you’re a Presidential candidate trying to nail down the soccer/hockey/whatever mom vote, “women’s health” is probably not the best phrase to put in sarcastic SCARE QUOTES.  Really could not believe he did that — one of those mask-slipping moments.

Whether McCain Deserves Blame for the Meltdown

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Matt Taibbi and Byron York Butt Heads Over Whether McCain Deserves Blame for the Wall Street Meltdown

This is hilarious and great:

M.T.: I’m saying that you’re talking about individual homeowners defaulting. But these massive companies aren’t going under because of individual homeowner defaults. They’re going under because of the myriad derivatives trades that go on in connection with each piece of debt, whether it be a homeowner loan or a corporate bond. I’m still waiting to hear what your idea is of how these trades work. I’m guessing you’ve never even heard of them.

I mean really. You honestly think a company like AIG tanks because a bunch of minorities couldn’t pay off their mortgages? …Tick tick tick. Hilarious sitting here while you frantically search the Internet to learn about the cause of the financial crisis — in the middle of a live chat interview.

B.Y.: Look, you can keep trying to make this a specifically partisan and specifically Gramm-McCain thing, but it simply isn’t. We’ve gone on for fifteen minutes longer than scheduled, and that’s enough. Thanks.

M.T.: Thanks. Note, folks, that the esteemed representative of the New Republic has no idea what the hell a credit default swap is. But he sure knows what a minority homeowner looks like.

B.Y.: It’s National Review.

I now ♥ Matt Taibbi, who I think went to high school with Sarah — gotta read his book The Great Derangement.

The Little Kitten, Baby Mouse, & Baby Snake

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Iris came home with another doozy of a story.

Once upon a time there was a little kitten.  And he found a baby mouse.  And the mouse said, “I live in a farm.  And they make fun of me because they think my body is very small and I’m so small that I can climb up on them.  But I heard them whispering that they’re making a plan.  To make a fire because they think that if they made a fire they would think that I would think that it would be interesting to look up at closer.  And then they think that I would fall into the fire and die.  But I won’t go near it because then I would die but I don’t want to die.  That’s the whole thing I went out the farm.”  And the kitten said, “Then I can help you because I am very strong and scary.  Because I can arch my back and then they might run away.  And if that doesn’t work I could put my claws out and they would probably run away.”  And then the kitten said, “I have an even better idea.  I will put my claws out and arch my back at the same time.”  The end.

Celie’s is much more cheerful and less complicated this time:

One day a little snake went on a trip.  And he found another baby snake.  And the other little baby snake said, “I’m lost and I can’t find my house.  Can you help me?”  “Yes, I can.”  So he took she to her home and they had dinner and breakfast together.  And then they went on a little bike ride.  And then they went to the palace.  And then they went on a trip to the moon.  And then they went to the pet store to get a little puppy.  And then the first little snake said, “I’m bored.  I want to go to my friend bear’s house.  Come on!”  And they went there and bear was there and they had lots of candy.  The end.

The common denominator here is, I guess, the twin theme of companionship and friendship.  For Celie it’s pure fun: sleep-overs, candy, and the care-taking of pets; for Iris it’s banding together in the face of peer bullying, mockery & violence.  But baby animals can protect themselves and their friends by acting bigger than they really are.  If you put your claws out and arch your back, people might think you’re strong and scary even if you’re just a little kitten.  (This is definitely true of Pot Luck.)

Bon Iver “The Wolves (Act I & II)”

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I initially resisted this guy — he came to town a while ago and I decided not to go because he struck me as a bit too affected in the Devendra Banhart mode: solo folkie strumming acoustic guitar, but “weird” in ways that seemed predictable. But the album grew on me, especially this song. I guess the deal is that the record was recorded while he spent the winter in his father’s cabin in Northern Wisconsin, where there may actually be some wolves around (? coyotes for sure), getting over a breakup. Think an Upper-Midwestern Nick Drake, maybe. This song is pretty intense and haunting, especially when the falsetto vocals start to tweak like Justin Timberlake and the percussion loops pile up. “Don’t bother me, don’t bother me” seems an appropriate refrain under the circumstances. I also like “Stacks” a lot.

Kudos to Paul Krugman

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I was psyched to learn that Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize.  Reading his NY Times columns, it’s sometimes been easy to forget that he’s not just a pundit/commentator but a world-class economist.  He must have a swelled head now.  He and Al Gore can have private little “I Won a Nobel Prize on the Side” parties.

I recently went back and, to help my mother win an argument with a friend who denied that Krugman had correctly predicted the financial mess, pulled together some especially prescient columns from the last six years:

Aug 2002 — discussing our housing bubble

March 2003 — who lost the US budget

May 2003 — the lunatics are in charge of the asylum — our fiscal train wreck

May 2004 – our looming oil crisis

May 2005 — our housing bubble

From May 27, 2003:

How can this be happening? Most people, even most liberals, are complacent. They don’t realize how dire the fiscal outlook really is, and they …imagine that the Bush administration, like the Reagan administration, will modify our system only at the edges, that it won’t destroy the social safety net built up over the past 70 years.

But the people now running America aren’t conservatives: they’re radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need…. [W]hen will the public wake up?

Canvassing for Obama again

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I went canvassing with our friend Steve on Sunday afternoon.  About half of the names on our list were in this huge, bleak development of apartment units southwest of town.  A lot of “Not Homes” although sometimes we could hear someone there, and one “Refused” (a guy who slammed the door in our face).  But there were two gratifying encounters.  One was a self-described 33 year old mother of three who has never voted before and is gung-ho for Obama (although is also planning to vote for our incumbent Republican governor Mitch Daniels — there’s a lot of this, apparently).  She was really fired up and told us about how she convinced her mother that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to vote for another rich Republican born with a silver spoon in his mouth.  “Obama was born with nothing, so he knows what that’s like.”  She was happy to learn about early voting, so we felt we’d accomplished something, albeit minor (the Obama people are very eager to get people to vote early in order to reduce lines on Nov. 4).

The other memorable one was deep into the depressing complex.  This shirtless dude entirely covered with tattoos and with peeling skin on his back answered the door and got his wife, also extensively tattood in what seemed an especially unsystematic/piecemeal way.  She said she’d never voted before but had registered this time, and is going to vote for Obama.  She said she was really glad we’d come by, because she didn’t know where or how to vote.  It came out that she had no idea what Democrat or Republican means, basically did not have any sense of what a political party is.  I got the feeling that she was worried that the process of trying to vote might be somehow embarrassing or difficult (I actually wish we’d explained the process in more detail).  Steve did a great job of trying to explain the party system concisely and sort of nudging her towards voting the Democratic ticket, although she too seemed inclined to vote for My Man Mitch (she had no sense that there’d be anything strange in doing so).  We left her with a handful of campaign leaflets.  Steve mentioned afterwards that she’d made a reference, which I’d missed, about “not caring what religion” Obama is, so she’d clearly gotten some of the emails claiming he’s a Muslim.

We got canvassed the other day, and I had this visceral sense of how that experience of chatting with a stranger who’s come to your door about the election does make it seem that much more concrete and not in a realm of media abstraction, even for someone like me who is thinking and talking about it all the time.

Here’s one way to do some canvassing, start here at the Obama/Biden site.

Perpetual Garage Sales in Elkhart, Indiana

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Sad NY Times article about hard times in Elkhart, Indiana:

To understand just how grim things have gotten in this northern Indiana town, consider a new law passed last month by the City Council that limits residents to one garage sale a month.

It seems the perpetual garage sales — which for scores of people in this town are a sole source of income, and for others the only source of clothing — were annoying some residents. The restrictions will make the financial pinch that much tighter.

“I have no other option,” said Todd Baker, 34, who lost his factory job in July right before his wife gave birth to their third child. Friday was his last permissible day to sell old children’s clothing, muffin tins, a fake white Christmas tree, stereo speakers and dozens of household doodads out of his garage…

Elkhart, near the Michigan border in an area known as Michiana, is the white-hot center of the meltdown of the American economy. Its main industries, the manufacturing of recreational vehicles and motor homes, have fallen apart over the last year because of high gasoline prices. That has taken down ancillary businesses like R.V. parts suppliers and storage warehouses.

The jobless rate in Elkhart has increased more than in any metropolitan area in the country; it rose over 4.8 percentage points from August 2007 to August 2008.

This obviously shows why/how Indiana is in play for Obama.  There are probably a lot of desperate people in Elkhart and elsewhere in the state whose natural instincts would, in normal circumstances, lead them without question to the white P.O.W. air force fighter pilot over the black Hawiian/Kenyan former Chicago community organizer… but these aren’t ordinary times.

I taught Dickens’ Hard Times last week and kept thinking about resonances between the novel and our moment.  This article made me think about the role of entertainment and “amusement” (to use Dickens’s term) in our economy.  Hard Times puts a traveling circus at the heart of its imagery as a symbol of the need for imagination, play, and entertainment in everyday life.  Part of what I found sad about this article is the way the fate of this town has been linked to the manufacture of Recreational Vehicles.  Of course the 7 m.p.g. R/V is as good a symbol as any of the arrogant recklessness of the U.S. over the past several decades in terms of energy use.  But if you can bracket that, you can also see the R/V as an embodiment of American optimism and the middle-class promise of a retirement filled with travel and modest adventure/exploration.  That promise is now basically lost in such a dramatic way that people aren’t simply selling their R/Vs at bargain-basement rates, but the whole industry is disappearing into an economic black hole of “perpetual garage sales.”

Maybe that’s a subject for a different post, but until a year ago we lived in a slightly more modest neighborhood in town where there was a bit of the perpetual garage sale phenomenon.  For a while our neighbor across the street, a U.S. mailwoman we were friends with, had one every weekend — or she let some friend or cousin or something who lived in the country outside of town use her driveway for one.  It drove me a little crazy, this weekly sale with something of the quality of a Dollar Store — a lot of random cheap stuff (“muffin tins, a fake white Christmas tree,” etc.) some of it presumably purchased to sell here.  It’s a big class divide: the yard sale as a fun, very occasional family ritual, on the one hand — a chance for the kids to sell some of their old toys and clear out the basement — and on the other, as a serious opportunity to eke out an additional $100 or whatever for the week.

Going canvassing again this afternoon…

Reflections on World Music

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Let’s face it, World Music is a dubious category that can have an annoying/patronizing side: oh, those festive native costumes and delicious exotic polyrhythms.  At its worst, World Music can be dull global pop that would seem completely middle-of-the-road minus the foreign language/accent and colorful outfits.  Our town has this annual Fall world music festival that includes the potentially irritating sight of swarms of aging white Midwestern yuppies/new-agey types dancing badly to imported exotics playing African drums.

And yet…. in fact and notwithstanding the built-in ironies and problems, I love the Lotus Festival.  You pay your $33 and get to wander in and out of eight different venues all within a few blocks of one another (churches, night clubs, tents); we usually end up catching 6 or 7 acts in the four hours or so.  It almost always seems to be a gorgeous evening and the music tends to be about 50% interesting and worth checking out, 25% a bit disappointing, and 25% completely great.  The problem with the cynical take on World Music is that it kind of presumes as a norm the extreme homogeneity of pop music.  So in fact, what from one perspective can seem like exoticizing can also be understood just as a different take on modern popular music that does not give priority to the one tiny slice of traditions that we normally experience (e.g. the Western rock/pop mode).  My fond memories of Lotus festivals in the past include some truly amazing and unexpected music like the “Tuvan throat singing punk rock” of Yat-Kha, who did a Black Sabbath cover; the Gangbe Brass Band from Benin — it seems there’s been more than one really awesome brass band over the years; the Boban Markovic Orchestra from Serbia; the Peruvian chanteuse Susana Baca; the Be Good Tanyas.

So, this year these were my favorites:

Etran Finatawa from Niger, who combine “Wodaabe chants,” “a blend of choral polyphony and high tenor solos,” with a kind of blues-derived electric guitar drone.  It’s a lot like the great Tinariwen (not quite as great: if you want to try one semi-recent World Music album, check out their Aman Iman).  They wear “traditional long embroidered tunics, leather hose and turbans with ostrich feathers” and “adorn their faces with yellow spots and stripes,” so yes, the scene in the tent with the 95% white audience could be seen as having a diversity sideshow aspect, but the music was mesmerizing, the costumes looked great against the dimming blue sky behind the stage, and why should musicians have to wear jeans?  (I did imagine to myself these guys before the show saying, “Time to get folkloric, guys, where’d you put the can of yellow paint?”)

Pistolera, three women with tattoos and one guy, they seemed very Austin but I guess are from Brooklyn, sort of a fusion of trad Mexican ranchera music (with accordian) with a kind of indie rock sensibility.  They did a cover of Bob Marley’s “War” (“Guerra”).  Lots of fun.

Reelroad, “Russian post-folk.”  This was our fave actually, maybe partly because seeing them in a little club (rather than one of the big outdoor tents) felt more intimate.  They play “folk songs from northern and central Russia and Siberia” with a kind of punkish approach and style.  Eight people on the stage at times, four men and four women, the women cute, the men all slightly grouchy-seeming with some significant facial hair, they obviously were having a blast and reminded me a bit of a Siberian Pogues.  Towards the end these frat boys and sorority gals starting coming in the club for (it became clear) a dance party scheduled after Reelroad.  The girls were all wearing variations of the same Britney Spears skimpy dress; our friend Leah remarked “I think those boys are gonna get lucky tonight.”  They were sort of milling around, shouting and dancing in front in what I assumed was an ironic or mocking way, the girls teetering on their heels, although we got the feeling that some of them couldn’t help but actually get into it.  The dudes had a slight edge of menace to them, you felt that it wouldn’t take much to provoke them to knock some tables over or something.

Caught a few other bands too.  I was disappointed by Marta Gomez who I guess I’d hoped would be like Susan Baca or something but was, for my liking, too tasteful and soft-jazz in approach.  The setting of the big bland convention hall probably did not benefit her.  Vieux Farka Toure, son of the great Ali Farka, was pretty good but had a slightly wanky guitar-blues element.

The next day Sarah took the girls to the afternoon free concert in the park, but I was busy at my all-day departmental retreat in a big convention room lined, like Kurtz’s cabin, with human skulls (replicas I think; it’s an archaeology institute).