Black Friday Earns its Name

Yesterday, I heard and man and a woman arguing over whether the whole shopping on the day after Thanksgiving tradion was a scam. He said it was, she insisted, very hurt, that it wasn’t. Then I learned about stores opening at midnight and 4 am for ‘special sales’. The entire spectacle seemed obscene.

But then I read this, which pushes it from the merely vulgar to the truly awful. According to the NY Daily News:

“A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an “out-of-control” mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store’s front doors and trampled him, police said.

The Black Friday stampede plunged the Valley Stream outlet into chaos, knocking several employees to the ground and sending others scurrying atop vending machines to avoid the horde.

When the madness ended, 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour was dead and four shoppers, including a woman eight months pregnant, were injured.”

Consumerism 1, Humanity 0. I thought this economic crisis was supposed to be making us all more cautious spenders. No, we’re just more violently selfish in the pursuit of a good deal.

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In unrelated news, Claude Levi-Strauss turned 100. Levi-Strauss is one of the most important anthropologists of the 20th century and is particularly noteworthy for his pioneering use of structuralism in his field. I’m not going to write a lengthy review of his work, but I’d like to note how nice it is to see the way that France treats its great thinkers. For his 100th birthday, there were at least 25 different celebrations held. A television channel programmed a whole day of work by or inspired by him, and 100 top academics publicly read selections of his work along with comments on it, and President Sarkozy personally visited Levi-Strauss in his home.

Bad News/Good News/Best News

I came across this article today on Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2205223/

It details the history between Janet Napolitano and Joe Arpaio, and Napolitano does not come out looking very good. She has been extremely reluctant to criticize Sheriff Joe even for his worst excesses. That the head of Homeland Security would have had such an ally as Joe Arpaio casts serious doubts on the way she’ll handle our borders.

Napolitano is an example among many of the kind of person that Obama is surrounding himself with. What I mean is that these people are cautious, smart, politically ambitious, and really not very progressive at all. Frankly, when I see David Brooks lauding Obama’s choices across the board, it’s cause for concern. At least he didn’t pick Larry “women are genetically inferior at math and science” Summers.

There is good news though.  Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com projects Franken to win the recount by 27 votes. He admits a pretty high degree of variability in his model, but he’s got an excellent track record and correctly predicted the winner of every other Senate race and every state in Presidential election besides Missouri. I’m also optimistic about the Chambliss/Martin run-off. However, I have to admit that I’d be more excited to see a Franken victory than a Martin victory, if only because I think Saxby Chambliss has an excellent name and I like hearing it in the news.

Saxby Chambliss sounds like he should play point guard for Seton Hall, or run the numbers for some 1930s mafia, or maybe be a tough-nosed investigative reporter with a weakness for booze and dames.

And the best news: Penn State is going to the Rose Bowl.

3 Items

Several small notes. More serious thoughts to come later this weekend.

 

I was recently shown this link: http://blogoscoped.com/files/stripes.html

I think we can all agree that it’s pretty rad.

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I completed the first draft of my new book. It is a collection of short stories called ‘We Will Have Stronger Arms Now Than We Did Before’. I’m pretty excited about it although I know it needs some serious revision in parts.

If you want to volunteer to read it and give editorial advice, please let me know. Let me know by sending me an email though, not a comment here, because otherwise it will be embarrassing if/when nobody comments. 

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The Steelers and Penn State both won convincingly this week, although the Steelers punting was awful. We’re already on our third punter of the season and will likely have to pick up someone new this week. Everyone said that the Steelers took Sepulveda with too high of a pick, but he’s a huge asset when he’s healthy. Especially because we don’t have very good kick returners, having a first-rate punter is crucial for field position. Strangely enough, of all of the injuries that Pittsburgh’s struggled with this season, I think it might be Sepulveda’s that hurts the most. (apologies for the pun)

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Special Slavoj Zizek Edition

Slavoj Zizek, noted cultural critic/psychologist/philosopher/teller of vulgar jokes (and also one of my professors at EGS) has appeared on two very different websites that I read over the last two days. As there are only a limited number of websites that I read, this is unusual. The occurrence has prompted me to write the following post.

1) Mcsweeney’s, the popular independent press run by Dave Eggers, is having a very awesome sale this week. Most things are half-off. This is exciting for those of us who like to buy books but hate to spend money.

The news is not all good though. For some time now, I’ve noticed that their web content has become pretty boring and stale and at-best politely clever. Which leads me to Slavoj Zizek. Mcsweeney’s recently published a parody of Zizek discussing/semi-leading a workout video. I’m assuming this piece is a reference to his ‘Pervert’s Guide to Cinema’. Anyways, during the course of the parody, it becomes uncertain whether he is watching the exercise video or actually acting as an instructor. It is mildly amusing and I suspect might be funnier to people who haven’t actually seen him speak. A lot of the tics and phrasings are close to the real thing, but the content is kind of pointless. Overall, it is not a very accurate mimicry. But that is sort of beside the point.

Why would you do a parody of someone like Zizek discussing a pop-culture event? A huge portion of his work consists of discussing pop-culture events, and when he does it, it’s funnier and smarter and provides many more insights. Also, when he tells a joke, there is usually a long lead-in during which he pre-excuses himself for the crassness or lack of political correctness in the joke, tells you how much he loves the joke, why he loves the joke, and part of what the joke illustrates about ideology or Lacan or whatever his general topic is. In any case, I’m fairly certain that if they had just asked him, he would have done a real analysis of an exercise video and most likely it would have been genuinely funny. 

 

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2) By way of ‘brightstupidconfetti’, I came upon this article in the London Review of Books:

 http://www.lrb.co.uk/webonly/14/11/2008/zize01_.html

It’s a wide ranging (at times distractingly so) article discussing the implications of Barack Obama’s victory. It’s one of the more positive and hopeful election-related articles from any of the top-caliber leftist academics that I’ve seen. It also has a lot of depressing content about the corruption of the bank bailout and the role of resource exploitation and global capitalism in leading to famine and violence in poorer countries around the world. Zizek doesn’t think that the world is now on a great new path, but he makes the argument that Obama’s election proves wrong all of the hardened cynics that said a black man could never become president. He concludes that “nothing was decided with Obama’s victory but it widens our freedom and thereby the scope of our decisions. No matter what happens, it will remain a sign of hope in our otherwise dark times, a sign that the last word does not belong to realistic cynics, from the left or the right.”  

I think it is a nice essay and an important reminder of the path between cynicism and blind-trust that we need to try to follow.

A Note on Gertrude Stein and Some Publishing News

In the introduction to her Selected Writings, Gertrude Stein wrote that (I’m paraphrasing) she had decided not to return to the US from Paris until she had become a lion. I remember her specific use of the phrase “become a lion” and I think this is a wonderful phrase for the expression of literary ambition.

I realize that the lion as lit. figure does not originate with Gertrude Stein, but I’m currently reading her work and I think the notion of her writing as leonine is an interesting one. The lion is apparently a very masculine symbol. However, it is also a cat, and felines are typically coded feminine. I have been thinking today about how such a mixed symbol is well-suited to Stein’s work. There is a definitely an androgyne or at least gender-ambivalent quality to her output, and I believe that that is tied up somehow in the charm and strangeness of her writing.

This is not a well-developed thesis. I’m not sure I will develop it further, but I think it points to some interesting concerns about literary self-figuration and the complex gender signification of popular symbolism.

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Publishing News Preface: Unlike Gertrude Stein (and even though I admire her) I do not wish to be a lion. Or at least, it is not my ambition to become a lion. I’m not sure whether being one would be a good thing or not. At any rate, I don’t think literature has very many lions left, and they are an increasingly endangered species. I have to try to state my literary ambition in the form of an animal it might be one of those poison dart frogs. They are strange and lovely and powerful, but they aren’t massive or imposing or even particularly aggressive. But I don’t really know. I’m not even sure that trying to determine the extent or parameters of one’s ambition is a good thing. What is a good thing is that I have some new:

Publishing News:

I have a story (story?) up at Johnny America. It’s on the main page right now, but in the future will be available in the site’s archives. Anyways, the link is http://www.johnnyamerica.net.

The story is called ‘The Thing About Elephants’. I am not sure it is a story really. It’s a piece. It’s semi-narrative prose. What I mean is that there isn’t a story per se, but the prose works according to accretion of logic and makes gestures towards narrative. Anyways, I hope that people who read it will enjoy it.

Greenland and Football (not that they have anything to do with each other)

Greenland:

I used to only know that 1) Greenland was icier than Iceland and 2) It often appeared on maps as if it were much larger than it actually is because of the difficulty inherent in rendering a spherical body on a flat plane.

I recently learned that:

Greenland is almost entirely populated by native people, not Danes. It considers itself part of North America (not Europe) because it is technically on the North American continental shelf. It has astronomical suicide rates (50% of Greenlanders admit to seriously considering suicide). Many Greenlanders want independence from Denmark even though they already have autonomy and half of their government programs run on Danish subsidies. They are hoping that global warming will make it easier to extract their off-shore oil so they can become the middle-east of the north. thereby freeing them of dependence on Denmark.

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Football:

Today was a very odd football day.

The Steelers beat the Chargers 11-10. This is the first 11-10 score in the history of the NFL.

The Eagles tied the Bengals. It was the first NFL tie in 6 years.

And most importantly (this may be a few days old but I just came across it), Barack Obama has announced an excellent piece of policy regarding college football. As I’ve written about here and ranted at length about in the real world, the BCS system is unfair and insane and needs to be replaced with a playoff. Obama proposes an 8-team single-elimination playoff to replace the current BCS system. He was promised to “throw his weight around” on the issue because “it is the right thing to do.” Yes we can. Seriously, well done Mr. President.

Best Prose of the Year

Best Line of the Year about Michelle Obama:

“I touched her hand and she smelled like cherries.”

This was quoted from a second grader, according to the NY Times. It is one of the best pieces of prose I’ve come across in a long time. Seriously, the rhythm and weird logic of it is really fantastic.

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Anyways, I haven’t blogged in a while because of various reasons (travel, no internet, ill-health), but now it seems like I am finally in a more stable position and will be able to do this more regularly again.

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One last note on this short post: Penn State and Oregon State Rematch in the Rose Bowl? After PSU blew-out the Beavers in Happy Valley earlier this season, I more or less wrote off Oregon State for the season. Now they’re playing really really well and I actually think a rematch in Pasadena could be very entertaining. Of course, both teams still need to finish off the season with wins, and Penn State has a very good Michigan State team left to face, so I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. On the other hand, I’m trying to use this Rose Bowl speculation as a way of overcoming the absolute disaster at Iowa.

Externalities and Ecology. Also a New Website I Like

I was reading an article in the Nation in which I discovered this gem:

“A new study by the European Union found that deforestation costs far more every year than the financial crisis, because when forests disappear humans must pay for ecosystem services– storage of water, neutralization of carbon dioxide– that previously were free.”

 

This kind of thing is what economists talk about when they use the term ‘externalities’– the costs involved in production that are not taken on or paid for by the producer or consumer directly, but end up being covered by society as a whole. 

Alain Badiou says that the true technical name for what we call democracy should be ‘capitalist-parliamentarianism’. I think he’s close, but I would argue that the term ‘capitalist’ should be put into quotes to denote the fact that it is a system that doesn’t play by its own supposed rules and in which the public shoulders the massive hidden costs of the ‘development’ of the commons that leads to the accumulation and production of wealth. This is of course because the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism date to an era in which our understanding of natural resources thought them both inexhaustible and valueless as anything besides the materials for production. 

 

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Totally unrelated: there is a literature-news blog that I read called ‘html giant’ that today introduced me to the blog Bright Stupid Confetti (www.brightstupidconfetti.blogspot.com). I’m pretty into it. It features visual art, some random weird thoughts/pictures, and links to a lot of essays and fiction that make me feel smarter after reading them.

Barack Obama Story

 

A Barack Obama Story – New Story for my ‘Stories Involving Celebrities” series:

 

Once there was a president that everyone loved. When you said things like, “What big ears”, then your friends would say, “The better to hear the voice of the people with.”

Barack Obama liked to eat spaghetti with meat sauce and seasoned it more heavily than most people might. 

When there was a crisis, a noodle was hanging from his bottom lip and he wondered if it was vulgar to slurp it the rest of the way into his mouth. Would it be obscene to continue enjoying his meal during such a time? Would it be more dignified to bite down and let the half-noodle drop back into his bowl? Or, alternately, in a time of such misery, would it be even less forgivable to waste his food?

So the spaghetti hung, suspended in its mouth-ward motion, brushing against Barack Obama’s chin. For a moment, the only motion in the room was the slight swaying of the noodle and the slow dripping of red sauce from its end.

Conversation Overheard: Discussion of How He Celebrated Obama’s Victory

Conversation Overheard: Discussion of How He Celebrated Obama’s Victory

 

30ish commercial artist with trendy hat (male) to friend with tattoos (female): I drank Budweiser, which is America juice, and then I drank tequila. I’m not sure how that’s patriotic, but I’ll pretend it is.

 

What I didn’t do was interject and say, excuse me sir, but you’ve made a mistake. Budweiser is now owned by Belgians. Now, PBR, that’s American owned and union-made…

 

Maybe I would have made a friend.