Accommodatingly

Academic parochialism watch, vol. XXVI: this Monday I had a long conversation with a student (one of my senior thesis writers) about the changing job market for receptionists: they’re still in demand, but it’s not clear where they belong, or what sort of enterprise fits them best. We were talking about these sorts of receptionists, people who study reception: not until after she left did I remember that, to almost all Americans who recognize the term, “receptionist” would mean something else.

As some of you know, these are my favorite receptionists. And speaking of My Favorite… did you know Michael Grace from My Favorite had a new blog? There’s a new band, too, called Secret History, but it looks like they have yet to release anything… I’m looking forward to the EP (same name as the blog) called Desolation Town.

And speaking of indiepop reception history– I discovered this summer that Mary Wyer, half the songwriting duo from Even As We Speak, had a newer (not truly new) indiepop act called Her Name In Lights. They sound superb (and a lot like EAWS, with the same sweet voice and the same caustic undertones) on the Internets, but my attempts to order their record have so far been balked… developing…

I had the idea that I’d spend the morning writing letters of recommendation, and instead spent the morning cleaning out hundreds, yes, hundreds, of old emails, making sure I knew what recommendations I owe and for whom and when they are due. It’s much, much better than not knowing. I’m starting to think that John Freeman’s forthcoming book (click here for his take on Jarrell, then scroll down for his own book) will have something to say to me.

And speaking of people with something to say to me: Boston-based poet and critic Dan Pritchard reviews my critical book about adolescence.

Election euphoria still hasn’t worn off around here, I think: said euphoria hasn’t even been derailed by the repeated, and scary, realization that the economy is in the tank– and that the economic collapse explains the size (if not the fact) of the good guys’ win. Time for a letter to Pollio, while the hope lasts.

Quasi-regular posting here could well resume after the election; right now, whenever I look at a computer, I’m either preoccupied with things I actually have to do, or else twitchy and frightened. Yes, we’re ahead, we’re ahead, but stuff could happen! Some one-day samples are tighter than the previous day’s samples! Pennsylvania won’t actually go for Obama by double digits! Stuff could happen! Yikes!

More seriously I am worried about last-minute surprises, and about the robocalls which have been flooding key states; will robocall slime outweigh the vast advantage Obama has in enthusiasm and volunteers? I and many other Dems are having flashbacks to Kerry, who was “supposed to win” due to his slim lead in key states despite trailing by a couple of points in national polls: we remember that he almost did win (while losing the popular vote, as McCain surely will), but more than that we’re just having bad flashbacks.

I felt a lot better yesterday after, unable to do much else in any free moment but twitch and worry, I decided to make some phone calls for Obama. You can do it from home! (And you can do it pretty late at night, even if you live on the East Coast– you’ll be calling Montana or Nevada!)

Fortunately the only thing I must do professionally between now and the time that polls close on Tuesday is… write half a lecture about Robert Lowell. Which should be fun.

I’m in the current LRB on Frank Bidart, though you may need a subscriber log-in to read the piece on line.

Nathan is typing on the cardboard “computer” Jessie made for him. Cutest bedtime comment this week: “You know, kangaroos can be friends!”

Two poetry books I’m enjoying, by people I’d never heard of, books I might or might not write about in a couple of weeks, but books worth your time: Mark Irwin’s concisely lyrical Tall If,and Gary Copeland Lilley’s bluesy Alpha Zulu, which includes poems set on nuclear submarines.

Next Thursday (two days post-election) I’m reading in Ann Arbor. See you there?

Rae Armantrout, that is, reading today Tuesday Oct 7 in the Plimpton Room of the Barker Center, 12 Quincy St, on the Harvard campus, at 6pm, for free. (Warning: link above goes to PDF.)

Unforeseen, should-have-been-foreseen problem in deciding to write about 50 sonnets in less than a year: if you begin with the twenty that you know best, of whose shapes and implications you feel most sure, and put off the ones that require new research, your rate of progress will seem rapid at first, then slow greatly as you reach the last fifteen. By “you” I mean “I.”

It’s too bad the Milwaukee Brewers aren’t even more like Barack Obama. And it’s too bad I don’t do personal blogging more often, because then I would have linked to Jordan’s fun piece on that team before the Phillies eliminated them. On the other hand, now I get to link to his latest Slate piece, about probability, gambling and the financial crisis.

I was almost ready to stop worrying so much about the upcoming election, given the latest polls, till I read this. Now I guess I’ll worry for four more weeks. If you click the link, you can worry fruitlessly too!

Jessie says Nathan’s been reading the development books, just so that he knows what to do. Now more than ever that seems to be true. Downside: he’s stunningly contrarian on occasion– a two-and-a-half year old trying to get in, after a slightly late start, his full quota of one million times saying “No!” before he turns three. Upside: Monday night, after I lay in the dark with him for a couple of minutes (something we do after we finish reading stories and turn out the light) he said “I’m a different person. I’m not you!”

Last week Jordan accomplished a great deal of David Foster Wallace memorial blogging. You should go read it. I wasn’t quite as deeply affected as Jordan was by DFW’s sudden, grim passing, but I was very deeply affected by Infinite Jest when I read it, perhaps a year after it came out– I took it with me on trains, couldn’t put it down, found it not daunting but completely absorbing, and I think that if I reread it I’d still find it so. The intellectual games served a temperament; they were fun and sad and they got me to say “Life really might be like that.” What if it is?

When you’re done reading Jordan’s blog, but before you tear yourself away from the Internets, you should go look at Forrest Gander’s new writing on the Poetry Foundation blog– and at the rest of the fall team of bloggers there, too, especially Javier Huerta, whose verse I did not know at all but whose short piece about privilege will go on provoking talk for some time.

This week I don’t know which of the two desiderata I want more intensely, or more often: for Barack Obama to win this election, or simply for the election and its attendant news blitz to end, so that I can clear the mental real estate now devoted to such questions as whether cell phone-only voters skew polls (turns out they do) and what happens if there’s a 269-269 tie (if Obama has won the popular vote, Obama probably becomes President; if McCain has won the popular vote, it’s a national tangle that makes Florida 2000 look like a slice of pie).

If you too are way too close to the election, and if you have a couple of slices of time in which you can do something (other than write a check– checks are nice) to affect the outcome, and if you too would like Obama to win, you can use his state-by-state tool in order to learn where to go and what to do, even if you live in an uncontested state. If you live in Massachusetts and want to do something from home, you will almost certainly be asked to call New Hampshire.

Not political news– there’s enough of that elsewhere, and I have nothing to add to the best of its writers– but good news anyway: Elixir Press appears to be back in action. This was a good smallish literary press and magazine based in Minneapolis that became hard to contact right around the time they published Tracy Philpot’s stunningly good third book, which I reviewed a while ago. (They also published her cracklingly good second book. I don’t recommend her first.)

I knew the press had moved to Denver along with its chief operator, the poet Dana Curtis; I knew that it had continued to accept and publish books, but I wondered whether the books would become widely available… and today they sent me a big stack of their recent pubs, as if to say: we’re back! I look forward to reading the rest of them, and encourage you to have a look. It’s not avant-garde, it’s not “mainstream” (whatever that means), it’s usually energetic and serious, and it’s always work Dana genuinely likes.

Also in Denver: Monica, whom we haven’t seen for a while because she’s been busy trying to get Barack elected, tells Slate what it’s like on the convention floor. “Sweet trusting Coloradans… Enjoy your time in the tar pits!”

As for the fruitless distraction that ensures from my own, and others’, quasi-obsessive following and parsing the speeches, the polls, the pols, the windbags, the winds, and seeking reassurance therefrom, this letter to Josh Marshall nails my recent mood. I want our guy elected, and the Republicans gone. But I don’t really know how to bring it about. Maybe the people who are making plans around Obama do. I’m glad I’m not one of them. I would be pretty terrible at doing politics for a living, except maybe in a verrry specialized, writing-intensive capacity, and I’m glad it’s not my job.

Well of course I thought highly of today’s post at Beacon Broadside, about an education official in Texas who got fired for forwarding an email about a speaker who argues against creationists. But it’s not what I think that matters, in such matters: it’s what they think at Pharyngula, the very good and hugely popular science blog by P. Z. Myers, whose referral today broke records for Beacon’s blog traffic. Thanks, Pharyngula! (More science posts on the way?)

Also around the Web from one or both of us: I recommend more poetry books at Harriet, as do Ange and my other co-bloggers there; Mike puts online– I didn’t know it was up, really, officer!– an essay on Young Marble Giants I wrote about twelve years ago; and we attend our first Crimson women’s hoops game.

Also in music news: I still owe several people mix CDs– perhaps in the New Year, after I’m done with a talk about Stevens a review of Ashbery a troublesome piece about Philip K. Dick some other stuff? And track two on this great CD spent most of November in my head. It may even come back. Look, Mike reviews the same record! Small indiepop world.

Part of my job as Blog Editor over at Beacon Broadside is to find other blogs who care about the same things we do and let them know we exist. I try not to comment-spam blogs, and I much prefer, when an email address is available, to contact the blogger directly. I do this after researching their blog, reading their posts, and carefully assessing whether I think that they might actually be interested in our blog generally or a specific post.
In the course of doing this part of my work today, I searched for blogs linking to this piece in the Boston Globe yesterday on the history of torture in the US (since bloggers who linked to that might also be interested in this piece by Jennifer Harbury on BB). But it looks like nobody has linked to it yet, which is a shame, because it’s a fascinating, damning analysis of the history of torture, as perfected by democracies.

We think torture is mainly the province of dictators and juntas - the kind of thing that happens behind the iron doors of repressive regimes. In a democracy, with open courts and a free press, torture should be a relic. In the words of an American World War II poster, torture is “the method of the enemy.”

But a closer look at the modern history of torture suggests that exactly the opposite is true. Torture isn’t an alien force invading our democracy from the benighted realms of dictatorships. In fact, it is the democracies that have been the real innovators in 20th-century torture. Britain, France, and the United States were perfecting new forms of torture long before the CIA even existed. It might make Americans uncomfortable, but the modern repertoire of torture is mainly a democratic innovation.

Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College, goes on to outline both how torture techniques have been developed by democracies and how often those techniques have then been employed not only against foreign enemies but also on citizens at home.

If the spread of torture techniques suggests a blurry line between “us” and “them,” it also teaches that there’s no real boundary between “there” and “here.” It would be ignoring history to assume that what happens in an American-run prison in Iraq will stay in Iraq. Soldiers who learn torture techniques abroad get jobs as police when they return, and the new developments in torture you read about today could yet be employed in a neighborhood near you.

In Chicago, in the decade after Vietnam, the use of magnetos and other clean tortures left a disaster: At least 11 men were sentenced to death and many others given long-term prison sentences based on confessions extracted by torture, and in 2003, Governor George Ryan of Illinois commuted the death sentences of all 167 death row inmates. Earlier this month the City of Chicago agreed to pay nearly $20 million to settle lawsuits filed by four former death row inmates who claimed they were tortured and wrongly convicted.

So, even if you can’t muster enough outrage to care about us attaching electrodes to the bodies of prisoners of war, in defiance of international treaties and respect for human decency, bear in mind that soldiers interrogating prisoners in Abu Ghraib or at Guantanamo Bay or other, lesser-known prisons throughout the world, they will come home someday. And just pray to god that they don’t become your local sheriff.

Just a reminder: Jessie continues to post, get cool authors to post, and moderate the comments at Beacon Broadside, which has new content on most weekdays and comment streams ready for action at all times. Right now it’s veterans week, with a post today on the troubles our women and men in uniform face once they come home.

It’s also Jewish Book Month: the first of a few projected JBM postings has Jerusalem Syndrome blogger, editor and rabbinical candidate Danya Ruttenberg recommending David Grossman’s study of Samson, a book I’m now convinced I ought to read.

In the national news today, a fire rages on one coast and a drought on the other.

In California, the current administration, cowed by the public relations (and human) disaster that was Katrina, seem to be responding to the wildfires quickly. But in an echo of the analysis that followed the hurricane and flood in New Orleans, the Natural Resources Defense Council points out that the Bush administration has gutted programs that could have mitigated the impact of the current disaster.

The current situation in California also echoes Katrina in the mind-boggling number of environmental refugees created by the fires. Chris Carrel at HyleBlog relates a personal story:

Monday, around noon, I tried calling my uncle, who lives in Escondido, just outside San Diego. He and my Aunt were OK. They’d been evacuated the previous night. At the time I called they were stuck in a massive traffic jam of hundreds of thousands of people heading north, away from the fires. They were trying to find a place to stay the night. They had no idea what had become of their home.

And just how bad are things in Atlanta, where they’ve been experiencing “the state’s worst drought in almost a century”?

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates Atlanta’s reservoir Lake Lanier may run out of clean water in 110 days. The area has received 25 inches (64 centimeters) of rain this year, less than half the 50 inches it usually gets, according to the National Weather Service. Parts of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee have similar drought conditions. [Link]

While the governor of Georgia has been busy blaming endangered species act restrictions for the drought there, John Laumer at Treehugger reminds him that power plants and industry need water, too. And so, apparently, do the lawns and fountains of Atlanta residents, enough so that homeowners have resorted to cheating the system to beat water bans. Perhaps rather than resulting to subterfuge, they should try to collect some gray water.

NASCAR needs water, too, for its race at Atlanta Motor Speedway this weekend, but not as much as usual, since the teams will forego washing their rigs and haulers when they get there. Add that to their recent efforts to encourage recycling, and the sport almost seems green! Now, if it weren’t for all that pesky, leaded gasoline they consume…

Take a look– this time you should be able to see it!– at Jessie’s cool new project (link fixed), which has now, really, gone live.