Facebook International Politics

Via. Excellent internet snark from the Maila Times:

Islamabad, Pakistan: A diplomatic scandal erupted online yesterday when the Foreign Office of Pakistan found out that China, Pakistan’s so called “BFF,” de-friended Pakistan on Facebook. Initially, Pakistan thought that it was just an error, but senior ISI officials, after logging into Facebook through another account, confirmed that China had indeed removed Pakistan as a friend on Facebook.

Reports indicate that China is upset at Pakistan because they have started to become jealous of Pakistan over recent wall posts written by US diplomats on Pakistan’s wall. There were also questionable and scandalous photographs of Pakistani diplomats and US officials flirting in a night of debauchery in a local Chinese restaurant, which may have offended China.

Tensions have recently been high with the “Friends of Pakistan” group, as several of them have started to put Pakistan on limited profile and have ignored reciprocal ‘poke’ requests by Pakistan. Saudi Arabia complained a few days ago that Pakistan just ‘likes’ everything that the USA posts. The Saudi Foreign Minister has characterized Pakistan’s Facebook antics as “whorish,” and thinks that Pakistan is too much of a stalker.

3354 Words

This has not been the most productive week. Only 315 new words were written towards the 10k goal. However, the very coolest thing that happened this week was being invited to contribute an open letter to Barack Obama for an online journal edited by Amitava Kumar. This marks the first time my blog pseudonym has been invited to contribute to an academic publication. I love blogging.

Here's this weeks wordle pic of the new project so far.

Rejecting Rejection

By way of Amitava Kumar from the Kenyon Review. This is brilliant!

One of the very best: a rejection note sent by the writer Stefan Merken to an editor who had rejected one of his short stories. “Please forgive me for not accepting your rejection letter,” wrote Merken. “At this time I cannot accept a rejection of my short story. I accept more than 99 percent of the rejections I receive. Many I don’t agree with, but I realize that accepting a piece of fiction for publication is a very subjective judgment call. My acceptance of your rejection letter is also a subjective process and therefore I am returning your letter to you. I did read your letter. I read every letter I receive. Your letter was well-written, but due to time constraints from my own writing schedule, I am unable to make editorial comments. I do make mistakes. Don’t you, as an editor, be disheartened by this role reversal. The road of publishing is long and tedious. You need successful publications and I need for successful publications to print my stories. I will expect to see my story in your next publication. Good luck in the future.”

Excellent News!

Baudrillard's Bastard has favored Lumpenprofessoriat with the coveted, viral E for Excellent award for my provocative blogging. I am touched. Truly. Thank you. Given the source, I will display my E with pride.

I get to pass on the award now and I'll follow Ortho's example and select four, rather than the original ten, excellent blogs that I read and enjoy.

1. Limited, Inc. who is still the smartest man I know.
2. Amitava Kumar who's writings I've been a fan of long before there were blogs.
3. LesobProf for sanity and clarity.
4. Citizen of Somewhere Else for managing to post on both Hawthorne and anime.

Writ Large

From darkmatter via Amitava Kumar:

The interior and exterior space of the writer is blown up in Giancarlo Neri’s 30ft table and chair made from six tons of steel, plated with wood and painted brown. Placed deliberately in Hampstead Heath (London, UK) in 2005, an area with a historical concentration of canonized writers (Keats, Freud, Marx, to name a few). As one moves around the elongated table legs and looks up from under the table, the weight of the world as it is carried by the labour of writers, overwhelms, tires and leaves one wondering. In the writing of the literary histories of this landscape we know that the processes of legitimation and memorialisation have sliced out particular writers who have taken in the air of the heath and spoken out to the global currents of the landscape.

Only a five minute walk away from the sculpture, is located the house where C.L.R. James and George Lamming lived during the 1950s. The footprints of these Caribbean diasporic writers, as well as the scores of other theorists, musicians, students and writers from the colonies which have lived and written in the area are not part of the social imagination of what has been hailed as a specific literary corner of the world. The guidebooks of local histories are not full of the concerns of C.L.R. James as he sat at his desk on 70 Parliament Hill writing about racism and revolt, for instance. Neither does the house have a blue plaque at the front of it.

Mass Depression

Here is a very nice passage from Vivian Gornick's "At the University: Little Murders of the Soul" posted by Amitava Kumar. It ties in nicely with some previous speculations I posted on academia as a culture of conflict. Concerning the professors inhabiting an English Department she visits, Gornick writes:

I soon discovered that each of them held the place they found themselves in at a discount. One and all thought they belonged somewhere better. The atmosphere reeked of brooding courtesies and subterranean tensions. I did not for a long time understand exactly what it was I was looking at. I had never before encountered mass depression.

I like the term "mass depression." It seems to capture the dispirited feeling one so often encounters at committee meetings, conferences and other venues where academics congregate. I think that cases of mass depression like the one described by Gornick are extremely common in academia. The solution to this malady that is usually imagined, though, is an individual one. It consists of moving on to a better department and a better institution where one's talents will be appreciated and where the mass depression of "brooding courtesies and subterranean tensions" do not hold sway. This grass-is-greener solution doesn't seem a likely one to me. Aside from the real difficulties in job mobility, the problems in the academy are structural, not just personal. There is little reason to think that as one moves into more and more competitive academic environments that the tensions will lessen -- this is something each of us should have learned simply from watching the various dysfunctional relationships between the faculty on our own dissertation committees play themselves out.

Changing the system from the current one of ever escalating competition and conflict over publications, teaching loads, and service obligations to one where our work loads are predictable and tenure, raises, and promotions are also predictable outcomes that can be looked forward to, rather than battles that have to be fought would help create the conditions for ending this mass depression. Collective bargaining could replace the multitude of individual labor disputes now taking place on a case by case basis in a predictable cycle that moves from open and bitter hostilities to "subterranean tensions" and back again in a boring and endless repetition of the same.