#McConnelling

The best I found of this wonderful meme, followed by my own more modest contribution.

From Seuss To Zizek

I have been tagged by Professor Zero to join in the 25 writers meme "in which you name 25 writers who have influenced you. These are not necessarily your favorite writers or those you most admire, but writers who have influenced you. Then you tag 25 people." I will tag the first 25 volunteers.

I'm not sure what sort of influence was originally intended by this meme, but since I don't self-identify as a writer I will have to construe the influence more broadly. I also find that many on my list, while certainly influential, aren't primarily admired for the beauty of their prose. I was going to do a list in no particular order, but I find that my list does have an order after all. It is in chronological order, starting with those writers that influenced me first. Here goes:

1. Dr. Seuss
2. P. D. Eastman
3. E. B. White
4. Roald Dahl
5. Maurice Sendak
6. E. E. 'Doc' Smith
7. Isaac Asimov
8. Ray Bradbury
9. J. R. R. Tolkien
10. Lewis Carroll
11. Ursula K. LeGuin
    
12. Joseph Heller
13. Friedrich Nietzsche
    
14. Ludwig Wiggenstein
15. Martin Heidegger
16. Jacques Derrida
17. Karl Marx
18. Sigmund Freud
19. Herbert Marcuse
20. bell hooks
21. Judith Butler
    
22. Luce Irigaray
23. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
24. Trinh T. Minh-ha
25. Slavoj Zizek

Songs for the Next Eight Years

Limited, Inc. sent a new meme my way: "10 Songs to scare away the evil spirits of the past eight years, and welcome the new spirits of the next eight." I love this meme. Anyone else want to play along? Here's my playlist:

Get Happy (Judy Garland's version)
This Land Is Your Land (Woody Gutherie version not owned by HBO)
Bourgeois Blues (a song about DC which is now no longer true)
The Great Leap Forward (Billy Bragg)
Dancing In The Streets (Martha & the Vandellas)
What a Wonderful World (The Ramones' version)
Ain't Gonna Study War No More (Sister Rosetta Tharpe)
Exaltation (Matisyahu)
Black, Brown and White (inspired by Joseph Lowery's benediction)
Wang Dang Doodle (Koko Taylor)

And the Winner Is ...

... LumpenProf! Dr. Curmudgeon has kindly bestowed the coveted blogger Inspiration Award on yours truly. I am deeply touched. It is heartening to know there are people who can find inspiration in the writings of a bitter and disaffected academic. Or, perhaps, I only inspire curmudgeons. Either way, I am truly honored.

I find the idea of viral awards to be oddly subversive. An award that is propagated like a ponzi scheme seems to undercut the scarcity which gives most awards their value. Blog awards seem to operate by a different logic and gain value as more members of the community come to share in them. So I will happily pass along this award to others who have inspired this cynical and pessimistic blogger. With deepest apologies, my winners are:

1. What the hell is wrong with you for inspiring me to write by hosting InaDWriMo.
2. Poet's Musings because I find it inspiring that there are poets still.
3. Abject Learning because it inspires me to learn that sometimes my luddite tendencies are actually cutting-edge.
4. What in the hell... for his inspiring sub-zero activism.
5. Limited, Inc. for inspirations too numerous to mention.
6. Baudrillard's Bastard for inspiring books and music.
   
7. Academic Cog who inspires me to care more about my teaching.
   

Finally, here are the rules as handed down with the award:

• Please put the logo of the award (above) on your blog if you can make it work with your format.
• Link to the person from whom you received the award.
• Nominate 7 or more blogs.
• Put the links of those blogs on your blog.
• Leave a message on their blogs to tell them.

Meme: Passion Quilt

Read More Marx!

Philosopher's Playground tapped me for this quick and easy blog meme:

Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.

Give your picture a short title.

Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt."

Link back to this blog entry.

Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

I've been looking for an excuse to post this picture. It's from Hugo Gellert's 1934 Marx' 'Capital' in Lithographs – an early graphic novel retelling of Capital, Volume I through Art Deco prints – a marvelous artifact. Perhaps one day I'll break down and have this picture done as a tattoo.

By far the most important public service I do for my students is to make them read Capital, Volume I. I've come to find that whatever else they may be studying or thinking about, it is helped along by a liberal dose of Marx. And, evidently, some of that passion seeps into my lectures.

Now I get to inflict this meme on five unsuspecting victims, so I will tap:

1. The Doctor Isn't
2. Rough Theory
3. Professor Zero
4. Citizen of Somewhere Else (again)
   
5. A Gentleman's C (just to see what happens)

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.

Meme Chain

Excellent! As I prowl around blogs searching for something to post, I see that Baudrillard's Bastard has tapped me for blog meme. That will make today's post much easier.

The rules:

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

1. What was I doing 10 years ago?

I was unemployed and filing for unemployment insurance. This was following a dispute with a department chair over a one-year position for which adjuncts were not being considered since the department "couldn't afford" to replace us. omfg.

2. What are 5 things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order):

Vote! Grade. Deal with Emails. Write a recommendation letter. Blog. (At least two of these will get done today.)

3. Snacks I enjoy:

edamame, chocolate covered espresso beans, krispy kremes (damn it).

4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Ha ha ha ha! Good one.

5. Three of my bad habits:

playing the banjo, procrastinating, answering blog memes.

6. Five places I have lived:

Texas, Texas, New York, Maine, Saudi Arabia.

7. Five jobs I have had:

TA, Adjunct Faculty, Visiting Assistant Professor, primary childcare provider, unemployed.

8. Six peeps I wanna know more about:

I tap the first six to volunteer for this meme in the comments below. Don't be shy.

This Thing That We Do

I've been tagged by Philosophers' Playground with the teaching meme. There have already been so many varied responses to this question of why we teach the things that we do, that I won't begin to be able to respond to all the different issues raised. So I will simply pluck at one or two of the strands of this far-flung discussion that resonate with my most recent teaching. This past week I have been teaching Marx and Zizek. Why?

I'm tempted to simply answer: "Because that's what I've been hired to do." The job aspect of teaching in the academy sometimes tends to disappear behind the presumed pleasures of teaching. After all, any job that pays this poorly must be a labor of love, and variations on "I love teaching" have been one of the most frequently recurring themes in response to this meme. Exceptions to this can be found in posts from Professor Zero and The Little Professor (along with a response at HTUW) who both express their ambivalence about this love of teaching. But even those who profess such a love will, I think, admit that on at least some days love is the last thing they feel in the classroom. This would be the Marxist answer in me. I teach because that's the place within the current social division of labor where I can best sell my labor-power. Every other reason for teaching tends to melt away when confronted by this simple economic fact.

However, one of Slavoj Zizek's oft repeated riffs is on the ways our culture has forced us to internalize our duties such that not only must we do them, we must enjoy them as well.

Superego is the reversal of the permissive "You May!" into the prescriptive "You Must!", the point in which permitted enjoyment turns into ordained enjoyment. We all know the formula of Kant's unconditional imperative: "Du canst, denn du sollst". You can do your duty, because you must do it. Superego turns this around into "You must, because you can." ... The external opposition between pleasure and duty is precisely overcome in the superego. It can be overcome in two opposite ways. On one hand, we have the paradox of the extremely oppressive, so–called totalitarian post–traditional power which goes further than the traditional authoritarian power. It does not only tell you "Do your duty, I don’t care if you like it or not." It tells you not only "You must obey my orders and do your duty" but "You must do it with pleasure. You must enjoy it." It is not enough for the subjects to obey their leader, they must actively love him. This passage from traditional authoritarian power to modern totalitarianism can be precisely rendered through superego in an old joke of mine. Let’s say that you are a small child and one Sunday afternoon you have to do the boring duty of visiting your old senile grandmother. If you have a good old–fashioned authoritarian father, what will he tell you? "I don’t care how you feel, just go there and behave properly. Do your duty." A modern permissive totalitarian father will tell you something else: "You know how much your grandmother would love to see you. But do go and visit her only if you really want to." Now every idiot knows the catch. Beneath the appearance of this free choice there is an even more oppressive order. You seem to have a choice, but there is no choice, because the order is not only you must visit your grandmother, you must even enjoy it. If you don’t believe me, just try to say "I have a choice, I will not do it." I promise your father will say "What did your grandmother ever do to you? Don’t you know how she loves you? How could you do this to her?" That’s superego. On the other hand, we have the opposite paradox of the pleasure itself whose pursuit turns into duty. In a permissive society, subjects experience the need to have a good time, to really enjoy themselves, as a kind of duty, and consequently feel guilty for failing to be happy.

This passage also resonates for me with much of Limited, Inc.'s ongoing interrogation of the pursuit of happiness as a new and strangely misplaced goal of life.

Teaching Marx and Zizek provides me with a way to raise these issues for my students who also face a similar bind of being forced first to take classes, and then forced to enjoy them. After all, why would someone pay all that money and spend all that time reading and studying subjects they don't enjoy?

I confess, I enjoy this part of my teaching. D'oh!

Rather than tag new victims and require them to respond to this meme, I'm simply going to ask for volunteers. If you would like to respond to this meme, just leave a comment below with a link to your post. Of course, you only have to respond if you would enjoy it...

Book Meme 123.5

By way of Decoys.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

"In both there is a complete lack of sense of time."
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Avon, 2006.

Feel free to play along in the comments below.

Fire Blogging

July wasn't a very productive month for blogging for the LumpenProf. My attention hasn't been online -- which isn't really a terrible thing. But I've started to miss my online exchanges, so it's time to start back again. August will be a much better month to blog, I think, if for no other reason than that I'll need the distraction from all the other reading and writing I ought to be doing to get ready for the school year.

This afternoon I'm burning a pile of lumber scraps in the front yard. Somehow, blogging on the front porch swing while drinking a beer and listening to the amazingly loud pops and cracks of some of the venerable, but sadly useless and rotting, American Chestnut boards on the bonfire seems like the thing to do.

I haven't really posted since I got tagged by the Combat Philosopher for the 8 things meme. Like the CP, I'm also somewhat ambivalent about these memes, since they seem to be the blog equivalent of chain letters. But since they are mostly harmless and innocuous chain letters, I'll play along. With one proviso. I hereby proclaim that I will accept any and all resulting bad karma for any of the folks I tag who do not wish to play. So, without further ado, here are eight lumpenfacts about the LumpenProf:

1. I'm currently learning to play clawhammer banjo. It's strangely relaxing. Plus, I have a beautiful old Luscomb banjo from the 1890's that's nice to hold and plunk on.
2. Another musical factoid, in college I once played guitar with a blues band that played in the bar where the bloody final shootout would be filmed for Robert Rodriguez' Desperado. As I recall, we set up right about where Antonio Banderas leaves the pile of dead bodies.
3. I once shook hands with the father of the voice of Alvin the Chipmunk.
4. I went to grad school with Mr. Limited, Inc. who is still the smartest man I know.
5. I habitually read Catch-22. I don't know why.
6. Sometimes, when I'm feeling happy, I brew beer. It's pretty good beer too.
7. Wherever I am, but especially when I'm traveling, strangers stop me on the street to ask me directions. I used to think this happened to everyone. But evidently not. I must look either exceptionally knowledgeable, or exceptionally harmless. Or both.
8. I can handle a snake whip.

Now I will pass on this dubious honor to the following eight bloggers: Limited, Inc., What in the hell, Wildly Parenthetical, Professor Zero, Genderquake, notes of a neophyte, I think and it is so, and Academic Cog. You are all cordially invited to post eight things about yourselves on your blogs and then tag eight more poor unsuspecting bloggers out there.