Things I found in San Francisco

I had a lovely time in the fine city of San Francisco. Here are some things I found that you might have guessed I would locate:

i) A gourmet sweetbread and mushroom salad at a fine restaurant.
ii) House of the Dead IV, which has automatic pistols, and many, many zombies. As one character opines, "There weren't this many of them last time."
iii) First-rate real ale

Things you might not have guessed I would locate:

i) A pirate store, run by the people who do McSweeney's (and, it seems, endorsed by David Byrne).

The conference went well too. I had a nice time with the Flannery O'Connor society people, and the talk was well attended, given that it was at 8.30 am. I must start writing better papers, but that's another story.

Don't See The Da Vinci Code!

I did, and I'll never get that time back again. Here is some sample dialogue (from memory, since the script has not appeared online anywhere yet):

TAUTOU: I fell out with my grandfather a long time ago. [or something to that effect]

[some interminable running about …]

HANKS: Why did you fall out with your grandfather? Was it because of something in the past?

TAUTOU: How could you know that?

Perhaps it's because Hanks is a professor of Religious Symbology, and consequently has extraordinary powers of reasoning. On the other hand, perhaps Ron Howard's brain got eaten by Tom Hanks's hair.

Fighting Pierzynski

Fun at the White Sox yesterday (for my British readers who didn't see this on the news last night).

Four types of disinfectant

Friday night was Elizabeth's post-exams party -- held at the home of Dave Thieme -- a man in the PhD program who trades in crude oil on the side, and consequently has a Corvette and an incredible apartment with all-glass walls on the 22nd floor of a building downtown.

In keeping with the high-class nature of the evening, we decided to take a cab home with an extremely eccentric cab driver. Our driver didn't like handling banknotes, because of the dirt on the dollar bills. In consequence, he kept a little spray bottle next to the seat, full of four kinds of disinfectant mixed together (he showed us), with which to wipe down his hands after each ride. Just the kind of man to drive you home at 1am on a Friday night.

Hi everyone. Apologies for no blogging of late. I don't seem to have been near a computer, with time on my hands, for a couple of weeks! This may have something to do with the fact that Elizabeth's oral exams are today -- in fact she's being examined right now! I've been playing a kind of coaching and pastoral support role, roughly in keeping with the regular duties of a boyfriend.

Anyway, I keep meaning to write this post about everyone's favorite blogging topic in the academic sphere, all those pesky right-wingers who are mounting assorted campaigns against us radical humanities types. Actually, I could write it now.

So I heard Robert Post from Yale lecture on this topic a couple of weeks ago. In his lecture, Post characterized the academy as the last bastion of the American left, before going on to make an argument that the humanities need to stop griping against the hegemonic (and hence oppressive) nature of professional norms and standards, and instead regard the professional standards of our discipline as credentials to be relied upon and called upon in the face of Republican claims about our unprofessional hiring practices.

The lecture was v. smart -- Post is a law professor and based his argument on the legal history of the notion of academic freedom in the US -- a concept that is based firmly on professional standards. If we abandon them, he argued, we abandon the basis of our legal right to academic freedom.

However, I was, and continue to be, unsure about his claim that the academy ought at once to be maintained as a last bastion for the left, and that it ought to appeal to its own professional standards as a means of protecting its autonomy. Now one thing Post might have meant is that the notion of "professional standards" might itself be politicized, so we would claim that it is part of our professional duty to maintain some kind of leftist enclave in this country. I suspect he didn't mean to do that -- such an argument adopts the logic of the right, and plays right into the hands of the likes of David Horowitz. But then I end up thinking that the only other assumption he could have been making is something like this (from a piece by Justin Smith on the debate): that professors are left wing because being smart means being on the left:

these [left-wing] convictions, if they have them, flow willy-nilly from years of reading books by smart people, which is what humanities professors do. Reading smart people, they tend thereby to be made smart, and, statistically speaking, tend not to vote Republican (or Tory). Where is the unconstitutional discrimination in that?

Now maybe it's because I've been doing work on well-known anti-liberal Flannery O'Connor (San Francisco next week!), but I am uncomfortable with this assumption that there are no, or few, smart conservatives. What about, say, T.S. Eliot, Milton Friedman, Francis Fukuyama? What about much of the academy prior to the 1970s? I might disagree with their conservatism, but I still think they're smart. So -- my point is -- I'd love to sign off on the appealing notion that smart people are leftists because they're smart, but I just think it ignores too much. It doesn't work as a defense against the accusation that the academy has a leftist bias, and it worries me when we don't defend ourselves properly, because it gives ground to those who want to attack us.

So anyway -- that's that.

In other news, my friend Michael Meeuwis informed me yesterday that if he was casting the part of Phil Collins in a film, he would choose me. Thought you'd find that funny.

Duncan

British things

I've decided to give granola a break and have reverted to Weetabix. It turns out still to be very nice. Plus the new Dr. Who. It's quite good, isn't it? I like the new "horror" approach -- less of the philosophy, more of the werewolves. Actually, I thought the werewolf episode was very good -- all except for the Matrix ninja monks, who were not.

Soft Rock gets Everywhere

It's all the soft rock news today. Unlike Foreigner, who are languishing at the Illinois State Fair, soft rock guitar legend Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, erstwhile guitarist for both Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, was reportedly present at the hottest event of the week: Stephen Colbert laying the smack down on GWB at the White House Press Correspondents' Dinner.* His smooth guitar stylings were probably just what the president needed to calm him down after the speech.

*Actually this is not that unusual. Jeff Baxter is, as Richard Gowan has pointed out a number of times, now (weirdly) a top defense analyst. But it's still quite funny.

"That original sound that characterized the 70s and 80s is back"

In a booking worthy of Spinal Tap, Foreigner have been booked to play this year's Illinois State Fair. Perhaps Partridge will be on hand to introduce them. This is the best piece of old-rockery I have seen since Lynyrd Skynyrd played the "Taste of Chicago" festival last summer...

"Cold As Ice," "Feels Like the First Time," "Hot Blooded," "Double Vision," "Head Games," "Urgent," "Juke Box Hero," the list goes on and on. For two decades, Foreigner helped define rock music.

That original sound that characterized the 70s and 80s is back. Few groups have come close to the hitmaking success of Foreigner. Even fewer have the dynamics to deliver the hits live with an impact that keeps fans on their feet for the entire show. Foreigner fits that bill, always delivering killer rock'n roll at its finest.

Just One More Vote

Oh, what could have been if the Academy had voted differently. You learn all sorts of interesting things in my line of work. Fact of the day is that Peter Falk was nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1961, for the film Pocketful of Miracles. His character, as you can see, was named "Joy Boy." I will have to track this one down.

Wasn't April Fool's Day a month ago?

Apparently Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are down to star in a movie version of Ayn Rand's pseudo-philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged.

I am especially fond of the comment that includes the sentence "A full understanding of Objectivism should be a prerequisite for any prospective cast members."

My blog posts are all a bit same-y at present. That is to say, they often involve restaurants or cooking or food. But this weekend's culinary adventures bear repeating I think. On Friday night Dave and I went to Toys 'R' Us just south of Lincoln Square in order to buy a stuffed Pokemon figure. The stuffed Pokemon is going to accompany members of the department to conferences and be photographed at said conferences in a dumb gnome-like way. Yes, it's a little childish. But so are we. Anyway, looking about for a restaurant afterwards, we came across the Chicago Bräuhaus. This was exciting enough -- there were wursts galore, sauerkraut, Spaten, a band consisting of two old men, one of whom had a blond mullet and an electric guitar, and a throng of old German couples ballroom-dancing.

But then, on Saturday, Kate's long-distance boyfriend being in town, a bunch of us returned to the environs of Lincoln Square for Korean Barbecue. The Korean Barbecue (open 24hrs) is in a car park on the side of a main road. It has blacked-out windows. The menu includes fish heads and tripe. But the best bit is that you cook your own food on a fierce charcoal barbecue in a hole in the center of the table. The food, rather terrifyingly, is brought out as great big piles of raw meat in sauce, accompanied by a bunch of dishes of pickled vegetables. We grilled beef strips, beef ribs, pork ribs and baby octopus. At the time of writing, I have not yet died from food poisoning.