michael berube

Last week I got to hear my all-time favorite blogger, Michael Bérubé (blog since retired, alas), speak on "Whatever Happened to Cutural Studies." Basically, he was sketching out the general argument about cultural studies that's been going on since, well, since it started: are the products of pop culture always and necessarily only the carriers of capitalist, consumerist ideology (i.e. is their meaning determined by their PRODUCTION), or can pop-cultural artifacts and products carry diverse or even oppositional meanings because of they way people make use of them (i.e. is their meaning determined by their CONSUMPTION and RECEPTION). Marxists versus postmodernists. Bérubé comes down on the second side of this, and spent much of his time talking about how Robert McChesney and Thomas Frank are sharp writers but get this question all wrong.

It was exciting to be there--not for the celebrity aura that he has, because an academic "celebrity" these days doesn't really carry that kind of aura anymore, that's so Duke 1980s. No, it was the excitement of being in a room where people were really going to hash over ideas. And that's truly what happened. Berube spoke for more than an hour and took questions, at length, for another hour, but I never started fidgeting or feeling that he was running out of interesting things to say. Some of the things he covered: cultural studies, McChesney, Frank, Stanley Fish, the Social Text/Alan Sokal flap of about 15 years ago, creationism versus scientific anthropology, astrophysics concepts that I don't remember, the Mackinnon/Dworkin antipornography campaign, 1980s indie rock, the future of the internet, the effect of political blogs, and several other things that slip my mind. He's definitely enamored of his own intellect, and not at all hesitant to talk about all of those things for two hours, but the fact is that he's got the goods and so I don't mind.

bleedy mcstitches

bleedy mcstitches
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

Friday morning, we're harried and time-crunched getting out of the house. A scream from the front door, and we find Boy #2 lying on the floor with blood all over his face. We get him cleaned up, stop the bleeding from a big ol' cut on his forehead, bandage him, and send him in to daycare. Two hours later, daycare calls; the cut has opened up and he needs to go to the doctor, who sends him to the ER, where they stitch him up.

Then, we go out for a movie Saturday night. The babysitter calls halfway through; the boys have bumped heads and Boy #2 has a nosebleed.

So, now we call him Bleedy McStitches. But, as you can see, he takes it all in good humor.

Melanctha

It's definitely interesting--an attempt to make narrative voice reflect both Cezanne's painting techniques and the way motion-picture film looks when it's not being projected--but Gertrude Stein's story "Melanctha" is really, really racist. Wow.

THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG

Is it possible to start out a post on Norman Mailer's THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG without mentioning that it's a doorstop? Even in paperback? 1056 pages, in my edition. Fortunately, it reads quickly. I decided to read it after Mailer died last November; most obituaries seemed to argue, or actually stated, that THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG was Mailer's best book. I've read a few of his books--THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM, and I think something else. I remember that THE NAKED AND THE DEAD was impressive, but again I was 19 when I read it. Then I began to run into 1960 and 1970s refugees who either passionately loved or passionately hated Mailer. For me, he was one of those just slightly kitschy figures from the recent past, like Linda Ronstadt or Henry Kissinger (the famous naked centerfold of whom was framed in one of my parents' friends' dens back in the 1970s--I'll never forget that image). I knew he was famous, and I knew what he looked like, but I didn't know that much else about him.

I becmae interested in THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG several years ago when I went to the Guggenheim to see the installation of Matthew Barney's masterful/ludicrous "Cremaster 2", which includes a great deal of thematic material relating to Gary Gilmore and his execution. But I never got around to reading it until this Christmas.

It's pretty great. First, although Mailer is a NY/NJ guy to the core, and it would have been understandable had he not "gotten" the intermountain West, I found his deep and sympathetic portrait of the life of various lower-middle-class people in Utah to be utterly believable and truthful. I could recognize Western places that I know--southern Oregon, for instance--in his picture of Utah, and I also found his description of daily life in a Mormon-dominated community to ring true. (I grew up in a town with a very large LDS population and had many Mormon friends growing up.) I was also impressed by his ground-level portrait of the workings of the justice system, a feature that became especially telling to me as I read the last two hundred fifty pages while sitting in Judge Borkowski's courtroom in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, waiting to get called for a jury. (I didn't.) I found myself less interested in all of the machinations about various journalists and TV producers obtaining the rights to Gilmore's story, interviewing him, trying to get him to open up. I guess in the end, thirty years later, it seems like that whole debate is pretty irrelevant: Mailer told the story, wholly and comprehensively, and nobody else could have conceivably done it better. (I haven't seen the film, by the way). And finally, Mailer's portrayal of Gilmore himself is stunning: he's as completely visualizable as any character I remember reading for years. (Again: of course, Mailer had 1050 pages to do this.)

(I'm trying to watch a Swedish film, TOGETHER, about a 1970s commune while I write this, and I can't help but subconsciously compare the events of THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG with what's going on in this film, which takes place only a year before. I'm mostly getting the images in the film, because it's subtitled--I don't speak Swedish--and I'm looking at the computer screen, not the TV screen.)

shoulder ride

shoulder ride
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

The cousins were a big hit with our boys, too.

coyote statue

coyote statue
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

I just can't say enough good things about the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, even though anti-immigrant Arizona made them take down the Mexican flag that used to fly over the place. Idiots. But the toddler took enough time out of scooping dust and thorns into his mouth to take some quality time with the coyote statue.

pirates!

pirates!
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

For our older son, it was all pirates all the time.

looking old

looking old
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

Christmas in Tucson was quite nice. Our 18-month-old looks far too old.