This is simply a bonus for any of my spring 2013 undergrads who happen to be reading this: Cut-and-paste any full entry from this blog and send it to me in an email. For every full course week left in the semester after your email lands in my inbox, I’ll add 0.5 points to your course grade. You’re free to share this information with your classmates if you so choose . . . but not on the course website. If news of this bonus ever lands there, the bonus goes away, and all previously awarded benefits will be taken away. And, perhaps needless to say, this is a one-time-only bonus for anyone who happens to collect it.

(For the curious out there, last year, out of 20 students who could have claimed this bonus, only 4 did.)

Now the original rationales for using February as the time to honor black contributions to the US undo some of the truths to be found in all those wry jokes. The fact that a black man started the tradition — and that he picked February because it’s the month when both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were born — messes a bit with the fact that February really would have been the perfect “separate but equal” month for white America to parcel out as a token gesture to black America. Perhaps more to the point, back in 1926, when the whole thing started (and when it was only a week), it’s not as if there were exactly legions of white Americans who were actively looking to find even a day of the year — much less a week or a month — to pay homage to black people. If the choice had really been white America’s back then (and perhaps even now), I’m pretty sure that there would have been no debate at all about when to pay tribute to black America, since that tribute simply would not have been forthcoming at all.

But that’s not what led me to fire up the blogging machinery tonight.

No, what occurred to me as I was reading yet another one of those “of course, we got the shortest month” commentaries was that there’s no good reason why Black History Month simply has to stay tied to February. Sure, it’s been that way for almost a century now, but it’s not as if that’s dictated by law. There are no major holidays that would need to be moved that would disrupt the rhythm of school calendars or banks. No annual BHM sale days that would destroy the economy if they were shifted to some other time of year. No government agency charged with overseeing holidays from whom permission would need to be secured. BHM isn’t the sort of tradition, after all, that exists because of any formal mandate from the proverbial Powers That Be — no more so than clearly arbitrary “holidays” like National Sushi Day or National Drink Beer Day — and it’s only “stuck” in February because that’s where it began.

To put it a different way, if we don’t like the fact that BHM is in a short, cold month, then let’s just move it. Who’s going to stop us? It would probably be pretty amusing — and telling — to watch people try to prevent such a thing from happening. I am suddenly flashing on Fox News pundits trying to claim that the very future of the nation would somehow be imperiled if black folks were given positive public recognition during any month of the year besides February.

And if we want a long, hot month, there are some pretty good choices there. The easy one to take would be August. There’s certainly no major holiday then to compete with BHM — or even a minor one. It’s got 31 days, and it’s plenty warm, so there could be lots of picnics and parades and other such festivities.

But I think the far better choice would be July, which — like August — gives us 31 steamy, sultry days to work with. But it also puts BHM and Independence Day right on top of each other. And if part of the point of BHM is to celebrate the centrality of black contributions to the nation, then when better to do that than when the nation itself is being celebrated so heartily?

And, this time around anyway, the new semester also begins with a very freshly published essay on cultural studies and history (with the shockingly off-topic title of “Cultural Studies and History”).

But what really bugs me about this email is that “my Mitsubishi” is no longer mine. Not by a longshot. It gave up the ghost back in 2001 or so. Mitsubishi doesn’t seem to have noticed this, however, even though I have tried — over and over and over again — to get myself removed from their email lists. But the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of those friendly emails has never worked out. This time, it simply took me to a page that demanded my name and email — without any other explanatory assistance — in ways that suggested I would actually be inviting more advertising into my inbox if I filled it out.

Normally, I’d shrug this off. But today I was feeling ornery enough to try and push this unsubscription thing through. After more than a decade and three other cars (none of which were Mitsubishis), I figured I could afford to cut my ties with the big M completely. (Side note: I have no idea if anyone actually calls Mitsubishi “the big M,” even within the company.) Trouble is, that advertising email came from a “noreply” bot and was completely devoid of other directly helpful contact information.

So I wander over to the main Mitsubishi website. Which has lots of information if I want to buy a Mitsubishi or find a Mitsubishi dealer. But nothing at all obvious for extricating myself from (or, for that matter, adding myself to) their marketing database. I look back at the Wiper Tips email and notice a link to their privacy policy. Buried deep in that page, there’s a different link that offers me the chance to escape from (or join) their advertising lists. Hooray!

Except that the page in question contains a form that doesn’t actually work. I tried loading it in multiple browsers — just in case there was something about how their site interacts with all the pop-up blockers (etc.) that I have configured in Firefox — and none of them gave me a version of the page that actually allowed you to enter your contact information. The page contains apparently usable boxes for doing so, but those boxes don’t permit ordinary mortals to input text of any sort. And so it was back to their privacy policy page . . .

. . . where there was a phone number to call if you had questions or concerns about the policy. So I called. Not surprisingly, I found myself listening to a menu of options to direct my call. A very short menu. I could press “1″ if I already had a Mitsubishi. Or “2″ if I wanted to buy one. There was no option for anything else. Waiting the silence out eventually got me an error message about needing to press a number and then cycled me back to the start of the menu. Very helpful.

So I tried pressing “0″ — a common default choice for “customer service” — which got me a new error message about how “0″ wasn’t an available option . . . but then asked me to press “1″ if I wanted customer service. Which I did.

The first thing that the very nice woman I spoke with there asked me for was my Vehicle Identification Number. I told her I didn’t have one, so she asked for my name. I gave it to her. She asked where my vehicle was registered. I told her that I didn’t have one and explained — more succinctly than I do above — that I was simply trying to get off their email list, and she was apparently my only option to do so.

She really was very nice. But she also explained to me that she needed my VIN in order to pull my records up in their database, since she couldn’t do so reliably using my email address or my name. I pointed out that I didn’t have ready access to a unique, difficult-to-memorize 17-digit number connected to a car I hadn’t laid eyes on this century. She asked for the phone number that I would have had back then — but the only old phone numbers I can recall with any accuracy at this point take me back to pre-teen childhood.

Then, surprisingly, she started describing my old car (lucky for me that Rodman isn’t a very common name) and she told me that she had changed their records to indicate that I was no longer the owner of the vehicle in question. So this story may have a happy ending — though it’s just as likely that their computer system will now inundate my with special offers to buy a new Mitsubishi, since I was clearly delighted to own my old one for 23 years . . .

The tip itself seems deceptively simple: wherever you can do so — your phone, your laptop, your tablet — turn push notifications off. Don’t think of them as helpful attention-getters. Think of them as interruptions from whatever it is that you actually need to be doing at any given time. It’s only been a few days, so I may be singing a different tune in another week or three, but I’m liking the general effect so far. Still, this has been both easier and harder than I’d imagined it would be.

It’s been easier insofar as I don’t actively miss most of the “real time” notifications I’d been used to. For example, I’ve recently discovered Letterpress, which is a delightfully addictive word/strategy game (iDevices only, I’m afraid) . . . but I also don’t really need an addictive game sucking up my time and attention. And, before I turned its push notifications off, it was easy to find myself pulled into it at random moments, just because the little chime on my phone went off to let me know that it was now my turn to play again. I haven’t given the game up, mind you. But now it gets relegated to those moments when I’m between tasks, and I actively seek it out.

It’s been harder, though, since I’m starting to discover just how many apps, programs, and so on I had set (or, just as often, were set by default) to grab my attention whenever something “important” happened. Several times already, I have thought I’d managed to turn off all the things I thought I needed to turn off . . . only to suddenly hear a beep or a chime or a buzzer from something I’d forgotten about. Slowly, though, I think I’m chasing all these stray notifications down.

To be sure, there are a few push notifications I haven’t quite managed to let go of completely. Email and text messages are the big ones . . . though I’m trying to find ways to screen those more productively. I get a lot of email (managing a sizable listserv will do that), but precious little of it is actually so time-sensitive that I need to deal with it within seconds (or even hours) of its arrival. What I need to do is to figure out a set of filters that will trigger the relevant chimes and tones when important email comes through, while letting the rest of it pile up so that I can deal with it when I’m done dealing with other, more immediately pressing tasks.

(Oh, and yes, of course, your email messages are always going to get filtered through as “Vitally Important.” No, no. Sorry. Not you. I meant the reader two screens to your left. Yes, you. Your messages will never get the silent treatment from me.)

I’m also enough of a geek to participate in a friendly pick-’em pool every season. I’ve got a system (it’s highly proprietary, so don’t ask) that was right a respectable 61.1% of the time, and that brought me to a very close third place finish this year (one pick out of second place, and two out of first). And that system tells me that the NFL playoffs will shape up as follows.

Wild-card weekend:
Houston over Cincinnati
Minnesota over Green Bay
Indianapolis over Baltimore
Washington over Seattle

Divisional-round weekend
Minnesota over Atlanta
Denver over Indianapolis
Washington over San Francisco
New England over Houston

Conference championships
Washington over Minnesota
Denver over New England

Super Bowl
Washington over Denver

As I write these words, the nice folks at Football Outsiders (one of my fave NFL-centric sites) figure that this particular matchup — which would reprise the 42-10 beatdown that Washington handed Denver in Super Bowl XXII — is only about 2.8% likely, but I’m not phased by those odds. After all, seven weeks ago, when they were 3-6, that’s about what my team’s chances were of merely making the playoffs. And they’ve done alright since then. With much more to come.

To be clear, these are almost entirely rules for me. For folks who are playing along at home, there’s really only one rule: no cheating. If you can identify a lyric on your own, that’s cool. But if you need to start dropping my statuses into search engines to figure things out, that’s verboten. Still, even that rule is only enforced by my friends’ personal senses of honor. Once, I think, I suspected someone was Googling their way to correct guess after correct guess after guess, even across a diverse spread of genres and historical moments. But otherwise, I’ve simply assumed that everyone knows that the game isn’t really any fun (or much of a challenge) if you’re just firing up Google every time I change my status.

From my end, though, things are slightly more complicated.

• I do my best never to repeat a song. Every so often, I screw this up. But I keep a running file of used songs/lyrics to try and avoid duplication. That same running file also contains long lists of lyrics that are still waiting their turn to be used.
• The lyrics I quote never contain major words from the actual title. I also try not to be too obvious with the lyrics I actually choose, though what counts as “too obvious” is also a difficult thing to guess in advance. I do my best to pick songs that I expect more than a handful of people would know, but I’m often surprised by how quickly some of my (ostensibly) tricky efforts gets recognized, and by how lyrics that strike me as low-hanging fruit nonetheless flummox people left and right.
• I try very heard not to use lyrics that appear in multiple songs. This is much easier said than done of course, since there are lots of songs I have never heard, and every so often, someone will swear that I’m quoting (for example) some obscure Gladys Knight tune that I’ve never heard of that just happens to use the same lyrics I’ve quoted. But I don’t aim for deliberate confusion of this sort.
• This game began back when Facebook statuses were still set up (and mostly used) in such a way that your actual status was the back end of a sentence that began with your name: e.g., “Gil Rodman doesn’t trust you anymore” (which, incidentally, is Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddamn”). And I’ve stuck by that formulation, even as both Facebook and popular custom has moved away from it. One of the major consequences this has for status-lyrics is that I will sometimes make minor alterations to verbs and pronouns so as to fit this shift to the third-person singular. Otherwise, I leave the lyrics unchanged.
• Statuses stay “live” until someone correctly identifies the tune in a comment. Typically, people do this with some other lyric of the same song, though I don’t get all Jeopardy-fussy about this sort of thing. If I can tell that you know the song I’m quoting, I’ll tip my hat your way, and move on to the next lyric. If 72 hours have passed and no one has IDed some lyric, I’ll post the answer and move on.
• The bit you probably didn’t know, unless you’ve been paying exceptionally close attention (only one person I know of has figured this out on their own): lyrics are posted in alphabetical order by song title. My original plan was to do one status for each letter of the alphabet, and then cycle back around again to A every time we got done with Z. Not surprisingly, though, some letters (I, L, S, T) offer a lot more opportunities than others (J, Q, X, Z), and so I started letting some of those letters get multiple turns during any given pass through the alphabet. Right now, a little less than half the alphabet is “on vacation,” and so a typical sequence now may look something like ABBCDGHIIIJLMPRSSTW.

Admittedly, all this inside information will be of limited value if you want to play the game yourself. Knowing that the most recently used (and unguessed) lyric (as I type these words anyway) was from “I Got Rhythm” will tell you that the current tune’s title is probably going to begin with an I or a J . . . but that clue will only get you so far, eh?

But you know that already. The syllabus tells you not to do so. Pretty much every instructor you’ve ever had since high school has told you not to do so. And yet, in spite of all that, you may someday find yourself in what we might call the Triple-P Problem: you’ve Procrastinated, and now you’re Panicking, so you turn to Plagiarism and hope against hope that I will somehow fail to notice that the words I’m reading aren’t your own. The odds are pretty good, however, that such hope is misplaced, since the same procrastination problem that has put you in this particular pickle also means that you don’t have time to cover your tracks especially well. So I’m going to share a few basic tips with you — all based upon actual mistakes that your predecessors in my classes have made over the years — so that you don’t follow in their footsteps and wind up with a bright, shiny F on your transcript.

• Don’t plagiarize from the course readings. The odds are pretty good that I’ve done the course readings myself. You can, in fact, pretty much count on it. Which makes the odds pretty good that when I read long passages from those same readings in your paper, I will recognize them and know exactly where they came from. If you’re going to steal someone else’s words and try and pass them off as your own, it would be wise to steer clear of sources that you know that I have read myself. [Bonus sub-tip: If you're foolish enough to steal from readings on our syllabus, at least pick one that we haven't specifically focused on as an example of a pathetically weak, unsupported argument.]
• Don’t steal from sources that I’m likely to be familiar with. Obviously, this is much trickier than avoiding stuff on the syllabus, since you don’t know what other books and articles I might recognize. But if your paper happens to contain some unusual turn of phrase that (a) will be widely recognized by scholars in the field as a key concept in an oft-cited work, and (b) isn’t a phrase that an average person is likely to have come up with independently, then you run a high risk of getting caught. [Bonus sub-tip: Don't give your paper the same title as a famous book on your subject.]
• Don’t steal from sources that are too far afield. This would seem to contradict my previous tip, but it’s important to strike a proper balance here. If you’re relying on a source that is too far removed from the actual subject at hand, it will almost certainly jump out at me as unusual (at best) or suspicious (at worst). You need to find a comfortable middle zone between “too close” and “too far” that won’t raise either of my eyebrows. [Bonus sub-tip: In my classes anyway, stick to readings from humanities disciplines. When your paper on contemporary mass media (of the non-digital variety) is filled with technical jargon from computer science, I see red flags right away.]
• Don’t simply cut-and-paste your borrowed prose. I know. It’s quick. It’s easy. It saves you lots of time, and time is precisely what you don’t have lots of. But it also makes it very easy to spot the bits of your paper that have been lifted from elsewhere, especially if you don’t bother to adjust your fonts so that everything matches neatly. [Bonus sub-tip: When copying from an online source, take extra care to do something about any hyperlinks you're bringing along for the ride. When small phrases show up in your paper underlined and in blue ink, it's extraordinarily easy for me to know what to Google so I can find your original source.]
• Don’t use prose that doesn’t sound anything like the way you actually speak or write. If you are prone to uttering simple, short, declarative statements, a paper filled with elaborate, flowery, multi-claused sentences is probably not going to be convincing. It’s also wise to steer clear of borrowing from sources that use lots of specialized jargon that you don’t understand, since I’m not likely to believe that you actually wrote that sentence about “the precession of simulacra” yourself if you haven’t been prone to saying such things out loud in class already. [Bonus sub-tip: If you don't know how to use semi-colons correctly, don't use prose from other people that employs them extensively.]
• Don’t submit a paper that you haven’t actually read. Again, I know that actually reading what you turn in will slow the process down, and you simply don’t have a lot of time to spare. But this is a very important step. If I suspect (but cannot prove) that you have turned in a plagiarized paper, the first thing I will ask you is if you can tell me about your thought/work process in writing the paper . . . and if you haven’t read the stuff you’ve handed in as yours, then the game is up. [Bonus sub-tip: If you've been crafty enough to have someone else write your paper for you, it's extra important for you to read what they've written before I do . . . especially if your ghost writer has spelled your name wrong on the cover page.]

If you’ve actually followed all the steps above, then there’s a halfway decent chance that I may actually believe that what you’ve handed me is something you have written yourself. Congratulations! Of course, at this point, the odds are also still pretty good that what you’ve handed in doesn’t fit the assignment well enough to earn a respectable grade. And you’ve done as much work (and maybe even more) trying to cover your tracks as you would have had to do in order to write the paper yourself. But now you may squeak by with a D instead of an F. So it’s all been worthwhile, yes?

I rang out the old year yesterday by taking in Django Unchained, the latest from ultra-violence-loving director Quentin Tarantino. I’m still processing the experience, so these are merely some quick, fragmentary reflections. Ask me again tomorrow, and maybe they’ll have shifted. Also, there may be a few spoilers below. If you haven’t seen the film, and you want to do so without knowing too much more, then you may not want to read past the first bullet point.

• Spike Lee has done a curious two-step around the film. On the one hand, he doesn’t want to talk about it publicly. On the other hand, he’s made very public statements claiming that film is “disrespectful to [his] ancestors.” More problematically, he’s done so while also saying that he has no intention of seeing the film. Lee, of course, isn’t obligated to see any film he doesn’t want to see. Nor is he obligated to like (or respect) either Tarantino or his films. At the same time, it’s a bit disheartening to see him condemn the film so thoroughly without having seen it — not the least because Lee’s been on the receiving end of plenty of that sort of blind, knee-jerk condemnation himself. And Lee has wandered into some exceptionally murky waters himself with respect to ugly representations of black people on the big screen (cf. Bamboozled — which, to be clear, is a pretty brilliant piece of work . . . but Lee’s deliberately over-the-top depiction of blackface minstrelsy produced its own fair share of squirming audiences.) To be sure, I can respect Lee’s desire not to see the film. But there’s a big difference between saying, “I don’t really like Tarantino’s films, so I have no need to see this one” and slapping this particular film down unseen because of its content and tone.
• Now if you’re one of those people who doesn’t like Tarantino’s movies because they’re too violent, too bloody, or too gruesome, then you won’t like Django any better. The body count here is high (and not just because, at 165 minutes, there’s lots of time to pile up the corpses), and few (if any) of the deaths are exactly “clean.” That said, the film dives deep into the heart of chattel slavery in the US . . . and that was an extraordinarily violent practice. Enough so that, even though Tarantino could have ramped the violence up without being historically inaccurate, he toned it down so that audiences could not be too traumatized to cheer the movie’s final denouement. Let that sink in for a second. A Quentin Tarantino movie (of all things!) is softer than the actual historical violence associated with slavery in this country. If you haven’t seen the movie, you might be tempted to think that this “kinder, gentler” vision of slavery only justifies Lee’s refusal to see the film. But since I have seen the film, I can assure you that it does absolutely nothing to make slavery look like a benevolent institution.
• I’ve seen a handful of bloggers and critics who’ve criticized the movie for what it doesn’t do in terms of portraying racial solidarity between blacks or in terms of presenting even some tiny gesture towards collective rebellion. And there’s some truth to be found there. Django is not a selfless martyr, abandoning the path to freedom and wandering into certain death because he can’t bear to leave his brothers and sisters behind him in chains. Nor is he a new Nat Turner, helping to lead the fieldhands into open rebellion against white supremacy. His mission is purely personal (though not entirely selfish), and he is never distracted from it by even a moment of sympathetic solidarity for the obvious suffering of other black folk around him. But, you know, that’s okay by me. At least for now. Hollywood isn’t exactly overflowing with movies where the central characters are black and where pervasive, systemic, institutional racism is the primary target that must be destroyed. Of course, Django doesn’t take down the entire system, but Tarantino also doesn’t let us get away with thinking that that system was fundamentally a Good Thing that happened to be ruined by a tiny handful of wicked souls. What Django gives us is a vision of racism as a cancer that permeates the entirety of US society, top to bottom, and that’s an extraordinarily rare thing for Hollywood to do, even in an historical setting. I can live with Django, the fictional man, getting to live out his personal revenge fantasy and ride off into the night with his one true love . . . because Django, the movie, doesn’t let audiences pretend that slavery was really just some sort of pleasant Gone With the Wind costume drama after all.

So why the radical renovation? There are probably many reasons (and my dubious grip on sanity may still be one of them), but one of the biggest is that the fall version of the course was the latest in a long line of “experiments” I’ve undertaken with what I call a “hackable syllabus” . . . and it seemed to me that the main pedagogical goals I’d been trying to achieve had never actually come to fruition, and so the time had come to rethink the nature of that experiment.

The experiment in question originally grew out of a summer grad seminar on “Communication and Critical Pedagogy” that I taught towards the end of my time at USF. In the midst of one of those seminar discussions, when we were talking about the need to give students a significant measure of control over their own education, I decided that my previous efforts to do such a thing had been too superficial — e.g., letting students select from a pre-determined menu of assignments, or giving them flexible due dates for papers — and that I needed to embrace this philosophy more fully. Coincidentally, for reasons I can neither recall nor explain, sometime that same summer I also heard about a game called Nomic. I’ve still never actually played the game, but its fundamental nature — it’s essentially a meta-game, where you play the game by changing the rules of the game as you go along — struck me as something that could fit very nicely with my newfound desire to turn as much of a course over to my students as I possibly could. And so the hackable syllabus was born . . .

On its surface, the hackable syllabus looks incredibly complex — which is probably necessary, but also probably one of its major flaws. In practice, it’s much simpler than it appears to be: students can propose changes to almost any and every rule on the syllabus (including the reading list, due dates, and the graded assignments), the class as a whole discusses and votes on proposals, and proposals that are voted into place become part of the course rules. Most of the apparent complexity lies in setting up a fair and reliable mechanism by which the rules can actually be changed. The actual process varied slightly from one version of the syllabus to another, but the underlying core — propose rule changes, discuss them, vote on them — was still pretty simple . . . yet, time after time, students routinely got hung up on the mechanism in countless different ways, and never, ever really took control of the syllabus at the level I had hoped they might.

To be sure, they had good incentives to do so. Every hackable syllabus contained deliberately cruel and unreasonable rules that students needed to locate and vote out of existence, lest said “bad rules” come into play. And every successful rule change resulted in the authors of said change earning an extra point tacked onto their final course grades. Still, over seven different courses, each with slightly different versions of the hackable syllabus, a consistent pattern emerged: students would eliminate all the bad rules (though, typically, they would only do so after a false start or three), they would tweak some extraordinarily minor aspect of the grading policy (e.g., eliminating penalties for late arrivals and early departures), and they’d be done. No one ever tried to change the reading list. No one ever proposed a different sort of graded assignment be added to the menu of options. Once they’d freed themselves of the need to bring impossible-to-find yoga mats to class (and so on), they were perfectly content to leave the core of the course — i.e., what they had to read and write — up to me.

Of course, this “failure” was never really my students’ fault. At some crucial level, I always knew that, and probably should have done something about it sooner. If nothing else, by the time students wound up in one of my hackable syllabus courses, they had all experienced 15-20 years of education where they had routinely been handed a set of readings and assignments on Day One, and that was that. So of course they never raced to revise the reading list or to envision new assignments: never having been asked to do such a thing before, the odds that they would suddenly take such an initiative were slim to none.

So that radical rewrite of my fall syllabus was all about finding ways to encourage this semester’s batch of students to help build our reading list. (Encouraging them to craft new types of assignments is a goal that will have to wait for some future course. Baby steps, people. Baby steps.) I gave them a syllabus where the first month’s worth of readings was all lined up. After that, each week has a theme and one starter reading in place . . . and it’s up to them to come up with enough other readings (or videos, or audios, as they see fit) to bring us up to ~100 pages/week (or its audio-visual equivalent). There are collective sticks for falling short of that page-count target, and individual carrots for helping to reach it.

And, so far anyway, it seems to be working. We’re currently two weeks deep into the land of “Student-Provided Readings” and the group has hit the target both times, and put some worthy material on the table for us to read and watch and discuss. We’ll see how it goes for the next ten weeks or so but, to this point, I’m feeling pretty good about that “insane” decision.

[Bonus for any of my spring 2012 undergrads who happen to be reading this: Cut-and-paste any full entry from this blog and send it to me in an email. For every full course week left in the semester after your email lands in my inbox, I'll add 0.5 points to your course grade and shrink your Take-Home Final by 50 words and 0.5 points. You're free to share this information with your classmates if you so choose . . . but not on the course website. If news of this bonus ever lands there, the bonus goes away, and all previously awarded benefits will be taken away. P.S.: Perhaps needless to say, this is a one-time-only bonus for anyone who happens to collect it.]

No, for all the things that Facebook gets mind-bogglingly, astoundingly, stupefyingly wrong, they actually get at least one thing very, very right. And, significantly, it’s one of the things that an awful lot of people think they screw up the worst. For all the redesigned walls, feeds, sidebars, and timelines, the one feature — and I want to insist that it really, truly, honestly is a feature — that Facebook has never changed is that the site is incredibly noisy. If anything, most of those redesigns have made it even noisier.

Assuming that you have more than a dozen or so friends — and I mean “Facebook friends,” of course, who may or may not be people you consider your friends offline (but that’s a topic for another day) — your encounters with Facebook are most likely an endless barrage of information. Status updates. Check-ins. Uploaded photos. Event invites. Game annoucnements. And so on. The vast majority of these bursts of trivia about your friends’ lives aren’t actually intended for you in any directed fashion. By default, Facebook assumes that everyone wants to share everything with everyone else, so your friends generally have to make an extra effort not to share that status update about their great bike ride (or their recent bout of food poisoning, or their trip to see their grandmother, or what have you) with everyone they know. And since most people don’t make that effort, Facebook is a very noisy place indeed. This is a large part of why so many people run away from it. Or at least complain about it.

It’s also precisely why it works.

The best way to illustrate this is to compare Facebook to its latest major competitor: Google+. Trying so very, very hard to be the anti-Facebook, Google+ is set up, by default, so that you only share things with the people you specifically want to share those things with. You can, of course, opt to share things Facebook-style — i.e., with everyone you know on the network — but (again) most people don’t make that extra effort.

And so while Facebook is noisy to the point of being overwhelming, Google+ is almost deathly in its silence. Tomblike even.

Now, to be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with quiet social spaces — and nothing intrinsically superior about noisy ones. But Facebook seems to understand — much, much better than Google+ does — that a certain level of noise helps to produce a palpable sense of energy and excitement. Or, at the very least, it produces a measure of variety that, in turn, fosters actual engagement. Whenever I check Facebook, it’s almost always different — even if the time that’s passed since I last checked it is only a minute or two — and so even if 99% of what appears in my feed doesn’t grab my attention (mind you, that’s too high a figure, but only because I’ve hidden a lot of “friends” whose daily routines matter to me less), I’ve almost always got some potential reason to wonder if something has happened to someone that is actually worth my attention. Which, in turn, means I’ve got a reason to spend time on the site . . . and that often means I wind up finding something worth commenting on myself, and so I add to the overall level of noise, and the cycle continues.

Google+, on the other hand, can stay unchanged — at least from my perspective — for hours at a stretch. Sometimes days. To be fair, some of this might be a simple function of numbers: I have more Facebook friends than I have Google+ friends, so I’m likely to see more traffic on the former anyway. Still. The drop-off is much, much sharper than that. People who are my friends on both sites are almost always much, much more active on Facebook. They (and I, too, to be fair) could be much noisier on Google+ — but the site makes you work harder to do that. And so, for most people, it simply never happens at all.

Put a different way, Facebook is sort of like a giant, open-air house party. You walk in, there are lots and lots of people, they’re all engaged in lively banter of one sort or another . . . and while a lot of that is just noise to you, it’s still got a vitality and an energy that you can feel. And it’s pretty easy to drop in and out of conversation circles at will. The party as a whole may not appeal, but you can still have a pretty good time anyway. Google+, on the other hand, is like a high-rise apartment building where you know that there are parties going on all over the place, but where the walls are all soundproofed, the doors are all shut and locked, and you either have to be willing to knock on a few of those doors or you have to get lucky and hope someone opens one of them as you’re passing by . . . otherwise, you’re just going to wind up wandering the halls all by yourself.

None of this means that Facebook doesn’t still have serious issues with their privacy policies (they do) or that they don’t deserve a lot of the flack they get (ditto). And i have no doubt that there are people who are perfectly happy with the quieter, more buttoned-up atmosphere of Google+. But a large part of what makes Facebook actually work well — from users’ perspectives, mind you, rather than as a business — is actually bound up with many of the things that it seems to do so badly.

– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

– Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual, p. 93

[And I know I'm sorta cheatin' the syllable count in the last line a bit, but no one really enunciates that second E in "everyone," do they?]

You have been cheated. Misled. Lied to. By the U. By your high school. By your grade school. By your parents. By a lot of people. You’ve been cheated in many ways, but the ones I want to talk about are these:

• You’ve been lied to about what your tuition buys you.
• You’ve been lied to about what your education is supposed to be for.
• You’ve been lied to about what you should expect from your courses.
• You’ve been lied to about what your role in getting an education really is.

Big Lie #1. Show of hands, please. How many of you are paying for your own education? [Wait for it.] Sorry, but you’re wrong. This is not your fault. You’ve simply been trapped in one of the Big Lies that universities (among others) tell on a regular basis — and have started telling more and more over the past decade or two. You are, of course, paying good money. But you’re not paying for your education. Universities aren’t actually in the business of selling education — though they certainly want you to think they are — because education can’t actually be bought and sold.

Put simply, education is what happens when you learn something you didn’t know before. Ideally, that still takes place all the time on university campuses . . . but when it happens, it’s got nothing to do with what the university is actually selling. You can, after all, go sit in one of the big lecture halls on the West Bank from 9-5 all day every day for the next four months — most of the time, no one will know that you’re not actually registered for whatever courses you’re witnessing — and you can learn an awful lot simply by paying careful attention to lectures you haven’t paid a dime for. Similarly, you could take a copy of my syllabus (or anyone’s), go find all the readings for free in the library, and learn a great deal without ever writing anyone a check. In fact, you don’t even need a syllabus. The university library stacks are open to the public. Go in. Pick a floor. Start reading. Do that for 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, 50 weeks/year (i.e., as if it were a regular job) and you’ll get yourself a pretty impressive education.

What you get when you spend your tuition dollars, however, is not education. Rather, what you get when you write out that check to the U is the privilege of being evaluated and — if you meet a particular set of standards — of being credentialed. Ideally, you’re being evaluated on things that the university is helping you learn. But you don’t get an automatic refund if you don’t actually learn anything — nor do you get charged extra if you happen to learn more than what’s on the syllabus — because what you’re really paying for is for people like me to assign you a variety of tasks and then judge you on how well you perform those tasks. In the eyes of the university, if you actually get an education along the way, that’s great. Ideal, even, since it helps them keep that Big Lie in place. But the university isn’t selling education any more than health clubs sell fitness. In both cases, your money buys you access to the institution, but that’s it. Whether you actually get fit or educated depends on what you do after your check has cleared and you can’t get that money back.

Big Lie #2. You have been told that your education — particularly your college education — is the ticket to a Good Job. There’s a very tiny shred of truth in this, at least insofar as a college degree will make it more likely (though by no means guaranteed) that you’ll wind up with a job that pays you an annual salary rather than one that pays you an hourly wage. Eventually. Bearing in mind that “eventually” may still mean 10-12 years from now. But there’s much more to a Good Job than good pay. Lots of people, after all, make very good money working jobs they actively hate and that give them ulcers.

More importantly, that college degree hasn’t automatically translated into a Good Job upon graduation for at least 25 years. This sad truth is even sadder because it has nothing to do with questions of actual merit, skill, or brains. Most of you — even the best and the brightest of you — will graduate without a Good Job in hand . . . or even on the horizon. Again, not your fault. There simply aren’t enough Good Jobs for all the new college graduates who enter the job market every year. This was true even before the economy went into the toilet. But it is even more true now.

I still keep in touch with some of the best students I’ve had. People who I know are brilliant, articulate, creative, motivated, etc. People who I’ve written letters of recommendation for. People who will almost certainly succeed at anything they want to . . . if they’re given the chance to do so. As far as I know, none of these students from the past 5-10 years is actually unemployed right now. But most of them are still trying to find jobs that are more than placeholder positions that help pay the bills until they can find the career that they really want for themselves. These people aren’t lacking Good Jobs because they’re uneducated or unqualified or unmotivated. Far from it. They’re lacking Good Jobs because there simply aren’t enough of those out there.

Mind you, this is not necessarily the end of the world. There’s a lot to be said for taking some post-graduation time to breathe, to find yourself, and to figure out what you really want to do with your life — even if that means working a not-so-good job (or two) and living on the cheap for a while. Except, of course, that you’ve been told for most of your lives that the real reason you should go to college is so that you can get a Good Job. So you’ve been fed unrealistic expectations by people who really should know better. ‘Cause the non-connection between “a college degree” and “a Good Job” has been true ever since I graduated from college . . . way back in 1986. Which means that it’s been true for at least as long as most of you have been alive. Probably much longer. I was fed this big lie too, after all. And while I wound up with a Good Job in the end, that process still took about ten years after I finished my B.A.

Connected to Big Lie #2 is Big Lie #3: that the quality of your education is measured by your “grades.” That you should be worried about bringing home a report card filled with As (and maybe a B or two), because a high GPA demonstrates that you’ve gotten a good education . . . and that a high GPA will help secure you a Good Job.

Trouble is, in the long run, no one really cares about your GPA. But especially not future employers. When it’s your job to produce a presentation that will help your employer land the big contract that will keep your company afloat (and keep you employed) for another three years, your 3.8 GPA isn’t going to write a kick-ass presentation for you. It won’t guarantee that you’re able to write a kick-ass presentation. It won’t help you keep your job if you write a weak presentation. You will actually have to be able to write that kick-ass presentation.

Perhaps more to the point, the quality of your education isn’t measured very well by your grades at all. A grade simply demonstrates that you were given a set of tasks and someone evaluated you on how well you did those tasks. But it’s possible (for example) to learn a great deal but perform poorly when tested . . . or to ace a test without retaining anything meaningful about the subject after the test is done. In the former case, you’ve got a good education but a lousy grade. In the latter case, you’ve got a lousy education but a good grade.

Put those pieces of the puzzle together and most of you have been led to believe that the most important thing you should expect out of a course is a grade. As a kid, your parents are proud of you if you get As. They’re disappointed when you get Cs. And, typically, they’re much more likely to go to parent-teacher conferences and ask questions about your test scores (how can we help him get better grades?) than about the content of the curriculum (we think that it would enrich her life as a citizen of the world to learn French; where can we find a tutor for her?). It doesn’t take long before most children learn that they, too, should worry more about their grades than about their education.

Big Lie #4. Most of you — most of us — grew up in educational systems that were designed to produce good grades rather than active, engaged, productive citizens. Your average public school system, for example, gets extra funding when its standardized test scores go up, rather than when its graduates go on to become brilliant scientists or ground-breaking novelists. And so most school systems focus their energies on training students to produce good test scores. Which essentially means that you’re trained — from a very early age — to sit still, shut up, do what people in authority tell you to do, and regurgitate whatever they say on tests and exams and essays. Whether you actually learn something that matters is secondary to whether your school district’s test scores are higher than those in the next county.

And so you’ve also been lied to about the role that you should play in your own education. Which is not the role of the passive spectator who memorizes facts and figures and spews them back. There are contexts where rote memorization is valuable and important . . . but if that’s all you’re doing, then you’re not being educated: you’re being indoctrinated. A real education requires you to be actively involved. It requires you to participate. To ask questions. To engage in dialogue. To be challenged by ideas and opinions and worldviews that are different from your own. It requires you to analyze. To synthesize. To create.

These are the sorts of things you need to do routinely in the “real world.” A large part of what it means to be an adult, after all, is that you’re on your own, you’re independent, you’re taking responsibility for your own well-being — and those are difficult things to do if the major lessons you’ve been given on how to cope with the world are to sit still, shut up, and do what you’re told.

Now I’d be lying if I said that this course, all by itself, can erase all those Big Lies. We’re together in this classroom for a grand total of about 48 hours over the next four months . . . which is not a lot of time compared to the 20 or so years of lies you’ve been fed about how you should simply sit still, shut up, and do what you’re told. But, with any luck, this class can be a start.

The public, as usual, is in a fog. If the [political party] and the media cooperate, the fog won’t be lifted until [. . . .] after [the President's] reelection, [when] you will finally be given the full details of another monstrous financial scandal — and the bloody bill that has come due. The media will belatedly begin searching for villain. Experts will explain that ordinary citizens have no choice but to provide tens of billions of dollars to clean up the mess. If this scenario sounds familiar, it’s because the same sequence of events played out in the [major financial crisis of 3-4 years prior], for which taxpayers are now in the process of ponying up $200 billion.

This is from a William Greider essay in Rolling Stone with the (probably familiar sounding) title, “Bailout Now, Pay Later.” Greider goes on to explain the depths of the then-current banking crisis, that the necessary solution — i.e., government shutdowns of big, Big, BIG banks such as Citibank — will almost certainly not be the solution pursued by the then-sitting administration, and that the government’s bailout of all these failing banks will come back to bite taxpayers in the ass later. Hard.

Sounds like 2008, right? It certainly does. But my magazine hoarding ways run much, much deeper than that. (Though I’ve almost purged everything by now. Honest!) This is from June 1991. Occupy Wall Street clearly got to the party much, much later than it should have . . .

And, yes, I’m aiming to blog from my iPad as much as I can. The laptop is still always an option — and it’s certainly a friendlier typing machine — but I’m also not a touch-typist, so I’ve got no indelible home-key habits or tactile rhythms to disrupt when faced with a virtual keyboard embedded in a sheet of touch-sensitive glass. The iPad is also a much more frequent companion than the laptop as I move about town (and beyond) these days. And, perhaps most crucially, several months back, I splurged on a WordPress-friendly blogging app several months ago that has simply been gathering dust in its corner of my home screen. So this piece of my resolution also helps me recoup my major economic investment in Blogsy. After all, that’s $5 that I will never, ever get back . . .

I’ll admit that when the iPad first came out, I wasn’t even remotely tempted by it. I simply didn’t see the point. I already had an iPod Touch and a laptop, and I was perfectly happy with both. More specifically, the iPad seemed to me to be precisely the wrong combination of the two: an iPod that was to big to fit in my pocket, and a portable computer that was too small and too weak to fit my everyday needs. But then I spent a lovely chunk of my July in Belgium, where I watched some good friends zip around with these light, bright, tight little machines for note-taking, emailing, game-playing (etc.) . . . and I got a serious case of Gear Envy.

And so I splurged. And, six months or so later, I haven’t regretted it at all. The iPad won’t replace my laptop as my primary computing device. I’m still too big a fan of the penguin and open source software to join the Cupertino cabal as a full-time member. And, even given all the wondrous things one can do with cloud computing these days, I’m not yet ready to give up on a machine where several gigabytes of files — from old syllabi to new music, digital photos to PDF-ified readings — are always available to me, even when I’m not online.

Regardless of what device I’m using, though, (and, truth be told, I’ve now worked on this entry on both my available options) I’m aiming to drop more text in this space in the coming year than was the case in 2011. I’ll let you decide whether that’s a promise or a threat.

As I type these words, at the very top of the front page of the New York Times‘s website, there’s a link to an op/ed piece by Michael Kazin called “Whatever Happened to the American Left?” with the following subheading:

Critics of corporate power have failed to organize a movement against the policies that drove the nation into a recession.

Even if Kazin happened to write his piece before the Wall Street protests began eight days ago (so it’s not necessarily his fault that the world has undermined whatever truth his complaint might have contained), one would think that the Times‘s editors might have noticed the glaring contradiction between an essay they chose to feature so prominently on their website and the unfolding events happening just down the street.

Then again, the Times doesn’t appear to think the Occupy Wall Street protests are particularly newsworthy. Buried much, much deeper on that same page, there’s a simple link — no story, no photo, no additional detail — to a Times blog entry of a “Video of a Confrontation on Wall St.” That’s the only mention of the protests of any sort on the Times‘s website’s front page.

Meanwhile, as I type these words, over on CNN’s website, there are 21 stories listed under “Latest News” (i.e., stories that, in a print context, would be described as “above-the-fold”). Those big, Big, BIG stories include:

• Python is 24-26 feet long, 300+ lbs
• Campus bake sale sparks outrage
• Police: Sorry for not uncovering sex lair
• Scarlett Johansson on her privacy
• Ben & Jerry’s sells ‘Schweddy Balls’
• Tiger Woods hires new caddie
• Elizabeth Taylor’s jewels on display

Not a single one of the 21 stories is about the Wall Street protests. Nor is there a link to a story about those protests anywhere else on CNN.com’s front page.

But it’s good to know that Tiger has found someone else to lug his clubs around for him. I’d been losing sleep over that burning issue for weeks.

I finished the first of those CDs earlier this month, popped it in the mail, and have just received word that it has finally reached its intended destination.

Though perhaps I should instead say that it made landfall, since the theme in question was “Hurricane” (see track listing below). And while I knew the timing of said CD’s arrival would come pretty close to the anniversary of Katrina coming ashore in NOLA (six years ago this coming Monday, for those of you who’ve forgotten), there was no way for me to know that it would also coincide with the ongoing movement of Irene up the eastern seaboard. (Stay safe and dry, all you peeps from the Carolinas up to New England.)

For the record (for the disc??), I’m open to future requests . . . bearing in mind that there’s already a line here (so I can’t guarantee anyone a rapid response), and that I suspect the uncanny “make it so” magic that happened this time only works by accident (so you probably won’t be able to produce an everlasting global utopia simply by asking for an “everlasting global utopia” mix).

1. Rolling Stones — “Gimme Shelter”
2. Kansas Joe & Memphis Minnie — “When the Levee Breaks”
3. Led Zeppelin — “When the Levee Breaks”
4. Bob Dylan — “The Levee’s Gonna Break”
5. St. Louis Jimmy — “Florida Hurricane”
6. Lord Beginner — “Jamaica Hurricane”
7. Jamie Lidell — “Hurricane”
8. Marcia Ball — “American Dream”
9. Liz Phair — “Hurricane Cindy”
10. Neko Case — “Middle Cyclone”
11. Hurricane Smith — “Oh, Babe, What Would You Say?”
12. Hurricanes — “Pistol Packin’ Mama”
13. Hurricane Harry — “Last Meal”
14. Johnny & the Hurricanes — “Crossfire”
15. Johnny & the Hurricanes — “Storm Warning”
16. Bob Dylan — “Hurricane”
17. Dr. John & the Lower 911 — “Say Whut”
18. Elvis Costello & Allen Touissant — “The River in Reverse”
19. Bruce Springsteen — “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?”
20. Marcia Ball — “Louisiana 1927”

Actually, to be honest, I’m not sure exactly when it began. Maybe it was when I first created a “check-in” entry for a place that did not yet have one. Maybe it was when I first noticed a check-in option that was clearly some random individual’s awkward misspelling of the place I was at the time. Maybe it was when I first realized that Facebook will suggest places to you when you “check in” that are a mile or two away from where you actually are — and so the relationship between your real location and your check-in location is pretty shaky to begin with. Whenever it actually began, “it” was the recognition that Facebook’s openness when it comes to its “Places” feature allows for an . . . unusual . . . degree of playfulness.

And so, over the past several weeks, I’ve been “checking in” on Facebook far more often than I ever did before . . . but I’ve almost always done so by inventing the name of a new place and adding it to the Facebook database. Sometimes these have been completely whimsical (Drunken Cheetah Cafe). Other times, they’ve been more abstract (that spot at the center of your back that you can’t quite scratch). Occasionally, they’ve had some small relationship to where I’ve actually been (Brown. Tall. Who Are We?). But I’ve rarely used the same invented check-in more than once, even when I’ve gone back to the same place repeatedly.

What this now means for some locales in my usual circuit is that when I — or, presumably, anyone else — open up the check-in dialogue, I will see the actual name of wherever I am . . . surrounded by a dozen different invented check-ins. And so the digital city around me isn’t just filled with the names of various businesses: it’s checkered with a host of more fanciful locations. The First National Bank of Soul and Funk. Uptown Ska Palace, Divorce Court, and Tobacco Emporium. Fort DeSoto Park (East Beach) (secret Minneapolis extension). And so on.

I have mild regrets — though only mild ones — that, by avoiding the “proper” check-in choices for my favorite coffee shops and bars, I’m blurring their online visibility somewhat. At the same time, however, I’d much rather help to create a map of the city that isn’t based entirely around commerce. And I’m happy to undermine, even if only in a very little way, the logics of surveillance and marketing that “checking in” are intended to perpetuate.

What I’m still waiting for, however, is to open up that check-in dialogue and find that someone else has started inventing fanciful place names of their own. I can’t be the only person who’s started doing this. And it wouldn’t take a lot more people doing so to slowly fill the digital versions of our world with the places that we really want to be. Consider this your invitation to join in on the fun. . .

1. Mocha Java, Empress of All North America. I let the old girl go on Jan 21. It was time. She went quietly and peacefully. I still miss her, of course. And I’m sure I will for a long time to come.
        
2. Paris. Right before classes started, I spent seven days in Europe, mostly in my capacity as Acting Chair of the Association for Cultural Studies. The bulk of my time was spent in Paris to help survey the facilities for the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference . . . and I think it’s shaping up to be a fabulous event. Here, though, I simply want to note how weirdly comfortable Paris felt, given how awkward my “command” (much too strong a word in this context) of the French language is. If you believe my undergraduate institution, I’m “proficient” in French and German. Even then, I knew that institutional proclamation overstated my abilities to handle either language with real comfort. Twenty-five years later (and with little real practice in the interim), as I boarded my flight, I felt even less confident. And yet, on this trip, just enough of that ancient training came back to me to make me feel as if I could stumble my way through with only minimal embarrassment. With a little (okay, a lot) of practice, I might even be able to hold brief conversations about something more complex than purchasing train tickets or sandwiches. This sounds like a laudable goal for me to aim for between now and next July.
3. Ghent. The small chunk of time I didn’t spend in Paris on that European trip was spent in Ghent. Also on ACS business, but this time to do some advance planning for the first ever ACS Summer Institute. Which I’m also very excited about. Not the least because Ghent is a wonderful little city, and will be even more exciting when (a) I have more than 24 hours to experience it and (b) it’s summer. I even found a Belgian beer (Westmalle Dubbel) that made me feel okay about spending so much time in countries where the hop-heavy brews I generally prefer are nowhere to be found.
4. European trains. The one major blemish on my otherwise thoroughly enjoyable week abroad was a small (but expensive) curse that appeared to settle over my attempts to move around the continent (even in a small way) by train. I booked my train tickets between Paris and Ghent prior to leaving the States, hoping that this would help make things easier for me. Which it totally would have done . . . had I not misread my own timetable and missed my scheduled train to Ghent. Or had I not managed to lose my ticket for the train back to Paris in the short walk from grabbing dinner in Brussels (where I knew my ticket was in my hand) and walking back to the train station (where said ticket was nowhere to be found). The trains themselves were comfortable, pleasant, and quick. But my ability to manage my timing and my tickets was clearly beset by some bad juju.
5. Car troubles. The flights to and from Paris were absolutely fine — especially the flight back, which was only about a third full, and where everyone got to stretch out quite comfortably indeed — or else I might think that bad juju covered just about any form of transportation I touched in January. The first time I tried to drive my Beetle after I got back into the country, it stalled out on me . . . and wouldn’t start up again. At some point, it seems, I must have hit a rock or a chunk of jagged ice or something that ripped a hole in my oil pan. Which, of course, drained all the oil out of my engine. Which, in turn, caused the engine to lock up. For good. Ouch. On the plus side, my insurance covered this. And my usual mechanic (who I’m delighted to recommend as fast, friendly, and affordable) happened to have a used Jetta they were looking to sell, and that I’m very happy with. But losing my dog and my car in the same week did have me wondering whether I’d stepped into some old-time country song.
6. Ice dams. For folks who live south of the frozen tundra that is Minnesota, ice dams may be an unknown beast. I certainly knew nothing about them until I moved here. But they’re a plague that can beset snow-covered roofs if just enough heat escapes for some of that snow to melt and then re-freeze . . . so that any subsequent meltage gets blocked by the wall of ice that’s formed on your roof . . . and, with nowhere else to go, said meltage can then trickle underneath your shingles and into your walls and ceilings. And you can only imagine the fun that results from that. Unfortunately, my knowledge of such “fun” was not simply imaginary this year. Fortunately, the internal damage I suffered was very minor — and caught before it grew into something much more serious. Still.
7. Lauryn Hill. Her First Avenue show could have been fabulous. I certainly wanted it to be. After I’d already dropped money on not-so-cheap tickets, I started hearing tales of other recent shows where she would wait hours to appear on stage and then perform badly . . . but I was still hopeful. But that hope was misplaced. Even at the end of a loooong day on campus, I could probably have weathered the 2.5 hour wait (doors opened at 9, with nothing but a so-so DJ to entertain the actual show started at about 11:30) if Hill had truly rocked the house, or if her band had been tight, or if her grooves had been compelling. But none of those things happened. My friend and I toughed it out till about 1 . . . but then decided that we hadn’t seen her do anything strong enough to make us hopeful that we were going to get anything better in whatever was still left of the show.
8. Beer Dabbler. Minnesotans love their winter. So much so that they do things the rest of the country (the world?) would think are insane. Like hold outdoor Winter Carnivals in January, even (or especially) when the thermometer is well below freezing. Or hold outdoor beer festivals in the midst of that Winter Carnival. Done well, the Dabbler could have been a truly special event. Even on one of the coldest days of the year. There were lots of good breweries present. There was plenty of room in the park where the event was held. There were certainly lots of people who wanted to be there. Sadly, though, there were not enough volunteers to help ticketholders enter the park when the gates opened . . . and so the line still stretched for a full three blocks half an hour after the event began. And the Dabbler only used about a third of the actual space of the park . . . so all those people were crammed into not enough real estate. And, most amazingly, no one had bothered to actually clear the park’s walkways of snow . . . which, even for a Winter Carnival, seems like a major safety issue when you combine (a) 12-15″ of the frozen white stuff, (b) a few thousand people, (c) minimal post-nightfall lighting, and (d) what is effectively an open bar. Again, we left early. And, again, leaving early was a damned good idea.
9. The new semester. January was (clearly) a month filled with challenges this year. But it was also the start of a new semester. And new semesters always begin — at least for me — with a certain spirit of hopefulness. Sure, the last few days before that first class meeting tend to be filled with sizable measures of stress and strain, as I try to get all the pieces in place so that Day One can come off smoothly. But there’s also something exciting about meeting a new group of students, watching them start to gel as a group, and seeing them start to wrestle with the course material in productive fashion. And, so far anyway (even more than a third of the way into February), I’m still feeling a large dose of that Day One optimism.

Anywho, a good friend posted a query to Facebook asking for people to name their favorite holiday movies. I chimed in with a joke answer . . . that, on further reflection, may have been a more serious answer than I originally intended it to be.

My chosen movie features an “everyman” actor who plays a man with a restless soul. He struggles with his inner demons and wins the love of a good woman. Along the way, he also manages to champion the virtues of simple living, fixing up old houses, and fighting off the rapacious ways of evil bankers. The movie ends with the happy couple reunited and smiling as the credits roll.

Sounds a lot like It’s a Wonderful Life. But I hate that movie. No, really, I do. Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed are fine, and the scenes of their early courtship are actually sweet. But, in the end, Frank Capra slathers way too much cloying, syrupy sappiness on top of everything, and my gag reflex kicks in.

No, my new favorite holiday movie — now that I realize that it really is a holiday movie — is Fight Club. “The things you own end up owning you.”

1. Mocha. She’s still with us. Believe it or not. She’s had a couple of spells where she stopped eating for a few days, and I thought she was ready to go . . . but then she’s suddenly rediscovered the joy of kibble.
2. In like a lamb, out like a frozen four-pack of lamb chops. Our slow arriving fall treated us mellow and fine deep into the second week of the month, when we had highs in the 60s . . . and then we got walloped with 6-10 inches of snow. By month’s end, the city had already declared its second snow emergency of the season, and we’d all forgotten what outside temperatures above freezing felt like.
3. The American Studies Association conference. I got to escape some of those early sub-freezing days by flying off to San Antonio for the annual ASA meetings. And, as scholarly gatherings go, the ASA is routinely much more interesting and enjoyable than the annual ICA and NCA confabs. It didn’t hurt that I got to wear sandals for four days in mid-November without putting myself at risk of frostbite. I did struggle to find anything that resembles good beer in San Antonio . . . but the margaritas made up for that.
4. Town Hall Tap. My fave brewpub in town anywhere opened up a new location at 48th and Chicago in south Minneapolis. And, not surprisingly, it appears to already be a huge success. The official opening happened at 3 pm on a Friday. By 4, the place was standing room only. By the time I left that night, the wait list for tables was about 45 minutes long. The opening was even sweeter for me, thanks to the unexpected pleasure of not one, but two different former undergrads — neither of whom I’d seen in years — spotting me and making a point of saying how much they’d enjoyed the classes they’d taken from me.
5. The collapse of the Cowboys. It was not a good month to be a fan of Washington’s professional football team. An embarrassing loss to a bad team (the Vikings). A humiliating loss to a good team (the Eagles). A squeaker victory over a mediocre team (the Titans). On the other hand, it was delicious to watch the Cowboys self-destruct so thoroughly. Even more delicious to have The Onion capture the joy I felt so perfectly.
6. Apple pie. Thanksgiving found me baking my very first ever pie. From scratch, no less. The filling, if I do say so myself, came out quite nicely. At least in terms of its taste. A little more cornstarch would probably have helped it firm up a bit. The crust, on the other hand, needed some serious help. Again, it tasted fine. At least insofar as it stayed intact, since the bottom crust basically disappeared during the baking process. Perhaps it melted into the filling. But there was little to no there there when it came time for dessert.
7. A kind mention. Proud as I still am of Elvis After Elvis, I also don’t figure it gets much attention these days. It’s nearly fifteen years old (as a book, anyway), and so it’s well past the usual “freshness” date of an awful lot of scholarly volumes. So I was quite surprised to stumble across the brief shout-out for it in this interview.
8. Bettye Lavette, Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook. Wow. Just wow. Worth it for the opening track alone (a stunning cover of an otherwise little-played Beatles track called “The Word”), but the rest of the album is awfully sharp too.
9. Mavis Staples. Also wow. Only this time for a live performance at The Cedar. If the opportunity presents itself to see her in concert, run (do not walk). You will not be disappointed. Promise.

1. Mocha. Given the unhappy prognosis for her long-term health back in March, she stays at the top of this list for every month she remains on this side of the topsoil. The past week or so, she’s actually seemed a bit perkier. And the slow, perpetual nose bleeds that had made my living room floor look like it had been decorated by Jackson Pollock with a one-dimension palette have slowed down as well. If she’s still with us this time next month, I’ll have had to go back to the vet twice to re-renew the prescription for her meds. And, given how she seems to be faring right now, I’m not gonna be surprised if I have to do that.
2. A long delayed fall. We knew it couldn’t last. And it didn’t. We saw our first snow flurries of the season here in Minneapolis last week. But earlier in the month, we were still rocking temps in the 80s. Not just fleetingly, but for several days at a stretch. Patio dining was still feasible — and comfortable — more than halfway into the month. And when those sorts of days aren’t likely to roll around again until April, every little extension of the summer is a glorious thing.
3. Lake Wine and Cheese. Newly opened, and a short four-block walk from my house . . . and with a marvelous selection of craft beers and microbrews. If I didn’t have a fridge full of beer I brewed myself, this place would tempt me to part with a bit more of my take-home pay than would be wise.
4. Town Hall Brewery‘s Fresh Hop. Speaking of places where I spend money on beer, it’s tough to top the stuff THB brews and pours on a regular basis. But it’s extra tough to top their Fresh Hop: a once-a-year, get-it-while-supplies-last batch of hopped-up ale made, just as the name implies, with hops picked fresh off the vine . . . or at least as fresh as possible, given that the vines in question are still 1000 miles or so to the west.
5. Washington, 17, Philadelphia 12; Washington 16, Green Bay 13; Washington 17, Chicago 14. On a day when my lifelong football allegiance were sorely tested (i.e., the day when, for the second year in a row, my team lost to the otherwise woeful Lions), I need to remind myself that we had a winning record for October, that two of our three wins came against teams that made the playoffs last season, and that the season is still far from over.
6. Teaching via IM. Once every year or two, I’ll have a moment when I think I know what I’m going to do in the classroom that day . . . and then, at the last second, some wild idea pops into my head for something totally weird that I should do instead. I can’t predict or control those flashes of inspiration, but I’ve learned to trust them. ‘Cause they often wind up working much, much better than whatever I’d originally had planned. This time around, the course was “New Telecommunication Media” and one of the two readings on tap was from Shayla Thiel-Stern‘s book on adolescent girls and instant messaging. And I’d been prepared to lead the group in our usual conversation about the issues raised by the readings for the day — until I realized that it would be far more productive, at least with respect to one of the topics at hand, to hold our discussion using IM. Or at least a primitive, pre-digital version of IM, where our entire conversation took place using the whiteboard at the front of the room. It took my students a little while to warm up to the idea . . . but, eventually, we had 3-4 separate threads running on the board at once, and we were able to have a much smarter, much more embodied discussion of the material at hand than we ever would have if I’d stuck with my original lesson plan.
7. So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities. Yes, it’s one of those videos that has already been around the world about 40 times, thanks to Facebook and listservs and such. But that doesn’t make it any less funny. Or sad. Or true.
8. Chastity Brown @ the Kitty Cat Klub. This show was already down as a “must-list” for this month’s Notable Nine, and I figured I’d be able to find some suitably representative performance already online to give folks who’ve never had the pleasure a sense of what went down at the KCK on Oct 16. But, o frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! I found a clip from that very show. Enjoy.
9. Paul Beatty reads Slumberland. A last-second addition to this month’s list. But that’s because I only became aware of this video in the last hour or so. If you haven’t read Slumberland yourself, run (do not walk) to your nearest independent bookstore, buy a copy, and stay up all night to finish it. While you’re at it, do the same with his first novel, The White Boy Shuffle. But if your nearest independent bookstore is closed at the time you’re actually reading these words, you can whet your appetite by watching the video below.

So here’s my “notable nine” for September 2010. These aren’t necessarily the best — or the worst — things that happened to me this past month. And they’re not presented in any clearcut order. They’re simply nine slices of my life from the past 30 days that deserve some sort of recognition.

• Mocha. The old girl is still with us. She is now fourteen and a half. She was diagnosed with a tumor in her snout in March, and there isn’t anything to do about it that will make it go away. The tumor has grown large enough that it’s reshaped her face a bit. She’s got a perpetually slow-dribbling bloody nose. She’s stopped eating cheese and seems indifferent to treats. And yet, she still gets a pep in her step when it’s time for a walk, and she’s still a pretty perky pooch overall. Not sure how much longer she’ll hold on, but she’s here now. And that’s good.
  
• Tank. People have asked if I intend to bring a new dog into my life once Mocha decides it’s time to retire to the Land of Fat Squirrels With Broken Knees (aka, Doggie Heaven). And I don’t know for sure. Mocha will be a very tough friend to replace, after all. But for the next 8-10 months or so, the question is moot, as I have temporary custody of “my” former cat (back when that “my” would have been an “our”). And she’s as adorable as Mocha, though she fancies herself to be a cruel and vicious killer.
  
• Mom. I shared a brief Mom anecdote in this space a couple of weeks ago. There’s no fresh update since then (which is good . . . or as good as it gets, anyway), but my trip to DC back then lingers for me still.
  
• Billy Bragg. He played live at The Cedar on the 8th. And was amazing, of course. Even if he didn’t play the tune below.
  
• Hops. When I moved into the new house a little more than a year ago, I decided that I needed to expand my homebrewing adventures a bit by growing my own hops. So back in March, I planted a couple of hop rhizomes (calm down, you crazed Deleuzeans) on the south side of the front porch . . . and they appear to be almost ready to harvest.
• Theme Time Radio Hour box sets. A few years ago, Bob Dylan started hosting a weekly satellite radio show. I’ve never heard it live, and have only heard one episode in full. But I know enough about it to know that his playlists — which revolve around a different theme every week — are a glorious potpourri of old country, folk, blues, r&b, soul, gospel, and then some. And, thanks (I think) to the quirks of how UK copyright law treats compilations of recordings of a certain age, there are three separate labels (Ace, Chrome Dreams, and Mischief Music/Music Melon) that have each released a series of multi-disc sets drawn from Dylan’s radio show. There are a handful of duplications across the collections, but nowhere near enough to make any of them redundant. And, between them, that’s 22 discs (so far?) chock full of musical delights.
• Washington 13, Dallas 7. I was born and (mostly) raised in DC. And while I was never even remotely close to being an athletic child, I was still a straight boy. So it was almost inevitable that I would become a fan of the team with the most heinous nickname in all of US sports. And I’m a very loyal sports fan. So that allegiance still holds. Even without the nickname problem, this has not exactly been an easy cross to bear for the past decade or so. ‘Cause the team has disappointed on the field far more often than it’s provided moments of glory. So it was awfully fine to see them open the season with a primetime beatdown of the Cowboys. The two games they’ve played since have not ended so happily. But it’s always good to watch the Cowboys lose. Always.
• USBank. Over the past several years, I’ve toyed with pulling my money out of USBank and finding somewhere else to put it. A different bank. A credit union. A shoebox hidden in the freezer. Anywhere. That interest-bearing, mile-earning, no-fee checking account I opened when I first came to Minneapolis has gradually morphed into a no-interest, points-for-gifts-I-don’t-want, $20-per-year checking account. And they closed the branch on campus right across the street from my office. Grrr.
  But then I went and did something stupid. And, much to my surprise, USBank made it right.
  Several months ago, I realized that my favorite brewpub has dartboards. Real ones, that is. Not the cheesy electronic ones. And so I started carrying my darts in my computer bag, for those occasions (and it’s happened more than once) when I was at Town Hall and had someone to beat at darts with me. Being prepared like that was smart. Forgetting I had my darts in my bag when I tried to fly to DC to visit Mom, however, was not so smart.
  Fortunately, I had arrived at the airport with time to spare. And the TSA agent who took me aside was very nice. He said that I could go back to the “dangerous” (my word, not his) side of the security checkpoint and get the customer service office to mail my darts home for me. The “customer service office,” however, turned out to be the airport branch of USBank. Who not only mailed me my darts, but they did so for free. And, evidently, they do that for everyone, not just USBank customers. My darts were waiting for me when I got home.
  Even more impressive? Two days later, there was a handwritten note in the mail from the teller I’d dealt with: “I hope your package arrived safely, & I’m glad we were able to help.”
  None of which guarantees that I won’t still move my money at some point. But even big, greedy, penny-pinching corporations can still do nice things sometimes. And it’s good to acknowledge it when they do.
• Reclaiming the University. In response to this dispiriting-looking event, the Faculty for the Renewal of Public Education (of which I’m a proud member) and the Education Action Coalition MN organized a much better conversation. Our event rocked, and was very well attended. Their event pretty much lived down to my already low expectations.

Every once in a while, though, even when she’s clearly not performing very well, she manages to bring a smile to my face. Today, for instance, we had the following exchange:

Mom: I don’t even know what my name is.
Me: Your name is Jacquie.
Mom [clearly surprised, yet pleased, by this news]: Oh! Well. That’s very personable.

The company has set aside $32bn (£20.5bn) to cover its liabilities arising from the disaster, which US lawyers say has affected tens of thousands of people in the Gulf, particularly those in the fishing and tourism industries.

What’s not remarked upon here is that BP has $32 billion lying around to set aside. That is, they can go about their normal business while simply bracketing that outrageously huge sum as if it were some sort of “rainy day” fund.

And that really is an outrageously huge sum. As I type these words, the US Census Bureau’s rolling population clock estimates that there are currently slightly less than 310 million people in the US. Which means that if each and every man, woman, and child in the US put $100 into a pot (and that’d have to be a very, very big pot indeed), that would still be less money than BP can “put aside” to pay for the mess it made in Gulf.

A fella only turns 45 once (time travel and reincarnation notwithstanding). And, being the pop music geek that I am, I decided to honor the occasion by making a couple of suitably themed mix CDs to give away as door prizes (first 45 celebrants only!) at today’s birthday bashes. And, just to make folks who can’t be here today jealous — or to make the locals who were still deciding whether to show up for the festivities — the playlists and liner notes look like this.

I’m turning 45, which certainly seems like an important number, but I’ll be damned if I know what it’s really supposed to mean.

Growing up, though, “45” meant only one thing: a 7” inch circle of magical, musical vinyl. I can still recall the first pop single I ever got as a gift (Steam’s “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)”) and the first single I ever bought for myself (the Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight”). I once spent the better part of two straight days in an Austin record store flipping through their massive (and completely unsorted) collection of used 45s for hidden gems. And while it’s been ages since I’ve played any of them, I have several hundred 45s tucked away in my living room. Even hidden and silent, they’re still magical.

Despite growing up in the era of the concept album, I’ve long believed that the single is vastly underrated. Rock’n’roll didn’t really take to the album as a major aesthetic form until 1965. Even then, it took a few more years before the LP truly replaced the 45 as the center of the rock universe. Take away Rubber Soul, Highway 61 Revisited, and Bringing It All Back Home, and all the great “albums” of 1965 are merely collections of singles padded out with a few filler tracks.

So one of the obvious (to me anyway) things to do for my 45th birthday was to create a mega-mix of 45 of my favorite 45s from 45 years ago. But when I sat down to tackle this project, two big problems quickly presented themselves.

First, there was the length problem. I can usually fit 22 or 23 tracks on an 80-minute CD, so a 2-disc set should have worked fine . . . but my mixes typically don’t draw from a pool of songs that mostly run less than three minutes. So either I needed to trim the project down to one 30-song disc, or I needed to scale it up to 60 songs.

Second, there was the “favorite child” problem. My initial list of viable candidates was about 150 songs long. Some of these were easy to eliminate: Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” has its schmaltzy charms, but there were clearly at least 60 better songs on that list. Nonetheless, even after I made those easy calls, there was still a lot of great music to consider. Chopping things down to 30 songs was out of the question. Even getting down to 60 felt too brutal.

I made things a little easier by imposing several rules on myself.

Any eligible song had to have appeared on a single. It didn’t have to be the A-side. It didn’t have to have hit the charts. But if it were strictly an album track (e.g., Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam”), or if I wasn’t sure it had been released as a single, it was out.

The song had to have been released in 1965. A few tunes here may have first entered the world in late 1964, but the historical record is also fuzzy enough that I gave a few tunes the benefit of the doubt.

No artist was allowed more than one slot in the finished mix — which made things easier and harder. I didn’t have to decide whether, for example, Edwin Starr’s “Agent Double-O-Soul” deserved a spot ahead of two James Brown classics . . . but I did have to choose between “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “I Got You (I Feel Good).”
Other obligatory disclaimers and explanations:

These aren’t absolutely, positively, unmistakably the 60 best singles of 1965. My goal, after all, was to make a really good mix: not to define some sort of canon. And the sequencing is more about creating a mix that flows well than about trying to rank these tunes top to bottom.

Still, quality matters. I paid some attention to chart success, but I also didn’t let the vagaries of Billboard’s rankings rule the day. You don’t really want to hear Freddie & the Dreamers’ treacle-filled “I’m Telling You Now” (which was a #1 Pop hit) instead of the Apollas’ totally divine “Absolutely Right” (which never charted at all), do you? And you’d stop being my friend if I’d included any of the seven Top Ten Pop singles (including two #1s) that Herman’s Hermits released in 1965 — especially if I’d left low-charting gems by the Who or Them out of the final mix. If you really want “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” or “I’m Henry VIII, I Am,” you can find them yourself. But I don’t have to be party to such insanity.

I sometimes chose tunes that you most likely know from some later version. Gloria Jones, for instance, did the original “Tainted Love” more than a decade before Soft Cell. You may already know “Thanks a Lot” because of Neko Case (if you don’t, you should; it’s on The Virginian), but she clearly owes a lot to Brenda Lee (even more than she does to Ernest Tubb, who did it first). The J. Geils Band would later cover the tracks by the Contours and the Marvelows. “Respect,” of course, was a hit for Otis Redding before Aretha Franklin made it her own. And many of you may not realize that one of Britney Spears’ biggest hits was first recorded by a band out of England called the Rolling Stones. No, really, it’s true. I wouldn’t lie about that.

A few tunes wound up on the cutting room floor because they pushed too hard against the feel of the rest of the mix. The Wonder Who (a pseudonym that the Four Seasons used for a handful of singles in 1965 and 1966) went to #12 on the Pop charts with a so-bad-it’s-great version of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice.” The We Five (a semi-folky two-hit wonder) had a #3 hit with “You Were on My Mind” that I’ve always loved. Elvis had a few forgettable movie-related hits (“Do the Clam,” “Tickle Me,” and “Puppet on a String”) that I wouldn’t inflict on you, but he also reached #3 with the genuinely worthy “Crying in the Chapel.” And yet these tracks would have muddled the vibe of all the great garage band and soul that simply had to be included.

The final mix also held a few surprises for me. While he was a true maestro of the pop single, there’s nothing here from Phil Spector’s stable of artists, largely because the great girl groups he worked with didn’t do much of note in 1965 — but also because I’m not fond enough of the Righteous Brothers to include either (yawn) “Unchained Melody” or (mega-yawn) “Ebb Tide.” I expected the Stones would provide me with tough choices to make . . . but none of their other 1965 hits (“Heart of Stone,” “The Last Time,” “Play With Fire,” “Get Off of My Cloud,” “As Tears Go By”) come anywhere near “Satisfaction.” On the other hand, I didn’t expect quite so many great singles from the Animals and the Yardbirds: “It’s My Life,” “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” “For Your Love,” and “I’m a Man” all missed the final cut (though none did so by much). And I hadn’t thought of Nina Simone as a singles artist — or even as an artist who reluctantly played that game to keep her record label happy — so I was thrilled to find that her deliciously smoky version of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You” made it onto a 45, so that I could share it with you here.

Disc One:
1. Sam the Sham & the Pharoahs — Wooly Bully (#2 Pop, #31 R&B)
2. Animals — Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (#15 Pop)
3. Contours — First I Look at the Purse (#57 Pop, #12 R&B)
4. Marvelows — I Do (#37 Pop, #7 R&B)
5. Shirley Ellis — Clapping Song (Clap Pat Clap Slap) (#8 Pop, #16 R&B)
6. Strangeloves — I Want Candy (#11 Pop)
7. Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders — The Game of Love (#1 Pop)
8. Gentrys — Keep On Dancing (#4 Pop)
9. Dixie Cups — Iko Iko (#20 Pop, #20 R&B)
10. Cannibal & the Headhunters — Land of 1000 Dances (#30 Pop)
11. McCoys — Hang On Sloopy (#1 Pop)
12. Sir Douglas Quintet — She’s About a Mover (#13 Pop)
13. Brenda Lee — Thanks a Lot (#45 Pop)
14. Beach Boys — Help Me Rhonda (#1 Pop)
15. Beatles — Day Tripper (#5 Pop)
16. Knickerbockers — Lies (#20 Pop)
17. Martha Reeves & the Vandellas — You’ve Been in Love Too Long (#36 Pop, #25 R&B)
18. Marvin Gaye — I’ll Be Doggone (#8 Pop, #1 R&B)
19. Jr. Walker & the All-Stars — Shotgun (#4 Pop, #1 R&B)
20. Stevie Wonder — Uptight (Everything’s Alright) (#3 Pop, #1 R&B)
21. Apollas — You’re Absolutely Right (didn’t chart)
22. Ad Libs — Boy From New York City (#8 Pop, #6 R&B)
23. Len Barry — 1-2-3 (#2 Pop, #11 R&B)
24. Lou Christie — Lightnin’ Strikes (#1 Pop)
25. Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons — Let’s Hang On! (#3 Pop)
26. Gloria Jones — Tainted Love (didn’t chart)
27. Edwin Starr — Agent Double-O-Soul (#21 Pop, #8 R&B)
28. Little Milton — We’re Gonna Make It (#25 Pop, #1 R&B)
29. James Brown — Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag (#8 Pop, #1 R&B)
30. Fontella Bass — Rescue Me (#4 Pop, #1 R&B)

Disc Two:
1. Sam Cooke — Shake (#7 Pop, #4 R&B)
2. Otis Redding — Respect (#35 Pop, #4 R&B)
3. Betty LaVette — Let Me Down Easy (#20 R&B)
4. Ray Charles — Crying Time (#6 Pop, #5 R&B)
5. Nina Simone — I Put a Spell on You (#23 R&B)
6. Zombies — Tell Her No (#6 Pop)
7. Shirley Bassey — Goldfinger (#8 Pop)
8. Moody Blues — Go Now! (#10 Pop)
9. Who — I Can’t Explain (#93 Pop)
10. Them — Gloria (#71 Pop)
11. Marvelettes — Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead (#61 Pop, #11 R&B)
12. Velvelettes — He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin’ (#64 Pop, #21 R&B)
13. Mary Wells — Use Your Head (#34 Pop, #13 R&B)
14. Smokey Robinson & the Miracles — Going to a Go-Go (#11 Pop, #2 R&B)
15. Four Tops — I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) (#1 Pop, #1 R&B)
16. Temptations — My Girl (#1 Pop, #1 R&B)
17. Barbara Lewis — Baby I’m Yours (#11 Pop, #5 R&B)
18. Don Covay — See Saw (#44 Pop, #5 R&B)
19. Lee Dorsey — Ride Your Pony (#28 Pop, #7 R&B)
20. Major Lance — Come See (#40, Pop, #20 R&B)
21. Kim Weston — Take Me in Your Arms (Rock Me) (#50 Pop, #4 R&B)
22. Diana Ross & the Supremes — Back in My Arms Again (#1 Pop, #1 R&B)
23. Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels — Jenny Take a Ride! (#10 Pop)
24. Dave Clark Five — I Like It Like That (#7 Pop)
25. Paul Revere & the Raiders — Just Like Me (#11 Pop)
26. Yardbirds — Heart Full of Soul (#9 Pop)
27. Rolling Stones — (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (#1 Pop, #19 R&B)
28. Bob Dylan — Subterranean Homesick Blues (#39 Pop)
29. Wilson Pickett — In the Midnight Hour (#21 Pop, #1 R&B)
30. Solomon Burke — Got to Get You Off My Mind (#22 Pop, #1 R&B)

Until this morning, when I suddenly realized that I was channeling this TV show’s theme. (Embedding has been disabled.) Why this particular tune would rise to the surface now from the depths of 1973 is beyond me. But it scares me to think what else might be waiting there to take me by surprise in the future . . .

New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don’t Love Each Other

Was out with a couple of friends, celebrating a birthday (not mine). The Super Bowl was not an official part of anyone’s agenda though, as it turns out, all three of us were rooting for New Orleans. Even the birthday girl, who’s not a football fan. At halftime, we leave the bar we’d been and start walking back to where 2 of the 3 of us had parked their cars. And we hear this noise up ahead from several blocks away.

We get closer, and it sounds vaguely like a Mardi Gras parade. There’s music. Horns. Shouting.

Bear in mind, this is Minneapolis. In February. And it’s snowing. So we figure that can’t possibly be the case.

We get closer still. And, yes. There’s a small brass band standing in an alleyway. There are a dozen people dressed in black and gold (Saints colors, for those who are not NFL-savvy) dancing in the street, having the time of the fuckin’ lives.

This is one of the reasons I love Minneapolis.

Better still, it’s one of the reasons I love N’awlins. Even though I’ve never lived there. I can’t think of any other city in the US that could generate enough passion and love and community and loyalty to have people dancing in the snow like that. Not for people who were 1000 miles from home, anyway.

• Beyonce does interview with bleeding feet
• Newest Obama ‘loves to chew on feet’

yesterday was monday.

something is missing…..

So I’m trying to offer a “makeup” post today. Ten tunes. But no comments this time. It’s another swamped week, I’m afraid.

1. Professor Longhair, “Mardi Gras in New Orleans.”
2. Todd Rhodes, “Rocket 69.”
3. Lou Ann Barton, “Sugar Coated Love.”
4. Marcia Ball, “Married Life.”
5. Madonna, “Don’t Tell Me.”
6. Asylum Street Spankers, “Beer.”
7. Lyle Lovett, “I Love Everybody.”
8. Cole Porter, “You’re the Top.”
9. Louis Prima, “It’s Good as New (I Painted It Blue).”
10. Dinah Washington, “I Love You, Yes I Do.”

1. Dinah Washington, “No Voot, No Bout.” Innuendo-laden jazz, rather than blues or r&b — though Dinah did plenty of those in her day as well. And did them damned well.
2. Wynonie Harris, “Lovin’ Machine.” Hmm. Looks like it’s going to be one of those MMMs. Harris made a good-sized career of saucy jump blues tunes like this one. “You put a quarter in the slot, things light up, out comes your lovin’ in a Dixie cup.”
3. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Want Your Body.” Today’s randomness is definitely all hot and bothered . . . and growing more so by the minute.
4. Joe Tex, “I Want to Do Everything for You.” One of the more underrated figures of ’60s/’70s soul.
5. Fats Witherspoon, “Hook Line and Sinker.” I’ll be honest. I know next to nothing about this track. I think I found it on a compilation of old r&b sides, and it somehow found its way from there onto the iPod. A yeoman-like effort. It won’t make anyone forget Louis Jordan or Fats Domino . . . but it’s also nothing I’d turn away from if it came up on the radio.
6. Al Green, “Let’s Stay Together,” Is there a sweeter voice in ’70s soul than Al Green’s? I know there are many who can compete, of course. And a few who are undoubtedly his equal. But anyone who can put him to shame? I don’t think so.
7. Drifters, “Try Try Baby.” I’m pretty sure this would be the early Clyde McPhatter version of the Drifters. Not one of their bigger hits, but some vintage early ’50s doo-wop all the same.
8. Tom Waits, “Puttin’ on the Dog.” One of the “Brawlers” from Waits’ Orphans three-disc set. Play an old Howlin’ Wolf record at half-speed, lay a whiskey-soaked mashup of lyrics from various Rufus Thomas and Big Joe Turner tunes on top, and you’ve got this track.
9. Four Tops, “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got).” Some classic early ’70s Motown — and the last Top Ten hit for the Tops. The little “Shaft”-like bursts of guitar scattered intermittently in the background always make me smile.
10. Adverts, “One Chord Wonders.” And now for something completely different. Nine straight tracks that all live somewhere in (or at least near) the blues/r&b/soul . . . and then straight into ’70s punk DIY nihilism. I think if you listen close enough to the last thirty seconds, you might actually be able to hear Kurt Cobain being born in the midst of the multiple repetitions of “We don’t give a damn.” No, really, you can. Honest.

Better than ever? Maybe not. But at least one friend told me that MMM has become the highlight of her week, and that she’d missed it during its hiatus. That can’t possibly be true, of course. I’m sure MMM is merely the third or fourth best part of anyone’s week — at best — but, wherever it ranks in your personal pantheon, I’ll try not to take it away again anytime soon.

No extended song-by-song commentary this week, I’m afraid.  Classes begin tomorrow and I’ve miles to go before I sleep.  But I will note that the world really needs to be reminded about the Irma Thomas tune above.  Which is not a cover version.  It’s the original.  And vastly superior (IMHO) to the Stones’ cover version (and that isn’t so much a critique of Mick and Keith and Brian as it is high praise for Irma).

I’m teaching two courses this semester. Both of them are filled to capacity, which means that students who want to get into either of those courses either have to hope for a fortuitously timed drop by someone currently in the class, or they need to ask me for a permission number to get added to the roster. Since registration for spring courses began a couple of months ago, I’ve probably had two dozen queries along these lines. Most of which have been pretty straightforward and easy to handle: the student in question sends me an email, asks about one of my two courses by name, and I tell them I’ve added their name to the relevant waitlist.

But I’ve also had at least half a dozen queries by students whose requests to get into my course ignore “little” details like specifying which course they want to join. At least three queries from students who don’t provide me with their full names (’cause, of course, there’s only going to be one Chris or Elizabeth or John who might show up in my classroom (either of them) on Day One). And at least two queries from students expressing a strong and profound interest in taking my course . . . in an email that’s actually addressed to the instructors of three or four different courses that the student in question wants to get into.

No one knows why they do what they do, indeed . . .

PS: How did I forget to include this bit? About 25% of the students who I’ve written back, asking for (a) their full name and/or (b) the course they want to join, have never written me back again. I suppose that’s good. If you have a hard time answering either of those questions, after all, you’re going to have a helluva time with an actual exam or a research paper.

So. Here we go. The next ten shuffled tracks off of my iPod (with side comments, as the situation warrants), no matter what the effect might be on any residual cred I’ve still got. I’ll try to make this a weekly thing. Mondays should be pretty good for me in that regard this semester. It’s a prep day, but a little blogging makes for a good prep break, yes?

1. Jon Rauhouse, “F86.” Rauhouse plays pedal steel guitar for Neko Case — and damned fine pedal steel it is, too. Not sure if there’s any other way I would ever have stumbled across his stuff long enough to bother picking up any of his CDs, and I find them to be hard to listen to straight through in one sitting. Not ’cause they’re bad (they’re not), but because there’s only such much instrumental pedal steel I can take in one dose. But he’s actually great to have come up in shuffle mode every so often.
2. Big Joe Turner, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll.” An r&b classic. With some of the dirtiest clean lyrics I know of. “I’m like a one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store. But I can look at you till you ain’t no child no more.” Bill Haley and the Comets did a lamer, tamer version of this that was a bigger hit. But this is the version to chase down and keep.
3. Nine Inch Nails vs. Spice Girls, “Closer to Wannabe.” One of my fave mashups. Whoever has the idea to put “Closer” and “Wannabe” together has a warped mind and a wicked ear, in all the best ways.
4. Byrds, “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season).” I teach courses on pop music just often enough to have a bunch of “classic” rock on my iPod. I probably wouldn’t seek out this track on my own too often these days, but if you have to have a bit of mid-60s folk-rock-pop floating around in your head, this track isn’t such a bad choice.
5. Dr. John & the Lower 911, “Keep on Goin’.” A track from City That Care Forgot, the angry (even if it “ain’t as mad as it coulda been”) post-Katrina CD released by a N’awlins musical legend.
6. Barrel House Annie, “If It Don’t Fit (Don’t Force It).” Classic dirty blues about the eternal problem of trying to house oversized farm animals. “It may not stretch, it may not tear at all, but you’ll never back that big mule up in my stall.” (Huh? What did you think it was about?)
7. Heatwave, “Grooveline.” What the hell ever happened to this group? Between this track and “Boogie Nights” alone, they produced some of the finest dance-funk of the ’70s. But who knows about them any more? Okay, okay. You knew. But you’ve clearly got taste. But why doesn’t anyone else?
8. Aretha Franklin, “Day Dreamin’.” Courtesy of the very fine, super fine, ultra fine Atlantic Rhythm ‘n’ Blues 1947-1974 box set. I actually bought this set on vinyl, one double-record album at a time, when it was first released. And it was a marvelous introduction to a great swath of music I’d never heard before (the Big Joe Turner track above is on one of the early volumes). And it was high on my “must-upgrade” list when I finally made the switch to CDs.
9. Billy Bragg, “I Keep Faith.” Opening track of Bragg’s most recent album, Mr. Love & Justice. And his show at the Cedar Cultural Center was one of the live musical highlights of 2008 for me. Just him and a guitar and a helluva lot of great energy. At one point, he joked from the stage that we should all become his Facebook friends. Turns out, he wasn’t joking. Go on. Go to Facebook. Search for “Billy Bragg.” Then ask to be his friend. He’ll say Yes.
10. Bruce Springsteen, “Born in the USA” (live). This isn’t the fist-pumping full-band live version from the 1975-85 live box set. It’s the raw, angry, acoustic version from the NYC live set. The version where I think Bruce finally figured out a way to play the song so that it became impossible to hear as the jingoistic bit of patriotism that many people treated it as for so long. You can hear the crowd try to push him into that spirit a bit here. he sings the chorus, they start cheering madly, as if they’re anticipating the full band will kick in and give them the “Ain’t America the Best” anthem they want . . . but they don’t get it. And it’s better that way.

Damn. I got lucky. Nothing shameful at all in that randomness. Maybe next week.

• Elton John, “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues”

How bad has this been for me? That whiny harmonica solo and some truly pathetic lyrics (“laughing like children, living like lovers, rolling like thunder, under the covers”) have been stuck in my head for over a week now. I’ve managed to chase Elton away for brief periods of time by seeking out good music . . . but he’s always snuck back in as soon as as I’ve let my guard down again. So I’ve resorted to actively seeking out other, slightly less grating earworms because I feel I have a better chance of purging those from my system . . . or, barring that, I can at least have something bouncy and upbeat lodged deep inside my head for a while.

I know, of course, that there are lots of good reasons why people don’t make it to conferences.  Not enough time.  Not enough money.  Competing obligations.  The simple need/desire to be a homebody for a while, especially when conferences fall during the gap between semesters.  So I don’t really blame my curious but absent friends for not making it to Jamaica.  Still:  You should’ve been there.

I have been struck by the multiple requests for reports — not just friendly “how was the conference?” queries, but an explicit desire for extended details (who was there? who gave good papers? what’s new and hot in the field? etc.) — from friends who would have fit in perfectly, who would’ve enjoyed themselves immensely, and (most tellingly) who have been to enough conferences themselves to know that even the most thorough “report” is no substitute for being there.  The feel of a conference often matters as much as (and probably more than) the actual content of the presented papers, or the roster of attendees, or a rundown of who said what to whom at the hotel bar on the final night.  So I’m not going to try and provide a detailed accounting of the who and the what of the event, ’cause even if I were to feel the muse and be graced with the most eloquent way to capture five days worth of conversations, I still couldn’t do the event justice.  You should’ve been there.

One of the things I most appreciate about the Crossroads conferences — or at least the past two renditions — is the degree to which they take their international-ness very seriously.  To be sure, they’re not some perfectly ideal space of worldly cosmopolitanism: the official language of the conference is still English, and the global South remains under-represented.  At the same time, Crossroads isn’t the sort of “international” conference where most of the usual suspects from the US, Canada, and northern Europe simply gather in a big chain hotel in some different corner of the world for a long weekend and have the same basic conversations with each other that they could/would have had at a conference back home.  For me, Crossroads somehow manages to simultaneously feel both smaller and larger than those sorts of conferences.  It’s smaller, insofar as Crossroads has a much more tight-knit, communal feel to it than a Hilton/Sheraton/Hyatt-style conference.  While it’s still a fairly large gathering, I’ve come away from the past two versions feeling like I’ve shared an experience with several hundred people — and that doesn’t happen at most other conferences I attend.  And it’s larger, insofar as the people you’re sharing that experience with represent a much broader slice of the world than is the norm for “international” conferences.

We do it all again in 2010.  In Hong Kong.

You should be there.