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After two weeks or so of making Big Payments to various creditors, I am now completely debt-free. No credit card balances. No student loans. No car loan. No house payments. Nada.

Of course, the road to this particular financial nirvana was not quite so easy as that first paragraph makes it sound. It took more than ten years after leaving graduate school and starting my first salaried job . . . and a cross-country move to a new (and better-paying) job . . . and the successful sale of a house that had been earning me equity for several years . . . and becoming part of a two-income household.

The most amusing moments of the whole process revolved around a couple of credit card companies that tried very hard to keep me from closing my accounts. I almost felt bad for the customer service rep who tried to convince me that my credit rating would be jeopardized if I cancelled my American Express card. But I had to laugh at the MBNA employee who wanted me to stick with a company that, over the past year, had consistently raised my interest rate after every month in which I paid more than the minimum balance due on my account.

I know that my momentarily balanced budget can’t last forever — if only because Margaret and I are hoping to buy a house together in the next year or so — but, for now, it feels damned good.

When did you last see a television newscaster — of any stripe, much less one working for a major media conglomerate — attack a sitting administration? I’m not talking about a quick one-liner or an offhand quip. Nor am I talking about the sort of implicit criticism that might be found in a bit of pointed analysis. I’m talking about a polemic full of forceful and unwavering critique that lasts nearly seven minutes without ever letting up.

But read — and watch — for yourself here.

The Yes Men go to New Orleans.

And I’m especially stunned by the video available on CNN’s website, where the reporter claims that no one has any idea who this faux HUD official was. I know that the Yes Men aren’t exactly celebrities in the way that, say, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are celebrities. But they’ve also released an award-winning documentary about their media pranks through a major movie studio. And, for the non-cinematically inclined, they’ve got a book with lots of photos that covers much of the same material. They’ve perpetuated witty and politically savvy hoaxes on the WTO, MSNBC, McDonald’s, Dow Chemical, and Halliburton (among others) that have garnered a fair amount of press attention and notoriety. And they don’t exactly work hard to disguise their appearance when they undertake their efforts at “identity correction.” By now, I would’ve thought that their inability to sneak up on people would almost rival that of Michael Moore (or, once upon a time, Mike Wallace). But obviously, I would’ve been wrong about that.

Good thing, too, since I suspect it may take a few more Yes-Men-like pranks to help remind folks just how bad the situation in New Orleans remains to this day.

A year later, the Katrina debacle still makes me unbelievably sad. And furious. All the more so because so little has been done to rebuild the places hardest hit by the storm — and because what has been done has been so transparently about helping the rich get richer . . . while the poor (once again) get kicked to the curb. My own words are simply too bogged down in grief and rage to come out well right now. So I’ll borrow a handful of words that Bruce Springsteen’s been singing recently:

There’s bodies floatin’ on Canal and the levee’s gone to Hell
Martha, get me my sixteen gauge and some dry shells
Them who’s got got out of town
And them who ain’t got left to drown
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?
I got family scattered from Texas all the way to Baltimore
And I ain’t got no home in this world no more
Gonna be a judgment that’s a fact, a righteous train rollin’ down this track
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Full lyrics here (though you’ll need to scroll down a bit). Audio available online in multiple formats (Real, Quicktime, Windows)

Evidently, the correct answer is “M-O-N-E-Y.”

Such, at least, was one of the major lessons of last week’s three-day orientation for new UMN faculty. The morning of the final day was devoted to “research” — at least that’s the word they used to describe it — but those of us in the arts and humanities probably had a hard time seeing our work well represented in the mix. There were two hours of presentations and break-out sessions on things like how to negotiate patents derived from your laboratory research, where to go on campus to get help writing up your NSF grants, proper procedures for dealing with live animals in your work (and so on) . . . and a whopping thirty minutes on the library.

To be sure, there were plenty of new faculty present for whom all those grant-and-lab oriented sessions were both relevant and valuable. The library session was the strongest and most informative formal presentation I saw all week. And I recognize that there is no “one size fits all” formula for what counts as “research” at an institution as large and varied as Minnesota. If the ratio had simply been reversed — i.e., 80% of the time was devoted to libraries and archives with the remaining 20% devoted to folks whose research involves People, Pets, or Patents — that wouldn’t have been good either.

But this was probably not the most graceful way to convince new hires in the arts and humanities that the work they do is valued very highly. Or even that it counts as “research.”

For several years now — ever since I read Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line… — I’ve been itching to cast aside my Windows-flavored digital life for the glories of Linux and the open source world. I’ll spare you (unless someone really wants to know) the backstory of why I wanted to make The Switch in the first place. And I’ll spare you (see previous parenthetical) most of the reasons why The Switch never actually happened before.

I actually tried to cross over a few years ago, when I repartitioned the hard drive on my old laptop and loaded Red Hat on the newly cleared space so that I could get used to the new world of Linux without having to completely abandon the familiar (if cranky and clunky) territory of Windows . . . and immediately discovered that the Broadcom wireless cards that Dell uses in most of its laptops require extra tweaking and attention before they’ll play nice with Linux. And because I could never get that extra tweaking and attention right, The Switch was more or less stillborn from the start. If I couldn’t go online with my laptop without being tethered by cables, I wasn’t going to be a happy (or productive) camper. So I’ve spent the last couple of years more or less ignoring the Linux side of my old machine and making do with Windows.

A couple of weeks ago, the new laptop that came with the new job finally arrived — and this was my opportunity to try to bring The Switch back to life. Once again, I repartitioned my hard drive. Once again, I loaded Linux (the Ubuntu flavor this time). And, once again, I couldn’t get Linux and Broadcom to cooperate with each other. I came close — largely thanks to the kindness and expertise of my friend and colleague Kirt — but couldn’t quite make things work right.

So this week, I tried a different tack. I scrapped the Ubuntu plan and installed SUSE 10.1 and then followed the helpful instructions offered here . . . and wireless Linux nirvana is finally mine.

It’ll probably still be a little while before I can abandon the Microsoft paradigm completely. If nothing else, the fast-approaching semester means that I will have limited time to indulge my tech-geek persona fully. But my Windows days are now officially numbered.

• . . . George Washington was such a ba-a-ad mother–shut your mouth!. Definitely not work-safe. But definitely funny.
• . . . Keanu Reeves could act? Well, he can’t. But he keeps finding films — in this case, A Scanner Darkly — where his “I am a cipher” schtick works out well for him and his audience.
• . . . a song about summer in the land of forty-below could be so damned infectious? [No guarantee how long that link will last, since it points to the "Weekly Download" at The Current -- and the week in question may end any second now.]

UPDATE: The Current’s Weekly Download has moved on to something different . . . but, as of 21 Aug, the link given above still works. I’m assuming that they’re updating their website without necessarily pulling old mp3s off the server.

I really meant to type up (blog up?) some of my thoughts on the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference sooner, but life got in the way. More than once, clearly, since the conference was over nearly a month ago already. Eventually, I need to produce a more polished review of the event for Cultural Studies, but this is as good a place as any to get some of my preliminary thoughts in order.

Let me start with the “bad” stuff, simply to get it out of the way. There’s not very much of it, and none of it is exactly the stuff of scandals or nightmares. And, to be frank, that’s a bit surprising — if only because it’s next to impossible to hold a conference this big (600+ presenters on the program) and this global (50+ nations represented) on a shoestring budget . . . and have everything go right. The fact that so little went wrong is a testament to how well organized everything was (and a big tip of the hat to Ferda Keskin and his team of student volunteers who made that happen). My short list of “what went wrong” really boils down to two items:

1. No-shows. Absenteeism and emergency cancellations are nothing new when it comes to academic conferences, but the gaps between the printed program and the actual panels that took place in Istanbul seemed much larger than normal. Four-paper panels where only one or two speakers showed up were not uncommon. In some cases, entire panels were AWOL. I suspect that, overall, most of the scheduled presenters were actually present for their panels . . . but the no-show rate was still high enough that seemingly everyone I talked with reported having attended a “short” panel or three.
2. Poor panel attendance. The flip side of the no-show coin? Maybe. Again, it’s a problem that plagues a lot of conferences, but (again) it seemed to be slightly more common in Istanbul. A few folks at the business meeting suggested that this was a side effect of holding the conference in a city distracting enough for would-be attendees to play hooky — and I know a few folks who did, in fact, skip a day of panels so they could go sightseeing — but I’m skeptical of this explanation. If nothing else, an exciting city also brings more people to the conference in the first place (I’m pretty sure the previous Crossroads — in the bustling metropolis of Urbana, IL — didn’t attract 600+ registrants . . . though those who came certainly weren’t likely to spend the day sightseeing instead).

Put these two things together and the conference’s formal sessions were not always as scintillating as they should’ve been . . .

. . . but, then again, the same can be said of many conferences. And I long ago learned not to judge the merits of a conference based on the overall quality of the panels. [Sidebar: Some of the best advice I was ever given was that a good conference was one where you saw one good paper, made one good contact, or came away with one good idea for a project of your own. By this standard, I've never had a bad conference . . . and I've managed to enjoy conferences that might otherwise have seemed to be huge waste of time.] What made the Istanbul Crossroads an exciting event was not the papers and panels as much as it was the people, the setting, and (at the risk of sounding much more new-age-y than I am in everyday life) the amazing energy produced by the mixture of the two. The highlights for me (in no special order) are as follows:

1. Istanbul. I didn’t get to see anywhere near as much of the city as I would’ve liked — and there’s clearly a lot to see — but the small taste I had of the place was delicious. Other folks made extra time in their visits (or, perhaps, stole it from their conference time, thus contributing to the problems described above) to see some of the major tourist venues, but I “settled” for the (literally) pedestrian attractions of wandering around bits of the city near the conference hotels and soaking up some of the local vibe. The contrast with the Urbana edition of Crossroads could not have been more striking. Or more desirable.
2. A truly international affair. To steal a riff from Meaghan Morris’s comments at the business meeting, this was most emphatically not the sort of “international” conference typical of US academic life. That sort of conference still tends to be dominated by US participants, with a tiny sprinkling of attendees from mostly Anglophone nations . . . and so, not surprisingly. they don’t feel terribly different from more local affairs. This conference, on the other hand, brought together people from more than 50 different countries . . . and while it wasn’t quite a utopian global village (if nothing else, the conference’s lingua franca was still English), it also wasn’t the faux internationalism of the usual (American) suspects talking to no one but themselves in a Hilton ballroom on some other continent.
3. An intellectually rich gathering. Again, this isn’t so much a function of the papers I heard (though there were some noteworthy standouts here, such as Devleena Ghosh on call centers in Bangalore and Sue Murray on online photo-sharing networks) as it was the overall character of the gathering. On the whole, I felt more intellectually stimulated by the various conversations I had in Istanbul — at panels, in the hallways, over food and drink — than I have at almost any other conference I’ve been to.
4. A surprisingly intimate conference. And I don’t mean that in a saucy, salacious kind of way (though I’m sure it was that kind of conference for some attendees . . . but this isn’t that kind of blog). I mean that, despite the overall size of the conference and the number of attendees, the gathering — happily — had very little (if any) of the giant, impersonal, anonymous feel that one gets from most large conferences. Some of this, of course, may have been a side effect (for me) of being a non-Turk in Istanbul, and thus finding it easier to feel a sort of immediate connection to various conferees that would not normally happen at, say, your average NCA or ICA gathering. But some of it was also the result of the way the conference was structured and organized — with a special nod here going to the Friday evening boat ride up the Bosphorous and back, which went a long, long way to giving the conference a sort of intense affective and communal charge that one doesn’t typically get from hotel meeting rooms and convention centers.

I don’t want to jinx things — especially not after my last post was immediately followed by global turmoil in the very sphere about which I’d blogged — but I’m starting to feel positively giddy about the upcoming school year. To be sure, my syllabus is still in a state of mild chaos as I try to update and reshuffle what we’ll be reading, and I’m looking at the calendar and realizing that an awful lot of that chaos has to dissipate pretty damned fast if things are actually going to go well.

I can’t remember the last time I felt this eager for a new semester to actually get underway. I feel better about the semester to come than I did before my first semester teaching at USF, or my first semester as a grad student at Illinois . . . and both of those were pretty exciting moments for me. Closest point of comparison may be when I first left home to go to college.

I’m not interested in pimping this blog out to corporate sponsors, but there are also moments when it’s worth giving props (no aviation pun inten—well, okay, maybe there’s a little intent here) to those who deserve it. As one of Northwest’s major hubs, Minneapolis is almost a one-airline city . . . and it’s an increasingly lousy airline. Even if I were willing to overlook Northwest’s egregious labor politics (which I’m not), they’ve simply become an annoying airline to fly with. The usual complaints apply here: no legroom, no elbowroom, bare-bones in-flight amenities for domestic travel, and a frequent flyer program that makes it close to impossible to actually use your accumulated miles. But the final straw for me came on my return trip from Istanbul, where the flight crew from Amsterdam to Detroit was far and away the rudest, the surliest, and the most xenophobic bunch of flight attendants I’ve ever witnessed. These folks got on the plane with a mighty bad attitude . . . and even if that attitude might have been justified by (surprise) Northwest’s egregious labor politics, the passengers wedged into tiny, uncomfortable seats for a nine-hour flight simply weren’t the proper target for such frustrations.

So Northwest is moving fast towards the bottom of my list for airline choices — while two trips to DC this summer have me convinced that Midwest should be at the top of my list whenever circumstances allow. The downside is that they’re a small carrier serving a relatively limited number of destinations (so they won’t always be a viable option) and currently everything that they fly in and out of Minneapolis gets routed through their Milwaukee hub (so they’re rarely going to give me a non-stop flying experience).

But their planes have wide, comfortable leather seats for all passengers (there’s no separate business class here). Because they’re not trying to squeeze extra passengers into every square inch of cabin space, their overhead luggage bins don’t seem to get filled up prematurely, and the boarding process runs more smoothly and quickly. Without exception, every one of their flight attendants on eight different legs of my summer travels have been personable, relaxed, and seeming quite happy with their jobs. And surprisingly tasty baked-onboard chocolate chip cookies are standard snack fare. This is how flying should be — even on a budget.