Wordbender

Got off on a tangent

2010-08-14T21:01:00.001-07:00

again. But for now, I'm leaving it. Here, an excerpt from chapter five:

Thirdly, and most importantly, it was important to frame the situation as a war. Among other things, this paved the way for Yoo’s rapid—and legally binding--declaration of unlimited presidential power. Although previous terrorist attacks, such as the first bombing of the world trade center, the attack on the U.S. Cole, and the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, had not been defined as acts of war, Bush was quick to define this attack as such. This framing as war was perhaps the single most crucial rhetorical move in positioning the administration to enact, in the OLC memos and elsewhere, its subsequent exercise of “plenary” executive power—including the right to torture.

For many, of course, calling the situation after 9/11 a war was logical and appropriate, if only because no previous attack on the United States in peacetime had even remotely approached the magnitude and scale of this one, both in sheer numbers and in its particularly horrific nature. Hours of compounded atrocities—the exploding fireballs, the trapped victims jumping to their deaths, the buildings collapsing on first responders, the United passengers who “rolled” on the hijackers—all of which “the entire world” had witnessed, live, and which the media replayed endlessly, became events and images that quickly reached iconic status. Arguably, 9/11 is the most powerful thematic formation in our current culture, one that, possibly uniquely, embodies the sway and authority of both a god-term and a devil-term.

Among the vast array of polyphonic strands of 9/11 as a devil-term: the crashing of planes into walls of glass, the rain of debris, the billowing black smoke, the bewilderment, the growing horror, the lost innocence, the breathless magnitude, the inexplicability, the rage, the injustice, the what-the-fuck?!, the loss. The fear. The grief.

Among its strands as a god-term: the sacredness, the coming together of strangers, the sharing of the grief, the honoring of the sacrifices, the beloved we will not forget, the innocence lost, the vulnerability, the reverence for the dead, the heroism, the uniting of “the whole world,” the sudden holiness of place, the outpouring of sympathy. The awful, searing majesty of the images: Edmund Burke's sublime writ large. 9/11 the divider of history: before and after. 9/11: the standard-bearer of American identity. Compared to 9/11, war itself is ordinary. Thematically, in its mystification, 9/11 attained the power to move mountains, to change reality. In the ensuing anger and grief, the desire for revenge and retaliation, the overriding thought that someone had to pay, were more than understandable.

Sooooo, if beheading

2010-08-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

makes Them barbaric and savage, what does crucifixion make us? Because that's how a number of detainees in our custody have died. Hung by their wrists, like they did in the good old Spanish Inquisition, until they die of suffocation, arms dislocated from their sockets.

More humane than beheading? Less savage? Who are the good guys again? Because honestly, I can't tell any more.

When I am done with this project I am going to start a punch list. A slow, careful long-term compilation of NAMES, which I will post here, of people who participated in this, sanctioned it, who think it's okay, who got away with it, people I want to line up and PUNCH--along with a list of the names of their victims.

I can't punch them, of course. But I can bear witness. And I will.

Stupid goddamned fucking idiots. GOD I am pissed.

Am hitting a snag

2010-08-09T13:27:00.000-07:00

I went through my files in my WONDERFUL Scrivener organizer (my abject worship of the genius who invented this continues), and I have fourteen pages of links to article and sources that document in meticulous detail the acts committed under the Bush Reich (sorry, but I'm PISSED, looking at all this stuff is really PISSING ME OFF) while he was mouthing off to the world ("heh heh heh now where were those WMD again?!") that the U.S. does not torture.

Fourteen pages of LINKS. That's LINKS to articles and sources, that link through to other articles and sources . . . Links. Double spaced. Fourteen pages.

And I probably haven't even scratched the surface of what's out there.

So my momentary dilemma--the one that's halted the momentum, such as it was (the writing is easy, relatively--the source management isn't)--is how to condense this all into a few pages of text. I don't think I have the TIME to go back through and read every one of those links, much less cull quotes, etc. Or maybe that's what I should do--scan, cull, pull a quote, move on. Yikes. I gave myself until tonight, with time out for a dog walk, to have this done. I've been trying to get INTO this for about three days, and time's a-wastin' . . .

So if there are any brilliant and bright ideas about how manage this floating around out there in the ether . . . I call you to me now. :-)

I swear to God

2010-08-04T19:32:00.001-07:00

. . . the weirdest thing is happening.

Every night, or every day, whenever I am getting ready to work on this diss . . . the articles I need to have, the material that's missing, the links, the incidental info that is crucial to exactly that section of the chapter I am working on . . . appears on the screen before me.

I swear, I am not making this up. It goes like this: I do some sort of "gear-changing" surfing, maybe I'll go to one or the other of my political blogs, mess around, waste time, goof off--so I tell myself--but I get into my mind-set and switch gears. And something will catch my eye. A story. A phrase. A link. And then I click through, or I do a search, just out of curiosity. And sometimes an article will be there, or it will link to another . . . I read, it's cool, I'll bookmark it . . . and then I think I really better get to work, and as soon as I turn my mind to whatever it is I'm working on: there it is. All the connections.

For example, this evening, I was linking through a bunch of stuff, googling, I don't even know, and I just HAPPENED on this article that summed up everything I've been trying to pull together for the last week or so, namely how many confirmed deaths have happened in US custody due to violent means since the WOT began. There it is, right there. Not only that, but a summary of the methods that led to those deaths. Not only that, but somewhere along that twisted path was a discussion of the terms used in place of the word torture--VITAL to the diss--and a link to some right wing blogger who was saying, back in 2005, enough is enough we don't torture, that's not who we are. And somewhere down the page is a discussion, and in that discussion is the PERFECT, I mean the PERFECT comment to sum up the final section of this chapter: "stop saying 'torture is wrong' like it's an absolute and not just your opinion." Right there. Right in front of me, the comment that essentially sums up a whole core concept of this diss.

I mean . . . if I spent YEARS trying to find the perfect comment, I couldn't have found anything as perfect as that.

You see? It isn't me. It's not that I'm a genius. It's that--this is the best explanation I can come up with, because really I got nothin' else--just that there's a good star hanging over this project. A guiding star. The universe is working in my favor.

Of course, everyone thinks that (when they're not thinking the universe is aligned against them, and most likely neither is true).

But sometimes you feel like that, too. And that's cool.

Checking in

2010-07-27T15:22:00.000-07:00

So, the feeling of "slogging" through doesn't abate . . . but today I have, suddenly, five solid pages and 18 more of notes, quotes, and raw material of one of the most difficult chapters, the context chapter, to turn into something coherent. I spent an hour trying to find an exact phrase, specifically where in the hell in Terror Presidency Goldsmith actually USES the much-quoted "golden shield." And it was a highly fruitful search. I am beginning to suspect that there's very little I will say that someone hasn't already said before me--but perhaps just pulling it all together in a way that makes a coherent narrative, that makes sense in a slightly new way, will be enough? Not sure, but I'm going to keep going.

What is emerging is a highly interesting look at the contested space of "power"--what it is, exactly, who defines it and how, where it's located. CDA is all over power and its abuses. But even the word means very different things to different people. And I can see, although I don't really believe, that Goldsmith believes it all WAS, first and foremost, about protecting the American people and keeping them safe.

I disagree. But then, he was there and I was not.

And that might not be a bad thing, to NOT be there to get caught up in the panic. If indeed it is panic???? When Addington says to him (and Addington is emerging as a REAL problem, perhaps an originator as much as Cheney of The Dark Side), after Goldsmith tells Addington he was NOT approving a specific "counterterrorism initiative" (cagey as hell, is Goldsmith)--when Addington says, with disgust, "If you rule that way, the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands," Goldsmith never questions him. Never looks at it as the hyperbole it is. Perhaps not for Addington, of course, but for those of us who live in the REAL world . . .

The really really fascinating thing about all of this is how minimal the actual threat is--although the potential threat is, admittedly, much greater. But there are so many other, greater ACTUAL threats--guns, smoking, cars, planes, family members, cancer, heart disease, obesity, high fructose corn syrup, and when you get right down to it, the greatest threat to "economic prosperity," which Goldsmith ties to terrorism in the book, is economic DISparity. So why this? What is it about terror, about 9/11, that pushes all the buttons that actual threats do not? And it's not even terror--it's a particular kind of terror. As someone in something recently (don't ask me who, or where, I'm fried) pointed out, after Timothy McVeigh, we didn't invade Michigan.

No, it's this particular threat. And that's maybe what I can tease out, in the language. Maybe that is what I'm looking for--evidence of that, of why--why this, why in this way, what is that button pusher?--that will contribute something to the larger discussion.

I don't know. Some site or other recently said, don't except national attention for your research. I'm not. But I do want it to be meaningful. To say something that hasn't already been said.

And the only way that is going to happen is if I keep going.

Of two minds

2010-07-07T16:14:00.000-07:00

From an email to Alicia:

Well we finally broke down and rented "Inglorious Basterds" the other night. Have you seen it? I'd love to hear what you think of it. Ty hates Tarantino, and I agree with pretty much every reason why (the stylistic exaggeration is one of the big things), but still--stuff both in about that movie was awful and ridiculous and some of it--I really hate to say it!--was utterly brilliant. And it's this weird glorification--celebration--over-the-top-revelling-in massive huge absurd violence, but I think that was sort of the point?

And I think: I don't need to be told how absurd violence is, I already know it. It's like he takes adolescent boy fantasies and elevates them to high art. No mean feat, I'm thinking.

Anyway--I loved that it was IN the original languages, with native speakers, and the Nazi villain was so wonderful (he was the really brilliant thing), and so familiar to me, that he's been HAUNTING me ever since--me personally! And the cultural things were SO REAL and true, the Germans so utterly German, I felt like I was back home. I understood the German and much of the French and even a bit of the Italian, so I enjoyed all that immensely. And I'm not generally a Pitt fan, but I love the way he can make fun of himself.

But Ty got so impatient with the self-conscious "look at ME! I'm a DIRECTOR!" devices (maybe, he admitted, he's just too old to get post modernism) that he kept leaving the room, and finally went shopping and missed the grand finale, so I had to replay the interesting bits for him. He's no better at dealing with the killingkillingkillingkillingkillingkillingkillingkillingkilling (Sharry's synopsis of Pulp Fiction) than I am.

But I had to keep watching, even as they're all plotting to murder each other in grand conflagrations and huge mass killings with bombs and fire and machine guns--and then they do . . . and the really sad thing is? That's the part that was most true.

Sigh.

I don't want to like that movie, but I think I do. In spite of its cinematic over-the-top-ness. So have you seen it? I really hate to admit it, but I think it's worth seeing . . .

Parallel Universes

2010-07-06T11:57:00.001-07:00

I live in the World of Things Appear and Disappear. This happens without warning, at random, any time of day, no matter how organized I think I am, or how carefully I try, just this once, to keep track of my physical world. I’ll have my phone in my hand, knowing I’m holding it, and then I look down and it’s not there. And it’s not in my purse, nor in the pocket where I normally keep it, nor on the desk or the counter or the table. It’s nowhere at all. Just, suddenly, not there.

I'm not just talking socks, mind you. Socks are for amateurs; really, all you need is a dryer. I’m talking about phone charger cords, bank cards, bills that must be paid, remote controls, important letters, scraps of envelope upon which I have hurriedly scribbled a crucial phone number, my brush or winter scarves or a shoe—one missing shoe, from the pair I decided to wear that day and nothing else will do. Anything in my life that will make it run more smoothly and efficiently is apt to disappear at will. And not MY will, but some magical mystery gremlin-ish will of the universe that plays impish tricks on its inhabitants for fun, or spite, or both.

My friend Alicia told me once that one day the remote control for the TV in her living room disappeared. Suddenly, without explanation. They used it every day; it was always there, and then it was gone. They looked all over the living room, and finally, mystified, the house. They tore apart the couches and looked underneath cushions, behind the lounger and the rocker and the bookshelf, under covers, in the cracks, between and beneath and beside. But it was nowhere.

There was no reason for it to disappear; their children had moved out of the house and the remote was half the size of the cat. Hard to imagine that Ben, their small orange feline, would all of a sudden find pleasure in transporting a boring, everyday, metal-slash-plastic device it had lived with for years to some secret unknown location. So they gave up looking and lived without. For months, actually, because what, really, do you do when your remote disappears, short of buying a new TV, something they were not inclined to do?

And then, months later, literally, there it was. All of a sudden. Right on the floor, in the middle of the living room.

My friend Alicia swears there is a parallel universe with small wicked goblins, devil-like Borrower creatures who travel back and forth, collecting objects for their anthropological research, and who then return them without warning when they are done. If so, they have defined my house as a prime location for study. So I spend inordinate amounts of time searching for whatever it is they have absconded with that day. I don't mind their curiosity; but really, don't you think they could be at least somewhat considerate about other people's things? Leave a note, perhaps, telling me what they've borrowed, and when they intend to return it? So I don’t run around the house searching for it like a Cornish hen without her head, convinced I’ve lost my mind?

But alas, the Borrowers never do. And so I live on, forever searching, flummoxed, perplexed, in a world where all of a sudden Things Appear, and Disappear, and Reappear, without any warning at all.

Dog of My Heart

2010-07-02T15:13:00.001-07:00

Apropos of nothing, but here's a short non-fic story I wrote this week during the Open Institute (which was pretty darn fun--the week, I mean, as well as the writing):

My son came home one night with a bunch of friends.

And a dog.

"Mom!" he called. "We have to take Juno for the weekend!"

Juno was his girlfriend's dog. Nick had told me a while back that said girlfriend, Jess, had acquired a puppy from Nick’s friend Luke, but so far I'd never met the creature.

"What?!" I said. "Why?"

"Because Jessica's mom kicked him out. We just need to take him until she calms down. Just for a few days."

"Why did she kick him out?" I demanded.

"Because he--because I don't know, she just got mad. He messed up the room or something. She's just mad right now. She'll calm down."

"What room? Jessica's? What did he do?" Visions of steaming, unmentionable piles all over my beige carpet popped into my head. “He’s housetrained, isn’t he? He’d better be housetrained.”

"He is, Mom, don’t worry.”

“So what happened?”

“I don't know, he chewed up her room or something."

Nick was 16. He'd mastered vagueness around 14 or so, when he realized that "I don't know" was a fairly effective tool for blocking further questions. It had pretty much become his standard response.

"Chewed up her room? What do you mean?"

"I don't know. Mom--I gotta go."

Somewhere above, a door slammed. Upstairs, an unknown quantity of adolescent boys were laughing and yelling. Not only was the house filled with the typical jangling energy a gaggle of teenagers brings into the house, but the dog--a mid-sized, lab-like-looking animal, mostly black except for a white triangle on his chest--was weaving through the downstairs rooms, panting. He was terrified, obviously. I could tell he was scoping out the place trying to figure out, fast, from which direction the next unknown threat might come.

I didn't blame him. From what I knew about the dog, he'd been slated for destruction in some shelter when the mother of Nick’s friend Luke rescued him. They couldn't keep him, she’d apparently told Luke, but he could stay with them until they found him a permanent home.

That had proved harder than she thought. The dog had landed, finally, with Jess.

And now with me.

"Mom, we're leaving!"

"Wait--where are you going?"

"Out. I don't know--I'll be back in a while."

"Nick!" This, finally, got me up off the couch, prying me from the laptop where I’d been sitting working until the front door slammed, ushering in all the noise.

"Nick!" Heavy footsteps, several sets of them, pounded down the stairs. I shouted over them. "Nick! You can't just leave me here with this--"

The front door slammed.

“--dog!”

The word echoed into sudden quiet. Quiet, that was, except for the panting of the dog. Nick was actually doing this, I thought with a flash of fury. He was actually going to dump this dog on me and then leave me to take care of it alone. Who knows when he might be back. We could be here alone for hours, this terrified dog and I.

I didn't want to think any further than that.

The dog loped down the hall to the front door. Then I heard him circle into the living room, his tags jangling. Pant pant. He looped back to the family room where I still stood by the couch, feeling angry and helpless, as I did so often with Nick these days.

I looked at the dog. The dog looked back at me, pink tongue dangling below sharp white teeth. It wasn't his fault, I knew. How many hands had he passed through in the few short months of his life? How many crazy things like this had already happened to him, further disorienting the already unwanted, packless puppy? As far as I knew, he hadn’t had a stable home since the day he was born.

Including Jessica's, I suspected. But we weren’t going to go there just now.

I sat down, slowly.

"Come here," I said in a soft voice, patting the couch next to me. "Come here and sit."

Instantly the dog ran over. He jumped up, right next to me, on the beige cushion. Obviously, he was unfamiliar with the idea of not jumping on the furniture. But by the way he came to me, I could tell that this was a dog who still had hope. Desperate hope, that was clear. But hope nonetheless.

I put my arm around him, patting the soft black fur.

"It's okay," I said, in the voice I reserved for the comfort of small children and pets. "It's all right. Everything's all right."

He eyed me, sideways, through one brown orb.

I looked at him. He licked my cheek, once.

And then, just like that, our eyes zinged.

Really, that's the only way I can describe it. He looked at me and I looked at him and a spark of electricity--a miniature bolt of lightning--flashed between our two sets of eyes.

Zing.

“It’s all right,” I told him, and this time I meant it. “It’s all right.”

I patted him. The dog leaned into me, dropping the full weight of his head and upper body onto my shoulder, as though in relief, as though he knew with sudden, certain gratitude that his long canine nightmare was finally over.

I sighed. I didn’t need a dog. I didn’t want a dog. I wasn’t equipped for a dog, and I certainly didn’t have time for one just now. But I knew this: he was never going back to Jess’s. That much was sure; he wasn’t going anywhere. And I realized with equal certainty, the way you know when life has once again gently taken you by the hand--that is, suddenly picked you up, turned you upside down, and then dumped you flat on the crown of your head, as life has a habit of doing—that I had just become the owner of a 6-month-old, traumatized, half-grown, almost-lab, mostly-black dog, except for that white triangle on his chest, a dog whose name was Juno.

This is NOT a commercial for Scrivener

2010-06-12T06:19:00.000-07:00

but actually, it could be.

I discover how hard it is to write my 750 words without my breakfast handy. That's my little ritual. I discover how easy it is to write a dissertation. Just sit down and write it.

No, seriously. The trick will be to see whether we can keep the momentum going for more than one day. But oh, what a day that was. Of course I "cheated." I used stuff I'd already generated/written/created/composed, for various venus, and just started compiling it in an order that seemed to make sense (seems the order is what's demanding the most decisions and thought at the moment). And I'm going to continue with that today. For as long as I have stuff to compile and stick together and work with. And then I'll stop, and look at it and see what's next.

So the series of occurrences went like this:

I saw a random posting on the WClistserv about Scrivener software. Some grad student swearing by it, someone saying, sounds interesting. So I went and I read the description and a couple of reviews and I thought, Someone was just telling me about this recently, and I made a note to check it out. Who was that? Couldn't remember, but in any case I followed the links and found the download and thought, 30 day free trial? Only the days you actually use it count? Sounds pretty good. It was so EASY. And it wasn't "swallow my crap so you'll buy this and make me $," which frankly most things seem to be. It was: "take a look at this, it's really cool, you might like it." And only for Macs, too! Which made me feel special. So I downloaded it, the free trial version, for 30 days.

The next thing I did was carefully watch the tutorial. Because for once I didn't want to buy something really really awesomely cool that, actually, I had no idea how to work and was not going to be bothered to sit down and figure it out, invest the time in so that I could actually properly use it. No. I watched the tutorial, in detail. Took me two days. Then I was ready.

And then, all of a sudden, I sort of fell into a black hole. Because then I was pulling stuff together, locating everything, sticking this here, moving that there. All my disorganized files and folder, all crammed into one long "Dissertation" file on dropbox, suddenly started to make sense. All there, at a glance. One click of the mouse and I can navigate through ALL OF IT. No more opening files, managing windows, closing them again and opening more until I expand the dock tray at the bottom of the screen, which I've already minimized to the max, so far it trails off the screen. WOW, I realized. Wow.

So. Then I had gathered everything I could think of, articles, PDF files, powerpoints, folders from the old Mac, everything online that I have, pretty much. And there it was, completely organized and 100% findable in almost no time at all.

And I looked at all that and it hit me: Wow. I'm really a LOT farther than I thought.

Now what?

I need more research, I decided. I need to pick Doc 2 apart completely, and I don't know how to do that. I'm not a linguist (although I wish I was. At a Writing Center meeting when Dr. Seig came in to talk to us about tutoring ESL students, I was talking and Seig leaned over and said to Jackie in a stage whisper, "she's a closet linguist." And I am, it's SOOOOOO true. From my fascination with grammar and language and meaning to my fascination with ELLs -- but okay, that's another story).

So I started researching. Found a term, lexeme, lemmas, I hadn't known before. Could use that (mostly right now I'm worried about sounding academic enough. Well, and one or two other little details, as well). Went on, found some good articles . . . researching, corpus, have to know more . . . have to figure all this out . . .

And somewhere in there, in the afternoon, when I'd started yet another article I didn't finish, or finished one and stuck it in the appropriate CDA folder . . . it dawned on me . . . I know all this already. None of this is really telling me anything new.

And I have more material than I'll ever need. Than I'll ever be able to fit into the

dissertation. I know this.

So I thought: just start writing. Just. Start. Writing.

So yesterday morning, I was actually in a bit of a dilemma. My mind was telling me, write the Doc 2 chapter. Do that, thoroughly. That will give you a template for the other docs you want to pick apart.

And on the other hand, some other part of my brain was saying, nah, don't do that. Do something FUN. Just stick your old drafts together and you'll feel like you've written 100 pages! Do the FUN thing.

So I went back and forth: fun thing, or should thing. Fun thing or should thing?

Fun thing! I decided. We'll just do the fun thing now and do the work later. (Alas, I often run my life this way. I admit it.) But going with the Fun Principle yesterday may have been the best decision I've made in a very long time.

Nearly 30 pages later, I've realized that I may not even separate the chapters into docs. The doc is not the important thing. I can use the close, word-level analysis of some of the documents to illustrate/expand on/investigate my larger points, but I don't have to take it by textual pieces. Take it by concepts instead. MUCH more effective approach, I'm thinking. Much more effective way to go about structuring this--which, at the moment, seems to be the most immediate question.

So there you have it. I continue with that this morning--say, from 9:30 to 11:30, two hours, then I have to walk dogs and get ready for dinner in Louisville. Leave at 2.

It's progress, people. It's progress.

Well. One thing is clear.

2010-06-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

I should have just started writing this damned thing MONTHS ago. I have TONS OF SHIT to say already, and have done far more work than I realized until just these last few days, and skeletoning this out is probably going to be way way easier than I ever imagined.

Because half an hour in, I already have three pages. And it is FLYING, frankly. It's just a matter of doing the WORK.

I sort of knew that, I think. At least I've spent the past whatever figuring it out. Several days.

All right, back to work. Will keep you posted. But I have to say, if I'd known it was going to be this easy--hell, I'd have knocked this puppy out months ago. (Yes, complete and utter exaggeration, but I have to kick this down into manageable size somehow!)

Whew! All I can say is--whew!!

:-)

======================

And now it's almost 7 p.m., and I have over 20 pages. In one day.

Of course, it's all rough and sketchy. But it's helping me figure out what order to put things in. For example, I could organize according to the actual docs--I had intended, for example, to write a good chunk just on Doc 2.

But I don't think that's the best way to do this. I think the best way is to structure the chapters around the levels of granularity, which provide the analysis, and use bits and pieces of the chapters for illustration. Or at least use good big chunks of the docs for illustration. That way I also don't really have to spell out the fact that I only do deep analysis on a few of the docs. Or maybe I should do a lot more and build it in. I should keep going and see how much I have and then expand outward until it seems redundant or until I'm exhausted, whichever comes first.

:-)

I'll have to think about that.

Anyway--it's going. It's going WELL and huge and quick. All good. All good.

Casey is NOT going to beat me!!! LOL!

Soooo . . .

2010-06-09T13:18:00.000-07:00

I search the academic database at BSU for articles on critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, and the first hit that comes up is an article on how to induce ovulation in llamas using the hormone "gonadotropin" . . .

I am not making this up.

In other news: the software Scrivener has already changed my life. Inside of three hours, I have amassed and compiled an enormous amount of material so that it's all right there, visible, at my fingertips. Hundreds and hundreds of pages.

There are no excuses now. The good news is, I look at all this stuff and I'm really, probably, much farther than I thought. I have already done a fairly large amount of work. I have a few detail things to work out--like the juxtaposition of CDA and CL, and how to use CL for my purposes--if I could find, say, 3 or 4 studies, I'd probably have a fairly good idea of what to do. I'm not sure people have actually done what I'm doing before. Although surely they must have. I'm not THAT special. :-)

I just have to find it. Figure out what it's called, and then locate some stuff as an exemplar.

I'm feeling better . . . a little. Still feel like there's a house sitting on me. Maybe a 10-story apartment building known as "gotta write the diss in 3 months." Except now it's more like 2 1/2. Okay, I can give myself 3 (with two coming weeks completely eaten up by teaching, but hey, it's money!) -- three months, but then I'm really cutting it close. No more than that, or I lose out on the job market for at least 6 more months and maybe a year, and that, ladies and gentleman, is a thought so scary I don't care to contemplate it.

It's okay. I pulled off the C's thing in 3 months, pretty exactly, and that worked okay. I'm a fast writer--once I figure out what it is I want to say, at least.

It's okay, too, if I dot all my i's and cross all my t's and still don't find a good job. I need to know I did everything I could--the rest is out of my control. It's the stuff IN my control I'm more scared of, actually. Scared of screwing it up.

Which is why I'd better get back to work. I may have a fair amount of evening to keep going in, after I break for a dog walk. So I better do it.

Wow

2010-06-02T07:43:00.001-07:00

Wow because it's been a year. A whole year. Since I started this blog and this project.

Wow because I am so eminently distractible. This is going to change, starting today. Diss comes first. Everything else comes second.

Consider this my official working diss/research journal. I have already created a timesheet and am going to clock in every day. Goal is to have a working draft of the substantial chapters of the diss done by the end of August. That's three months, with two weeks of teaching in between. Can I do this? Of course I can do this.

There are several assumptions that I am going to make that will be accepted as true (as in, questioning my premises is now a waste of time, and I am to spend as little energy as possible on this):

1) My subject is important

2) My subject is still current and of interest

3) Number 2 remains true because I will be able to use the methodology I create to apply to any subjects/important issues that come up. There fore it will remain current and of interest.

Okay. That's the first piece. The second piece is as follows:

1) Not being done yet does NOT make me a loser!

2) I am going to finish

3) I am going to finish quickly, because my full and undivided attention is on this now, FIRST

4) This is first priority (except for basic life issues such as eating, sleeping, paying bills, taking care of health, etc.--all of which support this project). Everything else comes second after the dissertation.

The third piece is as follows:

1) I am to spend 4 hours minimum, six days a week, working on this.

2) I will track my hours.

3) The reward will be the pleasure as I get deeper into the project.

Now to the software issues. AntConc 3.2.0m for Mac seems to be the best analytical software I've found so far. It took me the better part of a week in early March, it seems, to find it, and an hour this morning to relocate it on the Internet (for some reason, it's not transportable to the computer), and to compare it to other possible tools, and decide I'm sticking with this one for now.

So here's the plan for the rest of the week:

1) Reread doc 2

2) Analyze as thoroughly as possible using "naked eye" analysis. Look for word usages, logical fallacies. Track all four levels.

3) Concordance and collocate as thoroughly as possible using software.

4) Write section for diss chapter.

5) Do the same for Docs 9, 12, 36. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Once that's done, I should be able to write. This should take me until the end of June. Then I rewrite the intro chapter and lit review, and write the methodology chapter. That chapter I'll have to research, I think, because it would be fun to sort of make it the detective work chapter; a recap, perhaps, of the CCCC presentation.

I think I haven't done "any" work in a year, but actually that's not really true. I'm fine. Leo is taking longer. Casey is NOT going to beat me. It's all right. I will get done.

So now, time to get to work.

Impeccability

2009-12-23T17:21:00.000-08:00

Let's go on vacation, M-chehr said. Just you and me, together somewhere for a whole week.

I laughed. We'd kill each other within 24 hours, I said.

No, we wouldn't, he answered. We'd each make a promise: you promise to be impeccable, and I promise not to make you wrong.

I've thought about that whole "impeccable" thing a lot lately. Especially after two recent conversations we had. The first was the one during which he went to his Dark Place after I asked him to give me a book, for free, in return for all the editing help I'd given him. Knowing on some level that that would push his buttons. Not sure why I did it--we were having a good conversation until then--but no, we weren't, not really. He'd made some cutting remark about my "impeccability," or perhaps my "shrillness," the same kind of 'teasing' insult he's been slipping my way in every conversation we've had since I hooked up with Ty. Jealousy, I think--and something more, I'm not sure what. But still, it hurt, as it always does.

So, in retaliation, I asked him to give me something in return. Jokingly asked, or so I pretended. But I wanted the book, and I wanted to piss him off at the same time.

Oh boy, did I piss him off.

He went Dark--his anger is formidable--slash and burn. Essentially this: how my editing help is nothing, means nothing, compared to the help he's given me, for free, over the years. How his work is so much more meaningful--and so much more expensive, worthwhile, valuable--than mine. His old rant: he helps all his friends, they all take advantage of him, no one appreciates his genius, his vastly superior knowledge, etc. etc. etc. His deepest Victim mode. I've known him to disappear for weeks when he goes into that space.

We got to the edge of that precipice--all the lightness went of the conversation--and then we both carefully stepped back, trying to restore communication. But the next morning, I let the full import of that anger, and his negation of me and my work, hit me. And doubled over, sobbing, in the shower.

I was the one who didn't answer his phone calls for weeks, after that. I love you, I emailed him, but you're toxic to me. I meant it and still do. Handle with care. When he's good, he's very very good--but when he's bad, he's horrid.

A few months later, he's back. Asking me for help again, for free, for this friend who's desperate for work but whom he's so proud of NOT helping out with actual money, as of course that would be 'enabling' and not the lesson she 'needs to learn.' Asking as he has in the past for his friends, his family, his brother, his sister-in-law (which I give GLADLY), his nephews, people he knows. Looking good, because he's got an in with the wordsmith.

And I help, always, because I believe, deeply, in that. It's part of my code of ethics, a strong part. I do what I can.

And all the while, I am keenly aware of how much M-chehr admires wealth. How much he drools over the obscenely wealthy people in the world (watching those stupid shows for hours, the mansions of Saudi sheikhs, Tiger Woods' estates, weddings of the fabulously rich--stuff both so boring and so nauseating I will leave his house rather than tolerate it), wishing it were him. I mean obscene--people (and I DON'T mean ALL rich people, but this is the caricature) whom I detest rather than admire, people for whom I mostly feel nothing but scathing contempt, the true wastrels of the planet, the ones who suck up all the air and give so much less back, whose lives--it often seems--are only about feeding the vast hunger of their insatiable egos.

But that's what M-chehr wants to be when he grows up--like Werner Erhardt, his mentor and god, the billionaire who is purportedly doing so much to save the world. Perhaps he is. Perhaps, though, he also keeps all those billions to himself so the less fortunate can 'learn the lessons they need to learn' rather than be cruelly crippled by actual help . . .

M-chehr calls me out on my prejudice against the obscenely rich (this is the second conversation). Get over it, he says. So what if greed is the motivator? Rich people get things done. That Waste Management guy, with his ridiculous [strikethrough] incredible yacht--he's done great things for the world. The world wouldn't function without the people who are never satisfied, who never get enough.

Bullshit, I think silently. Actually, the world wouldn't work at all without the people who are willing to do without, to do more for less, to do it for free, to just give, without asking anything, much less a painfully high price--gobs of other people's time, efforts, health, lives, souls--in return.

Case in point, I think silently, as I edit the umpteenth email. Every time I correct one mistake, he creates three more.

[Yes, says Alicia. What about those people? What about the ones who pick up garbage for a lousy living, the ones who actually DO the work, actually PICK UP the garbage? Aren't they the ones you should be admiring for getting things done? Why aren't THEY the ones who are making enough to purchase a custom-built yacht?]

A last thought about impeccability, M-chehr's so highly cherished value--the one he thinks I must define my life by if I am ever to live in real integrity. His use of the written word is atrocious. It's awful. He can't spell worth a damn and he can't articulate his thoughts on paper to save his life. One of his emails to me, while I was helping his friend write her way out of her predicament: "Thank you, thank you, thank you, May the blood of Jesse cleans all your systems." (He's profusive with his prose, awful as it is, and his thanks. Just don't ask for a free book.)

"Who's Jesse?" I wrote back, laughing. His misplaced commas are the junk in my cupboards; his unclean spelling is as awful as my bathroom, his punctuation as messy as my garage. (Perhaps an unfair comparison; his first language, after all, is Farsi, which doesn't even have the same alphabet. But perhaps not. He's lived here over 30 years, and his spoken English is brilliant.)

Impeccability, my ass.

And yet THAT, he doesn't see. For him--it's just something he can't do. For me--it's something I simply don't do, a laziness, a choice.

So this morning I was thinking--and this whole long post is merely an addendum to my previous post (two in one day! which makes two in three months!) about NOT having to clean up the clutter before you get work--

So this morning I was thinking, impeccability my ass. Who is HE to decide I need to be impeccable when what I need is to get to work?! And who is HE to decide that impeccability (and when he uses the word, he is referring to my house) is the value that should take precedence over all others? What about HIS impeccability? What about HIS goddamned spelling?! Huh?!

Huh?

All that said knowing that I would be in HEAVEN if my house were impeccable. That that--along with finishing the diss, getting a good job, doing good work, writing powerful stuff that makes a difference in the world, surrounded by people I love--is my heart's deepest desire. Having a house NOT so full of clutter would be, to me, an impossible dream come true. It's an integral part of my ideal life, when I manage to dimly envision it. But I have no idea how to get there. I'm too busy running, trying to catch the train.

Call it an excuse, but I have no more clue how to create a perfect, neat, clean, clutter free house than M-chehr knows how to write Jesus rather than Jesse and cleanse instead of cleans or how to manage commas and semi-colons. Part of it is an abject inability to let go of stuff, even stuff I don't want--there are layers of complexity, and there is enormous resistance, and a multi-generational exhaustion over the carrying of unwanted burdens, etc. etc. etc. . . . but the novel idea, the thing that has never occurred to me before until this morning, is this:

Forget the clutter, and just focus on what I want. Forget the work, and just focus on the joy. On what I truly desire.

What if it's true, and the rest really will take care of itself? What if it IS much easier than I think?

So all this time

2009-12-23T16:58:00.000-08:00

has gone by, and I've done nothing. Nothing. Well, I got through two classes and a pretty challenging semester at the WC, emotionally as well as time-wise, and other stuff. What? Dealing with the court, and Germany, to get child support again, which is now done and hopefully will show up, because--once again--I'm at the end of the money. I had to hit deep savings this semester, first time ever. Like FAFSA, first time ever. I will be sooooo glad to be earning real money, enough hopefully to actually pay for my life. If I ever get this damned thing done!

And so it turns out that writing a dissertation is as much about life management, and time management, and emotion management, as it is the work itself. All of which I don't feel stellar in at all--quite the opposite, my life-management self being a polar opposite to my grad-student self (as in, all straight Fs versus straight As).

So this is one thing I've been exploring lately:

Radiant Recovery

And this arrived this morning via email, in my just-for-fun-New-Age inbox:

So the big question is, "Well, do I just dump all those unwanted things and try to start fresh?" And we say, no. You just set the Tone, where you are, by looking for things to appreciate. And by setting your Tone in a very clear deliberate way, anything that doesn't match it gravitates out of your experience, and anything that does match it gravitates into your experience. It is so much simpler than most of you are allowing yourself to believe.

--- Abraham

Excerpted from the workshop in Boston, MA on Saturday, October 4th, 1997 #297

Our Love,

Jerry and Esther

(Abraham-Hicks publication -- can't NOT include source info when I bashed both my classes this semester for same)

And that really struck me. Because I always think I have to clear the path--free up my environment from all its clutter: physical, mental, emotional--get everything done and out of the way--sweep everything clean--before I can start moving forward. I am always behind. Always running to catch the moving train.

And so I never get started, because there's so much in the way, so much sitting on me, so much MESS all around me . . . what a novel idea, to just start. In spite of it. Just ignore the mess and clutter and just do what I want to do. What I love. What excites me and makes me happy. And all the rest will follow.

I don't have to be perfect before I begin.

What a concept.

Just discovered

2009-09-15T11:22:00.000-07:00

that you have to be careful in researching the legal term "facial violation" on the internet, especially as pertains to the word "facial."

:-)

Mixed feelings

2009-09-15T10:59:00.000-07:00

about how much to write about what's been going on . . . I think that I haven't done a single minute of work on this since the diss proposal meeting (at which the diss was approved, but with great modifications and the need to go back and revise) because I wasn't sure the meeting went well at all (although when I asked LKH she said she thought it went fine).

But it felt like the wind had been taken out of my sails--esp because PR, who is my counterbalance, seemed to get so quiet. He did not seem happy. Perhaps what bothered him was when he said, well the way I understand it, you want to look at the arguments being made on the left and the right and how they're making them and basically you're going to say they're exactly the same. And I said: some things are, but not all. Not all. I'm not sure he liked that. I think there are differences--it's for me to find out which, and in what measure.

But they whistled me back. Step I only. "This," said MTS, "this is a research plan, not a dissertation." I could do the rest of my life's work (and hopefully will) on different angles of this. Or perhaps the next 5 years or so (provided I can increase my productivity level enough) and then we'll see where it takes me. By then I should have a foundation. --But in any case, they took away the four levels, or what I am now calling discourse planes, and said, start with the first one. 45 documents. That's plenty for a dissertation, it will give you plenty of material.

The thing is, I know they're right. It's a good, relatively manageable way to approach what I know is HUGE. Huge. Yet I thought: what?! No blogs?! They're key! And it's not that I won't get there--it's that I've got about five serious steps before I do, including the crucial one, which is this dissertation: creating the analytical framework. The foundation for looking at everything else.

So today, finally, after Ty yells at me on the phone (my inner prima donna, when I can't keep her under wraps, does annoy him) to just get to work on the diss, I finally sit down and pick up the first document. George Bush's declaration of a national emergency after 9/11. And glancing through the next few, I can already see that that became the justification, clearly, for all that followed. Step by step toward torture.

So I'm sitting here, and I glaze out for a number of minutes, listening to the voices in my head telling me, you're not a lawyer, you don't even know legalese, how are you going to read these, you won't recognize standard phrases and you'll probably miss the meanings of all kinds of elemental language any lawyer would now, you're an idiot for thinking you can do this, blah blah blah, etc etc etc, the usual litany. And after a while I look down, and I think, nothing I can do but try, and so I read the first paragraph.

And there, right in the very first paragraph, is this:

they changed a "the" to an "a." That's it. That's what they did, in the FISA Act. Yoo said, go ahead, it's fine, the collection of foreign intelligence is now "a" standard purpose of searches, not "the" standard purpose of searches. Which, presumably, left the field wide open for any other purpose they damned well pleased.

Wow.

And I think: I can do this. I can see. And the deeper I go, the further into it, the more I will be able to make sense of it. I'll be able to contribute something of value--maybe even because I'm not a lawyer, and don't have those patterns already embedded in my head.

Besides which, this is sort of like giving childbirth: you can't turn around once you've begun. You just have to get through it, however best you can.

A word on the health care debate

2009-08-14T04:38:00.000-07:00

and the ideologies behind it:

We are often the Soviet Union through the looking glass: prideful, nationalistic, blindly ideological, suspicious, heavy-handed in our attempts to impose our will, our "system," on the rest of humanity while convincing ourselves we're the good guys, we're right. Substitute "individualism" for "communism," "anti-government" for "government," "free markets" for "socialism" and you have the same extreme and fanatical adherence to a certain worldview--at any price, even that of our well-being and our lives.

And this blind faith in our own mythology will ultimately be our undoing, just as it was theirs. We are allowing corporations to poison our economy, our air, our water, our planet, and our bodies in the name of free enterprise. As Big Agriculture took over our food supply, food costs went down proportionate to a rise in health care needs; there have been explosions in diabetes, obesity, cancer, all manner of environmentally and nutritionally related diseases. Yes, people live longer, because strides in medicine have managed to keep pace, but I can't help but wonder whether we aren't nearing a tipping point--whether, like the seas, we have fished ourselves dry and the piper is waiting with the bill, just around the corner.

Now Big Insurance and Big Pharma have us in a Big Squeeze, and don't even get me started on Big Banking. Nothing is local any more, and if we had gone into a supermarket 100 years ago nothing, but nothing, we would buy there would be the same as what we buy today.

And we cling to our mythology--which has a good deal of truth in it, perhaps half--that if you work hard (and have that magical alliance of stars above and behind you), you can live the dream. Bill Gates comes to mind. Hard work and the right configuration of gifts (and yes, perhaps circumstances, although the Grand Myth pays little homage to circumstance, because it's the Individual who controls his or her own destiny) will bring you unimaginable success and wealth. And because we like to believe that we are the Masters of our own Universe--similar, I imagine, to the mirror-opposite Soviet devotion to the vagaries of Fate and of circumstances beyond one's control--we insist on complicity with our own destruction by using words like personal responsibility and bootstraps and Not Being a Victim.

I don't know what, of these varying mythologies is true, but I suspect it's both. It seems to me that the healthiest societies, the ones where the most people live the longest in relative comfort (which means not merely material goods, but freedom from excess stress and anxiety) are a more or less intelligent mix of both public and private resources, a collaboration between government and business that both enables and restrains each while creating as much free space for the individual as is possible in a democratic society (and this includes freedom from struggling for basic survival, because surely, we ought to be beyond that); in a society, that is, that claims to view all men as created equal, although I suspect that phrase means very different things to different people.

The older I get, the less capitalism impresses me--especially in its current predatory and insidious form. The real tragedy in the health care debate is that it is being set up (especially by the Hysterics) as a binary: either free market or socialism, either business or government. No one is talking about what a partnership between the two might actually look like--or at least they're not, as Lakoff said, talking about it effectively enough. Perhaps this is because the goals of the two sides are inherently opposed; one wants to make profits at the expense of health and lives, the other wants (or claims to want) to save lives and health at the expense of profit. And I'm not at all sure that the dictates of basic human decency are going to win this one, given our blind faith in the Master Narrative, our blind adherence to our reigning ideology, that may well kill us, literally, in the end.

Warning: ANGST POST courtesy of Myrtle

2009-07-31T17:23:00.000-07:00

Feeling really defeated tonight.

There's too much. It's too much. I have no idea how to process all of this, gather and organize, much less analyze. WAY too much material to do any of it justice.

I have to start somewhere. So step back and figure out where.

Well I have the first 45 key documents--courtesy of torturingdemocracy.org. I have hundreds, literally hundreds, of other documents loosely organized into some-semblance-of-order files. I feel like other people have done the hard work, have done all the legwork. I have to remember that this is NOT a project of investigative journalism--there ARE others for that, and that's okay, they're way better at it than I am.

This is about the analysis of material that other people have gathered. And that's okay.

Right now I am wishing for someone to bounce all this off of, but my 3 pillars are all out of town (one permanently, of course) and temporarily inaccessible. Who else? Even if there is just me--and Myrtle, with all her angst--I have to tell myself this is a worthwhile project. I have no doubt that I can do it, if I can just figure out a working mode of attack (of course I can). But I also have to believe there are things here to discover that, when you put everything together, will amount to more than the sum of its parts.

That's what I have to have faith in. That there is something worthwhile *I* can do here, something *I* have to contribute.

Conditionality of basic human rights

2009-07-27T07:11:00.000-07:00

I think what I am finding perhaps most disturbing in all the discussion I am reading is the idea that human rights are conditional, that there are deserving and undeserving people, that rights should only be afforded to certain groups or only to people who fulfill certain criteria and meet certain requirements.

It's pervasive. Maybe I can get at identifying this more closely--I see it as a trend, but that's a subjective judgment (and what judgment isn't?)--i.e., is it a function of our strain of capitalism, which defines people as commodities? A function of the strain of religious conservatism that has dominated our political discourse for the last 20-30 years or so? A throwback from Puritanism? It certainly doesn't seem to me to be in line with the concept of "inalienable rights."

For me the baseline requirement is being born.

Which yes, doesn't mean that the unborn don't have rights, but that the rights of the born take precedence.

All an interesting angle of analysis to pursue.

Things to think about

2009-07-26T06:41:00.001-07:00

1) The importance of words--how words are crucial to everything about this subject. The rule of law is based on words, on written documents. Yoo was willing to find the words that permitted this to happen.

2) The process of intention --> action --> realized goal. The role of words, too, in that process, as they "tried to define torture out of existence" (TD).

3) The intention came from Cheney first of all, and W & Rumsfeld. Yoo (and the "War Council") opened the door to action.

4) Bush seems to stammer when he's lying and/or obfuscating. He speaks clearly when he the thought in his head is clear, usually something he feels as opposed to something else he seems to be struggling to make up, or describing something he's struggling to understand but doesn't really. Pay more attention to that in the videos.

5) Empathy is the only thing (?) that stands between our ideal and us as "a totalitarian evil nation with a complete disregard for human rights and the Geneva Convention" (TD). Human rights--selective? For some? For whom?

Cutting to the chase

2009-07-25T18:19:00.000-07:00

Have been spending all afternoon immersed in documentation of torture under the Bush administration. I'm just the beginning, and I can see that this is going to be an emotionally difficult road. (DUH.) So I thought I'd try blogging, since I can't seem to locate a pen and a journal in the same place at the same time any more, and see whether this works as a decompression mechanism. There will have to be something. This is not going to be an easy project to get through.

First off, a word about Myrtle: she's going to be here too. Since she dogs me much of the time anyway, I may as well give her a voice here. Perhaps if I do, she'll leave me alone long enough to get this project done. It's the one possibly worthwhile thing I'm doing in my life (says she) and the more space I can allow it (i.e. by letting her vent and hoping she'll then shut up), the better off we'll all be.

Another thought: I tend to be wordy. Which means a blog might not be the right format. Something to think about.

So now to the mega consideration, the big one, right off the bat: what's that law that you can't have a discussion on the Internet without running into comparisons to the Nazis after a certain (short) amount of time? The six degrees of separation, only it's Hitler, not Kevin Bacon?

Hang on and I'll research it. Ah, here it is: Godwin's law, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." It has also in lore, apparently, come to mean that as soon as you use or make that comparison, your credibility in the discussion approaches zero.

Which quickly becomes a small dilemma for me. Because, as I was watching "Torturing Democracy" today (which I HIGHLY recommend, go WATCH it!!), the comparisons were all too obvious. General Geoffrey Miller as Eichmann, just following orders. Cheney. W, Rumsfeld . . . well, it's hard to say who was worst, but John Yoo the Torture Enabler, the legal arm who gave them the words to make it all possible, has a special place in hell.

John Yoo is one sick fuck.

It will be important to think about what words I am going to use in the diss, too. Water TORTURE will be my term of choice, with a clear understanding that the term WATERBOARDING, a euphemistic word that makes one think just as easily of sun and surf, is just that: a Verharmlosung (ah, those good German words!) of the reality of controlled drowning.

If there were a god, or justice, these people would be in the Hague.

So this will be a place for the rage. I hope I can channel it in a way that turns the dissertation into something truly productive. Meaningful--well, Myrtle won't let me use that word, but something that isn't just a rehash of things everyone else has already said and done, and much better than I, but something that ties the knots, connects the dots, goes deeper for its breadth.

It's funny--I can see all these connections--strings that are attaching and arching all the way across my life--my core burning question through all those years in Germany, how could this have happened??, has morphed into the same question here. I want answers. I want to understand. I guess THAT has been the core quest of my life. And so, here we are.