While I'm on the subject of Nazism

I chose my dissertation topic because I get an actual visceral reaction to stories about the Holocaust and Hitler. I'm not Jewish--not that I'd have to be, but it bears saying. It's just that somebody who so embodies evil and brutality makes me, I don't know, want to shoot him in the kneecaps. The reaction is entirely a result of revulsion mixed with fury. My guess is that human's have this capacity in them, probably because the crazy idea in the middle of a neolithic Winter could kill an entire village (a liberal would have killed the Pilgrims in a Massachusetts Winter). I am not entirely lost to the fact that it is probably this particular reaction that is responsible for the worst exesses of human kind. Madness can cause a lot of violence, but righteous fury has defined entire epochs of mass murder.

In any case, I think having worked through my dissertation, I can kind of understand why neo-Nazis become neo-Nazis. I don't agree with them at all, but I do understand just what it is that they think they've lost, what they think they need to fight to recover.

I think what's complicated about it is that the neo-Nazi's desire is actually fairly philisophical but it doesn't really sell itself that way. They sell themselves on losing out to opportunities which the rest of the world can't understand because the loss of opportunity seems well...either unlikely, too infrequent to matter, or the result of some other factor (like the neo-Nazi's crap attitude). We non-neo-Nazis simply don't see this massive race struggle, and even those who do, don't really think that minorities have any chance at all of winning this struggle in America. The richest people are still white and male and the prisons are filled with African and Latino Americans. So...why go through the trouble of getting the hair cut, the tattoos, and making an ass of yourself. Essentially, most non-neo-Nazi racists figure they're in a superior position to the races they abhor and see no reason to make a big stink about it. They may even detest neo-Nazis for being either too stupid to take advantage of the cultural opportunities afforded them in America due to their skin color, or simply too delusional to understand how things really work.

Having done my dissertation, however, I think I may understand neo-Nazis from another angle. It seems to me that what the neo-Nazi really can't stand is the loss of stable value of which race is only the most obvious visible symbol--like a gateway hate. It goes back to Plato really and the question of what makes the best society. If someone says efficiency, as I think we'd all agree is a pretty good answer to that question, then the simple answer is that if we could all agree on universal values that remained constant no matter what the situation in which they are used, society would have those values to use always. The removal of discrepency in that situation would cause fewer arguments and debates--thus, the society would become more efficient. In this sense, efficiency is the opposite of diversity because efficiency streamlines society--diversity creates more opportunities.

The average neo-Nazi can, then, can be thought of as a person whose main belief about improving society is directly related to efficiency...and efficiency taken to its most extreme is fascism. The point is though that the concentration is always on race, but I think it's fair to say that in these stiuations, racism is just a symptom of some other outrage and in this case, I think the neo-Nazi's outrage is tied to a lack of values that remain constant throughout American culture.

Interesting Facts of the Day from My Dis

I thought I'd share.

First off, a dissertation is an enormous research project. By now, I've looked at political speeches, political cartoons, wartime posters, and all manner of World War II propaganda films and news footage--as well as documentaries, history books, yadda yadda yadda.

So, here's the interesting fact. When the concentration camps were liberated by Americans, they were filmed. The films acted as newsreel footage. Moreover, the films often did not mention Jews specifically, and when they were mentioned, mentioned them in a list of prisoners in which they generally appeared somewhere near the bottom. The end result of this is that the American public who learned about the Holocaust through newsreel footage were at odds to think of it as a crime committed primarilly against Jews.

Oh crap...I mentioned the Holocaust on my blog. Oh well, here come the Neo-Nazis, I'm sure. Keep in mind, I have to okay commentary and I don't okay fascists. Sorry, free country (still). You can start your own blog if you want and block my comments.

I should point out that the reason that Jews were not mentioned as primary victims in the crime had to do with America's anti-German propaganda which concentrated on the Nazi's imperialism, not their racism. Americans were ill prepared for what they found in the camps and as a result, fit what they saw into the story they'd been telling themselves all along about why they fought. Thus, the prisoners were seen as military and political enemies--not innocents that had been rounded up.

Bad

Mmmm....

Okay, I'm lost. Every once in a while the world does something that totally baffles me. Michael Jackson was a pedophile. I get it, yes, I really do. I liked Beat It same as everyone else. Thriller? Great video. That was twenty five years ago. Since then, Michael Jackson touched children and then paid them off to avoid law suits. Remember? There were all kinds of jokes and stuff. He got them drunk first on "Jesus Juice."

Pedophile.

So, how do I feel about pedophiles. What, for instance, are my feelings concerning what I might do if someone molested one of my children? What if that person died from a drug overdose? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't call for a period of national mourning.

Rewriting tips

The hard rewrite: read a section of the thing you need to revise, open up a blank sheet and rewrite the thing from scratch. If you have the time, I recommend this. Note: I can write 10 pages (single spaced) in a day with a minimum of effort. Being able to write quickly is necessary for this kind of tip. The advantage here is that you say things the way you want to say them and lose all the hee-hawing over what you want to say. This is what it would look like if you could organize and write at the same time. The best way to perform this kind of revision is to actually delete the file first draft, preferably through a crashed hard drive.

Your interesting point: No, it isn't. You know those things you say that don't really fit, but you like them, and you can make them fit? f'ing get rid of them. Tangents are for senile professors. Stay on topic! Writers come to believe that every word that they put on the page is sacred. Man, it isn't. Half of it is not witty, and the worst part is it looks like you're trying to be witty, and there's nothing worse than trying to look witty and not succeeding, actually not knowing that you're succeeding is worse. It ruins all the witty things you do manage to say...and the easiest way to not look witty is to just start saying things that don't have very much to do with what you're talking about because you think they sound cool.

Read aloud: No seriously. Read it aloud. Many people say, read it aloud so that you can hear the tough spots in your prose, and I think that's great, but you know what? Read it aloud 5 or 10 times so that it BORES you. That way, you get some sense of what your scenes read like to people who are hitting them for the first time. You may find that you can read a 10 page scene for 5 pages and then you want to skip to the end. Okay, it's too long. Simple as that.

Look, the plain and simple truth here is that editors are mean. Professional editors are ruthless. Send an article to a journal and it is, 9 times out of 10, read by some bitter grad student who can't get their work in the journal and is now forced to read crap by the professor who has given them the job and so they work tirelessly, from the inside, to change things to make the climate better for their work, which sucks.

Commercial editors want nothing that they haven't seen before on a bestsellers list, except that they don't want that. They want Twilight and Harry Potter, but not Twilight and Harry Potter. You need to be both derivitive and original, and they want NOTHING else. Don't fool yourself, these people are out to make money.

Forget about unprofessional editors...people who just happen to be in charge of approving your work. God only knows by what criteria they operate. You can get attacked because you don't boldface and underline main points.

But then, how do good novels get put on the shelf...Nepotism. Remember your Primo Levi, "To He Who Has, All Shall Be Given." Nothing makes success like success. Someone's uncle runs a literary journal and they publish a poem, and Whallah! you're published.

I'm not bitter. That's not the point here. My point is this: there are a lot of good writers out there (too many of them, if you asked me), and a lot of proof that being good has nothing to do with success. I would be more supportive of people who write hack. However, if you're going to try to turn skill into success then you are going to have to know that being good simply isn't good enough. You have to be a monster. You have to be good, striving for genious, with a desire to attack your own work like Godzilla v. Tokyo. Nothing less will do. And even then, you're either going to have to get lucky or know someone.

And you have to be mofo confidant. It isn't that you have something to say, it's that most people have NOTHING to say. If they did, they'd be interested in learning how to say it. You are the sage, the shaman, the bodhisatva if that's your gig. God (goddess, It, Shub-Niggurath the black goat of the woods with a thousand young) has given you the tablets to take down off the mountain, and damn it all, it's your job to write better so that someone will follow your new religion lest they burn eternally. You are responsible for their soul, and no, you didn't get it right the first time.

Hope that helps.

Game Place

I found a place to play Warhammer 40k on Wednesday nights. My usual Tuesday night game got cancelled when the guy hosting it had an "intervention" by his parents. They think he plays too many games. The presence of hundreds of little bits of terrain probably didn't help.

So anyways, we had cooled it at his place for awhile and I figured I needed to find a new place to play and they played on Wednesday instead of Tuesday, and now you're up to speed (unless you don't know what Warhammer 40k is, but then god bless you, may you stay safe in your ignorance).

So, game night. But here's the thing. The first time I show up, I don't play. Not enough people looking for a game. Just me. Second time, I sign up on-line and the guy nearly doesn't show up. I play, I lose. No biggie (Necrons vs. a Shrike led Space Marine band, really nasty). The third time, the guy says he might not show up, he does, but its too late to play. Last night, no one extra there to play, sorry. F.

But last night I came prepared. I had a 6x4 board ready in my car and I basically donated it to the star. Strangely enough, after my act of altruism, the club seemed to warm up to me. But of course, by now, my regular Tuesday night game's back on. So...

A post that wasn't supposed to be about my dissertation

I'm trying to get back into the swing of things by writing for the fun of it. They say that you should always try to do something you love as a job. That way you'll love your job. In my experience, that's the easiest way to turn something you love into work. Right now, I write for my dissertation (work) and I write for my job (work), and even though I'm pretty good at writing, it can still be pure drudgery.

Take, for instance, my dissertation. In my first draft, I had two chapters. One in which I discussed early twentieth century dystopian visions (ideas about how the world was going to hell in a handbasket) and one in which I discussed the rise of relative morality. My argument was that in the hell in a handbasket chapter, most writers saw the problem as loose morality. In other words, people didn't believe in solid rules about right and wrong. Lack of morals ultimately lead, according to these guys, to horrible social orders. My evidence for this was Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell's Essay "Politics and the English Language," but the chaper relied heavilly on a short story by Jorge Louis Borges called, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." The other chapter, in which the world basically switched over to valuing context dependent morality used lot's of stuff, but among that stuff (Casablanca, Gertrude Stein, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, O'Connor) I used Borges again--specifically to show that he had "converted" so to speak to the new way of thinking. Borges one way in one chapter, and Borges the other way int he next.

Well, my one reader complained. He said that the dissertation was becoming about Borges and that there should only be one chapter with Borges in it, and even then, there was still too much damn Borges. So, now I'm trying to take two chapters, each about 40 pages in length and turn them into one chapter that's about 30-35 pages in length. To do that, you have to do a bit more than eliminate every other word; you kind of have to refigure a lot of stuff.

Now, I am more than able to kill some of the more mundane information. After all, facts that astounded me when I began my dis are now kind of pedestrian. Some of it is just plain wrong. So, I cut all that stuff out. But still, I have to make a fundamental shift in the tempo, and in many cases, the point of my use of Borges. So, basically, I'm forced to rewrite the whole thing. I import blocks of text as needed, but more often than not, those just serve as inspiration for what I'm likely to write after that.

Anyways, I sort of promised I wouldn't write about that crap, and I did. Sorry.

stuff

A dissertation saps all will for all activity save the most flippant. I have lost all capacity to do anything that qualifies as "productive" because, like an abused animal, I want nothing more than to escape the gauntleted fist that keeps smacking me about. To wit, writing has been utterly difficult for me this last year. When I write anything, I feel guilty that I'm not writing the dissertation. When I write this blog, even now, I feel like I'm selfishly wasting time on what essentially doesn't matter at all. Who am I that anyone should read anything I write. I'm not dying of cancer. I'm not converting to Buhdhihsm (can't spell that. There's an H in there somewhere) and so to tell you my condition or my thoughts is so utterly mundane as to make the act of it worthless.

Hi all. I, like so many others, lead a rather dull life. Its not even interesting for being miserable because, unfortunately for you all, I'm also rather content...blah.

Likewise, I cannot read. Reading smacks too much of something I should be doing and so I pick up book after book, which I don't read, and won't read. Like the soldier who becomes a gardner from having seen "too much," I too, want to get away from the horror. Why don't people write good books that are easy to read?

So...here is what I actually have been doing.


I am now the proud owner of a Necron, Dark Eldar, and Ork army for Warhammer 40k. I am painting these. I am making scenery for 40k which isn't selling very well on Ebay. I am trying to start up a Dungeons and Dragons group. I am editing my finished first draft of my dissertation. I am trying not to care that no member of my dissertation committee has read anything I've written since I started handing them stuff to read almost a year ago. I am playing quite a lot of Left 4 Dead. I am playing quite a load of Boulderdash Treasures. I am eating Chili. I make very good Chili. I have all the songs from The Philidelphia Chickens stuck in my head perpetually.

AIG stock

Okay, what's the difference between a purebread dog and a mutt? The price pretty much. Now, new question. If mutts are cheap, how much would you pay for a mutt that was immortal? You know, a dog that wouldn't die.

AIG is immortal. I realize that this is a strange place for stock advice, but AIG won't die. In fact, AIG is pretty much insured against death by the U.S. government. It won't die, unless they die. The government, right or wrong, has thrown in their lot with an insurance company and said, "you are too big for us to let you collapse."

My thought is that a company that cannot die is infinitely better than a company that can. So, while the media and everyone else concentrates on the fact that AIG is horrible and all that, they've entirely missed the point. You can buy stock in an immortal insurance firm for around $2 a share. If the company can't die, then it will still be around in 5 years. What do you think the price per share will be then?

New frontiers with my novel

I haven't blogged in a while. Mostly, I've been writing (or should I say re-writing) my novel.

So, here's the skinny. My novel is about a kid who takes and overdoses on a designer halunicinigen and so is put into a permanent state of delirium. The main theme of his delirium is that he starts to see the movements of his world in the kind of "rending of the veils/religious epiphany" manner befitting an acid or shroom trip. Most notably, he sees and falls in love with the angel of death.

Now, meanwhile, in the very real world, a gang war has begun between the kid's boss and that boss's boss. Many of the acts of which the kid either interprets, or invents, so as to mirror language concerning the end of the world. This culminates in the kid having to choose to betray God in order to save God, or to be loyal to God so as to provide assistance to the devil. It is a scene I have been trying to figure out for about 8 years.

Now, I admit that this is already an enormous undertaking and incredibly esoteric and weird, but upon re-reading the novel, I've discovered that, out of nowhere, I was writing fantasy. While I still liked the writing, it lacked any and all gritty reaslim. It just didn't have the punch. So, I'm working through it. Over Christmas I made it through about a third of it (it's nearly 400 single spaced pages right now) and I really like how it's shaping up. The wife is thinking about Breadloaf and, for the first time in a long time, my confidance in my writing (which was once overwhelming) is coming back.

Richard Powers says that writing a novel is like digging a tunnel through a mountain from both sides. It's hard to get it to link up in the middle. I think he's right. Just as you get the biting cynicism to work, you realize that you're writing a farce, and that's no good. In any case, wish me luck. I've always believed that the realistic is the most powerful so long as we can admit how weird reality is. Kafka is a realist and all that.

Doing math with the pre-doc

To fully appreciate a Ph.D. program, one must do math.

In order to graduate, I have to take 9 classes as well as two years worth of a foreign language. 13 classes.
Taking two classes a semester (full time for graduate school), that means I have six and a half semesters worth of classes. Let's say 3 and a half years.

On top of that, I am supposed to take a semester doing a qualifying exam (because I came in with a degree in English and not in American Studies). Add another half year to read the twenty five works for the QE and you're at four years (actually, it took two years to get them to okay my stuff for the QE but I did other things while I was waiting).

You're not done. You've still got to take the comps. That's 75 works. Give it a year, and that's 5 years. A semester to write and get your dissertation proposal worked through and you're at 5 1/2 years. Now to writing...no matter how fast you write, someone has to get around to reading it... so a year and a half. Good. Seven years.

Myself, I came in with a foreign language (lose a year of classes) and we're back down to six. My comps? Finished them in a semester rather than a year (read a whole bunch during the summer). Five and a half! Yeah.

But of course, I've only been funded for five. That's right, next year, no money. No childcare. No health insurance. And boy oh boy, I'm going to have to pay tuition. Now, quick question. Who thinks that it was designed like this? Who thinks that perhaps the powers that be decided to make you fight it out the last year trying to figure out how to write a dissertation while taking care of two kids who, if they get sick, can't go to the doctor. What kind of evil monster would design the program like that.

Well, never fear. They didn't design it on purpose. They just didn't think about it at all, and have not managed to fix the system after numerous years of complaints. They don't have the time to care about your petty life problems. Now, big question: which would be worse, their having designed a system that pulls you through the ringer on purpose, or their having designed it because they couldn't care enough about the students to make a system that actually works.

My graduate advisors suggestion: take a semester off (back up to six years now) and apply for fellowships to pay for year 6.