My Day (With Apologies to Harper’s Index)

Total time spent on bed-related issues: 2 hours

Amount of these two hours that were spent on fitted sheet: 15 minutes

Amount of time doing exchange at Bed Bath & Beyond: 30 minutes

Amount of this time spent waiting for “air bed expert” to arrive: 5 minutes

Number of times Bed Bath & Beyond employee used air quotes while explaining that we were waiting for the “expert”: 2

Number of air beds I’ve gone through in six months: 3

Number of other customers returning air beds to the same store this month: 5

Amount of time spent waiting at DMV: 45 minutes

Number of times DMV employee, using highlighter, circled my forms to emphasize I had to do everything through the Web: Twice

Previous times I’d attempted to use the Web to solve the error blocking my re-registration: 2

Attempts made after visit: 3

Number of times I attempted to say my license plate number via DMV’s automated phone system: 12

(Successful resolutions via either system, phone or Web: 0)

Number of times I attempted to say my license plate number in a goofy Southern accent: 1

Average percentage of improved automated voice recognition when I used that accent: 18%

Number of Save-Mart Customer Service stations in one Save-Mart store: 2

Percentage that were non-operational due to computer problems: 100%

Number of computer systems at Blue Cross Anthem, library, Save-Mart, and lawyer’s office that were either “down” or “updating”: 4

Minutes spent receiving handwritten receipt for returns at library: 10 minutes

Callbacks I was waiting for from customer service representatives once computers “were back up”: 2

Callbacks received: 0

On Writer’s Block and Responding to the Joker comments

Dear readers,

Happy Indian summer, everybody! Even if you’ve already headed back to school, or are working an eight-to-five, there’s a dreamlike haze to August, a feeling as though there’s still one or two chances to make good on the hedonistic plans you had for summer, and a suspension of crushing drudgery until the days get shorter and you have to go to those special clinics where the lights are “full spectrum.”

Personally, I’ve found it impossible to blog anything this August, at least until now. Partly that’s because of the goofy comments on my Batman post (exceptions: Daniel Roberts, va, Bill, tomemos). People, you can do better. Both here and at the Valve I’ve had people quoting at me some eighties comic wherein the Joker was declared “super-sane,” and it just makes me want to scream. Just because he’s an interesting villain and we’re interested in subverting normality doesn’t mean we can genially overlook the murders he’s committing. That’s overwrought, theoretical analysis obscuring basic facts, and it’s the most common way criticism shipwrecks.

When Heath Ledger died, he left behind him a small body of exceptional work, much of which will survive as classic (above all Batman and Brokeback Mountain). That is a wonderful thing to have achieved, though I am sorry he died so young. Since I did not know him personally, although I think we did party once at this club at like four in the morning but who can really remember because that night was CRAZY, that is as much as I can say about his death. It seems unlikely to me that a man who could become so many different characters was really driven over an edge by playing the Joker, any more than playing a gay character made him gay. Perhaps the reason that the idea of Ledger getting sucked into the movie is so compelling is that we get to express our anxieties about the ways we ourselves are saturated by films and imitate them.

The politics of the movie are determinedly centrist. It could be cause for liberal alarm that Batman is a self-directed vigilante, but unlike most Dirty Harrys, he has two friendly old concerned dads keeping him in check. In the next movie Jack Nicholson is slated to play his third dad and golf caddy. Between Batman’s spy system and Morgan Freeman’s concern about his spy system, you get the same sort of inconclusive, inoffensive political ping-pong delivered everyday by CNN and the New York Times.

The pathos of the film is that we want to root for the Joker, but we can’t: we understand the principle he represents, and feel in our bones the need for liberation and chaos and detonating the status quo, but people cannot die as part of that process. They cannot be turned from followers into victims — that doesn’t liberate them. So we are caught between hero and villain, hating the city itself and its systems of power…the proud, Gothic high rises of a city whose name has become part and parcel with Batman, “Baltimore.”

I highly recommend Daniel’s post, va’s fascinating comment, and Steven’s final moment where he announces that the sexual fantasies in Fellini movies are entirely realizable in real life. To which I say, if that’s not a good starting premise for a verité blog, nothing is. Certainly better than attacking the culture of teenyboppers, who are only out to “shake it” to savage primal rhythms before driving to “make out point” (their term for movie theaters) and who don’t think long attention spans are “groovy.” Have these kids even heard Vivaldi? That’s some “kickin” glissando, man!

Finally, a post that I wrote a fair while ago called “Zizek the Embarrassment” got quoted in The Nation, and The Nation refused to attribute it. It really got me down. Here’s a magazine that I’ve been reading since high school — that fills every corner of my parents’ house in neat, outraged piles — refusing to let any sunlight filter down to the netroots. I’m not a purist about this medium. Blogging doesn’t have to be cut off from the mainstream media. But unless it’s their blog, that’s how they want it. So these posts are for the questions that don’t have any answers, and for the grits when there ain’t enough eggs to cook, and for the hoods of the world misunderstood. Greenzo out.

Parodying Academic Blogging

(x-posted to The Valve)

Dear readers,

In the spirit of the MLAde 2007, produced by two very funny UC Irvine grad students and distributed, guerrilla-style, around the conference, I’m pleased to present this parody of academic blogging, entitled “My Story.”

***

A lot of people, almost none of whom read blogs, and one of whom sent most of his confidential information via e-mail to Nigeria, have asked me how I got into blogging. So I thought I’d blog my answer out loud to the blogosphere. After all, today is Sunday through Thursday, and it’s time for my Blogging About Blogging Sundays Through Thursdays. (But don’t worry, Existential Despair About Capitalism Friday is just four days off!) My story is a lot like other stories about learning to use a very simple web template, and you can read those other stories here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

I guess you could say that some part of me was always a blogger, just as some people know that from birth that they are meant to be accountants or customer service representatives. It began when I was very little; when my parents left me alone in the house, I would watch episodes of television programs on DVD, while feeling terrifically anxious about not doing my reading. I was very much a “boy’s boy,” but still, I would catch myself fantasizing about the feel of tweed against my skin; I would thumb through the glossies, dreaming of the latest Parisian fashions, even though my mother could not afford simulacra, and had to make do with cheap imitations. I would creep upstairs to our attic, to the old dresser my father kept up there, and reach around in the bottom drawer until I found his collection of New Yorker magazines. I didn’t really understand everything I was reading, because we lived in Boise and I was reading the “Talk of the Town,” but the images and words consumed me like a secret fire. I wrote a short story, “Adultery,” and then a poem called “Lonely Cabbages, 1993,” which I posted here after it was rejected by the editors of the New Yorker, as well as many, many other editors, many times.

As the DVDs for Season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer gradually yielded to those containing Season 4, and the space of years made me older and bolder, I began to play with dolls. They were shaped like postmodern theorists, and I found them “hilariously campy.” Under my covers, long after my official bedtime, I would set up little conferences, where I would force the Alain Badiou doll to give a talk entitled “I’m In UR Auditorium Repeating My Book For UR Stipend,” and then I would ask him questions. My questions were long, thought-provoking, and remarkably similar to my dissertation. I felt like the only person in all Idaho brave enough to be ending my questions with periods, and saying “Well, I guess this isn’t really a question per se.”

After this had gone on for a while, I began to wonder who was really listening to the little conferences I held with the postmodernist dolls in my bedroom. It felt like I didn’t have much of an audience, aside from one or two specialists also working in my field who were, in this case, made out of plastic. I wondered if there were other people like me, people who cared above all about serious scholarship, and whether, like me, they wanted to prove it by writing about popular films and beach trips under assumed names. I already had my assumed name all picked out – it was a German word meaning “of or relating to Derrida,” because he is one thinker you have to read in the original German. I modified it, though, so that it was also a pun on three Elvis Costello albums. It took a mere fortnight of continuous effort to pick my blog title, my blog name, my blog epigraph, my blog picture, and my blog design scheme, plus one more day to remove all references to money laundering from my publicly linked MySpace page.

I remember all the milestones. I remember the first time a commenter showed up to tell me about how useless literary critics were compared to writers. “Those who can’t do, teach,” he wrote, starting a wonderful conversation that has continued, ceaselessly, after every single post, to this very day. What I like about him is that he is the people, the real people, not some bloodless academic; he’s like Tiny Tim, and I am like Charles Dickens, giving him the crutches he needs to walk the walk of the learned. Other examples of the salt of the earth who have learned to use my comment box include a schizophrenic person, whose discursive universe is a play of absences and misspellings, and the person who has always had just about enough of me and my blog, for going on two years. I also like the fact that these folks click on my advertising banners, although that may be an accident, since I Advertise Liberally, meaning that ads cover about 65% of the screen. I remember the first time I used the word fuck, in my post “Fuck All The Fucking Bullshit, I’ve Been Reading About Fucking Punk.” I thought that would get me fired from my Ph.D. program, forcing me to earn a living by blogging, but it didn’t, and neither did my post “Things We Think But Do Not Say.”

But, in the end, there’s something very simple that keeps me blogging, and that is a truth that might even sound a little sentimental, but so what, it’s a blog: what I can really write about is how I’m having trouble with my writing. My best days blogging are the ones where I can’t even add one solitary preposition to my half-finished sentence on page 63 of Chapter 4, “Tristam Shandy and the Anti-Topographical Comic,” all of which I chronicled in the post “One Solitary Preposition.” So yes, I’m now in my seventh year of blogging, but allow me this indulgence: I like to call it Season 7, Part 1. It’s the season where the writers got together and deconstructed everything you thought was happening. Beat that, Lawrence Sterne, you stuffy old academic. (I will continue my series of posts on Tristram Shandy and Habermas tomorrow.)

The Feminist Bookstore Video and Yes Means Yes

That prankster Jessica Valenti, of Feministing, is back at it (in the aftermath of her book Full Frontal Feminism) with an essay collection in progress entitled Yes Means Yes. As sometimes happens, I’ve been busier writing comments than posting; you can read the ongoing discussion at tekanji’s Shrub Blog.

Hat tip to Truly Outrageous for a link to Carrie Brownstein’s hilarious performance in the Feminist Bookstore video, which, if you have any contact with New Age culture — and you know you do — you’re bound to enjoy.

Absolutely Fun and True Facts, Chapter One: I Am Defamed

Dear readers,

I’m working my way through a draft of my dissertation prospectus, with a little help from Soren Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way. I’m also really enjoying teaching Persuasion and The Bluest Eye. However, I couldn’t help but notice that me, my blog, and the Valve, where of course I cross-post most of what I write, were all nominated for various piercingly satiric blog Oscars at a blog called Parody Center. Scott Kaufman has the story over at Acephalous, and I recommend that you go there rather than clicking over to the howling, schizophrenic void of the Center itself. But maybe you don’t care that the Center is not safe for work, or maybe you work somewhere where jpegs of self-violating golden statues are the norm, in which case I grudgingly provide you the following link to the thing-in-itself.

Here is an important quotation from this post, in which I am nominated for Aristocratic Parody:

Dr. Josephina Kugelmass’ Romantic Tantrum ( http://kugelmass.wordpress.com/)

for cooking her own elitist Ratatouille; for being timid and restrained in her criticism of dr. Slovenly Zizek;

In this quote, there are several inaccuracies. To begin with, my first name is Joseph. It is not so much that I am offended by the thought of being called “Josephina,” as it is that Josephina Kugelmass is a travel agent who lives in Wichita, and I don’t want to see her or her family adversely affected by my blog. Also, this text (at Parody Center) genders me as a woman. While my gender categories are in no way “fixed” or stable in their significations, I have seen almost every episode of The Sopranos, and have enjoyed them. I also recently listened to practically all of AC/DC’s album Back in Black, last Thursday I think.

My blog is unabashedly romantic. Reading my blog is like drinking a rosewater piña colada on the island of Capri. In general, though, these authors use the word “romantic” so often that it really starts to lose all meaning, like when you buy too many Godiva chocolates and they end up tasting odd, as though somebody had melted saran wrap into them. They call the Valve neo-Romantic, and so forth. I picture them pretending to like conceptual art on a daily basis.

With respect to the charge of elitism, I would like to dispel any rumors once and for all by announcing that I am always looking for ways of achieving lower culture. If there is anyone who can suggest a complete anti-elitist program, I promise to put on hold what I am currently doing with my free time, which is watching Entourage, playing Texas Hold ‘Em poker, planning a belated birthday trip to Las Vegas for New Year’s, and listening to Young Jeezy and Celine Dion. As anyone who knows me can tell you, that is not even a little bit a joke.

I was timid and restrained in my criticisms of Zizek, so let me remedy the situation. One time Zizek came to Irvine to speak, and he told an extended story about the function of obscene and offensive jokes as a bonding ritual in the Yugoslav Army. Allow me to say, ruthlessly if you please, that these jokes, all of which he repeated for our benefit, were kind of boring. Dr. Zizek, hear me roar: YOU HAD TO BE THERE.

(Radio Interview) These Cats Aren’t Laughing Out Loud

(x-posted to The Valve)

(The following are excerpts from a recorded interview between Terri Gross and Lion-O, the young lord of the Thundercats. It was originally aired on National Public Radio and its member affiliates. Lion-O’s essays on culture and feline subjectivity are collected in his first book, The “I” of Thundara.)

LION-O: These cats are babies. They sound like babies. They have a baby-like fascination with the world.

LION-O: These cats are in blackface. They claim to be talking like people who use instant messenger, but since people who use IM are not always this bad at spelling, or this insanely violent, cats who talk “gangsta” and “pimp” is the only way to explain some of the pidgin.

LION-O: These cats, if you sound them out, sound a little like the kids on South Park. It’s all in my new book, The Screaming, Obscene American Id, or, You’re Always A Reproachful Baby When You Dream. What I’m saying, Terri, is that cheeseburgers are bad for cats, and they’re bad for you. So why do these cats want to have them so badly? And from whom are they trying to get permission?

TERRI: From their owners.

LION-O: Exactly. From their “owners,” even though those owners are themselves too scared to eat cheeseburgers. This is not how it was on Thundara, Sacred Home of Grammar.

TERRI: What are you doing to keep the Thundercats going under these circumstances?

LION-O: We’ve been very fortunate to have a group of fans, the “Furries,” who have been incredibly loyal even during these tough times. So we’ve been able to make a living doing reunion tours. Plus, a lot of the Thundercats have families now, so it’s about family and how wonderful that is, which is a whole other thing. That’s our real full-time job, you could say, being there for the ThunderKittens in a way that my parents could never be there for me, because the planet they inhabited exploded. But we are making some changes also. For example, we have changed our battle cry from “Thundercats Ho!” to “Thundercats LOL!” Also, we’ve created a great site where you can put “catpshuns” on photographs. So, for example, you might have a picture of your hamster washing dishes, and you could add a hilarious caption like “Eye of Thundara, give me sight beyond sight!”

TERRI: In the studio with me is Lion-O. Later, he’ll be reading from a piece entitled “That’s The Statue of Liberty,” which explains his 2004 arrest in the I Can Haz Cheezburger office, where he was found shouting “You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” But first a short break.

Cormac McCarthy: “God Is A Little Boy, And Also Trout”

(x-posted to The Valve)

I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which set everyone’s hair on fire.

As an example of style, it works; the book is criss-crossed by references to ash and the aftermath of fire, and despite the single-mindedness of the landscape, and the microscopic focus on the father and the son, the minimalism is a triumph. Literally, there is less to do in the postapocalyptic world than there was in the world of cowboys, and this is a help to McCarthy, who otherwise tends to spend a long time on the insignificant everydayness of craft. For example, he will describe how a horse is saddled, or how a cowboy will secure a gate.

The Road is a Christian parable; that is its most important quality, and its downfall. Another Christian parable is a waste of time; it would be more worthwhile just to re-read the Bible. If anything, the patent religiosity of the text made me realize for the first time that the “larder” scene in novels of scarcity (a more profane example being The Ginger Man) is actually a scene of communion, and sometimes also a scene of baptism, if there is an abundance of clean water.

Earlier this month, I watched Eastern Promises, which had a terrific baptism in it. I won’t be hungry for another baptism for at least six months.

Anyhow, the father and the son nearly starve to death. The moment they began to starve, I began to wait for the scene where they would find a tearjerking superabundance of food. It’s on page 123: the dinner of canned pears.

Over the course of the novel, the father struggles to keep himself and his son alive. Increasingly, the son becomes distant, because he rejects his father’s creed of kinship. The son tries to give food away, first to a little boy, then to an embittered old man, and finally to a thief who attempts murder. Angrily, the father says you’re not the one who has to worry about everything, and the son says, I am the one. I think he did not add “I am the alpha and the omega” because the apocalypse destroyed most of the good courses in ancient Greek.

The wasteland is actually described as “secular.” In the final scene, when the boy is adopted by good people, the woman begins to speak to him about God. The Son, however, is too busy conversing with the Spirit of his departed Father. The woman reasons with him that the breath of God passes between people who converse thus.

The final paragraph of the book is about trout, who mazily puzzle the hours in deep, remembering, mysterious waters. It is not clear who is speaking, since the father is dead. To McCarthy, the deep pools are rumors of God. His editor should be reprimanded, or at least subjected to small practical jokes. McCarthy’s editor, I mean. Not God’s.

I don’t think I could have Cormac McCarthy over for dinner. It would get awkward. Nervously, I would talk too much, and he would spoon the candied yams without even looking at them.

I recommend watching the trailer for The Golden Compass. In my dreams, that polar bear fights Aslan. I’m mixed in among the crowd, my fist around a wad of bills, yelling Faster, pussycat! Kill, kill!

It’s An Actual Conversation Post! (AFTF #5)

Please note: readers of the previous post may be disappointed that the post was not labeled “Ha Ha.” That is why I have written this post.

This actual conversation is one hour old.

ME: Is that baby digging for beer with a shovel through the storebought ice cubes?

YVES: Oh, my God! Yes! It’s like Pearl!

ME: You mean the elf-child?! The demon offspring?!

YVES: I never know what he’s talking about.

PERSON DRINKING A NEGRO MODELO: I don’t think he knows about the Will Ferrell sketch. Joe, we’re not talking about Nathaniel Hawthorne. That is never what we’re talking about. Whenever you want to bust out with something about The House of Seven Gables, just take a deep breath and say, “It’s a Will Ferrell sketch.”

The History of Nice Guys

Dear readers,

I am suddenly in Boston, still exhausted from 23 hours in planes and airports. In two days I begin teaching at a prep school here, all the way until I return to Irvine in August. I’ve been trying to keep current through wireless, including dealing with my old laptop dying and needing an heir. I just posted an academic piece on Barthes, Hugh Kenner, Freud, and Rousseau over at The Valve, in which I tried to put modernism together with the origins of trauma theory. It’s about knots, scars, and the opera. Meanwhile, over here, I thought I’d respond to LittleLight, who asks her readers whether any of them were ever Nice Guys™, and how they recovered from it, so we can do a better job with the next generation. (This is also my way of giving a quick nod to Taking Steps, which is as thrilling now as it was when it burst onto my feeder with “the seam of skin and scales.”)

(I’m going to capitalize Nice Guys, but skip the trademark henceforth, because it’s annoying.)

The term Nice Guy shows up a lot on the feminist blogosphere, and there is a certain amount of confusion about what it means. It’s not just that new readers show up and need a primer; it’s that people occasionally take it in overly subjective directions. (In addition, the suggestions I’ve read for how Nice Guys should behave are mawkish and unreflective.) Nonetheless, I bet that it will not only survive online, but migrate offline into the vernacular. It simply describes a certain kind of awkward and contradictory Western masculinity too well. The craigslist post that LittleLight pointed to is now a broken link. When it was working, it was a nasty letter from a guy to some woman he apparently helped home when she was drunk. The guy railed at her for being indifferent to his services, for having no sexual interest in him, and for having gotten so drunk in the first place. Strangely enough, he announced that had he been a “Bad Boy,” she would have had lots of sex with him. LittleLight writes:

Were you ever, even for a brief, stupid, youthful period, a Nice Guy(tm)? How did you get over it? What do you think would work toward nipping this stuff in the bud when it comes to teaching our young men not to slip down that slope?

Arguably, my answer to this question is “yes,” although “brief” doesn’t fit. Nice Guys are guys whose approach to women is a mixture of fear, passivity, eager interest, deference, and misogyny. According to them, their whole worldview has been invalidated by a lack of girlfriends, and their basic attitude tends to go like this:

I’m a decent person. I should have a girlfriend by now; I want one very badly, and I do all the things women say they want. I’m extremely respectful and I believe in good conversation and gender equality. However, women clearly do not find respectful conversational partners sexy, which makes them hypocrites, and proves that I need to re-think the way I act around them.

I’ve wanted to write a post about this phenomenon for awhile. Like my Buffy post, it’s going to step on the toes of my upcoming sexuality posts, planned for August. C‘est la vie.

Nice Guys start out as guys with no confidence. Confidence is one of those terms, like intelligence, that gets used in mystifying ways; I mean that, aside from family and a small group of friends, Nice Guys believe that most people will find them unlikable and boring. They believe this because of how they failed on the playground and at school, and the reasons they failed are bad reasons, as is the fact that such painful “failure” is possible at all. Some Nice Guys are disabled or unattractive. Some are nerds. Some are minorities. Some are naturally shy. Some are young. Some simply went through a bad move or series of moves. At first, they got treated badly by a lot of other guys. Most Nice Guys I’ve met have a very specific relationship, not (at first) to Bad Boys, but rather to Golden Boys, the athletic and popular kids who seemed to get friends, girlfriends, and status the way you get presents at Christmas. At colleges where some of the population joins fraternities and sororities, and some does not, this crystallizes as hatred of “frat boys,” and as the phenomenon of toadying within frats.

Once Nice Guys reach puberty, a bunch of things happen at once. First of all, they discover porn, which is full of fairy tales about adventures (and “kinds of women”) that could and should somehow come true. Through this, through discussions with friends, and through the movies, they catch a glimpse of what is supposedly happening for the Golden Boys. It’s not just about sex — they want girlfriends. It’s not just an overheated wrong guess — they really are staying virgins while other guys awkwardly start rounding the bases. At a certain point, the Nice Guy suddenly decides that middle school is over, the Golden Boy image is attainable with practice and money, and they should get back in the ring and try to reverse the judgement of early childhood. Suddenly, they start talking about “alpha males” while simultaneously calling “frat boys” assholes. Part of the reason Nice Guys earned their name is that they call themselves “nice guys,” because they’re obsessed with the saying “nice guys finish last.”

Meanwhile, the Nice Guy is forming relationships with women that are something else entirely. They’re not sexual relationships, they’re friendships. The guy spends a lot of time talking to his female friends — a mixture of women he takes for granted, one of whom is guaranteed to have a crush on him, and women he secretly likes — and hears a lot about sexual relationships that aren’t working out, and about crushes, and about the rest of their lives. These friendships are astonishingly earnest; for everybody involved, a lot is painfully vulnerable, and a lot is scripted like a sweet film. His female friends share with him diary entries, favorite records, dreams and ambitions, cigarettes. The Nice Guy comes out of this experience with a lot of respect for assertive, strong women, but that doesn’t fit with his new plan to turn into a domineering id.

That’s why Nice Guys and Men’s Rights Activists show up at feminist sites; they’re still troubled by everything about those friendships that was so rewarding, despite constant sexual frustration. They also want revenge — the horns of this dilemma produces tons of contradictory thinking. The Nice Guy is being pulled in one direction by his female friends, and in another direction by the thought of waking up one morning, Gregor Samsa in reverse, transformed into James Bond or Jim Morrison.

For now, that’s where we have to leave our Nice Guy, stuck between a busy but Platonic social existence, and a bunch of fantasies that can go very wrong indeed. (Little has been said about the homosocial and homoerotic aspects of Nice Guy masculinity. It’s all there in A Separate Peace. Nice Guys have cannibalistic crushes on Golden Boys, for example, despite being usually straight.) LittleLight asked how we could keep our young men from that slippery slope. That’s putting it in a too-fatherly way; still, here are a few thoughts.

First of all, Nice Guys feel lonely, but the truth is that they’re not nearly lonely enough. They rarely spend enough time introspecting about what they really want, what they like and dislike, and what interests they care to pursue. As a result, they’re not very challenging in conversation. They’re followers, and that’s boring. They also imagine that they can only be satisfied by the kind of woman who would go out with a Golden Boy, which often means chasing after women with whom they have little in common. Being undiscerning, they become corny, humorless, and weirdly anachronistic. Nice Guys, including the jerk from LittleLight’s post, can suddenly start to wax about finding “a lady” in these fallen times.

Second, the fundamental assumption of a Nice Guy — I want a girlfriend — just isn’t true a lot of the time. Everybody values privacy and freedom, and Nice Guys value it even more because it’s mostly what they know. A lot of the panic Nice Guys feel when they do get close to a kiss or a shag has to do with the perceived threat to their own habits. If I could send them all a copy of “I No Longer Know Anything,” by Trembling Blue Stars, I would do so tonight. A very good evening to you.

Do I only think what I did
Was a stupid thing because
I did not get what I wanted
Or would it have been no matter what?
What if something had happened?
Would I still have fallen apart?
What if?
Would you have pushed her right out of my heart?
Is there something I don’t want to face?
Might it not have been seen a mistake?
What if something had happened?

Was it over anyway?
Does she cast such a shadow
Because she hasn’t been followed yet?
Would she do so
If someone walked in her footsteps?
Am I right to feel such regret?

Absolutely Fun And True Fact #3: Superpowers

Rich Puchalsky, from the comments thread to my last post (note that Rich is being quoted out-of-context here, and is not being described in what follows):

Since academic work is valuable, the problem is mostly one of self-perception; too many people want a leftist, cooperative politics but retain the idea that they personally have to be a superhero.

Everybody wants to be a superhero. Check out lefty political blogs like Kos, or the mission statement of the Christian Coalition. CEOs of major corporations actually think they already are superheroes, because they have discovered a few foolproof principles for making it to the top, all of which they cover in their new book, Working With People: How I Was Able To Bathe In Money By Encouraging Innovation. If I hear one more Spider-Man lovin’, Harry Potter readin’, Mother-Teresa-referencin’ fool talk about academics and their inflated egos, I am going to throw up. It’ll be like The Exorcist. Not pretty.