Wikipedia Knows My Darkest Secrets

After watching the first season of Dexter, I was curious about what factor plays a bigger part in the development of sociopaths, nature or nurture. Instead of doing a lot of time consuming research and actually learning something, I went to my old friend Wikipedia. However, the section on sociopaths is a particularly ill written mess with little useful information. But I soldiered on and was rewarded with the following extract, which seemed to have no connection to the rest of the entry:

The one area still being discussed regarding cruelty to animals is within the feline realm. Although cruelty towards them is not what is called into question, ironically it is the individuals who own four or more of these animals.^{[citation needed]} There is increasing evidence of deviant behaviour associated with these individuals. There have been reported cases of cat owners losing perspective of society as a whole, believing that their cats are equal, and in some cases superior, to the population around them. They begin to lose perspective and begin to feel it is their obligation to “rescue” every cat they see and believe they are the only ones capable of judging the appropriate household a cat should be tended.^{[citation needed]}

As the owner of six cats I think this was a rather unwarranted and unfair attack. It seems that Mr. Wikipedia author has a personal ax to grid. Maybe he was feeding his cat Cheetos and Diet Coke three meals a day and is still bitter that some do-gooder took Fluffy away. The only “deviant behavior” my cats have driven me to is the desire to dress them up in capes. Now this is bad, I grant you, but do I really deserve to be lumped in with the bed wetters and fire setters? It seems more of a harmless fetish than anything. And why is four the magic number? It should at least be six, the number of the beast. And don’t think I missed the ironic quote marks around rescue.

My hazy future as an academic

I spent a week with my grandparents this summer, in a small Missouri town with a population of less than 500. There is one gas station, one café, and one bar, which has a dirt floor, no windows, and the nomenclature of “Bucks and Does.” After a week of Lion Club breakfasts, afternoon tea, and small talk with people who have a median age of 80, I gave up trying to explain what I do for a living and realized that I will always be a school teacher to the denizens of this town (And a rather stupid one at that – otherwise, why would I still be in school myself?). Therefore, I was thrilled when I learned that my uncle would be in town during the last two days of my visit.

For reasons that are not abundantly clear, I have always looked up to my uncle. He is a nuclear technician who is permanently out of work due to a brouhaha with the government that ended in a two-year prison sentence over refusal to pay taxes. The male side of my family is highly paranoid and rather crazy when it comes to the government. We reminisced while my grandparents watched a Walker: Texas Ranger marathon, and of course my uncle asked what I did professionally. I proudly discussed my area of study, and how in the future I will be both a teacher and an academic, who will surely produce many books and papers of surprising depth and wonderment. My uncle was rather glassy-eyed at this time, perhaps an effect of boredom and gin, and he proceeded to shake off his lethargy by telling me that I was contributing nothing to society, especially if I planned to write with the goal of getting a job, getting tenure, and retiring in ease and splendor.

My uncle’s attack was unexpected, as everyone else I know accepts what I do because they love me or because they themselves are embroiled in the same sort of pursuit themselves, but that does not mean that I am not aware of the paradoxes inherent in academia. I do want a good job and tenure, but I don’t write so I can get them; I want them so I can write. I did not choose my specialties because they are profitable or trendy (I still have no idea of how marketable my interests will be), but because I enjoy them. That said, I worry constantly about getting published so I can someday have a job, and I would not flinch at putting a project close to my heart on the back burner to write an article or prepare a presentation that has a chance of being accepted. To my uncle (who, by the way, is 55 and living in a trailer in his parent’s backyard, and so perhaps should not be questioning others’ contribution to society), such writing is a waste of time. I do see his point, as academic writing is a bit solipsistic, but this is a slippery slope that can lead to the banishment of all art – the next thing you know we’ll all have four-wall vid screens and compulsory TV programs. To me, academic writing is a lot like the space program. Once it was established that there were no Martians to date or Cylons to fear, I lost all interest. Yet I continue to support space exploration because I don’t have to understand or even be interested in something for it to have value; it is important to both the morale and image of our country, and exploration for the sake of exploration is a noble, if unprofitable, goal.

Best/most painful moments from the two weeks I spent in Missouri with my family

One

Me: My bedroom is freezing! It’s the coldest room in the house.

Father: No it’s not. It’s always warmer upstairs; heat rises.

Me: I sleep in that room and I’m telling you it’s cold.

Father: No it’s not.

(At this point I draft my mother to go upstairs with me to confirm the relative coldness of my room)

Mother: She’s right. Her room is really cold.

Father: I knew you women would conspire against me, you always do. That room is the warmest in the house.

Me: I can tell when a room is cold! Go check for yourself.

Father: I’m not going to waste my time checking to see if a room is cold when I know it’s not.

(Mother hustles me out of the room before an incident can ensue)

Two

My mother, father, and I watch Juno. My mom was reluctant, but as usual my father and I bulldoze over her opinion and pop the movie in. During the sweet, cheery song at the end my father and I discuss how charming the movie was and we both turn to my mother so she can reinforce our opinion, only to see that she is crying. At that moment my father and I remembered that my mother gave a baby up for adoption when she was 15, and the cheeky, irreverent tone of Juno was more painful for her than any dark exploration of teen pregnancy would have been. We also remembered that we are insensitive assholes.

Three

Best statement made by my uncle: “The Mexicans are killing American with their language. It’s a scientific fact that a country can’t survive if the people speak more than one language.”

Four

On Memorial Day my grandfather and I are at the Wal-Mart outdoor garden center searching for flowers to decorate graves. I’m on the opposite side of the center from my grandfather checking out the lilies, when he starts to whack at his pants in a frantic manner. He hops up and down, cussing freely. I start to hustle toward the peonies to see what’s wrong, when my grandfather drops his pants, revealing his tightly whities and a pair of battling bumble bees. I veer off toward a display of fake flowers, which I become deeply interested in. Later that night, on a midnight trip to the bathroom I see a startlingly white and emaciated figure lumbering evilly down the hallway and I give a shriek of fear and surprise before I realize it is not the ghost of an Auschwitz victim, but my second sighting in one day of my grandfather in his underwear.

The Search for Genius

Last week I finished Eden’s Outcasts, Matteson’s wonderful biography of Bronson and Louisa May Alcott. I have read biographies of Louisa May Alcott before, but never one that also focuses on her father. What I have learned is that my father and Bronson Alcott are soul brothers. Perhaps Bronson was reincarnated as penniless mid-west philosopher to make up for his 19^th century god-complex. If so, he has still not learned his lesson.

Bronson Alcott was an ambitious dreamer who dragged his family from city to city looking for a population that would acknowledge his greatness. He could not stand dissention, and willfulness of any type in his family was construed as a personal insult. His wife and daughters would labor at lackluster, soul sucking jobs to keep the family fed and clothed while he read and visited his great friends, refusing to descend to labor that he thought was beneath him. If it sounds like I’m being hard on both Bronson and my own father, I am. They both had a wonderful, loving side and tended to error more from blindness than inclination. But the parallels between my family and the Alcott family were startling, though I realize they should not be. Bronson Alcott was no harder on this family than Percy Shelley or Edger Allan Poe was on theirs; people of genius are not easy to live with. That said, people searching for genius, but never finding it, are just as hard to live with, and there are a lot more failed than ascending genius in the world.

I also started reading Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian. Written by Scott Douglas, who I have adored as a McSweeney’s correspondent for years, I was quite looking forward to this book. Sadly, it has been a bit of a disappointment. Flashes of Douglas’s sardonic yet affectionate humor are still present, but it is mostly hidden behind a clumsy and heavy- handed apparatus that make it impossible to get into the story. Douglas’s personal narrative is constantly interrupted by surprisingly uninteresting sidebars and needless footnotes. I am all for footnotes in the style of David Foster Wallace, but I don’t need to be told what a class visit to a library is. The whole narrative is also very episodic, which works well for a blog or the McSweeney dispatches, but it oddly unsatisfying in a book. I hope Douglas keeps up his contributions to McSweeney’s and perhaps branches out into other magazines/newspaper. His style is perfect for that venue.

Book Hording More Hygienic Than Cat Hording

Today was the first day of summer vacation and I spent the first 30 minutes trying to decide what book I want to read first. For the last couple of weeks I have been perusing book stores, libraries, and various online sellers, compiling my summer reading list. No matter that I have gathered more books than I will ever be able to read in three months, let alone three months in which I will be taking a class and trying to supplement my meager income with freelance writing gigs. Half the fun is in the gathering.

My first literary conquest of the summer (not including The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I read while I was completing my final paper and grading my students’ final projects) is Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson. Even though I have officially dedicated my life to British Victorian lit, I still have a soft spot for 19^th Century American. Other books appearing on my reading list, in no particular order, are:

• Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism by Paul Youngquist
• Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London by Seth Koven
• Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell
• The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise
• Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
• Frankenstein: A Cultural History by Susan Tyler Hitchcock
• Kafka on the Shore by Murakami
• Discipline & Punish by Michel Foucault (Someone has questioned my patience when it comes to reading this book. Now I have to finish it just to prove a point.)
• The Detective and Mr. Dickens by William Palmer (The author is one of my professors. I’m very curious about his mystery novels.)
• Our Vampires, Ourselves by Nina Auerbach
• A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke (This is a guilt read. One of my professors found out I had never read it and her distain still gives me nightmares.)
• Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

And a bunch more, but I am tired of typing and no one cares but me anyway. This hording of books may seem silly, since it’s a free country and you can read anything you want at anytime. This is not true for literature grad students, who almost always love reading, but must bow to the cruel literary whims of their professors and dissertation committees. The freedom to choose what I want to read is so rare that it’s intoxicating.

In a trip to the library today, to gather more books for my ever growing army, I ran into a student. His surprise at seeing me away from Purdue reminded me of how I felt when I was 10 and I saw one of my teachers at the movies. This surprise might have been enhanced by the fact that I was covered in dirt from weeding my yard, and both my jeans and my shirt had holes in them. I really need to take more pride in my appearance. Anyway, he told me he was going to spend his summer “reading the classics.” He only had one book in his hand, Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country. Far be it for me to discourage a student from reading liberal rhetoric; I have read it myself and thought it was great. But I do wonder what list of classics he is going off of.

It is a far, far better quote than I have a right to use

I just finished A Tale of Two Cities and I must say that I’m quite disappointed in myself. Do you know the closing lines to this famous Dickens’s novel? It’s quite possible that you’re smarter and better read then me, but just in case I’ll reproduce the lines here:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

This is perhaps the most famous line in literature and I had no idea where it came from. What’s worse, I have heard this line hundreds of times in silly sitcoms and out of the mouths literary parrots, and most likely parodied them myself, without knowing the origin. Really, that’s rather sad. Why are we, as a culture, using lines that we have no idea of their origin? For all I knew this quote could have come from a KKK recruiting pamphlet. As it is, these lines are spoken by (or thought by) an innocent man walking to his death, because he feels he is not as good as another man who happens to look a heck of a lot like him. “Rest” equals death. Sydney Carton has one serious inferiority complex and, in my opinion, is much sexier than that goody-goody Charles Darnay. But that’s not my point. The point is, unless we know where the quote comes from, we really should not be using it, especially when the lines involve a walk to the guillotine. Or Madame Guillotine, as Dickens would say.

On a related note, while writing this blog I am watching Smash Lab, a show on the Discovery channel where they spend 60 minutes blowing up buildings and the like. The narrator just said, in reference to the Smash Lab team building a fake wall to be blown up, that they like “a fine and private place” to conduct their explosive experiments. What possible connection can that allusion have to the demolition of brick walls? Is our narrator a frustrated Marvell scholar, or did he hear that phrase on a Simpson’s episode? Either way, it made me happy, like I was in on some snobby joke, which is the true secret to why allusions are so popular.

Garfield Exposes My OCD

As a child I loved a variety of highly crappy comics: Family Circus, Heathcliff, Beetle Bailey, and above all, Garfield. As all fans of this comic know, Garfield has three eye configurations: closed, half-closed, and wide open. I used to go through my slender, horizontal Garfield books, with such puny names as Garfield Makes it Big and Garfield’s Big Break (Get it? He’s fat!), and put a check mark next to the strips that featured Garfield using all three ocular expressions. Three panels, three eye patterns. Especially prized were strips that started out with closed eyes, moved to half-closed and ended in wide open. Sunday comics didn’t count, as the panels and the visual options did not match up numerically.

Over dinner last night I mentioned this habit to some friend, two of who laughed until their faces turned red, and the last looked so concerned and rather afraid that I started to questions what I had always seen as a rather harmless pastime. What about my other childhood habits, like always announcing myself before I turned on a light in a dark room and chanting a poem I made up five times in a row before I turned my light off every night before bed (it had to do with not having bad dreams). Did I have a bit of OCD, or do all children act this way? Anyway, it’s not like I still do that stuff. Now I’m content with filling in the circles on all memos, worksheets, and handouts. Capital letters are filled in with green ink, and lowercase with blue.

The Politics of Hand Washing

Someone on the third floor of the English building has a real problem with people who don’t wash their hands. Right now there are nine signs in the bathroom begging, threatening, or trying to scare people into washing their hands. Some are just friendly little signs with a happy person washing their hands. Others show close-ups of the influenza virus and tell us that this will be our fate if we don’t wash with soap and water, and preferably repeat. My favorites are the ones geared toward us graduate students, which take famous passages from books and incorporate clever little messages of hygiene. For example:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was a time when people rarely, if ever, washed their hands – in short, it was a very dirty time, full of sickness and disease.”

Oddly, these signs it not last long. I assume some indignant student was appalled to see Dickens, Melville, and Twain used in an advertising campaign, no matter how noble the end may be, and tore them down in a fit of existential despair. I rather enjoyed them and varied whatever stall I was using in a given day so I could read the whole collection.

Last week a bottle of fancy hand soap showed up in the bathroom, with a sign attached stating that it was for “hand washers ONLY!!!!” This shows an odd bout of anger against people who don’t wash their hands and an odd lack of forethought. Is the mystery soap provider trying to entice people who normally don’t wash their hands with a bit of reverse psychology (and the desire to smell like raspberries) or are they trying to exclude non-hand washers from the fun of using fancy soap? Why would people who don’t wash their hands want to use the soap anyway? Was their really any reason to specify who could and could not use the soap? If they wanted to tempt non-hand washers into using soap they should have gotten some of those fancy guest soaps that are shaped like roses or seahorses. Everyone loves those.

The 1^st, 2^nd, and 4^th floor bathrooms don’t have any signs at all, leading me to wonder if we are naturally dirtier on the 3^rd floor and need more policing. I have been keeping my eyes open, but everyone seems neat and clean and I have never seen anyone skip the ritualistic hand washing. I, however, am considering giving up the whole pointless ordeal. I have been washing my hands all year with both fancy and non-fancy soap and I have suffered from the flu and a cold, both illnesses the signs specifically state hand washing will keep away. I might start my own anti-hand washing campaign. My first sign will go a bit like this:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, probably because they washed their hands like The Man wanted them to and yet they still got sick and eventually threw themselves in front of a train.”

How my PhD has lead me to watch more TV

It’s true that I like to read. It has been my favorite pastime as long as I can remember. As a small, geeky child my parents would ground me from reading instead of from going out and playing with my friends. A sad but true tale about me that says way more than one simple sentence should.

I am currently studying for my PhD in literature, which is really nothing more than an excuse to read for a living. I have worked for bookstores, publishing houses, and newspaper, and let you tell you, they get awful mad when you read on the clock. I’m that sad little man from the Twilight Zone who almost gets fired from the bank for reading on the job. However, I would like to point out that he is apparently the only piece of humanity who survives the holocaust, all because he snuck down to the bank vault to read some Shelley. Anyway, after a number of years it became apparent that English professor is the only career that is going to pay me to read, so here I am.

I certainly have enough to read. Between my three classes I have 29 books to read in sixteen weeks. I’m not complaining about this. Even if I don’t really care to read all of the books assigned (like the evil Pamela), I know I’ll probably end up liking them once I get into them (except for Pamela). What I hate is that now that I have rearranged my life so reading and writing about books are my main function, I feel guilty if I read for fun. Anytime I pick up a book just for kicks, I find myself analyzing if this is really how I should spend my time. If I’m reading I should be reading for class, and if I’m caught up, I should be reading in preparation for prelims or my dissertation. Death Note and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao have become as psychotically bad for me as reruns of Friends and The Fairly Odd Parents.

Reading in and of itself has become an indulgence. My mind feels that if I’m holding a book it had better contribute to a class or a paper or a lecture. Often I feel so guilty about reading for fun that I end up not reading at all and instead turn on the TV or surf the net. I make deals with myself, like any reading I do after 11pm and before 8am is OK, since I would normally be sleeping in that time anyway. There is a certain danger in turning your favorite hobby into your career.     

Baby in a bag and other highlights of Babies R Us

The world’s population is increasing at an alarming rate, if my circle of friends is any indication. We have hit the age where it’s now or never for baby making, and more people then I expected are making good use of their ovaries. The most unfortunate side effect of this unprecedented burst of births is that I am forced to spend valuable time within the hollow, soulless maw of Babies R Us.

 This store is enormous; it resembles nothing more than a dismal, pastel splattered warehouse. Exposed pipes and beams arch over the customers in utilitarian glory, and bleak, characterless music saps what little strength the shopping parents may have left. My first visit lasted less than five minutes. I ran in terror, feeling as if some monster from a David Lynch movie has sucked out my essence. Subsequent visits have lasted longer as my strength and desperation for gifts grew stronger. I tend to wander aimlessly up and down the aisle, peering at items called “piddle pads” and “pee cups” in fascinated disgust. I have no idea what to get or what a baby needs and the store itself offers no clues. Even when there is a registry to follow, the aisle and category numbering is so confusing that I usually end up buying the first thing I’m able to understand the use of. I’m fond of the baby bag. Baby goes in bag. Makes sense to me.

 The one thing I do like about the baby store is how soft everything is. Why don’t they make adult t-shirts or pillows out of this material? I would even put up with the graphic of a giraffe and bear hugging to have a blanket as cuddly as what babies get on a regular basis. I spend half my time feeling around the store like a newly blind person.

 There are two types of people in Babies R Us: people with babies and people who are about to have babies. It’s easy to spot which is which by their stomach size and number of babies they are pushing around. Their attitude is also a big indicator. People about to have babies are still nice, normal humans. People with babies are beasts who would run you down with a cart full of diapers and piddle pads rather than move an inch out of your way. There are of course exceptions to this rule. None of my friends have ever run over my foot with a stroller and smiled at my pain. However, I’m watching them closely and am prepared to perform an exorcism at a moments notice.

I assume there are other people like me, friends of the fertile, skulking around the store, hiding from the triplets and the scary soccer-moms-to-be. Maybe we can get together and make a fort out of the diapers or giggle at the breast pump displays.